Explores the many facets of Harold Bloom's critical writings and career. It argues that Bloom draws on a variety of disparate traditions that comprise a dialectical, difficult whole in a constant quarrel with itself. The Saving Lie brings all these "Blooms" together and, despite their own tendencies toward dissociation, lets them speak in unison: in one almost harmonious voice that will clearly utter the principles of a new speculative position—Bloom's antithetical vitalism.