Bloom
at Thermopylae
By NORMAN
FRUMAN
"The Western Canon" is a
heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the
present state of the humanities. "After a lifetime spent in teaching literature"
at Yale University, Harold Bloom writes, "I have very little confidence that
literary education will survive its current malaise." "We are destroying all
intellectual and esthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in
the name of social justice." "The Balkanization of literary studies is
irreversible. . . . I do not believe that literary studies as such have a
future." The responsibility for this previously unimaginable catastrophe lies
with "all six branches" of what he terms "the School of Resentment: Feminists,
Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians."
Framed by "An Elegy
for the Canon" and "An Elegiac Conclusion" -- both despairing reflections on the
present state of literary studies -- this magnum opus focuses on 26 writers from
among hundreds whom he later lists as canonical. Bloom regards the 26 not only
as great artists, but as the chief representatives of their literary cultures.
"The Western
Canon" concludes with four appendixes in 36 pages listing those works from
remote antiquity to the present that Bloom regards as canonical, or potentially
so. It is sobering to think that in recent years most of these authors, who
collectively have bequeathed us those thousands of poems, plays, epics, stories
and novels that constitute our literary heritage and much of our historical and
cultural memory, have been dismissed, sometimes with contempt, as "dead white
European males."
In his final statement on the
"canon crusades," Bloom writes, with startling bluntness: "Expanding the Canon,
as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive out the better
writers, sometimes even the best. . . . Nearly everything that has been revived
or discovered by feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all too
precisely into the category of 'period pieces,' as imaginatively dated now as
they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence." No doubt this
is unnecessarily abrasive, but the more serious problem is that the fundamental
issues raised here are not likely to be calmly debated in literary or
educational terms, but to become mired in the increasingly bitter gender, racial
and class politics that are overwhelming literature departments and the entire
field of literary studies.
"The Western Canon" is a passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort. It inspires hope, despite Harold Bloom's despair, that what humanity has long cherished, posterity will also.
Original text
on: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-canon.html
Colossus
Among Critics: Harold Bloom By ADAM BEGLEY
In the pages of
"The Western Canon," Bloom strikes a heroic pose, the critic at the barricades
defending the literary tradition of the West. He marshals those writers he
judges "authoritative in our culture," Shakespeare foremost among them. He sings
out the names of the elect; he accounts, with many a virtuoso turn, for their
superiority. And he slaps insistently at his enemies ("these resentniks"), an
insidious network of politically correct academics and journalists who resent,
Bloom claims, precisely what he cherishes: the esthetic value of literature.
"The
Western Canon" is Bloom engaged in an extended series of one-on-one matchups, a
lively spectacle and heartening. Here is a truly learned man whose life is
literature and who isn't at all ashamed to proselytize. Lindsay Waters,
executive editor at Harvard University Press, believes that "Bloom is always
asking what would it mean for America to have a spiritual life that is not
identified with or rooted in organized religion." The goal of Bloom's criticism,
in the view of Waters, "is to goad us into living that life."
The canon, Bloom believes, answers
an unavoidable question: What, in the little time we have, shall we read? Bloom
also wants to tell us how to read. "You must choose," he writes. "Either there
were esthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and
gender."
Even some of Bloom's most loyal
supporters have their doubts about the value of this mass-production
scholarship. They worry that he's spreading himself too thin, stretching the
limits of his admittedly vast competence. But his Chelsea House venture has at
least proved lucrative. "He's been a fabulous moneymaker," says Bloom's friend
and colleage, the biographer R. W. B. Lewis. "The Western Canon" earned Bloom a
$600,000 advance from his publisher, a huge sum for a nearly 600-page book about
the greatest hits of literature.
As an appendix to "The Western
Canon," he includes lists of all the canonical authors and their canonical
works, from "Gilgamesh" to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." The lists are
partly a marketing gimmick, partly the nose-thumbing gesture of the inveterate
provocateur, though his choices, from the earliest epics through the end of the
19th century, are mostly unexceptionable. When it comes to choosing among his
contemporaries, however, Bloom's idiosyncrasies take over. What happened to Mary
McCarthy, Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg? Why list only one of John Updike's
novels, "The Witches of Eastwick," and nine of Philip Roth's, including his
latest, "Operation Shylock"? (The answer to the second question could be that
Updike once referred to Bloom's criticism as "torturous," while Roth is the
would-be canonizer's pal.)
But the lists are not at all
the meat of "The Western Canon." Even if the "declining old Bloom" is spreading
himself too thin, or blowing the same note too many times, he's still a
wonderful reader. His enthusiasm for literature is a joyous intoxicant. He
scatters insight with manic profligacy. M. H. Abrams, Bloom's mentor nearly half
a century ago, ponied up a blurb for "The Western Canon." Reading Bloom's
commentaries, Abrams wrote, "is like reading classic authors by flashes of
lightning." Though Abrams intended an unalloyed compliment, the image works two
ways: The illumination is sporadic -- and yet thrilling, unpredictable, powerful
in effect.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html
The
Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
By VICTOR
LINDSEY
While the appendices, with their
lists of books, are the sections that have prompted the most comments among
teachers of literature, they take up only a relatively few of the 578 numbered
pages. After his "Preface and Prelude," Bloom indicates the mood of the book by
presenting "An Elegy for the Canon." Then, adapting Giambattista Vico's theory
of history, he discusses twenty-six canonical writers: from the Aristocratic
Age, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Milton,
Johnson, and Goethe; from the Democratic Age, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman,
Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen; and from the present
period, which Bloom calls the "Chaotic Age," Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka,
Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Beckett. Just before the appendices comes the
"Elegiac Conclusion," in which Bloom says he has "very little confidence that
literary education will survive its current malaise" (517) but hopes that, amid
high-tech, low-brow amusements, there will still be "literate survivors" (528).
It is refreshing to find someone
who treats art as art--not as politics, economics, or sociology, regardless of
the political, economic, and sociological implications and background of the
art. And it is a relief to find someone who does not treat the Western canon as
a repository of easily withdrawn moral maxims for all contemporary occasions.
Yet questions do arise: Is
canonicity always the result of one writer's triumph over a great literary
ancestor? If art depends on money and therefore canons in some way support the
worldviews of the rich, as Bloom acknowledges, do not canons depend also on
apparent chance--on what old manuscripts survive fire and flood and illiterate
marauders and the sporadic attention of censoring officials, or on what kind of
a day an editor at a publishing house is having when an unsolicited typescript
lands on the desk? Does Bloom overwork his theory of the anxiety of influence,
turning a helpful insight into a light that blinds him to other relationships
among writers? Does he put too much emphasis on cognitive difficulty, confusing
it occasionally with tedious obscurity in works that few skilled readers outside
universities would ever want to re-read? Does his enormous praise of Shakespeare
as the canon's center cross the line dividing perceptive criticism of a great
writer from blind bardolatry?
It is not that The Western Canon,
with argument and lists, is beyond all disapproval, for, as the questions imply,
obviously it will never reach that kind of critical paradise. Rather the point
is that, although any individual reader will disagree with Bloom about one
matter or another, he has treated an important topic with enormous expertise,
however eccentric; and he has offered opinions and reading suggestions that are
at least worth careful consideration.
http://www.ecok.edu/dept/english/tfloor/bloom.html