Harold Bloom (1930–2019)

He, the [old] man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
— T.S. Eliot The Wasteland

Is Literature "Plausible"

The Past always has the appearance of what economists, euphemistically, term an "emerging market." An enormous opportunity (strange beast) is lying fallow in cultivated fields, awaiting alienation (In the legal sense of "transfer of title"). At the turn of the 19th century, show more Freud, who is writing adequate-to-very-good essays on human psychology, comes to dominate the field for three generations, whereas a man of similar talents today might hope to achieve an associate professorship at the University of Minnesota. Perhaps it's worth considering the career of Harold Bloom in light of a such a process. He spent his tenure sowing the academic Canon — a fait accompli we alternatively view as both "chthonic treasure," and (per Jon Franzen), "sowing salt in the fields of the financially unrighteous." Though such a contribution has also been called, with equal veracity, (per Sheila Heti) "Putting a lot of shit in the [field]," a more equivocal association which suggests, in the future, we might unexpectedly find some strange Wheat slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. (Beware Olipo's Curse: The extended metaphor is only half as clever as you think it is.)

James Wood, in his elegy for Bloom in The New Yorker writes, "Bloom loved Emerson’s (very Freudian) line about how, in the great writers, we recognize our own rejected thoughts—'they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.' That’s true of Bloom, too, at his best—both the inspired analyst and the eloquent returner of those rejected thoughts" (2019). Bloom is reflecting these thoughts in his tentative answers to the questions posed by title of this book: Literature is, "idiosyncratic excess," "a candle which the love and desire of all men will light," or simply, "a form of the good." I would contrast these propositions with the answer supplied by Eileen Myles, "I think literature is wasted time, I don’t think there’s anything good about it. It’s not a moral project except in this profound aspect of wasting time. It’s the great adventure of our time [. . .] rolling in the shit of time." (Myles, Why I Write). Though Myles isn't so easily pigeonholed into the "Feminist" camp, this contrast demonstrates some of the "threat" motivating Bloom's invective against "Feminism" throughout the text. (Though Bloom's repudiation of Marxist/Feminist/Historicist/Deconstructivism criticism is more or less an oblique, sensitized, response to what's simply a different kind of reading, among the many you can do, to open and experience the text a little more (per Eileen Myles), "The Vagina of my [text] is so stretched out" (With a good connotation.).)

The tension between the Bloom & Myles is exemplified more succinctly in two competing phrases from Keats: The well-known phrase, "A thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever," suggests the "Eternal Book" that Sontag once wrote about in her diaries, a work that's always as good or better than the first time you read it, and which Bloom appears to have found in Shakespeare. We contrast this with Nabokov's humorous (mis)translation of the same phrase in Pale Fire, "A pretty bauble always gladdens us," which is intended to be a howler of a mistake, since it inverts the tone of the phrase from Grand to Petty and therefore appears to lie in Myles's aesthetic camp, but which actually conforms much closer to Bloom's modest claims about literature as a Carver-esque "small, good thing." (Perhaps Freud would have appreciated this inversion.) This commonality between camps suggests Kierkegaard's phrase, "Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy both want the same thing: to make [Literature] 'plausible.'" (SK, The Book on Adler). "Plausibility" is the quality that still makes us believe the words written on a page. Bloom despises the bad writing of clichés, explicitly because they don't possess the "idiosyncratic excess by which meaning gets started," but also because clichéd writing is "implausible." Myles's semi-autobiographical constructions are also destroyed by this, and so the question of "how" and "why" we read literature appears to be, in part, answered by the fact that, "We believe it."

That the reader must remain open to the "plausibility" of literature, appears to be an alternative formulation of the thesis of Bloom's project, and explains his exasperation with a "historical/feminist" analysis that he perceives to flatten the text to a machine that "does" something. There's not much "close reading" in this collection, but Bloom does take care to elaborate on Henry James's characterization of Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady:

His conscious, curious eyes, however, eyes at once vague and penetrating, intelligent and hard, expressive of the observer as well as of the dreamer, would have assured you that he studied it only within well-chosen limits, and that in so far as he sought it he found it.

Per Bloom, the description of Osmond, who thinks himself completed, "tells the reader how narrow and dubious [he] is." My abuse of this phrase for my impending argument is a cheap turn, and to be generous, there's something to be said about the difference between Osmond's "well-chosen limits" and Bloom's dedication to Shakespearean scholarship, but I would press my case here. Rather than fortify a position around Shakespeare as the wellspring of human sensibility, such that to remain "plausible" every generation must be brought into relation with The Bard (i.e. adapting the Human to the Canon), would it not be just as good to adapt the Canon to the Human at any given point in time, and might there not come a time when the Human (as social/biological being) is so far removed from the 17th century that the salt goes out of Shakespeare. There's something horrifying in the assertion: "Shakespeare will be performed on Mars in the year 3000." Just as we are already despising the characteristic misogyny of Hitchcock's "eternal" films while also continuing to enjoy them, not much is lost by reading Shakespeare against-the-grain in this way, and yet crying out and demanding something better, even as we continue to perform him. Surely there will be something better to perform by 3000, and possibly Humans will be so different so as not to take interest in Iago anymore (in the good sense). A certain mind, circumscribed within "well-chosen limits," cannot comprehend this. He would do well to recall the words from Rabbi Hillel with which he closes his own collection, "It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it [. . .] If not now, when?" show less

Harold Bloom was an unabashed aesthete and contrarian, an unashamed elitist with working-class roots. He was a passionate advocate for strong, rich reading of imaginative literature, which, he fears, is a dying endeavor.
Twenty-one of the twenty-three chapters are devoted to twenty-six writers who, in Bloom’s consideration, are the strongest in the canon, beginning with Shakespeare at the canon’s center. Shakespeare’s greatness is not his dramatic skill—others, such as Ibsen, surpass show more him in this—but in his “cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention” (p. 44). Shakespeare’s genius reveals itself not only in that his characters speak to themselves (soliloquy), but that they overhear what they are saying, learn from it, and develop. And since for Bloom one of the hallmarks of canonicity is “agon”—the struggle—Shakespeare in a way determines who else belongs in the canon: those writers who can not avoid matching themselves against him, beginning with Milton and extending to Joyce.
I enjoyed and learned from all of the essays (the text reads more like a collection of essays that hasn’t been edited to avoid repetition than a coherent test). Some held my attention more than others, though, for instance, that on Virginia Woolf. Bloom is also very good on Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
It’s in the nature of things, I suppose, that the appendix of this book got more attention than the main text itself. This is a list of three thousand or so titles that Bloom offers as his suggestion for the canon. Anyone who reads the text of the book would discover that Bloom stresses “no one has the authority to tell us what the Western Canon is, certainly not from about 1800 to the present day. It is not, it cannot be, precisely the list I give, or that anyone else might give” (p. 36). Among those who apparently didn’t read this is the author of the text on the back cover of my edition, who refers to the book as “more than just a required-reading list.”
You might miss some of your favorite books from the list and might feel that some on the list don’t belong there. Bloom wouldn’t quibble with your right to do that, but he does set a high bar for challenging his selections: he only includes books that offer sustained pleasure after two or more readings. I won’t make it through all three thousand once.
The book is relatively accessible to the serious reader. It is well-argued and relatively free of the arcane terminology of the guild of literary criticism. I’ll confess, though, that I’m not sure what it means to “perspectivize” something. He overuses the word “preternatural,” which seems to appear in every chapter as his go-to adjective for a writer who is astoundingly good. Some of his terms are illuminating, though: I’d not previously encountered an author who used “contaminate” in a positive sense. And I enjoyed his description of what a desert island list is: a list “against that day when, fleeing one’s enemies, one is cast ashore, or when one limps away, all warfare done, to pass the rest of one’s time quietly reading” (p. 490). show less

The Daemon Knows is an exploration of what Bloom calls the American sublime; that class of literature that reaches beyond the human, in a way that is distictly American. What is beyond the human falls, by Bloom’s estimation, into three major categories; God, Nature, and the Daemon, and it is the last of these that Bloom is concerned with. What connects the twelve works that Bloom has chosen is what he calls, “their receptivity to daemonic influx.’ But what is the daemon? It is show more Emerson’s “God within”; the ‘American self’; the genius, the muse, that spark of the individual that transcends the everyday.

The American sublime then, is, like America itself, a self-created entity; forward-pushing, immediate, and individualistic, yet cut through with ambivalence. As Bloom remarks:

ambivalence has to mark the American Sublime: Think of Melville, Whitman, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Faulkner’s doomed landscapes. A selfhood endlessly aspiring to freedom from the past is bound to resist actual overdeterminations that bind us all in time.

The daemon of the American sublime is the very daemon that both haunts and yet makes possible the American Dream itself; a striving, fated never to succeed. It is this very essence that Bloom seeks to distil from the works he considers.

The authors Bloom selects for his study are considered in roughly chronological pairings, which are often left to bleed into one another. In his mid-eighties, the great critic has brought a lifetime of reading and thinking about authors from Herman Melville and Walt Whitman to T.S Eliot and Wallace Stevens, into one very personal volume. The personal tone of The Daemon Knows, with it’s anecdotes, opinions, and autobiographical details, marks out the confidence of its author, while allowing for a degree of intimacy in the reading.

As a critic, Bloom’s confident style has always maintained the capacity to meander into sweeping largesse and generalised pronouncements, but in this more intimate volume, there is perhaps a step back from the outright didacticism of some of his preceding works, into a more humble stance, and a slightly more personable style. In this volume, Bloom concedes that: ‘We do not read only as aesthetes – though we should – but also as responsible men and women.’ In accepting the subjectivity of his own reading experience, albeit a little grudgingly, there is a greater sense of openness to the book in general, and subsequently more room for the emotion that must form the bedrock of the sublime for a reader. Bloom’s love of Hart Crane in particular is at times quite moving, and I was left feeling much more sympathetic towards Harold Bloom the man after reading this volume, than some of his previous views and attitudes would have me be.

As well as the personal elements, the strength of Bloom’s knowledge, and his ability to select and deploy the most exquisite quotes, makes this book an absolute joy to read. My personal familiarity with American Literature does not extend to all of the major writers in this book, but where I was less familiar, my interest was piqued, and where I brought my own knowledge, my appreciation was deepened.

In many ways, this style of criticism harks back to the expansive ebullitions of critics like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a style that is certainly not to everyone’s taste. But for a general audience, with an interest in getting to know some of the great writers of American literary history, this makes a wonderful introduction from one of the most renowned critics of his generation.

For more reviews, visit my blog: https://ahermitsprogress.wordpress.com/ show less

Emulating one of his favorite critics, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Bloom returns once more to sift through the Western canon, this time to discern and describe those writers whose brand of wisdom he holds in highest esteem. Beginning with Job and Ecclesiastes, and ranging from Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Johnson and Goethe to Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, Bloom writes gracefully about each as he evaluates by comparison and teases out indicators of their show more subtle interrelationships. Into this brew he interjects a personal note, describing how he is writing in the aftermath of life-threatening illness and with a renewed sense of the preciousness of literature's great lessons. At the heart of Bloom's project is the ancient quarrel between "poetry" and "philosophy." In Bloom's opinion, we ought not have to choose between Homer and Plato; we can have both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior. Bloom considers Cervantes and Shakespeare the masters of wisdom in modern literature, "equals of Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Job, of Homer and Plato." He justifies his tastes with close readings of King Lear and Macbeth that find a Shakespearean variety of nihilism, a form of wisdom Bloom identifies as central to the poetic tradition. In his intricate discussion of each great writer, Bloom offers the rich perceptions of a scholar drawing on the whole of a long and thoughtful career.

Where shall wisdom be found? Harold Bloom finds it in the same place as the question -- the Book of Job -- as well as in Ecclesiastes and the writings of Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, St. Augustine and in the Gospel of Thomas. Bloom's new book, which compares and contrasts what he calls the "wisdom writing" in these varied works, "rises out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends." He tells us, "Since childhood, I have been comforted by Talmudic wisdom," and he cites wisdom writing that helped him rally when he "was ill, depressed, or weary." show less