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Vol. LX, No. 3: AUTUMN 2007
Grease, Balance, and Point of View in the
Work of Anthony Trollope
Skating Upriver; A Wedding in Maine;
Ring Effect
Bald Spot
The Interpreters;
In Tide Pools
CHRONICLES
Art
At the Galleries:
Toronto & New York
Theatre
International Theatre
Dance
Cunningham's Collaboration
REVIEWS
The Long and the
Short of Robinson
The Art of What Remains
How Dosty Did It
Another Wharton
If Lucky Jim Could
See Him Now
Jim Crace's
Violent Verities
COMMENT
Letter from India
Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, has been on a helluva roll. His last two major books, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have both been bestsellers—unusual in itself for works of such high intellectual pretension—and when the latter came out, in a thickish paperback edition, its publisher saw fit to send out a vast number of copies in its own special floor display, à la John Grisham or Danielle Steel. Bloom has won a MacArthur Fellowship, better known as a genius grant or a Big Mac; been chosen to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard; been awarded the gold medal for criticism of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, of which he is himself a member. Michael Dirda, in the Washington Post, called Harold Bloom one of the three most important literary critics writing in English in the twentieth century: the other two being the Cambridge don F. R. Leavis and the American man-of-letters Edmund Wilson.
Harold Bloom’s success is of a peculiarly American kind and yet not easily fathomed. As a critic, he is not all that accessible and is capable of producing sentences, paragraphs, lengthy stretches that are quite incomprehensible. (“Like Thoreau, Whitman has a touch of the Bhagavad-Gita, but the Hindu vision is mediated by Western hermeticism, with its Neoplatonic and Gnostic elements.” Yeah, sure, as the kids say, right!) He claims to be of the school of aesthetic critics, remarking that, in an ideological age, “I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic.” Yet he himself doesn’t seem to have a clue about how to produce anything approaching the aesthetically pleasing in his own writing. In an interview in the Paris Review, he declared that he never revises his prose, and nothing in his work refutes this impressive claim. Any critic ready to avail himself of such gargoylesque words as “psychokabbalistic” and “pneumognostic,” who can refer to a passage in Montaigne as an “apotropaic talisman,” and can write about the cosmos having been “reperspectivized by Tolstoy,” may be many things, but he ain’t no aesthete.
Nor does Bloom, in his writing, project an attractive, let alone a seductive, character. He is the type not of the charmingly nutty but of the exhaustingly garrulous professor. His writing displays all the symptoms of an advanced case of Professor’s Disease— dreaded PD—and to the highest power. Such is Bloom’s loquacity that he discovered himself, in the midst of his own psychoanalysis, “paying him [his own analyst] to give him lectures several times a week on the proper way to read Freud.”
Bloom writes like a man accustomed to speaking to his inferiors—to students, that is, a captive audience beholden to him for grades and promotion. To them he may lay down the law, brook no argument, take great pleasure in his own performance, be utterly unworried about someone coughing politely and saying, “Excuse me, pal, but what you just said seems to me a bunch of bullshit!” One has the sense that everything Bloom writes he has probably said before, scores, perhaps hundreds of times, to students; it all comes out of that great booming Bloombox, the academic equivalent of a great Boombox, but this one with no Off switch and no control whatsoever over the volume.
Harold Bloom resembles no one so much as Zero Mostel, with something of the same physique and verbal mania but none of the amusing punchlines. Such laughs as are to be found in Bloom are all unconsciously created on his part. In The Western Canon, he reports that whenever he re-reads Bleak House he cries whenever Esther Summerson does, “and I don’t think I’m being sentimental.” In the same book he also reports that he uses the poems of Walt Whitman to assuage grief. “I remember one summer, in crisis, being at Nantucket with a friend who was absorbed in fishing, while I read aloud to both of us from Whitman and recovered myself again.” Poor friend, one feels, poor fish.
Critics come in vastly varying styles: from subtle, self-effacing, and sardonic, to oracular, vatic, apocalyptic, to plain damned intelligent. The one quality indispensable to the critic, however, is authoritativeness. He must show no hesitation, making commandingly clear that he knows whereof he speaks. Edmund Wilson put the case for authority in criticism best: “The implied position of the people [that’s critics] who know about literature (as in every other fine art) is simply that they know what they know, and that they are determined to impose their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people who do not know [that’s the rest of us].”
Bloom has had no problem mastering the tone of authoritativeness. If he came off any more ex cathedra in his judgments, he’d be Pope. In his literary judgments, he is all assertion and no proof whatsoever. Samuel Johnson is, for Bloom, “unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him.” Then there is Oscar Wilde, “who was right about everything.” Tolstoy’s story “Hadji Murad” is his “personal touchstone for the sublime of prose fiction, to me the best story in the world, or at least the best I have ever read.”And then there is Emily Dickinson, who, “at the height of her powers,” is “the best mind to appear among western poets in nearly four centuries.” What’s that qualificatory nearly doing there, one wonders. And why not round it off, and make it an even half millennium?
Harold Bloom presents himself as a genius—a genius battling his way through the dark forces of the ignorant. His claim is to universal knowledge. He is the man who ranges across literatures, absorbs religious ideas, swallows whole cultures, happily making pronunciamentos upon them as he passes. His pretension rate is quite outside the solar system. In The Book of J, for example, he argued that the real author of the Hebrew Bible was a woman who belonged to the Solomonic elite and wrote during the reign of Rehoboam. Although every serious scholar on the subject shot holes in this notion, Bloom remains unshaken in his sense of his own rightness on the matter, and placidly refers, to this day, to the “J writer” as if his own speculation is the unshakeable truth.
Born in 1930, Harold Bloom began his professional life as a critic of Romantic poetry, and quite a good one, as his book The Visionary Company still shows. But his ambition grew out of all bounds, and he soon became the intellectual equivalent of that character in P. G. Wodehouse of whom Wodehouse writes that he looked like someone who was poured into his clothes but forgot to say when. The sensible Bloom occasionally peeks through, even in his recent books. “You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without that love,” he writes in The Western Canon. “How can you teach solitude?” But for many years now bombast, rant, and confident obscurity have been his reigning notes.
“The personality of the critic is much deprecated in our time,” Bloom wrote in The Western Canon. Sad, because the great critic—that would be Dr. Bloom—is engaged in a dramatic struggle at a depth and with an accompanying danger beyond our imagining. For you and me reading is not the hell that it is for Harold Bloom, who, in Kabbalah and Criticism, writes that “reading is defensive warfare, however generously or joyously we read, and with whatever degree of love, for in such love or such pleasure there is more-than-usual acute ambivalence.” If you are what Bloom calls a “strong reader,” it gets even worse, as he notes in his A Map of Misreading: “Such a reader, at once blind and transparent with light, self-deconstructed yet fully knowing the pain of his separation both from text and from nature, doubtless will be more than equal to the revisionary labors of contraction and destruction, but hardly to the antithetical restoration that increasingly becomes part of the burden and function of whatever valid poetry we have left or may yet receive.” It’s almost enough to make a person turn in his library card.
Writing, it turns out, isn’t much easier. Although Bloom allowed, in a Paris Review interview, that he doesn’t often revise and accepts no editing, he also holds that writing carries its own Sturm und Drang. “One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad,” Bloom told that same Paris Review interviewer. “One writes to be able to write the next piece of criticism or to live through the next day or two. Maybe it’s an apotropaic gesture, maybe one writes to ward off death.” As with writing criticism, so with teaching literature: “The various times I have taught her [Emily Dickinson’s] poems have left me with fierce headaches, since the difficulties force me past my limits.” Imagine, if you will, the headaches of his students.
Harold Bloom is that most comic of unconscious comic figures: the academic Dionysian, calling for higher fires, more dancing girls, music, and wine, all from an endowed chair. His literary taste runs to the hot-blooded and long-winded, his natural appetite is for the apocalyptic. Blake, Whitman, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, these are among the writers who light our aging professor’s fire. “Strangeness, as I keep discovering,” he writes in The Western Canon, “is one of the prime requirements for entrance into the Canon.” Apart from Shakespeare, Bloom’s great culture heroes are Emerson and Freud, who, in combination, yield a gasbag with a dirty mind. “Why criticism has not addressed itself to the image of masturbation in Whitman,” Bloom writes, “I scarcely know.” A critic’s work, as you can see, is never done.
“Criticism,” Bloom has said, “is either a genre of literature or it is nothing.” But criticism becomes literature only when it satisfies one of two standards. The first is that it be so well written that it gives some of the same pleasure that literature itself does. William Hazlitt, Edmund Wilson, V. S. Pritchett, and a few other critics qualify here. Harold Bloom, whose writing is charitably described as “difficult” by John Hollander, his colleague at Yale, does not. The second way criticism can qualify as literature is through the elucidating power of its ideas. Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and perhaps Northrop Frye qualify. It is here that Bloom would no doubt wish to stake his claim.
Bloom has been known as a man with a Big Idea. His Big Idea has not had the luck of instant luminosity that other Big Ideas— the class struggle, the Oedipus complex—have had. The idea itself is named in the first of three books he devoted to it, The Anxiety of Influence (the other two books are A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism). Written in prose with the translucency of isinglass, these three books, as the Germans say, zie lassen sich nicht lesen—do not permit themselves to be read. Still, one can make out their broader lineaments. The Big Idea, which was more modestly and lucidly first put forth by W. Jackson Bate, the biographer of Dr. Johnson and Coleridge, is that writers feel greatly haunted if not daunted by their predecessors, causing them to feel sorely belated, as if everything they wish to do has already been done before them. Weaker writers are crushed by this, the idea holds, but strong writers go on to challenge and in many instances surpass their precursors.
As a theory of literary influence, based on the psychology of authorship, Bloom’s Big Idea has not been taken up either by his fellow academics or by practicing critics. So far as one can determine, The Anxiety of Influence has had very little influence and appears to have caused anxiety chiefly in Harold Bloom, who claims that few people really understand it. A characteristic passage from the book may indicate why this is:
But what is the Primal Scene, for a poet as poet? It is his Poetic Father’s coitus with the Muse. There he was begotten? No—there they failed to beget him. He must be self-begotten, he must engender himself upon the Muse his mother. But the Muse is as pernicious as the Sphinx or Coevering Cherub, and may identify herself with either, though more usually with the Sphinx. The strong poet fails to beget himself—he must wait for his Son, who will define him even when he has defined his own Poetic Father. To beget here means to usurp, and is the dialectical labor of the Cherub. Entering here into the center of our sorrow, we must look closely at him.
Bloom sees literary influence everywhere, and his claims have the crisp clarity that only freedom from evidence or consecutive argument give. In The Western Canon, Bloom writes that he is “inclined to believe that Shakespeare induced a considerable anxiety in Freud.” He next tells us that “Shakespeare is everywhere in Freud, far more present when unmentioned than when he is cited.” The plot quickens, thickens, and sickens: “Freud, as prose-poet of the post-Shakepearean, sails in Shakespeare’s wake; and the anxiety of influence has no more distinguished sufferer in our time than the founder of psychoanalysis, who always discovered that Shakespeare had been there long before him, and all too frequently could not bear to confront this humiliating truth.” But how do we know? We know, as the song from the old Walt Disney movie has it, because Uncle Harold (for Remus) tells us so.
Finding the anxiety of influence in your favorite writer—or friends and relatives, for that matter—may work better as an after-dinner game, or way to break up dull parties, than it does in actual criticism, though Bloom thought, when he first published the book, that it would change poetic history and provide “a wholly different practical criticism.” As with almost all Bloom’s criticism, the theory of the anxiety of influence has a nice arbitrariness about it. Tennyson, Arnold, Hopkins, and Rossetti, Bloom tells us, felt anxiety over the influence of Keats, though among them, according to him, only Tennyson triumphed. Dostoyevsky, like Freud, had to struggle free of the influence of Shakespeare, though through five volumes of his biography this notion seems to have eluded Dostoyevsky’s highly intelligent biographer Joseph Frank, who makes no mention of it whatsoever. T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens both felt anxious about the influence of Walt Whitman. Ezra Pound had to square off against Robert Browning.
No one denies that literary influence exists, which of course it does, but it almost always does in ways too subtle for genuinely precise tracing. “I am not fond of the word influence,” Valéry wrote, “which indicates ignorance or a hypothesis and plays a great and convenient role in criticism.” The real question is does influence always necessitate anxiety, a struggle, an agon (a favorite Bloom word), a misreading of a writer’s precursors? Nobody but Harold Bloom seems to think so. Near as one can make out, as an idea, the anxiety of influence chiefly gets in the way, so that, for example, in his biography of Balzac, Graham Robb feels compelled to note: “The ‘anxiety of influence’ is not much in evidence in Balzac’s jottings [his early writings]. . . . Rather, he seems to be cheered on by his predecessors, most of whom he came across in primers and anthologies. . . . If anything, Balzac was underwhelmed by the intellectual achievements of humanity.”
Bloom seems happiest viewing the world locked in endless struggle. He sees himself, for example, in bayonet battle with the younger generation of English professors, among them feminists, new historicists, deconstructionists, Marxists, the rather pathetic motley that Bloom calls the School of Resentment. He also sees fundamentalist religion, the wider and wider spread use of the computer, television and “the University of Resentment (already well along in consolidation)” combined “into one rough beast,” presaging a future that would cancel out not only a literary canon but literature itself. True enough, something like a School of Resentment does exist and it is destroying literature as an academic subject, but in attacking these academics, Bloom portrays himself as the lonely heroic outsider, single-handedly taking on the charging horde of barbarians. Not quite so.
Harold Bloom is an establishment man. He is the consummate literary politician, riding to hounds—now there is a subject for a David Levine cartoon—with those literary personages who have themselves already been declared winners. In contemporary literature, eschewing heterodoxy, he takes few chances, and none that are likely to cost him future emoluments or useful friends. Thus he attacks Alice Walker but lays off Toni Morrison. He everywhere pretends to contemn the stridently political in literature, yet in an appendix to The Western Canon called “A Canonical Prophecy” he lists Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—a play that is all politics and little else—as a likely canonical work of the future. If one runs down the names of contemporary poets he admires in this same appendix, these turn out for the most part to be the usual suspects, the old gang, that happy mutual admiration society that each year awards one another Pulitzer, Lannan, and other jolly prizes.
The mystery is that Harold Bloom, for all his nearly perfect unreadability, today finds himself in that small but lucky elite of writers whose books sell without being actually read. I have been plowing my way through Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human for weeks now, and I can only report that it is difficult to imagine anyone reading through it who has not been paid to write about it. The Shakespeare book, too, has a large, useless idea at its center—namely, that Shakespeare invented our feelings and way of feeling and so, through his plays, invented (or, as Bloom sometimes says, “reinvented”) human personality. Reading Bloom on this point is, as John Carey, writing in the Times of London, puts it, “like chatting with an acquaintance and gradually realizing he believes death rays are issuing from his television screen.”
Much the greater part of Bloom’s book on Shakespeare is a great ramble, play by play, in which Bloom piles opinionation upon opinionation, agreeing with this critic, arguing with that, inserting bits of quite uninteresting academic autobiography, establishing his own superiority, providing as heavy-breathing a solipsistic performance as one is likely to find off a Beverly Hills psychoanalytic couch.“It is very difficult, even painful to have done with Falstaff,” Bloom writes toward the conclusion of his chapter on Henry IV, “for no other literary character . . . seems to me so infinite in provoking thought and arousing emotion.” Choice selections of the characteristically impenetrable Bloomian prose are the raisins in this indigestible pudding of a book: “Shakespeare’s uniqueness, his greatest originality, can be described either as a charismatic cognition, which comes from an individual before it enters group thinking, or as a cognitive charisma, which cannot be routinized.” As a work of Bardolatry, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human succeeds in giving even Shakespeare a bad name. “If Bloom himself is anything to go by,” John Carey writes, “an ability to laugh at yourself is far from being an inevitable result of reading Shakespeare.”
Bloom has a book in the works on genius. That he would next turn to this subject makes a certain amount of sense: a great critic is, after all, a reader of genius. Which is the claim that Harold Bloom has for many years made for himself, in books both arcane and ambitious. A critic for whom Bloom hasn’t much regard, T. S. Eliot, once said that the best method for being a critic is to be very intelligent. Harold Bloom isn’t very intelligent—he is merely learned, though in a wildly idiosyncratic way. He has staked out his claim for being a great critic through portentousness, pomposity, and extravagant pretension, and, from all appearances, seems to have achieved it.
This comes about, in part, through a lack of competition. What Randall Jarrell, half in rue, once called The Age of Criticism—the cavalcade of whose names include T. S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, E. R. Curtius, Erich Auerbach, and René Wellek—seems to have been over for more than two decades, to be replaced by . . . well, by not much. In Europe there is George Steiner, who has all Bloom’s pomposity and pretension and even more of his portentousness but none of what a wag—me, actually—once referred to as the latter’s modesty and lighthearted humor. Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue write careful and serious literary criticism, but neither seems to want to set up shop as omniscient in the way Bloom does. Helen Vendler has restricted herself to the realm of poetry in English, both past and present, and her own book on Shakespeare’s sonnets makes no claims outside attempting to understand how they work. Frank Kermode, though very learned, writes with a modesty that is almost the reverse of Bloom’s assertiveness.
Proust says that in art, medicine, and fashion, there have to be new names, by which he meant that new names will arise whether they are worthy or not of being known. The same principle operates in literary criticism, where the name that has now popped up is that of Harold Bloom. But his is a reputation much in need of puncturing, if only to release the bloat and if literary criticism is once again to be taken—and is to take itself—seriously.
The Hudson Review Vol. LV, No. 2 (Summer 2002)
Copyright © 2002 by Joseph Epstein