The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

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Summary: Work your brain
Review: Fine book. It'll make your brain sweat. I was a convert in Bloom's religion of literature before I ever read anything by him. I'll get around to reading Proust eventually, Mr. Bloom, I promise.

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Summary: The Western Canon or rather the English-speaking one?
Review: I have read this book with mixed feelings. I have appreciated the undubious love of the author towards books, not so common today. I agree with some of its analysis, and I found others simplistic (that analysis about Pessoa, please!). But, coming from a different cultural background than the author,I have felt enormous holes in its selections. I have no doubt Chaucer is key to understand the development of English language, for instance, but in other languages this function is done by other works. In the Spanish language, the equivalent of Dickens is Galdós, to put another example. Even for English speakers, I would have missed Henry James and Joseph Conrad in the canon. Both have greatly influenced many other authors.

Perhaps a more appropiate approach would have been to try to make an English-language Canon, just to put it face to face with other ones.

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Summary: What are we to do with Bloom?
Review: On one level,you have Harold Bloom the great thinker,the defender of intellectual and artistic standards against the blatant phillistinism of 'multiculturalism', and other forms of social cant: like his student Camille Paglia he loves art and brilliantly champions its sanctity. But also like Paglia, Bloom's actual approach to art is at times dismally vulgar. He is enamored with Freud and accepts his simplistic, ignorant 'explanation' of the artistic imagination (sublimated libido and all that jazz)...Bloom seems too excited about discovering the Freudian 'anxiety of influence', as he called it, to actually examine individual genius and style; he says himself that Beckett's 'Murphy' pleases him so much because Joyce's influence on that novel is obvious. Bloom on Nabokov is even more depressing: a bold genius who makes sense only to those readers who come to him with developed imaginations unemcumbered with general ideas and accepted conventions, Nabokov is a major thorn in the side of Bloom's approach, with delights in dragooning differences under a particular flag of myth or general thought. In his introduction to the Critical Views volume of Nabokov, Bloom makes a complete fool of himself by stating that Proust was Nabokov's main influence ("hmm, Proust is concerned with memory...and, so is Nabokov! Aha! There is the influence!"--what a fool!)and, get this, that the second part of 'Lolita' is an unconscious retelling of Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' ("Hmm, Humbert desires Lolita, so he's gonna kill Quilty for taking her away--Eros to Thanatos!"). It is sad to see such a beautiful, intricate masterpiece gruffly manhandled by simplistic, second-rate thought; Bloom exlplains away Nabokov's repeated dismissals of Freud as merely an aversion fed by ignorance.

Don't get me wrong, I respect alot of Bloom's work (his scholarly work on the Romantics, and his defense of Shelley and Keats against that muddle-headed criminal, Eliot), his loving adoration of Shakespeare, and his steadfast position that art should not be compromised in order to redress past social ills.... but why does he have to love Freud, who Akhmatova once called 'the number 1 enemy of creativity'?

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Summary: Emerson, please!
Review: I agree with those who claim that Mr. Bloom has lost some of his edge in his most recent books. It seems to me that this has come about through his apparent need to engage in polemics with his perceived enemies. As a polemicist he is often very amusing, though not particularly perspicacious (can the author of humorous but facile diatribes against attitudes that are already out of fashion or will be before long be the same author that gave us that book on Stevens?). Although I can't help delighting in his cariacature of the academy of the '90's (the "School of Resentment" and so forth), I feel that he undermines his critical integrity through a dismissiveness that comes perilously close to the right-wing camp -- from which he no doubt would wish to distance himself as well. In addition, he handicaps himself by equating the thought of such continental luminaries as Foucault and Derrida with their Anglo-American reductionists -- thereby forfeiting the opportunity to consider how much his key early work shares with that of other important contemporary thinkers. And yes, let's have a book on Emerson...without the hackneyed polemics.

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Summary: The school of Bloom
Review: Critical intelligence is always inversely proportional to age and fame. Bloom was quite good in his early days, when he was an unestablished fighter for the Romantics; now he mainly babbles and parodies himself. All of his recent books are badly in need of a real editor, who can with the severity of a schoolteacher tell him straight out to delete and revise. Bloom ought to stop reading his great authors, and pick up an elementary style manual. He is a gifted man, with real strengths as a critic in the tradition of Johnson; and it is a pity that he should waste away his talent and the rain forest like this.

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Summary: An End To Literature?
Review: The Western Canon is indisputably a great book. It is also likely the last book of its kind that will ever be written. No younger trained reader can consider its central thesis, a defense of the aesthetic, without sniggering--obviously such a contention is merely a defense of what's known, in the jargon, as the "hegemony." It doesn't matter, to these people, of which I am one, that the existence of such a thing has not been proven--the seminars and the books, or texts, will continue to be produced regardless. If these people, whom Bloom calls the School of Resentment, are defeated, they will merely be replaced by right-wing elements with their own party line. The young (such as myself) are not being trained to do things in any other way; hence, there will be no successors to Bloom. This is, perhaps, a very good thing. For it might just clear the way for a really scientific study of literature, of the sort already being proposed by Stephen Pinker, who suggested in his book, The Language Instinct, that perhaps narrative literature is the result of an evolutionary development in the simian brain. This may or may not be true, of course, but because literature professors have so obviously botched their profession, it may be the way of the future. Thus, one ought to read Bloom's book now, while there is still time. It is the last book we will ever read that takes "the Western Canon" seriously.

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Summary: An excellent overview, but missing one crucial link.
Review: I found this book to be a monumental achievement. Bloom's choice of the 26 canonical authors to review is compelling, his insights are superb, and the index of some 500 canonized works is an excellent reference source for library building. However, he neglects to include The Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I believe are essential texts for understanding the middle ages. Perhaps this was an oversight, or perhaps Bloom neglected to include the Gawain-poet because he casts doubt on Bloom's thesis that Shakespeare was the first writer to depict the human character accurately. Howbeit, this is an extraordinary book, a must-read for anyone seriously interested in literature. I highly recommend it.

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Summary: Immortal Literature versus Political Academia
Review: Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is centered around the concept of a literary canon, which Bloom describes as "what has been preserved out of what has been written." The term canon is religious in origin, initially referring to wisdom literature chosen for inclusion into Scripture by the Christian Church. Bloom's book addresses the preservation issue, that is, how do we choose what to preserve and grant canonical status? The current canon debate seems to have arisen from a more modern definition of the term, referring to the books chosen by our institutions for teaching. Bloom asserts that a recent emergence of politically-motivated attacks will result in the imminent displacement of the traditional Western Canon from our schools' curriculum. Bloom accordingly names his first chapter "An Elegy for the Canon" and identifies two factions in the canon debate: the right-wing element that defends the canon with appeals to Platonic arguments of moral good, and the left wing "journalistic-academic" element Bloom names the School of Resentment that attacks the canon with appeals to Aristotelian arguments for a work's supposed social good. Bloom claims both disinterest and disassociation with this political debate and argues that both sides are misguided in their approach. Bloom then dedicates the remainder of his book to explaining why the attackers and defenders are misguided in their criteria and offering his own arguments for canonical inclusion. The essential criteria that Bloom advocates is one rooted in tradition and purely artistic considerations: for Bloom, the only true test of literary excellence is aesthetic quality, a criteria that judges a work based on its artistic merit alone and is unconcerned with political, moral, or social issues.

Bloom is possibly the preeminent literary critic in America and is well-known for his theory of the anxiety of influence, reflecting his belief that, "there can be no strong, canonical writing without the process of literary influence." Bloom contends that, "any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts" and that "tradition is not only a handing-down process or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration...[a] conflict [that] cannot be settled by social concerns, or by the judgement of any particular generation of impatient idealists."

Bloom places Shakespeare and Dante at the center of the Western Canon and claims that any writers who follow must inevitably wrestle with their greatness. This bold contention is a courageous and provocative one that requires a satisfying justification. But Bloom, in accordance with his reputation, rises to the challenge, surveying the vast landscape of literary criticism and presenting the greatest passages of analysis on the reasons for Shakespeare's greatness. Although many critics are quoted, the German writer Goethe is granted the final word: "Shakespeare confers on [his characters] intelligence and imagination; and by means of the image in which they, by virtue of that intelligence, contemplate themselves objectively, as a work of art, he makes them free artists of themselves." Bloom subsequently concludes that the singular excellence of Shakespeare is "his power of representation of human character and personality and their mutabilities" and leaves us with the observation that "at once no one and everyone, nothing and everything, Shakespeare IS the Western Canon."

In the remaining chapters, Bloom continues his analysis of the major canonical figures, carefully applying his criteria of aesthetic value throughout. The chapters are organized according to age: the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, and the Chaotic Age (understood to begin with the twentieth-century and including the present day). The major figures include Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, and a few others. The Appendix offers a suggested reading list of well over 500 authors from all ages that Bloom considers worthy of reading.

Bloom's book serves as a touchstone for literary criticism and the teaching of literature, and I would certainly recommend it for both academic and public libraries. The reader follows an experienced and formidable literary critic in his analysis of the strongest literary works. In the process, the reader learns a great deal about literary textual analysis and our body of Western literature. The reader also gains a sense of the current debate surrounding the canon in our universities and the present nature of literary criticism as it is being practiced. Bloom cannot hide that he is most disturbed *not* by the right wing moralists but the academics in the School of Resentment who aim to replace aesthetic value and high standards with a program for social justice as the principal criteria of literary excellence. Bloom extends his lament by discussing other elements of contemporary society, including MTV, short attention spans, inpatient readers, failing public schools, professors of cultural politics, the loss of love for reading and good literature, and the predicted conversion of Departments of English to literature-depleted Departments of Cultural Studies. In the end, even if you don't fully share his views, you cannot help but sympathize with Bloom's genuine concerns, be moved by his cogent arguments, and respect his learned and masterful analysis of the literary art he loves so well.

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Summary: Stuck in the Jungle with Harold Bloom
Review: In the Western Canon, Harold Bloom repeatedly asks (and answers) the "desert island question." -- what books would one choose to be stranded with on a desert island? I've never been stuck on a Pacific atoll but I did serve two years in the Peace Corps stranded in the Cameroonian jungle. Unfortunately, I was sent a copy of The Western Canon. I must have read that book a dozen times both straight through and Swiss cheese style. The infuriating thing about The Western Canon was that it inspired a passion to read Proust, Becket, and Cervantes -- a passion that bordered on mania, a passion that has led to a lingering speech impediment -- and I WAS STRANDED IN A DAMN JUNGLE! So instead of nuturing a joyous desire that can be satisified at the local library or bookstore, Harold Bloom drove me insane. Word of advice: please read the Western Canon within walking distance of a public library.

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Summary: a much-needed dose of cultural conservatism
Review: "The Western Canon" has some flaws but it is an excellent means by which the general reader may get a sense of which works are classics and which schools of thought are to be viewed with skepticism. I find Bloom's models of "the anxiety of influence" and of Viconian cultural evolution to be fascinating, but no more than models; they do not encompass the totality of literature. The biggest flaws in his analysis of individual works are that he is too general, and that he does not cite enough concrete evidence. This, however, was probably inevitable, as the book was aimed at a general audience. --- Having said these things, however, I believe Bloom's plea for cultural conservatism, for skepticism of today's trends, is right on the mark. He does not condemn multicultural or feminist or avant garde works; rather, he asks that they be accepted based on their aesthetic merits alone. Thus, you will find "The Country of the Point Firs" on the list of canonical works, but not the works of Mary Noailles Murfree (a contemporary of Jewett's). You will find Borges, but not his weaker imitators. The criterion is aesthetic value -- which, he says, is elitist only in the sense that one's critical standards must be severe. If a work is a dull, mud-encrusted stone, no amount of polishing is going to make it look like an emerald.