I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about Harold Bloom in the context of my series of posts on the Greatest of All-Time Literary Critics, which has become, as I knew it would, mostly about the nature of the discipline, but as examined by the world of several thinkers – for neither Lévi-Strauss nor Derrida were literary critics, though they were important to the evolving discipline. Bloom may be as brilliant a thinker as academic literary criticism has seen, but it’s not at all clear to me that he has had a distinctive influence on the discipline and I rather suspect that his value as public spokesperson for literature will become heavily discounted over time. But I’ll save those arguments for my main post on Bloom.
In this post I want to think about the strange, ambiguous, and divided nature of literary criticism, for thinking about Bloom has forced me once again to think about it. Perhaps I’ve made some progress.
Consider this crude image, in which Reality is depicted as a sheet of paper with a fold in it:
To the left we have the external world, the world studied by physicists, geologists, biologists, but also economists. Their observations, analysis, description, and explanation, all are about phenomena in the external world. To the right we have the inner world, a collective world we experience, elaborate, and share through religion and the arts. Literary criticism, that double blue line in the image, exists in both worlds, rather precariously so. The meanings it seeks to explicate exist in the inner world, but it is reduced to accounting for them in terms of the signs visible in the external world.
That is true for all aesthetic objects. In the case of paintings, sculptures, and works of music, the physical artifacts seem to carry the meaning rather directly whereas in literary works the physical forms of the words tell us nothing about their meanings [1]. Critics of music and of the plastic arts have the physical objects they can talk about. But the physical objects literary critics deal with, symbols on paper, are of little interest in themselves. Critics must instead talk and write about what those symbols imply and mean.
That’s tricky and deeply problematic. The problematic nature of that activity didn’t hit home until the 1960s or so, when critics realized that they weren’t reaching consensus on their interpretations. How could literary criticism be a proper intellectual discipline if critics can’t agree? I’ve already devoted two posts to this problem (René Girard prepares the way for the French invasion and Derrida deconstructs the signs while Lévi-Strauss tracks the system of myth) and so don’t intend to rehearse that material again.
In reading around in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, but also the much earlier Anxiety of Influence, it’s clear that Bloom yearns for a criticism that is very much intertwined with the (collective) inner realm. At one point he says something to the effect that the meaning of a poem is another poem (that’s what influence is about). So the critic cannot tell us about that meaning ‘from the outside.’ Rather the critic must bath in it, if you will.
One of his last books, which I’ve not looked at, is entitled The Anatomy of Influence (playing on his own earlier book and Northrup Frye’s still earlier one). Sam Tanenhaus reviewed it in the New York Times in 2011 where he said:
The critic, his antennae sharpened, was the poet’s secret sharer or, perhaps, his unrecruited psychoanalyst. “If to imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems antithetical to their precursors, then to imagine after a poet is to learn his own metaphors for his acts of reading.” This erased the barrier separating critic from poet. Each, an impassioned reader, annexed the functions of the other.
For the strong misreading poet and critic, there was but one ambition, to achieve the sublime, the highest form of spiritual-aesthetic exaltation, mingled with intimations of terror, first described in antiquity by Longinus ...
That’s what Bloom seems to have been about, erasing “the barrier separating critic from poet” so that the two have “but one ambition, to achieve the sublime, the highest form of spiritual-aesthetic exaltation.” Bloom seeks to avoid the problematic activity of explicating the forms and movements of the inner world in the fragile terms afforded by mere verbal symbols by fusing with the poet and so disappearing into the inner world, which he termed “the aesthetic.”
Bloom to all but worshiped the aesthetic, without, so far as I know, attempting to define and explain it. The aesthetic lives in the actions of that inner world. To attempt to define it, examine and analyze it, to explain it, would be to step aside and (attempt to) project it into the external world. He opens The Western Canon with these two sentences:
This book studies twenty-six writers, necessarily with a certain nostalgia, since I seek to isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in our culture. “Aesthetic value” is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant's rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.
He invokes that aesthetic many times but he never explicates it. It is self-evidently there, given in (his) experience.
For Bloom the canon, and Shakespeare above all, defines the aesthetic. That is what he is setting over against the external world. His job as critic is to dwell in the aesthetic. The extremism of his Bardolatry, in which he often compares Shakespeare to God, is an attempt to make Shakespeare as REAL as possible, and thereby make the CANON as REAL as possible. It’s an act of glorious desperation. Writing in a collection of essays about Bloom’s Shakespeare, Linda Charnes observes [2]:
One cannot help but feel that Bloom wants to be regarded not as an interpreter of Shakespeare, but as his “partner in communication,” and – most hysterically–regarded thus by Shakespeare himself.
What, in the end, though, is the point? Does reading Bloom on Shakespeare or the canon send readers back to those texts, renewed with fresh insight, or does it simply enmesh them in Bloom’s erudition, judgement, and mythification? Norman Mailer once published a collection of various pieces, fictions, essays, poems, stuff, entitled Advertisements for Myself. Is that what Bloom is doing in The Western Canon, Shakespeare, and no doubt in other books, using critical commentary as a vehicle for tooting his own horn? Is there anything in Bloom’s criticism other than Bloom dressed up in various guises? Or, to point it more pointedly and perhaps more accurately, regardless of his (good faith) intentions, is his method such that all the words, the erudition, the passion, the commitment, it all collapses around him, leaving nothing but Bloom declaiming into the void?
One more time: If, for example, Bloom had published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in, say, 1924, two decades after A. C. Bradley had published Shakespearean Tragedy – a book Bloom mentions often enough, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece, not only by the educated public, but by the academy as well. Bradley’s book is still in print, over a century after it was originally published, and Bradley has an honored position in the history of literary criticism. The fate of Bloom’s work in 20, 30, or more years, that doesn’t seem so certain to me. The world of literary criticism has changed. If you compare the tone and style of the two writers you can see that, where Bradley is full with Shakespeare, in Bloom’s case, alas, it seems the other way around, with Bloom all too energetically stuffing Shakespeare full of himself.
To use one of his favorite terms, one that has entered into the common parlance of academic criticism, Bloom’s work is belated. Brilliant, but obsolete. I'll explicate that judgement in later posts.
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Looking Ahead: At the moment I’m thinking of doing two more posts about Bloom before a final post on the future of literary criticism, which I think has to change quite a bit, both to exploit new intellectual possibilities, but also to take advantage of the various distributed intellectual technologies now available. In my next post on Bloom I want to consider the relationship between author and critic (which has been at the center of this post) in relation to the question of intellectual authority in literary criticism. I indent to conclude my Bloom series with a post that looks at three books, The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
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[1] In the case of poetry we do have the sounds of the words, rhythm, rhyme and other patterns. They resonate, imply, perhaps even connote, but they do not themselves tell us anything. In the case of drama there is always the spectacle on stage, itself the result of interpretive choices as contingent, ambiguous, and richly motivated as any of the words critics may write.
[2] Linda Charnes, “The 2% Solution: What Bloom Forgot,” in Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, eds., Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 259-268.
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