Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Tyler Cowen thinks highly of the work of Harold Bloom. In particular he recommends Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), which is a one-volume conspectus of Western literature from Dante through Samuel Beckett. As skeptical as I am of Bloom (see my remarks on Bloom in The Discipline of Literary Criticism) Cowen’s got me there. I don’t know of any other comparable one-volume introduction to Western literature, though I imagine that, with a bit of care, you could have your favorite top-of-the-line chatbot do something comparable for you.

But if what interests you is not so much the sweep of Western literature as the sweep of the Western mind, then you might consider Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy. The emphasis is different, obviously, but philosophy is literature-adjacent. And the sweep is grander, from the Pre-Socrates to the 20th century. It has been criticized for its, shall we say, idiosyncratic emphasis and judgements,  but the same can be said for Bloom. Neither man pretended to take stock of their respective domains as a neutral observer.

Moreover Russell was arguably one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early contributions to mathematical logic and analytic philosophy are foundational; he was also a public intellectual of considerable influence, writing God knows how many essays collected into dozens of books, and a political activist as well, collaborating with diverse figures in opposition to nuclear weapons (Albert Einstein) and the war in Vietnam (Jean-Paul Sartre). (Alas, he was also a eugenicist in the first half of his life.)

And, I suppose, roughly the same chatbot strategy that would allow you to displace Bloom from your reading list would also work with Russell.

* * * * *

FWIW, I’m only four degrees of separation from Bertrand Russell, and all the links are strong, none of them mere acquaintance. Here’s the chain:

(1) Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein;
(2) Wittgenstein taught Margaret Masterman;
(3) Masterman was a colleague of David Hays;
(4) David Hays was my teacher and then colleague.

Given my teachers at Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo I’m likely no more than two links from Bloom in two or three directions. For example, I audited a graduate course on the Victorian novel taught by J. Hillis Miller, who also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He became Bloom's colleague at Yale as one of the infamous “Yale Mafia.”

ChatGPT on Literary Texts as Cognitive Instruments, with Notes on Tyler Cowen and Harold Bloom

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a book about the social and cultural implications of AI, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I’m planning it to have eight chapters, with the sixth and seventh being in science fiction mode, rather than the non-fiction mode I use in the other chapters and that is standard for such books. In discussing this with ChatGPT 5.2, it (he, she, they – I’ve never asked it what pronouns it prefers) remarked:

When prediction fails, fiction becomes a legitimate cognitive instrument. That is why Chapters 6 and 7 are not “illustrations.” They are epistemological machinery.

That struck me, hard. I decided to follow up on that and entered into a brief discussion about academic literary criticism after World War II and its avenging nemesis, Harold Bloom. The rest of this post consists of excerpts from that conversation along into which I have inserted a bit from Tyler Cowen’s essay on novels as models.

The academic discipline of literary criticism

Here’s the prompt I gave to ChatGPT:

Now I understand what academic literary criticism (in America) has been about since WWII. It’s obvious that literature is about pleasure and beauty, but also escape. That yields a certain critical practice. And there’s critical practice around the notion of literature as moral instruction. But literary texts as cognitive tools, as epistemic instruments? That didn’t get institutionalized until after WWII with the rise of interpretive criticism. And THAT’s why there was all that controversy in the 1960s and 1970s about validity in criticism. Critics were now treating texts as authoritative instruments of cultural cognition. So it became imperative to determine just how the critic could know what the texts were saying. Otherwise it collapses down on the critic as mere opinion.

ChatGPT’s response:

You’re right: American literary criticism after WWII did quietly institutionalize the idea that literary texts function as epistemic instruments, even if it never quite said so in those terms.

Once critics moved beyond:

• pleasure,
• beauty,
• moral uplift,

and began treating texts as:

• sites of cultural knowledge,
• vehicles of historical consciousness,
• instruments for thinking about identity, power, subjectivity,

then validity became unavoidable.

That’s exactly why the 1960s–70s debates mattered so much:

• If texts are just aesthetic objects, disagreement is taste.
• If texts are moral instruction, disagreement is ethics.
• But if texts are tools for knowing, then disagreement becomes epistemological.

And epistemology demands standards.

The famous anxiety about “valid interpretations” was not pedantry; it was the growing pain of a discipline that had, without quite realizing it, claimed cognitive authority.

Cowen: Novels as Models

Just what does it mean to think of a literary text as a cognitive instrument? Consider an unpublished essay by an economist, Tyler Cowen, “Is a Novel a Model?” Here’s the abstract:

I defend the relevance of fiction for social science investigation. Novels can be useful for making some economic approaches – such as behavioral economics or signaling theory – more plausible. Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics. Economics can, and has, profited from the insights contained in novels. Nonetheless, while novels and models lie along a common spectrum, they differ in many particulars. I attempt a partial account of why we sometimes look to models for understanding, and other times look to novels.

I can’t imagine a more direct way of asserting that literary texts are cognitive instruments.

To be sure that is not the way literary critics talk, and Cowen knows this. He notes that “there is a massive literature on what novels are all about, there is virtually nothing comparing novels to models,” which is linked to a long footnote referencing discussions of what novels are about from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, including literary critics. Literary critics will have been trained in Continental modes of thinking – with its philosophical, psychoanalytic, and Marxist strains – which are quite different from the empirical and mathematical economics Cowen learned at Harvard. Thus the cognitive style of literary criticism is different, perhaps even unrecognizably so, but it IS cognitive. Cowen is aware of this difference, which he acknowledges early in his article:

But in the larger picture social scientists should consider, for research reasons, spending time reading novels, and humanities professors should consider spending time with formal models. The two methods of investigation, despite notable and persisting differences, have more in common than is commonly supposed. Since this article is directed at social scientists, it should be thought of as pro-novel, relative to economic science as a whole, although individuals from the humanities may experience discomfort at seeing novels compared to models at all.

With that behind us, let’s turn to a literary critic, Harold Bloom, whom Cowen admires a great deal.

Harold Bloom

Bloom interests me because he has rejected post war literary criticism and thus has, implicitly, rejected the idea that literature can serve epistemic ends – though I suspect, if the issue were put to him in those terms, that he would claim, quite the contrary, that literature speaks to out deepest possible cognitive aspirations.

Here is the prompt I put to ChatGPT:

This also explains why I find Harold Bloom so puzzling and uninteresting as a critic. Brilliant he was, but he rejected the idea of literary texts as cognitive instruments. That’s what’s behind his rejection of those “critics of resentment.” Did they sometimes/often go overboard into polemic, sure. But they were treating texts as cognitive instruments. And thus they were not being reductive as Bloom claimed. I find it telling that when he rejected those critics (e.g. in his book on the canon) in favor of an aesthetic reading, he never developed an explicit account of just what an aesthetic reading was. He just asked the reader to accept of faith that’s that what Bloom was up to and that it was good. He was so brilliant in his range of reference and discourse that many were happy to accept him on face value.

Bloom’s Shortcomings as a Public Critic: Shakespeare and the Aesthetic

A new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/130317867/Blooms_Shortcomings_as_a_Public_Critic_Shakespeare_and_the_Aesthetic
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5337721
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393362370_Bloom's_Shortcomings_as_a_Public_Critic_Shakespeare_and_the_Aesthetic

Abstract: This paper reexamines Harold Bloom’s famous claim that Shakespeare “invented the human,” treating it as a provocative intuition rather than a defensible thesis. While Bloom’s brilliance is undeniable, his critical method often falters in its lack of precision, dialogue, and systematic argument. His assertions remain suggestive rather than demonstrable, his central ideas never quite articulated in a form that others could test, extend, or refine.

Bloom’s insights can benefit from a broader historical and conceptual framework, drawing on the founder effect, the rise of the nation-state, and changes in the structure of family life to explain how Shakespeare’s works came to resonate so powerfully—and why that resonance was institutionalized in canon formation. Rather than dismissing Bloom’s view outright, the argument reframes it: Shakespeare was not uniquely responsible for modern subjectivity, but his plays became a particularly vivid site where evolving ideas of inwardness, identity, and public/private distinction found artistic form.

A substantial portion of the paper engages in a sustained dialogue with Claude 3.5, a large language model. This conversation serves as both a critical method and a philosophical thought experiment, probing Bloom’s aesthetic commitments through Kantian theory, Huizinga’s concept of play, and Edward Said’s reflections on the autonomous aesthetic. The exchange reveals not only the tension between Bloom’s aesthetic absolutism and his resistance to theory, but also the possibility of reconciling aesthetic and cultural criticism through new tools and vocabularies.

The paper concludes by proposing that modern computational techniques—including large-scale textual analysis and cultural analytics—offer a way to redeem and complete Bloom’s project. Where Bloom intuited transformations in the representation of consciousness, digital tools may now be able to trace those transformations empirically, revealing Shakespeare’s influence not as an abstract myth but as a legible pattern across literary history. This is not an argument against Bloom, but an effort to carry his vision beyond its limits and into a new critical era.

If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalization, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns.

–Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence

Contents

Harold Bloom, Brilliant and Intuitive, but not Great 3
About this document 4
About the title page image 5
Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's greatness 6
Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] 8
What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? 10
The founder effect 10
Shakespeare and the invention of the modern 11
Twice a founder 15
Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom 16
Kant, Huizinga, and the Aesthetic 17
Edward Said on a separate aesthetic realm 21
Bloom’s mode of thinking 24
The Value of Computational Techniques 28

Harold Bloom, Brilliant and Intuitive, but not Great

I’ve known about Harold Bloom for most of my career. I read The Anxiety of Influence sometime in the 1970s, thought it interesting, but also peculiar, wrote a letter to Dick Macksey about it, and then set it aside. By that time I had committed to cognitive science so Bloom had little to say to me. As fas as I was concerned, that was pretty much it for Bloom. I read a review or two of The Western Canon, but saw no need to read it, and I thumbed through Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in a bookstore, but that was it.

Then, in October, 2023, Tyler Cowen published a book, Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? So I decided that I’d take a crack at identifying the greatest literary critics of all time. I went at it rather casually, intending no more than one or two or three posts, certainly no more. But the enterprise stuck to me and kept posting and posting. As I’m doubtful of this GOAT business, the project morphed into a look at the conceptual boundaries of the contemporary academic discipline of literary criticism: Who are the major figures marking those boundaries? After running through a half-dozen or so important figures – Coleridge, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Northrop Frye, Renee Girard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida – I found myself staring at the specter of Harold Bloom. What was I to do about Bloom? He’d all but abandoned the profession by the 1990s, but was the literary critic most visible to the general public. How well did he serve that public?

I decided to take another look at him. I looked through the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence, with its new and rather long preface. I picked up both The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, but was unable to bring myself to read either of those in full. Rather I read the opening and closing sections of both, figuring that’s where I’d find whatever general thoughts Bloom had on those subjects, and read around here and there in both books, looking for this and that. I also looked at some other books, most especially his late book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, read some interviews, and read a bunch of stuff about him. I reached the conclusion that he may well have been as brilliant a literary critic as we’ve seen since World War II, but that he was not a great critic.

In making this distinction I am thinking of brilliance as property of a person’s mind while greatness is a property of the work they produced. To the extent that I can judge such things, Bloom is as brilliant a critic as I’ve read. But I am unable to think of his work as being great. He may have read “everything,” and been able to quote it from memory at the drop of a hat, and he may have felt deeply about it all, but he was also enormously self-indulgent and, in the end, undisciplined.

There’s another distinction we need to make as well, a somewhat more obscure and delicate one. I want to distinguish between attitudes, ideas, behavior we can attribute to Bloom as a result of internalizing the norms of practices of academic literary criticism as he encountered them early in his career in the 1950a, and the attitudes, ideas, behavior more properly attributed to Bloom’s personal inclinations. It is clear that he stayed within those early disciplinary boundaries, though he realized them with a flamboyance attributable to his personal style.

Had Bloom gone beyond those boundaries in ways I indicate in this paper, then he might well have achieved greatness. The public deserved at least that. Instead of construing himself as a sage, oracle, and magister, to use an archaic word, he should have acted as disciplined and thoughtful man of reason. As it is, he’s left us with brilliant and often pompous mediocrity.

About this document

This working paper looks at his failings with respect to Shakespeare and to literature as aesthetic experience. His major claim about Shakespeare, which is about the self in Shakespeare’s characters and the importance of those characters in Western culture, is implicitly an empirical one, but he never provides us with empirical evidence. As for the aesthetic, he offers The Western Canon as an account of the aesthetic value of those books, rather than reducing them to matters of historical accident, as he claims is done in “the School of Resentment,” but he never offers an account of what the aesthetic is and why it is important. Gesturing toward Kant is not sufficient. The general reading public deserved more than Harold Bloom’s deeply held opinions on these matters. They deserved actual evidence and arguments. Those seemed beneath Bloom. They weren’t necessary to criticism as he’d internalized it.

In the first three sections I look at Bloom’s ideas about Shakespeare. While I freely grant the had an important insight about Shakespeare, as I’ve already indicated, he failed to develop that insight through empirical evidence. Had Bloom undertaken the kind or empirical work I suggest in the first and third sections he might thereby have become a great critic, the more so because that work could easily have been made access to the general educated public to which he addressed himself since the 1990s. In this I think he was inhibited by now archaic professional decorum. He didn’t have and didn’t want to develop the conceptual tools to do anything else.

Harold Bloom on Shakespeare's greatness – I quote from a 1991 Paris Review interview where Bloom talks about his central insight into Shakespeare. I grant him the insight but suggest that he needs to offer empirical evidence.

Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] – This might seem like an extended kvetch on Bloom’s use of the word “invention” in the title of his book. And, yes, it IS that. But Bloom’s always doing this, using big words in vague ways that free him from the necessity of actually thinking. Richard Levine notes that a number of writers have been credited with inventing “the human.”

What does evolution have to teach us about Shakespeare’s reputation? – In this section I present some conceptual equipment one can use to conceptualize the significance of Shakespeare’s position in the canon. First I present some ideas by Oleg Sobchuk, a young scholar interested in cultural evolution. Then I present some of my own work on Shakespeare which considers his work in relationship to changes in family structure.

The last section is an extended conversation I had with Claude, an AI chatbot, about Bloom’s work:

Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom – I start with Bloom’s insistence on the “aesthetic value” of the works he studies in The Western Canon, noting that he says little about what that is and why it is important and so never demonstrates how those works exhibit these specifically aesthetic qualities. I suggest that he might have developed an explicit account around the ideas in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). Claude and I develop that a bit and then bring up Edward Said, of the so-called “School of Resentment,” pointing out that, like Bloom, he also believed in aesthetic value. Perhaps, I suggest to Claude, “Bloom would have been a better public critic if he had other critics to argue with in the public sphere.” From there we move to Bloom’s mode of thought, where he seems to be drowning in text fragments he’s memorized while at the same time avoiding the rigors of abstract conceptualization. We end with some remarks about the computational techniques that have been developed in literary criticism in this millennium.

About the title page image

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the body of this document and asked it to create a suitable image. It then gave me a program for the image and proceeded to create it. Here’s the program it devised for the image:

Title: No title text on the image (per your past preferences).

Visual Concept:

• Foreground: A seated figure evoking Harold Bloom, surrounded by a swirling vortex of books and fragments of text. His expression is intense, even haunted—brilliant but trapped in the very canon he champions.
v • Midground: A spectral image of Shakespeare, partially formed from calligraphic script and glowing lightly, gazing not at Bloom but past him—into the future. Shakespeare is not deified but ambiguous, generative.
• Background: A fractured library wall fading into digital abstraction—half Renaissance study, half neural net latticework—symbolizing both the literary past and the computational future you gesture toward in the essay.
• Symbolic Elements:

o A spiral or circular motif suggesting ring-composition, subtly present in the background architecture or cloud patterns.
o A long scroll unrolling from Bloom’s hands, but frayed at the end, being caught by an invisible wind.
o A single paragraph of text from Heart of Darkness visually highlighted mid-image, embedded in the swirl.

Rambling into April: 4th Arena, Patriotism, Mystery Box + stuff

Lot’s going on. Time to sort things out.

The Fourth Arena

I’m committed to writing a book with the tentative title: Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. Here’s my current elevator pitch:

"Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising" charts humanity's next great leap - not toward obsolescence, but toward unprecedented forms of existence. Just as life emerged from matter and culture from life, we're witnessing the birth of entities that transcend traditional boundaries between human and artificial. Drawing on complexity science and cultural evolution, this book offers an optimistic vision of how human-AI partnerships could create genuinely new forms of consciousness, relationship, and being. For readers seeking a fresh perspective on our technological future that goes beyond both utopian and dystopian clichés.

I contacted my agent from Beethoven’s Anvil, but he’s getting out of the business so he can’t take me on. But he’s agreed to help me with the proposal. I’ve got a chapter outline (17 chapters) and a decent idea of what goes in each chapter. I’m in the process of putting finishing touches on a draft of the introduction, “The Four Arenas,” which is based on an article I’d published in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve started work on drafting Chapter 14: “Science Fiction Imagines the Future.” That will use some material from an old 3QD piece plus some new material. This working paper contains early pre-draft material for the final chapter and background material for the two preceding chapters: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising.

My New-Found Patriotism

I’m sure you’ve heard a saying that goes something like this: You don’t understand the value of something until it’s gone. Well, sometime during the last week, as I was thinking about the damage that Trump, with the help of Musk and a bunch of others, is doing to the country, and the world, I felt patriotic in a way I’d never felt before.

It’s MY country these people are destroying! NO.

I’ve decided that’s the topic for my next article for 3 Quarks Daily. Tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.”  From a note I sent to friends:

Patriotism is an abstract thing, like justice, gravity, charity, evolution, and dozens and hundreds of other phenomena. All of these things have definitions, which are easily enough learned, and stories associated with them. But at some point, these things must resolved into often complex patterns of concrete events. So this article is about some of the (more or less) concrete events which give meaning to my patriotism. For someone like Trump, “patriotism” is just a word, a powerful word, he uses to get what he wants. It’s detached from any meaningful committee to and participation in the large collective effort and experiment that has been America to date.

So, the piece will be largely autobiographical, with a concentration on my years in Baltimore, when I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins, protested against the war in Vietnam, got drafted, and performed alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins.

I’ll also be talking about my trip to Goshen College to talk about my book on music. Why? First, because I was invited. Beyond that, Goshen College is a Mennonite school and Mennonite men are pacifists. During WWII many Mennonite men went to prison rather than serve in the army. Consequently, in order to avoid the expense and bother of criminal proceedings and imprisonment, the government decided to allow pacifists the option of performing some kind of civilian service as an alternative to going into the military. That’s what I did. I owed a debt to the older male relatives to the students I would be speaking to.

The Mystery Box Show

I’ve discovered a very interesting YouTube channel: The Mystery Box Show. Here’s how the channel describes itself;

Take a bit of The Moth, a bit of TED and throw a lot of sex into the mix and you've got The Mystery Box Show, a storytelling podcast where people tell their true stories all about sex. From the vanilla to the kinky, from hilarious mis-adventures to inspiring sexual revelations, our storytellers bare their souls and deliver their sexy secrets directly to your ears.

I’ve watched a bunch of them and have enjoyed most of them, some more than others. I’ve included one of the videos in a recent post: Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

Other things I’m working on

I’ve still got to finish my commentary on Harold Bloom and then gather that whole series together into a single document with the (tentative) title, A Quixotic Essay about Literary Criticism: Thinkers, Methods, Authority.

I’ve got to prepare some working papers. There’s that literary critics one. I also want to do something with my series on melancholy and at least one more Claude conversation: Dialog with Claude 3.5 on the Intellectual Potential of Man-Machine Interaction.

Finally, I’ve decided to write some more about my years in Baltimore, which was a very important period in my life. Between a number of posts here – most recently, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s – and at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve already written quite a bit about that period. I’ll be writing more in the course of my patriotism essay. Then, I suppose, I could gather them all together into a single document.

And so it goes.

LLM as Collaborator, Part 3: Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom

Not long after Harold Bloom’s death in October of 2019, Ted Underwood posted a tweet in which he asserted that Bloom was a “gasbag” who made “dogmatic unsupported assertions.” He attributed that habit to “theory-stardom” in a subsequent tweet, something I’ve explored in this post, GOAT Literary Critics: Part 5.2: The Nature of Authority in Literary Criticism as it Pertains to the Relationship between Author and Critic (Harold Bloom). Color me sympathetic to Underwood's assertion.

Sometime in the late 1970s I picked up a copy of The Anxiety of Influence, noting that it was a rather slender book. I found it rather obscure and elusive and I can’t for the life of me see why he insisted on those preposterous names for his “revisionary ratios.” I also sensed something interesting going on in there, and said so in a letter I wrote to Dick Macksey. Whatever it was, though, was not my cup of tea.

I set it aside and hardly gave Bloom another thought until I saw his The American Religion (1992) on the new books shelf in the Troy Public Library. “That’s an odd topic for Bloom,” thought I to myself, so I leafed through it and decided to check it out. It proved useful, for there I learned that revivalist camp meetings often had both African and European Americans in attendance. They convened separately until the last day of the meeting, at which point the barriers came down and they all danced together. Other than Influence, that’s the only book of Bloom’s that I’ve read cover to cover.

But I’ve read chunks of a number of them in the last year, The Western Canon, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Influence, his last one (I forget its name), several interviews, and listened to a variety of video clips. The man did bloviate, but, as I far can tell, he’s also as brilliant a mind as the craft of literary criticism as seen in the last half-century. Why, then, am I reluctant to consider him to be a great critic?

No mystery there. Brilliance is one thing, a thing that is entirely a property of an individual. Greatness, however, requires that brilliance be fit to cultural opportunity, if not necessity. Giordano Bruno was undoubtedly brilliant, but we remember him, not for his ideas or his poetry, but because the Roman Inquisition had him burned at the stake. How deeply did Bloom speak to the cultural moment?

Anyhow, I’ve been pondering the matter and have decided to take it up with Claude 3.5. I’d already chatted with Claude about the Hamlet chapter of Bloom’s Shakespeare (though I've not posted any of that conversation) and I’d used Bloom as a foil in the discussion I had with Claude about Formal structure in Heart of Darkness. So I decided to continue that discussion.

I began with Bloom’s insistence on the aesthetic value of literature. I suggested that Johan Huizinga’s concept of play in his classic, Homo Ludens, might provide a way of grounding a Bloomian aesthetic. Next came Edward Said, one of those resentful critics Bloom was always complaining about. I quoted from one of Said’s last essays, where he confessed to believing that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists. Claude agreed that that might have been a way to effect a rapprochement, or perhaps merely a detente, with the resentful ones. That lead to a discussion of academic politics. We then moved on to a discussion Bloom’s mind, suggesting that his extraordinary ability to recall literary passages may have been both a strength and a weakness. Yes, he seemed able to remember everything he read, but he also seemed trapped in those memories, unable to stand back and abstract over the texts he so loved. We concluded with by suggesting that modern computational techniques, digital humanities slash cultural analytics, might well be able to redeem Bloom’s insights about Shakespeare and his importance in the canon.

It was a bracing discussion. As always, my words are set in bold, while Claude’s are plain.

* * * * *

Kant, Huizinga, and the Aesthetic

Bloom opens “The Western Canon” by saying: “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.” What does Kant mean by aesthetic value?

Later Bloom says: “Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest.”

What do you think about these?

These passages touch on fundamental questions about aesthetic value and literary criticism. Let me address each one:

Regarding Kant's conception of aesthetic value, he argued that aesthetic judgments are both subjective and universal - a seeming paradox that he explored in his Critique of Judgment. For Kant, when we judge something as beautiful, we are making a claim that others should agree with us, even though the judgment stems from our subjective experience. This aesthetic judgment is disinterested, meaning it's not based on any practical purpose or moral consideration, but rather on the form of the object itself.

Bloom's reference to Kant seems to push back against those who would dismiss aesthetic value as merely subjective or culturally constructed. His statement about his "lifetime of reading" suggests that he sees aesthetic value as something real and discoverable through direct engagement with literature, not just a theoretical construct.

In the second passage, Bloom articulates his vision of literary criticism as fundamentally concerned with individual consciousness rather than social context. His concept of the "deep self" and "ultimate inwardness" shows his belief that great literature speaks to something essential in human consciousness that transcends historical and social circumstances.

The idea of "warding off the massive weight of past achievement" connects to Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence - that strong writers must struggle against their predecessors to create space for their own originality. The emphasis on "inwardness" suggests that this struggle happens at the level of consciousness rather than through external technical innovation.

These passages reveal Bloom's fundamental commitment to aesthetic value as real rather than constructed, and to reading as an essentially private experience that touches our deepest sense of self. This position stands in opposition to critical approaches that emphasize literature's social and political dimensions.

Johan Huizinga wrote a book entitles “Homo Ludens.” I’m wondering if we could use Huizinga’s expansive conception of play as a way to develop an aesthetic theory that would appeal to Bloom. In literature we see the human psyche at play.

Your suggestion about using Huizinga's concept of play as a foundation for aesthetic theory is intriguing. In "Homo Ludens," Huizinga argues that play is fundamental to human culture, predating culture itself, and that it lies at the root of many human activities including art, law, and philosophy.

This perspective could align well with Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and individual consciousness. When we engage in play, we create a space separate from ordinary life with its own rules and meanings - similar to how Bloom sees literature as creating an autonomous sphere of aesthetic experience.

The idea of the psyche at play in literature could help explain what Bloom calls the "strangeness" of great works. Just as play involves trying on different roles and possibilities, literary works allow both writers and readers to explore different modes of consciousness and being. This connects to Bloom's interest in how literature expands our understanding of human possibility.

Furthermore, seeing literature as a form of play might help bridge the gap between form and meaning that troubles much literary criticism. In play, form and content are inseparable - the rules of a game aren't separate from the experience of playing it. Similarly, in literature, formal elements like the paragraph structure we discussed in Heart of Darkness aren't separate from but integral to the work's meaning and effect.

This approach could maintain Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy while providing a theoretical framework for understanding how literature actually works on consciousness. It would see reading not as interpretation in the traditional sense, but as a form of engaged play with consciousness itself.

LLM as Collaborator, Part 2: Formal structure in Heart of Darkness and literary criticism (+ a lesson on “alignment”)

The chart below depicts the length of paragraphs in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The paragraphs are listed in order, first to last, from left to right. The length of a bar is proportional to the number of words in the respective paragraph.

There is an important issue at stake: Does that chart depict a phenomenon that is real, not only in the sense that it represents a set of valid measurements, but in the deeper sense that those measurements represent some intrinsic aspect of the causal process that produced the text. For the most part I leave that issue to the discussion I had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The purpose of this introduction is to indicate why the issue arises.

The problem of literary form

Despite the fact that form and formalism are important concepts in academic literary criticism, the careful description of form is not central to current practice. This is not the place to discuss this issue in any detail. I have done that elsewhere on New Savanna, I have published a long article on form (Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form), and have written a number of working papers on description.

Form is an aspect of the physical substance of the work of art. That is quite obvious in the case of drawing, painting, and sculpture. That is also true in the case of music, where we are interested in the arrangement of sounds in time, and dance, the arrangement of gestures and movement. Literature is like that as well; it is a string of words, one after the other after the other after the other. It follows, then, that the description of literary form involves analyzing how words are placed in a string.

And there is some of that in literary criticism. In dealing with poetry one may learn how to count feet in a line and work out the rhyme scheme, if there is any. But this is often treated as decorative and unrelated to meaning in any deep way, and it’s meaning that critics are after. In the study of narrative the Russian Formalists made a distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), where the former refers the events as they occur in order while the latter is the order in which events are introduced into the narrative. In the extreme case of Tristram Shandy, for example, plot and story are quite different. This distinction, and more, is quite important in narratology, but narratology is a relatively minor approach to literary criticism and one that is more important in Europe than the United States.

As an example of this situation, here’s a few lines from an essay by Frances Ferguson and John Brenkwood introducing papers from the 2013 English Institute on form:

A second irony is that the recently renewed interest in questions of literary form has proved quite amorphous. Perhaps, though, that has been the predicament and vitality of the topic all along. [...] There is also a conflict, cutting across these competing methods, between form as a feature of literary works and form as constitutive of literary works. The New critics are often the benchmark of formalism in American discussions, but they did very little to illuminate literary forms compared to the Russian Formalists or, say, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson’s classic essay on Baudelaire’s “Les chats.” [...] And yet even the surest markers of literary forms fail to define form when it comes to actual works. The form of the sonnet, for example, is readily defined by the number of lines and the stanza organization, but does that account for a particular sonnet’s form any more than a rectangle accounts for a painting’s form? Vertical for portraits, horizontal for landscapes! And, finally, is formalism itself based on the idea that literary works are purely form, or on the idea that the vocation of literary criticism lies in formalization, that is, in its capacity to create categories at a level of abstraction applicable to the widest variety of literary phenomena?

The upshot of this conundrum is that literary form is more an object of wonder and a source of methodological argument than the basis of practical criticism. It’s important, but we don’t know much about it.

Thus, that chart is something of an embarrassment to literary critics, or would be if they saw it. On the one hand, it represents and objective fact about Heart of Darkness. When you count the words in each paragraph and graph the result, that chart is what you get. [I used the text provided by Project Gutenberg.] Once you’ve seen it, you can’t argue it out of existence.

Now, I’ve been in this business a long time. While I’ve discussed that chart and its implications extensively in my working paper on Heart of Darkness, I’ve not bothered to seek formal publication. Why not? Opportunity cost. I don’t know of any venue that would be interested and I don’t want to waste my time jumping through hoops making that work acceptable to some journal only to wait six months to a year or more to have it turned down (though I’m seriously considering taking a shot at it in the new year; we’ll see).

However, when I discovered that structure I did send at note to Mark Liberman, who runs, Language Log, and group log devoted to linguistics. He was kind enough to post a link and we had a lively discussion, Markov’s Heart of Darkness. The discussion started with the issue of whether or not paragraph length followed a power law as that’s the question I presented to Mark; it does not. But one Lucy Kemnitzer brought up the issue of order during the discussion and I linked to a post in which I had the chart I posted above. If you look through that discussion, you’ll find comments by someone identifying themselves as “JL” and noting that they are a novelist. They’re quite dismissive of that kind of description and the analytical work it supports:

The question is whether you're adding anything at all to anyone's understanding of the book, or whether, instead, you're indulging in puffery and pseudoscience, bringing in spurious mathematical models and childish anthropological "theories" to gaudy up a banal and perfectly obvious account of a very well known phenomenon. (Look! I've discovered that the ratio of vowels to consonants in 'The Waste Land' is exactly equivalent to Planck's Constant! Which is used to explain black holes! See? It really is a depressing poem…)

That’s the kind of reaction I expect of well-trained humanists.

Ask Claude

And so I turned to Claude 3.5 Sonata. What would they think of that distribution of paragraph lengths?

I’d already loaded the entire text of Heart of Darkness into Claude and had some discussion about it (I’ve already posted some of that discussion). It was a simple matter to reactive that discussion, upload the chart, and initiate a discussion. The discussion went well, at least from my point of view. Claude even pointed out some things that I hadn’t noticed.

But after all the (standard) literary criticism it surely must have ingested during training, why didn’t it react with, if not outrage, certainly skepticism? Why wasn’t it aligned, as the kids say, with the conventional wisdom on this matter? Context, I figured, context. This interaction was loaded with Conrad’s text and extensive earlier discussion. Standard literary criticism was nowhere to be found in the immediate context.

“I wonder,” thought I to myself, “if I could create a context in which Claude would register a conventional reaction to that chart?” No sooner had I registered that thought than I figured out how to do it. I had previously loaded Claude with the Hamlet chapter from Harold Bloom’s, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’d asked Claude to summarize the chapter and then we had a little discussion.

So, I reactivated that discussion, uploaded the chart, and BOOM! Claude reacted with the expected skepticism, albeit a rather mild expression of it:

Based on Bloom's critical approach, he would likely be skeptical of this kind of quantitative or structural analysis of literature. He would probably view this chart as an example of what he saw as the problematic tendency in modern literary criticism to focus on technical or formal aspects rather than aesthetic and imaginative power

The discussion went on for a bit, took an interesting turn, at which point I decided to introduced Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” into the discussion. Why? Because she argued that “criticism needs to focus less on trying to extract hidden meanings from art and more on describing the direct sensory and formal experience of engaging with it” (Claude’s words). We had an interesting discussion. For what it’s worth, Claude agrees with my view that literary criticism needs to pay more attention to the analysis and description of literary form.

An exercise for the reader: What does Claude’s ability to take different and contradictory positions on the same issue – in this case, the value of that chart for analyzing Heart of Darkness – suggest about the much-discussed problem of AI alignment?

* * * * *

First, we have my discussion with Claude about Heart of Darkness. Once that’s finished, I introduce the Harold Bloom discussion, which leads to Susan Sontag. As always my prompts are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain.

I’ve uploaded a bar graph. Each bar represents a single paragraph in Heart of Darkness. They are arranged in order, with the first paragraph on the left edge and the last paragraph on the right. Do you have any observations about paragraph length as revealed in this chart?

Looking at this visualization of paragraph lengths in "Heart of Darkness," several key observations emerge:

Most paragraphs in the novel are relatively short, with many falling under 200 words. This creates a baseline rhythm for the narrative. However, there are significant spikes where paragraphs become much longer, particularly in the middle section of the text.

The most striking feature is a dramatic peak of approximately 1,400 words around paragraph 109-110. This extensive paragraph appears to be an outlier, being significantly longer than those around it. There are also several other notable peaks reaching between 600-1,000 words.

This variation in paragraph length suggests a deliberate structural choice by Conrad. The longer paragraphs likely correspond to key moments of exposition or critical narrative developments, while the shorter paragraphs maintain the story's forward momentum and may handle more immediate action or dialogue.

The pattern also shows that the novel ends with a series of consistently shorter paragraphs, perhaps indicating a more rapid narrative pace as the story reaches its conclusion.

This visualization effectively reveals Conrad's technical approach to pacing and structure in the novel, showing how he varies paragraph length to create rhythm and emphasis throughout the text.

Would you be interested in identifying what narrative content appears in those particularly long paragraphs? That might help us understand why Conrad chose to expand certain moments in the story.

You’d think that variation was deliberate. But we have no evidence that Conrad was conscious of this. He just did it. It’s how he wrote.

You make an excellent point. I fell into a common critical trap of assuming intentionality where we have no evidence for it. This pattern of paragraph length variation emerged naturally from Conrad's writing process - it's simply his natural rhythm as a writer.

This observation connects to a broader point about literary analysis. While we can usefully identify patterns and structures in texts, we should be cautious about assuming these were consciously planned by the author. Sometimes the most powerful effects in literature arise organically from how a writer naturally approaches their craft.

In Conrad's case, this varying paragraph length creates compelling effects in "Heart of Darkness," but we don't need to attribute this to conscious design. It's simply part of how he told stories, his natural way of allowing some moments to expand while keeping others concise.

This is a useful reminder about the difference between identifying patterns in a text and making claims about authorial intention.

That single longest paragraph, I believe it’s 1502 words long, is that nexus paragraph we’ve already discussed.

I’ve already had extensive discussion about this paragraph with Claude. Here's part of that discussion, though it doesn't contain Claude's remarks about the nexus paragraph. However, here’s my original blog post about that paragraph. And this post places that paragraph in the context of the whole text.

That's a fascinating discovery about the nexus paragraph! The fact that it’s not only structurally and thematically central to the novel, but also stands out quantitatively as the longest paragraph, adds another dimension to our understanding of its importance.

This paragraph accomplishes several crucial narrative tasks: it provides Kurtz's European background, introduces his report with the chilling "Exterminate all the brutes" line, and frames the death of the helmsman. The paragraph's exceptional length seems to naturally correspond to its function of bringing together multiple strands of the story.

Time for another ramble: Melancholy, Claude, Bloom, Claude, Ring composition, and Other Stuff

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; May 29th was the last one. If you look over there to right at the Blog Archive you’ll see I’ve been on a posting slump, with 3-figure monthly totals from January through June, then a dip to 61 for July, August: 18, September: 15, October: 30, and now 33 for November as I write this, and the month isn’t over. Maybe I’m pulling out of the slump.

Anyhow, I’m feeling a little backed up with things to post about, so it’s time to ramble on and see what’s up.

Melancholy, Mind (Mine), and Growth

That’s the tentative title for my next 3 Quarks Daily article. Starting back in November 2017 I’ve been making occasional posts about my monthly posting habits, which tend to drop during the winter. I’m thinking of using that as the point of departure for my next 3QD piece, which will go up on December 2nd.

During those down times I’m depressed to one degree or another (melancholy). But why? Since those down times have been in the winter, perhaps its seasonal affective disorder (SAD). But that doesn’t square with all of the evidence. There was no down-time in the winder of 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, but there was a slump in the summer of 2023. Something else is going on, and I think it has to do with creativity. To that end I want to discuss the ridiculous blither of tags here, 665 by November or 2023.

Claude

I’ve starting working with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot. I want to do some posts where I verify some of the work I’ve done with ChatGPT. I’m thinking of posts on stories, ontological structure, abstract definition, and the Girardian analysis of Jaws. I can then gather those into a working paper.

I also want to look at other things. At the moment I’m thinking of seeing how Claude summarizes longish documents. I’m thinking of the Hamlet chapter from Bloom’s Shakespeare book and Heart of Darkness.

Harold Bloom and GOAT literary critics

A year ago I began a series of posts on the theme of the greatest literary critics. I got bogged down in discussing Harold Bloom. It’s time to finish it off.

Bloom may well be as brilliant a literary critic as we’ve had in the last 50 or 60 years. But brilliance is one thing, greatness is another. Brilliance is a function of the individual, while greatness is a function of the relationship between an individual’s work and the arena in which they’re working.

I’m not sure about Bloom’s fit. While he’s got a wide readership, it’s not clear to me that scholars have taken up his work in any significant way. They may cite him – perhaps especially is concept of influence – but that they don’t much use of his ideas in his work. But we’ve also got to consider his work in the larger public arena, where he is hands-down the most prominent literary critic. I’m not sure of how to handle that.

However, if History wants to declare that Harold Bloom is one of the great all-time literary critics, maybe even the GOAT, what do I care? What would really bother me is if future critics should decide to take his work as a model and (attempt to) do more like it. Like most literary critics he’s neglected the study of form and he’s been deaf to the cognitive sciences. There’s little in his work that’s worth amplifying. It’s a dead end.

ChatGPT report

About a year or so ago I started writing a report summarizing my work on ChatGPT. I need to finish that report. I’d estimate the three-fourths or more are done. I’d like to be able to include some work with Claude. I don’t intend a lot on this, just enough to say that I’ve verified some things.

I’d like to finish this by the end of this year.

Why’s ring-form composition important?

That’s tricky. It has to do with the fact that literary works are extended in time, unlike the visual arts, which are static in time but extended in space. You can’t take the whole thing in at a glance like you can a painting.

There are constraints on how a literary work can unfold in time. There is a sense in which (the nature of) the end is inherent in the beginning. Ring-compositions are even more tightly constrained. Dylan Thomas consciously and deliberately plotted the ring-composition of the rhyme scheme in his “Author’s Prologue.” Rhyme is not about meaning; its patterns are arbitrary with respect to meaning. But Coleridge did not consciously work out the ring-compositions in “Kubla Khan,” not Conrad in Heart of Darkness. These patterns ARE NOT arbitrary with respect to meaning. On the contrary, they are central to how meaning is constituted.

Other Stuff

More Cobra Kai: Follow-up on my post where I explore the Freudian angle, saying a bit more about Girard, and extending that into history.

* *

More on meaning in LLMs: I’ve suggested that Ilya Sutskyver conflates mistakenly (and unknowingly?) conflates cognitive and semantic structure with the structure of the world and so suggests that robust next-token prediction requires knowledge of the world. In this post I argue that making that distinction is, in fact, difficult, and involves what I’ve been calling the word illusion. I first confronted the problem as an undergraduate when I was trying to understanding the difference between the signified, and mental structure, and the reference, something in the world, of a sign. I may not have gotten deep intuitions about that until I began studying cognitive networks in graduate school.

* *

Gila-monster venom and computational irreducibility: The idea is to start with a NYTimes article on drug discovery that starts with Gila-monster venom and ends up with Wolfram’s concept of computational irreducibility. This is about search, computation, and the complex and irregular structure of the (natural world).

* *

My work with Ramesh: Notes on conceptual ontology and hypergraphs in conceptual space.

* *

LLMs and literary study: Can we use LLMs to analyze the thematic structure of literary texts?

In particular, can we use them to examine Bloom’s these about Shakespeare as “inventing” the human. Are there themes that appear first in Shakespeare? We need more than Bloom’s vigorous assertion on this. We need to examine the thematic structure of prior texts and of Shakespeare’s texts and show that there are things new in Shakespeare. Do those new things then continue if texts after Shakespeare? To do this properly we need to examine a lot of texts.

I’d also like to know if LLMs could be used to find ring-composition in literary texts. It is by no means obvious to me that they can.

Paul Fry on Influence: Eliot and Bloom (Theory of Literature)

87,872 views Sep 1, 2009
Introduction to Theory of Literature (ENGL 300)

In this lecture on the psyche in literary theory, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom, specifically their studies of tradition and individualism. Related and divergent perspectives on tradition, innovation, conservatism, and self-effacement are traced throughout Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and Bloom's "Meditation upon Priority." Particular emphasis is placed on the process by which poets struggle with the literary legacies of their precursors. The relationship of Bloom's thinking, in particular, to Freud's Oedipus complex is duly noted. The lecture draws heavily from the works of Pope, Borges, Joyce, Homer, Wordsworth, Longinus, and Milton.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction to Harold Bloom
06:31 - Chapter 2. Mimesis and Imitatio
11:51 - Chapter 3. Bloom "Misreads" Eliot
29:34 - Chapter 4: Literary History: the Always Already Written "Strong Poem"
48:09 - Chapter 5. Lacan and Bloom on Tony the Tow Truck

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2009.

Bloom the aesthete: Does Bloom abandon the humanistic tradition in his take on the canon?

Dr. Scott Masson: Harold Bloom's strange defence of the Western Canon

This lecture briefly discusses the idea of a literary canon, as opposed to the Biblical canon. The former unlike the latter can admit of additions. Harold Bloom defends the idea of the Western canon on exclusively aesthetic grounds, which is an extraordinary departure from the rationale given for studying it traditionally.

However, while the 'canon wars' of the 1980s that pushed for the inclusion of authors usually on grounds of what we now call 'identity' was objectionable, it is nothing like as problematic as the idea that the previous canon needs to be utterly replaced. The cultural studies approach to literature is an expression of the latent cultural Marxism of the earlier critics being more fully articulated.

I have transcribed some passages from the lecture. I'm simply reproducing the automatically generated transcription without capitalization and punctuation, etc. Starting at about 19:37:

the problem that he brings up at the beginning here is that overpopulation malthusian repletion [p. 19 in The Western Canon] is the authentic context for canonical anxieties this is his rather interesting way of presenting this there are too many books to be read now and and um this is the the problem now when you read Bloom by the way I think you always have to realize that he is um being um humorous I don't think he's altogether serious in his uh it's sort of a playful engagement with the critics and yet there's something that is serious in it and his where where he is serious is in thinking that the Canon serves aesthetic purposes alone and nothing but aesthetic purposes that's the purpose of the the Canon of literature and the Western Canon he sees it as a uh collection of books whose inclusion in the Canon is solely on the basis of aesthetic Merit solely he's very strong on this

Continuing at 21:34:

he strongly opposes uh morality as a consideration here which is an extraordinary position to take now this is the defender of the western Cannon you have to realize when he writes this in the early 90s I think it's 1994 he is defending against the what he calls the uh what does he call them his critics School of resent School of resentment yes so these people who are just motivated by Envy and resentment whing negative emotions um are just not readers at all or they are readers that are moved by politics or social uh motivations and that's not the right way to understand literature well what is the right way well Bloom says to study for the purpose of aesthetic Merit and that alone so this is the defense of the western Canon and interesting you'll you'll be interested interest interested in this as well uh Harold Bloom was uh a Jewish um I say an atheistic Jew um committed to a very Gnostic understanding of life you can see other works written by him and he's also a romantic scholar and I think that's also key to his development [...] but he's opposed to the idea of the Canon including a concept like goodness let alone truth and uh in so doing I think that he abandons the whole humanistic tradition going back from the ancient world all the way up to his contemporaries so he's a very unusual figure

Then at 24:22:

forget the Canon as a list of books for required study will be seen as identical with the literary art of memory not with the religious sense of Canon so it's something that individuals and it's for individuals the Canon then is for individuals it's not it doesn't have a broader humanizing function and it's something that you choose that and here's Mr Bloom's Canon that as an aesthete but it doesn't serve the purpose of humanitas then which the uh tradition of the helenistic critics would most certainly have held that's why we read to be educated Mr Bloom's notion of canonicity is not for the purposes of Education it's for the purposes of titilation or Delight that's it but we saw last semester that um even in Horace he sees the that there are two purpos at least for good literature and one of them is that bloom excludes is to teach to teach and to Delight Augustina adds to move to that to teach to Delight to move and Bloom has reduced it to delighting and I don't see what the difference is in certain respects between uh great works of literature and entertainment at that point it's just one's high brow and the other's low

Harold Bloom discusses Bud Powell and influence in jazz

I believe Bloom's interlocutor is Christopher Lydon. The discussion of Bud Powell starts about 43:00.

At 47:00 or so there's an explicit discussion of influence and competition. He's right, cutting contests are part of the jazz tradition. But that kind of highly ritualized bandstand combat is one thing, influence is another. Bloom seems to be conflating the two in his remarks. I've read many anecdotes about jazz musicians listening to records or broadcast performances and being inspired what they hear. That's influence. It takes place over a period of years and is enduring. That runs orthogonal to real-time competition in cutting contests, in which musicians will mirror or complement one another's lines. Whether or not that activity has a permanent influence on a musician's style, that's incidental to the dynamics of real-time musical combat. 

Miles Davis provides a clear example of the sort of phenomenon Bloom talks about. He came up in the 2nd cohort of bebop musicians and played with Charlie Parker for awhile. If you listen to his earliest recordings you'll hear him playing in the fleet multi-noted 'vertical' style of Parker and Gillespie. But by the mid-1950s he'd developed a sparser and more 'horizontal' style. He'd moved to a distinctly different musical territory. That move is widely interpreted as a (creative) response to the overwhelming presence of Parker and Gillespie.

Bloom on Shakespeare [persistence of identity] {the last mile}

The key point (01:57)

I think that Shakespeare had the first sense I know
of what he actually called the self-same
which is the persistence
of identity through all kinds of vicissitudes and change

In another (more recent) video about The Anatomy of Influence (2011) Bloom remarks about the meaning of "invention" in the subtitle of the Shakespeare book: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (c. 43:30):

everybody even if they more or less tolerated the book smashed at the title and said
what nonsense to say he invented us
obviously had they read the great Samuel Johnson
they would have known that the great man said
the essence of poetry is invention
that is to say discovery, originality
and if you say that Shakespeare invented the human
what you mean quite
modestly but accurately is
there's a great deal about both ourselves
and about one another
and about all of life
that was always there
but we would not have seen it [...]
except for Shakespeare

With that in mind, I've been looking through a collection of essays, Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (Palgrave 2001), which has an essay by Richard Levine, "Bloom, Bardolatry, and Characterolatry," where he asserts (p. 76):

Finally, 1 do not think we can take seriously Bloom's claim about Shakespeare's "invention of the human." I have appended a partial list of books (I am sure there are many more) that announce the discovery that the traits we call "human"-self-consciousness, individual identity, subjectivity, etc.-were invented in some particular period (ranging from Homeric Greece to eighteenth-century England), which, by another remarkable coincidence, usually turns out to be the period in which the discoverer specializes. The obvious truth, however, is that these traits were not invented by any specific people at any specific time and place; rather, they slowly developed over many thousands of years, along with the evolution of our brains and nervous systems, since they can be found in some of the oldest texts we have, in the most "primitive" tribal cultures, and even, in a rudimentary form, in our primate cousins. Of course, there have been inventions (or discoveries) at various times of new modes of conceptualizing these traits in philosophic and scientific discourse and of new modes of representing them in literature and the other arts. I believe that we can credit Shakespeare with an artistic invention of this kind in a number of the soliloquies in his middle and late periods that show a character going through a stressful thinking process (and, in one of Bloom's favorite phrases, "overhearing himself"; see Bloom 1998, xvii), unlike the static form of soliloquy used in the plays of his predecessors (and of his own early period), where a character simply expressed and expanded upon some idea or emotion. But Bloom transforms this invention in the representation of the human into the invention of the human itself.

As the paragraph opens, Levin is obviously "smashing" Bloom's title. By the end of the paragraph, however, Levin has equally obviously granted the somewhat different and weaker claim that Bloom asserts is what he was thinking all along. So, why didn't Bloom say that, explicitly, time and again in the book? I suppose anyone with half a brain would have figured that something like that's probably what he really meant; but if he doesn't say so explicitly, how can you know? Is he playing some kind of weird power-tripping Socratic guessing game?

It seems to me the Bloom has a bad "last mile problem"? What do I mean by that? Let me quote from the Investopedia:

The last mile describes the short geographical segment of delivery of communication and media services or the delivery of products to customers located in dense areas. Last mile logistics tend to be complex and costly to providers of goods and services who deliver to these areas.

We're talking about ideas. In that context I mean "the last mile" to be the explicit formulation of an idea that is latent in some discourse. It may exist there indirectly, or in metaphor, but the idea isn't explicit. Thus, the idea is not made clear. That is certainly the case of Bloom's central idea, "the anxiety of influence." It became the title of his 1973 book (which I've read), he revisited in three subsequent books (which I've not read), and it keeps coming up over and over, and he keeps revising it and qualifying it. But he never takes it over that last mile. It remains stillborn. 

* * * * * 

Addendum, June 26, 2024: In that second video Bloom has a great deal to say about his time at Yale. Starting at 33:18 Bloom talks about his dislike of Theory and tells about how the book, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), came about. It contains essays by Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, and Miller. Bloom put the project together and explains that "they were deconstruction and I was literary criticism."

That Shakespeare Thing

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue for several reasons, general principle among them. The opinion I offer in the last half or so requires a proper argument and, while I've written various things in that direction, I haven't gotten around to such an argument. Nor can I see putting it high on the agenda now. Consider it a stake in the ground, or a promissory note.

 

* * * * *

 

It is a truth fervently believed, at least among those who have beliefs about such things, that Shakespeare is the greatest writer the world has ever seen. Without question. Period. End of story. So help me god. Cross my heart and hope to die.

Bollocks!

It’s not that I doubt Shakespeare’s excellence. Of course he’s good. But not that good. No mortal human is, or could possibly be, that good. For THAT good is not about history, it’s about mythology.

And that mythology has got to stop. We can’t treat our literary culture as though it were but an appendage to Shakespeare’s large, various, and excellent output. Debts are owed, certainly. But appendages to, certainly not.

It’s simple: We can’t enter into the 21st century as long as we keep swearing fealty to The Bard, even if we cross our fingers behind our backs while so swearing. The world’s changing, it’s been changing since Shakespeare’s time. The old guy can no longer keep up. It’s time to put him on a raft, and cut the raft free. Let him float out to sea.

Who’s this WE you’re talking about?

Good question. Tricky question. I suppose I could say Harold Bloom and the Bloomistas and be done with it. In fact, that’s what I will say: Bloom and the Bloomistas!

Call it a figure.

Though Harold Bloom is real enough. His admiration for Shakespeare is well known – didn’t he write a fat book explaining how we’re all Shakespeare’s children? And he’s set himself up as the Defender of the Western Literary Canon, the Finger in the Dike that Protects Western Civ from the Sea.

Give the finger a rest. Let the water flow. Life goes on.

What brought this on, you ask?

It’s been a long time coming. At least since late 1989 when The New Republic published a special 75th anniversary issue in which their long-term film critic, Stanley Kauffmann, reflected on film’s history and accomplishments. Toward the middle he had a Big Paragraph:

After we have at the beginnings [of film], what can we say today about the results? What has film accomplished since then? Once, after a meeting in which films were glowingly discussed, a well-known poet challenged me to name one film that was the equal of the greatest work in other arts, the work of Sophocles or Dante or Michelangelo or Bach or Tolstoy. The answer was, is, double. First, there is no such film. There may never be such a film. Second, who is the Sophocles or Bach of the 20th century? Great artists there have certainly been in our time, and I would not blithely equate even the best films I know with the work of Joyce or Picasso. But few would rank Joyce or Picasso or the other masters of our time with the greatest artists in history; and the overwhelming fact is that, arriving in this century that has been stormy even for the oldest arts, film has created hundreds of works that are now part of the cultural legacy of every civilized human being.

He’s got that last clause right: Film HAS created hundreds of works that are now part of the cultural legacy of every civilized human being. The rest of it is pious nonsense, spun from the same thread as Bloomistavision.

That’s what set me on this line of thought. What set me off is Apocalypse Now. I didn’t see it when it first came out. Don’t know exactly why. Perhaps because it was a Hollywood film, so how could it be Really Good? Saw the Redux version; don’t remember what I thought. But then the DVD set came out, Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier.

I was stunned. Watching it on my small computer monitor with the add-on speakers – decent sound, but not as good as my stereo system, and certainly not theatrical – I was stunned. Thought I to myself: Shakespeare couldn’t do this.

Shakespeare couldn’t do this.

It’s not simply that he didn’t have the technology, though he didn’t, and that’s not irrelevant. Whatever Coppola was saying, Shakespeare couldn’t say it, because he didn’t know it. He didn’t know it.

Shakespeare didn’t know it. It’s not his fault. Our world isn’t his world. Our world makes its own demands, and Shakespeare’s knowledge cannot be equal to them, no more.

Let him rest.