Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Commonweal, Nov, 1998 by Frank McConnell

Harold Bloom Riverhead Books, $35, 768 pp.

Frank McConnell

I have to begin by acknowledging that Harold Bloom has been, for almost forty years, a major presence in my life. He was my teacher and my dissertation advisor at Yale a role equivalent to that of "Godfather" in Mario Puzo's universe - and has continued to be my friend, adversary, rabbi, and counselor. This, in other words, is not an objective review. How could it be?

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, simply, the book of a lifetime, the culmination of a career - twenty-two previous books, and countless essays, editions, introductions, etc. - devoted, with an intensity that needs to be called "holy," to understanding literature as the human testament, as, however ambiguously, the means to secular salvation. And now at the end (and Bloom knows it's the end: this is in every sense a summary book) he argues that such salvation exists, if anywhere, most splendidly in the works of Shakespeare, the heart of the heart of the Western canon, the man who - he's really serious about this - invented us.

What an astonishing claim, especially in the currently politicized academic climate. But into the midst of this spiritual desert comes Bloom, proclaiming at the top of his voice - alas, like his least favorite prophet, Jeremiah, he seems to know no other register - that literature matters because it helps us save or at least possess our souls, and that no, that's no, literature matters as intensely as Shakespeare's just because Shakespeare, in any human context, is the greatest writer who ever lived.

The only thing more astonishing than Bloom's claim for the centrality of Shakespeare is that the claim will almost certainly be derided by the apparatchiks currently in charge of departments of English. Shakespeare is bound to get bad reviews from the professionals - I have in mind here folks like Gary Taylor and Gerald Graff - because it's a call, and a splendid one, to just that kind of reading the professionals fear and are incapable of, the full engagement of the mind and soul with the book at hand. Bloom here, as everywhere in his work, is a true elitist: Ph.D. or taxi driver, you are in his church if you can open yourself to the poem and find yourself there. Against this absolute love of what poetry really does for us, the idea of the "profession" of literature pales, as it should, altogether.

Now all this sounds as though Bloom regards literature, and Shakespeare especially, as the only authentic religious text for modern mankind; and that's just the point. Bloom means his subtitle literally. For him, Shakespeare does invent us all, at our heights and depths and our in-betweens, and to discover him is to discover who we are. But I have to quarrel with this assignment of total originality to the Bard. Virgil, of whom Bloom says nothing, and Saint Augustine and Dante seem to me equally creators of the Western idea of the self. But then I only read, teach, and love Shakespeare. I do not, like Bloom, inhabit him. Harold is fond of describing himself as a Jewish gnostic atheist (shuffle the terms any way you like - he does), and that's about right, since it means he's essentially a deeply troubled religious man, which is to say the only kind of religious man the twentieth century can tolerate. I'd like to introduce him to my favorite living theologian, John Dunne. Anyway, it's significant to me that the other commentators on Shakespeare to whom Bloom refers most often - and again, in defiance of current academic fashion - are Samuel Johnson, G. K. Chesterton, and W.H. Auden - all of them, with different and masterly kinkinesses, profoundly religious writers.

Bloom's thesis is simple and his procedure even simpler. William Shakespeare invented all the possibilities for the modern personality, from Hamlet to Falstaff, and all you have to do to discover the truth of that is to read all thirty-seven of his plays.

Now there's not much new about this. Of course Shakespeare is our strong precursor, and of course his massive presence towers over everything since - and, scarily, before - him. Mozart? Not really. The right analogy for him is Beethoven, who so exhausts the possibilities of music that there is very little left after him but - Brahms to Wagner to Mahler - belated commentary. George Steiner, observing the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964, wrote that "the very words with which we seek to do him honor are his." I don't know a more eloquent tribute - it's how I always begin my own class in Shakespeare - and I'm sure Bloom would not mind my describing his brilliant book as a long excursus on that splendid observation.

But Bloom's Shakespeare is not just about "words." In fact, close reading, the careful attention to metaphor, versification, and plot structure has never been his strong point or his major interest. His authentic passion - as with the unapproachable Samuel Johnson and the great critic/sages of the Romantic era - is with the creation of possibilities of human character, the forging of mirrors in which we see ourselves better, literature as "equipment for living," as Kenneth Burke called it. In a world where academic criticism is ever more aridly formalist and/or politically correct, ever less connected to the needs of human readers, this book is exhilaratingly old-fashioned, arguing, as did Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, that we read poetry to save, or find, our lives.