The Western Canon. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Alexander Theroux

INTERTEXTUALLY, an autobiography emerges from the dense scholarly pages of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom's plea for literacy, and description of what it includes, and how it should be understood. A professor at Yale, Bloom reveals much of himself in the book. "Close reading may not have ended with my generation," he writes, "but it has certainly been eclipsed in the generations after us." "Is it irrelevant that I was nearly forty before I first owned a television set?" At one point in the book, he notes the sound of "gunfire drifting across New Haven even as I sit here writing." He recalls one summer, "in crisis," being in Nantucket, where only by reading books aloud could he find his bearings. Mr. Bloom notes in passing, and self-consciously, that his father was in the garment business, that by reading and striving he has become a professor, but literature is in a state of supreme scruple. Ideology, political correctness, multiculturalism have warped the way we read. The barbarians are at the gates.

What strikes me is the amount of silence Harold Bloom must have had in his life not only to have read what he has read, but to have pondered it to such depths. He is brilliant in so much that he sees and intuits, almost uncannily at times, that it is hardly surprising he has come to see himself in such a minority.

The Western Canon is a personal and highly quirky book as well as a compendium of literary criticism, expressing Bloom's belief in the aesthetic as the sole standard of what we read, and not the ruinously didactic and sectarian indices, so popular today, of social and multicultural anti-intellectualism. He is pessimistic. Looking around, he feels literary education will not survive its current malaise, even at such a place as Yale.

The Western Canon is an important topical book, and what Bloom is saying badly needs to be said. It is an eloquent defense of the great authors and works, identifiable, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's and in high school, with the rise of multiculturalism, the study of literature has moronically--and tragically--devolved into "cultural studies." Aesthetics have been reduced to ideology: didactic poetry, gender studies, "sincere" writers, minority writers, marginal writers, sectarian writers. Hacks such as Maya Angelou and Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, the Barry Manilows of writing, seem alone to prevail.

Bloom at his most Jeffersonian says, "To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all." "An Elegy for the Canon," Bloom's opening chapter, should be required reading everywhere. After that, he goes on to explain how and why the 26 keystone Western authors he has selected qualify (they include Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, Milton, Goethe, Whitman). This is a genre, literary taxonomy, not particularly original, though what he observes often most certainly is.

Yet after he shows us the need to save art from the parochialists, the pseudo-Marxists, and all the Francophile reductionists who make up what he calls the current "School of Resentment"--we find the old Harold Bloom, subjective and often loony, weighing in with a lot of wacko pronouncements: "It may be that Chaucer's true literary parent was the Yahwist and his true child, Jane Austen," or "Moliere and Ibsen still share the stage, but always after Shakespeare."

Although he sounds like a bishop, Bloom, in his literary viewpoints, is almost always resolutely on the side of the dark, the anarchic, the rebellious, and the profane, wittily, but often tiresomely (not to mention tendentiously), trying to find godlessness in the godly. In one of the book's autobiographical moments, Mr. Bloom admits to having been spooked as a young professor by the neo-Christian New Criticism of T. S. Eliot and his academic followers. It seems to have turned him into a ferocious secularist. He goes to Emily Dickinson mainly for desperation, Milton for Satan, Beckett for hopelessness.

Which is to say that, while defending the idea of a canon of near-deified writers, Bloom at the same time sets about--sadly, maniacally--to detheologize those same writers. He blames Milton's God for "causing all the trouble in the first place"--a charmless and overly theatrical misreading for effect. "Whitman's poetry refuses to acknowledge any sexual demarcations, just as it refuses to accept any fortified lines dividing the human and the divine." Cervantes's deepest literary affinities "were with the [Jewish] converso Fernando de Rojas, author of the great narrative drama Celestina; not exactly," Bloom adds sarcastically, "a Catholic work in its savage amoralism and its lack of theological suppositions." But Cervantes's intellectual debts are various, including everybody from Amadis de Gaul to Ariosto to Erasmus. Characteristically, Bloom clears his throat and pronounces ex cathedra, "We do not read Don Quixote as a pious work." Reading anything for piety, it seems, is, for Bloom, not so much anathema as parochial, antiintellectual, just plain wrong.