The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. - book reviews

Reason, June, 1995 by Nick Gillespie

by Harold Bloom, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 578 pages, $29.95

So many books, so little time. That is, at rock bottom, every reader's lament. There is simply so much stuff to plow through--and so much more being published by the minute--how can anyone decide what's worth reading, much less the order in which things should be read? Even when you restrict yourself just to literature--poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism of the same--the matter looms larger and more humbling than Everest.

In fact, limiting the discussion to literature raises an even more basic question: Why read literature in the first place? The idea that literature is frivolous at best and subversive at worst has a long and distinguished pedigree. Plato, of course, famously banned poets from his Republic because they sacrificed the "truth" for aesthetic effect. (Ironically, literature departments are among the few academic outposts in which Plato is still regularly read.) Educational reformers in revolutionary France disparaged literary studies (along with most of the humanities) as irrelevant in a "rational" world order, a charge echoed by contemporary academicians in professional programs and the hard sciences who wonder aloud what the point is of carrying English and comparative literature departments which pull in few (if any) grant or research dollars.

Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages attempts to state authoritatively what's worth reading and why. Bloom is one of the most influential literary critics of the past 30 years. As the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and the Berg Professor of English at NYU, a past MacArthur "genius" grant winner, and the author of some 20 books and editor of over 100 more, he is certainly in a position to offer definitive answers--or as close to definitive as we might manage.

The Western Canon consists of essays on the 26 post-classical-age authors Bloom considers central to Western literature. Bloom's literary dream team--Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, Beckett--contains no surprises (except perhaps by omission). The book ends with a series of appendices in which Bloom lists another 800-plus writers, from the Gilgamesh poet to Tony Kushner, whom he feels are also worth browsing through.

But even without the provocative list at book's end, it's clear that Bloom is padding the count. For him, Shakespeare is the alpha and omega of literature. "Shakespeare is the Canon. He sets the standard and the limits of literature," writes Bloom. Shakespeare's genius is so overwhelming, in fact, that he "recenters" Western literature, says Bloom. All literature, whether written before or after Shakespeare, must be measured against the literary yardstick left behind by the Bard of Avon (and inevitably found wanting).

Well, sure. But asserting that Shakespeare is the tops is like saying Babe Ruth was the greatest baseball player of all time: It's an eminently defensible position, but it ultimately provides no guidance on what to do next. Should we stop playing and watching baseball (whether with true major leaguers or replacement scrubs)? Given our limited reading time, should we confine ourselves just to Shakespeare? This is counsel that Bloom, a self-confessed "addict who will read anything," manifestly ignores; he is conversant even about books he thinks are junk.

And indeed, Bloom ultimately seems less interested in boosting Shakespeare's reputation (which hardly needs the lift) than in besmirching the current lit-crit scene. Bloom is an entertaining, hyperbolic stylist, quick to spout fashionably anti-P.C. soundbites: "We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice," he writes at one point. These are "the worst of all times for literary criticism," he insists at another. Such claims fairly beg for clarification and qualification--are we destroying "all" standards, or merely altering the ones Bloom values?--but he doesn't deign to fill in the details.

The wellsprings of Bloom's discontent is what he calls "the School of Resentment," the "academic journalistic network...who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change." He identifies six branches of this particular ecole (Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians), each of which seeks in its particular way to recast "great" literature as the product of some impersonal, material cause (gender politics, class ideology, etc.) rather than of transcendent genius.

And so, for instance, "Shakespeare criticism is in full flight from his aesthetic supremacy and works at reducing him to the 'social energies' of the English Renaissance, as though there were no authentic difference in aesthetic merit between the creator of Lear, Hamlet, Iago, Falstaff and his disciples such as John Webster and Thomas Middleton," says Bloom. This is, in fact, an overstatement. Even critics who chalk up Hamlet and King Lear to social energies generally admit that those social energies are better than the ones that scratched out, say, Webster's Duchess of Malfi or The White Devil.