Thus I was glad to see The Western Canon, authored by the prolific Harold Bloom, "Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University," who was also an erstwhile Norton lecturer here. Bloom is quite in favor of Western culture and is convinced that there even exists a canon for it.
He opens, however, with an elegy. The School of Resentment, by which he refers to feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist critics, argues that the Western canon is tired and irrelevant, a construct imposed by a societal and political elite. The contrary view comes partly from what might be called the School of the Moral Majority, whose adherents believe that by upholding the canon they can sway the United States from the Seven Sins to the Seven Virtues. Even as Bloom concedes a takeover by those new academics, he attacks both sorts as debasing literature. "Whatever the Western canon is, it is not a program for social salvation É All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."
It is this mortality, and a sense of our "belatedness," that make the Western Canon so central. Because we are belated - in the sense that there are cultural figures and civilizations before us - we must compete with our predecessors. Because we cannot live forever, there is only a part of this cultural precedence that we can understand, emulate, and surpass. "The pragmatic question has become what shall I not bother to read." It is here that the canon becomes the embodiment of the cultural knowledge worthy of generation transmission.
Works become canonical only if they have "a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange." The canonical writers, having survived their own time, exert their power on their descendants by causing an "anxiety of influence," forcing the latecomers to be either followers or challengers. They must contend with the greatness of the canon because its influence is palpably felt. Works which fail to excite this anxiety are doomed to be period pieces: Their fame is ephemeral, their influence ethereal.
Theorizing about the existence of the canon and its desirability is the sort of pursuit which the great ideologues of campus media would like to sink their teeth into. Fortunately, throughout Bloom's book, such politicking is the marginalia rather than the opus; the bulk of the book is devoted to a critical reading of twenty-six canonical authors.
Bloom divides his writers into three ages - the Aristocratic, the Democratic and the Chaotic. Shakespeare is placed at the very center: "At once no one and everyone, nothing and everything, Shakespeare is the Western Canon." His universality is achieved by a singular ability to examine and expose the nature of humanity and to mold it with a vivid reality into his imaginary individuals on stage. "Shakespeare so opens his characters to multiple perspectives that they become analytical instruments for judging you." Bloom's favorite Shakespearean characters are as diverse as Falstaff, Edmund and Hamlet, by turns jocular, cunning and intellectual, but always complex and interesting. Bloom speaks of them with an awe that is palpable, a sobriety that is shrewd, and a love that is infectious.
Here Bloom's greatest strengths and faults lie. He packs in decades of reading, rereading, thinking and rethinking into little more than five hundred pages. On Goethe, Bloom manages to convey a sense of the plot of Faust, but quickly goes on to explore its extravaganza of sexuality. He can at once make great pronouncements about Goethe's audacity and style, and yet go into intricate details about his sexual metaphors. At the end, we know that Part One of Faust is "a perfect sin, error and remorse, fit only for Faust to drown in;" but we also gain a glimpse into Goethe's flamboyant irony and "sublime bad taste" in his phallic symbolism. And all this in the space of thirty pages.
All that is not to say, however, that Bloom does not have his peculiarities. In part, he makes the canon arbitrary by dedicating parts of the book to some of his most personal and iconoclastic readings. On Tolstoy, for instance, he spends much time on the obscure novel Hadji Murad, a celebration of Tartar heroism which, from the excerpts Bloom selects, seems tritely formulaic. In addition, Bloom clings throughout the book to the somewhat eccentric idea that Shakespeare is the canonical writer, whose influence is felt by everyone and whose knowledge of the human character is surpassed by no one. Dante is of course exempt from influence, for he precedes Shakespeare, but he is still inferior to him. Goethe, Tolstoy, Freud and Shaw (who coined the phrase Bardolatry) are all guilty of the anxiety of influence, as they struggle to escape the shadow of Stratford, and, happily in Bloom's view, fail eventually in that endeavor. Joyce comes closest to the Shakespearean ideal, but in the event, he becomes an inventive protŽgŽ rather than an equal. Many of those authors, when still living, did not agree with Bloom, and their disciples still might not.
Of course, the most obvious arbitrariness lies in who and what gets into the canon. While Shaw is scarcely mentioned, Dr. Johnson gets a whole chapter. French literature of the Democratic age is almost wholly ignored: Balzac is mentioned with dismissiveness, Hugo with indifference, only Flaubert is discussed with some reverence; and Maupassant and Zola are not spoken of at all. Indeed, reading Bloom's "short-list" may lend more credibility to the School of Resentment than any theoretical arguments they can marshal. Though it is supposed to be the list for the Western canon - and Bloom does conscientiously search out canonical hopefuls from Czechoslovakia and Hungary - the names are heavily biased in favor of those writing in English. Even among the English writers, the field is uneven. Maugham and Waugh are placed alongside Beckett - I am a fan of Maugham and Waugh, but by no means are they of the stature of Beckett.
Disagreement, however, is not necessarily negation. To go back to Bloom's anxiety of influence, it is the opposition and challenge mounted against a writer, I think, that confirms his or her place in the canon. The fiercer the opposition, the greater the effort required to escape the influence of the canon: The hue and cry are but an alternate expression for anxiety. It is the School of Resentment that is doing more than everything else to solidify the centrality of Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes et al - for scarcely anyone resents those who have made no impact on others' lives. And the resentment against the canon is especially strong because the impact of the canon is so inescapable. That is perhaps the true mark of greatness: It excites so overwhelming an anxiety that one cannot but feel the need to engage in an agon with it, an agon that might very well last centuries.
It is a testament to Bloom's learning that his is a book with which one needs to struggle and grapple, a book which one can still enjoy in spite of the most vehement of disagreements. It is unusually compact and abundant, and thus at times dense and difficult. Hoping to dash through it is doomed to failure, for the result would be inevitable indigestion and boredom. Many times I have had to read and reread his paragraphs to realize the full import of his observations. Many times I have had to suppress my impatient disagreement with his judgment in order to see his superior insight. But happily, Bloom's is one of those rare books, nowadays, that requires and deserves a second read.
--Davis Wang