Hermans Kids

[Lear's Fool]

In another chapter, Mr. Bloom points out Melville's
considerable debts to Shakespeare, comparing Ahab to
the likes of King Lear and Macbeth, and he goes on to
argue that writers as disparate as Faulkner, Nathanael
West, Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison
"are Melville's children."

FOOL   Toni? I didn't know Melville  had a Toni. Did shelove
him as a daughter?

As he did in his 1994 magnum opus, "The Western Canon,"
Mr. Bloom demonstrates his taste in these pages for
categorizing literary works and ranking them in
strict hierarchies. He declares that modern short stories
are either Chekhovian or Borgesian, the first gratifying
"our
hunger for reality," the second teaching us "how ravenous we
still are for what is beyond supposed reality."

FOOL  Categorizing? Prithee, nuncle, tell me whether a
madman be a teacher or a critic.

LEAR   A Bloom, a Bloom.

FOOL   No, he's a teacher who has a critic for a King.


He asserts that "Don Quixote" is the best of all novels, and
that Cormac
McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" is "the strongest imaginative
work by any living American writer."

FOOL  Old men cannot remember the living from the dead, but
that old man that wrote that knightly tale owes much your
maker and mine and your child of the sea is the father a
Toni? I didn't know he had a Toni.  




As for human nature, he suggests that all people -- not to
mention all
Literary characters -- can be divided into four types:
Hamlets, Falstaffs, Don Quixotes or Sancho Panzas.

FOOL  Are you Don or a Hamlet nuncle? 

LEAR  Oh madness, I am two crowns from one egg. 

OSWALD  How's Sancho Falstaff?





http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/060200books.html