Harold Bloom Quest for Truth

[Dave Monroe]

The Harvard Crimson
Friday, November 12, 2004

Harold Bloom Quests for Truth
By JOE L. DIMENTO
Crimson Staff Writer

With over twenty-five books to his name, as well as
fellowships, honorary degrees and innumerable
articles, Harold Bloom is arguably the nation’s
premier literary thinker today.

But he’s not afraid to veer from the literary, either,
as anyone in First Parish Church learned on Monday.
There to promote his new book—Where Shall Wisdom Be
Found?—Bloom also waxed on a number of topics,
including religion and “our current American political
debacle.”

Although Bloom insisted in an interview prior to the
reading that he would not pack the capacious old
church, he managed to come close and filled the
puritan hall with his slow, methodical voice as he
read from his latest book and spoke eagerly about
literature and his life.

Bloom, 74, was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at
Harvard from 1987-88, during which time he lived in
Adams house. He has otherwise taught at Yale for the
past 51 years. “I long ago began referring to myself
as Bloom Brontosaurus,” he joked, “but I intend to go
on teaching as long as I feel I’m capable.”

Bloom published his first work—Shelley’s Mythmaking—in
1959 and has continued to write and think seriously
about literature ever since. His 1973 work The Anxiety
of Influence earned him international acclaim for its
novel contention that authors are constantly aware of
their predecessors’ achievements and “misread” them in
order to achieve originality. “Influence,” Bloom
wrote, “is influenza—an astral disease.”

Much of Bloom’s scholarship is quite unorthodox in its
claims. For example, his 1998 work, Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human, argued that Shakespeare
“essentially invented human personality as we continue
to know and value it.”

That’s a big claim, and Bloom writes about it as he
does virtually every other literary subject—with
eagerness, erudition, and a tinge of comic
self-awareness.

In the years following Shakespeare, Bloom sought to
write books for a more popular audience, specifically
on the importance of literature in informing our
lives. His 2000 publication, How to Read and Why, was
an assessment of literature’s importance on life
throughout the ages.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? exists in this vein of
informed literary analysis for (quasi) popular
consumption. Bloom wrote much of an original draft,
but later discarded it and started anew. A
life-threatening health crisis—when he was, as he
said, “sliced up as so many people”—made him
re-examine the work and the importance of literature
to himself. After “being at the gates of death,” Bloom
said, “I took one look at the book and simply wrote an
entirely new one.”

Bloom writes in his introduction that the book “rises
out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity
that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of
recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss
of beloved friends.”

The book is dedicated to examining wisdom writing
throughout the ages, beginning with Job and
Ecclesiastes and moving through canonical Western
literature until the 20th century, ending with Freud
and Proust. Each section is dedicated to a pair of
writers and thinkers, with intensely close and
sometimes confusedly compacted analysis that is
characteristic of Bloom’s writing.

Although ostensibly for a general audience, a reader
must know a great deal about literature to understand
all of Bloom’s points. Yet it is still possible to
appreciate his analyses with only a fraction of the
breadth of his knowledge, especially since Bloom ties
many of the crucial ideas to more observable
historical phenomena, including American history.

Though these references are sometimes vastly
generalized and mispronounced (“Fundamentally, America
in 1860 and America now are little different.”), more
often than not they serve to allow access to less
knowledgeable readers. Even the above case can be
found to contain a kernel of cross-historical truth,
when it is followed by the explanation, “much of the
opposition we can muster [to America’s leadership past
and present] is ‘sniveling.’”

Bloom did not hesitate to refer to current political
events at times throughout his reading, at one point
spontaneously including “our current president” into a
part of the introduction he read from which mentioned
those who “reject what they know of Marx, Darwin, and
Freud.”

Referring to the Bush administration specifically in
the interview, Bloom lamented, “that may be the
administration for the rest of my life, [or] if not
him it’ll be his brother, or someone like him.” He
made sure to focus mostly on ideas surrounding
literature, though, dismissing his personal political
views as “another story.”

In the past, Bloom has been labeled a conservative by
some for his defense of canonical Western writers
against postmodern and deconstructionist critics in
recent years. (For the record, he calls himself a
“left-wing Democrat, whatever that means these days.”)

Bloom went so far as to resign from the English
department of Yale in 1976 for this growing schism in
English studies, as well as the Modern Language
Association and the English Institute “with a letter
blasting them” for adherence to this trend.

Although his opinions have made Bloom, in his words,
“the pariah of [his] profession for the last thirty
years,” he sticks by his beliefs. He maintains that
using gender, race, or any other personal
characteristics of authors in evaluating the artistic
merit or validity of their work is “a blasphemy
against the arts…a horrible absurdity.”

Noting that he has “limped off too many canonical
battlefields,” Bloom insists that he has only three
criteria for what he reads and teaches: “aesthetic
splendor, intellectual power, wisdom.” At this point
in literary scholarship he suspects “the profession is
pretty much split down the middle” between
aestheticists like himself and more postmodern
theorists.

When asked what undergraduates should be reading, he
listed his quintessential canonical authors—Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Samuel Richardson, among
them—“the great authors of the language.”

In terms of more contemporary authors, Bloom said
“there’s no question about it, we have four
first-class novelists writing at the moment,” Philip
Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormack [sic]
McCarthy, whose Blood Meridian he said was “so savage
and splendid there’s been nothing as good since
Faulkner.”

Bloom affably deflected references to his esteemed
reputation. “Obviously I am not unique,” he said,
“there are in every generation remarkable people who
are teaching English and other literatures all over
the world.”

Shrugging and joking throughout the interview, Bloom
bantered with others in the room in a self-effacing
and familiar manner, and seemed to enjoy himself,
laughing regularly. At one point, when I affirmed that
I didn’t disagree with him about his political views,
he wryly concurred, “we have very few arguments, Joe.”

After the reading, Bloom did not hold a question and
answer session, which is unusual for a Harvard Book
Store author event. In explaining his reasoning he
said that in spite of his “palpable amiability,” some
people have taken “the entire audience—not to mention
my sad self—captive with an oration rather than a
question.” He added that he would be happy to answer
individual questions as he signed books, and complied
with a line that stretched to the back of the church. 

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=504447


		
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