The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

published	September 1st 1995 by Riverhead Trade
binding	Paperback
isbn	1573225142 (isbn13: 9781573225144)
ebook
pages	560
literary awards	1994 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
description	Discussed and debated, revered and reviled, Bloom's tome reinvigorates and re-examines Western Literature, arguing against the politicization of readi...more [close] Discussed and debated, revered and reviled, Bloom's tome reinvigorates and re-examines Western Literature, arguing against the politicization of reading. His erudite passion will encourage you to hurry and finish his book so you can pick up Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens once again to rediscover their original magic. In addition, his appendix listing of the "future" canon - the books today that will be timeless tomorrow - is sure to be the template for future debate. [close]
date added	12-28-06 edit book

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Darren rated it:

02/26/08

Read in January, 2008

"The only spirit in 'Ulysses' is Shakespeare."
"In conversation with John Dryden, [Milton] once confessed rather too readily that Spenser was his 'Great Original,' a remark that I have come to understand as a defense against Shakespeare."
"Oedipus, I suggest, was hauled in by Freud and grafted onto Hamlet largely in order to cover up an obligation to Shakespeare."
"Except for Shakespeare, Chaucer is foremost among writers in the English language."
'Kno...more "The only spirit in 'Ulysses' is Shakespeare."
"In conversation with John Dryden, [Milton] once confessed rather too readily that Spenser was his 'Great Original,' a remark that I have come to understand as a defense against Shakespeare."
"Oedipus, I suggest, was hauled in by Freud and grafted onto Hamlet largely in order to cover up an obligation to Shakespeare."
"Except for Shakespeare, Chaucer is foremost among writers in the English language."
'Knowing more English would not have enlightened Tolstoy; his fury at Shakespeare was defensive, though presumably he was unaware of it.'

Harold Bloom represents everything that is wrong with everything I usually tend to hold dear - intelligence, literature, higher education, lofty pretension, the belief that writing about artwork can be just as important as the artwork itself, the notion that the critic is something akin to a holy man. He is the parasite suckling the sweet nectar of the gods out of the wide expanse of literature. We are all very, very lucky that he has never deigned to notice any but the most obvious modern authors (Pynchon, Roth, Delillo, and McCarthy.)

Of course, that would involve writing about people who are alive and could defend themselves, and Bloom has the courage of a dozen Grail knights when it comes to making the most far-spanning assumptions about very great, very intelligent, very talented, very dead men. I'm not quite sure how it is that Bloom has become so highly regarded in the study of literature, because he basically has one weapon in his arsenal which he pulls out at nearly every juncture. The man writes "Shakespeare" often enough to demand a drinking game. In the very first paragraph of his essay on Milton, he writes "Shakespeare" 9 times. This is a rare moment of restraint for Bloom.

Okay, okay, I am not simple. I understand that Bloom has chosen to frame his western canon through the prism of Shakespeare. In this way, Bloom's writing is very strikingly similar to the writing of one of my favorite non-fiction novelists, David Thomson, who, in "The Whole Equation," views the history of Hollywood through the double lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" and Robert Towne's "Chinatown." The difference is that Thomson is focusing on their treatment of Los Angeles, whereas Bloom is focusing on how Shakespeare invented literature, awareness, and humanity (one of his books is "Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human").

There is another important difference between Thomson and Bloom: Thomson would have been a great novelist if he weren't so obsessed with the movies (he says as much, or comes close to saying that, very often in his writing); Bloom would have been a second-rate used car salesman if someone, somewhere, hadn't given him the awful idea that he should write about writing.

I realize Bloom knows more about literature than practically anyone on the face of the earth. This does not hide the fact that he understands literature less than your average ten-year-old and, moreover, that he is so unremittingly insistent upon some unchanging interpretation of literature, and so humorless in his consideration of writers and their writing, that his continued presence in the literary world is an insult to every single author he claims to praise in the book, Will Shakespeare included.

Over and over again, like a king besieged by madness in an empty castle, he rails against the numerous people and forces who are arrayed against him - feminists, marxists, culturists (he references African-American academics specifically and all non-white academics generally.) This at first seems peppy and un-PC, then lightly racist and sexist, before it settles in that Bloom simply has very little interest in most non-Caucasian, non-male, non-Bloom concepts.

And there's the Shakespeare. You could argue (Bloom doesn't, but strongly implies to the point of embarrassment) that Shakespeare's influence has trickled down through the ages and social strata, so that an illiterate Sudanese orphan or a third-generation Turkish "guest worker" immigrant in Berlin or Paris Hilton all live and breathe in his influence, just as you can argue that a butterfly in Brazil flaps a hurricane into existence on the other side of the world or that, when no one is around, trees that fall in forests hum "Stairway to Heaven" on their way down. Because you can't really prove anything, you can say everything. David Thomson gets away with this kind of thing because he is witty, because he carries himself like a fellow traveler, and because he has a certain British self-deflation which gives his most madcap suggestions a twinkle - as when, in his biography of Orson Welles, he casually notes that young Orson was racing through local Irish lassies in a small province just about nine months before Peter O'Toole was born.

Above all, David Thomson (and I am talking about him so much only because there is so little to say about Bloom) is daring, and perhaps self-loathing, enough to question whether or not his primary influence - the filmic art - is actually rather silly, if not ruinous. Bloom, conversely, declares, "We owe to Shakespeare not only our representation of cognition but much of our capacity for cognition." Bloom is openly declaring literature as religion, Shakespeare as God (and the other way around, too) - which would place him, humbly, as the great outspoken prophet of a debased age - a Daniel in Babylon.

Too bad the tigers would just spit him back out....less

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17 comments

Tim rated it:

01/19/08

This book is half brilliant, a quarter nonsense, and a quarter defensible but repetitive and angry venting at deconstructionists, New Historicists, neo-Marxists, queer theorists, feminists, etc. Okay, art should be judged on its esthetic and conceptual merits and not as it accords with someone’s political or social agenda. Fair enough, and enough said already, Harold. He idolizes Shakespeare, and makes an almost convincing case for us to do the same. He’s incredibly well-read and knowled...more

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