I watch all sorts of things on YouTube. I've just been watching this interesting interview of Harold Bloom from the Charlie Rose show, back in 2005.
When I first read Harold Bloom, back in my teens, I felt crestfallen. I thought I had no appreciation of literature at all because Bloom seemed to read everything in a way so different from the way I read it. All these years later, I've come to think that he produced a great deal of hot air, no doubt along with profound insights. For one thing, his interest in the actual language and lyricism of poetry seems minimal. Like so many people, his interest seems entirely in the meaning. I think that's a huge mistake.
Bloom was a cultural conservative, who gave the grievance industries a well-deserved hammering. But he still lamented the Christian right in America, as he does in this interview, and as pretty much everybody (left and right, religious and secular) tends to do.
I have no time to argue it right now, but personally I have always liked the American religious right and think the attacks on them are lazy and snobbish. I used to like the Hour of Power from the Crystal Cathedral as a kid. I didn't reallly watch it, but I liked the atmosphere and it felt very wholesome to me. I think the world is a much better place for the American religious right.
I have always found Bloom insufferable. An arrogant, know-it-all -- and he did in fact "know it all" -- but without any wisdom, spiritual maturity or spiritual insight to go along with it. He produced one after another of Pronouncements From On High, but what import did any of it have, even from a scholarly perspective: Hamlet is great, Falstaff is great. Okay, and?
ReplyDeleteYour point about his focus on meaning rather than beauty and art is one I had not thought of, and it rings true. Perhaps his upbringing in a very Jewish, essentially midrashish milieu contributed to his predilection for searching for, and gleaning, meaning, interpretations from texts, rather than focusing on their beauty. This would also explain some of his antagonism to American Christianity despite his own cultural conservative predilections.
Personally, of critics of a similar generation as Bloom, I always found scholars such as Frank Kermode and W. Jackson Bate far more insightful as well as possessing a humility in spite of their immense learning, as well as a joy that they conveyed. Kermode was inviting you to a joint enterprise of joy in approaching literature. Bloom invited you to sit at the feet of the Great Man (him) and shut up and listen.
Bloom struck me as a Smartest Boy in the Class who never grew up.
Daniel F, thanks for your comment, and yes, these are exactly my views on Bloom. He's considerably more personable in TV interviews than he is in written form, where he always seems to be sneering. Apparently Tolkien is a terrible writer, as is JK Rowling, as is Stephen King, and he admits he can't see anything in Philip Larkin. I'm tempted to say: if you can't see anything in Philip Larkin, you just don't really like poetry. (Interesting link, since you mentioned Kermode, which I've just discovered:
Deletehttps://slate.com/culture/1999/01/elegy-for-smyrna-figs-and-a-heart-battering-god.html)
I suppose Bloom made some contributions that go beyond his encomiums, most famously "the anxiety of influence". I must admit this concept often strikes me when I'm thinking about poets, filmmakers, etc. But he DID seem to settle into a sort of exalted position of making summary judgements.
I've never really read Kermode and I've never even heard of W. Jackson Bate, I must look into them.
And the point about the midrashic tradition is excellent, with no disrespect at all to the midrashic tradition.
Great comment!
Thank you. And you make a great point about The Anxiety of Influence, which I should have made myself. There is no doubt that this was a very useful and pertinent concept for understanding the history of literature and art in general.
DeleteAlso, for all of his curmudgeonlyness and arrogance, it was also those very qualities which enabled Bloom, in an era of relativism and subversion of generally recognized cultural patrimony, to staunchly defend both the notion of a canon as well as to insist on a particular canon. One can take issue with particular inclusions or omissions, but at least he stood up for it, and in broad outline, his choices were defensible. So I have to give him credit where it was due.
That was an interesting and serendipitous quote you found by Kermode about Bloom and his view of Larkin!
I hope you find W. Jackson Bate of interest. His biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats are classics, and deservedly so. Also, I have found his edited volume "Criticism: The Major Texts" to be an incredibly good resource, and -- to his specific contribution -- the introductory essays he prepared to to with the various selections are excellent and valuable.
Thank you!