The Trouble(s) with Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom has a written a new book in which he says something that has been quoted a great deal already:
I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.
The quote is short, pithy, and really pretty good, which is probably why it’s being quoted all over the blogosphere. I will paraphrase what I take away from it, which is that a work much be beautiful, provocative, and wise. I think Bloom’s criteria are good ones, especially in conversation with the questions I asked in a recent entry on novels, is there such a thing as a Great Novel, and if so, what are the determining factors?
Bloom’s criteria, though, don’t make the question of what is a great work and what is not any less subjective, because whether a work has aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom is a matter of opinion. For example, I noted that I did not think Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth, belonged on the Time best-novel list. One of my readers, Duff, disagreed. White Teeth has many strengths, among them a canny portrayal of individual voices from disparate cultures and insightful relationships of family and friends. I think these things give it cognitive power and wisdom. But I found its ultimate plot, which centered around a mouse, to be conventional and overly tidy. Because of this, the book lacked aesthetic splendour for me, and I consider it good, not great.
Bloom’s criteria, then, can be useful in discussing and disagreeing on what works have merit. Bloom earned many enemies when he trashed the Harry Potter books in a Wall Street Journal piece titled “Can 35 million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? Yes!.” I’ve enjoyed reading the Potter books, yet I can’t honestly say they have aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, or wisdom. I find them fun to read, and cleverly plotted. I’ve enjoyed the evolution of the characters over six books. But there are greater books out there, ones I eschew when I read a Harry Potter novel, so Bloom has a point. He’s an intelligent person, so this should not be surprising.
Yet when I read Bloom, my hackles rise, and I want to dismiss him as a hide-bound racist who perpetuates on an intellectual level the kind of fascism he decries on a political one. In an interview with Bloom at Eurozine, he says, right after he makes his comment about the three criteria he uses
And those are not the standards now applied in the universities and colleges of the English-speaking world. Nor are they the standards applied in the media. Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, and twenty other irrelevancies, whereas I am talking about what I have never talked about before, and that is wisdom.
Throughout the interview, the link to which I found at Arts and Letters Daily, Bloom refers to the female interviewer as “Dear” and “dear child”. He names writers who exemplify wisdom to him. All are male; nearly all are white and dead. I don’t disagree with him on many of the writers he names, especially his author of particular expertise, Shakespeare. In the interview he has some fascinating analysis of Hamlet and the experience of reading Hamlet. I did find it curious that he didn’t talk about the experience of seeing the play but only of reading it. But when he says things so absurd as that he is one of the few teachers left who truly care about teaching, and when he refuses to recognize the worth of work by authors who are not male, I question whether any of what he says can be of value.
In the interview, Bloom quotes another influential but problematic author
Nietzsche said: “Jedes Wort ist ein Vorurteil”, which I would translate as “Every word is a misjudgement”. He also said in Twilight of the Idols — and I quote it again and again teaching about Shakespeare — “Anything that we are able to speak, to say or formulate, is something which is already dead in our hearts” — we can’t even feel it anymore, you know.
The quote reminds me that I don’t have to write clearly about how troubling and problematic I find Bloom and some of his views. It’s better if I don’t have clarity, and continue to wrestle with it. Like Nietzsche, Bloom has written some great things, some troubling things, as well as some things that have been used by others to maintain outdated and exclusionary status quos about whose value has work. Great work has been and will continue to be produced by all people, male and otherwise. Reading work by authors whose lived experience is different from one’s own allows one to expand one’s consciousness, one’s awareness of the subjectivity of great work, and one’s empathy. Bloom calls this irrelevant. Here are a few books that have earned permanent spots on my bookshelf, and that are good examples of why I think Bloom’s white male focus is wrong.
February 10th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
I would like to point out that Bloom has much respect indeed for authors both of a non-male gender and a non-white race. He considers Cervantes to be nearly Shakespeare’s equal, and he considers Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” a “perfect novel” and has similiar respect for female writers such as George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Dickinson. These are just two examples upon many. Also, I have read several interviews with Bloom in which calls the interviewer, male or female, “my dear” and so on. It’s just his way. There is no sexism in Harold Bloom, nor any racism, just an appreciation for writers who, in his words, “deserve to be re-read.”
March 1st, 2006 at 10:10 pm
You have a point, Geoff. But…Cervantes belongs to a “non-white race”?
June 1st, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Perhaps Cervantes isn’t a good example, but I’ll merely substitute Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his list of great African and Latin American writers under the “Chaotic Age” appendix in The Western Canon as instances of writers who aren’t Caucasian and are appreciated by Harold Bloom.