BOOK #83
|
 |
Review
by Edward Tanguay February 10, 1998 |
Who reads must choose.
Which books do we choose to read in our short lifetimes? What makes a book great? For Bloom, the litmus test for a great book is whether or not it has a certain "strangeness" or "weirdness" that cannot be assimilated. Great books seem so strange and bizarre that they are difficult to digest, or perhaps they seem quite ordinary to us precisely because they have assimilated us and defined how we see the world (e.g. Shakespeare, Whitman and Freud).
A great book does not necessarily please, in fact it causes anxiety by identifying something about human nature or about us or the world we live in that is odd and uncanny. "The Western Canon is a kind of survivor's list." Books that are on the Western Canon are there because they are still on top in the battle of assimilation. Our minds are not yet complex enough to sink them; they still agitate our intellects.
In this sense, Bloom sets himself up squarely against what he terms "the school of resentment," those who whine that literature is politically based and who want to replace the great books with a smattering of books from various cultures and lifestyles so that each is equally represented. Bloom playing the literary Darwinist asserts these resenters "denounce competition in literature as in life . . . they do like like to be told that they must compete with Shakespeare and Dante." Literature is in no way political for Bloom. Great literature will not make you a better person or a better citizen. All literature is a reaction against literature that has come before it.
So is the case with Shakespeare. To Bloom, Shakespeare is our maker, our prophet, our God. Bloom makes it no secret that he sees the literary world through Shakespearean-colored glasses: Shakepeare "largely invented us:"
He is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whever you are. he renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine . . .
No other writer has ever had anything like Shakespeare's resources of language, which are so florabundant in Love's Labour's Lost that we feel many of the limits of language have been reached, once and for all.
Shakespeare invented the perpetually changing, endlessly growing inner self, the deepest self, all-devouring, the self first perfected in Hamlet and still ravening on in (Milton's) Satan.
Shakespeare's hold upon human nature is so sure that all post-Shakespearean characters are to some degree Shakespearean.
There are two playwrights, the Catholic God and Shakespeare, both of them gods . . .
Shakespeare is universal because he has something for everybody: "to this day, multiculturally, Shakespeare will hold almost any audience, upper or lower class." You get the idea from bloom that no matter how many different personalities you know or how many literary characters you have encountered, you will be able to find (or refind) them in Shakespeares works.
Dante is the second most influencial on Bloom's list. Yet Dante is not a Shakespeare. Where Shakespeare created characters so humanly real that they "walk out of their own plays," Dante was creating a religion, a system based on his vision of one woman who wholly possessed and drove his mind until he bloated her into a super-godlike, white-Christ figure:
No single personage in Shakespeare, not even the charismatic Hamlet or the godlike Lear, matches Beatrice as an exuberantly daring invention. Only the J writer's Yahweh and the Gospel of Mark's Jesus are more surprising or exalted respresentations.
Dante is not meek. He has written something like a Third Testament, and yet it is strangely a lot about him. He had something to get out, but it is quite personal, you get a private Dante.
Dante's outstanding characteristics as poet and as person are pride rather than humility, originality rather than traditionalism, exuberance or gusto rather than restraint . . . You are not converted by or to Beatrice; the journey to her is an initiation because she is, as Curtius first said, the center of a private gnosis and not of the church universal.
Dante, the most singular and savage of all superbyly refined temperaments, made himself universal not by his absorption of tradition, but by bending tradition until it fitted his own nature.
Bloom is succinct and informative in his comparisons:
Shakespeare is everyone and no one; Dante is Dante.
Chaucer is the second in line for being a "generator of character." You don't get much more original, deeply funny, and human than the Wife of Bath. Bloom brings out the robust earthiness of the Wife and the complexity of the Pardoner ("His authentic drive is for self-exposure, self-destruction, self-condemnation. He is doom-eager, or else need to defer despair and self-immolation through sustaining the little death of humiliation by the bluff Host before the other pilgrims.")
I have never actually read Don Quixote and if you have not read a work that Bloom talks about, you have the unpleasant experience as when you come to World Lit class without having read the text. You are simply lost. Yet you can catch pointers which basically outline the text.
With Cervantes we get the impossible dream-quest of two friends:
The loving, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book . . . I cannot think of a fully comparable friendship anywhere else in Western literature.
Cervantes' two heroes are simply the largest literary characters in the whole Western Canon, except for their triple handful (at most) of Shakespearean peers.
Quixote is universal:
Don Quixote goes mad as a vicarious atonement for our drabness, our ungenerous dearth of imagination.
Bloom gives you many connections throughout the book. Even though he has chapters dedicated to certain authors, you get side notes on many sub-authors all the way through. In this way he makes a lot of informative comparisons between authorsm, for instance, that Emerson was an "American Montaigne," and even more enlightening: "Walt Whitman and Norman Mailer are indirect descendants of Montaigne, even as Emerson and Nietzsche are his direct progency. It makes you think for awhile, but if you know a few of the authors, you can begin to patch the others together with borrowed characteristics. It makes the book easier to read for those who haven't read everything Bloom has.
Montaigne on dying and enduring:
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don't bother your head about it.
We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musican liked only one kind, what would he have to say? He must know how to use them together and blend them. And so must we do with good and evil, which are consubstantial, wiht our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one element is no less necessary for it than the other. To try to kick against natural necessity is to imitate the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook a kicking match with his mule.
I like Montaigne. I would have discovered him much later I suppose if I hadn't read Bloom.
Molière's Misanthrope sounds worthy of a read:
Philinte: Now, what's got into you?
Alceste: Kindly leave me alone.
Philinte: Come, come, what is it? This lugubrious tone . . .
Alceste: Leave me, I said; you spoil my solitude.
Philinte: Oh, listen to me, now, and don't be rude.
Alceste: I choose to be rude, Sir, and to be hard of hearing.
Paradise Lost is of course a classic in that it creates a Catholic Satan and a Catholic God which has defined our definitions of these entities since. Satan's bad-boy image comes from Milton. And Milton's God is "pompous, defensive, and self-righteous, while Milton's Christ, as I once remarked, is reduced to the leader of an armored attack, a kind of heavenly Rommel or Patton." (!)
What makes Paradise Lost unique is its startling blend of Shakesperaean tragedy, Virgilian epic, and Biblical prophecy.
Dr. Johnson is the "canonical critic proper." I would want to read Johnson because Bloom describes him as one who "never came easily to belief" and "more than anyone else, he understood how little we can bear any anticipation of death, especially our own death." Isn't the problem of believing and a preoccupation with death and destruction two topics which occupy us tremendously in the 20th century?
Goethe is not a beginning but an end. It is the end of an era which began with Dante and ended with Goethe's parody of Dante. Goethe is "least available to our sensitivity" today as he is from another world, the world of Dante, yet the end of that world. He ended that world with the shocking Faust II:
As a sexual nightmare or erotic fantasy, it has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem.
I do not know a more surprising poetry thatn the grotesque and sublimly absurd final utterances of the heroically ridiculous Mephistopheles as he fights a solitary rearguard action against the heavenly floods of floating roses and angelic buttocks that prevent his snatching away the soul that Faust has pledged to him.
The only god or godling in Faust seems to me to be Goethe himself, for this extraordinary poet was neither Christian nor Epicurean, neither Platonist nor empoicist.
After Faust II, enough was enough and the heavy Christian literature era ended.
Acclaimed as a literary messiah almost from the start of his career, Goethe shrewdly evaded stultification by becoming an endless experimenter, and Faust, Part Two may well be more of an experiement than a poem.
Faust, Part Two is the grandest monster movie ever directed at us.
After Goethe, everything that can be broken has been.
The soul of Faust is borne heavenward by these enticing youths, and Mephistopheles rightly laments the manner of his defrauding. Thsi is all good, unclean fun, and perhaps Goethe should have neded it there. Instead, he loots and parodies Dante's Paradiso, presenting all readers since with an ultimate problem in perspectivizing. What are we to do with this apparently Catholic conclusion to an altogether non-Christian poetic drama? The Blessed Boys and various grades of Angels are one sort of entity, but how is the reader to react to the heavenly battery of Doctor Marianus and all the Penitent women who attended Jesus? Is Faust really going to take up residence in Dantesque heavens as the loving teacher of a bevy of Blessed Boys? Is Oscar Wilde somehow writing this conclusion in advance, or is all this Goethe's final blasphemy, his ultimate outrage to normative sensibilities?
Bloom quotes:
I cannot find, anywhere else in Western literature, anything like Wordsworth's understanding that the apocalyptic power of hope, drawing its strength from benign memory, becomes more dangerous than despair could be.
Wordsworth invented modern or democratic poetry as surely as Petrach inaugurated Renaissance poetry.
What Austen parodies in Sense and Sensibility she raises to an apotheosis in Persuasion: the sublimity of a particular, inwardly isolated sensibility.
While the pre-Socratics and Freud agree that there are no accidents, Austen thingks differently. Character is fate for her also, but fate, once activated, tends to avade character in so overdeterminded a social context as Austen's world.
American's paradox with Whitman is that our national poet is an egotistical, homosexual onanist who "proclaimed his own divinity in a series of untitled, unrhymed, apparently prosy verses." Why Whitman is considered a "democratic prophet" and even "modern Jesus" not only in American but worldwide sheds an interesting light on our times. What is it about Whitman that defines us today?
Whitman freqently proclaimed his desire to absorb all other identities into his messianic largeness, his capacity for containing multitudes.
Whitman is the passionate populist, precursor of Allen Ginsberg and other professional rebels.
Is it his "his clear sense of his world" that we long for? His honesty, openness. His robustness and innocence and brashness is embedded in the American character. Whitman's relationship with American religion is fascinating:
Whitman centers the American canon because he changes the American self and the American religion by changing the representation of our unoffical selves and our persuasive if concealed post-Christian religion.
Whitman had a profound understanding that his country requirid its own religion as well as its own literature.
I found the description of Emily Dickinson most evasive. I have tried to read her but never understood her poetry. Many of Bloom's comments were informative but not fully explanatory. She seems difficult to understand, yet Bloom sees genius in her:
Except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.
Except for Kafka, I cannot think of any writer who has expressed desperation as powerfully and as constantly as Dickinson.
The various times I have taught her poems have left me with fierce headaches, since the difficulties force me past my limits.
She is not her nation's first post-Christian poet; that would have to be Emerson . . . but she had the best mind of all our poets.
Emerson, Nietzsche, and Rorty alert us to the bewilderments of perspectivism, while Dickinson, in doing the same, also has the poetic strength to hint at a beyond, another way to bring selfhood and the contingencies of canoncial tradition into a dialectical relation.
The will to power in Emerson and in Nietzsche is also receptive, but its reaction is interpretation, so that, in them, every word becomes an interpretation either of the human or of nature. Dickeinson's way, whether to see or to will, favors questioning over interpretation and intimates a kind of othering, both of human stance and of natural processes.
What I learned from this review it that if you read Dickinson, you better
have some secondary literature next to you.
What is it about Dickens which makes him great? He is certainly different, and even strange and weird.
That Shakespeare should be a kind of Bible for secularists is not surprising; it is more startling to realize taht Dickens, translated and read everywhere, has also become something close to a cosmic mythology.
George Eliot gives to us the enduring fact that millions of bland, ordinary lives guide history. In Middlemarch, I never understood what she was driving at if not to portray the great fabric of human kind as a tremendous collection of normal lives. She has a strong message and she is unique:
George Eliot, like Emily Dickinson and Blake, and like Shakespeare, rethought everything through for herself. She is the novelist as thinker (not phlosopher), and we frequently mistake her because we undersestimate the cognitive strength she brings to her perspectivizings.
Eliot shows the interworkings of society and the individual in the minutest sense. Her feeling for detail and subtlety makes her an uncanny writer.
George Eliot was too great an artist and too acute an ironist to be crippled by the societal structures of her day.
I know of few sentences as wise and admonishing as "For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside of it."
Not knowing much of Tolstoy before I read this book, I have a much more defined picture of him now: basically he was an egoist who had a very difficult relationship with both God and Shakespeare. Bloom lets Gorky describe Tolstoy:
In his diary which he gave me to read, I was struck by a strange aphorism: "God is my desire." To-day on returning him the book, I asked him what it meant.
"An unfinished thought," he said, glancing at the page and screwing up his eyes. "I must have wanted to say: God is my desire to know him. . . . No, not that. . . . " He began to laugh, and rolling up the book into a tube, he put it into the big pocket of his blouse. With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relation of "two bears in one den."
Who was Tolstoy?
His Christ was the preacher on the Sermon on the Mount and nothing more, perhaps less a god than Tolstoy himself.
Reading him incessantly, you don't so much begin to see what he sees, you start to realize how arbitrary your own seeing tends to be. Your world is much less abundant than his, since he somehow manages to suggest that what he sees is at once more natural and yet more stange.
Tolstoy absurdly attacked Shakespeare for being unable to endow his characters with individuality of language, which is rather like saying that Bach could not compose a fugue. Knowing more English would not have enlightened Tolstoy; his fury at Shakespeare was defensive, though presumably he was unaware of it.
It is questionable whether Tolstoy ever loved anyone, including his children. Not even Wordsworth or Milton, not even Dante could match Tolsoy as a great solipsist.
Anothing fascinating discovery in this book was Ibsen and trolls:
Ibsen's trolls are personally very nasty indeed, particularly in Peer Gynt, but they are closer to sadistic, disturbed children than to systematic technocrats of genocide. Most simply, trolls are before good and evil, rather than beyond it.
I cannot think of any other Western dramatist of true magnitude who is as consistently weird as Ibsen. A strangeness that refuses domestication, an eccentric vision, really a baroque art . . .
Ibsen is more of a scorpion than a moralist and, in this Peer Gynt, more of a Dionysiac than we have understood.
Act 5 darkens Pee, giving him his first ugly moments in the play. Part of the lasting strangeness of Peer Gynt is that it is more a trilogy of dramas single work. The twenty-year-old Peer of the first three acts is a heroic vitalist, uncanny enough to be part troll in his energies and desires. Act 4's middle-aged Peer is both a matured humorist and a scoundrelly scamp, and his fantastic adventures just barely stay within natural bounds. The supernatural pervades the final act, in which the aged Peer, at some cost to his humor, is at once more rancid and more poignant than ever before.
"Ibsen charmed almost no one."
THE CHAOTIC AGE
We are now in the Chaotic Age. Bloom divides his book using Vico's prophecy of the stages of mankind which repeat each other in cycle: "the Theocratic Age exalts the gods, the Aristocratic Age celebrates heroes, and the Democratic Age mourns and values human biengs. There was for Vico no Chaotic Age, only a Chaos." Bloom adds the Chaotic age to describe our world today, or basically the world of the 20th century.
Freud is a main player in the chaos. But although Bloom believes that Freud is weird and strange (and thus great), he believes that Freud was almost fully subsumed by Shakespeare, and throws Freud in the back seat and puts Shakespeare behind the wheel of psycholanalysis wagon. Yes, Shakespeare was so influencial, he retrointerpreted Freud:
Shakespeare is the inventor of psychoanalysis; Freud, its codifier.
Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex, and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex!
Psychoanalysis, in many ways a reductive parody of Shakespeare, continues to be haunted by Shakespeare's ghost because Shakespeare could be judged as a transcendental king of psychoanalysis.
As an interpreter of Hamlet, Freud does not warrant a passing grade.
Proust: The True Persuasion of Sexual Jealousy
While Bloom lectures about authors I had read, I enjoyed his fine-tuned descriptions and nuances of distinction. For the authors I had not yet read, Bloom's pontifications were road maps for me, roadmarks for unknown territory. We find out for example that Proust is about sexual jealousy:
Shelly affirmed that incest was the most poetical of circumstances; Proust teaches us that sexual jealousy may be the most novelistic.
If Freudian love is the overestimation of the object, then Proustian jealousy, far more dialectical and ambivalent, is at once the underestimation of the object and the lunatic hyperbolization of her appeal for everyone else.
James Joyce was the one who came closest to breaking out of Shakespeare's all-encompassing embrace.
[In James Joyce] there is controlled aggressiveness toward Shakespeare and a profound desire to play at replacing English with the dialect of the Wake . . .
As an obsessive student of literary influence, I celebrate the Wake as the most successful metamorphosis of Shakespeare in literary history. The only possible rival is Beckett, who in Endgame appropriates Hamlet with audacity and skill.
Woolf's Orlando: Feminism as the Love of Reading
To be solemn about Woolf, to analyze her as a political theorist and cultural critic, is to be not at all Woolfian.
I cannot think of another strong novelist who centers everything upon her extraordinary love of reading as Woolf does.
Her religion (no lesser word would be apt) was Paterian aestheticism: the worship of art.
No other twentieth-century person-of-letters shows us so clearly that our culture is doomed to remain a literary one in the absence of any ideology that has not been discredited. Religion, science, philosophy, politics, social movements: are tehse live birds in our hands or dead, stuffed birds on the shelf?
That books are necessarily about other books and can represent experience only by first treating it as yet another book, is a limited but real truth. (cool)
Virginia Woolf's love of reading was both her authentic erotic drive and her secular theology.
Woolf has finer works than Orlando, but none more central to her than this erotic hymn to the pleasure of disinterested reding.
Kafka: Canonical Patience and "Indestructibility"
From a purely literary perspective, this is the age of Kafka, more even than the age of Freud. Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.
Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa: Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman
The hispanic and Portuguese poets were all new to me.
Neruda can be regarded as the canonical center of all latin American literature.
Although in Borges the labyrinth is an essentially playful image, its implications are as dark as in Kafka.
Hence we encounter irony; the two modern writers most exasperated by Freud were Nabokov and Borges.
Homer, like Shakespeare, is for Borges the Maker or archetypal poet . . .
I have the feeling that if you read the literature of Borges and the Neruda, you better get braced for an anslaught of mysticism.
Of all Borges' phantasmoagorias, the City of the Immortals is the most dismaying. Rufus the tribune, exploring it, finds it to be "so horrible that its mere existence . . . contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.
It seems that hispanic authors see Whitman as a gigantic Shakespeare around which they cannot break out of. Are these writers giving Whitman an hispanic flavor or do they carve out real niches of their own?
Beckett
Beckett's sense of our malaise was more a post-Protestant realization, stemming from Schopenhauer rather than Descartes.
No one, confronting Endgame or How It Is, will find Beckett deficient in strangeness, in palpable originality.
In Endgame, we get radical internalization; the entire play is liek a play within a play, but there is no audience on the stage, and we might as well be inside the mind of the bizarre solipsist Hamm, Hamlet in the final ditch . . .
* * *
So, oh my God, I've gotten through it! In its quantity, this book was like a 2-week summer course on world lit. Many times Bloom swung me off of his reasoning wagon; I couldn't stay on. I just had to keep reading hoping I would be able to hook on and identify at some later point. His wonderful groupings and comparisons of authors and works, some quite wild which threw me for a loop "It may be that Chaucer's true literary parent was the Yahwist and his true child, Jane Austen." (Huh?) But most of the connections he gave seemed like wise pointers to new insights otherwise unknown. The guy's mind is wide.
Bloom could write endlessly, yet it wasn't an endless book. He kept it interesting in that he ended his ravings of each author because it got old. He simply has so much to say.
And in all, it is quite obvious in this book that the old man Bloom is pessimistic. The whole book reads as though this is his last speech before his "Western Titanic" slowly sinks into the cold ocean of multiculturalism and political "cheerleading." It has already scraped the iceberg; the end is near. It is no coincidence that the last chapter is entitled "Elegiac Conclusion."
It may be that the new Theocratic Age of the twenty-first century, whether Christian or Muslim or both or neither, will amalgamate with the Comptuer Era, already upon us in early versions of "virtual reality" and "the hypertext." Combined with universal television and the University of Resentment (already well along in consolidation) into one rough beast, this future would cancel the literary canon once and for all.
Don't read The Western Canon without having read some or many of the texts mentioned. And don't read this without a thick encyclopedia next to you (or a thin one in your cd). Then get a glass of wine and spend a couple pleasant evenings wandering along literary paths with Mr. Bloom.
Edward Tanguay
Send your review on this book to The Online
Reading Club.
Check out the books we are currently reading.
Go the the Online Reading Club Home Page.