Harold Bloom

From Philosopedia

Bloom, Harold (11 July 1930 - )

Calling himself “an unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies,” Bloom - like Jung and some contemporary existentialists - has been influenced by Gnosticism, a gloomy 3rd century outlook. In a review of Bloom'sThe Anatomy of Influence, Literature as a Way of Life (Yale University Press, 2011), the editor of The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, reiterated that Bloom is "a secularist with Gnostic proclivities."

Gnostics thought of the universe as an evil creator’s prison into which, as described by L. S. Klepp, “some sparks of divinity have fallen, trapped in human bodies but able to be liberated by the knowledge of their origin in the hidden true God.” Bloom’s J, in which he speculates as to the gender - female? - of whoever wrote the Bible, and The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992), place him in the forefront of controversial contemporary writers about religion. He writes of Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, and Lucina Umphreville in a way that displeases both the pious as well as the heretics. He is fascinated by Pentecostals, New Agers, Christian Scientists, and Mormons, finding Joseph Smith a “religious genius” who, in Klepp’s words, “burrowed so deeply into the Bible that he came out on the other side, arriving at a faith resembling archaic Judaism but offering everyone the possibility of becoming a self-made God Almighty.” Klepp in a critique adds, “I only wish he had reeled in a few more, such as Cyrus Reed Teed, the hollow-earth prophet, or Thomas Lake Harris and his theory of erotically matched souls. They may not make a great contribution to the national welfare, but what would the national comedy be without them?” (The Village Voice, 28 July 1992)

In a controversial work, The Western Canon, The Books and School of the Ages (1994), Bloom - called by some a psychologist, not a literary critic - argues that Shakespeare is the touchstone for all writers who come before and after him, that literature is where titans meet and clash, and that the major titans number twenty-six, whom he divides into three historic ages:

• The Aristocratic Age: Shakespeare is named as having no precursor and as having left no one after him untouched:

Dante; Chaucer; Cervantes; Montaigne; Molière; Milton; Samuel Johnson; Goethe

• The Democratic Age: Wordsworth; Austen; Whitman; Dickinson; Dickens; George Eliot; Tolstoy; Ibsen

• The Chaotic Age: Freud; Proust; Joyce; Woolf; Kafka; Borges; Neruda; Pessoa; Beckett

His book’s appendixes then list several hundred specific works which he critiques as being major, stating, “I would think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran [sic]. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is foolish and increasingly dangerous.”

In his first list, titled “The Theocratic Age,” Bloom cites Gilgamesh, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Holy Bible (Authorized King James Version), The Apocrypha, and Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth). These are followed by The Mahabharata, The Bhagavad-Gita, and The Ramayana. Works of the ancient Greeks he cites are by Homer, Hesiod, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, and Aristotle. Then he lists Hellenistic Greeks such as Meander, Callimachus, Theocritus, Plutarch, Lucian, and Aesop; then Romans such as Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, Persius, Catullus, Virgil, Lucian, Ovid, Juvenal, Martial, Seneca, Petronius, and Apuleius; then authors and works of the Middle Ages before Dante, such as Saint Augustine, the Koran [sic], Snorri Sturluson, Wofram von Eschenbach, Chrétien de Troyes, Beowulf, The Poem of the Cid, Christine de Pisan, Diego de San Pedro. Finally, he lists several hundred works by authors in “the Aristocratic Age” and “the Chaotic Age,” including, among the 161 American authors writers listed in Philosopedia (as being non-theists), the following:

Conrad Aiken, Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, Willa Cather, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Tony Kushner, Sinclair Lewis, Vachel Lindsay, Norman Mailer, John P. Marquand, Edgar Lee Masters, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, May Swenson, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, and Richard Wright.

As expected, scholars raced to inquire why some writers were included and why others were excluded. For example, not included are Mary McCarthy, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg. Bloom’s response has been that he is not in the business of being politically correct, that he holds different standards of excellence from those who are complaining. His disparagers he describes as being ideologues of the “six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians.” Yes, he admits, certain women or certain African American authors have not made the list, but in the world of art would one include lesser artists in any analogous canon? If so, he reasons, “When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of the Guerrilla Girls?”

Robert M. Adams, author of works on Erasmus, Voltaire, and Sir Thomas More, mentions that in the 1930s he had known about Bloom’s “Ivy League predecessors, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Their basis program—making allowance for the different dialect of those distant days—was to reaffirm the classical (canonical) literary values.” But although New Humanism created a considerable stir for a limited time in limited circles, “the New Humanism faded without a climactic battle into the Old New Humanism, then into the Late New Humanism, and finally into a formula which now arouses nothing more than an incurious ‘Huh?’ Adams concludes that Bloom “at his best is a rewarding and humane critic; one feels obliged to express gratitude for his many passing generosities before dismissing his Western canon with a gentle ‘Thank you, but no, thank you.’”

In a 1994 interview with Adam Begley, Bloom told how he despises “resentniks” and the “rabblement of lemmings” - Marxist critics, feminists, New Historicists, anyone who might read a poem as a social document, mix politics with literature, or in any way dilute the primacy of the esthetic. Bloom particularly dislikes Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, the French theorists, and the deconstructionists. They in no way, he holds, measure up to the standards set by, for example, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Emerson, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, or Hart Crane. As to why only one of John Updike’s novels is included but nine of Philip Roth’s selections are, Begley suggests that “Updike once referred to Bloom’s criticism as ‘torturous,’ while Roth is the would-be canonizer’s pal.”

As for Shakespeare, Bloom argues that he was the author who invented something which had not existed before, “personality,” inwardness, what it means to be human. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), he develops the view that no other author in English surpasses the bard’s universal genius. George Wilkins, who might have had a hand in writing “Pericles,” is described as a “lowlife hack.” Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy is rejected as “hideously written and silly.” John Webster, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson are all written off as second-raters, critical barbs which critic James Shapiro (The New York Times Book Review, 1 November 1998) found unfortunate.

According to Begley, Bloom asks “what it would mean for America to have a spiritual life that is not identified with or rooted in organized religion.” The goal of Bloom’s criticism appears to be to goad readers into living that life, which admittedly few will be capable of achieving. At Yale, where “the dominant orthodoxy was T. S. Eliot - inspired New Criticism, Bloom observed how he felt somewhat out of place because “I am very Jewish, and lower-class Jewish at that.”

A 1996 work, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection, examines the two-millennia-old belief system that emphasizes knowledge of “the God within.” The current fad of angel worship, he declares, is a “debased parody of Gnosticism.”

His The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2012) emphasizes his humanities humanism view that literary criticism needs to consist in acts of appreciation.

In short, the eccentric, idiosyncratic Bloom is Jewish at times and an “unbelieving Jew” at other times. But he is neither a religious nor a secular humanist nor is he attracted to any one philosopher, although he cites many philosophers in his works. Further, Bloom is unacquainted with the various freethought journals, adding as he autographed one of his books for a male inquirer at a book-signing party, “No, my dear, I belong to no particular philosophic movement.”

(See Robert M. Adams, “Bloom’s All-Time Greatest Hits,” The New York Review of Books, 17 November 1994}