an review of the new Harold Bloom book

[heidi tandy]

No: HPFGUIDX 377

You may remember him as that git who wrote a criticism of the HP 
books for the Wall Street Journal, criticising the writing, the 
plotlines, the dialogue, and the (huh?) lack of sex in the books. He 
has a new book out, and it was reviewed in The Guardian last sunday -
here's a bit from the review, which is at 
http://www.booksunlimited.co.uk/reviews/classics/0,6121,356270,00.html
 I've starred the more interesting passages.
Harold Bloom was once an interesting critic. In the 1970s, he 
developed an extravagant theory of literary creation for which all 
authors were locked in Oedipal combat with some mighty predecessor. 
Literature was the upshot of rivalry and resentment, as poets beset 
by what Bloom called the 'anxiety of influence' sought to triumph 
over some 'strong' precursor by rewriting his or her text as their 
own. All literary works were a kind of plagiarism, a creative 
misreading of earlier efforts. Wordsworth tried to kill off Milton 
and Shelley had it in for Shakespeare. The meaning of a poem was 
another poem. 
The critical wheel, however, has come full circle. Aghast at the 
theoretical excesses to which he so robustly contributed, Bloom, on 
the threshold of his seventieth birthday, has reverted to the quote-
and-dote school of criticism. Indeed, he has fallen back to a level 
of critical banality which might even have embarrassed Oxbridge 
aesthetes like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. 
How to Read and Why takes us on a Cook's tour of some of its author's 
favourite poems, plays and novels, boring the reader with plodding 
plot summaries or ludicrously long quotations and then adding a few 
amateurish, undemanding comments. Thus, Maupassant is 'marvellously 
readable', the pleasures of great poetry are 'many and varied', 
while 'Shelley and Keats were very different poets, and were not 
quite friends'. 
It would be charitable to think that Bloom writes as slackly and cack-
handedly as he does because he is out to attract the general reader. 
He is admirably intent on rescuing literature from the arcane rituals 
of US academia and restoring it to a wider audience. ***Even so, you 
cannot help suspecting that this rambling, platitudinous stuff is 
about the best he can now muster. *** As with all his work, a certain 
desperation runs beneath the heroism. Literature is the last 
surviving source of value in a degraded world, the only antidote to 
an academia obsessed with cross-dressing and multiculturalism. 
*Bloom is right to criticise US academia as sexually obsessed; but if 
literature is all that stands between us and suicide, then we might 
as well commit suicide. 
His criticism is all about the success ethic and the terrors of being 
a loser. 'The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of 
Rosalind,' he tells us, 'also makes me wish I could be more myself.' 
There are those malicious souls for whom Bloom is quite enough 
himself without there being even more of him, but the notion of 
reading as a kind of self-entrepreneurship is plain enough. 
Why does Bloom need to augment the self? 'We read,' he suggests, 'not 
only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is 
so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, 
time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and 
passional life.' ** It sounds as though Harold is a bit short of 
mates and reads to make up for it. Perhaps he alienates them by his 
repeated chanting of excessively long poems. **
But there are other reasons for reading besides 'alleviating 
loneliness'. If there is Bloom the self-therapist, there is also 
Bloom the American TV evangelist, full of windy moralistic rhetoric 
about how to 'apprehend and recognise the possibility of the good, 
help it to endure, give it space in your life'. 
Bloom may idolise Shakespeare with all the sticky sentiment of a 
teenage groupie, but his own language can be as cheap and threadbare 
as Jimmy Swaggart's. This book provides us with a number of reasons 
to read great literature, but none at all to read Harold Bloom.