Book Information
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Harold Bloom
Riverhead Books, New York
Copyright 1994
ISBN: 1-57322-514-2
About the Author
From the book jacket: "Harold Bloom [was] Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. The author of numerous books, including The Anxiety of Influence and The Book of J, Bloom [was] a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a former Charles Elliot Norton Professor at Harvard University, a member of the American Academy, and the recipient of many other honors and awards."
The Canon Defined
With The Western Canon, Harold Bloom seeks to define what the literary canon is, and his purpose is to ask: what makes a writer’s works canonical? He wrote at the very end of the twentieth century, at a time when he believed the canon was under attack. His secondary purpose is to defend the canon through an elegy in which he is both emphatic and exasperated.
The literary canon began as the choice of books in educational institutions. In Bloom’s view, the canon has evolved and now represents those works worthy of an attempt to read. Its pragmatic function is to help one remember and order a lifetime of reading. He suggests that the canon not be thought of as a list of required reading, but instead as the relationship between an individual reader to what has been preserved out of what has been written over the ages. He defines canonical as authoritative in our culture. He suggests that canonical works are original and have an uncanniness that makes the reader feel strange at home. The strangeness either cannot be assimilated or we assimilate it so wholly that we no longer see it as strange. In a canonical work, strangeness is combined with originality, aesthetics, and agon. The word agon takes us back to the ancient Greeks with their Homeric conflicts, competitions, and struggles. For a work to be canonical, it must stand up to a simple test - it must demand rereading. If nothing new is gleaned from that rereading - no new insights, no gaps in understanding resolved, no agon revealed - then the work is not canonical. That is not to say it is not good or bad - it is simply not authoritative in our culture.
It is popular to denounce the Western literary canon for its focus on ‘Dead White European Males’ at the apparent exclusion of women or any writer who is not white. Bloom argues that this denouncement misses the point of the canon which does not evolve based on contemporary concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion but instead on influence. Writers write and over time they influence one another. This influence can be better understood by comparing a religious canon with the literary canon. In the former, certain texts are codified as being sacred and canonical whereas in the latter, the canon is a collection of authoritative works that has evolved over time based on continual influence. Unlike a religious canon, with its fixed, sacred texts, the literary canon changes with changes in taste. For example, Bloom argues that the historical novel is no longer as valued as it once was, and that the genre is no longer canonized.
Structure and Organization
Essays about twenty-six writers form the primary content of The Western Canon. The essays are literary critiques in which twenty-five writers are compared to Bloom's Número Uno - William Shakespeare. He chose the writers for their sublimity and their representative nature and included crucial figures from national canons. They are Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Beckett.
I would not be surprised to learn that sales of The Western Canon were primarily driven not by the book's main content but by its appendices. Bloom pokes fun at what he calls the antique idea of a lifetime reading list, however, in effect his appendices serve just that purpose. There are four – the Theocratic Age (2700 BCE to 1300 CE), the Aristocratic Age (1300s to 1700s), the Democratic Age (18th and 19th centuries), and the Chaotic Age (20th century). Writers and their canonical works are listed in each appendix by country or region. These appendices have become colloquially known as 'Bloom's Western Canon.'
The Ages are based on a social cycle described by the 18th century counter-Enlightenment philosopher, Giambattista Vico. The phases of the cycle are the Theocratic, Aristocratic and Democratic Ages. Bloom suggests that once the cycle completes, there is a period of chaos, and then the cycle starts afresh. He characterizes the 20th century as the Chaotic Age, an age in which we pretended we were still in the Democratic Age however we behaved, thought, and wrote chaotically.
The canonical literature of the Theocratic Age starts with the ancient Near East, and the Epic of Gilgamesh and it ends with the Middle Ages and Saint Augustine - a span of almost 4,000 years. In Bloom’s choice of the twenty-six writers, he bypasses the Theocratic Age altogether and starts with the Aristocratic Age. He begins with Shakespeare, so we learn little of Bloom’s thoughts about Homer, the Bible, the Koran, Saint Augustine, and the many other ancient writers whose works form the foundation of the Western Canon. Bloom describes Shakespeare as the central figure of the western canon and argues for his centrality throughout the book. Therefore, it makes sense that he would begin with the age in which Shakespeare wrote.
Perspectives
What held my interest more than Bloom's comparative critiques of the twenty-six writers were the parenthetical components of the book that surround the critical essays. In the Preface, Prelude, and Conclusion, Bloom writes what he calls an elegy for the Western Canon. The elegy describes what the canon is, what it is not, why it is relevant and should remain so, and how it is under attack. He labels academics and journalists who threaten the canon as the School of Resentment. From his perspective, the School of Resentment is made up of well-meaning but misguided idealists for whom “…all aesthetic and most intellectual standards are being abandoned in the name of social harmony and remedying historical injustice.” One of the arguments the School of Resentment makes against the canon is elitism. Those who are against the canon erroneously mix the concept of social elitism with artistic selectivity. No one argues that a writer must be wealthy to be canonized. Creation of a canon, by its very nature, is selective. That selectivity occurs over time through the process of influence. Yet because the canon has been politicized, and because in politics, it is not acceptable to be elitist, the canon is up for attack for the wrong reasons. Bloom argues that “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction. The final injustice of historical injustice is that it does not necessarily endow its victims with anything except a sense of their victimization. Whatever the Western Canon is, it is not a program for social salvation.”
Despite his exasperation with the School of Resentment, Bloom does not alternately side with right-leaning defenders of the canon. He balances his argument by criticizing those who support the canon because they believe it speaks to the superior moral values of the West. He writes, “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.”
While Bloom is offended by both sides, he does reserve his most sarcastic and funny criticism for left-leaning idealists. For example, he takes down feminist critics who denounce the sort of agonistic, competitive influence that he credits to canonical authors. “Thus, feminist cheerleaders proclaim that women writers lovingly cooperate with one another as quilt makers…” I agree with him here and myself take offense to the idea that to be a woman means to be 'cooperative'. Later, Bloom hits a feminist home run with: “The strongest women among the great poets, Sappho and Emily Dickinson, are even fiercer agonists than the men. Miss Dickinson of Amherst does not set out to help Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning complete a quilt.” I love the barb and would have enjoyed an equal opportunity take-down of the same magnitude toward a right-leaning moralist.
I have enjoyed two other influential books that allude to the idea of canonical literature – How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren; and The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. While both are excellent, neither shares Bloom’s opinionated passion nor cutting criticism. From that perspective, Bloom’s is the more entertaining book.
Writing Style
The Western Canon is the second of Bloom’s works that I have read. I have come to understand that his writing style depends on what type of writing he is doing. He has one style for the personal essay and another for the literary critique. Both are more accessible to people who have read a lot and who have read well. Those who have not might struggle to follow his train of thought because he does not fashion his arguments linearly. In the feminist quilt-making example, he sets the stage on page seven and hits the home run twenty-six pages later. Of his two styles, the personal essay is more accessible because he shares his passion with emphasis. The reader is never confused as to what his opinion is. His literary critiques, while also passionate, are quite different. He demands a lot of his reader. This is not a terrible thing – anyone reading Bloom can educate themselves so they can better understand the connections he makes – however, it does mean that reading his critiques is not easy. He likely preferred it that way given his anxiety over the dumbing down of educational standards.
My biggest peeve with Harold Bloom is his omission of a bibliography. One could argue that a bibliography was unnecessary because of the book’s structure. Bloom selects his twenty-six canonical authors and refers to and quotes their works directly. However, he not only quotes the canonical works, but he also refers to the interpretations and critiques of other literary critics. A bibliography is a standard tool and Bloom’s exclusion of one makes him seem arrogant. I own two other books by him and neither include a bibliography which implies that this is his editorial choice. A snippet from a review by Frank Kermode in The London Review of Books hints to the probable reason: “In one sense the hero of this book, as of all his books, is Bloom himself, modestly bold, genially polemical, dogmatically opposed to dogma, carrying so much in his head and always ready to say what he thinks about it all.” One does get the sense that Bloom has an awful lot going on in his mind, so much so that he has forgotten that the lay person simply does not have the same inventory of knowledge. That person would benefit from and appreciate something as basic as a bibliography.
Final Thoughts
In this review, I chose to write about Bloom's elegy and canonical lists rather than the critical essays on the twenty-six writers. I made this choice not only for brevity's sake but also because I haven't read many of the works he discusses in those essays. I will save a review of them for another time. I loved Bloom's sarcasm and his opinionated stance, even when I didn't always agree with it. I was also impressed - who wouldn't be - by his immense literary knowledge and ability to make connections. My blog, Banks Western Canyon, was inspired by Harold Bloom. After having read his elegy, I feel more confident than ever that embarking on the journey to read his canonical works is a worthy choice.
Comments