He should know you should trust him.īut if Bloom’s prodigious reading was his rest and his strength, it was also, I suspect, key to his failures. He analyzes great works of art not through the eyes of a poet or a novelist or a playwright-that is, through the lens of their actual creators-but through the lens of reading. He can declare that Moliere is one of the three-and three only!-playwrights of the last six hundred years that deserve canonization because he has read them all, damn’t. Harold Bloom, champion avatar of librarians everywhere! This was the source of his cultural authority. He was staggeringly, smashingly, outlandishly well read. What could be read, he did read. Instead he stacks his pages with one overwrought judgement after another–and the best of these judgements are usually not even his, but some quote lifted from Hazlitt, Johnson, or some other ancient critic.īloom read all of the ancient critics. He rarely bothered trying to prove anything. Upon Falstaff he bestows the title “t he grandest personality in all of Shakespeare.” But peer at his pages long enough and you quickly realize the truth: Bloom asserts this title he does not argue for it, much less prove it.
You’ll discover this within a minute of reading any of Bloom’s criticism of the Bard. Bloom deplored young Hal to the center of his bones his love for Falstaff soaked through his soul down into his toes. This weakness is seen most clearly in his many volumes on Shakespeare in less exaggerated form it mars the judgments Bloom throws around in The Western Canonor Genius.īloom declares where he should argue, emotes where he should analyze, and effuses where he should unveil. The truth is that Bloom adds nothing to the great works he champions. The trouble with Bloom was not his elephant love for the canon, but his inability to articulate anything but this passion (and disgust with those who sought to defile it). It seems obvious to me that some works are better than others and more obvious still that if a book is still being read several centuries after it was written it is likely one of those better works–or barring that, a work whose intellectual or artistic legacy makes it a necessary piece of the larger puzzle. With the concept of a ‘canon’ or a ‘classic’ I have no argument. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring.
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