The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

I first read this book about nine or so years ago, and I reread parts of it almost every day. So why am I just now getting around to reviewing it? Well for one thing I didn't have internet access when I bought it. But, I figured it's time to give the master his due. This book has had the greatest influence on me of any book I have read in recent memory, for many reasons. To begin with, Bloom's erudition is staggering. That he could read all that he has, and in addition retain and catalogue all of it, is simply beyond my comprehension. Bloom focuses on 28 authors he considers canonical and provides extensive descriptions and quotations from their work. If I understand Bloom correctly, he regards these authors as comprising the Western Canon, but he also has an appendix listing hundreds of authors that, I think, comprise the national canons of different countries. Whatever. But Bloom's importance lies in providing vivid enough descriptions of some major works so that one is motivated to read them. In my own case, at least, he has succeeded brilliantly. Solely because of this book, in the past few years I have done all of the following, which I might not otherwise have done: 1) Read Goethe's "Faust," Parts I and II. Part II is absolutely wild, and is every bit as great as Bloom says. 2) Read "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, which Bloom regards as the greatest English novel. It probably is. 3) Seen a production of "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett. Not my cup of tea, but it piques discussion at least. 4) Read several novels by Cormac McCarthy, beginning with "Blood Meridian." Bloom regards McCarthy as one of many successors to Shakespeare. Bloom is right; McCarthy is a powerful writer. I don't think I had ever heard of him before I read Bloom. 5) Read "Persuasion" by Jane Austen; Bloom regards this as Austen's greatest novel. 6) Read "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. No other author has so influenced me to expand my range of reading as Bloom. However, I do not share Bloom's pessism. He sees literacy as in decline, which it probably is. However, the literary acumen with which previous generations have been gifted is probably being replaced by a new set of audio-visual skills that are more related to electronic media. Whether this is as tragic a thing as Bloom seems to think it is will have to be determined by history, but I don't think it is. Unfortunately, Bloom is a follower of Vico's historical theories, which envision the current chaotic age being replaced by a theocratic age. I simply cannot envision that happening in the western democracies. But we won't know until this writer, at least, is long gone from this world.

Bloom adopted Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history for organization of the western canon. Vico proposed that history is divided into three ages: an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men followed by a chaos out of which a new historical cycle will begin. After his introductory Elegy for the Canon, Bloom skips the Theocratic Age, proceeding to the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, the Chaotic Age, and his Elegiac Conclusion. Each age has 6-8 chapters, each chapter devoted to an author or group of authors. The authors are, in order: Aristocratic: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Goethe; Democratic: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen; Chaotic: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Beckett. He begins with Shakespeare whom he calls the center of the canon. Bloom exalts Shakespeare almost to a godlike state in his aesthetic zeal. In fact, every other author in the book is related to Shakespeare in some way. For example, Chaucer's Pardoner, he says, was a prototype for Shakespeare's Iago and Edmund. Tolstoy, he says, could not handle the influence of Shakespeare in his works so much so that he had to disavow him in his essay What is art?. The reason Freud believed Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford is that he could not himself reckon with Shakespeare's greatness and Freud's reading of Shakespeare was really Shakespeare's reading of life.Bloom can appear at times a little too radical in some of his statements. For example he claims that the Jesus of the American religion is not the true Jesus of Nazareth, of the Crucifixion, or of heaven but only the Jesus of the Resurrection. He says that the Jesus Christians worship is a literary figure created by the writer of the Gospel of Mark. He exalts the search for aesthetic greatness above all else in canonical works, even dismissing morality in them past the point of serving its aesthetic purpose. But he can be forgiven some of his university gobbledygook. The real thesis of the book is that the feminists, Marxists, new historicists, deconstructonists, Freudians, and other ideologues that are taking over the universities are wrong that the western canon, just because it is made up of a bunch of dead white males, is outdated. He defends the western canon very effectively, especially against adding period authors just because of their ethnicity or gender. He argues for the aesthetic merit and place in the canon of each of the authors he covers in the chapters eloquently and justly. I dare anyone who reads this review to read this book and you will be converted, too.

Harold Bloom has been, arguably, the world's best reader, the most wide-ranging and the most retentive. Some people believe his book, The Western Canon, verges on the audacious since Bloom dares to list what Western literary works are canonical as well as what ones will be.While the appendices, with their lists of books, are the section of The Western Canon that provokes the most argument, these take up relatively few of the book's 578 pages. Bloom begins with a "Preface and Prelude," then indicates the mood the book will assume in "An Elegy for the Canon." Adopting Giambattista Vico's theory of history, Bloom then goes on to discuss twenty-six writers from different ages of literature. From the Aristocratic Age: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Johnson and Goethe; from the Democratic Age: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Ibsen; and from the Chaotic Age: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. Just before the appendices is the "Elegiac Conclusion," in which Bloom says he has "very little confidence that literary education will survive its current malaise," but he hopes that there will be "literate survivors."Early in the book, Bloom tells us that he is not interested in the debate among those want to preserve the Western canon and those who want to destroy it. Instead, Bloom is interested only in literary aesthetics and he claims that canonicity comes "only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction." Bloom believes in the existence of canons, he says, because the very brevity of life prevents us from reading more than a fraction of the literature created by various authors throughout the centuries.The Western Canon is more than an interesting book; it is also very thought-provoking. Some of the questions raised include: Is canonicity always the result of one writer's triumph over a great literary ancestor? Do not canons, to some degree, depend on the choices of the wealthy as well as on chance, luck or other devices of caprice? Does Bloom put too much emphasis on cognitive difficulty, choosing books that few readers outside of universities would ever want to read, much less reread? Then there is the excessive praise of Shakespeare as the entire center of the Western Canon. Is this perceptive criticism or does it cross the line into idolatry?There are those who believe Bloom is too quick to dismiss the moral value of literature. Shelley, they say, went too far in his Defence of Poetry in praising great literature for enlarging a reader's imagination and thus leading to moral improvement. But Bloom, say the same critics, fails to go far enough in acknowledging the moral implications inherent in all great literature.The greatest arguments, however, are reserved for the lists at the end of the book. How

Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is centered around the concept of a literary canon, which Bloom describes as "what has been preserved out of what has been written." The term canon is religious in origin, initially referring to wisdom literature chosen for inclusion into Scripture by the Christian Church. Bloom's book addresses the preservation issue, that is, how do we choose what to preserve and grant canonical status? The current canon debate seems to have arisen from a more modern definition of the term, referring to the books chosen by our institutions for teaching. Bloom asserts that a recent emergence of politically-motivated attacks will result in the imminent displacement of the traditional Western Canon from our schools' curriculum. Bloom accordingly names his first chapter "An Elegy for the Canon" and identifies two factions in the canon debate: the right-wing element that defends the canon with appeals to Platonic arguments of moral good, and the left wing "journalistic-academic" element Bloom names the School of Resentment that attacks the canon with appeals to Aristotelian arguments for a work's supposed social good. Bloom claims both disinterest and disassociation with this political debate and argues that both sides are misguided in their approach. Bloom then dedicates the remainder of his book to explaining why the attackers and defenders are misguided in their criteria and offering his own arguments for canonical inclusion. The essential criteria that Bloom advocates is one rooted in tradition and purely artistic considerations: for Bloom, the only true test of literary excellence is aesthetic quality, a criteria that judges a work based on its artistic merit alone and is unconcerned with political, moral, or social issues. Bloom is possibly the preeminent literary critic in America and is well-known for his theory of the anxiety of influence, reflecting his belief that, "there can be no strong, canonical writing without the process of literary influence." Bloom contends that, "any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts" and that "tradition is not only a handing-down process or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration...[a] conflict [that] cannot be settled by social concerns, or by the judgement of any particular generation of impatient idealists." Bloom places Shakespeare and Dante at the center of the Western Canon and claims that any writers who follow must inevitably wrestle with their greatness. This bold contention is a courageous and provocative one that requires a satisfying justification. But Bloom, in accordance with his reputation, rises to the challenge, surveying the vast landscape of literary criticism and presenting the greatest passages of analysis on the reasons for Shakespeare's greatness. Although many cri

Since I am one of the "general readers" to whom Harold Bloom directed The Western Canon, I am not qualified to judge his critical opinions. All I can say is that Mr. Bloom's descriptions of canonical works made these works and their authors sound so rewarding that I began to read them. As soon as I read the chapter on George Eliot, I had to read Middlemarch. As soon as I read Mr. Bloom's description of Jane Austen's Persuasion, I had to read that novel. Especially compelling is Mr. Bloom's description of the competitive drive that pushes strong authors to attempt to write their way out of the shadows of earlier literary giants - a phenomenon that he terms "the anxiety of influence." This concept is most useful, Mr. Bloom argues, in helping us to understand Shakespeare's place at the center of the canon. I began reading The Western Canon one year ago, and since that time I have, under Mr. Bloom's guidance, sampled hearty portions of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Eliot, Beckett and Proust, and have read tidbits of Whitman, Dante and Joyce as well. Harold Bloom is the teacher we all long for but seldom find; to him and to The Western Canon I owe the most intellectually rewarding year of my life.