Ó 1994 Don W

A version of this review appeared in World 9 (November 5, 1994): 20-21.

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, by Harold Bloom, Harcourt Brace, 578 pages, $29.95.

What constitutes the canon, the books a literate person ought to read? Though this could have been the framing question for The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, avoids that mare's-nest. Instead, Bloom sharpens his pen against those he calls the School of Resentment--Feminists, Marxists, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Afrocentrists--and argues books should never be read for moral, social, or political ends. To do so is to overthrow the vital relationship between reader and text for cultural criticism, a tactic modern literary critics use "to assuage displaced guilt."

For Bloom, aesthetic value (figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, and exuberance of diction) should drive the formation of the canon; however, the difficulty, as he admits, is "that the individual self is the only method and the whole standard for apprehending aesthetic value." Although one is tempted to say that the idea of developing the canon is not really possible since each reader values books differently, Bloom tries to argue that "aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced."

The one shared criteria he uses to evaluate writers from Homer to Beckett is an originality characterized by "a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its

idiosyncrasies." On the one hand, for example, Emily Dickinson is canonical because of the intellectual demands of her poetry, "her surpassing cognitive originality and the consequent difficulty of her work"; indeed, readers of her poetry often struggle with the strangeness of both her style and content. On the other hand, Chaucer is canonical because of "the virtual reality of [his] literary characters, convincingly persuasive women and men."

According to Bloom, one writer dominates the western canon, so much so that all others stand in his shadow. Shakespeare, he asserts on several occasions, is the canon. Though hyperbole, this claim is returned to time and again with Bloom determined to show how all Shakespeare's literary ancestors live in his shadow and know it. Some such as Milton and Johnson embrace the bard and give homage; others such as Tolstoy and Freud reject him and end up saying silly or nonsensical things. Regardless, for Bloom, the center of the canon is Shakespeare, and he repeatedly twits the School of Resentment on this issue: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." If cast on a desert island, Bloom would want only two books: a complete Shakespeare and a Bible.

There is much to admire in this book. Bloom discusses great writers; in addition to those already mentioned he

devotes chapters to Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne and Moliere, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickens and Eliot, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Borges. Furthermore, he writes with great passion and depth of understanding. He is frequently outrageous as when he criticizes Milton's God in Paradise Lost for being "pompous, defensive, and self-righteous" while Milton's Christ "is reduced to the leader of an armoured attack, a kind of heavenly Rommel or Patton." But he is just as often refreshingly perceptive: "Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex, and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex!"

Depending on a reader's presuppositions, there is much to attack in Bloom's book because he promotes the notion that art exists only for itself (art for art's sake), and he shares Oscar Wilde's argument that art is perfectly useless. According to Bloom, "reading the very best writers. . .is not going to make us better citizens." Instead, reading great books helps "augment one's own growing inner self" and brings one to "the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."

So while some might agree with Bloom's critique of "the academic rabble that seeks to connect the study of literature with the quest for social change," they would be discomforted by his implicit denial that great literature is

a valuable commentary on the human condition, a perspective effectively articulated in Leland Ryken's Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective (Shaw, 1991).

In essence, literature for Bloom is a substitute for God, and his canonical works, especially Shakespeare, are a secular scripture. It is too harsh an evaluation to claim The Western Canon is full of "sound and fury, signifying nothing," but it is close to the truth to say it is written by "one that loved not wisely, but too well."