Like most readers, I am frequently troubled by the fact that there are far more books out there that I want to read than I am ever likely to. Consequently, I have a dangerous fascination with “great book” lists, which offer the reassuringly pre-post-modern view that some answers to the question “What shall I read?” are better than others.
It is that momentous question that brought me to Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. I suppose I will begin with a few remarks about Bloom as a personality. He seems to be the quintessential grumpy old professor, although I suspect that this persona is at least in part a literary creation of his own. He sees himself as a holdout against what he calls “The School of Resentment.” By this he means the academic forces that have sought to define the value of literature in terms of race, class, gender, and the various degrees of oppression incident thereto. “Students of literature,” he complains, “have become amateur political scientists, uninformed sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers, and overdetermined cultural historians.” In his “Elegiac Conclusion,” he gloomily predicts that “what are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies’ where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.” In contrast to the forces of Resentment, Bloom offers a purely aesthetic appreciation of literature. He acknowledges, of course, the importance of context, but denies that Hamlet was composed by Elizabethan “social forces.”
A “grumpy old professor” persona must include some crackpot ideas, which Bloom seems to lavish on the Old Testament. The Pentateuch, if I understand him correctly, was likely composed by a woman at King Solomon’s court, possibly Bathsheba herself. Whatever. He also makes some unexpected choices about which writers are canonical. I was surprised to see a full chapter devoted to Emily Dickinson. (An American canon, he freely admits, is as yet poorly defined. Still, a chapter on Dickinson and scarcely a word about Faulkner or Melville?) This, of course, is the fun of such lists: perusing them and wondering “why X and not Y?”
Bloom has not only assembled impressive lists of the great books of various ages, but has also provided the canon with a sort of geography, with Shakespeare at its center. Of the twenty-one topical chapters, six have the Bard’s name in the title (e.g., “Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare,” “Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare,” and even “Freud: A Shakespearean Reading”). He is an unapologetic “Bardolater,” also offering space in his pantheon to Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare’s greatest prophet. Bloom’s enthusiasm is contagious and I find myself currently reading both Henry IV, Part I (Bloom worships Falstaff) and various writings by and about Dr. Johnson. More on these later.
So I suppose that The Western Canon has provided what I desired, namely some suggestions of ways to anchor and discipline my reading, and some suggestions for books for which I really must make time.