V V: Literature as liberation

It matters if individuals are to maintain any capacity to form their own judgements and opinions that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they must be read and in their own interest. You can read to pass the time, or you can read with overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock… The ideal reader is Dr Samuel Johnson who said that like every other activity of the mind, it must satisfy ‘what comes near to oneself, what we can put to use’. Bacon gave the advice, ‘read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.’ And Emerson who remarked that the best books ‘impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same nature reads’. Fuse Bacon, Johnson and Emerson into a formula of how to read: find what comes near to you that can [be] put to [the] use of weighing and considering, and that addresses you as though you share the one nature, free of time’s tyranny. Pragmatically, this means first find Shakespeare [and the Western Canon] and let it find you,” writes Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities in Yale, in the Prologue to Why Read?

 

At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him, particularly The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Professor Bloom has now come with The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (Yale University Press, $32.50). It is “a kind of summing up … my virtual swan song,” born of an urge to say “in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature”. What Professor Bloom says is that literature, not the scriptures, sustains the mind and the soul. All the ethical dilemmas of life are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Schiller and Dostoevsky (and the rest of the “Western Canon”) than in the mythical morality tales of holy books.

For Professor Bloom, Shakespeare is “the founder” not only of modern literature but also, in his expansive view, of the modern man’s “infinite self-consciousness”. “For me, Shakespeare is God,” he says at one point and repeats it time and again. In fact, he has a whole section devoted to Shakespeare: The Founder, with eight essays: Shakespeare’s People; The Rival Poet: King Lear; Shakspeare’s Ellipsis: The Tempest; Possession in Many Modes: The Sonnets; Hamlet and the Art of Knowing; Milton’s Hamlet; Joyce ... Dante ... Shakespeare ... Milton; Dr Johnson and Critical Influence.

There are three questions he asks himself as he wades through the great works of the “Western Canon”. Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life? In trying to answer these questions, Professor Bloom shows what great literature is, how it comes to be that, and why it matters to us. Each chapter shows startling new literary connections that emphasise his earlier view that great works of literature do not spring into the world fully formed. They emerge through impassioned struggles with the great works that preceded them.

Professor Bloom believes these intensely competitive struggles offer the key to literary understanding and appreciation, which elaborates the axiom that all great writers compete only with the past. What a great poem means, why it matters and whether it is worthy of the literary canon by investigating how that poem overcame, or failed to overcome, its literary rivals are perhaps the only ways to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of a poem. With these literary relationships from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, Professor Bloom takes us through the literary universe of the “Western Canon”.

Shakespeare and Walt Whitman are Professor Bloom’s two points of departure. What is interesting is the “connections” he makes between writers ranging from Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Joyce, Lawrence, down to poets of his own generation. “It is the strangeness as well as the sublimity of what remains that matters most, the utter uniqueness of the literary powers” that makes a piece of literature stand out from the rest.

“When you read Dante or Shakespeare, you experience the limits of art, and then you discover that the limits have been extended or broken.” This would be true for any discipline because unless you break with tradition and redefine the contours, you cannot make it “new” and unique. The result is an extraordinary feat of criticism and a personal meditation on a life lived through the great works of the “Western Canon”.

Literary criticism of this kind usually follows the old tradition of academic studies rendering the subject either boring or incomprehensible, or both. This book by one of the great contemporary scholars of literature is not; it has been written for the common reader, who can go back to it again and again.