An Elegy for Bloom

In the introduction to his controversial masterpiece The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), the late Harold Bloom distills a theory of literature that has long been maligned by the purblind doomsters of the humanities who seem unable to distinguish writing that is forever relevant from that which speaks only to an age or generation and who, owing to an inveterate if not pathological politicism, pursue the best that has been written not as an end itself but as a means to advance social agendas. Despite having been published nearly three decades ago, Bloom’s introduction, “An Elegy for the Canon,” calls us from the din of confusion that is contemporary literary study back to an appreciation of the canon around which such study traditionally has centered. He begins by defining the proper approach to literature, continues by excoriating those who deviate from it, and finishes by offering edifying insights into what has motivated the greatest authors and the wisest readers.

To approach literature properly, says Bloom, is to recognize, before all else, its uselessness. Literature does not improve selves or society. Implicit in his argument, of course, is that it does no harm either. Critics of previous centuries maintained that reading bad books is bad for the character; now, “the new commissars tell us that reading good books is bad for the character.” In Bloom’s mind, yesterday’s critics and today’s academic censors are both wrong. “Reading the very best writers…is not going to make us good citizens,” he contends. Nor is immersing ourselves in their words going to make us racists, sexists, misogynists, xenophobes, heterophobes, or transphobes. It’s going to make of us nothing, morally speaking.

With respect to moral utility, “All art is quite useless,” said Oscar Wilde. For Bloom, Wilde is as sage as the first literary theorist, Plato, above whose academy in Athens appeared the words: “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.” Had it been in his power to do so, Bloom would have had Wilde’s declaration “engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”

Rightly or wrongly, Bloom does not subscribe to the theory of the English poet Sir Philip Sidney, who argues in his “Defence of Poesy” (1580) that the goal of studying literature is the improvement of manners through exposure to precepts embodied in literary texts and through experiences of vicarious suffering in small doses in preparation for that inevitable moment of personal grief or distress, for instance, through reading the Book of Job. Nor does Bloom equate works of the literary imagination with theodicy, the philosophy concerned with “justifying the ways of God to men,” in John Milton’s phraseology. According to Bloom, the proper study of literature is an extension of aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the principles of beauty and artistic taste.

“The aesthetic is,” in Bloom’s view, “an individual rather than a societal concern”; therefore, he does not despair of its devaluing by the rampant philistinism of the multiculturalists of higher education who teach literature but fail, or refuse, to see the canon for what it is: a relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written, not a mere list of books for required examination. Bloom understands that literary study, in contradistinction to cultural studies and the concomitant erosion of literary standards, is, and ever will be, an elitist endeavor in the service of aesthetics; cultural studies are, at best, variant forms of the worst elements of social science, which, instructive though it may be, has no aesthetic value.

It was wrongheaded from the start, asserts Bloom, “to believe that literary study could become a basis for democratic education for societal improvement.” That lesson will be learned, he maintains, “when our English departments…shrink to the dimensions of our current Classics departments, ceding their grosser functions to the legions of Cultural Studies.” For all intents and purposes, since Bloom penned this observation, most English departments, barring a handful at public universities and a waning number at private, have already resigned their aesthetic values to the whims of multiculturalists or to the interests of those who place canonical literature on par with graphic novels for the sake of democratizing literary study.

To quarrel with those who would politicize the literary curriculum, or transform it into a product for mass consumption, is, Bloom declares, not worth the time. He is correct. The ideal teacher of literature realizes that the disposition of the ideal student is comparable to the protagonist’s in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). As John, the so-called Savage, rejects the values of Huxley’s parody of civilization, the ideal student of literature recoils from the pretenses of celebrating “diversity” through mandated curricular alterations that celebrate nothing but mass conformity to ideology, if not blatant pseudology. Like John, who reads Shakespeare not as a requirement but as an avocation born of love, the ideal student of literature reads to remember, and that which he seeks to remember through literature is precisely what John desires and endeavors to know: beauty.

Beauty is a philosophical category; it is the third of Plato’s three transcendentals, following truth and goodness. In the ancient moral imagination, true joy exists only in beauty, which aspires, like the human soul, to eternity. Despite this postulation, the ancients realized that such joy can be attained by only a highly individualized few. Perennial thinking such as this informs Bloom’s critique of contemporary education. For this reason, his solution to the demise of literary study is “to teach more selectively, searching for the few who have the capacity to become highly individualized readers and writers,” instead of quarreling with those who are susceptible, owing to misdirection, a fear of censure, or a politicized curriculum devoid of intellectual rigor. Whether Bloom’s solution is practicable or realizable is a question history must answer. What is not in question, though, is the truth he speaks: “Aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions.”

That it cannot was the concern of Glenn C. Arbery when he wrote Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation (2001). In an attempt to rescue two eminent authors from what Bloom has dubbed “the School of Resentment,” Arbery devotes several pages of his book, published seven years after The Western Canon, to proving the literary worth of Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney. Defending the aesthetics of two Nobel Prize-winning authors, one a masterful fictionist and the other a distinguished poet, might seem to be begging the question. But Arbery feared that, though rightly esteemed, both are esteemed for the wrong reasons. Almost anyone who has sat in a university English class in which either writer was discussed can understand Arbery’s apprehension. As a rule, the discussion, sooner than later, turns to the author’s race, either to Heaney as an Irishman or to Morrison as an African American. In a word, the discussion degenerates into “identity politics,” and from there into mere abstraction, again proving, as Arbery puts it, “that literary works and the reputations of their authors can sometimes have a cultural utility that has little to do with literature per se or with artistic excellence.”

The professorial sciolists in the School of Resentment happily exploit an author’s repute for its utility, cultural or political, but believe the author’s reputation to be as arbitrary as his inclusion in the canon. They scoff at claims of literary eminence and abominate critics like F.R. Leavis, who dared in his bold treatise The Great Tradition (1948) to denominate Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad as the great Anglo-American novelists in addition to Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. For Leavis, these fictionists are the successors of Homer, whose seminal epic, the Iliad, is the first measure of literary distinction. The School of Resentment ignores the standards of excellence by which critics such as Leavis ascribe distinctions of greatness to what Matthew Arnold considered “the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Superlatives such as best are shunned in the School of Resentment, the administrators of which are the loathing levelers of literature.

Loath though they be to admit the implausibility of the canon’s arbitrariness, the levelers of literature must at some point come to terms with whom Bloom deems, correctly or not, “the most original writer we will ever know,” William Shakespeare. “If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role,” Bloom writes. It could be the case, he allows provisionally, that it wasn’t the evil hegemony or ruling class that cast Shakespeare in that role. Perhaps it was the old demiurge of Marxism — the forces of mere economics and social history, the comptrollers of the material world beyond which there is nothing for the materialist but oblivion. If that is the case, then the School of Resentment has a troublesome question to answer: What was it in Shakespeare and the well-filed lines in which he is immortalized that so enthralled the mighty demiurge of the Marxist imagination? As Bloom posits rationally, such inquiry verges finally on the absurd: “How much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whomever.” Genius of the kind Shakespeare clearly possessed, Bloom asseverates, is “the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate.”

Today’s canon-despisers are not simply intolerant; they are duplicitous. While they profess to embrace all peoples, creeds, and customs, they openly repudiate dead white males, Christian values, and traditional social roles. Literature by dead men of faith whose representations of reality are rooted in customary societal roles is, for the openers-up of the canon, suspect; it is to be “interrogated,” not reverenced for its instructive value. What’s more, though its members present themselves as decriers of religion, the School of Resentment is fervent in its devotion to its god, which is, in fine, progress. As the end of literary study, the academics who Bloom indicts have substituted progress for knowledge of the human condition through mankind’s enactments of beauty. Paradoxically, these purveyors of nihilism who deny the existence of any absolutes subscribe absolutely to the idea that the man of today is a fundamentally different creature from the man of 500 years ago. All they profess in the classroom proceeds from this erroneous assumption, which goes unchallenged in the blighted groves of academia.

It would be one thing were the ignorant masses alone enchanted by the myth of progress. That the supposedly educated members of the School of Resentment promote it as a universal principle to live by is quite another. The myth’s establishment as such proves once again that what begins as theory in the ivory towers of higher learning soon masquerades as truth, error though it be, in the thoroughfares of America. Misguided, misdirected, and misinformed by what Bloom has called the “sexual politicians” of higher education, college students have become hapless thralls of presentism, unable and disinclined to reform themselves, much less society, in light of those unchanging truths about the nature and destiny of mankind that inform the intelligence of canonical literature. Like the modern academic, students are lost in a thicket of half-truths concerning the human predicament. Only when they see man as he has been can students begin to know what man is. And they can see most vividly what he has been not through discussions narrowly focused on race, class, or gender, but in the imaginative creations of action and character in the canonized verse and prose of the noble dead, which Bloom defended with might and main until his death in 2019.

Bloom underscores what the greatest writers have known for millennia: The tradition in which they create “cannot be ideological or place itself in the service of any social aims, however morally admirable.” By aesthetic strength alone is one admitted into the canon. Such strength, notes Bloom, “is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.” Despite what saboteurs of the canon think, hope, and say, the poet is finally accountable not to them but to those poets who preceded him; he is judged by that tribunal of poets past who sit in perpetual judgment of all poets. Bloom understands what the School of Resentment does not: “Whatever the Western Canon is, it is not a program for social salvation.”

In his discussion of canonical inclusion and, yes, exclusion, Bloom evokes “the historical sense,” which, as T.S. Eliot argues in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), is indispensable to any poet who would continue to write anything of permanent value beyond his 25th year. The historical sense, as Eliot defined it, entails an understanding “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” It compels a poet to create not solely within the historical context of his own generation but “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” The works of the past, accurately correlated in Eliot’s literary imagination, are forever modified by those of the present as much as those of the present are informed by those of the past through a phenomenon Bloom identified early in his career as the “anxiety of influence.”

In his introduction to The Western Canon, Bloom invokes the word agōn, a noun of Greek origin connoting a strenuous athletic contest held during a public festival, to describe the competition for canonical inclusion. As he understands them, authors who create under the anxiety of influence are agonists, persons not unlike the titular character in Milton’s lyrical drama Samson Agonistes (1671) who are engaged in a struggle for survival. Like medieval knights agonizing to prove their superiority in the lists of jousting, canonical writers agonize to prove their literary eminence in perpetuity. In Bloom’s view, Milton and Dante Alighieri are the fiercest of the agonists in Western literature, despite scholars’ evading their ferocity by mistakenly dismissing them as pious and, therefore, problematic. Dante rose to the challenge of Virgil, the greatest of his influences, whose work he creatively appropriated and corrected as thoroughgoingly as Milton appropriated and corrected “absolutely everyone before him (Dante included) by his own creation.”

Fiercer yet is the competition between the greatest female authors. Emily Dickinson met the ancient Greek poetess Sappho in the lists of literary competition and proved herself a worthy challenger. Moreover, Dickinson leaves 19th-century poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning “far behind in the dust.” Bloom minces no words: “I do not know whether Feminist criticism will succeed in its quest to change human nature, but I rather doubt that any idealism, however belated, will change the entire basis of the Western psychology of creativity, male and female, from Hesiod’s contest with Homer down to the agon between Dickinson and [20th-century Pulitzer Prize winner] Elizabeth Bishop.”

Such remarks call to mind Arbery’s discussion of Toni Morrison. His positive assessment of Morrison’s literary achievement is based solely on the virtue of her art, and on her moral vision as a writer who “chooses, not Us-vs.-Them, but Us-vs.-Us situations,” unlike, say, the novelist Alice Walker, whose fictional conflicts are generally limited to group grievances. Arbery finds the jarring, albeit probing, political commentary in Morrison’s published essays to be at times objectionable, but he commends Morrison for refusing to turn her fiction into propagandistic accompaniment. In praising her creative genius in spite of her notoriously strident radicalism in public debates, Arbery acknowledges, without being explicit, that Morrison is extraordinarily capable of what one of his favorite philosophers, Jacques Maritain, called “aesthetic innocence,” a creative intuition that lends wisdom to an author’s work regardless of the life he leads at home or the causes he espouses in the public square. Capacity of the kind Maritain describes is requisite for creative writers who aspire to canonization.

Authors who do aspire are neither provincials nor trimmers of contemporaneity; they produce art in the service of no prevailing political trend and create not for an age but for all time. Writing is, for them, a private matter. When asked why she wrote, Gertrude Stein replied, “I write for myself and strangers.” Hers is “a superb recognition,” Bloom remarks, “that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers.” Indeed, great literature exists as a mode of knowledge through which readers discover they are not alone, for it looks at material things and transitory wants from the standpoint of eternity, functions as a medium for apprehending unchanging truths, and plumbs the depths of being with, in W.B. Yeats’s words, “unageing intellect.” Great literature, Bloom reminds us, does not exist to “augment preexisting societal elites.” The Western canon “is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Eric Auerbach after him) called ‘aesthetic dignity,’” a dignity “which is not to be hired.”

Bloom’s appreciation of the canon’s aesthetic power does not extend to any conceivable efficacy it might have to shape ethics or serve an ideology: “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.” For Bloom, reading canonical literature serves the individual exclusively: “It enables one to know and endure oneself as a human being.” Whether it entails engagements with Fyodor Dostoevsky or Charles Dickens, immersing oneself in canonical literature “will not,” Bloom insists, “make one a better or a worse person.” All that it “can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”

Bloom’s theory of literature does not comport with that of the great moral critics. Horace said poetry should both delight and instruct; Samuel Johnson, echoing the Latin lyricist, said it should instruct delightfully. Still, Bloom is not incorrect. Art cannot, and should not, be expected to solve history’s problems or be credited with serving other than the imagination. Such was the opinion of W.H. Auden, the finest English-born poet of the past century. In his elegy for Yeats, he wrote that, although the Irishman’s gifts have survived for generations, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s realistic understanding of art’s limitations notwithstanding, he never subscribed to the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” He consistently maintained that poetry, while making nothing happen, should nevertheless serve a moral function. Great poetry, as he defined it, is that which perspicuously exposes and delineates evil in all its forms. “An art which did not accurately reflect evil,” he once wrote, “would not be good art.” On the surface of his polemic, it appears that Bloom disagreed with Auden. But his devotion to Shakespeare, a moral playwright in the tradition of moral dramatists Sophocles and Aeschylus, begs the question whether he disagreed entirely.

This is not a question to be settled here, or one that needs settling at all. Bloom was the staunchest defender in recent history of the glorious Western canon. His defense is tantamount to a defense of civilization, if we take civilization to mean, as Bloom clearly did, a supervening high culture that results not from the inculcation of morality or ethics but from the mental cultivation of thinking men. To appropriate G.K. Chesterton’s exquisite simile describing the Catholic Church, the canon was for Bloom “like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.”

Nobody has savored the canon’s delicacies more than Harold Bloom. In the 23 chapters that comprise The Western Canon, he discusses at length only 26 authors. He does so because, for him, the canon is not where one’s reading ends; it is where one’s reading begins and is the touchstone for judging literature generally. Moreover, Bloom perceives that prejudice is part and parcel of civilization and, for that reason, synonymous with canonicity. Let us remember Russell Kirk’s definition: “Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.”

In the final analysis, Bloom’s introduction appears to be less an elegy for the canon than an elegy for the decline of that on which the canon depends: the art of reading. Bloom was cognizant of an unfortunate historical reality that few professing in the humanities acknowledge: It is becoming ever more difficult for people to read and appreciate poetry, whether in prose or verse, as an integral form of art comprising statements that are neither true in the purely scientific sense nor false in the eminent domain of imagination. The reason for this difficulty is that, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, as Allen Tate, a Southern man of letters and defender of the canon in his own right, observed nearly a century ago, we have operated under the insidious assumption that “our intellects are for mathematics and science, our emotions for poetry.” Bloom shatters this assumption. He shows that a proper appreciation of poetry requires extraordinary intellectual firepower. It necessitates as much intelligence as does apprehension of scientific investigation and certainly more acuity of intellection than that manifested in the pabulum of pseudosociology printed in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America or that of an irresponsible professoriate for whom literature is a mere opportunity to condition the minds of the masses rather than a means to condition the souls of individuals through the acquisition of wisdom and the development of philosophical habits of discernment.

It is the present writer’s hope that others ensconced in higher education will fight to preserve the integrity of canonical literature with unabashed reverence — in defiance of the canon’s degreed traducers who continue to promote the very theories and practices that have been undermining their profession since the deconstructionists first besieged it in the early 1970s. Bloom pointed the way; he left the traducers to the enfeebled fate they have created for themselves: “You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength.” For Bloom, our intellectual strength, the strength of Western civilization, consists in the canon: “Without the Canon we cease to think.”

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