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[proximoception]

Harold Bloom is the best and most important critic of literature ever, and probably the best writer alive. You're not allowed to say such things but it's true. He's usually not Samuel Johnson's match for perfect, irascible prose or Hazlitt's for graphic acuity but he's engaged his subject much more deeply, broadly, diligently, and lovingly over most of a century, and thereby won from it secret after secret...and finally genuine authority in an area where that shouldn't be possible. Of course he has as many detractors as fans (the two groups probably overlap to a great extent), and these will be happy to tell you what's wrong with him well into the night. I don't disagree he has faults, I just don't think they matter. I think this is one of the things I learned from reading Bloom, how glaring flaws can be and still remain irrelevant, in any large enough, bright enough stone. Not that I see large flaws in him. The genuine prophets court enemies and refuse disciples.

I hated him once. I think I hated him before reading him. His book The Western Canon came out when I was in my late teens, and deeply offended by people pretending they knew everything. His book, its title and length and tone, probably also the fact that he was a Harold, all seemed to epitomize the destructive pretensions and stupidities of the parent/teacher/media/history/government forces making such a mess of the world. Just worthless prejudice, against the book (the ideas I had of the book) rather than the person. This I know because a year or so after I came to greatly love (and still love) the Introduction to his Shelley selection--later collected in The Ringers in the Tower as "The Unpastured Sea"--and didn't catch till later that the writer was the same man. Shelley and the other Romantics had sealed my conversion to literature, and Bloom's early essays and commentaries (Ringers, The Visionary Company, Blake's Apocalypse) deepened my excited sympathy for what they were getting at. Rediscovering The Western Canon a season or so on introduced me to late Bloom, and alerted me to the existence of middle Bloom. My father retired for health reasons around this time, and in cleaning out his office I found a battered copy of The Anxiety of Influence, heavily marked and highlighted by someone other than my father, and rather inanely. The Anxiety of Influence. Wrestlers with middle Bloom will know why my hatred began here, hatred probably intensified by my love of the wholeheartedly Romantic early works.

The wrestling match I'll skip over, tonight. Very hard to do that kind of thing justice, a battle with a book. As for late-and-kicking Bloom, he won me over entirely. The Western Canon and The Invention of the Human would be universally loved if he'd excised the mortal insults aimed at contemporary Humanities trendoids scattered throughout both. They rank with Visionary Company and some of his middle period work as his career high points. His last few books are still excellent, just a bit underedited and gimmicky. He now spends a lot of time recommending specific works, which is all to the good when the recommender is Bloom. I question his taste in only a half dozen instances, in each of which I know perfectly well I must be wrong.

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[nightspore.livejournal.com]

The first Bloom I read was The Anxiety of Influence, a bit after A Map of Misreading came out. That was displayed everywhere in the bookstore, and as a freshman I thought it was a psychology text. But a friend was sitting in on his DeVane lectures that spring, so I went; they turned into Kabbalah and Criticism (Bloom's favorite of his own books) and Poetry and Repression (my favorite of the middle period). And I agree that the recent books are strikingly good, especially The Western Canon, but also Genius. On Shakespeare he's unfailingly interesting, but does miss a lot of Empsonian and Cavellian tricks. And I've been having occasion to read his headnotes to the Oxford Anthology -- he did the Romantic volume, Trilling the Victorian (though each is double-billed) -- and they're really really really great. What's amazing about him is that intuitive sense of depth after depth which a now-superseded culture of psychoanalysis made it possible to acknowledge without tedious explanation. (I don't mean his readings are psychoanalytic, though they sometimes are: I mean that he sees right away, makes you see right away, that anything can be deep, can be of mortal importance; that mortal importance doesn't have to be argued for in person or in poem.)

He's also great at changing his mind -- appreciating what he hadn't. And you're right: unlike his only rival at Yale, Paul de Man, he was a) uninterested in cultivating discipleship; and b) interested in people for depths of personality and motivation and not just intellectual power.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

(He did the poetry in both Oxford volumes, Trilling the prose. Also he must have had some pull with the editors of the other volumes, since they include such Bloom favorites as Cowper's obscure "On the Ice Islands..." and Yeats' "Cuchulain Comforted. His headnotes to the Romantics and big Victorians are so satisfying he reprints them entire in his recent poetry anthology. I think those gentlemen would be startled that anyone could understand them so well.)

There's a generosity and self-effacement at work there that one would never expect from a theorist of, among other things, narcissism. It makes me think of Borges' remark that all truly intelligent people are kind. There are insights that calm and reconnect, and Bloom lives and conveys them. And I couldn't agree more about the depth: there's a power there now let's get more of it, is his approach, rather than setting up prolegomenae to the possibility of laying the groundwork for defining the parameters of a discourse etc. etc. on the existence of said power.

Kabbalah and Criticism mostly succeeded in confusing me about Kabbalah, at least the didactic section. He primarily summarized Scholem's and other accounts, in that first part, and so tersely I felt he wasn't doing them a favor. Probably I read it too early on. Poetry and Repression has the virtue of running through the whole Bloomantic tradition lucidly, needful after the mind-blowing of Anxiety and unhelpfully scattered Map of Misreading. Very strange how his gnomic and expository styles alternate in those '70s books, even the Yeats and Stevens ones. I think my favorite middle-Blooms at the moment are the essays on Orphism in Figures of Capable Imagination and the Tintern Abbey piece in Repression.

The sefirah scheme in Genius is pretty silly and I was let down by how much of the content was reprinted from Chelsea House intros, but it was still great, and the reprinted material was also top notch. The Swinburne chapter is hilarious and I was touched he wrote on Hofmannsthal, a favorite.

I've had little luck with Empson or de Man but will look up this Cavell.