proximoception | (no subject)

How in the world does one deal
With this dissipation of zeal?

I've read comparatively little Bloom the last two or three years, essentially since coming to agree with him completely. That was a strange effect, a strange, spasmodic string of realizations--almost amounting to the externalization of my own opinions, which perhaps created a sense of freedom from them (since someone else was in charge of them and fighting for them better than I ever could), maybe one exaggerating a natural late youth/early middle age aversion to the very concept of opinion? Not that I don't still have a billion knee-jerk ones, but suddenly they are largely knee-jerk. Once I've uttered them I regard them with some bemusement and wander away. Creative, violent, spontaneous opinion-making has died down a bit, doubtless to the greater delight of everyone I know. No, this too seems wrong. I may not wonder more, but how I wonder does feel different.

It seems to me that when you're young you pick, or something picks for you, either the route of ignorance or certainty (each requiring tactical deployment of the other one now and then for self-maintenance, of course). You can know exactly as much either way, this is more how you frame your knowledge against your lack of knowledge. I picked certainty, which I'd defend as not necessarily the worse of the two: it does involve the assumption you've settled profound issues based on as-yet superficial experiences, but the more wildly you do this the more you butt into reality, the more you learn to defend. And the first lesson of defense is to give up what's indefensible. I guess this is what people mean when they offensively suggest that everyone who isn't religious/an atheist/a Democrat/a communist/whatever at 15 is lacking, but anyone not the opposite by 30's even more so. Arbitrary self-approval allows you to experience more errors from the inside--combined with the ability to learn, which also probably erodes the more dangerous appendages of self-approval, this can create an impressive amount of knowledge of what to avoid and why. But maybe you'd have had that anyway if capable of this much mental engagement, just by seeing the errors of others.

I doubt it, though. I think we fill the circle best by scribbling madly, then erasing carefully as needed: Blake's path of excess leading to wisdom, Kafka's line you know only by tripping over it.

But there's certainly more to learn once you're wise. And whatever cabin in the woods or base underwater the line takes you to, there you are, still alive. How's this second verse go?

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Was there a time you did not completely agree with Bloom? I agree with him on many things, but I think he tends to wildly overestimate Shakespeare. Which is hard to do. It's just this side of impossible. But possible still and he manages it.

I had some intense quarrels with his ideas, yeah. I should probably write about that sometime. They were in roughly this order:

1. There's all these great old books we should be reading. 1993ish
2. The Romantics ultimately wrote against Nature. 1998ish
3. Shelley's art was trapped/contained in the shadow of Wordsworth's. 1999ish
4. We are all trapped/contained in the shadows of precursors. 1999ish
5. Shakespeare invented the human. 1999ish
6. There's use in assessing reality in broadly theological terms. 2000s
7. Christianity is slightly more stupid than most Judaisms. 2000s

Posted this in 2005:

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.

Thanks for re-posting this. Another request.

Examples of where you question his taste?

Over the years I questioned Hardy and Beckett, who I've caved on because they are ultimately much greater than they are irritating, and Merrill who I'm still shaky about, and Chaucer who I stubbornly insist is just okay (while still knowing the odds heavily favor my being wrong). You have to understand Bloom's perspective on them before some of the Biblical texts he champions become palatable, I've found. He sometimes says overly kind things about Hopkins and Donne, but he's mostly being polite.

He rarely dislikes something I like. He attacked Shelley's Revolt of Islam early in his career but had some nice things to say about it in his Yeats book. My teenage self might rankle at his dismissal of Catch-22, but for all I know I'd dismiss it also now. And he does not yet fully understand the awesomeness of Engine Summer, though I hear he at least acknowledges that this awesomeness exists in his LB25 preface.

Bloom, and Stevens, moreso Stevens actually, is one of those people I'll defend to the death to any naysayers, and yet, and yet, and yet, there's something I know I can't agree with. And something I can't quite articulate, and I'm afraid that trying to articulate it would only play me further into their hands (ie, rewriting my complaint into their language, thus answering it while not answering me). Clearly part of it has to be residual whitemanitis, which I see in full when I try to mention either of them to the few writers I've met. With Stevens it's more obvious, his realism, his quotidian sensuality annoys me with its lack of urgency -- like the most convincing dilettante ever to walk into a dinner party.

people should talk more about wrestling with books. That's where everything happens.

Well, once you have the true answers shouldn't you put on a bathrobe permanently and spend your life wandering in and out of other people's dinner parties sensually running your hands and toes over their decor?

In principle, Bloom would be quite easy to refute. Just write a skullexplodingly major poem that was not reliant on prior figurations at crucial moments.

Stevens, not so much. You can say he left out various things, and I'm sure he'd agree. Maybe you could say that his poetry went too far in the direction of explaining what poetry should be, while leaving behind certain elements necessary for being it? Explaining the rules of the imagination is hard to do while imagining, for example. Though I'd say his skill at doing so is one of the reason all our eyes are still wide at this very, very white guy. Because you just know he had special little dishes for every kind of egg.