Harold Bloom Archives - Bob on Books

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The Weekly Wrap: May 31-June 6

Why I Still Read

I see many stories about the eclipse of reading. I’m not sure what to believe about all that. What I am sure of is that I’m going to keep reading.

First of all I’m still able. Neither the mind nor the eyes have failed. So let’s read while we can.

Also, you could argue that it is a habit. And that would be right. Reading has enriched my life for over 65 years. Why stop?

“Because I think I am making progress.” That’s what famed cellist Pablo Casals said in his eighties when asked why he still practiced for hours a day. I think that is true for me as well. I think I’m a better reader than five years ago. I carry more from what I’ve read before into what I read now.

I’m still curious. I still long to understand more of God, the world around me, human history, and even baseball. Actually, it’s humbling, because in all of these things, the more I read, the more I grasp how little I understand.

I also read to resist everything from AI to the bombardments of our visual and social media that would turn my mind to mush. Longform writing challenges me to focus, to see the connections of one idea to the next, one event to the next. None of us sees the totality of the big picture. But I don’t want to settle for memes, slogans, and nostrums.

Finally, did I mention what a pleasure this all is? Not the quick, evanescent pleasure of a snack but the slow, savoring pleasure of a multiple course dinner at a top end restaurant, where each bite is savored.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Persepolis was a ground-breaking graphic story, depicting an Iranian girl’s life during the Iran-Iraq War. Sadly, Marjane Satrapi, once that girl, died June 4 in France. “Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis and acclaimed French-Iranian artist, dies aged 56” reports that death, offering a retrospective on her life and work.

We celebrated our 48th anniversary this week. Count me in as a believer in marriage. But marriage isn’t easy, nor is it the institution it once was. Stephanie Coontz has a new book title For Better and Worse, reviewed by Honor Jones in “How to Save Marriage.” The article portrays how our cultural landscape has changed and why.

The Man Who Read Everything is a literary biography of Harold Bloom through his correspondence. Barry Schwabsky introduces us to Bloom and the book in “The Critic’s Loves.”

Reaction continues to come in to Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI. In “Should the Lion Lie Down With the Electric Lamb?” Anton Barba Kay argues the encyclical doesn’t recognize the greatest threat of AI. He writes:

“The letdown is not that Magnifica humanitas is too moderate or that we are called on to ‘embrace’ technology ‘with gratitude and realism,’ it is that the Church and the pope have not yet discovered what technology is or how it recomposes us—have not realized what it would truly mean to articulate the disagreement they have with Big Tech.”

Finally, I’ve long been a fan of Ann Patchett, both as a writer and a bookstore owner. Her latest novel was published this week and is reviewed by Helen Schulman in the article “Ann Patchett’s Latest Will Engage Your Mind and Warm Your Heart.”

Quote of the Week

Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King and an accomplished writer as well, was born June 4, 1972. He observed:

“You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.“

Miscellaneous Musings

Did you ever feel you were reading a book the author wasn’t ready to write? That was my feeling about a book I just finished. It had some great insights, but it just didn’t feel “ripe” to me.

I agreed to review a book from an e-galley in .pdf format. It’s from a very small publisher and I understand their financial constraints. But the experience reminded me how I prefer physical books in reviewing. They allow me to easily flip back and forth. This did not even have any hyperlinks, so it meant lots of scrolling of a 400 page book.

Today the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches 82 years ago. I’ve read several histories of that day as well as watched Saving Private Ryan. One can’t but celebrate the heroism of those who fought and those who died. It also sobers me to remember that they were resisting in Nazism a tyrannous, expansionist, nationalist, and white supremacist regime.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands

Tuesday: Sharon Delgado, Love in a Time of Climate Change

Wednesday: Daniel Smith, Hard Feelings

Thursday: Mikel Del Rosario, Did Jesus Really Say He Was God?

Friday, Howard Thurman, Nothing Can Separate Us

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for May 31 – June 6.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Western Canon, Harold Bloom. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing, 1994, this edition 2014.

Summary: A spirited defense of the traditional Western Canon of literature against what Bloom calls the “School of Resentment” and a discussion of 26 representative works Bloom would include.

Harold Bloom wrote this book in 1994 at a time when the “dead white males” who constitute most of the works considered part of “the Western Canon” were under attack. With the continued growth of feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, and queer criticism, many of the works Bloom treats in this volume have been further marginalized. Alternate reading lists have flourished, classics departments have closed down, and course offerings focused on those in the “traditional” canon have been done away with in many English departments.

This is not without some warrant. The men clearly outnumbered the women. Writers of other cultures were non-existent as were those who were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and LGBTQ. The perspectives of most represented ruling and affluent classes, and the dominant powers of the world.

Harold Bloom is less diplomatic than I am. He calls the critics the School of Resentment, who want to replace these works with representative modern authors. Bloom’s case is that the works we’ve called “canonical” have survived not because of some hegemonic dominance of white and mostly male proponents, but because of their compelling originality and what he would call their “strangeness.” Coming from a different time and social milieu, they nevertheless pose insights about the human condition that generations of readers, and other writers have wrestled with.

For Bloom, the works of William Shakespeare are at the center of the canon, with Dante and Milton close by. Under the categories of aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic ages, he considers 26 authors representative of those he would include in the canon. A theme running through his discussion of authors from Milton to Whitman to Beckett and Joyce is how they interacted with and defined themselves in relation to the Bard. Their “anxiety” about Shakespeare, Bloom contends, is part of what drives them to their own brand of greatness.

Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf manage to make it into the men’s club. Bloom seems to especially like Dickenson, praising her intellectual complexity, literary originality and own brand of strangeness. Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa also make his list.

Bloom plainly doesn’t care about critics or the academic guild where he spent so many years. What he does care about is the love of reading and the awareness all bibliophiles have of there being so many books and so little time. He wonders how many of the books replacing what once were canonical will be read in a generation or two. He also observes how great authors in later generations wrestled with the greatness of those who preceded them. The inference is, what great influences will our contemporaries have? What does this bode for literature.

Bloom also offers us an extensive list from the Greeks to the present (at least the 1990’s) of books he considers worth reading, going far beyond the works he focuses on. This list alone might keep most of us busy for a lifetime, and expands to include a variety of Latin American and African authors in the recent era.

If you have not read the works Bloom discusses, the book could be a hard, long slog. In that case, read the “Prelude and Preface,” “An Elegy for the Canon” and “Elegaic Conclusion” and you will have the gist of the argument. On the other hand, if you know many of the works, Bloom offers a fascinating intertextual commentary. Beware that Bloom is a curmudgeon who has little sympathy for contemporary authors seeking to develop voices unbeholden to the “dead white males.” Yet I think we must also consider what makes works sufficiently great that they are read long after the authors (and all our literary critics) are dead. Are not these the works we hope to read before we are dead?