Harold Bloom recites “Tea at the Palace of Hoon” by Wallace Stevens
with a hearty hat-tip to Adam Fitzgerald. Happy Sunday!
Justin Taylor—
As regular readers of this blog know, over the past year or so I’ve been reading a lot of Harold Bloom. I’ve blogged my favorite quotes from his books as I’ve come across them, read several books on the strength of his recommendation (Bleak House, Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad). But I don’t think I’ve said much about his body of work as a body of work, or articulated what it is about him that compels my sustained interest. And I’m still not going to do that–at least not today; first, because I’m not yet prepared to articulate that thought or those thoughts (blogs happen basically in real time, and my own work here is a present-tense record of my own ongoing education and expanding horizons, rather than any kind of attempted statement of intractable positions or beliefs); and second, even if I was prepared to attempt such an undertaking, I’ve got other things to do this afternoon. But, since the Viceland interview I linked to the other day seems to have been received well, I thought I would share another bit of Webvailable Bloomiana: this New York Times Review of Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?. The review is from October 2004, and is written by the great Melville scholar Andrew Delbanco. It offers a concise and articulate an introduction to Bloom’s virtues and talents–as well as a clear-eyed but vitriol-free acknowledgment of his limitations. I don’t know–or care, quite frankly–whether it will sell you on Bloom, but I think it will help make clear why I have become such a regular customer.
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Harold Bloom Viceland Interview
Read a report today in the Yale Daily News that Harold Bloom has had to cancel his classes this semester due to illness. He’s had a brutal last several years, but had seemed to be doing well lately–up until today’s announcement, anyhow. Here’s hoping that this is just a blip on the screen for him. Anyway, the above is from a great, and weirdly sweet, interview that I just uncovered that he gave to Vice Magazine last year. It’s worth reading in full.
Lastly, since HB tends to be a lightning-rod for controversy and/or ignorant invective, you are hereby reminded that a man is ill, perhaps gravely so, and you are forewarned to say something kind/useful, or else keep your bullshit to yourself for once.
I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many.
- Montaigne, “Of Books”
quoted in Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom
Still More Harold Bloom… Hooded Negro’s YouTube Posts
I just discovered this, and it’s awesome. Part 1 is a general discussion of Bloom and his work; Part 2 focuses specifically on The Anxiety of Influence.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_WtTx2x5sg
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7p_brtNA8
Talkin’ Blood Meridian: The Harold Bloom Onion A/V Club Interview
Wonder and delight!!!! (Also: Terror and violence!!!!)
Recently The Onion chose Blood Meridian for their Wrapped Up in Books feature, and then they decided to kick things to the next level by calling up Harold Bloom to talk about it with them in an Onion A/V Club interview not to be missed. And what are the first words out of Professor Bloom’s mouth? “I read it on the recommendation of a friend, Gordon Lish, a New York book editor and a specialist in fiction”
It’s Monday morning and I love life, not just because of the above, but the above sure as damn doesn’t hurt. One more money quote (they’re all money quotes) then you need to go click through and read the whole thing.
Something Baffling, Something Bloom: In which I follow H.B.’s advice and start reading Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks
February 19, 1917.
Today read Hermann und Dorothea, passages from Richter’s Memoirs, looked at pictures by him, and finally read a scene from Hauptmann’s Griselda. For the brief span of the next hour am a different person. True, all prospects as misty as ever, but pictures in the mist now different. The man in heavy boots I have put on today for the first time (they were originally intended for military service) is a different person.
–The First Notebook
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
May 14th, 2009 / 4:12 pm
May 14th, 2009 / 4:12 pm
Power Quote: Harold Bloom Brings it All Back Home
The motives for reading, as for writing, are very diverse and frequently not clear even to the most self-conscious readers or writers. Perhaps the ultimate motive for metaphor, or the writing and reading of figurative language, is the desire to be different, to be elsewhere. In this assertion I follow Nietzsche, who wanred us that what we can find words for is already dead in our hearts, so that there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. Hamlet agrees with Nietzsche, and both might have extended the contempt to the act of writing. But we do not read to unpack our hearts, and so there is no contempt in the act of reading. Traditions tell us that the free and solitary self writes in order to overcome mortality. I think that the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness, which is the basis of the aesthetic experience once called the Sublime: the quest for a transcendence of limits. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuous but persistent, is for some version of survival.
–Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, “Elegiac Conclusion”
Power Quote: Harold Bloom, Virginia Woolf Double Down
Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards–their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble–the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
– Virginia Woolf, from The Second Common Reader (quoted by Bloom in The Western Canon)
Those first three sentences have been my credo ever since I read them in my childhood, and I urge them now upon myself, and all who still can rally to them. They do not preclude reading to obtain power, over oneself or over others, but only through a pleasure that is final, a difficult and authentic pleasure.
– Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, ”Woolf’s Orlando: Feminism as The Love of Reading”
Power Quote: One of Harold Bloom’s Hands Clapping Edition
This one’s for my homies who asked for a more detailed commentary on Dickens/Bloom that I don’t have time to offer up this week.
One of the blessings of Dickens’s powerful influence on Kafka is the altogether Borgesian impact of Kafka on our understanding of Dickens.
- The Western Canon, “The Canonical Novel: Dickens’s Bleak House and George Eliot’s Middlemarch“
Update: The Western Canon, Again
Does anyone remember that about a month ago I announced that I was putting my reading of Bloom’s The Western Canon on hold so I could read Dickens’s Bleak House before reading the chapter on Bleak House, because I didn’t want the plot spoiled by Bloom’s criticism? Well, I finished Bleak House on Monday, and yesterday I got to read my Bloom chapter. You know what? It was all worth it–the novel was, and the chapter was, and the reading the novel before reading the chapter absolutely was. I just couldn’t be happier with the sequence of decisions and actions that has led me to this place. Next up in The Western Canon, we learn about Ibsen. Tally ho!
Power Quote: Harold Bloom Names Names Edition (with special “I don’t know how to control myself” bonus feature)
If you think of the major American writers, you are likely to remember Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Cather, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald among the novelists. Nathaneal West, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Philip Roth would be among those I would add. The poets who matter most begin with Whitman and Dickinson and include Frost, Stevens, Moore, Eliot, Crane, and perhaps Pound and William Carlos Williams. Of more recent figures I would list Robert Penn Warren, Theorodre Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, May Swenson. The dramatists are less illustrious: Eugene O’Neill now makes for unsatisfactory reading, and perhaps only Tennessee Williams will gain by the passage of time. Our major essayists remain Emerson and Thoreau; no one has matched them since. Poe is too universally accepted around the world to be excluded, though his writing is almost invariably atrocious.
–”Walt Whiman as Center of the American Canon,” The Western Canon
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
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If the essence of poetry is invention, as Dr. Johnson rightly maintained, then the classical Walpurgis Night shows us what poetry essentially is: a controlled wildness, a radical originality that subsumes previous strength, and, most of all, the creation of new myth.
– The Western Canon , “Goethe’s Faust, Part Two: The Countercanonical Poem”
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
I myself, as a student of gnosis, whether poetic or religious, judge the poem to be neither truth nor fiction but rather Dante’s knowing, which he chose to name Beatrice. When you know most intensely, you do not necessarily decide whether it is truth or fiction; what you know primarily is that the knowing is truly your own.
- The Western Canon, “The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice”
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritence, with the anxiety of influence.
- “Preface and Prelude” to The Western Canon
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
Poetry and belief, as I understand them, are antithetical modes of knowledge, but they share the peculiarity of taking place between truth and meaning, while being somewhat alienated both from truth and from meaning. Meaning gets started only by or from an excess, an overflow or emenation, that we call originality. Without that excess even poetry, let alone belief, is merely a mode of repetition, no matter in how much finer a tone. So is prophecy, whatever we take prophecy to be.
- Ruin the Sacred Truths (p. 12)
*********SPECIAL BONUS**********
What do you mean you didn’t know that Bloom’s title is drawn from an Andrew Marvell poem about Paradise Lost?
Read Marvell’s “On Mr. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’”
Then why not revisit the only Andrew Marvell poem you actually know?
Now let us sport us while we may
