Hurrah for Dead White Males!

Lurking behind the question “What should I read?” is usually a second, tacit one: “And why, while we’re on the subject, should I read it?” Coming up with answers has long been the practice and business of literary criticism. But such queries have, in recent years, taken on a snappish edge, not only from attention-span-challenged students of the MTV generation but from a number of grownups whose putative profession is the teaching of literature.

The rebellion against Dead White European Male authors has by now turned itself into a campus cliche, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away. D.W.E.M.s are still being elbowed off reading lists by writers deemed worthy of study solely because of their gender (translation: female), race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The disparagement of once esteemed writers takes other forms as well. New Historicists view authors as passive conduits of social energies; deconstructionists argue that they didn’t understand what they wrote and are irrelevant anyhow.

It is tempting to dismiss all this turmoil as academic. One who decidedly does not is Harold Bloom, 64, the occupant of endowed chairs at both Yale and New York University, the author of 20 critical works and the editor of hundreds more, and a Vesuvian source of erudition and opinions. Bloom believes, among many other things, that a body of great literature of imperishable value exists, recognizable solely by its intrinsic aesthetic merits; further, that those who try to use or subvert the great works for extraliterary purposes, i.e., anything smacking of social engineering, are barbarians; and further still, that these barbarians are not at the gates but are largely in charge of American education and the nation’s debased institutions of public discourse. His The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (Harcourt Brace; 578 pages; $29.95) is thus, in part, a dire prophecy of the end of civilization as we know it: “I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible.”

But the triumph of the forces of darkness need not, Bloom thinks, be total. A small band — his publisher obviously hopes not too small — will continue to turn to the rewards of literature as people have been doing for 3,000 years. “The Common Reader,” Bloom writes, referring to a figure conjured up by Dr. Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, not the contemporary Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel fan, “still exists and possibly goes on welcoming suggestions of what might be read.”

On this score, the Common Reader is likely to be overwhelmed by The Western Canon. At the end of his book Bloom ticks off more than 3,000 works by some 850 authors, ranging from Gilgamesh (anonymous) to Angels in America (Tony Kushner), that merit an educated person’s attention. Good grief. Even if each work could be read in a day — and most can’t — boning up on the Western Canon as set forth by Bloom would take nearly 10 years uninterrupted by any of ^ the mundane details of life, such as jobs, friends and loved ones, and most meals. The task looks every bit as impossible as Bloom, much earlier in his book, declares it: “Indeed, it is now virtually impossible to master the Western Canon.”

So what are these lists there for? Chiefly, it appears, to spark controversy and sales, particularly when Bloom gets around to handing out pass-fail grades to 20th century writers (see box). But for all the prepublication hype it has aroused, Bloom’s back-of-the-book grab bag of ancient and modern writers forms the least interesting part of The Western Canon.

Bloom does not really expect his Common Readers to master 850 or so writers. He wants them to pay close attention to the 26 discussed in the bulk of his book: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom’s elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers but does not discuss their works at any length because his interests focus on authors who came later. A line must be drawn somewhere, but leaving out the classical foundations of Western written culture may strike some as harsh.)

But never mind. If reading the works of 26 authors proves too arduous a prospect, Bloom offers a final shortcut for the canonically hungry: “Shakespeare is the secular canon, or even the secular scripture; forerunners and legatees alike are defined by him alone for canonical purposes.”

Coming upon this assertion so early (page 24) in The Western Canon is a little like opening a mystery novel and being told straight off that the butler did it. Bardolatry took root shortly after the dramatist’s death in 1616, flowered in the 18th century and has flourished largely unchecked ever since. If all Bloom has to say, as the 20th century winds down, is that Shakespeare is the best, the champ, numero uno, then the necessity of his doing so, at such length, seems dubious.

That is not all Bloom has to say. His re-exaltation of Shakespeare occurs as an end product of his own idiosyncratic notions of how literature is written and read. Bloom’s Canon is the offshoot of a theory he first formulated in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and has modified somewhat in the interim. This presupposition, as so much in Bloom’s criticism, is difficult to state succinctly. For openers, writers who wish to be “strong,” that is, to produce works worthy of the Canon, must first confront and somehow conquer the power of “strong” writers who preceded them: “Any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts.” What others simply regard as literary imitation Bloom recasts as Darwinian or Freudian struggles for dominance: “Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion.”

Bloom’s view of literature as a ceaseless agon between challengers and titleholders is interesting and, in some instances, true. Virgil obviously had an eye on Homer when he set out to write The Aeneid, just as Dante and Milton had Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence of hard evidence for his theory that he simply elevates the anxiety of influence into a universal truth: “Agon is the iron law of literature.”

This assertion is just as extraliterary as those set forth by feminists, multiculturalists and all the others who discuss books in ways Bloom ridicules and despises. And Bloom’s view produces chapter titles such as “Freud: A Shakespearean Reading” and “Joyce’s Agon with Shakespeare,” in which the actual works and words of the upstart authors are wrenched out of context and forced into hypothetical bouts of cross-generational arm wrestling.

Surely no one opens The Interpretation of Dreams or Finnegans Wake in the hope of finding out exactly how Freud or Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding, imaginative literature at all? On this topic, Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. “Reading the very best writers — let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy — is not going to make us better citizens.” And: “The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society.” While discarding these schoolmarmish fallacies, Bloom’s Common Readers are also advised to forget about picking up literature for enjoyment: “The text is there to give not pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide.” (Among many personal asides scattered throughout the book, Bloom notes that teaching the poems of Emily Dickinson left him with “fierce headaches.”) What finally, then, is the point of this whole painful business? “All that the Western Canon 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.”

Such guidance was once the province of religion, and it is ultimately the religious experience that Bloom seeks in secular writing: “Since I myself am partial to finding the voice of God in Shakespeare or Emerson or Freud, depending on my needs, I have no difficulty in finding Dante’s Comedy to be divine.” He amplifies this perception a bit later: “As a writer, Shakespeare was a sort of god.” Bloom is entitled to his worship, since he has spent a lifetime of reading achieving it. But he is not, in The Western Canon, a very effective prophet for his cause. Imaginative literature — sacred texts or a rich lode of inspiring writing — badly needs a less agonized champion.