Harold Bloom | |
|---|---|
 Bloom in 1986 | |
| Born | (1930-07-11)July 11, 1930 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | October 14, 2019(2019-10-14) (aged 89) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Cornell University (BA) Pembroke College, Cambridge Yale University (MA,PhD) |
| Literary movement | Aestheticism,Romanticism |
| Years active | 1955–2019 |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and theSterling Professor ofhumanities atYale University.[1] In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world".[2] After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books,[3] including over 40 books ofliterary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for theChelsea House publishing firm.[4][5] Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1995.[6]
Bloom was a defender of the traditionalWestern canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "School of Resentment" (which includedmulticulturalism,feminism, andMarxism).[7][8] He was educated at Yale, theUniversity of Cambridge, andCornell University.
Bloom was born inNew York City on July 11, 1930,[7] to Paula (née Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in theBronx at 1410Grand Concourse.[9][10] He was raised as anOrthodox Jew in aYiddish-speaking household, where he learned literaryHebrew;[11] he learned English at the age of six.[12] Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born inOdesa and hisLithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, nearBrest-Litovsk in what is todayBelarus.[11] Harold had three older sisters and an older brother. He was the last living sibling.[11]
As a boy, Bloom readHart Crane'sCollected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry.[13] Bloom went to theBronx High School of Science, where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high.[14] In 1951 he received a B.A. degree inclassics from Cornell, where he was a student of literary criticM. H. Abrams, and in 1955 a Ph.D. from Yale.[15] In 1954–55 Bloom was aFulbright Scholar atPembroke College, Cambridge.[16]
Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty ofNew Critics, includingWilliam K. Wimsatt. Several years later Bloom dedicated his bookThe Anxiety of Influence to Wimsatt.[17]
Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death.[7] He received aMacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English atNew York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron ofRalston College, a new institution inSavannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts.[18][19] Fond ofendearments, Bloom addressed both male and female students and friends as "my dear".[7]
Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958.[20] They had two children.[21] In a 2005 interview, Jeanne said that she and Harold were bothatheists, which he denied: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."[22]
Bloom was the subject of a 1990 article inGQ titled "Bloom in Love", which accused him of having affairs with female graduate students. He called the article a "disgusting piece of character assassination". Bloom's friend and colleague the biographerR. W. B. Lewis said in 1994 that Bloom's "wandering, I gather is a thing of the past. I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years."[23] In a 2004 article forNew York magazine,Naomi Wolf wrote that while she was an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom attended a dinner with her, saying he would discuss her writing. Instead, she claims that he came on to her, placing his hand on her inner thigh.[24] Bloom "vigorously denied" the allegation.[7][25]
Bloom never retired from teaching, swearing that he would need to be removed from the classroom "in a great big body bag". He had open heart surgery in 2002 and broke his back after a fall in 2008.[21] He died at a hospital inNew Haven, Connecticut, on October 14, 2019. He was 89 years old.[7]
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Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs onPercy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley's Myth-making,Yale University Press, originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation),[26]William Blake (Blake's Apocalypse,Doubleday),W.B. Yeats (Yeats,Oxford University Press),[27] andWallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate,Cornell University Press).[28] In these, he defended the High Romantics againstneo-Christian critics influenced by such writers asT. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book,Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.[citation needed]
After a personal crisis during the late 1960s, Bloom became deeply interested inRalph Waldo Emerson,Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions ofGnosticism,Kabbalah, andHermeticism. In a 2003 interview with Bloom,Michael Pakenham, the book editor forThe Baltimore Sun, noted that Bloom had long called himself a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom responded: "I am using 'Gnostic' in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand aYahweh, or aGod, who could be all-powerful and all-knowing and would allow theNazi death camps andschizophrenia."[29] Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggle to create their individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the poets who inspired them to write.
The first of these books,Yeats, challenged the conventional critical view ofWilliam Butler Yeats's poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." New poets become inspired to write because they have read and admired previous poets, but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poets discover that the poets they idolized have already said everything they wish to say. The poets become disappointed because they "cannot beAdam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."[citation needed][30]
In order to evade this psychological obstacle, according to Bloom, poets must be convinced that earlier poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that they have something to add to the tradition. Poets' love for their heroes turns into antagonism toward them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible."[31] The book that followedYeats,The Anxiety of Influence, which Bloom started writing in 1967, drew upon the example ofWalter Jackson Bate'sThe Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair 17th- and 18th-century poets felt about their inability to equal their predecessors. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which poets broke free from their precursors to achieve their own poetic visions. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets", who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets", who merely repeat their precursors' ideas as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios" through which strong poets pass in the course of their careers.
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A Map of Misreading picks up whereThe Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios.Kabbalah and Criticism attempts to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of theLurianic Kabbalah, as explicated by scholarGershom Scholem, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence.Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his "influence" books.
Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the 1970s and '80s, and penned little thereafter that did not invoke his ideas about influence.
Bloom's fascination withDavid Lindsay's fantasy novelA Voyage to Arcturus led him to take a brief break from criticism to compose a sequel to it. This novel,The Flight to Lucifer, was Bloom's only work of fiction.[32]
Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning withRuin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989). InThe Book of J (1990), he andDavid Rosenberg (who translated the biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the Bible (seedocumentary hypothesis) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing adogmatically religious work (seeJahwist). They envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kingsDavid andSolomon – a piece of speculation that drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations did not go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the biblicalBathsheba.[33] InJesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory covered inThe Book of J in discussing the significance ofYahweh andJesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility ofChristianity and Judaism.
InThe American Religion (1992), Bloom surveyed the major varieties ofProtestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most had more in common withgnosticism than with historical Christianity. The exception was theJehovah's Witnesses, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that theMormon andPentecostal strains ofAmerican Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades.[34] InOmens of Millennium (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition that invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerningangelology, interpretation of dreams asprophecy,near-death experiences, andmillennialism.[35]
In his essay in "The Gospel of Thomas", Bloom writes that none of theAramaic sayings in theGospel of Thomas have survived in the original language.[36]Marvin Meyer generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek.[37] Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay.[38] Bloom notes the otherworldliness of the Jesus in Thomas's sayings by making reference to "the paradox also of the American Jesus".[39]
The Western Canon (1994), a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses on 26 works Bloom considers sublime and representative of their nations[40] and of theWestern canon.[41] Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, Bloom's major concern in the volume was to reclaim literature from what he called the "School of Resentment", the mostly academic critics who espoused a social purpose in their work. Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitaryaesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment". He cast the latter as absurd, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position was that politics had no place in literary criticism: that afeminist orMarxist reading ofHamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing aboutHamlet.
In addition to considering how much influence a writer had had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of "canonical strangeness" (cf.uncanny) as a benchmark of a literary work's merit.The Western Canon also included a list – noted by the general public with widespread interest – of the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or candidates for that status. Bloom said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it.[42]
| External videos | |
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 Presentation by Bloom onShakespeare: The Invention of the Human, December 10, 1998,C-SPAN |
Bloom had a deep appreciation forWilliam Shakespeare,[43] considering him the supreme center of the Western canon.[44] The first edition ofThe Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt toOvid andChaucer, and hisagon withChristopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.
In his later survey,Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom provided an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces".[45] Written as a companion to the general reader and theater-goer, Bloom declared thatbardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is".[46] He also contended in the work that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory wereSir John Falstaff andPrince Hamlet, whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Bloom called those two characters, along withIago andCleopatra, "the four Shakespearean characters most inexhaustible to meditation".[45]
ThroughoutShakespeare, characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other. Contemporary academics and critics decried this as harking back to the out-of-fashion character criticism of Bradley (and others), who are explicitly praised in the book. As inThe Western Canon, Bloom criticizes what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and forbalkanizing the study of literature through multicultural andhistoricist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him the only truly multicultural author. Repudiating the "social energies" to which historicists ascribed Shakespeare's authorship, Bloom pronounced his modern academic foes – and all of society – to be but "a parody of Shakespearean energies".[citation needed]
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| Booknotes interview with Bloom onHow to Read and Why, September 3, 2000,C-SPAN |
Bloom consolidated his work on the Western canon with the publication ofHow to Read and Why (2000) andGenius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003).Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (also 2003) is an amendment toShakespeare: Invention of the Human written after Bloom decided the chapter onHamlet in the earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of theUr-Hamlet to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself. Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism inWhere Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism was marked by the publication ofJesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry.
Bloom took part inPaul Festa's 2006 documentaryApparition of the Eternal Church. It centers on people's reactions to hearing for the first timeOlivier Messiaen's organ pieceApparition de l'église éternelle.
Bloom began a book under the working titleLiving Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare andWalt Whitman, which was published asThe Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011).
In July 2011, after the publication ofThe Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work onThe Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom was working on three further projects:
In 1986, Bloom creditedNorthrop Frye as his nearest precursor. He toldImre Salusinszky in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations ... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and readFearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr.Kenneth Burke, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye."[49]
But inAnatomy of Influence (2011), Bloom wrote, "I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye" and nominatedAngus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience". Elsewhere that year, he recommended Fletcher'sColors of the Mind andM. H. Abrams'sThe Mirror and the Lamp. In this late phase, Bloom also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such asWilliam Hazlitt,Ralph Waldo Emerson,Walter Pater,A. C. Bradley, andSamuel Johnson, describing Johnson inThe Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him". In his 2012 foreword toThe Fourth Dimension of a Poem (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence Abrams had upon him in his years at Cornell.[50]
Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development ofWestern literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating them, but must make their own work different from their precursors'. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors to make room for fresh imaginings.[51][52]
Observers often identified Bloom withdeconstruction, but he never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with deconstructionists. He toldRobert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me throughnegative theology ... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."[53]
Bloom's association with theWestern canon provoked a substantial interest in his opinion of the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer isSamuel Beckett. He's certainly the most authentic."[54]
Of British writers, Bloom said: "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active" and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be ofIris Murdoch's eminence". After Murdoch died, Bloom expressed admiration for the novelistsPeter Ackroyd,Will Self,John Banville, andA. S. Byatt.[55]
InGenius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), he called thePortuguese writerJosé Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".
Of American novelists, Bloom said in 2003, "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise".[56] Saying that "they write the Style of our Age" and that "each has composed canonical works", he identified them asThomas Pynchon,Philip Roth,Cormac McCarthy, andDon DeLillo. He named their respective masterpieces asThe Crying of Lot 49,Gravity's Rainbow andMason & Dixon;Sabbath's Theater andAmerican Pastoral;Blood Meridian; andUnderworld. He added to this estimate the work ofJohn Crowley, with special interest in hisAegypt Sequence and novelLittle, Big, saying, "only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets ... only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level".[57] Bloom called Crowley'sLittle, Big "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know". He wrote the afterword to a 40th-anniversary edition of the novel.[58] Shortly before his death, Bloom expressed admiration for the works ofJoshua Cohen,William Giraldi, andNell Freudenberger.[59]
InKabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identifiedRobert Penn Warren,James Merrill,John Ashbery, andElizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly namedA. R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he later identifiedHenri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He expressed great admiration for the Canadian poetsAnne Carson, particularly herverse novelAutobiography of Red, andA. F. Moritz, whom Bloom called "a true poet".[60] Bloom also listedJay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets and the best living American poet after Ashbery's death.[61][62]
Bloom's introduction toModern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1986) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. PlaywrightTony Kushner sees Bloom as an important influence on his work.[63]
Bloom's work has drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States"[64] and "America's best-known man of letters".[65] A 1994New York Times article said that many younger critics see Bloom as an "outdated oddity",[5] whereas a 1998New York Times article called him "one of the most gifted of contemporary critics".[66]
In an obituary published inThe Guardian,Kenan Malik emphasized the significance of Bloom's work while also arguing that it had shortcomings: "Bloom conflated judgment and understanding. We may judge the quality of a literary work in its own terms, but its social, political and historical context nevertheless remains vital in understanding it."[67]
James Wood wrote: "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own – a kind of campiness, in fact – Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant."[65] Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away... There's nothing to the man... I don't want to talk about him."[42]
In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such asAdrienne Rich,[68]Maya Angelou,[69] andDavid Foster Wallace.[70] In the pages ofThe Paris Review, he criticized thepopulist-leaningpoetry slam, saying: "It is the death of art."[71] WhenDoris Lessing received theNobel Prize in Literature, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction", while conceding his appreciation of Lessing's earlier work.[72]
MormonVoices, a group associated withFoundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for saying, "The current head of the Mormon Church,Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator', is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy."[73] This was despite Bloom's sympathy forJoseph Smith, the foundingprophet ofMormonism, whom he called a "religious genius".[74]
There are a few affinities, except perhaps with the admirable Antonia Byatt, in the generation after: novelists I also now admire, like Will Self, Peter Ackroyd, and John Banville.
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