Wood, James - Misreading Harold Bloom - The anxiety and influence of a critic.

October 16, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/misreading-harold-bloom

Sometimes all you remember of a teacher is a voice—“a way of happening, a mouth.” I never met
Harold Bloom, but like many of his readers, I thought I knew his voice very well. Bloom, who died on
Monday, wrote like a teacher; his every utterance projected pedagogically, and I always assumed he
wrote much as he talked in class. This quality had great appeal but wasn’t an unmixed blessing on the
page. He wrote ceaselessly, torrentially, and as he churned away he easily became vatic, windy, merely
reckless where he had once been adventurous. Late Bloom repeated and recirculated his favored
obsessions, cross-referencing himself in ecstasies of unearned fulfillment. He was easy to parody; I
praised and derided Bloom at different times, and once succumbed to the mischievous parody itch, as
surely generations of his students had, too: “Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff,
and even Emerson at his strongest—stronger, here, even than his belated rival, Nietzsche—is not quite a
match for his ultimate precursor, J’s Yahweh, though I concede that the greatest Jewish genius after
Jesus, Sigmund Freud, would not have agreed with my heretical opinion.”

So he wrote too much, and wrote too fast. But the powerful writer is easy to parody because of a certain
strangeness and consistency (think of Cormac McCarthy, whom Bloom so championed); in this sense,
Bloom was a wonderfully particular stylist. My teasing version is, perhaps, just frustrated admiration.
You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably
Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-
involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone
connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been
there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early
work. There is a way in which Bloom was always speaking his own private language, and gradually
publicizing that privacy on his own odd terms. Maybe that’s what strong critics do.

There were several Blooms, or perhaps we should think of a pistil and its petals. At the center of these
selves was the teacher who gave his celebrated classes at Yale for nearly fifty years. (The writer Naomi
Wolf, a former student of Bloom’s, has alleged that these classes led to unwanted sexual advances;
Bloom denied the accusation.) From this core of private reading and public sharing came a flaming
variety of performances: the early champion of Romanticism, at a time (the late nineteen-fifties) when
English departments, still in thrall to the scrupulous meanness of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, were
reluctant to take romantically “religious” poets like Shelley and Blake very seriously; the Freudian
theorist who speculated powerfully about how writers struggle with their predecessors; the critic who
(along with Robert Alter and Frank Kermode) changed the way that literary studies appraised the Bible;
and the mainstream popularizer, a well-paid exhorter with some residual insight, who issued books such
as “The Western Canon,” “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages,” and
“Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.”
The early work, including “Poetry and Repression” and “The Anxiety of Influence,” customized a lexicon
of somewhat forbidding rhetorical terms—clinamen, askesis, agon—which Bloom then employed with
joyously irresponsible confidence, like some English aristocrat who insists on using his mangled French
everywhere he goes, and at high volume, too. The technical language fell away as he wrote his more
popular books, such as “The Western Canon” and “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” but the
structures of thought that underlay that rhetoric did not. I’m reminded of one of his loveliest
formulations, his insight that Shakespeare’s great soliloquists change and develop by “overhearing
themselves.” Bloom can be faulted for not changing and developing, for not overhearing himself
attentively enough. But we, the audience, were lucky enough to get the chance to listen in on his
declamations.