Harold Bloom
26 writers
not always chronological
canonical = authoritative in our culture
“ ‘aesthetic value’ is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant’s rather than an actuality , but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading”
Harold Bloom: “mimic cultural wars do not much interest me” -- here ‘mimic’ is used as an adjective meaning ‘imitating something on a smaller scale, such as a ‘mimic battle’
Giambattista Vico posited a cycle of three phases -- Theocratic (religious), Aristocratic (heroic), Democratic (western civilization/democracy) - followed by a chaos out of a New Theocratic Age would at last emerge -- James Joyce made grand seriocomic use of Vico in organizing Finnegans Wake.
Bloom, in his canon of western literature omits (and he uses that word) the Theocratic Age (represented by the Torah and the Gospels)
His historical sequence begins with Dante and concludes with Samuel Beckett
His Aristocratic Age begins with Shakespeare -- not chronological -- because Shakespeare is the central figure of the Western Canon.
Bloom considers Shakespeare in relation to most of the other 25 -- from Chaucer and Montaigne, who affected him, and through many of those he influenced -- Milton, Dr Johnson, Goethe, Ibsen, Joyce and Beckett among them -- as well as those who attempted to reject him: Tolstoy in particular, along with Freud, who appropriated Shakespeare while insisting that the Earl of Oxford had done the writing for “the man from Stratford.” [Brenda James, 2005, is very convincing in her article that Sir Henry Neville was the “real” Shakespeare.”]
The major Western writers since Dante are:
Chaucer
Cervantes
Montaigne
Shakespeare
Goethe
Wordsworth
Dickens
Tolstoy
Joyce
Proust
He then tries to represent national canons by their crucial figures:
England: Chaucer
Shakespeare
Milton
Wordsworth
Dickens
France: Montaigne
Moliere
Italy: Dante
Spain: Cervantes
Russia: Tolstoy
(doesn’t include Pushkin, Lermontov)
Germany: Goethe
Hispanic America: Borges
Neruda
United States: Whitman
Dickinson
He included the major dramatists:
Shakespeare
Moliere
Ibsen
Beckett
He included the major novelists:
Austen
Dickens
George Eliot
Tolstoy
Proust
Joyce
Woolf
Literary critic: Dr Samuel Johnson, the greatest of Western literary critics
Bloom notes, unlike Joseph Campbell, that Vico did not posit a Chaotic Age before the ricorso or return of a second Theocratic Age; “but our century, while pretending to continue the Democratic Age, cannot be better characterized than as Chaotic.”
The key writers of our century – which can only be described as Chaotic -- are Freud, Proust, Joyce, Kafka: they personify whatever literary spirit the era possesses.
Freud called himself a scientist, but he will survive as a great essayist like Montaigne or Emerson, not as the founder of a therapy already discredited [1994] (or elevated) as another episode in the long history of shamanism. I wish that there were space for more modern poets here than just Neruda and Pessoa, but no poet of our century has matched In Search of Lost Time (Proust), Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake, the essays of Freud, or the parables and tales of Kafka.”
What makes the works canonical? In a word -- “strangeness” -- “a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated [Finnegans Wake], or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange [the Bible].
The J writer -- the original author of what we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers -- but what she wrote was censored, revised, and frequently abrogated or distorted by a series of redactors across five centuries, culminating with Ezra, or one of his followers, in the era of the return from Babylonian exile. Bloom feels that these revisionists were priests and cultic scribes, who seem to have been scandalized by the author’s ironical freedom in portraying Yahweh. -- see Bloom, p. 5.
“A shrewd reviewer [Bloom’s] Book of J chided [Bloom] for not having the audacity to go the whole way and identify J as Bathsheba the queen mother, a Hittite woman taken by David the king after he arranged for her husband, Uriah, to (conveniently) die in battle. Bloom accepted the suggestion gladly and belatedly: Bathsheba, mother of Solomon, is an admirable candidate. Her dark view of Solomon’s catastrophic son and successor, Rehoboam, implied throughout the Yahwistic text, is thus highly explicable; so is her ironic presentation of the Hebrew patriarchs, and her fondness both for some of their wives and for such female outsiders as Hagar and Tamar. Besides it is a superb, J-like irony that the inaugural author of what eventually became the Torah was not an Israelite at all, but a Hittite woman. Bloom will refer to the Yahwist alternatively as J or Bathsheba. Interesting.
“The ultimate shock implicit in this canon-making originality comes when we realize that the Western worship of God -- by Jews, Christians, and Moslems -- is the worship of a literary character, J’s Yahweh, however adulterated by pious revisionists. The only comparable shocks Bloom knows come when we realize that the Jesus loved by Christians is a literary character largely ‘invented’ by the author of the Gospel of Mark, and when we read the Koran and hear one voice only, the voice of Allah, recorded in detail and at length the by audacity of his prophet Mohammed. Perhaps some day, well on in the 21st century, when Mormonism has become the dominant religion of at least the American West, those who come after us will experience a fourth such shock when they encounter the daring of the authentic American prophet Joseph Smith in his definitive visions, the Pearl of Great Price and Doctrines and Covenants.”
The top of his list (p. 25):
Milton’s Paradise Lost
Shakespeare’s major tragedies (Hamlet, MacBeth, King Lear, Othello)
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
Dante’s Divine Comedy
The Torah
The Gospels
Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Homer’s epics: the Iliad, and the Odyssey
“Except perhaps for Dante’s poem, none of these is as embattled as Milton’s dark work.”
What does Bloom mean by “embattled”?
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