Is There a Better Mode of Literary Criticism Than Appreciation?
In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Judith Shulevitz has written an excellent review of Harold Bloom's latest epic pontification, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. She correctly identifies everything that seems wrong with his writing over the last decade or so:
Few literary critics court ridicule as compulsively as Harold Bloom. His overproduction of doorstopping volumes of popularizing surveys of world literature feels more like brand extension than scholarship. His choice, for his latest book, of title (Genius), publisher (the mass-market Warner Books) and organizing principle ("one hundred exemplary creative minds") is more Kmart than Yale. The book itself displays all the faults that have led fellow academics to disapprove of him. He repeats himself so often that his favorite words acquire the ring of revolutionary slogans (Originality! Vitality!) or ritual denunciations (Resenters! Historicizers!). He makes grandiose and indefensible claims without explaining or arguing for them. He cloaks himself Wizard-of-Oz-like in the polysyllabic hermeticism of cabala and Gnosticism, with little seeming regard for the violence his borrowings may do to those systems or to the comprehensibility of his prose. And oh, that prose! Ranting, pontificating, self-interrupting -- every few pages bring another aside on the deplorable state of literary studies today or the evils of the Internet -- it defies every rule of elegance and economy.
But she goes on to describe exactly what it is that makes reading him worthwhile if ones is seeking a deeper experience of literature:
Bloom is not so easily dismissed, however. His style may be disheveled and his book shockingly attuned to the demands of the marketplace, but both have a virtue that trumps those flaws: authenticity. Bloom's focus on genius is not just commercial opportunism, the usual blather about the moral import of cultural literacy or part of the national obsession with success, though critics will find elements of all three if they go looking for them.
Bloom's most perverse and important insight, here as in his earlier work, is that genius hurts. It wounds. Not only is it vital and supremely real but it transcends conventional morality and frames of reference, which means that it may well rip through our defenses, shredding our fragile sense of self. The genius of a great poet can so overwhelm a later poet that he never writes an original word again. Readers prefer not to acknowledge genius either, since it may well pass judgment on their mediocrity. The proper appreciation of genius, by this account, is not the twee hobby of gentlemen-scholars so often mocked by those who favor scientific approaches to literature, but an exacting discipline that yields wise and humble readers.
Speaking for myself, Bloom's perspective has helped me immensely in my own efforts to explore literature. I look forward to reading this book.
10:55:12 AM 
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