Harold Bloom interview on "The Western Canon" (1994)

welcome to our broadcast tonight we'll talk to Harold Bloom you know his book the Western canon he is a sterling professor at Yale University he is also a professor of English at new University the author of 20 books and the editor many more Blum is a MacArthur prize fellow a past Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard and a member of the American Academy and the recipient of many other Awards honorary degrees and prizes also on this broadcast the animated cartoonist Chuck Jones will be here talking about the creation of his art we begin with Harold Bloom his new book is called as I said the Western canon but first I'd like to begin our conversation by talking about the notion of what you think is happening to literature today to literature China so it's a literary static to literary study to literary study we just about haven't got it anymore I wouldn't think that there are ten academic institutions of name and repute in the United States which still feature literary study as such why's that it has been politicized by a combination of what I would have to call though I don't wish to give offense I suppose I do wish to give it a yes I know I don't it would be new to feminists pseudo Marxist pseudo historicists calling themselves new but nothing but mixtures of the French theorist Foucault and a lot of sarsaparilla people who are in no way interested in aesthetic values people who in fact have combined to assure all of us that what we call aesthetic value is a bourgeois mystification that is to say no book they say is intrinsically better than any other book these things are determined by the societal needs of the ruling classes one would think that so crass and crude a doctrine would have been laughed out but it's like our politics my dear you think things are going to be laughed out and sudden you discover there's been an avalanche and you have lost and in the same way there has been an avalanche maybe from the other direction in the Universities and close a little correct came from one direction and now the midterm election you're saying is coming from another election yeah might the two collide are they reinforcing each other I don't they I think they reinforce one another I have received as many nasty letters from neo-conservatives who denounced me because I refused to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions or our let me just what do you mean by canonical works I mean I understand we're talking about the Western Canon and those that you have listed here 26 of them but well the Canon really means from Greek days onwards and from ancient Hebraic and Christian days onwards the works that a particular tradition designates as being most essential for study by the young in Scholastic situations thus the subtitle of this book of mine is the books and school of the ages I have stolen that from the German end of the last century poet Stefan Georg o who was just talking about Dante and he was simply saying that the Divine Comedy had been v book and skull of the ages homer is the great instance of the canonical work all of ancient Greek and then Alexandria education was founded upon Homer particularly upon the Iliad the formation of what Christians call the Old Testament that is to say the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament was also a canonizing kind of a process though there in the pure good of theory the criteria were not supposed to be aesthetic I sometimes wonder about that since except for Leviticus everything in the Hebrew Bible is of immense literary power and there's a great deal of enormous literary power in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John in particular in the book of Ju suggested a lot of a Bible had been written by woman I still stick with the notion that the crucial portions of Genesis Exodus and numbers that is to say the earliest part of the Hebrew Bible to be written undoubtedly written by a highly-placed woman at the court of Solomon the the attitude the stance the point of view is entirely that of a very highly placed and very sophisticated and very ironical woman indeed let me just talk about one apparent not contradiction but somehow maybe a look of a note of amusement by some people they look at the Western Canon and look at the 26 counties and they look at some 800 authors and 3,000 works that you listed the back and they say aha here comes Harold Bloom who is criticizing multiculturalism he is criticizing too much emphasis on the gender of the race or the sexual persuasion of the writers and that's part of what he talks about in the body of this book yet at the same time you will find on his list of eight hundred and seventy writers a number of women a number of african-americans the women the women the African Americans gave ins a full 35 or 40 percent of major Western authors from the beginning to the present day Michael gay now it would be very safe to assume William Shakespeare himself would appear to have been bios bisexual whether or not scholars find an easy time in accepting that there isn't anyone I have put on that list who might have not read at least twice if the work has sustained a second serious reading then these people are mixing me up with the William Bennett's of this world or the late Allan bloom or this whole neo conservative rabble mint who are looking for moral values I'm not looking for moral values but you are talking about what you call a school of resentment which is over here in case our money comes from the other side and it has largely destroyed the art of reading it has given us the amazing phenomenon of multiculturalism my favorite sentence in the book upon which you are holding your hand goes as if I'm swearing to multiculturalism rather than multiculturalism meant servantes then who could protest but of course multiculturalism doesn't mean servantes it is not as though they are urging us to read servantes rather than Shakespeare or Dickens not so at all they are asking us to read extremely inadequate Chicano writers now I have no objection whatsoever to writers of any background being read but as I also remarkable of my favorite sentences of the book the biblical three school years and 10 on the whole still holds for us if science came along and saw to it that we all lived a hundred and forty years on the average that at the moment there would be no canonical problem but we have three thousand years of major imaginative literature in the West we have a plethora and you are jesting it is about to become marginal it has been marginalized it has been substantially marginalized people are getting doctorates people are getting undergraduate majors in literature or English or call it what you will in thousands of American colleges and universities and this is not hyperbole who have never read a play by Shakespeare have never read one of the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer who have never read a novel by Charles Dickens or a poem by William Wordsworth I stopped let me just stop you there because I want to get to this innocence why what do what would professor bloom say they'll get by reading Shakespeare and Chaucer oh I and I didn't go on I can go I know that's how the rest of the evening but I've got 15 minutes I know if that's sir well the first place I would say cognitive power that is to say an increase in one's own ability to think and one's own ability to talk on the basis of that thinking and the next would be rhetorical power the ability to understand better the uses of metaphor which according to Aristotle was the special mark of genius in every one of us but beyond all that a real capacity for apprehending other nests for on the one hand realizing that we are trapped inside our own mortality and on the other than our only hope of getting beyond that trap of mortality is to have some real sense of other selves we read many books is the ancient adage because we cannot know enough people you are still a young man I am now getting to be a rather older man when discovers as one gets older that it's difficult to know more and more people that your old friends have pretty much said what they have to say to you or you to them and it's harder to make friends when goes back to books because when can it possibly know enough people and I suppose um is the but really than that um memory is the major element in cognition in everything that we call the humanities um if you cannot remember then you can think and you can't imagine and you can't write and you can hardly read if you have shallow authors chosen only for political reasons or because supposedly they will make people of one ethnic background or another somehow feel good so the theme is there's a sense of noise self-esteem connection to your that ridiculous metaphor we now call empowerment which is cheerleading so far as I can tell if you do that you will not augment a memory you will not cause the mind to grow um you will put people into a state of another kind of poverty a poverty that the school of resentment does not seem to care about you know poverty as imaginative need davide as imaginative lack we could have a whole program just on this now I want to move beyond it but does it have to be I mean where is there a recognition on your part at least of it giving some ground to some recognition that there may be merit in terms of recognizing the literary history of an ethnic group I give a great deal of ground on that but I point out in many places not always in that book the oddity that it is by no means the best the strongest the most interesting writers of such groups who are being studied and exalted as it happens the best african-american poet by lightyears is a man named Jay Wright JY w RI ght is difficult and complex he works in terms of Dogon mythology West African mythology and a vast range of European learning he is just too difficult for afro-american specialists to bother with and they shrug him off they do this to his considerable extent with the next most eminent poet the late Robert Hayden may also find too dense and too aesthetic for them there is a brilliant young woman poet phyleus moss t hy l IAS MOS s was an African American she too has very inadequate people have pointed out that and oh this gets me into the list the other things I want to do pinpoint at Alice Walker is not in this book among your list of 850 a very charm of Angela a very charming lady Larson is but not for the book that we thought not for beloved but for Solomon song a very charming lady miss Walker a very remarkable personality miss Angelou and certainly Toni Morrison began as a very strong writer and reached the kind of culmination in Song of Solomon unfortunately her sense of what she would call her responsibility to she now calls herself as you know a Marxist a feminist and afro centrist and all of these things beloved and jazz even more than beloved or I think top-heavy books with very strong political programs they are not aesthetic accomplishments and s Ted and an aesthetic accomplishment is the standard an aesthetic accomplishment is Shakespeare or Tolstoy or William Faulkner in the case of Miss Morrison she blent Virginia Woolf and Faulkner very powerfully in her early work and it did culminate in the Song of Solomon she has been I believe victimized by the times in trying to give the age what she feels the age demands miss Walker is quite another matter I have read Meridian twice I suppose it would be my candidate for the poorest work of its kind that is now being studied in American universities and colleges I mean it could only possibly be read and studied on a political basis it has no resembling aesthetic merge as to miss Angelou I have gotten many people angry at me by saying at the beginning of the book quoting the divine Oscar Wilde as having said splendidly all bad poetry is sincere and then saying that the New York Times the day after the inauguration of President Clinton praised the inaugural poem by Maya Angelou as a work of which mainly an amplitude to which I can only reply it is a work of astonishing sensor all right let me talk about did you write this because of how you feel about the the plight of literary study I wrote it for well I quote my heroic precursor dr. Samuel Johnson is no man but a blockhead would write for anything except money yes once once we put that immediate matter aside and we go on to shall we say more aesthetic and spiritual and educational motives I wrote it to two reasons one because I have seen my profession I'm now in my 40th consecutive year of teaching at Yale I have seen my profession destroyed by what I score these school of resent and so you rise in this book to say this is what's important this is what matters even though as I say this is an elegy I think we have lost the war I think irreversible you believe well you know there is this special difficulty Charles if you have faculties because of this pernicious thing we call tenure perhaps in these days in which the Republicans say they're going to do away with term limits no I went tenure as well I hardly see the speaker Gingrich and doing away with his own trip but uh perhaps indeed it might not be such a bad idea to do away with tenure because what we have now whoa you just sent them into into terror we have we have networks all over the place at every American in school and university we have networks of people who are hard at work all the time as activists making sure that only the politically correct come in as graduate students or get teaching appointments the standard you made the choices so we're saying this is one man's taste and one man's opinion Charlie the works of the second half of the 20th century on my list from all kinds of trajectory when I was looking for and so on fifty years from now there are bound to be houses on that list as I remark in the book cultural prophecy is a mug's game you know dr. Samuel Johnson made some ghastly mistakes Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that William Ellery Channing was going to be a major American poet I have undoubtedly committed some blunders and howlers also it is built into the process all one can do is try to set aside one is idiosyncratic preferences and I am a rather idiosyncratic human being so it is not easy to do so and look for what I hope is aesthetic merit you have mentioned Emerson and now in dr. Johnson several times you even gave him credit as being your historic precursor well that is paying myself a considerable comfort well it is because in a sense in anxiety the influence anxiety it was anxiety and anxiety the idea of influences your book you talked about the notion of great writers well come to greatness because there is a precursor and that what they are driven to do the boxing agent go ahead explain no no no going with what you're saying sir is rephrasing it they are driven the black ink they are driven to they're driven to distinguish himself apart from their precursor and only the best and the strongest have the will and that drink exactly so a number of reviewers of this book I particularly remember a gentleman in Time magazine got very up stress about this the fellow in Time magazine said doesn't professor bloom realized that to use the agonistic the literary competitive is just as much to use an extra literary category as the multiculturalist due to which I could only throw up my hands and say as he never read let alone Jakob Urquhart or Nietzsche on the fact that agon is the entire basis of Greek intellectual and cultural and literary life let's say among the agency home is contest with Hesiod or the fact that in the Athenian drama you are competing for the foremost place you are competing for the prize Western literature whether we like it or not aesthetically speaking as thesis is a Greek word it means perception and Western literature the whole basis of the aesthetic remains Greek and that was agonistic to the heart score it was always a competition for the foremost place let me just take a moment if anybody hasn't heard your list William Shakespeare Shaw Shaw sir Cervantes Milton Samuel Johnson Goethe Wordsworth Jane Austen Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson Charles Dickens George Eliot Leo Tolstoy but not guess what not for war and peace well our Murad I'm delighted you bring this up in the news the last few days we have the stuff about the Russian closing in on the Chechens right this is the renewal of the war that is being fought in Murat Murat is Shania's right-hand man who was broken with him he is the legendary hero to this day of the Chechens a lot of those people that is to say Tolstoy has really intersected reality here it is a historical novel or Nivola in this case much closer to something prevalent and permanent in human nature and I must say there indeed is the use of the canonical it is perpetually relevant if you wish to understand you know the new horrors that are now breaking out among the Chechens and Yeltsin closing in upon the Reid Murad I wish we had more time our continuing EPS and Freud interesting things you have to say about Freud that if in fact you look to a precursor for Freud who's clearly Shakespeare and all that Freud thought he had discovered you could find in the works of Shakespeare II the Shakespeare had found and if Freud saw them there is that right and I thought to Neruda and pessoa and Beckett n4j and Kafka and Virginia Woolf and James jaw or Lando Virginia Virginia well I I chose that really as a kind of dear to the feminist state they have made her into a Bible they've made her into what they call a political theorist and I wanted to show that her feminism as is particularly made clear in Orlando is nothing but the love of reading the pleasure of doing the broadcast in New York is I can get you back here because you also teach it in weiu the Western can of the books in school of the ages Harold Bloom we'll be right back don't you leave yet we'll be right back stay

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 335,600

Keywords:

Id: S9ieF7LVbyI

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016