If Harold Bloom is such a genius, how come his opinions are so idiotic?

[BurtWorm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/books/15BOOK.html

Told of Mr. (Stephen) King's selection (to receive a special National Book Award for "distinguished contribution" to American literature), some in the literary world responded with laughter and dismay. "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls," said Harold Bloom, the Yale professor, critic and self-appointed custodian of the literary canon. "That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy."



I confess, I'm not a big Stephen King novel fan. I haven't read a single one of them. I do like King's essays, however, and I admire the man. I think he's got a heart of gold. That's not why I believe he deserves an award for distinguished contribution. Horror novels aren't my cup of tea, but I have read glowing prose from perfectly respectable critics about King--including John Leonard in The New York Review of Books. So if the NBA wants to honor King, it's no big deal to me. Maybe I'd be up in arms if the honoree was Ann Coulter...well, actually, there's no doubt I'd be up in arms over that. King at least is prolific, versatile, and a craftsperson if not a great artist.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to praise King but to wonder why an alleged genius like Harold Bloom is such a knee-jerk snob. Who finally gives a shit about awards like this?

[KAMouflage]

1. Bloom Makes Me Sad Here...

I greatly respect Prof. Bloom, especially his thesis in "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" that essentially argues that "human nature" as we understand it was shaped by the characters of Hamlet and Falstaff. The tome was a thick read but I was so impressed I decided to use his premise for my current work on "Hamlet," choosing to see him as the first real existential character in the cannon.

However, the above quote is really disappointing.

[BurtWorm]

5. Your current work on Hamlet? Are you writing a book?

I wonder about Bloom's methods when I read the number of snobbish quotes he has out there. I don't know if a slave to the canon can have the tools to answer a big question like that. He seems to think the only people who matter in history are the ones in power.

[Plaid Adder]

2. Because being a knee-jerk snob is his career.

Seriously.

Bloom has built his entire reputation on being a defender of the canon, otherwise known as the Dead White Men Of Genius definition of Literature. That's all he does: explain why all the people we always thought were literary geniuses--Shakespeare, Milton, etc.--really are geniuses, and nobody else is, especially not people who are valued for providing perspectives other than that of the white male. Because in case you didn't realize it, the experience of white men is universally true for all of humanity, whereas the experiences of women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and so on are only of interest to people from the same subcategory.

Man, typing that paragraph makes me feel like I need a bath.

After years of staunchly resisting any effort to broaden the definition of literature to include books written by persons other than Shakespeare, Bloom eventually figured out that as a (nearly) dead white male himself he was not really in a position to dismiss the efforts of women, people of color, and so on wholesale, as it might look a teeny bit like self-interest or special pleading. So, when Camille Paglia came along, he became her mentor, and eventually he sent her forth into the world to preach the same gospel, on the theory that people would believe this "women just aren't the same kind of creative geniuses that men are" crap if it was coming from an actual woman, as opposed to Bloom himself.

Well, Camille has become the flash in the pan that she was always destined to be; but Bloom is still with us, just as George Will is still with us and William F. Buckley was with us before that. Pay him no mind, he has already been rendered extinct by recent developments in literary criticism ("recent" being "the past 30 years or so").

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[BurtWorm]

4. Very interesting analysis.

It's funny how these types who pretend to loath the politicization of criticism are themselves Machiavellis of the academic world.

[Plaid Adder]

6. Yeah, funny how that works.

Cause for them, see, it's not political, because their experience is UNIVERSAL!

Even though King is a white male, he can never pass the Bloom test because he works in horror, which evolved out of sensation fiction (what Bloom calls "penny dreadfuls"). Sensation fiction was hugely popular in the 19th century but was not considered 'literature'. Not coincidentally, most of its readers were women.

I'm not saying there is no difference between what King does and what Shakespeare did. But, let us remember that Shakespeare did not set out to become a genius; he set out to make money. The fact that he has survived as our Greatest Living Author is really an accident, and is as much a testament to the persistence of his fans in the lit-crit community as it is to his own genius. Jeez, in the Elizabethan period writing for the theater was about as lowbrow as you could get. Never mind the fact that all of Shakespeare's plots are stolen from somewhere else...well anyway.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[quilp]

7. It is one thing to put King in the class of Bram Stoker, and Rider Haggard

It is another to put him in the class of Dickens, Austin, Faulkner or Bellow. Isn't that the point Bloom is making? What happens when an entire population has a "University Degree"? Every actor is a film "star"? Everyone on television is a "celebrity"?

[Character Assassin]

9. If everyone had university degrees.....

Then either everyone would see what a self-important, pompous jackass Bloom is or they themselves would be self-important, pompous jackasses just like Bloom.

King has written some exquisitely crafted and insightful, moving and original works.

Literary critics are parasites that usually can't write worth a fuck themselves and are quite cross about that.

[Bryan]

8. That's not entirely fair to Bloom's skill

as a teacher, IMHO. One example: his late pupil Frank McConnell.

http://dynaweb.oac.cdlib.org:8088/dynaweb/uchist/public/inmemoriam/inmemoriam2000/@Generic__BookTextView/2587

McConnell, a noted professor of English, media critic, and-in his spare time-mystery writer, wrote extensively on the artistic value to be found in some aspects of 20th-century popular culture.

In a weak moment in 1986, he wrote to the Pulitzer Prize fiction judging committee (on which he served four times, twice as chair) and suggested that King receive some sort of recognition for his body of work; McConnell's suggestion was quickly rebuffed.

[supernova]

3. Harold Bloom is one of those

who believe there is an invisible dividing line between popular fiction like Stephen King's and serious literature a la William Blake.

I don't know what to say. I enjoy Bloom very much and sometimes enjoy King. I'm not a big horror fan though.

But I think the same thing happened to Edgar Allen Poe. Everybody thought of him as a dime store novelist, horror and detective short fiction. But, some of his best work was as a literary critic. "The Philosphy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" are absolute classics.

So, if King is interested (not that he has to be) in getting on Bloom's good side, he'd better start writing more about his philosophy on writing.