Dipping Our Knives Into Harold Bloom’s Body

The wilting of Harold Bloom’s intellectual reputation happened long ago, but with his passing the fierce wit of very-online scholars fevers into flower. As one professor remarked, “Lest we forget, he was also a bad scholar. His Shakespeare book is written horribly and says nothing.” Another mourned that we haven’t yet “managed to do what he feared” in completely decentering literature within English departments. The Chronicle’s own Daily Briefing saw fit to eulogize him only as “the literary critic who promoted a Western-centric canon over works by multiculturalist, feminist, and other authors whom he collectively dismissed as ‘the School of Resentment.’”

Like dunking on Erich Auerbach or Lionel Trilling, there is nothing quite so tedious as hating on Bloom in 2019. There’s an inherent ghoulishness in a discipline that trains its blossoms around the jutting rib-bones of preceding generations. Indeed, one wonders what could motivate this graveside schadenfreude. Someone we largely stopped listening to several decades ago is finally dead. I have no apologies for Bloom’s conservative canon (at least, no apologies that his laziest critics don’t make for me), for his reaction against anything smacking of identity politics, or for the sordid allegations spun off from his personal and professional life. But the little anniversaries of the profession offer occasions for reflection, and the death of one its most notorious critics seems like just such a moment. So, what does the death of Harold Bloom tell literary studies about itself in this miserable decade’s twilight year?

Among other things, it offers a study in disciplinary incoherence. Criticism’s ambling return to aesthetic value has been a long time coming. The “return” to aesthetics in the 1990s was, in the end, little more than a throat-clearing gesture, the humble admission that literary form, too, mattered. Imagine. More recent work has begun to take the language of aesthetic value itself seriously, to develop it as a resource for criticism — from Rita Felski’s studies of attachment to Sianne Ngai’s reinvigorated aesthetic categories to Michael Clune’s brief for aesthetic judgment. Much of this work is worlds apart from Bloom’s endless bullet-point appendices, Aeschylus-to-Zukofsky, his vatic pronouncements as to which poets would survive the ages and which were mere ephebes. Yet Bloom did offer criteria of value. He made claims. Our embarrassment at that fact seems noteworthy.

Indeed, it sometimes appears as if the most scandalous thing about Bloom was that he judged at all. If, as Timothy Aubry has explained, critics have never in fact eliminated aesthetic judgment from their work, they have nonetheless rarely felt comfortable making strong judgments of value. Still reeling, apparently, from the shock of discovering “cultural capital,” literary studies has taken a long time to readjudicate judgment’s place in the continuing labors of literary history and cultural critique. If we believe that there are indeed works of literature that afford a wider view of human experience, are richer in aesthetic or conceptual resources, on what will we base our claims? Bloom may not provide the answer, but one hardly regrets the question.

Am I required to write, “I generally don’t agree with Bloom”? That I don’t think literary history is an endless psychodrama of Oedipal murder and self-curtailment? That his “school of resentment” was a cruel and pointless antagonism? That great literature is not exhausted by the back matter of one of his more trivial late-career books? The apparent glee with which academics have dipped their knives into Bloom’s corpse would seem shocking if it weren’t so predictable, and the bitterest irony of these celebrations is the unironic self-regard. What if I admit that, as an undergraduate, I looked at his silly lists for writers I didn’t know and then read them? That he led me to read and admire, for instance, A.R. Ammons, Toni Morrison, Robert Hayden, and Jay Wright?

The life-cycle of professional outrage seems at once endless and all-too-brief, like a spark devouring the detonator cord in slow motion. In a few weeks, we will all forget that we picked out Harold Bloom in our latest constellation of professional indignation, a bright bulb on the shining marquee of our self-involvement. We will forget, too, that before he became the name that launched a thousand Chelsea House publications, he wrote Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Yeats, The Ringers in the Tower, The Anxiety of Influence, and A Map of Misreading.

We will forget his revisionary ratios, which were, in the end, nothing more than the admittedly pretentious names for quite valuable rhetorical figures and literary effects. “Apophrades,” the return of the dead — that feeling when reading a poem by William Wordsworth that his successor, Percy Shelley, has been there before. “Metalepsis,” a lateness transformed into an earliness — as when John Milton imagines his poetry starting time over, his Christian mythos preceding and enveloping the pagan. The valid suspicion that these figures work only for certain authors or within the confines of a very particular Romantic tradition does not simply do away with them. Their casual dismissal suggests only the limited imagination of contemporary criticism.

Bloom’s poetic psychodramas were always as much about Bloom as they were about poetry. Yet they have their uses, and my favorite of his revisionary ratios was always “askesis,” a self-defensive emptying out, a deliberate act of self-limitation. Askesis makes visible a severe and tasking imagination within the florid poetry of Wallace Stevens, modernist dandy. It helps us see “Childe Roland” and his failed quest as part of Robert Browning’s attempt to wrestle with his Romantic inheritance not by exceeding it but by curtailing it. The subtitle of Bloom’s chapter on askesis in The Anxiety of Influence is “Purgation and Solipsism,” which could as easily characterize so many responses to Bloom’s death.

Watching a discipline look back at a portion of its own history, not critically, but with unearned snark and condescension, is dismaying. And here, finally, is the most important question. As the discipline slowly atrophies and the death-monger plods down the streets of the profession, chanting, “Bring out yer dead,” why is it we have shown up so eagerly in the doorway, clutching our most precious corpses and throwing them on the cart with a laugh? Askesis indeed.