Literary and Artitistic Criticism

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Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs –

He who has read one book well is in a position to read any book, while he for whom books are easy currency is rendered incapable of living fully with one.

Allan Bloom“The Study of Texts”

This smorgasbord of essays which Bloom wrote over a 30-year period would never have been published had he not hit the jackpot with The Closing of the American Mind. As his student, of course, I am delighted that he was given this opportunity for a wider circulation of his efforts, and although I was certainly familiar with some of the entries to be found here, there were others that were unfamiliar to me. All of them are excellent and thought-provoking, but I will only remark on those which I had not previously read.
Two offerings, for example, are short Platonic dialogues, "Hipparchus or the Profiteer”[1], and “Ion, or On the Iliad.” The reason these were included is to be found in Bloom’s essay, “The Political Philosopher in a Democratic Society.” He suggests that we read the smaller dialogues first since Plato was always more interested in posing the right question than the answer[2]. After all, in Plato’s day, philosophy was a novelty, challenging through questions the traditional and authoritative opinions and conventions under which men lived.

“A [Platonic] dialogue which is a few pages long permits one to wonder over every detail, to ask innumerable questions of the text, to use on it every resource of intellect, passion, and imagination. In another sense, though, these small dialogues are much more difficult, for they are so strange.”

Furthermore, there is a strong possibility that we have read the more famous dialogues through the millennia’s filter of familiar scholarship which we rely on. (For example, Bloom seems to say, Hipparchus is Plato’s conscious analogy to Socrates himself in the “Death of Socrates” dialogues and so “Hipparchus” gives a useful perspective to what happens there.)

“If we cannot understand dialogues which do not contain the well-known themes, it means that we do not really know what Plato was about or what the dialogue form is and means.”

Thus inspired (and taking a big risk because I find Plato so difficult to get right), here is a passage from the “Ion” in which Socrates – whose attack on the poets I remember from The Republic – dilates on poetry. Poets, Socrates says, are like iron rings which cling to naturally-occurring magnetized rock and they inspire others in the way that such rings, magnetized by the rock itself, also become magnetized and attract other rings[3].

“[T]he poets tell us . . . that culling their songs from fountains flowing with honey and certain gardens and glens of the Muses they bear them to us just like bees, flying as they do. And they speak the truth. For the poet is a light thing, winged and sacred, unable to make poetry or oracular utterance. Since they make poems and say much that is fine about things, . . . not by art but by divine dispensation, each is able to do finely only that to which the Muse has impelled him . . . . For they say these things not by art but by divine power. For if they knew how to speak finely by art about one of them, they would be able to do so about all the rest. On this account the god takes away their intelligence and uses them as servitors along with soothsayers . . . .”

So it is not that Socrates is unaware of poetry’s uniqueness, but he also sees it as establishing false community opinions. The human need for poetry “is one of the most revealing facts about the human soul” but it is “at war” with man’s love of wisdom. Poetry, in short, is the opposite of reason and Ion’s world, “a dazzling poetry of telling of gods and heroes, [is] a precursor of philosophy but its bitterest enemy.”
There is another Bloom essay included here, “Aristophanes and Socrates: A Response to Hall,” in which Bloom answers a criticism of his interpretive essay published with his translation of The Republic. I have not read Hall’s original essay, so I have no observations about it. But in his rejoinder, Bloom does make this remark, which seems useful for anyone reading The Republic:

“I can appreciate Hall’s opinion that there is something mad in the assertion that a work of political philosophy which argues that philosophers should be kings actually means that philosophers should not be kings. But if we were to suppose for a moment that this is not precisely a book of political philosophy, at least as we know books of political philosophy to be, but is a drama at one moment of which one of the characters makes an unusual proposal that is designed to affect the action, as are so many speeches in drama, then the paradoxical character of my interpretation disappears.”

“There is something mad in the assertion . . . .” Bloom has emphasized that Plato does see philosophy as madness. But this remark also brought back to me the feeling that I always suspected that Bloom himself was not committed to philosophy. He was, it seemed to me, distracted by, if not committed to, the madness of the artist, the man who creates something never before imagined, a new world. And yet Socrates, whom Bloom occasionally refers to as a poet, does precisely that with his cave and his dragon’s teeth. The Republic must be read as a drama admixed with philosophy, an evolving revelation, and not as a philosophical treatise.
I feel certain I have somewhere else already read the Bloom essay included here on Rousseau’s Emile[4]. In it, he is almost unreserved in his excitement about this “novel.” And although I have yet to read Emile, every other time I have ventured into reading Rousseau and worried over what Bloom cheerfully identifies as his “paradoxes,” I have found myself overmatched. Bloom, by contrast, is obviously energized. With Rousseau, he says, we do not deal with a ”troubled soul, but accurate reflections of an incoherence in the structure of the world we all face.” Emile, he asserts, is comparable to Plato’s Republic, a “truly great book, one that lays out for the first time and with the greatest clarity and vitality the modern way of posing the problems of psychology” – by which he means replacing virtue and vice as the cause of goodness and happiness.
In Emile, Bloom says, Rousseau “sets out to create a human type whose charms can rival those of the saint or the tragic hero [the two great moral-political traditions: the Bible and classical philosophy] – the natural man – and thereby shows that his thought, too, can comprehend the beautiful in man.”
Much of what Bloom writes – and what I remember him saying – dwells on knowledge: what was known, what can be known, and what we no longer know. Above all, he was an educator. But in a scientific era, the crux of education for Rousseau was more than science; the crux is the sublime and whether the sublime can be achieved in the modern era. If man is to be explained in modern terms – i.e. scientifically – there is no place for the sublime, and its new explanation is sublimation, a “raising of the lower to the higher.” Books IV and V of Emile, Bloom says, are dedicated to this purpose.
Bloom’s essay titled “Commerce and Culture” recapitulates much of his view of modernity. For me the most helpful passage is the one in which he reflects on “culture” which he says is merely an artificial or abstract concept. Here is a longish passage which effectively summarizes his view:

“[N]obody serious does anything for the sake of ‘culture’ – or it is only recently that men do so, now that they are apparently for the first time willing to live so as to represent the conceits of intellectuals. Men and women die for their country, for their gods, and perhaps even for the truth, but not for culture. . . . ‘Culture’ somehow always means that man’s higher activities have their source in human spontaneity or creativity, an interpretation which has more or less plausibility when applied to poetry or painting, but one resisted by the facts when applied to science or philosophy. . . . The quarrel between poetry and philosophy, which was previously thought to be the fundamental issue, is thus covered over by the triumph of the poetic perspective. . . . Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does ‘culture’ become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.” [5]

In his final essay, called “The Democraticization of the University,” Bloom portrays as his frustration and bemusement what is actually a profound sadness and betrayal. It was almost too painful for me to read, not because of a pathos which is not expressed, but because I saw the savage self-control of a missionary being burned at the stake. I can do no more than to quote it at length:

“The modern university was that great folly of an attempt to establish a center for reflection and education independent of the regime and the pervasive influence of its principles, free of the overwhelming effect of public opinion . . . . It was to be an independent island within civil society, the Sovereign Republic of Letters. It tried to disprove the Socratic contention that he who shares bed and board with the rulers, be they kings or peoples, would soon have to share their tastes and way of life, and that thus the thinker must separate himself in heart and mind from the currents of party passion in order to liberate himself from prejudice. . . . [¶] But precisely because it is so necessary to democracies, [the university] is particularly threatened in nations where equality takes on the character of a religion and can call forth all the
elements of fanaticism. . . . [F]lattery of the regime and of the people at large is hard to avoid. . . . And, in the second place, the university is, willy-nilly, in some sense aristocratic. . . . [¶] [T]he truest explanation of what is going on in our universities today is the triumph of a radical egalitarianism view of democracy over the last remnants of the liberal university. This kind of egalitarianism insists that the goal of a democratic society is not equality of opportunity but factual equality. . . . It would more willingly accept a totalitarian regime than a free one in which the advantages
of money, position, education and even talent are unevenly distributed.”

Is this assessment true? Yes. And sad? Yes. Yes.
ENDNOTES 1. Not translated by Bloom, but a younger scholar Steven Forde.
2. Socrates's contribution, Bloom says, "is only that of questioning the traditional answers and thereby elaborating the essential structure of human alternatives." And although "deeply indebted" to the tradition, Socrates is "forced to break with it."
3. Ion, a "rhapsode," is a pretty low link in the chain of rings. He is analogous to a performer of the art of others. He weeps like Hamlet's player king.
4. Probably Love and Friendship.
5. Later he says that commercial society is hostile to culture because the latter "was invented to correct or oppose commercial society. . . . 'Culture' implied an opposition between art and science, and a preference for the former." /div>

Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship –

[Friendship] is . . . an abdication of self. Even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition. We may talk fior a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance -- though with more effort, it is ture -- towards a goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well.

Marcel Proust, Within a Buddiong Grove

Expanding on a theme that I heard frequently from him in college and which he later played to great effect in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom attempts in this comprehensive volume to recover, as he says,

“[t]he power, the danger, and the beauty of eros under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poetic writers.”

Although a professor of ethical philosophy, Bloom never hesitated to point out that people and their social relationships will never be completely understood or described by rational analysis. Thus from his first sentence Bloom’s mission is to explore, not the philosophers but the “poetic writers.” It is they as much as the scientific philosophers – and perhaps more so – who make new worlds, and make them so convincing that we as readers embrace them without even recognizing how radically new the rules have become. (Thus it was Homer who taught us what it meant to be Greek and Shakespeare who did the same for the modern Englishman.)

These were the artists, inspired makers of new worlds: Daedalus if not Prometheus himself. And Bloom proclaims that the engine for this is love, erotic love.

“Love is neediness, longing, awareness of incompleteness. It is a passion of the soul that palpably and visibly engages the body and points to the union, however, uneasy, of the two. Love is a self-forgetting that makes man self-aware, an unreason that is the condition of his reasoning about himself. The pain it produces is linked to the most ecstatic of pleasures, and it provides the primary experiences of beauty and of life’s sweetness. It contains powerful elements of illusion, it may be thought to be entirely illusion, but its effects are not illusory. Love can produce the most prodigious deeds in the most immediate way, without guidance by principle or command of duty. The lover knows the value of beauty and also knows that he cannot live well, or perhaps at all, alone. He knows that he is not self-sufficient. The lover is the clearest expression of man’s natural imperfection and his quest for perfection.”[1]

No one in modernity better understood this than Rousseau, as Bloom sees it. It was he who explained how the arts, music as well as literature, take their rightful place in an understanding of the whole man because they inspire the sine qua non, imagination, or what Bloom repeatedly calls “longing.” Bloom is therefore an ardent student of Romanticism, the movement inspired by Rousseau, the novelist and philosopher.

Rousseau had spied a danger, a “demystification” of the world caused by science leaving no place for the gods. But for Rousseau, says, Bloom, “[n]ature must be full of gods in order to motivate men.”[2] And yet imagination has become steadily impoverished since Rousseau’s time because it is erotic at its core and the erotic has become increasingly replaced by the nomenclature of the bodily needs and mechanisms of nothing more than sex. “The loosening of bourgeois morals . . . did not so much make life easier for lovers as destroy the conditions of love.” And therefore instead of building on the erotic, the last century has deconstructed it and instead of using it as a platform for education in matters of taste, it has led us into a vapid and uninspiring babble of psychological jargon[3].

To illustrate how it could have been – and was – otherwise, Bloom then considers what he calls “The Romantic Project,” consisting of his interpretations of Rousseau in general (but chiefly Emile), The Red and The Black, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina. As I have said, Rousseau is not accidentally the starting point, because, as Bloom sees it, Rousseau’s notion of education was a revolutionary rejection of what had been proposed by Socrates, whose approach was to remind men what was already natural in them.

“If there is any merit to this book that I am writing,” Bloom states, “it will be to reopen the quarrel between these two standpoints [i.e Hobbes’s state of nature vs. the ancient concepts of political man] with respect to what Rousseau and Plato agree to be crucial, love or eros.” Thus it was Rousseau’s explicit point in the Emile that “one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time” and thus he throws down the glove to the ancient world. Indeed Bloom suggests that as a revolutionary, Rousseau was more comprehensive even than Marx, because “for him the sex wars preceded the class wars and point to scarcities [which] economics cannot remedy.”

In the natural state, where sex was preeminent, those who possessed the qualities most attractive to the opposite sex left those who were deficient in such things to become

“dissemblers and hypocrites, beginning the underground life of capricious torment in their dependence on others for their self-esteem. And all this for sex!”

Hence in Emile, the hero’s sexual development thus becomes the “golden thread” which binds the apparently unconnected episodes and observations which have put off the uncomprehending critics.

At this point, I want to comment on Bloom’s interpretation of Rousseau’s “compassion,” a word which, if Bloom were giving his own views, I expect he would deprecate as much as he did the word “sensitivity” in the 1960's. For Rousseau, the philosophic teacher – the eponymous Jean-Jacques in the Emile – is expected to show “how sentiment can enchain imagination with the first step of his [student’s] sexual education, which is compassion.” In the end, Bloom says, Rousseau takes things much differently from Hobbes who, although he recognized the maelstrom of human irrationality and brutality, eventually built his state on a rational solution to the wars of all against all: the state as leviathan. Bloom points out that Rousseau begins at the same point and comes to an opposite conclusion:

“[R]eality resides in the unique, individual beings [a conceit of modernity]. The universal is abstract. Therefore, humanity is an abstraction unless there is a bridge built by the unique individual to it by feeling. This is the work of compassion, and its emergence is the first stage in overcoming the natural opposition between self and others. . . . It is immediately clear why Rousseau prefers feeling to reason . . . . Natural pity makes us immediately sympathize with the sufferings of others, but reason can assure us that it is the other who suffers . . . . Excessive rationalism individualizes man and strengthens natural selfishness. Therefore liberalism’s attempt to use reason as the ground for the social contract goes in the wrong direction. . . . . Only feeling finds ground for true common cause. . . . A suffering human being observed by a neutral observer is an absolute other. But if one sees oneself in the other, he become’s one’s fellow. He becomes a human being by an act of the imagination.”

Thus properly-trained compassion tempers one’s relations to his fellows and “determine[s] the limits of his selfishness.”

And this takes us back to the tools of the “training”– or “teaching” which was at the center of Bloom’s life – and the theme of the Emile. The training is inextricably bound to the ancient art of rhetoric, the passage on which Bloom calls “the most telling in the whole of Rousseau’s amazing book.” This ancient art did not call upon man’s economic interests but on his nobler motives. And to make that appeal requires mystery, both then and now, because nature must be “full of gods” in order to motivate and “strike awe” into men. For Rousseau, this was a delicate job, as he tried to avoid the power of the priesthood even though men so liberated,“in the absence of other authority, [are] most likely to be slave[s] to public opinion.”

Because I have provided elsewhere my own review and interpretation of The Red and the Black, I will not try to repeat all of what I learned thereafter from Bloom’s essay in Love and Friendship. Bloom is a very strong and insightful reader and in many ways his observations following Rousseau are but variations on the theme. For example, he says of Stendhal that he

“denies that there is or ever was a God. A nothingness becomes the standard for the judgment of the world. Longing, not the object of longing, is his standard for such judgment. The emptiness at the top haunts this literature. Stendhal tries to fill this emptiness with love or poetic creation.”

This is particularly true of the two women of the novel. For them, life would be nothing unless the sexual act is

“a matter of life and death and sacred honor. These relationships, constructed like the most complicated movements of great old watches, have as their mainspring the conviction that the gift of the body comes from the grace of the whole soul.”

And the misinterpretations and self-deceptions that complicate every love affair?

“[T]hese are the facts, perhaps sad facts, about the difficulty of human relationships. How much simpler isolation or frank acceptance that one is just using others would be. Love is the no-man’s-land, studded with mines . . . . The true meaning of the civilized sexual act is that one has successfully navigated this minefield.”

And all of the foregoing records Bloom’s approach only to the first part of his book. The second part commences with a lengthy section entitled “Shakespeare and Nature” in which Bloom, it seems to me, is even more ardently moved by the themes of “the classical goal of contemplation rather than the modern aspiration to transform.” Indeed, that small phrase does much to remind me of a passing observation made once in a lecture I heard given by Walter Berns, one of Bloom’s colleagues at Cornell, that it was important to understand the distinction that Shakespeare made between obscenity and pornography.

In his section on “Romeo and Juliet,” Bloom remarks that Shakespeare’s

“obscenity is never reductionist. It does not dismiss the imaginative overlay of the facts. Rather it expresses admiration for and wonder at the strange things that happen to us in the grip of sexual passion.”

And it is vital to understanding Shakespeare that the “low holds the key to what is highest,” a remark which somewhat echoes the Lockean remark that civil society is founded on “low but solid ground.” And yet Shakespeare is also a poet, an elevated man who completely fulfills his mission of expressing what others cannot express about what they feel.

“This may seem unscientific to the modern mind, a mere fiction to elevate poetry, but the test of assertion about the nature of eros or any other part of man is whether it can account for what one actually experiences and for what one imagines. In this critical respect Shakespeare wins hands down against Freud or his kind, and, it seems to me, outdoes Rousseau and the Romantic novelists.”

But it is also in the Shakespeare segment of his book that Bloom gets to the other half of his title, friendship. It comes out explicitly in his essay on “Antony and Cleopatra,” specifically in his remarks about the relationship between Antony and Enobarbus, whom Bloom sees as the “epitome” of Antony’s friends. Men could speak directly to Antony, “leaping over the barriers of inequality that make friendship so rare a thing for political rulers.” In fact, Antony’s openness to friendships is perhaps “another aspect[4] of his unworthiness to be king.” Shakespeare was completely in touch with the classic view that the passions, although not evil, “are to be ruled and used for the sake of the good and noble.”

In the third and final part of his book, “The Ladder of Love,” Bloom returns to the greatest philosopher of love, Socrates, chiefly as revealed in The Symposium. As with The Red and the Black, I have elsewhere tried to give my own interpretation of this dialog without reference to (and before reading) Bloom’s views. I must say that one of the reasons that I did so emerged in a passage that I later found in Bloom’s review of The Symposium. All great teachers, he says, face a problem of “fanatic loyalists.”

“They develop an almost religious reverence for this man whose teaching they are so deeply impressed by but are not themselves in a position adequately to judge. The teacher himself may very well not want to discourage such people. They are the scholars who study him carefully and pass on what he has to say to others. But there is a danger that he will be misinterpreted or rigidified or codified by them in a way contrary to the spirit of his teaching.”

(He was not writing about me, of course; he was probably writing about himself and Leo Straus and he may even have had a reference to Nietzche who went out of his way to discourage anyone from taking him seriously.)

Meantime, Bloom’s essay on The Symposium is longer by far than the dialog itself and, unsurprisingly, detailed in a way not easily summarized. One point I do want to record is his assertion that the dialog – particularly the segment given by Pausanias -- is not about homosexuality but pederasty, and that this is an important distinction.

“Homosexual erotic activity as such is no more theoretically interesting than heterosexual erotic activity. Pederasty is specifically interesting because it has a certain connection with philosophy[5], and for Socrates, philosophy is the highest way of life.”

Bloom also makes another useful point about the segment in The Symposium attributed to Aristophanes, and that is that the original (circular) man resembled the cosmic gods while those who resulted from Zeus’s cutting them in half resemble the later Olympian gods. This act

“gave birth immediately to what is most distinctively human: longing, longing for wholeness. Thus, what is perhaps the most important strand of philosophy and literature came into being. . . . For both Aristophanes and Socrates, Eros, in its own overwhelming and immoderate demands, is the clearest and most powerful inclination toward lost wholeness.”

Endnotes

1. In The Razor’s Edge I found Maugham’s cynical version:

“[W]hen passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. And if it doesn’t destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one’s life, that one’s brought disgrace on oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one’s expended all one’s tenderness, poured out all the riches of one’s soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one’s dreams, who wasn’t worth a stick of chewing gum”

2. It was as I read this commentary that I believe I understood for the first time the significance of the title of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Now I see I must read it.

3. I do not mean to suggest that Bloom dismisses Freud. Indeed he gives him far more credit than I ever remember from college in respect to his understanding of the erotic impulses that guide our lives.

4. The chief one, of course, being his ungoverned love of Cleopatra.

5. Roughly that the catamite, who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in old men, trades sex for wisdom.

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human –

Harold Bloom has taught literature for years at Yale and over that time has augmented his reputation by publishing countless books and articles on his various interests in the public press. By now (I write this in 2003), he is thought of as something of a prodigy. And yet, in furnishing amateurs like me (Bloom calls us “common readers”) with a place to stand and regard Shakespeare’s plays, I would not say that this volume – which I enjoyed and found very informative – is superior to what I have learned in Dr. Johnson, Bradley, or even Granville-Barker.

Obviously I am no position to criticize one of Bloom’s eminence, and I am not offended by his often truculent method of expression. He wishes to be heard more than savored, it seems to me, but that is his choice. And even when I find myself wondering whether some piquant opinion from Bloom could really be widely held – for example his view of Measure For Measure as a “savagely bitter” play – I will say that he is persuasive in getting me to consider it.

This large volume contains no end of such opinions. (Not included among the good ones is this rare absurdity: “Shakespeare’s greatest insight into male sexual jealousy is that it is a mask for the fear of being castrated by death”; too much nonsense like this can cheapen a good book.) Bloom provides us with a separate essay on each play, including The Two Noble Kinsmen, and characteristically offers his own contrary views about the accepted chronology. Among other things, this approach permits him to argue that Shakespeare was methodically eliminating Marlowe’s influence over him, play by play, culminating in his precocious initiative (e.g. characters who “overhear” themselves) and his triumph as the non-mythic Daedalus, the man who invented us all.

Ironically, Bloom sees the invention process as essentially nihilistic, a word he uses repeatedly, eventually concluding that “the death of belief becomes the birth of invention.” Bloom frequently refers to the Geneva Bible as Shakespeare’s source of Biblical references and I would say that it is to his credit that he is obviously as familiar with the New Testament as the Old. But his analysis of both is entirely literary. In other words – and there is probably an expression for this in academia – he evaluates Jesus and Yahweh more or less as creations of their authors, as sources of invented as opposed to revealed truth.

“Shakespeare is our scripture, replacing Scripture itself, and one should learn to read him the way the Kabbalists read the Bible, interpreting every absence as being significant.”

I cannot dissent from Bloom’s conclusion that Shakespeare is the essential source of modern man, but he is certainly not the first to announce it. I vividly remember from my own studies in the classes of a greater Bloom (Allan) in the mid-20th Century, his expressly comparing Shakespeare, the inventor of the modern, to Homer, inventor of the Greeks – and he did not claim the insight as his own[1]. But this is not to dismiss Harold Bloom’s own views on the matter and in this book he speaks for himself:

“The idea of Western character, or the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care to add. Personality in our sense is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness.” Italics supplied.

Bloom urges several controversial opinions, including the point which he continually emphasizes that there was a Hamlet, now lost, which was one of Shakespeare’s first plays and rewritten in his maturity, possibly over a period of 10 years. (This is inside baseball; an “Ur-Hamlet” as possibly having been written by Thomas Kyd has come up in academic circles from time to time.) Beyond controversy, however, he simply hits the bull’s-eye time and again: e.g. pointing out Iago’s delight in discovering his “genius for improvisation,” both Antony’s and Cleopatra’s “endearing trait of never listening to what anyone else says, including each other,” or the irony that Mercutio dies for a love that he not only was unaware of but would not have believed in.

To give a flavor of Bloom’s straight-ahead style, he says such things as Richard III is “a cumbersome and overwritten drama.”[2] Prospero is the “anti-Faust.” He sees Mercutio and the nurse as forerunners of Touchstone and Jacques. Notwithstanding his overuse of the word “prolepsis,” Bloom dwells on Macbeth’s remark that in him “function is smother’d in surmise,” meaning that this warrior “with something less than ordinary intelligence [is endowed] with a power of fantasy so enormous that pragmatically it seems to be Shakespeare’s own.” George Bernard Shaw, he says, owed Beatrice “too much for his comfort.” In Twelfth Night, he says that “everyone, except the reluctant jester Feste, is essentially mad without knowing it”; and Malvolio is a personal caricature of Ben Jonson.

Bloom’s major point about Richard II is that in him Shakespeare introduces a subcategory of human dignity which Bloom calls “aesthetic dignity” – a “fissure” between human and aesthetic stature, the latter of which will survive “when the greater dignity is lost.” Bloom calls attention to the context of Jacques’s famous speech of cynicism (which he calls “reductionism”) in As You Like It. It is, Bloom says, a “Jonsonian apologia for the satirical playwright, who attacks types and not individuals.” And in proof, the speech being ended, who appears but Orlando carrying Adam “who has sacrificed everything for him and yet who is precisely not ‘sans everything.’”

Love, Bloom says, “is no healer in The Tragedy of King Lear; indeed, it starts all the trouble, and is a tragedy in itself.” Bloom is infatuated with Love’s Labor’s Lost (“a festival of language”), but he is absolutely besotted with Falstaff. Falstaff inhabits virtually every chapter of this book. Bloom sees Falstaff (and Hamlet) as the transcendent figures in Shakespeare (also giving a nod to Rosalind.) Indeed, he is so enthusiastic that his Henry IV chapter is jarringly repetitive and much in need of an editor. (In his acknowledgments he claims to have had one[4].) If I can summarize Bloom’s conclusions about Falstaff it is that only he is Hamlet’s rival in intelligence (a “comic Socrates”), that he “ran away from” Shakespeare during his creation, that he is Shakespeare’s alter ego in wit, that he is the most impressive representation of vitality and freedom ever.

Bloom makes this case – as he simultaneously makes the case for Prince Hal’s “murderous” aggression toward Falstaff – but the case is not airtight. It sags, in my opinion, just where Bloom labors most to patch its weaknesses: his acknowledgment that Falstaff is bad news as company and his passion for life ironically affirmed by stabbing a dead man. And yet the persuasive argument for Falstaff as the central character to an ambivalent prince is so well stated that Bloom’s ensuing point that Shakespeare could not have carried Falstaff into Henry V without completely unbalancing that play seems almost self-evident. This third play of what Bloom says is woefully mis-called “The Henriad” finally puts the spotlight on the mature king who is little more than the embodiment of “policy” (echoes of Hotspur’s contempt for Henry IV) – a policy of “militarism, brutality, [and] hypocrisy.”

Coming to Othello, Bloom’s explication of the inexplicable Iago goes like this: Othello “maintains the purity of arms by sharply dividing the camp of war from that of peace.” He therefore understands that Iago, though brave and every inch a soldier, “could not replace him were he to be killed or wounded,” as opposed to Cassio “who is courteous and diplomatic and knows the limits of war.” Thus like Satan in Paradise Lost, Iago rebels with a “sickening loss of being at rejection. . . . a sense of nullity, of no longer being what one was.” And given my limited reading, at least, it seems very controversial to contend that Othello and Desdemona never consummated their marriage.

Before ending, I should also acknowledge what Bloom – an acknowledged “Bardolator” – describes as Shakespeare’s “foregrounding” of his characters, a term which he prefers to (and tries to distinguish from) “background.” The term comes up throughout the book, and even then the author feels the need to add an unhelpful afterword to explain what he means. There, he gives credit to Emerson for the concept, which he describes as calling upon the audience “to surmise just how Falstaff and Hamlet and Edmund got to be the way they are,” an exercise which he says is “to one side of” exploring “the mysteries or enigmas of personality.” I hate to end on a note of puzzlement, but as Bloom describes it, the whole concept of foregounding, which Bloom finds so important, never becomes any more clear than what one would hear from acting coaches.

ENDNOTES

1. It must be hard for two eminent contemporaries in more or less the same field to share the same name. The two Blooms are so much alike that I much suspect Harold would have expressly acknowledged their intellectual kinship were it not for that. For Allan Bloom’s short essays in Shakespeare’s Politics are thrillingly insightful, equal to anything in Invention of the Human. And yet, when, in his chapter on Julius Caesar, Harold remarks that Shakespeare had no politics, it sounds to me little more than saying, “I am not that other man.” Incidentally, I do believe they were acquainted.

2. A touch of Bradley here: “to surmise Richard III’s bedroom behavior with wretched Anne is to indulge one’s unhealthiest fantasies.”

3. The overuse of self-conscious terms is a recurring problem. Not that it overweighs the value of his insights, but Bloom’s pomposity could be ameliorated if he were simply to stop his tedious use of academically-pretentious words like “normative” and “mimesis.” (On the other hand, his first use of “rancid” is very powerful. A few dozen uses later, it becomes tedious.) He also can’t resist some references to contemporary American partisan politics which trivializes his efforts (and which at the time of my reading are already outdated). After all, Bloom purports to have gone beyond that environment (though perhaps he sees himself as having descended beneath it) by making his fortune, if not his name, by publishing to the rest of the world. And now that he is among us, I am certain that he needn’t condescend further.

4. What he does not have is an index, which I would certainly have appreciated.

Joseph Epstein, Plausible Prejudices --

If I knew anything about how to read and review a novel, particularly modern American fiction, I would possibly be one quarter as good as Joseph Epstein. I write this not having yet read Edmund Wilson and other great critics (including Van Wyck Brooks, whom Epstein devotes an entire generous essay to[1]), but I will say with conviction that Epstein knows the game backwards and writes like a dream[2] .

It would be an insult to him to review this preeminent reviewer, but he offers some observations that are just irresistible. When he speaks of Joan Didion, he asks,

“Why make narrative seem so difficult? The trick used to be to make telling a story as straight and smooth as one could. Now it seems to be to make it as tortuous and jagged as possible.”

Of John Updike, he says,

“Can one write too well? I shouldn’t have thought so, and yet style, understood as sheer prettiness of phrasing, can cover up the absence of having anything very pressing to say – or anything to say at all.”

And again,

“it is difficult to recall an American novelist who has been convincing on the work his characters do since Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.”

In referring to modern fiction, Epstein says it “provides many laughs but very few smiles.” (He wasn’t explicitly referring to John Irving, but if the shoe fits . . . . ).

Throughout these essays, Epstein ticks off almost absent-mindedly the obvious benchmarks for doing criticism of fiction: development of character, accounts of motivation, moral resolution. But he remarks at one point that it is best that the scholar not have “the upper hand over the artist.” “Literary artists make us see things, and differently from the way we have ever seen them before; . . . . they hold out the promise of telling us important secrets that we would be fools not to want to know.”

And elsewhere: “[I]n an essay, one is aware of one’s destination, in a story one is astonished at having arrived where one has.”

One derogatory phrase he drops in reference to Ann Beattie is that she produces “fiction that is so weightless . . . events occur without cause.” Somehow that seems to capture every modern short story I can ever remember reading which was written during my lifetime. And how about this on Norman Mailer: “Thirty-five years as an enfant terrible leaves one a vieux terrible.”

But to speak of Epstein’s own writing, there would be no point to it without saying the obvious: he is very funny. It’s like reading Robert Benchly if he had been a literary critic. In fact, Epstein is so funny, that I have to resist the urge to quote him more than I have. And yet he is reliably magnanimous to his victims. Philip Roth, he says, is

“an immensely talented writer. He is always very readable. He has a fine eye for the detail and texture of social scenery. He has a splendid ear and an accompanying sense of mimicry . . . . He is famously funny, dangerously funny . . . . He has a most solid literary education. Philip Roth has in fact everything but one thing: a generous spirit.”

If there is a criticism to make of Epstein, it would be that he is too modern, too much the magazine stylist. But even if his style is breezy and wise-cracking, with a George Will-style over-familiarity with the devastating quote, he is still a most penetrating analyst. An author discussed by Epstein comes to resemble one of those magnificent bulls described by Hemingway: praised, but left in a pool of blood. And (it cannot be avoided) Epstein is always willing to evaluate most of his subjects according to the pointed distinction of whether they are “Jewish writers” or writers who happen to be Jewish. His departure point for this is Cynthia Ozick, whom I have never read. But the topic is never far from his thoughts. And although it is only stated somewhere toward the middle of this collection, Epstein asks what he says is one of the major questions about American literature of our day: Does modernism represent “a dead stop to literature’s once central place in the strivings of men?”

Finally, I cannot leave off without mentioning what I consider the best essay of the lot. It is not criticism of a particular novel or author. It is simply an essay called “Sex and Euphemism” which articulates everything which people of my age – I believe – think about the central subject of literature in the second half of the 20th Century. It’s too much, it’s too detailed, it’s too heavy, and it’s inescapable. And in Epstein’s hands, I am happy to say, it’s both hilarious and trenchant.

ENDNOTES

1. “[H]e was a literary artist, and this alone guarantees that his work will outlast other critics who have been merely correct.”

2. Perhaps I am in for a disappointment with Wilson. Epstein says that he had a distaste “not only of the mystical but of the mysterious as well” and that among others he had an antipathy towards Conrad.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory --

I generally enjoy literary criticism, but for the most part this thing reads like a Woody Allen parody. It has a contrived texture like a graduate thesis. Let it be stipulated; World War I was the great watershed of modern times. But Fussell proves this point into the ground by copious references to the literature (especially poetry) of the period and later generations. The scholarship seems sound but -- as even he acknowledges -- the raw material was often second rate. The result is that the book is no more interesting than the literature of war generally is. Furthermore, it seems to me that one of the hardest kinds of criticism to do is criticism of poetry. Some poetry, of course, is quite sturdy and can stand up to a good deal of handling. But a critic always risks breaking the spell when dealing with more fragile specimens. How does it help to write out in prose that "the daffodils are the young men of the poet's day," or some such nonsense? (This is not a quotation.) And apart from this, if he is not careful any critic can easily fall into a slightly condescending tone -- a danger which Fussell has not altogether avoided.



William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays – 

It was this summer 2012 that I saw for the first time productions of both “A Comedy of Errors” and “Henry VIII,” the only two plays I had not read or seen before. That freed me to read 1817 Hazlitt’s volume of essays, each one devoted to a specific play. The postponement was just as well. Hazlitt obviously expected the reader to be familiar with every play[1].

 

Obviously there would be no point to recapitulate his views (which are almost uniformly positive). Each essay is quite short, often no more than three or four pages, and sufficiently idiosyncratic that none of them would furnish an introduction as opposed to an afterword. But just for my own remembrance, I will record one or two things which stand out.

 

One is Hazlitt’s hesitancy about “Measure for Measure.” In general he says, it lacks “passion.”

 

“[T]he affections are at a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in all directions. The only passion which influences the story is that of Angelo; and yet he seems to have a much greater passion for hypocrisy than for his mistress. Neither are we greatly enamoured of Isabella’s rigid chastity . . . . We do not feel the same confidence in the virtue that is ‘sublimely good’ at another’s expense as if it had been put to some less disinterested trial. As to the Duke, he is more absorbed in his own plots and gravity than anxious for the welfare of the state; more tenacious of his own character than attentive to the feelings and apprehensions of others. Claudio is the only person who feels naturally . . . .”

 

“Hamlet’s” Protestant/Catholic/ancient Roman tension – not to mention the references to Wittenberg – have always led to me see it as more or less set in the mid-16^th Century. Hazlitt, by contrast, accepts “Hamlet” as being from a much earlier period when Denmark and Norway did honestly struggle, and England’s tribute to the former was expected in the Danish court. More important – though not to me – is Hazlitt’s indifference to the political implications of this drama in favor of the absolute reality of the prince’s thoughts and how forever after they have entwined themselves in our own.

 

More than a few of these sketches rely on Hazlitt’s reaction to contemporary actors’ interpretation of the parts he discusses – Mr. Kean, Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Liston. But in considering “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” he comes to grips with what he regards as the essential problem:

 

“The Midsummer’s Night Dream,” when acted, is converted from a delightful fiction into a dull pantomime. All that is finest in the play is lost in the representation. The spectacle was grand; but the spirit was evaporated, the genius was fled. – Poetry and the stage do not agree well together. The attempt to reconcile them in this instance fails not only of effect, but of decorum. The ideal can have no place upon the stage  . . . : everything there is in the foreground.”[2]

 

A few other observations. Hazlitt’s view of Shylock seems quite contemporary, but of the “Taming of the Shrew” it is not. “Twelfth Night” is “too good natured for comedy. It has little satire and no spleen. It aims at the ludicrous rather than the ridiculous.” Barnardine “is Caliban transported from Prospero’s wizard island to the forests of Bohemia or the prisons of Vienna.”

 

And finally, this heretical thought:

 

“Our idolatry of Shakespeare (not to mention our admiration) ceases with his plays. In his other productions he was a mere author . . . . It was only by representing others, that he became himself. . . . [B]ut in his own person he appeared to be always waiting for the prompter’s cue. In expressing the thoughts of others, he seemed inspired; in expressing his own, he was a mechanic.”

 

---

[1] He assigns “Titus Andronicus” to a final chapter, “Doubtful Plays,” in which he lists a half-dozen titles unfamiliar to me. He makes no mention of “Two Noble Kinsmen.”

[2] “Richard III,” by contrast, “belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet.”

Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary –

Kott was a Polish Marxist who published this book around 1961 when he was getting his bearings back. He is a wonderful reader, as good in his pessimistic way as Leo Strauss, though his Marxism is never quite suppressed.

As for the former, Kott always has a sense of what the reader – or audience – sees: a “starting point” for transmitting Shakespeare’s vision, he says, “could be the great paintings of the Renaissance and the Baroque; or tapestries, as in Richard III.” Like a man of the theatre, he always conveys a sense of the audience. His chapters on King Lear and Midsummer Night’s Dream are especially compelling, although I can’t avoid a pang when he draws a convincing parallel between Titania’s fairies and the people in a Breughel painting. (More easily digested are his parallels of The Tempest – “a great Renaissance tragedy of lost illusions” – to the world of Hieronymus Bossch, “severe, lyrical and grotesque.”)

And this is the other theme of Kott’s analysis: history, the Grand Mechanism, endlessly repeating itself as illustrated most intensely, but not exclusively, in the so-called history plays. (The formula is too mechanical to be entirely persuasive, but it gives a coherent skeleton to Kott’s interpretations that redeems the Marxist demands of the idea.) Others may see the Cotswold poet in Shakespeare; Kott will have none of it. For him, the Forest of Arden and Ilyria are Shakespeare’s “bitter Arcadia.” By Kott’s lights, Shakespeare not only saw the world clearly, he saw it as “cruel,” a word that recurs time and again in this book. Here is just the shortest sample of his view:

Shakesperean forests are real and enchanted, tragic and grotesque; pathetic and lyrical scenes are performed in them. In Shakespeare’s forest, life is speeded up, becomes more intense, violent, and at the same time, as it were, clearer. Everything acquires a double significance: the literal and the metaphorical. Everything exists for itself and is also its own reflection, generalization, archetype.

I have much less experience with Shakespeare’s sonnets than with his plays, so I only record the following comparison for future reference: Petrarch’s sonnets, Kott says, seem “transparent and pure as crystal, but cold, artificial, contrived,” while in Shakespeare “this rigid division into physical and spiritual is blurred. Good intermingles with evil, beauty with ugliness, desire with revulsion, passion with shame.” These elements are the source of Kott’s continual and prolonged digressions on androgyny in Greek and Italian art, done persuasively and with erudition, but as much for that as any other reason, unsettling and disorienting.

Now I suppose I understand the subtitle of Twelfth Night, a bland almost smug invitation to a sexual smorgasbord of desire, and although I always sensed a theme or regret in that play, now I regret I know why. And I cannot say with more emphasis how much this book deserves a second reading.

George Orwell, Dickens, Dali, and Others --

I know that Dickens is in some disfavor in these times, and maybe Orwell is one of the reasons. (Robert Graves had his say too.) But my reaction reading this plausible work of literary criticism was that I was reading one author whom I respect criticizing another whom I respect even more.

None of Orwell's routine criticisms (the Dickens prolixity, the "iron bound" plots, etc.) is off the mark, just irrelevant. Like Melville, Dickens is a force of nature. It is impossible to imagine him doing anything else but writing novels. (Melville actually did have another life.) Orwell's method is to call attention, often brilliantly, to countless Dickens peculiarities and I think he would agree that most of these idiosyncrasies are badges of the genius. But not all of them. It is Orwell's own eccentricity that he believes too fervently in a planned society (benevolent, of course) and he is thus noticeably agitated because Dickens does no more than illustrate immorality without positing some reform. This, to Orwell, means that Dickens is not "intellectually curious."

The other essays in this small collection are not so thorough as the one on Dickens, but they do still show his characteristic attention to accuracy. The one on Dali, for example, does not dismiss his art (Orwell thinks Dali is a wonderful "draftsman"), but it completely dismisses the man himself as a repulsive, self-publicizing necrophiliac. The essay on boys' magazines, a topic the old New Yorker would have been pleased to feature, is not much of a success because for all the writer's earnestness and attention to detail, the subject matter never ceases to be insignificant.

Walter Pater, Studies in The History of The Renaissance --

In the 1870s, when these essays were first published, if anyone who hadn't taken the Grand Tour had in mind a mental picture of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" or Michelangelo's "David," it most likely came from an etching in the frontispiece of a book. There were no mass media, no television, no color plate books, no widespread photographic books at all. For most people a discussion of the "Mona Lisa" would have been little more than hypothetical.

That may be the reason why Pater's efforts were so influential, at least within his own realm. Pater is essentially an art critic, and it seems to me that his meditations on art are at best an introduction to the wider meaning of the Renaissance. I gather that he more or less single-handedly rediscovered and called Europe's attention to the art of the Renaissance which he describes as a self-conscious effort to reconsider Christianity in light of Classic pre-Christian art forms. But this must be strictly a reference to the art, because it seems to me that at the same time philosophy was moving in precisely the opposite direction, breaking with the Mosaic law and the Platonic view of the ideal.

Pater's general approach appears to be to analyze the art for its facets -- not what is universal about it but what is distinctive. The word "sweet" appears with persuasive regularity and this has much more appeal to me than the art criticism I come across these days which appears to rely almost exclusively on the "artist's" iconoclasm or willingness to "shock" as an index of his greatness. [1]

Apparently from the very first appearance of these essays, Pater's writing style was remarked upon and even criticized. For some reason, however, the style presents no problem to me, though I have the impression that Pater must have been quite donnish. Is that blameworthy? He closes with his famous remark about burning with a "hard, gemlike flame," apparently as advice to the young men whose impressionability caused him to delete the remark from the second edition of the book.
Endnotes
1. This probably comes from Rousseau who, as Leo Strauss says, foreshadowed the modern "artist" as one who justifies his transcendence of civil society by demanding privileged treatment "based on his sensitivitry rather than on his wisdom, on his goodness or compassion rather than on his virtue." Natural Right and History.


A.L. Rowse, Prefaces to Shakespeare’s Plays –

Almost two decades ago there was some sort of a public controversy about Shakespeare. I don’t remember what it was – the “newly-discovered” poem, perhaps. But one result was a discussion segment which I watched on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. I also don’t remember the participants – except one of them. It was the disagreeable Mr. Rowse.

Rowse was obviously on the program because of his credentials, which are considerable. But he was an amazing boor. That’s something that would normally be forgotten by a casual observer. But it was unforgettable. Short of vulgar language, he could not have been more obnoxious, a trait which is also front and center in this book which predates that television appearance.

If I am not mistaken, Rowse’s chief claim to fame was that it was he who deduced the identity of the “dark lady” from the sonnets. He did this admirably, if I recall the report of his methodology which he includes in Shakespeare, The Man. But Rowse evidently concluded that that worthy achievement elevated him into the first rank of Shakesperean critics. But he is not a particularly good critic. Instead, his strength would appear to lie in his familiarity with the Elizabethan age in general, which he mistakenly confuses with insights into the poetry. To be sure, in many senses his remarks are extremely helpful in understanding a difficult passage. He frequently disentangles some problematic vocabulary, for example, and he makes valuable use of the “timeline.” By calling attention to events contemporaneous with the writing and publication of various plays, he will often form helpful connections between scenes and actual events. He repeatedly stresses the historical relationship between the youthful Southhampton, Shakespeare’s patron, and the dangerous Essex, as it might throw light on plot developments in the plays. He persuasively shows a link between Polonius and the old lord Burleigh. Sometimes, particularly in his emphasis on Shakespeare’s rural roots and references, Rowse will speculate that a play may have been written while the writer was back home in Stratford. He reports that in the 1570's there was a drowning of a girl (whose last name was Hamlet!) in the Avon River.

But Rowse at best gives only occasional evidence that he understands the larger aspects of what Shakespeare means. One derives more from the observations of Harley Granville-Barker, a theatrical producer, whose title Rowse has unabashedly borrowed for this book. Much of Rowse’s presentation is little more than dogmatic irritability that he somehow “knows” what other critics do not know. The cut and thrust of vigorous scholarship admits to this approach only when it is supported by reliable evidence, credible refutation of the opposing evidence, and plausible argument. But from my standpoint as nothing more than a willing auditor, Rowse falls flat on his face in two of these three categories. His interpretation of Iago’s character is excellent because it is supported by dextrous references to the text; his asseverations about Hamlet are no more than ipse dixit.

It is a risky business to claim all knowledge when writing about a subject, i.e. Shakespeare, who truly did demonstrate that he knew more than anyone else. So while I will continue to look periodically at what Rowse has to say, I have already found considerably better sources about understanding Shakespeare in Granville-Barker, A.C. Bradley, Allan Bloom, and Dr. Johnson.