The late Time magazine “culture critic” William A. Henry III’s posthumously published In Defense of Elitism (212 pages. Doubleday. $20) says what all these books say: that “the wrong side has been winning.” So what else is new? Not much but an oddball rant on lotteries: “the most destructive egalitarian maneuver of my lifetime.” Henry’s Limbaughian urge to give gratuitous offense (“It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose”) seems novel only when he mentions his awards for civil-rights reporting and flashes liberal credentials. “I am a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union,” he writes. “At a party in Washington some months ago I hurriedly crossed the room to avoid even being introduced to Pat Buchanan.” They still talk about it.
At least New York Times “national cultural correspondent” Richard Bernstein went out and confronted the enemy, though the multiculturalist apparatchiks we meet in his Dictatorship of Virtue (367 pages. Knopf. $25)–diversity trainers, teachers, academic bureaucrats–seem to be disappointingly decent folks. Still, there’s grim entertainment value in the anecdotes–like the third-grade girl forced to stand before the class and justify her opposition to abortion – and jargon infuriating enough to tone up your system. One educator seeks to put the child “in a lateral relation to her own learning,” and avoids speaking of the “lower” grades: too hierarchical. But for an upholder of standards, Bern-stein is a little shaky on “like” and “as,” and he calls one controversy a “causus [he means casus] belli.” So caveat emptor.
Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (578 pages. Harcourt Brace. $29.95) sounds like yet another anti-multi-culti screed: ooh, two naughty words in one title. In fact, it’s a lit-crit celebrity’s idiosyncratic version of the survey course your school should have made you take; the title and Bloom’s haphazard but oh-so-controversial list of contemporary writers who might make the cut (reportedly the publisher’s idea) should help it outsell his 20 other books combined. Bloom gives us to understand right from the get-go that “mimic cultural wars do not much interest me”; they’re mere “journalistic events.” Yet they provide what we ink-stained wretches call a peg, on which to hang provocative if sometimes flaky chapters on 26 writers from Chaucer to Beekett, framed by reader-friendly renderings of his own agonistic vision of literary influence. (It’s an ideal introduction to the undiluted Bloom of “The Anxiety of Influence” or “A Map of Misreading.”) “Any strong literary work,” he writes, “creatively misreads … a precursor text … Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival.”
As Bloom notes–or maybe “exults”–such literary Darwinism has gone out of fashion. “Feminist cheerleaders proclaim that women writers lovingly cooperate with one another as quilt makers,” he writes. “But … such optimistic pronouncements are neither true nor interesting and go against both human nature and the nature of imaginative literature.” Bloom scorns to defend great books for their “relevance”; their only value is esthetic. “If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation … All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude.” His crowning affront to egalitarian orthodoxy is to claim that books get canonized for their “weirdness”–Bloom-speak for “uniqueness.” Nothing in literature, he says, is as “sublimely outrageous” as Dante getting the grand tour of heaven from Beatrice, his unrequiting earthly love.
If you expect Bloom to hold your hand and walk you through these books, forget it. He never quite explains why Freud is “essentially prosified Shakespeare,” why Walt Whitman and not somebody else is “the center of the American canon” or why a particularly opaque Emily Dickinson poem he wrestles with to no conclusion is worth the work. (Bloom just likes to wrestle: he reread Alice Walker’s “Meridian” to make sure it wasn’t worth rereading.) In praising canonical writers Bloom often sidesteps their canonical writings: he discusses Woolf’s “Orlando,” not “To the Lighthouse”; Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” not “Tin-tern Abbey”; Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murad,” not “Anna Karenina.” What Bloom communicates isn’t objective truth about these works (whatever that would be) but sheer gusto. Who could resist checking out “Hadji Murad,” for instance, after being told that “it is my personal touchstone for the sublime of fiction, to me the best story in the world”? Bloom thinks readers of his ilk, with their personal touchstones and their imperial solitude, will end up as marginal as the folks they used to marginalize. Scary stuff. Meanwhile, his book’s doing nicely.
“If I could have one book, it would be a complete Shakespeare; if two, that and a Bible. If three? There the complexities begin.” Here’s Bloom on some contenders:
Harold Bloom writes in “The Western Canon” that he hopes his book “does not turn out to be an elegy.” Yet Bloom, 64, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, now doubts that literary studies will survive. The elegiac tone creeps into both his book and his conversation – only to be chased off by his indignation. At home in New Haven, he spoke with NEWSWEEK’S Ken Shulman.
I am very unhappy with current attempts throughout the universities of the Western world by a group I have called “the school of resentment” to put the arts, and literature in particular, in the service of social change. The utility of literature is to teach us not how to talk to others, but how to talk to ourselves. And the function of the critic is to make one aware both of the sorrows and of the very occasional and rather perilous glories of what it means to be condemned to talk to oneself. A proper use of Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy and Cervantes and the other writers of the very highest order is to teach us both to fill out and to temper that conversation with ourselves.
Literature. They resent difficulty. And I suppose they resent the discipline to which they apparently apprenticed themselves, only to discover that they resented it more than they supported it. If they really believe that their function is to address the admittedly terrible plight of people who are trapped in the inner cities of America, who are trapped in the eroded wastelands of our decaying farm belt and elsewhere, they shouldn’t be teaching literature. They ought to become social and political and economic activists and devote their lives to serving the poor. They should strive to better the condition of those who are indeed insulted by the horrible inequities of our abominable system. But the truth is that they could not care less. I am one of the few professors from Yale from a workingclass background. And I believe that I can smell a hypocrite in these matters from a considerable distance.
They are pseudo-Marxists, pseudo-feminists, watery disciples of Foucault and other French theorists. And they are transparently at work propagating themselves in our universities, making sure that only those who hold their precise views receive appointments and advancement. 1 would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. Increasingly, those studies are being taken over by the astonishing garbage called “cultural criticism.” At NYU I am surrounded by professors of hip-hop. At Yale, I am surrounded by professors far more interested in various articles on the compost heap of so-called popular culture than in Proust or Shakespeare or Tolstoy. I am aware that I am fighting a rear-guard action, and that the war is over and we have lost.
Partly the staples of popular culture, and partly, to use that dreadful phrase, “politically correct” works. A dear friend who teaches English at the University of Chicago told me with great gusto how she had led the fight to replace the stories of Ernest Hemingway with the works of the Chicano-American writer Gary Soto in her introductory course on literature. Now Hemingway, at his very best, is just about as good as Chekhov or Joyce -that is to say, about as good as a short-story -writer can be. While Gary Soto couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. When I told her this, she replied that she and I could go home and read whatever we wanted to at night. I find her attitude a kind of social fascism, as if esthetic considerations were all right for us, but are not proper for all students. I find that outrageous.
