As a foreword, I would like to give you a little reminder that, I think, is not useless: everything has already been said about art. I would even add, everything has already been well-said. Famous men and women took turns to assert that art was the purpose of life, or that it was useless and that it was its value ; that it was political or a-political ; that we could use In Search of Lost Time as toilet paper once we had finished reading it or that we would accompany Dante to hell if we dared only to have the idea of committing such barbarism. Why this preamble, then? To tell you that what I am going to tell you next is useless?
Somehow, yes.
But above all, to invite you to consider everything I am going to write with a critical distance. I would like to suggest to you a variety of ideas that I have found relevant or, at least, interesting; they are not positions one should then adopt and defended until the end of his days.
We’ve all been through this phase of questioning once in our life : should I read classic books, or should I rather prefer to read the most recent novel published? The ideal answer would, of course, tend to be: read both. But, as time is ticking, there are choices to be made. Trying to find an answer to this question, I’ve decided to read books about reading books. And one of them particularly caught my attention, for it was extremely thought-provoking : Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994).
Harold Bloom is an interesting character. Hateable, perhaps; but interesting.
He is the one who called feminist critics “the school of resentment”. Well, that’s not so kind. But don’t stop reading here, and leave me a few more lines to convince you that he deserves your interest. On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that the type of feminist reading he was criticizing was, in fact, rather unproductive — they were, like Elaine Showalter, critics who only sought in their reading the political aspect and ended up forgetting aesthetics, and were then criticised by a second wave of feminist critics. The feminist theory has since changed, and no longer deserves such an appellation.
But, above all, Harold Bloom is an immense reader, of rare scholarship; he is part of the bourgeois elite and aware of it, and defines the canon according to values that are not ours, and he is aware of it. But what he says is not just a bunch of nonsense, and his analyses of literary works are usually very well-regarded in the literary world. Let’s give him a chance, then, I thought.
What is the canon?
For Bloom, the canon defines a set of immortal pieces that build on each other and have governed the cultural life of the West since their appearance. In short, although The Tale of Genji is a work of rare quality, it is not part of the Western canon because it has not had enough influence in the West to change its aesthetic values.
The idea that canonical writings are immortal comes from Petrarch, and was developed by our Shakespeare (after all, one is never better served than by oneself, and now Shakespeare is not far from immortality). Bloom dates the appearance of the “secular canon”, the one approved by the authors, to the 1850s, which is the end of the period of sensitivity and of the sublime. Bloom points that there are canonizing instances, which constitute lists. The universities and literary academies, for one; in France, we can mention the collection of the Pleiade, which is undoubtedly the best definition of a canonizing body. But there are other kind of lists, like all those lists you see on the internet called “The 50 Best Books You Ever Need To Read” and so on: although most of them are maybe worthless, they create lists, which are, in their own ways, canons.
Which books deserve to be included in the canon?
One only enters the canon according to aesthetic criteria, according to Bloom. That’s only partly true : one must of course add to this first criteria the idea of accessibility, because a book is only canonizable if it can be (materially) read — the idea of the “accessible canon” has thus been proposed by Alastair Fowler. “Canonization cannot be ideological”, since one can only “access the canon from an aesthetic power” that can be judged by the yardstick of “mastery of figurative language”, “originality”, “cognitive strength” and “the exuberance of fiction”, according to Bloom.
From an aesthetic point of view, it is “a strangeness, a mode of originality that cannot be assimilated, or that assimilates us in such a way that we stop seeing it as strange” that will make a piece become classic. Thus, Bloom defines Dante’s work as “a strangeness that we can never quite assimilate”, while Shakespeare would rather develop a strangeness “that becomes so familiar that we are blinded to its particularities”.
“In powerful writing, there is always a conflict, an ambivalence, a contradiction between the subject and the structure,” he writes. For Bloom, one of the greatest masterpieces of literature, because of his “story beyond irony and tragedy”, who invented “the ambivalence between the divine and the human”, is nothing less than the Hebrew Bible, with its God (Yahweh) with human traits (he drinks, he eats, he is unfair and revengeful).
The canon is perpetuated by a phenomenon that Bloom calls “the anguish of influence”: “every powerful literary creation is built on a creative misreading error, and, by the same token, misinterprets a precursor text”. The reading of the precursory texts thus becomes a basis for a new creation: “a fresh metaphor […] always implies as a starting point another metaphor” and is constructed from its rejection.
Bloom, although deeply in love with Shakespeare, acknowledges, for example, that in the first plays of the Bard, the characters he develops are copies of Marlowe’s, his great competitor; fortunately, he then emancipates them and makes them more subtle. So much so that, for all those who follow, “Shakespeare remains a problem”.
What is the canon’s purpose ?
On this point, Bloom is very clear: reading Homer and Dante “will not make us become better citizens”, since “art is perfectly useless.” Didn’t Oscar Wilde himself say that “all bad poetry is sincere”?
In this sense, it is necessary to distinguish between cultural theories, which look at literary works in order to seek and compensate for social inequalities, and literary theories, which are elitist and claim to be elitist. Consequently, aesthetic principles should not be judged according to social conflicts, but only according to the “individual self”, for Bloom. Dante and Milton would not have sacrificed their poem for a political cause; if we choose to focus on their poetry from a non-literary perspective, it is therefore appropriate to identify the cause with the poem rather than the poem with the cause. Bloom defends that their writing are “forms broader than any social program”.
In short, we must not be inspired by the moral values that can be found in the works of the canon, for fear of being transformed into “monsters of selfishness”. But the real interest of art is “to increase the individual essence of a person”, and also to allow “the correct use of solitude”.
That’s all a very conservative vision of the canon. But Bloom’s argument is that this is what defines the canon: the canon is conservative, because it is something that is built by looking at the past, or rather, by knowing that the past is looking at you.
Bloom is not saying that the Western canon is better than the Eastern canon; he only argues that our culture has been shaped according to a very conservative mechanism, and the we should acknowledge it. That doesn’t mean that we shall not read books from a distinct literary tradition; in our ever-changing world, maybe are we freed from this old cultural influence — though I kind of doubt that. However, I do really think that Bloom’s got a point: if we want to understand the particularity of an artwork, we do need to have notions about the artist’s design when he conceived it. And, from this perspective, reading books from the Western canon’s different stages is incredibly mind-opening: you’ll understand how Shakespeare reinvented Petrarch, how Hawhthorne fed on Shakespeare, the influence it had on Hemingway and, ultimately, probably, the way it influenced Game of Thrones.
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