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The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

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Since I am one of the "general readers" to whom Harold Bloom directed The Western Canon, I am not qualified to judge his critical opinions. All I can say is that Mr. Bloom's descriptions of canonical works made these works and their authors sound so rewarding that I began to read them. As soon as I read the chapter on George Eliot, I had to read Middlemarch. As soon as I read Mr. Bloom's description of Jane Austen's Persuasion, I had to read that novel. Especially compelling is Mr. Bloom's description of the competitive drive that pushes strong authors to attempt to write their way out of the shadows of earlier literary giants - a phenomenon that he terms "the anxiety of influence." This concept is most useful, Mr. Bloom argues, in helping us to understand Shakespeare's place at the center of the canon.

I began reading The Western Canon one year ago, and since that time I have, under Mr. Bloom's guidance, sampled hearty portions of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Eliot, Beckett and Proust, and have read tidbits of Whitman, Dante and Joyce as well. Harold Bloom is the teacher we all long for but seldom find; to him and to The Western Canon I owe the most intellectually rewarding year of my life.

Harold Bloom has been, arguably, the world's best reader, the most wide-ranging and the most retentive. Some people believe his book, The Western Canon, verges on the audacious since Bloom dares to list what Western literary works are canonical as well as what ones will be.

While the appendices, with their lists of books, are the section of The Western Canon that provokes the most argument, these take up relatively few of the book's 578 pages. Bloom begins with a "Preface and Prelude," then indicates the mood the book will assume in "An Elegy for the Canon." Adopting Giambattista Vico's theory of history, Bloom then goes on to discuss twenty-six writers from different ages of literature. From the Aristocratic Age: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Johnson and Goethe; from the Democratic Age: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy and Ibsen; and from the Chaotic Age: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. Just before the appendices is the "Elegiac Conclusion," in which Bloom says he has "very little confidence that literary education will survive its current malaise," but he hopes that there will be "literate survivors."

Early in the book, Bloom tells us that he is not interested in the debate among those want to preserve the Western canon and those who want to destroy it. Instead, Bloom is interested only in literary aesthetics and he claims that canonicity comes "only by aesthetic strength, which is constituted primarily of an amalgam: mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction." Bloom believes in the existence of canons, he says, because the very brevity of life prevents us from reading more than a fraction of the literature created by various authors throughout the centuries.

The Western Canon is more than an interesting book; it is also very thought-provoking. Some of the questions raised include: Is canonicity always the result of one writer's triumph over a great literary ancestor? Do not canons, to some degree, depend on the choices of the wealthy as well as on chance, luck or other devices of caprice? Does Bloom put too much emphasis on cognitive difficulty, choosing books that few readers outside of universities would ever want to read, much less reread? Then there is the excessive praise of Shakespeare as the entire center of the Western Canon. Is this perceptive criticism or does it cross the line into idolatry?

There are those who believe Bloom is too quick to dismiss the moral value of literature. Shelley, they say, went too far in his Defence of Poetry in praising great literature for enlarging a reader's imagination and thus leading to moral improvement. But Bloom, say the same critics, fails to go far enough in acknowledging the moral implications inherent in all great literature.

The greatest arguments, however, are reserved for the lists at the end of the book. How could Bloom leave out this author and include that? Why is this book included and that one is not? But even the critics have to praise Bloom for the breadth of his lists; his idea of the Western canon includes authors from the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Asia, Africa, the West Indies and South America. Bloom even notes The Mahabharata and the Ramayana and says that "ignorance of the Koran is foolish and increasingly dangerous." Bloom has also included English-language works by writers whom one would not necessarily think of as Western, for example: R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Another source of controversy has been the (almost) exclusion of female authors. Bloom does mention Alice Walker even before he gets to his lists, but he refuses to say anything good about her. Regarding the works of Toni Morrison, Bloom sees fit to include only Song of Solomon in the canon. He omits all works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Ayn Rand, Bobbie Ann Mason and Pearl Buck. To be fair, Bloom leaves out a number of male authors as well, authors whom one would have assumed would have been included such as John Gardner, John Updike (represented only by The Witches of Eastwick) and Arthur Miller (represented only by Death of a Salesman).

Although some have accused Bloom of composing a canon made up of Dead White European Males, he does include several American authors in his lists as well as devoting half chapters to Jane Austen and George Eliot and full chapters to Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf, all of whom he praises lavishly.

The Western Canon will never be beyond argument and debate, that is simply an impossibility. People will always disagree with Bloom on one point or another. In the final analysis, Bloom, this century's greatest reader, has treated an enormously important topic with tremendous expertise. And, although an eccentric par excellence, Bloom has definitely compiled astute reading suggestions and critical opinions that certainly deserve anyone's careful consideration.

I first read this book about nine or so years ago, and I reread parts of it almost every day. So why am I just now getting around to reviewing it? Well for one thing I didn't have internet access when I bought it. But, I figured it's time to give the master his due.

This book has had the greatest influence on me of any book I have read in recent memory, for many reasons. To begin with, Bloom's erudition is staggering. That he could read all that he has, and in addition retain and catalogue all of it, is simply beyond my comprehension. Bloom focuses on 28 authors he considers canonical and provides extensive descriptions and quotations from their work. If I understand Bloom correctly, he regards these authors as comprising the Western Canon, but he also has an appendix listing hundreds of authors that, I think, comprise the national canons of different countries. Whatever. But Bloom's importance lies in providing vivid enough descriptions of some major works so that one is motivated to read them. In my own case, at least, he has succeeded brilliantly.

Solely because of this book, in the past few years I have done all of the following, which I might not otherwise have done: 1) Read Goethe's "Faust," Parts I and II. Part II is absolutely wild, and is every bit as great as Bloom says. 2) Read "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, which Bloom regards as the greatest English novel. It probably is. 3) Seen a production of "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett. Not my cup of tea, but it piques discussion at least. 4) Read several novels by Cormac McCarthy, beginning with "Blood Meridian." Bloom regards McCarthy as one of many successors to Shakespeare. Bloom is right; McCarthy is a powerful writer. I don't think I had ever heard of him before I read Bloom. 5) Read "Persuasion" by Jane Austen; Bloom regards this as Austen's greatest novel. 6) Read "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges.

No other author has so influenced me to expand my range of reading as Bloom. However, I do not share Bloom's pessism. He sees literacy as in decline, which it probably is. However, the literary acumen with which previous generations have been gifted is probably being replaced by a new set of audio-visual skills that are more related to electronic media. Whether this is as tragic a thing as Bloom seems to think it is will have to be determined by history, but I don't think it is. Unfortunately, Bloom is a follower of Vico's historical theories, which envision the current chaotic age being replaced by a theocratic age. I simply cannot envision that happening in the western democracies. But we won't know until this writer, at least, is long gone from this world.

There is nothing better than a good book discussion. Everyone who takes reading seriously has ideas on what the best and most important books are. Certainly Harold Bloom is a serious reader and in this book he offers us his insights into some of the highlights of the past 500 years in Western literature. Even so, in 500 pages he is able to give us only about 25 authors. Fortunately, he also gives us a number of appendices listing many others.

At the head of Bloom's "western canon" is, not surprisingly, William Shakespeare. In fact, I would probably agree with Bloom on the basic fact of Shakespeare's importance to Western literature; however, if there is a weakness in Bloom's book, it his constant references to Shakespeare throughout the book. I admire Shakespeare as probably the single greatest dramatist in English but I do not think everything written since is simply a homage or reaction to Shakespeare. Shakespeare changed all of literature after him but he had his sources. Shakespeare was a source for writers after him but Cervantes, Montaigne, Whitman, Kafka and others altered our literature in ways that have no relationship to Shakespeare.

I also have trouble with the idea that Falstaff is the most important Shakespearean character or that King Lear is the most important play. When Bloom focuses on these ideas he reveals his prejudices. He also reveals himself as an old man. We all relate most closely to those characters in which we can see our reflection. I somehow doubt that Falstaff was Bloom's favorite when he was in his twenties.

Still, despite his obsession with Shakespeare, Bloom's intellect and experience range wide. He has a number of wonderful insights into the various authors he discusses and I admire his belief in the importance of literature. It is a belief that I share. Additionally, I enjoy Bloom's digs at feminist, Marxist and Freudian criticism. Though I feel they have made some important contributions to literary criticism, I would agree with Bloom's assertions concerning the damage they have done as well. I agree strongly with the idea that a book must earn a place in the canon by its brilliance and originality; not simply because it was written by a woman or a minority.

But, ultimately, we need not worry too much about the canon, I think. Books are suffering these days, it is true, but reading will never become obsolete and so literature will survive. And the canon will constantly reinvent itself as books are rediscovered and authors go in and out of vogue. (Even Shakespeare's popularity waxes and wanes.) Still, whether in a peak of popularity or a trough, some authors and their works will always be read and studied and this is how an author makes it to the canon. It is not a position granted by literature professors, no matter how much they wish it might be so. But it's nice to have professor's like Bloom to keep us talking about it.

Bloom adopted Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history for organization of the western canon. Vico proposed that history is divided into three ages: an age of gods, an age of heroes, and an age of men followed by a chaos out of which a new historical cycle will begin. After his introductory Elegy for the Canon, Bloom skips the Theocratic Age, proceeding to the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, the Chaotic Age, and his Elegiac Conclusion. Each age has 6-8 chapters, each chapter devoted to an author or group of authors. The authors are, in order: Aristocratic: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Goethe; Democratic: Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen; Chaotic: Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa, and Beckett.

He begins with Shakespeare whom he calls the center of the canon. Bloom exalts Shakespeare almost to a godlike state in his aesthetic zeal. In fact, every other author in the book is related to Shakespeare in some way. For example, Chaucer's Pardoner, he says, was a prototype for Shakespeare's Iago and Edmund. Tolstoy, he says, could not handle the influence of Shakespeare in his works so much so that he had to disavow him in his essay What is art?. The reason Freud believed Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford is that he could not himself reckon with Shakespeare's greatness and Freud's reading of Shakespeare was really Shakespeare's reading of life.

Bloom can appear at times a little too radical in some of his statements. For example he claims that the Jesus of the American religion is not the true Jesus of Nazareth, of the Crucifixion, or of heaven but only the Jesus of the Resurrection. He says that the Jesus Christians worship is a literary figure created by the writer of the Gospel of Mark. He exalts the search for aesthetic greatness above all else in canonical works, even dismissing morality in them past the point of serving its aesthetic purpose. But he can be forgiven some of his university gobbledygook.

The real thesis of the book is that the feminists, Marxists, new historicists, deconstructonists, Freudians, and other ideologues that are taking over the universities are wrong that the western canon, just because it is made up of a bunch of dead white males, is outdated. He defends the western canon very effectively, especially against adding period authors just because of their ethnicity or gender. He argues for the aesthetic merit and place in the canon of each of the authors he covers in the chapters eloquently and justly. I dare anyone who reads this review to read this book and you will be converted, too.

Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages is centered around the concept of a literary canon, which Bloom describes as "what has been preserved out of what has been written." The term canon is religious in origin, initially referring to wisdom literature chosen for inclusion into Scripture by the Christian Church. Bloom's book addresses the preservation issue, that is, how do we choose what to preserve and grant canonical status? The current canon debate seems to have arisen from a more modern definition of the term, referring to the books chosen by our institutions for teaching. Bloom asserts that a recent emergence of politically-motivated attacks will result in the imminent displacement of the traditional Western Canon from our schools' curriculum. Bloom accordingly names his first chapter "An Elegy for the Canon" and identifies two factions in the canon debate: the right-wing element that defends the canon with appeals to Platonic arguments of moral good, and the left wing "journalistic-academic" element Bloom names the School of Resentment that attacks the canon with appeals to Aristotelian arguments for a work's supposed social good. Bloom claims both disinterest and disassociation with this political debate and argues that both sides are misguided in their approach. Bloom then dedicates the remainder of his book to explaining why the attackers and defenders are misguided in their criteria and offering his own arguments for canonical inclusion. The essential criteria that Bloom advocates is one rooted in tradition and purely artistic considerations: for Bloom, the only true test of literary excellence is aesthetic quality, a criteria that judges a work based on its artistic merit alone and is unconcerned with political, moral, or social issues.

Bloom is possibly the preeminent literary critic in America and is well-known for his theory of the anxiety of influence, reflecting his belief that, "there can be no strong, canonical writing without the process of literary influence." Bloom contends that, "any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts" and that "tradition is not only a handing-down process or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration...[a] conflict [that] cannot be settled by social concerns, or by the judgement of any particular generation of impatient idealists."

Bloom places Shakespeare and Dante at the center of the Western Canon and claims that any writers who follow must inevitably wrestle with their greatness. This bold contention is a courageous and provocative one that requires a satisfying justification. But Bloom, in accordance with his reputation, rises to the challenge, surveying the vast landscape of literary criticism and presenting the greatest passages of analysis on the reasons for Shakespeare's greatness. Although many critics are quoted, the German writer Goethe is granted the final word: "Shakespeare confers on [his characters] intelligence and imagination; and by means of the image in which they, by virtue of that intelligence, contemplate themselves objectively, as a work of art, he makes them free artists of themselves." Bloom subsequently concludes that the singular excellence of Shakespeare is "his power of representation of human character and personality and their mutabilities" and leaves us with the observation that "at once no one and everyone, nothing and everything, Shakespeare IS the Western Canon."

In the remaining chapters, Bloom continues his analysis of the major canonical figures, carefully applying his criteria of aesthetic value throughout. The chapters are organized according to age: the Aristocratic Age, the Democratic Age, and the Chaotic Age (understood to begin with the twentieth-century and including the present day). The major figures include Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, and a few others. The Appendix offers a suggested reading list of well over 500 authors from all ages that Bloom considers worthy of reading.

Bloom's book serves as a touchstone for literary criticism and the teaching of literature, and I would certainly recommend it for both academic and public libraries. The reader follows an experienced and formidable literary critic in his analysis of the strongest literary works. In the process, the reader learns a great deal about literary textual analysis and our body of Western literature. The reader also gains a sense of the current debate surrounding the canon in our universities and the present nature of literary criticism as it is being practiced. Bloom cannot hide that he is most disturbed *not* by the right wing moralists but the academics in the School of Resentment who aim to replace aesthetic value and high standards with a program for social justice as the principal criteria of literary excellence. Bloom extends his lament by discussing other elements of contemporary society, including MTV, short attention spans, inpatient readers, failing public schools, professors of cultural politics, the loss of love for reading and good literature, and the predicted conversion of Departments of English to literature-depleted Departments of Cultural Studies. In the end, even if you don't fully share his views, you cannot help but sympathize with Bloom's genuine concerns, be moved by his cogent arguments, and respect his learned and masterful analysis of the literary art he loves so well.

I have said lots about Bloom in reviews of his other books. Suffice it to say that he was a literary genius who took advantage of his odd sleeping patterns and low need for sleep to read scores of books a week for his whole life. Therefore, I appreciate Bloom for his encylopedic knowledge of literature. And don't think he hasn't read contemporary multi-cultural works -- it's just that he never loses his perspective because he can hold the classics in his hands along with new works and compare them in an unbiased way. Like his book on Shakespeare, this book's main virtue is that it will inspire both the inexperienced reader and the long time reader to pick up many of these masterpieces and read them (or reread them). For that alone, Bloom deserves praise. You may not always agree with him, but you cannot help but be in awe of his knowledge base which extends from the biblical to the modern with few gaps. I found the reading list helpful as well. Of course he leaves out many great authors, but he's not trying to be all inclusive and that shouldn't stop you from seeking out other great works of literature. This is a great introduction to many great works that deserve to be read by any thinking person.

Perfect for a serious reader who has no clue what literature is all about -- people like me who majored in chemistry and biology and haven't read literature since middle school. Harold Bloom is the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, so this is like auditing the lectures of a great professor -- "tuition" is the price of the book. This is an easy book to speed read. Simply read the first three pages of each chapter, and then you will have an understanding of the 26 authors that form the canon of western literature. Once you have done that, you can go back and read each chapter over and over again. When starting a new book by one of the 26 authors, I first read Bloom's chapter on that author and go from there. The "appendix" includes ALL of the western canon -- hundreds of authors and thousands of books. (By the way, his comments on the Koran and Islam are prescient; remember, he wrote this book in 1994 and anticipated 9/11.)

I am still trying to understand how (almost) every single reviewer (good and bad, conservative and liberal) treats this book as if it were some sort of critical Mount Everest: to be Quixotically assaulted as a throwback to ignorant pre-Deconstructionist days, or to be ludicrously extolled as a Conservative Holy Grail, preserving the sacred works amidst a Gomorrah of Feminist studies and the like. For the book is simply this: An account of one person's love of literature and an elaboration thereof. Bloom continually reiterates (and all reviewers admit this, without going any further) that Bloom contends that the criteria of works of art should be aesthetic: not political, social, theoretical etc. But all this means is that books shoud be judged on whether they appeal to you, whether they move you, whether you have come to love them: "aesthetic" comes from a Greek word meaning "to feel." Personally, I think his Bardolatry is mostly ludicrous. But this is Bloom's book, not mine. While, on the other hand, his chapter on Emily Dickinson is the most profound and moving I have ever read on her poetry. It is aesthetic. It moved me. I loved it. So there. My disagreements with him don't really matter to me because no two people are going to see eye-to-eye on everything, and I don't regard this book as prescriptive. It is descriptive. It is descriptive of views that have come to be held by a literary genius and great lover of the written word over a long period of time. I appreciate it and (yes) love it on that level. It has no theory, per se, to promote, no cause to advocate, no fight to pick (Bloom himself likes to say, regarding literary fads and theories, "Whatever it is, I'm against it."). Yes, he's rather down in the mouth about the current state of academia. But aren't you down in the mouth about something too? The Western Canon has likes and dislikes. It is idiosyncratic. It is aesthetic. It is irrational. It is insane. I love it.

You will see below a review which points out a perceived contradiction in Bloom's book. Apparently, according to the reviewer, Bloom's idea that the value of a work is primarily aesthetic undermines his other argument: that authors form their works based on agon, or anxiety about and misreading of previous works. In reality, Bloom's argument is incredibly consistent, but to see the consistency requires an understanding of what "aesthetics" are, an understanding lost in today's ideological deconstructionist academies. The term aesthetics, as Aristotle and all critics until about 1950 seemed to know, refers to the structure of a work. Structure includes, among other elementary categories, plot devices, figurative language, and characterization.

Given this (appropriate) definition, Bloom's master argument is perfectly coherent. When he discusses the influence of Shakespeare on Milton, for instance, he compares the way the two authors paint characters. And creating characters is an aesthetic activity. When Bloom compares the figurative language between works, he again draws our attention to aesthetics. And so on.

Bloom's overall point, in making his argument for aesthetics, is that authorial anxiety and misprison about previous canonical works is not based on ideology. The influence of Shakespeare on Milton was clearly not ideological, it was artistic. Shakespeare himself, as far as his works reveal, had no ideology. This is precisely why Bloom puts him at the head of the Western canon. Western authors following Shakespeare had to contend with the Bard's aesthetic mastery and not, obviously, his nonexistent ideology.

The canon, then, defined as works which have had the most aesthetic influence for the longest period of time on other authors, is an organic structure, developing naturally out of Oedipal artistic jealously. Bloom's master theory consciously serves as a corrective to arguments such as one offered by Jane Smiley in recent years: that Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better book than Huckelberry Finn because it has friendlier ideas in it. Bloom shows, on the contrary, that primarily didactic works are never considered the best books by authors of proceeding generations. While some would argue that the Canon is controlled by political structures that manipulate ideology to anaesthesize the masses, I would argue, based on Bloom's work, that the contents of the Canon is controlled by nobody but other writers, most of whom prefer making beauty to making political tracts.