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164 of 181 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Where indeed . . .?, October 9, 2004
This review is from: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Hardcover)
To some degree Professor Harold Bloom has absorbed so much literature he has usurped it. He can read about five hundred pages per hour and when you consider the fact that he used to read one thousand pages per hour it is arguable that he has actually read more than any other human being in human history. The resources he brings to bear on his given subject matter in "Where Shall Wisdom Be Found" are enormous to the point of absurdity. But I am not convinced massive erudition alone makes for great literary criticism. The great writer G.K. Chesterton once boasted that he had read a thousand penny dreadfuls (as the trash novels of his time were called)and that he could describe the plot of any of them. The Great King Chesterton was never defeated. But it was not Chesterton's odd erudition that made him a formiddable critic and it is not Professor Bloom's erudition that has made him into something of a cultural hero to many. But the good Professor does have his flaws and in his instance perhaps they do come from his erudition.
For me (at any rate)the Professor's flaws as a writer have finally caught up with him. Since the wonderful shock of "The Western Canon" Bloom's prose has suffered from the constant repetition of a double or triple handful of ideas. We all know what they are - Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever; Shakespeare's only peers are Cervantes, Montaigne, etc.;the universities have collapsed and fallen into the hands of those scoundrels in the School of Resentment; reading is strictly a solitary activity; and so forth. The ideas have been recycled so often I have come to doubt each and every one of them merely on principal and to give myself a sense of relief.
The Professor also continues his habit of reciting lists of names - the names of authors he thinks important in various categories - and I have come to believe they function as a mantra of some sort.
I must admit it is terribly tiring to read his constant insistance that reading is absolutely necessary to spiritual growth. What about great music - rock and classical and jazz? What about painting? What about back packing and swimming and spelunking and fencing? But more importantly I sincerely wonder about the ethics of a critic who implies that the illiterate have hardly any spiritual lives. There's a sort of intellectual provinciality in such a stance.
The problem with Professor Bloom is not that he has read too many books. The problem with Professor Bloom is that he has not spent enough time scrubbing toilets, talking to car mechanics, sippping a cool one at a pub, hiking in winter time, and just about anything else to get him out of his capacious but closed head. His prose has always struck me as being almost ethereal, disembodied, as if he has seperated his own imagination from the redemptive power of pure physicality and the spiritual glory of matter.
Major flaws of the book include the fact that he hardly ever does argue his more provacative points. This is a failing that goes back to "The Western Canon" where he threw off shocking sentences like a tired academic re-incarnation of Oscar Wilde. He has always failed, most of the time to engage the reader with the kind of tightly woven arguments that make for good literary criticism.
His chapter of the Gospel of Thomas is most disturbing. He admits that he is preaching a Gnostic sermon but such a sermon is undesirable - he has preached it before in other books and what we would all like from him is an interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas that makes its partiuclar wisdom clear (if that particular work actually does have wisdom).
This book, however, is not without its charms. The Professor's melancholy is in evidence and the self-dramatization of a readerly elite against the cruel ideologues has its amusement value. His taste for inter-textual perversities remains infectious. The Professor is a profoundly aggresive (though ethereal) writer and it is a great joy to see that the lion in winter remains a lion.
Bloom has been described as a kidnapper who took hostage the whole of literature and was releasing it bit by bit on his own terms. I think that that is part of the thrill of reading him - one feels as if the Professor has become superhuman merely by reading and re-reading the whole of the Western literary canon and brooding darkly upon it until the ink is literally oozing out of the pores of his skin.
His book achieves a kind of sublimity that feels like all two or three thousand years of literary quagmires and literary vulcanic eruptions have exploded over that line that divides madness and genius. Harold Bloom is Jacob and the whole of western literature is God and Jacob and God wrestle with each other for a thousand years all night long.
C.S. Lewis once described himself as a dinosaur meaning that he was among the last of a breed that was deeply immersed in the great Greek and Latin writers of Late Antiquity and before. Harold Bloom occupies a similar place regarding the great European, American, and Latin American writers from the Middle Ages until Samuel Beckett.
What ever happens in this new century to the literary tradition Bloom is the largest embodiment of his name will endure where ever we rebel readers keep reading.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Wisdom of the great Reader, January 14, 2006
This review is from: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Hardcover)
Harold Bloom has so far as I know read more of the great Western tradition in Literature than any other person. I am no small reader myself, but beside Bloom my reading, my grasp of what I have read, my retention of what I have read, the connections I make with other works I have read, are small. Bloom is a great Genius of Reading, and in this book he reads Job and Ecclesiastes, Homer and Plato, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Neitzche, Freud and Proust, The Gospel of Thomas, Saint Augustine( on reading). He reads the opposing pairs in his search , for what he regards as a fundamental goal of reading in general, the attainment of Wisdom.
Bloom is such a rich mind, so filled with the love of literature, that every page brings new insights and great quotations from classical works. He gives the sense in his writing and reading that the very involvement with these texts is a deep spiritual exercise, an art of self- development and perfection, a probing towards our own better selves. He does this however with a strangely competitive idea, one of his central critical ideas is that of great writers in struggle with their predecessors and contemporaries. In this book the pairs of each chapter are taken as opposing, and involved in an `agon' or struggle for precedence and preeminence. In his chapter on Homer and Plato he repeatedly emphasizes the effort of the Philosopher to displace the Poet. And in his chapter on Shakespeare he even goes so far as to make Shakespeare defeat all Philosophers in his achievement of Wisdom.
This `anxiety of influence' and ` agon ` aspect of Bloom I think of as a bit childish, and very American. Shakespeare is `number one' in Bloom's book of life. And Shakespeare and Montaigne in Bloom's conception defeat or stand above all subsequent competitors, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky , Joyce, Proust, etc. But these kinds of comparisons and the pressagentry involved in them are a small part of the great weave of insights Bloom provides.
All of the chapters of this work have brilliant insights, but one favorite of mine was Bloom on Montaigne. He cites Montaigne's prescription for being most human," There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as to how to live life well and naturally, and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our own being".
Bloom tells us in this work of his own private crises, the illness which at seventy brought him to greater consideration of his own mortality- the depression he suffered for a year at the age of thirty- five which led him to a year of reading Emerson backwards and forwards.
Bloom like another of his great heroes , Samuel Johnson stands as a kind of Ideal Reader in his time. And this when one of Bloom's laments is that the very love of and reading of great Literature has been compromised by an academic world given to rigid misreadings of the great canon, in favor of ideological politically correct ones.
Critics of Bloom have charged that his knowledge and wisdom are perhaps too exclusively bookish, and not deeply enough in touch with experience outside of 'reading'.
It seems to me that the opposite is the case, and that his readings of Great Literature enhance our own experience and sense of of life.
He is the Great reader of our age, and reading this work is another opportunity to learn from and take pleasure in his 'wisdom'.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, Slightly Opaque, Short, and More About Literature Than Wisdom, March 6, 2006
This review is from: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Hardcover)
This is a short but very interesting book. After reading it cover to cover, I went to a book store and looked at a few other books written by Bloom. I was thinking of buying "The Western Canon" from 1994. However, what I discovered was that the two books were very similar, i.e.: the present is a smaller version of the 1994 book with a different approach. If you have "The Western Canon" by Bloom, then I suggest that you skip the present book. If you have yet to buy a Bloom book, buy the 1994 book.
Okay, now back to the present book. The book is not about wisdom in a general sense but mainly religious wisdom. Bloom tells us that civilization has literature, philosophy, and science. But he does not want to consider wisdom from science. He says that he wants to exclude science and writers such as Darwin as an example. Secondly, he thinks that Plato has shown that philosophy and literature can mix, so he will seek his wisdom exclusively through great literature and religion.
From Bloom we learn that Plato wrote about Socrates after Socrates' death - and according to Bloom - after a while Plato injected an element of fiction into the writings. He realized that by quoting Socrates - using him as a protagonist in his fictional stories - he would me more credible as an author.
Bloom thinks that this situation is firmly part of our religious writings, because most writings, including the Bible were written after the fact, decades later and in Greek for the New Testament. One can make the case that the religious writers knowingly embellished stories and created fiction to make the Bible and other writings more effective as a tool in their work.
The title is a direct quote from the bible, Job 28:12: "But where is wisdom found? and where is the place of understanding?"
So, the book has a religious bias and slightly a Jewish bias. He looks for hints of religion in great literature.
The book is a slow read. Sometimes, it is hard to determine exactly what the author is saying. It has many "Bloomisms," especially at the beginning and end. Here is an example: "Gnosticism may be an echo or a parody. Christian gnosticism also may be a belated version of some teaching of Jesus. All gnosticism .... is a kind of creative misinterpretation or strong misreading or misprision of both Plato and the Bible." What he is trying to say is that he does not like the New Testament.
I found it slow going. I had to keep at my fingertips and consult:
- an Oxford dictionary,
- a King James Bible,
- a good reference book on literature listing authors and great works with descriptions
- a book on Shakespeare (two books: Asimov and Norton),
- Plato's republic, and a book on
- Nietzsche's philosophy.
He discusses the Bible plus 12 great authors: Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud and Proust. They are presented in pairs, two per chapter, but he mixes all 12 in the discussions of each pair, so he jumps around a bit. There is no index or bibliography but Bloom has at least one reference on every page - or so it seems. One is constantly challenged to determine exactly what he is saying. I was stopping virtually every page to look at my reference books - above.
The book starts and ends with biblical writings, and overall given the amount of space he uses, he does a good job on the Old Testament. Between the beginning and end it is a mixed bag. He does a wonderful hob in describing Shakespeare, Cervantes, Emerson and Johnson, but this is offset with a terrible job on Nietzsche, and scant information on Freud and Proust. For the latter two, he concentrates primarily on jealousy.
The book is good for 240 pages then seems to die in the last 60. I enjoyed the book. If you do not own his book "The Western Canon" you will find the present book to be an interesting book. If you have no Bloom books, skip this and just buy the "The Western Canon."
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