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Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

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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.

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'.

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."

Esteemed literary critic, Harold Bloom (HAMLET, GENIUS, HOW TO READ AND WHY, SHAKESPEARE: THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN, THE WESTERN CANON, THE BOOK OF J), is also a Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former professor at Harvard. In his latest book, WHERE SHALL WISDOM BE FOUND? (the title of which he has derived from Job), Professor Bloom leads us on an enthusiastic pilgrimage through the Western canon to the "Canterbury" of poetic wisdom that can be found in reading Job, Ecclesiastes, Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine. "Of wisdom," Bloom writes, "we cannot embody it, yet we can be taught how to know [it]" (p. 284). And Professor Bloom--truly the embodiment of great literature--certainly has the credentials to teach us how to discover wisdom in reading great literature.

"We read . . . to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become . . . The deepest motive for reading has to be the quest for wisdom," Bloom observes. "Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing down in which America now leads the world" (pp. 101; 278).

In an era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling, Bloom confeses that he watches reading die with "elegiac sadness" (p. 277), noting that he now has three criteria for literature: "aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, and wisdom." In his book, Bloom addresses the never-ending, "ancient quarrel" between poetry and philosophy (p. 208). In his opinion, we ought not have to choose between Plato and Homer, "though Plato wants us to choose;" we can appreciate both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior (p. 63).

I admire Bloom's infectious passion for reading, and much like his other books, WHERE SHALL WE FIND WISDOM? will inspire readers to discover the poetic wisdom of the Western canon.

G. Merritt

Harold Bloom, the Yale Shakespeare and Western Cannon guru, has produce another book of erudition. In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, Bloom explores the wisdom literature of the Bible, Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Goethe, Emerson, Neitzsche, Freud, and Proust. Bloom argues that these selected authors are not to be understood within their historical context, but rather understood for the universality of their insight into the human sprit and condition. It is their very universality that makes their work "wisdom writing" as opposed to merely "period pieces." This is antagonistic to the wisdom theory emerging from the Yale psychology department headed by Sternberg who suggests that context, both cultural and historical, is what helps provide prospective. And it is prospective which, in turn, produces wisdom. A very different approach.

Bloom also fiercely contends that it is poetry and prose that teach us wisdom much more than philosophizing and goes into a quite lengthy explanation as to why Homer can teach us more than Plato.

One insight of this book that I hope to retain is the importance of wisdom literature in cultivating our own wisdom. Through reading we recognize our own thoughts articulated through another's words. The search for wisdom is a quest for knowledge and understanding that should begin by conversing with the ancients and the greats through their progeny - wisdom literature.

Where Shall Wisdom be Found? is another fascinating book by Harold Bloom. He (somewhat arbitrarily) chooses the greatest wisdom writers of all time, and his perspective on their work is very illuminating. He goes through the history of the western world and selects two authors from each time period. The couplets are Job and Ecclesiastes (books, not people), Plato and Homer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzche, Freud and Proust, and Thomas and Saint Augustine.

Even though I highly recommend this work, I disagree with much of what Mr. Bloom has to say. What makes it worthwhile is his invaluable commentary of the figures listed above - who they were, and the thoughts they express. However, nowhere in the book does Bloom give us HIS definition of what wisdom is - and everything is judged by his own very personal standards.

Literary criticism is, by definition, subjective; and it is Mr. Bloom's own personal prejudices that may put some readers off. In his defense, at least he is honest about his prejudices. "I agree with absolutely nothing in The City of God, but then the book is not addressed to a Jew and a Gnostic." Mr. Bloom constantly reminds us that he is not a philosopher; so, in the battle between literature and philosophy, he continuously asserts that we prefer literature. He considers Plato the greatest philosopher, but casually tosses him aside with preference to Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.

In trying to decipher his criteria for wisdom, it seems to center on useful aphorisms. It seems to be the reason he prefers literature rather than carefully constructed philosophical arguments. I had a logic teacher who uses to disparage maxims as "bumper sticker philosophy," and I think he has a point.

Also, in this stage in his career, Mr. Bloom has lost sight of who the true enemy is. He continues a pointless and wrongheaded feud with Stephen King and J. K. Rowling as `enemies of literacy.' Nothing could be further off base. He writes that his criteria for reading are "aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom." These are not the only criteria - sometimes you just want a good story. And, if I may be a philistine for a moment, I do think you can find a bit of wisdom even from Harry Potter, unless you are determined not to find it.

At a reading, Mr. Bloom said he should have included Kierkegaard, who keeps popping up in this book. I think Kierkegaard would have illuminated much about wisdom. It is not so much about saying that Plato is wrong and Shakespeare is right, but about one's own commitment to a belief system. Bloom rightly points out that literature holds a mirror, not to nature, but to ourselves. We find the wisdom in books that we are looking for. Mr. Bloom's wisdom may not be yours.

Bloom has proven himself a master of the intellectual life. His passion for learning and knowledge is contagious and it's that steady enthusiasm which makes this book pleasurable.

Bloom starts out working from the premise that literature can inform our lives. Certainly this is well established and few would challenge him. It's working from this assertion that he develops his ideas that even contrary forms of wisdom have shaped the thinking of Western civilization. And it's here that he sounds almost Hegelian in his push towards greater knowledge through conflict and synthesis.

One area I had hoped Bloom had developed more is the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Are they synonymous? Is all knowledge wisdom? Is some more valuable to the individual than other knowledge?

Bloom describes those writers whose brand of wisdom he holds in highest esteem. And it's here that I wanted Bloom to articulate specific criteria for the types of literature he would categorize as lending to wisdom. He certainly elevates some works above others. For instance he places Shakespeare, Cervantes, and others above the fray. Additionally, he includes some books of the bible like Ecclesiastes and Job. So, he elevates this subset, but then within this subset he doesn't seem to allow for a hierarchy - placing them all on equal footing. My questions would be...

1. Why are some works elevated above others?
2. What criteria can be used to identify works of wisdom?
3. Within the subset Bloom advocates how do we know none of these should be seen as more conducive for conveying wisdom?
4. Do some works of literature accurately describe the human condition and others prescribe a resolution to that condition? If so, which is of more value?
5. What is the ultimate source of wisdom?

Even with these questions posed; Bloom has made great contributions to the analysis of classic literature and ideas - in many of his books. And here is another example, well worth reading.

Harold Bloom is unquestionably one of this country's academic literary heavyweights. He has taught at Yale for many years. The listing of his books preceding the title page of this, his latest production, runs to 28 items. His opinions are strongly held, closely argued, often idiosyncratic, and never superficial. He seems to have read, digested and remembered not only all the works he is discussing, but also all the published critical comment on them down through the years.

The subject of this book is what Bloom calls "wisdom writing," a term that pretty well explains itself. The unspoken corollary, of course --- one that Bloom never really acknowledges --- is that each reader will have his own list of "wisdom" literature and that no two lists will exactly agree. Bloom's list begins with Plato and gets no closer to our own day than Proust and Joyce. The two major Gods in his pantheon are Shakespeare for poetry and Cervantes for the novel. Others who earn high marks from him include Sir Francis Bacon, Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. There are some surprises on his roster --- the anonymous authors of those parts of the Old Testament known as the Kabbalah or Hebrew Bible, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and Sigmund Freud, to name three. Americans who earn places on his team include Emerson and, on a slightly lesser level, Walt Whitman.

All of these authors and a number of others (Goethe, Saint Augustine) are discussed in densely packed and allusive prose. Bloom comes across as an academic writing mainly for his fellow academics. He has, however, one gift that many of his fellow academics lack --- he communicates well his own enthusiasm for the works he is discussing. You may not agree with all of Bloom's judgments and you may not understand what he is trying to tell you in his knotted prose --- but you will know that these are books and authors that matter deeply to him. If you go back to those you may not know and reacquaint yourself with them, he will have achieved his purpose.

The book often reads like a transcript of graduate-level college lectures or perhaps the gist of a learned literary seminar. But every so often Bloom sets off a colorful aphoristic skyrocket that for a moment lights up not only his subject but also his own mind: Sometimes, while reading THE ILIAD, he says, "you get the impression that the gods are a storytelling convenience" who "live on forever, perfectly cheerful as they contemplate our sufferings." Nicely put.

Bloom's admiration for Shakespeare brings him back time and again to two characters, Hamlet and Falstaff, who seem to him to most perfectly embody Shakespeare's world and wisdom. Safe choices, perhaps, but argued with uncommon gusto.

His characterization of Goethe centers on the man's "paganism." His chapter on Proust wanders off into a dense literary thicket on the subject of jealousy. There are indeed many spots in this book where even the well-educated and careful reader will have to go back over a sentence or a paragraph several times in order to puzzle out exactly what Bloom has in mind. This book is not a beach read, nor even a Saturday-afternoon-in-the-backyard-hammock item. Not surprisingly, Bloom is full of disdain for the level of American higher education, reserving for it the sarcastic nickname "mediaversity," in which the first syllable obviously stands for "mediocrity." It's safe to write that sort of thing when you are a revered professor and critic with half a century of college teaching on your resume.

Harold Bloom thinks great literature is important enough to discuss seriously. He is right, of course. You may not find him easy reading, but he will set you to thinking.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)

At times I felt like I was re-reading his book "Genius." The major weakness of "Where Shall Wisdom Be Found" is the lack of lamentation over the increasing lack of literacy and reflection plaguing Western Civilization. The general lack of critical thought is one of the most pervasive problems in Western culture which Bloom points out again and again. The condmenations by Mr. Eldon and Mr. Lee (above)are equally short-sighted as they seem to be unaware of key statements in this and other works by Bloom. Bloom has pointed out time and again that literature cannot and will not save the world. What literature provides us with is chance to reflect. This reflection for Bloom is focused on Western culture. He points out this limitation in the opening pages of the work. However, I know that Bloom's reading in philosophy, history, and science are much wider than what is revealed in this short work. What do you expect in only 200 or so pages? Bloom has consistently pointed out his exclusivity in this matter. His rational is simple--we should read the best of the best regardless of what the culture. Bloom simply focuses on Western Culture because he believes it is a tradition in decline. Let's face it, part of that decline is due to the lack of literacy in a society which has fewer an fewer (but far from perfect) limitations in who has access to literacy.

The statement that Bloom is bigoted falls into the trap he set in "The Western Canon." I agree with Bloom's assertion that when we look at the current state of academia this is an Age of Resentment among literary scholars. There is far too much polticizing of literature and not enough contemplation into the aesthetics of the work. This, I believe is caused by the false seed planted into our brains during our high school years when our literature teachers try to tell us that literature is a social energy which can bring about social justice. Such an assertion is nonsense. It is collective insight and ACTION which makes us moral. Yes literature is part of it, but social justice is not the purpose of writing literature. Our reasons for writing are self-serving. When I write a poem I do not think about the fact that I am contributing to the body of literature and creating a selfless piece of art to be bestowed upon humanity. I am writing for me--period. Get off your moral high horses with your expectations that Bloom and his view of literature should affirm liberal ideology. Bloom's politics (which are pretty liberal) have nothing to do with his argument regarding aesthetics. Literature cannot save the world. That is up to human beings.

With Dr. Bloom I lament the decline of literature as a discipline in academia. The so-called cultural studies courses which mask as literature courses are not literature courses. They are political courses for people who are too lazy to read a newspaper. Literature courses focus on aesthetics. If the literature in turn makes me an activist for women's rights or an opponent of the so-called war on terrorism then that is a great by product of reading but it is not the purpose of reading.

people dismissive of this study crack me up. nevertheless my own two cents: i'd have pit cervantes against rabelais, and shakespeare against chaucer. the latter better parallels the plato-homer agon (to say the very least: five books in chaucer's superior _troilus and creseyda_ prefiguring five act elizabethan drama) whereas the quixote/sancho pair, in prose nonetheless, descends directly from gargantua and pantagruel, not prince hal and falstaff. shakespeare himself was probably more influenced by rabelais than cervantes his contemporary shakespeare. to quibble too much with bloom though is really to blind oneself, sentence by sentence, to some of the most cogent insights into european literature ever offered