Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

sounds more authoritative, more decisive,
more oppressive. "Canon" is a religious
term, which, as it applies to the Bible, represents
an official, binding and permanent
separation of approved from rejected
("apocryphal") scriptures. As such it has no
equivalent in the literary field. At most
there is a vague analogy. There is not and
has never been (outside totalitarian
regimes) a body which licences approved
texts in this rigid way. What actually happens
is a constant process of acceptance of
new texts, as their quality is demonstrated
in a variety of institutional and informal
situations, into the tradition. Nor is there,
with regard to older books, any hard and
fast line between those which are "in" or
"out." Instead there is a central core of
acknowledged classics, graduating outwards
to lesser works, without any fixed
rankings and with much leeway for variations
of esteem. The notion of the "classics"
comes from the Greco-Roman side of the
Western heritage, and since it originated in
a literary context, it is more useful for literature
than the biblical concept of the
"canon." Thus Harold Bloom's defence of
the "Western Canon" takes the term from
its enemies, and many of the weaknesses of
his book are due to allowing the foe to
choose the field of battle. The most obvious
case is the lists of canonized texts at the end
of the book, which become more and more
arbitrary and absurd as they near the present.
The Canadian canon, for example,
includes all of eight names: Malcolm
Lowry, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro,
Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Anne
Hébert, Jay Macpherson, and Daryl Hine!
Yet perhaps the religious connotations
are relevant to Bloom's persona in this
book as an Old Testament Prophet,
denouncing the "academic rabble" for
falling away from the true faith. His aim is
not really to describe accurately the secular
process by which texts get acceptance as
classics, but to rise to the defence of his
own sacred texts, which have been profaned
by the School of Resentment. The
"enemy," as he calls it, haunts the book, like
a many-headed monster out of classical
myth or biblical prophecy, consisting of
"Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New
Historicists, Deconstructionists,
Semioticians." Bloom nowhere stops to
spell out and systematically refute the arguments
of this variegated group, but rather
denounces and abuses its members in
asides, sometimes witty, sometimes angry,
sometimes both. Nor does he look very far
into the capitalized Resentment he ascribes
to them all equally. At times it seems to be a
generalized Resentment of literature itself;
at others, of the Canon's unsurpassable aesthetic
quality. Since the Resenters and the
works they prefer cannot gain admission
on aesthetic grounds, they switch to sociopolitical
criteria, attacking the very notion
of the aesthetic as an aspect of patriarchal,
bourgeois, imperialist ideology.
For Bloom, the aesthetic pre-eminence of
Shakespeare is "the rock upon which the
School of Resentment must at last
founder," though elsewhere he represents
its triumph as irreversible. Shakespeare is
not only the centre of the English Canon,
but of the Western Canon and the World
Canon. Bloom claims that Shakespeare's
work is permanent, universal, and unsurpassable.
It is understood and appreciated
by all people, regardless of culture, education,
or language. Shakespeare occupies
first place in the book, breaking the otherwise
chronological order by taking precedence
over Dante, Chaucer and Montaigne.
Shakespeare is not confined to his own
chapter, but perpetually reappears to daunt
later writers with his supremacy. They,
though Bloom does not make this connection,
are among the first Resenters, especially
Tolstoy. Bloom discusses Tolstoy's
antipathy to King Lear at some length,
making many of the same points (notably
the resemblance between Lear and Tolstoy
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