Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

sound dangerously like the six-headed
monster. Nevertheless, Bloom's own voice
is clear and individual most of the time,
unlike the impersonal, ideologically
blended "discourse" of much contemporary
criticism. We never doubt his passion
for reading, of which we get occasional
revealing glimpses, such as his becoming so
engrossed in Paradise Lost that he read on
until he fell asleep at his desk in the middle
of the night.
In his "Elegiac Conclusion" (elegiac
because the new Theocratic Age will presumably
finish off the destruction of the
Canon begun by the Resenters) Bloom
recalls beginning his teaching career fighting
against the then dominant ideas of T.S.
Eliot as furiously as he now fights the "professors
of hip-hop," "the clones of Gallic-
Germanic theory," and the "ideologues of
gender." Yet Bloom has ended up sounding
some of Eliot's themes. Eliot was equally a
champion of the aesthetic supremacy of
Dante and Shakespeare ("there is no
third"). Bloom's Chaotic Age echoes Eliot's
view of contemporary history as "a vast
panorama of anarchy and futility." In some
ways, The Western Canon is a vast belated
gloss on "Tradition and the Individual
Talent." The difference is partly one of tone:
the polite adjustments made to admit
Eliot's deferential candidates contrast with
the strenuous anxieties of Bloom's newcomers.
But the main difference lies in the
Freudian dynamics Bloom brings into literary
history. It is noteworthy that only
Lacanians, not Freudians, are listed among
the "enemy," while Freud himself is honoured
by inclusion in the Canon itself,
albeit as an epigone of Shakespeare.
If the struggle for admission to Bloom's
Canon is a Freudian one, the struggle
against the Canon is seen in Nietzschean
terms. Like Eliot, Nietzsche haunts the
book without ever being focussed on
directly. The "School of Resentment" idea
clearly owes something to Nietzsche's concept
of the ressentiment which the Weak
feel towards the Strong. While the Strong
are busy struggling with each other, the
Weak are plotting to overthrow them
(Christianity and Socialism were Nietzsche's
examples of these conspiracies, and Bloom
would presumably add contemporary "theory").
Yet Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, confines
his endorsement of the Strong to the
aesthetic realm. He does not oppose "social
justice," merely asserts that it cannot be
accomplished through literature, which
must remain aestheticist and elitist.
The autonomy of the aesthetic is Bloom's
cardinal principle, though as the son of a
garment worker, he concedes the dependence
of his career in reading on wealthy
institutions like Yale University. He writes
of Virginia Woolf: "Her religion was
Paterian aestheticism: the worship of art,"
and describes himself as "a belated acolyte
ofthat waning faith." Criticism in the twentieth
century has rarely succeeded in holding
a balance between the political and
aesthetic dimensions of art, and Bloom's
heroic protest against the current politicization
of literature, despite its contradictions
and absurdities, is an admirable one.
He remarks that Molière, like Shakespeare,
understood the "aesthetics of representing
someone in the state of being outraged,
made furious by intolerable provocations."
Bloom understands too, and there are
echoes of Lear and Alceste in the persona
he creates for this book, as well as of the
biblical prophets. A huge, passionate,
absorbing book, it reminds us that aesthetic
"greatness" is the living centre of literary
experience, reached by the individual
struggles of readers and writers, not "constructed"
by society, politics, class, ideology,
institutions, criticism, culture or
anything else.
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