What more do we have to learn from Harold Bloom? In his 85th year, the critic and author of 36 books, including the monumental Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, returns with a new study that fuses literature and faith. The Daemon Knows focuses on “the dozen creators of the American sublime”, in familiar or unexpected pairings, including Melville and Whitman, Emerson and Dickinson, Faulkner and Hart Crane.
Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more. “I do not consider Walt a product of the sensibility of his own time,” Bloom proclaims at one point. “Genius or the daemon is rare and of its own age.” This is a typical Bloom pronouncement, both personal and universal: he’s perfectly comfortable on first-name terms with “Walt”. His declarative authority is daunting to readers who are able to count on their fingers how many times they’ve read Moby-Dick.
But this is not a set of rules about reading. Rather, it’s the testimony of a man of faith, who has never let his lifetime of diligent study interfere with his worship of these authors.
Why Bloom should be so comfortable in the didactic mode is obvious; he has been in the classroom for well over half a century. He is eager to impart big ideas and big emotions, and speaks of his students as fellow grapplers with literary mysteries. And sometimes, it really works for him. When he recounts the “occult experience” of walking across campus with his students on a dark day after studying Emily Dickinson, to see a corner lit up by a “certain Slant of light” just as the poet described, it is the kind of sublime experience that can only arise from a life in the cloister.
Yet as even Bloom has had to learn, the modern ivory tower is no longer impervious to politics. In 2004, his former student, the feminist critic Naomi Wolf, accused Bloom of placing his hand on her inner thigh during a study session 20 years earlier. Her story unleashed fierce arguments about trauma, teaching and truth telling. Wolf insisted that her target was Yale, for its failure to protect her and thousands of other female students from professors like Bloom, whose “banal, human and destructive” advances symbolized the second-class status of women on campus. Pedagogical relationships of any kind are inherently unequal and often intimate – “We learn face-to-face” as Bloom puts it here. In the decade since Wolf’s accusation, many American universities have responded, rather desperately, by banning any kind of romantic relationship between professors and students. But the problem is not with the relationships themselves but with power and its abuses.
Deeming power irrelevant to the appreciation of art has always been the privilege of the powerful. In 1994’s The Western Canon, Harold Bloom coined the phrase “School of Resentment” to refer to those critics who argued that it was important take race, ethnicity and gender into consideration when choosing what to read, what to teach, and what to accept into the canon of greatness. But although he is still attached to mystical greatness, Bloom does admit here that the pure communion of reader and author may be a fantasy. “We do not read only as aesthetes – though we should – but also as responsible men and women.” He comes to this realization at the end of his analysis of TS Eliot, for whom he can muster no more than “cold admiration”, unable to overlook the poet’s antisemitism. As a self-described “Yiddish-speaking Bronx proletarian”, Bloom’s distaste for Eliot is both political and personal. He ought to see that when he labels Eliot, Faulkner and “in certain moods” Melville and Frost as misogynists, that judgment might leave a different reader cold where he is warm.
An 84-year-old man, even an esteemed Yale professor, no longer holds the power he once did. Though Bloom speaks often like a cranky Prospero, insisting that the world actually is the way he happens to see it, this book is often humble, doubting, and human. Convinced that “true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir”, Bloom threads these pages with life stories and memories of a host of “departed” mentors and friends, who live on, for him, in books, and whose ghostly presence brings the literary sublime back down to earth.
