How to Read and Why
by Harold BloomScribner, 283 pp., $25
It’s tempting to think of Harold Bloom as a grumpy old man. Even the title of his most recent volume seems to confirm the suspicion that our most esteemed literary scholar has settled into curmudgeonhood. How to read? Are we still in grade school? Are we not to be trusted with books?
Annoyed at such presumptuousness, we might recall the firestorm over The Best of the Best of American Poetry anthology of 1998, when Bloom snubbed the poet Adrienne Rich for her multicultural inclusiveness (which he branded a “culture of complaint”). Recently, we find him trashing J. K. Rowling in the Wall Street Journal, where he aims familiar barbs at the “dumbing-down” of reading lists and “the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study,” and grudgingly concludes that reading Harry Potter is better than not reading at all — but only barely. And we might feel justified in banishing Bloom to the conservative camp of the so-called “culture wars.”
That verdict would be hasty. Sometimes it’s hard to see the message for the messenger, the self-styled “amiable Bloom Brontosaurus,” whose supercilious manner seems almost perverse in our climate of policed niceness. Still, it was Bloom who almost singlehandedly made literature sexy again in the Seventies and Eighties, who conjectured that part of the Old Testament Genesis was written by a woman, who championed “misreading” — the practice by which writers creatively reinterpret their forebears, giving literature its continuing relevance and vitality. The freshness and eccentricity of his approach have often been lost on a generation of readers to whom Bloom is simply another white male on his way to being dead.
But Bloom’s version of tradition is far from the backward-looking moralism of a William Bennett, who would have us read to absorb and submit to the lessons of Great Books. It is instead the romantic liberalism of Emerson, who found reading an act of self-assertion; we engage and grapple with ourselves over the pages of a book, in order to enable and empower our individual imaginations.
In the spirit of Emerson, How to Read and Why attempts to bypass the ivory tower and reach that most elusive of audiences, the common reader. Bloom remains one of our few scholars who is able to translate the often erudite terms of literary criticism into living, breathing prose, and here, he takes more pains than usual not to appear pedantic or elitist. His choice of stories, novels, poems, and plays are not a prescription for “cultural literacy,” and indeed include such non-canonical authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.
What we’re offered is an uncharacteristically personal testimony of the value of literature, favorite authors woven into a rhapsodic mesh of almost Biblical genealogies: Turgenev begat Chekhov, who begat Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor; Shakespeare begat (and then obliterated) himself. Bloom imagines Shakespeare reading aloud from Lewis Carroll, or Jane Austen (his favorite) surviving to rival Shakespeare; he confesses how, while walking, he finds himself involuntarily reciting from the anonymous mad-song “Tom O’Bedlam.” For Bloom, literature must ultimately be a selfish and solitary occupation — and, it seems at times, a lonely one, perhaps the only consolation available to that peculiarly “American soul” that “does not feel free unless it is alone.”
In a recent interview, Bloom joked that How to Read and Why was a “self-help” book. His label is only partly ironic. Just as people might now turn to philosophers rather than clinical therapists to help them work their way through their difficulties, Bloom offers literature as the origin of all self-help. But unlike a host of other literary “how-to” books, Bloom’s purpose is not to make literature look easy, but to sell us on its difficulty. “It is not the function of reading to cheer us up, or to console us prematurely,” he warns. “I myself believe that poetry is the only ‘self-help’ that works.” We may like Whitman for his soapbox sermons on egalitarian democracy, but for Bloom, the poet’s wisdom stems from his extraordinary self-consciousness, his uncomfortable sense of the self divided between outward persona and enigmatic soul. O’Connor may try “to shock us by violence into a need for traditional faith,” but the gentler shock of great literature is that it offers an invitation to “overhear yourself,” to “apprehend an unexpected otherness,” a window onto those parts of the self which are unpleasant or unacceptable, and a field on which to grapple with them.
Bloom will remain Bloom, and his occasional fits of high-handedness or flippancy will charm or repel, according to taste — as when he speaks of his students reading Proust as “only an enhancement of their pragmatic training by sexual jealousy.” But when he dismisses Harry Potter for lacking “an authentic imaginative vision,” he is being not schoolmarmish but sober, putting his finger on our tendency to avoid facing up to the disturbing elements of our own selves — not least of which is our own mortality. If this is conservative, then put me down for Dubya.
This article appears in September 22 • 2000.