"The Resentniks"

Ok, here's a little something else from Bloom, based on the overall premise of his book "The Western Canon".

Essentially, Bloom's felt need to defend and solidify the secular Western literary canon stems from his perception of contemporary scholarship in Europe and America. According to him, the resentniks, as he calls them, are destroying the foundations of what is and will be considered great literature by relegating to aesthetics a minor role and exalting the socio-political-racial context of any literary work.
In a nutshell, he thinks great literature is often the inevitable product of the classes with more leisure time - more time to think - and cannot be diluted by a resentment of elitism. This means, not that he wants to close the secular canon, but that he wants only those texts which are aesthetically superior (a huge question in iteself) included in it.

This is the idea I find compelling and provocative: Great literature, perhaps great art in general, should not have to be a catalyst for social reform - should not have to change our society for the better or promote justice - neither in its content nor in the appraisal of its value.

(Interestingly, there is a seemingly irrepressible love of individualism and the strengthening of the self running between Bloom's lines as he expounds upon his favorite Western texts - The Pentateuch, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes etc.)

Blooming

I have recently (and somewhat belatedly) been reading a book by Harold Bloom called The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.
There are one or two really thought provoking ideas he has already raised for me very early on that I want to discuss here. Let's start with this:

"...the J writer (writer of the early parts of the Pentateuch) deserves to be called the most blasphemous of all authors ever...priests and cultic scribes seem to have been scandalized by [her] ironical freedom in portraying Yahweh...we realize that the Western worship of God...is the worship of a literary character."

I have no time at all for the abritrary presumptions of his redactionist criticism or the implication that God is merely a symbol or archetype, however, I find the idea that the scriptures themselves are blasphemous a fascinating one.
I wonder - if we stopped reading the Bible as a "guidebook for life" or a kind of theological system and read it, instead, as an ingenius masterpiece which provides us a complex, layered, literary experience of the person of God, would we find it, in many places an affront to our traditionalized, chlorinated and somewhat technical view of the deity?
I think it is very difficult to wave aside the proliferation in scripture of rhetorical contradiction and irony - all of which, I think, serve - not to weaken its sense of truth - but inestimably deepen it.
Bloom's respect for scripture is merely a literary one - mine is that and far more, but looking at it through his eyes makes me wonder if I haven't missed some of the frightening edges over which the abyss of God is looming.

Erika

Erika has started a blog that should make up for my lack of personal reflection.

lost-in-oz

J Alfred Prufrock

"'Inevitability', unavoidable phrasing seems to me a crucial attribute of great poetry." (Harold Bloom)

There is something very resonant and inevitable about Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that makes me shudder and laugh. The powerlessness of total subjectivity could hardly be better expressed.

...For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?...

Read It Here