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HAROLD BLOOM - PART 1INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON PORTRAIT BY TARA SINN, MICHAEL MARSLAND/YALE UNIVERSITY 
Harold Bloom is the preeminent literary critic in the world, and as such he is perhaps the last of a dying breed. Bloom adheres, passionately and single-mindedly, to the true and first tenet of lit crit—to take a book and judge it on its own merit, to see it as a thing in and of itself. The aesthetic value of the prose, the mastery of metaphor, strength and conviction of theme—these are the sorts of things that a critic like Bloom pays attention to. Much of contemporary criticism takes a novel and holds it up to a series of incongruous and irrelevant sociological magnifying glasses—gender theory, feminism, Marxist analysis, and all sorts of postmodern muck. These critics, whom Bloom has memorably called the School of Resentment, have gained such strength that they have colored, even infected, writers whose careers have started since the Resentment began. So what we are seeing is criticism that changes literature for the worse and, as Bloom laments, contributes to the idiot-ization of the entire world. It’s a mess, and it may be irreversible. And so we return to Harold Bloom, the old voice crying out in the wilderness, who, besides writing one of the most important and useful books on Shakespeare (The Invention of the Human) and coining the term “the anxiety of influence”—an extremely useful theory of literary evolution—in the book of the same name, took on the whole of academia (for that is now just another name for the School of Resentment) in the towering 1994 work The Western Canon. It is in this book that Bloom first and most comprehensively did his part to preserve what’s important—essential, really—to humans from all the great works of writing that have been produced from the Bible and Gilgamesh all the way up to, well, right now. The professors and critics of the world will only get their hands on my copy of this book when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Vice recently spoke with Bloom over the phone. He was in his office at Yale, where he teaches two classes a week. Vice: I was hoping to talk first about The Western Canon. Harold Bloom: Do you mean the whole category, or what I wrote about it? I mean your book. But can we make an agreement? Let’s forget that damned list. Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonical works? The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the other translations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world, including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’s agree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list. It’s a deal. I wish I had nothing to do with it. I literally did it off the top of my head, since I have a pretty considerable memory, in about three hours one afternoon. It does seem like the sort of thing that a publisher would ask for to make the book more palatable to a casual reader. It doesn’t exist. Let’s go on. I started college in the same year that this book was published—1994. 1994. That’s a long time ago now. That’s 14 years. I am now 78 and I’ve come off a terrible year. I nearly died. But I’m all right now and I’m back teaching. What happened? A whole series of mishaps and illnesses, but the big one that knocked me out for six months and nearly killed me was that I quite literally broke my back in a fall. But let’s forget about it. It’s over now. Looking at the book, and thinking about it being available right when I was starting college— Where were you at college? Well, that’s part of the problem. I went to a very small liberal-arts college with no grades and no majors. Let’s not speak its name. Or OK, let’s. It’s called Hampshire. Oh yes, I know it very well. It was supposed to be very elite. I remember they once wanted me to talk there and I sort of dodged it because I felt it wasn’t going to work. It wouldn’t have worked. And I feel like I should have just read your book instead of going to school there. But can you tell me, do you think that things have become better or worse in terms of the School of Resentment since the book was published? Obviously they’ve gotten much worse. Just look at the enormous international as well as domestic dumbing down and decline in serious reading and indeed the falling apart, inevitably, of standards. Yet you’re still soldiering on, teaching undergraduates. But I’ve turned my back on the academy even though I still teach at Yale. I am part of no department—I became a department, or nondepartment, of one when I walked out on the English department back in, my God, way back there in 1976. That’s a long time ago now. Thirty-two years. But I started to write books pretty early on—certainly from about the late 1980s on to the present, so for about 20 years now, addressed to the general reader all over the world. And it has worked because I now have an enormous general readership, mostly in an incredible number of translations. So there is always a saving remnant of readers out there, as I have discovered. On the other hand, every single one of those countries, like our own, does suffer from a kind of dumbing down. It’s in all sorts of culture and media, but it’s mostly in books. It has something to do with, though not everything to do with, technological change—the fact that most kids grow up not reading deeply or going to a museum and staring at a picture or going to a concert and really listening to authentic music—including authentic jazz. People are trapped in the age of what you might call the triple screen: the motion-picture screen—and this is in ascending order of evil in terms of what it does to their minds throughout the world—the television screen, and finally the computer screen, which is the real villain. It’s disappointing because the internet could have been such a good thing. It could have been like an indestructible Library of Alexandria, but with porn. This goes back to what I said about the saving remnant. You’re part of that saving remnant. As I’ve been saying for years: If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown. I started school, ostensibly at least, as a poetry major. But I couldn’t find a class there that wasn’t “Transgendered Chicano Poets of the Latter Half of 1982” or something. Not that I don’t like transgendered Chicano poets of 1982—they’re great, I’m sure. But I wanted to learn more than that. Or rather, I wanted to start from the very beginning and work my way up to transgendered Chicanos. I wanted the context of history, and I couldn’t get it at college. Oh my dear, let’s not get into that. I’m so weary now of being called a racist or a sexist. I can’t take that anymore. But where does this fear of reading the works of what some critics derisively call “dead white men” come from? Well, we’re about to crash on the scale of 1837, the Great Panic, or 1929, and now we’re going to have the Panic of either 2008 or 2009. That is a consequence—it’s one of many consequences including a lot of innocent dead everywhere—of the way in which the counterculture ultimately, by its enormous recoil, helped give us George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. They are both semiliterate at best. They both exude self-confidence. And they both claim a direct relationship with God. Hopefully she’ll disappear now, or just start a talk show or something. She is a very, very dangerous person. Agreed. But moving on… If a person wants to seriously approach literature on their own, outside of academia, it’s very difficult. Without a real teacher, an authentic teacher, a real mentor, it’s very difficult for anyone to get started. CONTINUED HAROLD BLOOM | 1 | 2 | >
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