Harold Bloom

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 (

) 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

. 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:

I mean your book.

Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonical works?

It’s a deal.

It does seem like the sort of thing that a publisher would ask for to make the book more palatable to a casual reader.

I started college in the same year that this book was published—1994.

What happened?

Looking at the book, and thinking about it being available right when I was starting 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.

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?

Yet you’re still soldiering on, teaching undergraduates.

It’s in all sorts of culture and media, but it’s mostly in books.

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.

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.

But where does this fear of reading the works of what some critics derisively call “dead white men” come from?

Hopefully she’ll disappear now, or just start a talk show or something.

Agreed. But moving on… If a person wants to seriously approach literature on their own, outside of academia, it’s very difficult.

Can you explain to me your concept of the solitary reader? That’s who you say you address your books to.

Nice! Can we talk about the School of Resentment?

But it’s been a struggle of yours for so long.

How do they get it wrong?

It’s an inescapable thing, and an ancient thing. It’s simply what happens from being part of the lineage of writers and writing.

The Anxiety of Influence

Yeah, I’d better because I’m getting way out of my league there. In the introduction to The Western Canon you say that you agree with this idea that “there is a god, and his name is Aristophanes.” What’s so great about him? He was sort of the first literary critic, right?

Oh, but hey, what about James Wood? I’m sort of kidding, of course.

I thought his last book was fun to read because he gets so enthusiastic about things, but yeah, I don’t really understand the phenomenon of him on the whole.

His last book seemed to be a period piece at least in terms of its cover design. It looked like a textbook from the 30s or 40s. It was kind of cute.

Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence

New Republic

OK. Maybe this next one is a silly question.

How do we read Shakespeare?

Is going to see productions of his plays valuable while reading him?

So are there no useful guides besides your own?

The Meaning of Shakespeare

I’ll do what I can. How many of his plays do you get through in your course on him?

You have a particular affection for the character of Falstaff, who appears in the two Henry IVs and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

What makes those four characters so rich?

Does teaching young people give you any hope for the future of literature and criticism?

Is it because they are ruined by contemporary academia at that point?

And which era of poetry are you teaching?

The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost

Thanks for talking to us.