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Monday
For the past few weeks, I’ve been fine-tuning my book manuscript for publication. Thanks to my periodical failure to record page numbers, the endnotes alone have taken me three weeks to complete and I had to master the Chicago Manual of Style to boot. Fortunately, I now can see the finish line.
For the most part, I’ve just been line editing but occasionally I’ve seen the need to add material. I report today on what I’m saying about Harold Bloom.
I include Bloom in the chapter about cultural conservatives. Previously, I had given him short shrift by not discussing his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since my book is about how literature changes lives and since Bloom contends that Shakespeare invented personality as we now understand it, it’s essential that I say something.
I’m intrigued by the project itself. Bloom is famous for his notion that writers are anxious about being influenced, and it’s clear whom Bloom is competing with and has anxieties about: Samuel Johnson
In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote what his Pulitzer-winning biographer Walter Jackson Bate describes as ““one of the landmarks in the history of literary criticism.” Johnson changed the way we see Shakespeare, placing him “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”
Johnson is particularly impressed by Shakespeare’s characters, observing,
His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.
It’s clear to me that Bloom felt, if he were to be the Johnson of our own age, he needed to write his own Preface to Shakespeare. And in fact, it’s the same kind of book, with a magisterial introduction followed by comments on the individual plays. I sense that Bloom wants to be for our time what Johnson was to “the Age of Johnson” (1745-1798).
Bloom also follows in the footsteps of Percy Shelley, the subject of Bloom’s early studies. I think he takes to heart what Shelley, in Defence of Poetry, says about authors who change the world. At one point Shelley writes that
it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.
Thinking, like Shelley, that an author like Shakespeare can change “the moral condition of the world,” Bloom sets out to spell out how.
Bloom contends that Shakespeare “altered life” by changing the way we think about ourselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Elaborating on what he means by this, Bloom writes,
Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…
By “deplore,” Bloom is partly thinking of Shylock. Shakespeare’s powerful depiction of the Jewish money lender who literally demands a pound of flesh may, he thinks, have incited more anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the infamous 1903 Russian tract about “Jewish global domination” that played a role in the Holocaust). In other words, once Shakespeare unleashed fully three-dimensional characters upon world, they didn’t always lead to good. Shakespeare may have changed the very way we experience feelings—Bloom says that he “pragmatically reinvented” us—but those feelings could have bad as well as good consequences.
So although Bloom is like Shelley in the way he sees Shakespeare as having changed history, unlike Shelley Bloom doesn’t connect the Bard with the struggle for social and political liberation. In fact, he has derided those who embrace a multicultural canon. Bloom speaks unapologetically about Shakespeare’s ability to transcend history, something which Shakespeare’s fellow playwright also noted when he said that he “was not of an age but of all time.”
Bloom is not at all a fan of various historical approaches to Shakespeare and speaks derisively of “Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists and Deconstructors.” Calling them “the school of resentment,” he attacks them for reducing figures like Shakespeare to their own narrow agendas.
In my experience, Bloom caricatures his opposition here. Most literature teachers I know tend to be rather eclectic in their approach to texts, using whatever tools seem most appropriate for the task at hand. There are relatively few doctrinaire feminists, Marxists, etc in the academy. Likewise, those who insist on Shakespeare’s universality are no longer adverse to looking at him through historical, psychological, and other lenses as well. In fact, a play like Merchant of Venice, which Bloom has problems with, cries out for an examination of how 16th century Britain regarded Jews.
But whatever reservations I have about The Invention of the Human—for instance, I think some credit for the invention should go to the Chaucer and, before him, to the great Greek playwrights—I share his admiration for figures like Hamlet, Falstaff and others. It really does feel like such characters actually existed.
As Bloom observes, “even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.”