Mini-Cast #8 - Who Will Mourn Harold Bloom? - Rough Draft

Few people will mourn Harold Bloom who aren't dead already. It's amazing he made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.

Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...), and it's possible that the literary pages of every magazine (if they still exist) will fill entire back halves with dozens of other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher, and his most fawning students will pretend to be shocked at the extent of it. He was the pope from which the church seceded - a living embodiment of apolitical aesthetic worship. The church had hardly any new saints, and most of the new saints were just modernist updates of the old saints. The profiles by former students who earned his favor were practically hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on an essential question: what did he actually teach?

In his long dotage, Bloom was not a teacher or a thinker, he was a religious cleric, a preacher of literature's church in a revival tent, and by the time I came of age as a reader, the extent of his literary output was just book after book of literary cheerleading. When he was a young man, Bloom clearly had ideas. Everybody who's dipped into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, and the idea is a little ridiculous - that great poets wrestle with their greatest predecessors in a kind of Freudian struggle to declare independence from father-figures. If you take it as a metaphor, I suppose it yields insight when it helps you perceive how artists might have transformed the material of their predecessors, but if you read it literally, it's ridiculous, inspiration comes from literally any facet of life, and we still have no idea how the brain conjures inspiration; and yet as Bloom never tired of admitting in one of his many self-contradictions, literary theory is itself ridiculous. No one in their right mind would read the theory behind a work you love when you can experience the work again.

The point of the arts is not to be a tool to better understand politics or religion or ideology or sociology or systemic injustice or mythical archetypes... the point of art is to create something meaningful where nothing used to be. Once all the interpretations of theorists both Christian and Marxist expire which Shakespeare and Mozart and Rembrandt inspire, the primary works still remain, with new interpretations for the concerns of new generations. Artistic meaning can be reside within all those fields of study, but attempts to pigeonhole art's purpose within the realm of those other fields make art a servant of propaganda - and this is a practice indulged in as often by right-wing intellectuals as it is by left-wing, all of whom Bloom loathed and they loathed him back seventy-seven fold.

If my contempt for Bloom was slightly loving in spite of itself, then what I admired was mostly that he had all the right enemies. To be perfectly honest, I own more than a half-dozen of his books, and I still occasionally dip into them, mostly for suggestions for other books to read, because it's not like I could make heads or tails of much. I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am, but for a reader who could read thousands of books in his memory, Bloom was a shockingly bad writer - his critical judgments were simultaneously imperious and incoherent, his tone both egotistical and self-pitying, and his prose only compelling when he hurled invective. I agreed with many of the insults, but it's a sad person indeed who likes another only for hating everybody you hate.

Bloom mounted every defense for keeping the gates of high art up a critic could possibly mount, and by defending it so strenuously, he did as much as anyone to collapse the gate he claimed to defend. The question among intelligentsia used to be if it's a good use of one's time for a person who loves Dickens to read Bradbury and Tolkein, we now live in a world where the intelligentsia asks if its a good use of one's time to read Dickens if you love X-Men.

By not conceding that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (art), we're now long since living in a world where the 'A-words' are 'anything at all you like.' Even the quote/unquote 'postmodern' world of 'art is anything goes' is now dying, and perhaps we're now moving into a world where the 'A-word' is 'anything that promotes my values.' And by not conceding that a writer of differing identity can bring a valuable perspective by virtue of their uniqueness, he lent legitimacy to all his enemies who claimed that the perspective of the traditional geniuses is all the same by virtue of their white male privilege.

I had an indulgent contempt for Bloom, he was the guardian who fell asleep at the wheel. By his ilk refusing to regard anything which smacked of popular culture as worthy of serious consideration, who can be surprised that so many current millions regard anything that smacks of high culture as unworthy of serious consideration? The 'arts' as they've been practiced for three-thousand years are now a cultural backwater which have little to do with contemporary life as it's now lived.

It's ultimately fine that the literature most people now consume is TV, the music is electronic, the poetry is song lyrics, the theater is movies, the art is graphic novels and animation and cinematography. All of those new arts have long since proven their worthiness. But why is there so little place in common discourse for all five of those arts as they have always been practiced? Is the reason partially that people are simply lazy and uncurious? Of course. But that can't be the whole reason. Part of the story is how ignorant and insensitive the gatekeepers were to new developments. If you live too much in the past, the present evolves without your input.

And now that we live in a world where the study of art's long history as its own reward is barely acknowledged, we begin to live again in an era when art is a servant to other forces. We've been here many times before, and no matter how good and pure the intentions of the first generation ideologues, lots of people will eventually attach themselves whose intentionality is bad indeed. It's a shame, history is suddenly littered with the remains of artistic works that would alert people to these dangers.