I almost forgot, Dear Listener, we still need to return to our three critics: Harold Bloom, John Simon, and Clive James. Let's begin with the easiest of these three to tackle, easy because he was such an intellectual caricature, his persona to the world was so over the top that he was almost a popular culture figure of fun. With his physical shape it's amazing that Harold Bloom made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.
In so many ways, Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...). Given the lack of other women who came forward, I suppose it's possible that this was a one-off lapse in judgement, and given Naomi Wolf's long history of intellectual sloppiness and outright mental insanity, she might have misinterpreted Harold Bloom's intentions toward her as well, though I frankly doubt it. After he died I half expected that the every major magazine (such as they still exist) would fill their entire back halves with a dozen other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher, and his most fawning students would pretend to be shocked at the extent of it. The truth is that Bloom long had a reputation for hitting on his students, but nevertheless it's still possible albeit unlikely that Naomi Wolf misinterpreted him, and that all his other dalliances were both entirely consensual and without quid-pro-quo understandings of the power he would wield to their benefit. But even if Bloom was a Saint, unlikely as that is, he was nevertheless a pope from which his church seceded - a living embodiment of apolitical aesthetic worship - that immersion in the greatness of literature was its own reward. His church had hardly any new saints, and inclusion in the church's canon practically ended with Samuel Becket, a modernist update of the old saints. He would praise a couple later writers: Jose Saramago, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and, of course, Tony Kushner, who was an ex-student of Bloom's and counted Bloom an influence on his work. Profiles in major publications were often by former students who clearly earned his favor, bordered closely on the hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on the essential question: what did he actually teach?
In his long dotage, Bloom was not really 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 a couple toes into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, - his thesis that great poets wrestle with their greatest predecessors in a kind of Freudian struggle to declare independence and individuality from father-figures. The idea both has some merit and is also a little ridiculous. Everybody has predecessors, and great writers have to read in order to know how to write. So if you take it as a metaphor, I suppose it can yield all kinds of insight that helps you perceive how artists might have transformed the material of previous writers, but if you read it literally, it's also ridiculous; inspiration comes from literally any facet of life, and we still have no idea how the brain conjures inspiration. His last truly original idea was surmising that the J-writer, writer of the largest and most consequential swath of the Old Testament, was none other than David's wife, Batsheva or Bathsheba. Why Batsheva? Nobody could really figure out his reasoning...
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. In that sense, Bloom was absolutely right. 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. Great work remains great, but our relation to it is always evolving. 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.
My contempt for Bloom was somewhat loving in spite of itself, and what I particularly admired was 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 of his writing. 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.
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Part 2:
By not conceding that the best of popular culture was entirely worthy of the 'A-word' (meaning art of course), 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 most people live it, and this is less than 200 years after Beethoven and Tolstoy and Goya and Keats and the resurrection of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach, the era when people realized that the contemplation of art and its transcendent metaphysics did more to free them from the mental dictatorship of religions than any political action, and now, not even two-hundred years later, we are in danger of placing ourselves into new mental prisons, based on the idea that various forms of science will protect us - be those beliefs in science based on hard science and the belief that greater scientific and statistical-data knowledge will eventually liberate us from the condition of being human, or be they not well-thought-out social sciences like intersectionality which believe that the underprivileged of the world remain so because of a silent conspiracy of systemic forces that with enough effort can be cast off like a shirt, these beliefs fall apart as nearly every belief system in history has that the human condition is a prison from which there is escape. It is a most definite part of the human condition to search for an escape route, but the only escape from being human is temporary and illusory, and that escape is the arts. The details of how the arts can provide that must obviously be a podcast for another day and another theme.
But now we live in the 21st century. And just after the 19th century, the era when culture's widespread triumph facilitated a near-universal adaptation of enlightenment principles and the widespread emergence from the long mental choke-hold of monotheistic dogma, came the century when culture lit a match to the very world that built it to its greatest height. On one side, the side of fascists and imperialists, came the idea that those nations who had not yet developed their culture to a similarly visible extent are inferior by their very nature, and therefore should either be exploited as slaves or eliminated as pollutive threats; on the other side, the side of communists, and yes, the vast majority of socialists too, came the idea that culture is the greatest tool humanity has yet invented to facilitate humanity's belief in its own material liberation and equality and freedom from exploitation, and therefore culture must be used, and invariably used, as a weapon of propaganda, and those millions who might be powerful use it in any manner other than propagandistically are threats who must be eliminated. So let there be no doubt, there are many great dangers to the belief that culture can save us, just as there are to any other system of belief, and when it came to culture's more destructive properties, critics like Harold Bloom might as well have stuck their heads into a sewer. Its all well and good to say that such beliefs are a misuse and perversion of culture, but all things of this world will be misused all the time, and there is no choice but to be vigilantly mindful of our values' misuses and take as many precautions as we can against them.
And in the place of what we've mistakenly termed 'high culture', we now have a new culture, a popular culture, filled with electronic art forms still so new that they've barely grown past infancy - and at the first sign that the voice of the people may demand something other than what intellectuals proscribe for them, the most gifted academics, or at least the most privileged ones, fled from popular mediums almost entirely, and without the input of people who understand the long history of art's uses and misuses, billions now subsist on mass entertainment without realizing that their greater say in world affairs requires them to contemplate what entertains them more deeply, like, just to take two obvious examples, why they exult in the most desensitizing depictions of violence, or why they love the very real humiliations of reality television ... I certainly don't believe in censoring people's entertainment, but I do have to imagine both to a certain extent desensitize people to suffering, and that if a critical mass are introduced to works that interrogate why they love those kinds of degradation, our cultural empathy might just increase. As hard as it is to believe, in a democracy whose maintenance depends on the intelligence of the general public, contemplation of our reasons for enjoying violence and humiliation is what might make the difference between a democratic society that thinks conscientiously enough to stay together, and a society that so misunderstands itself that it breaks down.
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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. The best work among 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.
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