BOOKS
The getting of wisdom
Raymond Carr
HOW TO READ AND WHY by Harold Bloom Fourth Estate, £15.99, pp. 283 arold Bloom is among the most revered and prolific of American critics. How, he asks, in an age in which we are overwhelmed by information, shall we find wisdom? His answer is that it is to be found in the close reading and rereading of great literature. The function of the critic is to make 'what is implicit in a book finely explicit'.
This he achieves by a series of essays, normally selecting for 'close reading' a sin- gle work of some 14 poets, dramatists and novelists belonging to what he calls the Western Canon. They include, as short- story writers, Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupas- sant, Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Borges, Nabokov and Italo Calvino. For Shakespeare, he brings his bull's-eye lantern of close reading to Hamlet; for Ibsen he selects Hedda Gabler; for Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest; for his beloved Jane Austen Emma.
He claims as his masters Dr Johnson and liazlitt. His native master is Ralph Waldo Emerson from whom he derives two of his four principles of reading: reject cant and read by the inner light. Friend of Carlyle, Emerson is now almost unknown in Eng- land as a model critic. Of the dozen or so wnters and critics I accosted at the recent celebration of the award of the Hawthorn- den prize only one — Paul Johnson — had read the works of the Sage of Concord in extenso. For sage Emerson was, though his Prophetic utterings were dismissed by Her- man Melville as 'oracular gibberish'. Trained as a Unitarian pastor, he deserted orthodox Christianity as 'dead', finding refuge in Transcendentalism, a surrogate religion which professed to find God in every man.man. Emerson may be considered as one of the founding fathers of what Bloom calls the American religion. For him Nathanael West's Miss Lonebthearts is 'at mce a parody and a major instance of its Prevalent power. No nation, as West Prophesied, is now as religious or as implic- itly violent as we are.' There is no such English religion. We have sincere Catholics, Muslims, Protes- tants and so on but no pervasive surrogate religion, unless it be football with its rituals and its violence. Princess Diana looked on the way to becoming a surrogate saint, an English Evita Peron. But the flowers have faded and the candles burnt out. Of course the bleak pessimism of Hardy has religious roots in his own loss of faith and the agnos- tic George Eliot is much concerned with the social and personal consequences of contemporary religion, but neither is remotely transcendental. In Wordsworth's Nett), 'nature' may be 'a spirit that beck- ons us to sublime intimations'; but even he, Bloom confesses, 'stops well short of tran- scendency'. We may recognise, as does Bloom, Melville's Moby-Dick as 'a fictional paradigm for American sublimity'. Melville was a self-proclaimed gnostic and to Bloom Faulkner is 'a kind of unknowing gnostic'. Neither gnosis nor sublimity is much in evi- dence — Blake would be an exception — in our own literary heritage.
This difficult and, with all its insights, sometimes opaque book will convert no one who has not already fallen in love with literature into one of Bloom's ideal solitary readers. He remarks that as immature youths we fall in love with fictional charac- ters rather than real people. As an adoles- cent I was confronted by a series of girls who had fallen in love with Heathcliff just as I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina. What does the mature solitary reader gain from close reading? For him Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment will not be merely the 'best of all murder stories'; more than that, it 'enlarges our consciousness'. So complex is our imaginative identification with the murderer, Raskolnikov, that 'we begin to feel that we too might commit murders'.
But 'enlargement of our consciousness' will not, for Bloom, make us better citizens. 'I remain sceptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulat- ed by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatso- ever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.' We are told that political awareness is merely 'a tenu- ous dividend' to be earned by a reading of The Portrait of a Lady. 'The cultivation of an individual consciousness' is the prime purpose of Henry James's masterpiece: 'social information is a peripheral gain.' Ibsen's social concerns are peripheral to his 'demonic obsessions with character and personality, to what I have called his trollishriess'. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest should not be read as a portrait of the English landed aristocracy but in conjunction with the nonsense art of Lear, Carroll and Gilbert and Sullivan. Bloom's ideal imagined heaven has Shakespeare reading Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass aloud to its inhabitants.
`Historicising', according to Bloom, 'whether of past or present, is a kind of idolatry, an obsessive worship of things in time'. As a historian concerned with the imaginative reconstruction of the past, sub- limity is not my métier. But I am illumined by those novelists who are similarly con- cerned. Dostoevsky's rants on the future destiny of the Orthodox Faith, like Dick- ens's insistent social reformism, may irri- tate the reader in search of higher consciousness. But the dark underside of Dickens's London, of Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, are supreme works of the imagination. I suspect that Bloom would prefer Iris Murdoch's neo-Platonism to Trollope's apparently pedestrian social realism as providing a more extensive 'enlargement of our consciousness'. Yet Trollope has a prophet's insights in The Way We Live Now, and Melmotte is a tragic figure of Shakespearian proportions, the self-destructive King Lear of the money market.
For Bloom, Shakespeare is simply the greatest genius of all time, he has 'invented the human'; only he can stand beside the Bible as an abiding influence. Cervantes's Don Quixote is 'the first and best of all nov- els'. But whereas the Don and Sancho Panza change and learn by talking and lis- tening to each other, Falstaff and Hamlet change through 'overhearing' themselves. Hamlet is 'afflicted with absolute self- knowledge'. Madame Bovary, with no San- cho Panza to bring her down to earth, destroys herself through an excess of self- overhearing.
One niggling criticism. Overwhelming though Shakespeare's influence on any lit- erate person must be, Bloom tends to understate other influences. Though, in Jane Austen's case, he recognises her debt to her English precursors, yet in his hero- ines, Emma and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, 'there is something ineluctably Shakespearian'. Shakespeare's high tragedies of blood, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, may be the 'inescapable origin of Dostoevslcy's grand nihilists', Svidrigailov and Stavrogin. But, as George Katkov suggested some 20 years ago, Stavrogin's immediate literary ancestor is the Steerforth of David Copper- field — Shakespeare is mediated by Dick- ens whose influence saturates Dostoevsky's novels.
What will the solitary close reader gain from How to Read and Why? Certainly a knowledge of modern American writers to add to our canon: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is 'a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a uni- versal tragedy of blood'; it has a brute power not often found in our domesticated fiction.
Before the war I went to David Cecil's lectures on English literature. The prime target of Leavisite puritans, he was no great shakes as a literary critic and would be dismissed by the postmodernists in the English departments of our universities (to whom a comic and pulp fiction are as worthy of our attention as King Lear) as an elitist and a snob. But I owe him an immense debt. He made me see the rewards that bless the solitary reader of great literature.
Bloom's extensive menu is too rich to be digested at a single meal. Only the unfortu- nate reviewer must read the book all at one stretch. The common reader must select; first he must read a canonical work and then Bloom's guide for its deep reading. 'I am not', he writes 'exactly an erotics-of- reading-purveyor', which David Cecil undoubtedly was, since his main message was the simple pleasure derived from read- ing great literature. For Bloom there is a higher pleasure: 'the only secular transcen- dent we can ever attain except for the even more precarious pleasure we call "falling in love" '. Proust's irony — the gift of all great writers — is the secular equivalent of a profound spirituality'. We read in order `to strengthen the self, to learn its authentic interests'. Emerson would have agreed. Self-improvement is all.