I first read this article way back when it actually came out, but I return to it periodically because there’s something so weird about it.
I also have a thing about Harold Bloom. I got sidetracked into a substantial discussion of his peculiar aesthetic neurosis in the introduction to my undergraduate thesis, because I find him, and it, pretty fascinating. His arguments all seem to have two layers: one layer of essentially reasonable and articulate stuff, and one layer of visceral and passionate reaction that twists the other layer into crazy knots as he tries to make them match up. He’s passionately opposed to the rethinking of the canon in which academia has dabbled of late, but he also shares some of its basic premises: that what we read shapes who we are, that what books we as a culture expect ourselves and our fellow citizens to read reflects our values, etc. Still, he rages on against the fools and villains on the other side of the fence. I think he finds a historically and/or culturally grounded criticism an affront to the importance of literature, its essential miracles, and I think he’s not altogether wrong to want to bring back to academia some appreciation of affect.
Nevertheless, he is most of the way ’round the bend. This article, in which he praises the writing of old white men and disdains the writing of women (and Stephen King), almost entirely lacks an actual argument. There’s a statement: “Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex.” There is no further discussion of what the causes are. There is only the fretting and strutting of Bloom’s familiar shtick:
I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.
Okay, Edgar Allan Poe was not a writer of penny dreadfuls. Stephen King is, kind of. The mass-market small-trim paperback is the contemporary equivalent of the penny dreadful (and the dime novel), and operates in basically the same way (action for men, romance for women; recurring characters; a fast-moving, plot-driven narrative). The weird thing is that penny dreadfuls were an early- to mid-19th century phenomenon, occupying the hours of the men of the working classes while the elites read the Romantics, among others. So why doesn’t Bloom get that the two can coexist?
Okay, though: Bloom’s premise for the article is that King shouldn’t be winning prestigious book awards. So it’s not that he has to think that Stephen King shouldn’t be read (although I do think he thinks that), it’s just that he thinks Stephen King shouldn’t be honored with “legitimate” awards. He’s not alone in thinking so. It’s not a position with which I fail to empathize. King acknowledged while accepting the award that lots of people felt that way.
Really, it’s just an excuse for Bloom to Bloom it up for a while. If this were about Stephen King, presumably Bloom would quote one clunky sentence, one cheesy metaphor. It’s not about Stephen King. It’s about Bloom’s great crusade.
I began as a scholar of the romantic poets. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it was understood that the great English romantic poets were Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But today they are Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Tighe, Laetitia Landon, and others who just can’t write.
This is absolutely the most interesting thing about this entire article: I have no idea who those interloping ladies are. I hadn’t heard of them when I was a sophomore in college first reading this article, and I haven’t heard of them since. This is important because Bloom is writing about what “is understood,” which requires some sort of consensus. I think that most people would recognize the names of the “lost” Romantics; I think that many college-educated people could name a few greatest hits (Coleridge: “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan”; Blake: “Tyger! Tyger!”; Keats, “Nightingale,” “Grecian Urn”; etc.). But I don’t think that anyone but a scholar of Romanticism would have a single solitary clue as to the details of those women’s lives or bibliographies.
One is left to believe that the reputations of the pretender(ess)es to the throne are artificially inflated in Bloom’s mind, that they, and Stephen King, are representative of something big and ugly and looming, correlating to something else big and beautiful and gone. Bloom likes to think of himself as Falstaff, but in this article, he seems more like Don Quixote, tilting at Stephen King and false Romantics like windmills.
P.S. Read this.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Sam // Apr 19, 2008 at 8:15 am
I understand the criticism of King, but after reading the entirety of his Dark Tower series and his memoir, On Writing, I have come to see him in a bit of a new light. There is more to Stephen King than mass-market paperbacks.
2 Emily // Apr 20, 2008 at 9:48 am
I find it interesting that one of Bloom’s suggested alternative winners is Don DeLillo. DeLillo’s texts, in my opinion, are not any more difficult to read than King, but the themes are more complicated. Plus DeLillo hasn’t seen his texts turned into movies, so I suppose they are less well-known. In my opinion, commercial success and high-art accolades should not necessarily align. I wouldn’t say it’s the ‘dumbing down of American readers’ when they do align, but I think such alignment suggests there’s only one right answer to what makes ‘good’ writing and ‘good’ texts in a given period. I think that’s just wrong.
Seriously, I really like Harold Bloom. Always have, and feel lucky that a member of my dissertation committee had Harold Bloom as diss director, so I feel indirectly connected!
3 Mark // Apr 22, 2008 at 10:21 am
Terry Eagleton may have put it best: “Harold Bloom was once an interesting critic.” Over the past two decades, however, he’s gone from advancing an interesting but problematic agonistic Freudian theory of creativity to setting himself up as a cross between Falstaff & Samuel Johnson – which precisely equals Don Quixote, yes. Saddest of all, he’s so busy railing against the inanities of popular culture that he no longer has the time or concentration to do any real critical thinking. He’s turned himself into one of the Dinesh D’Souza style culture warriors, who can’t be bothered (1) to actually ascertain the state of affairs they’re attacking in academia or (2) to say anythings substantive about the “high culture” they’re defending.
4 mollie // Apr 22, 2008 at 10:29 am
Mark, I think you’re right about most of your comment but wrong about #2. Bloom may not be saying anything new or interesting about “high culture” anymore, but he is saying something. Check out The Western Canon. Some critic–actually, possibly Eagleton–understandably dubbed it hagiographic, but that’s the kind of criticism Bloom’s interested in doing these days: waxing rhapsodic on things we already know are good. I think he makes–well, not “makes,” quite, but perhaps “embodies”–a really valid point, which is that in academia we sometimes forget to value the reading experience itself, how it feels to read a great book.
5 Mark // Apr 22, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Mollie, I pretty much agree with you on the occasional usefulness of being reminded of the *experience* of reading great literature, but “hagiography” — or less charitably, “cheerleading” — in itself doesn’t constitute critical thinking. A rather intense rereading of Johnson recently reminded me of how bracing it can be to read a really great critic assess even works with which he has no sympathy. Bloom, in recent years (and here I’m thinking mostly of the past decade — *The Western Canon* is actually far better than its detractors admit) shows little more than petulant dismissal for works he doesn’t like.
I guess I part company with Bloom both on ideological & aesthetic grounds, in that I see a good deal of value in the various “recovery” projects he’s so busy pouring scorn upon — why *not* spend a little time with Hemans, for heaven’s sake? — and in that I think he’s gotten postwar American poetry rather radically *wrong*. But that’s another lengthy kvetch.
6 Phil A. // Apr 24, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Stephen King is a very gifted writer and arguably the greatest writer of horror fiction in the world. He is incredibly influential.
7 Bill // Apr 24, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Bloom seems to be lamenting what is essentially affirmative action applied to the canon. In that, he’s right. He’s also right that much of what has passed for scholarship over the past few years is totally worthless BS about racism. Racism is the devil and multiculturalism/diversity is god; that is all ye know in academia, and all ye need to know.
On the other hand, Bloom, whom I am a fan of when he’s writing in accessible mode, is only partly correct about King. King is a tremendously talented writer. True, he’s sloppy in some respects. He brings in characters for little or no reason, kills them off for little or no reason, and seems more concerned about giving the reader an enjoyable roller-coaster ride than leaving him (or her!–take that, PC Police) inspired or enlightened. In especially his earlier novels, the reader can expect to be shocked every three or four chapters by a grotesque image that few other than King could imagine with such frequency and relish (usually having to do with small insects crawling out of eye sockets). But Shakespeare had his share. Consider Hamlet’s contemplations while holding Yorick’s skull, and the whole death-as-leveler conversation between Hamlet and Horatio. Doesn’t King make a somewhat similar statement when Edgar, in Duma Key, uses the jaw of a dead debutante to hold his flashlight? And doesn’t Juliet wonder if she will be driven crazy waking among the bones of her ancestors? I don’t know; maybe she doesn’t; it’s been a while since I’ve read the play. Anyway, King’s also a genius at characterization through short vignette. It’s a shame some of these vignettes do little to move the plot or help the reader understand the entirety of the novel. But they’re good, nonetheless. King is also innovative in his effective use of foretelling, as opposed to foreshadowing. Sure, it’s like nicotine in cigarettes; it keeps the reader hooked. But at least it doesn’t cause cancer.
Moreover, King is friendly and open. In his “On Writing” he actually invites writers to send him writing samples. Would Thomas Pynchon do that? Okay, maybe sociability shouldn’t be a criterion to determine great writing. But it should be one to determine who’s a great man (or woman!).
King’s capable of violating rules of grammar and diction. So is Shakespeare. I could go on. I’d for damn sure prefer to read King over some of James Joyce’s crap, or that of Herman “why-say-it-one-sentence-when-we-can-say-it-in-seventy” Melville.
So, as to the sad state of affairs involving English departments, the Modern Language Association, and nihilistic French literary theorists, I’m with Bloom all the way. But King as a bad choice for the National Book Foundation’s award? No, it’s not out of the question that he should have been the pick a few years ago. I submit that Bloom, unquestionably a unique genius, is only partly correct in his horror at the NBF’s choice of Stephen King.
8 Marry Me, Harold Bloom: A Love Letter | The Interpreted World // May 8, 2010 at 1:20 pm
[...] what about this?, my reader enjoins. And it’s true, Harold Bloom. I think you are a lunatic. I think you are [...]
Leave a Comment