The Western Canon. Harold Bloom

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Harold Bloom
New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace & Company
1994

Why read it? Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. is widely quoted as saying that "Nobody reads anymore." That may be an exaggeration, but I think it is probably true that not many people read serious books anymore. And maybe never did except under duress in our schools and colleges. Bloom suggests that the goal in our schools and colleges today is no longer intellectual excellence, but achieving social harmony and remedying historical injustice. Bloom explores the problem of no longer reading serious books, the books enumerated in the Western Canon, "what has been preserved out of what has been written."

Why do people read? According to Bloom, people don't read for "easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence." "Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen." And I infer from Bloom's remarks, that reading the books of the Canon is a search for ideas, the purpose of this blog.

My blog is part of the solution to a serious problem, the loss of the book-reading public. My solution is to begin each blog with "Why read it?" and then to fill out the blog with sample ideas from the book, whether nonfiction or novel, concluding with some memorable quotes from the book, a kind of summing up.

Here are some of the ideas from Harold Bloom on reading books from the Canon:
"Storytelling is Boccaccio's invention, but the Canterbury Tales freed story telling from didacticism and moralizing. Chaucer appreciated the 'entire comedy of creation.' "

"Moliere's Tartuffe or The Misanthrope makes me reflect on my own worst qualities and the dreadful qualities of my enemies. Moliere's plays show that 'everyone's life is a romance, a farce, a disgrace...." "Montaigne urges self-possession, but Moliere shows that indulging the will leads to self-destruction."

"Samuel Johnson had a passion for consciousness; wanted more life right to the end of his life."

"Nietzsche believed that we remember the painful."

"Austen's major heroines had an inner freedom that could not be repressed."

Dr. Johnson: "Possession never equaled expectation and evils were never so formidable as they appeared to his imagination."

"Whitman tried to live as if life were a perpetual morning."

Blake: "We are what we behold; Dickinson: What we are is what we see."

"George Eliot wrote about how people's virtues promote their errors. Lydgate in Middlemarch wants scientific knowledge in order to achieve fame; Dorothea's desire for knowledge is strictly spiritual."

"Readers think that Tolstoy helps them to see everything as if for the first time."

"Shakespeare's minor characters are exuberant beings and so are Tolstoy's.

Woolf on Austen: wrote without hate, bitterness, fear, protest, and preaching as did Shakespeare."

Kafka" "Impatience is the major sin, embracing all others." "Man cannot live without believing that there is something indestructible in him. For Kafka, the problem is not Christian original sin, but an unconscious sense of guilt."

"Beckett's protagonists must repeatedly tell and act out their stories over and over again."

"For Borges, eternity is where 'all time--past, present and future--coexist simultaneously.' "

What is bloom saying? Literature does not exist to alter individuals or society; that the Canon displays a complex view of humanity; that people read to enlarge their lonely existence by understanding the complexity of motivation and point of view in the world, but without didacticism and moralizing.

Quote: "What are now called 'Departments of English' will be renamed departments of 'Cultural Studies' where Batman comics, ...theme parks, television, movies and rock [and rap and text messaging?] will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens."

Quote: "I have very little confidence that literary education will survive its current malaise." "...only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading."