Bear with me my heart is not totally in the coffin with Bloom – but it is a little bit. O judgement! We’ve become snarkish beasts let us not lose our reason. If academic Twitter is anything to pay attention to, then it seems that there is a writ that has been passed against an 89-year-old man who just died. I suspect that for a certain segment of us, who though we were bored by his evaluations of taste, angered by his accusations of political correctness, frustrated by his provincial Ivy League concerns, couldn’t help but love him once, not without cause. Bloom has died, yet he haunted the discipline as a ghost for many years, decades even, as a goad, a foil, a strawman, and more often than some are comfortable to admit as a brilliant interlocutor. Bloom brought many people to literature, however, and while the critiques of him – elitist, classist, ethnocentric – bear an uncomfortable truth, it must also be admitted that his books and articles introduced more people outside of the academy to criticism than did the entire back run of Social Text and The Minnesota Review. We’ve been told that Bloom was ambitious, and it’s true dozens of books churned out, a prolific critic, but one apt to dismiss that which he didn’t have the patience to more fully consider.
The misinterpretations, reactionary poses, and grandiose sentiments too often live after our seemingly once-omnipotent critics pass, while that which was radical, transgressive, and illuminating is interred with their bones. We come to bury Harold Bloom, not to praise him. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that reads and writes.
Studies of Flowers, Jacques-Laurent Agasse, 1848 by Ed Simon
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