Historicizing Theory

9. Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon

I am a comic critic, and all I get are serious reviews. —Harold Bloom, interview by Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society What is there to say, at this late date, about Harold Bloom?1 The polemics are over, history has moved on—yet was anything ever said in a timely fashion about him, even back in the distant seventies? Has it not always been too late or too early in the day to figure him out? Such questions no doubt risk sounding tendentious: surely Bloom has received more than his share of attention over the years. And though he likes to complain (as what author doesn’t?) of the incomprehending attacks and “weak misreadings” his work receives, has he not also been granted careful professional scrutiny as well as remarkable professional success? No doubt—and yet, as the slender but persistent trickle of books and essays about him testifies, Bloom remains, if not quite a mystery, a nagging question and idiosyncratic figure within the American literary-critical institution. As young, iconoclastic romanticist, as mature anxiety-of-influence theorist, and as pugnacious and hyperprolific éminence grise—the “Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” whose books on Shakespeare and the Western canon show up in airports, and whose Chelsea House volumes fill thirty feet of shelf-space—in 209 9 Literature, Incorporated Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon MARC REDFIELD all these incarnations, Bloom has left his mark on literary culture, and always in a way that has about it a certain improbability, baroque excess, and irreducible singularity. Despite the shrewd critiques and careful evaluations that his work has at various times inspired, he remains a compellingly inexplicable figure, at once strange and overfamiliar, like a literary character about whom we will always be able to write again. It is as a literary character, figuratively speaking, that Bloom will appear in the pages that follow: as, that is, a character who sees himself, and has often been seen by others, as representing to the point of embodying the “literary,” particularly when the literary is understood as “the Canon.” This role catapulted Bloom to national prominence in the early 1990s at the height of the so-called “canon wars,” and may therefore be understood in relation to developments in the American culture and education industries that made the canon wars possible—a broad and ongoing defunding of the humanities within increasingly technologically oriented, corporate-controlled, and corporationlike universities; the emergence of “theory” as a glamour discipline, soon to be partly absorbed into and eclipsed by “cultural studies”; the diversification of university populations and the increasing prominence of themes of cultural diversity in classrooms and journals; the well-funded production, by mainstream media sources and neo-conservative foundations, of a specter of multicultural , anti-aesthetic anarchy from which the university and Shakespeare must be saved; and so on.2 The relations among these various phenomena are not always self-evident, but critics who have tried to provide synthetic overviews of the contemporary state of the humanities have often found themselves speculating about a crisis within literature, a crisis that in some fashion underlies both the outbreak of the canon wars and the emergence of literary theory. “The canon debate,” in John Guillory’s influential analysis, “signifies nothing less than a crisis in the form of cultural capital we call literature,” literature being understood to name “the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the present educational system” (vii, x). Having become largely irresponsive to the needs of a new professional-managerial class, literature has entered a public state of crisis, one symptom of which, according to Guillory, was the emergence of an alternative canon of texts labeled “theory” in the 1970s. Theory, personified above all by Paul de Man, sought to stave off literature’s irrelevance by reimagining literature as “literariness” (Guillory, 180); in similar fashion, the culture wars— the aggressive rejection of the category of the aesthetic by advocates of “cultural studies”; the corresponding conservative backlash by middlebrow cultural journalists and academics like Bloom—act out, with varying degrees of self-consciousness , the crisis within literature as an institution or social form. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, however, this account of theory and the canon wars fails to register the power and persistence of aesthet210 Marc Redfield ics within contemporary Western cultural institutions (a persistence visible in the name “cultural” studies...