The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom (review)

Dr Johnson once lamented that there was hardly anything yet written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress. Five hundred pages of criticism on Harold Bloom must put one in mind of the Yaleman's own prodigious work rate – how many contemporary critics apart from the Great Cham of the present literary age warrant a door-stop volume like this one? The answer is absolutely none! The slight hesitation experienced when leafing through this dictionary-length compendium was my fear that either the super-size volume would be filled with head-achingly-involved deconstructive jargon or the weighty tome might resolve itself into a politically-correct exercise in baiting the self-styled defender of the canon. Although there are some redoubtably heavyweight essays, including one weighing-in at more than fifty pages, there are refreshingly few puritans in this cock-pit. Indeed, it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the collection begins with a series of poems inspired by Bloom. At their best, the contributors praise Bloom as a peerless reader of Romantic poetry, an almost lost art in today's academy.

Outwardly the aged Johnson became a reactionary bellower at non-conformists, a Tory grandee alarmed at the slide towards Romantic aesthetics. The same hint of self-parody is to be found in the elderly Bloom's tilt at New-historicist windmills, at those 'historians' who elide literary nuance and complexity with easy-to-understand excerpts from letters and other contextual ephemera. Guided by this point of comparison, I divide the contributors into two groups – Bloom's spiritual friends and his spiritual enemies. Firstly, I examine these friendly writers who elegantly probe Bloomian aesthetics, only later to ponder those prosecutory Ha-Satanic toings and froings that succeed in wresting the plough-reigns from Bloom. The latter reduce Bloom to an incongruous cultural purview, or, more interestingly, to Bloom's own Jewish American sensibility. The former are represented by Robert Gilbert, Graham Allen, Barnard Turner, T. J. Cribb, Gregory Machacek, Milton Welch, John Phillips, Roy Sellars, Nicholas Burns, Peter Morris and Maria Rosa Menocal. The Ha-Satans are represented by Clifton Spargo, Sinead Murphy, Stephan Da Silva, Christopher Rollason, Gwee Li Sui, Leslie Brisman, Martin McQuillan, Anders Klitgaard, Moshe Idel and Heidi Sylvester. The first group discuss this or that work by Bloom just like an old-fashioned lecturer explicating a treasured literary text, while the second group are perfectly sensible and frequently sensitive, if occasionally sceptical, readers of Bloom's works.

Five-hundred pages of literary criticism can only be distilled into a review with the loss of many excellent aphorisms and insights. Gilbert writes that Bloom is the last appreciative critic who takes as his responsibility the task of persuading his readers that a text has aesthetic value. Allen pithily points to the fact that we accept Bloom's canonical umpiring decisions on authority since who else has read so widely and deeply? Turner mentions that aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul – the protestant American reader – not as a person in society, but as a deep self, an ultimate inwardness. This inwardness is identified by Bloom's spiritual friends as the aesthetic language of power rather than the historicised language of knowledge. Allen's introduction quotes Bloom arguing that reading grants you power or the pathos of more life; the transcendent lie that human mortality can triumph over time. Morris produces a useful allegory for texts that are free from influence and therefore aesthetically poor, and writings that would seem over-determined by precursive influence. 'I read the allegory of Sin and Death […] as outlining two opposite poles of poetic creation: one in which the poet does not individuate himself from the precursor at all' and the other deathly alternative allegoric of the poet who remains un-influenced and un-canonical. Morris...