Harold Bloom and the School of Resentment; or, Canon to the Right of Them

HERBERT N. SCHNEIDAU Harold Bloom and the School of Resentment; or, Canon to the Right of Them I am a comic critic, and all I get are serious reviews. Harold Bloom TL· Veiled Sibyl. I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth. James Joyce, Ulysses MONG the TALKED-ABOUT authors and deal-cutters of the .season (O.J., Newt, the Pope), Harold Bloom stands out by crying wolf to the academic world: literary studies, he maintains, are about to pass into the hands of those who read politically and ideologically, those who reject aesthetic value as a mystification used to cover up the hegemonic nature of academic literary discourse. For writing The Westem Canon as a warning against this "School of Resentment," Bloom was given an advance of $600,000 by the publishers, according to reports . I can't begrudge Bloom the money, since it is bruited that he doesn't spend it on himself; but I do revel in schadenfreude at the prospect of Harcourt Brace losing a great deal of that money, for the book has no potential readership that I can imagine. The publishers obviously counted on a lot of sales to the same people who made Allan Bloom's Ciosing of the American Mind a best-seller (and thus a national disgrace). Need we wonder if they quietly hoped that most of these lumpen-conservative buyers would confuse the two Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 128Herbert N. Schneidau Blooms? No doubt in Harcourt's way of looking at it such gambles are worth trying. It has been reported that they, with Bloom's agent, talked him into adding a list of some 400 canon-worthy authors as an appendix ; a good idea, for otherwise the targeted audience will find nothing to read for their money. The idea of such minds, primed for a highminded version of a Limbaugh tirade, plowing through Bloom's chapters in praise of Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the rest is hilarious; I'd love to watch one try it. Much worse for such readers, Bloom explicitly and emphatically slams their beloved premise that reading the greats is salvific for individuals and society. He makes it clear at the beginning that he refuses to be grouped with "right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values" (4). Later, he warms to the theme: "Ideological defenses ofthe Western Canon are as pernicious in regard to aesthetic values as the onslaughts of attackers who seek to destroy the Canon or 'open it up,' as they proclaim" (22). In fact, he gets carried away and says, "Whatever the Western Canon is, it is not a program for social salvation. ... If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation " [!] (29). He tries thus to outwit those who assert that supporting the canon perpetuates dominant values and blinds individuals to social oppression: "The new commissars tell us that reading good books is bad for the character, which I think is probably true" (16, emphasis added). "The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalistic enterprise," he avers. Indeed, the "greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature" (40). So much for cousin Allan, not to mention Holy Willie Bennett. Needless to say, many who buy the book will never read these passages, since they want it only for display purposes: but in the spate of reviews and interviews that were arranged to give the book its nimbus of shock value, Bloom has sometimes been incautious enough to sympathize with the oppressed, "those who are indeed insulted by the horrible inequities of our abominable system" ("Bloom and Doom," 75). This isn't exactly what the target audience wants to hear. In short, those who buy...