Genius

NYtimes Book section

October 27, 2002
'Genius': The Hall of Fame
By JUDITH SHULEVITZ


Few literary critics court ridicule as compulsively as Harold Bloom. His
overproduction of doorstopping volumes of popularizing surveys of world
literature feels more like brand extension than scholarship. His choice, for
his latest book, of title (''Genius''), publisher (the mass-market Warner
Books) and organizing principle (''one hundred exemplary creative minds'')
is more Kmart than Yale. The book itself displays all the faults that have
led fellow academics to disapprove of him. He repeats himself so often that
his favorite words acquire the ring of revolutionary slogans (Originality!
Vitality!) or ritual denunciations (Resenters! Historicizers!). He makes
grandiose and indefensible claims without explaining or arguing for them. He
cloaks himself Wizard-of-Oz-like in the polysyllabic hermeticism of cabala
and Gnosticism, with little seeming regard for the violence his borrowings
may do to those systems or to the comprehensibility of his prose. And oh,
that prose! Ranting, pontificating, self-interrupting – every few pages
bring another aside on the deplorable state of literary studies today or the
evils of the Internet – it defies every rule of elegance and economy.

Bloom is not so easily dismissed, however. His style may be disheveled and
his book shockingly attuned to the demands of the marketplace, but both have
a virtue that trumps those flaws: authenticity. Bloom's focus on genius is
not just commercial opportunism, the usual blather about the moral import of
cultural literacy or part of the national obsession with success, though
critics will find elements of all three if they go looking for them. Bloom
has been writing about genius since at least ''The Anxiety of Influence''
(1973), if not before. His famous theory of poetic production as a struggle
between strong older poets and aspiring younger poets is in essence a theory
of genius – of how geniuses defend themselves against the might of previous
ones. Strength and genius overlap in the Bloomian cosmos, even if they're
not exactly the same thing. Both are terms for power.

Don't confuse Bloom's view of power with that of Michel Foucault, whose
critique of power inspired the materialist and historicist approaches to
literature that Bloom complains about so bitterly. For Foucault, power was
everything and everywhere: all institutions, all discourses, all social
relations could be – must be – reinterpreted as struggles for power. For
Bloom, power is rare, mysterious, dangerous and inexplicable, although we
never stop trying to explain it. Instances of this power, which has much to
do with charisma and could also be called greatness, are to be cherished and
studied, not deemed suspect and demystified. Efforts to explain literature
as a function of the author's social milieu or historical context, according
to Bloom, amount to little more than pathetic attempts to ward off the
terrifying force of genius, to reduce it to something harmless.

Bloom's most perverse and important insight, here as in his earlier work, is
that genius hurts. It wounds. Not only is it vital and supremely real but it
transcends conventional morality and frames of reference, which means that
it may well rip through our defenses, shredding our fragile sense of self.
The genius of a great poet can so overwhelm a later poet that he never
writes an original word again. Readers prefer not to acknowledge genius
either, since it may well pass judgment on their mediocrity. The proper
appreciation of genius, by this account, is not the twee hobby of
gentlemen-scholars so often mocked by those who favor scientific approaches
to literature, but an exacting discipline that yields wise and humble
readers. In his introduction Bloom throws out this bold challenge to
America's English departments: ''I base this book, 'Genius,' upon my belief
that appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than
are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional
individuals.''

What do we get if we eschew the reigning analytic methods – the New
Historicism, cultural studies, feminism, queer theory and so forth – and
embrace appreciation? If Bloom is our model, here is what we don't get:
precision. Bloom has long since stopped paying careful attention to
prosodic, novelistic or dramatic form or systematically unpacking layers of
meaning, though he will occasionally make his skills at those tasks
admonishingly clear. As well read in Western literature and criticism as
anyone alive today, Bloom prefers to arrive at his judgments through broad
comparisons rather than close textual scrutiny. In each of the five- and
six-page essays devoted to the 100 geniuses in this book, he gives as much
space to writers who may have resembled, influenced or been influenced by
the author as to the author himself. Though Bloom's ambition is to isolate
in 3,000 words or less the quality that makes the author a genius –
Chaucer's cheeky good cheer, George Eliot's moral grandeur, Proust's
detached sense of the tragicomic – he discovers this trait not by examining
the work under a microscope but by scanning all the heavens for its like.

This will frustrate you if you're a reader who seeks specific insights into
how literature works, but it makes a certain rough sense. Bloom's own genius
is not for scholarship but for rekindling an ancient sense of awe, for
restoring to us an awareness of literature's uncanny, unspannable distance
from ordinary life. Bloom sees literature in half-Greek, half-Gnostic terms:
it is, first, a Promethean theft by which humans usurp what belongs to the
gods, and, second, a sort of heresy by which authors create characters who
are richer and more alive than mere mortals could ever be. The subtitle of
this book is somewhat misleading, because Bloom is much less interested in
the exemplary minds of his geniuses than in those of the men and women who
people their works. He speaks of the audacious Wife of Bath, of Iago, Hamlet
and Falstaff, of Don Quixote, as if they had once walked the earth. Given
his notions of how they affected our further development, it would seem they
had. The Wife of Bath is the mother of anticlerical skepticism; Iago, the
father of nihilism; Hamlet, the inventor of inwardness; Quixote, the
prototype of all later moral and visionary courage.

Bloom's cult of character helps to explain why he gives himself over to
Bardolatry with such religious fervor. Shakespeare is the prime mover of
Bloom's universe, the greatest creator of character who ever lived and an
author who hides himself behind his creations as thoroughly as the God of
the cabalists does behind his. Bloom's obsession with literary personality
also explains his odd insistence that J, the Yahwist, the author of much of
Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, was a woman in King David's court. The biblical
scholars who object that there is simply no evidence for this miss Bloom's
point. He is not making a claim about an actual historical person but
inventing a myth provocative enough to counter the normative Jewish and
Christian ones. Bloom wants us to see that God, too, is a character in J's
literary cosmology, one richly endowed with her mischievous irony and far
less predictable and fair-minded than tradition likes to admit. (It doesn't
hurt that the J thesis lets Bloom thumb his nose at his feminist critics by
reinterpreting the story of Adam and Eve as one in which God's creation of
woman surpasses, in originality and power, his creation of Adam.)

THIS isn't to say that Bloom's urge to monumentalism won't drive you batty
at times. The intensity of Bloom's praise for the writers he most admires,
Shakespeare and Blake and Emerson, can border on the embarrassing. His
tendency toward hyperbole ties him into knots when he trains it on something
he only pretends to admire, like the Koran. I can only guess at the
editorial pressures that bore on his decision to include Muhammad in his
pantheon, but his argument ripples with false praise: ''The polemical edge
never abandons Muhammad's tone, which asserts and achieves authority by
never allowing the reader to rest.'' (Bloom can be very funny, however, on
the subject of authors he openly dislikes, such as T. S. Eliot. Of Eliot's
criticism, he writes, ''Some of his earlier judgments . . . have their own
value if you turn them upside down.'')

Bloom's identification of literature with religion leads him to erect a
bizarre, almost worshipful frame over this book. It is divided into 10
sections, each named after a property attributed to God by the Jewish
mystics – a system of nomenclature that, since these properties are given
in Hebrew and identified cursorily in a line or two, seems as pretentious
and unhelpful as the obscure taxonomies favored by the theorists Bloom
dislikes. But what Bloom loves he loves with a largeness of heart that he
transforms into a fundamental critical principle, and at a time when critics
vie with one another to see who can manifest the greatest degree of
suspicion, such generosity is nothing to laugh at.


Judith Shulevitz writes the Close Reader column for the Book Review.






_________________________________________________________________
Get faster connections