Harold Bloom Interview Teach Course 24 Shakespeare

8/18/2019 Harold Bloom Interview Teach Course 24 Shakespeare

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.Harold Bloom

INTERVIEWED BY JESSE PEARSON

Harold Bloom is the preeminent literary critic in the world, and as such he is perhaps thelast of a dying breed. Bloom adheres, passionately and single-mindedly, to the true and

first tenet of lit crit—to take a book and judge it on its own merit, to see it as a thing inand of itself. The aesthetic value of the prose, the mastery of metaphor, strength andconviction of theme—these are the sorts of things that a critic like Bloom pays attentionto.

Much of contemporary criticism takes a novel and holds it up to a series of incongruousand irrelevant sociological magnifying glasses—gender theory, feminism, Marxistanalysis, and all sorts of postmodern muck. These critics, whom Bloom has memorablycalled the School of Resentment, have gained such strength that they have colored, eveninfected, writers whose careers have started since the Resentment began. So what we areseeing is criticism that changes literature for the worse and, as Bloom laments,contributes to the idiot-ization of the entire world. It’s a mess, and it may be irreversible.

And so we return to Harold Bloom, the old voice crying out in the wilderness, who,besides writing one of the most important and useful books on Shakespeare ( The

Invention of the Human ) and coining the term “anxiety of influence”—an extremelyuseful theory of literary evolution—in the book of the same name, took on the whole of

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academia (for that is now just another name for the School of Resentment) in thetowering 1994 work The Western Canon . It is in this book that Bloom first and mostcomprehensively did his part to preserve what’s important—essential, really—to humans

from all the great works of writing that have been produced from the Bible and

Gilgamesh all the way up to, well, right now. The professors and critics of the world willonly get their hands on my copy of this book when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

I recently spoke with Bloom over the phone. He was in his office at Yale, where heteaches two classes a week.

Jesse Pearson: I was hoping to talk first about The Western Canon .Harold Bloom: Do you mean the whole category, or what I wrote about it?

I mean your book.

But can we make an agreement? Let’s forget that damned list.

Ha. Do you mean the appendix in the back of the book that lists all the canonicalworks?

The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. Ifought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot ofthings that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like

to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the othertranslations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world,including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’sagree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list.

It’s a deal.

I wish I had nothing to do with it. I literally did it off the top of my head, since I have apretty considerable memory, in about three hours one afternoon.

It does seem like the sort of thing that a publisher would ask for to make the bookmore palatable to a casual reader.

It doesn’t exist. Let’s go on.

I started college in the same year that this book was published—1994.

1994. That’s a long time ago now. That’s 14 years. I am now 78 and I’ve come off aterrible year. I nearly died. But I’m all right now and I’m back teaching.

What happened?A whole series of mishaps and illnesses, but the big one that knocked me out for six


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months and nearly killed me was that I quite literally broke my back in a fall. But let’sforget about it. It’s over now.

Looking at the book, and thinking about it being available right when I was starting

college—Where were you at college?

Well, that’s part of the problem. I went to a very small liberal-arts college with nogrades and no majors. Let’s not speak its name. Or, okay, let’s. It’s calledHampshire.

Oh yes, I know it very well. It was supposed to be very elite. I remember they oncewanted me to talk there and I sort of dodged it because I felt it wasn’t going to work.

It wouldn’t have worked. And I feel like I should have just read your book instead of going to school there. But can you tell me, do you think that things have becomebetter or worse in terms of the School of Resentment since the book was published?

Obviously they’ve gotten much worse. Just look at the enormous international as well asdomestic dumbing down and decline in serious reading and indeed the falling apart,inevitably, of standards.

Yet you’re still soldiering on, teaching undergraduates.

But I’ve turned my back on the academy even though I still teach at Yale. I am part of nodepartment—I became a department, or nondepartment, of one when I walked out on theEnglish department back in, my God, way back there in 1976. That’s a long time agonow. Thirty-two years. But I started to write books pretty early on—certainly from aboutthe late 1980s on to the present, so for about 20 years now, addressed to the generalreader all over the world. And it has worked because I now have an enormous generalreadership, mostly in an incredible number of translations. So there is always a savingremnant of readers out there, as I have discovered. On the other hand, every single one ofthose countries, like our own, does suffer from a kind of dumbing down.

It’s in all sorts of culture and media, but it’s mostly in books.

It has something to do with, though not everything to do with, technological change—thefact that most kids grow up not reading deeply or going to a museum and staring at apicture or going to a concert and really listening to authentic music—including authentic

jazz. People are trapped in the age of what you might call the triple screen: the motion-picture screen—and this is in ascending order of evil in terms of what it does to theirminds throughout the world—the television screen, and finally the computer screen,which is the real villain.


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It’s disappointing because the internet could have been such a good thing. It couldhave been like an indestructible Library of Alexandria, but with porn.

This goes back to what I said about the saving remnant. You’re part of that savingremnant. As I’ve been saying for years: If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and

maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you anendless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how toread, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in whichyou simply drown.

I started school, ostensibly at least, as a poetry major. But I couldn’t find a classthere that wasn’t “Transgendered Chicano Poets of the Latter Half of 1982” orsomething. Not that I don’t like transgendered Chicano poets of 1982—they’regreat, I’m sure. But I wanted to learn more than that. Or rather, I wanted to start

from the very beginning and work my way up to transgendered Chicanos. I wantedthe context of history, and I couldn’t get it at college.

Oh my dear, let’s not get into that. I’m so weary now of being called a racist or a sexist. Ican’t take that anymore.

But where does this fear of reading the works of what some critics derisively call“dead white men” come from?

Well, we’re about to crash on the scale of 1837, the Great Panic, or 1929, and now we’regoing to have the Panic of either 2008 or 2009. That is a consequence—it’s one of manyconsequences including a lot of innocent dead everywhere—of the way in which thecounterculture ultimately, by its enormous recoil, helped give us George W. Bush andSarah Palin. They are both semiliterate at best. They both exude self-confidence. Andthey both claim a direct relationship with God.

Hopefully she’ll disappear now, or just start a talk show or something.

She is a very, very dangerous person.

Agreed. But moving on… If a person wants to seriously approach literature on theirown, outside of academia, it’s very difficult.

Without a real teacher, an authentic teacher, a real mentor, it’s very difficult for anyone toget started.

Can you explain to me your concept of the solitary reader? That’s who you say youaddress your books to.

It’s not a concept. It’s just a fact. There are solitary readers all over the world. I don’thave any special insight into this. I do not know why it is that certain young people, from

the beginning, are loners—perfectly sane—who want to go and be alone with a very goodbook. Again, it’s the saving remnant. It’s a sort of strange grace and of course I’m


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profoundly thankful for it. So you don’t have to ask me what I mean by the solitaryreader. I mean you—on the basis of what you’ve told me. All you need to know about thesolitary reader is Pearson.

Nice! Can we talk about the School of Resentment?Their name is Legion. I have wasted my breath on them. Doctor Samuel Johnson, myhero, told us to clear our minds of cant. But my friend John Hollander keeps warning meto stop ranting against cant, which is what I do. By the time you’ve spent a certainamount of energy ranting against cant, it becomes a kind of cant in itself. So let’s notbother with it.

But it’s been a struggle of yours for so long.

Phrases that you formulate come back and haunt you. I shouldn’t have formulated “theSchool of Resentment.” I once called them a “rabblement of lemmings,” and I run intothat phrase everywhere. And I now wish that I hadn’t formulated the single phrase that Iseem to have given to the language: “the anxiety of influence.” Of course everybodymisunderstands it.

How do they get it wrong?

They interpret it as an affect in the later writer. But it isn’t an affect in the later writer. Itdoesn’t matter whether the later writer does or does not feel an anxiety, conscious orotherwise, with regard to a precursor figure. It’s actually the relationship between onepoem and another poem, one novel and another novel, and so on and so forth.

It’s an inescapable thing, and an ancient thing. It’s simply what happens from beingpart of the lineage of writers and writing.

The current paperback of The Anxiety of Influence has a long introduction by me onShakespeare and Marlowe, which makes very clear that I don’t think of it as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon anymore. In fact it exists in Pindar in relation to Homer andobviously in Plato in relation to Homer. It’s universal. It’s in ancient Chinese. It’s even in

the Hebrew Bible. Think of the relationship between Ben Sira and the Apocrypha, so-called, the ecclesiastical, so-called, the wisdom of the fathers, in relation to Coheleth orEcclesiastes. But go on.

Yeah, I’d better because I’m getting way out of my league there. In the introductionto The Western Canon you say that you agree with this idea that “there is a god, andhis name is Aristophanes.” What’s so great about him? He was sort of the firstliterary critic, right?

Yes, the great point about Aristophanes as I see him is that he is the real beginning of

Western literary criticism, particularly when he savages Euripides in favor of Aeschylus.In fact, he really talks about a kind of anxiety of influence on the part of Euripides in


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relation to Aeschylus. What I can recognize as Western literary criticism really beganmore in Aristophanes than in Aristotle. His formalism tells me that criticism always has aclose relationship to the origins of parody, of satire, of a kind of desperate irony. And ofcourse we don’t have literary critics anymore. It’s an archaic notion.

Oh, but hey, what about James Wood? I’m sort of kidding, of course.

Oh, don’t even mention him. He doesn’t exist. He just does not exist at all.

I thought his last book was fun to read because he gets so enthusiastic about things,but yeah, I don’t really understand the phenomenon of him on the whole.

My dear, phenomena are always being bubbled up. There are period pieces in criticism asthere are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away.

His last book seemed to be a period piece at least in terms of its cover design. Itlooked like a textbook from the 30s or 40s. It was kind of cute.

A publisher wanted to send me the book and I said, “Please don’t.” I think it was my ownpublisher, of the huge book I’m working on called Living Labyrinth: Literature and

Influence , in which I’ve been bogged for five years now. It’s meant to be a grand summaand may be my undoing. Anyway, I told them, “Please don’t bother to send it.” I didn’twant to have to throw it out. There’s nothing to the man. He also has—and I haven’t everread him on me—but I’m told he wrote a vicious review of me in the New Republic ,which I never look at anyway, in which he clearly evidenced, as one of my old friends putit, a certain anxiety of influence. I don’t want to talk about him.

OK. Maybe this next one is a silly question.

Ask what you will, dear.

How do we read Shakespeare?

Well, I of course teach Shakespeare. I’m back to teaching again after a year off, and Ialways teach a class on Shakespeare that goes through the year and a class on how to read

poems that goes through the year. But this is a very hard thing to answer. Critical bookson Shakespeare usually don’t help much.

Is going to see productions of his plays valuable while reading him?

If it’s the right production. I won’t go to almost anything because I know it’s going to behacked up and smashed by some stupid, pigheaded, politically correct, high-conceptperson who thinks his or her concepts are higher than Shakespeare’s, which is ridiculous.So I don’t even go once a year. I doubt that I’ll ever go to one again.


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So are there no useful guides besides your own?

I also like Harold Goddard’s book. It’s called The Meaning of Shakespeare . It’s now intwo paperback volumes and I really urge you to read it and get other people to read it—aswell as to read my admittedly rather ramshackle book on Shakespeare.

I’ll do what I can. How many of his plays do you get through in your course on him?

I manage in the course of a year to cram in 24 of the 38 or so plays because two dozen ofthem really are of the highest quality.

You have a particular affection for the character of Falstaff, who appears in thetwo Henry IV s and The Merry Wives of Windsor .

Oh yes, yes. In this I follow [literary scholar] A.C. Bradley, who was there before me. Infact, that’s still a good book. His work on Shakespearean tragedy is far preferable to mostmodern books on the same thing. Bradley said that the four Shakespearean charactersmost inexhaustible to meditation are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra—which mightat first seem an eccentric choice, but you brood on it and you see that he is right. Lear isbeyond you so you can’t really keep meditating on him past a certain point. Macbeth istoo uncomfortably close—you can’t meditate on him. Rosalind is too free of you, is toosane and normal.

What makes those four characters so rich?

They’re so powerfully, elliptically presented, and I guess increasingly that’s the clue tomy Shakespearean teaching. From the first moment on, I try to show the students thateven though he is the richest of writers, he is also paradoxically the most elliptical. Youalways have to follow what it is that he’s leaving out on purpose to make your mind’swork harder. With Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra, an enormous amount is left out.

Does teaching young people give you any hope for the future of literature andcriticism?

It gives me personal exhilaration at the moment because I was awful tired of lying on my

back and being cut off. And I refuse to teach graduate students. I have for a number ofyears now for obvious reasons.

Is it because they are ruined by contemporary academia at that point?

Look, I’ve become the pariah of the profession. You have to write letters for graduatestudents and I found that I was giving them the kiss of death. I’m not going to put that onmy head in my old age. So I gave it up maybe eight or ten years ago, when I was alreadyold. The only thing that I think is a little awkward is going into my Shakespeare classevery Wednesday and my poetry class every Thursday and finding that my students are,

after all, since these are Yale undergraduates, very good and highly selected ones.They’re all quite wonderful, I think. But they are between roughly 19 and at most 22


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years of age and I’m 78. There is an age gap there and I can’t always be sure that I’m ableto bridge it.

And which era of poetry are you teaching?

Oh, I did a huge anthology called The Best Poems of the English Language: FromChaucer Through Robert Frost , though it actually goes beyond Frost. He’s simply the lastperson to be alive and to write poems. I wanted to end it with the close of the 19thcentury in terms of the poet’s birth, with Hart Crane, who is still my favorite poet, born in1899. I follow that book out for the first semester, and in the second semester I go back tothe four poets who after all this time are the ones I most care for among the 20th-centurypoets: William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens, upon whom I’ve written very largebooks, Hart Crane, on whom I’ve written a couple of essays, including the centennialintroduction to the current best paperback of Crane’s poetry, and D.H. Lawrence, whom

I’ve written only a couple of essays on through the years, but who is a marvelouspoet. And now my voice is failing. We’ll have to stop.

Thanks for talking to me.

And thank you, Mr. Pearson. Before I go into the Great, perhaps we will meet.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN VICE MAGAZINE IN 2008

INTERVIEWS

A Conversation with Harold Bloom author of How To Read and Why

What inspired you to write How To Read and Why? With both The Western Canon published back in 1994 and Shakespeare: The Inventionof the Human published in 1998, I had toured extensively and found an astonishingresponse from the audiences I addressed and from people who talked to me and peoplefor whom I was signing books !o this day, I am deluged with mail from people who sayhow desperately pleased they are to find that someone is indeed writing about literaturefor the common reader, that someone does not try, as it were, to do the "rench thing, in

regard to literary study or the many ideological modes which I will not mention, which arenow practiced in the #nglo$#merican %niversities and college world!he more I thought about the response to these two books I had written, the more Ireali&ed that neither of them had really addressed a need which I felt highly 'ualified andhighly driven to meet #nd that is, a self$help book, indeed, an inspiration book, whichwould not only encourage solitary readers of all kinds all over the world to go on readingfor themselves, but also support them in their voyages of self$discovery through reading(How To Read and Why is meant to) give readers a human aid to their own reading, not totell them what to read, because to some extent I had done that in The Western Canon ,but to tell them indeed how to read, and even more than how, to remind them why wehave to go on reading, why indeed it*s a kind of death in life if we yield completely to whatWilliam Wordsworth called the +tyranny of the bodily eye,+ that is to say, the tyranny of the visual at a time when we are so bombarded by information of a visual kind

What do you think is the single greatest threat to the future of reading?


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I used to believe, until fairly recently, that the greatest threat was both visual over$stimulation$$television, films, computers, virtual reality, and so on$$and also auditory over$stimulation, you know, what I call rock religion, !-, rap, all of these mindless burstingsof the eardrums #nd, of course, I think what has happened to education on every level,from grade school through graduate school throughout the .nglish speaking world, is anincreasing menace to disinterested and passionate reading, reading not governed byideological and other social considerations/ut more recently, I have reached the very sad conclusion that what most threatens thefuture of reading is the, I will not say probability$$I would become very wretched indeed$$but the real possibility of the disappearance of the book I begin to fear that what it meansto be alone with a book$$the various ways in which you can hold a book in your ownhands and turn the pages and write in the margins when you are moved to do so,underline or emphasi&e when you are moved to do so$$might almost vanish, that thetechnological overkill of the latest developments we are moving towards, the e$book sortof thing which r 0ates and others are proclaiming might perhaps put the book in

eopardy #nd I really don*t think that without the book we are going to survive 2ou canhave a technological elite without the book, but you cannot finally have a humanelyeducated portion of the public that is able to teach to others #s a matter of fact, I think

what you will really have is the death of humane teaching, as such

What can people get from reading that they can't from movies or television? I would say not less than everything 2ou can get a great deal of information, as such,from screens of one sort or another 2ou can da&&le yourself with images, if that is your desire /ut how you are to grow in self$knowledge, become more introspective, discover the authentic treasures of insight and of compassion and of spiritual discernment and of adeep bond to other solitary individuals, how in fact can like call out to like without reading,I do not know I suppose if I were to put it in almost a common denominator sort of way, Iwould say that you cannot even begin to heal the worst aspects of solitude, which areloneliness and potential madness, by visual experience of any kind, particularly the sortof mediated visual experience that you get off a screen of whatever sort If you are to

really encounter a human otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself, whichcan become an answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation, there truly is noauthentic place to turn except to a book

ou talk in the !ook a!out contemporary readers having difficulty comprehendingirony in literature of earlier times" Why do you think this is a pro!lem? Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while meaning another, sometimes indeed'uite the opposite of what overtly you are saying It*s very difficult to have the highestkind of imaginative literature from 3omer through on e5illo, as it were, and entirelyavoid irony !here is the tragic irony, which one confronts everywhere in 6hakespeare,that the audience, the auditor, and the reader are aware of$$something in the character or predicament or inward affects, emotions of the protagonist or protagonists, that theheroes and heroines are totally unaware of themselvesIt*s very difficult to convey this 'uality of irony by purely visual means -isual ironies tendto fall flat or they vulgari&e very 'uickly or they become grotes'ue 7eally subtle irony of any sort demands literary language !he way in which meaning tends to wander in anyreally interesting literary text, so that the reader is challenged to go into exile with it, catchup with it, learn how to construe it, make it her very own, is essentially a function of ironyIf we totally lose our ability to recogni&e and to understand irony, then we will be doomedto a kind of univocal discourse, which is alright I suppose for politicians* speeches andperhaps for certain representatives of popular religion, but will leave us badly defrauded

What !ooks or poems have you returned to most often over the course of your life? !he primary answer has to be 6hakespeare .ven if I did not teach 6hakespeare all thetime, I would always be re$reading 6hakespeare, reciting 6hakespeare to myself,brooding about the great plays I tend personally to re$read the ma or lyric poets of the


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.nglish language from 6hakespeare*s sonnets through Wallace 6tevens and 3art rane!hat*s what most vivifies and pleases me I re$read onathan 6wift*s A Tale of theTub twice a year, but that*s to punish myself It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictiveprose in the .nglish language, but it*s a kind of vehement satire upon visionary pro ectorsas it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and corrective for me I re$read:roust every year because In Search of ost Time is ust about my favorite novel, exceptmaybe for Samuel Richardson!s Clarissa , which I also tend to re$read every year or so Ire$read ickens all the time, especially my peculiar favorite which I*ve loved since I was achild, !he :ickwick :apers I re$read ;scar Wilde nearly every day of my life, or I recite;scar to myself, but that*s a personal enthusiasm which perhaps surpasses his literaryworth, very large as that indeed is I read r 6amuel ohnson all the time because he ismy great hero as a literary critic and I have tried to model myself upon him all my life /utthis answer would be endless, since I do very little besides teach and read and write

What is your favorite !ook to teach? ;h, most certainly, 6hakespeare !eaching either the high tragedies, Hamlet" #thello"$acbeth" %in& ear" Antony and Cleopatra , or the greatest of the comedies, Twelfth'i&ht" As (ou ike It" A $idsummer 'i&ht!s )ream , or what may be, I think, the finest,

most representative instance of what 6hakespeare can do, the two parts of %in& Henry I* , taken together, considered as one play, in which, of course, the central figure is myparticular literary hero, 6ir ohn "alstaff #nd the so$called late romances, which arereally tragi$comedies, particularly The Tempest and The Winter!s Tale

#id you have a teacher who was a particular inspiration to you? ;h yes I was deeply inspired and helped greatly, humanly, by three of my teachers inparticular When I was at ornell undergraduate, I came very much under the influenceand the kind guidance of 3 #brams, eyer 3oward #brams, who I*m delighted to sayis still alive 3e*s 88 years old now, one of the leading, perhaps the leading scholar of .nglish 7omantic poetry in the


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How did you choose which works to discuss in the !ook? #s I made very clear in one of the earlier sentences of the book, there is nothingprescriptive about the book It isn*t trying to tell you what to read? it is really trying to tellyou how to read and why to read It is a self$help and inspirational kind of manual, as itwere #nd as I say very clearly at the beginning, whether I*m dealing with any of my fivecategories, .uropean novels, #merican novels, short stories, poetry, or plays, I can onlygive samples I tried to take samples that were really in some deep way central to theexperience of the reader, but that were also to some degree, varied, and above all elseaccessible I wanted them to be accessible stories, accessible novels, very familiar worksif possible, or familiar to many readers, if not to most or all readers @I would have toadmit that 6helley*s The Triumph of ife may be a little too difficult for the purposes of thebook, but I felt that by then one could try a really difficult poem on the reader A/ut it*s very, very difficult to try to write such a book and keep it to about whatever this is,$or$so pages, and not seem to be purely arbitrary or purely personal in the books thatyou choose !hus some of my friends who are poets and novelists and playwrights,though they like the book, have 'uestioned why one writer is there rather than another,and I*m not always sure that I can give an answer that will altogether satisfy or appease

them !o some extent, the choices had to be, in part, arbitrary /ut I think they are all of them representative I think they are almost all of them accessible to a reader with goodwill who is willing to work a little I think that all of them are beautiful, to use a term thatwe should not let go of !hey are all of them aesthetically rewarding to the highestdegree #nd I think that all of them have either a great wisdom or, 'uite manifestly, agreat unwisdom, which teaches you a good deal alsoWhen I re$read the book in proof the other day, I reali&ed that without meaning to do so, Ihad at one time or another, whether I was dealing with novelists, storywriters, poets, or dramatists, found myself reflecting upon and trying to say something useful about the'uite palpable influence of 6hakespeare upon all of these writers #nd he has been, of course, in all .uropean languages, probably with the exception of "rench, theinescapable influence, the inescapable presence for the last four centuries, since he is,

after all, the largest and most powerful writer that we know$n the prologue you write% & ltimately we read in order to strengthen the self"& Asyou have noticed% self(help !ooks top !estseller lists" How can reading greatliterature provide an alternative to these manuals? In the self$help and inspirational category, to be perfectly fair, most things that arepublished, or that sell widely, are really intellectually and spiritually rather thin !hey don*tchallenge a reader in any way, and I*m afraid fre'uently tend to flatter a reader inpreconceptions and misconceptions and easy ad ustments to one*s own self 6o the'uestion is, how can one possibly hope to vie with, to compete with, self$help books of that sort in presenting a book on how to read and why I suppose pragmatically is theonly answer I can give I have tried to be as simple and clear as I either can be or can beinduced to be It is a very direct book, I think It addresses the reader$$whether he or shebe young or old, whatever their background$$'uite intimately!he purpose of the book, and I hope the achievement of the book, is to get in very closeto a reader and try to speak directly to what it is that they either might want out of thebook or might be persuaded to seeB that truly, though they may not have been aware of it,this is what they want and only really first$rate imaginative literature can bring it to them"or example, they want hekhov*s short stories, because they are not only so poignantbut have the uncanny faculty, rather like 6hakespeare in that regard, to persuade thereader or the auditor that certain truths about himself or herself, which are totallyauthentic, totally real, are being demonstrated to the reader for the very first time It*s notas though 6hakespeare or hekhov has created those truths It*s ust that without theassistance of 6hakespeare and hekhov, we might never be able to see what is reallythere


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:re$eminent #merican literary critic 3arold /loom*s twenty$ninth book, WhereShall Wisdom +e ,ound- , was officially launched a few hours after thisconversation took place in his anhattan apartment on


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problems ust a few years ago I survived, but I had to cut back some 2ounever know how much time you have

$)B o you prepare for that moment of passing in any wayD

HB B Go, no, noH In my new book F I don*t know if you*ve had a chance to lookat it yet F I 'uote one of my heroes, the "rench essayist ontaigne F certainlyone of the greatest essayists of all time F who saysB + on*t worry about gettingready for your death, don*t prepare F when the moment comes for you to die,you will know how to do it well enough +

$)B What is the new book aboutD

HB B It*s very different from the previous ones I had written a bookcalled Wisdom and iterature , and it was mostly finished, but after I got so ill,almost exactly two years ago F first I had a terrible bleeding ulcer, I lost sevenpints of blood, and then I had a heart attack and they had to save me bygiving me a three$way open heart bypass surgery It took me six months torecover It gave me a terrible trauma #nyway, so I had written thisbook Wisdom and iterature , and I threw it away /ut I got better #nd in ayear, from #pril to #pril, I wrote this book Where Shall Wisdom +e ,ound ,which is a study of wisdom writing as I understand it, beginning with the3ebrew /ible, /ook of ob, .cclesiastes, passing on to :lato in particular,who has an endless struggle with 3omer, particularly in the Republic , andthe Symposium #nd then I thought, who are the two greatest writers that theWestern world has ever known, well, it*s certainly ervantes and6hakespeare 6o I wrote a chapter on ervantes and 6hakespeare,contrasting the wisdom of each #nd then the second part of it, called +!he0reatest Ideas #re the 0reatest .vents+, which is, of course, a notion ofGiet&sche*s I thought I*d take a great moral essayist for each of the fourcenturies, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, the nineteenth F ontaigne,"rancis /acon, 6amuel ohnson, 0oethe, who, to this day, is the mind of0ermany, and the great #merican sage .merson When I reached thetwentieth century, I had a real dilemma, because I do not regard "reud as ananalyst, as a psychiatrist? I considered 3 5awrence, his polemical writings,I considered :aul -al ry, the last "rench sage and theorist, but they didn*t'uite measure up /ut then I said, ah, the two greatest writers of the twentieth

century are ames oyce and arcel :roust oyce is interested in changingthe form of the novel in relation to the character, whereas arcel :roust, thegreat moralist, is in the great tradition of escartes and ontaigne 6o Icontrasted 6igmund "reud with :roust #nd then I said to myselfB well, I havetalked about the great 3ebrew literature at the beginning, and in the course ofit, I talked about the !almudic sages, the second$century 0nostics, but, withthe exception of r ohnson, I don*t have a hristian sage Who else should Ichoose but the normative hristian wisdom of 6t #ugustineD 3e also seemsto me the inventor of reading as we know it /ut in the end I suspect that thetruest word on wisdom belongs to the doctor and psychologist William amesB+Wisdom is in learning what to overlook + :ragmatically speaking, that seems

to be as wise a remark as I have read


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$)B o you possess wisdomD

HB B Go

$)B GoD

HB B Go If I possessed any wisdom, I would not write a book called WhereShall Wisdom +e ,ound- I am very unwise, I can assure you %nwise in allthings I think I am a good teacher of literature, particularly of 6hakespeare #t2ale on Wednesdays I give an undergraduate seminar ;f course, I am a one$man department, I divorced the .nglish department back in 19EC, I convincedthem to reappoint me as a +professor of absolutely nothing+ F I give courses insomething called humanities #nd on Wednesdays I give a course, year byyear, where we read all of 6hakespeare together #nd on !hursdays I give acourse called +!he #rt of 7eading :oetry+ I regard myself as a teacher Iremark in this new book that I have only three criteria for whether a workshould be read and reread and taught to others, and they areB aestheticsplendour, cognitive power, and wisdom #nd those are not the standards nowapplied in the universities and colleges of the .nglish$speaking world Gor arethey the standards applied in the media .veryone is now much moreconcerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation,and twenty other irrelevancies, whereas I am talking about what I have nevertalked about before, and that is wisdom /ut I am not a wise man, I am not asage I am an aesthete, a very old$fashioned aesthete F I have been reali&ingthat increasingly

$)B Would you apply to literary criticism your notion of misinterpretationD #reyou misinterpreting somebodyD

HB B !he twentieth$century literary critics who were my friends, they are alldead now, the .nglish 0eorge Wilson$Jnight, William .mpson, the anadiandoctor Gorthrup "rye, the #merican Jenneth /urke, together with .rnst

urtius, the 0erman critic whom I have never met F these seem to be thema or literary critics of the Western world of the twentieth century I try toemulate them !hey seem to me primarily aesthetes, I am even more directlyan aesthete, because I react against this repugnant political correctness 6o Ithink a great influence upon me are ohn 7uskin, Walter :ater, and the divine

;scar Wilde, all of whom are very wise literary critics I am fascinated by6amuel ohnson and William 3a&litt, and 6amuel !aylor oleridge, yes 2es, Iwonder what the 5atvian e'uivalents for +misinterpretation+ and +misreading+would be

# lot of people in all languages tend to mix up what I call strong misreadingwith a kind of dyslexia F obviously, I am not talking about that It really seemsto me that all strong literature is a strong misreading of one kind or another ofliterature #nd yes, I think it applies to literary critics also Giet&sche saidB+.edes Wort ist ein *orurteil +, which I would translate as +.very word is amis udgement+ 3e also said in Twili&ht of the Idols F and I 'uote it again and

again teaching about 6hakespeare F +#nything that we are able to speak, tosay or formulate, is something which is already dead in our hearts+ F we can*t


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even feel it anymore, you know 3e says there is always a kind of contempt inthe act of speaking F that sounds like 3amlet himself, don*t you thinkD I think itrelates to the same phenomenon 2ou can*t really catch the living moment ofwhat is happening to you as you read 6hakespeare or as you read !olstoy, or

ante, or ervantes, or ostoevsky F any of the greatest writers Who is the

leading 5atvian writer to dateD

$)B ost would say, 7ainis

HB B ;h yes, yes 7ainis Well, it would apply there also

$)B /ut as to what happens as you read F I think that your book Hamlet: /oem0nlimited comes closest to capturing that very moment

HB B Well, this is the book that the .nglish disliked intensely F well, theygenerally dislike what I write ;f course, the %nited 6tates is in a terriblecondition, we have a kind of fascist regime here F I think it*s the real truthabout it and you can 'uote me on that # few years ago, when I was in/arcelona receiving the national pri&e of atalonia, I remarked whensomebody asked me a 'uestion about president 0eorge /ushB +3e issemiliterate at best, to call him a "ascist would be to flatter him + 3e has nowsufficiently grown in depth that you are no longer flattering him by calling hima "ascist F it is simply a descriptive remark #nd yet the %nited 6tates is not adead country F primarily because it still allows people to come in here F ofcourse, this fascist regime is trying to keep them out, but the lifeblood of thiscountry has always been immigration I teach my clases at 2ale and whatcheers me up are my #sian #merican students F about half of the studentswho take my clases are #sian #mericans What in my generation the ewswere F the intelligentsia F these people are becoming !he ews in thiscountry are now so assimilated that looking at their score cards I could not tellthe difference between my 0entile and my ewish students !he #sian

#mericans are the new ews F they are the ones who study hard, they have areal passion, a real drive to understand If this country has a future, it will bebecause of the new immigrants, the #sians, the #fricans, the 3ispanics ;urregime is fascistic, but our constitution is good !he best provision in thatconstitution states that any child who is born on the #merican soil is an

#merican citi&en, and therefore all these so$called illegal immigrants are now

the parents of #merican citi&ens I may not live long enough to see it, but myhope is that this country would be saved by the 3ispanic #mericans, the #sian #mericans F the new waves of .uropeans !his is still a vibrant and livingculture, whereas the .nglish are incorrigible !hey have no minds at all !hatlittle book had a mixed reception in the %nited 6tates, a terrible reception in.ngland, a very good reception in other countries !he Italian, the 6panish,the :ortuguese, the 6candinavian readers want to understand me, the.nglish don*t I really don*t want to go there again, it*s an absolutely deadculture It no longer has any poets, it no longer has any novelists, it cannotproduce a composer or a painter anymore !he "rench are not much better

$)B /ut how about the literature written by people from the former colonieswho are living in 5ondonD


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HB B 6omething good may yet come out of it /ut they are not as high apercentage of the population as they are here !he only hope to get rid of the7epublican party, since it*s the white male population who votes for them, isthat in another generation the #sian and 3ispanic and other new #mericans

will be numerous enough so that F I hope F there will be political changes!he #merican literary culture is still very much alive F there are real poetshere F ohn #shbery is a remarkable poet? we have four remarkable novelistsstill alive and at workB my friend :hilip 7oth, my friend on e5illo, themysterious !homas :ynchon, and that remarkable, reclusive novelist ormac

c arthy who wrote that astonishing book called The +lood $eridian , which Iwrote about in How to Read and Why I don*t know if a book like The An1ietyof Influence would be translated in the /altic countries F they exist in 7ussian,they exist in &ech and :olish I would like to know more about the /altics,but I am a very bad traveller, I don*t know if I*ll ever go abroad again

$)B 3ave you been anywhere in eastern .uropeD

HB B Go y parents* families were slaughtered there, so I stayed away I alsodon*t like to reschedule clases I have stopped teaching at G2%, though!eaching full$time at 2ale and part$time at G2% is simply too much, so aftersixteen years I decided to cut down I care a lot about teaching and F I hopeI*m mistaken F I sometimes fear I am the last who does #ll my friends haveretired, people of my generation who have taken teaching seriously haveretired I am beginning to be a dinosaur, a brontosaurus /ut I don*t want togive up, I really want to go on teaching

$)B /ut whyD 2ou have talked about reading as a certain kind of an escapefrom the cruelties of life

HB B 2es, my dear child, it*s the same thing I don*t distinguish between certainkinds of reading, writing, and teaching F they seem to me a part of the samekind of activity I can*t give up any of the three and still be myself #lso, I havetaught for fifty$two years F the longest continuity of my life In some kind ofsuperstitious way, I would consider it a kind of dying to give up such a longcontinuity #lso, by teaching I bear witness to the insistence on aestheticvalues and wisdom 2ou know, I am very glad you liked that little book I wrote,

I think it*s more even than the new one I feel that in that 3amlet book I reallylet myself go, I allowed myself F if only once F to write for myself, even thoughI found myself saying things that I know other people have difficultyunderstanding and which they consider extravagant

$)B What are some of these thingsD

HB B Well, for instance, that 3amlet starts to fight back against 6hakespeare,that he attempts to rewrite the play that he is in, that he has a kind of authorityof consciousness, that even more than "alstaff he breaks away from6hakespeare 3e is so gifted that, to 'uote Giet&sche, +3e does not think too

much, he simply thinks too well + 3e knows too well, he understands too well,he has thought to the end of thought 3e has thought himself into an abyss


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that is nothing ;f course, 3amlet moves us because there are all these hintsabout transcendence, but to me, it*s the darkest literary work I have ever read,its implications are simply shattering

$)B I think I can more or less intuit what horror understanding represents for

him 2et I still wonder why he doesn*t simply kill himself, why he has to doaway with seven other peopleD

HB B 0ood 'uestion 3e is simply not the nicest guy in the world 3e is asmuch a villain as he is a hero 3e transcends these categories as hetranscends any category

$)B #s I was reading the book, I found myself wondering where you placeyourself, the author, in your own scheme of thingsD 2ou say it*s 3amlet*sconsciousness expanding, 3amlet is wiser than all of us including6hakespeare Where does that put you, the person talking about 3amlet andthe play, and 6hakespeareD

HB B It is a very wise 'uestion and a very apt one 2 on& pause3 I think that thespecial power of 6hakespeare is to pack more in 3amlet than there is in"alstaff or leopatra or Iago or 5ear, but probably the other thing is that wecannot exhaust 6hakespeare in meditation 2es, I suppose I can count myselfin the picture 6hakespeare more than any other writer allows the reader*sconsciousness to expand 3amlet*s consciousness is extraordinarily wide andit becomes an interesting 'uestion whether or not he ever really is mad #nd Idon*t think he is, if he says +I am but mad north$north$westB when the wind issoutherly I know a hawk from a handsaw + I think my meditation, even thoughI try to be a faithful reader and a useful literary critic I think that when6hakespeare and 3amlet together expand my consciousness to its limits, myconsciousness starts to get the point

$)B What is that pointD

HB B I run into my own limits, not so much from the aesthetic apprehension,but partly from encountering wisdom, I have to say I have no wisdom I waswondering about that as a child and now am wondering again as an old manBwhat are my peculiar giftsD I am not so sure !he speed of reading, the speed

of picking things up, the extraordinary memory F what is all thatD 6o I know allmy 6hakespeare by heart, I know my 0oethe I know there has to be somekind of intellectual power that accompanies such gifts, but they are not ofthemselves counted as gifts, they are something else, they simply indicate thefrontier to psyche and physiology #t times, I run into my own obsessions Fthat is, my own strength and weakness as a literary critic and a teacher, andwriter F I have to personali&e everything I think readers like it a great deal ordislike it a great deal, the same way my students like or dislike me a greatdeal /ecause, like Walt Whitman, addressing the readers of his poetry, I sortof reach out, I shake the reader, I say, listen to me, you know F very urgently,and very personally, very emotionally I understand that while it gives me a

kind of immediacy, it is also a limitation 6o it is not ust a 'uestion of wisdom,it gets rather complex I find your 'uestion very interesting, but I gues the best


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answer is that I am still trying to establish where I am in all this I would notwant to be 3amlet because, as I grow old and ill, I attach much moreimportance to being rather than knowing

$)B #lthough you claim not to be wise, I would still like you to try to formulate

what you understand by wisdom

HB B In a roundabout way I would have to sneak back to :irke #both, to the!almudic 6ayings of the "athers to which I turned for comfort as a child anddo so even now "or instanceB 3illel used to sayB **If not I for myself, whothenD #nd being for myself, what am ID #nd if not now, whenD+ !o me, it*s anexample of perfect, balanced wisdom

$)B 7eportedly, you are in the habit of reminding your studentsB +!here is nomethod but yourselves + What do you mean by thatD

HB B 2es, indeed I tell them that What theory did the great critics, the likes ofr ohnson and William 3a&litt haveD !hose who adopt and preach some sort

of theory are simply emulating others In my opinion, any useful criticism isfirst of all rooted in experience F experience gained by reading, writing, and,most of all, living #nd wisdom also is first of all a personal matter Go, there isno method 2ou know, I am really alogos, without a philosophy, without asystem #ny attempt to systemati&e leads to the kind of purism :lato had F Iam of course not talking about the wonderful ironist writing the life story of6ocrates F who has no place for poets in his ideal republic

$)B 2ou seem to have your reservations for philosophers, yet you glorify"reud

HB B /ut you understand that I have no use for him as a psychoanalyst Iperceive him as a codifier and an abstractor of 6hakespeare It is6hakespeare who has provided us with a map of the mind, not "reud6hakespeare is the real author of "reudian psychology "reud has simplytranslated it into an analytical language

$)B 2ou talk about 6hakespeare as a demiurge 2our attitude seems almostreligious

HB B /ut isn*t what we experience when reading the 3ebrew /ible or the Gew!estament the same as when we read 3omer, 6hakespeare, ervantes, or:roustD Isn*t the difference between the scriptures and worldly literature onlysocial and politicalD !he centuries$long polemics on the contrasts betweenpoetry and faith can perhaps be reduced to the 'uestion of whether we shouldconsider one poem or story holier than another I have long since come to theconclusion that we can say with certainty that any powerful literary work isholy #nd the opposite claim, that it is worldly, is e'ually valid /ut it would becompletely senseless to consider any great literary work holier or worldlierthan another

Gow I am starting a book that may also interest you F that I have always


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wanted to write and I think I am old enough now F and the title is rather ironic F 41odus and Hi&her Culture ewish high culture has influenced theproceses of high culture in 7ussia, 0ermany, 6pain, the %nited 6tates, 6outh

#merica It*s a very complex thing /y exodus I don*t actually mean theexodus from .gypt !hat was a 0reek word that translates !he 3ebrew word

that 2ahwa first says to #braham and later says to oses in 3ebrew is yetsiat ,which is best translated as +get yourself out+, pick yourself up and get yourself out, get out to the world and then on to the public ground #nd so the wholenotion of global higher culture as a kind of exodus 0et yourself out ofyourself 0et yourself out of the bondage of yourself I think what we callnineteenth$century romanticism and twentieth$century modernism arevariations of this exodus What we see today in the %nited 6tates, also in theso$called +culture studies+, is the death of .urope, it*s the twilight of .urope

$)B /ut, after the events of 9K11, isn*t #merica going back to .uropeD

HB B !his regime really hates .urope It doesn*t ask for allies !his regime isacting as if the %nited 6tates is the new 7oman .mpire #nd it*s trying to forceanother :ax 7omana upon the world, which is no peace at all, like Ga&is, like"ascists, like 6talinists

$)B /ut that*s what I meant F does it not constitute going back to .uropeD

HB B In that sense, yes, but it has nothing to do with higher culture

$)B 2our insistence on what you call higher culture makes many people mad,and when you talk about your dismay at the decline of the book as a culturalphenomenon, they say that never before in history have there been as manybooks and bookstores as now

HB B I spend a good part of my life in bookstores F I give readings there whena new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse /utthe 'uestion is what do these immense mountains of books consist ofD 2ouknow, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from:otterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street.ournal more than a year ago, entitled + an L> illion 3arry :otter "ans /eWrongD F 2esH+ !hese people claim that 3arry :otter does great things for

their children I think they are deceiving themselves I read the first book in the:otter series, the one that*s supposed to be the best I was shocked .verysentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters F any one ofthem could be anyone else, they speak in each other*s voice, so one getsconfused as to who is who

$)B 2et the defenders of 3arry :otter claim that these books get their childrento read

HB B /ut they don*tH !heir eyes simply scan the page !hen they turn to thenext page !heir minds are deadened by cliches Gothing is re'uired of them,

absolutely nothing Gothing happens to them !hey are invited to avoid reality,to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves /ut


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of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose 3arry :otter

$)B 2ou have discused at length the intimate relationship #mericans seem tohave with 0od

HB B !he %nited 6tates calls itself hristian, but it isn*t really, it has nothing todo with .uropean, iddle .astern historical, theological hristianity It is anindigenous #merican religion which started


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desperation and pleadB +Is there really no hope at allD+ I could cheer you upB;h, yes, lots of hope F plenty of hope for 0od, ust none for us

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Harold Bloom Interview Teach Course 24 Shakespeare

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