Product Description

From the Bible to Ralph Ellison, America's most prominent and bestselling literary critic takes an enlightening look at the concept of genius through the ages in a celebration of the greatest creative writers of all time. 50 photos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #591076 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 832 pages

Books in Canada
One of my favourite country songs goes "If You Don't Like Hank Williams, You Can Kiss My Ass" and I feel the same way about Harold Bloom. Like the song says, What he Done was well worth Doing, and I'm dead-sick of reading English academics and their even paler North American imitators reef on Old Harold. What they hate about him is pretty clear. First, that he is so obviously quicker, smarter and better-read than they are is something they cannot forgive. He has lost nothing since his days in graduate school at Yale when he was able to settle an argument about how many stanzas there were in Spenser's Epithalamion by reciting them while his fellow students counted. And, secondly, Bloom is embarrassingly uncool about things he loves. In an era when the height of academicians' chic in cultural studies departments is to act like totally, totally cool high school juniors—crapping on everything, taking no risks, running with the pack— Bloom is an affront to their adolescent sophistication. He actually loves literature and believes that great writers enlarge our collective humanity. And, oh yes, Bloom in recent books has made the unforgivable gaffe of talking to a larger audience: laity, some of whom are rather better acquainted with world literature than are those cultural specialists who now make their living reading the backs of cereal boxes and baseball cards.
Of course, Bloom's book, Genius, is a whirlwind of opinion, prejudice, argument, hectoring and moral improvement, but that is to miss the point. It is also a very cunningly constructed work of art. That Bloom has chosen an especially hermetic Jewish form and cross-riffed it with some of the motifs of Jewish and Christian Gnosticism—a pre-Creation Adam and sharp light-darkness distinctions—is neither accidental nor self-indulgent. It does, however, take some wrestling with if one is not to misread this book as a Wal-Mart of the western mind.
Kabbalah is Bloom's chosen form, and he re-creates the ten-sector wheel of kabbalistic belief. (Or, strictly speaking, of one of the several variants of kabbalism.) Ten groups of ten-cohort writers spin round a centre that in the original belief was both finite and infinite and formed the location of the Almighty, a concept more palatable to topologists than to most of us in the humanities. Each of these groups of ten has a Hebrew name or letter that governs its main characteristics and in the original religious situation these are only partially known to outsiders. (Kabbalah continues to be an underground river in modern Judaism.) Fair enough. Where things become really complicated is that Bloom introduces into this Jewish mystical wheel a bifurcation of each set of ten writers. In true Gnostic fashion, he thinks digitally, so that each member of the set of ten is loaded into a "lustre" (a gloriously pseudo-Gnostic term) of five related writers. At a conceptual level, this is elegant and is also textually defensible: Kabbalists and Gnostics interacted in real time and therefore merging the two forms is a respectful trope on an existing structure. This bowing to earlier forms is necessary for, in any work of appreciation, it is important not to appear very original—especially when one is.
But, elegant as all this is, can I say that Genius is any fun to read? Absolutely, but it should be read the same way one approaches the wheel of Kabbalah. That is: don't start at the beginning. Pick any point and spin the wheel from there. Begin and end at an arbitrary place of your own choosing, and then keep going, circling again, and on and on, reflecting, reading, finding new authors, arguing with Bloom's opinions. If done in that spirit, one gains the dizzy drunkenness of mind and soul that Kabbalah intends.
The Kabbalah-form clusters together writers one would not often associate, and does so with real profit. Probably few readers would be surprised by the grouping of Yahwist, Socrates, Plato, Saint Paul and Muhammed. But putting Stendhal, Falkner, Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor in the same box with Mark Twain is surprising and freshly productive.
This vast mosaic of geniuses will vex you at times. Why Swinburne? And Iris Murdoch has always seemed to me to be a faux-Irish fraud. And some of the designated geniuses I've never heard of: José Maria Eca de Queiroz, Gerard de Nerval and Fernando Pessoa, to name a few. That, though, is part of the use of the book—to expand horizons. The real fun, however, is hearing Old Harold trumpet the writers he loves and see him give backhanded slaps to the ones he really hates. (The anti-Semite T.S. Eliot takes stick memorably.) The biggest problem with the actual pieces on specific writers is that there is no index (is AOL-Time-Warner really that broke?) And, since comparison is so frequent in this volume, one desperately needs a cross-referencing system.
At the end of the day, what is a genius? Here is where the system of Kabbalah is illuminating, for it describes characteristics of God without ever saying what God is, or is not. Attributes are not definitions and Bloom gives us only attributes of genius, not delimitations. Ultimately, genius in literature is for Bloom what miracles are in Christian apologetics: they are the magical events that cannot be explained by any reductionist system or, indeed, any rational one. Genius, like Miracle, acts upon humanity but cannot be explained by merely human reasons.
This is not comfortable for most of us trained in the Enlightenment belief that every human experience has a humanly-explicable cause, but there you are. Old Harold is really the angel, Old Herald. He is engaged in reading great literature in a way that is High Victorian, an activity that is part of a spiritual experience and, ultimately, a very humble one. Despite his roundhouse opinions, he is humble before the great teachers, as any postulant should be. But that humility does not extend to small-window academic professionals. They really should get off his case, for the angel Old Herald can turn into the Archangel Michael fairly swiftly and he carries a broad and vengeful celestial sword.
Don Akenson (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
With The Western Canon, Yale-based critical eminence Bloom tapped into a strain of the cultural zeitgeist looking for authoritative takes on what to read. Bloom here follows up with 6-10 pages each on 100 "geniuses" of literature (all deceased) pointing to the major works, outlining the major achievements therein, showing us how to recognize them for ourselves. Despite the book's length, Bloom's mostly male geniuses are, as he notes "certainly not `the top one hundred' in anyone's judgement, my own included. I wanted to write about these." Bloom backs up his choices with such effortless and engaging erudition that their idiosyncrasy and casualness become strengths. While organized under the rubric of the 10 Kabalistic Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image," Bloom's chosen figures are associated by his own brilliant (and sometimes jabbingly provocative) forms of attention, from a linkage of Dr. Johnson, Goethe and Freud to one of Dickens, Celan and Ellison (with a few others in between them). A pleasant surprise is the plethora of lesser-known Latin American authors, from Luz Vaz de Camoes to Jos‚ Maria E‡a de Queiroz and Alejo Carpentier. Many familiar greats are here, too, as is a definition of genius. "This book is not a work of analysis or of close reading, but of surmise and juxtaposition," Bloom writes, and as such readers will find it appropriately enthusiastic and wild.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Bloom, a distinguished and often controversial literary critic and best-selling author of numerous books about literature (e.g., How To Read and Why), explores the concept of literary genius through the ages by examining 100 writers. Aside from such "must includes" as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, and Plato, Bloom offers some perhaps less well known to American readers, such as Lady Murasaki and Octavio Paz, acknowledging that his selections are idiosyncratic and were chosen because he wanted to write about certain authors, not because they were necessarily in "the top one hundred." In the introduction, Bloom posits a definition of genius that is fleshed out in his discussion of each writer. Authors are clustered into Lustres, or groups of five, while a brief introduction to each section explains why the writers in the section are associated with one another. (Each of the Lustres is based on one of the common names for the Kabbalistic Sefirot, which Bloom describes as representing God's creativity or genius.) Although the book is a delight to read, its real value lies in the author's ability to provoke the reader into thinking about literature, genius, and related topics. No similar work discusses literary genius in this way or covers this many writers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., Zanesville
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Another attempt by Bloom to push his agenda on literature
They should have titled this "The Western Canon part two." Bloom gets to glorify his favorite poster boys Shakespeare and Freud again, as well as sermonize about others such as Cervantes, Mann and Faulkner (who have no business being called genuises).

In addition, the title is also misleading in the sense that Bloom actually means, "Literary Creative Minds." Nowhere does he talk about Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Monet, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff etc etc etc. He also ignores two very creative literary figures; Dr. Suess and Vladimir Nabokov, two authors whose genius cannot be contested.

It might be taken as arrogance that Bloom has only focused on literary genius, or what he takes to be genius. The implication is that writers, poets and philosophers have sole claim to the title "Genius." Actually, this is just the limitations of Bloom's training as an English Professor, as well as a product of his horrifically inventive and capable mind. Wouldn't one be biased towards literatures if they had spent their whole lives teaching and researching just that?

This book is also produced on the assumption that the author knows exactly what makes a genius a genius. Although when one reads the book, the impression is that Bloom is far more fascinated with the works of the subject rather than the figures themselves, but this is what he does. So if you're searching for very incisive criticism on the lives of some very prominent people in the written history, delve in. If you're a student of music, art or even mathematics, this book is not about you. Bloom caters to the exclusive group of literateurs.

This is precisely what Bloom wants though, exclusivity. He wants to banish what he thinks is mediocrity to the rafters where they can hoot and hollar to the ceiling, and leave us high-minded ones alone to our thoughts. A intriguing thought, yes, but mediocrity exists to give light to genius (didn't "Amadeus" teach us anything?). Genius only exists because the debate of genius continues, and while this book might be seen as such, it is really only a few steps away from it's big brother "Western Canon," a book in which Bloom says that a Canon cannot be defined, and yet in the appendices, attempts just such a Canon. Also with Bloom is the air that he's constantly looking over the tops of his glasses at us, trying to get us to read what he's read, agree with him, and just sit there in agreement. No thank you.

Third times a charm...
At times this book is amusing, entertaining, sometimes even enlightening but most of all exasperating. Harold Bloom has spent half a century digging deep into the best that our literary culture has to offer, but all he has given us, once again, is another 800 pages of unedited notes. Each Genius is regrettably reduced to a few pages of off-hand comments and we have seen many of these comments too many times before in his books on the Western Canon and Shakespeare.

There is some humor and insight but for every insight we get thirty pages of unexplained marginalia like the following: "Negation of seeming realities in an ostensibly Christian society is the essence of Kierkegaard's genius, but this was an anxiety for him, since Kierkegaard had to be post-Hegelian, even as we have to be post-Freudian." This might make a great thesis statement for a long article (or even a book) but Bloom tosses it off like it is a self-evident truth that needs no further elaboration. I suspect it meant something interesting to Bloom, but it is lost on those mortals among us who cannot read his mind (and he complains about the obfuscation of the French!)

I guess if you are as well-established and respected as Harold Bloom then you no longer need to write books, you can merely publish them.

The Bloom 100
This thick book is Harold Bloom's meditation on literary genius, by which he means not exactly an extraordinary intelligence but a communication with the "God within," an internal source of world-expanding creative inspiration, that only few people manage to achieve. He selects one hundred authors -- the list, he stresses, is by no means hermetic -- in the literary canon who in his estimation have done this, subdividing them into ten groups of ten, each group represented by a concept from the Kabbalah called a Sefirah. For example, under Hesed, or "God's covenant love for men and women," he locates Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, and others who he feels manifest various aspects (especially irony, one of his favorite topics) of such love.

Which authors have genius? Shakespeare, obviously, and all the classical poets whose works have survived for a number of centuries, and Bloom's personal hero of literary criticism, Samuel Johnson, and even T.S. Eliot, towards whom Bloom displays a dichotomous attitude of admiration mixed with hostility. What evidence of genius is offered that elevates these authors above the merely talented? For Renaissance historian and prose stylist extraordinaire Walter Pater, it is his "secularization of the religious epiphany"; for Balzac, it is his mercurial comic criminal Vautrin; for Robert Browning, it is his perfected development of the dramatic monologue.

I regard Bloom's opinions very highly and respect his efforts to rescue the best literature of the ages from forced obsolescence by the authorities of ephemeral ideologies in what he considers to be the intellectually decadent academic institutions, but I'm not blind to his idiosyncrasies as a critic (call them "Bloomisms") for which he surely would not apologize and which anybody approaching his criticism for the first time has to keep in mind. The most notable is his insistence on putting just about everything literary in relation to Shakespeare's major characters: Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, and Lear. Next is his tendency to make thunderous declarations and magisterial assertions of canonical rank ("Proust is the last of the great novelists") which will hardly persuade an unimpressionable reader who isn't looking for a lecture.

Past this, you will find that Bloom is so enthusiastic about the world's greatest literature and writes so well about his passion that it is immediately infectious. His desire is to motivate his readers to become better readers by demanding the highest standards, and so he isn't reticent about using superlatives to make his points. His dedication to literary quality highlights the book's greatest usefulness, which is to introduce or uncover important authors that are overlooked by or unknown to a large portion of readers; Montaigne, Saint Augustine, Carpentier, and Hart Crane are not widely read today, but Bloom argues cogently that they should be because their work is substantial and still relevant. Also, those authors whose works are of considerable cognitive difficulty are made more accessible to the common reader by Bloom's helpful clarifications of their themes.

"Genius" is indeed bloated, but its bloat is of mostly informative commentary and more than a few entertaining quips. Bloom can be provocative: "Emma Bovary is Gustave Flaubert, and almost all the rest of us as well." Or humorous: "Dante, like the rest of us, suffered a great deal, but many of us would be hesitant before we peopled Hell with our personal enemies," he says about the "Inferno." Or incisive: "Freud, who wanted to be a third with Copernicus and Darwin, became a third with Montaigne and Goethe," he says about Freud's success as a mythmaking essayist despite, or perhaps as a result of, his (failed) aspirations to be a scientific revolutionary. He can also be pedantic and often acrimonious when mentioning his academic opponents; but most importantly he, more than any other current critic, is gracious enough to put up the signposts on the long, winding highway of Western literature, and for that reason I'm willing to take his side. After all, what have the ideological cheerleaders ever done for me?