Product Description

What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America's preeminent literary critic presents an unprecedented celebration of one hundred of the most creative literary minds in history. From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent masterpieces of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Harold Bloom explores the many parallels among his chosen geniuses and the surprising ways in which they have influenced one another over the centuries. Accompanied by revealing excerpts from their works that continue to astonish, enchant, and move readers, Bloom's insightful and spirited analyses illuminate and enlarge our common understanding of Western literary and spiritual culture...and offer us a grand yet intimate tour of it in one magnificent volume.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #279310 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.88" h x 1.75" w x 5.75" l, 2.04 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 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.