Still bloom-ing
CATTON, PIA
Still Bloom-ing by Pia Catton Chicago Cultural critics pronounce, almost daily, that America is going to hell in a handbasket. But no one has done so as memorably, or as successfully, as Allan...
...Maybe worse...
...To mark the tenth anniversary of the book's publication, Bloom's friends and colleagues convened last week at the university of Chicago for three days of discussions of it and its author, who died almost five years ago...
...The participants shared a sense of satisfaction in knowing that the topics they were discussing were no longer on the margins, reserved for intellectuals...
...There is a certain hostility to high culture by popular culture...
...It was, of course, Bloom's attack on rock music and popular culture that helped make The Closing of the American Mind a sensation: "Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse...
...Spurred by one of his students, who said, "I loved Romeo and Juliet...
...In the last session, someone in the audience asked what Bloom would have thought of the conference...
...Nathan Tarcov, a close friend and colleague, did not want the last word to be so solemn: "The food," he said, "would not have been up to Bloom's standard...
...In the question and answer period, the composed Mansfield reiterated that waves of equality have not produced better results for faculties or students: "Clubs for gentlemen are now clubs for non-gentlemen...
...It was an exercise in the good life, and one that Bloom would have relished...
...During the panel "The Academy and the Polity," Mansfield shared the stage with Columbia University's Katznel-son, who made the case for the affirmative-action, multiculturalist university...
...The chance to air arguments that had animated Bloom clearly pleased his friends...
...Fox-Genovese retorted, "If identity is the most important thing to you, then you probably don't belong in politics...
...Finding out what works and what doesn't is exciting...
...Emory University professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese put the charge vehemently: "Feminism represents the most radical assault on everything Bloom cherished...
...And yet the panel dedicated to the subject stirred few passions...
...professors in Bloom's camp celebrated The Closing of the American Mind and analyzed its arguments with both great sobriety (Frank Kermode's panel was titled "Is There a Case for Teaching Literature...
...It's the first thing people notice...
...And Americans—more than a million of them—made the book the unlikeliest bestseller of the decade, considering that learned disquisitions by university of Chicago professors, even when they are witty and graceful, don't ordinarily make a sensation at Barnes and Noble...
...At a panel on "The Character of Generation X," one young woman emerged from a pack of students in dirty T-shirts and sneakers to rebuke the panel: "I don't sense despair in my peers," she said...
...Now, a decade later, the story seemed to be the same...
...Another graduate student bedecked in grunge-wear and little-girl barrettes afforded an example of feminism's decline into identity politics...
...I am going to repay that today...
...And indeed he did...
...What the student had experienced was a cleverly packaged refashioning of the old play, a sort of MTV version, in which pounding music and rapid-fire visual images in effect deconstruct and displace the poet's text—in short Romeo and Juliet reduced to a series of slickly produced music videos, fleshed out around the bare bones of Shakespeare's plot...
...She acknowledged that feminism had allowed great strides by women, but that did not keep one female student from challenging Fox-Genovese with the now-cliched response: "But I wouldn't be here if it weren't for feminism...
...I just don't know why it had to end so sadly," Cantor denounced the recent film version of Romeo and Juliet and its music...
...A woman who worked with him for years answered that Bloom would have enjoyed the scholarly tone of the conference...
...The conference divided into ideological camps similar to the ones that greeted the book on its release...
...What we have now is an audio safari...
...This is not to say that the conference was simply a battleground...
...And for that, they had their old colleague, and his remarkable book, to thank...
...Antagonists (Ira Katznelson, with "The Left and the Liberal University") found Bloom an elitist hopelessly out of step in a pluralist society...
...The students at the conference generally showed a cheerful willingness to discount excellence when it would be too threatening, courage when it would be too demanding, and honor when it would produce inequality—just as Bloom warned...
...His depiction of MTV and its reception among young people was accurate and amusing, and forceful enough to still the students...
...The University of Virginia's Cantor stepped in for the opposite side...
...But no one has done so as memorably, or as successfully, as Allan Bloom did in 1987 with The Closing of the American Mind...
...This exchange angered the same professors who were incensed by Harvey Mansfield's philippic against political correctness, an attack that included criticism of liberalism, feminism, and multiculturalism...
...A hundred years ago, if you wanted anything this dangerous, you had to get inoculations, guns, and guides...
...But at the discussion on "Feminism and Identity in the Academy," the students raised the temperature...
...Pia Catton is a reporter for The Weekly Standard...
...Martha Bayles, literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, challenged what she called Bloom's "blanket condemnation of rhythm...
...Bloom told America that her professors and parents had been so corrupted that the young were being left to wallow in unexamined relativism and soft nihilism...
...Sexuality will be read back onto us...
...Now all you need is $12.50 at Tower Records...
...As interesting, though, were the students at Bloom's beloved Chicago, whose manners and morals (or their lack) had been the subject of his book...
...The panel's last speaker, Stanley Crouch, dismissed the microphone, stood up, and gave an audience-winning ramble through popular culture...
...and rollicking wit (Paul Cantor led "Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet: Generation X goes to Shakespeare...
...In other words, there are no lessons to be had from the past, and everything is up for grabs...
...I have hope...
...People will first encounter me as a woman, and I have some experience with this since I'm in graduate school here...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
