Canons in Front of Them

...The greatest dead white Anglo male of all, Shakespeare, is hard to pin down on either politics or religion...

...That is to say, members of what he calls the School of Resentment—those feminists, Marxists, new historicists, de-constructionists, and so forth to whom a progressive social agenda is more important than literature—dominate academic literary study at the moment...

...For them, the "canon" consists not of great literary works that have stood the test of time but of "texts" by dead white males that embody every kind of oppression and must be "interrogated" the way police used to question suspects, with bright lights and rubber hoses...

...I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the esthetic," he says plaintively a few pages later...

...The cultural revolution continues in universities, where the School of Resentment is firmly in control for the time being...

...That nearly all publishing American poets and a growing proportion of novelists now teach may possibly be good for universities, but it drastically narrows the range of life experience that today's poems and novels express...

...With its passionate, brilliant, idiosyncratic discussions of 26 writers representing 3,000 years of Western literary history, the book is really more an autobiography than a critical polemic...

...SO HOW DOES a sensible middlebrow respond to all this...

...As literature departments in many universities increasingly resemble museums of ideological fashions that the the rest of the world has outgrown, both the reading and the writing of serious literature may start to disentangle themselves from an academic embrace that goes back only 40 or 50 years...

...Bad as that situation is for higher education, it may not be the most significant fact about the present state of literary life...

...Literature in a given language is the heritage of all the people who speak that language, not just of one race or nationality...

...More to the point, is there any hope of resurrecting the kind of public that used to read them...

...For a start, middlebrows don't make the mistake of seeing literature in the singular, or of defining it by a single standard, because for them literary works don't have to fall on either side of an esthetic Berlin Wall...

...So far as the English language or that even larger, vaguer concept "the West" is concerned, no such entity has ever existed...

...Canonical works should be protected from every sort of philosophical or political criticism...

...Perhaps they were mistaking a memoir of that life for a defense of something Bloom clearly thinks needs no defense...

...In short, they never confuse the curriculum, which is always changing, with a canon, or the English department with the Delphic oracle...

...Otherwise they get judged on whether or not we agree with what they say, instead of on their merits as literature...

...The temporary or permanent disappearance of that audience will affect the future of literature far more profoundly than whatever foolishness universities take up next...

...At bottom, to be sure, much canon-bashing is merely a matter of dumbing things down for the student whose literary pleasures are restricted to rock videos and who can't be expected to make much of Milton...

...Things turn ugly when, as often happens in schools and universities, the rationale for denouncing the canon becomes the supposed inappropriateness for black students of material so alien to their own heritage...

...The successive tastes and theories that underlie the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, Faust, and War and Peace are today historical curiosities, interesting only because a few great writers put them to memorable use before fashions changed...

...Without ignoring its many messages, they tend to read the stuff for fun, which means they have a broader, deeper sense of what pleasure is than either the MTV audience or the average professor of literary theory...

...Neither do I, but they did...

...The claim that great literature makes a powerful criticism of societies or individuals is, Bloom asserts, a mistake made both by conservative defenders of the canon (who think they approve the messages in canonical literature) and by Left-wing debunkers (who think they don't...

...What is true of content is equally true of form...

...They may, like Bloom, sometimes use Shakespeare and Alice Walker to symbolize the difference between the great and the nongreat, but their sense of a vast middle ground of good books keeps them from dividing all imaginative works between the saved and the damned...

...Writers in English departments usually see themselves as a distinct minority in conflict with the orthodoxies and bureaucracy of academic life...

...Some popular versions of multicul-turalism—anatomized by Richard Bernstein in Dictatorship of Virtue (another recent book that deserved better reviews than it got)—distribute cultural property strictly according to ancestry, which usually ends up meaning race...

...They know that people who start reading seriously for pleasure early in life sometimes move up from Patrick O'Brian to Jane Austen without any professorial intervention...

...And why have people been talking about it so much over the past 10 or 15 years...

...The canon, in other words, is a consensus list of great imaginative works, mis-guidedly conceived of as a single entity by both defenders like Harold Bloom and attackers from the School of Resentment...

...Listen, stranger...

...But what is the "canon," apart from the autobiographies of those who read it for a living...

...His Yale colleague David Bromwich, well-known to readers of these pages, published a book called Politics by Other Means last year that dealt with the same academic phenomena...

...If you add Homer, Dante, Goethe, and Tolstoy to the mixture, you find still less unity...

...The more hostile the environment becomes, the greater the incentive for the writer to move back into a broader world...

...Eliot...

...That's why middlebrows fret so much when the New York Times bestseller list includes Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Anne Rice, Sidney Sheldon, and Danielle Steel all in the same week, with no poets anywhere on the horizon...

...For Bloom, the criterion is esthetic...

...What happened to Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway...

...In that respect, The Western Canon closely resembles Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep (1988), another important academic critic's explanation for the enthusiasms of his own life disguised as a defense of a currently unpopular view of literature...

...it involves "strangeness" and a demanding originality but not, as a line of critics from Plato to Booth have argued, moral content...

...As in most areas of life, a race-based double standard does the most damage to those people it was designed to protect...

...some Left (Shelley again, Shaw again, Whitman), some Right (the mature Wordsworth, Thackeray, T.S...

...In taking this line, Bloom resembles the once orthodox, now reviled New Critics, who tried to guard poems from ideological assault by emphasizing their difficult, unparaphrasable esthetic qualities...

...This putative unity causes intellectual problems: You have to decide what the works all have in common, and then measure each one against that criterion...

...In the first place, "canon" is an unfortunate word to use for the collective literary achievement of a nation or civilization because it implies a unitary entity, with overtones of a holy scripture...

...this was myself: this was I," Bloom seems to be saying through his allusive readings (the words are William Faulkner's...

...Rationally, the poems of William Wordsworth are no more Bloom's property or mine (neither of us lives a pastoral life, after all, or comes from England) than they are a black freshman's from Harlem or Alabama...

...They know that some literature (Western and non-Western) is great, some near-great, some comfy, and some awful by any standard...

...Eliot and William Faulkner appeared on the cover of Time...

...If I were Bloom's editor, I might have recommended as a title A Book of Introductions...

...Remember when T.S...

...The playing of that par-ticular race card in academic politics damages those very students' prospects of sharing equally in the best products their language has to offer, along with their reputation for being able to compete on an equal basis with white students...

...The great writers in English shared neither an esthetic nor an ideology...

...A man is known by the company he keeps, and here are my lifelong pals...

...That way of dividing the world's riches amounts to yet one more deprivation for the poor...

...When The Western Canon came out this fall, many reviewers commented on its pessimism and found it an eccentric, argumentatively thin defense of the masterpieces in many languages with which Bloom has spent his life...

...Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen...

...These thoughts of a gold-plated past are prompted by a spate of recent books, particularly Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace, 578 pp., $29.95), representing late salvos in a cultural war that has been going on for a long time...

...Some were Christians (Chaucer, Milton), some anti-Christian (Shelley, Shaw...

...For writers to do that, however, the nonacademic audience for serious writing would have to start growing again...

...I hope that the book does not turn out to be an elegy for the Western Canon," Bloom declares in his introductory chapter, yet an elegiac tone dominates most of the volume, as if the "canon" had been shot while trying to escape...

...As alone, he almost adds, as an intellectual in a university...

...Life must have been so peaceful back when little depended on what was taught in English courses because serious writers—Ellen Glasgow and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Vincent Benet, if not James Joyce or Ezra Pound?had a real life with readers who never entered a university classroom from one year's end to the next...

...According to Bloom (who himself appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine last fall and is anything but a middlebrow), the war has been lost or, if you take the opposite point of view from his, won...

...Not a bad gang to hang around with, though they take some getting to know...

...When the canon wars heat up and famous regiments go over the top, when blood starts flowing on the question of whether old books should be tried for capital offenses or simply left to rot in the stacks, I wonder how we ever got into this mess...