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by Curtis White
[Review and Criticism of The Western Canon by Harold Bloom]
" . . . the question 'of what does the greatness of the great works consist?' is exactly the right question . . . we all should try, to understand what it is that makes for the greatness of the great . . ."
[re The Western Canon]
"Bloom has taken far less care than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them into one monstrous and threatening whole. . . called variously the School of Resentment or simply . . . cheerleaders. He also strongly implies. . . that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists, feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author [which] was a way of showing, what any artist knows, that the sublimely unified self of Romantic genius was always contaminated by that which was not-self . . . "
"[Derrida's] deconstructive criticism 'had no other motive than discovering and eliciting the incoherences of a text." . . . Anyone who has taken the trouble to understand Derrida will tell you that this putative incoherence was the discovery that the possibility for the Western metaphysics of presence was dependent on its impossibility, an insight that Derrida shared with Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Buddhist philosopher of sunyata, Nagarjuna, who wrote that being was emptiness and that emptiness was empty too."
"Bloom . . . does make a good faith effort to account for the greatness of the great . . . I would like to follow his logic on two principle concepts that form the bedrock of his defense of the canon: the 'anxiety of influence' and the 'uncanny.'"
" . . . influence of the work of the past becomes . . . a competition, for the writers of the present.
For the would-be canonical writers experience anxiety not only about their relationship to the talents and the works of the past but also about their own mortality. Thus, to join the canon means to compete not only with the past but also with the present in a drive for the qualified immortality of joining the canon and thereby joining communal memory.
The principal means through which writers win their . . . struggle with the past and win out over the fear of their own mortality is through 'originality,' what the reader experiences as the 'uncanny.'"
"On the other side, the reader's side, reading, for Bloom, is the 'proper use of one's solitude,' a 'solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's mortality.' In How to Read and Why, Bloom writes,
Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
" . . . Bloom's aesthetic of loneliness allows very little for art's 'truth' function."
[Discussion and Criticism]
" . . . Adorno in particular liked to point out, art needs criticism (which was really, for him, another word for philosophy) in order to complete the fullness of its social as well as its artistic intentions. (Adorno: 'Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.')"
"Shklovsky wrote, 'If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. . . . Automization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.' [Shklovsky and Heidegger]sought to oppose poetry to prose for the purpose of the return of perception, for the refreshing of the language that captures perception, and ultimately for the clarifying of our very humanity."
"Shklovsky wrote, 'And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.'"
"This restoration of those capacities that are most innately human is accomplished through "enstrangement" [which] seeks to emancipate the work from the leaden forms of the past by describing things as if seen for the first time, by telling stories from unusual points of view, or by placing things out of context. Most broadly, enstrangement is at work whenever an image leads us 'to a 'vision' of this object rather than a mere 'recognition.' ' "
" . . . unlike Harold Bloom's account, the artistic, social and human motivations for artist and audience are shared and consequential. We are not talking about [a competition]whose triumph over tradition is its own hollow thrill of victory, but a triumph whose purpose is the generalization for both reader and writer of the aesthetic experience understood as the quintessence of human experience. As for the proponents of criticism on the race-class-gender axis . . . Shklovsky's lesson is simple: the art of enstrangement itself is the most consequential social act. It is what art has to give, without apology, to the social."
"Shklovsky also calls forcefully to our attention the importance of 'complexity' and 'difficulty.' Why, one might ask, is the greatness of a work often tied to its complexity? . . . The difference is that a Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or even leave that confine for brief and startling moments. . . . it seems to be telling us something both truer and more complete about the world in which we live. It is more adequate to a sophisticated sense of the real . . . "
"Shklovsky pushes this understanding of complexity by introducing the aesthetic force of 'difficulty.' . . . difficulty is also about the risk of moving outside of the familiar . . . outside of what Derrida likes to call our 'closure.' The virtue of the difficult, or what we often call the "experimental," is that it keeps the necessary stability of our "closure" (which we surely need in order to share a common culture and live together in it), but it keeps that closure from becoming something deadening. The problem that art helps us face, and great art helps us face best, is the problem of creating social stability without creating a state of administered conformity. In other words, art helps us to think what it would mean to live together as a whole and yet be fully human as individuals. In art, we speak of this dialectic as the relationship between tradition and innovation."
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