On Harold Bloom

I’ve been thinking about the death of Harold Bloom all week; it seems morbidly appropriate that the great literary critic should pass away now, when essentially all of his predictions about the decline of a certain mode of deep reading, have come true — when much of what he loved, and fought to preserve, is near extinction. Every day seems more distracted, shallower, less real, more unreal than the last; every day, we fall further from the orbit of the canon Bloom passionately advocated for: a canon centered on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, the romantic poets, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, and others. Not only are we losing the ability to read these writers, we’re straightforwardly forgetting who they are: we don’t get the references; we don’t care to get the references. Our culture is coddled, infantilized, empty, tasteless — as Bloom tirelessly pointed out. I’ve read a handful of the obligatory obituaries and thinkpieces about Bloom which have come out this week, all of which quibble and equivocate rather than acknowledge that Harold Bloom was merely accurate about the value of entertainment culture, about the fate of reading, and about which books are good, and which books are trash. It’s funny to read third-rate academics pontificate on The Chronicle of Higher Education about someone exponentially more important than they’ll ever be; all they can manage to explain is that Bloom was a flawed critic who other academics didn’t like. In the closed-loop of academic thinking, one academic reports on the other academics reporting on other academics — and misses the point entirely: that a great and powerful symbol of lost values has passed away, leaving the cultural field open for the final devastation and sweeping-away of those values.