Harold Bloom Western Canon

[Anthony Small]

Thegreat books style of education changed this. Americans had never trucked with the classical education model as happily as the English aristocrats did; when the model began to disappear from American life in the late 1800s they began searching for something more democratic. The greatest classics of world literature and philosophy, taught and read in the English vernacular, did the job. But what should be included? So began the job of sorting which titles made the lists and which did not. Dante was in; Spencer was out. A new canon was born. [3]

That is the logic of the lists. They were fun to create. However, here I must admit blemish. My acquaintance with each of the great traditions is not equal. The poets and thinkers in the East Asian bucket are the ones I know best. I have read every one of the authors there listed save three. I do not have quite as strong a record on the Western list, but a pretty strong one nonetheless. It is with the Islamicate and Indic traditions I turn weakling. I have explicitly left several spots in both groups blank. The two empty slots early in the Islamicate tradition list is intended for the hadith and the most important names from the world of fiqh. I suspect two spots may not be enough for these things, and cannot pretend to be familiar enough with them to know who the most important names in hadith compilation and Islamic jurisprudence are or how many spots they might need. The empty slots at the end of that list are intended for the last five centuries of Islamicate literature and thought. Works in Urdu and Turkish have just as strong a claim in these centuries as works in Arabic or Persian, though again, I must admit I am not familiar enough with the intellectual or literary course of these centuries to discern the awesome works of this era from those merely prominent.

I'd have Goethe instead of Nietzsche and Pushkin instead of Dostoyevsky. Maybe a few more Italian poets too, like Petratch or Ariosto or Tasso. The Icelandic sagas aren't canonical by any stretch. Horace on the other hand is canonical whether you like him or not (I don't especially).

On Bloom: The word "prove" in this post seems slippery. I think perhaps, at best, you are looking for a contrast between assertion and argument or persuasion. "Proof" does not exist in art! To use the word "prove" suggests a bit of a subterfuge on the subjectivity inherent in art.

I am not familiar with Bloom, so I shan't further waste too much comment space when some who *is* should respond to this. If I would comment at all on this piece, it seems to be ostensibly be about Bloom but indirectly about your ideas about what criticism in the literary arts should be about; which seems to be that it should be about making forceful and clear arguments for a particular set of work, with the end in mind that these should be *for* the formation of readers as a certain kind of persons, superior to what they were before in some sense and united by profound shared experiences and ideas.

It seems a little like Bloom is irksome to you as he doesn't bother doing much more than conveying his subjective extreme with what is intended to be a style that inspires a sympathy with his sentiments. That is, he doesn't bother with argument that is meant to enlist the intelligent, yet uninitiated reader as a missionary or evangelist in the cause of the Western canon (as almost a secular Bible of sorts, to the idea of which you seem approving?). Not knowing Bloom, it may be that the reason he doesn't argue is simply that he was entirely in such evangelism and persuasion, rather than that he was incapable.

But it is harder to argue for a canon that takes in the world of Islam, China, the Hindus, while excluding extinguished civilizations and cultures (the Maya, Austronesians on their expansions, the Bantu and such) without a thriving literate culture, yet who we would be hard pressed to proclaim lesser in our eyes than the small club of literate, Malthusian and rather oppressively dour Asian civilizations mentioned above.

25 certainly doesn't leave too much room and but I'm a little surprised in a list of East Asian canon texts, not a single Korean text was included. Surely, something like Chinul's excerpts on Zen buddhism or the Four-Seven debate that engaged the most influential Neo-Confucians in Korea would have been worth a mention, despite some overlap with the other Zen/Neo-Confucian writers you've already included.

It is for this reason I never seriously considered adding Hegel or Freud to the list, though they often appear on many other lists of this type. These thinkers were wrong. Their ideas were appallingly ill thought out. Everybody admits this; few living readers find anything redeeming in their philosophy.

Part of my love for Balzac comes through his attempt to create something like an encyclopedia of his entire society. It is his work as a whole (which I have completely read) that I am amazed, not just one book or another. I think there have been few observers of humanity as keen as he, and fewer still that could observe such a wide cross section of the human species.

The Spaniards added little on the philosophy side of things, while the French have been at the center of that conversation for a very long time. I am comfortable with the assertion that France was the most central nation and French the most central language to the Western tradition after Latin declined.

Bloom includes Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa on his list for what it is worth. I have not read Spanish poetry even in translation; for the Western tradition, so divided among different languages, it is hard to favor lyric poets. I also have a bias against the 20th century (thus no Marquez as well) because I feel like canonical status is still much more up in the air for it. (Interesting to note hat the canon setters in the 1920s did *not* feel that way about the 1800s, and picked from it gladly!)

With whom? No psychologist takes him remotely seriously; literary theory abandoned him back in the 80s. He 'discovered' the unconscious, something others had already uncovered and someone else would have popularized had he not been around. I just don't see the argument.

"which seems to be that it should be about making forceful and clear arguments for a particular set of work, with the end in mind that these should be *for* the formation of readers as a certain kind of persons, superior to what they were before in some sense and united by profound shared experiences and ideas."

I am less comprehensively familiar with the Islamic and the Indic traditions but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here is why. These civilizations were not like the bantus or the austronesians or the Maya (though the Maya and the Mesoamericans come closest). These societies built ways of living, ways of ruling, of ordering society and of dealing with the cosmos that lasted. Their examples lasted and spread. They built civilization. And that is what this list is, in a sense: a tribute to human civilization.

The other problem with this take is that under your schema there is no real reason to study the pre-modern West at all. (Bloom doesn't include them on his list, for what it is worth). The Greeks and the Romans never would have had their enlightenment. They did not give birth to the modern world. Neither did Aquineas and Dante. In many ways modernity was only seized by whole sale abandonment of what came before. Virgil really was for the 'oppressively dour' machinery of tyranny. I still include them. They have lasted.

I spent a lot of time thinking over this. Were I to turn it into a college course I would have to include a Protestant Reformation Reader type book. But I have trouble fitting the whole reformation into one man's thought, and then had an evern harder time deciding who I would take out to include him.

I could theoretically add some Hanafi books of law by Ibrahim al-Halabi and Maturidi's theology that influenced both the Ottomans and the Mughals but I can't fit that in and it is less important than the rest.

Instead of drafting fixed length "you-must-read-these-books canons", wouldn't it be more fruitful to list authors whose works have been seminal in starting a certain kind of genre, or even a new way of seeing the world?

Then there are authors whose real value might be really found only much later, like say Sherwood Anderson or Olaf Stapledon. And of course, even for "Western canon", many authors from less known European languages, who haven't been translated at all to the world languages, or translated only poorly (Kazantzakis?), so they are still under the radar from the world perspective.

I would argue that this is exactly what this list is. If an author is on here it is because they pioneered a genre (or exemplified the genre at its strongest) or were the originators of a new way of seeing the world.

E.g., I guess Orwell, although his fame fading a bit, like Kipling's is today. Solzhenitsyn for certain, and perhaps some other Russians? For the Middle-East part of (20th century) canon I would add Iranian Ahmad Shamlou, although one cannot really call him "islamicate" by any means.

Also, I think it is the authors who were slightly estranged from their time and milieu (e.g. Borges as a typical example, or say, Fernando Pessoa) fare better in future, than those who were too near the high societies of their time, the mores of which could only interest the future historians.

Also, we cannot know why some books will be read in future. Some might develop even an esoteric reading tradition, like for example Tolkien's stories already have done. Also, what was said about Freud above: certainly there will always be people who will find that Freud's one-eyed reduction describes the world perfectly, like there are people who think the same about Marx's reduction. And I guess Jung with his archetypes and synchronicity will stay for a long time popular among certain circles.

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