|
Literary Review
The solitary reader
|
For those impatient with, or unsympathetic to, the current ideology-based pedagogical configuration, Bloom's How to Read and Why will be astonishingly refreshing, says M.S. NAGARAJAN.
|
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Walter Savage Landor
HAROLD BLOOM, Professor of Humanities at Yale, is an indisputable literary cormorant. Having travelled much in the realms of gold in a great deal of Western literature, he is the most widely read — probably surpassing even the great Sam Johnson whom he venerates rapturously — man of letters in the modern world. Going on with more than 60 years of deep and unceasing addiction to the riches available in the print medium, who else can be more qualified than he to take us on a critical excursion into the some of the most admired sites of literature? Houseman has been in his head for well over six decades, Hart Crane has been haunting him daily since he was 10, he has been rereading Moby Dick time and again all these years. His most recent short volume, How to Read and Why, a necessary sequel to his The Western Canon (1994), is a learner's manual for literary study.
He regretted in the earlier book that the institution of English studies has been so much circumscribed that "students of literature have become amateur political scientists, uninformed sociologists, incompetent anthropologists, mediocre philosophers and overdetermined cultural historians." Good literature can help us to use our solitude properly. It can teach us to confront mortality bravely. Why read? Bloom answers, "... only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self. Until you become yourself, what benefit can you be to others?" How to read? He answers, "There are many different ways to read well... . Wordsworth's `wise passitivity' seems my best synonym for the kind of attention that good reading requires." And adds, "Reading well is one of the pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures (italics mine)... Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness."
In his Map of Misreading (which along with his The Anxiety of Influence catapulted him to the rank of a cult figure among literary critics) Bloom had declared that ordinary readers read while extraordinary readers misread. By misreading he did not mean losing one's track and getting facts wrong but active reading, that which brings the whole soul of man into activity. How to Read and Why is a robust demonstration of such strong critical "misreading" at its best. He takes us to the mountaintops, as it were, so that we can command a wider perspective, a view that is exhilarating and gratifying to our senses.
For restoring active reading, Bloom suggests what appears like a five-finger exercise, which by no means is an easy task to practise: 1. Clear your mind of cant, 2. Do not try to improve your neighbour or your neighbourhood by what or how you read, 3. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light, 4. One must be an inventor to read well, 5. Recover the ironic. One's own self is the only standard for apprehending the value of a piece of literature.
Bloom practises what he preaches. The book, in five sections, demonstrates a close reading of some 60 works in literature representing the different genres. The first section is devoted to an active and involved reading of the short stories of Turgenev, Chekov, Maupassant, Hemingway, Flannery O' Connor, Nabokov, Borges, Landolfi and Calvino. These are close-read, interpreted and evaluated for their individual merits. Each story has its significance, its own value for us. We want these for meeting our different needs. If Turgenev can expose "our vulnerability" to fate, Chekov "is able to reveal in the dim sea of banality its tragic humour," Maupassant enlarges life. Though differing in kind and quality, our responses to these stories are wonderfully intense.
The section on "Poems" carries 24 poems, short and long, most of these invariably anthologised in any representative collection. There is no selection involved in the choice of these poems; they are meant to show us how and why these should be read. Bloom concludes his reading of Tennyson's superb dramatic monologue, "Ulysses" thus:
The pleasures of great poetry are many and varied, and Tennyson's "Ulysses" is, for me, an endless delight. Only rarely can poetry aid us in communing with others; that is a beautiful idealism, except at certain strange moments, like the instant of falling in love. Solitude is the more frequent mark of our condition; how shall we people that solitude? Poems can help us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhear that speaking. Shakespeare is the largest master of such overhearing: his women and men are our forerunners, as they are also of Tennyson's Ulysses. We speak to an otherness in ourselves, or to what may be best and oldest in ourselves. We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strange than otherwise we could hope to find.
For Bloom, Whitman and Dickinson should be read to strengthen what Emerson calls Self-Reliance. The popular ballad "Sir Patrick Spence" fills our heart with unique stoic heroism. Milton is a profoundly learned and allusive poet but Bloom's worry is "whether he will survive our visual age of information." Bloom recommends everyone to read Wordsworth for his celebration of the Sublime, for his "preternatural gift for emotional urgency." We ought to read Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" for the higher sense of freedom the poem can give us. He urges readers to read poetry aloud, for, it strengthens our spirit. Poetry being the most supreme mode of transcendence (one hears an echo of Arnold), memorisation is an indispensable aid to the enjoyment of poetry. A good poem can possess us. The proper work of poetry is "to startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life."
There are two sections on novels. Fifteen novelists — Russians, French, Germans included — are analysed mostly for their themes. Bloom's view is that novels should be read as they were read in the 18th Century: more for the aesthetic pleasure and spiritual insight they give than for entertainment. He has justifiable fears that the genre of the realistic novel which dominated Western literature for almost three centuries might vanish what with the onslaught of new and easier modes available to us through the mass media. Reading a good novel not just cheers us up but rather strengthens our spirit, cleanses us of our negativity, elevates our self.
The section on "Plays" is devoted to a close and detailed examination of three plays, "Hamlet", "Hedda Gabler" and "The Importance of Being Earnest". Coleridge once said, "I have a smack of Hamlet myself... . There is something inviolate in his character that is proof against analysis and labelling... It is we who are Hamlet." Bloom allots a long section for an analysis of the play to show how "Hamlet" expands the horizons of literary art. He proves that the portrayal of Hedda is a stroke of genius in playwrighting and as a piece of nonsense literature (a variant of fantasy literature) there is nothing to beat "Earnest".
Bloom being such an accomplished and devoted reader of literature, it is impossible not to be affected by his persuasive arguments presented with a Hazlittian gusto. His touchstones provide for us concrete instances of different kinds and degrees of literary merit. As Leavis very pertinently observed once, these touchstones are meant to serve as "a tip for mobilising our sensibility, for focussing relevant experience in a sensitive point, for reminding us vividly what the best is like." How to Read and Why is a short book. It is sometimes marred by uncritical eulogy, vapid truisms, redundant phrasing and judgements of debatable nature. Given the "ideology" based pedagogical configuration that almost dictates the metropolitan elitist centre of learning, Bloom's personalised sublime reading is astonishingly refreshing like a whiff of fresh air in a smoke-ridden room. Bloom succeeds triumphantly.
How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom, London: Fourth Estate, 2001, p.283, Rs.330.
M.S. Nagarajan is former Professor and Head, Department of English, University of Madras.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
