The definition of the Western Canon is always changing, according to literary critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom: but is that mutability a good thing? Bloom, a rather conservative literary critic, believes that there should be literary standards that outlive the fashionable theories of the day. In our times, these literary theories include ideas borrow from Marx, Foucault, New Historicism, and ethnocentric and gender perspectives, among other lenses through which to view the production of literature.
Amidst these ever-changing standards and definitions of a “classic,” Bloom believes the study of literature and good reading habits—to read well and deeply—never change. That thought provides a measure of security against the ever-changing tides of contemporary criticism, today based on social rather than literary criteria.
Twice, in this excerpt, Bloom makes the claim that it is the Western Canon—with William Shakespeare at the center—who invented us, not us who have placed a designation or commendation upon Shakespeare. Shakespeare “and his few peers,” according to Bloom, subsume and absorb the canon—they are superlative, beyond criticism, because they have fully internalized and formed the Canon.
This seems like an odd stance for Bloom to take. If Shakespeare and his few (white, male) peers, such as Dante and Milton, are beyond reproach, how can literary critics attempt to exercise their faculties of not just analysis and appreciation, but critical judgement? Yes, Shakespeare’s genius has stood the test of time, but isn’t placing him paradoxically both at the center and outside of Canonical assessment an error akin to the worldview before Copernicus, in relation to the position of sun and the earth?
Bloom’s central claim is that literary criticism is unapologetically elitist art, one that both the working class and left-wing critics are not likely to influence permanently. It requires special schooling, time for scholarly meditation, and access to institutions of higher education, a rare trifecta. Bloom is chiefly concerned, thus, with the fruits of immortality (the laurel crown of canonicity), and the preservation of cultural memory through the canon. The art of memory and the art of social justice, he repeatedly stresses, are not the same art. “The party of memory is the party of hope,” he states, and “Forgetting, in an aesthetic context, is ruinous, for cognition, in criticism, always relies on memory” (Bloom, 17-18).
One might argue, here, that literature that effects or documents social change would be the bedrock of the “party of hope,” as it hopes not just to be remembered and preserved as aesthetic texts, but also as documentation of social upheaval or revolution. Bloom hopes to remember, and to preserve history. It seems fitting that Bloom’s classicist views are of art—and art criticism—as a static phenomenon, one that has occurred in the past, to be memorialized in the present.
Not surprisingly, Bloom then positions himself against the literary criticism movement of New Historicism (which would argue poetry to be both a social document as well as literature), in saying that his aim isn’t to historicize but to “preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible” (18).
New Historicists would argue that treating poetry as a force of social and economic, as well as “literary” production, is to preserve poetry as “fully” as possibly—denouncing the very idea of “purity,” as an error of perspective stemming from neo-colonialist ideas of single origins, virgin lands, genre specifications, and artworks untainted by the social and economic forces involved—or denied—in their creation.
While Shakespeare continues to define the canon, according to Bloom, Dante invented the idea of the “canonical.” It wasn’t until the middle of the 18th century that the “secular” canon arose from the works of writers such as Dante and Milton (and, previously, Homer) whose epic works were based in metaphysical, religious, and cosmological dramas. Bloom does concede that in each time period, some genres are considered more canonical than others.
The other main component of Bloom’s claim, along with literary criticism being a necessarily elitist act, is the idea that aesthetic choice rather than social conscience should guide canon formation. Making these aesthetic choices is an “ideological act,” Bloom states, one that requires not just discernment but the deployment of aesthetic judgement—this is better than that, and this is why.
Why must canon formation be “elitist,” and not just “selective,” then? Bloom’s arguments continue to take Shakespeare’s singularity and exceptionalism (the figure beyond figures) as their model, in saying that only the educated elite are qualified to render such judgements: to, in effect, have the final word over what he calls the “School of Resentment” (those critics who take umbrage against the dominant school of criticism for various reasons).
Bloom, too, believes his argument is sacrosanct and invincible, handed down from the heights of the Ivory Tower. The Marxist analysis of class interest—the individual self as shaped by economic factors—only interests him inasmuch as he believes “individuation” to be at the heart of the creative act. Shakespeare, again, is proven superior, in light of a Marxist analysis of literature. “He renders you anachronistic because he contains you,” Bloom states (25). Too, Shakespeare “contains” the class struggle, which for Bloom isn’t at the core of literature, but, rather, creative genius.
It seems here that Bloom is unable to distinguish between social and literary forces of production. An art form that is “necessarily” elitist is both written by and speaks to a very small minority of (usually white, male) subjects. If a criteria for a “classic” is that it speaks to the universal conditions of humanity, how can upholding the works of a few, exclusively canonical figures be said to meet the criteria of a “classic”?
A possibly solution may be found, not in hypothesizing about the social order or the literary order, as such, but in the sanctity and salvation of the individual, as again, Bloom focuses on literary criticism as an aesthetic act of individualism; all canonical art, he claims, is highly original. And the thrust of canonical art (Dante and Milton in particular), centers on individuation, not social change. “Whatever the Western Canon is, it is not a program for social salvation” (29). Too, the development of aesthetic or “spiritual” authority is a solitary act.
The Canon, therefore, subverts rather than defines values, and outlines the cause of the individual as preparing for his (or her) solitary birth, and death. “The Canon . . . is the minister of death” (32).
Literature is not a form of cultural capital, as the Marxists would have it, says Bloom: it’s a memory system. Bloom, in the last glance, is inveighing the modernist and post-modernist relativism of literary criticism and the introduction of the various schools of criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries (Marxism, New Historicism, New Criticism, ethnocentric, gender-based, reader-response) that would purport to read texts through these lenses or history, economics, class. “We are destroying all intellectual and social standards . . . in the name of social justice,” says Bloom (35).
This cantankerous stance is conservative at best, and extremist at worst. It isn’t necessarily in the “name of social justice,” that other schools of criticism beyond white, academic, male punditry have been established; it is in the service of expanding the definition of a “classic” to better frame the standard of universality, not exclusivity, to which great literature has been defined since antiquity, and to which it should aspire.
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Comic book artist Art Spiegelman came into fame in the 1960s, at a time when countercultural forces were beginning to threaten the mainstream order in all sectors. As the Norton Anthology of World Literature indicates, “In the 1960s, as beliefs and practices were challenged and to some extent changed, comic book art found itself uniquely positioned as an underground form ready to disrupt a traditional, more conservative order” (Norton, 3090).
Spiegelman was the son of Polish Jewish parents; his parents had survived the Holocaust, and imprisoned at Auschwitz, where their first son died. They subsequently moved to Sweden, and then to New York City, where Art received his formative training in the arts. A college dropout, Spiegelman’s work quickly moved, in the 60s and 70s, from “novelty to subversion,” particularly when Spiegelman chose to treat the Holocaust in his comic books Maus I and II (1997). “By applying the cartoonist serial-narrative skills to his father’s experience, Speigelman gave the graphic novel literary importance” (3090).
Maus I and II were similar to George Orwell’s political allegory Animal Farm in that it associated several ethnic groups with animals (Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and French as frogs), to create an allegory of war-time social relations and antagonisms.
It is very unlikely that Harold Bloom would consider Spiegelman’s work as a “classic,” or canonical. It’s true, Bloom does state that genres of literature and definitions of what is canonical change with time, but it’s doubtful that Bloom would place Spiegelman in that category, as Bloom concerns himself with epic texts, and graphic novels or comic books, however high an art form they may be within their genre, are still a hybrid art form with roots in low (working class) culture, not Greco-Roman literature. It’s possible, however, that Bloom would consider Spiegelman’s Maus I and II to be classics in their genre (of comic books), just not necessarily as compared to works of literature (Dante, or Pulitzer-prize winning novels).
It’s easy to see the flaws in this projected assumption, as Spiegelman’s work, along with that of comic book artist Will Eisner, was genre-defining, like, as Bloom takes pains to point out, Shakespeare. Thus, the criteria I would establish to argue that Spiegelman’s work is a classic, and belongs in the Western Canon, would be that it was anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Literature; it represents the changing nature of narrative forms (as, say, from Greek dramas to the historical novel); and it is iconoclastic genre-defining, taking serious historical events such as the Holocaust and 9/11 as its subject matter.
Just as, in Homer’s time, literature was an oral and mimetic rather than a written art, it’s possible that our generation is undergoing a similar revolution in narrative and cultural preservation methods, with the advent of digital technologies and other forms of narrative forms such as the graphic novel. Tell the truth, but tell it slant, as poet Emily Dickinson said: the genre of comic books arose out of a need to have established stories told “slant,” or through a means that had more mass appeal, and was accompanied by images, beyond those supplied in the reader’s mind’s eye. While Bloom may disagree, comic book fans and contemporary literature scholars alike would agree that it takes an intelligent artist to reduplicate history; it takes a creative genius—Art Spiegelman—to reinvent history.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. 15-41. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym, et al. 7th ed. Vol. E. New York: Norton, 2007. 3090-3107. Print.
