If you're not from within the academic world, you may not enjoy intimate knowledge of Harold Bloom's works. But if you have spent any time at all at postgraduate level, then you'll know that the relevance of his contribution to literary knowledge is as polarising an issue as IKEA or Marmite. Bloom is a superstar of the critical world and in the environment he inhabits, it's quite difficult to find a colleague whose ego is smaller than Tom Cruise's.
[Allow me to digress at this point: unless you've never sat in an academic conference, you haven't witnessed the lowest depths of classless intellectual misery. It is not unusual to listen to an absolutely brilliant paper delivered by some great speaker (say, Caryl Phillips), only for a member of the audience to suck all air out of the room with, 'Thank you Doctor. That is all fine and fair in some ways, but I wonder whether you've seen my research on...'. Ahem... spare me.]
I've been in the company of some brilliant academics who consider Bloom too simplistic in his arguments (much could be said about this too, as in certain intellectual circles, only Lacanian gibberish seems to be worthy of intellectual accolades). However, everyone I know, academic or otherwise, agrees on his seminal article for The Wall Street Journal ('Can 35 Million Buyers Be Wrong? Yes', July 2000) where he trashed Harry Potter as a book 'for readers non-readers'. Make of my circle of trust what you will. Whether you like or dislike Bloom's opus, whether you think his work merely accessible or tragically simplistic, there is one book of his that I tend to return to because I am fascinated by the idea that there could be a specific way to read: How to Read and Why.
These few lines of mine today though are not meant as a review of any sort; I am merely here to mention this text and to share its preface with you. Is there a way to read Austen, Milton, Keats, Morrison (Toni, not Jim), among others that is more perfect and just? Should there be one? Get this book and find out, for I have to tell you that the preface is misleading... Please note: I have left these long unbroken paragraphs as-is.
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'There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. 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.
This book teaches how to read and why, proceeding by a multitude of examples and instances: poems short and long; stories and novels and plays. The selections should not be interpreted as an exclusive list of what to read, but rather as a sampling of works that best illustrate why to read. Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline; finally there is no method but yourself, when your self has been fully molded. Literary criticism, as I have leaned to understand it, ought to be experiential and pragmatic, rather than theoretical. The critics who are my masters–Dr. Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt in particular–practice their art in order to make what is implicit in a book finely explicit. In what follows, whether I deal with a lyric by A. E. Housman or a play by Oscar Wilde, with a story by Jorge Luis Borges or a novel by Marcel Proust, my principal concerns will be with ways of noticing and realizing what can and should be made explicit. Because, for me, the question of how to read always leads on to the motives and uses of reading, I shall never separate the "how" and the "why" of this book's subject. Virginia Woolf, in "How Should One Read A Book?"–the final brief essay in her Second Common Reader–charmingly warns: "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice." But she then adds many codicils to the reader's enjoyment of freedom, culminating in the grand question "Where are we to begin?" To get to the deepest and widest pleasures of reading, "we must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly." So it seems that, until we become wholly ourselves, some advice about reading may be helpful, even perhaps essential.
Woolf herself had found that advice in Walter Pater(whose sister had tutored her), and also in Dr. Johnson and in the Romantic critics Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt, of whom she wonderfully remarked: "He is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading." Woolfthought incessantly, and never would stop reading. She herself had a good deal of advice to give to other readers, and I have happily taken it throughout this book. Her best advice is to remind us that "there is always a demon in us who whispers, 'I hate, I love,' and we cannot silence him." I cannot silence my demon, but in this book anyway I will listen to him only when he whispers, "I love," as I intend no polemics here, but only to teach reading.'
I need to get this book!
Posted by: Karen D | 28 September 2010 at 15:07