In a time when literature is held to be futile, it is cheering that some literary values persist. One of those values, confirmed by T.S. Eliot in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), is that writing a book is almost invariably less futile than writing a book about books. Criticism, Eliot wrote, could not be ‘autotelic’, expressing only itself, because criticism was about other things, like ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’. The critic, then, performs a kind of clean-up operation after the party.
Harold Bloom, who died yesterday at 89, was a rare exception to that rule. For Bloom, criticism was the vehicle of spiritual autobiography. The value of reading his books about books lies less in their erudition and range –– though if you’ve read and understood Bloom, you really have no need to waste four years on Eng Lit at Yale –– than in their rearrangement of what Eliot called the ‘ideal order’ of art’s ‘existing monuments’. In this, as in his pursuit of the spotlight and his democratizing public presence, Bloom had more in common with ebullient and emotional Victorian grandstanders like Carlyle and Emerson than with a parsonical puritan like T.S. Eliot, let alone the fashionable puritans whose mobilizing of criticism as politics supplied a Malvolio-like counterpart to Bloom’s Falstaff routine.
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