I visited The Barrow, a terrific used bookstore in Concord, MA, a town that needs no introduction today.
This small store -- probably 14 x 28 feet -- was more crowded than I had ever seen it. I was told it was founded by a retired Brown professor and I know one of the "clerks" is a rather well regarded author of children's books.
On top of the literary criticism section was a copy of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon.
I asked the clerk if Bloom was in demand and she said no, that when a book of his came in, it generally remained for a long time. I looked though it carefully and said that I felt he was someone who was negative -- a person who opposed every school of criticism that arose during his lifetime, but who failed to found his own coherent school.
She laughed and said that that was not only her opinion of him but of most critics.
I didn't buy the book. I hadn't much money and I will be working on a project at Orchard House all next week, so I knew I would be in and out Concord often. I did buy a book on Carl Larssen's home, as I would like to decorate a house using elements of his style.
When I checked out, the clerk noticed I had changed my mind about buying Bloom. I told her of the goings-on her at a2k and she laughed. I also said that I didn't want to spoil a perfect summer day with someone as bombastic as Bloom and she said, "Amen."
Miller -- dlowan told me that she has grown weary of trying to start book discussions.
One of the problems that I see in such a discussion is having people all read and finish a book at the same time and then begin posting on it.
The book group I had been in ran on an academic year schedule -- September through June, with 10 books read and reviewed. We would begin collecting nominations in March or April and the list of books nominated would be presented at the June meeting -- which also included a pot luck luncheon and discussion of the final book of the year -- a looooonnnngggg meeting.
If you nominated a book, you had to review it. You also were supposed to "sell" it to the group and, if you could not make the June meeting, you should have left a pitch with that year's chair.
We would vote via written ballot. The outgoing and the incoming chairs tabulated the votes and published the decision by the first of July, giving readers and reviewers plenty of time to prepare.
We can't do that in this format.
Now, I would like to hear some names of books people have been reading and consider the best book they have read from those published in America in the past 25. I have named one book. Do I consider it the best? Yes and no. A problem I have is that the best book I have read that was published in the past 25 years is English, Zadie Smith's White Teeth.
My book group always read at least one book by a Middle Eastern writer each year because one of our members had lived in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt. A member who floated in and out of the group is married to an Indian who teaches math at Harvard and she tends to nominate Indian writers, when she is active, although her own field is German. I introduced some Medieval material.
I have to admit that while I was engaged in Medieval studies, I would read two or three current English or AMerican novels during term break, because I was eager to return to my own time. However, while the first novel or two went down quickly, by the third, I was ready to return to the Middle Ages.
That's a rather long explanation for why no one is naming books they like.
Organizing a book club on A2K would be like trying to herd a thousand cats across Central Park's Sheep Meadow.
In a thunderstorm.
===
Well.
Twenty two more miles of running and a couple of subway rides later, I have finished Beloved. It is a novel that occasionally drifts one way in confusion over time and just as often soars as a love prose-poem for the ages. Morrison reveals how the madness of one thing, life as a slave, can lead to madness of the mind. It is a great ghost story set upon the lives, the simple lives, of people just trying to make a place for themselves in this world.
Beloved is complex, (how could such a story, which stretchs itself across three generations, be anything less?), but Morrison's voice leads you through to the end. There are things about the story which for me are less than satisfying, but maybe that reveals how close it is to being a truly human tale with a ghost in tow.
It is not the best book I have ever read (or listened to, although Morrison's reading of her characters and prose is superb.). It has some wonderful images, some impelling characters and a great historical screen upon which to project the story, but there are too many times when I hear Morrison reading her notes to us readers instead of the finished narrative.
Joe(Read it, see what you think)Nation
Joe Nation wrote:Organizing a book club on A2K would be like trying to herd a thousand cats across Central Park's Sheep Meadow.
In a thunderstorm.
It was.
But I see little similarity between that and a thread to discuss books, within certain confines, in a thread like this....though people will always stray from the point.
The troll just derailed this thread.
===
Joe Nation wrote:Well.
Twenty two more miles of running and a couple of subway rides later, I have finished Beloved. It is a novel that occasionally drifts one way in confusion over time and just as often soars as a love prose-poem for the ages. Morrison reveals how the madness of one thing, life as a slave, can lead to madness of the mind. It is a great ghost story set upon the lives, the simple lives, of people just trying to make a place for themselves in this world.
Beloved is complex, (how could such a story, which stretchs itself across three generations, be anything less?), but Morrison's voice leads you through to the end. There are things about the story which for me are less than satisfying, but maybe that reveals how close it is to being a truly human tale with a ghost in tow.
It is not the best book I have ever read (or listened to, although Morrison's reading of her characters and prose is superb.). It has some wonderful images, some impelling characters and a great historical screen upon which to project the story, but there are too many times when I hear Morrison reading her notes to us readers instead of the finished narrative.
Joe(Read it, see what you think)Nation
Very interesting viewpoint.
I began it a while back, and stopped for some reason, and it sits among the drifts and swathes of "to be read" books in my place.
I'll move it up a notch...
Mr.Nation- You have read the book correctly in my opinion. It is not a great book; possibly a good book. There are so many unread great books out there that reading Beloved is, in my opinion, a waste of time.
One of the most annoying parts of her novel is found in the frontspiece where we find --SIX MILLION DEATHS--
Morrison is a propagandist who would have us believe that SIX MILLION SLAVES DIED COMING TO THE NEW WORLD.
Such a statement at the beginning of her book renders the rest of her novel, no matter how limpid her prose, a book written by someone who is a propagandist. That places a book which might be classed as good in a lower category--propaganda--
SIX MILLION???? What a lie.
Eugene Genovese in his book-Roll, Jordan Roll, gives the truth based on documentation-
quote--"The less than 400,00 Africans imported into the North American British Colonies and the United States..."
Morrison may write fairly well but she is a lying propagandist!
Am attending a conference at the Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott. Worth while.
What have you seen and heard?
J
I hesitate to post this because I am afraid that the two people who need to read this will probably not understand it. There are some polysyllabic words in it and also some thoughts not normally encountered by the readers of the Stephen King genre.
But, Ms. Plain Ol Me and Mr. Nation are invited to try--PS Ms. Plain Ol Me's anonymous book seller has nothing on my book store where the owner said to me that Bloom's Western Canon was one of the books she reads again and again. Here is a review from an NON ANYNOMOUS SOURCE.
Ms. Plain Ol Me and Mr. Nation( if you read it) might need a dictionary. These words and concepts do not appear in crap literature like Beloved.
A review of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon
Back to Basics
Davis Wang
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am not in the habit of reading campus newspapers. Only when looking for a friend's article did I chance upon the following house ad: "_ Western Culture, Comp Perspective." The blank, of course, replaces a common expletive much too vulgar for the polite audience for which the Salient is intended.
Thus I was glad to see The Western Canon, authored by the prolific Harold Bloom, "Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University," who was also an erstwhile Norton lecturer here. Bloom is quite in favor of Western culture and is convinced that there even exists a canon for it.
He opens, however, with an elegy. The School of Resentment, by which he refers to feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist critics, argues that the Western canon is tired and irrelevant, a construct imposed by a societal and political elite. The contrary view comes partly from what might be called the School of the Moral Majority, whose adherents believe that by upholding the canon they can sway the United States from the Seven Sins to the Seven Virtues. Even as Bloom concedes a takeover by those new academics, he attacks both sorts as debasing literature. "Whatever the Western canon is, it is not a program for social salvation É All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."
It is this mortality, and a sense of our "belatedness," that make the Western Canon so central. Because we are belated - in the sense that there are cultural figures and civilizations before us - we must compete with our predecessors. Because we cannot live forever, there is only a part of this cultural precedence that we can understand, emulate, and surpass. "The pragmatic question has become what shall I not bother to read." It is here that the canon becomes the embodiment of the cultural knowledge worthy of generation transmission.
Works become canonical only if they have "a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange." The canonical writers, having survived their own time, exert their power on their descendants by causing an "anxiety of influence," forcing the latecomers to be either followers or challengers. They must contend with the greatness of the canon because its influence is palpably felt. Works which fail to excite this anxiety are doomed to be period pieces: Their fame is ephemeral, their influence ethereal.
Theorizing about the existence of the canon and its desirability is the sort of pursuit which the great ideologues of campus media would like to sink their teeth into. Fortunately, throughout Bloom's book, such politicking is the marginalia rather than the opus; the bulk of the book is devoted to a critical reading of twenty-six canonical authors.
Bloom divides his writers into three ages - the Aristocratic, the Democratic and the Chaotic. Shakespeare is placed at the very center: "At once no one and everyone, nothing and everything, Shakespeare is the Western Canon." His universality is achieved by a singular ability to examine and expose the nature of humanity and to mold it with a vivid reality into his imaginary individuals on stage. "Shakespeare so opens his characters to multiple perspectives that they become analytical instruments for judging you." Bloom's favorite Shakespearean characters are as diverse as Falstaff, Edmund and Hamlet, by turns jocular, cunning and intellectual, but always complex and interesting. Bloom speaks of them with an awe that is palpable, a sobriety that is shrewd, and a love that is infectious.
Here Bloom's greatest strengths and faults lie. He packs in decades of reading, rereading, thinking and rethinking into little more than five hundred pages. On Goethe, Bloom manages to convey a sense of the plot of Faust, but quickly goes on to explore its extravaganza of sexuality. He can at once make great pronouncements about Goethe's audacity and style, and yet go into intricate details about his sexual metaphors. At the end, we know that Part One of Faust is "a perfect sin, error and remorse, fit only for Faust to drown in;" but we also gain a glimpse into Goethe's flamboyant irony and "sublime bad taste" in his phallic symbolism. And all this in the space of thirty pages.
All that is not to say, however, that Bloom does not have his peculiarities. In part, he makes the canon arbitrary by dedicating parts of the book to some of his most personal and iconoclastic readings. On Tolstoy, for instance, he spends much time on the obscure novel Hadji Murad, a celebration of Tartar heroism which, from the excerpts Bloom selects, seems tritely formulaic. In addition, Bloom clings throughout the book to the somewhat eccentric idea that Shakespeare is the canonical writer, whose influence is felt by everyone and whose knowledge of the human character is surpassed by no one. Dante is of course exempt from influence, for he precedes Shakespeare, but he is still inferior to him. Goethe, Tolstoy, Freud and Shaw (who coined the phrase Bardolatry) are all guilty of the anxiety of influence, as they struggle to escape the shadow of Stratford, and, happily in Bloom's view, fail eventually in that endeavor. Joyce comes closest to the Shakespearean ideal, but in the event, he becomes an inventive protg rather than an equal. Many of those authors, when still living, did not agree with Bloom, and their disciples still might not.
Of course, the most obvious arbitrariness lies in who and what gets into the canon. While Shaw is scarcely mentioned, Dr. Johnson gets a whole chapter. French literature of the Democratic age is almost wholly ignored: Balzac is mentioned with dismissiveness, Hugo with indifference, only Flaubert is discussed with some reverence; and Maupassant and Zola are not spoken of at all. Indeed, reading Bloom's "short-list" may lend more credibility to the School of Resentment than any theoretical arguments they can marshal. Though it is supposed to be the list for the Western canon - and Bloom does conscientiously search out canonical hopefuls from Czechoslovakia and Hungary - the names are heavily biased in favor of those writing in English. Even among the English writers, the field is uneven. Maugham and Waugh are placed alongside Beckett - I am a fan of Maugham and Waugh, but by no means are they of the stature of Beckett.
Disagreement, however, is not necessarily negation. To go back to Bloom's anxiety of influence, it is the opposition and challenge mounted against a writer, I think, that confirms his or her place in the canon. The fiercer the opposition, the greater the effort required to escape the influence of the canon: The hue and cry are but an alternate expression for anxiety. It is the School of Resentment that is doing more than everything else to solidify the centrality of Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes et al - for scarcely anyone resents those who have made no impact on others' lives. And the resentment against the canon is especially strong because the impact of the canon is so inescapable. That is perhaps the true mark of greatness: It excites so overwhelming an anxiety that one cannot but feel the need to engage in an agon with it, an agon that might very well last centuries.
It is a testament to Bloom's learning that his is a book with which one needs to struggle and grapple, a book which one can still enjoy in spite of the most vehement of disagreements. It is unusually compact and abundant, and thus at times dense and difficult. Hoping to dash through it is doomed to failure, for the result would be inevitable indigestion and boredom. Many times I have had to read and reread his paragraphs to realize the full import of his observations. Many times I have had to suppress my impatient disagreement with his judgment in order to see his superior insight. But happily, Bloom's is one of those rare books, nowadays, that requires and deserves a second read.
So Joe, as you were saying...
If there is anyone who can write on this website of thousands over time, it is JoeNation. He's a guy who can choose words well to tell a story, and picks them from a vast panoply of monosyllabic and pollysyllabic words.
Absolutely- When I read the posts from Joe Nation, I threw away my last copy of Joyce's Ulysses. Nation's limpid prose should be published so that the whole world can view his genius.
I think, however, that he is a gentleman who does not want to upstage Ms. Toni Morrison!
Oh, and past words, man has both mind and heart.
He's quiet, doesn't really want attention so much as to express himself well.
I assume my comments will be annoying, in the way. He's a kind of purist.
Not a blowsy poster, as some of us are and I include myself before y'all get all riled.
You are correct, sir. Mr. Nation didn't( to his everlasting credit) get riled when I pointed out that Toni Morrison was a fraud and a race carder who wrote a poiltical polemic and had the gall to post a vicious lie in the front of her book--Six Million Killed. Morrison referred, of course, to the deaths of six million Africans during their transport to the USA. When I told Mr. Nation that this was a vicious lie which rendered her novel as no more than a political polemic because there were only 400,000 Africans imported into the British Colonies, Mr. Nation( to his credit and showing that he was and is a gentleman) hardly demurred.
You are absolutely correct, Mr. Joe Nation is a gentleman through and through..
I don't care what you do with your copy of Ulysses.
I always listen to what JoeNation has to say. He tends to speak small, in particulars. Anyone with a bulb can extrapolate to the universal.
But never mind, grasp your canon and may it keep you warm.
POM, we sometimes but not always agree. Surely she is fluid with polysyllables.
Digs like that are adhoms, not useful.
BernardR, I'm a woman. Please adjust your ripostes to accomodate that.
Well, ne'er mind all this. I'll back off to let others talk about take on the best book of the last 25 years. I'm still honing in on that myself.
Ossobuco- In your search for the best book of the last twenty five years is one limited to Fiction?
No, it isn't, for me. But...
I'll have to go back and look at the original question, that might have been about fiction and i've forgotten.
