Harold Bloom Has Died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We've lost a great mind today. RIP
I still go back to it from time to time, thinking especially about Bloom’s concept of “The Anxiety of Influence”. The thread I weave starts from a piece by Walker Percy, entitled “The Loss of the Creature”. That one is somewhat esoteric and underrated, but beautifully describes the conundrum of art education by “experts”, and the contrast between truly experiencing art and merely trying to “get it”.
Anyway, I archived my essay, “Questioning the Canon”, on my personal site here:
Almost thirty years ago I was in Avignon. It was scorchingly hot, with temperatures reaching into the 40 degrees Celsius range. My girlfriend and I sought refuge against the heat in the neighbouring village of Villeneuve-Les-Avignon. There was going to be a festival of old music there in the remains of an old fortress that evening. We could hear someone practicing a piece on the cello.
No-one cared to guard the entrace in this impossible heat. We trespassed into the ruins and located an old tower where the music was coming from. There was actually no door and we snuck up the staircase until we were right next to a room where someone was playing a beautiful piece, flawlessly. We sat there on the stairs for fifteen minutes, transfixed by the music. We knew enough about music to know that it was late baroque, definitely not Bach, possibly French, but we never dared to expose ourselves and ask. It was a transcendental experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRY5SelxqPU
" O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm. "
I didn't know he hated Harry Potter. Raises my opinion of him.
I am not an expert in literature or criticism, but it seems like there's something missing from the article to explain that gap.
(I'm sorry to hear of his passing, of course, and I don't mean this as disrespectful in any way.)
It’s a little—just a little—like the “art for art’s sake” movements, where the slogan says less about what art is for and mostly insists that art isn’t about its conventionally understood purposes (to morally educate, to record, etc.) and also not about the next dozen theories that might occur to you.
When #MeToo first came to national consciousness about men in arts and letters who completely abused their position to take advantage of women, I thought of Harold. How could these giants of arts and letters abuse so many? Because no one spoke out.
It does sound near the end of his life, he got some of the medicine he deserved: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/12/16/students-organize-...
> In 2004, Wolf wrote an article for New York magazine accusing literary scholar Harold Bloom of a "sexual encroachment" more than two decades earlier by touching her thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a "victim", but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years. [0]
Briefly, she did not feel harassed or traumatized or victimized by it, but rather that her education was corrupted. She says: "Sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf#Alleged_sexual_encr...
A couple weeks ago my neighbor was drunk and kept trying to make physical contact with me, grabbing my hand, hugging, touching me, despite me incessantly asking her to stop. I didn't feel victimized or assaulted (I have actually been sexually assaulted by another male and it is different), but I was still at a loss for words to explain to her the severity of her actions and how different it would be if our genders were reversed. Sexual encroachment is probably a good phrase for it.
We tend to give people that are accomplished in a field an aura of saintliness that they don't deserve. The reality is that once people attain a bit of power many find it hard not to abuse it. And also, people around them tend to ignore the abuses. The only way to fix it is to call the abusers out on their behavior but it's hard for most people to do it because of all the trouble it brings even if it's 100% true. It's easier to give it a pass and hope someone else will do something about it.
I, personally, really don’t enjoy reading about people using someone’s death or funeral as a platform for maligning their life, regardless of the accuracy and poignancy of the claims.
Would you bring up this discussion in front of a grieving family member? Do you think it impossible someone already in pain might read what is said on the internet?
There’s a concept I like that even the bitterest of enemies allow the dead to be buried in peace.
I take somewhat the opposite view: once someone is dead they can no longer be hurt by anything bad said about them. Defamation law also follows the same principle.
Not that I want to speak ill of Harold Bloom. I only knew him through reading The Western Canon, which I found a very rewarding read, and for his disdain for the Harry Potter mania, where I felt the same way.
I don't understand why this is worth your commenting on but you're silent on the airing of somebody's dirty laundry between their death and their funeral.
What this signals to the Hacker News community is disturbing to the extent that I'm not sure I want to spend any more time here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The question of airing dirty laundry immediately on someone's death is more complex. I agree that accusations against Bloom should not dominate discussion over the significant things he did. But they're not off topic, and the social injunction against speaking ill of the dead isn't shared by the whole community. We can argue reasonably about how to handle all of that. From my perspective, there aren't guidelines violations in those comments, but the various other things moderators do to encourage substantive discussion are applicable.
But I see no such nuance in "I feel like coming on strongly to women is something desirable now". That doesn't mean the GP was posting in bad faith, but it's the sort of post we have to moderate if we don't want the thread to burst into flames.
Did you?
What's also not cool is to judge people from another time by the standards of today.
Speaking ill of the dead at all is generally not good because the person is no longer able to defend their reputation, and no remedy can be made. The dead is no longer in a position of power to be removed, nor can they improve themselves out of remorse. So of something ill is to be said, saying it after death is too late, not too soon.
"Too soon" is problematic because you are using a death as an opportunity to amplify your own message, and because it can amplify the grief of those left behind.
Unless you truly believed that if we were to go through your life with a fine toothed comb, nobody could find anything at all objectionable?
We should remember people as they were in totality. That means recognizing that people are human, and humans can be remarkably awful to some while putting on a good face to others.
It is also a simple application of the Golden Rule; you would not care for everyone around you to take your death as an opportunity to slag you, neither should you do it to you other fellow humans, all condemned to die one day as well.
There will be more days. It doesn't have to be done today.
if I ever turn into someone who gets a reputation for molesting young college students drag me all you want, hell rent a billboard for all I care and chuck my remains into the trashcan.
If I ever figured out that one of my family members engaged in behaviour like this I would not mind it one single bit if their accusers spoke about it the day they died, the only thing I'd be sad about is that I didn't know sooner.
>If I ever figured out that one of my family members engaged in behaviour like this I would not mind it one single bit if their accusers spoke about it the day they died, the only thing I'd be sad about is that I didn't know sooner.
He touched a woman's thigh and then died.
And if people are speaking ill of the dead it's highly likely that people were speaking ill of them before they died too, so any 'ill-speak' is hardly likely to be news to them.
(I'm speaking from principle here; I personally have nothing ill to say about Harold Bloom).
And yes, I'm including victims who felt they had something to lose. Those are the claims someone has the greatest interest in defending themselves against.
“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”
I guess I’m arguing that the right words are a function of the context.
And it's polite. There's nothing wrong with keeping these thoughts to yourself. With rare exception, it certainly doesn't harm anyone.
But when a person leaves this world, they take all their good and all their bad with them -- I think it's acceptable to acknowledge what we are left with. To some, the striking acknowledgement is that we are one harasser less.
The conversation will naturally steer towards the good if it outweighs the bad. Perhaps I'm being too insensitive; Those are my thoughts for the moment, anyway.
When we are all thinking about them and their legacy is an opportune time to discuss the underlying issues. How else can we accurately remember the dead, and learn from their actions?
The main options appear to be 'Genius', 'The Western Canon' and 'How to read and why'.
I'd like to read more, and a good guide to Western literature might be helpful.
In my opinion here is Bloom at his boldest and finest.
He is looking for wisdom, not just in literature, but also in philosophy, religion....
While in some ways breezy, a bit of an airplane read, and sometimes provocative of little more than a chuckle, or a facepalm, it is, taken as a whole, a liberal and generous conception of the humanities and human life. That's Bloom for you.
I'll check out 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?'
Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"
Aaron: “That which thou canst not undo."
Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."
Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."
If you’re a Bloom fan, or are interested in history and literature generally, I recommend looking into Lewis Lapham and his magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly. Lapham is also an exceptionally well-read, classically-trained writer and the magazine operates in the same areas as Bloom’s work.
(psst...I encourage people to subscribe for access, but most older Paris Review interviews are accessible through archive.org.)
In fact it's probably more common in the great men and women, than in the puny average moralists who never achieved greatness, but also never dared go into any excess as people, and had far far less chances to indulge in such things...
If female grad students were inviting him over for booty calls I think the tone of the conversation would be much different.
But the claim is that he was making advances on people who didn't welcome them. This is especially a problem since he was an influential professor with power over their careers.
Even for professors, where the natural state for many is social awkwardness, you have some obligation to read the signs of when your behavior is unwanted.
That was part of my point. One can be crash or sexist like that and still a great writer/thinker/etc.
The other ("If female grad students were inviting him over for booty calls I think the tone of the conversation would be much different") of course goes without saying!
Let me add somethings of importance then: one can be thief and/or murderer (like e.g. Caravaggio, François Villon, Burroughs, Jean Genet, Cellini, etc.) and still be a great writer, poet, painter, sculptor, etc.
>I will not, however, accept that the contributions either justify or excuse harmful behavior.
Could be the worse, the harmful behavior could inform the contributions.
Good people can still make great art (Bach for one), but they don't make great art of the kind bad people make, nor do they have the same access as bad people to express those impulses and that side of humanity.
Lots of amazing writers, poets, scientists, are terribly flawed, depressed, tortured souls. Hell, even we here on HN debate every day the ridiculous company founders and VCs whose behavior creates interesting enterprises but leads to inevitable problems later.
We seem to want saints who pique our attention, stimulate our fancy, and amuse/entertain us. But as some witty person said, living in heaven with the saints would be worse than hell.
People who actually achieve something are just subject to more scrutiny.
Also changing social mores means you are almost guaranteed to have done something improper if you have been publicly exposed for several decades.
so which is it? should sexual assault be condemned, or should it be celebrated, like you're doing here? to be clear, i care less about where you stand than i care that you pick a fucking stance.
I personally have no knowledge of those serious claims. I don't read in any reports here or elsewhere that Harold Bloom came close to perpetrating sexual assault. Do you, or do you have personal knowledge? If not maybe you should think about your own relativism as you try to turn every possible act by a person you don't know into a rallying cry to fuel your righteous indignation?
I was commenting that the people who have the most creativity often display severe personality flaws. I wasn't excusing anything. Seems like you're quite angry?
One can imagine a politician who is a thief for example, stealing public money or who uses the state to harm his personal enemies, but is still a genius of public policy, great for steering the economy, a great leader at war, and so on. In the end, the amount of money they stole e.g. (in the case of the embezzler) is insignificant compared to the good he hid for the country as a leader.
You'd replace them with some "good person" if said good person's weren't as good?
And here's the catch, history accounts are filled with such people.
It’s not about declaring some people “good” before hand. It’s more about spotting when power is being abused and giving someone else a go.
A government area very close to here recently arrested a politician who was also the most popular politician in the country (by % votes). He’s now been found guilty of some crimes the scale of which is quite small compared to the absolute scale of the area he ran. But all of his decisions and appointments will now be examined. There are definitely plus and minuses to his downfall. But on balance I’m glad that people didn’t continue to turn a blind eye to his corruption, even if some of it “got the job done” faster.
Lecherous / womanising professor is a popular trope.
e.g. Donald Sutherland in Animal House
Similarly I fully support Handke winning the Nobel this year, but it doesn't mean I can't deplore his support of Milosevic.
He was also incredibly biased towards English language books and had barely read any Eastern or African literature. Not to mention his general bias against anything written in the last 20 years, I seem to remember him saying that there were only three authors in the last 20 years who wrote a good book...