Citat:
BLOOM
I would think, my dear, that most people these days might be kind enough to call me difficult. The younger members of my profession and the members of what I have called the School of Resentment describe me, I gather, as someone who partakes of a cult of personality or self-obsession rather than their wonderful, free, and generous social vision. One of them, I understand, refers to me customarily as Napoleon Bonaparte. There is no way of dealing with these people. They have not been moved by literature. Many of them are my former students and I know them all too well. They are now gender and power freaks.
But, no. The Anxiety of Influence is a difficult book. So is Kabbalah and Criticism. Theyre books in which one is trying to discover something. But Ruin the Sacred Truths is a very different book from these earlier ones, a very simple book, to me quite transparent. Besides the aging process, and I hope the maturing process, the major reason is that I am writing more for that Johnsonian idealwhich, of course, does not exist anymorethe common reader. I wouldnt dream of using a too technical word or term now if I could possibly help it, and I dont think there are any in Ruin the Sacred Truths except for facticity. I use that term and then dismiss it. I dont think that any of my own special vocabulary, for which I have been condemned in the past (and which was meant to expose how arbitrary all critical and rhetorical terminology always is and has to be) is in that book. Nor do I think its necessary to have read Kabbalah and Criticism or A Map of Misreading or any other to understand the book. It is general literary criticism.
INTERVIEWER
How do you account historically for the school of resentment?
BLOOM
In the universities, the most surprising and reprehensible development came some twenty years ago, around 1968, and has had a very long-range effect, one that is still percolating. Suddenly all sorts of people, faculty members at the universities, graduate and undergraduate students, began to blame the universities not just for their own palpable ills and malfeasances, but for all the ills of history and society. They were blamed, and to some extent still are, by the budding school of resentment and its precursors, as though they were not only representative of these ills but, weirdly enough, as though they had somehow helped cause these ills and, even more weirdly, quite surrealistically, as though they were somehow capable of ameliorating these ills. Its still going onthis attempt to ascribe both culpability and apocalyptic potential to the universities. Its really asking the universities to take the place that was once occupied by religion, philosophy, and science. These are our conceptual modes. They have all failed us. The entire history of Western culture, from Alexandrian days until now, shows that when a societys conceptual modes fail it, then willy-nilly it becomes a literary culture. This is probably neither good nor bad, but just the way things become. And we cant really ask literature or the representatives of a literary culture, in or out of the university, to save society. Literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform. It is more a mode of human sensations and impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.
INTERVIEWER
How does one react to the school of resentment? By declaring oneself an aesthete?
BLOOM
Well, I do that now, of course, in furious reaction to their school and to so much other pernicious nonsense that goes on. I would certainly see myself as an aesthete in the sense advocated by Ruskin, indeed to a considerable degree by Emerson, and certainly by the divine Walter and the sublime Oscar. It is a very engaged kind of mode. Literary criticism in the United States increasingly is split between very low level literary journalism and what I increasingly regard as a disaster, which is literary criticism in the academies, particularly in the younger generations. Increasingly scores and scores of graduate students have read the absurd Lacan but have never read Edmund Spenser; or have read a great deal of Foucault or Derrida but scarcely read Shakespeare or Milton. Thats obviously an absurd defeat for literary study. When I was a young man back in the fifties starting out on what was to be my career, I used to proclaim that my chosen profession seemed to consist of secular clergy or clerisy. I was thinking, of course, of the highly Anglo-Catholic New Criticism under the sponsorship or demigodness of T. S. Eliot. But I realized in latish middle age that, no better or worse, I was surrounded by a pride of displaced social workers, a rabblement of lemmings, all rushing down to the sea carrying their subject down to destruction with them. The school of resentment is an extraordinary sort of mlange of latest-model feminists, Lacanians, that whole semiotic cackle, latest-model pseudo-Marxists, so-called New Historicists, who are neither new nor historicist, and third generation deconstructors, who I believe have no relationship whatever to literary values. Its really a very paltry kind of a phenomenon. But it is pervasive, and it seems to be waxing rather than waning. It is a very rare thing indeed to encounter one critic, academic or otherwise, not just in the English-speaking world, but also in France or Italy, who has an authentic commitment to aesthetic values, who reads for the pleasure of reading, and who values poetry or story as such, above all else. Reading has become a very curious kind of activity. It has become tendentious in the extreme. A sheer deliquescence has taken place because of this obsession with the methods or supposed method. Criticism startsit has to startwith a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to call imaginative literature. And when you are in love that way, with or without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what used to be called the sublime. And as soon as you do this, you pass into the agonistic mode, even if your own nature is anything but agonistic. In the end, the spirit that makes one a fan of a particular athlete or a particular team is different only in degree, not in kind, from the spirit that teaches one to prefer one poet to another, or one novelist to another. That is to say there is some element of competition at every point in ones experience as a reader. How could there not be? Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way you choose between people. You cant become friends with every acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with what you read.
INTERVIEWER
Do you foresee any change, or improvement, in the critical fashions?
BLOOM
I dont believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards to the literary scene. The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent. The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective. That is to say, sooner or later, students and teachers are going to get terribly bored with all the technocratic social work going on now. There will be a return to aesthetic values and desires, or these people will simply do something else with their time. But I find a great deal of hypocrisy in what theyre doing now. It is tiresome to be encountering myths called The Social Responsibility of the Critic or The Political Responsibility of the Critic. I would rather walk into a bookstore and find a book called The Aesthetic Responsibilities of the Statesman, or The Literary Responsibilities of the Engineer. Criticism is not a program for social betterment, not an engine for social change. I dont see how it possibly could be. If you look for the best instance of a socially radical critic, you find a very good one indeed in William Hazlitt. But you will not find that his social activism on the left in any way conditions his aesthetic judgments, or that he tries to make imaginative literature a machine for revolution. You would not find much difference in aesthetic response between Hazlitt and Dr. Samuel Johnson on Milton, though Dr. Johnson is very much on the right politically, and Hazlitt, of course, very much an enthusiast for the French Revolution and for English radicalism. But I cant find much in the way of a Hazlittian or Johnsonian temperament in life and literature anywhere on the current scene. There are so many tiresomenesses going on. Everyone is so desperately afraid of being called a racist or a sexist that they connivewhether actively or passivelythe almost total breakdown of standards that has taken place both in and out of the universities, where writings by blacks or Hispanics or in many cases simply women are concerned.
