Harold Bloom Interview - Radio Open Source

A Brief (Bloomian) History Of Our Impoverished Intellectual Climate

How might we account for the present state of literary studies in the United States?

The failure of the so-called "New Left” of the late 1960s and early 1970s to end American Empire led us to this pass. The dismal end of the Vietnam fiasco should have knocked the Pentagon back on its heels and discredited militarism for generations to come. Instead, the military-industrial complex just went back to the drawing board and devised new ways to attract recruits and invented new enemies to vilify and fight. When the generation that had scored a palpable hit against the military-industrial complex (by contesting Vietnam) began to sense that they had been out-flanked (and were now invested in the system anyway and no longer in danger of being drafted and sent to kill people whose lives and longings they could not understand and whose names they couldn’t even pronounce), they turned inward, looking to literature for self-validation.

This turn was, and remains, deeply problematic; for, as Harold Bloom has always understood, literature worth reading calls the reader and her smug, self-validating worldview into question. Knowing that they should be contesting something, the former radicals embraced multiculturalism.

Now, the embrace of multiculturalism is, in itself, quite laudable as a moral and political posture. But history is the record of unintended consequences and the unintended consequence of the “new [multicultural] radicalism” of the mid-to-late 1980s (and continuing to this day) is a kind of tribalism called “identity politics.” In this new power game, every player is expected to latch onto a particular totem (or set of totems) with which to identify and from which to “speak one’s truth.” So race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation (and, these days, the “intersectionality” among several of these accidents) become reified into cudgels with which to batter the status quo and, possibly, to find some sort of vindication for (or meaning in) the accidents of one's own birth.

The severe limitations of this approach to "radicalism" has lately been exposed by the so-called "alt-right," which has demonstrated that those in power can play this game too--making a mockery of the entire project.

Meanwhile, with the radicals thus preoccupied with scoring points that make little difference to anyone besides themselves, the Pentagon quietly slipped its tentacles deep into our economy and culture and began its program of war-without-end by capitalizing on the tragic (and remarkably convenient) events of 9/11.

Those of us who were reading and have continued to read literature that awakens us to otherness (Harold Bloom is perhaps the most outspoken of this “saving remnant” as he has called it) have watched this new dispensation unfold in disbelief. The new radicals (who really are not radical at all—they are, in fact, deeply reactionary) won’t read Shakespeare or Blake or Tolstoy to discover what it is like to be another person (something Tolstoy does incomparably in Hadji Murad) but only to find reasons to blame them for being straight (though Shakespeare may well have been bisexual), white, males.

What makes this new dispensation so troubling is the fact that there is plenty of blame to be assigned to straight, white, males—and even to an occasional straight black male like Barack Obama or Colin Powell (but don’t suggest to the “radicals” that any blame should be assigned to the latter two sellouts). So one cannot (and ought not to) dismiss their righteous indignation; indeed, one should validate and support it. At the same time, however, one should turn to literature (regardless of the race, ethnicity, sex, religion, etc. of its author) for its cognitive power and its strangeness (a key word with Bloom that he lifted from Owen Barfield).

One should do this because literary strangeness un-houses us (Blake, prophet against Empire, does that so well) and awakens us to the contingencies of our lives and of the lives of every other member of our species (with whom we should be in solidarity). That is the true radicalism that the self-styled “radicals” who are in fact reactionaries (in an Orwellian world, words tend to acquire their opposite meanings) do not embrace—for to do so would mean abandoning identity politics and the illusion of "empowered difference” they believe it has brought them.

The irony of this tale is that, in trying to achieve their birthright as human beings (the best which has been thought and said, i.e., that which "un-houses" and thereby de-tribalizes us), the pseudo-radicals have but sold it for a mess of multicultural pottage.

William Blake And Karl Marx

Let us read them in tandem.

Harold Bloom In Depth (2003)

C-Span Interview.

Harold Bloom On "Hamlet" (2003)

The Gnostic Harold Bloom

                                                                Charlie Rose interview.

Harold Bloom: The American Religion

Arts: Harold Bloom's Influence

Our Lady Zaynab (Cairo)

1894:



Today:

Harold Bloom Interview On "The Western Canon" (1994)

Saving Literature With Harold Bloom

Henry Miller On G.I. Gurdjieff

George Orwell On Henry Miller

Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

~ George Orwell, "Inside the Whale."



Miller on sex and politics.

Harold Bloom Revisited: Jesus and Yahweh

                                                The Charlie Rose interview from 2005.

Remember To Remember...

Paul Simon, Part 2

Paul Simon, Part 1

Kathy's Song

Armistice Day

Pittsburgh, Pa.

The Bridge To Nowhere.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Remember To Remember...

The Past Is A Foreign Country...