“Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!”
- William Blake
Let’s start with this: an excellent article by Stephen King on Harry Potter and reading in modern society. [Warning: do not read it if you haven't read the Potter books, because it spoils them completely. And if you think the books are silly or beneath you, you are a silly person. You can understand this post without reading King's article.]
There’s one quotation from near the end which I particularly liked, and which is the basis of this post.
I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.
And that is the essence of the problem with modern academia and people like the despicable Harold Bloom (who, incidentally, hates both Rowling and King). Not only do they have a terrible idea of what makes a good novel (something as obscurantist and incomprehensibly written as possible, with little to nothing real to say about the world), they also want the novel to be dead. The idea that “no-one reads anymore” and “all the good novels were written in the past” is essential to their understanding of art: that it’s something exclusive that only they and their buddies can understand. If it’s popular (i.e. King or Rowling) then it must be bad. If they had lived in Shakespeare’s times, they (like many others) would have thought him mediocre; they would have said the same about Dickens or Chesterton or Mark Twain or any other great artist popular in his own time.
But people like Harold Bloom aren’t just glorifying a past they intentionally distort: they’re strangling the present. To a large degree thanks to them, the current attitude towards art in our society is deeply unhealthy. It’s not just that some writers get overlooked – that has always happened and probably always will, to some degree. And it’s not just that some academics wouldn’t recognize a great novel if someone hit them repeatedly in the face with it (Harold, I’m thinking of you) – no, even readers think lowly of what they enjoy reading. Millions of people read Stephen King, and there’s good reason for it: not just because his books are often exciting or scary, but because they’re full of wonderful observations of modern society, strong and memorable characters, powerful themes that are relevant and important, and on a sentence-to-sentence level, simply fantastic writing.
But how many of these readers are aware, when they’re putting away It or Duma Key, that they’ve just read a literary masterpiece? Almost none of them. “I know it’s just Stephen King,’” they say, “but I kinda like it.” As if reading something enjoyable has to be justified. As if art must, by definition, be unpleasant to be meaningful. It is one of the best novels ever written about childhood and childhood friendships. Duma Key is a deeply thoughtful work about friendship, fatherhood, the human body, and art. They are also exciting and funny and scary – like a good Shakespeare play.
King makes another very useful observation:
And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of best-seller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ”Never happen!” the bigheads would have cried. ”The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!”
But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ”literary novels” each year.
You see, a great many kids still read. It’s when they turn into adults that they stop. And why is that? It’s because when they’re adults, the books they are expected to read are shit. The critics haven’t applied their disgusting ideas to children’s literature as much (yet) – if only because they don’t take it seriously in the first place. What children read is considered to be mostly stupid anyway, so they have much greater leeway when it comes to reading books they like. But as they grow older, they are taught that the kind of books they enjoyed were stupid, now it’s time to read something boring. Something that no-one but professional critics would really read in the first place; something that people mostly praise because they think they ought to, not because it actually did something for them.
That’s what Harold Bloom and his intellectual bedfellows (like the equally idiotic Theodor Adorno with his hatred of anything modern) are selling us: the death of art. Because what is art if not the ability to reach out and touch people? The ability to talk about the things that make us human, both good and bad? What is art if not imagination and craft combined into something that transcends both?
Art, Mr. Bloom, is not your exclusive boys’ club. It’s a living, breathing entity, a force that is alive now, not just in your silly and outdated idea of a canon. It shouldn’t be populist, but it has every right to be popular. And I hope that one day it crushes you and your accomplices, you stranglers of dreams, because the alternative is too terrible to consider.
You know Bloom has never irked me to the degree that he has some many others including yourself. I guess I sympathize with his concern for standards and the waning quality of art in the western world. Regarding your article I wanted to make two points, first Bloom does not condemn all current novelists in America or abroad and second I don’t think Bloom finds only the novel to be endanger so much as all art and culture to be endanger due to a lack of standards.
The subjectivity of art makes standards much more difficult to judge than in other fields. It is important to remember that the “canon” attached to the end of Bloom’s book The Western Canon was an compromise he made in order to have the book published and Bloom has expressed on numerous occassions that it is far from a complete or perfect list.
Some of the living novelists Bloom has praised include Philip Roth, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon and John Crowley in America and most prominently abroad is the Portugese novelist Jose Saramago whom Bloom finds to be the most powerful living novelist but he also has praised Will Self, Peter Ackroyd, John Banville and A.S Byatt from the UK.
I don’t think Bloom would claim the novel is dead in America, we have great novelists (and poets too.) There has been a shocking loss of cultural knowledge/ memory in the past few generations that only seems to grow as means to determine the quality of a work diminsh. Philip Roth perhaps expressed this looming “dark age” best in his novel “The Dying Animal” which seems very prophetic of our time written it so happens a little over a year prior to 9/11:
We watched the new year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year’s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over night time London and more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire a facsimile flame throwing weapon such as Warner von Bron might have designed for Hitler’s annihilating arsenal. The historical missile of missiles, the rocket of rockets, the bomb of bombs with ancient powers the launching pad the whole of humanity the target. All evening long on networks everywhere the mockery of the Armageddon that we had been awaiting in our backyard shelters since August 6, 1945.
How could it not happen? Even on that very night, especially on that night people anticipating the worst as though the evening were one long air raid drill. The wait for the chain of horrendous Hiroshimas to link in synchronized destruction the abiding civilizations of the world. It’s now or never and it never came.
Maybe that is what everyone was celebrating. That it hadn’t come, never came. That the disaster of the end will now never arrive. All the disorder is controlled disorder punctuated with intervals to sell automobiles. TV doing what it does best the triumph of trivialization over tragedy. The triumph of the surface with Barbara Walters. Rather than the destruction of the age old cities an international eruption of the superficial instead. A global outbreak of sentimentality such as even American’s hadn’t witnessed before. From Sydney to Bethlehem to Times Square the recalculating of clichés occurs at super sonic speeds. No bombs go off no blood is shed, the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets. Watching this hyped up production of staged pandemonium I have a sense of the moneyed world eagerly entering the prosperous dark ages. A night of human happiness to usher in barbarism.com. To welcome appropriately the shit and the kitsch of the new millennium. A night not to remember but to forget.”
But is art really waning that much? I’m not going to say things are great, but there are some pretty amazing works of art out there – but Harold Bloom spends most of his time condemning them.
You’re right about the first point – unlike Adorno, Bloom doesn’t hate everything modern. But his idea of “standards” is quite despicable, because it excludes anything that is popular or doesn’t fit into his very narrow ideas of what it is appropriate to write about. And thus he spends his time railing against writers who are profoundly talented and have important things to say, and ultimately cultivating an incredibly unhealthy attitude towards art.
Yes, but academia has been struggling for ages to get away from the concept of a canon and this kind of thinking.
Some of these writers aren’t half bad, but I think the list says pretty much everything about what Bloom considers quality. And if these writers are all that people are supposed to read… no-one will read.
(And yes, I find J.K. Rowling to be a considerably more accomplished writer than most of those, even on a pure prose level.)
I certainly agree that we’re heading for a cultural and political dark age if things continue like this. But blaming writers like King or Rowling for it is completely upside-down. Here are writers who are both excellent and popular, and have something to say – the very fact that such a large portion of the academic and critical world has decided that only obscure and mostly unpleasant-to-read novels are art is what is leading us into a cultural dark age. People no longer believe art is valuable precisely because art has been defined as boring stuff, and those things that people do enjoy and that are meaningful are not valued as anything but commerce. And so the truly great novels of our time, like Harry Potter, are seem only as products, and even their readers miss many of the wonderful layers of meaning and philosophy.
While I respect Roth as a not-too-bad writer, this passage actually makes me wonder about his perception of the world. Since when did the 21st century invent shit and kitsch? There were more than enough inane celebrations of meaningless events before the turn of the millennium. Sentimentality and superficiality? Hello, the 1950s? The 1980s? I agree that it was a depressing spectacle, but to me this seems more like a mixture of technophobia and general nihilism. Quite fashionable with some folks, and probably even honestly meant, but not very interesting or constructive – or perceptive, for that matter.
It’s easy to always see the past as some kind of golden age, and to condemn the present as unsaveable. That’s why writers like Rowling and King interest me a whole lot more: they write about today, recognizing its flaws with much clearer and more painful perception, but not without hope.
You’re not very intelligent, are you?
No, apparently not, since I am not capable of understanding the profound wisdom of simply posting a sentence like that on someone’s website without explanation. And I like Stephen King, which is also an obvious sign of stupidity, as is any positive reaction to that incompetent populist playwright William Shakespeare and his scatological jokes.
Why don’t you go hang out with Harold and glory in your intellectual powers while the rest of the world attempts to do something meaningful?