books

Harold Bloom's 1994 defence of Western literature is a book that arrives already lit. Before you even reach the text proper, there is the famous appendix - those thirty-odd double-columned pages listing the works Bloom deemed canonical, from Gilgamesh to Tony Kushner - which he would later publicly disown, claiming it was included at his editor's insistence. That sense of a critic wrestling with his own convictions in real time is, in many ways, the book's defining quality. It is less a stable monument than a sustained act of argument, and it is all the more alive for that.

The structure is deceptively neat. Twenty-six authors, organised into three Viconian ages - Aristocratic, Democratic, Chaotic - with Shakespeare placed unambiguously at the centre of everything. The framework feels generous in the abstract and becomes constricting in practice, largely because Bloom cannot stop returning to Shakespeare. Whether the subject is Cervantes, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce or Borges, the Bard is wheeled back onstage within a few pages. This is a feature, not a bug - it flows directly from the theory of literary influence Bloom built his career on - but over five hundred pages it becomes wearying. You begin to crave a chapter that will let its subject breathe without the ghost of Hamlet hovering.

What rescues the book repeatedly is the quality of the close reading when Bloom finally settles in. The chapters on Dante, Whitman, Dickens and Beckett contain some of the finest pages of practical criticism written in the late twentieth century. Bloom is at his best when he is being specific - when he is showing you what makes Tolstoy's Hadji Murad or Ibsen's Peer Gynt strange, original and unkillable. The prose in these passages is muscular and unashamedly grand, and the erudition never feels performative.

The polemical apparatus is another matter. The now-famous attack on the "School of Resentment" - Bloom's catch-all term for feminist, Marxist, New Historicist and post-structuralist critics - has not aged well, and it was already repetitive on publication. The jeremiad is delivered not once but perhaps fifty times, in variations that rarely add to the argument. Readers who agree with Bloom will wish he had trusted them; readers who disagree will find the tone closed rather than engaging. A more serious charge is that the list itself is narrower than its title suggests: substantial Polish, German and non-Western traditions barely register, and Goethe is represented almost solely by Faust Part Two.

Still, the book does what the best literary criticism should do - it sends you back to the primary texts with sharpened attention. Treated as a provocation rather than a decree, and read in sections rather than cover to cover, it remains one of the more bracing arguments for why aesthetic response deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Its certainties are its weakness; its passion is its lasting gift.