GENIUS: The very title of this book is a measure of Harold Bloom's dedication to critical effrontery. John Banville reviews Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
He is firmly of the old school - he considers the new schools anathema - in asserting that there is such a thing as genius, that it is instantly recognisable, and that it occurs with most frequency in the realm of literature. He places Shakespeare on an eminence only slightly lower than God, and insists that Shakespeare's characters are as real as we are - in some cases, more real. This is a deeply unfashionable stance, but he likes it that way. A professional colleague reports saying that Bloom's book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, would set Shakespeare studies back 100 years, in the knowledge that its author would be pleased.
Although he is professor of humanities at Yale and of English at New York University, Bloom constantly bewails the present state of higher education, especially in his native US, and will have no truck with cross-culturalism, ethnic and gender studies, French literary theory, the New Historicism, and other current academic fads. "Groupthink," he declares, "is the blight of our Age of Information, and is most pernicious in our obsolete academic institutions, whose long suicide since 1967 continues."
He believes firmly in free-standing greatness, and repudiates the second-rate. "The study of mediocrity, whatever its origins, breeds mediocrity . . . We do not accept tables and chairs whose legs fall off, no matter who carpentered them, but we urge the young to study mediocre writings, with no legs to sustain them." As is apparent, he is eminently quotable.
"Genius" is a problematic concept, as Bloom himself will acknowledge. There is, for instance, the question whether a genius must necessarily produce a work of genius. In the case of one of the "exemplary creative minds" he identifies in his book, Iris Murdoch - yes, Iris Murdoch - he worries that, although the oeuvre of this "philosopher- romancer" attests to greatness, she did not manage to write a great novel. "Genius, as I keep perceiving, sometimes concentrates itself, and produces a canonical work, but often diffuses and fails to crystallise a singular masterpiece."
Bloom, as befits a scholar of his range and depth, is alive to the nuances of his key term:
There are two ancient (Roman) meanings of the word "genius", which are rather different in emphasis. One is to beget, cause to be born, that is to be a paterfamilias. The other is to be an attendant spirit for each person or place: to be either a good or evil genius, and so to be someone who, for better or worse, strongly influences someone else. This second meaning has been more important than the first; our genius is thus our inclination or natural gift, our inborn intellectual or imaginative power, not our power to beget power in others.
Yet as he has admitted a couple of pages earlier, the prime purpose of this book is "to activate the genius of appreciation in my readers, if I can". Bloom's tone always is one of desperate entreaty; the great world, he tells us, the world invented by such giants as Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Henry James, Emerson, and Joyce - all his heroes are writers - is going from us, and we must try to save something of it before it is gone. He is surely a superb teacher. In an informative but rather pedestrian profile of him in a recent New Yorker, a former student - anonymous, of course - is quoted as saying of him: "There was always something exciting about the way he staged that sense that he had some enormous thing inside him, some huge soul or being that's too big for this world and his body." Then comes the knife. "But his teaching seemed crushing to me. You weren't encouraged to think on your own. He was the sow who rolls over and kills her young."
Genius is organised in typically eccentric fashion. Bloom has always had something of the Old Testament prophet about him - he is deeply learned in religious, particularly Jewish, texts - and he arranges his material here along Kabbalistic lines. The Kabbalah is a form of religious study originating among the Jews of Provence and Catalonia in the 13th century, although scholars such as Gershom Scholem, so Bloom tells us, identify the Kabbalah with the very essence of Judaism. Bloom's 100 mini-essays are set out in a "mosaic" - no doubt the pun is intended - under 10 headings corresponding to the 10 Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image".
The other paradigm underlying the book's structure is the heretical Christian teaching known as Gnosticism, another of Bloom's long-time interests, or, indeed, obsessions. According to the Gnostics, the world was not created by God, but by an evil demiurge - a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, as a moment's reflection upon this vale of tears will confirm. Kafka, as usual, put it beautifully, as Bloom notes: "There is only a spiritual world; what we call the physical world is the evil in the spiritual one".
Gnosticism, according to Bloom, "is pragmatically the religion of literature . . . it is a knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicising, and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative in the self". As Bloom's beloved Wallace Stevens says in his triumphantly secular hymn, Sunday Morning:
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
This is bracingly high-falutin' stuff, and only a cultural prophet of Bloom's ambition, daring and disdain would risk it. Inevitably, when one comes to the text proper, there is a certain sense of deflation. For instance, an Irish reader might turn at once to the few pages devoted to Samuel Beckett, and could be disconcerted to discover that the only work discussed is the early, and surely less than representative, Murphy, a product of Beckett's obstreperous though lavishly talented youth.
And then, every reader will have a bone to pick with Bloom's choice of his 100. The great ones are there, of course - Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes - but some omissions - Heinrich von Kleist, for example - are hard to account for, while the inclusion of the likes of Pirandello, Edith Wharton, and the already mentioned Iris Murdoch, will cause more than one eyebrow to rise. Bloom is never less than shrewd, however, even in the transports of his enthusiasm; speaking of Iris Murdoch's failure to create truly memorable characters, he splendidly observes: "Murdoch is rather like a mother who upstages all her children, so that in comparison to her they appear lacking in personality."
Bloom's most famous, and controversial, contribution to contemporary literary theory was contained in his book, The Anxiety of Influence, wherein he set forth his contention that the truly great artist finds himself or herself by squaring up to, as it were, a looming figure from the past whose influence must be overcome. In Genius, however, as Larissa MacFarquhar, the author of the New Yorker profile, noted, a milder, more inward confrontation is identified. "With all the figures I depict in this mosaic," Bloom writes in his introduction, "my emphasis will be on the contest they conducted with themselves." This "agon with the self" is perhaps the true theme of Genius. One may be permitted to surmise, too, a personal inward turn; now in his 70s, profoundly pessimistic yet never less than an ecstatic celebrant of human greatness, Bloom may have found his way back to
where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
John Banville's novel, Shroud, was published last month
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. By Harold Bloom. Fourth Estate. 814pp. £25
John Banville