Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish
Started
reading Harold Bloom’s Anatomy of
Influence: Literature As a Way of Life, in an attempt to delve deeper into
the question that I raised writing about Virginia Woolf. Does the biographical details
connected with an author enrich our understanding of their work?
I
happened to be downstairs in City Lights one afternoon looking at the
Philosophy and Lit Crit sections, picked Bloom’s book off the shelf, attracted
by the plain white cover, and the happy subtitle. I opened randomly, and
started reading. I had happened upon his description of a weekend with W. H.
Auden. It’s the kind of piece that, once read, tends to fix an image of the subject
in the readers’ mind. I mean, Bloom knows how to use his words, and since I am
not likely to ever meet Auden (he died in 1973) it is easy to assume this
portrait is a true likeness. He describes a scene that will instantly be
recognizable to the readers of New Yorker-style literary gossip—the suitcase
that contains nothing but alcohol; the bad behavior concerning the reading fee;
the brilliant, if eccentric pronouncements. And, since Bloom is deeply
interested in creating a literary canon, he must build up the literary
reputations of his favorites (and his own, too, of course). But does it add to
the texts involved?
He also looks down his patrician nose
at popular literature, the Harry Potter books in particular. I suppose we are
to go through life with nothing but a Riverside Shakespeare and poetry
anthologies to sustain us. But what shall we read on the train? If someone
reads the first Harry Potter book, say out of curiosity or simply because they
are following a trend, and they love it, and so then they read all of them, and
love them, and talk their friends into buying them and reading them so they can
discuss how much they all love them, are they any less of a literary hero than
Professor Bloom?
Because
as a bookseller, I’ve seen that kind of thing happen all the time. Just when I
start to get depressed about the state of contemporary publishing, or worried
about the survival of my tiny part in it, somebody will ask me for something
like Doctor Zhivago or Sons and Lovers. I have no idea how they
decide on any specific title, but it makes my day that they do.
The
title of this post refers to a conversation my husband and I overheard on a #30
bus as it made its way through Chinatown a few years ago. The conversation was
between two high school students.
“Did
you read that book for English?”
“Nah.”
“I did.
It was hella boring. Page after page about a man trying to catch a fish.”
That’s
what happens when literature loses its relevance. All of the salacious details
in the world (and we know a lot of them) can’t save Hemingway from this
scathing review.
That’s
what bothers me about Bloom’s book as a representative of literary criticism. Obviously,
he has read everything, and for that he is to be commended. As an esteemed professor
and author, he has most definitely influenced how we think about reading. It’s easy
to pontificate on the primacy of Shakespeare and Milton, but what about those
kids on the bus? What would make them want to read past The Old Man and the Sea?
How
many books have been ruined by being assigned in high school? But the need for
narrative is still achingly strong, as evidenced by the success of 826 Valencia
and Poets in the Schools here in San Francisco and elsewhere. The hardest thing
to teach is the practice of literature as a living art, alive in the present,
with roots that go deep in the past.
That’s
the thing—the canon is the canon for a reason, not just because some guys in
New York, or some other literary capital say it is. If Shakespeare (Bloom’s
touchstone) has been absorbed into our psyche because of his literary
perfection (although I find myself wondering if at least some of Shakespeare’s
lasting appeal isn’t due to the visual nature of his original medium—the
theater), others are there too, and not merely for those of us that read. Not
everyone will go to Yale and study literature, but surely we can all decide for
ourselves what books we like.
