Page after Page about a Man Trying to Catch a Fish

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.