Bloom for Improvement (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human - Harold Bloom)

Member Name: trisk

Product:	Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human - Harold Bloom
Date:	20/09/02 (81 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: He's a well-read man, so you may learn some things, It shows you how not to write Shakespeare criticism

Disadvantages: The sheer wrongheadedness of its central thesis, You may not feel human by the end of it, If you wrote essays like he does you'd fail your course

Even considering the enormous amount of rubbish that gets printed about Shakespeare every year, one would be hard pressed to find a book more worthless and tedious than *Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human*. It's something of a phenomenon that over almost 800 pages Bloom has so little to say. Had the work been a short memoir entitled *Shakespeare and Me, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bard*, it might have made for enjoyable reading. Instead, he tries to bring coherence to what is essentially a collage of his favourite quotations by arguing that human consciousness, as we understand it, did not exist until Shakespeare invented it. Unfortunately, he doesn't find time to substantiate the claim; rather, he inserts the phrase 'invented the human' into every chapter as a kind of mantra with which to win us over. Even so, there's something touchingly honest about the way he acknowledges his own limitations as a human being:

"I never know how to take the assurances (and remonstrances) I receive from Shakespeare's current critics, who tell me that Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Cleopatra and Iago are roles for actors and actresses but not "real people." Impressed as I (sometimes) am by these admonitions, I struggle always with the palpable evidence that my chastisers not only are rather less interesting than Falstaff and Cleopatra, but are less persuasively alive than Shakespearean figures..." [pp. 14-5].

'He needs to get out more,' we cry, only to realise that he's not alone in his idolatry. In fact, theists worship Literature without realising it:

"A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran" [pp. xviii-xix].

The problem with discussing Shakespeare with this
thesis in mind is that Bloom just can't cope with those plays that palpably don't 'invent the human'. Thus, *Titus Andronicus* is dispatched in a mere ten pages. It's a "poetic atrocity" (79); that said, Aaron is "very funny" (80). It's not possible that Shakespeare could have written a bad revenge tragedy; rather, it's a "bloody farce, in the mode of Marlowe's *The Jew of Malta*" (80), "a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony well past the limits of parody" (83). He pours scorn over those who would see in Titus a proto-Lear, or in the fate of Lavinia a feminist critique of patriarchal language. It's similarly entertaining to watch him squirm over *Coriolanus*: "Had Shakespeare wearied of reinventing the human[?]" he asks (578). You tell us, Harold. He doesn't of course, but gets round the problem by taking a swing at Ben Jonson:

"It is almost as though Shakespeare had set out to defeat Ben Jonson on his chosen ground, since *Coriolanus* is in many ways the work that Ben Jonson failed to write in *Sejanus his Fall* (1605), itself an inadequate attempt to correct and overgo *Julius Caesar*" [p. 583].

The book's limitations are saddening, because often Bloom's contempt for modern critical trends is very refreshing. Few would have the courage to argue that *The Merchant of Venice* is "a profoundly anti-Semitic work" (171), and that "we tend to make [it] incoherent by portraying Shylock as being largely sympathetic" (172). Unfortunately, his rejection of modern academic thought goes hand in hand with a disregard for its scholarly conventions: footnotes, bibliographies, acknowledgement of sources and that oh-so-tiresome custom of backing up an assertion with some sort of evidence (viz the Jonson comment above). *Edward III* is refused entry into the canon with little explanation and we are also informed that, contrary to popula
r (that is to say, academic) opinion, it was not Thomas Kyd who wrote the lost Ur-*Hamlet* but Shakespeare himself. Bloom also has a clever knack of turning his own confessed shortcomings as a critic into an advantage, or even a virtue. "I have never seen a performance of *The Two Noble Kinsmen*," he admits, but goes on to declare that he doesn't "particularly want to, since Shakespeare's contributions to the play are scarcely dramatic" (694). He has only seen two (student) performances of *Pericles*, but that doesn't matter since "very little in the play can be judged dramatic" (604).

In short, it's difficult to see for which kind of audience the book is intended. Students at school level are unlikely to be attracted by its size and diffuseness. It's hardly going to be snapped up by the academics it spends its time disparaging. Perhaps its target is the undergraduate? There's certainly something of the latter in its gratuitous display of erudition. In his discussion of *The Tempest*, he quotes the 'what goal but the Black Stone?' section of Caliban's speech in Auden's *The Sea and the Mirror*, only to dismiss it as "primarily Auden on Auden, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard..." (664). The inevitable retort is that *Invention of the Human* is primarily Bloom on Bloom. One also can't help but be depressed at the conclusion he reaches about what it means to be human:

"When we are wholly human, and know ourselves, we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff" [745].

If the apex of humanity is to be like a muddled and murderous undergraduate or an overweight and cowardly drunkard, then perhaps being human ain't all it's cracked up to be.

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