On Bloom

A fellow professor asked me today, is Harold Bloom a moldy fig or insightful critic? I would say an insightful fig.

I do not think Bloom is being nostalgic – Nostalgia is bemoaning the loss of something past, dead, and gone; he is decrying the progressive loss of something important dying yet recoverable. Wishing for tailfins on cars is nostalgia; wondering why Stephen King is trumping Kipling is genuine cultural worry, and not without justification. Would anyone say this is a positive phenomenon?

If it is true that “you are what you eat” (eat cheeseburgers = get heart disease/get large) it is also true “you are what you read, listen to, and see.” (watch only “Temptation Island,” “Cops,” “When Animals Attack,” anything on FOX and see what happens to your vocabulary and imagination). If this was not true, why would Madison Ave. spend billions to make us think, act, and, therefore, purchase in particular ways? What you consume matters, whether it enters via the mouth or the eyes. That said, if you do not read quality literature, you will read substandard fare, and eventually the bad will drive out the good. This is what Bloom is aiming at. What in Rowling fires students to tackle Hawthorne? Probably nothing.

I know I sound like an economist, but there are two ways to look at the J. K. Rowling phenomenon, from the demand side and from the supply side. In the first, the students have been “dumbed down” in our own day so that the only way to reach them is through a Harry Potter story, hence the oft’ used line, “better they read Harry Potter than nothing at all”; here, demand creates supply. In the second, the literature has been “dumbed down” independent of readers’ interests and abilities, hence Bloom’s cry “where has all the quality gone”; here, supply creates demand by appealing to readers’ lower instincts.

Based on my own experiences, I lean toward the former. I see this too often in my own students. The last two years I have used Horatio Alger’s juvenile rags-to-riches tale “Ragged Dick.” Without shame or realization, numerous students in and out of class told me it was one of the best books they read in college. The fact that is was written for 10-year olds in the 1870s didn’t seem to faze them and they laughed it off. The malicious side of me grumbled, “I bet you read a lot of Judy Bloom too.”

So, Bloom (though certainly a curmudgeon) has a point, and denying it exists seems to me to be whistling past the Humanities graveyard.