(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Harold Bloom was a humanities professor and prolific literary critic.
He believed that there is no single way to read well, and that the technique is inextricably linked with our motives for doing so (Bloom 2001, 19–20). We should read deeply because it’s a healing pleasure, prepares us for change, strengthens the autonomous self, and teaches us our authentic interests (pp. 21–22, 29). Reading helps alleviate our loneliness, because we can’t know enough people, yet friendships are liable to diminish (p. 19). The strongest motive “is the search for a difficult pleasure”—a pursuit of the Sublime (p. 29).
Reading is a solitary, selfish endeavour (p. 22). Its pleasures are not social so “there are no ethics of reading” (p. 24). Our reading will not directly benefit others or our community in general, so a principle of Bloom’s is that we shouldn’t even attempt to improve others in this way through our reading (ibid.). There is already insufficient time for the difficult process of self-improvement, to establish and augment your autonomous self, and we can be of little benefit to others until we become ourselves (pp. 24, 195).
The pleasure of reading isn’t taught in universities, and how we read depends in part upon our distance from an academic context and culture (p. 22). Bloom exhorts: “clear your mind of academic cant” (p. 23). The jargon and discourse of academic ideologues is inimical to our understanding: “to read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. You are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions” (p. 28).
These two principles contribute to Bloom’s controversial stance on the relationship between the Western canon and social activism (Bloom 1994, 40):
The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise…The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the Iliad, or by the politics of Plato
Elsewhere Bloom clarifies further (Bloom 2001, 196):
A great novelist…shares with Dickens the power to make us read as if we could be children again. A child in love with reading…will read for the story and the characters and not to expiate social guilt or to reform bad institutions
Even when novels do “address crucial enigmas, or brood upon central questions”, we should allow these concerns to reveal and uncover themselves, rather than search for them (ibid.). We can trust the author not to hide vital points.
Again, this is an avowedly selfish and pragmatic approach to reading. Even if we want our reading to improve our neighbour, it can’t, so if we read in a community-minded, historicist, or ideological manner, we don’t get the full value from literature. Instead, we should develop our autonomous selves; then, we’re in a position to benefit our communities.
Bloom follows Emerson in declaring his principle that “a scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light” (p. 24). This is to confirm that developing as a reader without ethics is not to be unethical or uncaring of others, but rather that “the response to your labours will confirm you as an illumination to others” (ibid.). These labours could take the form of producing scholarship, but also inspiring others and directing them to books that will help them develop these capacities in themselves. We can benefit our peers by encouraging them to read in such a way that strengthens them, aiding their self discovery.
Further following Emerson, Bloom offers the principle that “one must be an inventor to read well”, a “creative reader”. This requires “self-trust” that we develop through much deep reading: a development of an aesthetic confidence.
Imaginary literature requires saving, then, and this requires a revival of an ironic sense (pp. 27, 25). Irony “is only a metaphor, and the irony of one literary age can rarely be the irony of another” (pp. 26–7). If we lose an appreciation of an author’s irony we essentially lose access to their literature: the loss of irony is “the death of reading” (pp. 25–7). Hamlet, for example, “when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says” (p. 25).
This principle is intertwined with the earlier comments on ideology: as we blinker our reading with such baggage we fail to apprehend this kind of subtle richness, without which certain writers perish (ibid.). Bloom sees “historicized ideology” as making ironic authors like Thomas Mann unavailable (p. 27):
New biographies of him appear, and are reviewed almost always on the basis of his homoeroticism, as though he can be saved for our interest only if he can be certified as gay, and so gain a place in our curriculum
Unable to appreciate an author’s ironic sense we rely on ideologically live attributes of their characters to preserve interest in them.
To appreciate ironic writing “demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas” (ibid.). The need for a renaissance of an ironic sense connects with the prior principles in that “Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the scholar of one candle” (ibid.).
We should read deeply not to believe, accept, or contradict, books with which we can weigh and consider, that address us as one with the same nature as the author, and teach us how to “share in that one nature that writes and reads” (pp. 27, 29).