The Western Canon

In The Western Canon , Bloom 's romanticism finds expression in his sense that great works of literature are always strange , or , in Freud 's sense uncanny . Sitting down to reread Paradise Lost , Bloom is overwhelmed by 'the terrifying strangeness of what is being presented ' which seems closer to science fiction or literary fantasy than heroic epic . Bloom 's Dante contrasts with the tedious classroom version 'so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can only be fully apprehended by American professors .[1] Like Milton , Dante has the extraordinary audacity to write latter-day

Holy Scripture , indeed , a work 'which prefers itself to the Bible . For Dante 'the poem is the truth universal , not temporal . Finally Dante takes the 'sublimely courageous step of enthroning Beatrice , his own inamorata , at the pinnacle of heaven . And so continues the outrageous history of literary hubris through Wordsworth 's creation of a poetic tabla rasa , whose blankness he fills with memories of the self , through Emily Dickinson 's 'reconceptualisation of everything , and down to Kafka 's troubled gnosis

All this becomes clearer if one considers the case of Shakespeare . He is at the heart of the canon and so many thousands of books have been devoted to him that even specialists find it hard to keep up with the literature relating to just one aspect of his work . But for all this writing , we seem to be no nearer a consensus on how to interpret those thirty eight plays . After all these years , critics still cannot decide whether Shakespeare was a radical republican or a reactionary royalist a neo-platonist or a materialist , a Christian , or a sceptic . How is it that Shakespeare , who is so accessible that he is performed incessantly across the world , is so impossible to pin down ? Surely this mystery at the heart of our culture is worth our full reverence

Bloom 's answer is partly epistemological , deriving as it does from his question : what is it to know literature ? But in The Western Canon he is also more specific . He starts with the observation that Shakespeare 's greatest achievement is the creation of uniquely compelling characters who not only change in the course of the plays , itself an innovation but have the capacity to change themselves through the power of their inward and reflexive consciousness . Such characters , who are 'free artists of themselves , do not appear as props to a narrative , nor as rhetorical figurations , nor as reflexes of Shakespeare , but as independent beings . We never know what Shakespeare thinks , only what the characters say . Where we may feel inclined to identify characters such as Hamlet or Prospero with Shakespeare , because they possess an authorial shaping consciousness , we often encounter the greatest ambiguity . Herein lies the generative fecundity of Shakespeare , a spiritual force which is stronger than our own ability to interpret

Shakespeare . suggested more contexts for explaining us than we are capable of supplying for explaining his characters (he ) so opens his characters to multiple perspectives that they become analytical...