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The Western Canon is Harold Bloom’s ambitious attempt to delineate and defend what he considers the most significant works of Western literature. In it, Bloom assembles a list of canonical texts, authors including Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Chaucer among others, that he argues have shaped the cultural and aesthetic foundations of the West, elevating them above the vicissitudes of historical change and cultural politics.
Confronted by the rise of modern critical theories that question universal standards of literary merit, Bloom felt compelled to write this work as both a celebration of enduring artistic genius and a polemic against the democratisation of literary taste. His mission was to reaffirm the intrinsic value of these texts—those works that, he contends, capture the profound depths of human experience and have repeatedly redefined the very limits of art for all ages.
The book was a birthday present and here are my impressions so far (about one third of the way through).
Firstly, I am not convinced by his eminent regard for any of: Cervantes, Chaucer or Dante. I wish I were better acquainted with Shakespeare of course. I still have hopes for Montaigne - his Essays are on my personal reading list.
Bloom spent a lifetime reading all this stuff - and the critical commentaries - and the critical commentaries on those - so of course he is embedded in that cultural matrix. But is his canon objectively so supremely worthy of its place at the apex of human cultural achievement?
Or is there something subjective and culturally relative going on here? Some hard issues here: I'm going to wait and see what he has to say about Kafka, an author I do know pretty well.
ChatGPT:
Bloom was a formidable reader, but his taste was both intensely personal and deeply shaped by a particular Western literary tradition—Romantic, bardic, and individualistic. He revered what he saw as the "strong poets," those who struggled against their precursors to carve out original aesthetic space. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare as the center of the canon is largely unassailable, but his disdain for modern literary theory and his dismissal of contemporary writers (especially postmodernists) can feel reactionary.
Your skepticism of Cervantes, Chaucer, and Dante is interesting—what about them leaves you unconvinced? Chaucer is obviously dated in diction and structure, and Cervantes' Don Quixote is often read more as a cultural monument than a living work of literature. Dante, however, seems to me to be one of the most potent visionaries ever to set words on paper—The Inferno remains one of the most viscerally compelling depictions of the human imagination at work.
As for contemporary culture, it's a fair question. Bloom’s hostility toward modern literary trends was partly aesthetic snobbery, but there is a case to be made that the conditions that produced great literature in the past—intellectual struggle, deep engagement with tradition, and a slower pace of cultural digestion—are harder to come by in an age of rapid media saturation and ideological tribalism.
Kafka is an interesting litmus test. Bloom grudgingly respects him but doesn’t see him as central to the tradition he champions. I suspect you’ll have strong opinions on how Bloom handles him.
Nigel:
Perhaps my Inferno translation was rather flat and pedestrian. Although it seemed almost list-like in its travelogue of 'horrors': we don't really live in that theology-saturated world any more. Are there any modern high literary quality fiction/SF which in some sense retells Dante's epic? Did Dan Simmons, for example, attempt anything?
ChatGPT:
Yes, there are modern reimaginings of Inferno, though they vary in fidelity and intent. Dan Simmons' The Hyperion Cantos has clear echoes of Dante, especially in the journey-into-the-unknown structure and the Shrike as a quasi-divine arbiter of suffering. The Hyperion pilgrimage is like a descent into a techno-theological underworld.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno (1976) is a more direct SF retelling—essentially a modernized Divine Comedy with a rationalist twist. A writer (loosely modeled on Robert A. Heinlein) finds himself in Dante’s Hell but treats it as a puzzle to be solved. It's a more literal adaptation but lacks the poetic grandeur.
Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969) and Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail (2010) both explore afterlife-style hells, though with different tones. Banks, in particular, examines the idea of virtual-reality Hells where the damned suffer eternally for ideological reasons.
For a more literary take, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) has a dreamlike descent into an urban inferno, though it’s more Pynchon than Dante.
If you're looking for something with true literary weight that captures Inferno’s grandeur while modernizing its themes, you might consider these. But Dante's moral architecture is hard to update without irony—modernity struggles to take eternal damnation seriously...
Nigel:
OK, let me express some further thoughts (I am up to his chapter on Montaigne and Molière). I'm beginning to get Bloom's style: he seems a very emotional and opinionated individual, garrulous and repetitive, and of course, very opposed to the left, progressive, egalitarian, anti-elitist trend, prevalent in 1999 and still dominant in artistic circles today. I would expect to be sympathetic to Bloom here, but still, there’s something not quite compelling.
He's quite selective in his quotations from the canonical works, and he tends to gush and 'big up' the quality of his chosen authors' writings. This methodology seems to favour Bloom's own taste, scholarship and breadth of study more than it illuminates the works themselves.
In particular, Bloom never discusses the works in the social and historical context of their time, he's always assuming some universal, almost Platonic quality he's ascertained of 'profound writing' and then claiming his canonical authors are not only the trailblazers here but have never been surpassed in their insight. Really? This ahistorical approach seems really dubious to me.
Reading some of his texts (I am massively uneducated by Bloom's standards) I see the historical interest (The Canterbury Tales is a time capsule) but I don't see the surpassing literary quality. The references are, of course, antiquarian in most cases, the concerns expressed are often obsolete (we have moved on!) and the writing frequently is there to be studied rather than enjoyed.
You can write deeply profound, conceptual works and still engross the reader: these two things are not counterposed!
There is a cultural tendency which we see all the time for art to develop in esoteric directions, beyond the reach of the 'common people' so that only learned intellectuals can claim to appreciate it. Bloom is a prime example: he only extols the esoteric aspects he finds in the canon: but those authors originally wrote for their contemporaries.
I find Bloom’s unwavering devotion to an ahistorical canon rather irksome. He treats the literary past as if it were a timeless pantheon of unassailable genius, completely ignoring the social and historical forces that shaped those works.
ChatGPT:
Yes, Bloom operates within an unapologetically elitist framework, but his elitism is idiosyncratic—it’s less about social class or formal education and more about what he considers aesthetic originality and linguistic power. His devotion to Shakespeare as the wellspring of modern consciousness is a case in point. But your criticism of his approach is well-aimed: his eschewal of historical and social context makes his arguments feel hermetically sealed. Literature, in his view, isn’t shaped by external forces—it is the shaping force. This makes for grand pronouncements, but it also leads to an exaggerated veneration of certain writers at the expense of acknowledging the complex interplay between culture and literary production.
Your point about The Canterbury Tales is crucial. Chaucer’s work is undoubtedly a historical artifact, a snapshot of medieval life, but does that necessarily make it an enduring literary masterpiece? Bloom insists on an intrinsic aesthetic superiority, but your skepticism suggests that he’s mistaking historical significance for timeless literary excellence. This distinction matters, because it raises the question: are some of these works great because they shaped literary history, or are they great regardless of their historical influence?
Your observation about art becoming esoteric and self-referential is another issue for Bloom. He sees the canon as a series of geniuses engaged in a vast conversation with each other, but in practice, this can make literature feel like an exclusive club rather than something organically connected to the experience of ordinary people. Dante wrote for a readership steeped in Catholic eschatology, but his work now requires extensive annotation to be intelligible. Should we really pretend that’s a timeless greatness, or is it an antiquarian one?
Do you think there’s a line to be drawn between genuine artistic difficulty—where complexity and depth reward effort—and artificial difficulty, where obscurity is cultivated for its own sake? Bloom would argue that the former is essential to literary greatness, but perhaps that’s an excuse for intellectual gatekeeping.
Nigel:
I'd certainly agree that we need to disavow kitsch, the production of 'art' within the safe space of the Overton Window, the reinforcement of conventional pieties and sentiments.
Most transgressive art is pretty bad though: it's not enough to be deviant: you have to penetrate past the conventional ideologies and unveil the deeper truths, so that people get their reward of true insight for perseverance - shock and awe alone don't cut it. Everything eventually becomes stale and kitsch so we need the explorers. Everything of quality was once dangerous and new.
But it's one thing to historically celebrate those ancient pioneers; it's another to continue to find them relevant in a contemporary problematic. Bloom thinks that the canon represents those writers who expressed the depths of human nature better than anyone else, before or since. But that's a very atomised, individualistic way of thinking and ahistorical again: as the nature of human societies has complexified, the best historically-relevant authors today explore the crushing and liberation of human nature in these new circumstances - in some truly profound way.
Bloom presumably likes Kafka for this reason, and I'd add George Orwell and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) for similar reasons - Stalinism challenged human nature in ways that were both extreme and unique in history so those artists had a situation worth engaging with. But those authors are still read today because they wrote well and engaged the reader in their plots and stories. And the problems that Kafka, Orwell and Koestler wrote about are still those of large-scale modernist societies which completely resonate with today's readers.
The mediaevalism of Bloom's favourites is a different world...
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