(2 of 3)
So what are these lists there for? Chiefly, it appears, to spark controversy and sales, particularly when Bloom gets around to handing out pass-fail grades to 20th century writers (see box). But for all the prepublication hype it has aroused, Bloom's back-of-the-book grab bag of ancient and modern writers forms the least interesting part of The Western Canon.
Bloom does not really expect his Common Readers to master 850 or so writers. He wants them to pay close attention to the 26 discussed in the bulk of his book: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Pessoa and Beckett. This grouping, Bloom's elite among the elite, holds few surprises: an obligatory academic obscurity (Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa), four women and a majority of D.W.E.M.s. (Bloom gives canonical status to Homer and the major Greek dramatists and philosophers but does not discuss their works at any length because his interests focus on authors who came later. A line must be drawn somewhere, but leaving out the classical foundations of Western written culture may strike some as harsh.)
But never mind. If reading the works of 26 authors proves too arduous a prospect, Bloom offers a final shortcut for the canonically hungry: "Shakespeare is the secular canon, or even the secular scripture; forerunners and legatees alike are defined by him alone for canonical purposes."
Coming upon this assertion so early (page 24) in The Western Canon is a little like opening a mystery novel and being told straight off that the butler did it. Bardolatry took root shortly after the dramatist's death in 1616, flowered in the 18th century and has flourished largely unchecked ever since. If all Bloom has to say, as the 20th century winds down, is that Shakespeare is the best, the champ, numero uno, then the necessity of his doing so, at such length, seems dubious.
That is not all Bloom has to say. His re-exaltation of Shakespeare occurs as an end product of his own idiosyncratic notions of how literature is written and read. Bloom's Canon is the offshoot of a theory he first formulated in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and has modified somewhat in the interim. This presupposition, as so much in Bloom's criticism, is difficult to state succinctly. For openers, writers who wish to be "strong," that is, to produce works worthy of the Canon, must first confront and somehow conquer the power of "strong" writers who preceded them: "Any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts." What others simply regard as literary imitation Bloom recasts as Darwinian or Freudian struggles for dominance: "Tradition is not only a handing-down or process of benign transmission; it is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion."