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Bloom's view of literature as a ceaseless agon between challengers and titleholders is interesting and, in some instances, true. Virgil obviously had an eye on Homer when he set out to write The Aeneid, just as Dante and Milton had Virgil in their sights when they embarked upon The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. But Bloom cannot prove, on aesthetic or any other grounds, that all the writers he deems great shared the motives he ascribes to them. By the time he gets to a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, he has grown so vexed at the absence of hard evidence for his theory that he simply elevates the anxiety of influence into a universal truth: "Agon is the iron law of literature."
This assertion is just as extraliterary as those set forth by feminists, multiculturalists and all the others who discuss books in ways Bloom ridicules and despises. And Bloom's view produces chapter titles such as "Freud: A Shakespearean Reading" and "Joyce's Agon with Shakespeare," in which the actual works and words of the upstart authors are wrenched out of context and forced into hypothetical bouts of cross-generational arm wrestling.
Surely no one opens The Interpretation of Dreams or Finnegans Wake in the hope of finding out exactly how Freud or Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding, imaginative literature at all? On this topic, Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. "Reading the very best writers -- let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy -- is not going to make us better citizens." And: "The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society." While discarding these schoolmarmish fallacies, Bloom's Common Readers are also advised to forget about picking up literature for enjoyment: "The text is there to give not pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide." (Among many personal asides scattered throughout the book, Bloom notes that teaching the poems of Emily Dickinson left him with "fierce headaches.") What finally, then, is the point of this whole painful business? "All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."
Such guidance was once the province of religion, and it is ultimately the religious experience that Bloom seeks in secular writing: "Since I myself am partial to finding the voice of God in Shakespeare or Emerson or Freud, depending on my needs, I have no difficulty in finding Dante's Comedy to be divine." He amplifies this perception a bit later: "As a writer, Shakespeare was a sort of god." Bloom is entitled to his worship, since he has spent a lifetime of reading achieving it. But he is not, in The Western Canon, a very effective prophet for his cause. Imaginative literature -- sacred texts or a rich lode of inspiring writing -- badly needs a less agonized champion.