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Novelists and Novels
Harold Bloom is America's most esteemed literary critic and one of the greatest critical minds of our time. This work contains the best of Bloom's writing on the greatest novels and novelists of our time - from Daniel Defoe to Philip Roth, from Charles Dickens to Amy Tan. It also features his overview of the genre and thoughts on its development.
588 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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About the author
Harold Bloom
1,713 books2,015 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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November 9, 2022
ElLamenté la muerte del crítico literario Harold Bloom, en octubre de 2019. Por entonces ya tenía en mi poder este vasto libro de “Novelas y Novelistas. El canon de la novela”, editado por Páginas de Espuma en su colección de Voces. Otro más de esa inmensa y enorme conjunto de crítica literaria que este hombre hizo en vida.
De Bloom he leído casi todo lo que se ha editado en castellano, porque aunque muchas veces no estoy de acuerdo con sus afirmaciones pocas mentes de nuestro tiempo han leído tanto y han vivido tanto en literario. Destaco entre mis preferidos “Anatomía de la influencia”, “Shakesperare: la invención de lo humano”, “Cómo leer y por qué”, “¿Dónde se encuentra la sabiduría?, y “Genios: cien mentes creativas y ejemplares”. Puede que su obra más polémica y conocida sea “El canon occidental”, pero casi todo lo que está inmerso ahí ya está en otros libros suyos, y puede que mejor explicado.
A Harold Bloom se le puede y se le debe criticar por su excesivo predominio de lo occidental frente a otras tradiciones literarias, pero es inevitable que un crítico literario formado en lengua inglesa destaque la suya por encima de las demás. En una vida no da tiempo a leerlo todo, ni siquiera a un voraz lector como fue Harold Bloom. Y pertenecer a una tradición literaria, la escrita en lengua inglesa, de la que salió Christopher Marlowe, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stevens, etcétera, no es poca cosa. Condiciona muchísimo.
En cuanto a sus polémicas con la ortodoxia de la crítica literaria, pues en parte llevaba Harold mucho de razón, puesto que los estudios literarios actuales están excesivamente politizados y en nuestras sociedades de las pantallas y de la tecnología invasora cada vez se lee peor. La ideología o la identidad no puede ser un baremo para decidir si un libro contiene calidad o no. La alta cultura-literaria- occidental, esa trinidad formada por Shakespeare, Dante y Cervantes, que tanto defendió Bloom en vida, no peligra. Son autores tan originales que seguirán vivos hasta el final de los tiempos. Basta leerlos y releerlos para darse cuenta de eso. Pero los formidables autores en los escalones inferiores, véase (por ejemplo) Herman Bröch, Thomas Mann, el propio Goethe, “padre indiscutible” de los dos anteriores, por poner solo unos pocos ejemplos y todos de una misma tradición literaria: la que proviene de la lengua alemana, sí que corren el riesgo de quedarse aislados en las bibliotecas para rémora de estudiosos de época y poco más. Hemos de alguna manera perdido la base cultural para abordarlos y disfrutarlos en total plenitud.
Le guste o no a la gente hay mucha más magnificencia creativa en una sola página “La muerte de Virgilio” que en la inmensa mayoría de los libros que se editan cada año. Ya ni hablar de las estupideces que escriben esos fantasmas que pululan por las letras castellanas y se prodigan por la tele y por la prensa, tan repletas de individuos altaneros, ignorantes y serviles. En ese sentido Harold Bloom llevaba toda la razón: el tiempo acribilla a la mediocridad; pero puede que su cabezonería y su indudable machismo le cerrase las puertas de un público más amplio, que en un momento dado pudiera haberse deleitado con su vastísimo conocimiento de la literatura.
En cuanto a Novelas y Novelistas no es un libro uniforme, sino una recopilación de artículos sobre novelistas que van desde Cervantes a Paul Auster y a Ami Tan, pasando por infinidad de autores (sobre todo autores), y casi todos (en su gran mayoría) de lengua inglesa. Nada que sea muy nuevo o que no conociéramos por otros libros suyos y artículos. A destacar el amplio capítulo dedicado a la obra de Saramago y el dedicado a Kafka.
Bloom es de los pocos críticos que yo conozco que analiza al autor checo en el contexto de su judaísmo. Acertando de pleno en ello. Sin profundizar en su conflictiva y emocional lucha con la tradición judía es imposible adentrarse hasta la médula en sus alegorías narrativas. Bloom fue también judío (creo que sabía hablar el yiddish con perfección) y comprendía y sabía del ambiente en el que anímicamente y culturalmente se desenvolvió Kafka.
Dicho esto, si tienen oportunidad de leer Genios: un mosaico de cien mentes creativas y ejemplares, vayan directo al capítulo dedicado a San Pablo. A Bloom los editores le prohibieron que incluyera a Jesús de Nazaret como genio, y el neoyorkino les engañó haciendo ver que ese capítulo lo dedicaba a San Pablo, pero en verdad de quién está hablando es de Jesús de Nazaret.
Sócrates y Jesús de Nazaret son los dos genios creativos de nuestro mundo sin haber escrito ni una sola página. Ambos influyeron hasta la médula en nuestra cultura. Puede que Homero ande en una categoría similar, pero al no tener datos fiables de su vida no lo sabemos a ciencia cierta. Lo que resulta indudable es que Homero influyó tanto o igual que los otros dos en toda nuestra cultura occidental. Y es que los libros religiosos: el Tanaj, la Biblia, el Corán, son ante todo y sobre todo libros de literatura, tanto como la Ilíada y la Odisea puedan serlo. ¿Por qué hemos de utilizar para analizarlos distintos métodos que los que utilizamos con Homero, con Italo Calvino, o con el propio Shakespeare?, ¿es que acaso los tres mencionados son escritores menos sapienciales e imaginativos que los escribas que trabajaron en el Antiguo Testamento?
En definitiva, un libro para seguir disfrutando de ese inmenso cascarrabias que fue Harold Bloom. Un hombre enamorado de la literatura clásica que se dedicó a su estudio en cuerpo y en alma, y del que tuvimos la suerte de disfrutar desde muy joven pese a estar en desacuerdo con muchas de sus apreciaciones.
De hecho, si no hubiese sido por su magisterio yo difícilmente me hubiera acercado a leer a Samuel Johnson, su gran predecesor en la crítica literaria y su “daimon” en influencia. Y la verdad, tampoco hay página escrita por Johnson que sea un desperdicio, como tampoco la existe en Bloom. Ambos son gigantes de la crítica literaria. Y hay que valorarlos por ello sin dejar de señalar también sus flagrantes errores.
Hasta otra.
De Bloom he leído casi todo lo que se ha editado en castellano, porque aunque muchas veces no estoy de acuerdo con sus afirmaciones pocas mentes de nuestro tiempo han leído tanto y han vivido tanto en literario. Destaco entre mis preferidos “Anatomía de la influencia”, “Shakesperare: la invención de lo humano”, “Cómo leer y por qué”, “¿Dónde se encuentra la sabiduría?, y “Genios: cien mentes creativas y ejemplares”. Puede que su obra más polémica y conocida sea “El canon occidental”, pero casi todo lo que está inmerso ahí ya está en otros libros suyos, y puede que mejor explicado.
A Harold Bloom se le puede y se le debe criticar por su excesivo predominio de lo occidental frente a otras tradiciones literarias, pero es inevitable que un crítico literario formado en lengua inglesa destaque la suya por encima de las demás. En una vida no da tiempo a leerlo todo, ni siquiera a un voraz lector como fue Harold Bloom. Y pertenecer a una tradición literaria, la escrita en lengua inglesa, de la que salió Christopher Marlowe, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stevens, etcétera, no es poca cosa. Condiciona muchísimo.
En cuanto a sus polémicas con la ortodoxia de la crítica literaria, pues en parte llevaba Harold mucho de razón, puesto que los estudios literarios actuales están excesivamente politizados y en nuestras sociedades de las pantallas y de la tecnología invasora cada vez se lee peor. La ideología o la identidad no puede ser un baremo para decidir si un libro contiene calidad o no. La alta cultura-literaria- occidental, esa trinidad formada por Shakespeare, Dante y Cervantes, que tanto defendió Bloom en vida, no peligra. Son autores tan originales que seguirán vivos hasta el final de los tiempos. Basta leerlos y releerlos para darse cuenta de eso. Pero los formidables autores en los escalones inferiores, véase (por ejemplo) Herman Bröch, Thomas Mann, el propio Goethe, “padre indiscutible” de los dos anteriores, por poner solo unos pocos ejemplos y todos de una misma tradición literaria: la que proviene de la lengua alemana, sí que corren el riesgo de quedarse aislados en las bibliotecas para rémora de estudiosos de época y poco más. Hemos de alguna manera perdido la base cultural para abordarlos y disfrutarlos en total plenitud.
Le guste o no a la gente hay mucha más magnificencia creativa en una sola página “La muerte de Virgilio” que en la inmensa mayoría de los libros que se editan cada año. Ya ni hablar de las estupideces que escriben esos fantasmas que pululan por las letras castellanas y se prodigan por la tele y por la prensa, tan repletas de individuos altaneros, ignorantes y serviles. En ese sentido Harold Bloom llevaba toda la razón: el tiempo acribilla a la mediocridad; pero puede que su cabezonería y su indudable machismo le cerrase las puertas de un público más amplio, que en un momento dado pudiera haberse deleitado con su vastísimo conocimiento de la literatura.
En cuanto a Novelas y Novelistas no es un libro uniforme, sino una recopilación de artículos sobre novelistas que van desde Cervantes a Paul Auster y a Ami Tan, pasando por infinidad de autores (sobre todo autores), y casi todos (en su gran mayoría) de lengua inglesa. Nada que sea muy nuevo o que no conociéramos por otros libros suyos y artículos. A destacar el amplio capítulo dedicado a la obra de Saramago y el dedicado a Kafka.
Bloom es de los pocos críticos que yo conozco que analiza al autor checo en el contexto de su judaísmo. Acertando de pleno en ello. Sin profundizar en su conflictiva y emocional lucha con la tradición judía es imposible adentrarse hasta la médula en sus alegorías narrativas. Bloom fue también judío (creo que sabía hablar el yiddish con perfección) y comprendía y sabía del ambiente en el que anímicamente y culturalmente se desenvolvió Kafka.
Dicho esto, si tienen oportunidad de leer Genios: un mosaico de cien mentes creativas y ejemplares, vayan directo al capítulo dedicado a San Pablo. A Bloom los editores le prohibieron que incluyera a Jesús de Nazaret como genio, y el neoyorkino les engañó haciendo ver que ese capítulo lo dedicaba a San Pablo, pero en verdad de quién está hablando es de Jesús de Nazaret.
Sócrates y Jesús de Nazaret son los dos genios creativos de nuestro mundo sin haber escrito ni una sola página. Ambos influyeron hasta la médula en nuestra cultura. Puede que Homero ande en una categoría similar, pero al no tener datos fiables de su vida no lo sabemos a ciencia cierta. Lo que resulta indudable es que Homero influyó tanto o igual que los otros dos en toda nuestra cultura occidental. Y es que los libros religiosos: el Tanaj, la Biblia, el Corán, son ante todo y sobre todo libros de literatura, tanto como la Ilíada y la Odisea puedan serlo. ¿Por qué hemos de utilizar para analizarlos distintos métodos que los que utilizamos con Homero, con Italo Calvino, o con el propio Shakespeare?, ¿es que acaso los tres mencionados son escritores menos sapienciales e imaginativos que los escribas que trabajaron en el Antiguo Testamento?
En definitiva, un libro para seguir disfrutando de ese inmenso cascarrabias que fue Harold Bloom. Un hombre enamorado de la literatura clásica que se dedicó a su estudio en cuerpo y en alma, y del que tuvimos la suerte de disfrutar desde muy joven pese a estar en desacuerdo con muchas de sus apreciaciones.
De hecho, si no hubiese sido por su magisterio yo difícilmente me hubiera acercado a leer a Samuel Johnson, su gran predecesor en la crítica literaria y su “daimon” en influencia. Y la verdad, tampoco hay página escrita por Johnson que sea un desperdicio, como tampoco la existe en Bloom. Ambos son gigantes de la crítica literaria. Y hay que valorarlos por ello sin dejar de señalar también sus flagrantes errores.
Hasta otra.
January 3, 2023
I wonder how my life would be different if I had not walked into the BYU bookstore as a college freshman. I found this book in a shelf near the entryway and stood there reading book review after book review. I would go back to the bookstore just to keep reading it, until I finally realized I should just buy it. BYU freshmen now literally cannot have that experience anymore--the "bookstore" has only racks of merchandise where all the books used to be.
I don't pull this one as frequently as Bloom's other books from my shelf because I don't like spoilers. But I always pull it after I've read one of the books in the list--I love seeing what he has to say about them--and I also like to use it as a list of what to read next.
I don't pull this one as frequently as Bloom's other books from my shelf because I don't like spoilers. But I always pull it after I've read one of the books in the list--I love seeing what he has to say about them--and I also like to use it as a list of what to read next.
April 15, 2019
A collection of essays by Bloom on the novelists that have most interested him over a lifetime of critical reading and commentary. This book is for the person who is interested in Bloom's thoughts about major novelists, as he has a steady and particular view that applies influence and psychoanalysis to each one. And in order to better comprehend his views and analysis, you have to have read some of the work of the writers or he can be a bit like wandering in a dense woods with no sense of a way out. Of the essays here, I liked the ones on Austen, Dickens, and Faulkner.
Read
December 12, 2025Woah! Didn’t know this existed until stumbling upon it. So this is going to take a while to get through, but need to mark it as Read so I can jot my notes. So many here whose works I’ve read, so I’ll start with some of the most recent ones; of 77 authors in the TOC, I’ve read 38: so even these will take time to get through, and then come back around some point in the future when I’ve read more of the others.
Introduction:
“What is now called ‘relevance’ will be in the dustbins in less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices and inequities.”
[I’d just recently read Breton Mitchell in his introduction to his translation of Metamorphosis say something very similar, to the effect that great works stand, but undergo reinterpretation with every generation.]
Jane Austen:
… but I favored the judgment that Elizabeth and Darcy scarcely change and learn rather that they complement each other’s not holy illegitimate pride.
Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park…another precursor of the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One’s Own, was shrewdly described by Lionel Trilling as ‘overly virtuous and consciously virtuous,’ and therefore almost impossible to like. . . . .
Fanny’s exile Portsmouth is so painful to her, not for reasons, turning upon social distinctions, but for causes related to the quiet that Wordsworth located in the Bliss of solitude or Virginia Woolf in a room of one’s own…
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:
Edith Wharton:
The Age of Innocence is a historical novel set in socially prominent Old New York of the 1870s, a vanished world, indeed when seen from a post-World War II perspective. Wrongly regarded by many critics as a novel derived from Henry James… is a rather deliberate complement to The Portrait of a Lady, seeking and finding a perspective that James was conscious of having excluded from his masterpiece. Wharton might well have called her novel Portrait of a Gentleman, since Newland Archer’s very name is an allusion to Isabel Archrr, a far more attractive and fascinating character than Wharton’s unheroic gentlemen of Old New York. . . . . Wharton was horrified at the post-World War I United States. . . . . Henry James Isabel archer, returning to her dreadful husband Osmond, also accepts an idea of order, but one in which her renunciation has a transcendental element. Wharton, shrewder if less sublime than her friend James, gives us a more realistic, yet a less consequential Archer.
Ethan Frome is tragedy not as Hawthorne wrote it, but in the mood of pain and of a reductive moral sadism, a kid perhaps to Robert Penn Wayne’s harshness towards his protagonists… the books, aesthetic fa fascination, for me, centers, Tim Hortons, audacity, and touching the limit of a reader’s capacity at absorbing really extreme suffering, when that suffering is bleak, intolerable, and in a clear sense unnecessary. Wharton’s astonishing authority here is to render such pain with purity and economy, while making it seem inevitable, as much in the nature of things and of psyches social customs of its time and place… is so charged in its representation of reality as to be frequently phantasmagoric and effect. It’s terrible vividness as strange as it suddenly from mirror naturalism, and makes its pain just bearable. . . . Manifest both Nietzschaen perspective, and an aesthetic intensity that I expect goes back to a reading of Schopenhauer . . . .
What Fails Ethan, and in his beloved Mattie, is precisely what Schopenhauer urged us to overcome: the Will to Live, though suicide was hardly a Schopenhauerian solution. . . .
The narrators ‘mental and moral reach’ is not in question, but his vision has acute limitations. Winter indeed is the cultural issue but Ethan Frome is not Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. It is not a ‘combination of obstacles’ that hindered the flight of Ethan Frome, but a terrible fatalism, which is a crucial part of Edith Wharton’s Emersonian heritage. . . .
Ethan Frome is an Ahab who lacks Moby-Dick, self-lamed rather than wounded by the white whale, and the whiteness of the whale. Not the whiteness of Starkfield, but an inner witness or blankness has crippled Ethan Frome, perhaps the whiteness that goes through American tradition ‘from Edwards to Emerson’ and on through Wharton to Wallace Stevens, contemplating the beach world lit by the glare of northern lights in “The Aurora of Autumn”:
Here, being invisible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise…
This season changes . A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of a grow longer emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
And the whiteness grow less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances, it’s blue-red sweeps
And gust of great enkindlings, it’s polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.
That, with more sublime eloquence, is the visionary world of Ethan, a world where the world is impotent and tragedy is always circumstantial…, the novels apparent realism is a mask for its actual fatalistic mode, and truly it is a northern romance, akin even to Wuthering Heights
Franz Kafka:
“In her obituary for her lover, Franz Kafka, Milena Jesenka sketched a modern Gnostic, a writer whose vision was Kenoma, the cosmic emptiness into which we have been thrown:
‘He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened my life… he saw the world is being full of invisible demons, which assail and destroy defenseless man…all of his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions, and guiltless guilt and human beings.’
“ Max Brod responded to Kafka’s now famous remark—‘we are nihilistic thoughts that came into God‘s head’—explained to his friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and evil. ‘no,’ Kafka replied, ‘I believe we are not such radical relapse of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day. playing straight man, The faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly, said: ‘plenty of hope— for God—no end of hope—not only.
The Hunter Gracchus’ —The jackal or crow or Kafka is also the weird figure of hunter Gracchus (whose Latin name also means a crow) who is not alive but dead, yet who floats like one living, on his death-bark forever— as a story or extended parable is not the narrative of a Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman because Kafka’s trope for his writing activity is not so much a wandering or even a wavering but rather a repetition labyrinthine and burrow-building. his writing repeats not itself, but a Jewish esoteric interpretation of Torah that Kafka himself scarcely knows or even needs to know. what his interpretation tellsKafka is that there is no written Torah but only an oral one. however Kafka has no one to tell him what this oral Torah is. He substitutes his own writing, therefore for the oral Torah not made available to him.
What calls out for interpretation in Kafka is his refusal to be interpreted, his evasiveness even in the realm of his own Negative. Two of his most beautiful beautifully enigmatically performances, both late, are the parable “the problem of our laws” and the story or testament “Josephine, the singer and the mouse folk”, each allows a cognitive return of Jewish cultural memory by refusing the effective identification, that would make either parable or tales specifically Jewish and either historical or contemporary identification.
Josephine the singer is also a crow or Kafka rather than a mouse and the folk may be interpreted as an entire nation of Jackdaws.. in Josephine’s story the mouse folk simultaneously are and are not the Jewish people, and Franz Kafka is both is and is not their curious singer. cognitively the identifications are possible as though returned from forgetfulness, but effectively they certainly are not, unless we can assume that crucial aspects making up the identifications have been purposefully, if other than consciously, forgotten. Josephine‘s piping is Kafka’s story and yet Kafka’s story is hardly Josephine‘s piping.
The Castle the tale of how Kafka cannot write his way back to the abyss. . .
Erich Heller:
The Castle of Kafka’s novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons, successfully, holding an advanced position against the maneuvers of an impatient soul. There was no conceivable idea of divinity which could justify those interpreters who seen in the Castle the residence of “Divine Law and Divine grace.’ It’s officers are totally indifferent to good if they are not positively wicked. neither in their decrees nor in their activities is there any traits of love, mercy, charity, or majesty. In their icy detachment they inspire certainly no awe, but fear and revulsion. their servants are a plague to the village…’Their scandalous behavior knows no limits,’ an anticipation of the blackguards who were to become the footman of European dictators rather than the office boys of a divine ministry. compared to the petty, and apparently calculated torture of this tyranny, the gods of Shakespeare’s indignation who ‘kill us for their sport’ are at least majestic in their wantonness.
If The Trial has a center, it is in what Kafka thought worthy of publishing: the famous parable “Before the Law.”. . . . The Law, I take it, has the same status It has in the later parable “the problem of our laws” where it cannot be Torah or Jewish law, yet Torah flickers uneasily near as a positive analog to the negation that is playing itself out. . . No one could judge The Trial to be grander as a whole than in its parts, and “before the law” bursts out of its narrative shell in the novel. the terrible greatness of Kafka is absolute in the parable, but wavering in the novel, too impure a casing for such a fire.
Read “The Cares of a Family Man”. “The Problem of Our Laws”. “Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk”
Introduction:
“What is now called ‘relevance’ will be in the dustbins in less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices and inequities.”
[I’d just recently read Breton Mitchell in his introduction to his translation of Metamorphosis say something very similar, to the effect that great works stand, but undergo reinterpretation with every generation.]
Jane Austen:
… but I favored the judgment that Elizabeth and Darcy scarcely change and learn rather that they complement each other’s not holy illegitimate pride.
Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park…another precursor of the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One’s Own, was shrewdly described by Lionel Trilling as ‘overly virtuous and consciously virtuous,’ and therefore almost impossible to like. . . . .
Fanny’s exile Portsmouth is so painful to her, not for reasons, turning upon social distinctions, but for causes related to the quiet that Wordsworth located in the Bliss of solitude or Virginia Woolf in a room of one’s own…
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:
Edith Wharton:
The Age of Innocence is a historical novel set in socially prominent Old New York of the 1870s, a vanished world, indeed when seen from a post-World War II perspective. Wrongly regarded by many critics as a novel derived from Henry James… is a rather deliberate complement to The Portrait of a Lady, seeking and finding a perspective that James was conscious of having excluded from his masterpiece. Wharton might well have called her novel Portrait of a Gentleman, since Newland Archer’s very name is an allusion to Isabel Archrr, a far more attractive and fascinating character than Wharton’s unheroic gentlemen of Old New York. . . . . Wharton was horrified at the post-World War I United States. . . . . Henry James Isabel archer, returning to her dreadful husband Osmond, also accepts an idea of order, but one in which her renunciation has a transcendental element. Wharton, shrewder if less sublime than her friend James, gives us a more realistic, yet a less consequential Archer.
Ethan Frome is tragedy not as Hawthorne wrote it, but in the mood of pain and of a reductive moral sadism, a kid perhaps to Robert Penn Wayne’s harshness towards his protagonists… the books, aesthetic fa fascination, for me, centers, Tim Hortons, audacity, and touching the limit of a reader’s capacity at absorbing really extreme suffering, when that suffering is bleak, intolerable, and in a clear sense unnecessary. Wharton’s astonishing authority here is to render such pain with purity and economy, while making it seem inevitable, as much in the nature of things and of psyches social customs of its time and place… is so charged in its representation of reality as to be frequently phantasmagoric and effect. It’s terrible vividness as strange as it suddenly from mirror naturalism, and makes its pain just bearable. . . . Manifest both Nietzschaen perspective, and an aesthetic intensity that I expect goes back to a reading of Schopenhauer . . . .
What Fails Ethan, and in his beloved Mattie, is precisely what Schopenhauer urged us to overcome: the Will to Live, though suicide was hardly a Schopenhauerian solution. . . .
The narrators ‘mental and moral reach’ is not in question, but his vision has acute limitations. Winter indeed is the cultural issue but Ethan Frome is not Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. It is not a ‘combination of obstacles’ that hindered the flight of Ethan Frome, but a terrible fatalism, which is a crucial part of Edith Wharton’s Emersonian heritage. . . .
Ethan Frome is an Ahab who lacks Moby-Dick, self-lamed rather than wounded by the white whale, and the whiteness of the whale. Not the whiteness of Starkfield, but an inner witness or blankness has crippled Ethan Frome, perhaps the whiteness that goes through American tradition ‘from Edwards to Emerson’ and on through Wharton to Wallace Stevens, contemplating the beach world lit by the glare of northern lights in “The Aurora of Autumn”:
Here, being invisible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise…
This season changes . A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of a grow longer emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
And the whiteness grow less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
With its frigid brilliances, it’s blue-red sweeps
And gust of great enkindlings, it’s polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.
That, with more sublime eloquence, is the visionary world of Ethan, a world where the world is impotent and tragedy is always circumstantial…, the novels apparent realism is a mask for its actual fatalistic mode, and truly it is a northern romance, akin even to Wuthering Heights
Franz Kafka:
“In her obituary for her lover, Franz Kafka, Milena Jesenka sketched a modern Gnostic, a writer whose vision was Kenoma, the cosmic emptiness into which we have been thrown:
‘He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened my life… he saw the world is being full of invisible demons, which assail and destroy defenseless man…all of his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions, and guiltless guilt and human beings.’
“ Max Brod responded to Kafka’s now famous remark—‘we are nihilistic thoughts that came into God‘s head’—explained to his friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and evil. ‘no,’ Kafka replied, ‘I believe we are not such radical relapse of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day. playing straight man, The faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly, said: ‘plenty of hope— for God—no end of hope—not only.
The Hunter Gracchus’ —The jackal or crow or Kafka is also the weird figure of hunter Gracchus (whose Latin name also means a crow) who is not alive but dead, yet who floats like one living, on his death-bark forever— as a story or extended parable is not the narrative of a Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman because Kafka’s trope for his writing activity is not so much a wandering or even a wavering but rather a repetition labyrinthine and burrow-building. his writing repeats not itself, but a Jewish esoteric interpretation of Torah that Kafka himself scarcely knows or even needs to know. what his interpretation tellsKafka is that there is no written Torah but only an oral one. however Kafka has no one to tell him what this oral Torah is. He substitutes his own writing, therefore for the oral Torah not made available to him.
What calls out for interpretation in Kafka is his refusal to be interpreted, his evasiveness even in the realm of his own Negative. Two of his most beautiful beautifully enigmatically performances, both late, are the parable “the problem of our laws” and the story or testament “Josephine, the singer and the mouse folk”, each allows a cognitive return of Jewish cultural memory by refusing the effective identification, that would make either parable or tales specifically Jewish and either historical or contemporary identification.
Josephine the singer is also a crow or Kafka rather than a mouse and the folk may be interpreted as an entire nation of Jackdaws.. in Josephine’s story the mouse folk simultaneously are and are not the Jewish people, and Franz Kafka is both is and is not their curious singer. cognitively the identifications are possible as though returned from forgetfulness, but effectively they certainly are not, unless we can assume that crucial aspects making up the identifications have been purposefully, if other than consciously, forgotten. Josephine‘s piping is Kafka’s story and yet Kafka’s story is hardly Josephine‘s piping.
The Castle the tale of how Kafka cannot write his way back to the abyss. . .
Erich Heller:
The Castle of Kafka’s novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified garrison of a company of Gnostic demons, successfully, holding an advanced position against the maneuvers of an impatient soul. There was no conceivable idea of divinity which could justify those interpreters who seen in the Castle the residence of “Divine Law and Divine grace.’ It’s officers are totally indifferent to good if they are not positively wicked. neither in their decrees nor in their activities is there any traits of love, mercy, charity, or majesty. In their icy detachment they inspire certainly no awe, but fear and revulsion. their servants are a plague to the village…’Their scandalous behavior knows no limits,’ an anticipation of the blackguards who were to become the footman of European dictators rather than the office boys of a divine ministry. compared to the petty, and apparently calculated torture of this tyranny, the gods of Shakespeare’s indignation who ‘kill us for their sport’ are at least majestic in their wantonness.
If The Trial has a center, it is in what Kafka thought worthy of publishing: the famous parable “Before the Law.”. . . . The Law, I take it, has the same status It has in the later parable “the problem of our laws” where it cannot be Torah or Jewish law, yet Torah flickers uneasily near as a positive analog to the negation that is playing itself out. . . No one could judge The Trial to be grander as a whole than in its parts, and “before the law” bursts out of its narrative shell in the novel. the terrible greatness of Kafka is absolute in the parable, but wavering in the novel, too impure a casing for such a fire.
Read “The Cares of a Family Man”. “The Problem of Our Laws”. “Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk”
June 16, 2018
I only read the parts discussing novels and writers that I read, which is about half -ish. It seems that he likes it when books re-creates the world as a rather desolate plane of the Gnostics, where all beings suffer and are ruled by morally neutral or rather malevolent Archons. When not all things are named and the reader has to go explore and find meaning and hope and all that. Its really nice remembering Faulkner and Cormac Mcarthy WIth Mr. BLoom
December 14, 2017
Me encantan las recomendaciones de Harold Bloom, inevitablemente tengo mis diferencias, sobre escritores que no deberían estar y otros que faltan, pero coincido con el 80% de sus preferencias.
June 25, 2020
If you like Bloom it's hard to dislike this one, I particularly liked his entries about The Red and the Black (which I just read) and Anna Karenina.
February 23, 2024
Polemico pero pleno de sugerencias para quien de repente se siente perdido a la hora de decidir que autores seguir y porqué.
April 23, 2013
Excellent resource for Bloom's views on various novels and novelists. Essentially a collection of previously published essays. I consider this a reference book well worth having.
July 18, 2013
Great resource from the inimitable one.
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