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Following at a little distance - Omens of the Millennium inter- vened - the exemplary virtuoso arias of The Western Canon. f larold Bloom has created a set of repetitive, interlocking music- dramas, based on the plays, which I should call Wagnerian if the evidence did not persuade me that his incendiary commentaries were, in the nature of the case, Shakespearean. Such authorial adjectives are invariably invoked to account for those inclusive, over-reaching human productions said to rival nature (Homeric uaed to be the third of these), with something of nature's bat- tological excess as well M "her" inevitable pleonasm. Bloom has added another whopper to the sequential accounts of the plays, in the lineage of Dr. Johnson, William Hazlitt, Francis Bradley, and Harold Goddard, deliberately retracing critical steps in order to

as they SO singularly do, that Shakespeare's function is to bring life to mind.

A failure LO recognize the genre of such discourse - a failure alrpady exhibited in the reviews of Bloom's book appearing in the

newspapers and in that punctual exponent of anti-intellectualism The New Yorlier - makes it easy and even inevitable to snipe, to sideswipe, and sometimes apparently to apostasize Bloom’s inclu- sive achievement; one is reminded of the young woman at Parsifal whose audible complaint, during the performance, that Wagner was too long, elicited from the next box the suitable retort: “No, Mademoiselle, it is you who are too short.”

Professor Bloom has always been notoriously vivid, some will say intemperate, in his use of unwonted, indeed of sensational words and phrases that might identify his enterprise to striking effect (remember “the anxiety of influence” and “the necessity of misreading,” remember the dread apparition of metalepsis, of ap- ophrades and lienosis). He has now come up with another such expression, the invention of the human, and already contestation has begun. I would scotch this snake by quoting an earlier version of the notion appearing five years ago (and doubtless even earlier in Bloom’s classes, where he often assays such formulations, then in his frequent reviews and blurbs, ultimately to accord them the dignity of conceptualization in his oeuvre, now as voluminous, nearly, as that of Georg Brandes, that nineteenth-century critic he most resembles and author of a comparably voluminous study of Shakespeare, translated into English by William Archer just a hundred years ago); here is Bloom’s initial registration of “the invention of the human” in 1993:

What is it, what can it be, that a fictive character should be termed “a free artist of himself” (Hegel)? I do not find this phenomenon in Western literature before Shakespeare. Achilles, Aeneas, Dante the Pilgrim, Don Quixote do not change by overhearing what they themselves have said and on that basis, through their own intellect and imagination, turn themselves about. Our nabe but aesthetically crucial convic- tion that Edmund, Hamlet, Falstaff, and scores of others can, as it were, get up and walk on out of their plays, perhaps even against Shakespeare’s own desires, is connected to their being free artists of themselves. As a theatrical and literary illusion, as an effect of figurative language, this Shakespearean power remains beyond comparison, though it has been imitated uni- versally for almost four centuries now. . . . The introspective

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consciousness, free to contemplate itself, remains the most elitist of all Western images, but without it the Canon is not possible, and, to put it most bluntly, neither are we.

To make things even easier for the likes of Michiko Kakutani, I should like to add that of course we know Penelope and Medea are human, but it is largely because we have encountered Gertrude and Lady Macbeth that we can entertain such knowledge; it is, as Bloom would say, because Shakespeare invented humanity in figu- rative language that we can project it backward upon the Greeks, who probably saw such jigures in another light, another darkness: the chiaroscuro of inhumanity, precisely.

Ten years ago, in putting together a first (and only) anthology of Bloom’s writings, covering - or uncovering - the entire range of his enterprise, John Hollander cited Bloom’s observation that “strong poems strengthen us by teaching us how to talk to our- selves, rather than how to talk to others.” Here perhaps was the root or at least the seed of Bloom’s Shakespearean flowering; in any case, it was Hollander who then and there prophesied the work before us when he remarked, “It is Bloom’s ultimate will to power over texts which makes him respect true originality so deeply; it is perhaps why the so-called Yahvist of the biblical higher criticism has recently occupied Bloom’s concern and why he may eventually write about Shakespeare, upon whom it has hitherto been inconvenient for him to reflect.”

Convenience has been found, and the reflection has ensued. Certainly the convenience is not to be shared with readers of the reflections. Bloom’s wisdom-literature, which he has made into a masterful dimension of literary criticism, is aphoristic, elliptical, and assumes that his reader is not newborn. In each essay there are sentences no Shakespeare scholar can acknowledge without cavil, assertions no Shakespeare-lover (sic) can comfortably assent to, and fiats no newcomer to Shakespeare can even comprehend; here are some examples:

Shakespeare clearly preferred his woman characters to his men (always excepting Falstaff and Hamlet).

Shakespeare manifests no hostility toward any of his charac- ters . . . The profound sadomasochism any audience creates

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merely by assembling: we are there to be entertained by the suffering of others.

As perhaps the last High Romantic Bardolator, I still wish Shakespeare had not perpetrated this poetic atrocity [Titus Andronicus], even as a catharsis.

Marriage, Shakespeare always implies, is where we are writ- ten, and not where we write.

Shakespeare’s greatest insight into male sexual jealousy is that it is a mask for the fear of being castrated by death.

After Lear something vanishes from Western literary repre- sentations of the father-king-God. Aesthetic and spiritual defenses of Milton’s God in Paradise Lost are never persua- sive, and the culprit is as much Shakespeare as the Milton whom he overinfluenced.

Yet precisely because it is what he calls “a personal statement,” an expression of that humanity the invention whereof is so cru- cially delineated here, Bloom’s book is the best comprehensive interpretation of all Shakespeare’s plays, addressed to common readers and theatergoers, to have appeared in my lifetime. More- over, its particular concern - which Bloom calls, quite deliberately, Bardolatry - with characters, with the creation of individuals who exist for and against others, undivided, is of particular utility to the tribe of teachers nowadays, of which I am, so to speak, a brave. For Shakespeare is no longer an unquestioned item in our educational structures but rather an elitist decoration; we read two, perhaps three plays in high school, and (unless we are what is called English Majors, God help us) no more than half a dozen others in college. I t is a pretty common experience in our classes to hear someone (so far, it is not the teacher, at least, nor yet the professor, usually a bright iconoclast among the students) ask with all the gleeful certainty of the child discovering the emperor’s nakedness, “What’s so good about Shakespeare? Why should we read this stuff?” Harold Bloom tells why.

I take it as something of a solace that his study, hysterical

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prejudices and all, is being Book-of-the-Monthed; it is all the more likely that someone, anyone, will be able to pick it up and find out (as nowhere else) why Shakespeare is the originating and account- able writer of our culture.

One emphasis in this anatomy of characterological discovery I should like to retard, though I abound in its apparent sense. Throughout, Bloom is so appalled by modern productions of the plays that he urges the Charles Lamb approach: if we read Shake- speare, he urges, we will get Shakespeare and not the usual sus- pects - Marxists, multiculturalists, feminists, new historicists - whose causes have overtaken contemporary stage productions. This is too hot: even a performance of Caliban as an Afro-Caribbean Freedom Fighter (I have seen it) can withstand the distortions, and there will be compensatory achievements in the distribution. Last summer I attended Andrei Serban’s production of Cymbeline in Central Park and discovered that even Harold Bloom could not anticipate - or limit - the rightness of Shakespeare’s invention of the human; in this ceremonial festivity, the play became, astonish- ingly, a masterful articulation of experience, not through inward- ness and personal transformation (Bloom actually suggests that Imogen deserves to be in a better play) but through what an ill- natured New York Times review of his book rightly calls wonder, improbabilities, larger patterns of death and regeneration. Read- ing the text could not have afforded such a revelation, and we must not legislate preemptively against the likelihood that a director of genius can discern its possibility beyond the delineation of “character.”

It is but a matter of emphasis; even here Bloom realizes that a performance is what Shakespeare, who appears to have had little care for the publication of his plays, requires:

Performance somehow transfigures the ineptitudes. This puzzles me, because bad direction and bad acting have con- verted me to Charles Lamb’s party: it is, alas, better, espe- cially now to read Shakespeare than to see him travestied and deformed. Pericles is the exception; it is the only play in Shakespeare I would rather attend again than reread, and not just because the text has been so marred by transmission. Perhaps because he declined to compose the first two acts,

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Shakespeare compensated by making the remaining three into his most radical theatrical experiment since the mature Hamlet of 1600-1601. . . . The audience does not attend without the foregrounding of knowledge as to who the play- wright is, and how different Pericles from the more than thirty plays preceding it. . . . Wonder is always where one starts and ends with Shakespeare, and Shakespeare himself, as poet-playwright, is the largest provocation to wonder in Pericles.

Certainly a book so Wagnerian -I take this account of Prospero, for instance, to apply to Wotan and to the apocalypse of Gotter- diimmerung: “greatest of spirits thinking his way to the truth, of which he perishes. The ultimate use of Shakespeare is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing” - offers an irresistible temptation to select favorite bits, to appreciate bravura turns. Three must here suffice: the chapters on Othello, on Lea5 and on The Tempest seem to me the freshest, deepest, and truest responses to those plays I have ever read. Yielding to the temptation commits me to quote:

The Tempest is neither a discourse on colonialism nor a mys- tical testament. It is a wildly experimental stage comedy, prompted ultimately, I suspect, by Marlowe’s Doctor Fuustus. Prospero, Shakespeare’s magus, carries a name that is the Italian translation of Faustus, which is the Latin cognomen (“the favored one”) that Simon Magus the Gnostic took when he went to Rome. With Ariel, a sprite or angel (the name is Hebrew for “the Lion of God”) as his familiar rather than Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, Prospero is Shakespeare’s anti- Faust, and a final transcending of Marlowe.

And also to add that if Bloom refuses to see The Tempest as a “mystical testament,” he nonethless, in his long and rare discus- sion of The Two Noble Kinsmen, replaces it with a grave and testamentary farewell in Theseus’s final address to the gods, the fates, the stars in this too-little-known withdrawal:

0 you heavenly charmers, What things you make of us! For what we lack We laugh; for what we have we are sorry; still

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Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful For that which is, and with you leave dispute That are above our question. Let’s go off, And bear us like the time.

Bloom has two (very fine) supplementary essays beyond his re- sponse to this summative passage, as well as a generous set of directions, throughout, to modern Shakespeare critics of worth (Bloomian worth, need I say), but it is appropriate for both of us to end his account of the plays with his words concerning this conclu- sion to The Two Noble Kindmem ‘‘All the cartoons have been dis- missed, and what remains is Shakespeare and ourselves. . . . Both lack and possession are very light, as in our own best moods when we were, or still are, children. The rest is not quite silence, nor is it being equable while we keep appointments we have never made, for ‘bearing us like the time’ means sustaining not just a particular moment but whatever time still remains. No concluding lines elsewhere in Shakespeare seem to me nearly as comforting.”

Remembering how often Shakespeare plays on his own first name in the sonnets on which Bloom does not find it convenient to reflect, it is well to leave my appreciation of this powerful and decisive book, so tragic in apprehension of our Shakespearean uses, even as it insists upon the triumph of the comic spirit (Rosalind, Falstaff) in our Shakespearean attentions, with Emily Dickinson’s premonitory lines:

When the Winds of Will are stirred - Excellent is Bloom.

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