A question from Marred about Shakespeare and Bloom

A few days ago, I received a long message to my blog from someone called Marred, from Greece. He had some questions about Shakespeare and Bloom. To tell the truth, I don’t feel qualified enough to answer, so, with his permission, I’m putting up his message here (with greetings, personal information, and some other details removed) and going to try to answer it the best I can. I’m inviting all friends who are more knowledgeable and articulate (I mean you—Tom, Himadri, Scott, Marly, etc.) to contribute.  

From Marred: 

“… This email concerns rather a personal tension I am experiencing, one that set a terrible confusion in me in the last few days, partly due to my young age, partly because of my neuroticism. I have read not a word of Shakespeare. In fact, my trade, if one can be called that, is that of painting and print making, with my attempts to write coming secondary. For that explanation, the only thing I can say is that I am not an American, rather a Greek, who is trying to engage in the process of making great art.

[…] You see, while I have not come in contact with the bard's writings, I am very intensely aware of this reputation, so much so that I have read a few books on his status in the Western European mind. The books of Harold Bloom unfortunately were those that I read, ones where the worship of Shakespeare becomes a black hole from which one cannot uncertain what is true or false about him. It is precisely this reputation that has made me immobile. It may sound hyperbolic, and probably is. To stop reading Harold Bloom is probably a wise first step to take, both for me and my psychological health. But I've learned that remaining still with my thoughts can be a very dangerous thing.

The issue is that I am having a hard time trying to engage with literature, at least of the English variety, now that I have become aware of this cultural fact. I am having the deepest and highest trouble with myself, because I think some part of me has accepted the centrality of Shakespeare as the base that all writers, regardless of their background return. He is the spectre that hangs above all writers, and the assumption is that we are all chaff in the end, only retreading his grounds.

Indeed, I went and asked myself what exactly is the central focus of my problem exactly, I think I made a mistake.

I don't think I have a problem with Shakespeare, rather, its with Harold Bloom's hyperbolic claim that Shakespeare 'invented' the human, and his writings on Hamlet. In that regard, I think I need to revise what has been distressing me:

It's not that Shakespeare is the best exactly, or even that there is no way beyond our grasp to redefine the 'Human' that Shakespeare defined. Its bloom's claim that all things lead back to shakespeare, that he is the source of a conception of consciousness that we all embody. It's akin to saying that we are not we, that anything we do is basically already predicted, 'contained' as he said by him, or in another way, that we are Shakespeare's characters. Its an argument that attempting to obliterate my thinking before I even have a chance to reject it. I mean, again, its a bit scary to think that, regardless of anything that I read, I've been undercut/contained by an author 400 years before I was born, and Bloom keeps making this case in religious language.

Again, it sounds asinine in a way, as well as empirically unfalsifiable, but my mind keep freaking out considering how many people have been influenced by Shakespeare, beyond just literature but also in psychoanalysis and stuff. Some stupid part in my brain is dreading Bloom's thesis, even if its silly in the end. […] Maybe its also that I get possessed by the personalities of others sometimes (like with Bloom), and I keep freaking out because some irrational part of my brain goes "he is the truth, you're over".

If I were to pull two quote summarising what is haunting me, its the following

```In the end, we're all heirs of the Melancholy Dane and the Fat Knight. When we're wholly human, "we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff" (745). When we talk about them, we're really talking about ourselves.```

And from a review of the book

```What surprises me most about Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is that Bloom surrenders so eagerly to Shakespeare's superiority. Throughout his career Bloom has stoutheartedly struggled against all kinds of political, religious, and cultural dominance-so why not intellectual sovereignty as well? Indeed, intellectual strife, the Emersonian sort, is one of Bloom's dominant tropes. Yet Emerson could say in his journals: "The only objection to Hamlet is that is exists." If Bloom believes William Shakespeare "contains," "encloses," or "circumscribes" him, why is he so uncharacteristically comfortable with the fact? Why doesn't he measure the limits of his and our confinement? If anyone could mastermind the great escape from the Shakespearean dungeon and show us the way to a post-Shakespearean world it would surely be Harold Bloom. Even if he had to tunnel his way out.```

I always thought that western canon was like a church, and through one's hard work, talent, creativity and artistry, one could be accepted in this church as a Saint. It seems now I have become aware that while it's possible to become a Saint, there is in fact a god, from which one is not allowed to criticize or not like, and there is a final altar from which all others will be sacrificed first before they come for the Bard.

[…]

With Regard

Marred”

_______________________________________________________

My answer to Marred: 

The first thing I must get out of the way, which is one of the reasons I don’t feel qualified to answer, is that I love Shakespeare but dislike Bloom.

First of all, let’s see what Bloom means about Shakespeare’s invention of the human. 

“In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others.”

I don’t know what he means. 

“Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us, which is the central argument of this book.”

Again, what is he saying? One of my troubles with Bloom, as I wrote in an earlier blog post, is that I don’t know what he means. He throws out ideas without clarifying them or supporting them with arguments or evidence, so it’s impossible to agree or disagree.

Bloom is right, however, when he says that Shakespeare’s eminence is in a diversity of persons, which is one of Shakespeare’s strengths (though not the only one). Shakespeare creates a wide range of characters, diverse in gender, class, background…, and all distinct. He creates both larger-than-life characters (such as Othello) and characters that feel utterly lifelike and natural (such as Emilia in the same play).

Bloom is also right that his characters are deeper and more complex than the characters of his contemporaries. That’s my impression reading Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, I suppose my thoughts will remain the same when I read other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, as the general consensus is that Shakespeare is way ahead of everyone else. Marlowe’s and Jonson’s characters are more like types or concepts, they tend to be two-dimensional, without the complexity and contradictions of Shakespeare’s characters. 

I haven’t read widely enough to know, Bloom may be right when he compares Shakespeare to his predecessors: 

“Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed.” 

Bloom also says: 

“What Shakespeare invents are ways of representing human changes, alterations not only caused by flaws and by decay but effected by the will as well, and by the will's temporal vulnerabilities.”

That is perhaps true (if the previous point is true), but I don’t know if that is what Bloom means when he says Shakespeare invents all of us. 

“Shakespeare's own playgoers preferred Falstaff and Hamlet to all his other characters, and so do we, because Fat jack and the Prince of Denmark manifest the most comprehensive consciousnesses in all of literature, larger than those of the biblical J Writer's Yahweh, of the Gospel of Mark's Jesus, of Dante the Pilgrim and Chaucer the Pilgrim, of Don Quixote and Esther Summerson, of Proust's narrator and Leopold Bloom. Perhaps indeed it is Falstaff and Hamlet, rather than Shakespeare, who are mortal gods, or perhaps the greatest of wits and the greatest of intellects between them divinized their creator. […] Setting mere morality aside, Falstaff and Hamlet palpably are superior to everyone else whom they, and we, encounter in their plays. This superiority is cognitive, linguistic, and imaginative, but most vitally it is a matter of personality. Falstaff and Hamlet are the greatest of charismatics: they embody the Blessing, in its prime Yahwistic sense of "more life into a time without boundaries" (to appropriate from myself). Heroic vitalists are not larger than life; they are life's largeness.” 

I’m not sure that “we” do prefer Hamlet and Falstaff to all of Shakespeare’s characters, and to all characters in general. I’m not sure that “we” think Hamlet and Falstaff are the greatest of wits and greatest of intellects. What about Hal? His wit matches Falstaff’s, he can adapt anywhere and speak anyone’s language and beat everyone at their own game. What about Macbeth? He too is a highly intelligent character, who knows exactly what he is doing and what the consequences would be—he just can’t help himself.

This is like when Bloom discusses Jane Austen in The Western Canon and picks out Anne Elliot from Persuasion as “the one character in all of prose fiction upon whom nothing is lost”, and he doesn’t convince me as to why he singles out Anne Elliot when Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is similar or even more clear-sighted and perceptive. 

The reason I want to see what Bloom means about Hamlet and Falstaff is because he says:  

“More even than all the other Shakespearean prodigies—Rosalind, Shylock, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra—Falstaff and Hamlet are the invention of the human, the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognize it.”

But why? In what sense? Because I don’t know why Bloom singles out Hamlet and Falstaff, I don’t know what he means about “the invention of the human” and “the inauguration of personality”.

He goes on:

“The idea of Western character, of the self as a moral agent, has many sources: Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, the Bible and St. Augustine, Dante and Kant, and all you might care to add. Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare's theater of what might be called the colors of the spirit.”

Because I don’t know what “personality, in our sense” means, I can’t argue whether or not it is a Shakespearean invention. Bloom doesn’t explain his meanings.

You wrote:

“Its bloom's claim that all things lead back to shakespeare, that he is the source of a conception of consciousness that we all embody. It's akin to saying that we are not we, that anything we do is basically already predicted, 'contained' as he said by him, or in another way, that we are Shakespeare's characters.” 

Let’s see what Bloom says: 

“Overfamiliar yet always unknown, the enigma of Hamlet is emblematic of the greater enigma of Shakespeare himself: a vision that is everything and nothing, a person who was (according to Borges) everyone and no one, an art so infinite that it contains us, and will go on enclosing those likely to come after us.”

There are two separate points here. First is the idea that Shakespeare is everything and nothing, everyone and no one. The reason Bloom and many people say this is because Shakespeare depicts so many different types of characters and so many conflicting perspectives, and conflicting sides in each character, that we do not know his real views and opinions. We may notice recurrent themes and obsessions, but because there are always voices and counter-voices, we cannot know what Shakespeare was thinking and whom he was siding with in a particular argument. This is why Shakespeare can appeal to many different dispositions.

Shakespeare is elusive in that sense. Novelists and short story writers can never be completely invisible, because of narrators. Playwrights have the advantage of presenting characters as they are, through dialogue, but I still see Marlowe and Jonson, I still see Ibsen, whereas I cannot see Shakespeare. Shakespeare is elusive also because he writes a wide range of plays: there are comedies and tragedies and histories and romances and problem plays, and within each genre, the plays are still very different. Among comedies, The Comedy of Errors is a farce, Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy, As You Like It is a pastoral comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost has verbal humour and an uncharacteristic ending (not a happy ending), A Midsummer Night’s Dream is whimsical and has fairytale elements, and so on. Among tragedies, King Lear is different from Macbeth, different from Hamlet, etc. Compare, for example, the unconsoling vision of the apocalypse in King Lear to the vision in Antony and Cleopatra, where two ordinary, flawed characters somehow gain a nobility and even a god-like status in the last two acts of the play. Or place it next to the fairytale of The Tempest, written a few years after. 

The second point in the passage is “an art so infinite that it contains us”. It doesn’t mean that we are Shakespeare’s characters or that anything we do is predicted by him. You may say that his art “contains us” in the sense that Shakespeare has such large visions and such a wide range that all types of people, all kinds of things seem to be depicted in his plays.  

As for Bloom’s idea that all things lead back to Shakespeare, in a way, he has a point. Shakespeare is the central point of world literature. The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate is very good if you want to read more about Shakespeare’s influence beyond Britain, and influence on other art forms.

But I also want to know writers, perhaps outside the West, who never knew Shakespeare. Cao Xueqin for example couldn’t have known Shakespeare because he was in 18th century China, but his novel also depicted a wide range of characters. Admittedly they were nowhere near the complexity and depth of Shakespeare’s characters, but there was an admirably wide range, the characters were all distinct, and felt real. This is a fascinating subject that I don’t think Bloom writes about. 

Regarding the last point in the message, I tend to dislike it when some readers carelessly dismiss Shakespeare—not because he’s a god, but because I have the same attitude about classic literature, I think people should have more humility and try harder when a work of art has lasted for so long and influenced generations of writers. In the case of Shakespeare, his importance is immense, and it’s not without reasons.

My last, but most important, point is that I think you should read Shakespeare, with the company of some good critics such as Tony Tanner or G. Wilson Knight. Don’t worry about Bloom, at least until you have read Shakespeare for yourself. You should read the plays, then watch some good productions (I can recommend a few if you’re interested).  

That’s my answer. I hope my more knowledgeable friends may have some more to say.