I know that I'm not the first to wonder - no, to gape, stunned - at the cataract intensity of the mind and sensibility of Harold Bloom, whose various works of literary summation, books such as The Western Canon and Shakespeare, reproach me from my shelves: Not only have I not taken them in as completely as they have offered themselves, but worse, all the time that I have been but dithering here and there in the shallows of the word, this prodigious intellect has been steadily siphoning up the best that has been thought and written, making ready to serve it back, comprehended and integrated, in yet another mastodon volume. And here it is, clocking in at more than 800 pages, Genius: A Mosaic Of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.
I hope that my tone captures, alongside my inevitable exasperation, my unbounded admiration. True, this envious, insecure reader looks first for cracks and fissures, reassurances that such vast learning comes at some obvious price. But while there are the natural gripes - that Bloom argues by proclamation and rumbles forward in what can feel like willy-nilly fashion - these are more than offset by the force of his irresistible adoration of literature. Agree or disagree with any particular assessment, there remains the encompassing grandeur of the enterprise.
Genius is Bloom as Quixote, even Bloom as Ahab, the solo act of a driven (though not necessarily deluded) man. It is, even in its very title - for there is nothing less academically fashionable than the idea of surpassing individual greatness - a retort to what Bloom has famously derided as the "rabblement of lemmings," the theory-driven persecutors of the text.
If the book's "one hundred" seems like a patently marketplace, greatest-hits kind of ploy, Bloom's organizational structure is compensatorily esoteric. He has divided his geniuses, drawn from all eras and cultures (though overwhelmingly Western) into 10 sets of 10, and each of these into subsets of five. The larger groupings, he explains, map to the Kabbalistic Sefirot, which are "attributes at once of God and of the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's image." The subsets, or Lustres, are associative groupings, individuals brought together for "the gloss or sheen that one genius imparts to another, when juxtaposed in my mosaic."
Thus, in Sefirot IV, "Hesed," referring to "the bountiful covenant love that issues from God (or from women and men)," we find one Lustre comprising Donne, Pope, Swift, Jane Austen and Lady Murasaki, Bloom's ironists of love, and another featuring Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf," who are "also geniuses of eros, but deal more with the anguish of covenant."
Bloom wrestles at the outset with a definition of that most problematic word, "genius," never quite pinning down its elusive essence, opting instead for the "know it when we see it" argument. "Literary genius, difficult to define, depends on deep reading for its verification," he writes. But then comes what may be the book's core assertion, invoked again and again in these pages: "The great inventions of genius influence that genius itself in ways we are slow to appreciate. We speak of the man or woman in the work; we might better speak of the work in the person." In other words the individual creator is essentially a vessel for his or her creation, not so much fashioning as being fashioned by something greater.
Keeping Bloom's Sefirot schema in mind, we begin to see the larger suggestion: that, taken together, our geniuses manifest the fullness of God's, or Kadmon's, image. It would appear that Bloom has taken it upon himself to present us, in 800-plus pages, with nothing less than the expressive likeness of the ineffable.
No small ambition, but this is where the enterprise founders. So learned and idea-enamored is Bloom that he cannot discipline his own celebratory sensibility. There is too much, the cohort is simply too large, and Bloom is too eager to play passionate tour-guide to his many beloved writers, everyone from Plato to Kierkegaard, Whitman to Ellison. Every page announces and declares; quotations and gnomic interpretations abound. But no one genius can be got - represented - in a few short pages, and Bloom can only telegraph his fondest insights. Like: "The prophetic, Zarathustra-aspect of Nietzsche is now as archaic as Freud's credo: 'Where it was, there I shall be'." A thesis topic for somebody, to say the least. But Bloom drops this nugget, and a hundred like it, without bending over to pick it up. This is a problem, for without a stronger thread of argument the whole never does exceed the sum of its parts. Still the parts are, many of them, luminous, and the pages are crowded with exuberant personality. Bloom's outsize ambition and reach make the idea of greatness attractive once again.
The Washington Post
