814 pages, Warner Books,
ISBN-13: 978-0446527170
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary
Creative Minds is the culmination of Harold Bloom’s – American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at
Yale University – more than 60 years of attentive reading of an exhaustive
array of works. Such a broad and all-encompassing topic necessitates an author with
the erudition of Bloom that very few people have had throughout history, let
alone now when such vapid distractions are so readily available. Only someone
that has read and reread the Western Cannon many times over could make some of
the brilliant connections that Bloom makes in Genius; of course, it helps that he was a freakishly-fast reader: during
his prime he could go through an impressive 1000 pages in one hour! While not
being a fast as Bloom (damnit), I still went through these 800+ pages faster
than I would have thought possible. Prof. Bloom makes his case for the genius
of each of the individuals in Genius
in such a compelling and seductive way that I couldn’t wait to finish reading
it and get my hands on the masterpieces he recommends (although his
choices and organization left me bewildered, as you’ll see below). Bloom’s
views of genius are tied to different concepts:
- The idea of originality, a creative and unexplained spark shared by many authors in the book that can’t be easily explained or dismissed by social factors
- How the genius of the author affects its work and, most importantly, the reverse: how the work influences the life of the genius
- The struggle to surpass, transcend and continue the work of previous genius (and in some cases genius yet to come)
This last point is something that has been
thoroughly covered by Bloom on his previous books, what he calls the “Anxiety
of Influence”. The central thesis is that writers become hindered in their
creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with their
precursors. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience, Bloom
argues that one is inspired to write by reading the work of others and will
tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative and, therefore,
weak. Thus, having established his game plan, Bloom can, as himself a strong
precursor, offer judgments and interpretations that are intended to astonish
his followers – or ephebes as he insists
on calling them, which is a Greek word for adolescent males (careful, Prof.:
those snowflakes you teach at Yale won’t like such a male-exclusive term). Genius is described as “a mosaic of genius” and consists of essays on 100
authors who in one way or another fit Bloom’s scheme of literary genius. While
many of these essays have something to say, some are little more than confident,
self-regarding chatter: a tendency to bombast coexists with a kind of benign
naughtiness (for instance, the characters of Iris Murdoch “derive more from J.M.
Barrie’s Peter Pan than from George Eliot’s Middlemarch”.
That’s just what I thought!).
Good stuff, to be sure, but there were a few
problems with this book. I find his explanation for why he would have chosen
these one hundred authors to write about rather peculiar: he says that he didn’t
choose these because they are the top one hundred in his or anyone else’s
judgement, but that he wrote about them because he “…wanted to write about
these”. Huh, well, okay then; what a brilliant explanation from someone who can
write pages about what one character said to another on page 143 of a
particular book. I also found the organization of the book to be…weird (now, bear
with me here): these hundred unique figures are organized using the Sefirot as a guiding source. What in the
hell is the Sefirot, you ask? Okay:
it’s the 10 attributes or emanations in Kabbalah, through which Ein
Sof (The Infinite) reveals Himself and continuously creates both the
physical realm and the chain of higher metaphysical realms, these being: Keter (Crown), Chochmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed
(Kindness), Gevurah (Severity), Tiferet (Beauty), Netzach (Eternity), Hod (Splendor),
Yesod (Foundation), Malchut (Kingship); thus, the 10
geniuses to be found grouped within each of these categories possess qualities,
according to Bloom, supposed to be reflected in the chapters so classed. Hold
on now, there’s more: each of these 10 sections is
further divided into two Lustres,
each containing five authors; thus Keter,
the first Sefirot, has Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton and Tolstoy in its first Lustre, and Lucretius, Virgil, Augustine, Dante and Chaucer in its
second: Chochmah, the second Sefirot, contains Jahvist, Socrates, Plato,
Paul and Muhammad in the first group, and Johnson, Boswell, Goethe, Freud and
Thomas Mann in the second. Most readers will presumably see that these
divisions and groupings are little more than Bloom showing off, for they seem
to serve no other purpose (I certainly did).
In order to
make up for these quirks, I have invented a fun (if not humiliating) game to
play with friends: open Genius to a
random page and read one sentence out loud, and the first person to guess
correctly whom the sentence is discussing gets a point, or a drink, or a gold
star, or…whatever, all of which makes Bloom’s book sound rather comical and
merely a toy to be used during party games. It is an intense book and you’ll
find yourself following an endless and exhausting maze of leads, references,
languages and whatnot, all in the hopes of learning just a bit more about some
of the thinkers showcased here. You may not read it cover to cover, and that’s OK;
it’s a book to be savored and slightly scared of at the same time.
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