-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Harold Bloom offers an in-depth interview discussing his inspiration to writing How To Read and Why?, what he believes most threatens the future of reading (and it’s not just TV!), and why technological means of obtaining information threaten our human growth in self-knowledge, introspection, compassion and spiritual discernment. He also discusses his favorite book to teach and the three people who inspired him most.
What inspired you to write How To Read and Why?
With both The Western Canon published back in 1994 and
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human published in 1998, I had toured
extensively and found an astonishing response from the audiences I addressed and
from people who talked to me and people for whom I was signing books. To this
day, I am deluged with mail from people who say how desperately pleased they are
to find that someone is indeed writing about literature for the common reader,
that someone does not try, as it were, to do the French thing, in regard to
literary study or the many ideological modes which I will not mention, which are
now practiced in the Anglo-American Universities and college world.
The more I thought about the response to these two books I
had written, the more I realized that neither of them had really addressed a
need which I felt highly qualified and highly driven to meet. And that is, a
self-help book, indeed, an inspiration book, which would not only encourage
solitary readers of all kinds all over the world to go on reading for
themselves, but also support them in their voyages of self-discovery through
reading. [How To Read and Why is meant to] give readers a human aid to their own
reading, not to tell them what to read, because to some extent I had done that
in The Western Canon, but to tell them indeed how to read, and even more than
how, to remind them why we have to go on reading, why indeed it's a kind of
death in life if we yield completely to what William Wordsworth called the
"tyranny of the bodily eye," that is to say, the tyranny of the visual
at a time when we are so bombarded by information of a visual kind.
What do you think is the single greatest threat to the
future of reading?
I used to believe, until fairly recently, that the
greatest threat was both visual over-stimulation--television, films, computers,
virtual reality, and so on--and also auditory over-stimulation, you know, what I
call rock religion, MTV, rap, all of these mindless burstings of the eardrums.
And, of course, I think what has happened to education on every level, from
grade school through graduate school throughout the English speaking world, is
an increasing menace to disinterested and passionate reading, reading not
governed by ideological and other social considerations.
But more recently, I have reached the very sad conclusion
that what most threatens the future of reading is the, I will not say
probability--I would become very wretched indeed--but the real possibility of the
disappearance of the book. I begin to fear that what it means to be alone with a
book--the various ways in which you can hold a book in your own hands and turn
the pages and write in the margins when you are moved to do so, underline or
emphasize when you are moved to do so--might almost vanish, that the
technological overkill of the latest developments we are moving towards, the
e-book sort of thing which Mr. Gates and others are proclaiming might perhaps
put the book in jeopardy. And I really don't think that without the book we are
going to survive. You can have a technological elite without the book, but you
cannot finally have a humanely educated portion of the public that is able to
teach to others. As a matter of fact, I think what you will really have is the
death of humane teaching, as such.
What can people get from reading that they can't from
movies or television?
I would say not less than everything. You can get a great
deal of information, as such, from screens of one sort or another. You can
dazzle yourself with images, if that is your desire. But how you are to grow in
self-knowledge, become more introspective, discover the authentic treasures of
insight and of compassion and of spiritual discernment and of a deep bond to
other solitary individuals, how in fact can like call out to like without
reading, I do not know. I suppose if I were to put it in almost a common
denominator sort of way, I would say that you cannot even begin to heal the
worst aspects of solitude, which are loneliness and potential madness, by visual
experience of any kind, particularly the sort of mediated visual experience that
you get off a screen of whatever sort. If you are to really encounter a human
otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself, which can become an
answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation, there truly is no
authentic place to turn except to a book.
You talk in the book about contemporary readers having
difficulty comprehending irony in literature of earlier times. Why do you think
this is a problem?
Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while
meaning another, sometimes indeed quite the opposite of what overtly you are
saying. It's very difficult to have the highest kind of imaginative literature
from Homer through Don DeLillo, as it were, and entirely avoid irony. There is
the tragic irony, which one confronts everywhere in Shakespeare, that the
audience, the auditor, and the reader are aware of--something in the character or
predicament or inward affects, emotions of the protagonist or protagonists, that
the heroes and heroines are totally unaware of themselves.
It's very difficult to convey this quality of irony by
purely visual means. Visual ironies tend to fall flat or they vulgarize very
quickly or they become grotesque. Really subtle irony of any sort demands
literary language. The way in which meaning tends to wander in any really
interesting literary text, so that the reader is challenged to go into exile
with it, catch up with it, learn how to construe it, make it her very own, is
essentially a function of irony. If we totally lose our ability to recognize and
to understand irony, then we will be doomed to a kind of univocal discourse,
which is alright I suppose for politicians' speeches and perhaps for certain
representatives of popular religion, but will leave us badly defrauded.
What books or poems have you returned to most often
over the course of your life?
The primary answer has to be Shakespeare. Even if I did
not teach Shakespeare all the time, I would always be re-reading Shakespeare,
reciting Shakespeare to myself, brooding about the great plays. I tend
personally to re-read the major lyric poets of the English language from
Shakespeare's sonnets through Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. That's what most
vivifies and pleases me. I re-read Jonathan Swift's A Tale of the Tub twice a
year, but that's to punish myself. It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictive
prose in the English language, but it's a kind of vehement satire upon visionary
projectors as it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and
corrective for me. I re-read Proust every year because In Search of Lost Time is
just about my favorite novel, except maybe for Samuel Richardson's Clarissa,
which I also tend to re-read every year or so. I re-read Dickens all the time,
especially my peculiar favorite which I've loved since I was a child, The
Pickwick Papers. I re-read Oscar Wilde nearly every day of my life, or I recite
Oscar to myself, but that's a personal enthusiasm which perhaps surpasses his
literary worth, very large as that indeed is. I read Dr. Samuel Johnson all the
time because he is my great hero as a literary critic and I have tried to model
myself upon him all my life. But this answer would be endless, since I do very
little besides teach and read and write.
What is your favorite book to teach?
Oh, most certainly, Shakespeare. Teaching either the high
tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, or the
greatest of the comedies, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's
Dream, or what may be, I think, the finest, most representative instance of what
Shakespeare can do, the two parts of King Henry IV, taken together, considered
as one play, in which, of course, the central figure is my particular literary
hero, Sir John Falstaff. And the so-called late romances, which are really
tragi-comedies, particularly The Tempest and The Winter's Tale.
Did you have a teacher who was a particular inspiration
to you?
Oh yes. I was deeply inspired and helped greatly, humanly,
by three of my teachers in particular. When I was at Cornell undergraduate, I
came very much under the influence and the kind guidance of M. H. Abrams, Meyer
Howard Abrams, who I'm delighted to say is still alive. He's 88 years old now,
one of the leading, perhaps the leading scholar of English Romantic poetry in
the 20th century.
Then when I became a graduate student at Yale, I was much
under the influence of Frederick A. Pottle, who was a Johnson and Boswell
scholar and a Romantic scholar, and is remembered best now for writing a large
two-volume definitive biography of James Boswell and for his work on the Boswell
papers. He was a tremendous steadying influence upon me. I was a sort of wild
young man with fierce opinions of every sort and congenitally unable to see
anybody else's point of view. Mr. Pottle was sufficiently strenuous in urging a
proper care upon me for the really civilized and well thought-through and valid
opinions of others, not just any opinions. But I think he did me a vast amount
of good.
The third person would be the late dean of Yale College,
William Clyde Devane, a great Browning scholar. I was his student also, but
mostly he was too busy during those 25 years, first when I was a graduate
student and then when I was a younger and beginning-to-be-middle-aged person on
the faculty. He was too busy running Yale College to give me much direct
instruction, but he took a great interest in me, defended me against my Yale
enemies, as Professor Pottle did, and I had plenty of enemies, some of whom I no
doubt deserved and some of whom I didn't deserve. But he was a fountain of
wisdom. He was a man of enormous worldly insight, but of still an idealistic
kind, and he took the long view. Even if I never quite learned from him to take
as long a view as William Clyde Devane could take, he had a strong effect upon
me.
I suppose also, you know, I would say that Meyer Howard
Abrams and Frederick Albert Pottle and William Clyde Devane were, in their very
different way, very wise men. I say at the beginning of How to Read and Why,
"information is readily available to us; where shall wisdom be found,"
which is an ancient Biblical question. I found wisdom in those three teachers in
particular. While I'm not trying to be a guru or anything of that sort, any more
than they tried to be or actually were gurus, any hard-won wisdom of my own
comes primarily from what they started in me and from the deep reading of what
by now must be literally hundreds of thousands of books-ingesting them,
memorizing them, voluntarily and involuntarily, pondering them, always turning
them over in my mind.
How did you choose which works to discuss in the book?
As I made very clear in one of the earlier sentences of
the book, there is nothing prescriptive about the book. It isn't trying to tell
you what to read; it is really trying to tell you how to read and why to read.
It is a self-help and inspirational kind of manual, as it were. And as I say
very clearly at the beginning, whether I'm dealing with any of my five
categories, European novels, American novels, short stories, poetry, or plays, I
can only give samples. I tried to take samples that were really in some deep way
central to the experience of the reader, but that were also to some degree,
varied, and above all else accessible. I wanted them to be accessible stories,
accessible novels, very familiar works if possible, or familiar to many readers,
if not to most or all readers. (I would have to admit that Shelley's The Triumph
of Life may be a little too difficult for the purposes of the book, but I felt
that by then one could try a really difficult poem on the reader.)
But it's very, very difficult to try to write such a book
and keep it to about whatever this is, 285-or-so pages, and not seem to be
purely arbitrary or purely personal in the books that you choose. Thus some of
my friends who are poets and novelists and playwrights, though they like the
book, have questioned why one writer is there rather than another, and I'm not
always sure that I can give an answer that will altogether satisfy or appease
them. To some extent, the choices had to be, in part, arbitrary. But I think
they are all of them representative. I think they are almost all of them
accessible to a reader with good will who is willing to work a little. I think
that all of them are beautiful, to use a term that we should not let go of. They
are all of them aesthetically rewarding to the highest degree. And I think that
all of them have either a great wisdom or, quite manifestly, a great unwisdom,
which teaches you a good deal also.
When I re-read the book in proof the other day, I realized
that without meaning to do so, I had at one time or another, whether I was
dealing with novelists, storywriters, poets, or dramatists, found myself
reflecting upon and trying to say something useful about the quite palpable
influence of Shakespeare upon all of these writers. And he has been, of course,
in all European languages, probably with the exception of French, the
inescapable influence, the inescapable presence for the last four centuries,
since he is, after all, the largest and most powerful writer that we know.
In the prologue you write, "Ultimately we read in
order to strengthen the self." As you have noticed, self-help books top
bestseller lists. How can reading great literature provide an alternative to
these manuals?
In the self-help and inspirational category, to be
perfectly fair, most things that are published, or that sell widely, are really
intellectually and spiritually rather thin. They don't challenge a reader in any
way, and I'm afraid frequently tend to flatter a reader in preconceptions and
misconceptions and easy adjustments to one's own self. So the question is, how
can one possibly hope to vie with, to compete with, self-help books of that sort
in presenting a book on how to read and why. I suppose pragmatically is the only
answer I can give. I have tried to be as simple and clear as I either can be or
can be induced to be. It is a very direct book, I think. It addresses the reader--whether he or she be young or old, whatever their
background--quite
intimately.
The purpose of the book, and I hope the achievement of the
book, is to get in very close to a reader and try to speak directly to what it
is that they either might want out of the book or might be persuaded to see:
that truly, though they may not have been aware of it, this is what they want
and only really first-rate imaginative literature can bring it to them. For
example, they want Chekhov's short stories, because they are not only so
poignant but have the uncanny faculty, rather like Shakespeare in that regard,
to persuade the reader or the auditor that certain truths about himself or
herself, which are totally authentic, totally real, are being demonstrated to
the reader for the very first time. It's not as though Shakespeare or Chekhov
has created those truths. It's just that without the assistance of Shakespeare
and Chekhov, we might never be able to see what is really there.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
How To Read And Why
Try:
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
by Pierre Bayard
Ronald B. Shwartz is a Boston trial lawyer and former editor of The University of Chicago Law Review. He has edited three books of quotations and has written essays and reviews that have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
How To Read And Why
Try:
For The Love Of Books
by Ronald B. Shwartz
We recommend 3 similar authors
 (1).gif)
In war there are no unwounded soldiers
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
