Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 9 (1996): 165-181 [PDF]
José Antonio Gurpegui: What’s the reason for writing a book about the Western Canon, particularly now?
Harold Bloom: Well, this brings one to the question of a national context: in fact people in American universities and colleges and in the secondary schools and in academies throughout the English-speaking world, are very much worried about canonical matters because a tremendous debate has been going on now for about the last twenty years or so, which in one very bad sense is settled: that the people who would argue for humanistic education, in English at least (the study of the traditional Western Canon, from Homer through Shakespeare, Cervantes and Tolstoy, down to Marcel Proust, say, or Samuel Beckett), we have been defeated. A traditional Western Canon is largely not studied anymore in American colleges, universities, preparatory schools, secondary schools, and this is trae also in Australia, New Zealand, Canadá, Great Britain, and so forth.
But the personal reason is really quite different, and had nothing to do with polemic. I am a literary critic in my middle sixties; Tve been writing about literature, publishing on literature since 1957.1’ve been a student of literature really from the time I was a very small boy; in any language I could teach myself to read. And I’ve written a number of books, and I just thought it was time that I write a kind of general study of literature, trying to see if I could isolate those qualities that in the end unify Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Chaucer, Tolstoy, and so on, and trying to extend Walter Pater’s notion of the aesthetic or Osear Wilde’s notion of the aesthetic to a kind of general defense of the aesthetic study of literature.
From a Spanish perspective, a number of things that I talk about the book in would not make much sense: thus my favorite sentence in the entire book must be totally incomprehensible to a Spanish reader, an Iberian reader. And that is the rather bitter and ironic sentence, which I quote verbatim from the book, “If multiculturalism meant Cervantes, then who could protest?” There is in the English-speaking countries, but particularly in the United States, a terrible movement in the academies called
“multiculturalism,” which holds that the racial, sexual, and class origin of a work of literature is far more important than any other aspect of a work of literature, and which insists that aesthetic valué is merely a mask, or disguise, for, as they would say, sexist, racist, economic exploitative forces.
The plague of American universities and colleges, and indeed of all academic institutions now throughout the English-speaking world, are the extraordinary collection of what I would cali “pseudo-Marxists” (because they are not Marxists), and “pseudo-feminists,” “feministists” as I like to cali them (because they are not really feminists), and the “pseudo-historicists,” disciples of Foucault, who, in conjunction with multiculturalists and varíous kinds of so-called theoreticians, mostly of the French variety, have pretty much destroyed the traditional study of Western literature in the English-speaking world. I think this process has gone much further in the United States and Great Britain than it has in Spain, which is after all ethnically a homogenous country, so that multiculturalism would appear only, say, in the distinction between Catalán literature and Castilian literature, or perhaps, I don’t know how much Basque literature there is, really, so… I think that might be a little bewildering to a Spanish reader if they did not understand how bad the situation is here. The situation really is very bad here… [PDF]
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