A world elsewhere

Harold Bloom died on Monday.  He was probably the staunchest defender of the Dead White Male literary canon we had left.  He even wrote a thick book called The Western Canon, and countless books about his idol Shakespeare.  In fairness, he also co-wrote The American Canon, admitting to a smaller pantheon Ursula K. LeGuin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neal Hurston, Thomas Pynchon and others.  He had no use for literary theory, especially the Marxist kind, and for that I am grateful.  He also had no use for Harry Potter.  Better children should not read at all than they should read tripe.

Bloom was perhaps the last of a sort of writer-critic who showed up on the New York Times bestseller list and on talk shows beyond BookTV (you know, "This week, live from the Tuscaloosa Book Festival!").  Like Gore Vidal, he and his views were entertaining and often outrageous.  Sometimes he just made stuff up, as in The Book of J, which asserted that the author of the section of Torah known as the Yahwist was a woman.  Well, how can you prove or disprove that?  Few people are in a position to argue with a man who read it in the original Hebrew.  If you're a Sterling professor at Yale, none dare call it bullshit.  Literature has always cherished opinionated mountebanks (in the kindest sense), and Bloom was Samuel Johnson without the Dictionary and the more disturbing physical ailments.