To the reader, by Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

HAROLD BLOOM To the Reader

Cover of the book Shakespeare The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, 1998

An extract of his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA

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Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, where he has been teaching since earning his doctorate in 1955. One of America’s preeminent literary critics, Bloom has been translated into 40 languages, and is a MacArthur Prize fellow. He is the author of many books, including The Western

Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, How to Read and Why, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, A Map of Misreading, and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. He calls his new book, The Anatomy of Influence, his “swansong”.

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Harold Bloom

Acknowledgement

The Fundación Shakespeare Argentina expresses deep and sincere gratitude to Professor Harold Bloom for his generosity in permitting us to publish the text "To the Reader" quoted from his wonderful book Shakespeare:

The Invention of the

Human.

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Harold Bloom

Shakespeare The Invention of the Human

"A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare:

The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of

reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships-that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today" says the commentary of his brilliant book on Shakespeare.

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Harold Bloom

To the Reader

Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they

overhear

themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.

The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe. How he was possible, I cannot know, and after two decades of teaching little else, I find the enigma insoluble. This book, though it hopes to be useful to others, is a personal statement, the expression of a long (though hardly unique) passion, and the culmination of a life's work in reading, writing about, and teaching what I stubbornly still call imaginative literature. Bardolatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us, which is the central argument of this book. I have repeated that argument throughout, because it will seem strange to many.

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I offer a fairly comprehensive interpretation of all Shakespeare's plays, addressed to common readers and theater goers. Though there are living Shakespearean critics I admire (and draw on here,by name), I am disheartened by much that now passes as readings of Shakespeare, whether academic or journalistic. Essentially, I seek to extend a tradition of interpretation that includes Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, A.C. Bradley, and Harold Goddard, a tradition that is now mostly out of fashion. Shakespeare's characters are roles for actors, and also they are considerably more than that : their influence upon life has been very nearly as enormous as their effect upon post-Shakespearean literature. No world author rivals Shakespeare in the apparent creation of personality, and I employ " apparent" here with some reluctance. To catalogue Shakespeare's largest gift is almost an absurdity : where begin, where end? He wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language. That is inseparable from his cognitive strength; he thought more comprehensively and originally than any other writer. It is startling that a third achievement should overgo these, yet I join Johnsonian tradition in arguing , nearly four centuries after Shakespeare, that he went beyond all precedents (even Chaucer) and invented the human as we continue to know it. A more conservative way of stating this would seem to me a weak misreading of Shakespeare: It might contend that Shakespeare's originality was in the representation of cognition, personality, character. But there is an overflowing element in the plays, an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the metaphor we call "creation". The dominant Shakespearean characters - Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra among them - are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning get started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran. I do not suggest that we FUNDACIÓN SHAKESPEARE ARGENTINA

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substitute the worship of Hamlet, but Hamlet is the only secular rival to his greatest precursors in personality. Like them, he seems not to be just a literary or dramatic character. His total effect upon the world's culture is incalculable.

After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either. (He cannot be reduced to a role for an actor; one would have to begin by speaking of "roles for actors" anyway, since there are more Hamlets than actors to play them.) Overfamiliar yet always unknown, the enigma of Hamlet is emblematic of the greater enigma of Shakespeare himself: a vision that is everything and nothing, a person who was (according to Borges) everyone and no one, an art so infinite that it contains us, and will go on enclosing those likely to come after us.

With most of the plays, I have attempted to be as straightforward as the oddities of my own consciousness allowed, within the limits of strongly favoring character over action, and of emphasizing what I call "fore-grounding" in preference to the backgrounding of historicists old and new. The concluding section, "Foregrounding," is meant to be read in connection with any of the plays whatsoever, and could be printed at any point in this book. I cannot assert that I am straightforward upon the two parts of Henry IV, where I have centered obsessively upon Falstaff, the mortal god of my imaginings. In writing about Hamlet, I have experimented by employing a circling procedure, testing the mysteries of the play and its protagonist by returning always to my hypothesis (following the late Peter Alexander) that the young Shakespeare himself, and not Thomas Kyd, wrote the earlier version of Hamlet that existed more than a decade before the Hamlet we know. With King Lear, I have traced the fortunes of the four most disturbing figures - the Fool, Edmund, Edgar and Lear himself - in order to track the tragedy of this most tragic of all tragedies.

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Hamlet, Freud's mentor, goes about inducing all he encounters to reveal themselves, while the prince (like Freud) evades his biographers. What Hamlet exerts upon his fellow characters is an epitome of the effect of Shakespeare's plays upon their critics. I have struggled, to the limit of my abilities, to talk about Shakespeare and not about myself, but I am certain that the plays have flooded my consciousness, and that the plays read me better that I read them. I once wrote that Falstaff would not accept being bored by us, if he was to deign to represent us. That applies also to Falstaff's peers, whether benign like Rosalind and Edgard, frighteningly malign like Iago and Edmund, or transcending us utterly, like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Cleopatra. We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. We need to exert ourselves and read Shakespeare as strenuously as we can, while knowing that his plays will read us more energetically still. They read us definitively. *

•*Quoted from Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by permission of Harold Bloom c/o Writers Representatives, LLC (www.writersreps.com), all rights reserved

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