On the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life

Abstract

It is a big book, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), and it was written by a big man: Fat and famous, with more than twenty books to his credit, Bloom holds named professorships at two universities. Immediately upon the book’s publication, reviews appeared by the dozens, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human was nominated for a National Book Award even before it was published (Gates and Chang 1998, 76). There was no hiding from it, not even in the ivory tower, where literature professors prefer to focus on small, scrupulous books written by scholars who overindulge mostly in rigor. Perhaps especially in the ivory tower, there was no hiding from the fact that Bloom’s 745-page Grand Tour of the Bard’s Personalities takes dead aim at us, the professionals, and the more specialized tours we have been offering, of such subjects as the Bard’s Racism, the Bard’s Misogyny, or the Bard’s Subservience to Power. Bloom needed only to announce, “I scarcely agree” with contemporary orthodoxy, with the “professional resenters” who “insist that the aesthetic stance is itself an ideology” (Bloom 1998, 9), in order to move us to defer or, more usually, to demur. Such, Bloom might say, is the power of personality—or of the anxiety of influence.

Ben Jorison remained closer to Marlowe’s mode than to Shakespeare’s in that Jonson’s personages are also cartoons, caricatures without inwardness.

—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human