Eloquence: A Response to Harold Bloom's <em>The American Canon</em>

Abstract

Eloquence:A Response to Harold Bloom's The American Canon Robert L. Caserio (bio) A "literary" canon might be thought of as a treasury of eloquence, an ultimate resource of community expression. Harold Bloom suggests that possibility in his book's opening chapter, about Emerson. Juxtaposing a passage from Emerson's "Politics" with "this time of Trump" (2019a, 14) and with the President's (and his party's) "culture of narcissism," Bloom cites the following: "We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defense of those interests in which they find themselves. … A party is perpetually corrupted by personality" (2019a, 14). Thus a passage by Emerson leaps out of its era (1843) to provide us an exact utterance with which to articulate our present condition. Utterance of this eloquent kind provides a rhetoric that can re-frame our vision of things and persons, so that we see them suddenly for what they are, instead of what we thought them to be. Bloom also measures the "time of Trump" in his chapter about Nathanael West. Shagpoke Whipple, the fascist president of the United States in West's A Cool Million (1934), "talks in terms," Bloom comments, "that now can be read all but daily in our media" (2019a, 283). A speech of Trump's in October, 2018, Bloom thinks, unwittingly even exceeds the "satirical genius" (283) that propelled West. Nevertheless, Bloom proposes, it is West's ghost that indites the President's stupidities. Indeed, "West's ghost now writes not only Shagpokian speeches, but the very text of reality in America" (284). Not limited to its time and place, West's narrative fiction materializes imaginative possibilities in a language that can strike us as permanently definitive. The American Canon involves fifty-seven writers, with Emerson at their head, as framers of "the very text of reality in America." In doing so, Bloom collects more than a treasury of eloquence. He also sets himself a heroic task: to unify a diverse population of essayists, poets, dramatists, and novelists, with all their variety of genres and styles, so that they tell a single national story, complemented by a single literary history. Not surprisingly, such an all-encompassing effort is full of hazards. How can everything be made to fit? To surmount the difficulties Bloom thematizes the treasury, basing it on [End Page 431] what he calls "wisdom writing," for which Emerson is the epitome, and the assigned source. The theme of the wisdom is a victorious limitless selfhood: in Bloom's words, "Emerson insists upon the necessity of the single self achieving a total autonomy" (2019a, 14). What unfolds after Emerson is for Bloom a chain of experiments in Emersonian success. "The territory all [the writer-experimenters] light out for is ultimately themselves" (241); indeed, the territory is the place of "worship of the god within" (110). Naming "the god within" a daemon, Bloom follows Emerson's diction. In "The Poet" (1842-1844) Emerson writes: "Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody" (i.e, by a verse melody; Emerson 1951, 278). In "Fate" (1852) Emerson, speaking of personal defects and illnesses, remarks that "And as every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity" (Emerson 1957, 350). In the same essay he recommends that "when a man is the victim of his fate," he should "leave…the daemon who suffers, [and] take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain" (351). As these examples suggest, Emerson uses this term fluidly: without fixating on it, I would propose. Indeed, as I shall be pointing out, he early in his career criticizes fixation on it; and he criticizes the phenomenon again in the final (1876) version of his poem "Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love." But Bloom, foregrounding the term, reifies it, as an inward, self-divisive component of the interior god, according to which his writers...