The Pedagogy of the Aesthete: Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom

Abstract

The Pedagogy of the Aesthete:Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom Daniel Rosenberg Nutters (bio) Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget them all. Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry with us. —Oscar Wilde (1965, 57) In an interview given several months before his death, Edward Said comments, "any sign, in my opinion, of defeatism or dandyism or aestheticism à la Harold Bloom with his pathetic imitation of Oscar Wilde…is to be resisted" (Mallios 2005, 299). Such mockery is not an uncommon reaction to the invocation of Bloom's name in contemporary academic circles. I speak only of my own experience as one who proudly declares his Bloomian inheritance. In our time of political urgency, however, a moment of unending academic crises and the apparent actualization of doomsday prophesies from yesteryear, Bloom can be diminished to a caricature. To find it coming from Said is surprising given Bloom's importance for the worldly critic's thinking about beginnings and each critic's shared debt to Vico and agonistic vision of history. But when Bloom decries that he is tired of hearing about the political responsibilities of the literary critic and longs for a book on the literary responsibilities of the politician, the frustrated groans from recent generations of scholars might drown out the subtle continuity his "imitation of Oscar Wilde" has with Said's own understanding of criticism as performance. If we amended Bloom by substituting intellectual for politician, surely a reader would be liable to assume it is a quote from Said! Nevertheless, at least since the publication of The Western Canon and his full-scale attack on the school of resentment, Bloom is associated with the worst of aestheticism and it is easy to see him as a latter-day Saul Bellow searching for an African Tolstoy when he quips about literary studies denigration into lesbian Eskimo studies. How might we assess his legacy in this context? If Bloom thinks of himself as a comic critic fated to get all the serious reviews, how can those serious critics miss the element of (trivial) play within his prose? Like few others, Bloom's writing perfects the truth of masks and self-reinvention. Throughout [End Page 333] his career, he has been a Blakean rebel contesting the dominance of Eliotic New Criticism, a master-theoretician and systematizer in his tetralogy, a high priest of the Western canon, and, starting with the publication of The Anatomy of Influence, or maybe a bit further back with Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? or How to Read and Why, Bloom has transformed himself again. His late style is somber yet always humane and life-affirming, highly self-conscious, introspective, and wary of his previous guises. In The Anatomy of Influence, for example, Bloom opens with a section entitled "The Point of View for My Work as a Critic." The three chapters it contains offer a powerful defense of literature and criticism that reveals a pervasive continuity throughout his corpus. His focus on the sublime, otherness, and estrangement suggest that from the beginning of his career Boom's interest has simply been literature's ability to "transpor[t] us beyond ourselves, provoking uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self" (Bloom 2011, 20). This is a sentiment we find not only in the work of Bloom, but many of his peers in the so-called Yale School, not to mention others who write under the aura of French theory. I recall my M.A. advisor, a scholar of Derridean persuasion, reminding me to cultivate my "scene of writing." My dissertation advisor would confidently substitute "scene of instruction." Whatever the technical differences between Derrida's reading of Freud and Bloom's counter-reading, those critics we associate with theory demonstrate an unrelenting commitment to literature that enables transport. The devotion to the sublime as that which transcends the human is a deeply anti-humanistic sentiment. For Emily Dickinson, transport engenders pain and, for Bloom, it provokes the "uncanny recognition" that selfhood remains...