How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all.

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Opinion

I’m really torn on this reading. Had it not been for the book club, I don’t suppose I would have ever picked up this book, let alone read it cover to cover. I found this book frustrating in a variety of ways. The language is academic, highfalutin, and unnecessarily difficult. I hadn’t read any of the selected works, so I couldn’t challenge Bloom’s critiques, and on top of that, he doesn’t spoiler alert anything. So if you like going into a book without any pre-judgment or knowledge of how things transpire, this will ruin a few for you. The poetry chapters were by far the most challenging to work through. I consider the selection of poems to be extremely challenging, I had to keep a dictionary handy in order to comprehend the prose. On the other hand, there is something truly aspirational in the vastness of Bloom’s literary expertise. I quite enjoyed the conviction with which he writes. Several of us, during the discussion, agreed a more fitting title would have been What to Read and Why. Lastly, I appreciated this book because I think it gave me a point of reference for what expert literary criticism looks, sounds, and feels like. I believe after reading this, I have leveled up as a reader and re-reader.

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What I’m stealing

1. Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline

2. We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

3. Search for a difficult pleasure

4. One needs to overhear characters as well as hear them

5. Pay particular attention to intensity of response

6. When reading poetry, commit to memory whenever possible, read slowly, and read or recite aloud

7. A prime reason why we should read is to strengthen the self

8. Read in search of characters we can absorb into our own story

9. Give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures

10. Quarreling frequently and robustly, befits two strong personalities who know who they are

11. Clear our mind of "cant."

12. Close converse with a good companion leads more readily to self-reflection, and consequent psychic alteration

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Dog ears, highlights, marginalia

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? (Page 19)

Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline; (Page 19)

Her best advice is to remind us that "there is always a demon in us who whispers, 'I hate, I love,' and we cannot silence him." I cannot silence my demon, in this book anyway I will listen to him only when he whispers, "I love," as I intend no polemics here, but only to teach reading. (Page 20)

Note: Advice from Virginia Woolf

You need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others. (Page 24)

We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own. (Page 25)

Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. (Page 29)

Chekhov's artistry is never more mysterious than here, where it is palpable yet scarcely definable. (Page 41)

Note: Anton

Chekhov

Gorky says of Chekhov that he was "able to reveal in the dim sea of banality its tragic humor." It sounds naïve, and yet Chekhov's greatest power is to give us the impression, as we read, that here at last is the truth about human existence's constant blend of banal misery and tragic joy. Shakespeare was Chekhov's (and our) authority on tragic joy, but the banal does not appear in Shakespeare, even when he writes travesty or farce. (Page 41)

Note: Anton Chekhov

Short stories favor the tacit; they compel the reader to be active, and to discern explanations that the writer avoids. The reader, as I have said before, must slow down, quite deliberately, and start listening with the inner ear. Such listening overhears the characters, as well as hearing them; think of them as your characters, and wonder at what is implied, rather than told about them. (Page 66)

Note: Summary Observations - Short Stories

short story writers refrain from moral judgments (Page 66)

Note: Summary Observations - Short Stories

we read the two schools differently, questing for truth with Chekhov, or for the turning-inside-out of truth with the KafkanBorgesians (Page 67)

Note: Summary Observations - Short Stories

Our energies of response are different in quality, but they are equally intense. (Page 67)

Note: Intensity of response is useful heuristic to cultivate.

but something in poets likes to manifest its creative exuberance by packing much into little. By "visionary" I mean a mode of perception in which objects and persons are seen with an augmented intensity that has spiritual overtones (Page 72)

Note: Poems - William Blake

I have arrived at a first crux in how to read poems: wherever possible, memorize them. (Page 73)

Note: Poetry

Poems can help us to speak to ourselves more clearly and more fully, and to overhear that speaking. (Page 79)

Note: Poetry - Reoccurring theme is “overhearing”

Poetry, Mill implies, is also overheard rather than heard. (Page 79)

Note: Poetry - Overhearing creates an intimacy or a knowing of the author or character. Like eavesdropping on an internal monologue?

I maintain, a prime reason why we should read is to strengthen the self, then both Whitman and Dickinson are essential poets. (Page 89)

Note: Poetry

The shock of overhearing yourself is that you apprehend an unexpected otherness. (Page 89)

Note: Poetry - overhearing

"I" is the "Myself" of Song of Myself, or Whitman's poetic personality. "The other I am" is the "Me myself," his true, inner personality. (Page 91)

Note: Poetry - this exemplifies the difficulty in reading poetry

Whitman knows his poetic persona very well, since (according to Vico) we know only what we ourselves have made. His inner self or "real me" he also knows, astonishingly well when we reflect how few among us have such knowledge. (Page 91)

Note: Poetry - Walt Whitman

We learn explicitly by reading Whitman what so many Americans seem to know implicitly, that the American soul does not feel free unless it is alone, or "alone with Jesus," as our evangelicals put it. (Page 91)

Note: Poetry - Whitman

Brontë (Page 94)

Note: Poetry - the coolest name in all of literature

She read the Bible pretty much as she read Shakespeare and Dickens, in search of characters she could absorb into her own drama. (Page 95)

Note: Poetry - Emily Dickenson

Many traditions tell us it is unsafe to maintain erotic mourning for longer than a year, and "The Unquiet Grave" memorably enforces such wisdom: just one day too much, and the lost beloved is startled out of her sleep. (Page 103)

Note: Poetry - “The Unquiet Grave”

after a year and a day, mourning is dangerous to the survivor and troublesome to the dead. (Page 103)

Note: Poetry - “Unquiet Grave”

Try chanting the poem aloud, repeatedly. Its surging power is deeply energizing for the attentive reader, and I strongly recommend the poem for memorization. (Page 107)

Note: Poetry - reading aloud and chanting/repeating

He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on. (Page 121)

Note: Poetry - William Wordsworth

The poet Shelley, who was in some respects Wordsworth's involuntary disciple, once defined the poetic Sublime as an experience that persuaded readers to give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures. Since the reading of the best poems, stories, novels, and plays necessarily constitutes more difficult pleasure than most of what is given to us visually by television, films, and video games, Shelley's definition is crucial to this book. (Page 122)

Note: Poetry

Sublime began to mean a visible loftiness in nature and art alike, with aspects of power, freedom, wildness, intensity, and the possibility of terror. (Page 122)

Note: Poetry - on the evolution of the meaning of sublime

I hope that the reader will go on to the remainder of this torso of a poem without me, remembering always to slow down and read very slowly, and preferably out loud, whether to oneself or to others. (Page 134)

Note: Poetry - slowly and out loud

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Updated: Jul 13, 2023

The reader will be reminded that all great poetry should be read aloud, whether in solitude or to others. (Page 139)

Note: Poetry - repeating sentiment

Refreshingly, they quarrel frequently and robustly, as befits two strong personalities who know who they are. (Page 145)

Shakespeare's women are capable of maintaining authentic friendships with one another, but not his men. Sometimes this seems to me as true of life as of Shakespeare, or is it another instance of Shakespeare's influence upon life? (Page 146)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote- what are authentic friendships?

Open the book at random, and you are likely to find yourself in the midst of one of their exchanges, angry or whimsical, but ultimately always loving, and founded upon mutual respect. Even when they argue most fiercely, their courtesy is unfailing, and they never stop learning from listening to the other. And by hearing, they change. (Page 146)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote

Cervantes, like Shakespeare, will entertain any reader, but again like Shakespeare he will create a more active reader, according to the reader's capabilities. (Page 149)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote

Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all novels, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists.

There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. (Page 150)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote

passion, even when it kills, is a mode of play (Page 150)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma

What makes the Charterhouse wonderful for the reader is how much unmixed affection is inspired in us by the style and panache of Gina and Fabrice, of Clélia and Mosca. They delight us all: they have admirable pride, verve, honor, authentic lust, and a superb sprezzatura: they truly are Stendhal's unhappy/happy few, whom he can commend to the happy few, ourselves as his readers.

Stendhal bravely addresses us as if we were Henry V's cohorts at Agincourt, about to be led on to glory. (Page 152)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Stendhal: Charterhouse Parma

A profound ironist, who employs her irony to refine aspects of Shakespeare's invention of the human. (Page 156)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Jane Austen: Emma (emphasis on Shakespeare’s invention of the human)

The strong selves of her heroines are wrought with a fine individuality that attests to Austen's own reserves of power. Had she not died so soon, she would have been capable of creating a Shakespearean diversity of persons, despite her narrowly, deliberately limited social range of representation. She had learned Shakespeare's most difficult lesson: to manifest sympathy towards all of her characters, even the least admirable, while detaching herself even from her favorite, Emma. (Page 158)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Jane Austen: Emma

Ideological cheerleading does not necessarily nurture great, or even good, readers and writers; instead it seems to malform them. (Page 159)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Jane Austen: Emma

Like Johnson, though far more implicitly, Austen urges us to clear our mind of "cant." "Cant," in the Johnsonian sense, means platitudes, pious expressions, groupthink. Austen has no use for it, and neither should we. Those who now read Austen "politically" are not reading her at all. (Page 159)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Jane Austen: Emma

A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations is grand public entertainment. It joins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and a round dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as works certain to survive our ongoing Information Age, and not just as film or television. We will go on reading Great Expectations as we will continue to read Hamlet and Macbeth: (Page 163)

archetype of all those young women, in fiction or in actuality, who are pragmatically doom-eager because they seek complete realization of their potential while maintaining an idealism that rejects selfishness (Page 176)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

sexual jealousy, the most aesthetic of all psychic maladies (Page 184)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time

The Magic Mountain will find it a novel of gentle high seriousness, and ultimately a work of great passion, intellectual and emotional. (Page 189)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

Why read? Because you can know, intimately, only a very few people, and perhaps you never know them at all. After reading The Magic Mountain you know Hans Castorp thoroughly, and he is greatly worth knowing. (Page 191)

Castorp is intensely interested in everything, in all possible knowledge, but knowledge as a good in itself. Knowledge is in no way power for Castorp, whether over others or himself; it is in no way Faustian.

Hans Castorp is enormously valuable for readers in the year 2000 (and beyond) because he incarnates a now archaic but always relevant ideal: the cultivation of self-development until the individual can realize all of her or his potential. Eagerness to confront ideas and personalities combines in Hans with remarkable spiritual stamina; never merely skeptical, he is also never overwhelmed. (Page 191)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

Cervantine, where close converse with a good companion leads more readily to self-reflection, and consequent psychic alteration (Page 194)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Summary Observations

You do not read Don Quixote or In Search of Lost Time for the plot, but for the progressive development of the characters and for the gradual unfolding, indeed the revelation, of the author's vision. (Page 196)

Note: Novels, Part 1 - Summary Observations

Now Hamlet has also become the representation of intelligence itself, and that is neither Western nor Eastern, male nor female, black nor white, but merely the human at its best, because Shakespeare is the first truly multicultural writer.

One learns from Shakespeare that self-overhearing is the prime function of soliloquy. (Page 205)

Note: Plays - William Shakespeare: Hamlet

The importance of being Earnest (the name that both Gwendolen and Cecily desire for a husband), as Wilde knows but does not tell us, is that earnest (or Ernest) goes back to the Indo-European root er, which means to originate. To be earnest is to be original, (Page 226)

Note: Plays - Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Wilde might have titled his best play: The Importance of Being Insouciant, except that, as we have seen, the secret meaning of earnest for Wilde was to originate. To be original was to lie, but to lie insouciantly, in the interest of art. (Page 229)

Note: Plays - Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

He is American through and through, fierce in his desire to avenge himself, but always strangely free, probably because no American truly feels free unless he or she is inwardly alone. (Page 238)

Note: Novels, Part 2 - Herman Melville: Moby-Dick

Does this grand invention retain more than antiquarian interest, particularly here in the United States, where Jews, Protestants, and Catholics begin to blend together in what I have called "the American Religion," an indigenous national faith that I suspect we do not yet begin to understand? (Page 279)

Note: Epilogue - Completing the Work

Terms to define:

quatrains

obstreperous, cockle, spurge, penury, calcine, colloped, presage, fell cirque, mews, mad brewage, rood, palsied, dotard, nonce, knelled. (Page 81) Note: Poetry - Tom O’Bedlam Define these terms.

exegetes, “florabundance” (Page 89)

phantasmagoria (Page 108)

terza rima (Page 130)

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