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| HOW TO READ AND WHY | |
 August 29, 2000 
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RAY SUAREZ: I have to say, I got a kick out of the title: "How to Read and Why." It seems kinds of audacious, and at the same time takes on some of the tone of a late 19th century self-improvement book. There were a lot of them then. This would help you catch up to all the people around you. But then the Brooklyn boy in me says, "well, how to read and why? Says who?" HAROLD BLOOM: Well, I'm a Bronx boy, and this Bronx boy says, "says me," because I've just touched 70. And I started to read-- I guess I was kind of a freak at that age-- I was maybe three years old, in Yiddish, and then I taught myself to read English, and I never stopped reading since. So you're quite right. The title, which has been somewhat attacked, is deliberate, is not an irony, though it is allusive. It's an attempt to restore the 19th century mode, but then I started primarily as a student and teacher of 19th century poetry of English. I've become a kind of generalist, a very general literary critic, and perhaps by now I'm not quite a literary critic. I suppose I regard myself now as a teacher. RAY SUAREZ: Is this book a tool? Is it a handbook? I mean, if we consider that a hammer is for pounding nails and a plier might be to pull them out, what's this one for? HAROLD BLOOM: I like the analogue very much. Most people, myself included, rightly have a kind of contempt for those lists of books that many publishers call inspirational works or that many publishers call... what's the general term for it? It eludes me. RAY SUAREZ: How-to. HAROLD BLOOM: Yes, how-to books; how to do this, how to do that. It's in five parts, one on short stories, one on poetry, one on plays, and two on novels, one on the European novel and the other on certain elements in the American tradition of the novel starting with "Moby Dick" and ending with Toni Morrison. It tries to give a reader-- and I would think a reader on almost any level-- but a real reader, someone who wants to read better, someone who wants to immerse herself or himself in what they are reading, someone who wants indeed to open herself or himself up to the best that can be read, the best that has been thought. It tries to give them an entry. It sort of holds out its hand and says, "Come with me." It tries to serve as a guide. It is a handbook in many ways. RAY SUAREZ: You tell us a lot about the authors of these works by way of illuminating the works, and I was wondering, how much do you really need to know if you're about to read "Swann's Way," that Marcel Proust was a Jew, a homosexual? HAROLD BLOOM: You can pick up Proust the way you can pick up Dickens or the way you can pick up Cervantes or Shakespeare. You can count upon the passion and storytelling skill of the narrator. You can count upon the extraordinarily intense depth of characterization on Proust's part to carry you so deep into the interior of the crucial figures in the book that you will be concerned about their lives and deaths as human beings, not about the time in which they live or the political causes through which they're struggling. Indeed, even their particular sexual orientation in some sense becomes secondary because there's no essential difference between the sorrows and vicissitudes - you know -- that attend all human erotic relationships, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual. RAY SUAREZ: You're a professor of literature. You've been talking to young people for almost half a century about these works. I'm wondering if we sometimes ask people to read some of these things too early in life. I mean, right across Washington square here I read "Ulysses," and, you know, I thought it was pretty good, but then I read it 20 years later, as a middle-aged man, married 20 years, a couple of kids, some disappointments in life, and the whole experience was changed, radically changed for me. HAROLD BLOOM: Very good question. It's the kind of thing I frequently brood about also. And again, Shakespeare, since I spend about half of my time always teaching Shakespeare, is very much to the point. Teaching "King Lear" to a young woman or a young man age 20 or 21 is, in a sense, a premature activity. You are quite right. But something... If one does one's job at all creditably, something does get through. Some seed can be planted. RAY SUAREZ: Were you called to do this because of a feeling, a conviction that reading is in trouble as a pastime? HAROLD BLOOM: Reading is in horrible trouble. The problem is that we are, as everybody knows, increasingly what they call an age of information. And this book says information is... it begins by saying, "information is endlessly available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?" I suppose that in that endless ocean of information that is constituted by the Internet, there is wisdom to be found if you know where to look for it and are able to recognize it when you find it. But I don't think you can begin your education on the Internet and not drown in it. RAY SUAREZ: It's interesting to hear you say that reading is in trouble when you look at bookstores, they've become huge. They are now mountains of books. HAROLD BLOOM: There are mountains of books, and I spend much of my life in bookstores, talking in them, just browsing in them, reading in them. It's a question of what those books are. My e-mail is flooded with angry Harry Potterites denouncing a piece I published on my birthday two days ago on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, insisting that they feel their children are benefiting enormously by reading "Harry Potter." I think they are deluding themselves. I read the first "Harry Potter" book in order to write that piece. I was appalled that every sentence was a string of clichés, that there was no characterization, that every character in it spoke with the voice of every other character, that it was finally just a piece of goo. I think reading is in trouble no matter how many people crowd the bookstores and no matter what profits the publishers are turning. It's in trouble because we do not consider how to read and why. RAY SUAREZ: So you have no truck with those who say, "well, at least they're reading," whether speaking of adults or children. HAROLD BLOOM: Ray, they're not really. Their eyes are passing over a page. They are turning the page. Their minds are being numbed by cliché. No demands are being made upon them. Nothing... Nothing is happening to them. They're being schooled in what you might call unreality or the avoidance of reality. They are going in every direction except inward into the self. RAY SUAREZ: And that, finally, is the essential part of real reading, that confrontation with the self? HAROLD BLOOM: It certainly is one of the essential elements in real reading, yes. There is perhaps in the end, since we cannot know enough people and we have such trouble really knowing ourselves and overhearing ourselves, it is Shakespeare, it is Cervantes, it is Dickens, it is Jane Austen, it is Virginia Woolf, it is Tolstoy, it's Dostoyevsky who will help us to encounter ourselves, accept ourselves, or realize that we are not acceptable by ourselves and perhaps we ought to do something about it. RAY SUAREZ: Harold Bloom, it's been a great pleasure. HAROLD BLOOM: Thank you very much, Ray. Thank you. |
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