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Yeah, sure - I just think it's profoundly cynical. He's doing this really typically academic thing of making out that people who have a different approach or tr

Yeah, sure - I just think it's profoundly cynical. He's doing this really typically academic thing of making out that people who have a different approach or tradition to a subject are actually not 'doing science', as it were. "Those who now read Austen "politically" are not reading her at all." Ultimately, it comes down to jockeying for a limited number (in literature, very limited) of jobs. If people like Bloom can convince us that 'real reading' is not political reading, then people who take a political approach to literature won't get 'real reading' jobs in universities. Which they often don't, not because of this weak reasoning, but because apolitical hires are generally a safer choice. He's providing rhetorical cover for the supression of political discourse, to the detriment of his own field. It's depressing, but it's the reason why so many inherently apolitical techniques and schools of thought flourished in the post-McCarthy era humanities.

exolymph 5y ago
So it's not that you struggle to parse his meaning, you just disagree with him and doubt his motives. Ironic that you didn't simply say that openly at first.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  Well, no, I also think his use of the word ideology is nonsensical. You can understand what somebody is getting at while also thinking they are making a really weak argument. (To clarify, I think his argument is bad on a straight formal level. I also happen to disagree with his position).
yesenadam 5y ago
Thanks to you and exolymph for this fascinating thread! I hear what you mean. There are different schools of thought (e.g. yours and Bloom's), each with the idea they are right and the others are wrong. Well, "no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error"[1]. I disagree with everything about your characterization of political/apolitical schools of thought etc, I guess because I'm closer to Bloom's views than the, uh, other end of the aesthetic-political spectrum, the everything-is-political-always-ness of some Marxist academics. Saying Bloom is saying what he does because of a struggle for English department jobs, not because he thinks it true, seems itself...extremely cynical, to say the least. The reason for everything is not a political reason. Anyway, Bloom was talking about ideological writers, not academics/critics. I just came across this in a recent article[0]: “The hardest thing in the world to do,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 article for Esquire, “is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out.” Of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he quipped, “see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are.” Hemingway was not discounting the political, merely clarifying its relationship to literature. “Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.” Be it a piece of fiction, criticism, or journalism, great literature has always contained a social and political dimension with moral ramifications for the society in which it was conceived and written. But its unique role is to explore a version of reality that others may have overlooked—indeed, there may be nothing more subversive than honestly re-creating one’s own experience. However, when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are—their work might succeed in persuading people but, ultimately, it fails to achieve transcendent resonance. That seemed a great way of describing what it is for a writer to think ideologically in Bloom's sense: "when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are". Then everything slopes the same way, instead of having an endlessly varied terrain. But perhaps you will see in that idea the same "suppression of political discourse" as in Bloom. I have to give another passage, from the last chapter of Chesterton's Heretics[1] (1905), taking the other side—talking up the art of "ideological writers", and even dealing with anti-ideological critics! Apologies for length: A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and G. B. S., enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. And they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. Mr. Shaw is a good dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good politician. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice and natural genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything else to be is a conventional poet. He desires to be the poet of his people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding their origins, celebrating their destiny. He desires to be Poet Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire. Having been given by the gods originality—that is, disagreement with others—he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking instance of all...is the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy of pure art. He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke. He has since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial. He was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about the London omnibus. He was careless in "The Time Machine," for that dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even cautious, in "Mankind in the Making," for that deals with the day after to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult. But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to be writing "with a purpose." Suppose that any cool and cynical art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think, most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things that stood first were "Soldiers Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and "The Time Machine," by a man called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we want doctrines we go to the great artists. But it is clear from the psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have to go to the doctrinaires. ...I would ask...that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by being taken for artists. No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of his country by the French. Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to enrage us. No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us, it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. If a man comes into Hyde Park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. And an artist is only a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has anything to say. [0] https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-trouble-with-protest-literature/ https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-troub... [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap20 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap20
- pasabagi 5y ago
  The typical picture you have of a political reading is somebody reads a poem by Basho about crickets chirping or something and then tells you that it's about the anxiety of Edo period japan about colonialism. In this case, I think you can make a non-cynical argument that this is a limiting way to read the poem, and you might be better off with some close analysis or whatever. In the general case, especially in the specific case of novels, it's absurd. Novels were born in broadsheet newspapers - the original texts for many of the stand-outs of the genre were published in serial format, right next to adverts for soap and opinion columns. The names he invokes kind of damn his argument rather than support it: George Eliot edited a left wing magazine, Emily Dickinson was published in the Springfield Republican, and so on. I was honestly surprised to find out that Austen was self published: a big point of episotlary novels is that they can be published letter-by-letter in a weekly paper. Doestoevsky was famous for loving newspapers - not because that's where his novels were published, but because that's where the live written culture of his time was. Bahktin said (iirc) that his novels were pure ideology, in the sense that the raw material of the work was woven from the rants, commonplaces, and opinions they were published side by side with. Hemmingway is more or less operating at the opposite pole of the spectrum - and 'operating' is the key word here. He had a very specific idea about how to write, what language to use, that is very different than most novelists - part of that is obvious just in the way Hemmingway reads, but part of it is also implicit - while a really typical novelist like Dickens is obsessed with not just how people talk, but also why, what causes they are involved in, arguments they make, Hemmingway is writing much later, when novels were standalone things you didn't get in serial format, and you could make some kind of case for a transcendent, 'high art' novel. Now, I thought it was cynical because this stuff is obvious to somebody like Bloom. He knows that to read your average novel while ignoring the political context is like listening to Bach and putting your fingers in your ears and going 'lalalala' every time you hit a religious bit. And, when you put Bloom in his political context, he's a man who got his first job in a couple of years after two americans were electrocuted to death for being communist spies, when academics everywhere were being frozen out for having the wrong politics, so you can really see why the incentives were there to go 'lalala' when you hit some of the racy political sections in your average 19th c. novel. When it comes to varied or sloping terrain, I think it's totally possible to have a varied ideological terrain in a novel. In fact, I think it's unavoidable. I think that's absolutely a good principle when reading novels: to pay attention to at which point they depart from the course set out by the author's various enlistments. That's different to saying a novel is not 'ideolgical' - it's saying a novel is composed of many different and often contradictory ideologies. I think this is definitely a reasonable approach, if you imagine the novel placed right in the middle of a lively comment section of a tabloid.

exolymph 5y ago

So it's not that you struggle to parse his meaning, you just disagree with him and doubt his motives. Ironic that you didn't simply say that openly at first.

pasabagi 5y ago
Well, no, I also think his use of the word ideology is nonsensical. You can understand what somebody is getting at while also thinking they are making a really weak argument. (To clarify, I think his argument is bad on a straight formal level. I also happen to disagree with his position).

yesenadam 5y ago

Thanks to you and exolymph for this fascinating thread! I hear what you mean. There are different schools of thought (e.g. yours and Bloom's), each with the idea they are right and the others are wrong. Well, "no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error"[1]. I disagree with everything about your characterization of political/apolitical schools of thought etc, I guess because I'm closer to Bloom's views than the, uh, other end of the aesthetic-political spectrum, the everything-is-political-always-ness of some Marxist academics. Saying Bloom is saying what he does because of a struggle for English department jobs, not because he thinks it true, seems itself...extremely cynical, to say the least. The reason for everything is not a political reason. Anyway, Bloom was talking about ideological writers, not academics/critics. I just came across this in a recent article[0]: “The hardest thing in the world to do,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 article for Esquire, “is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out.” Of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he quipped, “see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are.” Hemingway was not discounting the political, merely clarifying its relationship to literature. “Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.” Be it a piece of fiction, criticism, or journalism, great literature has always contained a social and political dimension with moral ramifications for the society in which it was conceived and written. But its unique role is to explore a version of reality that others may have overlooked—indeed, there may be nothing more subversive than honestly re-creating one’s own experience. However, when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are—their work might succeed in persuading people but, ultimately, it fails to achieve transcendent resonance. That seemed a great way of describing what it is for a writer to think ideologically in Bloom's sense: "when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be, rather than how they are". Then everything slopes the same way, instead of having an endlessly varied terrain. But perhaps you will see in that idea the same "suppression of political discourse" as in Bloom. I have to give another passage, from the last chapter of Chesterton's Heretics[1] (1905), taking the other side—talking up the art of "ideological writers", and even dealing with anti-ideological critics! Apologies for length: A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything. So we find that when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and G. B. S., enter our arena, they bring with them not only startling and arresting art, but very startling and arresting dogmas. And they care even more, and desire us to care even more, about their startling and arresting dogmas than about their startling and arresting art. Mr. Shaw is a good dramatist, but what he desires more than anything else to be is a good politician. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice and natural genius an unconventional poet; but what he desires more than anything else to be is a conventional poet. He desires to be the poet of his people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh, understanding their origins, celebrating their destiny. He desires to be Poet Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and public-spirited desire. Having been given by the gods originality—that is, disagreement with others—he desires divinely to agree with them. But the most striking instance of all...is the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in a sort of insane infancy of pure art. He began by making a new heaven and a new earth, with the same irresponsible instinct by which men buy a new necktie or button-hole. He began by trifling with the stars and systems in order to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the universe for a joke. He has since become more and more serious, and has become, as men inevitably do when they become more and more serious, more and more parochial. He was frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but he is serious about the London omnibus. He was careless in "The Time Machine," for that dealt only with the destiny of all things; but he is careful, and even cautious, in "Mankind in the Making," for that deals with the day after to-morrow. He began with the end of the world, and that was easy. Now he has gone on to the beginning of the world, and that is difficult. But the main result of all this is the same as in the other cases. The men who have really been the bold artists, the realistic artists, the uncompromising artists, are the men who have turned out, after all, to be writing "with a purpose." Suppose that any cool and cynical art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed with the conviction that artists were greatest when they were most purely artistic, suppose that a man who professed ably a humane aestheticism, as did Mr. Max Beerbohm, or a cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had cast his eye over the whole fictional literature which was recent in the year 1895, and had been asked to select the three most vigorous and promising and original artists and artistic works, he would, I think, most certainly have said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in art, the things that stood first were "Soldiers Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and "The Time Machine," by a man called Wells. And all these men have shown themselves ingrainedly didactic. You may express the matter if you will by saying that if we want doctrines we go to the great artists. But it is clear from the psychology of the matter that this is not the true statement; the true statement is that when we want any art tolerably brisk and bold we have to go to the doctrinaires. ...I would ask...that men such as these of whom I have spoken should not be insulted by being taken for artists. No man has any right whatever merely to enjoy the work of Mr. Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the invasion of his country by the French. Mr. Shaw writes either to convince or to enrage us. No man has any business to be a Kiplingite without being a politician, and an Imperialist politician. If a man is first with us, it should be because of what is first with him. If a man convinces us at all, it should be by his convictions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's from political passion, we are hating it for the same reason that the poet loved it; if we dislike him because of his opinions, we are disliking him for the best of all possible reasons. If a man comes into Hyde Park to preach it is permissible to hoot him; but it is discourteous to applaud him as a performing bear. And an artist is only a performing bear compared with the meanest man who fancies he has anything to say. [0] https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-trouble-with-protest-literature/ https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-troub... [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap20 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm#chap20

pasabagi 5y ago
The typical picture you have of a political reading is somebody reads a poem by Basho about crickets chirping or something and then tells you that it's about the anxiety of Edo period japan about colonialism. In this case, I think you can make a non-cynical argument that this is a limiting way to read the poem, and you might be better off with some close analysis or whatever. In the general case, especially in the specific case of novels, it's absurd. Novels were born in broadsheet newspapers - the original texts for many of the stand-outs of the genre were published in serial format, right next to adverts for soap and opinion columns. The names he invokes kind of damn his argument rather than support it: George Eliot edited a left wing magazine, Emily Dickinson was published in the Springfield Republican, and so on. I was honestly surprised to find out that Austen was self published: a big point of episotlary novels is that they can be published letter-by-letter in a weekly paper. Doestoevsky was famous for loving newspapers - not because that's where his novels were published, but because that's where the live written culture of his time was. Bahktin said (iirc) that his novels were pure ideology, in the sense that the raw material of the work was woven from the rants, commonplaces, and opinions they were published side by side with. Hemmingway is more or less operating at the opposite pole of the spectrum - and 'operating' is the key word here. He had a very specific idea about how to write, what language to use, that is very different than most novelists - part of that is obvious just in the way Hemmingway reads, but part of it is also implicit - while a really typical novelist like Dickens is obsessed with not just how people talk, but also why, what causes they are involved in, arguments they make, Hemmingway is writing much later, when novels were standalone things you didn't get in serial format, and you could make some kind of case for a transcendent, 'high art' novel. Now, I thought it was cynical because this stuff is obvious to somebody like Bloom. He knows that to read your average novel while ignoring the political context is like listening to Bach and putting your fingers in your ears and going 'lalalala' every time you hit a religious bit. And, when you put Bloom in his political context, he's a man who got his first job in a couple of years after two americans were electrocuted to death for being communist spies, when academics everywhere were being frozen out for having the wrong politics, so you can really see why the incentives were there to go 'lalala' when you hit some of the racy political sections in your average 19th c. novel. When it comes to varied or sloping terrain, I think it's totally possible to have a varied ideological terrain in a novel. In fact, I think it's unavoidable. I think that's absolutely a good principle when reading novels: to pay attention to at which point they depart from the course set out by the author's various enlistments. That's different to saying a novel is not 'ideolgical' - it's saying a novel is composed of many different and often contradictory ideologies. I think this is definitely a reasonable approach, if you imagine the novel placed right in the middle of a lively comment section of a tabloid.