I'd like to think I've evolved significantly from my HP-crazy days, where I would rant at anybody who even remotely expressed a dislike of Harry Potter. Especially Harold Bloom, literary critic, Yale professor, author of
The Western Canon, and all around intellectual, who wrote an article (see below) about how Harry Potter would end up in trash cans in a few years. Honestly, I think I wrote him hate mail after I found out about that (no worries, no letters were ever sent). I even refused to read any of his literary criticism as a way to, so to speak, stick it to him.
But I've since "matured." In fact, I even bought one of his books on Hamlet (I've never opened it, but still, it's a start). Last night, I was up late reading his 1998 book on Shakespeare, and I discovered I actually like his writing style. This is the first thing I have read by him, and I genuinely liked it, compared with other literary criticism I have had to read. He exudes knowledge without being patronizing, and he has a certain familiarity with Shakespeare's plays that only somebody who is truly obsessed really can. He is, in his own words, an avid practicer of "bardolatry."
He is, in other words (namely,
mine), as crazy about Shakespeare as I am about Harry Potter, if not more. So I can't fault him for that.
However, I finally brought myself to re-read his 2000 article on Harry Potter, and even though my blood no longer boils (oh look, Professor Bloom, I used a cliché), I have this sense that he just doesn't
get it. By it, I mean the HP phenomenon.
From
Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes. --
"Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter."
"The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies."
Wall Street Journal, 7-11-2000
http://wrt-brooke.syr.edu/courses/205.03/bloom.html There is something fundamental that he is missing about the whole HP phenomenon. I mean, sure, HP
is commercial, more so now than ever (see: WB), and it does borrow from earlier fantasy sources like LotR, and J.K. Rowling's writing is not the greatest (though I would argue that the first book, the only one he read, did not represent her at her best), the social frenzy it represented and still represents is a far cry from a "dumbing-down." HP brings people of all generations together, and the enthusiasm with which they discuss it, and the eagerness that they have toward reading in general because of HP, is invaluable.
I just don't understand how Professor Bloom could characterize it so negatively when, for me, and for so many people, HP means so much on a personal
and intellectual level. Don't get me wrong, I have no delusions about HP as part of the "new literary canon," whatever that is, but Professor Bloom's implication that, for my generation and those below it, reading HP is worse than not reading at all, is not only incredibly pompous (who is he to say I am stupid based on the books I read), but also incorrect.
EDIT:
From a NY Times blog:
"Earlier this year Newsweek asked Bloom to name an important book he hadn’t read. His weary response: 'I cannot think of a major work I have not ingested.' "
... he may not come across as arrogant in his criticism, but in interviews he apparently feels the need to present himself as such!
As for me, I need to get back to quoting him in a more Shakespearean context -- back to work on this dreaded paper!
(http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/harold-bloom-at-77/#more-64)
