shakespeare and the invention of the human

Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt to Anne Barton and A.D. or taxi driver, you.While generous in expressing his indebtedness to critics he finds valuable, from Dr. Bloom here, as everywhere in his work, is a true elitist: Ph.D. Shakespeare is bound to get bad reviews from the professionals - I have in mind here folks like Gary Taylor and Gerald Graff - because it's a call, and a splendid one, to just that kind of reading the professionals fear and are incapable of, the full engagement of the mind and soul with the book at hand. The only thing more astonishing than Bloom's claim for the centrality of Shakespeare is that the claim will almost certainly be derided by the apparatchiks currently in charge of departments of English. But into the midst of this spiritual desert comes Bloom, proclaiming at the top of his voice - alas, like his least favorite prophet, Jeremiah, he seems to know no other register - that literature matters because it helps us save or at least possess our souls, and that no, that's no, literature matters as intensely as Shakespeare's just because Shakespeare, in any human context, is the greatest writer who ever lived. What an astonishing claim, especially in the currently politicized academic climate. And now at the end (and Bloom knows it's the end: this is in every sense a summary book) he argues that such salvation exists, if anywhere, most splendidly in the works of Shakespeare, the heart of the heart of the Western canon, the man who - he's really serious about this - invented us. devoted, with an intensity that needs to be called 'holy,' to understanding literature as the human testament, as, however ambiguously, the means to secular salvation. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is, simply, the book of a lifetime, the culmination of a career - twenty-two previous books, and countless essays, editions, introductions, etc. This, in other words, is not an objective review.

He was my teacher and my dissertation advisor at Yale a role equivalent to that of 'Godfather' in Mario Puzo's universe - and has continued to be my friend, adversary, rabbi, and counselor. I have to begin by acknowledging that Harold Bloom has been, for almost forty years, a major presence in my life. Harold Bloom Riverhead Books, $35, 768 pp.

Shakespeare and the invention of the human