I read Harold Bloom yesterday, in a Paris Review article from the Spring issue of 1991. I was surprised we cherished some of the same authors he stands by. Like Emerson, Plotinus and some other guy. Though you can tell he is strictly monolingual in his approach to English. There isn’t a Borderland with him which he can admit to. He keeps his stuff separate. Hence his love of Shakespeare. I can get into Shakespeare. Sure. But he thrives in it. People like him do. The monolingual English letteraty.
I loved his whole down to earth spectacle. He gave the interviewer what the interviewer wanted to see plus a whiff of Americana. Americana is a distract. A tool to fool the Other in the US. We claim a past we lived as friends and enemies. We claim a common territory which lays claim to a universal understanding & swear to defend its pristine abjection.
His psychology doesn’t allow for free pass between his past, his present. Nor his roots or whatever he wants to come off as in the paper.
I can nearly understand him. Like bouncers at a club, some people are just best let in, show them the show, and allow them the curiosity of thinking they saw what they needed to see.
It’s really a joke. Harold Bloom played a joke on the chap. Antonio was played like a Shakespearean play.
That’s what happens when you’re able to control narrative. You’re able to redirect it. You’re in control of the imagery. At best the illusion.
Yet in the lullaby Bloom allows for some truths about letters to come through. At least for me.
Cause I can identify and claim his observation as mine. He clarifies so many things. Yet what was said then hadn’t happened to me yet.