Early this Sunday morning, I pulled Harold Bloom’s Genius from a shelf in my study. Bloom devoted six pages to William Faulkner in this work. Bloom, the late great Yale professor, “America’s prominent literary critic,” had by the time Genius was published in 2002, already written 26 books. The sub-title for Genius is, “A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.” All in 814 pages!
On my shelf with Genius, are three other books by Harold Bloom. The 2005, Jesus and Yahweh, the 2019 Possessed by Memory, and from 2020, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. This book’s subtitle is, “The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death.” I had two or three other Bloom books but gave them to an orthopedic surgeon in Richmond. Sir William, who saved me from a Sea of Arthritic Troubles, expertly provided two new knees. Ah, the joy of running at age 81!
I will admit, however, that without tennis from age 10, and given my love of literature, I could be as large as Harold Bloom was, from a sedentary existence of reading.
In Genius, Bloom with a photographic memory, gave four of six pages to Faulkner’s Light in August. What famous novel precedes Bloom’s discussion of Light? Mark Twain’s brilliant Huckleberry Finn. Bloom calls it “a book loved alike by religious and irreligious.”
A statement possibly untrue today in our black book milieu. Would that I had matched Huck with Light, instead of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But that’s for next week.
Bloom wrote that literature of genius like Faulkner’s is our best path for reaching wisdom, which he believes is “the true use of literature for life.” But he says this path “depends upon deep reading.” In the book club I started for the local community college, we agree to read each novel twice before we meet to discuss two novels, as we will this Thursday, September 19th.
From the long list of novels that William Faulkner wrote, Light in August is Bloom’s second favorite. His first is As I Lay Dying. The book club read this novel last year. Bloom also declares that “Faulkner is incontestably the major North American novelist since Henry James.” I am pleased to say we read Henry at our last meeting. All, I believe, appreciated The Master, Colm Tóibín’s fictional story of Henry James. But most of us were less enthusiastic about Henry’s What Maisie Knew.
Bloom asks a question, which is one I will ask on Thursday. Does the tragedy of Joe Christmas in Light in August, hold up in the United States of 2024, rather than as it did in 1932, when the novel was published?
Next week: An answer to this question, plus the movie version of Beloved.
Yes unfortunately Joe is not only alive but thriving.
Similar dehumanizing behavior is contaminating minds today with a kind of mental slavery, ie turning fact to fiction, continuing lies in the face of repeated denouncement and false realities seen with our own eyes. how ironic a political candidates media platform is called "Truth Social ." The fallout creates mind numbing fatigue , exhaustion and constant awareness of corrosive and incendiary mind bending and division.