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prose.... his verse is (mostly) weak; his prose is wholly tendentious."
Bloom became notorious some twenty-five years ago by maintaining
that all interpretations of written works are misreadings of those works.
This claim anticipated deconstruction's contention that we cannot ever
truly comprehend any piece of writing.
Bloom now disagrees. But his way of conferring canonical status
tends to confirm the poststructuralist case. All is subjective. Therefore,
reasoned argument may as well be replaced by Bloom's assertions. These,
though they refer to canonicity, remain in accord with poststructuralism,
and are therefore no less damaging to the case for a reasonably arrived-at
consensus about which are the great works. Bloom, then, helped bring
about the canon assault that he now finds distasteful, and even now re–
mains more loyal to his old debunking ways than to the canon.
Most important, Bloom begs the larger question of what it is that
makes the canon significant and worth arguing over in the first place. He
insists that "the defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of
the West." But it is. For the process of informed consensus that resulted
in broad agreement about which works constitute the canon is a crucial
example ofWestern critical thought. The canon assaulters freely aver that
they are attempting to delegitimize this kind of thought. If Bloom's self–
indulgent declarations on behalf of the canon have any use, therefore, it
is to remind us that defense of the canon makes sense only in the context
of the defense of rational thought.
From another point of view, though, Bloom's belated defense of
the canon is surely a notable development. It comes on the heels of the
striking admissions by academic administrators like Phyllis Franklin and
Catherine Stimpson that political correctness rules in the university. It
also follows the retreat from the more extreme forms of deconstruction
and poststructuralism by academics like Lentricchia and Fish. And finally
it follows acknowledgments of both political correctness and the excesses
of contemporary scholarship by those who, like Graff, have been reposi–
tioning themselves between two supposed extremes. The significant de–
velopment in each of these instances is a perhaps reluctant yet irreversible
intellectual capitulation to the traditionalist critique.
At the same time, of course, the very tendencies being apologized
for and disavowed by prominent academics have tightened their hold on
the academic culture. The press's exposes, and the professors's embarrassed
disavowals of political correctness, multiculturalism, and canon assault
have left unaffected the continuing institutionalization of these practices
in the academy. All the concessions and all the repositionings have
proved to be pseudo-reformations. If anything, they have advanced rather
than slowed the tendencies they appeared to be abandoning.
