WHERE SHALL WISDOM BE FOUND?
By Harold Bloom
Riverhead. 284 pp. $24.95
Where shall wisdom be found? Harold Bloom finds it in the same place as the question -- the Book of Job -- as well as in Ecclesiastes and the writings of Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, St. Augustine and in the Gospel of Thomas. Bloom's new book, which compares and contrasts what he calls the "wisdom writing" in these varied works, "rises out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends." He tells us, "Since childhood, I have been comforted by Talmudic wisdom," and he cites wisdom writing that helped him rally when he "was ill, depressed, or weary." He also says, "We most of us know that wisdom immediately goes out the door when we are in crisis" and that he has "not found that wisdom literature is a comfort."
These claims may seem inconsistent, but inconsistency does not trouble him. His section on Emerson approvingly quotes that writer's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and alludes to Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes." Such familiar sayings contrast with a central delight of Bloom's book -- its inclusion of wonderful aphorisms likely to be new to many readers. One of my favorites is the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus's "Psychoanalysis is itself that disease of which it purports to be the cure," although my delight had dimmed by the time I encountered Bloom's third repetition of this remark.
As the foregoing suggests, Bloom's book is inconsistent (or multitudinous) in quality as well as in attitude. Often his fervent discussion yields shimmering insights. Consider his treatment of what he calls the "Nietzschean" position that what makes one poem more memorable than another "must be that the memorable poem, the poem that has more meaning, or starts more meaning going, is the poem that gives (or commemorates) more pain." Bloom comments, "Strong poetry is difficult, and its memorability is the consequence of a difficult pleasure, and a difficult enough pleasure is a kind of pain." What serious practitioner in any field can fail to appreciate the last part of that observation? But of course a poem's memorability is not simply a function of pain; nor is all strong or memorable poetry difficult, let alone difficult enough to support Bloom's account. Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall," a beautifully clear poem suggesting that a flower holds the secret of the universe, is just one exception to these exaggerated claims.
This is far from the only place where Bloom's confident pronouncements cry out for critical examination. Consider also his statement that "Shakespeare wisely did not" long for "a literal immortality." Why "wisely"? Slogans such as "Wisdom literature teaches us to accept natural limits" do not answer this question; they re-invite it. Nothing in Bloom's book convinces me that it is wise to accept natural limits, as opposed to valuing life enough to rage against the dying of the light. Another particularly problematic pronouncement, in the discussion of Goethe's rejected marriage proposal to a much younger woman, involves Bloom's reference to "the grotesquerie of a seventy-four-year-old groom with a nineteen-year-old bride." This categorical dismissal ignores even the possibility of a non-grotesque love that transcends externals.
Bloom's writing style likewise varies in quality. Often it is charming and pithy, as in his above-quoted observation about difficult pleasures. Yet he "awkwardizes" his book through his penchant for graceless words ending in "ize(s)," "izing" or "ization" -- including "literalization," "transcendentalizes," "ironizing," "totalizing" and "literalize." Also irritating is his repetitiveness, already noted with respect to the Kraus aphorism and emerging more gratingly in his references to "our dreadful moment in education," "all the current commissars of Resentment who throng our academies," "academic resenters who dismiss all cognitive and aesthetic standards as masks for 'racism' and 'sexism,' " "the encroachments of our Age of Resentment" and so forth. Bloom offers almost no justification for such remarks. They might appear to function largely as in-group signals to conservatives, giving his book a clubby tenor ironically reminiscent of much writing by the academic leftists he deplores. But he also inveighs against "the exploiters of the poor, who now dominate the plutocracy and oligarchy that has replaced democracy in America" and describes "the Bush bunch" as "semiliterate." Although the combination renders Bloom refreshingly hard to pigeonhole, both sorts of remarks, being formulaic, lower the book's intellectual tone. Through most of Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, however, Bloom remains engaging enough to make you want to read him, argue with him and learn from him. •
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University. Her short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Commentary, Playgirl and "Prize Stories 1990: The O. Henry Awards."
