Harold Bloom says J.K. Rowling is cliched, Stephen King inadequate; what, then, should we read?

April 7, 3:05 AMBook ExaminerMichelle Kerns

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     Mr. Harold Bloom

To call the Yale University Professor and book critic Mr. Harold Bloom a Harry Potter fan would be about as appropriate as asking the Pope to be a birth control pill spokesman.

In 2000, when Harry Potter mania was beginning its inexorable climb up the publishing record lists, Mr. Bloom said in the Wall Street Journal:

[Rowling's] prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers....How to read Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do. Is there any redeeming education use to Rowling?

....Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? Yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter.

Readers continued to persevere and Mr. Bloom continued in his unmitigated disdain of all things Potter, as well as anything else smacking of literary slumming.

When Stephen King was awarded the National Book Foundation's 2003 medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Mr. Bloom had a fit, calling the Foundation's decision "another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life."

He went on to call Mr. King

an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.

and threw in a few more hits at Ms. Rowling for good measure:

Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

 

The public -- according to Harold Bloom, anyway -- is an ass.

In Mr. Bloom's book How to Read and Why (published, ironically, the same year as Stephen King's memoir, On Writing -- more on that later), he expounds his theory of why people should read, his five principles of reading well, and lists the works that have made it past his personal litmus test of literary quality.

"To enrich mind or spirit or personality" is what Mr. Bloom believes the sole goal of reading should be, and his five principles of reading well are:

1. Clear your mind of academic cant.

2. Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read.

3. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

4. One must be an inventor to read well.

5. Good reading should involve the recovery of the ironic.

Interesting? Yes. Useful to the common reader? Scarcely. Mr. Bloom appears to believe that reading should be damn hard work. Reading for fun? For the joy of getting caught up in a good story? To escape the cares of this life? Bah, humbug.

What is truly amusing about all of this, however, are the novels that Mr. Bloom recommends readers clear their minds of cant and light scholarly candles with and whatnot; take a look (I include here only the recommended novels, not the short stories, poems, or plays)

WWHBR? (What Would Harold Bloom Read?) 

 

Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal

Emma - Jane Austen

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

Most of these books are read and loved by book fiends everywhere (yes, even those of us who slum about with copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) though I doubt it crosses our minds to recover the ironic or to improve our neighborhoods.

We read and enjoy these books because they are, simply, good. Mr. Bloom seems to be laboring under the strange delusion that anyone who reads for this lowbrow reason is a heathen and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. In fact, if Mr. Bloom's own prose is anything to judge by, he'd rather that everything be written as if it were an over-thick bean soup: dense and probably nutritious, but hardly a joy to consume. He would do well to crack open a copy of Strunk and White and cast an eye upon some of the rules therein. "Omit needless words," and "Write in a way that comes naturally" spring to mind.

Harold Bloom and Stephen King represent the ultimate literary face-off: those who elevate writing style above story, and those who believe the style should be subordinate to the enjoyment of the story. Like aged Capulets and Montagues, both sides -- not unlike Mr. Bloom and Mr. King -- have been hammering away at each other for decades. What better fodder for the Book Examiner?

On Wednesday, we'll look at Mr. King's anti-Bloom arguments and peruse his list of recommended readings in On Writing. Then, we'll discuss them both in a Harold Bloom vs. Stephen King fracas: Highbrow Reading versus Literary Slumming.

Have an opinion? I know every self-respecting book fiend does. Leave a comment below or direct your musings to michellekerns@surewest.net

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