GENIUSA Mosaic of One HundredExemplary Creative Minds.

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By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
Published: October 27, 2002

GENIUS
A Mosaic of One Hundred
Exemplary Creative Minds.
By Harold Bloom.
Illustrated. 814 pp. New York:
Warner Books. $35.95.

Few literary critics court ridicule as compulsively as Harold Bloom. His overproduction of doorstopping volumes of popularizing surveys of world literature feels more like brand extension than scholarship. His choice, for his latest book, of title (''Genius''), publisher (the mass-market Warner Books) and organizing principle (''one hundred exemplary creative minds'') is more Kmart than Yale. The book itself displays all the faults that have led fellow academics to disapprove of him. He repeats himself so often that his favorite words acquire the ring of revolutionary slogans (Originality! Vitality!) or ritual denunciations (Resenters! Historicizers!). He makes grandiose and indefensible claims without explaining or arguing for them. He cloaks himself Wizard-of-Oz-like in the polysyllabic hermeticism of cabala and Gnosticism, with little seeming regard for the violence his borrowings may do to those systems or to the comprehensibility of his prose. And oh, that prose! Ranting, pontificating, self-interrupting -- every few pages bring another aside on the deplorable state of literary studies today or the evils of the Internet -- it defies every rule of elegance and economy.

Bloom is not so easily dismissed, however. His style may be disheveled and his book shockingly attuned to the demands of the marketplace, but both have a virtue that trumps those flaws: authenticity. Bloom's focus on genius is not just commercial opportunism, the usual blather about the moral import of cultural literacy or part of the national obsession with success, though critics will find elements of all three if they go looking for them. Bloom has been writing about genius since at least ''The Anxiety of Influence'' (1973), if not before. His famous theory of poetic production as a struggle between strong older poets and aspiring younger poets is in essence a theory of genius -- of how geniuses defend themselves against the might of previous ones. Strength and genius overlap in the Bloomian cosmos, even if they're not exactly the same thing. Both are terms for power.

Don't confuse Bloom's view of power with that of Michel Foucault, whose critique of power inspired the materialist and historicist approaches to literature that Bloom complains about so bitterly. For Foucault, power was everything and everywhere: all institutions, all discourses, all social relations could be -- must be -- reinterpreted as struggles for power. For Bloom, power is rare, mysterious, dangerous and inexplicable, although we never stop trying to explain it. Instances of this power, which has much to do with charisma and could also be called greatness, are to be cherished and studied, not deemed suspect and demystified. Efforts to explain literature as a function of the author's social milieu or historical context, according to Bloom, amount to little more than pathetic attempts to ward off the terrifying force of genius, to reduce it to something harmless.

Bloom's most perverse and important insight, here as in his earlier work, is that genius hurts. It wounds. Not only is it vital and supremely real but it transcends conventional morality and frames of reference, which means that it may well rip through our defenses, shredding our fragile sense of self. The genius of a great poet can so overwhelm a later poet that he never writes an original word again. Readers prefer not to acknowledge genius either, since it may well pass judgment on their mediocrity. The proper appreciation of genius, by this account, is not the twee hobby of gentlemen-scholars so often mocked by those who favor scientific approaches to literature, but an exacting discipline that yields wise and humble readers. In his introduction Bloom throws out this bold challenge to America's English departments: ''I base this book, 'Genius,' upon my belief that appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals.''

What do we get if we eschew the reigning analytic methods -- the New Historicism, cultural studies, feminism, queer theory and so forth -- and embrace appreciation? If Bloom is our model, here is what we don't get: precision. Bloom has long since stopped paying careful attention to prosodic, novelistic or dramatic form or systematically unpacking layers of meaning, though he will occasionally make his skills at those tasks admonishingly clear. As well read in Western literature and criticism as anyone alive today, Bloom prefers to arrive at his judgments through broad comparisons rather than close textual scrutiny. In each of the five- and six-page essays devoted to the 100 geniuses in this book, he gives as much space to writers who may have resembled, influenced or been influenced by the author as to the author himself. Though Bloom's ambition is to isolate in 3,000 words or less the quality that makes the author a genius -- Chaucer's cheeky good cheer, George Eliot's moral grandeur, Proust's detached sense of the tragicomic -- he discovers this trait not by examining the work under a microscope but by scanning all the heavens for its like.

This will frustrate you if you're a reader who seeks specific insights into how literature works, but it makes a certain rough sense. Bloom's own genius is not for scholarship but for rekindling an ancient sense of awe, for restoring to us an awareness of literature's uncanny, unspannable distance from ordinary life. Bloom sees literature in half-Greek, half-Gnostic terms: it is, first, a Promethean theft by which humans usurp what belongs to the gods, and, second, a sort of heresy by which authors create characters who are richer and more alive than mere mortals could ever be. The subtitle of this book is somewhat misleading, because Bloom is much less interested in the exemplary minds of his geniuses than in those of the men and women who people their works. He speaks of the audacious Wife of Bath, of Iago, Hamlet and Falstaff, of Don Quixote, as if they had once walked the earth. Given his notions of how they affected our further development, it would seem they had. The Wife of Bath is the mother of anticlerical skepticism; Iago, the father of nihilism; Hamlet, the inventor of inwardness; Quixote, the prototype of all later moral and visionary courage.

Bloom's cult of character helps to explain why he gives himself over to Bardolatry with such religious fervor. Shakespeare is the prime mover of Bloom's universe, the greatest creator of character who ever lived and an author who hides himself behind his creations as thoroughly as the God of the cabalists does behind his. Bloom's obsession with literary personality also explains his odd insistence that J, the Yahwist, the author of much of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers, was a woman in King David's court. The biblical scholars who object that there is simply no evidence for this miss Bloom's point. He is not making a claim about an actual historical person but inventing a myth provocative enough to counter the normative Jewish and Christian ones. Bloom wants us to see that God, too, is a character in J's literary cosmology, one richly endowed with her mischievous irony and far less predictable and fair-minded than tradition likes to admit. (It doesn't hurt that the J thesis lets Bloom thumb his nose at his feminist critics by reinterpreting the story of Adam and Eve as one in which God's creation of woman surpasses, in originality and power, his creation of Adam.)

THIS isn't to say that Bloom's urge to monumentalism won't drive you batty at times. The intensity of Bloom's praise for the writers he most admires, Shakespeare and Blake and Emerson, can border on the embarrassing. His tendency toward hyperbole ties him into knots when he trains it on something he only pretends to admire, like the Koran. I can only guess at the editorial pressures that bore on his decision to include Muhammad in his pantheon, but his argument ripples with false praise: ''The polemical edge never abandons Muhammad's tone, which asserts and achieves authority by never allowing the reader to rest.'' (Bloom can be very funny, however, on the subject of authors he openly dislikes, such as T. S. Eliot. Of Eliot's criticism, he writes, ''Some of his earlier judgments . . . have their own value if you turn them upside down.'')

Bloom's identification of literature with religion leads him to erect a bizarre, almost worshipful frame over this book. It is divided into 10 sections, each named after a property attributed to God by the Jewish mystics -- a system of nomenclature that, since these properties are given in Hebrew and identified cursorily in a line or two, seems as pretentious and unhelpful as the obscure taxonomies favored by the theorists Bloom dislikes. But what Bloom loves he loves with a largeness of heart that he transforms into a fundamental critical principle, and at a time when critics vie with one another to see who can manifest the greatest degree of suspicion, such generosity is nothing to laugh at.

Judith Shulevitz writes the Close Reader column for the Book Review.

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