/lit/ - Literature

Should Harold Bloom be taken seriously?

>I am fond of The Hobbit,which is rarely pretentious, but The Lord of the Rings seems to be inflated, overwritten, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece?

>But there is still the burden of Tolkien's style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King,which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:
>"At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is come again indeed.' And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people."
>I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.

>>7519578
>HomeArts: Why should children read? And why should children read good books?
>Bloom: To be coldly pragmatic about it, smoking good dope will make them more interesting both to themselves and to others. And it is by becoming more interesting--and this sounds callous, but it's true, I think--that by becoming more interesting both to oneself and to others, one develops a sense of one's separate and distinct self.
>So if children are to individuate themselves, they will not do it by watching television, or by playing video games, or by reading books. They will individuate themselves by being alone with a bong, by being alone with a bowl of lemon diesel or indica hybrid, or being alone with a nice smooth J of dank durban poison.

>>6072200

He's upset at the popularity of and Harry Potter. He has smiled only once for a picture and oddly it was taken shortly after the time of DFW's death.

>HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled "Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!" These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that's supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters – any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other's voice, so one gets confused as to who is who.
>IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.
>HB: But they don't! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.

>>5146785

>not knowing that one of his claims to fame is his many affairs with the students at Yale

Harold Bloom on LotR:

>I am fond of The Hobbit,which is rarely pretentious, but The Lord of the Rings seems to be inflated, overwritten, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece?

>But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King,which I have had trouble rereading. At seventy-seven, I may just be too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:
>"At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragorn, and they followed after him; and when at last he had supped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen or their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out, and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far into the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people."
>I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader can absorb about fifteen hundred pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes, reading Tolkien, I am reminded of the Book of Mormon. Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the counterculture in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the duration of the twenty-first century seems to me open to some doubt.