![]() ![]() So he wrote too much, and wrote too fast. He was easy to parody I praised and derided Bloom at different times, and once succumbed to the mischievous parody itch, as surely generations of his students had, too: “Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and even Emerson at his strongest-stronger, here, even than his belated rival, Nietzsche-is not quite a match for his ultimate precursor, J’s Yahweh, though I concede that the greatest Jewish genius after Jesus, Sigmund Freud, would not have agreed with my heretical opinion.” Late Bloom repeated and recirculated his favored obsessions, cross-referencing himself in ecstasies of unearned fulfillment. He wrote ceaselessly, torrentially, and as he churned away he easily became vatic, windy, merely reckless where he had once been adventurous. This quality had great appeal but wasn’t an unmixed blessing on the page. Bloom, who died on Monday, wrote like a teacher his every utterance projected pedagogically, and I always assumed he wrote much as he talked in class. Sometimes all you remember of a teacher is a voice-“a way of happening, a mouth.” I never met Harold Bloom, but like many of his readers, I thought I knew his voice very well. ![]() Harold Bloom, who died at the age of eighty-nine, imagined literature as a quarrelling family and the critic as a Freudian analyst. ![]()
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