Martyred Canon Makers

[Denis Salter]

JUST NOTICED:

Some kind soul at Penguin has just sent me a copy of Harold
Bloom's *The Western Canon.*  I have read a few pages and
now I know what it feels like to be yelled at, page after page,
by a man who takes himself very seriously indeed.

I would have thought that those preoccupied with restoring
culture and academic study to their proper conditions, and
recommending that scholarship be not only wide and deep but
accurate would take good care to be accurate themselves.

This book is of the type that other academic (friends) help
to hype. There are several pages at the start of NAMES who,
no surprise, applaud the book for more virtues than Adam and Eve
had before that apple got'em.

To wit: one M.H. Abrams--is he the one who wrote *A Glossary of
Literary Terms*?--observes as a Bloomite:

"To read Bloom's commentaries (as Hazlitt said about the great
tragic actor Edmund Kean) is like reading classic authors by
flashes of lightning" [sic]

What scholarship, no matter how carefully conducted, is free of
factual area?  None that I know of.  It is just that when people
set themselves up as standard-bearers and then make errors that
I become restless, concerned, full of troubling questions.

Does anyone know Professor Abrams?  Please, if you do, don't tell
him than he is being disparaged here.  Not at all.

But, just so all is clear, to Bloom, Bloomites, and Abrams,
it was Coleridge {not Hazlitt} who referred to the "flashes of
lightning" that Edmund Kean set off, not with general reference
to "classic authors," but with specific reference to Kean's
playing of Shakespeare.

There must be a zillion websites for Notes and Queries. Is there
one for theatre / performance?--or, again, are there zillions of
these?  I know that such a website would be a more suitable place to
bring up scholarly minutiae such as these,rather than interesting some,
while forcing many others to push the big D. Thank you for your patience
ahead of time.  (Is it possible Abrams' glossary is, well, riddled with
factual errors or just troubled by the normal few that creep in? . . .)

Ciao,

Denis.

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Denis Salter
4965, avenue Connaught
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H4V 1X4
(514) 487 7309
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<d.salter at sympatico.ca>
31 May 2000