The Western Canon–Intro
We’ve been dormant here for a few months: a sentence that I know you read often on blogs. It isn’t that I stopped reading books, just that I haven’t had the energy to write extended responses to them. Other things have occupied my time: buying a house, figuring out how to mow a lawn.
I’ve basically finished off reading everything from my lists of books published from 1946-1950. Instead of moving on to 1951, I have decided to take a step backward, to one of my older goals: to read all the books on Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon” list.
The book “The Western Canon,” published in 1994, has an appendix that lists all of the books Bloom believed to be central to Western culture, beginning in the prehistoric Middle East and moving through the ancient world (the Theocratic Age), the Renaissance (the Aristocratic Age), the Industrial Revolution (the Democratic Age) and into the 20th Century (the Chaotic Age.) A thousand or so volumes are listed. It seems both overwhelming and incomplete.
The book appeared around the time I was beginning grad school. I remember looking at it in the library and despairing at how little of the list I’d read. I wanted to go read the Greek tragedies, the works of Victor Hugo, etc. But I was studying poetry, contemporary stuff, mainly—and there wasn’t time.
After I graduated and felt I could read whatever I wanted to, I made my first attempt to read the Canon—and immediately ran into the ultimate stumbling block. The first book on the list was fine—the ancient Sumerian text “Gilgamesh”. But next up was the King James Bible. I was not raised in the church and had picked up most of what I knew about the Bible from movies and “Davy and Goliath” episodes. Still, I was interested. But halfway through the third book I gave up.
Over the years I tried other methods—reading the 20th century list first, for instance. That gave me a pretty good overview of Italian literature (in translation), but I knew that the beginning of the list still needed trudging through.
So here I am again, armed this time with my Kindle. I had the idea of blooging my reactions to the works on the list as I read them. Well, it turns that at least in the case of the Old Testament, someone else beat me to it. David Plotz read the Bible and posted his thoughts about it on Slate. He later published the project as “The Good Book.” It’s a funny and insightful book and I direct your attention to it. It was a valuable guide to finally help me get through the Bible.
I’m going to skip over writing about the Old Testament, except for giving a few thoughts here:
It’s sort of like listening through a band’s entire catalogue when you’re already familiar with their greatest hits. You keep slogging through all these noodling jams knowing that Job is coming up, or the parts quoted by writers or the Byrds.
All in all, the Old Testament is a mean-spirited, genocidal book. God directs his chosen people to massacre thousands, kill women and children, and sacrifice a whole bunch of animals. Every time a king disobeys him, he lays down the law, inflicting plagues and horrors upon the Israelites, and eventually letting them be conquered.
The history portions are pretty disgusting, though there is some good poetry near the back the book.
Here’s a story to give you a hint of what the god of the Old Testament is like: You are probably already familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac, where God tells Abraham to (in Bob Dylan’s words) “kill him a son, out on Highway 51” and Abe complies, preparing to sacrifice Isaac. At the last second God is all “lol jk” and calls the murder off. I guess we’re supposed to think that God is merciful, but it’s a pretty unflattering look.
So, anyway, that’s the story we remember. One I’d never heard before, and which shares some features, appears in Judges 11. Jephthah vows that if god helps him defeat his enemies, he will sacrifice the first person he sees when he comes back home. He beats the Ammonites, then returns, finding his own daughter at the doorstep. Jephthah lets his daughter go to the mountains to wail for two months, then he kills her. God, a real Gov. George W. Bush figure here, issues no last minute reprieve. And of course we’re supposed to think that Jephthah is a great guy for keeping his word.