How to Read and Why 
by 

Harold Bloom

 

Learning to Listen by Reading

Listening and reading are generally considered independent activities. The only way to spot imposture is to listen attentively to lots of people. And the only way to spot fakery in print is to read lots of books critically. But it strikes me that Bloom is making an implicit case for considering listening and reading as functionally equivalent. Everything he has to say about reading applies with even greater urgency and relevance to listening. 

One need only substitute the word ‘conversation’ for ‘literature’ to see the relevance of Bloom’s insights to human communication in general. For Bloom, “literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.”Clearly there is no difference here from conversation. According to Bloom, the best critics are those who“make what is implicit in a book finely explicit.” Isn’t this the same outcome as with good conversation? And doesn’t it make sense that what we are really doing in any serious conversation is exactly the same as what we do when we read, namely “prepar[ing] ourselves for change,” in order to “strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests?”

And it seems to me that Bloom’s principles of productive reading are also important in creating productive conversation. The first principle, “clearing one’s mind of cant,” that is, recognising pious platitudes and their source in one’s tribal history is as relevant to listening as it is to reading. Most conversations are formulaic and have no real content other than establishing peaceful social relationships. But even significant communication is dominated by cliché and inarticulate usage. And when we are challenged to provide a description of our emotional state, we are likely to drop into an abyss of the most awful and trite vocabulary. Cant is our typical way of life.

The second principle flows from the first in light of our universal tendency to confuse words with reality:“Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read.” Because we instinctively feel that the language we use is an concrete as the things we experience, we believe that the language used by others is just as concrete as our own. Words therefore become things to argue and fight about, sometimes even to die for. At best we become idealists trying to get the rest of the world to conform with our ideas of what is good for it; at worst we become monsters who use those words to beat it into submission. Strengthening the self has nothing to do with changing the world.

Bloom’s third principle is taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson and echoes the advice of many others: “A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.” It seems to me that scholarly conversation has little to do with erudite academics but with an appreciation of one’s interlocutor. The realisation that language is as much a veil as a bridge between two people suggests that one must listen not for the words but for the intention and interests which are unspoken. Listening for what is agreeable is one way to discover purpose. The logic of purpose is often hidden below layers of irrelevant language, a sort of anti-poetry which hides what is trying to be expressed. This is Bloom’s “making explicit that which is implicit,” and establishes the same relationship between speaker and listener as between writer and reader, namely a collaboration that produces a new experience.

The fourth principle is an Emersonian variant of the third: “One must be an inventor to read well. ‘Creative reading’ in Emerson's sense I once named as ‘misreading,’ a word that persuaded opponents that I suffered from a voluntary dyslexia.” This goes beyond refusing to accept language at face value. The principle demands conscious interpretation of what one reads or hears. Interpretation is in any case inevitable even in the most casual of conversations. So Bloom’s idea is simply to ‘fess up to the process, not only to oneself but to one’s partner in communication as the foundation for clarification and expansion. Another way to state the principle is that if nothing new arises from a conversation, it wasn’t worth having. I think Bloom is correct about all our communication when he says that we are, “frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” If we are not so disposed, perhaps we ought to be.

Finally, Bloom’s final and most important suggestion is “that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed rhe opposite of what he says.” This fifth principle is a summary and recapitulation of all the rest. Language, it says, is beautiful but it is not to be trusted because it is beautiful. Remember that this is from a man who has devoted his entire life to language and its beauty! It is because of this devotion that we can trust him when he says that “Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another.” 

To extend these principles to all of communication is, to me, an obvious and productive necessity. Bloom’s one-sentence dictum captures his programme concisely: “Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” I think I’ll try it out this evening over dinner with my wife.

Postscript, on the same day: In the way of these things, the attached article showed up from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/op...