Harold Bloom is dead. His death has prompted one final, staggered brawl between the exhausted ranks who have spent away their strength with three decades of culture warring. My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a 'canon' or a 'classic' I have no argument. It seems obvious to me that some works are better than others and more obvious still that if a book is still being read several centuries after it was written it is likely one of those better works–or barring that, a work whose intellectual or artistic legacy makes it a necessary piece of the larger puzzle. The trouble with Bloom was not his elephant love for the canon, but his inability to articulate anything but this passion (and disgust with those who sought to defile it). The truth is that Bloom adds nothing to the great works he champions. This weakness is seen most clearly in his
many volumes on Shakespeare; in less exaggerated form it mars the judgments Bloom throws around in
The Western Canon or
Genius.
Bloom declares where he should argue, emotes where he should analyze, and effuses where he should unveil. Bloom deplored
young Hal to the center of his bones; his love for
Falstaff soaked through his soul down into his toes. You'll discover this within a minute of reading any of Bloom's criticism of the Bard. Upon Falstaff he bestows the title "t
he grandest personality in all of Shakespeare."
[1] But peer at his pages long enough and you quickly realize the truth: Bloom
asserts this title; he does not argue for it, much less prove it. He rarely bothered trying to prove anything. Instead he stacks his pages with one overwrought judgement after another–and the best of these judgements are usually not even his, but some quote lifted from Hazlitt, Johnson, or some other ancient critic.
Bloom read all of the ancient critics. Bloom's erudition was his genius. He was staggeringly, smashingly, outlandishly well read. What could be read, he did read. Harold Bloom, champion avatar of librarians everywhere! This was the source of his cultural authority. He can declare that Moliere is one of the three—and three only!—playwrights of the last six hundred years that deserve canonization because he has
read them all,
damn't. He should know; you should trust him.
But if Bloom's prodigious reading was his rest and his strength, it was also, I suspect, key to his failures. He analyzes great works of art not through the eyes of a poet or a novelist or a playwright—that is, through the lens of their actual creators—but through the lens of reading. The original theoretical technique of his earlier days (the theory which made him a literary name) was exactly this: categorize authors by their reading habits, build fancy lineages of who read who through whom, and argue that great literature can be reduced to great minds trying to negotiate a space in the shadow of their own favorites. This is all great fun. Sometimes these classification games are even insightful. But peruse his books and you are left with the sense that Bloom cannot really do much else. He can put works into lists and lineages and into buckets of mutual influence. But ask him to bridge these works to the world of living men and women and you will be met with silence. Bloom strikes me as a man who experienced life entirely through the written word. The tangible world outside of literary images lies beyond him.
[2] This is a shame; there is nothing essentially wrong with the ideals of folks like Bloom, who would fill those god-shaped holes in our souls with the great books of the ages. But that means demonstrating how a great work confronts the same problems that trouble real people in the dust-stained realms beyond the ivory towers. This task is an inescapable part of that project. Bloom was not capable of that; I doubt he saw the need for even trying.
Like Walt Whitman (who makes Bloom's canon short list), his greatest virtue was his bounding enthusiasm for what he loved. He cried to the skies "How awe-inspiring! How wonderstruck am I!" Enthusiasm is infectious; for many fans the wonder stuck. Yet no matter how wonder-filled, his prose was never wonderful. He writes no turn of phrase for your copy book. His actual ideas are either too zany ("Shakespeare invented the human") or too banal ("Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's star creations") to take seriously. Bloom dealt in tautologies. In so many superlatives, he would have you believe that Iago bedazzles because he is the most captivating villain of Western literature, or that Jane Austen is a classic because her novels are immortal. Tautologies all—and tautologies that ultimately come down to Bloom's personal taste. He really likes some things, he really doesn’t like others, and he has read so much that you are supposed to trust him when he divides one from the other. I find this personally difficult: I set out this year to read every play of Shakespeare’s—I finished
Lear four nights ago—and I am finding that the more I read the less I trust Bloom's judgements. Harold Bloom was a man that read much, effused more, but discerned little.
(As an aside,
this Goodreads review of Bloom's ouvre tracks my feelings pretty well).
But the common criticism of Bloom has nothing to do with any of that. Bloom is disliked because his canon is parochial, Western, and white. Were it offered in good faith, this would be fair criticism. Only a fraction of humanity's greatest works were written by Europeans and Americans between 1500 and 1900 AD. Humanity is larger than one continent; our experience broader than those four centuries. Sadly, this idea is rarely argued in good faith. Bloom's critics want to destroy all notions of canon, not expand it.
But what if we did want to expand it? What if we were to include the great classics of Indic, Sinic, and Islamicate civilization in our list of great books? What would a truly
global canon look like?
I advance this notion as a thought experiment. Perhaps it is a bit of a parlor game, but it is not without precedent. Advocates of 'great books' and 'the Western canon' often speak in terms of a civilization-spanning "great conversation," with philosophers, theologians, poets, and novelists sharing in one dialogue that stretches across the ages. But this conversation was mostly constructed post-hoc in the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th. If there was a literary canon before that moment, it consisted mostly of poetry, and all of that poetry was in English. This canon included both long epics like Spencer's
Fairy Queen and lyric poems, many of which are little remembered today and never included in great books syllabi. Yes, education in those days was rooted in the "classics," but a classical education in Latin and Greek was nothing like an education in literature or philosophy today. In most centuries preceding the invention of the Western canon the focus of classical studies was
composition, rhetoric and
grammar; a man educated in the classics spent equal time on
Horace,
Quintilian, and
Terence as they did on Virgil (and more than they spent on Homer). Reading Sophocles was a philological exercise.
In those days, Dante's
Inferno (which is universally acknowledged as a central work of the Canon today) was not part of the English-language "conversation." How could it have been? It was not translated into English until the 19th century, and with the exception of a brief moment in the Renaissance when Italian was one of the proper languages of the literary "Renaissance man," Italian was not a focus of upper-class education in the English speaking world. Under the influence of the classical model of education, which did not distinguish literature from language, most American universities that
did teach Dante only taught him in Italian to students of that language. Foreign literature in English translation was vulgar. Those translations were to be read in the drawing room, not the school house.
The great books style of education changed this. Americans had never trucked with the classical education model as happily as the English aristocrats did; when the model began to disappear from American life in the late 1800s they began searching for something more democratic. The greatest classics of world literature and philosophy, taught and read in the English vernacular, did the job. But what should be included? So began the job of sorting which titles made the lists and which did not. Dante was in; Spencer was out. A new canon was born.
[3]
If Dante, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Kant, Nietzche, and Marx could be canonized in the early 20th century (and a dozen works of English literature thrown out to make room for them), there is no reason we could not do something similar today, adding in other truly great works that only recently entered the Western stream but have been tempering souls for millennia in the currents of other cultures. I divide these currents of culture into four broad categories (though there are overlaps and intersections in the 'conversations' between them): the Western tradition, which my readers will be most familiar with; the East Asian tradition, which began in ancient China but which also properly includes the literature of Vietnam, Korea, and Japan; the Indic tradition, which begins with the Sanskrit and Pali classics of Ancient India and continues through to modern South Asia, Tibet, and Southeast Asia; and the Islamicate tradition, which was written in classical Arabic, Persian, or their successor languages in Central Asia and the Near East.
The list that follows is tentative. It is a thought experiment, an exploration. I have not read every author listed. Selections which I have not yet read are included on the strength of their reputation and the size of their later influence. Readers will notice that my list differs from Bloom's in some key ways. He includes only literature, giving no space to theologians, philosophers, or political theorists. He also restricts his choices to 'modern' world of literature written in vernacular tongues. In contrast, I include the ancients along with the moderns, the philosophers alongside the poets. When I reduce all of Western thought to 30 authors it is truly all of Western thought I am reducing.
Well, not quite. My lists—especially the Western one—are idiosyncratic. That is inevitable: any list like this will reflect the concerns and tastes of it compiler. As I see it, there are three broad reasons a work might end up on a list of "great books." The first is that the work is a vehicle for immense beauty or stunning insight. This is necessarily subjective. My decision to include the
Icelandic Sagas instead of the
Nibelungenlied was made on these grounds. Both show the West's Germanic heritage; both provide a picture of less-than-heaven-centered Medieval minds at work. But at the end of
my day, the emotional journey
Njal's Saga and its kin took
me on was filled with terrible meaning. The
Nibelungenlied I just found terribly interesting.
The second reason an author may be included is that the ideas or the imagery associated with his or her work has been so influential that these writings (or misinterpretations of it) changed everything that came after. To understand the 'after' you must first understand the before. Regardless of whether you agree with their ideas found in
Plato's dialogues, the
Upanisads, or the
Analects, each of these collections must be included in our list of global classics on these grounds. There is nothing subjective about this judgement, though the apparent importance of this sort of thinker may wane as we move further away from him or her in time. It is for this reason I never seriously considered adding
Hegel or
Freud to the list, though they often appear on many other lists of this type. These thinkers were wrong. Their ideas were appallingly ill thought out. Everybody admits this; few living readers find anything redeeming in their philosophy. When they are studied today it is usually because of the influence they had on their contemporaries. But that influence has ended. We are barely a century away from Freud and already he is obsolete; I cannot imagine he will be anything more than a historical footnote in two more centuries time. In contrast, no matter how much I detest him (and detest him I do), Plato will certainly still be debated two centuries hence. He must stay.
The third reason to include an author is because his or her work is the most brilliant or the most distinctive expression of a certain stand point or ethos. These perspectives simply must be grappled with. I do not believe as Dante, Machiavelli, Rosseau or Nietzche did. I
do believe that every thoughtful person must spend time wrestling against the ethos each embodies. I would believe this even if their ideas had waned in influence (as Dante's arguably have). It is rare to find someone who thinks highly of
virtue ethics,
deontology, and
consequentialism, but it is a poor ethicist who has not tussled with them all (in this case, through the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill).
These are the positive arguments for including a thinker on the list. To this I add a negative argument, the central reason for which I
exclude names from it. This reason will strike some readers as strange, even unforgivable. But I am unapologetic: I refuse to give any space to authors whose central contribution was in
metaphysics. I view the entire field as a series of unanswerable pseudo-questions; its debates are of no more interest to the business of human life than hair-splitting arguments in alchemy and astrology. Religious faith may force certain metaphysical commitments upon you: those commitments, and their implications for the wider world of human action, are worth studying. On the opposite side, empiricism, mathematics, and the natural science have revealed many wonderful things to us about the workings of our universe. These things deserve to be studied deeply (though I do not think 'great works' is the ideal way to do so). In between the range of science and revelation lies a vast wasteland of metaphysical "
sophistry and illusion." With Hume I cry: "
Commit it then to the flames!"
[4]
Thus
Leibniz and
Descartes have no place on my list. I am interested first and foremost in the realms of decision, action, and meaning. Ethicists, who ask "what should man do?" and "what should man value?" deserve their place in the pantheon. So do political theorists, who ask those same questions of human communities. Epistemologists ("how do we know what we know?") are at their strongest when they are at their most practical. The less metaphysics are involved in any of their theories, the better. This is especially true in a project like this, which gladly crashes millennia length traditions into each other to see what will emerge. One reason I find
Warring States philosophy so compelling is relative ease with which their ethical and political programs can be decoupled from the metaphysical fancies of ancient China. This is harder with Western and Islamic ethical theory, and harder still with the classics of ancient India. The ethics and epistemology of the ancient Indians is trussed to their metaphysics; these metaphysical commitments become a stumbling block for those who do not share them.
That is the logic of the lists. They were fun to create. However, here I must admit blemish. My acquaintance with each of the great traditions is not equal. The poets and thinkers in the East Asian bucket are the ones I know best. I have read every one of the authors there listed save three. I do not have quite as strong a record on the Western list, but a
pretty strong one nonetheless. It is with the Islamicate and Indic traditions I turn weakling. I have explicitly left several spots in both groups blank. The two empty slots early in the Islamicate tradition list is intended for the
hadith and the most important names from the world of
fiqh. I suspect two spots may not be enough for these things, and cannot pretend to be familiar enough with them to know who the most important names in
hadith compilation and Islamic jurisprudence are or how many spots they might need. The empty slots at the end of that list are intended for the last five centuries of Islamicate literature and thought. Works in Urdu and Turkish have just as strong a claim in these centuries as works in Arabic or Persian, though again, I must admit I am not familiar enough with the intellectual or literary course of these centuries to discern the awesome works of this era from those merely prominent.
A similar concern convinced me to leave open the last few slots on the Indic tradition list. These spots could be given to the ancient Tamil poems, none of which I have read. They also, perhaps, could go to the titans of India's 'vernacular' literature (of which, again, I must admit ignorance).
Yet I am troubled with deeper concerns about the Indic list. I might state them as thus:
In classical India, human pursuit was said to be divided into four grand categories:
moksha, artha, kama, and dharma. The first eleven titles of the Indic list are divided more or less equally between the four pursuits, with
kama getting the short end of stick. This balance was not hard to achieve. With the exception of a few of the
Upanisads, I have read, either in abridgment or in whole, every one of the authors/texts included (and between the
Indian Sourcebook in Philosophy and the
Clay Sanskrit Library I have been exposed to many other writers of "classical" India that I judge to have not made the cut). But as we move closer to the second millennium of the common era my knowledge thins. This era—the period from 700-1400 AD—marks the advent of Advaita Vedanta and Vaishnavism, the ascendance of bhakti practices, the death of Buddhist devotion, and the armed introduction of Islam to the subcontinent. Sadly, my knowledge of these events is absurdly superficial. I have not yet read any of the texts I listed for this era, nor even
read about most of them except in the most cursory fashion. There is a high probability I have missed someone important or included someone who, for all their merits, does not deserve the honor. In fact, I feel like this must be the case, for the diversity of classical India disappears in these selections. If the first half of the list divides itself among
moksha, artha, kama and
dharma; the second half (as far as I understand thinkers I know by reputation only) is devoted entirely to
moksha. Did Indians stop thinking about power, justice, beauty, and human love in the Middle Ages? Was there no thought but for release
and religious devotion? I cannot believe it. This imbalance probably reflects my ignorance more than it does the tradition I am drawing from.
I encourage readers more knowledgable of these two traditions than myself to provide their own suggestions or lists in the comments.
Below is the list. I chose names, not books, but with each name I have linked to a book you could find in a book store or library if you wished to read through the canon yourself.
A GLOBAL CANON
THE WESTERN CANON
1.
THE HOLY BIBLE
2.
HOMER
3.
SOPHOCLES
4.
THUCYDIDES
5.
PLATO
6.
ARISTOTLE
7.
VIRGIL
8.
OVID
9.
EPICTETUS
10.
AUGUSTINE
11.
ICELANDIC SAGAS
12.
THOMAS AQUINAS
13.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
14.
NICOLO MACHIAVELLI
15.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
16.
MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE
17.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
18.
JOHN MILTON
19.
DAVID HUME
20.
JEAN-JACQUES ROSSSEAU
21.
IMMANUEL KANT
22.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
23.
HONORE DE BALZAC
24.
KARL MARX
25.
LEO TOLSTOY
26.
JOHN STUART MILL
27.
GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN EVANS)
28.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
29.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
30.
MARCEL PROUST
THE EAST ASIAN CANON
1.
CONFUCIUS
2.
MOZI
3.
DAO DE JING
4.
MENCIUS (+
GREAT LEARNING and
DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN)
5.
ZHUANGZI
6.
XUNZI
7.
HAN FEI
8.
SIMA QIAN
9.
TAO QIAN
10.
PLATFORM SUTRA (+
HEART SUTRA and
DIAMOND SUTRA)
11.
LI BAI
12.
DU FU
13.
MURASAKI SHIKUBU
14. THE
HEIKE MONOGATARI
15.
YOSHIDA KENKO
16.
ZHUXI
17.
SU SHI (SU DONGPO)
18.
HONEN/SHINRAN/NICHIREN DEBATES
19.
SHI NAI'AN
20.
WANG YANGMING
21.
WU CHENG'EN
22.
CAO XUEQIN
23.
NGUYEN DU
24.
LU XUN
25.
NATSUME SOSEKI
THE INDIC CANON
1. THE
UPANISADS
2.
ASHVAGHOSHA
3.
PALI CANON (e.g., selected discourses from the SUTTA PITAKA)
4.
MAHABHARATA
5. THE
NYAYA SUTRAS
6. THE
YOGA SUTRAS
7.
RAMAYANA
8.
LAWS OF MANU (
MANUSMRITI)
9.
KAUTILYA
10. THE
LOTUS SUTRA
11.
KALIDASA
12.
NAGARJUNA
13.
SANTIDEVA
14.
JAYANTA BHATTA
15.
GAUDAPADA
16. THE
BHAGAVATA PURANA
17.
ADI SHANKARA
18.
RAMANUJA
19.
JAYADEVA
20. THE
YOGA-VASISTHA
21. [----]
22. [----]
23. [----]
24. [----]
25.
MAHATMA GANDHI
THE ISLAMICATE CANON
1.
THE QURAN
2.
IBN ISHAQ
3. [----]
4. [----]
5.
JARIR AL-TABARI
6.
AL FARABI
7.
FERDOWSI
8.
AL GHAZALI
9.
IBN RUSHD
10.
RUMI
11.
NIZAMI GANJAVI
12.
IBN TUFAIL
13.
SAADI
14.
ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS
15.
HAFEZ
16.
IBN KHALDUN
17.
BABUR
18. [----]
19. [----]
20. [----]
[5]
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[1] Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life (New York: Scribner, 2017), 50.
[2] Relevant here is Truman G. Madsen's critique of Bloom's claim (made in claim in American Religion) that Mormons had abandoned the ethos and impulse of Joseph Smith for corporate respectability: "With a clipboard and a gifted interview style, Bloom might have consulted a fair sample of recent converts to the LDS Church. If he did not impose his paradoxical indifference to self-awareness, he could glimpse what is stirring and moving in their lives [instead of speculating based off of Church PR reports]. Truman Madsen, "Four LDS Views of Harold Bloom: A Roundtable," BYU Studies 35, iss 1 (1995), 188.
[3] Some helpful texts here include David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 25-98; Marianne Montgomery, Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 (Ashgate: Burlington, VT: 2012), 6-15; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Caroline Winterer, Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 152-179; William Scott Rule, "Seventy Years of Changing Great Books at St. John's College," Dissertation, Georgia State University (2009), 1-123.
[4] David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section IV, Part I.
[5] For the curious, I made a count of which languages are represented in these works. The Bible is divided between classical Hebrew and ancient Greek; Gandhi between Gujarati and English. I considered dividing Milton between Latin and English (which he would have approved of), but decided against it. Milton's works in Latin have left only a threadbare memory.
19 - Classical Sanskrit
18 - Classical Chinese
6.5 - Ancient Greek
9 - Arabic
5.5 - English
5- Persian
5 - French
4 - Classical Japanese
4 - Latin
3 - German
2 - Russian
2 - Italian
1 - Old Norse
1 - Chagatai
1 - Vietnamese
1 - Modern Mandarin Chinese
1 - Modern Japanese
.5 - Gujarati
.5 - Classical Hebrew
