979 What does he say about authors he dislikes?

About five years ago, Harold Bloom, defender of the Western Canon, offended millions of fans by calling Harry Potter a total waste of time and energy. “And yet I feel a discomfort with the Harry Potter mania, and I hope that my discontent is not merely a highbrow snobbery, or a nostalgia for a more literate fantasy to beguile (shall we say) intelligent children of all ages. Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter.” (Wall Street Journal 7-11-2000). Here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal he writes that “J.K. Rowling and Stephen King are equally bad writers. . .” and advises one to reread Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear for the real thing rather than Rowling and King. And although he admires Andersen’s stories (I think) and recommends him for “children of all ages,” he certainly doesn’t think much of the man. He calls him a narcissistic pagan, prophet of annihilation, blithely insouciant, sadistic, endlessly wandering to Byzantium, a theorist of seduction, monument of narcissism, self-obsessed monomaniac, of solipsistic vision, sexually frustrated homoerotic, a pagan in his art, driven by fame and honor and animistic.

The article is a messy stroll through the Western Canon, and either Bloom is not a particularly fluid writer himself, or some WSJ editor had to hatchet his way through it to reduce its size. In a marathon of name dropping he mentions: Nietzsche, Whitman, Kierkegaard, (Rowling, King, Dickens, Carroll, Lear), Heine, Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, Mendelsohn, Schumann, the Brownings, Hoffmann, Gogol, Kleist, Lawrence, Kafka, Shakespeare, Blake, Tolstoy, Freud, Byron, Hemingway and Schopenhauer. That’s a lot to pack into an article about a guy who is famous for kids’ fairy tales.

And to think that the very first book I was given as a child was “The Ugly Duckling.”