1. The Harold Bloom conversation seems to be people talking at cross-purposes with one group saying "let's celebrate the great man's work" & another saying "he was a creep & predator." But maybe the two sides can be linked? What's the relationship between the life & work?
2. I thought this Times obituary did a disservice to Bloom by foregrounding his banal late-period "Western canon is 💯" rather than the scholarly work that his lasting reputation rests on (the advocacy for the romantics & "Anxiety of Influence"
3. I'm not the biggest fan of Freud or Bloom but "Anxiety of Influence" did help return history to literary studies (in a period of arid formalism) by showing the richness of poets responding to each other. Also: Bloom wasn't cowed by Eliot/Pound's dismissal of the romantics
4. But by the 1970s, Bloom's individualism (inherited from the romantics) was already atrophying into a kind of maniacal narcissism: all that counted was the strong writer and the strong reader (the strongest of whom was Bloom), a veritable God-like creature.
5. Some context: Bloom, like other Yale bigwigs, responded badly to the social movements of the 1970s, particularly feminism. Yale English was notoriously hostile to female grad students. And Bloom preyed on students. His hyper-individualism was intellectual counterpart to this.
6. Hyper-individualism is everywhere in Bloom -- in the exaltation of Emerson, in gnosticism, in how his pathway to Judaism was mysticism, in his revival of hoariest idea of "genius." That hyper-individualism, I'd argue, was rooted in his rejection of social movements.
7. Bloom's arguments for divorcing literature from its social context - for seeing writers as God-like beings who create but are not created - was a retreat from his own best work and also, sadly, a way of justifying an elite that was beyond normal morality.
8. Bloom's attacks on PC and "the schools of resentment" reads a little bit differently once you realize what a hot house of chauvinism Yale English was when he ruled the roost.
9. In the long run, the 1970s Bloom (which was the Bloom he remained till his death) will be seen as of a piece, the life and work both emblematic of the hyper-individualism of the "Me Decade" & (sorry) neoliberalism.
10. It's too bad Harold Bloom was so dismissive of popular culture because his "Anxiety of Influence" paradigm really helps illuminate the Joker movie.
11. The melancholy of Joker comes from what Bloom would call its belatedness, its desire to simultaneously pay tribute to the symbolic father (Scorsese) and also to kill and replace him.
12. Joker, in the new film, is a fusing of the main characters of two Scorsese films (Taxi Driver & King of Comedy). Robert DeNiro, who played those characters, is in Joker and his character is killed by Joker. Joker is about the desire to kill & replace Scorsese.
13. The oedipal theme is pretty explicit in Joker (the hero thinks Thomas Wayne is his father & hates him). But it exists not just at the level of plot but also the subtext (in how the Scorsese material is handled). Scorsese has to be eliminated for a fresh start to begin.
14. I think Scorsese is of the oedipal drama going on, hence his hostile comments about superhero movies. He's not prepared to give up the throne to this unworthy spawn.
