The Western Canon.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

It is not surprising that Harold Bloom's The Western Canon has enjoyed ample success in Latin America, where, ever since Jose Enrique Rodo published Ariel in 1900, exhortations to cultivate aesthetic excellence and reject crass utilitarianism have fallen on receptive ears. Bloom defends the traditional emphasis in universities on classics that have endured for generations - The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, and Don Quijote, for example. He deplores the current tendency to reject the canon in favor of inferior works whose only merit is that they represent a particular group or political point of view.

Bloom does not object to expanding the canon to incorporate new authors from diverse backgrounds, but he insists that the only criterion for inclusion be aesthetic eminence. He writes: "Nothing is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria." Bloom characterizes as "partisans of resentment" those who, marching under the banners of Marxism, Feminism, the New Historicism, or the other "isms" currently in vogue, would reduce the aesthetic to ideology. In Bloom's view, the Western Canon is not a program for social or moral salvation, and those academics who embrace "political correctness" to the detriment of the classics are shirking their responsibility to assuage their guilt.

For Bloom, what distinguishes a canonical work is a certain strangeness that differentiates it from all earlier writing, that "individuates" it, making it recognizable as a unique creation. At the same time, a canonical work possesses a certain familiarity, for it penetrates the essence of human existence. Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon, for it is he to whom all others must be compared. He then analyzes works by twenty-five other authors whom he considers unrefutably canonical, showing how they break new ground and add to our understanding of the human condition. Among those he studies are Cervantes, Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa.

Bloom classifies Cervantes as a "wisdom writer" because, like Shakespeare and Montaigne, he is "sane, temperate, and benign," and his work never lessens, but always enhances the reader. He celebrates the "heroic individuality" displayed by both Don Quijote and Sancho, as well as Cervantes's technical innovations, in particular his endless disruptions of the narrative, which force readers themselves to invent the...