INTERVIEWER You teach Freud and Shakespeare. BLOOM Oh yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that Im not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. Theres a lot of resentment on Freuds part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldnt be too surprising. Freud himself says the poets were there before me, and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. Its not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; Im not so sure he doesnt largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I dont see why one shouldnt, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that Ive had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isnt anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesnt exist before Shakespeare. It doesnt happen in the Bible. It doesnt happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesnt even happen in Euripides. --Harold Bloom, The Paris Review, 1991
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 02:37:10 +0000
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