On Reading Ordinary Prose: A Reply to Allan Bloom

There is no help for it: after taking Allan Bloom to task for reading Shakespeare badly and tyrannically, I must now charge him with doing no better by me. I cannot join the debate at the elevated level he prefers-the level where one can talk about art, life and political philosophy. Since the original issue was the validity or invalidity of his and Harry Jaffa's Shakespeare interpretations-and since his rebuttal raises questions about what I did and did not say-he must forgive me for staying closer to the text than he will like. Perhaps, in return for the lesson he has given me in political philosophy, he will accept one in the much humbler discipline of reading. But first I must try to mollify him over the injustice he feels I did him when I empaneled my imaginary jury. He writes: "In presenting my conclusions, I have a right to ask that they be tested in the light of my evidence and my arguments" [his italics]. If I had known that he was writing syllogisms rather than an Othello interpretation, I would have been more careful; I thought that he, like any other interpreter, was to be judged by the evidence and by the ordinary rules of inference. As I see it, only the conclusion of a syllogism can be adequately tested as Bloom demands that his be tested. In an interpretation the interpreter's own evidence may be insufficient or distorted; the argument may neglect contrary evidence, or it may impose constructions which the -evidence is not strong enough to bear. Moreover-and more directly to Mr. Bloom's point-since the conclusions are in fact descriptions (however refined) of the object of interpretation, their unrecognisability creates a strong presumption that the interpretation which brought them forth is invalid. As for the jury, I submit that merely by the act of publication Bloom presented his case to just such a jury as I assumed; that he does so again now; and that I am doing the same. If I committed an error in dramatising this simple fact, it was at most that of laboring the obvious. I prefer to pass over the various characterizations by which Bloom sees fit to insult this jury. My description of it was simple and clear: "widely read, intelligent men." I should be glad to know what canons of debate he subscribes to, when he willfully distorts the character of a jury which he then attacks me for having summoned. The jury he complains about is quite of his own selection. But to the work Bloom has cut out for me. He says sternly: "In the first place, it is not true that Jaffa is unaware that there is a subplot [in Lear]." (p. 458) This, I suppose, would be called a "leading assertion": if I agree to it, I am damned; if I disagree, I am demonstrably in the wrong. The only answer I have is that I never said anything of the sort; I am just as positive as Bloom is that Jaffa knew of the subplot's existence. On the page Bloom cites, I use the words "this unawareness," but the antecedent sentence, to which they unambiguously refer, reads as follows: "It does not occur to [Jaffa] that his whole elaborate edifice is undermined by no more than the simple fact that it renders the patterned interweaving of the two plots meaningless." This is a puny matter; I mention it only because it is symptomatic of Bloom's mode of reading texts. In a final note, he requires me, if I am "not merely being pedantic," to show him what error he has made by not citing what recent Othello critics "have produced and marketed" (the phrasing casts a revealing light on his mode of argumentation). I will oblige him, not by showing him an error now, but simply by quoting what I wrote in this context and what he therefore had in front of him when he made this demand. After citing his original article to the effect that Othello criticism "has tended to forget" the problem of how the hero falls so readily into Jago's snares, I continue: "Had Bloom consulted-to name only oneRobert Heilman's full-length study ... he would have discovered a very careful treatment of this problem. Indeed, Othello criticism has lately been almost obsessed with [it]." Does he require any further information about the error he has made? It was he who charged critics with having "tended to forget" a problem which he claims to have confronted and solved. My very simple point was that the charge was untrue and the claim correspondingly doubtful. But I find it hard to remain calm about more important matters. He imputes to me (p. 463) a "conventional morality" so primitive that it leads me to believe that "Jago is a bad man, and Othello is a good man, and nothing more need (or may) be said." Has he any warrant to ascribe to me this absurdly simple-minded belief-a belief which he then makes it his equally simple task to demolish? I did not impute opinions to him; I quoted him, and the quote speaks