The Age of Resentment

A lab leak theory about how culture is downstream from literary criticism

“Old Main” at Wayne State University. Detroit, Michigan

Harold Bloom, who died in 2019, was one of the most formidable American literary critics and professors of literature for most of the second half the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first. Of course, if you have spent any time in college and university English departments over the last generation (as I have) you wouldn’t know that because Bloom was (and is) almost universally reviled by what passes for the intelligentsia. Academia, in case you didn’t know it, is a realm fueled in great part by envy and herd mentality (I once heard it described as “a herd of independent minds”), so I attribute much of the abuse heaped on Bloom as due to envy. From his early book on the English Romantics, The Visionary Company, to his extraordinary output during the 1970’s and 80s—The Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and The Breaking of the Vessels (1982) among them—Bloom rejected the facile posturing of Post-Structuralism, Feminist and Queer criticism, Post-Colonialist and Marxist criticism—and, following one of his heroes, Samuel Johnson, argued on behalf of a literary criticism that was primarily concerned with aesthetics and excellence. In an age when academic poseurs voiced revulsion over English literature being the study of “dead, white males,” Bloom celebrated excellence. And if men were writing the great works of literature, that wasn’t their fault. (As an aside, Bloom’s protégé Camilia Paglia’s statement that “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper” is a great conversation starter. Try it sometime!) Because of this “radical” stance, he invited (and welcomed) the attacks of the Post-Structuralists, Marxists and their whiny compatriots, whom he called “The Schools of Resentment.” For that is all they are.

I have met no one in academia who can hold a candle to Bloom’s erudition and insights into literature. That doesn’t mean I always agree with him or that he’s always right, but he’s always interesting. One thing that comes across in his literary criticism is his deep love for literature, but another is that his criticism, no matter whether one agrees with him or not, is eminently readable. That is, he elevates literary criticism to an artform. This was by design, as he writes in The Breaking of the Vessels:

“The theory of poetry, like all criticism, is an art, a teachable and useful art, and its true criteria are poetic: it must be memorable, pragmatic where it is most visionary, and it must give pleasure, even if only to an elite. I would sum up its necessary attributes in one formula: it must be strong, with the strength of usurpation, of persistence, of eloquence. By these criteria, most current theory can be given back to the empirical scientists, to the social scientists, and to the dialectical philosophers. Facts and arguments alike have little to do with poetry, or with poetic criticism. . . . Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poet, but looks at the order of his thoughts. Then the critic is a poet.”

Even before I knew his work, one of my professors in my undergraduate program called me “the Harold Bloom of Marygrove College,” because, I imagine, even then I tried to turn my college essays into works of art in their own right and brought in insights from psychology and esoteric thought (like the kabbalah) or whatever else was interesting me at the moment. Years later in graduate school, I used one of Bloom’s insights regarding metalepsis, a kind of literary device as well as a psychological mechanism, when I was writing on the English Catholic alchemist, swashbuckler, and apologist, Sir Kenelm Digby. (You can get a copy of the essay, which appears in my book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, on my website). At one point, I emailed Professor Bloom to get his take on what I was doing—he responded almost immediately. (My kids should be so responsive!) When I was telling a friend in class what had happened, our professor walked in, overheard what we were talking about, and said, “Harold Bloom wrote you?” I was all like, “Well, “Hal’… but yeah.” Some of my classmates, predictably, hid their envy by adopting the “disdain for Bloom” flex, looking out the corners of their eyes for the Freudian professorial approval. I can’t even with these people. It was not for nothing that Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, describes such devotees to the various Schools of Resentment as “having been propagandized by an academic sect or coven.” That man had a way with words.

In case you were wondering: the only other relatively recent literary critics I can think of who write readable literary criticism that is memorable, pragmatic, and pleasurable are the great Blake scholar and poet Kathleen Raine and Stanley Fish, whose Self-Consuming Artifacts remains one of my favorite books on seventeenth-century literature. I know there are others (Regina Schwartz wrote a great book on sacramental poetics that I recall liking quite a bit), but these two stand out.

But this post is not about Harold Bloom.

What I want to write about is how bad literary theory has spread into the wider culture in the West over the past generation or so and wreaked absolute havoc upon the body politic. Those Schools of Resentment, the Coven of Whiners, if you will, have contaminated every corner of our culture. Think of it this way: the English Department is the Wuhan Lab, theory is the virus the professors have engineered, and we are living among the ruins of a lab leak in which some have been infected by direct injection but many more have been infected through shedding.

Yesterday, I tried to do an internet search on what percentage of undergraduates were English majors over the years. That was a pretty fruitless and cumbersome process! Out of frustration I turned…to Grok. Bingo. There were no stats available prior to 1970, but those I found were telling:

1970: 7%

1980: 7.6%

1990: 6.7%

2000: 4.1%

2010: 3.1%

2020: 2.6%

2024: 2%

That’s right—in a few years we’ll be in negative growth. Well done, English departments!

Side note: When I was working on my doctorate at Wayne State University, the English Department regularly ran eleven or so sections of Shakespeare a semester. Last I heard (and it’s been a few years) it was down to one or two. When I was teaching at Adrian College, they only ran a Shakespeare course once every few years (I should know—I was the only one who taught it), and even then could barely get enough enrollment to run the course. This is what cultural decline looks like.

While the English departments I have been associated with over the years (since 2000 as a professor) have uniformly fretted about their dwindling majors, very few of the faculty have been willing to admit that maybe their paid-up memberships in the Schools of Resentment might have something to do with it (even without taking current market conditions into consideration—you can see it’s been sliding for fifty years: right about when the Schools of Resentment starting setting up shop). I mean, seriously, who would want to get a degree when those professors doing the professing think their discipline is rotten with white supremacy, colonial power, racism, homophobia (though they also try to tell you all the great artists and writers were homosexuals), etc etc?

Another aside: I always loved the observation that English departments “are where discredited theories from other disciplines go to die.” LOL.

The thing is, the mindset of the Schools of Resentment is not only a feature of English departments: it infiltrates all of the arts and humanities (the sciences seem to be somewhat, but not completely, immune. They must have a vaccine.) From here, the virus has spread to the general population. Anytime you hear the words or phrases “white supremacy,” “gender is on a spectrum” (fuck you, Judy Butler), or “diversity,” know that you are in the presence of a deadly pathogen. Take the necessary precautions.

By now, though, everyone has been infected, even if they’ve never heard of Judith Butler or Foucault—or even Harold Bloom, for that matter. But an antidote is available.

I wandered into academia completely by accident. I started as a musician and songwriter—I signed a really crappy record deal when I was eighteen—and didn’t even begin college until I was twenty-six. My first love was the magic of words and music, which naturally inclines one toward poetry. When I realized I had a gift for deep reading and interesting writing in college, the study of the great poets brought me great pleasure and taught me much. And it continues to do. My enthusiasm (Greek for “being filled with the god”) led to my success as a teacher and professor. I wasn’t trying to “unpack misogyny” or “detect structures of power” in the works I taught: I was trying to show my students how the mega ergon, the great achievements of literature, are likewise great achievements of the human spirit. They teach us what it is to be human and they show us the realities of the thing we call “the spirit.” And love was my teaching method.

I imagine my late start to college allowed me to develop a healthy immune system so that when confronted with the resentment virus then at pandemic levels in academia it was not able to infect me. Like it or not, the criticism that colleges and universities (let alone K-12 schools) are indoctrination centers is based in reality. As a result, we now live in an Age of Resentment. I think that age may be showing signs of wear and tear. People are tired of it and don’t even want to send their children to college and risk the chance of turning them into resentful, ungrateful little pricks.

Before Covid, most smaller colleges and universities were on the verge of extinction, not only because of the virus but because of demographic winter: there just haven’t been enough babies born to justify the existence of so many colleges that came into being at a time of exponential population growth. But these schools were flooded with government Monopoly money during Covid, which kept them on life-support. The money is running out, and so are the students. And since these institutions have betrayed their mandate, it is probably a good idea to let them die.

The encouraging thing is that alternative models of education—think of them as podcasts of education—are cropping up and that invite the curious to a participation in the mega ergon of culture, not only in literature but in other disciplines, both traditional and esoteric (and everything in between). We could be on the cusp of a new Renaissance in Western culture, not unlike what we saw in Florence in the Quattrocentro or in New England with the Transcendentalists. It is high time we burned the effigy of the Schools of Resentment on the pyre of renewal. Surely some revelation is at hand.

Having said that, I should mention that I am doing an online course, Shakespeare, Magic, and Religion which starts at the beginning of January. I still have some spots available, and it would be great to have you along for the ride.

And, no, this wasn’t an infomercial!

A lesson on The New Criticism.