The Three Ages
of the Western Canon
Harold Bloom’s
Literary Figures
Filling the
Historical Paradigm of Giambattista Vico
Vico was an eighteenth-century
scholar who argued that the history of the nations of Europe follows a
three-fold pattern of development from barbarism, to heroism, to reason. This
hopeful dynamic is tempered in Vico by the notion that it is an ever-recurring
pattern whick breaks down into chaos and starts all over again. Bloom, a
contemporary literary critic, uses Vico’s idea to divide the history of Western
Literature into three phases in his landmark survey: The Western Canon: The
Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Harcourt, 1994).
In this period, a culture is
governed by a strong sense of the divine and its inclusion in the life of the
people. Literature in this age is really coming from God’s inspiration into the
lives of the people and especially through the divinely appointed ruler or
monarch. Frequently there is a priestly class of men devoted to the keeping of
the treasures of the divinely inspired writings and laws.
|
Ancient Near East |
Gilgamesh, the Bible, The Egyptian Book of the Dead |
|
Ancient India |
The Maharabharata, The Bhagavad-Gita, The Ramayana |
|
Ancient Greeks |
Homer and Hesiod (epic and cosmic
poets) Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Aristophanes (drama) Heroclitus, Empedocles, Plato,
Aristotle (philosophers) Herodotus and Thucydides
(historians) |
|
Romans |
Cicero, the moral playwrights,
Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and Vergil, the satirists, Apuleius, and Petronius |
|
The Middle Ages |
The Koran, Augustine, Beowulf,
Arthurian Romances, The Niebelungenlied, The Poem of the Cid,
Christine de Pisan |
The Aristocratic
Age
Immediately there are anomalies in
the above list. Even though these works fall into the predominantly theocratic
mode, the cycle of heroism is represented in Gilgamesh, Homer, Beowulf, and the
Arthurian Romances. Likewise, the dynamic of democracy and reason belonging to
the next age appears amply, though sporadically, in the philosophers of Greece,
the rhetoric of Cicero, the autobiography of Augustine, and Christine de
Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. The predominant mode of the
aristocratic age is, however, represented by the rule of the upper classes. It
begins with Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. This is the age of feudalism and
embraces the politics of the hero, monarch, or emperor who now must also deal
with rising middle class values.
|
Italy |
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Michelangelo, Leonardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Castiglione, and Vico |
|
Spain |
Francisco de Queveda, Cervantes,
and Lope de Vega |
|
France |
Froissart, The Song of Roland,
Montaigne, Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, Racine, and Rousseau |
|
Germany |
Erasmus, Goethe, Schiller,
Lessing, and Hõlderlin |
|
Great Britain |
Chaucer, Mallory, Marlowe,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Milton |
The Democratic
Age
Democracy and individualism have a
long history that begins well before the Romantic Period, but for the most part
Bloom imagines the age of revolution (French and American, esp.) as the
beginning of the canon of an age of democracy, freedom, and individual rights.
At first this may appear to contradict Vico’s designation of the third phase in
the historical cycle as an age of reason; but the romantic reaction to
rationalism or eighteenth-century Enlightenment has not done away with the
completely rational foundations of the previous century.
This is the first age in which
Bloom finds a place for American literature; omitting the Puritans and other
colonial writers (do they belong to theocracy and aristocracy?), he begins in
the United States with Irving, Bryant, Cooper, etc. He stops this age in the
nineteenth century and uses a new designation, The Chaotic Age, to account for
the modern and postmodern era. . I leave that phase to your imagination and
suggest that it might best be considered Late Democratic.
|
Russia |
Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov |
|
France |
Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal
Rimbaud, de Maupassant, Zola, Baudelaire, and Mallarme |
|
Germany |
Hoffman, Heine, Nietzsche, and
Wagner |
|
Great Britain |
Burns, Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Keats, Browning(s), and Tennyson, |
|
United States |
Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson,
Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Douglass, James, and Twain |