To Freud, Shakespeare ‘Invented’ Psychoanalysis by Inventing the ‘Psyche’ ❤️

“Shakespeare, Center of the Canon” 

by Harold Bloom

Introduction

This essay titled, “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” is taken from Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, published in the year 1994.

This essay is a powerful defence and assertion of William Shakespeare’s unique and unassailable position at the heart of the Western literary tradition, grounded entirely in his aesthetic supremacy over all other writers. Bloom emphatically declares that the chapter’s purpose is to place Shakespeare at the very heart of the Western literary world, as he has set the standard for all literature that precedes and follows him, through his unsurpassable standard of literary achievement.

Why Shakespeare is the Center of the Canon

The central thesis is that Shakespeare, alongside Dante, is the center of the Canon because he “excels all other Western writers in cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention”. Bloom argues that Shakespeare is an exemplary writer who has set the standard and the limits of literature itself.

Shakespeare’s Invention of Character

Shakespeare’s greatest originality is the invention of a new mimesis in the representation of character. The author pinpoints the creation of Sir John Falstaff as the ‘angel of the confirmation’ for Shakespeare’s genius, arguing that Falstaff changed “the entire meaning of what it is to have created a man made out of words”.

The key literary innovation is the psychology of mutability, specifically the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing. This concept - where characters like Hamlet and Falstaff constantly talk to and reflect upon themselves - is what makes Shakespeare the key to the Canon.

Shakespeare’s Disinterestedness and Universality

A critical component of Shakespeare’s canonical power lies in his disinterestedness and freedom from ideology. He is characterized by a conspicuous absence of explicit theology, metaphysics, ethics, or political theory. This freedom from moral and religious overdeterminations is what makes his art like the “largeness of nature itself” and accounts for his universal appeal.

Attack on the ‘School of Resentment’

The essay launches a critique against modern literary movements - collectively termed the “School of Resentment” (including New Historicists, Marxists, and academic Feminists) - who view Shakespeare’s supremacy as a “cultural conspiracy” and a tool of “Eurocentric center of power”. The author dismisses this criticism, noting that the sheer excellence of the work prevails regardless of political context.

Tolstoy’s Attack on Shakespeare’s Works

Bloom specifically addresses the attack by Leo Tolstoy, who condemned Shakespeare’s work as “trivial and immoral” and lacking “true religious drama”. However, Bloom says that, Tolstoy’s outrage inadvertently validates Shakespeare’s genius by locating its true power in its non-moral and non-religious nature.

Shakespeare ‘Invented’ Psychoanalysis by Inventing the ‘Psyche’

Harold Bloom stresses the contrast between the extraordinary work and the ordinary man. The historical William Shakespeare is described as an “amiable, rather ordinary-seeming person” who led an “uneventful life”.

This lack of an intense, idiosyncratic personal persona - an anonymity that Milton first observed - is central to his art, allowing his imagination to be entirely absorbed into his characters. Moreover, Bloom notes that even Sigmund Freud, who found comfort in believing Shakespeare was an “enigmatic and mighty nobleman” (the Oxfordian theory), essentially acknowledged that Shakespeare invented psychoanalysis by inventing the psyche.

Conclusion

In his concluding remarks, Bloom observes that, universality is the fundamental property of poetic value. Perhaps we can go farther; for Shakespeare we need a more Borges-ian term than universality. At once no one and every one, nothing and everything, Shakespeare is the Western Canon.