Dear Readers,
I have been doing a bit of thinking this summer about the work of Harold Bloom and particularly his writing about the struggle between works that for him is the key to whether or not a work becomes canonical. On reading Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears--a work that Bloom would probably not consider canon-worthy overall--I have been struck how this "agonistic struggle" between various works (Bloom's terminology) occurs in this novel, particularly through its allusions, and come to the conclusion that perhaps the canonical works Mengestu surveys are just too big to be digested. In Bloom's terminology, Mengestu must not be (mis)reading the canon quite well enough.
First, a note about Bloom's work: I am struck now by how many women and minority works are included in his book The Western Canon: The Books and the School of the Ages (1994) than how many are excluded, as I was when I first read the work in graduate school. My graduate program was right in seeing Bloom as old guard and a barricade against inclusion, but they were wrongheaded in dismissing his theories, for Bloom shares many of our values as proponents of literary studies. When he is not pushed in a corner (which he seems to be) and made defensive, he can be quite a thoughtful expounder of the values of avid reading and study that many if not most of us share who have invested our lives in literary study. And, additionally, his values can indeed be shaped to be quite useful for the kinds of recovery work many of us do of voices that have either just come on the scene (as Mengestu's) or been lost somewhere in the past.
And now a bit more about Mengestu's novel: Reading Bloom this summer has made me intensely aware of (sensitive to) allusion and what he calls "intratextual" relations (I think Julia Kristeva's term "intertextual" is as accurate and more understandable). I will take one example of how this intertextual relationship shapes Mengestu's novel. The title is a translation from the Italian of the last lines of Dante's Inferno, as Dante (the protagonist of the poem) leaves Hell with Virgil and walks into the light of the stars of night. The lines themselves almost sigh with relief; I suspect that the Italian may even more sound like a sigh, as many of the translations do. The lines are quoted by our protagonist Sepha's friend Joseph, who as an Ethiopian immigrant, has tried college as a way of legitimizing himself in America without success. He likes, when he gets drunk, to say the two lines that contain the title.
The lines are cited in the novel twice--once when Joseph is described as saying them and then later in the protagonist's voice as he returns to stasis, sitting on the front steps of his store, at the end of the novel. In Bloom's view, Mengestu has challenged Dante by trying to incorporate him (agonism again), and in essence I think Bloom would be partially correct. I tend to think that what Mengestu is signifying is that Sepha, having left Ethiopia where he saw his father beaten to death before his mother and younger brother and come to America is an emergence from Hell into a kind of modern Purgatory in the streets of the city of Washington. (There is some suggestion as well of ascending to a better level of Purgatory than the one at the very bottom, when Naomi and her mother begin a kind of gentrification of the area through their renovation of a dilapidated old mansion just across from Sepha's store, but this fails miserably and the area is in even worse shape by the end of the novel.)
Now, in Bloom's idea, Mengestu must overcome Dante in his representation to achieve canonical status, and he certainly does not do this (who could?). Yet somehow the novel is successful in locating Sepha and Joseph's stories within the framework of traditional high literature. By taking on Dante and alluding to him in his title and references, Mengestu reaches for something more than just the now that is the context of his novel. He shows his awareness of the literature of the past and suggests that it still provides for us many lessons and nourishment that can continue to inform our lives and creations today. That in and of itself is a powerful message, and perhaps the best that the novel can do. It certainly makes it a worthwhile reading experience. Cheers, friends!
