THE WESTERN CANON: The Books and School of the Ages

transition entails Calasso traces through his random (but artfully so) disposition of the text, and that apparent randomness comes to mirror the disconnectedness of modern con- sciousness itself, which Calasso believes has severed all ties to a larger sustaining realm.

Calasso builds much of his case around Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838), the French statesman who leaped from regime to regime and from era to era with a cat's ease. Before the French Revolution, Talleyrand was a very worldly Catholic bishop, and he later observed that those who never knew the ancien regime would never know the sweet- ness of life. Yet Talleyrand went on to support the Revolution and then to serve the Direc- tory, Napoleon, and finally the restored House of Bourbon. Talleyrand presides as master of ceremonies here because he achieved a whole- ness despite historical ruptures and discor- dancies; even his deathbed reconciliation with the church managed to round the circle of his various life interests.

In addition to Talleyrand, Calasso's cast includes-and this is a mere sampling-French kings and Vedic seers, Plato, Marx (Karl, though Groucho might easily have found a place), Jeremy Bentham, Hegel, Max Stirner, Charles Baudelaire, Pol Pot, and Cecil

B. De Mille. The list suggests a larger degree of playfulness than the book generally man- ages. For Calasso writes in a tone of icy and ironic omniscience that one might call Olym- pian but for a suspicion that he would prefer something a bit higher. Himalayan, say. Con- sider: "If we really must find a distinction be- tween what can be said of the Modern and everything that we encounter in previous ages, might it not perhaps be a certain ability .. . to ignore limitations even when explicitly defending them-to invade every off-limits area, perhaps on the pretext of guarding it against all violations?"

This is pure Calasso. The observation is striking (and may even be true), and the pair of hedging perhaps's is entirely in character. But the sentence only finally appears on page 293 of a book that has labored mightily, up to that point, precisely to find a distinction be- tween the modern and what came before.

Under the circumstances, the "If we really must" is maddening and provokes an exasper- ated "Well, whose idea was this anyway?" No matter: the reader who takes to the extraordi- nary mind will readily forgive the manner.

THE WESTERN CANON: The Books and School of the Ages. By Harold Bloom. Harcourt Brace. 578 pp. $29.95

A reader could grow hoarse talking back to this book-at times in annoyance, more often in admiration. Bloom teaches literature at both Yale and New York universities, and The Western Canon is his summation of a lifetime of reading great literature as well as watching what he considers its growing debasement in the universities and schools.

Bloom has always been a critic provoca- teur. As such, he attaches three appendices that identify what's canonical down through the 19th century and a somewhat diffident fourth appendix about the 20th century that he calls "a canonical prophesy." It is these lists, which go on for 36 pages and are, by turns, traditional, quirky, and tentative, that have made the book controversial. They also have diverted attention from The Western Canon's larger achievement.

For the Greeks a kanon was a rod or bar used to keep things straight. Today, the word canon has been stripped of its original and all subsequent meanings but one: the body of work that has kept the study of literature fix- ated on the writings of dead, mostly white, mostly European, mostly male authors. An- tagonists of Bloom's idea of a canon now com- mand the academy-feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, New Historicists, Decon-structors-all of whom he ridicules for their insistence that literature must serve political and social ends. "One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength," he argues, by "mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction."

In the beginning and concluding chapters, Bloom mourns the current loss of concern for preserving a tradition of great literature.

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These two elegiac chapters serve as bookends for 21 essays on individual authors whom Bloom believes most important "for both their sublimity and their representative nature." By focusing on individual writers, Bloom can put into practice his famous theory of literary in- fluence. Indeed, what is best about The West- ern Canon is the way Bloom reads the writers against one another-ingeniously, persuasively, implausibly. Writers go at each other in these pages head-to-head like sumo wrestlers. The most powerful figure with whom they all must contend is Shakespeare~for Bloom, "the larg- est writer we ever will know,"his hero, idol, god, the Western canon all compact in a single vessel. This book is Bloom's homage to Shakespeare, and one likes to imagine the play- wright responding in kind: "Here is a reader! When comes such another?" When indeed?

#### Philosophy & Religion

NET OF MAGIC: Wonders and Deceptions in India. By Lee Siegel. Univ. of Chicago. 455 pp. $60 (hardback); $19.95 (paper)

Twice as sonorous as "abracadabra" is the in- vocation that begins an Indian magic show: yantru-mantru-jalajala-tantru. In India the changing phenomena of daily life are consid- ered to be "maya" or illusion, and so a book about the profession of illusion, or magic, promises to be a rather revealing affair. Net of Magic indeed makes a good introduction to contemporary India because it captures so zestfully that country's noises, odors, sensory feel, tumult, and contradictions. Siegel, profes- sor of religion at the University of Hawaii and the author of Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (1987),describes, for example, riding out to the Delhi slum where street magicians reside, and his prose rhythms duplicate the swelter and back-and-forth rocking of the taxi: "The hot and dusty breath of the earth, the pant and moan of it, and the hot and rude rub of the sky, the growl and grunt of it, were in- escapable.'

The book has no shortage of magic. Small boys are decapitated and their heads grow

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back, mango trees spring up instantly from dust, pigeons turn into pigs. But for those who want to believe in a world of wonders-bad news. Asked by Siegel if there was real magic, one magician answered, "No, but I shouldn't ever say it. I earn a living only if people believe . . .at least in the possibility of miracles. But there are no real miracles, and all the holy men and god-men, Sai Baba and Jesus and other men like them, are just doing tricks, tricks that I can do, that I can teach you to do." This relation between magic and miracle, be- tween staged spectacles and genuine religion, is at the heart of Siegel's investigation. When Paul Brunton wrote A Search in Secret India (1934), that country was synonymous in the Western imagination with everything mysti- cal, mysterious, occult. A half-century later, Net of Wonders makes India seem the last place to look for religion, a country where, for for- eigners, religion is a tourist attraction-with Hinduism as India's Disneyland-and for In- dians, a set of mundane rituals without epiphany, without frisson.

Siegel's argument, however, is that, while the miracles of religion and the allure of magic may be false scientifically, they can be "true" aesthetically, in their emotional appeal. He wants to recreate that emotional experience of Indian magic for Western readers, and his approach re-sembles Robert-Hou- din's Confessions of a Prestidigitator (1859),in which the famous ma- gician wrote, "My au- dience shall be my reader, my stage this book." Like a good magician, Siegel also keeps changing per-

spectives, from analyzing ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts to reporting his own travels with Indian magicians to writing fictional short sto- ries about their inner world. "As I leave the plane and make my way toward the counter- Indian Immigration and Customs," so his nar- rative starts, "I sense that the magic show is