Paradiso

As a staunch defender of the Western Canon as it has been characterised by the likes of Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, Frank Kermode, among many other of our great classic, canon-centric critics, I find—as I have done before—that it is crucial to illuminate the essential factor of aesthetic merit as it pertains to the author’s placement in our canon. A topic which, I am well aware, can be a ‘thorny’ enterprise for some; new academia, woke-leaning, feminist-centric readers especially—even more stingy, considering, to quote Harold Bloom,

“Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.” (Harold Bloom: 1994).

While Shakespeare, Dante or Milton, or any other author within Harold Bloom’s 26 core canonical authors, are obvious candidates for the purpose of investigating aesthetic judgement and values—they are, after all, among the greatest aesthetes in literary history—I find myself in a strange sort of predicament as using any of these crucial canonical authors is nothing short of a doomed undertaking. I say this with melancholy since, sadly, the 21st-century literary ‘scholar’ has not either (a) read them, or (b) due to nihilistic ideologies, refused to read them (I have made much of this in a previous issue), or (c) attempted to read them but, one might say, through the dirt-smeared mirror that is heralded by the School of Resentment—a woke, Marxist, Foucault-like, feminist-oriented, ideology-riddled reading—which, by and by, prioritises as a principle ‘context’ over ‘text’. A mirror through which the extraordinary beauty and significance of aesthetic values will forever be a hidden thing—values that have, after all, been the culprits of shaping (or re-shaping, as it were) our literary canon, as well as the literature any deep reader has come to cherish: Austen, Cervantes, Dickinson, Whitman, Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Henry James, George Eliot, among many others.

Nonetheless, the flight from ‘aesthetic supremacy’, to put in Bloomian terms, has already been underway for decades. There has been a slow, accumulative degradation of literary criticism (not to mention criticism within more or less any faculty on the whole), which, instead of initiating a plunge into the deep, multitudinous depths of what makes a literary work canonical—that is to say: aesthetic values, universality, unassimilable strangeness, deep characterisations, and cognitive originality—has shown, on the contrary, an incessant, almost fanatical focus on ‘social energies’ (Harold Bloom: 1994) and social ideologies. This focus has been placed at the very forefront of criticism. The autonomy of the aesthetic has been under extreme, possibly irrecoverable neglect, even attack, and I find myself quite in agreement with Bloom, that:

“It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism and is founded upon a reading that clears space for the self, or that so works as to reopen old works to our fresh sufferings. The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yields to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.” (Harold Bloom: 1994).

Is the lack of wrestling with our canon why we have so few original and aesthetic-centric authors left? Sure, Pynchon, DeLillo, Joshua Cohen, and poets the likes of Thylias Moss, Rita Dove, Henri Cole, Rosanna Warren, Martha Serpas, among a handful of others are still alive. But we have lost Roberto Bolaño, Sebald, Feinman, John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Bloom, and recently Cormac McCarthy—I dare ask: who is left?

If wrestling with our canon stimulates canonical genius, and the modern critic and author alike rejects—yes, rejects—the canon, will we see an even greater degeneration of literature as well as its, traditionally, magnificent criticism? The answer, sadly, is likely a resounding yes.

I suspect we will see the offspring of more lemming-like authors who, to the best of their already weakened abilities, will create works that are hyper-fixated on social ideologies and push with tooth and nail certain agendas that fit their worldview. Authors like Jonas Eika, who won the Nordic Council Prize for Literature—an author who, I do not say this lightly, is shedding the most terrible of light on not only the Danish literary tradition (hollow enough in itself), but on all fresh, upcoming writers too. Very few authors in the past ten years or so have proved themselves to be a more pragmatic example of the decadence and ill-intentioned nature of modern literature than Jonas Eika. I recall, when thinking of Eika, Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that, “All bad poetry is sincere.” In that case, Eika is the sincerest prophet of them all.
Another, though different, instance is Jon Fosse who, while having written some decent plays, has been praised for his mess of a work, Septology. A work which, ironically, he (Fosse) has cited as being inspired by Samuel Beckett. While Fosse’s work, clearly, is leagues better than Eika’s, it still comes across as a funeral-like procession for the Canon more so than a reinvigoration: it lacks the strangeness (it has but a dull, weather-stained familiarity), it lacks the devotion to language (I read it in Norwegian—believe me, it is no better), and it lacks, most importantly, the Agon; that is, wrestling with what has come before. And what the Septology has been praised for, the slow, rain-clattering prose, is but a laughable compliment. Mind you, Fosse’s slow prose is not a Hemingwayan aesthetic or a Beckett-esque internalisation, it is, rather, an example of prose that has all but given up before it began. For any reader well-nourished (if I may use that simile) on Bloom’s intense regimen of Shakespearean vitality and Joycean complexity, Fosse does not just feel like a “poor executor”—no, he feels like the end of the line. And I think, with a heavy heart, a line which many newer authors will follow, to the further detriment of our hitherto vital canon.

Other examples include Maggie Nelson, Colson Whitehead and, pardon me, Jonathan Franzen, all of whom are among the modern, aesthetically stunted authors whose works, by and large, it can be difficult to read with any of the Bloomian effervescence one finds in abundance in the canon. I cannot for the life of me see how Maggie Nelson, who has been described as a,

“genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry”

is anything but a third‑rank, maybe fourth‑rank, political commentator with views that are as stale and poorly augmented as leftover bread.

With Colson Whitehead one enters into an entirely different arena, and I would like to quote my previous essay,

“No one with half a brain would consider Alice Walker’s Meridian or Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad works that could compete with Melville’s Moby-Dick, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Cortázar’s Hopscotch, despite how much they (Walker and Whitehead) are catering toward, quote, ‘afro-centrism’ and ‘civil rights.’ If one wants to read African American literature of the highest aesthetic order, read Ralph Ellison, Jay Wright, Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon especially—everything after became a quest for political activism), or Thylias Moss. And one may ask: why are these phenomenal authors not being studied rigorously at universities? I dare say they are too difficult. . . They require work. Hard work. They do not easily qualify for the modern scholar’s obsessive need for a surface-level perspective.” (Bjerregaard: 2025)

However, I am not in this issue directly concerned with the loss of our canon, a subject which I have already written about extensively; rather, this issue is dedicated to illuminating aesthetic values. In addition, the question that is, possibly, the most central: Why is aesthetic judgement obscure to the modern scholar? And who, in Shakespeare’s name, can we use as a simple, yet universal, representative?

I have chosen for this subject a 20th-century author, someone who is still firmly rooted within the canon and who is, on the whole, read by a broader audience—though, so to speak and yet not, often for the wrong reasons. It is not Joyce or Proust; while they would be valuable, few have read Ulysses, and even fewer have read In Search of Lost Time. Nor is it Beckett, whose Endgame and Waiting for Godot are well known in literary circles, but again, often for reasons of social energies and problematic ideology. Woolf or Austen do not quite stand the test either, as both have been thoroughly bastardised by neo‑feminists, and must, both of them, be preserved and defended in a different issue. Rather, I have had to choose an author—still of profound importance and read by academics and passionate readers alike—who, at the very sprawling and bustling centre of his writing, is an aesthete, possibly beyond any other 20th‑century author: Franz Kafka.

Kafka is one of the few modern writers who refuses to be interpreted; hence he calls upon interpretation. It seems like every ideology wants Kafka to represent what it wants or needs him to represent. The Marxist sees a critique of capitalism, while the neo‑Marxist sees Kafka as an interrupter or a distorter of reality. The feminist movement has Kafka portraying a landscape fitting that of their normative, modern female centric ideology—though failing, that is to say, not comprehending the esotericism of Kafka’s writings. Existentialists see Kafka as a front figure, as he portrays absurdity, sarcasm and hopelessness. And on, and on we go. From neo‑expressionism to sociologists to a procession of ‘post‑modern’ writers (to quote D. F. Wallace, “whatever that notion means”), through the psychologists’ movement and the late 20th‑century/21st‑century literary scholars.

There are even prominent canonical authors such as Thomas Mann, who sees Kafka as a sort of metaphysical writer, interpreting his works as both allegorical and God‑seeking in nature—one can, of course, excuse Mann for this, as Mann was, after all, an aesthete himself.

Kafka is more evasive than most modern writers, and ultimately a master of his craft—a master of aesthetic dignity; a quality that is as underrated in modern literary criticism as it is critically misunderstood. Shakespeare, who is undoubtedly the greatest aesthete in our canon, is the best example of this, as he creates an aesthetic architecture and characterisations that are so fundamental and in alignment with human nature that the reader cannot, in good faith, judge Shakespeare’s plays. Rather, the plays are tools with which the reader can judge himself or herself—like a mirror, if you will, in the spirit of Hamlet, held up to nature. A Marxist, new-Historicist, Foucault‑inspired, or feminist reading of Shakespeare can never work; however, a Shakespearean reading of, say, neo‑feminism or social‑centric ideologies is not merely appropriate, but it gives us such a persuasive and thorough critique that the modern, woke‑oriented scholar will be left, for want of a better phrase, baffled, shaken—even, I dare say, “lost in transition”.

Kafka has a way of representing the world without any immediate nor obvious identification. He will, in many of his short stories, both represent and not represent the subject matter at hand which, when interpreted in the eyes of a non‑aesthete, makes “synectical interpretation impossible” (Harold Bloom: 1978). Has any notion proved more idiosyncratic than the much used and abused: kafkaesque? Certainly it carries an uncanniness, which underpins many of Kafka’s stories. But for feminists, we are told the kafkaesque is navigating the patriarchal, legal, or bureaucratic systems that are surreal, illogical, and inherently designed to disempower women. The Marxist is convinced it is a literal manifestation of alienation, where human‑made systems (like the economy or our law) take on a life of their own and begin to dominate their creators. And so on and so forth—but, in truth, the social ideologues do not realise that,

“Kafka was too intelligent an ironist to believe that either his art or his life mixed profoundly enough with the world’s diversity.” (Harold Bloom: 1994)

The true scholar or canon‑centric reader, however—if I may venture on such a tangent—must confront the idiosyncrasies of not only feminism and Marxism (of which there are plenty) but of the kafkaesque itself. What if we strip the notion down to its very aesthetic roots? Bloom formulates it as such,

“Perhaps it [kafkaesque] has become a universal term for what Freud called ‘the uncanny,’ something at once absolutely familiar to us yet also estranged from us (…) Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.” (Harold Bloom: 1994)

To truly absorb the inherent Kafkan idiosyncrasies and contradictions (something we find in any canonical author), one must, challenging as it is, assimilate him where he is most impersonal and impartial—objective, even. The roots of which, naturally, we can only approach, and never quite touch.

One example of Kafkan evasiveness is from his “Zuerau Aphorisms” (1917–1918) where he writes,

“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.”

Another example is his exuberant short story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, a prototype of Kafka’s intrinsic paradoxes. The mouse folk portrayed in the story represents, naturally, the Jewish people, while, on the same token, they do not represent the Jewish people at all. This is what Kafka does in most parables, stories and even within his diary—he is and he is not the characterised personalities. Like that of Gregor Samsa or Josephine, the Mouse Folk’s singer, he both is and is not these characters. Josephine’s singing is Kafka’s story; and yet Josephine’s singing is not the story at all. It is but an allegory that itself is not an allegory; it refuses to be either, yet it is both.

Or, consider the opening of “The Metamorphosis”: Gregor Samsa’s terse, almost bureaucratic report—”One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin”—both states the fact and refuses, at the same time, psychological explanation. The flat, clinical diction withholds emotion even as it demands our empathy, so the sentence performs the story’s central tension: revelation without resolution (and vice‑versa). Kafka’s syntax, by equal measures precise, estranged and sharp, makes the reader inhabit the gap between knowledge and comprehension, and thereby enact the very aesthetic architecture described.

This dynamic enactment of revelation‑and‑evasion in the Kafkan cosmos exemplifies the kind of aesthetic mastery that, above ideological readings, secures a work’s canonical status.

Bloom writes, magnificently,

“Criticism is defeated by Kafka whenever it falls into the trap he invariably sets for head‑on interpretation, the trap of his idiosyncratic evasion of interpretability. In his kind of irony, every figure he gives us is and is not what it might seem to be.” (Harold Bloom: 1994)

If criticism struggled with Kafkan idiosyncrasies when criticism was in, if not a healthy state, then healthier, imagine then how criticism in today’s unseeing environment, where the Eikas, Fosses and Nelsons of the world are heralded as literary pioneers, suffers. But then again,

“Kafka, a fantasist of almost unique genius, is a romance author and in no way a religious writer. He is not even the Jewish Gnostic or Cabalist of Scholem’s and Benjamin’s imaginings, because he has no hope, not for himself or for us anyway.” (Harold Bloom: 1994)

This is what makes Kafka tricky, but also a wonderful, canonical read. He exposes shades of reality, revealing for the reader just enough, but not more. Or, to flesh it out differently, Kafka creates an aesthetic architecture that both refuses interpretation and thirsts for it at the same time. We see this with Fernando Pessoa, Walt Whitman, James Joyce and, to an extent, Jane Austen. But in the case of Kafka there is a difference in the sense that he believed, if we were to strip him to the core, in nothing but writing—that is to say, in what reveals itself in it. Kafka is the writer and what is written. Joyce certainly had an ego beyond his writing—yet he did what Shakespeare and Rabelais did: he transformed and reinvigorated language itself. Whitman, also not without an ego, evades us completely. He is, like Dante and Shakespeare, one of the few canonical authors who always waits a step or two ahead of us: “I depart as air, I shake my white Lockes at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot‑soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another I stop somewhere waiting for you.” (Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself: 1892). Could anything be more in the spirit of Kafkan evasiveness?—not merely in words, but in what is left unsaid as well?

Jane Austen is in many respects as evasive as Kafka, but it is channeled through her—often misunderstood—irony. Once one understands the Austenian irony (an aesthetic value itself), the evasiveness moves to the aesthetic, almost Shakespearean characterisations.

It is Pessoa, however, above all, who is the “Kafkan evasive”. So far as I can see, like Kafka, Pessoa refuses interpretation on a more fundamental level. Any of Pessoa’s major heteronyms—de Campos, Caeiro, Soares, Reis, even Search and Crosse—are representatives of what cannot be represented, despite what they claim to represent.

In conclusion, in an age when academic inquiry all but heralds identity, context and social ideologies over “formal qualities”, if I may, aesthetic criticism has been utterly relegated to the margins of literary study. I see the restoration of aesthetic judgement as a crucial step because it alone attends to craft, imaginative and cognitive originality, and the singular language‑work that sustains an ever‑lasting canon. Our canon does not need great expansion; it needs deep and serious readers.

Unfortunately we have modern nihilistic scholars claiming we do not need a canon at all. To this segment of ideologues, of which I have encountered too many too often, I can only stress that if aesthetic values are sidelined, the literary field risks a collective suicide. Reasserting aesthetic judgement and the focus on aesthetic supremacy—exemplified by Kafka’s capacity to reveal yet evade—remains essential to preserving a canon that both prizes depth, difficulty, and the transformative force of great writing, and keeps expanding the cosmos of strangeness and universality.

We do not merely risk losing literary criticism, if that is not already lost; we risk losing our exuberant, profound, and ever‑lasting literature too.