Man of Lepanto

Fiercely categorical pronouncements tend to raise my hackles, given my genetic tendency to equivocate and temporize.  Witness Bloom on Cervantes:  "So original is Don Quixote that nearly four centuries later, it remains the most advanced work of prose fiction that we have."  I do not doubt that the novel was highly original for 1605, or internationally popular and thereby highly influential.  My quibbles have to do with Bloom's sweeping use of the word "advanced" and his characteristically imperial "we".

Does he mean advanced in the sense of recondite, as advanced mathematics, a purely intellectual accomplishment of progress along a more or less previously stipulated sequence?  If so, then Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and Borges all are candidates for having produced prose fiction at least as far along, not to mention any number of experimental efforts in the realm of speculative fiction. Or, if it is to moral advancement that Bloom alludes, in the 1950's sense of statements like "I think there's so much that we can learn from negroes", then humanitarian fiction like Ole Rolvaag, Ignazio Silone, or even the lamentable Pearl S. Buck would need to be considered.

I don't question the book's greatness, but "most advanced"?

I almost get the impression that Bloom regards Don Quixote as advanced in the same way that Madame Blavatsky described the Hidden Mahatmas as advanced:  a mystical quasi-perfection that exists on an altogether higher plane than our merely mortal coil.  Perhaps the ingenious gentleman is the first truly universal character, but, if so, that says more about the development of the European mentality as the result of the advances of the Renaissance than it does about the advancement of Cervantes, an outstanding beneficiary of that change.

As for that "we", to whom does Bloom refer?  Surely not the average American reader, who cannot be said to "have" Don Quixote, in the sense of internalized possession through age-old familiarity, as Americans of a previous generation may be said to have had snippets of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution.  No, I suspect that Harold Bloom has spent so much of the past 46 years hobnobbing with the literary cognoscenti and gazing down his rabbinical nose at the unlettered hoi polloi, that he would regard anything less than a full professor of English at Yale as a member of the Great Unwashed.

Sorry, Marjorie Garber.