Harold Bloom (post 2): The eminent literary critic finds that normal novelists have multiple personality, but thinks of alternate personalities as daemons.

Bloom’s The Daemon Knows and this blog have the following authors in common: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and William Shakespeare. If you have read The Daemon Knows (or even if you haven’t), I invite you to search those writers in this blog.

In this post, I will hint at how Bloom and I differ in regard to Melville, James, and Shakespeare.

Bloom prefers Melville’s Moby-Dick. He calls Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man, “a botch.” But the latter is the Melville novel I chose to read for this blog. Why? Because Melville—like Dickens with Drood and Twain with Mysterious Stranger—waited until his last novel to more fully reveal his own multiple personality.

Bloom chose Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” to represent that author’s ghost stories. In addition to The Turn of the Screw, I have read two of James’s ghost stories, “The Jolly Corner” and “The Private Life.” They are both multiple personality stories, but I chose to discuss the latter in this blog, because, relatively speaking, “The Jolly Corner” is a botch.

Bloom’s The Daemon Knows mentions Shakespeare and Hamlet quite a number of times, but he does not focus on the character who is key to Shakespeare’s multiple personality: the Ghost. See my discussion of Hamlet in this blog.

Of course, the title of Bloom’s The Daemon Knows refers to Bloom’s own “daemon.” See the quote of Bloom’s reference to his own alternate personality in my previous post.