15. Harold Bloom1
[1 The key for Bloom citations is: ANX: The
Anxiety of Influence (197 5 [19731); BF: “The Breaking of Form" (1979); CCP:
“Criticism, Canon Formation, and Prophecy: The Sorrows of Facticity” (1984);
and MAP: A Map of Misreading (1980 [1975a]). MAP and CCP were the texts
Bloom himself recommended to me, but the more radical formulations of ANX were
often useful.]
A recipe for concocting your own Harold Bloom out of our
other critics would be no mean culinary challenge. From Frye, take the mania for
elaborate, numbered schematics and erudite terminology cribbed from the
“classical languages”; from de Man, the paradox of blindness and insight,
with the scare factor heightened; from Hartman, the aggrandizing equation of
criticism with literature, and the turn to arcane theology; from Holland, an
orthodoxy the writings of Freud and his closest disciples (Rank, Fenichel,
Ferenzi, Ernest Jones); from Fiedler, an obsession with the dark, daemonic role
of the id, and a cultural unease of the American latecomer; from just about
everybody, a distaste for empirical studies of communication and for Marxist
aesthetics, an embarrassment about what to make of formalism (especially the New
Critics) and moralism (those opposites that criticism is so wondrously apt at
combining), plus a magisterial sense of having finally created the method
literature truly demands; flavour with saturated anxiety and sorrow; contract
the mixture in a Kabbalistic vessel and apply satanic or promethean fire until
the vessel breaks apart; and even so, what falls or is thrown out may still be
but a weak homunculus that could never thrive as Bloom has.
Once a prime academic critic included by Wellek and Warren among those
doing “close reading” (TL 338), Bloom has blossomed into an anti-critic par
excellence, an enfant plus-que-terrible, a Childe Harold loathing his own
belatedness and re-visioning himself as Childe Roland to do battle with the
forces of a darkness he himself has summoned to highlight (as Wallace Stevens
might say) the effulgence of his own candle. He aspires to be cast (indeed
thrown) not in the image of God, but of Satan, whose Miltonic portrayal reveals
the "archetype of the modern poet at his strongest” (ANX 19f; cf. ANX
21f, 32; MAP 37, 40, 63, 113).
Bloom is at times uneasily placed among the deconstructionist critics.2
[2. BF appeared as the opener in a volume whose title Deconstruction and
Criticism announces counterstatements to deconstruction as well as uses of
it.] Though he may at times share their terminology, rhetorical tactics, and
sources (Nietzsche, Freud, the Romantics, etc.), he uses their program mainly as
a point to swerve away from quite emphatically. His development was doubtless
affected by their territorial ascendancy at Yale, where he had to keep looking
over the fence into their yard. Instead of re-energizing his career by moving
in, as Hillis Miller seems to have done, Bloom promoted his by carving out his
own bit of stubbed ground in their very shadow and erecting his dark tower, a
dead ringer (pun intended, like the others in this Chapter and many more on
Hartman) for Childe Roland's tower, as we shall see.
His proceedings have been brilliantly strategic. Deconstructionist
dilemmas -- that writing and reading are beset by complex displacements,
substitutions, tropings, evasions, defenses, and so on -- become a backdrop to
dramatize his own valorous forays. He seizes the role of a "strong”
partisan to lead us in the “struggle" of “reading well,” the “very
difficult” and “daunting” “task” of “reading a poem properly,” the
“endless quest of “how to read,” and comparably heroic ventures (BF 5, 16;
ANX 69; MAP 105). To call such valour “death-defying" turns out to be
almost literally accurate, though in a sombre sense we will explore later on.
Bloom advocates an “antithetical” method upon which he claims “all
interpretation depends" (MAP 76, e.d.). He merely “urges criticism"
“farther upon a road already taken” (ANX 6 5). The term
“antithetical" has two main meanings, inspired, like much of Bloom's
thought, by Freud and Nietzsche: "the counterplacing of rival ideas in
balanced or parallel structures, phrases, words”; and “the anti-natural, or
the “imaginative” opposed to the natural” (MAP 88). Also, Yeats used the
term for “a quester who seeks his own opposite” (ANX 65).
In Bloom's “manifesto,” “antithetical criticism” is depicted as a
"series of swerves": “to read a great precursor poet as his greater
descendants compelled themselves to read him”; “to read" them “as if
we were their disciples” and "learn where we must revise them”; to
“measure” the first swerve against the second, and to “apply” "the
accent of deviation" as a “corrective to the reading of the first
poet" (ANX 930. “The best critics of our time” are those who, like
“Empson and Wilson Knight," “misinterpret” most “antithetically”
(ANX 95).
Bloom also names his method "revisionism," but not in the
Marxist meaning, invoked by Jameson, of “making a theory comfortable and
palatable by leaving out whatever calls for praxis or change, whatever is likely
to be painful for"
"purely contemplative intellectual consumption” (MF
xv) -- rather the opposite. “Modern revisionism” descends from “heresy,”
but practices “creative correction” (ANX 29). “The revisionist strives to
see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as then to aim
“correctively'" (MAP 4). “Revisionism follows received doctrine along
to a certain point, and then deviates, insisting that a wrong direction was
taken at just that point” (ANX 29).
In “poetic influence,” though, this “creative correction"
“is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation” (ANX 30). Such
“influence” is thus identified with misprision " “miisreading,” and
“misapprehension,” and with “perverse revisionism (ANX 7, 30, 50).3
[3 Though “imagination's gift comes necessarily from the perversity of the
spirit," “the strong poet’s imagination cannot see itself as
perverse” (ANX 85; cf. MAP 200). Despite the shock value of such avowals,
Bloom allows for “health” in this “perversity,” as compared to mere
“pathology”; “we cannot assume that poetry is a compulsive neurosis” (ANX
85, 105, 66).] If “to imagine is to misinterpret," then “poetry is
misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance” (ANX 93ff). "Every poem
is a misinterpretation of a parent poem” (ANX 94). “Strong poets make"
“poetic history” “by misreading one another so as to clear imaginative
space for themselves” (ANX 5). Thus, poetry is doomed to dwell in the
misprision-house of language, where the poet may “raise his Ararat," but
never lower his “error” rate (cf. ANX 155; 101; MAP 70, 93).4
[4 The “Ararat” figure is transposed from Ferenezi's vision of the
"flood" over to Artaud as an artist flooded by influence (ANX 154f)
(keeping in mind the “flow” stem in “influence”). Water imagery pervades
Bloom's vision, as I remark toward the end of the Chapter.] “Error
about life is necessary for life, and error about poetry is necessary for
poetry" (ANX 120).
In his “larger vision of trope than traditional or modern rhetoric
affords," Bloom “re-defines” “a trope” as “a willing error, a
turn from literal meaning” (MAP 93). Such “turns” "occur between the
meanings of intention and the significances of linguistic utterances”(BF 10).
In this large sense, “any critic necessarily tropes” in “giving a reading
of a specific poem," because “a trope is troped wherever there is a
movement from sign to intentionality, whenever the transformation from
signification to meaning is made by the test of what aids the continuity of
critical discourse" (BF 10f.) Moreover, “emotion" is “experienced
as trope”; the expression via a poem is "a revisionary further troping";
and the poem “is necessarily still further troped in any strong reading"
(BF 16).5 [5. These three stages of “troping” are surely
not the whole story. Further stages of must occur if a critic is to define and
expound his reading of the poem; again if (as in my case), one critic discusses
another's readings; and so on.] So much “tropicality" “makes a mockery
of most attempts at reading.”
If “fictions and poems can be defined, at their best, as works that are
bound to be misread, that is to say, troped by the reader," then “reading
well” must be the struggle” Bloom vows it is (BF 5f.) Correspondingly,
"criticism" explores “unique acts of creative misunderstanding” (ANX
93). If “all poems” are “antithetical to their precursors,” “criticism
then necessarily becomes antithetical also.” “Perhaps there are only more or
less creative or interesting misreadings”; “there are no interpretations but
only misinterpretations" (ANX 43, 95). “Most so-called “accurate”
interpretations of poetry are worse than mistakes” (ANX 43). Bloom thus
confronts such projects as Hirsch's method for “valid interpretation"
with a conception of “misreading” so pervasive that even the empathetic
Hartman finds it “a wrong-headed term, more spirited than helpful” (CW 52).
Nothing daunted, Bloom claims his approach “should help us read more
accurately any group of past poets who were contemporary with one another”. (ANX
11). This approach is "corrective" in being able to “foster a more
adequate practical criticism, “ “a newer and starker way of reading poems”
(ANX 5, 58). In place of the “failed enterprise of seeking to ‘understand’
any single poem as an entity in itself,” we can embark on “the quest of
learning to read any poem as the poet's deliberate misinterpretation" “of
a precursor poem or of poetry in general” (ANX 43). “Whether the theory is
correct or not may be irrelevant to its usefulness for practical criticism”
(MAP 10). Bloom does, however, periodically express the hope that it is in fact
“correct” (ANX 148; MAP 74, 178). Moreover, his is confidently offered as
“a single scheme of complete interrelation” suitable to support criticism
the way “a paradigm works” in “normal science” (MAP 71; BF 19).
When I asked Bloom if he felt his position had been consistent over the
years, he quoted his revered Emerson: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of small minds.” Disregarding all the small minds I have known who were
foolishly inconsistent, I would revise the Emersonian formula for Bloom,
to wit: “a cunning inconsistency is the daemon of strong minds.” The claims
of a method to engender both “misreading” and a “corrective" or
“correct” theory is one striking illustration. Another is the density of
scholarly source-namings without the customary footnotes or bibliographies, as
if Bloom were both hailing and defying his own precursors, or conjuring on great
names without revealing their texts. Bloom's short, feisty Anxiety,
though bristling with allusions and quotations, ends not with references and
indexes, but with a poem (followed by nine blank pages filled in my copy with my
scribbled index of his terms and obsessions).
The problematics of language are emphasized. “I only know a text, any
text, because I know a reading of it, someone else's reading, my own reading, a
composite reading”; "words” are “only words, not things or
feelings,” and “words will not interpret themselves” (BF 8f.) The goal
here, as for the deconstructionists, is by no means the intersubjective
consensus projected by Hirsch or Bleich. The critic instead seeks out the
“agon"6 [6. Frye uses “agon” in the sense of
“conflict,” “pathos,” or “death struggle” and finds it most
characteristic of “romance” (AC 187, 192). Bloom extends the idea of a
“quest” to criticism itself (Note 11). Compare Note 30 to Ch. 5] -- a
desperate conflict in which “every poem" “begins as an encounter
between poems,” and “all interpretation depends on the antithetical relation
between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its
meanings” (MAP 70, 76). Because “the meanings of an intertextual encounter
are as undecidable and unreadable as any single text is,” every poem becomes
as unreadable as every other” (BF 9). “A more antithetical criticism"
might “persuade the reader” to “take on his share of the poet's own agon"
(MAP 80).
Bloom's “practical" outlook sallies into battle against much
contemporary critical theory. He castigates the “reduction” performed by
“rhetorical, Aristotelian, phenomenological, and structuralist criticisms”;
the “impasse of Formalist criticism”; the “barren moralizing that
Archetypal criticism has come to be";7 [7. Bloom
complains because “archetypal interpretation too readily posits a shared
generosity of spirit" and “over-spiritualizes" “criticism"
(MAP 79), steps he deplores (cf. Note 25).] and the “anti-humanistic8
[8. Bloom is no great champion of humanism himself, since it clashes with his
vision of the “perverse," “ungenerous” “savagery” of “the
strong imagination" (ANX 85f) (cf. Note 3). “The only human virtue we can
hope to teach” “is the social virtue of detachment from one's own
imagination” (ANX 86), this too an echo of Frye (AC 348).] plain dreariness
of all those developments in European criticism that have yet to demonstrate
that they can aid in reading any one poem by any poet whatsoever” (ANX 94,
12f.) Against the “formalist view still held in common by archetypalists,
structuralists, and phenomenologists" that “criticism teaches" “a
language of criticism," Bloom champions “a language in which poetry
already is written, the language of influence" (ANX 25).
By such lines of reasoning, Bloom attains the most assertive version of
the Yale-school power play that raises criticism to the rank of literature and
poetry. “Poets’ misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics’
misinterpretations or criticisms, but this is only a difference in degree and
not at all in kind" (ANX 94f.) If a "poem” performs an
“interpretation of other poems" (MAP 75), the critic merely extends
rather than interrupts the process.
The "manifesto" that “all criticism is prose poetry" (ANX
95) should be considered in view of the exalted status Bloom accords to poetry.
He invokes Vico's “system of primitive magic" whereby “poetic
wisdom" is "founded upon divination” (ANX 59). "What the ephebe”
(novice artist) “enters upon, when he begins his life cycle as a poet, is in
every sense a process of divination" (ANX 152). “Isaiah” the
“prophet” is emblematic of the “preternaturally strong poet" (ANX
73). "In most” of such “strong poets," “there is a context
against which the numinous shines forth” (ANX 101).
At times, Bloom even seems to make “gods” out of poets (ANX 21, 107,
117, 152; MAP 116), especially Milton (MAP 87; ANX 79,152), as if to invite
himself into their company, less Prometheus than Tantalus9 [9.
To ascribe the “devouring" of an “infant” to “Prometheus"
rather than Tantalus (ANX 11 5) almost gives away the whole show; it would be a
very complex Freudian slip.], hands outstretched toward elusive glory. Though
fire no longer waits to be discovered or stolen from heaven, “the candle of
the Imagination as God" may yet “light the dark" (MAP 66). Bloom's
own “imagination” (a faculty identified in the opening words of the
"Manifesto” with “misinterpretation,” ANX 93) and "eloquence”
might support the “self-preservation” that “makes us giants and heroes and
magical, primitive formalists again” (MAP 67f.) After all, “the imagination
can do anything."
Yet another cunning inconsistency meets us here. Bloom readily concedes
that “we after all (myself and those for whom I write) are not poets, but
readers” (ANX 122). “Poets, or at least the strongest among them, do not
read necessarily as even the strongest of critics read" (ANX 19). “The
poet in every reader does not experience the same disjunction from what he reads
that the critic in every reader necessarily feels" (ANX 25, e.d.). “Our
sorrows as readers cannot be identical with the embarrassment of poets, and no
critic ever makes a just and dignified assertion of priority” (ANX 65).
“Critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with
continuity cannot be a poet” (ANX 78).
A closely related inconsistency turns up in Bloom's proposal to
“de-idealize” the poetic and critical transactions traditionally displayed
among “academics” (BF 6; ANX 5). Though “we have idealized Western poetry
almost since its origins,” he avows that “humanism” can “never" be
"founded upon” any “idealized mirroring" of the “implicit
categories of literature” (ANX 120, 86). For “an Idealizing critic, even one
of great accomplishment," "poets are concerned” “only with the
anxieties of form," not of "influence” (MAP 173). To comprehend
“the reader's defense” and “anxiety," “we need to be less
idealistic about interpretation than we generally are" (MAP 74). Among his
“de-idealizing” precursors, Bloom mentions Schopenhauer, Emerson, Freud,
Burckhardt, Curtius, Browning, and “the heirs of Nietzsche” in “the school
of Deconstruction,” "among whom Derrida, de Man, Hillis Miller are most
distinguished” (BF 5; MAP 89, 119, 79).
Yet Bloom doesn't want to push this alliance too far. He laments that
“criticism" is “being excessively despiritualized" by the
deconstructionists (MAP 79). He wants to "follow Emerson, as against
Nietzsche, in declining to make of demystification the principal end of
dialectical thought in criticism” (MAP 175). Besides, the “de-idealizing”
"achievements" of “Deconstruction” "seem to rely both upon
too narrow a canon of texts, and upon only parts of texts, where intratextual
differences tend to cluster or even protrude” (MAP 79).
Bloom "favours a kind of interpretation that seeks to restore and
redress, “rather than to primarily deconstruct meaning” (MAP 175). A
“self-deconstructed reader" is “hardly equal” “to the antithetical
restoration” of meaning as “burden and function of whatever valid poetry we
have left" (MAP 5). In addition, “poetry and fiction share with criticism
the mystery that poststructuralist speculation seeks to deny: the spark we call
personality or the idiosyncratic, which in metaphysics and theology once was
called presence” (CCP 9). “Nietzsche's” “attack” would “deconstruct
the thinking subject itself, by dissipating the ego into a “rendezvous of
persons" (MAP 86).
Bloom's prime tactic for “de-idealizing” is to “call into
question” the “myth” of “the innocence of reading” and the
"mystique of a somehow detached yet still generous, somehow disinterested
yet still energetic, reading-process" (BF 6). “Strong poets"
“should always be condemned by a humanist morality” for being “necessarily
perverse"; their “imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery
and misrepresentation” (ANX 85f.) To “idealize” is a trait of “weaker
talents" (ANX 5). “Idealism's” belief that “influence" is
transmitted via “generosity of the spirit” applies only to “minor or
weaker” or “poorer” “poets” (ANX 30). “Literature” is an
"antagonistic,” “competitive," and “combative” domain,
“built upon the ruin of all that is most generous in us" (ANX 85; BF 5).
"Nothing is less generous than the poetic self when it wrestles for its own
survival" (MAP 18). Vico's “poetic wisdom,” "this magic formalism,
was cruel and selfish, necessarily" (ANX 59). Depictions of literary
creation as "stealing” (ANX 31, 56) suggest a similar judgment.
Yet this judgment is no mere antithesis-Bloom-bah-humbug
anti-cheerleader's scorn of literary creation. Hardly has idealistic humanism
been hurled with hideous ruin and combustion down, when the daemonic arises from
the fall with a desperate heroism heralding a re-idealizing and re-mythologizing
“upward fall'10 [10. This term “upward fall” resounds
among the Yale group, appearing in Hartman's Beyond Formalism (1970: 160)
and Criticism in the Wilderness (CW 238), and in de Man's rendition of
Binswanger (BI 46). See Note 14 to Ch. 16.] to far loftier (though more
precarious) heights than before (cf. ANX 104). For Bloom at least, pride goeth after
a fall. "Quickening power comes when the Selfhood," "a sense of
one's own divinity," “stands in its own defense" (MAP 64). We
already encountered the invocation of Vico's idea that poetic
“divination" might allow one to “become a god” by
"foretelling” (ANX 59; MAP 19). Shelley, for instance, “compels us to
see him in the company of angels, the daemonic partners of his quest for
totality" (ANX 104).
"Quests” of every sort are proclaimed11 [11
Compare the wide range of uses for “quest" from heroic to trivial (as a
synonym for try, look for, etc.) (ANX 10, 13, 35f, 54, 63f, 79, 104, 125, 140;
MAP 24, 59, 66, 91, 105f, 109, 156f, 174f), with Bloom himself accounted a
valouros "quester” (MAP 175, 59, 91) in the august company of poets like
Shelley and Browning (ANX 104; MAP 24), characters like Childe Roland and
Ulysses (MAP 106,156), and indeed all “ephebes” and “strong poets” (ANX
10 35, 79, 36, 63). The “impossible heroic” nature of such
"quests" (MAP 174; ANX 10) dooms them to “failure" as their
“goal and glory," for which the fate of Childe Roland is peculiarly
emblematic (cf. ANX 79, 104, 131; MAP 31, 108f, 114, 117). “Roland has
triumphed by failing precisely as his precursors failed” (MAP 119). “The
Dark Tower is the self-negating element in the activity of art, and Roland is
the poetic consciousness at its most dangerous." “The Tower” “stands
for the blindness of the influence process, which is the same as the
reading-process," and “for the possibilities” and “limitations of
metaphor" (MAP 113).
The goal of such heroism is nothing less than the defiance of death.
“In our poetry, what is being evaded ultimately is fate, particularly the
necessity of dying” (BF 9). “Every poet begins (however “unconsciously”)
by rebelling more strongly against death's necessity than all other men and
women do" (ANX 10). "The goal of divination is to attain a power that
frees one from all influence, but particularly from the influence of an expected
death, or necessity for dying” (MAP 13). Accordingly, “poetic anxiety
implores the Muse for aid in divination, which means to foretell and put off as
long as possible the poet's own death, as poet and (perhaps secondarily) as
man" (ANX 61). "Divination, in this sense, is both a rage and a
program, offering desperate intimations of immortality through a proleptic magic
that would evade every danger, including nature itself” (MAP 13). For such
valorous heroism, the great poets must be “strong,” a Bloomian term
influenced perhaps by Emerson's use of it for the "great geniuses"
that “inspire, derange, and deject us, and perplex ages with their fame”(MAP
166). We are assured that “strong poets are infrequent"; “great
poets” may have
"enormous gifts” and yet "fail of continuous
strength” (MAP 9). For “our own century,” Bloom lists “only Hardy and
Stevens writing in English,” though later relents to acknowledge “Ashbery
and Ammons” (MAP 9, 161, 199). At least occasional strength is granted to
Yeats, Lawrence, and Frost, along with Robinson, Moore, Eliot, Aiken, Ransom,
Jeffers, Cummings, Crane, and Warren (MAP 9, 162, 197). For earlier periods,
Bloom nominates Browning, Whitman, and Dickinson plus Milton, Shelley, Blake,
Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Rilke, and, apparently, Keats and Tennyson (MAP 9, 11,
177; ANX 91; MAP 144f.) Pound and Williams are denied “strength" in one
listing but awarded it in another; Bloom seems to resent them and their
“schools" for “scoffing at the notion of the anxiety of influence"
(MAP 9, 162, 199), a privilege he reserves for Milton alone (ANX 34).
Shakespeare is disregarded because he “belongs to the giant age before the
flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic
consciousness" (ANX 11).12 [13. Shakespeare had only
“Marlowe, a poet very much smaller than his inheritor” (ANX 11). Besides,
Shakespeare's form was “dramatic," not “lyric,” a reservation
suggesting. Along with the citation of authors, that Bloom's entire method might
be limited to lyric and epic, though I don't see why it has to be.]
With yet another cunning inconsistency, Bloom typically
offers his argumerits as valid for “all poems" or “every poem” (ANX
93; MAP 19, 69), not just for “strong" ones. For him, any “poem"
is “anxiety”; and “influence" is “a figuration for poetry
itself," including "the greater relation of latecomer poet to
precursor, or of reader to text, or of poem to the imagination, or of the
imagination to the totality of our lives" (ANX 94; MAP 71).
“Necessarily" is among Bloom's favourites modifiers for making the
processes he depicts seem inescapable. 13 [13. In addition to
the uses of “necessarily” cited here, see those in MAP 25, 34, 47, 49, 51,
55, 75; ANX 7, 19, 30, 25, 85, 92, 93, 95, 100, 117; BF 10, 16. The term almost
gains the force of a prophetic shibboleth.)
“Poems"
“are necessarily about other poems”; “poetic influence is necessarily
misprision"; "all literary tradition is necessarily elitist”; and so
forth (MAP 18, 20, 39). For the formulation “strong poets are necessarily
perverse," Bloom explains that "necessarily” “means as if
obsessed," (ANX 85), though surely he is in that state as much as they.
To capture Bloom's rhetoric, we might raise “hyperbole” to “superbole,"
a term for an exaggeration proudly pushing toward ultimate limits.
“Shelley" is "the most truly poetic of all true strong poets"
(MAP 11). “Whitman is at once the greatest and the most repressed of all
American poets" (MAP 178). “Angus Fletcher" is “the most daemonic
and inventive of modern allegorisers” (MAP 129), One poem shows Whitman
performing a “more direct” “defense of undoing the poetic self” “than
anywhere else in the language"; another poem by Tennyson
"achieves itself
by one of the most complex misprisions in the language”; and so on (MAP 181,
144).14 [14 Compare also “the most violent and sustained
hyperbole in all of Stevens”; or “Warren's" "transumption without
rival in American poetry since “Auroras of Autumn" (MAP 189, 197).] Since
the standards for assigning such superlatives have been mainly invented by
Bloom, we can't very well dispute him.
If “there is no method other than yourself" (CCP 9, e.d.), then
Bloom's values can be as personal as he likes. He is totally free to declare
what is “grand," “immense," "triumphant,”
"brilliant,” “astonishing," “exalted,” “glorious,"
“magnificent,” and so on (ANX 124,133, 143, 153; MAP 182f, 186). I am
sometimes puzzled by his preferences, such as the lofty esteem for the gloomy
poetry of the aged Thomas Hardy, whose "During Wind and Rain" is
called “as good a poem as our century has given us," and “few books of
twentieth-century verse in English compare with Winter Words in
greatness” (MAP 20f.) Apparently, the decisive factor is whether Bloom is
moved to strong emotions: “intensity" of "anguish,"
“sorrow,” “uneasiness," “enormous nostalgias,” and the like (BF
24, 31, 36). “As I Ebb'd” is for him “the most moving of all Whitman's
poems"; Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn” contains “the single passage
that moves me most in all his work" (MAP 178, 189). Like Dr. Johnson, Bloom
presumably "praises” a “passage" in which his “own deepest
anxieties are openly expressed” (ANX 149). Like Whitman, Bloom may fear that
he "too but signifies at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift'" (MAP
181). Like Stevens” persona, Bloom may be a "scholar of one candle"
who "sees an arctic effulgence flaring on the frame of everything he
is," and "feels afraid” (MAP 189f.)
To accent the originality of his own approach, Bloom trenchantly swerves
away from the established scholarly methods of, literary history. Against the
"absurd myths" and “gossip”15 [15. Stanislaus Lee's
formula, "myth is gossip grown old" (MAP 65), gives “myth” a far
lower status than in the work of Fiedler and Frye.] of “literary
pseudo-history," he expounds “true poetic history: how poets have
suffered other poets” (ANX 69, 94). “Poetic history is indistinguishable
from poetic influence" -- defined exactly to fit Bloom's own critical
movements, namely as “a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of
distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism” (ANX 5, 30, e.d.). The
“historicism” in his “scheme of interpretation" "deliberately
reduces to the interplay of personalities" (MAP 71). He allows, however,
that “an application of literary history,” though “not strictly necessary
for the study of misprision,” would be “greatly desirable” (MAP 116).
With equal assertiveness, Bloom wants to “distinguish once for all”
between his “poetic influence" and “traditional “source
studies,'" whose scholars he goadingly spurns as “carrion-eaters of
scholarship” (MAP 116, 17, 21) ---a quaint jibe for a critic who ruminates on
cannibalism and “wrestling with the dead."16 [16. On
cannibalism and wrestling with the dead, compare ANX 78 115f; MAP 17, 26. In the
ratio of “apophrades,” the poet is nourished by the dead, though more
through possession than ingestion.] Bloom's vision provocatively empties the
encounter between poems or poets of its historical factuality. “Source study
is wholly irrelevant" in an “antithetical criticism” for which “the
meaning of a poem can only be another poem,” a “central poem by an
indubitable precursor, even if” the later poet "never read that
poem" (ANX 70). The “precursor" “may well" “be an
imaginary, composite figure” (ANX 121).
Bloom issues his most audacious challenge of all when he upsets
chronology with the prospect that an earlier poet was influenced by one who
lived much later. “Examples abound; the hugely idiosyncratic Milton shows the
influence, in places, of Wordsworth; Wordsworth and Keats both have a tinge of
Stevens; the Shelley of The Cenci derives from Browning” (ANX 154).
Indeed, “the strongest poets” are those who “achieve a style that captures
and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time
almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are
being imitated by their ancestors” (ANX 141). This "drastic" and
"absurd” "phenomenon" is a deconstructive reversal which
remains involved in the hierarchy it undermines. Bloom occasionally backslides
by offering historical testimony about “influence,” perhaps one more cunning
inconsistency, designed to conciliate more traditional scholars. For instance,
he cites a letter to Schiller in which Hölderlin complains that "to you,
my dependence is insurmountable," and "I sometimes strive to put you
out of my mind so as not to be overcome by anxiety" (BF 17). Or, Dryden is
called in to "testify" that "'Milton has acknowledged to me that
Spenser was his original,” and a passage of Milton's own is adduced to the
same effect (MAP 127). In this case, though, "the paternity required no
acknowledgement"; and I would say as much for the obvious, sometimes
stifling, resemblance of Hölderlin's poetry to Schiller's.
On a grand scale, Bloom proposes to equate "the history of fruitful
poetic influence” with “the main tradition of Western poetry since the
Renaissance” (ANX 30, e.d.). At first, he saw a major historical break in the
Enlightenment. “By the 1740's,” "the anxiety of style and the
comparatively recent anxiety of influence had begun a process of merging that
seems to have culminated during our last few decades” (ANX 150). “The great
poets of the English Renaissance are not matched by their Enlightened
descendants, and the whole tradition of the Post-Enlightenment, which is
Romanticism, shows a decline in its Modernist or post-Modernist heirs" (ANX
10). The precursors of the Romantics, Milton and Dr. Johnson, become the
"prophets” of “Post-Enlightenment" poetry” and “criticism,”
respectively (BF 12).
Milton is indeed “the central problem in any theory and history of
poetic influence in English” (ANX 33). “No poet compares to Milton in his
intensity of self-consciousness as an artist and in his ability to overcome all
negative consequences of such concern" (MAP 125). Even great successors
like Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley have to be situated “in the shadow of
Milton,” the “god" or “sub-god," "the awesome blind
ancestral hard” (MAP 144ff; ANX 152, 74; MAP 54). The neglect of Shakespeare,
“the greatest poet in our language," who (as we saw) was “excluded”
from the “argument" for not having had major precursors (ANX 11; MAP
142), is a disturbing one here, since his shadow is even longer than Milton's.
Bloom later “recanted” his “previous emphasis on the anxiety of
influence as a Post-Enlightenment phenomenon”; “the affliction of
belatedness" “is a recurrent malaise of Western consciousness" (MAP
77). Historical variations are mainly “differences in degree, rather than in
kind." Still, “Romantic tradition differs vitally from earlier forms of
tradition" in being "consciously late, and Romantic literary
psychology is therefore necessarily a psychology of belatedness” (MAP 3 5).
It is through this feeling of “belatedness” that history enters most
forcefully in hindsight. Bloom's Map is “a study of creative
misreading, or the belatedness of poetic reading” (MAP 4). “The subsuming”
of “literary tradition” “by belatedness” is an "inescapable
phenomenon" (MAP 36). “A full critical awareness" of this
“phenomenon and the resultant misprision worked by revisionism might lead to a
kind of criticism we rarely possess" (MAP 79). "We need to begin again
in realizing for how long and how profoundly art has been menaced by greater
art, and how late our own poets have come in the story” (ANX 70). This
“our" may well refer to “Americans," who are especially
“latecomers," “and we are better off for consciously knowing it"
(MAP 27). "From the origins of our nation until this moment,"
“evidences" of “belatedness" can be sought "most usefully in
our poets" (MAP 27, 52).
Modern times represent “a cultural situation of such belatedness that
literary survival itself seems fairly questionable" (MAP 39). Bloom is
"aware that this must seem a Gospel of Gloom,” but he prefers it to
"evasions of Necessity" (MAP 39). And whereas Nietzsche considered
“the sense of being a latecomer" “pernicious,” Bloom “insists"
it is “now" "salutary," a means to recognize “the energy of
humanistic performance” (MAP 29, 83).
However, the pervasive “darkness" of Bloom's vision is hard to
overlook. 17 [17. For instance, “the strong dead” “darken
the living"; “anxiety of influence is dark and demonic” (ANX 139, 25).
Freud is called upon for his “darkest wisdom," and his “darker view of
instinct” (ANX 63; MAP 89). Bloom in turn expounds “dark truth,” “dark
sense,” “darker relationships,” and so on (MAP 33; BF 11, 15). If it
enhances the effulgence of his own candle, as I claimed, cribbing from Stevens,
Bloom has reason to bless the darkness.
Highly characteristic is his reverent invocation of Milton's fallen Satan
as “archetype of the modern poet" (ANX 19). Only through a catastrophic
fall can the creative spirit rise up. Bloom's preoccupation with
“daemonization" makes him a reverse exorcist who, far from casting out a
daemon, “summons him” under "many names," because “the anxiety of
influence" is "identical” with "the daemonic” in poets,"
or is at least a “dark and daemonic ground” (ANX 35, 103, 25, 58).
“Daemons" are, however, not merely negative; they are, in Drayton's
words, those "'who for greatness of mind come near to Gods" (ANX 100).
Without doubt, Bloom's dark vision reflects his own keen consciousness of
being a latecomer. Instead of seeing in critical theorizing a recent and
original trend (as Culler does), he traces “our latest mimic wars of
criticism” all the way back to the “Hellenistic" rivalry between the
partisans of "analogy," the “equality of ratios,” versus the
partisans of “anomaly," the "disproportion of ratios" (BF 13f,
c. d.). “Whereas the analogists of Alexandria held that the literary text was
a unity and had a fixed meaning, the anomalists of Pergamon in effect asserted
that the literary text was an interplay of differences and had meanings that
rose out of those differences." It would seem that New Critics and
post-structuralists are neither “new" nor “post-."
For his own part, Bloom finds a different ancestry in a venerable
tradition rarely touched by academic criticism in the West, namely Kabbalism.18
[18 The precursor here is Gershom Scholem, who “emphasizes" the
“Kabbalah's" "work of interpretation” (MAP 4, 31). “The
psychology of belatedness” "is the invention of Kabbalah,” which
“remains the largest single source for material that will help us to study the
revisionary impulse and to formulate techniques for the practice of antithetical
criticism" (MAP 4f). "All Kabbalistic texts" “interpret"
“a central text that perpetually possesses authority, priority, and strength,
or that indeed can be regarded as text itself” (MAP 4). “In its stance
toward the precursor text, its revisionary genius and mastery of the perverse
necessities of misprision,” “Zohar, the most influential of Kabbalistic
books, is the true forerunner of Post-Enlightenment strong poetry" (e.d.).
Such a framework refounds the authority of the text against
deconstructive dissemination and erasure of origins. Magical and prophetic
discourse are models in which statements cause the realities they depict, and in
which words partake of the actual substance of the objects and events they name.19
[19. Bloom includes “magic” in his lament that "words refer only to
other words" (BF 9). For the magician, though, words are real things, real
powers. Magic and myth may indeed have begun as devices for grounding the power
of words in something besides words. Compare the prominence of naming and
commanding in the Biblical account of creation.]
The text is endowed with a quasi-sacred origin that it revises so as to
gain strength. “If the Imagination, in poetry, speaks of itself, it speaks of
origins, of the archaic, the primal, and above all of self-preservation” (MAP
67). “Meaning cleaves more closely to origins the more intensely it strives to
distance itself from origins” (MAP 62). Hence, "the prestige of origins
is a universal phenomenon against which a solitary demystifier like Nietzsche
struggled in vain" (MAP 46). “All sacred history, as Nietzsche knew, was
against him.”
The prestige of origins is invoked by Bloom's etymologizings --a stark
contrast to the deconstructionists’ use of etymologies to uncover traces and
disseminate meanings. Bloom reminds us that “the word “influence" had a
“root meaning of “inflow" and designated “an emanation or force
coming in upon mankind from the stars” (ANX 26). “A power -- divine and
moral” – “exercised itself, in defiance of all that had seemed voluntary
in one" (ANX 26f.) Small wonder that “influence" may “make
poets” “more original,” not “less” (ANX 7).
Bloom's image (taken from Blake) of a “Covering Cherub” as “the
emblem of Poetic Influence" (ANX 38) intimates a similar tie to the sacred,
though within a more oppressive tension. A comparable etymology is traced for
the “antithetically primal word" ‘chesed’ back to a “root" of
"eagerness” or “sharpness” that “moves from “ardent zeal” to
“jealousy,” “envy,” and ambition"; the outcome is that
“Covenant-love is uneasily allied to a competitive element” (MAP 53). This
argument supports Bloom's turn to Old Testament sources to depict an aggressive
"Covenant-love between two poets" (MAP 115). The same
"antithetical element" in this Hebrew word “leads to the ephebe's
first accommodation with the precursor” and thereby to the “archaic, ritual
sense" in which “the young poet adopts” the "persona” like “a
mask representing the daimonic or tribal father" (MAP 54).
Again etymologically, “the word Kabbalah means"
“tradition or reception" and was a "version of Oral Tradition"
able to “shatter" the “Written Torah" (MAP 44). A bit
surprisingly, “much of Derrida," who "seeks to demonstrate that the
spoken word is less primal than writing is,” is found to be “in the spirit
of the great Kabbalist interpreters of Torah," who “create baroque
mythologies out of those elements in Scripture that appear least homogeneous in
the sacred text” (MAP 43). “Though he nowhere says so,” “Derrida may be
substituting davhar, the “dynamic word" that is “at once an
object or a thing and a deed or act," “for logos,” the
"intellectual concept" of “gathering, arranging, and putting into
order” (MAP 42f.) If so, “Derrida” is "correcting Plato by a Hebraic
equating of the writing-act and the mark-of-articulation with the word itself”
(MAP 43).
Freud is placed together with the Kabbalists for also having
"developed” “the psychology of belatedness” (MAP 4
“ 52). This association is logical if Freud is “more in the oral than
the written tradition" and thus a “curiously direct continuator of his
people's longest tradition" (MAP 50). He is also welcomed for being a
“de-idealizer" (MAP 89), as we saw, though he still seems
“humane," “amiable," “optimistic,” and "not severe
enough" to the more sinister Bloom (MAP 107, 109, 119; ANX 8).
“Influence” is construed to be the "true subject" of Freud's
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (MAP 12).
Unlike Holland, Bloom is a "deliberate revisionist" of
"Freudian emphases" (ANX 8).20 [20. Bloom feels that
Freud "revised himself” sometimes (ANX 135). But another
“revisionist's," “Derrida's interpretation of Freud,” is apparently
rejected as not “correct" (MAP 50) (see Note 23).] One major revision is
to "transform” “the family romance" “so as to place the emphasis
less on phallic fatherhood, and more upon priority” (ANX 64). Thus emended,
the “family romance” serves among Bloom's favoured images for "the
relations between poets" (ANX 8, 27, 56f, 62, 94). Another large revision
foreign to Holland is to refocus "sublimation" from “sexual
instinct” over to “aggressive instinct" -- at least, via a
“suggestion" Freud “should have developed," in the process of
“poetry" (ANX 64, 115; MAP 101). “Whether sublimation of sexual
instincts plays a central part in the genesis of poetry is hardly relevant to
the reading of poetry, and has no part in the dialectic of misprision” (ANX 11
5).
Using these various sources, Bloom offers to "chart how meaning is
produced in Post-Enlightenment strong poetry by the substitutive interplay of
figures and of images" (MAP 87). He presents four sides of a "scheme
of complete interpretation, at once rhetorical, psychological, imagistic, and
historical" (MAP 71). Rhetoric and psychology are aligned by
"surmising" “that the poets invented all of the defenses, as well as
all the tropes”; Bloom can "seek to take back from Freud precisely what
he himself took from the poets,” and besides, Freud was himself "the
strongest of modern poets" (MAP 178, 89f.) The imagistic is brought in to
accommodate “the common reader,” who "cares little to be taught to
notice tropes or defenses" (MAP 178). The historical aspect we have already
explored.
Bloom's alignment of rhetoric and psychology again swerves from
deconstruction by maintaining a balance of the self against language. For
Derrida, "there is no psyche without text"; for Lacan, "the
structure of the unconscious is linguistic"; for de Man, “the linguistic
model usurps the psychological" (MAP 48, 76). For Bloom, though, it
"trivializes human action” to "conceive textuality so diffusely --
that all human action is textual” (CCP 1). His concept of “influence” is a
"subject-centered relationship, not to be reduced to the problematic of
language" (MAP 77). Yet cunningly inconsistent here too, he may envision
“a precursor” who is "no less a text than we are"; or insist that
“acts, persons, and places, if they are to be handled by poems at all, must
themselves be treated first as though they were already poems" (MAP 167,
70). The war of poets implies a war of texts, but texts conceived so broadly as
to water down Bloom's proclamation that every poem is “about another
poem" (MAP 198).
Bloom's “map" contains “revisionary ratios” that are “not
tropes only, but also psychic defenses"; “from the viewpoint of
criticism, a trope is just as much a concealed defense, as a defense is a
concealed trope” (MAP 71, 77; cf. MAP 89). A number of Freud's central
concepts are called "tropes,” for example: “the understanding of health
through sickness"; “fixation as the basis of repression”; and the
“resemblances between sexuality and intellectual activity, including poetry”
(MAP 48, 56, 101). The “death instinct” is “a Sublime hyperbole" and
an "extraordinary oxymoron” (MAP 91). Certainly, such a description
befits Bloom's own “antithetical formula" that "defenses can be said
to trope against death, rather in the same sense that tropes can be said to
defend against literal meaning” (c.d.). “Death” “is a kind of literal
meaning, or from the standpoint of poetry, literal meaning is a kind of
death."
“Primal Scenes" figure in a whole range of "tropes":
Freud's “Oedipal fantasy" and “the slaying of a father by his rival
sons"; Derrida's “Scene of Writing”; and Bloom's “Scene of
Instruction," “the most Primal” of all (MAP 47ff, 55). This “Scene of
Instruction" “is staged" in “the psychic place of heightened
consciousness, of intensified demand," “a place cleared by the newcomer
in himself.” “The metaleptic or transumptive trope of a Scene of
Instruction" provides “the origins" of the "hyperbole"
that is “the unconscious" itself (MAP 56).
"Repetition compulsion" is allied to “the daemonic” (ANX
77, 87), a force we saw identified with the “anxiety of influence” (ANX
103).21 [21. But Bloom treats “repetition compulsion"
under “kenosis” rather than “daemonization" (ANX 77). He identifies
“repetition” with “thrown-ness,” an obscure concept from Valentinus and
Heidegger (ANX 79, 84), reminiscent perhaps of the fall Bloom sees before
creativity (pp. 287, 291). ] Bloom “offers” this “anxiety” “as a
variety of the uncanny,” the trait of “our inner tendency to yield to
obsessive patterns of action” (ANX 77f). To gain “freedom" from the
“demon of continuity," that is, “the Covering Cherub,”
"discontinuity" is “vainly but perpetually" sought as “the
strong poets’ defense against repetition," especially among
"Romantics" (ANX 39, 87; MAP 36). Even while pursuing this
“fantasy," they still "perversely" “manifest"
“repetition compulsion" and cannot escape the “doom" of
"hateful exclusiveness" (MAP 36; ANX 85, 117). “Roland's equivocal
triumph is an instance of Kierkegaardian “repetition”(MAP 120). But surely
so is Bloom's own critical triumph, with his obsessive style and proud fealty to
a central group of intertwined, though warring, ideas.
By appropriating Freud's major conceptions as tropes, Bloom escapes the
dilemma confronting Holland, namely that contemporary psychoanalysis has amended
or rejected a number of those conceptions. Whereas Holland's case depends on a
fairly literal acceptance of Freud's arguments, Bloom “revises” Freud quite
freely, as we have seen, and tropes while he borrows. Like Fiedler, Bloom
adheres to the darker side of Freud's thinking, and focuses on the “id."
The Freudian formula of "where Id was, ego shall be” is for Fiedler, I
suggested, “where ego and superego were, id shall be"; Bloom's version is
"where my poetic father's ego was, id shall be, or even better, my ego
"more closely mixed with id” (ANX 110).22 [22. For
consistency, I use “Ego” for “I" and “id” for “it." See
Note 29 to Ch. 8.] Accordingly, “Freud, unlike Nietzsche and Derrida, knows
that precursors become absorbed into the id and not into the superego" (MAP
50).23 [23. This argument is held to refute “Derrida's
interpretation of Freud” that “writing" is “as primal as coitus”
(MAP 50). “The inhibition of writing" is not, in Bloom’s opinion, due
to the “superego," but to the “id.” Yet his claim that writing is
“more automatic” than speech is simply not true for most people (Beaugrande
1984a).]
The "revisionary ratios" in Bloom's “map" are
“interpretations of influence," ways of reading/misreading poetic
relationships," or “ways of reading a poem" (MAP 71). The
etymological root of “ratio" as "thought” is invoked alongside its
“mathematical” and “monetary" designations for “relations between
unequal terms" (MAP 95). “The ratios of revision work"
“against" a “spectral image or blocking agent," this too
designated a “Covering Cherub." Each ratio "names intertextual
differences,” and “characterizes a total relationship between two poets,
earlier and later” (BF 19).
The Kabbalistic foundations for Bloom's map center on the "sixteenth-century master” “Isaac Luria's" "story of creation': "the best paradigm available for a study of the way poets war against one another in the strife of Eternity that is poetic influence" (MAP 5). The "story" comprises "Zimzum," “the Creator's withdrawal or contraction"; "Shevirath hakelim,” "the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels" in a “vision of creation as catastrophe"; and “Tikkun, “ “restitution or restoration-man's contribution to God's work." Surely a critic should feel flattered to use a map that mimics the divine creator's own dialectic. And this use again portrays the establishment of meaning as a grandiose struggle.
To Bloom,
"six” ratios “seem to be minimal and essential to my
understanding of how one poet deviates from another” (ANX 11). The number is
not crucial: they “could as well be more," though “the three pairs of
ratios" handily “form the pattern of what has been the central tradition
of the greater modern lyric” (ANX 11; MAP 96). He later decides that “the
ratios work in matched or dialectical pairs," "with each pair
following the Lurianic pattern of limitation, substitution, representation”
(MAP 95f,,4).24 [24.
'Substitution" has no special content of its own: no trope, defense, or
ratio. It is represented in Bloom's chart only by a bidirectional arrow, as if
it is a movement entailed in all transactions.] This three-part design matches
the "three main stages" in Luria's “story of creation" (MAP 5,
96f) just described.
The ratios “could take quite different names than those” Bloom
"has employed" (ANX 11). (I would jolly well hope so!) The names are
variously culled from "Lucretius," “St. Paul,” “mystery
cults," and the philosophies of “Neo-Platonists” and
"pre-Socratics," with a few intermediaries like “Coleridge" and
"Lacan” (ANX 14f, 42, 87; MAP 200; ANX 67). Though “the revisionary
ratios" are said to be "the invention" of “the High
Romantics" (BF 13), and the “Four Master Tropes" of Burke and Vico
are “followed” (MAP 94), a repressed precursor for such a multilevel scheme
with erudite labels might well be the "terminological buccaneer"
Northrop Frye (AC 362), whom Bloom rebukes for “Platonizing,”
“over-spiritualizing," and “idealism” (MAP 30, 79; ANX 31).25
[25. Bloom's real objection is probably that in Frye's vision, archetypes and
myths are a form of influence that doesn't have to be stolen or wrestled away
from precursors, since they. belong to the whole culture. Bloom must see this as
“Platonizing the dialectics of tradition” (MAP 30). See Note 7.]
Here is a compressed summary of the ratios (following ANX 14ff, 101; MAP
7Iff, 84): (a) “clinamen," whereby a poet “swerves away from," and
seems to .correct," a precursor; (b) "tessera,” whereby a poet
“retains the terms" of the precursor, but “means them in another sense,
as though the precursor had failed to go far enough"; (c) “kenosis,"
whereby the poet “breaks" by “moving toward discontinuity with the
precursor,” who gets “removed from his context"; (d) “daemonization,”
whereby the poet creates a “counter-sublime” against the precursor’s
sublime," and “the Great Original" "loses his originality"
to “the world of the numinous, the sphere of daemonic agency"; (e) “askesis,”
whereby a poet “yields up part of his own imaginative and human endowment,”
so as to "separate himself from his precursor"; and (f) “apophrades,
" whereby the poet deliberately “holds his poem open to the precursor”
in order to usurp the latter's priority.” 26 [26. This last
ratio is the one whereby the “strongest poets" can seem to have been
“imitated by their ancestors” (ANX 141). See Note 16.] Each ratio is
assigned a dominant “rhetorical trope," giving us the series: (a)
“irony,” (b) “synecdoche,” (c) “metonymy,” (d) “hyperbole,” (f)
“metaphor,” and (f) "metalepsis," respectively. Also, each ratio
is assigned a dominant “image in the poem," giving us the series: (a)
“dialectic of presence and absence," (h) “part for whole or whole for
part," (c) "fullness and emptiness," (d) “high and low,"
(c) “inside and outside," and (f) “early and late”, respectively.
Finally, each ratio is assigned a dominant “psychic defense," giving us
the series: (a) “reaction-formation", (b) "turning against the self,
reversal,” (c) "undoing, isolation, regression”; (d)
“repression," (e) “sublimation,” and (f) “introjection,
projection," respectively. The whole configuration is shown in Figure 14.1
(cf. Bloom's
own figure, MAP 84). The bunching of terms in the
'defense” series is due to fitting Bloom's “six primary defenses” to Anna
Freud's “ten” “basic” "defenses" (MAP 92). He consoles us that
“just as tropes blend into one another, so defenses are difficult to keep
apart” -- which seems to make theoretical difficulty into a virtue at the risk
of erasing the differences that delineate the whole scheme.
The meaning of the text undergoes a traumatic career as the ratios get to
work. “As tropes of contraction or limitation, irony withdraws meaning through
a dialectical interplay of presence and absence; metonymy reduces meaning
through an emptying-out that is a kind of reification; metaphor curtails meaning
through the endless perspectivizing of dualism, of inside-outside dichotomies.
As tropes of restitution or representation, synecdoche enlarges from part to
whole; hyperbole heightens; metalepsis overcomes temporality by a substitution
of earliness for lateness" (MAP 94f.) “Hyperbole and metalepsis I add as
progressively more blinded or broken representation, where “blinding” or
“breaking” is meant to suggest the Lurianic breaking-of-the-vessels or
scattering-of-the-light” (MAP 94). The meaning too seems to get scattered,
which reminds me of Bloom's view of “representation” as “a mutilated part
of a whole," a “masochistic impulse" of “strong poems in our
tradition, from Wordsworth on" (BF 28).
De Man and Hartman also have a penchant for violent tropes deriving from
Freud. 27 [2. 70n a similar tendency among the other Yale
theorists, see Note 31 to Ch. 14; Note 24 to Ch. 16; and Note 21 to Ch. 20. Only
Bloom fully aligns the violence of metaphorics with that of armed combat.]
But de Man ultimately leaves all tropes in the control of irony, whereas
Hartman and Bloom allow for a “restitution” or “restoration” (c. g., CW
42; MAP 5, 175) -- slyly associated in the Lurianic “story" with “man's
contribution to God's work” (MAP 5), quite in line with the Bloomian
mythologizing of the critic. “Antithetical” "restitution" can
oppose the nihilism of “Deconstruction's ironies” with "a supermimesis
achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language” (BF 37). As
Hartman remarks, both he and Bloom retain a “stake” in the “persistence”
and “provenance" of “pathos” (DC ix).
To support the “practical applicability” of his “map,” Bloom
proudly announces its benefits. “The insight our map of misreading gives us
here is precisely how the part/whole image of representation directly restitutes
for the absence/lpresence image of limitation" (MAP 181). "What the
map of misprision helps us to see is the desperation of this heroic hyperbole”
(MAP 158). And so on.
Bloom's discussions of "a remarkable number of poems" reveal a
striking isomorphism between their rhetorical or dialectic structure and his
scheme of ratios (MAP 105). He attributes this less to own his ingenuity than to
the poem or the poet. “It should be clear how closely Wordsworth's “Ode”
sets or follows the patterns of our map of misreading” (MAP 146). Keats”
“one resource” is “further internalization, which condemns him to a
fairly strict following of the map of misprision" (MAP 152). “Ashbery”
“tends like Stevens to follow rather precisely the crisis-poem paradigm that
I have traced in my map of misreading” (MAP 205). Sometimes, however, “only
a broad and rough" “application of the map" is feasible (MAP 180).
“Variants and displacernents of course abound, though generally in clearly
discernible schemes of rearrangement," and “the rebellion from the model
is frequently equivocal” (MAP 105). One poem by Stevens “calls for its own
version of the map of misreading" (MAP 186). Dickinson “often ” passes
beyond our revisionary model” because “her originality extends so far”
(MAP 184).
Bloom concedes that his own “defensive emotions" play a part in
finding the same “sequence of revisionary ratios in so many poems,” but he
insists that "the sequence is there in the sense that image and
trope tend to follow over-determined patterns of evasion” (BF 29). “What
matters is not the exact order of the ratios, but the principle of substitution,
in which representations and limitations perpetually answer each other"
(MAP 105). In any case, the isomorphism looks less surprising if we bear in mind
the status of the ratios as sufficiently flexible tropings to be tailored to all
sorts of passages or imagery. To maintain his sequence, Bloom interprets
“trailing clouds” as an image for “fullness” and “emptiness” in
“kenosis," and later the "wind" “disturbing"
“clouds” as an image for “presences" and “absences,” which should
belong to “clinamen” (MAP 146, 149f.) If considerable ingenuity is involved
in such readings, then Bloom's critical achievement seems all the more valorous
and brilliant. His own “antithetical strength” has been demonstrated by the
triumph of his map over the poem. Thus, like most of the critical theories I
survey, Bloom's casts him in the role of the most indispensable critic. In the
manner of Childe Roland, he “rides with us as interpreter" on a quest,
but armed only with his map for an “ordeal," a “trial by
landscape" (cf. MAP 106); and goes even beyond Borges” royal
cartographers in making the map not merely coincide with the dimensions of the
landscape, but also fill in t(r)opological contours not previously visible.
In my exploration of Holland's work, I noted the wide flexibility of his
“dictionary of fantasies".. A small repertory of these fantasies --
Oedipal, Primal Scene, castration, and the like -- was extended to a very wide
range of literary instantiations. The total effect is a powerful reduction,
however much ingenuity the critic expends. Bloom's map is far richer and more
open. It does not make the “defenses" the privileged rock-bottom, but
moves continually to tropes and images as elements of equal import. The map
often enriches the texts as well as reduces them.
However, a levelling effect appears elsewhere, namely in the role
projected onto the poets. Their personalities are rather uniformly painted as
defensive and beset by anxiety, sorrow, melancholy, and the fear of death,
against all of which they react with aggressive and usurping countermoves. They
all look like Bloom-meanies: cruel, jealous, and selfish, untouched by
generosity or modesty. Whether a given poet was following a precursor by
conscious or unconscious intent, or just by accident, makes no difference for
the portrayal. Bloom “projects" and “introjects” his own personality
into each “strong” poet. “Projection" “attributes outwardly all
prohibited instincts” “to others”; “introjection” “is a fantasy
transposition of otherness to the self” (MAP 101f.)
Bloom's own personality is certainly distinct in his style of writing.
His “Manifesto" that “all criticism is prose poetry” (ANX 95) offers
considerable license for statements few besides Bloom would venture to make. A
few examples will suffice. “Each strong poet's Muse, his Sophia, leaps as far
out and down as can be, in a solipsistic passion of quest” (ANX 13). “The
ephebe's first realm is ocean, or by the side of the ocean,” "but the
antithetical impulse will” “send him inland, questing for the fire of his
own stance” (ANX 79). “The God of poets is not Apollo, who lives in the
rhythm of recurrence, but the bald gnome Error, who lives at the back of a cave;
and skulks forth only at irregular intervals to feast upon the mighty dead, in
the dark of the moon" (ANX 78). I can't imagine a Hirsch, a Culler, or a
Jauss writing this way; and if Fiedler did, I'd think he was spoofing.
Such quasi-poetic critical statements are strategically hard to challenge
in a genuinely substantive dispute. For example, I am not convinced by Bloom's
method that “the central American poems are houses founded on the sea,” a
claim he places at the head of a chapter, just below a motto from Emerson (1850)
(MAP 177). But I have no idea what sort of evidence could serve to refute or
confirm the claim. The poems he cites in that chapter do not all mention sea or
water. Certain of his theses may be relevant, but they are just as apodictic and
puzzling, for instance: “the precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die
by drowning in them”; or the “revisioning of the inventors of an American
Sublime” came from a “new vision that rises up” as an "'unnamed
flowing" (ANX 154; MAP 26). Or, we might look to Ferenczi's
"apocalypse" of "the raising of Mount Ararat out of the
waters," and to Wordsworth's “metaphoric vision" of “the immortal
sea” (ANX 154; MAP 11, 146f.) Since such evidence never adds up to an actual
demonstration, I can only choose to believe or disbelieve.
Again like the Deconstructionists, Bloom rallies support for his theory
by selecting poems that seem to embody it. The appropriation of Browning's
“Childe Roland” for this purpose has been repeatedly noted. On another
occasion, Bloom finds "the defense of repression” in a Keats poem “so
finely obvious as to make commentary redundant” (MAP 154). Or, the “dramatic
monologue" of “Tennyson's Ulysses” gets “read as the belated strong
poet's act of judgment upon the Romantic tradition" (MAP 156). By equating
criticism with poetry, Bloom can slip in and out of the diction of his
“strong" poets with as much proximity and empathy as he likes -- the more
so if the poems are, as I conjectured, selected because they lend voice to
Bloom's own deepest anxieties.
One revealing analysis, published somewhat uneasily at the start of an
anthology on “Deconstruction and Criticism,” uses as its “proof-text”
John Ashbery's “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (BF 22-37).28
[28. The title of the essay, “The Breaking of Form," could refer to Lurianic creation (cf. MAP 5). In some spots, I have added more of Ashbery's
poem to clarify Bloom's responses.] The point of departure for Ashbery's
discursive poem (552 lines) is a self-portrait by Parmigianino (1503-1540), a
post-Renaissance manneristic painter struggling with the problem of perspective
in a two-dimensional medium. Seeking an illusion of depth and space, he
substituted for a canvas a wooden half-sphere on whose convex surface he painted
his own image as he saw it in a convex mirror. Ashbery's poem is a similarly
radical inquiry into perspective, with the viewer/painter and the painting
representing the “soul" and its experienced world. The physical enclosure
of the painted image in the sphere becomes the spiritual enclosure of the soul
(BF 24, 26):
The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes
And still return safely to its nest? The surface
Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
That the soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept
In suspension, unable to advance much farther
Than your look as it intercepts the picture. […]
One would like to stick one's hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension,
What carries it, will not allow it
With particular virtuosity, Bloom works through his six “ratios"
in their original sequence, relating each to one of the six successive divisions
of Ashbery's poem. This isomorphism is achieved because the sphere can readily
suggest ratios between fullness and emptiness or inside and outside; and
Ashbery's imagery also supports such ratios as part for whole, presence and
absence, and early and late. He dwells on the portrait as a microcosm, on the
loss of the visible and tangible, and on the passage of time.
To demarcate full or empty, inside or outside, Ashbery's globe has a
limiting surface. Correspondingly, “the soul has to stay where it is;” “It
must move as little as possible. This is what the portrait says”; "the
soul fits its hollow perfectly” (BF 24f.) A parallel antithesis between
stability versus instability is implied by images and tropes wherein life is
beset by forces that transform and disperse. Ashbery prominently enlists
“dream,” “wave,” “wind,” and “time.” These forces antithetically
perpetuate what they render insubstantial and transitory, as in (BF 30-33):
The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave of arrival; […]
Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up
Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.
Or, the “wind's" drift brings an ominous restoration (BF 33):
A breeze like the turning of a page
Brings back your face: the moment
Takes such a big bite out of the haze
Of pleasant intuition it comes after.
The locking into place is “death itself “ (cf. BF
33).
This turn
reminds us of Bloom's contention that “in our poetry, what is being evaded”
is “the necessity of dying” (BF 9) (p. 287).
These
illustrations suggest how Bloom's map can interweave with the texture of a poem
that offers a congenial terrain. The poem is cast as an antithetical structure
of tropings in metaleptic interchanges. Paradoxically, this excellent fit
between the poet's work and the critic's map exerts a centripetal momentum upon
a poem that seems conceived to be rather more centrifugal. Bloom consoles
himself and defends against dispersal by drawing the poem together in his
tightly locking scheme. De Man, in contrast, heightens dispersal by interweaving
the poem with his elusive theory .
Still, Bloom's method has a centrifugal aspect too, when his reading
turns the poem outward toward other poems. He mimics the evasiveness of
Ashbery's poem by hovering on its margins to record associations with such poems
as Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and “Ode to a Nightingale,”
Whitman's “Song of Myself,” plus Stevens’ "Poems of Our Climate,”
"Asides on the Oboe,” and “Poem with Rhythms” (BF 22ff). Bloom
portrays Ashbery's poem as a “version or revision” of these sources, whose
authors "are ancestral presences in “Self-Portrait" (BF 22). Some of
the associations he constructs are “verbal resemblances,” which he had
disdained as hallmarks of “traditional “source studies" (cf. MAP 19,
116). He compares the "waking dream” written by both Ashbery and Keats
(BF 35); Ashbery's "peculiar slant of memory” with Dickinson's
"certain slant of light"; or Ashbery's "the hand looms large”
with Stevens” "the hand has a will to grow larger" (BF 35, 28, 26).
Even the single word “As” at the beginning of “Self-Portrait” is taken
to be “one of Stevens” “intricate evasions of as" (BF 23) (from “An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and the opening motto for Anxiety,
ANX 4). Also conventional enough are relations based on common themes and
emotions. Ashbery's poem is classed with Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and
Stevens” “Poems of Our Climate" because all three are “reveries upon
aesthetic distance and poetic coldness” that “share a common sorrow, and
manifest almost a common glory" (BF 24).
But relations may be postulated quite independently of resemblances, or
may be detected “despite appearances,” as when Hart Crane is made into an
“ancestral presence” on the grounds that “the language of the poem
engages, however covertly and evasively, the central Emersonian tradition of our
poetry” (BF 22f.) If poets are genuinely defensive, influence may well be
signaled by what a poem “does not say,” or “what is missing in the poem
because it had to be excluded” (BF 15; MAP 178). For example, "Whitman”
is “as large a hidden form in Stevens as Shelley was in Hardy” (MAP 26). We
might recall that Holland's “dictionary” also worked well enough with
missing evidence).
Hence, Bloom's map does not crucially
require a convenient textual surface, though the texts that have it are likely
to seem “strong” to him. We could describe Bloom's readings by troping on
Ashbery:
The sample one sees is not to be taken as
Merely that, but as everything as it
May be imagined outside time.”
In this spirit, Bloom moulds Ashbery's text after his own
affinities. The poem is claimed to move “towards a lament for the confinements
of art and the artist” (BF 25f.) Ashbery's tropes are further troped into
concerts of art: “the portrait of a ship suggests the perils of poetic
art"; "the chamber” is “the suicide" "of a
self-regarding art" (BF 32, 37). “The poignancy of extreme dualism"
that is “almost constant throughout the poem” might be related to the
“constant consciousness of dualism" which is “the state of Satan” and
the “honest acceptance" of which “unites" Milton, Wordsworth,
Keats, and Stevens (BF 25f; ANX 32f.)
Whether or not we happen to accept Bloom's interpretations, we gain
little by debating their correctness in any traditional philological or
historical sense. Yet as we saw, Bloom does not abandon all claims to
correctness. “The “will to power” and "interpretation"
"combine in the forceful reading that presents itself as absolutely true
but can then, it its turn, be undermined" (MAP 69f, cf. de Man, ALG 76,
277). “In order for a reading (misreading) to be productive of other texts,
such a reading is forced to assert its uniqueness, its totality, its truth. Yet
language is rhetoric, and intends to communicate opinion rather than truth”
(MAP 70). Or, he invokes the authority of de Man, in whose “paradigm"
"intratextual encounters" match Bloom's “literary misprisions."
“De Man's implicit irony that error cannot be distinguished from
imagination" “seems essential to any account of intra-poetic
relationships."
Like most of our sample critics, Bloom is in the usual fix of presenting
a powerfully original and personal method as the best or true one inherent in
the very nature of both literature and criticism. The more extravagant his
procedures become, the more acute this dilemma must seem. He has gone through
deconstruction and come out the other end, which I suppose makes him (and
Hartman) a post-post-structuralist. He prefers to “restore" meaning
rather than to leave it deconstructed; he opposes the dissolution of the human
self and action into language; he swerves from Derrida's readings of Freud and
Nietzsche; he seeks the prestige of origins; and he retains his faith in the
Word (though substituting Hebraic davhar for Greek logos). Against
the deconstructive “heirs of Nietzsche,” he admonishes that
“belatedness” “is the true dungeon of the imagination, rather than the
prison-house of language" (MAP 68).
Yet however “post-post-,” Bloom would be absurdly classed as an
ultra-modernist. His method passionately looks back to the archaic and the
primal, to some time which was not yet so dismally belated. To him, Plato was
already a late-comer; "Modernism,” a shibboleth many of us think we may
have invented,” is an “inheritance" of "the first literary
scholars wholly distinct from poets," the “Alexandrians" (MAP 34). Kabbalah,
Torah, and Bible (Old Testament, of course) are venerable
pathways to still older traditions. “In the sorrow of origins," “art
rises from shamanistic ecstasy and the squalor of our timeless human fear of
mortality” (ANX 58). Bloom professes to “find this return to origins
inescapable, though distasteful”; but it promises “splendor,” and
“shamans” who, like Bloom, "had memory of the beginnings" are held
in “continued awe" (ANX 58f; MAP 58, 47).
The “map” itself has some affinities to a magical formula. Its
“ratios” enable multifarious manipulations of dimension, shape, and time, as
if in some ultimate alchemist's dream. The absent can become present, and
vice-versa; emptiness can be fullness, lowness can be highness, lateness can be
earliness. If “tropes" “defend against literal meaning" and
"literal meaning is a kind of death, would not a map of tropings be a grand
defense for "putting off as long as possible" the critic's death (cf.
MAP 91; AN.X 61), the very anxiety pervading Bloom's morbid rhetoric?
The founding of the map on the “story of creation” (MAP 5f) is no
accident or colourful sidelight, but a foretaste of power. Bloom seems to have
bested the would-be-robbers in the Monty Python group's movie Time Bandits,
who snatched God's map of time to guide their plans of thievery, but seldom
managed to use it without disaster. Bloom is in undisputed possession of his map
of “creation,” and the model for his “restoration” is, after all,
"man's contribution to God's work” (MAP 5). How better to combine
"'the will to power” with “interpretation" (cf. MAP 690?
And so the acceptance of Bloom's map and method or of his "theory of
poetry" is essentially a matter of faith, and the benefits it heralds for
its believers are substantial. “Bloomian" critics hover at least on the
doorstep of poetry and if they are “strong" enough, may usurp power from
a poet. Their reading can be strikingly creative and complex yet interwoven with
the original text at every step. They are buffered by the proclamation of
universal “misreading" and “misprision" against being wrong in any
traditional sense. They are inured to failure by their glorification of failure
as the heroic and death-defying culmination toward which every poem moves (cf.
ANX 79, 104f, 107; MAP 31, 186, 206).
All this power has to come from someplace. The biggest losers are of
course the “weak" poets and critics who “idealize” and fondly imagine
creativity to be carried on in a “generosity of the spirit" (ANX 5, 30).
Bloom would apparently just drop them from the canon and ignore them out of
existence, except when it's time to show how “entire generations go wrong in
their judgments," e.g., by esteeming Cowley, Cleveland, Denham, and Waller
to be "great poets" (MAP 28). He “asserts for literary tradition”
the "valuable" “pragmatic function” of “stifling the weak"
(MAP 28f.) A formulation like “the poet Wordsworth was long dead" before
“the man Wordsworth” (ANX 140) suggests that even great poets get tossed on
the junkpile when they lose their strength.
Some loss is sustained even by “strong poets.” Total originality is
categorically abolished, as if poetic creation resembled pasting up a collage of
echoes and allusions, whether you intend to or not, perhaps of works which you
never read or which haven't even been written yet. In this context,
“strength" is a very ambivalent grant, since what power you get is
probably stolen from the dead or the not-yet-born. Defiance is but an inverse
form of compulsion and doomed anyway, pre-cursed, like trying to sweep back the
sea. For instance, Bloom's "revisionary patterns” embody the “fixed or
all-but-fixed relations between tropes and defense” that “are set by
Wordsworth and Whitman” and “reappear in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry,
in Holderlin and Rilke, in Yeats and Stevens and Hart Crane” (BF 13). How
could lesser talents than these hope to rebel against such fixity?
And the poems may lose something too. With so much focus on personal
combat, the commentary on the poem resembles a ringside report of a wrestling
match. Amid the flood of influences, the boundaries of the individual text waver
and blur until we get confused: are we reading Shelley or Browning, Stevens or
Ashbery? In addition, the criteria for being a “strong poem" are a trifle
narrow, a “density of allusiveness” apparently being the top criterion (cf.
MAP 125), though it doesn't save Pound. While Bloom claims “the anxiety of
influence" to be “the covert subject of most poetry for the last three
centuries" (ANX 148, e.a.), he isn't taking any chances. He assigns high
ratings to poems which can be conveniently read as tropes for that anxiety, and
responds strongly to overt moods of pessimism, gloom, and morbidity. Among the
odder consequences of such criteria is the offhand treatment of poets, however
great, who didn't betray the anxiety Bloom looks for. Shakespeare is shut out
from the whole discussion, despite his enormous influence and exuberant
borrowings, and Pound and Williams are tersely mauled in gruff asides (cf. pp.
288, 291). In exchange, the “greatness” of Hardy's morose late poetry is
vastly inflated.
In addition, an unduly rigid application of the “map” would impose a
disquieting family resemblance on all poems and thus affirm the “continuity”
that 11 critics love" but “Ideal or Truly Common readers” do not (cf.
ANX 78). The sequence of limitation, substitution, and representation must be
dutifully performed not just once for every poem, but three times, one for each
“dialectical pair" among the six “ratios" (MAP 95). Though these
“ratios” were set up to “name intertextual differences" (BF 19), and
though “antithetical criticism" calculates the exact “accent of
deviation” in the “swerves" of “descendants" away from
“precursors” (ANX 93), the project might become monotonous in the hands of a
less erudite critic than Bloom, who never runs out of alludable sources. The old
“source-studies" he despises were limited to purportedly real influences
detectable in highly specified classes of evidence, and the results indeed
became boring and “pedantic" (cf. ANX 7). If Bloom is the irreplaceable
energy source -- if “there is no method" here “other than himself"
(cf. CCP 9) -- how “practical" is his map for the critical profession?
Can we “renew the study of poetry” (ANX 43) on the idiosyncratic moves of
one man without a counterpart in the whole world?
At one point, Bloom defines “critics" as “common readers raised to the highest power," yet avers at another point that “the Ideal or Truly Common Reader still waits to be born" (ANX 31, 78). He himself, though born at least once, is certainly a most uncommon reader. Despite his claims that “if we are human, then we depend upon a Scene of Instruction," and that “poetry is crucially pedagogical in its origins and function” (MAP 38, 32), I can't see much hope that common readers could raised to the power at which Bloom ope