return to homepage On
re-reading Harold Bloom's The
Anxiety of Influence The most modest expenditure of intelligence, not to say decency, I first read Bloom's highly
influential book in college many years ago.
I think I was supposed to like it, and I think I tried to. I was a philosophy major at the time, and I
was one of the few who then found Deconstruction unentertaining. I had been told that Bloom was critical of
Derrida and Lacan and Foucault, as well as contemporary poetry, and so I went
to him looking for ammunition. I still
remember a quote of his, from an interview, where he said that modern poetry
was not verse, much less poetry: it was just typing, or word-processing. I liked that. But I read the book and put it aside. I couldn't agree with any of it, but I
didn't know exactly why. I needed more
information. His more recent forays into notoriety—his theory of the
"J-writer" in the Bible and his theory that Shakespeare all but
created the modern mind—led me back to a reconsideration of his theory of criticism.
And his student Camille Paglia's many
citations of Bloom also made me think I might be missing something. But a lot has happened to me in the meantime. I now have more information. I have read a lot, it is true. But, more importantly, I have painted
pictures and written poems and books: I
no longer need someone else's theory of creativity. And as an artist I have developed the ability to see the
argument from the other side. From the
side of synthesizer rather than analyzer.
From here I must tell you that Bloom's theory is a vast absurdity. A vast absurdity composed of many smaller
preposterosities. Let's start with the vast absurdity. His central thesis, stated as such in
italics on page 30, is that "poetic influence always proceeds by
misinterpretation," and that this misprision is "perverse,
willful revisionism." In another
place he states that all interpretation is misinterpretation. At first this may sound bold and
impressively esoteric. A
psychologically rich vein. But the fact
is that "misinterpretation" only has a meaning in relation to
"interpretation." If you
cannot do something right, you cannot do the same thing wrong. Misinterpretation, as a word, only makes
sense if there is a standing idea of correct interpretation. This is simple logic. If you say that all interpretation is
misinterpretation, it begs the question, "Misinterpretation with regard to
what?" In other words, what is
this misinterpretation missing? If the
sentence, all interpretation is misinterpretation is true, then it is
also true that there is no meaning, and no standard for meaning. In which case, all of Bloom's judgments are
no more than empty sentences, and the book becomes even worse than it is: a
collection of ink and paper with no hope of even the smallest insight. Bloom never considers, because it is much less titillating
and psychologically complex, the possibility that poets—of whatever skill—do
not misread or misinterpret. They
simply disagree. That is, a subsequent
poet does not falsify his precursors; he corrects them. A poet reads a poem by a poet he
admires. He understands it: he
correctly interprets it. However, he
sees faults, holes, problems un-addressed both technical and emotional. Or maybe he sees only successes, but he sees
where these successes might become even more successful. Or, at worst, he sees how these successes
can be translated into new successes, related but different. Another thing that Bloom's theory of misinterpretation does
not address is how poets who can see nothing but themselves in anything ever
manage to learn to write, or to write better.
It seems to me that one must assume that a strong poet is more
able to correctly interpret a great poem, to see truthfully how it succeeds and
how it fails. If he misinterpreted a
poem, he could not properly learn from it, and could never hope to equal or
transcend it. Maybe this is why the
very greatest poets all felt no anxiety (as Bloom freely admits) and denied any
misprision: they did not need to bastardize their precursors in order to better
them. They could admit all the
greatness of their teachers without having it detract from their own. It is only the weakest poets, and the
especially the critics, who must misread the great ones. Now for the
preposterosities. Bloom's title
concerns the anxiety felt by poets when they are influenced by their
precursors. This anxiety causes
misprision. What is most strange is
that Bloom cannot even give examples that support this thesis, although one would
think that you could always quote scripture to prove any point. Again and again, Bloom is forced to admit
that Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Nietzsche* did not agree with him, and (even
in his own opinion) do not seem to have been anxious at all. This at the same time that he is stressing
that his is a theory of what strong poets do. All that Bloom really proves is that he feels a terrible
anxiety of influence, and that perhaps where several lesser poets—such as
Wilde—failed was often in succumbing to this anxiety. But I do not think he proves even this. What those like Wilde felt was not an anxiety of influence; it
was simply disappointment.
Disappointment caused by the recognition that they could never write as
well, in any style, as those they admired.
It was a recognition of inferiority, which may or may not cause
anxiety. Anxiety is a complex
internalized emotion. And it is possible,
I believe, for a healthy person to feel not anxiety, but only
disappointment. Disappointment is a
fairly straightforward thing. But as
such, of course, it is not as interesting to the armchair psychologist and
severe critic. Once one performs the sort of Freudian reading on Bloom
that he performs on poets, one can see that all his criticism is tainted by a
transparent personal agenda, a resentment toward the greater poetic
talent of all those he critiques, whether they are in the empyrean clouds, like
Shakespeare and Milton, or whether they are much further down toward the
foothills, like Stevens or Ashbery.
What Bloom's theories all do, first and foremost, is elevate Bloom. In several places he compares his book to a
"severe" poem. "All
criticism is prose poetry," he says on the back cover. In fact, it is not, and Bloom should know
it. Not even the most correct and
brilliant criticism, like that of Goethe or Shelley, has anything to do with
poetry. Poetry is synthetic. Criticism is analytic, and never the twain
shall meet. All this was bad enough, but when Bloom began to talk of
Milton as the great barrier to achievement in subsequent poets, I realized
precisely how far he had sunk. Bloom
was now on a level with Clement Greenberg, the influential art critic who once
said that the Renaissance masters had long been the ultimate blockade to future
art, simply on account of their mastery.
It does not take a Goethe or a Nietzsche to see how perverse both these
sentiments are. Bloom is a casualty of his own erudition, and his own
ego. His vast array of factual
knowledge and quotations only set him up for ridicule from any strong poet who
happens to read him, since he is so clearly baffled by his own field from the
very first page, and since he is so psychologically transparent to anyone who
knows Freud and Nietzsche as well as he does.
He is in the horribly unenviable position of being scorned by those he
claims to admire most. And admired by
those he knows to be fools. And the
strong poets and artists scorn him the more for his success in the world, for
his burning of the fuel that should help to light poetry and art. What contemporary poet is as well known and
influential in academe as Harold Bloom, non-poet? It is not great historical poets who have been the barrier
to poetry in the last century. It is
the overriding and pernicious influence of criticism and theory—of all
kinds—that have sternly told young poets that all visible poetic influence is a
mistake, and that the weapons of our dead heroes are forbidden. It is the hyper-egalitarian milieu in which
we are all steeped, that tells us that a Goethe or a Nietzsche is no longer
possible, or, even if possible, unwanted.
What would we do with a Goethe now?
What could we possibly accept from him?
How could he possibly present himself to us? Any claim to such greatness now would be treated as a sign of
megalomania, no matter what artifacts he happened to share with us. Intellectuals like Bloom control all the
creative fields, and they simply will not allow a Goethe to erupt in their own
lifetimes. A dead Shakespeare is one
thing. A living genius would take
entirely too much of their light, and is a thing not to be considered.
*"Philosophy is to be understood here in a very wide sense as the art of reading well
--of being able to read a fact without falsifying it by interpretation, without losing caution,
patience, subtlety in the desire for understanding. Philosophy as ephexis [undecisiveness] in interpretation."
Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 52.
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