The relevance and irrelevance of Harold Bloom

[Part 2 ]

Last week in my discussion of the importance of Harold Bloom as a literary critic and literary theorist, I referred to his concept of the anxiety of influence. Indeed, this phrase has become a most widely-travelled concept in modern literary criticism and Bloom’s name is invariably associated with it. In today’s column I wish to examine this concept as it has a vital bearing on issues of literary tradition, literary history, poetic analysis and nature of the literary experience – topics that are of great interest to writers and readers in Sri Lanka.

As a literary theorist Harold Bloom was interested in constructing a psychopoetics – that is to say an approach to poetry that was marked by psychological factors. Although Bloom was influenced up to a point by the formulations of Sigmund Freud, he also departed from Freud in significant ways. At a time when literary critics of a post-structuralist and post-modernist persuasion were falling over each other to draw on the writings of Jacque Lacan, it is evident that Bloom chose to keep his distance from Lacanian formulations.

While the majority of literary theorists and critics were focusing on the supremacy of language, Harold Bloom sought to highlight the powers of the personalities of poets. His idea of literary influence is closely related to this desire. As he once remarked, ‘poetic influence – when it involves two strong, antithetic poets – always proceeds by misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of western poetry since the renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.’ What is interesting about this passage is the close connection he establishes between strong poets, literary influences and the idea of misreading. (I shall explain his concept of misreading and its relevance for us next week.)

Although Harold Bloom is frequently described as a deconstructive critic, I stated last week that this is not a convincing and accurate characterization of Bloom’s intentions. Bloom once, in criticizing the deconstructive approach to literary analysis, observed that, ‘a poetic text, as I interpret it, is not a gathering of signs on a page but a psychic battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion.’ Here the trope, ‘a psychic battlefield’ is important; Harold Bloom is shifting the focus from the linguistic battlefield envisioned by deconstructive critics such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man to a psychic battlefield.

The idea of the strong poet who is struggling against the influence of his illustrious predecessors is central to Harold Blooms’ notions of influence, tradition and poetic history. As he remarked, his focus is on the autonomy, freedom, imagination of the strong poet in a way that contradicts the post-structuralist and deconstructionist agendas. The following is one of the definitions of tradition that he offered. ‘Out of the strong comes forth strength, even if not sweetness, and when strength has imposed itself long enough, then we learn to call it tradition, whether we like it or not.’

One useful way of seeking to understand Harold Bloom’s consequential concept of the anxiety of influence is by paying closer attention to his book ‘The Anxiety of Influence: A History of Poetry’ published in 1973. This 155-page book is packed with a range of innovative ideas. It is a closely argued book, and does not make for easy reading; things are made worse by the fact that Bloom has resorted to an arcane vocabulary of analysis drawn from classical rhetoric and medieval Jewish philosophy. When the book was first published, a well-known critic made the comment that, ‘It was the most significant work that the gifted scholar-critic, Harold Bloom, has yet written. It is destined to become one of the classics of literary theory.’ Nearly four decades later, this book continues to generate animated discussion.

Bloom opens his book with the following remark. ‘This short book offers a theory of poetry by way of a description of influence, or the story of intra-poetic relationships. One aim of this theory is corrective; to de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another. Another aim, also corrective, is to try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism.’ Therefore, it is evident that Bloom’s understanding of poetic influence has theoretical as well as practical consequences. Bloom has a distinctive view of literary history. Unlike many other literary theorists and commentators who focus on the social, economic, cultural, political factors that shape literary history, in addition to the power of the texts themselves, Bloom scrupulously focuses on poets as powerful personalities as makers of literary history.

In the second paragraph of his book he asserts that, ‘poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.’ What is interesting about this paragraph, to my mind, is the fact that the author is making three important points that are central to his theory of poetic influence. First, poetic history has to be understood in terms of poetic influence. Second, poetic history is made through the efforts of strong poets. Third, strong poets consciously misread their precursors as a way of avoiding their dominion. These ideas he develops in the anxiety of influence as well as in his later writings.

Harold Bloom, in the third paragraph of his book casts light on the importance of strong poets in the propagation of literary traditions. ’My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to death. Weak talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?’ The idea of the strong poet with a strong personality – an idea reminiscent of Nietzsche – is at the heart of Bloom’s theory of poetry.

Harold Bloom was evidently not interested in minor poets with lesser talents. His focus was clearly on major poets with strong poetic personalities that struggled against the shadow cast by their predecessors. This focus on strong pots and anxieties of influence is evident in Harold Bloom’s early writings on romantic poets as well. His discussions of the work of Blake, Shelley as well as Yeats bear testimony to this fact. The idea of literary influence as a phenomenon is one that has been regularly explored in literary study. For example, in the case of Sinhala literature, we often talk about the influence of Sanskrit poetry and poetics upon classical Sinhala poetry, the influence of Romantic poets on Colombo poets or the influence of Russian literature on Martin Wickreamasinghe’s fiction. Bloom, of course, is deploying the term in a different way; he gives it a precise set of meanings that are vitally connected to his psychopoetcs and theory of poetry.

Bloom vigorously denied that the idea of poetic influence would deny poets of their originality; on the contrary, he saw it as a means of sharpening it.

As he remarked, ‘poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original……the profundities of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images. ‘ The point that Harold Bloom is making here is important and deserves our careful consideration. Normally, by literary influence we mean the tracking down of sources. This is not what Bloom has in mind; his idea of poetic influence has to be understood in terms of struggle between strong poets and their predecessors – the struggle involves their desire to escape the dominion of the predecessors. One can observe in this line of thinking the impact of Freud’s thinking related to the Oedipus complex.

Let us examine a little more closely Bloom’s notion of poetic influence. He says that, ‘by poetic influence I do not mean the transmission of ideas and images from earlier to later poets. This is indeed just something that happens, and whether such transmission causes anxiety in the later poets is merely a matter of temperament and circumstance. These are fair materials for source-hunters and biographers, and have little to do with my concern.’ It is important to bear in mind the fact, as is clearly evident in this statement, his notion of poetic influence is radically different from the normal understandings of poetic influence that calls attention to the way that an earlier poet determines the outcome of a later poet in terms of theme, style, imagery and so on.

Harold Bloom asserts that, ‘poetic influence, in the sense that I give it to it, has almost nothing to do with the verbal resemblances between one poet and another….the anxiety of influence more frequently than notes quite distinct from the anxiety of style. The distinction that he makes between the anxiety of influence and the anxiety of style is indeed important. He once commented that, ‘the fundamental phenomena of poetic influence have little to do with the borrowings of images or ideas, with sound-patterns, or with other verbal reminders of one poem by another. A poem is a deep misprision 'misreading' of a previous poem…’ So, what in essence is Bloom’s theory of poetic influence and the role of strong poets? Let me present my understanding of it in very simple terms.

Poetic traditions are transmitted through the work of strong poets. A strong poet is always conscious of the fact that a strong precursor is influencing his or her work. This generates a sense of anxiety.

Consequently, he or she strives to wilfully misread the poem as a conscious act of defiance. This misreading often leads to exciting works of poetry. This theory then has a psychological dimension to it; but questions verbal texture and imagery are not absent from it either. This is a kind of psychopoetics that deconstructive critics do not look upon with favour.

How does this misreading of an earlier poem by a later strong poet take place? Here Bloom resorts to the deployment of a six-fold scheme, what he terms revisionary ratios. He complicates matters by pressing into service six traditional rhetorical concepts; clinamen, tessera, kenosis, demonization, askesis, apophrades. These terms taken from classical rhetoric and medieval Jewish thought make things unduly complicated; in my judgment, they serve to obfuscate than illuminate. What do these six terms signify?

Clinamen refers to the process of swerving from the precursor poet. Tessera signifies the intimate and revisionary movement of a form of completion of the earlier poem; kenosis denotes the evacuation of the self vis-a-vis the precursor; demonization refers to the celebration and challenging of a foreign element in the precursor; askesis points to the self-purification performed in order to guard against the precursor; apophrades describes the uncanny return of the precursor.

So what we see here is a complex and evasive set of actions performed by the strong poet. These acts constitute the conscious misreading that I referred to earlier. These are all modes of psychic defenses that serve to protect the strong poet against undue influence.

I have described at length Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence. How does such a concept relate to our own distinct needs and interests? Let us consider a poet like Kumaradasa who wrote the ‘Janakiharana’, a narrative that has been re-told many times over in Sanskrit literature. In composing the ‘Janakiharana’, Kumaradasa, who was decidedly a minor poet, succumbs to the overwhelming influence of the more illustrious Kalidasa and earlier Sanskrit poets with the result that he was unable to compose a poem that truly displayed his originality.

Let us consider the three classical Sinhala poems the ‘Sasadavata’, ‘Muvadevdavata’ and ‘Kavsilumina’. All three poets were subject to the influence of classical Sanskrit poetry and poetics. While the authors of the first two poems failed to misread productively the earlier works, in the way suggested by Harold Bloom, and were unable to create truly original works. The author of Kavsilumina, on the other hand, succeeded in the kind of strategies outlined by Bloom and was able to create a masterpiece.

A close study of the ‘Kavsilumina’ and its Sanskrit precursors would illustrate in interesting ways some of the points that Harold Bloom is keen to stress in terms of poetic influence.

It seems that there are many sides to this concept of poetic influence, not all of which have been subject to Bloom’s critical gaze. Take for example Martin Wickrmasinghe’s fiction. Clearly, he was a great admirer of Russian literature most notably the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev.

However, he was also perspicacious enough to see that these Russian works had much in common, in terms of theme and vision, with the Buddhist Jataka stories. As a matter of fact, he wrote a book pointing out the similarities and points of affinity between these two bodies of writing.

Wickremasinghe, therefore, was able to mediate the Russian influence through the Buddhist Jataka stories, thereby investing his original works of fiction with a traditional tinge that they would not have otherwise possessed.

The point I am making, then, is that Harold Bloom’s notion of poetic influence could be productively widened to include the kind of literary mediation that one sees in Martin Wickrenasinghe’s pioneering efforts.

Let me consider an example that illustrates another facet of this literary phenomenon. Ediriweera Sarachchandra, in composing ‘Maname’ and ‘Sinhabahu’ was influenced by certain tropes found in the Kavyashekerya and Buddhist literature respectively.

In describing the sylvan beauty of the forest that Prince Maname and the Princess were travelling through, Sarachchndra deploys certain images from the ‘Kavyashekeraya’; however, he re-contextualizes them in a newer human experience and newer frame of intelligibility thereby turning this poetic influence into an act of creative innovation. Similarly, in ‘Sinhabahu’, Sarachchandra makes use of certain images and locutions found in Pali literature to dramatize the power of filial love.

Once again, he re-contextualizes them in a way that serves to extend their range of reference and emotional reverberation. This aspect of mediation and re-contextualization, it seems to me, has been relatively ignored by Bloom.

Therefore, while recognizing the importance of Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence, and the strategy of misreading that goes with it, we need to explore ways of expanding it to meet our own needs.

Harold Bloom’s concept of the anxiety of influence clears the way towards a new understanding of literary analysis. Normally, in literary interpretation, we focus on the empty space between the literary text and the reader in order to generate an interpretation. Bloom is unhappy with this course of action. For him the act of interpretation transpires between text and its reading of itself, between the sediments of meaning that one observes between text and the sets of meanings it perceives to be active in earlier texts. This is the essence of what Bloom refers to as antithetical reading; he sees it as the proper function of a critic.

He says that, all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning.’ As he observed on another occasion, ‘all criticism that’s that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology – in which the poem is and means itself – and reduction – in which the poem means something that is not itself. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both…’ This notion of antithetical reading, and its implications for us in Sri Lanka, is a topic that I wish to pursue in my future columns.

(to be continued)