The relevance and irrelevance of Harold Bloom

Part 3:

Last week I discussed at length the concept of the anxiety of influence as enunciated by Harold Bloom and its strengths and weaknesses. The idea of literary influence, legitimate and illegitimate, has been at the centre of many important Sinhala literary discussions. Some decades ago the eminent writer Munidasa Cumaratunga generated a great deal of debate among Sinhala literary critics and literary scholars when he pointed out that the highly venerated poet Sri Rahula was on occasions guilty of plagiarism - he showed the relevant passages that were direct translations of Sanskrit originals. This led to what is generally referred to as the 'kukavivadaya.' The idea of literary influence as a vexatious issue has been with us for a long time. Martin Wickremasinghe constructed a system of analysis of classical literature that saw as a negative force the undue influence of certain forms of Sanskrit poetics that placed an undue weight on conventional ornamentation.

Therefore, Bloom's idea of the anxiety of influence enables and encourages us to re-visit this topic with a renewed interest. In today's column, I wish to explore another theme that is equally important and relevant to Sri Lankan writers and readers alike, namely, his complex relationship to the existing paradigms of literary analysis. In this regard, I wish to focus on three dominant modes of literary analysis- the New Criticism, deconstruction and socially-oriented literary criticism. The first and the third approaches have had a significant influence on literary analysis in Sri Lanka. Although there are occasionally references to deconstruction, often presented in negative terms, one does not get the impression that these are motivated by an informed understanding of deconstruction and its philosophical foundations.

Let us first consider the New Criticism. It is still in many ways the mode of literary analysis that is taught in our universities and seats of higher learning in Sri Lanka. Here I am using the term the New Criticism in its broadest sense to cover the New Criticism in the United States and Practical Criticism in England. The basic idea of the New Criticism is to focus on the words on the page, the work of literature as a self-contained verbal construct, and downplay the biographical, social, cultural analyses that standardly are associated with literary assessment.

It can legitimately be said that the New Criticism constitutes the most important Anglo-American contribution to modern literary theory in the way that structuralism is a French contribution and phenomenological criticism a German contribution. The important work of I.A. Richards and T.S. Eliot paved the way for the evolution of this form of literary analysis. Their ideas were expanded in the United States by such writers as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks.

There is a certain resemblance between the work of Formalists and the New Critics. Both were interested in the autonomy of the work of literature and were mindful of the fact that extraneous factors such as the biography of the writer and the social context in which he or she lived, might deflect attention from the central task of the critic which is analysing the words on the page. However, very few of the New Critics make any reference to Formalists. One significant difference between Formalists and the New Critics is that the latter were guided by a set of humanistic values and empiricist considerations.

The term New Criticism was put into circulation by the American writer John Crowe Ransom. His book, The New Criticism (1941) was instrumental in gaining wide popularity for the term. The work of T.S. Eliot had a significant influence on the growth of New Critics, although he was not overly enthusiastic about its progress.

He was a kind of reluctant father to the New Critical movement. In America, the writings of Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, W.K. Wimsatt. In their different ways, played an appreciable role in propagating this mode of analysis not only among academics but also among educated lay readers. Ransom's pupils, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published a book titled, Understanding Poetry which helped to disseminate the basic ideas of New Criticism through the education system. I remember, when we were students at Peradeniya, the English Department and Sinhala Department, highly recommended this book as requested reading.

The New Criticism which emerged in the 1930s began to wane by the 1970s, when newer modes of literary analysis such as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction began to invade the academy. What is interesting is that during these four decades, it succeeded in influencing literary studies not only in North America and England, but also in Australia, various parts of Asia Africa, and to a lesser extent Latin America.

It is still, in many ways, the dominant form of literary investigation. At the time when Bloom began to emerge as a formidable literary critic and theorist, the New Criticism was the regnant model of literary assessment.

The New Critics are focused laser-like on the words that go to form the verbal construct before them and examine it in terms of the structure and organization.

Although the New Critics sought to examine poetry and fiction and drama, they were most successful in the analysis of poetry. Their privileged mode of analysis lent itself far more productively to the investigation into short poems than extended narratives of fiction. They as a practice sought to focus on such aspects of poetry as ambiguity, irony, paradox, tension as a way of comprehending the deeper structure and organization of a poem.

They believed that all works of literature constitute a complex unity; the task of the critic is to explore that unity and arrive at the set of determinate meanings inscribed in the work of literature.

The deconstructionists depart significantly from this approach. While they too are close readers of texts, they are of the opinion that literary texts contain a plurality of meanings and not a unitary meaning. Given the fickleness of language and the elusive ways in which it exceeds the grasp of the writer, this is indeed wholly inevitable.

As I stated earlier, the work of I.A. Richards played a significant role in sowing the seeds of this critical movement. In 1924, he published his boo principles of literary criticism, which was to exercise a profound and pervasive influence during the next five decades.

His other books such as Science and Poetry and Practical Criticism served to carry forward his convictions and protocols of literary analysis.

His book Practical Criticism had a deep impact on literary pedagogy throughout the world including Sri Lanka. Richards was indebted to Coleridge for both the central idea and the locution of practical criticism. As one commentator observed, Practical Criticism became the founding charter of the New Criticism. It was the intention of the author to point out how actual readers respond to texts and make that a significant point of departure in the understanding of literature.

In introducing his book, I.A. Richards made the following observation. ‘I have set three aims before me in constructing this book. First, to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture whether as critics, as philosophers, as teachers, as psychologists, or merely as curious persons. Secondly, to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry (and cognate matters) and why they should like or dislike it. Thirdly, to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.’ Every week he distributed among his students unsigned poems, some of them famous, and wanted to know how they responded solely to the words on the page.

Harold Bloom came into prominence during a period when the New Criticism was widely influential. He, of course, had serious reservations about the intentions, approaches and presuppositions of the New Critics. Like the New Critics, he was indeed a close reader of texts; he focused on strategies such as irony, ambiguity, paradox, tension that the New Critics were enamoured of. However, Bloom was not interested in seeing the literary text as self-contained and autonomous in the way that the New Critics did. He was far more interested in the relationality of texts. For him, a text was always an inter-text, a poem always an inter-poem. As I stated earlier, Harold Bloom focused on the interrelations among texts. He wanted to find out the complex ways in which later texts are influenced by earlier texts, and how later texts seek to avoid and subvert that influence. Bloom, in opposition to the New Critics, saw the literary text as a relational event.

This approach to the New Criticism that Bloom adopted has deep implications for literary pedagogy in Sri Lanka. While recognizing the indubitable value of the New Criticism as a way of teaching students to focus intently on the words on the page, we must also make an attempt to contextualize the literary text. Bloom opened up one pathway of inquiry towards this destination by focusing on the relationship between earlier and later texts. However, he did not, in my judgment, take adequately into consideration the historical, social, political forces that shape literary textuality. I shall discuss this topic later in the column.

The second important mode of literary analysis that I wish to focus on is deconstruction. Since the 1980s it began to influence literary study and literary teaching in many countries. Deconstruction began life as a form of philosophical analysis developed by the French thinker Jacques Derrida and later took on the mantle of a literary analysis in the United States largely due to the writings of scholars such as Paul de man and J.Hillis Miller. Since the 1990s it has spread to many countries of the world, although the last ten years or so have seen a steady decline of its seductive power and prestige.

At a very basic level, deconstruction can be regarded as a method of critical analysis that can be applied to literary texts, which demonstrates the inability of language to represent reality adequately. It believes that no text possesses a fixed and determinate set of stable meanings. Derrida once remarked that deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. However, the way his ideas have been developed and re-interpreted by American literary critics it has indeed become a method.

Deconstructionists see a literary text, whether it is a poem or a short story, as irredeemably fissured; its apparent unity is a myth. The text is composed of warring elements and it is the function of the critic to demonstrate these in his or her analysis. In other words, what critics of a deconstructive persuasion seek to do is to point out how the logic of the text contradicts the logic of the claims made by the author; they wish to uncover the presuppositions upon which a given text is based and point out the inescapable contradictions in them.

As I stated earlier, deconstruction is yet to make its presence in Sri Lanka in a recognizable way. However, Bloom reached his peak as a critic and theorist when deconstruction was in full flower. There were those who claimed that he belonged to the group of Yale Critics who championed deconstruction. This is not quite accurate. Although, Bloom and deconstructionists share certain features in common when it comes to the nature of literary analysis, he also differs in many important ways from deconstructive critics.

Bloom and the deconstructionists believe that texts have to be appreciated in their relationships to each other. This involves a process of displacement which can be best explained in rhetorical terms. They also share the common assumption that to analyze a text is to uncover the strategies and deployments of tropes by which texts present themselves. On the other hand, there are significant differences between them as well.

Harold Bloom once made the following comment. ‘It is not possible to return wholly to a mode of interpretation that seeks to restore meanings to texts. Yet even the subtlest contemporary Nietzschean deconstructors of texts must reduce those texts in a detour or flight from psychology and history. Nothing prevents a reader with my preferences from revolving all linguistic elements in a literary text into history, and similarly tracing all semantic elements in literary discourse to problems of psychology.’ Clearly, Bloom is aiming to go beyond the kind of linguistic monotheism that characterizes deconstruction and include issues of history and psychology. The kind of psychopoetics that he sought to construct with the aid of concepts such as the anxiety of influence bears testimony to this fact

In terms of our own interests the observations of Bloom on deconstruction merit close consideration. It is his considered judgment that a literary text is not a collection of verbal signs on a page, but a psychic battlefield in which poets struggle over dominion. This psychopoetic approach to the study of literature is one that we could examine in terms of our own cultural heritage. For example, the ‘rasavada’, which has exercised a considerable influence on Sinhala literary theory, has to be understood as a psychopoetic approach to literary textuality. After all, what the ‘rasavada’ is seeking to demonstrate, among others, is the psychological processes that are intertwined with generation of aesthetic emotion. Hence it is a clear instance of psychopoetics..

The third mode of critical analysis that I wish to focus on is socially oriented literary criticism. This is indeed an umbrella term covering a broad range of opinions and viewpoints. Marxism, to many of them, is an inescapable referent. When we consider the critical writings of critics and theorists such as Althusser, Gramsci,Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Adorno, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson,Tery Eagleton etc. we see the broad gamut of interests represented by these critics. Sri Lankan writers and critics have, for a long time, evinced an interest in this type of criticism which sought to enforce a vital connection between literary textuality and the wider society. In the 1970s, this form of criticism became extremely popular among Sinhala writers and readers of literature.

Most literary critics who have been inspired by Marxism in one way or another subscribe to the notion that in order to understand literary texts in their true complexity it is important to situate them in their social context. That is to say, literary works need to be evaluated within a larger social framework .Literary critics who espouse this approach make the argument that those who seek to interpret works of literature purely in terms of internal structures, ignoring or minimizing the influence of historical, social, political factors, will not be able to grasp the complex nature of literary texts.

Marxists believe that the meaning of a literary work cannot be discovered within it; one has to venture outwards. The work has to be understood as an articulation of specific ideologies, class antagonisms, social contradictions. To examine Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ in Marxist terms, we need to have reasonably clear understanding of Shakespeare’s age, the class antagonisms that characterized it, the emergence of colonial thinking and so on. What this means is that we as literary critics are required to explore works of literature within the context of significant social and political and cultural issues. A critic like Edward Said has widened our understanding of British fiction by relating it to the imperatives of the empire.

What is interesting about Harold Bloom’s critical writings is that they ignored the larger social questions and the determinate social forces that shape literature. He was far more interested in the visionary imagination of the writer, how it results in the work in question and the ways in which he or she negotiates prior influences. Bloom argued that to pursue the course of action advocated by Marxists and socially oriented critics is to ignore the true centre of literary analysis and be diverted by ancillary and extraneous issues. Not everyone, of course, agrees with this line of thinking articulated by Bloom.

It seems to me that Bloom’s critical outlook suffers and risks diminishment by being so uncompromisingly antagonistic to socially oriented criticism. It is indeed true that socially oriented, Marxist-inspired literary criticism can degenerate very quickly to empty posturing, sloganeering and propaganda. We saw some of this taking place in the 1970s in Sri Lanka. However, writers and critics who have a profound understanding of literature as well as a socialist thinking are able to fashion a mode of analysis that is true to the integrity of the work in question and receptive to the social forces that inflect it. Therefore, it seems to me, that this is an area in which we can learn very little from the critical formulations of Harold Bloom.

In addition to the challenging theoretical formulations, Bloom has also written books on literature for the general reader. They lay out in accessible terms the pathways to literary understanding. For example, in his nook, ‘How to Read and Why; he points the way to developing a cultured sensibility to, and informed understanding of, creative literature. In this book, he makes the point that a reader should read works of literature for the purest of all reasons; to discover and augment the self. He is a firm believer in the restorative power of literature. If this has an old world ring to it, it is a conscious choice on his part. Bloom says that the critics he admires most, and regards as his masters, are Dr. Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt.

Bloom opens, ‘How to Read and Why’, with the following statement. ‘There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?.….. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.’ This is a salutary reminder indeed. At a time when the art of reading is suffering a great decline because of electronic communication media, Bloom reminds us of the importance of reading. Moreover, the idea of reading for pleasure has been virtually erased as a consequence of modern critical theory which seems to bestow precedence to critical interpretations over original creative writings, and the concomitant professionalization of literature. This is indeed a danger that we should avoid. Bloom’s books signpost this important desideratum. (to be continued)