Paul Fry, How to Live With the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading

How to Live with the Infinite Regress

of Strong Misreading

Paul H. Fry

1

One of the surprises in Frank Lentricchia’s After the New Criticism, a book admired in its time for an impressive but largely unsympathetic grasp of literary theory, was its pronouncement that Harold Bloom should be valued as a literary historiographer: “No theorist writing in the United States today has succeeded, as Bloom has, in returning poetry to history; he has managed better than most to move beyond both the New-Critical concern with the isolated, autonomous monad and the poststructuralist tendency to dissolve literary history into a rep-etitious synchronic rhetoric of the aporia.”1 Bloom himself had indi-cated, after all, that there is no literary history — no history of texts as such, that is — only literary biography,2 but that was an acceptable manner of speaking to the historicist Lentricchia, who liked Bloom’s insistence that interauthorial relations are dynamic, two-directional, and constantly fluctuating. He saw this dynamism as a means of get-ting beyond the paradox that curiously haunts the strongest literary historiographies: namely, that the guiding principle of the most inci-sive writing of that record of change we call history emerges as nothing other than the eternal return of the same — which might as well be

Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (December 2008)

Doi 10.1215/00267929-2008-011 © 2008 by University of Washington

1 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 342.

2 So Lentricchia puts it (344).

438 MLQ December 2008

called, in Bloom’s vocabulary, apophrades. In this essay I wish to follow Lentricchia in insisting that Bloom can and should be considered a literary historian, expressing doubt that Bloom’s dynamism transcends this characteristically exasperating absence of change in what might be called the historiographical moment, but concluding nonetheless that history is recovered in his methods of commentary.

The best way to pursue this line of thought is to isolate Bloom from his immediate theoretical contemporaries and place him among major writers spanning the twentieth century who speak of tradition, horizon change, and horizon merger. I shall begin with the special case of T. S. Eliot, elaborating the suggestion that Eliot as a theorist of tradition — though in no other respect — is Bloom’s strong precursor and suggesting thereby that one aspect of the unchanging in literary history is the theory of influence itself.3 From there I move to some remarks on Russian formalist forays into literary history, on Mikhail Bakhtin, on Hans Robert Jauss, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer. The lat-ter two emphasize the role of the reader, and it is part of my purpose to align them with Bloom by pointing out that any reader who counts as a reader in literary history must also be a writer.4 Considering Bloom within this framework, I want to hold his celebration of strong misread-ing up to the light of mere common sense, not as others have done by kicking a stone and “refuting it thus” with a scoff of dismissal, but in order to wonder how at the least a plausible sense of change (we know things change, don’t we?) can be recovered from Bloom’s very strength. To this end I shall argue that Bloom distinguishes too sharply, for the good of his own position, between his own psychological wars among poets and the philological tracing of verbal influence he dislikes and that he actually reintroduces historical change in a salutary way just insofar as he himself participates in verbal source hunting.5

My feelings about these matters are autobiographically tinged. Reviewers of my first book, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980),

3 See esp. the discussion of Bloom and Eliot in Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 54 – 56.

4 Graham Allen makes this point about Bloom in Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Con-flict (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 24.

5 Bloom’s participation in this has been pointed out as a side issue most con-structively by Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London: Rout-ledge, 1988), 17.

Fry infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 439

were fully justified in noticing the giant shadows of Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman that fell across it (not as “covering cherubs”: my indebtedness was open and palpable), and the reviewers registered their approval or disapproval accordingly. But even then there was a difference, in particu-lar a divergence from the polemical agenda of Bloom. While I accepted both his agonistic premise and his dark theme — the poet’s fear of death as a threat to “his” arrogation of an originary birth6 — and while I never unreservedly accepted the alternative Yale school trope of poets as skeins of performative language belated with respect not to other poets but to language as such, I did remain a “verbal” critic. In this regard perhaps more closely resembling John Hollander (just to confine this confes-sional to Yale, where I was employed then as now but had not been a student), in that book I made bridges of echoic or rhythmic allusion between poets and poems. I was less continuously devoted to metaphysi-cal swerves and emptyings out than to what we could learn about Lamia, say (I give examples that are not in my book and that wander outside Bloom’s canon), by seeing its first line in the first line of Absalom and Achi-tophel or by considering what it meant for the strikingly original ottava rima of The Witch of Atlas suddenly and cheerfully to imitate the couplet clinchers of Don Juan for three stanzas in a row (73 – 75) near the end of the poem. Say, then, that my self-aggrandizing misreading of Bloom amounts to the claim that he too, even though his power of abstraction and focus on ultimate things almost suppresses his allusive sources, is finally a student of verbal influence, and a good thing, too.

2

It is difficult to prophesy that Eliot’s criticism will prove to be of permanent value, but perhaps we need to await the arrival of a generation neither formed by nor rebelling against him, before we can justly place him. — Bloom, “Reflections on T. S. Eliot”

The one covering cherub, the violently repudiated influence on the “tetralogy” and other books of Bloom’s midphase succeeding The

6 “Death, for Bloom, is the literal meaning against which all poetic tropes, indeed all languages as tropic systems, defend” (Beth Sharon Ash, “Jewish Herme-neutics and the Contemporary Theories of Textuality,” Modern Philology 85 [1987]: 72).


Anxiety of Influence, is the Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Tal-ent” (1919).7 Or rather, it is the Eliot of all the essays gathered in The Sacred Wood, for the best starting place is not perhaps in the famous essay mentioned above but in “Philip Massinger”: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (125). Here is the relation of ephebe to strong poet in the life cycle of the poet-as-poet, the only difference being the stronger determination of Bloom’s ephebe already to swerve from the precursor. What is most powerful in Eliot’s formula, in which one should immediately acknowledge the element of urbane, Wildean exaggeration to which Bloom responds with appreciation only when the speaker is Oscar Wilde himself — what is most powerful here is the idea of theft. What you steal you must hide, presumably, and that makes it seem almost as though what the mature poet takes from tradition were something other than verbal tags open to detection. No longer an apprentice or even an immature poet, John Keats writes that autumn and the sun conspire to “fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.” Is he stealing from Hamlet? The verbal echo suggests that he is; it puts us in mind of Hamlet. Yet this is ripeness with a major difference, oblivi-ous repletion rather than ultimate knowledge. This passage, like a bird feigning a broken wing to lead us away from its nest, displaces Keats’s authentic allusion to “ripeness is all,” which makes up the whole third stanza, where the allusion is neither verbal nor intellectual but power-fully revisionary in what I take to be the strongest Bloomian sense: ulti-mate knowledge, says Keats there, is not ripeness but skeletal thinness, unshaven, feverish, and barely breathing, “soft-dying” and poised at the outermost margins of experience.

If we suppose “To Autumn,” then, to be an extended revisionary reflection on Hamlet’s preparation for death, we do so because we have begun with a verbal echo that is without a doubt misleading and insuf-ficient in itself. We know what the thief has stolen, hence we know that he is a thief, but we cannot convict him of anything, and he rejoices in his freedom. When Eliot gets down to cases, surveying Massinger’s work in relation to that of his contemporaries, he knows himself to be a verbal critic and quotes heavily, devoting his attention to affinities and

7 All quotations are taken from T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960). For Bloom’s characteristic attitude toward this essay see The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 18.


idiosyncrasies of style. The Bloomian thief steals origins, Eliot’s thief steals mannerisms, yet the question remains between them how, if not via words, the thief is to be detected. I gotta use words when I speak to you. For the moment one may remark that Bloom’s belated fox gets into the precursor henhouse with six nonverbal ratios and six nonverbal defenses, yes, but he picks the lock with six tropes and leaves the door open as evidence behind him.

3

Yet kabbalah (literally, “reception”) is one of the Hebrew words for tradition, and the sacred wood in this instance is the Bible as “received” by medieval interpreters calling themselves Kabbalists, who claim that their understand-ing of the sacred text is a literal and orthodox one. — Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness

Taken for granted both by Eliot and by Bloom is the gulf between tra-dition and antitraditionalism — of which the latter is not necessarily the same as romanticism, just as the former may diverge from clas-sicism. Literary historiographies with their attendant canons line up on just these two sides. There may be no third position. Gadamer among my exhibits aligns with Eliot; Bakhtin, Jauss, and the logic of Russian formalist historiography before them rather oddly align with Bloom. Eliot in any case reads tradition as accretion and likes to use synchronic metaphors for diachronic things (anyone who commands a whole tradition sees that a country’s literature “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” [49]), as does his suc-cessor Northrop Frye, in whom Bloom recognized this tendency at the point when he repudiated him.8 The mediation of Eliot’s influence on Bloom by Frye is a matter of considerable interest but falls outside the scope of my topic because Frye is not a historian, as Lentricchia rightly says Bloom is, but a Vichian cyclist for whom the return of the same is not a repressed secret but the whole point of the exercise. Despite this gulf between them, it is telling that Eliot’s rehearsal for Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” takes its “shred of platinum” cue from the poet who is contested between their two can-

8 See, e.g., Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30.


ons: Keats, the one partial escapee from modernist censure, who said that men of genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals are great.

What Eliot means by “tradition” is as discriminatingly canonical as what Bloom means by his succession of strong poets. Eliot distances himself in his first paragraph from the notion of indiscriminate anti-quarianism (“archaeological reconstruction”) that probably he “stole” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s pamphlet on the use and abuse of history. Eliot’s distaste corresponds to Bloom’s distaste for “moldy fig” philol-ogy, or verbal source hunting at its least imaginative. With this clearing away accomplished, the argument of Eliot’s essay proceeds. I agree in advance with the objection that it is too easy and not wholly to the point to find equivalents in this essay for Bloom’s revisionary ratios, yet I think the game worth playing, if only for the sake of refining the differences in each case. Eliot’s first gambit is Bloom’s sixth, apophrades: the most “individual” parts of the mature poet’s work “may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (48). Arguably the return of the undead here is as uncanny as it is in Bloom, even though for Eliot the precursor is not identified as a particular poet, except in the poems of apprentices. To paraphrase Bloom, it is as though the new mature poet had written the “most characteristic work” of a host of ghosts.9 Soon thereafter comes Eliot’s acknowledgment of tessera, in which past and present supplement and complete each other: “The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (50). Again, with his Keatsian insistence on impersonality, Eliot shies away from naming poets and poetic relationships, but we easily supply some of many names: mediated by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Triumph of Life, Dante for completion needs Eliot’s misreading of him (“I did not know that death had undone so many,” with its ominous burden of secular modernity in Eliot), just as John Donne needs the misreading — as “space man” — of Eliot’s early disciple William Emp-son’s poetry (more than of Eliot’s poetry) to remain vital.

It will be clear already that Eliot sees the individual talent’s rela-tion to tradition in more than one way, just as Bloom does, and, pace Bloom, that Eliot’s stances are only intermittently nonaggressive. “We can seldom remain long unconscious,” writes Eliot in a 1919 review

9 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1973), 16.


quoted by Bloom himself (Breaking, 19), “of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated.” Eliot here sounds more like La Rochefoucauld than Bloom, but that is a matter of tone. Eliot places a high premium on innovation all the time, and why not call it rebellious innovation? Eliot’s clinamen is just the Poundian measure that “makes it new,” treating traditional materials (Robert Browning’s or Walt Whitman’s in the case of Ezra Pound and sometimes of Eliot) as though they had not been treated that way before: “To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art” (50). Eliot’s kenosis or personal emptying is the moment of the poet’s effacement before tradition, which is “much more impor-tant than [the poet’s] private mind” (51). This should be read against Bloom’s sense of this moment as a defensive tactic: “The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet” (Anxi-ety, 14 – 15). It may seem that Eliot’s abjection is replaced by Bloom’s eva-sive feint (“as though”), but in truth there is no genuine loss in either case; rather, there is a counterattack against the tradition (or precur-sor) that allows one to maintain one’s ground. “Art never improves,” says Eliot (51), a remark that applies as much to the ambitions of the past as to those of the present. If Shakespeare and Homer and the Magdalenian draftsman are never “superannuate[d],” they apparently do not improve on one another, either.10 And so in Bloom, to continue the passage quoted above, the poet’s self-humbled “ebbing is so per-formed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also” (Anxiety, 15). Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d,” for example, reduces the afflatus of the crucial “inland far” moments in “Tintern Abbey” and the Intimations Ode. To proclaim, in Eliot’s famous punch line — which is apparently supercilious toward the notion of our intel-lectual progress — that, precisely, the dead are what we know, is not in fact to deny that “ ‘we know so much more than they did’ ” (52).

As to ascesis, the moment in which the poet in Bloom “yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment” (Anxiety, 15), it is

10 Cf. Bloom: “The caveman who traced the outline of an animal upon the rock always retraced a precursor’s outline” (Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976], 4).


quite specifically the triumphal idea toward which Eliot’s essay is driv-ing: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (53). Of course, one can read this too as self-abasement before “tradition,” before something greater, confusing ascesis with kenosis just as Bloom fears they will be confused (Anxi-ety, 15). But to see how misleading this interpretation is, one needs to read Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality back into Keats’s letters, whence it comes. The poet, alone of all beings, lacks an identity and feels “pressed upon” even by infants in a nursery, yet the ethereal chemistry of the impersonal Man of Genius is greater than the “Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime” of the Man of Power. The poetry of power lacks the “snailhorn” sensitivity of true reflection, which is partly the assimi-lative capaciousness of Eliot’s impersonal appropriator of tradition; the poetry of power galumphs ponderously, even if John Milton wrote it (as Keats decided in breaking off Hyperion), whereas the poetry of genius is precisely that: as Eliot puts it, “a finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combi-nations” (53 – 54). This is all very different from Bloom’s strong poet, whose monstrous and rapacious ego is his power, but not very different from the strong poet’s ascesis, the purpose of which, in dwindling, is “to separate himself from others” (Anxiety, 15).

In one sense there is no daemonization in Eliot, because he is truly on the other side of the canonical gulf in declining to think of tradition as a sequence of countersublimities. Later, when concluding the bril-liant 1944 essay “What Is a Classic?” in which the classical element in literature is admired but circumscribed, Eliot marks Virgil’s farewell to Dante as a moment when Virgil says, “I, of myself, discern no further.”11 This would seem to expand Eliot’s taste, as in parts of Four Quartets, to include at least a Christian sublime. But in the essays of The Sacred Wood the sublime is always the galumphing of power. Nevertheless, it is just here that Bloom himself comes to terms with “tradition” and reencounters Eliot most interestingly: “The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precur-

11 Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harvest Noonday, 1975), 131.


12 Bloom came to revise his notion of a sharp break before Milton. See, e.g., Map, 77; and Breaking, 15.

13 Quoted from Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), 161.

sor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work” (Anxiety, 15). Suddenly Bloom’s strong poet, if not Bloom himself, comes face to face with at least one aspect of Eliot’s impersonal “tradition,” “the mind of Europe,” and so on, if only in performing yet another defense, or evasive maneuver. The sublime, the belated poet wants to say, is not a particular height or depth achieved by Longinus or Milton or William Wordsworth but a continuous truth standing behind all of their particu-lar swerves, a truth that can be understood at least in part as the sum of everything that has been written about it: in short, the sublime is a traditional topos that the belated poet can now make new.

Eliot, I think, remains a historical critic, despite his “simultaneous order” and “mind of Europe,” because we must understand him to have his own theory of influence. His historiography even includes the single moment of fissure, such as Bloom’s “great age before the flood,”12 that characterizes most such visions: “the dissociation of sensibility” in the long eighteenth century. As I have remarked, the inclination toward spatial metaphors is quite widespread in literary history, if only because the past coexists in the historian’s mind as a symposium of voices. John Dryden, for example, in a proto-Bloomian moment — acknowledged by Bloom — from the “Preface to Fables” (1700), wonderfully fuses time and space as a matter of “lineal descents” that are also “clans”:

Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates, that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that. . . .13

As an implied intimate in the circle of Milton and Edmund Waller, who themselves, like Edmund Spenser, aver mysterious earlier simultanei-ties, Dryden name-drops his elders (himself by this time near death) to turn what looks like a lineal descent into a clan. There are advantages in this maneuver that may not be available to one of Bloom’s strong poets.


“How many bards gild the lapses of time,” writes the apprentice Keats in an uneven sonnet; unfortunately, he continues, when I sit down to write, they are all babbling in my ear at once. I pretend they’re like the birds and bells I hear outside, so that “distance of recognizance bereaves,” and once bardsong becomes birdsong, an excellent remedy for the superficially verbal burden of the past, everything is fine.

4

The difference between classic and baroque that rationalizes Wölfflin’s system and that establishes at once their radical opposition and their total identity is quite simply this: that the classic does not exist. It never existed and can never have existed, for when the classic comes into existence or manifests itself, it does so in the form of existence, which is the baroque. — Marshall Brown, Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions

I shall now focus on Eliot’s spatial trope of a “simultaneous order” to confront more directly the peculiar way that not just Eliot but literary history in general, spectacularly exemplified by Bloom, at some level negates change rather than positing it. By change, here and henceforth, I mean a single and invariant principle of change as opposed to var-ied and variable change. If change could itself be subject to change, it would be important to distinguish between change and novelty, as change could then be either programmatically revanchist (as Samuel Johnson’s poetry resists the Wartonian norms in vogue and returns to Alexander Pope) or too subtly revisionary to be called new (like many of the best writers working in culinary genres in relation to their pre-decessors: Raymond Chandler to Dashiel Hammett, Marjorie Alling-ham to Dorothy Sayers). For strong literary historiographies, however, change is nothing but the appearance of something new, something that is always perforce new in the same way.

The Russian formalists, then, to their sorrow owed a great deal more to Charles Darwin than to Karl Marx, so that when in the 1920s, challenged by Leon Trotsky and no doubt sensing the changing atmo-sphere under Joseph Stalin, they began to reconsider their former taxonomies historically, they invoked the word evolution. Like Bloom, Jurij Tynjanov in “On Literary Evolution” (1927, a year after Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution) distinguishes strictly between the poet-as-poet and the poet-as-man. He argues that historical “context” (Marx’s mate-


rial or environmental base) actually disrupts the expression of those genetic transformations that are begotten upon text by text, transfor-mations that among other things no doubt express social forces (as in Roman Jakobson’s “referential function”):

The prime significance of major social factors is not at all discarded. Rather, it must be elucidated to its full extent through the problem of the evolution of literature. This is in contrast to the establishment of the direct “influence” of major social factors, which replaces the study of evolution of literature with a study of the modification of literary works — that is to say, of their deformation.14

That is thus to say: a sudden flood washes away the emergent prehen-sile thumb or the gene for blue eyes forever, just as a ukase demand-ing socialist realism forces those who would have been symbolists and futurists to become socialist realists.

We see in this bracing distinction between evolution and modifi-cation a daemonizing hyperbole similar to Bloom’s stance in general, but implicitly we also see, anticipating Bloom’s relation between pre-cursor poem and belated poem, the sense in which the introduction of hitherto nonexistent literary devices is not something that happens but something that has always already happened and hence cannot hap-pen. For the Russian formalists, all the devices of literariness are in any given work, genetically either latent or dominant. Boris Eikhenbaum, who introduced the concept of “the dominant” as a marker of literary change,15 quotes Viktor Shklovsky’s Rozanov (1921) to this effect, in lan-guage that no doubt deliberately echoes the weak precursor Marx, for whom dominance is also a keyword, rather than Darwin:

Dostoevsky introduced the devices of the dime novel into the main-stream of literature. Each new literary school heralds a revolution, something like the appearance of a new class. But, of course, this is only an analogy. The vanquished line is not obliterated, it does not cease to exist. It is only knocked from the crest; it lies dormant and may again arise as a perennial contender for the throne. (Eikhenbaum, 1085)

14 Quoted from David H. Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Con-temporary Trends, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 735.

15 Quoted from Boris Eikhenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1078.


History thus consists essentially in describing a succession of dominants ebbing and flowing among an unchanging simultaneity of devices, and that is why the formalists, like modernists everywhere, focused their attention on Making It New, in an agon of texts rather than poetic psyches. After 1917 one was inclined to call it, as Tynjanov did, a “ ‘struggle’ ” (1084).

Yet what could be new, if each text, according to Tynjanov in Dosto-evsky and Gogol, responds to its predecessor as a “parody” (Eikhenbaum, 1084)? Tynjanov’s treatment of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parody of Nikolai Gogol, writes Eikhenbaum, “was overshadowed by a whole theory of parody, a theory of parody as a stylistic device (stylized parody) and as one of the manifestations (having great literary-historical significance) of the dialectical development of literary groups” (1084). We naturally feel that he is stretching a useful term beyond utility, but we have our own stretched term, owing in large part to Bloom: the verb to trope. A good formalist history (this expression is certainly not the oxymoron it is often said to be) would be positively phantasmagoric, yet at the same time it would be the description of a single invariant and invariable move. The history of a chess game, with its unexpected moves, would be far more dynamic — unless, indeed, the opponent’s “answer,” or “counter,” were viewed as parody. To anticipate my concluding remarks about Bloom: the historiographical moment in abstracto always isolates a constant: a “move” is never anything other than a move, distanced from what Samuel Beckett called “the misfortune of beginning” and staving off, like Bloom’s “lie against time,” the inevitability of the endgame. But the historical analysis of moves reintroduces change, not as “trope” but as a variety of tropes (four in Kenneth Burke or Hayden White, six in Bloom, sometimes as many as two in Paul de Man), with each variety harboring a finite but copious number of possibilities.

Bakhtin’s historiography in revision of the formalists’ is perforce, like Marx’s, teleological and is maintained as a corrective to the formal-ist notion of resurgent devices: like the rise of a more progressive class, the dialogic novel irreversibly becomes the “dominant” and squeezes feudal and allegedly monoglossal forms (epic and lyric) to the periph-ery. This argument applies with special force to the early nineteenth century, when, as Bakhtin shows, the novel “novelizes” the vocabulary and style of much poetry, especially that of Aleksandr Pushkin, Heinrich


Heine, and the carnivalesque Byron of Beppo and its sequels, with their talk of macassar oil and John Harrison’s timepieces. (Bakhtin’s strong precursor in this argument, every bit as much as Eliot is Bloom’s, is the Friedrich Schlegel of Gespräch über die Poesie.) Ironically, this period is also the floruit of Bloom’s Visionary Company, the great Romantics, who could well be said (and have been said) to resist the rising novel as vigorously as they resist their strong precursors and arguably, at least in the case of Wordsworth and Keats, not to mention Byron, to resist the novel only in part. Even in Shelley, when Venus sells her boat to Apollo or when the speaker of Epipsychidion says that he has bought a trophy house in the Cyclades and lovingly details its furnishings (“books and instruments of music”) like a playboy inviting a starlet for the weekend, there is a whiff of the novel. Bakhtin wants to suggest, then, that some-thing like the single fissure of strong historiographies (Virginia Woolf’s “on or about December 1910 human character changed”) comes at this moment; hence one is shocked to find, in “Epic and Novel,” that the dialogic moment passes back through Menippean satire (and of course François Rabelais elsewhere) to the Socratic dialogues. Like the inferred swerves from unknown predecessors in the writings of Bloom’s “J” or Homer, novelization in Bakhtin has always already happened. So it is also, one may say in passing, with Walter Benjamin’s history of art as de-auraticization. The aesthetic of decoupage and suture distractedly received in the age of mechanical reproducibility is preceded by the commodified modernism of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the Paris Arcades, which is preceded in turn by the aesthetic of the allegorical fragment in baroque tragedy.

It is somewhat harder to generalize about the historiography of Jauss, whose thoughts about horizon change emerge not just from his reading of Roman Ingarden, Gadamer, and the Russian formalists but also from the empirical study of reception and change in medi-eval literature. For Jauss, texts that make a difference in the future coexist temporally with texts that may at the time seem even more transgressive — as Georges Feydeau’s Fanny seems more transgressive than Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary from the standpoint of pruri-ence alone — but contain no authentic innovation, such as the dead-pan voice of Flaubert’s style indirect libre. I have always been struck by the resemblance between the historiographical strategies of Jauss and


Bloom, seemingly unrelated as they may be. In the first place, Jauss makes clear in the fifth section of his pamphlet Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft that to bring about a change in the aesthetic horizon of the moment one must ultimately be a writer: “The critic who judges a new work, the writer who conceives of his work in light of positive or negative norms of an earlier work, and the literary historian who classifies a work in its tradition and explains it histori-cally are first simply readers before their reflexive relationship to litera-ture can become productive again” (quoted in Richter, 935). In thus introducing the reader, Jauss makes intertextual relations dynamic, like Ingarden or Gadamer, but he goes beyond this position, anticipating Bloom, by showing that the only reading that matters for a history of change is ultimately reflected in writing. Sales demographics and stud-ies of library circulation of the sort that were pioneered by Q. D. Leavis and that are much in practice again today are, on this view, irrelevant to anything but the study of a synchronic moment — the moment, for example, in which Feydeau and Flaubert published simultaneously or in which, according to Jane Tompkins and others, Susan Townsend Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe need to be reconsidered because they outsold Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, just as W. L. Bowles and Charlotte Smith outsold William Blake.16 If one claims in Jaussian terms that synchronic studies of this sort will almost certainly arise from historicist motives but cannot be historical, then one sees that Jauss is in fact closer to Bloom than to most theorists of “reader response.”

Jauss would not have had to affix a criterion of value to his mecha-nism of change. His predecessors the formalists claimed on “scientific” grounds to have no interest in aesthetic valuation, and just because on the contrary they can easily be shown to have pronounced tastes that anticipate his, it does not follow that he would have needed to say, “The way in which a literary work, at the historical moment of its appear-ance, satisfies, surpasses, disappoints or refutes the expectations of its

16 To be sure, insofar as Warner and Stowe exerted long-term influence, we are concerned with their influence on readers as writers (including the critics who take them up in the modern academy and define a “sentimental” tradition), and we return to Jauss’s paradigm. The influence of Bowles on Coleridge and Smith on Wordsworth is also, of course, greater than Blake’s on any writer until Algernon Charles Swinburne.


first audience obviously provides a criterion for the determination of its aesthetic value” (quoted in Richter, 940). Indeed, it comes almost as a surprise that Jauss introduces an evaluative factor. Yet one needs to realize that even if it is not appreciated evaluatively, the criterion of change must remain his invariant. Jauss attempts to resist this con-clusion, claiming in disagreement with Tynjanov that “the one-sided canonization of change requires a correction” (quoted in Richter, 946). This disagreement hinges, at first blush mystifyingly, on Jauss’s crude misreading of the conclusion of Tynjanov’s essay “On Literary Evolu-tion.” “The connection between literary evolution and social change,” pronounces Jauss, “does not vanish from the face of the earth through its mere negation” (quoted in Richter, 947). But Tynjanov made no such negation. “The prime significance of major social factors is not at all discarded,” he said. Why does Jauss suppress the referential function in Tynjanov, apparently to challenge the link between value and change? It is a peculiar moment that we can explain only if we take Jauss to presume that Tynjanov saw any sort of social modification of art as an inhibition of change and hence as an aesthetic impediment. As I have said, I suspect that in 1927 Tynjanov had this sort of inhibition exclu-sively in mind, though I cannot prove it. But modification as inhibition is not a necessary part of his formula (it would be just as easy to say that the coming imposition of socialist realism radically changes conven-tions that would otherwise have gone on wearing themselves out), and what this evidence of a misprision bordering on non sequitur reveals is Jauss’s own inflexibility. Whether an invariant criterion of novelty is aesthetic or historiographical makes little difference, because after all such a criterion appears to be a simple historiographical necessity.

Jauss’s complex methodological framework allows us to recognize that novelty does not just happen when it appears but is a phenom-enon whose emergence as an influence is subject to delays, detours, and bypaths of reception. But this is only to say, in effect, that Blake had to wait for William Butler Yeats, or that Laurence Sterne had to wait for the modernists, and is anticipated in any case (as two later footnotes seem to admit [Richter, 949n, 950n]) by Jakobson’s modification of syn-chronic cross sections in “Linguistics and Poetics” to include diachronic elements (archaic and anticipatory). All such collateral inheritances are entailed in what Bloom means in saying that poets find each other. The


logic of Jauss’s position thus resembles that of anyone who generalizes about history, especially if we understand history as that which exists to instruct the present by surprising it — aesthetically, again, or otherwise: “For progress in science as for that in the experience of life, the most important moment is the ‘disappointment of expectations’ ” (quoted in Richter, 952).

In this, perhaps, Jauss would seem to differ from Gadamer, who — like Eliot — championed “tradition” and the classical and spoke of the fusion (Verschmelzung) of horizons rather than of their change (Wandel). His distrust of innovations that would disrupt or preclude the possibility of understanding, and also his interest in cultural trans-mission and survival rather than in literary history, places Gadamer at a distance more remote from Bloom than that of Jauss. Gadamer’s reader is not necessarily a writer and has decidedly limited powers of divination. Yet Gadamer too, again like Eliot, and following Martin Heidegger in his belief that hermeneutic circles not too abyssal can be negotiated, has his own principle of change. Because, as in Heideg-ger, we approach the text of the past with “fore-meanings” from our own horizon, we cannot learn anything without testing these preju-dices: “How do we discover that there is a difference between our own customary usage and that of the text? I think we must say that it is generally the experience of being pulled up short by the text.”17 In two ways, then, neither of which is in any sense what Bloom would call strong, Gadamer’s reader is a misreader. First, a reader may remain oblivious to the anomaly, the element of pastness, that should induce the necessary double take. This reader relaxes unchallenged within a present personal and ideological horizon. Second, the reader who is alert enough to be pulled up short then has to be able to enter the circle of interpretation, as Heidegger says, “in the right way.” Know-ing that entering in the right way is not easy makes Gadamer a tradi-tionalist. Never able to bracket fully the “prejudice” of a contemporary horizon, the reader in quest of correct understanding must bring that horizon into a constructive question-and-response relation with a hori-zon recognized as other. The unlikelihood that this process can be accomplished perfectly imposes the logic of misreading on cultural

17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Burden and John Cum-ming (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 237.


transmission, much to the disapproval of “historicists” like Emilio Betti, E. D. Hirsch, and even Jürgen Habermas, who believe that personal horizons can be fully or at least sufficiently bracketed. The strong poet, then, is someone who magnifies the hermeneutic drama of merging horizons by converting the philological attempt to understand the past into the creative attempt to deny it. Insofar as he finds drama in his-tory at all, then — and he does — Gadamer too works with an invariant criterion of change.

5

He words me, girls, he words me, that I should notBe noble to myself! — Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.191 –92

The possibility that change could change is what remains out of play in all the historians I have considered while developing a framework for addressing Bloom’s historiography. I have wanted to celebrate rather than to attack his approach to literary history by showing that it is not merely idiosyncratic or aberrant but comparable in strength, to borrow his word yet again, to the arguments of those who have made the bold-est influential arguments about literary history over the last century. And Bloom’s model of interpoetic relations harbors the same counter-intuitive refusal of change as theirs. In all these historians, whether modernist, Marxist, formalist, or hermeneutic, change could have been of any kind, and itself would change, were it not for its fixed structural orientation to some default. If it is Hayden White’s hyperbole, follow-ing Burke rather than Bloom, that historiography is shaped by one or another of only four tropes, mine seems to be that it is shaped by only one: synecdoche. In Bloom’s case, the invariability principle can be put as follows: to misread strongly is to imagine oneself to have emptied out the afflatus or plenitude of the precursor, yet that misreading is itself nothing other than the belief that the precursor has not already performed this swerve with respect to a precursor (a belief that must be false, or it would not be a misreading) and so on back to the J-Text and its precursor. Like Satan, poetry knows no time when it was not as now. Or, where it was, there I shall be: “Freud, unlike Nietzsche and Derrida, knows that precursors become absorbed into the id and not into the superego” (Map, 50). True, Bloom frequently laments a kind of


entropy or attrition of strength, a steady if stubbornly resisted decline from Milton to John Ashbery (or, more recently, from Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud), but this decline has proved difficult for him to char-acterize in the terms of his interpoetic dynamic. Ashbery at times still writes the “most characteristic” Wallace Stevens, who at times writes Whitman or Shelley, and so on.

Bloom would resist the notion that his historiography is synec-dochic. That term is what he would use to describe the “simultaneous order” in relation to poems that he finds promoted in Eliot and Frye. Yet even though he insists that “we reduce — if at all — to another poem. The meaning of a poem can only be another poem” (Anxiety, 94; this is a metaphorical relation), the infinite regress of the poet-poet rela-tion does, after all, take in the entire sweep of tradition, as much so as Shelley’s “great cyclic poem” or Eliot’s simultaneous order. In Bloom’s defense, however, the implicit totality of his successive scenes of instruc-tion does not collapse into the kind of spatial trope he disapproves of. The whole remains a temporal line, or arc, and reveals its Kierkegaard-ian mode of repeating forward only when we remember its stages in turn: Milton to Blake and Wordsworth, Blake to Yeats, Wordsworth to Stevens, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman to Hart Crane and Ste-vens, among other lineal descents. These agonistic struggles, moreover, form branching patterns. Milton’s strength in Blake is very different from his strength in Wordsworth, or again in Shelley. It cannot be the same to say that the meaning of “Adonais” is “Lycidas” and to say that the meaning of the Intimations Ode is “Lycidas,” yet both seem worth-while statements to any adept in Bloomian misreading.

I think that to his credit Bloom forces us to invent a hybrid trope to characterize his version of the historiographical moment: hyperbolic synecdoche. The Map or spreadsheet of Misprision (see Map, 84; Poetry and Repression, 1) is in itself purely synecdochic because, as the map itself indicates — following Burke in the appendix to The Grammar of Motives — it is a re-presentation (my hyphen added). But it is the vari-ability in the influence relation that becomes at once more plausible and more hyperbolic: plausible because we really do observe that Mil-ton overpowers his worthy precursor Spenser (something that does not often happen again), hyperbolic because such localized comparisons introduce the aesthetic relation (in a poets’ pantheon) between higher


and lower, reflecting the typical images, “high and low,” for hyperbole or litotes as indicated on the Map. Already, then, without to any extent becoming falsifiably empirical, the variability of change through time that is known to common sense, and that is reflected in the fact that a decent candidate for graduate school cannot be under a delusion in recognizing differences between Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson on an exam, begins to reappear.

Yet the question lingers whether change can be registered with the precision to which even speculative criticism ought to aspire unless it attends to verbal cues. It would perhaps tax our hypothetical advanced student to quote “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” alongside “And murmuring of innumerable bees,” but it would reward the imagination, I think, to show that these related murmurs give off very different kinds of hum. In the “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats tropes the tradition of Virgil’s bees, setting the stage for Emily Dick-inson’s buzzing fly while displacing the drowsiness of low-frequency sound from the tradition of pastoral otium. His murmur reflects the indistinctness of life-sound, the hum between the ears, and is expe-rienced as one of the poem’s successive opiates taken to ward off the pain and suffering of hungry generations. Its bid for universality is pointedly classless and hence perhaps an aspect of bourgeois ideology. Tennyson’s murmur ratchets the class status of outdoor sounds back up to something like the classical norm. With its “immemorial elms,” this is a manorial park, not a tangled landscape, and the bees intone a cultivated leisure, with Tennyson’s deft ear (honed by Keats’s odes) cleverly linking the industry of the bees with his own skill by way of a sweeter unheard word, mellifluity. (“Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet.”) Whether in Bloom’s terms the meaning of Tennyson’s “Song” (“Come down, O maid”) is nothing other than the “Ode to a Nightin-gale” (“Already with thee!”) is a question that could be elaborated more than at first appears, but I would insist again that the question arises by way of allusion.18

And so it is with much of the finest criticism of Bloom himself,

18 See the comparable remarks I have made about these passages in “The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language,” MLQ 54 (1993): 171 – 82, rpt. in Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 67 – 69.


despite his disdain for microscopy. His commentary is never more con-vincingly historical than when it pursues a persisting image: the chariot of Ezekiel, culminating in The Triumph of Life; the word blank (antitheti-cally derived from bhel, or “black”), culminating in the Intimations Ode and The Prelude (or of course Moby Dick and Stevens’s “Snow Man”); and Homer’s generations of leaves, paraded through Virgil, Dante, Milton, and the Romantics, culminating (like the blank) in Stevens’s “Domi-nation of Black” and in Auroras of Autumn. These are the interpretive high-wire acts that everyone remembers in Bloom — prior, that is, to the readings of Shakespeare’s characters — but the verbal basis of insight is at work elsewhere in subtle ways. In Agon, for example, speaking of criticism, not poetry, he writes of the way in which “every word in a crit-ic’s vocabulary should swerve from inherited words”: “When Emerson speaks of a ‘poem’ he does not mean what Coleridge meant, but some-thing well under way to what Whitman wanted to mean in saying that the United States were themselves the greatest poem.”19 The notion of “swerve” here is crucially ambiguous; it can mean either choosing other words (in this case history has offered “text”!) or changing the mean-ing of a given word, as in the example itself. Either way, however, the point of departure remains a verbal cue: to an equal degree both the “text” of Bloom’s colleagues and the “poem” of Emerson are tropes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “poem.”

As de Man was the first to point out and as I now reiterate, not for my part to identify a blindness but merely to sharpen one aspect of Bloom’s insight into literary history, “for the most part, [Bloom’s] examples are a priori assertions of influence based on verbal and the-matic echoes.”20 “Thematic echo” metaphorizes the notion of echo so boldly that it is hard to know how to “hear” it, yet it identifies just the liminal space between words and concepts that Bloom tends to occupy. De Man’s critique, “from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than natural or psycho-logical models” (274), is I think fully answered by Bloom from A Map

19 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1982), 21.

20 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criti-cism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 268.


21 “Harold Bloom: The Art of Criticism No. 1,” interview by Antonio Weiss, Paris Review, no. 118 (1991): 210.

of Misreading on, once he has introduced tropes to go with the revision-ary ratios. Yet it may be the very pressure of this critique that returns Bloom to words more decisively than he can acknowledge.

6

Yet Edmund was beloved. — King Lear, 5.3.240

A last remark on Bloom’s Shakespeare breakthrough, which to him is at least the second most important idea of his career, and at most the idea that more truly humanizes what he tried to do in the books about the psyche of the strong poet. He turns in this later work to the psyche of characters in relation to themselves, not of poets in relation to other poets. Bloom says that his conversion experience related to Shakespeare had to do with the moment at which Edmund in King Lear says, “Yet Edmund was beloved,” and then reflects on the oddity of being loved so passionately by two monstrous women who seemed as incapable of love as he, leading to the sense that there was something in him that he was not aware of and thence to the sudden urge, during his own death throes, to reverse his warrant for the death of Cordelia. “There’s nothing like that in literature before Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then.”21 What has happened here? Edmund as I see him in Bloom’s reading is a strong poet, like Milton’s Satan, the character whose inwardness inspires Romanticism. But Edmund’s inwardness in Bloom’s view is different from Satan’s. Satan is a strong misreader of God. It is his tragedy and limitation that he fails either to read or to misread himself and hence degenerates into a bogey as the poem advances. Edmund misreads himself as his own strong precursor. That is just why the key to Shakespeare’s originality (sometimes Bloom refers it back to moments in Geoffrey Chaucer) is his power of making characters change as a result of reading them-selves. Even in the casual interview just quoted Bloom insists that what interests Edmund is specifically his own words — “Yet Edmund was beloved” — as they prompt reflection. Shakespeare’s characters keep


reading what they have said so far;22 they are their own poem, and they revise it, the epic forms of this revisionary self-reading being the char-acters of Hamlet and Falstaff.

An obvious response is that with the otherness of a competitor now finally eliminated,23 the solipsism of strong misreading is complete and unimpeded. But I would agree with Bloom that this new emphasis is another way, and every bit as flexible a way, of talking about the mind in evolution. No doubt we are saddened to think that we learn mainly from ourselves, that like Socrates or Shakespeare’s Malcolm we know all vices in ourselves or that like Sherlock Holmes we catch the criminal because we have only to look in the mirror to know what he would do, but even in the face of the pieties about other minds that all of us do try to honor as a matter of civility, we still navigate primarily with self-knowledge. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the Bloomian Coleridge who insisted that Shakespeare acquired his knowledge of humanity not from experience but from his own imagination. Whether our mis-reading of ourselves can really amount to a revision of ourselves is of course another matter, as unlikely indeed as it is in the case of belated poems. Edmund has always talked about himself as “natural,” a force of nature whose illegitimacy has secured him an unblinkered relation to the world, and in this there is the seed of something to be valued, something that for better or worse, in all times and places, has made rogues “beloved.” No doubt Edmund is worse than a rogue, but he is still also a rogue. Hence in being so astonished that he could be loved, Edmund misreads himself, and his leniency toward Cordelia is not so much a conversion as a return of the same. The precursor poem is

22 For another early version of this idea see Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44.

23 In a trenchant neopragmatist notice of Bloom’s Western Canon that soon moves away from Bloom to distantly related concerns, Frances Ferguson argues that agonistic competition must require a belief in other minds that is at variance with the solipsism of the strong poet (“Canons, Poetics, and Social Value: Jeremy Ben-tham and How to Do Things with People,” Modern Language Notes 110 [1995]: 1151). To this, one could reply that the solipsism of strength can only repress, never nullify, that with which it competes; the repression is solipsistic, but the repressed is not. Just so, it is the other minds within the psyches of Shakespearean characters that — or so Bloom argues — effect change.


inexorable, here as hitherto, in ways that Bloom no longer discusses. But the representation of conversion is at least insisted on, as was the strength of poets’ misreadings in the books about influence, and both moments in Bloom’s career testify eloquently to the mind’s impatience with its limits.

Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (1995), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2000), and Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008). His essay “The Hum of Litera-ture: ostension in Language” appeared in the March 1993 issue of MLQ.

Harold Bloom in his “anxiety of influence” phase is often thought to insist on

an intertextual dynamic that is ahistorical. This view might seem to be

confirmed by comparison with the text of Bloom’s “strong precursor,” T. S.

Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The reason for this widespread

response to Bloom—and to Eliot—is that although Bloom is as authentic a

historian of literature as Hans-Georg Gadamer, as the late Russian formalists

(e.g., Jurij Tynjanov), or as Hans Robert Jauss, he shares with all these

figures a sense of a fundamental and unchanging intertextual dynamic that

overrides conditions imposed by broader historical or even literary change.

The essay argues that Bloom’s theory does in fact accommodate change just

insofar as it belies his own claim that he is not interested in narrowly verbal

allusion. It shows that even in Bloom’s most broadly imaginative moments,

relations with past texts are inspired by verbal signals.

Documents

Paul Fry, How to Live With the Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading