Routledge Revivals. Harold Bloom

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2 Routledge Revivals Harold Bloom Since the 1960s, the literary critic Harold Bloom has been producing some of the most powerful criticism in the United States. This large body of work has, since the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, increasingly distanced itself from all critical vogues, be they psychoanalytic, post-structuralist or new formalist, in favour of a highly idiosyncratic poetic theory. First published in 1988, this title was the first to engage with this unique approach in order to extend and amplify its most crucial insights about the nature of rhetoric, as it functions both in poetry and in poetic theory. The underlying argument is for a historical conception of rhetoric, for an extension of Bloom's 'diachronic rhetoric' towards historical rhetorics.

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4 Harold Bloom Towards Historical Rhetorics Peter de Bolla REV ROUTLEDGE IV ALS Routledge Tayor & Francis GrouP

5 First published in 1988 by Routledge This edition first published in 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 1988 Peter de Bolla The right of Peter de Bolla to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic! mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: ISBN 13: (hbk) ISBN 13: (ebk)

6 Harold Bloom Towards Historical Rhetorics PETER DE BOLLA ROUTLEDGE London and New York

7 First published in 1988 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York NY Peter de Bolla Typeset Pat Pat and Anne Murphy, Highcliffe-on-Sea, Dorset Printed in Great Bcitain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester Ail rights reserved. No pan of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data De Bolla, Peter Harold Bloom: towards historical rhetorics. 1. English literature. Criticism. Bloom, Harold, Critical studies 1. Title ISBN ISBN Pbk Library of Congrt:ss Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN ISBN Pbk

8 Contents Editor's Foreword \,11 Part One 1. Introduction 3 2, Influence Misreading Tropes Diachronic Rhetoric 87 Part Two 6. History of Rhetoric 105,., I. Rhetoric of History 129 Index 153

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10 Editor' s Foreword The twentieth century has produced a remarkable number of gifted and innovative literary critics. Indeed it could be argued that some of the finest literary minds of the age have turned to criticism as the medium best adapted to their complex and speculative range of interests. This has sometimes given rise to regret among those who insist on a clear demarcation between 'creative' (primary) writing on the one hand, and 'critical' (secondary) texts on the other. Yet this distinction is far from self-evident. It is coming under strain at the moment as novelists and poets grow increasingly aware of the conventions that govern their writing and the challenge of consciously exploiting and subverting those conventions. And the critics for their part - some of them at least - are beginning to question their traditional role as humble servants of the literary text with no further claim upon the reader's interest or attention. Quite simply, there are texts of literary criticism and theory that, for various reasons - stylistic complexity, historical influence, range of intellectual command - cannot be counted a mere appendage to those other, 'primary' texts. Of course, there is a logical puzzle here, since (it will be argued) 'literary criticism' would never have come into being, and could hardly exist as such, were it not for the body of creative writings that provide its raison d'etre. But this is not quite the kind of knockdown argument that it might appear at first glance. For one thing, it conflates some very different orders of priority, assuming that literature always comes first (in the sense that Greek tragedy had to exist before Aristotle could formulate its rules), so that literary texts are for that very reason possessed of superior value. And this argument would seem to find commonsense support in the difficulty of thinking what 'literary criticism' could be if it seriously renounced all sense of the distinction between literary and critical texts. \Vould it not then find itself in the unfortunate position of a discipline that had wined its own demise by declaring its subject non-existent? But these objections would only hit their mark if there were indeed a special kind of writing called 'literature' whose difference from other kinds of writing was enough to put criticism firmly in V11

11 Editor's Foreword its place. Otherwise there is nothing in the least self-defeating or paradoxical about a discourse, nominally that of literary criticism, that accrues such interest on its own account as to force some fairly drastic rethinking of its proper powers and limits. The act of crossing over from commentary to literature - or of simply denying the difference between them -- becomes quite explicit in the writing of a critic like Deoffrey Hartman. But the signs are already there in such classics as William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1928), a text whose transformative influence on our habits of reading must surely be ranked with the great creative moments of literary modernism. Only on the most dogmatic view of the difference between 'literature' and 'criticism' could a work like Seven Types be counted generically an inferior, sub-literary species of production. And the same can be said for many of the critics whose writings and influence this series sets out to explore. Some, like Empson, are conspicuous individuals who belong to no particular school or larger movement. Others, like the Russian Formalists, were part of a communal enterprise and are therefore best understood as representative figures in a complex and evolving dialogue. Then again there are cases of collective identity (like the so-callecl 'Yale deconstructors') where a mythical group image is invented for largely polemical purposes. (This volume and the others in this series on de Man and Hartman should help to dispel the idea that 'Yale deconstruction' is anything more than a handy device for collapsing differences and avoiding serious debate.) So there is no question of a series format or house-style that would seek to reduce these differences to a blandly homogeneous treatment. One consequence of recent critical theory is the realisation that literary texts have no self-sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those critical texts whose meaning and significance are subject to constant shifts and realignments of interest. This is not to say that trends in criticism are just a matter of intellectual fashion or the merry-goround of rising and falling reputations. But it is important to grasp how complex are the forces - the conjunctions of historical and cultural motive -- that affect the first reception and the subsequent fortunes of a critical text. This point has been raised into a systematic programme by critics like Hans-Robert Jauss, practitioners of so-called 'reception theory' as a form of historical hermeneutics. The volumes in this series will therefore be concerned not only to expound what is of lasting significance but also to set these critics Vll!

12 Editor's Foreword in the context of present-day argument and debate. In some cases (as with Walter Benjamin) this debate takes the form of a struggle for interpretative power among disciplines with sharply opposed ideological viewpoints. Such controversies cannot simply be ignored in the interests of achieving a clear and balanced account. They point to unresolved tensions ancl problems which are there in the critic's work as well as in the rival appropriative readings. In the end there is no way of drawing a neat methodological line behveen 'intrinsic' questions (what the critic really thought) and those other, supposedly 'extrinsic' concerns that have to do with influence and reception history. The volumes will vary accordingly in their focus and range of coverage. This will also reflect the ways in which a speculative approach to questions of literary theory has proved to have striking consequences for the human sciences at large. This breaking-down of disciplinary bounds is among the most significant developments in recent critical thinking. As philosophers and historians, among others, come to recognise the rhetorical complexity of the texts they deal with, so literary theory takes on a new dimension of interest and relevance. It is scarcely appropriate to think of writers like Derrida or de Man as literary critics in any conventional sense of the term. For one thing, they are as much concerned with 'philosophical' as with 'literary' texts, and have indeed - both of them - actively sought to subvert (or deconstruct) such tidy distinctions. A principal object in planning this series was to take full stock of these shifts in the wider intellectual terrain (including the frequent boundary disputes) brought about by critical theory. And of course, such changes are by no means confined to literary studies, philosophy and the so-called 'sciences of man'. It is equally the case in (say) nuclear physics and molecular biology that advances in the one field have decisive implications for the other, so that specialised research often tends (paradoxically) to break down existing divisions of knowledge. Such work is typically many years ahead of the academic disciplines and teaching institutions that have obvious reasons of their own for preserving the intellectual status quo. One important aspect of modern critical theory is the challenge it presents to these traditional ideas. And lest it be thought that this is merely a one-sided takeover bid by the literary critics, the series will imclude a number of volumes by authors in those other disciplines, including for instance, a study of Roland Barthes by an American analytical philosopher. We shall not, however, cleave to theory as a matter of polemical IX

13 Editor's Foreword or principled stance. The series will extend to figures like F. R. Leavis, whose widespread influence went along with an express aversion to literary theory; scholars like Erich Auerbach in the mainstream European tradition; and others who resist assimilation to any clear-cut line of descent. There will also be authoritative volumes on critics such as Northrop Frye and Lionel Trilling, figures who, for various reasons, occupy an ambivalent or essentially contested place in modern critical traditions. Above all the series will strive to resist that current polarisation of attitudes that sees no common ground of interest between 'literary criticism' and 'critical theory'. CHRISTOPHER NORRIS x

14 Part One

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16 1 Introduction This is not the first full-length study of the work of the American critic Harold Bloom. Readers completely unfamiliar with Bloom's considerable output of critical and theoretical writing over the last thirty years could not do better than consult David Fite's book Harold Bloom, the rhetoric of romantic vision (Amherst, 1985) which sets out to explain how Bloom's project has developed via reference to contemporary issues in critical theory and to provide an introduction to his entire corpus of published work to date. It is, as Fite states in his preface, a book 'clearly enough written to serve some readers as a less painful substitute for the "experience" of Bloom himself'. 1 The present book is not an introduction to Bloom's work but an attempt to engage with a particular set of issues articulated within and by it, and most easily referred to under the rubric 'historical rhetorics', which is my term for an extension of Bloom's 'diachronic rhetoric'. The second part of this book sets out to build upon and develop Bloom's notion of a re-conception of the field of rhetoric, while the first part sets out to demonstrate how this concern is of interest to Bloom and where it animates his work. This first part is, therefore, introductory in relation to the present argument, but not so in relation to Bloom's entire published corpus. The interest of the present argument is, therefore, to be derived from a concern with the implications and extension of Bloom's critical and theoretical work, and not from a critique of or introduction to it. For this reason readers concerned with Bloom's readings of particular literary texts will not find a great deal here that coincides with their interests. Neither will readers interested in the 3

17 Introduction interpenetration of Bloom's 'theoretical' work with Yeats or Romantic studies find much here of direct relevance. While the nature of Bloom's 'theory' and its potential uses in literary critical work will be touched upon - it could hardly be avoided - this will remain a very peripheral consideration. Readers primarily interested in these matters are best advised to look elsewhere; most obviously to those Bloomian texts which treat these subjects. Thus while it may be argued that Bloom is one of the finest readers of the English Romantic tradition writing today, I will by and large ignore his work in this field. Nor will the problematic question of the 'relevance' of Bloom's 'theoretical' work for traditional literary criticism be addressed in any detail. Having said what the following work will not do it remains to outline what it will address and seek to accomplish. The first thing to note is that the argument put forward in the following pages does not assume that the reader is completely familiar with Bloom's complex and sometimes baffling or arcane 'theoretical' writings; nor does it proceed upon the assumption that the line I propose to take in examining that work is immediately obvious or self-explanatory as a perspective of Bloom's writing. On account of this the first part of the book examines in close detail those texts I regard as central to the 'theoretical' project in order to preface the second part. There I take up what I regard to be of crucial importance and relevance for contemporary work on reading, interpenetration and history - Bloom's project for a revised rhetorics - and attempt to expand or discourse upon one of the ways in which we might think about and work with Bloom towards the realisation of that project. Consequently the following study can be seen as an engagement with one particular reading of the Bloomian project, which itself focuses upon one aspect of a large and many-faceted intervention into the 'theoretical' groundwork of interpretation in literary studies. On account of this the second part of the present book draws upon a wider range of texts than the Bloomian corpus, even though it strives to keep the argument firmly within the scope of what I take to be Bloom's agenda for a more sophisticated form of rhetorical reading, which is outlined in the first part. It remains for the rest of this introduction to situate the particularly narrow focus of the argument pursued in the body of the book in relation to the larger whole of Bloom's published writing to date. Bloom began his career as a critic of British Romantic literature in the afterglow of the New Criticism. His first three published 4

18 Introduction books, Shelley's mythmaking (1959), The visionary company (1961) and Blake', apocalypse (1963) are all devoted to studies of the Romantic tradition, and were followed by a commentary on Blake for The poetry and prose of William Blake, edited by David Erdman in 1965, and a collection of essays entitled Romanticism and consciousness which Bloom edited in In the light of this it is most likely that Bloom's early readers would have been themselves interested in and engaged upon Romantic studies, In respect to this common project his early works stand as counter-examples to a body of work produced in the United States during the late 'fifties and 'sixties on the British Romantic tradition. v\lhere someone like Geoffrey Hartman, for example, was producing a set of readings of, most notably, Wordsworth's poetry which were to become the corner-stone of a renewed interest in and appreciation of Romantic poetry, and which were to set the terms in which that poetry would be read in the United States for nearly twenty years, Bloom's own development of the New-Critical heritage was more obviously antagonistic towards both it and other contemporary outgrowths of it. In this respect Bloom's early work is formidably idiosyncratic, a feature which has developed into almost a theoretical position-taking, as we shall see below. From the earliest publications, then, while Bloom's work could be situated within the larger domain of Romantic studies, its distance and divergence from that common project was already marked. It should, therefore, have corne as almost no surprise that in the early 'seventies Bloom's published work suddenly became outwardly something very different, and that the audience targeted by this work, accordingly, became something slightly adjacent to Romanticists, even if a new group or constituency was yet to be fully formulated. That these first 'theoretical' works caused alarm, hostility or bemusement in their initial readers may say something about the composition of this audience having in fact remained largely made up of Romanticists. Be that as it may, few of Bloom's readers are likely to have missed the strategic and polemical force his writings began to exude around 1975, and to have been unaware that these writings proclaimed a radical new departure in his interests. This brings into focus the second major strand of Bloom's project, that of what is loosely called 'theory'.3 During the' seventies Bloom published four books in very quick succession, The anxiety of influence (1973), A map of misreading (1975), Kabbalah and criticism (1975) and Poetry and repression (1976), which rapidly 5

19 Introduction brought to his readers' attention a very new and different agenda. The subtitle of The anxiety oj influence proclaims this from the cover: 'A Theory of Poetry'. However, while these books do look and feel very different from the earlier set, and while we may now note that they were published during a period of intense 'theoretical' activity at Yale - de Man's Blindness and insight was first published in 1971, the same year as the tellingly titled Beyond jormalism by Geoffrey Hartman, whose collection The jate of reading was published four years later in the 'theoretical' bent of these books is markedly different from anything we might impute to a 'Yale School' of theoretical criticism. This last beast, as much the invention of a publishing house as a real movement in literary studies, in the mid 'seventies was yet to be given definitive contours - something which took place in 1979 with the publication of Deconstruction and criticism. Having said this we should also note that a 'Yale School' had become part of the collective perception of the American profession of literary studies, referred to in articles of scholarly as well as journalistic pretension. Indeed, it would be wrong to negate the fact that at the time, as now, it was quite clear that something new and different was happening at Yale. The legacy of that new intervention into the teaching and dissemination of literary texts is still being played out across the United States, whether or not the phenomenon of the 'school' at Yale ever actually existed. Whatever we may make of this, it is clear that Bloom during the period in question was working towards his own 'theoretical' description of the activity of reading literary texts, and in fact that his own 'theory of poetry', which is as much a poetic theory, is to be very strongly distinguished from both a school of criticism at Yale and the forms of advanced rhetorical reading most often associated with the names of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, the two figures who have been adopted as the most powerful exemplars of a 'theoretical' project in the United States over the last fifteen years. Thus, while Bloom's writing during this period takes a 'theoretical' turn, it should be seen as modified to a very large extent by his single-minded pursuit of his own project, an endeavour which, as we shall see, constantly measured itself against the more overtly philosophical theories being embraced at the time by his Yale colleagues. We shall note in the following examination of these four books that while Bloom's concerns to some extent shadowed those of his Yale colleagues, the use he makes of the sudden explosion of 'theory' and its associated new canon of texts 6

20 Introduction and methodologies is extremely different. It may be argued, as we shall note below, that Bloom wrestles with these new readings and readers but never manages to throw off their influence; this is most obviously a possible reading of Bloom's interaction with the work of Paul de Map. Be this as it may, we can begin by noting that Bloom's own work during this period looked far more 'theoretical' than literary-critical, but its theory was not allied to any other around at the time. To have read Bloom during these years in relation to the works of Paul de Man or Geoffrey Hartman must have been to recognise the furious egotism of Bloom's project as well as to note its distinct swerve away from more traditional accounts of Romantic poetry. In this sense Bloom seemed to be the most theoretically minded of all the group; something which, one imagines, may have lost him a portion of his readership - his old co-workers in the field of Romantic studies. Of course with hindsight we see that the four books published within two years are all fully entrenched or immersed in readings of Romantic poetry -- the last of these four was clearly so at the time of publication, with its essays on Blake, Shelley and Wordsworth - so that an easy continuity can now be perceived between the early career, with the books on Blake (Blake's apocafypse) and Shelley (Shelley's mythmaking), a collection of studies on all the major Romantic poets (The visionary company) and the 'theoretical' engagement of the 'seventies. Thus, one possible description of Bloom's entire corpus would relate it to the initial and continuing engagement with the Romantic tradition. From this perspective Bloom's 'theoretical' work can be seen as merely good reading amplified tenfold. This also allows one to note a continuity between the earlier' practical' readings of the Romantic tradition and later programmatic statements to be found in texts such as The breaking of the vessels, which return to the matter of practical reading via the system of tropes articulated in the more overtly 'theoretical' phase of the 'seventies. \Vherever one may stand on this issue, and however we choose to describe the continuity of Bloom's published work to date, it seems clear that the writings during the 'seventies do mark a significant change from the earlier work, whatever the final disruptive force of that change may be judged to be. lt is on these writings that the first part of this book will concentrate. We shall not, however, attempt to fabricate the history of all these writi.ngs or resituate them within the issues and debates 7

21 Introduction which characterise the emergence of 'theoretical' work in the humanities during the 'seventies in the United States. This can be justified in part because Bloom himself does not attempt to take on these issues and debates out in the open; his own instincts seemed to have warned him off an abstract' theoretical' discussion of these competing and complementary projects and to have kept him firmly within his own project. This goes some way to explaining why many contemporary guides to 'theoretical' work dismiss Bloom as a loner, a one-off idealist obsessed with his private vocabulary and Gnostic ruminations. It is very easy to see how this comes about, for the tetralogy is bursting out with arcane words and private jargon. In fact this is true to such an extent that we must, I believe, see it as a theoretical and polemic intervention in which the 'theory' sets out to be what it claims it is about, to be a poetic theory of poetry, not a methodology of reading. In this way we might note that internal to Bloom's theoretical enterprise is its own resistance to dissemination, its own hedge against imitation. Thus, while Bloom's notion of 'influence' is probably one of the most widely disseminated concepts at work in literary critical practice today, the books in which this idea is conceptually formulated are little read or commented upon. As has just been noted, Bloom himself has been instrumental in guarding against disciples, and has deliberately shunned the institutional pressure at work in a professionalised discipline which seeks to appropriate and imitate the newest and the most newsworthy as quickly as possible, and has openly pursued a mode of writing and of criticism which sets out to prevent the institution from taking it into itself and speaking in his name. On account of this there has been no critical school or methodology developed in the wake of Bloom's work, no set of theoretical texts published in a series on 'Anxiety' or 'Influence', no critical vogue called the Bloom School, no Modern Language Association panels on revisionism. It is hardly surprising, however, that this is the case, or that articles and books on Romantic poetry, for example, have ignored completely the 'revisionary ratios' of clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis and apophrades since the publication of The anxiety oj influence; still less that co-workers in the Romantic tradition have neglected to 'map' their favourite poems according to the schema set at the opening of A map oj misreading, in which the images in the poem, rhetorical tropes, psychic defences and revisionary ratios are brought into alignment. It is, on account of this, possible to read Bloom in a Bloomian way, and to suggest 8

22 Introduction that his insistence on this private tropology stems from his theoretical commitment to a unique and personal theory of reading, a theory which is itself subject to the forces of anxiety and influence described by it. In this reading of Bloom the theorist, the struggle with a clutch of precursor New-Critical fathers (all critics of the Romantic movement) engaged with in the first book on Shelley, develops into a sibling rivalry with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida in the later theoretical works. 4 This description of Bloom's project tends to trivialise it and reduce it to a psychological reading of Bloom's personal relations with his mentors and peers. While Bloom's own readings of poetry may sometimes threaten to trivialise or reduce poets' relations with other poets, in the same way we should avoid the temptation to read Bloom exclusively in this fashion, since it diminishes to a considerable extent the full weight and import of the agenda set out in the range of writings from the early 'seventies on. Another way of seeing Bloom as a theorist, rather than as a literary critic (he can of course be seen as both), is to sketch the philosophical groundwork upon which the theory is based. This has been done to some extent by Daniel O'Hara in his essay 'The genius of irony: Nietzsche in Bloom' which is collected in The Yale critics: deconstruction in America, edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich and Wallace Martin (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983). In this kind of reading Bloom's work is given a genealogy and is placed within a continuing tradition of speculation upon certain philosophical concepts - in this case that of irony and the sublime. Here Bloom is seen to be one of the inheritors of the Nietzschean tradition, consolidating that playful project of self-ironic interpretation in his own fashion. This places Bloom alongside other contemporary thinkers, such as Derrida or Foucault in France, or Paul de Man in the United States, whose projects are similarly often taken to be within a Nietzschean tradition. The current book will not address the questions raised by this kind of approach: much can be gained from it in terms of a continuing intellectual history or genealogy of forms, but to read Bloom in this way is to make respectable something that sees itself as excessive and unrespectable, and it is to ignore the manifest drive towards self-origination or extreme idiosyncrasy which characterises all Bloom's writing. Readers of the first book, Shelley's mythmaking, already noted Bloom's severe tendency towards original and idiosyncratic ways of looking at literary texts. In this case the use of Martin Buber's 9

23 Introduction theories about 'I-thou' and 'I-It' relationships seemed to the anonymous Times Literary Supplement reviewer somewhat extravagant, and the readings it produced a little remote from the more traditional appreciations of Shelley's poetry. 5 Bloom has since gone on to state that he is now uncomfortable with that book and that his early fascination with Buber has been replaced with a high regard for Gershom Scholem. He remarked in interview with Tom Moynihan that: My attitude toward Buber has changed a great deal through the years. As late as the time that I was finishing the work on Yeats back around ' 68 to ' 69, when I wrote the last of six or seven versions of that book, I was still deeply uncomfortable with Gnosticism, whether in Yeats or in myself or in anyone else, and I stin tended to subscribe to Buber's view on the matter, but I'd already grown very uneasy with Buber, especially under the influence of reading Gershom Scholem. In these ten years and more I suppose Scholem has in every way replaced Buber for me. I now find Buber quite unreadable, a hopeless idealizer and someone who refused to see his own Gnosticism or the deep Gnosticism that is the actual basis of the Hasidic movement, as Scholem has demonstrated so overwhelmingly. 6 This brings us to the third major strand of the Bloomian project, that of the deep involvement with Gnosticism and Bloom's continuing critical position in relation to the dominant modes of discourse which animate the teaching and propagation of the Jewish intellectual tradition in America. It would be quite improper, not to say beyond the present book's small aims, to tackle the questions and issues articulated by this debate, since the present author is not equipped to engage in any serious sense with the claims that Bloom makes on behalf of a number of Gnostic and Kabbalistic thinkers. While on the one hand this is a severe limitation in regard to an exhaustive study of Bloom's writing, on the other it is an advantage in that the restricted aims of the present argument are best served by an exclusive consideration of the advances Bloom makes in conceptual rhetoric without the need to question whether or not his particular reading of Cordovero or Luria is appropriate or justifiable. We shall not, however, ignore the work that Bloom has done on Gnostic and Kabbalistic modes of interpretation, since what he says in the name of these traditions 10

24 Introduction IS fundamental to his project for a revised rhetorics. We shall instead take it as given that what he says about poetry, rhetoric and the tradition in relation to the Kabbalah can be extracted from the early thinkers he summons up as precursors. For the purposes of the present argument, then, it does not matter whether Bloom is right or wrong about this. The last major strand in Bloom's thought and writing left to consider briefly - having noted the high tendency toward idiosyncratic approaches and vocabulary, a deep interest in Gnosticism, and a revisionist reading of British Romantic poetry - is that of American poetry, and what Bloom terms the American Sublime. The publication of Wallace Stevens: the poems of our climate in 1977 extends and amplifies the readings of American poetry to be found in A map of misreading, poetry and repression, and Figures of capable imagination (Seabury Press, New York, 1976). Bloom's interest in what he calls 'The American Sublime' was signalled as early as the chapter on Emerson in A map of misreading, where the term is used in a discussion of Whitman's poetry. Bloom has gone on to develop a complex and comprehensive reading of American poetry in relation to what he describes as a specifically American understanding of the sublime. This is one of the areas in which his project is to be most strenuously distinguished from that of his former Yale colleagues. For where Hartman and de Man were fully suffused with the high European Romantic tradition, and have been concerned with following through the theoretical implications for the activity of reading and interpretation posed by this tradition, Bloom has been concerned with a native American 'counter-sublime', a singularly American sense of tradition and of the sublime and its implications for a theory of poetry and of reading. This has also led to one other specific feature of Bloom's project which distances it from most contemporary 'theoretical' accounts of reading: his interest in contemporary poetry, and in understanding two poets in particular as inheritors of the American tradition, as exemplars of the American Sublime. These two poets are A. R. Ammons and John Ashberry. In many respects this is one of the strangest facets of Bloom's project, which almost deifies his chosen exemplars of the contemporary 'strong' poet. There have been many voices raised against this Bloomian deification, many arguments about the relation that these two poets have to the American tradition and whether or not they should be seen as its inheritors. These arguments are best 11

25 Introduction left to those who have a commitment to this tradition and whose interests are sufficiently enraged or stimulated by Bloom's often high-minded assertions about Ashberry and Ammons. For the purposes of this sketch of the range of Bloom's writing we can note in passing that the Bloomian project does not allow itself to remain a theoretical reading of only the past tradition; it also strives to demonstrate its application and force within the contemporary. In this respect Bloom's 'theory' is, once again, very different indeed from those more generally spoken about in theoretical journals, conferences and so on. The trajectory we have sketched here, from New-Critical Romantic critic via a theoretician of the theory of poetry to a commentator on contemporary American poetry, might be said to describe Bloom's career to date. A number of important touchstones have been left out, such as his continuing reading of Freud and his antagonistic relations to a number of competing or contrasting 'theoretical' accounts of reading and of literature. The most important of these is feminism. In this regard it is especially interesting that one of the major works of feminist literary criticism published in the last few years, The madwoman in the attic, is directly connected to Bloom's project; to such an extent in fact that it could be described as a feminist account of the anxiety of influence. 7 That Bloom's own deep-rooted sense of the inadequacy of the female tradition and his strongly expressed anti-feminist sentiments should have spawned Gilbert and Gubar's feminist critique is particularly noteworthy. This might say more about Gilbert and Gubar's relations to the Bloomian project than it says about the project itself, of course, but it should nevertheless be placed as a part of this sketch of the contours of that project. In the recently published interview with Moynihan, Bloom states his case in the following strong terms: Most feminist poetry, of course, is like most black poetry. It isn't poetry. It isn't even verse. It isn't prose. It is just... I have no term for it. Maybe it is the cultural equivalent on one level of the literary criticism, say, of Mr Hilton Kramer or Mr Joseph Epstein, or Mr Norman Podhoretz. These groups would not care for one another, but as demotic enterprises they have much in common. That is to say, they are all ideologues. 8 We can note from this that the spirit of controversy is still very 12

26 Introduction much alive and kicking in the Bloomian project; something which will almost certainly cause him to lose readers as well as enrage those he keeps. The followmg study will certainly not attempt to persuade any part of that audience, potential or otherwise" that one should begin or continue reading Bloom. It will, however, present a reading of a part of that work in the hope that an audience be found willing to countenance a common project, working along with Bloom, towards historical rhetorics. Notes 1. David Fite, Harold Bloom (Amherst, 1985), xi. 2. References to works cited will be given in the text in shortened form in the following manner: Agon: Agon: towards a theory of revisionism (Oxford University Press, New York, 1982) AI: The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973) BV: The breaking of the vessels (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1982) DC: Deconstruction and criticism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979) KC: Kabbalah and criticism (Continuum, New York, 1975) MM: A map of misreading (Oxford University Press, New York, 1975) PR: Poetry and repression: revisionismjrom Blake to Stevens (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1976) WS: Wallace Stevens: the poems of our climate (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977) 3. The term 'theory' has come to refer to a very wide range of activities, research projects and institutional positions, so that it is unwise to use the term without qualification. It is not clear, however, how the term might refer to a specific kind of work pursued in the humanities, even though its current use would seem to assume that it is universally understood as such. While one might list a number of authors or texts which would be described as falling within the domain of 'theory' it would be far more difficult to ascertain if these works or authors were all committed to the same or even similar projects. This need not concern us unduly except to remark that the term will be used in quotation marks whenever it is used to refer to this loose and unspecified set of issues and projects throughout the following discussion. 4. This is in fact the reading of the situation made by Frank Lentricchia in his chapter on Bloom in Aiier the New Criticism (Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1980), p This is commented upon in David Fite's introduction to good effect. See Fite, Harold Bloom (University of Amherst Press, 1985, p