Barely a quarter-century after hopeful observers hailed the beginning of an “age of criticism” and with it the reform in the study of literature long needed in American universities and graduate schools, academic thinking and writing about literature in the mid-1970’s suffer from a division within that is as profound as the similar divisions elsewhere in contemporary society. On one side is the non-criticism of the great majority of doctoral dissertations, academic journal articles, and minor university press books that are written or published under the rubric of literature, although their subjects are as likely to be taken from the popular arts or “film” or the topical concerns of the season before last as from poetry and works of fiction. Included here are the uncertain publications issuing from the new socio-literary “studies” courses, which have been speedily recognized, funded, and staffed and now must find something to say about the literature categorized as their own. On the other side is what from an earlier standpoint could only be called anti-criticism, arising out of the many theoretical systems, from varieties of linguistics and semiology to a revived and transformed Marxism, which have been proliferating here as well as abroad and are coming to occupy the position of dominance once held by philology.
In the shrinking humanistic center, which it shares with what used to be considered conventional literary scholarship, literary criticism proper has been largely concerned during the past decade with defending its prerogatives and at the same time reacting against its predecessors, the New Critics and the New Critics’ successor, Northrop Frye. The favorite target of reassessment and retrospective criticism, apparently because it was the nearest approach to theory in a predominantly empirical and pragmatic movement, is the one general aesthetic principle, the autonomy of a poem as a work of art, that was held openly or tacitly by all the New Critics. (Or as they are now likely to be called, after being so long identified with a book title rather than by an actual group name, “American Formalists.” Frye too has been denaturalized, as a “Structuralist.”) Historically, it is possible to see now, a belief in poetic autonomy reflected the more fortunate cultural situation in the 1930’s and the 1940’s, when the productions in all the arts from earlier in the century still exceeded, and eluded, the criticism available to deal with them. Most of the New Critics, too—in the classic list of Eliot, Empson, Ransom, Tate, Warren—were poets themselves and brought to the poetry of others their experiential knowledge of how a poem evolves. From their different standpoint, however, assuming the primacy of theory, the newer critics of the present have continued what has become almost a tradition by disputing the essays, first published in 1946, in which W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley tried to defend the principle of poetic autonomy by exposing the two most common critical errors of the time: “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.”1
Naive readers, including undergraduate students, used to find Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s arguments too philosophical; now, by an ironic historical reversal, both the formulations of the critical fallacies and the principle they were designed to serve are made to appear philosophically naive and inaccurate as well. With great intellectual subtlety, Paul de Man2 has argued that Wimsatt’s anti-intentionalism was contradicted by the nature of his fellow critics’ practice and was based on a misunderstanding of the “structure of literary form.” De Man proposes instead a theoretical account of critical interpretation, adapted from Heidegger’s notion of the “hermeneutic circle,” in which there is no discontinuity between the author’s act of composing a poem and the critic’s act of interpreting it, and (by implication) the critic can never be mistaken. “Poetry is the foreknowledge of criticism. Far from changing or distorting it, criticism merely discloses poetry for what it is.” Attacking from another direction, Stanley E. Fish3 has turned the affective fallacy on its head and developed an “affective stylistics,” according to which the reading experience requires of the literary work precisely what Wimsatt and Beardsley wanted to save it from—disappearance into the consciousness of the reader. To Fish, the text is not an entity in itself, with the unity and integrity of a physical object (a “dangerous illusion,” he says), but what he elsewhere calls a “self-consuming artifact,” designed to be used up in the “workings of its own best effects.” (Both views are generally in accord with the position of Roland Barthes, to whom a separation between the critic and the writer and between the critical and creative acts is part of a “worn-out myth.”4)
There is also an incidental stricture upon the critic in “The Affective Fallacy,” as the authors note the ways in which affective theory had become “less a scientific [i.e., psychological] view of literature than a prerogative—that of the soul adventuring among masterpieces, the contagious teacher, the poetic radiator—a magnetic rhapsode Ion, a Saintsbury, a Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps.” A record of the adventures of the soul among masterpieces was the critical ideal of Anatole France, which at the time Wimsatt and Beardsley were writing had degenerated into the empty punditry of their last three illustrations. It is Anatole France whose literary essays in the “personalist mode,” along with those of Ruskin and Pater, are currently recommended by Geoffrey Hartman as models for the writing of criticism today. Although Hartman does not mention “The Affective Fallacy,” he refers elsewhere to a “backlash” against Ruskin and Pater as well as France led by I. A. Richards, whose own style is rejected as a model because its “superstructure” is “the managerial imperative of what is now called Social Science.” In his recent critical essays (“I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication,” “The Fate of Reading,” “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis”)5 Hartman seems to be mounting a counter-backlash in behalf of the subjective-impressionistic indulgences, as they once would have been considered, that were excluded from critical writing by the more austere followers of the New Criticism, those who took Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s essays most to heart. Hartman now calls criticism an art form itself, and warns those who insist on reading critical prose “only literally” that too strong a “privileging” of literary, or fictional, or “primary” texts over literary-critical, or nonfictional, or “secondary” texts may “reify” literature to the point of disordering the ability to read.
Harold Bloom, Hartman’s colleague at Yale, joins in exalting the 19th-century “personalist” essayists, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde, and foresees an end to the separation between literature, or more specifically poetry, and criticism in more thoroughgoing fashion: “As literary history lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just as all criticism becomes prose poetry.” The principle of poetic autonomy is rejected by Bloom even as a guide to practical criticism. In place of “the failed enterprise of seeking to ‘understand’ any single poem as an entity in itself” he proposes an “antithetical criticism” which, in the terms of a new literary theory of his own, approaches the meaning of any particular poem only by way of a range of other poems, including not only those written by other poets but also the poem that might have been written by the historical author as an alternative, and the new poem the critic himself “writes” in the course of his reading.
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The particular critical positions that have been noted for de Man and Fish, Hartman and Bloom, are similar enough to indicate that in what remains of literary criticism as such, even without newer influences from outside, a revisionist movement has been under way for several years, directed not only against certain weaknessses of the New Criticism in matters of theory but also toward a changed conception of the critic and his function, which is potentially more important. The similarities are not accidental. It happens that all four authors—together with two others who should also be included, J. Hillis Miller and Angus Fletcher6—belong to a middle-generation group of scholar-critics so called, some of whom are more the one than the other, initially related by similar or overlapping specialties, common institutional affiliations, or the dates and places of their graduate degrees. The earliest among them were already too late for the direct impact of modernism, and late enough to know the New Criticism when it was at the height of its prestige, with its stronghold at Yale, where at different times during the 1950’s and the early 1960’s Hartman, Bloom, Fletcher, and Fish all were graduate students. Their chief influences instead during the 1950’s (this is especially true of Hartman and Miller) were from the older European scholars, including distinguished refugees, who were in the United States and still actively teaching and publishing, such as Rene Wellek and Erich Auerbach at Yale and Leo Spitzer and Georges Poulet at Johns Hopkins. In varying degrees, the affinities of this group have continued to be with European criticism and its emphasis on theory, philosophically based, down to the present-day branches of Structuralism.
Although within their individual specialties the members of this group have been working independently, by their cross-relationships in other respects they have helped to create what is in effect a new canon in literary history, restoring figures of the past—Spenser, Milton, the “poets of sensibility” of the later 18th century—who have long been eclipsed by the “modern classics” favored after Eliot. Harold Bloom has taken the lead in defining in place of both the older period structure and the assumption of a unique Modernism a central Romantic tradition in English poetry, stemming from Milton and continuing to the present; a native American branch begins with Emerson and culminates in Wallace Stevens, but Pound, Eliot, and Williams belong to a “rival school” which is excluded. For some years Bloom has been championing A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery as successors to Stevens.7 Recently he has added a surprising third, the later Robert Penn Warren, who is welcomed into the American tradition in spite of his descent from Eliot and the “rival school.”
If the co-founders of the new canon now seem to be forming a school of their own,8 sharing ideas and terminology, quoting and reviewing each other, dedicating their books to each other in rotation, that in large part is the doing of the two most prolific members, Bloom and Hartman, who have been publicizing and drawing their associates along with them as they have drawn closer together in their explorations of the role of the critic; it is their emerging conception that represents the greatest change from the view bequeathed by the New Criticism. Their revisionist efforts in this respect are loosely coordinated in their latest series of books, from which all quotations earlier in this article have been taken. Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was published in 1973, followed in 1975 by his A Map of Misreading, Hartman’s The Fate of Reading, and Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism; Bloom’s Poetry and Repression was published in January 1976.9 Hartman’s prescription for a “personalist” criticism is limited to a few scattered sentences, among essays which illustrate his own personal-ism. For Bloom, in contrast, a revised conception of the critic is an essential part of the theory he has been developing and elaborating in the four books listed. Since the “theory of poetry” designated in the subtitle to The Anxiety of Influence changes markedly in the two subsequent books, the series will be considered in order of publication.
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II
“Influence” in Bloom’s sense is not the passing on of ideas or images from earlier to later writers, but a complex relationship between past and present that is the result of a more or less deliberate act of misreading, or “misprision,” by a later writer (properly poet; Bloom does not give fiction a place in his theory) of the work of a strong precursor he is trying to evade. As the governing principle of post-Enlightenment poetry, which means all since the later 18th century, misprision is necessary, inevitable, but doomed to fail as a means of totally delivering the anxious poet from the effects of his belatedness. If he himself is strong, he struggles against influence; if he is weak, he is unaware of it or idealizes his precursor.
Bloom’s theory was foreshadowed in his study of Yeats (1970) and among the essays collected as The Ringers in the Tower (1971). Its full development in The Anxiety of Influence brings together critical and scholarly influences from a number of precursors of Bloom’s own, including the two critics he is most obviously trying to evade and supplant, Eliot and Frye. For some enthusiastic reviewers, his effort is successful; according to Morris Dickstein, this is “the most provocative and original piece of literary theory in English since Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.” For not a few other readers, both the plausibility of the theory and its value as criticism are overshadowed by its own literary qualities. There is an undeniable appeal in the style and format of the book: the parables that serve as prologue and epilogue; the many quotations and allusions interwoven with the author’s arguments; the inspired eclectic names—“clinamen,” “tessera,” “kenosis,” etc.—of the “revisionary ratios,” or ways of misreading, under whose headings most of the discussion is organized; the sustained personal tone of an observer meditating on “the melancholy of the creative mind’s desperate insistence upon priority.” The greatest appeal and Bloom’s greatest originality lie in his use of Freud, beginning from an analogy between the belated poet’s struggle against a great precursor and the psychoanalytic “family romance.” “The Internalization of Quest Romance” (1968), an essay included in The Ringers in the Tower, was an earlier experiment in the adaptation of Freudian concepts to literary history, which had nothing to do with the library psychoanalysis of individual writers. In The Anxiety of Influence, by what seems a legitimate extension of Freud, Bloom outlines a powerful cultural myth in which the activity of writing poems calls out instinctual psychic energies -allowed little expression elsewhere in post-Enlightenment society, even within the seething 19th-century patriarchal family. The important new point he makes about the creative process, and in The Anxiety of Influence is able to hold in proper perspective, is that it can involve savage aggression and repression, threatening to both the humanity and the sanity of the poet if it is mishandled. An improved study of literature might be the foundation of a humanism, Bloom concedes; literature itself—the literature of his conception, poetry red in tooth and claw—never.
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Like The Anxiety of Influence the two following books are slim volumes, published without conventional scholarly apparatus, but neither can be called that “severe poem” which Bloom in the first book indicated his antithetical criticism was to be. With considerable loss, he turns away from a primarily psychoanalytical model and from his own meditative point of view to become a confident, sophistical lecturer, anticipating and parrying hard questions that might be raised by his audience, delighting in taking positions that can be defended only by ingenuity and the force of will. Repeatedly restated, the theory of influence hardens into the formula of an impersonal literary determinism, in which there are no longer poets and poets, or poets and poems, but only texts and texts; in Kabbalah and Criticism, even the individual text is allowed no existence except as a synecdoche for “a larger whole containing other texts.” A diagrammatic table inserted in A Map of Misreading sums up what similarly happens to the six original revisionary ratios when they are augmented by corresponding “psychic defenses,” rhetorical tropes, and classes of Romantic imagery to form the map, a composite paradigm of misprision.
The announced purpose of A Map of Misreading is instruction in practical criticism, how to read a poem according to the theory introduced in The Anxiety of Influence, but Bloom’s own performance destroys the credibility he was previously able to win by his tact in dealing with particular poems. The “roads” he follows now in his demonstrations (“Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem”) are blasted ruthlessly through the chosen texts, often by sheer assertion. Although (compounding the metaphor) Bloom assures his readers in advance that his map is not a bed of Procrustes, that is precisely what it becomes in the most extreme instance, a comparison of two Romantic “crisis-poems,” in which lines and images from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” are forcibly equated not only with the abstractions of the map but also, item by quoted item, with particular lines and images of very different meaning in Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” To Howard Nemerov (prescient, since he was reviewing only The Anxiety of Influence10) Bloom’s form is logic “but his essence is confusion.” In A Map of Misreading, the confusion is created by the logic, for Bloom has done far better as a practical critic of the Romantic poets than his Procrustean torture of Shelley might suggest. If there is any lesson for the practical critic in this and other illustrations of antithetical criticism in action, it is the excluding one that to a map-reader of Harold Bloom’s rationalizing and improvisatory powers any territory is interchangeable with any other; that moreover, possessing the map, such a reader—if he is Bloom—need never leave his armchair to visit any existing territory at all.
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Kabbalism is mentioned from time to time in the two earlier books, but the promised separate treatment is disappointing when Bloom reaches it in Kabbalah and Criticism. His account of the late medieval systems of Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria, based on secondary studies by Hebrew scholars (especially Gershom Scholem), is summary and perfunctory, with some noticeable historical omissions and without the imaginative engagement of his discussions of Freud or Nietzsche. In his own expanding system, the use to which he finally puts Cordovero’s and Luria’s revised kabbalism is to add a further layer of complication to the map of misprision. Cordovero, called the “first Structuralist,” is credited with uncovering in his doctrine of the behinot (six phases of the kabbalistic sefirot, or divine emanations) the “normative structure of images, of tropes and psychic defenses, in many revisionary texts, including many poems of the last three centuries.” Luria, “archetype of all Revisionists,” is said to have misread Cordovero and thereafter in his parzufim produced a set of “theosophical models” which, according to Bloom, “need little manipulation to become models for post-Enlightenment poems.” More than a little manipulation is required for Bloom to bring the tenuous Lurianic hypostases into conformity with his theory and his map. His most dazzling feat of ingenuity is his analogizing of zimzum, a “composite trope of limitation,” which became the “ultimate psychic defense of exiled Jewry”: from the derivation of the Hebrew word and Freud’s physiological explanation of anxiety, Bloom is able to move on to God’s creation of the world through “breathing trouble,” and thence to how the creation of a new poem can be the dialectical result of the anxiety of influence.
Despite the juxtaposition in the title, what is important in Kabbalah and Criticism is not Bloom’s claim to a kabbalistic model for his own criticism but the place he finds in his theory of influence for criticism itself, which is the subject of the last chapter, “The Necessity of Misreading.” In the familiar terms of the theory, the critic is to the text as the poet is to his precursor, and again, like poets and their poems, critics and their readings—or misreadings—are neither right nor wrong but only strong or weak. “A poet is strong because poets after him must work to evade him. A critic is strong if his readings similarly provoke other readings.” In the double act of misprision that occurs—the critic’s misreading of a text which was the result of an earlier misreading by the poet—the strong critical reading does not, as one might expect, simply remain in analogy with the strong poem; it displaces it, “for no strong reading can fail to insist on itself.” The view of the comparative strengths of poetry and of criticism expressed in the closing pages of the chapter is as antithetical to the New Critical belief in and respect for the autonomous text as it is possible to imagine: that poems in themselves have no presence, unity, form, or meaning but must acquire those qualities from their readers or from other poems. Criticism, on the other hand, can seem to have more unity, form, and meaning and “a stronger apparent presence” than the poem it comments on. At the conclusion, Bloom looking optimistically toward the future is no longer content to go forward with Ammons and Ashbery, his elected successors to Wallace Stevens. It is the critic, the revisionist reader and insister on his own strength, who now leads the way, unencumbered by deference toward the poems he has misread and displaced, or even toward the conventional idea of a poem at all: “Interpretation is revisionism, and the strongest readers so revise as to make every text belated, and themselves as readers into children of the dawn, earlier and fresher than any completed text could hope to be.”
As the third such volume to be issued under Bloom’s name in less than a year, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens brings together with the basic thesis of The Anxiety of Influence the modifications made in A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism. In the introductory chapter, Vico is discussed as the philosopher of rhetoric; gnosticism is added as the larger tradition to which kabbalism belongs; Petrarch is assimilated to the line of “lyrical subjectivism” beginning with Spenser and Milton in English; Freud himself in the context of poetic interpretation is called the “strongest of modern poets.” The second term in the main title refers to the repression of the poet’s creative freedom through the “initial fixation” of influence, and also to the selection of poetic language by which he tries to repress full knowledge of his indebtedness. The poets who are the subjects of Bloom’s extended readings are Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens.
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III
In their different but parallel revisions in the role of the critic, Hartman and Bloom in effect are misreading Paul de Man on the hermeneutic circle: to both, in their respective ways, poetry as the foreknowledge of criticism and criticism as the disclosure of poetry means that the critic breaks the circle and steps forward in place of both poet and poem. Hartman is willing to accept secondary creative status for his critic, whose identity is bound up with the writings of others; writing itself he sees as resignedly “living in the secondary, knowing it is secondary.” For Bloom, in contrast, the elaboration of his theory of influence is accompanied by a personal evolution that takes him from secondary to primary status in terms that are his own. As early as the “Interchapter” in The Anxiety of Influence he gives antithetical criticism a personal dimension: the critic, perhaps together with his readers (“we”), must learn to read the poetic descendants of a great precursor “as if we were their disciples, and so compel ourselves to learn where we must revise them if we are to be found by our own work, and claimed by the living of our own lives.” By the conclusion of Kabbalah and Criticism, the exhortation implicitly has been fulfilled. In the “children of the dawn” sentence quoted above, both texts and the reading of them are turned into a metaphor and we are allowed to glimpse the author in his own person, fortified by past victories and ready to go on to others, after presumably having been found by new work and claimed by the living of a new life.
Still deferring to the primary literary work, Hartman tries to place the burden of personalism on a revised form of the secondary or literary-critical essay. “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” is an example, and for all its meditative discontinuities it is no stronger in suggesting an authorial personality behind the printed page than Hartman’s earlier scholarly essays. Bloom is more successful, on a larger scale. Throughout the four books there is a continuing personal presence, in the second and third, at least, increasingly that of a performer. It is evidently to that self-advertising presence that Bloom’s most admiring reviewers are responding when they praise his “masculine” qualities or are reminded of the stance of Walt Whitman. For some receptive readers, the sense of personality elsewhere in the books may attach itself even to the map of misprision, so that in all its skeletal abstraction it becomes an object of interest in itself.
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Yet beyond the fascination of the author’s performing self and his unfolding inner life there is the fact that the theory of misprision is offered as a critical theory and the map as a guide to practical criticism. Bloom already has recognizable younger imitators, conscientiously misreading their poetic texts, who are or will become literature professors themselves, in the institutional setting which for all concerned is becoming inseparable from the literary experience. It was in the classroom as well as in books and the quarterlies associated with its name that the New Criticism built its reputation. In a different time, Bloom’s method of misreading (which I would like to believe began as something of a parody of contemporary anti-criticism11) sounds all too easily adaptable to the teaching gimmickry that prevails on all educational levels. (Even Bloom should be given pause by an example mentioned not long ago by Edgar Z. Friedenberg—the “mistranslation” of foreign languages for children in elementary school.) If literature is indeed dead, it at least met its end with dignity in the deaths or the silence of the last great writers. The end of literary criticism, if Bloom’s revisionism sets the pattern, may be in the bathos of a permissive classroom, where criticism allows anything whatsoever to be said about literature, and anything said about literature is criticism.
1 Reprinted in Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) . Simply stated, the point made by the two essays together was that the meaning of a poem is, or ought to be, independent of both its origins in the mind of the author and its results in the mind of the reader.
2 “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in the author’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 20-S5.
3 “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, Autumn 1970, pp. 123-162. Fish’s view is reflected in the titles of his books, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of 17th-century Literature (1972).
4 For a comparative account of the Anglo-American and French critical “schools” and of both in relation to Russian Formalism, see Edward Wasiolek’s introduction to Serge Doubrovsky, The New Criticism in France, translated by Derek Coltman (University of Chicago Press, 1973); on the position of Barthes cited above, see pp. 7 and 30.
5 Included in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays, University of Chicago Press, 1975, 352 pp., $15.00.
6 For Miller, see The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968); for Fletcher, Allegory, The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964) . Major publications by Geoffrey Hartman before 1975 are The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, Valèry (1954); Andrè Malraux (1960); Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814 (1964); and Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (1970) . Those by Harold Bloom are Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959); The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961); Blake’s Apocalypse (1963); Yeats (1970); The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971).
7 Ammons and Ashbery have been discussed by John Romano, “The New Laureates,” COMMENTARY, October 1975.
8 On the “Yale school” proper, which on campus comprises Bloom, Hartman, de Man, Miller, and now the “Deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida, see the conclusion of Miller’s omnibus review in the New Republic, November 29, 1975, pp. 30-33. This review also indicates how much of present-day European theory already has been adopted by American academic critics.
9 The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford University Press, 157 pp., $2.50 (paper); A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, 206 pp., $8.95; Kabbalah and Criticism, Seabury Press, 127 pp., $6.95; Poetry and Repression, Yale University Press, 293 pp., $11.95.
10 Sewanee Review, Winter 1975, pp. 161-169. While Bloom’s admirers have been reading his criticism as a kind of poetry, it has remained for the poet Nemerov to call attention to the critic’s slippery reasoning and to misreadings by Bloom himself that may not always be examples of misprision.
11 Bloom on occasion has harsh things to say about the European theorists—e.g., that they provide no aid in “reading any one poem by any poet” (The Anxiety of Influence); or that “their invocations of semiology or the archeology of discourse conceal a few simple defensive tropes, and they are at least as guilty of reifying their own metaphors as any American bourgeois formalist has been” (Kabbalah and Criticism) .
