The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Bloom’s 'Anxiety of Influence'

7/30/2019 The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Blooms 'Anxiety of Influence'

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The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Blooms

Anxiety o Infuence

Asha Varadharajan

Harold Blooms reputation, indeed his notoriety, rests on the tetral-

ogy that he produced in rapid succession: The Anxiety o Infuence:

A Theory o Poetry(1973), A Map o Misreading(1975), Kabbalah and Criti-

cism(1975), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism rom Blake to Stevens

(1976). Agon: Towards a Theory o Revisionism(1982) is a late entrant in

the ranks, o which Christopher Ricks had already said, Bloom had an

idea; now the idea has him. Visionary, compelling, gnomic, and, in

equal measure, willully obscure, strangely claustrophobic, and magis-

terially cavalier in the manner o F. R. Leavis, Bloom rewrites literary

history and cultural tradition as a titanic struggle between orbidding

patriarchs and their virile, i tormented, masculine progeny. The am-

ily romance is transgured into a ght to the death, a tale o malcon-

tent and usurpation in which the son emerges a bloodied victor. The

spoils o his victory, however, come at a price his creative energies are

continually sapped by anxiety and his poetic eusions haunted by his

literary orebears in the moment o their apparent overthrow. In other

words, the cost o priority is originality; its ruit, repetition. I write inthis deliberately forid ashion to convey the favor and panache o

Blooms style, which, more oten than his argument or method, per-

suades readers to suspend their disbelie.

Modern Language Quarterly69:4 (December 2008)

Doi 10.1215/00267929-2008-012 2008 by Unversty f Washngtn

Christopher Ricks, A Theory o Poetry, and Poetry, New York Times, March

14, 1976, www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-repression.html.


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462 MLQ December 2008

I revisit amiliar ground to oer a heretical paraphrase that attends

to the evoked rather than stated conclusion and that reinvents and rein-

orces the continued relevance o Blooms writings in unexpected and

revealing contexts, especially postcolonial ones. My aim is to demon-

strate that the tale Bloom tells o how one poet helps to orm another

is both as simple as the paragraph that precedes this one makes it out

to be and, simultaneously, ar rom simple. Indeed, The Anxiety o Infu-

ences conception o precursor and ephebe (Blooms words) locked in

ateul combat is both Blooms idiosyncratic myth and a perdurable

cultural orce with implications or our present, not just or Blooms.

A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis exposes what is atstake in Blooms venture into the realm o poetic history, which he

holds to be indistinguishable rom poetic infuence (AI, 5). Bloom

writes that acts o misreading, o clear[ing] imaginative space by

strong poets (AI, 5), constitute history. While he hastens to add that

this struggle or priority occurs between equals, he insinuates that the

contest might well take place between mismatched entities, the cour-

age and persistence o the son outdone by the might o the ather,

who is laden with the wisdom o generations and bestows on his son

not the rich legacy o the past but the immense anxieties o indebted-ness (AI, 5). In this scenario, the triumph o sel-appropriation (AI,

5) is marked by both immanent and imminent ailure; it is into and

o this vexed universe that the true poet is born. Bloom is immedi-

ately careul to part company with the enterprise o uriously active

pedants searching, in Wallace Stevenss disdainul words, or echoes,

imitations, infuences, as i no one was ever simply himsel but is always

compounded o a lot o other people (AI, 7), but he is also baleully

aware that denying obligation (AI, 6) is the distinguishing trait o

the newcomer pued up with the conviction o his own priority. Bloom

delineates, in his own estimation, a more proound version o poetic

infuence, one that cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history

o ideas, to the patterning o images, that can be more accurately des-

ignated as poetic misprision, and that connes itsel to the study o

the lie-cycle o the poet-as-poet (AI, 7). These shits in emphasis add

up, as one might expect, not to a revisionist history o modern poetry

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety o Infuence: A Theory o Poetry (New York: Oxord

University Press, 1973), 5. Hereater cited as AI.


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Varadharajan Legacy fAnxiety o Infuence 463

but, in keeping with Blooms git or sleight o hand, to a history o

modern revisionism (AI, 8). Bloom thus assumes rather than dem-

onstrates that revisionism is a peculiarly modern trait and then, with

customary brashness, revises the aboriginal poetic sel, the vocation

o contemporary criticism, the annals o Western imaginative lie (AI,

11), and the laws o cultural primogeniture. Are these objectives simply

an accelerating hubris on Blooms part, to be met with an excoriating

skepticism on ours?

Introduction unctions as both prolegomenon to and synecdoche

oThe Anxiety o Infuence. Bloom gives air warning o the antithetical

style that dominates the orm and content o the work in its subtitle:the introduction is a meditation anda synopsis, a ruminative, uncertain

beginning and a condent, retrospective encapsulation a conclusion,

in short. This pattern o oscillation denes the works rhetoric o tem-

porality as well as the logic o (dis)continuity that inorms its revisionist

poetics. I suspect that Bloom preers the term antithesistoparadoxnot

only because o its dialectical character (it contains its opposite in the

moment o becoming the other) but also because he values its comple-

mentary possibilities (it completes its opposite) as well as its revisionist

potential (it transumes the authority it evades or rom which it swerves).More to the point, antithesisis agonistic and dynamic; unlike its alterna-

tive,paradox, it will have no truck with the delicate symmetry o balance

and suspension. The law o castration (and eminization) underwrites

the signicance o poetic afatus in Blooms scheme o things; in these

conditions, antithesiscaptures the ull weight o infuence under which

the poet staggers, its catastrophic dimensions as well as the painul

ambivalence that its violence engenders. Anxiety, or Bloom, is primal

and, in this sense, predicated on wounding and irreparable loss. More-

over, infuence cannot be willed (AI, 11); anxiety, thereore, is as pre-

emptive as it is productive. The willed and artul nature o paradox, its

arduous but achieved stability, I suggest, would itsel be antithetical to

the zeitgeist that Bloom takes pains to elaborate.

In texture The Anxiety o Infuenceis a dense network o allusion and

quotation, none o which merits the usual scholarly obsequiousness

or the apparatus o the learned citation. Bloom assumes that he can

excerpt and select at will. He is not required to adumbrate the argu-

ment rom which the idiosyncratic quotation emerges, perhaps because


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his audience comprises those attuned to the Western imaginative lie,

as well versed as he is in its acknowledged architects. Bloom wants to

reproduce the inescapable power o the operations o infuence; rather

than trace its ormation, he experiences its eects, and his style mani-

ests an arbitrary sway. This severe poem sacrices the commonplaces

o argument to the demands o an imaginative unity reliant upon

aphorism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly tradi-

tional) mythic pattern (AI, 13). I used the epithetclaustrophobicabove,

but it may be more appropriate to speak o the centripetal orce oThe

Anxiety o Infuence, the charmed circle o the elect in which it moves,

and the structure o belonging that it ultimately discerns in the mis-prision o poetic inspiration. This is a severe poem indeed; the art-

less pastiche o aphorism and apothegm reveals itsel as a magnicent

orm o dissembling, beneath which lurk inexorable patterns o repeti-

tion and return. In other words, Bloom exploits the productive con-

notations oanxietywithout ever relinquishing its singular explanatory

value in the domains o poetic history and practical criticism; the vast

machinery o philosophies o history and identity, o Anglo-American

literary tradition, and o Gnostic speculation probes the riddle o anxi-

ety and celebrates, rather than challenges, its reign.The idiosyncratic intentionality on display as Bloom sits through

the debris o tradition to light on his precursors is belied by the pre-

dictability o his choices. Bloom appears to endorse the centrality o

the author gure, but, as he reiterates, authors are no more than the

aggregate o their (disavowed) infuences, and his own ocus remains

on these intrapoetic relationships, which he deems analogous to lie

cycles. Bloom also osters the illusion o agency when he insists on the

perverse, deliberate acts o misreading that constitute the poetic sel

as well as on poetic history itsel as agon, as the oedipal strie in and

through which the anxiety o infuence is born. These contentions seem

a ar cry rom the imperceptible, geological shits that produce cracks

in discursive ormations and inaugurate historical change in Michel

Foucaults archaeology, a orm o revisionism arguably more popular

now than Blooms. The import o these shits, nevertheless, is the same

because Blooms ocus on masculine aggression and contestation does

not dismantle the regulatory ction o the agon itsel or alter the out-

come o the struggle. For this reason, Foucaults later, tongue-in-cheek


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term genealogyseemed to promise disarray rather than simply victory

and deeat. His nod to amily trees is no coincidence, or they tend to

prolierate and to spite the laws o lineage and evolution. Foucaults

archaeology discerns ractures, gaps, lateral meanderings, and road-

blocks in the masquerade o historical continuity to make a revisionist

history possible: The Periodis neither its basic unity, nor its horizon,

nor its object. Blooms history assumes that such a revision has already

taken place; this revisionist ethic controls, rather as Foucault would say,

the terms under which uture deviations might occur. Both Bloom and

Foucault expose the endurance o discursive ormations even as they

emphasize their accidental, unmotivated, or contingent character. Nei-ther man denies that power is at stake in the construction o the order

o things, poetic or otherwise. Both uphold Friedrich Nietzsche as the

gure to whom they are most indebted. Both believe that revisionism

is the signature o the modern, though in later texts the lial agon

remains a stubborn trace o premodernity ater it should have become

obsolete. Despite their analogous resistance to periodization, the di-

erence between their histories cannot be gainsaid: Bloom cares about

power in relation to poetry; Foucault, in relation to knowledge. Bloom

writes an archaeology o revisionism that he equates with the birth othe modern rather than, as Foucault does, a genealogy o the modern

that stages the return o the repressed. I the spirit o the modern is to

be equated with the revisionist impulse, Bloom seems to say that this

impulse alone cannot be subject to genealogical revision.

The gure that mediates between Blooms sacralization o origins

and Foucaults insistence on discontinuity and interruption, his chal-

lenge to historicisms claim to unimpeded development, is Edward

W. Said. The distinction that Said draws between divinely ordained

origins and chosen beginnings closes the gap between Foucault and

Bloom. Said infects Foucaults vision o discontinuity with histori-

cal agency and individual imprint while ensuring that the dierence

between origins and beginnings removes the stings o inadequacy and

belatedness in Blooms vision and transorms risk into possibility. To

comprehend the nature o the historicism at stake in Blooms argu-

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology o Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith

(New York: HarperColophon, 1976), 176. My contention is that prolierating gene-

alogies cover up the revisionist consistencies that typiy the true Foucault.


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ment, or o the historicism that critical scholarship usually discerns in

it, I want to examine our essays by Said that appeared, in this order,

in The World, the Text, and the Critic: Introduction: Secular Criticism

(hereater cited as I:SC), The World, the Text, and the Critic (WTC),

On Repetition (OR), and Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contem-

porary Criticism (RT). Blooms writings are both incidental and vital

to Saids essays, particularly in his guise as the author oBeginnings:

Intention and Method, published two years ater Blooms Anxiety o Infu-

ence. Beginningsmight be the secular counterpart to Blooms mythic

(divinely ordained?) adventure, the narratological analogue to his

revisionist poetics. Saids observations enable me to oreground theunorthodox implications o Blooms genetic hypotheses (RT, 156)

even as they alert me to the recuperative consequences o his revision-

ary ratios (AI, 13). The remarkably similar litany o philosophers and

critical methodologies that echoes through Beginningsand The Anxiety

o Infuenceis itsel sucient cause to read Bloom through the lens o

Said; ar rom evaluating the dierence between their misreadings o

the Western philosophical and literary traditions, thereore, I want to

emphasize this similarity between the prophecy o beginnings and the

anxieties o belatedness. Saids animadversions on late style as a ormo intransigence, as the spirit o contradiction that makes it possible or

him to endure in the ace o mortality, marks his ascinating return, at

the end o his career, to a Bloomian vision o identity as an originary

wound and o writing as a personal struggle against extinction and as

a orm o cultural survival. I infuence cannot be willed, it is hardly

surprising that Blooms precursors bear a amily resemblance to Saids

and that revolution and repetition (the concepts with which Said and

Bloom have, respectively and routinely, been identied) can be traced

to the same orebears.

Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1983). The question that inorms my exploration here is, Can a his-

toricist stomach a revisionist? By the same token, does each imply the other? That is,

could only a thoroughgoing historicist become a revisionist worthy o the name? It

is thus a mistake to accuse the revisionist Bloom o being a closet historicist or the

historicist Bloom o being a secret agent o revisionism. Each is unthinkable without

the other. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method(New York: Basic Books,

1975). Jerey Mehlman oers an incisive refection on the valence o these terms


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The World, the Text, and the Criticcounters, in its estimation, a dan-

gerous trend. Textuality, Said avers, has . . . become the exact anti-

thesis and displacement o what might be called history (I:SC, 3 4).

This declaration seems to set him at odds with Bloom, whose enterprise

he airily (and anonymously) dismisses or routinely understanding

that reading and interpreting occur in the orm o misreading and

misinterpreting (I:SC, 4). Bloom would take umbrage at the confa-

tion o misreading with misinterpretation. For him, misreading is the

condition o all interpretation, but it is not to be construed as mistaken

reading. Said is more careul with Bloom as his argument develops, but

his desire to arm the connection between texts and the existentialactualities o human lie, politics, societies, and events (I:SC, 5) distin-

guishes his project rom that o Bloom, whose concern is only with the

poet in a poet, or the aboriginal poetic sel, even though Bloom knows

that the strongest poets are subject to infuences not poetical (AI, 11).

What is at stake or both Bloom and Said, however, is the diagnosis o

texts as udamentally [sic] acts o power, not o democratic exchange

in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac(Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press,

1977). Mehlman emphasizes the narrative o usurpation and illegitimacy with whichKarl Marx allegorizes the transormation o revolution into its opposite, repetition, in

the course o a persuasive account o literatures reractions o history. Mehlmans work

appeared only two years ater Saids and our years ater Blooms; despite the presence

o the genetic hypothesis in Marx, it remains an absent obligation in Bloom. Moreover,

Mehlman treats history and literature as lenses through which each reracts the other,

while Bloom insists on the integrity o poetic history, o intrapoetic relationships, and

o the lie cycle o the poet, all o which seem equally immune to the invasions o his-

tory. Indeed, in the special sense that Bloom accords the word, literature evadeshistory.

In The World, the Text, and the CriticSaid is aware that he is considered an undeclared

Marxist (29), an accusation (made thoughtully in Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry and

rather more controversially, i not necessarily inaccurately, in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:Classes, Nations, Literatures[London: Verso, 1992]; see also the responses to Ahmad

in Public Culture6, no. 1 [Fall 1993]) that dogged him his entire career, particularly

because Antonio Gramsci and Theodor W. Adorno played such important roles in it

and Foucault (another undeclared Marxist) was his oeuvres constant companion. The

important point is thatThe Eighteenth Brumaire o Louis Bonapartedoes provoke Saids

curiosity in the essay that bears his books title because o its exemplary attempt to

textualize the random appearance o a new Caesar (45). As Mehlman, too, observes,

Marx textualizes in order tohistoricize, and, as Said implies, the arcical repetition o

the uncle in the gure o the nephew eectively elicits the perversions o the amily

romance, condemns repetition to derivation and masquerade, and masterully trans-

orms lineage into an order o descending worth (45).


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(WTC, 45). My aim is to read each as the others completion and anti-

thesis as his tessera, in short.

Said and Bloom articulate identical concerns rom dierent per-

spectives: both explore the diculties o belonging to texts, tradi-

tions, and continuities that make up the very web o a culture (I:SC, 6).

Said undertakes this exploration rom the standpoint o loss and exile,

while Bloom imagines the process as the transition rom innocence to

experience. The ritual character o Bloomian sel-annihilation and the

prooundly disorienting Saidian exile rom sense, nation, and milieu

(I:SC, 6) are disturbingly complementary even though the possibility

o each is dictated by existential actualities that Bloom disavows andSaid acknowledges. While the passion that animates Blooms imagi-

nation o the agon probably arises rom his Jewishness, which makes

it less clear to him that he already belongs (although his poets do),

Bloom, like Erich Auerbach in Saids description, conceals the pain o

his exile in The Anxiety o Infuence. Nevertheless, the agonistic experi-

ence o those who already belong but must earn their welcome or dis-

cover that they have never let is radically dierent rom the agonizing

condition o exile in which deracination must be embraced beore it

can be transcended. In Bloom, ailure does not preclude belonging;in Said, belonging can neither be assumed nor, necessarily, achieved.

The austerity o Blooms model o poetic history stems rom his desire

to transcend society or social constraints altogether and rom his belie

that the strong poet transcends the physical and geographic traumas o

exile. For Auerbach, alienated rom the material and symbolic dimen-

sions o the European cultural heritage with which he identied, exile

is converted into a positive mission (I:SC, 7), contingent on the twin

movement o separation and transcendence. Indeed, Auerbach trans-

gures his great work o cultural armation into the articulation o

Bloom denes tesseraas the second o his revisionary ratios. Neither Said nor

Bloom can be said to unction as the others precursor in the strict sense that both

employ the term; thereore both can be said to skip the rst o Blooms revisionary

ratios, clinamen, in relation to each other but not to their shared precursors. The

near simultaneity o their published appearances suggests this possibility. Saids and

Blooms swerves rom their shared precursors (Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche,

and Giambattista Vico) result in the misprision that allows them to retain [each

others] terms but to mean them in another sense (AI, 14): Bloom names his expla-

nation or the process tessera.


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Said makes this argument in relation to Matthew Arnolds Culture and Anarchy.

I believe, however, that the link between poetic history as the relentless march o

strong poets and the impulse to propagate the best that has been known and thought

in the world is not dicult to make. Blooms more recent writings on the Western

canon only reinorce this connection. In any event, my juxtaposition o Bloom and

Said is meant to elicit what may not be obvious in both their arguments.

the ascetic code o willed homelessness (I:SC, 7). Said transorms the

historical act o exile rom ascist Europe and in Europes putative

other, Istanbul (6 7) into an existential condition o alienation and

an indispensable and universalizable element o critical consciousness

itsel. Bloom allows his strong poets to be willul but renders them inca-

pable o willing, or o willing in an original way, in his mythic venture.

He would appreciate, however, the principle o divestiture, o extin-

guishing rather than extending love, in Saids admiration or Auer-

bachs courage and insight (I:SC, 7).

Saids premise and conclusion make strong poets appear oddly

domesticated, ensconced in the comort and assurance o belonging tohumanity at large (I:SC, 7). The struggle or identity and the threat

o death are aspects o cultural repetition and renewal; thereore the

threat o deracination, like that o castration, bears the promise o prior-

ity and o belonging on the ephebes rather than the precursors terms.

Bloom argues that strong poets can give us vivid instances o this most

cunning o revisionary ratios [apophrades] (AI, 141). In these instances

the dead do not simply return to remain intact in strong poets, but the

latter make one believe, or startled moments, that they are being imi-

tated by their ancestors (AI, 141). As cautious as Bloom remains in theseormulations, such that the tyranny o time is only ever almost over-

turned (AI, 141), he suggests, like Said and Auerbach, that risk is the

condition o armation and possibility. Unlike their model o deraci-

nation, however, Blooms revisionary ratios operate, Said claims, within

the structure o belonging or cultural orthodoxy rather than against its

assertively achieved and wonhegemony (I:SC, 10). Saids illuminat-

ing discussion o the imaginative lie o Western culture thus reveals

that the agon depends on the understanding that the stakes played

or are an identication o society with culture, and consequently [are]

the acquisition o a very ormidable power (I:SC, 10), rather than a

transcendence o society by culture. Bloom would not disagree that,


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despite its agonistic dimension, The Anxiety o Infuencedescribes the

dialectic o sel-ortication and sel-conrmation by which culture

achieves its hegemony over society (I:SC, 12); however, like many

prevalent accounts o the development o the modern sel, poetic or

otherwise, Blooms history o modern revisionism is unaware o its eth-

nocentrism: the consecration o poetic history institutes a system o

discriminations and evaluations that valorizes imperial culture over

its designated others (I:SC, 11).

Those who regard Blooms poetic history as idiosyncratic and

arbitrary generally overlook a more intriguing eature, or The Anxi-

ety o Infuenceexemplies the naturalization o authority and culturalhegemony. Through the infuence his work has exercised, Bloom has

become one o those thinkers who make their ideas seem as i they

were expressions o a collective will (I:SC, 15, where Said is reporting

Antonio Gramscis view o Benedetto Croce). Subsequent pedagogy has

consecrated Blooms conjurings o strong poets as the abric o West-

ern imaginative lie. Said is only too aware o this sneaky and cheeky

dimension o hegemony; he insists, thereore, that poetry must

include criticism in the terms in which he has dened it. Said retains

Blooms terms The individual consciousness is not naturally andeasily a mere child o the culture but he replaces Blooms anxious

ephebe with a more humanistic, thinking historical and social actor

in the culture, and because o that perspective, which introduces cir-

cumstance and distinction where there had only been conormity and

belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism (I:SC,

15). Blooms humanism is dierent: he rejects the anti-humanistic

plain dreariness o all those developments in European criticism that

have yet to demonstrate that they can aid in reading any one poem by

any poet whatsoever (AI, 13 14), but he believes, equally, that the liv-

ing labyrinth o literature is built upon the ruin o every impulse most

generous in us (AI, 85). Blooms distinction here is between how litera-

ture comes to be (via the savagery and misrepresentation implicit in the

act o misreading) and what it is; the idea o literature as a repository

o humane values is, or him, merely sentimental. In Blooms Sturm

und Drang, repetition pulses on, whether or not re-imagined (AI,

86), and he is impatient with Saids urbane critical detachment, which

signals the end o desire, o the individual imagination (AI, 85 86).


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For Bloom, [Where] there is detachment in conronting ones own

imagination, discontinuity is impossible (AI, 86). Matthew Arnold is

Saids covering cherub: Bloom regards detachment (or Arnoldian dis-

interest) as the moment when cultural hegemony crushes individual

strength, rather than the moment when the hegemony o Western cul-

ture is contradicted.

Saids version o autonomy is much too tame or Bloom, but Said

would asten on Blooms comment that the poet is condemned to learn

his prooundest yearnings through an awareness oother selves and

turn that to his advantage (AI, 26). Bloom is, o course, speaking o the

paradox within which the strong poet is trapped: the poem within himis ound by great poems outside him. In declaring, however, that [to]

lose reedom in this center is never to orgive, and to learn the dread

o threatened autonomy orever (AI, 26), Bloom reveals the political

signicance and aective power both o Saids critical project and o

his own. At stake is the denition o heresy itsel the ancestor o revi-

sionism (AI, 29) and the ethical principle o Saids brand o secular

criticism. I will devote the conclusion o this essay to the implications

o this denition or a new theory o infuence and a radical vision

o humanist agency. For now, I want to elaborate on the hegemonicimplications o Blooms armation o revisionism and to consider, in

the process, its prevalence in modern and contemporary criticism.

Said concludes his commentary on Auerbach by challenging the

quasi-religious authority o being comortably at home among ones

people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected

against the outside world (I:SC, 16); Said claims that [although]

Auerbach was away rom Europe, his work was steeped in the reality

o Europe, just as the specic circumstances o his exile enabled a con-

crete critical recovery o Europe (I:SC, 16). Saids contrapuntal method

appears in nascent orm here, allowing him to locate a cooperation

between liation [natal culture] and aliation [adoption through

scholarship] at the heart o critical consciousness (I:SC, 16). But Said

immediately abandons his hero Auerbach. In the very next paragraph

he turns to the ailure o the generative impulse in modern ction

(I:SC, 16), which he treats as itsel generative o modern cultural his-

tory, producing alternative orms o social relationships that no longer

require biology. For his part, Bloom retains the generative impulse, but


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only as a parallel to the story o poetic infuence; indeed, he renders

poetic history exclusively aliative (adoptively intrapoetic) and the gen-

erative impulse or the amily romance purely rhetorical. While Saids

characterization o the democratic cooperation between liation and

aliation initially seems too complacent, it soon becomes unmasked

as a compensatory ideological ruse, designed to suture the antinomies

and atomizations o reied existence (I:SC, 19). The transition rom

liation to aliation usually signies Auerbachs extinguishing his love

or all places to earn his love or the world. Said exposes the underside

o aliation when it takes the orm o a party, an institution, a culture,

a set o belies, or even a world-vision (I:SC, 19). Instead o markingthe ailed idea or possibility o liation, the new order o aliation

reinstate[s] vestiges o the kind o authority associated in the past with

liative order (I:SC, 19). Said includes gures as diverse as T. S. Eliot,

Sigmund Freud, and Georg Lukcs in his catalog o those with a pen-

chant or restored authority (I:SC, 19). He isolates two unsavory and

related consequences o this move to convert anguished distance into

respectul adherence: it reinorces the known at the expense o the

knowable and results in the calculated . . . irrelevance o criticism

(I:SC, 25). Saids aim is to deend culture against system, and, curiouslyenough, so is Blooms.

Blooms strong poets inhabit a universe that is hermetic but also vio-

lent, perverse, and transgressive; imbued with intentionality; charged

with the ambition to dislodge precursors and to quarrel about author-

ity, ownership, and orce; cursed with the desire or priority that cannot

be contaminated by thet or commerce; prone to revel in the dark side

that gives culture its dominion; and commanded to speak in the pres-

ent rather than be dened by the silent past. In the previous sentence

I mix Saids and Blooms phrases (rom WTC and AI) to demonstrate

the conjunction o rather than the anticipated disjunction between

their visions o modern cultural history. What is one to make o this

strange coincidence? One answer lies in their common indebtedness

to Giambattista Vico. Indeed, Saids essay On Repetition explicitly

reerences Bloom, while his discussion o Vico claries the latters place

in Blooms imagination better than Blooms own brie account o being

most convinced yet also most repelled by Vicos theory o poetic ori-

gins (AI, 59).


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For Vico, repetition makes history intelligible. Said oers a Gertrude

Stein like ormulation, Human history is human actuality is human

activity is human knowledge (OR, 112), which is ollowed by an elegant

summary: For Vico, then, whether as the beginning o sense, as repre-

sentation, as archaeological reconstruction, repetition is a principle o

economy, giving acts their historical actuality and reality its existential

sense (OR, 113 14). The aspect o Saids explanation that is most per-

tinent to Blooms historicism is Vicos armation o the pasts inex-

haustible constancy; despite the prolieration o changing rhythms,

patterns, and harmonies, the ground moti recurs throughout, as i to

demonstrate its staying power and its capacity or endless elaboration(OR, 114). Vicos images or historical process are invariably biological

and, more, they are invariably paternal. Repetition is the consequence

o, and indeed can be identied with, physiological reproduction, how a

species perpetuates itsel in historical time and space (OR, 115). Vico

and Bloom share a vision o poetic history as the interplay o struggle

and generation, dierence and repetition; both seek to contain the orig-

inal and the revolutionary within the orbit o the constant and repeat-

able (OR, 116 17); and both seem attuned to laws o regression that

contribute to historical decline rather than to progress.Said, however, nds Vicos version o liation inadequate in the

ace o the growing evidence o cultural dispersion and diversication

(Blooms notion o poetic history is vulnerable to a similar criticism);

more to the point, he nds that the scientic inadequacy o genetic

explanations o origin also means that the athers place loses its unas-

sailable eminence (OR, 118). Generative and procreative metaphors

are insucient or explaining social and literary phenomena. Yet they

persist on account o their wish-ullling character (OR, 120). Blooms

revisionary ratios seem to bear out this contradiction between explan-

atory and aective or rhetorical power, because the progression rom

clinamento apophradesunolds in an anterior uture. But is there room

or reading the radical conservatism o Blooms tropological machinery

against the grain o Blooms own recuperative logic?

Said comments on Vicos pleasure in the etymological puns that the word gens

produces while identiying this process o liation, with Vico, as gentile. Surely

something could be made o the relationships (discordances?) between Vicos gentile

history and Blooms own investments in gnosis and the Kabbalah.


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In A Map o MisreadingBloom explicitly indicates that the revision-

ist wishes to nd his own original relation to truth . . . but also wishes

to open received texts to his own suerings, or what he wants to call the

suerings o history. I regard my meditation on belatedness as an

act o transumption, o liting up and redeeming the saving sparks o

[the precursors] being (MM, 6). Bloom calls attention to the ambiva-

lence that attunes transumption or metalepsis simultaneously to con-

serving and making. While I have ocused thus ar on this ambivalence,

I want to begin to answer the question Bloom himsel raises: How do

we pass rom origins to repetition and continuity, and thence to the

discontinuity that marks all revisionism? (MM, 47).In the second volume o his tetralogy, Bloom argues that the

rst step in this transition might be to transorm belatedness into a

strength rather than an afiction (MM, 80) and that the only trope

that might serve this purpose is metalepsis or apophrades. While meta-

lepsis precludes neither agonism nor ambivalence (he explains that its

characteristic aect is simultaneously one o identication and danger-

ous jealousy, o swallowing up and spitting out, or o introjection and

projection), Bloom insists on its heretical potential. He cites William

James: Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in whichwe can rest. We dont lie back upon them, we move orward, and, on

occasion, make nature over again by their aid. This emphasis on

instrumentality or pragmatism makes room or harmonizing Bloom

not with the company o elect precursors to which he himsel aspires

but with his critical heirs, who deploy revisionism precisely to open

the kingdom o culture to the suerings o history. Revisionism, in

this sense, becomes what Susan Buck-Morss characterizes as a stringent

politics o translation; that is, the process o introjection and projection

that Bloom traces is less about the diminution o the sel in the ace o

overbearing ancestors and more about the tolerance o cultural inheri-

tance or assuming unaccustomed orms.

Harold Bloom, A Map o Misreading(New York: Oxord University Press, 1975),

4. Hereater cited as MM. Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory o Revisionism(New York: Oxord Uni-

versity Press, 1982), 40. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Let

(London: Verso, 2003),7. Hereater cited as TPT. Buck-Morss is quoting Talal Asad,


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Genealogies o Religion: Discipline and Reasons o Power in Christianity and Islam(Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 190. Buck-Morss is hersel indebted (a nice

touch, because belatedness and indebtedness are intertwined in Bloom) to the writings

o Talal Asad on the Salman Rushdie aair, challenging both the liberal multicultural

rhetoric o tolerance and the atwa that accused Rushdie o blasphemy. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry26 (2000): 842. Here-

ater cited as HH.

In her essay Hegel and Haiti Buck-Morss writes, Where did

Hegels idea o the relation between lordship and bondage originate?

ask the Hegel experts. Where, indeed? she remarks wryly (HH,

843), beore claiming that the central metaphor o G. W. F. Hegels work

stemmed rom his perusal o the political journal Minervas detailed

account o the Haitian revolution. (In this admittedly oversimplied

account o Buck-Morsss research and argument, my concern is to

illustrate the transumptive character o her cultural genealogy, o her

political intent [to transorm] our historical imaginaries [TPT, 117].)

To avoid telling the tale o colonial liberation with Europe at its center,

Buck-Morss rescues the idea o universal human history rom the usesto which white domination has put it (HH, 865). The relevance o

Blooms shit rom originality to priority, o his armation o misread-

ing, and o his vision o strie becomes only too clear in her method.

When she describes her essay as an attempt to rip the historical acts o

reedom out o the narratives told by the victors (HH, 865), Buck-Morss

transorms her seemingly arcane retrieval o historical ragments into

a subtle orm o vengeance. I she stopped there, however, her reversal

o cultural and historical causality would be no more than a clever, and

by now quite amiliar, ploy to expose the catastrophic dimensions othe story o modern reedom. Her return to the past becomes more

than a run-o-the-mill orm o requital, however, through her ocus

on redemption and reconstitution. The metaleptic power o histori-

cal moments is contained, or Buck-Morss, in those times when the

consciousness o individuals surpasse[s] the connes o present con-

stellations o power in perceiving the concrete meaning o reedom

(HH, 865). In other words, her strong misreading salvage[s] Hegels

moment o clarity or our own time to show not only that Hegels phi-

losophy o history has a concrete historical whereabouts but also that


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the master-slave dialectic is very much always already a question o and

or the postcolonial.

Hegel looks dierent when Haiti is put at the center o modern lib-

eration, and even more so when Buck-Morss begins to conceive o the

world-historical spirit without a center (see TPT, 121 23). But in reus-

ing to turn these moments o historical clarity into the exclusive prop-

erty o any one part o the world (she writes that they belong equally to

Hegel and Toussaint LOuverture) in leveling the playing eld, so to

speak does Buck-Morss risk turning the present, historical realities

that surrounded [Hegels text into] invisible ink? (HH, 846). (I have

tactically modied her own charge against historians who silence thepast.) Hegel oregrounds the struggle to the death between master and

slave, the stark and painul choice between lie and liberty that is inevi-

table in the rebellion o Toussaint LOuverture and even in the cruelty

o Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Buck-Morsss point, o course, is that the

actual and successul revolution o Caribbean slaves against their mas-

ters is the moment when the dialectical logic o recognition becomes

visible as the thematics o world history (HH, 852), but her dialectical

transubstantiation o the historicity o slave rebellion into the story o

the universalrealization o reedom (HH, 852; italics mine) might bein danger, as Blooms tropology suggests, o subsuming her arguments

antitheticalpremise (the glaring discrepancy between the political value

o reedom and the economic practice o slavery) in the mutualityo the

dialectical logic o recognition between master and slave. It should be

clear that I admire Buck-Morsss vision; my intention, as has been the

case in my discussion o Bloom and Said, is to demonstrate how each

illuminates the other.

Whereas Buck-Morss seeks to turn the historical particular, the

perception o the concrete meaning o reedom into the realiza-

tion o absolute spirit (HH, 865), Dipesh Chakrabartys analysis o the

imperatives o postcolonial thought and terms o historical dierence

produces the opposite eect o provincializing Europe, o revealing

the limits o historicizing and universalizing thought, indeed modiy-

Interview: Susan Buck-Morss, Laura Mulvey, and Marq Smith, in TPT, 117.

The interview rst appeared as Susan Buck-Morss, Globalization, Cosmopolitan-

ism, Politics, and the Citizen,Journal o Visual Culture1 (2002): 325 40. Mulvey and

Smith, identied in Buck-Morsss book asJVC, are quoted in this passage.


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ing and interrupting in practice the latters totalizing thrusts. While

it is possible to see these two antihistoricist interventions as comple-

menting each other, a more nuanced account o Bloomian revisionism

enolds both in a productive embrace. Chakrabarty also privileges a

politics o translation; however, his argument inserts an extra step that

makes his viewpoint o a piece with Blooms investment in the anxieties

o belatedness without lapsing into a species o ressentiment. The logic

o empire, in Chakrabartys scheme o things, ensures that the uni-

versal has already been usurp[ed] . . . in a gesture o pretension and

domination by a proxy, a particular, Europe (quoted in Dube, 864).

The structure o belonging that Blooms story o infuence articulatesis precisely what Chakrabarty denies is everybodys history (Dube,

865). Like Buck-Morss, Chakrabarty seeks to engage in an immanent

critique o structures o domination, on the ground o the usurping

particular masquerading as the universal, just as, like her, he wishes

to blend the history o Europe with other histories o belonging that

together produce the conceptual artiacts o modernity (Dube,

866). The dierence is that Chakrabarty insists that the translation o

the universal into the particular, or the realization o the universal

in the particular, registers a disjunction and reuses the mediation othe universal. Chakrabarty simultaneously registers the agonism

and the ambivalence that are consequences o the condemnation o

Europes other to anachronism and repetition in the logic o history.

The indispensability o Europe must not, or Chakrabarty, obscure its

inadequacy: indebtedness exacts a terrible price.

Both Bloom and Buck-Morss envisage repetition and dierence

as moments in a universal history; Chakrabarty, on the contrary, asks

the dicult and perhaps unanswerable question o whether displac-

ing Europe rom the center o our conceptions o historical time and

o universality is possible. Both Buck-Morss and Chakrabarty would

Saurabh Dube, Presence o Europe: An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty,

South Atlantic Quarterly101 (2002): 862, 866, 861. Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe:

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dierence(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2000), hereater cited as PE, appeared in the same year as Buck-Morsss article in

Critical Inquiry. See Michael Hardt, The Eurocentrism o History, Postcolonial Studies 4

(2001): 243 49.


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agree with Bloom, I think, that individuation is not possible with-

out revisionary strie (MM, 10) even as their revisionism combines,

as Blooms does, the processes o making and conserving. Moreover,

their version o transumption is not, as Bloom occasionally indicates,

a process in which the dead return to be triumphed over by the liv-

ing (MM, 74). What is clear in their methods, rather, is the recogni-

tion that Haiti or India marks a limit and an absence (re-seeing,

in Blooms schema). This recognition produces a substitution o the

particular or the usurping and pretentious universal (re-estimating

Hegel and Europe, in Blooms schema) and results in a representation

o history or in a historiographical project that reorients the present(re-aiming, in Blooms schema). Blooms story o infuence, his atten-

tion to the cultural and historical imaginary o Europe, thus can lend

itsel to postcolonial imaginings that are concerned, as he is, to trace

how these imaginary representations insist and persist at our behest

and against our will.

As a concluding gesture, I want to return to the aesthetic realm

where Blooms rhetoric, ethics, and poetics o cultural belonging and

transumption nd their singular place. I want, in Blooms revisionary

and cantankerous spirit, to take seriously the possibility that aspirationto the universal, rather than assertion o dierence and heterogene-

ity, is the truly radical move in these troubled times. Translation then

becomes, as Chakrabarty intimates, not only one o interruption and

modication but also one o conversation. In this regard, Ross Posnocks

extraordinary refections on cosmopolitanism are the unquiet heirs to

Blooms politics o descent. Posnock shares the conviction that cos-

mopolitanism can serve as the instrument o cultural democracy with

the tradition o black intellectuals that he explores in Color and Culture

(1998). His cultural hero is W. E. B. DuBois, who, like Buck-Morss and

Chakrabarty in my characterization, sought to eliminate altogether

the inherently aversive structural position o oreignness in the name

o a transnational, deracialized kingdom o culture (DD, 809, where

Posnock is quoting Elaine Scarry and DuBois, respectively).

Posnock eschews both Saids detachment rom place and Blooms

Ross Posnock, The Dream o Deracination: The Uses o Cosmopolitanism,

American Literary History12 (2000): 803. Hereater cited as DD.


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knowing ones place in avor o a cosmopolitan reusal to know ones

place. Posnocks insistence on the syncretic basis o culture denies

Blooms politics o descent, while his rewriting o the liative logic

o entitlement and assimilation as cultural appropriation supplements

Saids celebration o deracination as indispensable to reedom and

protest. The egalitarian dimension o cosmopolitanism cannot sur-

vive within the structure o sacrice and hierarchy common to both

assimilation and deracination; instead, willed homelessness and ago-

nism and ambivalence yield to a cultural democracy based on the

orce o an ideal o shared humanity (DD, 806). Posnocks vision o

cultural democracy resonates with the deracinated, interrogative, andantiproprietary spirit o Saids oppositional intellectual as well as with

the agonism and ambivalence o Blooms narrative o the struggle o

the same against itsel. Posnocks cosmopolitan heretic, contrary to his

Bloomian and Saidian counterparts, renounces anxiety and asceticism

or pleasure, interrogation o the limits o identity and belonging or

betrayal o roots, and assimilation and deracination or appropriation.

His unorthodox reanimation o the ideal in contradistinction to the

uses and abuses o universalism keep[s] alive the interplay between

(unraced) universal and (raced) particular as a way to sustain thedynamic, antinomical [sic] character o modernity (DD, 814).

I have resorted to a provocative constellation o contemporary

cultural critics to explore how Blooms historicism and revisionism

may be, in Chakrabartys words, renewed rom and or the mar-

gins (PE, 16), rather than to exact postcolonial revenge (PE, 16,

where Chakrabarty quotes Leela Gandhi). Bloom comprehends revi-

sionism as the signature o the modern, but Chakrabarty contends

that historicism is the peculiar git o European political modernity.

Saids essays reveal how historical time becomes the measure o the

cultural distance between East and West, while Buck-Morss challenges

the rst in Europe and then elsewhere structure o historicist time

by rendering Hegel and Haiti coeval (PE, 7 8). Blooms historicist

notion o poetic history as a unique whole with an identiable logic

o development becomes the catalyst or Posnocks meditation on the

structure o inequality that underlies the hypnotic spell cast by roots

and or Chakrabartys articulation o the embeddedness and priority

o Europe in global historical imaginaries. Blooms writings seem


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tailor-made or postcolonial contexts, because the themes o ailure,

lack, and inadequacy that describe his ephebes ubiquitously character-

ize the speaking subject o colonial pasts and national utures whose

historical transormation, like the ephebes desire to become a strong

poet, is always grievously incomplete (PE, 34). What Bloom casts as

inescapability, Said, Buck-Morss, Posnock, and Chakrabarty recast as

indispensability and inadequacy, thus paving the way or an engage-

ment with universals, such as the idea o the human, precisely because

o Europes ailure to live up to its own vaunted ideals. The anities I

have imagined limn the contours o the history that Chakrabarty calls

or and Bloom inaugurates one that, in laying bare the inescapabilityo the poetic or postcolonial predicament, also exposes what the agon

represses in order to be (PE, 46).

The undeniable conservatism o Blooms thought makes o the

anxiety o infuence a liative mechanism and a regulatory ideal, trans-

guring inheritance into birthright. His unruly heirs, Buck-Morss,

Chakrabarty, and Posnock, make it possible or minorities, exiles, and

rebels to locate themselves within a specic inheritance and . . . use

that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright rom which that

inheritance had so brutally and specically excluded [them]. As orBloom, I believe that he would, in the spirit i not the letter o his work,

give them his blessing.

Asha Varadharajan s asscate prfessr f Englsh at Queens Unversty, Kngs-

tn, ontar. She s authr fExotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, andSpivak(1995) and s at wrk n tw ther bks, Violence and Civility in the New

World Orderand Enchantment and Deracination: The Lure o Foreignness in Con-

temporary Cinema.

Ross Posnock, Ater Identity Politics, in Color and Culture: Black Writers and

the Making o the Modern Intellectual(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),

27. Here Posnock quotes James Baldwin, Notes o a Native Son(Boston: Beacon, 1984),

xii, on the limits o inheritance and the boundlessness o birthright. I believe that

my use o Baldwins words is appropriate.

The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Bloom’s 'Anxiety of Influence'

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