The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence

Asha Varadharajan

arold Blooms reputation, indeed his notoriety, rests on the tetralogy that he produced in rapid succession: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (1976). Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982) is a late entrant in the ranks, of which Christopher Ricks had already said, Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him.1 Visionary, compelling, gnomic, and, in equal measure, willfully obscure, strangely claustrophobic, and magisterially cavalier in the manner of F. R. Leavis, Bloom rewrites literary history and cultural tradition as a titanic struggle between forbidding patriarchs and their virile, if tormented, masculine progeny. The family romance is transfigured into a fight to the death, a tale of malcontent and usurpation in which the son emerges a bloodied victor. The spoils of his victory, however, come at a pricehis creative energies are continually sapped by anxiety and his poetic effusions haunted by his literary forebears in the moment of their apparent overthrow. In other words, the cost of priority is originality; its fruit, repetition. I write in this deliberately florid fashion to convey the flavor and panache of Blooms style, which, more often than his argument or method, persuades readers to suspend their disbelief.
1 Christopher Ricks, A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry, New York Times , March 14, 1976, www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-repression.html.

Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (December 2008) doi 10.1215/00267929-2008-012 2008 by University of Washington

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I revisit familiar ground to offer a heretical paraphrase that attends to the evoked rather than stated conclusion and that reinvents and reinforces the continued relevance of Blooms writings in unexpected and revealing contexts, especially postcolonial ones. My aim is to demonstrate that the tale Bloom tells of how one poet helps to form another is both as simple as the paragraph that precedes this one makes it out to be and, simultaneously, far from simple.2 Indeed, The Anxiety of Influence s conception of precursor and ephebe (Blooms words) locked in fateful combat is both Blooms idiosyncratic myth and a perdurable cultural force with implications for our present, not just for Blooms. A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis exposes what is at stake in Blooms venture into the realm of poetic history, which he holds to be indistinguishable from poetic influence (AI, 5). Bloom writes that acts of misreading, of clear[ing] imaginative space by strong poets (AI, 5), constitute history. While he hastens to add that this struggle for priority occurs between equals, he insinuates that the contest might well take place between mismatched entities, the courage and persistence of the son outdone by the might of the father, who is laden with the wisdom of generations and bestows on his son not the rich legacy of the past but the immense anxieties of indebtedness (AI, 5). In this scenario, the triumph of self-appropriation (AI, 5) is marked by both immanent and imminent failure; it is into and of this vexed universe that the true poet is born. Bloom is immediately careful to part company with the enterprise of furiously active pedants searching, in Wallace Stevenss disdainful words, for echoes, imitations, influences, as if no one was ever simply himself but is always compounded of a lot of other people (AI, 7), but he is also balefully aware that denying obligation (AI, 6) is the distinguishing trait of the newcomer puffed up with the conviction of his own priority. Bloom delineates, in his own estimation, a more profound version of poetic influence, one that cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images, that can be more accurately designated as poetic misprision, and that confines itself to the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet (AI, 7). These shifts in emphasis add up, as one might expect, not to a revisionist history of modern poetry
2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5. Hereafter cited as AI.

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but, in keeping with Blooms gift for sleight of hand, to a history of modern revisionism (AI, 8). Bloom thus assumes rather than demonstrates that revisionism is a peculiarly modern trait and then, with customary brashness, revises the aboriginal poetic self, the vocation of contemporary criticism, the annals of Western imaginative life (AI, 11), and the laws of cultural primogeniture. Are these objectives simply an accelerating hubris on Blooms part, to be met with an excoriating skepticism on ours? Introduction functions as both prolegomenon to and synecdoche of The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom gives fair warning of the antithetical style that dominates the form and content of the work in its subtitle: the introduction is a meditation and a synopsis, a ruminative, uncertain beginning and a confident, retrospective encapsulationa conclusion, in short. This pattern of oscillation defines the works rhetoric of temporality as well as the logic of (dis)continuity that informs its revisionist poetics. I suspect that Bloom prefers the term antithesis to paradox not only because of its dialectical character (it contains its opposite in the moment of becoming the other) but also because he values its complementary possibilities (it completes its opposite) as well as its revisionist potential (it transumes the authority it evades or from which it swerves). More to the point, antithesis is agonistic and dynamic; unlike its alternative, paradox, it will have no truck with the delicate symmetry of balance and suspension. The law of castration (and feminization) underwrites the significance of poetic afflatus in Blooms scheme of things; in these conditions, antithesis captures the full weight of influence under which the poet staggers, its catastrophic dimensions as well as the painful ambivalence that its violence engenders. Anxiety, for Bloom, is primal and, in this sense, predicated on wounding and irreparable loss. Moreover, influence cannot be willed (AI, 11); anxiety, therefore, is as preemptive as it is productive. The willed and artful nature of paradox, its arduous but achieved stability, I suggest, would itself be antithetical to the zeitgeist that Bloom takes pains to elaborate. In texture The Anxiety of Influence is a dense network of allusion and quotation, none of which merits the usual scholarly obsequiousness or the apparatus of the learned citation. Bloom assumes that he can excerpt and select at will. He is not required to adumbrate the argument from which the idiosyncratic quotation emerges, perhaps because

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his audience comprises those attuned to the Western imaginative life, as well versed as he is in its acknowledged architects. Bloom wants to reproduce the inescapable power of the operations of influence; rather than trace its formation, he experiences its effects, and his style manifests an arbitrary sway. This severe poem sacrifices the commonplaces of argument to the demands of an imaginative unity reliant upon aphor ism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly traditional) mythic pattern (AI, 13). I used the epithet claustrophobic above, but it may be more appropriate to speak of the centripetal force of The Anxiety of Influence, the charmed circle of the elect in which it moves, and the structure of belonging that it ultimately discerns in the misprision of poetic inspiration. This is a severe poem indeed; the artless pastiche of aphorism and apothegm reveals itself as a magnificent form of dissembling, beneath which lurk inexorable patterns of repetition and return. In other words, Bloom exploits the productive connotations of anxiety without ever relinquishing its singular explanatory value in the domains of poetic history and practical criticism; the vast machinery of philosophies of history and identity, of Anglo-American literary tradition, and of Gnostic speculation probes the riddle of anxiety and celebrates, rather than challenges, its reign. The idiosyncratic intentionality on display as Bloom sifts through the debris of tradition to light on his precursors is belied by the predictability of his choices. Bloom appears to endorse the centrality of the author figure, but, as he reiterates, authors are no more than the aggregate of their (disavowed) influences, and his own focus remains on these intrapoetic relationships, which he deems analogous to life cycles. Bloom also fosters the illusion of agency when he insists on the perverse, deliberate acts of misreading that constitute the poetic self as well as on poetic history itself as agon, as the oedipal strife in and through which the anxiety of influence is born. These contentions seem a far cry from the imperceptible, geological shifts that produce cracks in discursive formations and inaugurate historical change in Michel Foucaults archaeology, a form of revisionism arguably more popular now than Blooms. The import of these shifts, nevertheless, is the same because Blooms focus on masculine aggression and contestation does not dismantle the regulatory fiction of the agon itself or alter the outcome of the struggle. For this reason, Foucaults later, tongue-in-cheek

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term genealogy seemed to promise disarray rather than simply victory and defeat. His nod to family trees is no coincidence, for they tend to proliferate and to spite the laws of lineage and evolution. Foucaults archaeology discerns fractures, gaps, lateral meanderings, and roadblocks in the masquerade of historical continuity to make a revisionist history possible: The Period is neither its basic unity, nor its horizon, nor its object.3 Blooms history assumes that such a revision has already taken place; this revisionist ethic controls, rather as Foucault would say, the terms under which future deviations might occur. Both Bloom and Foucault expose the endurance of discursive formations even as they emphasize their accidental, unmotivated, or contingent character. Neither man denies that power is at stake in the construction of the order of things, poetic or otherwise. Both uphold Friedrich Nietzsche as the figure to whom they are most indebted. Both believe that revisionism is the signature of the modern, though in later texts the filial agon remains a stubborn trace of premodernity after it should have become obsolete. Despite their analogous resistance to periodization, the difference between their histories cannot be gainsaid: Bloom cares about power in relation to poetry; Foucault, in relation to knowledge. Bloom writes an archaeology of revisionism that he equates with the birth of the modern rather than, as Foucault does, a genealogy of the modern that stages the return of the repressed. If the spirit of 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 figure that mediates between Blooms sacralization of origins and Foucaults insistence on discontinuity and interruption, his challenge 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 inflects Foucaults vision of discontinuity with historical agency and individual imprint while ensuring that the difference between origins and beginnings removes the stings of inadequacy and belatedness in Blooms vision and transforms risk into possibility. To comprehend the nature of the historicism at stake in Blooms argu3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: HarperColophon, 1976), 176. My contention is that proliferating genealogies cover up the revisionist consistencies that typify the true Foucault.

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ment, or of the historicism that critical scholarship usually discerns in it, I want to examine four essays by Said that appeared, in this order, in The World, the Text, and the Critic : Introduction: Secular Criticism (hereafter cited as I:SC), The World, the Text, and the Critic (WTC), On Repetition (OR), and Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism (RT).4 Blooms writings are both incidental and vital to Saids essays, particularly in his guise as the author of Beginnings: Intention and Method, published two years after Blooms Anxiety of Influence . Beginnings might be the secular counterpart to Blooms mythic (divinely ordained?) adventure, the narratological analogue to his revisionist poetics. Saids observations enable me to foreground the unorthodox implications of Blooms genetic hypotheses (RT, 156) even as they alert me to the recuperative consequences of his revisionary ratios (AI, 13). The remarkably similar litany of philosophers and critical methodologies that echoes through Beginnings and The Anxiety of Influence is itself sufficient cause to read Bloom through the lens of Said; far from evaluating the difference between their misreadings of the Western philosophical and literary traditions, therefore, I want to emphasize this similarity between the prophecy of beginnings and the anxieties of belatedness. Saids animadversions on late style as a form of intransigence, as the spirit of contradiction that makes it possible for him to endure in the face of mortality, marks his fascinating return, at the end of his career, to a Bloomian vision of identity as an originary wound and of writing as a personal struggle against extinction and as a form of cultural survival. If influence cannot be willed, it is hardly surprising that Blooms precursors bear a family resemblance to Saids and that revolution and repetition (the concepts with which Said and Bloom have, respectively and routinely, been identified) can be traced to the same forebears.5
4 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). The question that informs my exploration here is, Can a historicist stomach a revisionist? By the same token, does each imply the other? That is, could only a thoroughgoing historicist become a revisionist worthy of the name? It is thus a mistake to accuse the revisionist Bloom of being a closet historicist or the historicist Bloom of being a secret agent of revisionism. Each is unthinkable without the other. 5 See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Jeffrey Mehlman offers an incisive reflection on the valence of these terms

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The World, the Text, and the Critic counters, in its estimation, a dangerous trend. Textuality, Said avers, has . . . become the exact anti thesis and displacement of what might be called history (I:SC, 34). This declaration seems to set him at odds with Bloom, whose enterprise he airily (and anonymously) dismisses for routinely understanding that reading and interpreting occur in the form of misreading and misinterpreting (I:SC, 4). Bloom would take umbrage at the conflation of misreading with misinterpretation. For him, misreading is the condition of all interpretation, but it is not to be construed as mistaken reading. Said is more careful with Bloom as his argument develops, but his desire to affirm the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events (I:SC, 5) distinguishes his project from that of Bloom, whose concern is only with the poet in a poet, or the aboriginal poetic self, even though Bloom knows that the strongest poets are subject to influences not poetical (AI, 11). What is at stake for both Bloom and Said, however, is the diagnosis of texts as fudamentally [sic] facts of power, not of democratic exchange
in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Mehlman emphasizes the narrative of usurpation and illegitimacy with which Karl Marx allegorizes the transformation of revolution into its opposite, repetition, in the course of a persuasive account of literatures refractions of history. Mehlmans work appeared only two years after Saids and four years after Blooms; despite the presence of the genetic hypothesis in Marx, it remains an absent obligation in Bloom. Moreover, Mehlman treats history and literature as lenses through which each refracts the other, while Bloom insists on the integrity of poetic history, of intrapoetic relationships, and of the life cycle of the poet, all of which seem equally immune to the invasions of history. Indeed, in the special sense that Bloom accords the word, literature evades history. In The World, the Text, and the Critic Said is aware that he is considered an undeclared Marxist (29), an accusation (made thoughtfully in Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry and rather more controversially, if not necessarily inaccurately, in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [London: Verso, 1992]; see also the responses to Ahmad in Public Culture 6, 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 that The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte does provoke Saids curiosity in the essay that bears his books title because of its exemplary attempt to textualize the random appearance of a new Caesar (45). As Mehlman, too, observes, Marx textualizes in order to historicize, and, as Said implies, the farcical repetition of the uncle in the figure of the nephew effectively elicits the perversions of the family romance, condemns repetition to derivation and masquerade, and masterfully transforms lineage into an order of descending worth (45).

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(WTC, 45). My aim is to read each as the others completion and anti thesisas his tessera, in short.6 Said and Bloom articulate identical concerns from different perspectives: both explore the difficulties of belonging to texts, traditions, and continuities that make up the very web of a culture (I:SC, 6). Said undertakes this exploration from the standpoint of loss and exile, while Bloom imagines the process as the transition from innocence to experience. The ritual character of Bloomian self-annihilation and the profoundly disorienting Saidian exile from sense, nation, and milieu (I:SC, 6) are disturbingly complementary even though the possibility of each is dictated by existential actualities that Bloom disavows and Said acknowledges. While the passion that animates Blooms imagination of the agon probably arises from 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 of his exile in The Anxiety of Influence. Nevertheless, the agonistic experience of those who already belong but must earn their welcome or discover that they have never left is radically different from the agonizing condition of exile in which deracination must be embraced before it can be transcended. In Bloom, failure does not preclude belonging; in Said, belonging can neither be assumed nor, necessarily, achieved. The austerity of Blooms model of poetic history stems from his desire to transcend society or social constraints altogether and from his belief that the strong poet transcends the physical and geographic traumas of exile. For Auerbach, alienated from the material and symbolic dimensions of the European cultural heritage with which he identified, exile is converted into a positive mission (I:SC, 7), contingent on the twin movement of separation and transcendence. Indeed, Auerbach transfigures his great work of cultural affirmation into the articulation of
6 Bloom defines tessera as the second of his revisionary ratios. Neither Said nor Bloom can be said to function as the others precursor in the strict sense that both employ the term; therefore both can be said to skip the first of Blooms revisionary ratios, clinamen , in relation to each other but not to their shared precursors. The near simultaneity of their published appearances suggests this possibility. Saids and Blooms swerves from 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 explanation for the process tessera .

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the ascetic code of willed homelessness (I:SC, 7). Said transforms the historical fact of exilefrom fascist Europe and in Europes putative other, Istanbul (67)into an existential condition of alienation and an indispensable and universalizable element of critical consciousness itself. Bloom allows his strong poets to be willful but renders them incapable of willing, or of willing in an original way, in his mythic venture. He would appreciate, however, the principle of divestiture, of extinguishing rather than extending love, in Saids admiration for Auerbachs courage and insight (I:SC, 7). Saids premise and conclusion make strong poets appear oddly domesticated, ensconced in the comfort and assurance of belonging to humanity at large (I:SC, 7). The struggle for identity and the threat of death are aspects of cultural repetition and renewal; therefore the threat of deracination, like that of castration, bears the promise of priority and of belonging on the ephebes rather than the precursors terms. Bloom argues that strong poets can give us vivid instances of this most cunning of 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, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors (AI, 141). As cautious as Bloom remains in these formulations, such that the tyranny of time is only ever almost overturned (AI, 141), he suggests, like Said and Auerbach, that risk is the condition of affirmation and possibility. Unlike their model of deracination, however, Blooms revisionary ratios operate, Said claims, within the structure of belonging or cultural orthodoxy rather than against its assertively achieved and won hegemony (I:SC, 10). Saids illuminating discussion of the imaginative life of Western culture thus reveals that the agon depends on the understanding that the stakes played for are an identification of society with culture, and consequently [are] the acquisition of a very formidable power (I:SC, 10), rather than a transcendence of society by culture.7 Bloom would not disagree that,
makes this argument in relation to Matthew Arnolds Culture and Anarchy. I believe, however, that the link between poetic history as the relentless march of strong poets and the impulse to propagate the best that has been known and thought in the world is not difficult to make. Blooms more recent writings on the Western canon only reinforce this connection. In any event, my juxtaposition of Bloom and Said is meant to elicit what may not be obvious in both their arguments.
7 Said

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despite its agonistic dimension, The Anxiety of Influence describes the dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society (I:SC, 12); however, like many prevalent accounts of the development of the modern self, poetic or otherwise, Blooms history of modern revisionism is unaware of its ethnocentrism: the consecration of poetic history institutes a system of 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 feature, for The Anxiety of Influence exemplifies the naturalization of authority and cultural hegemony. Through the influence his work has exercised, Bloom has become one of those thinkers who make their ideas seem as if they were expressions of a collective will (I:SC, 15, where Said is reporting Antonio Gramscis view of Benedetto Croce). Subsequent pedagogy has consecrated Blooms conjurings of strong poets as the fabric of Western imaginative life. Said is only too aware of this sneaky and cheeky dimension of hegemony; he insists, therefore, that poetry must include criticism in the terms in which he has defined it. Said retains Blooms termsThe individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culturebut he replaces Blooms anxious ephebe with a more humanistic, thinking historical and social actor in the culture, and because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism (I:SC, 15). Blooms humanism is different: he rejects the anti-humanistic plain dreariness of 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, 1314), but he believes, equally, that the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us (AI, 85). Blooms distinction here is between how literature comes to be (via the savagery and misrepresentation implicit in the act of misreading) and what it is; the idea of literature as a repository of humane values is, for 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 of desire, of the individual imagination (AI, 8586).

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For Bloom, [Where] there is detachment in confronting ones own imagination, discontinuity is impossible (AI, 86). Matthew Arnold is Saids covering cherub: Bloom regards detachment (or Arnoldian disinterest) as the moment when cultural hegemony crushes individual strength, rather than the moment when the hegemony of Western culture is contradicted. Saids version of autonomy is much too tame for Bloom, but Said would fasten on Blooms comment that the poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves and turn that to his advantage (AI, 26). Bloom is, of course, speaking of the paradox within which the strong poet is trapped: the poem within him is found by great poems outside him. In declaring, however, that [to] lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever (AI, 26), Bloom reveals the political significance and affective power both of Saids critical project and of his own. At stake is the definition of heresy itselfthe ancestor of revisionism (AI, 29)and the ethical principle of Saids brand of secular criticism. I will devote the conclusion of this essay to the implications of this definition for a new theory of influence and a radical vision of humanist agency. For now, I want to elaborate on the hegemonic implications of Blooms affirmation of 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 of being comfortably 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 from Europe, his work was steeped in the reality of Europe, just as the specific circumstances of his exile enabled a concrete critical recovery of Europe (I:SC, 16). Saids contrapuntal method appears in nascent form here, allowing him to locate a cooperation between filiation [natal culture] and affiliation [adoption through scholarship] at the heart of critical consciousness (I:SC, 16). But Said immediately abandons his hero Auerbach. In the very next paragraph he turns to the failure of the generative impulse in modern fiction (I:SC, 16), which he treats as itself generative of modern cultural history, producing alternative forms of 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 of poetic influence; indeed, he renders poetic history exclusively affiliative (adoptively intrapoetic) and the generative impulse or the family romance purely rhetorical. While Saids characterization of the democratic cooperation between filiation and affiliation initially seems too complacent, it soon becomes unmasked as a compensatory ideological ruse, designed to suture the antinomies and atomizations of reified existence (I:SC, 19). The transition from filiation to affiliation usually signifies Auerbachs extinguishing his love for all places to earn his love for the world. Said exposes the underside of affiliation when it takes the form of a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision (I:SC, 19). Instead of marking the failed idea or possibility of filiation, the new order of affiliation reinstate[s] vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order (I:SC, 19). Said includes figures as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, and Georg Lukcs in his catalog of those with a penchant for restored authority (I:SC, 19). He isolates two unsavory and related consequences of this move to convert anguished distance into respectful adherence: it reinforces the known at the expense of the knowable and results in the calculated . . . irrelevance of criticism (I:SC, 25). Saids aim is to defend culture against system, and, curiously enough, so is Blooms. Blooms strong poets inhabit a universe that is hermetic but also violent, perverse, and transgressive; imbued with intentionality; charged with the ambition to dislodge precursors and to quarrel about authority, ownership, and force; cursed with the desire for priority that cannot be contaminated by theft or commerce; prone to revel in the dark side that gives culture its dominion; and commanded to speak in the present rather than be defined by the silent past. In the previous sentence I mix Saids and Blooms phrases (from WTC and AI ) to demonstrate the conjunction of rather than the anticipated disjunction between their visions of modern cultural history. What is one to make of this strange coincidence? One answer lies in their common indebtedness to Giambattista Vico. Indeed, Saids essay On Repetition explicitly references Bloom, while his discussion of Vico clarifies the latters place in Blooms imagination better than Blooms own brief account of being most convinced yet also most repelled by Vicos theory of poetic origins (AI, 59).

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For Vico, repetition makes history intelligible. Said offers a Gertrude Steinlike formulation, Human history is human actuality is human activity is human knowledge (OR, 112), which is followed by an elegant summary: For Vico, then, whether as the beginning of sense, as representation, as archaeological reconstruction, repetition is a principle of economy, giving facts their historical factuality and reality its existential sense (OR, 11314). The aspect of Saids explanation that is most pertinent to Blooms historicism is Vicos affirmation of the pasts inexhaustible constancy; despite the proliferation of changing rhythms, patterns, and harmonies, the ground motif recurs throughout, as if to demonstrate its staying power and its capacity for endless elaboration (OR, 114). Vicos images for historical process are invariably biological and, more, they are invariably paternal. Repetition is the consequence of, and indeed can be identified with, physiological reproduction, how a species perpetuates itself in historical time and space (OR, 115).8 Vico and Bloom share a vision of poetic history as the interplay of struggle and generation, difference and repetition; both seek to contain the original and the revolutionary within the orbit of the constant and repeatable (OR, 11617); and both seem attuned to laws of regression that contribute to historical decline rather than to progress. Said, however, finds Vicos version of filiation inadequate in the face of the growing evidence of cultural dispersion and diversification (Blooms notion of poetic history is vulnerable to a similar criticism); more to the point, he finds that the scientific inadequacy of genetic explanations of origin also means that the fathers place loses its unassailable eminence (OR, 118). Generative and procreative metaphors are insufficient for explaining social and literary phenomena. Yet they persist on account of their wish-fulfilling character (OR, 120). Blooms revisionary ratios seem to bear out this contradiction between explanatory and affective or rhetorical power, because the progression from clinamen to apophrades unfolds in an anterior future. But is there room for reading the radical conservatism of Blooms tropological machinery against the grain of Blooms own recuperative logic?
8 Said comments on Vicos pleasure in the etymological puns that the word gens produces while identifying this process of filiation, with Vico, as gentile. Surely something could be made of the relationships (discordances?) between Vicos gentile history and Blooms own investments in gnosis and the Kabbalah.

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In A Map of Misreading Bloom explicitly indicates that the revisionist wishes to find his own original relation to truth . . . but also wishes to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the sufferings of history.9 I regard my meditation on belatedness as an act of transumption, of lifting up and redeeming the saving sparks of [the precursors] being (MM, 6). Bloom calls attention to the ambivalence that attunes transumption or metalepsis simultaneously to conserving and making. While I have focused thus far on this ambivalence, I want to begin to answer the question Bloom himself raises: How do we pass from origins to repetition and continuity, and thence to the discontinuity that marks all revisionism? (MM, 47). In the second volume of his tetralogy, Bloom argues that the first step in this transition might be to transform belatedness into a strength rather than an affliction (MM, 80) and that the only trope that might serve this purpose is metalepsis or apophrades. While metalepsis precludes neither agonism nor ambivalence (he explains that its characteristic affect is simultaneously one of identification and dangerous jealousy, of swallowing up and spitting out, or of introjection and projection), Bloom insists on its heretical potential. He cites William James: Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest . We dont lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.10 This emphasis on instrumentality or pragmatism makes room for harmonizing Bloom not with the company of elect precursors to which he himself aspires but with his critical heirs, who deploy revisionism precisely to open the kingdom of culture to the sufferings of history. Revisionism, in this sense, becomes what Susan Buck-Morss characterizes as a stringent politics of translation; that is, the process of introjection and projection that Bloom traces is less about the diminution of the self in the face of overbearing ancestors and more about the tolerance of cultural inheritance for assuming unaccustomed forms.11
Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 4. Hereafter cited as MM. 10 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 40. 11 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003), 7. Hereafter cited as TPT. Buck-Morss is quoting Talal Asad,
9 Harold

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In her essay Hegel and Haiti Buck-Morss writes, Where did Hegels idea of the relation between lordship and bondage originate? ask the Hegel experts.12 Where, indeed? she remarks wryly (HH, 843), before claiming that the central metaphor of G. W. F. Hegels work stemmed from his perusal of the political journal Minervas detailed account of the Haitian revolution. (In this admittedly oversimplified account of Buck-Morsss research and argument, my concern is to illustrate the transumptive character of her cultural genealogy, of her political intent [to transform] our historical imaginaries [TPT, 117].) To avoid telling the tale of colonial liberation with Europe at its center, Buck-Morss rescues the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it (HH, 865). The relevance of Blooms shift from originality to priority, of his affirmation of misreading, and of his vision of strife becomes only too clear in her method. When she describes her essay as an attempt to rip the historical facts of freedom out of the narratives told by the victors (HH, 865), Buck-Morss transforms her seemingly arcane retrieval of historical fragments into a subtle form of vengeance. If she stopped there, however, her reversal of cultural and historical causality would be no more than a clever, and by now quite familiar, ploy to expose the catastrophic dimensions of the story of modern freedom. Her return to the past becomes more than a run-of-the-mill form of requital, however, through her focus on redemption and reconstitution. The metaleptic power of historical moments is contained, for Buck-Morss, in those times when the consciousness of individuals surpasse[s] the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom (HH, 865). In other words, her strong misreading salvage[s] Hegels moment of clarity for our own time to show not only that Hegels philosophy of history has a concrete historical whereabouts but also that

Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 190. Buck-Morss is herself indebted (a nice touch, because belatedness and indebtedness are intertwined in Bloom) to the writings of Talal Asad on the Salman Rushdie affair, challenging both the liberal multicultural rhetoric of tolerance and the fatwa that accused Rushdie of blasphemy. 12 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 842. Here after cited as HH.

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the master-slave dialectic is very much always already a question of and for the postcolonial.13 Hegel looks different when Haiti is put at the center of modern liberation, and even more so when Buck-Morss begins to conceive of the world-historical spirit without a center (see TPT, 12123). But in refusing to turn these moments of historical clarity into the exclusive property of any one part of the world (she writes that they belong equally to Hegel and Toussaint LOuverture)in leveling the playing field, so to speakdoes Buck-Morss risk turning the present, historical realities that surrounded [Hegels text into] invisible ink? (HH, 846). (I have tactically modified her own charge against historians who silence the past.) Hegel foregrounds the struggle to the death between master and slave, the stark and painful choice between life and liberty that is inevitable in the rebellion of Toussaint LOuverture and even in the cruelty of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Buck-Morsss point, of course, is that the actual and successful revolution of Caribbean slaves against their masters is the moment when the dialectical logic of recognition becomes visible as the thematics of world history (HH, 852), but her dialectical transubstantiation of the historicity of slave rebellion into the story of the universal realization of freedom (HH, 852; italics mine) might be in danger, as Blooms tropology suggests, of subsuming her arguments antithetical premise (the glaring discrepancy between the political value of freedom and the economic practice of slavery) in the mutuality of the dialectical logic of 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 of Bloom and Said, is to demonstrate how each illuminates the other. Whereas Buck-Morss seeks to turn the historical particular, the perception of the concrete meaning of freedom into the realization of absolute spirit (HH, 865), Dipesh Chakrabartys analysis of the imperatives of postcolonial thought and terms of historical difference produces the opposite effect of provincializing Europe, of revealing the limits of historicizing and universalizing thought, indeed modify13 Interview: Susan Buck-Morss, Laura Mulvey, and Marq Smith, in TPT, 117. The interview first appeared as Susan Buck-Morss, Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics, and the Citizen, Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 32540. Mulvey and Smith, identified in Buck-Morsss book as JVC , are quoted in this passage.

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ing and interrupting in practice the latters totalizing thrusts.14 While it is possible to see these two antihistoricist interventions as complementing each other, a more nuanced account of Bloomian revisionism enfolds both in a productive embrace. Chakrabarty also privileges a politics of translation; however, his argument inserts an extra step that makes his viewpoint of a piece with Blooms investment in the anxieties of belatedness without lapsing into a species of ressentiment. The logic of empire, in Chakrabartys scheme of things, ensures that the universal has already been usurp[ed] . . . in a gesture of pretension and domination by a proxy, a particular, Europe (quoted in Dube, 864). The structure of belonging that Blooms story of influence articulates is precisely what Chakrabarty denies is everybodys history (Dube, 865). Like Buck-Morss, Chakrabarty seeks to engage in an immanent critique of structures of domination, on the ground of the usurping particular masquerading as the universal, just as, like her, he wishes to blend the history of Europe with other histories of belonging that together produce the conceptual artifacts of modernity (Dube, 866). The difference is that Chakrabarty insists that the translation of the universal into the particular, or the realization of the universal in the particular, registers a disjunction and refuses the mediation of the universal. Chakrabarty simultaneously registers the agonism and the ambivalence that are consequences of the condemnation of Europes other to anachronism and repetition in the logic of history. The indispensability of Europe must not, for Chakrabarty, obscure its inadequacy: indebtedness exacts a terrible price. Both Bloom and Buck-Morss envisage repetition and difference as moments in a universal history; Chakrabarty, on the contrary, asks the difficult and perhaps unanswerable question of whether displacing Europe from the center of our conceptions of historical time and of universality is possible.15 Both Buck-Morss and Chakrabarty would

14 Saurabh Dube, Presence of Europe: An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty, South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 862, 866, 861. Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), hereafter cited as PE , appeared in the same year as Buck-Morsss article in Critical Inquiry. 15 See Michael Hardt, The Eurocentrism of History, Postcolonial Studies 4 (2001): 24349.

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agree with Bloom, I think, that individuation is not possible without revisionary strife (MM, 10) even as their revisionism combines, as Blooms does, the processes of making and conserving. Moreover, their version of transumption is not, as Bloom occasionally indicates, a process in which the dead return to be triumphed over by the living (MM , 74). What is clear in their methods, rather, is the recognition that Haiti or India marks a limit and an absence (re-seeing, in Blooms schema). This recognition produces a substitution of the particular for the usurping and pretentious universal (re-estimating Hegel and Europe, in Blooms schema) and results in a representation of history or in a historiographical project that reorients the present (re-aiming, in Blooms schema). Blooms story of influence, his attention to the cultural and historical imaginary of Europe, thus can lend itself 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 of cultural belonging and transumption find their singular place. I want, in Blooms revisionary and cantankerous spirit, to take seriously the possibility that aspiration to the universal, rather than assertion of difference and heterogeneity, is the truly radical move in these troubled times. Translation then becomes, as Chakrabarty intimates, not only one of interruption and modification but also one of conversation. In this regard, Ross Posnocks extraordinary reflections on cosmopolitanism are the unquiet heirs to Blooms politics of descent.16 Posnock shares the conviction that cosmopolitanism can serve as the instrument of cultural democracy with the tradition of 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 of foreignness in the name of a transnational, deracialized kingdom of culture (DD, 809, where Posnock is quoting Elaine Scarry and DuBois, respectively). Posnock eschews both Saids detachment from place and Blooms
Posnock, The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism, American Literary History 12 (2000): 803. Hereafter cited as DD.
16 Ross

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knowing ones place in favor of a cosmopolitan refusal to know ones place. Posnocks insistence on the syncretic basis of culture denies Blooms politics of descent, while his rewriting of the filiative logic of entitlement and assimilation as cultural appropriation supplements Saids celebration of deracination as indispensable to freedom and protest. The egalitarian dimension of cosmopolitanism cannot survive within the structure of sacrifice and hierarchy common to both assimilation and deracination; instead, willed homelessness and agonism and ambivalence yield to a cultural democracy based on the force of an ideal of shared humanity (DD, 806). Posnocks vision of cultural democracy resonates with the deracinated, interrogative, and antiproprietary spirit of Saids oppositional intellectual as well as with the agonism and ambivalence of Blooms narrative of the struggle of the same against itself. Posnocks cosmopolitan heretic, contrary to his Bloomian and Saidian counterparts, renounces anxiety and asceticism for pleasure, interrogation of the limits of identity and belonging for betrayal of roots, and assimilation and deracination for appropriation. His unorthodox reanimation of the ideal in contradistinction to the uses and abuses of universalism keep[s] alive the interplay between (unraced) universal and (raced) particular as a way to sustain the dynamic, antinomical [sic] character of modernity (DD, 814). I have resorted to a provocative constellation of contemporary cultural critics to explore how Blooms historicism and revisionism may be, in Chakrabartys words, renewed from and for the margins (PE , 16), rather than to exact postcolonial revenge (PE , 16, where Chakrabarty quotes Leela Gandhi). Bloom comprehends revisionism as the signature of the modern, but Chakrabarty contends that historicism is the peculiar gift of European political modernity. Saids essays reveal how historical time becomes the measure of the cultural distance between East and West, while Buck-Morss challenges the first in Europe and then elsewhere structure of historicist time by rendering Hegel and Haiti coeval (PE , 78). Blooms historicist notion of poetic history as a unique whole with an identifiable logic of development becomes the catalyst for Posnocks meditation on the structure of inequality that underlies the hypnotic spell cast by roots and for Chakrabartys articulation of the embeddedness and priority of Europe in global historical imaginaries. Blooms writings seem

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tailor-made for postcolonial contexts, because the themes of failure, lack, and inadequacy that describe his ephebes ubiquitously characterize the speaking subject of colonial pasts and national futures whose historical transformation, 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 for an engagement with universals, such as the idea of the human, precisely because of Europes failure to live up to its own vaunted ideals. The affinities I have imagined limn the contours of the history that Chakrabarty calls for and Bloom inauguratesone that, in laying bare the inescapability of the poetic or postcolonial predicament, also exposes what the agon represses in order to be (PE , 46). The undeniable conservatism of Blooms thought makes of the anxiety of influence a filiative mechanism and a regulatory ideal, transfiguring inheritance into birthright. His unruly heirs, Buck-Morss, Chakrabarty, and Posnock, make it possible for minorities, exiles, and rebels to locate themselves within a specific inheritance and . . . use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded [them].17 As for Bloom, I believe that he would, in the spirit if not the letter of his work, give them his blessing.

Asha Varadharajan is associate professor of English at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. She is author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995) and is at work on two other books, Violence and Civility in the New World Order and Enchantment and Deracination: The Lure of Foreignness in Contemporary Cinema.

17 Ross Posnock, After Identity Politics, in Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 27. Here Posnock quotes James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1984), xii, on the limits of inheritance and the boundlessness of birthright. I believe that my use of Baldwins words is appropriate.