Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS3304 Notes 12

H ARO LD BLO OM POETRY AND REPRESSION: REVISIONISM FRO M BLAKE TO STEVENS (1976) Bloom , Harold. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Poetry, Revisionism , Repression Bloom begins by repeating Derridas question in Freud and the Scene of Writing: what is a text, and what m ust the psyche be if it can be represented by a text? (209). Bloom , in the wake of Lacan, turns it around and asks by contrast: What is a psyche, and what m ust a text be if it can be represented by a psyche? (1). Arguing that the etym ological root of the word psyche is to breathe,, text is to weave and to fabricate, and represent to be, Bloom contends that his question m ay be rephrased as follows: W hat is a breath, and what m ust a weaving or a fabrication be so as to com e into being again as a breath? (1). Bloom s answer: In the context of post-Enlightenm ent poetry, a breath is at once a word , and a stance for uttering that word, a word and a stance of ones own . In this context, a weaving or a fabrication is what we call a poem , and its function is to represent, to bring back into being again, an individual stance and word. The poem , as text, is represented or seconded by what psychoanalysis calls the psyche. But the text is rhetoric, and as a persuasive system of tropes can be carried into being again only by another system of tropes. Rhetoric can be seconded only by rhetoric, for all that rhetoric can intend is m ore rhetoric. If a text and a psyche can be represented by one another, this can be done only because each is a departure from proper m eaning. Figuration turns out to be our only link between breathing and making. (1-2) The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior text as openings for its own totalising and unique interpretations (2). What he called strong poets (2) in his earlier studies of m isprision (2) m erely present them selves as looking for truth in the world (2). However, they seek pleasure and not truth (2), what Nietzsche nam ed as the belief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief (2). No strong poet can admit this, Bloom claim s. By strong poet, Bloom has in m ind not just the High Rom antic British and Am erican poets (2) but also the non-verse-writer (2), especially Nietzsche and Freud, two of the strongest poets in the European Rom antic tradition (2). This is why Bloom argues that poem s are not self-contained (2), that is, they do not have an ascertainable m eaning or m eaning without reference to other texts (2). Rather, poem s are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer still to other words, and so on, into the densely overpopulated world of literary language. Any poem is an inter-poem , and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem is not a writing, but rewriting , and though a strong poem is a fresh start, such a start is a starting-again. (3) Perhaps the first to point this out was Vico who uncovered the genuine scandal of poetic origins (3). His great insight was that poetic language . . . is always and necessarily a revision of previous language ( 3) as a result of which every poem is belated, that every poem is an instance of what Freud called . . . retroactive m eaningfulness (3). Each poet (even Hom er) is in the position of being after the Event, in term s of literary language. His art is necessarily an aftering , and so at best he strives for a selection, through repression, out of the traces of the language of poetry; that is, he represses

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som e of the traces, and rem em bers others. This rem em bering is a m isprision, or creative m isreading, but no m atter how strong a m isprision, it cannot achieve an autonom y of m eaning, or a m eaning fully present, that is, free from all literary context. Even the strongest poet must take up his stance within literary language. If he stands outside it, then he cannot begin to write poetry. For poetry lives always under the shadow of poetry. (4) The curse of belatedness, a dangerously self-conscious belatedness is that creative envy becom es the ecstasy, the Sublim e, of the sign-system of poetic language. But this is, from an altered perspective, a loss that can becom e a shadowed gain, the blessing achieved by the latecom er poet as a wrestling Jacob, who cannot let the great depart finally, without receiving a new nam e all his own. (5) Poetry is born out of ignorance of causes (5); if any poet knows too well what causes his poem , then he cannot write it, or at least will write it bad. He m ust repress the causes, including the precursor-poem s (5). Such forgetting (5) is the condition of a particular exaggeration of style or hyperbolical figuration that tradition has called the Sublim e (6). Bloom begins section II by asking How does one read a strong poem ? How does one write a strong poem ? (6). W hat Bloom calls poetic strength (his term for the poets finding of a voice that is seem ingly distinctive) is the product of an act of textual usurpation (6) designed to dethrone a strong predecessor. A strong reading is the only poetic fact, the only revenge against tim e that endures, that is successful in canonizing one text as opposed to a rival text (6). There is, he argues, no textual authority without an act of im position, a declaration of property that is m ade figuratively rather than properly or literally. For the ultim ate question a strong reading asks of a poem is: Why? W hy should it have been written? Why m ust we read it, out of all the too m any other poem s available? (6) Bloom admits that defining poetic strength as usurpation and im position goes against the grain of conventional poetic wisdom . However, poetry, when it aspires to strength, is necessarily a com petitive m ode, indeed an obsessive m ode, because poetic strength involves a self-representation that is reached only through trespass (7). Poetic strength consists in self-proclam ation (7). A strong poet is precisely like a gentile nation; he m ust divine or invent him self, and so attem pt the im possibility of originating him self (7). Poetry is always at work imagining its own origin , or telling a persuasive lie about itself, to itself. Poetic strength ensues when such lying persuades the reader that his own origin has been reim agined by the poem (7). Bloom argues, with Vico, that all beginnings begin in uncertainty. The poetic trope comes from ignorance (8): they are defences . . . against their own origins in ignorance, and so against the powerlessness of m an in relation to the world (8). Vico points out that just as rational m etaphysics teaches that m an becom es all things by understanding them (qtd. in Bloom , 8), so im aginative m etaphysics shows that m an becomes all things by not understanding them . . . for when m an understands he extends his m ind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of him self and becomes them by transform ing him self into them (qtd. in Bloom , 8). Vico gives us a way of understanding the nature of the poetic im age, the rhetorical trope and psychic defence: these are all form s of a ratio between hum an ignorance m aking things out of itself, and hum an self-identification moving to transform us into the things we have m ade. When the hum an ignorance is the trespass of a poetic repression of anteriority, and the transform ing m ovem ent is a new poem , then the ratio m easures a rewriting or an act of revision. As a poetic im age, the ratio is a phenom enal m asking of the m ind taking in the world of things, which is Vicos

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m isprision of the Cartesian relationship between m ind and the res extensa . An im age is necessarily an im itation, and its coverings or m askings in poetic language necessarily center in certain fixed areas: presence and absence, partness and wholeness, fullness and em ptiness, height and depth, insideness and outsideness, earliness and lateness. Why these? Because they are the inevitable categories of our m akings and our becom ings . . . within the fixities and lim its of space and tim e. (8-9) In the beginning is not a giving of nam es to things according to the nature of each (9) but rather the trope, a fantastic and figurative affair (9). In section III, Bloom argues that Vicos thinking in all this is anticipated by the Gnostics whose quarrel with the early Church was essentially that of any belated creator with his precursor. Their rebellion against religious tradition as a process of supposedly benign transm ission becam e the prophecy of all subsequent quarrels with poetic tradition (11). Gnosticism has great relevance, in short, to any theory of poetic m isprision (12). He mentions Sim on Magus and Valentinus, the form er who though he wrote his own poem , called it Hom er, the latter whose view of the Dem iurge is precisely the view of a strong precursor poet by a strong ephebe or latecom er poet (12). Bloom argues that while m ajor poetic traditions of poetic interpretation have followed Platonic and / or Aristotelian m odels, . . . the m ajor traditions of post-Enlightenm ent poetry have tended m ore to the Gnostic stance of m isprision (13-14). Bloom s own goal is to adopt an interpretative m odel close to the stance and language of m odern or post-Enlightenm ent poetry than the philosophically oriented m odels have proved to be (14). Another big influence on Bloom is the Kabbalah, the m edieval system of Old Testam ent interpretation, . . . particularly the doctrines of Isaac Luria (14), a unique blend of Gnostic and Neoplatonic elem ents, of a self-conscious subjectivity founded upon a revisionist view of creation (14). He stresses the usefulness of the Lurianic dialectics for poetic interpretation (14). Kabbalah provides a dialectic of creation astonishingly close to revisionist poetics (15). Bloom stresses that the quest for interpretive m odels is a necessary obsession for the reader who would be strong, since to refuse m odels explicitly is only to accept other m odels, however unknowingly (4). Bloom classifies the im ages by which the new poet engages in acts of re-seeing what his precursors had seen before him (16), re-seeings which are translations of desires into verbal acts (16), as follows: clinam en or swerve . . . the trope-as-m isreading (16); tessera , not in its m odern m eaning as a m osaic-building unit, but in its ancient, m ystery-cult m eaning of an antithetical com pletion, the device of recognition that fits together the broken parts of a vessel, to m ake a whole again (17); kenosis , St. Pauls word for Christs hum bling or em ptying-out of his own divinity (18); daem onisation (18); askesis (19); apophrades (19); and finally m etalepsis (20): the final m ovem ent is frequently a balance between introjection (or identification) and projection (or casting out the forbidden). Im agistically, the balance is between earliness and belatedness. . . . The trope involved is . . . called m etalepsis or transum ption, the only trope-reversing trope, since it substitutes one word for another in earlier figurations. . . . Metalepsis or transum ption thus becom es a total, final act of taking up a poetic stance in relation to . . . the anteriority of poetic language, which m eans prim arily the loved-and-feared poem s of the precursors. Properly accom plished, this stance figuratively produces the illusion of having fathered ones own fathers, which is the greatest illusion. . . . (20) Only the strongest poets can prevail in this entrapment of dialectics . . . by reattaining the Sublim e, though a greatly altered Sublim e (21). In the concluding section, IV, Bloom turns his attention to the fresh Sublim e, and its dependence upon poetic equivalents of repression (21). He stresses that it is his intention

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in Poetry and Repression to m ap (22) the dialectical character of lyrical subjectivism (22). He offers a m ap of m isprision (23) based on a dialectic of im itation / substitution / representation (23). His goal is to understand the source of the Sublim e (21). He discusses a num ber of writers such as Dante, Petrarch (the first strong instance in Western poetry of the anxiety of influence [23]), and Milton (whose Satan prophesises the postEnlightenm ent crisis-poem , which has becom e our m odern Sublim e [23]). Bloom also distinguishes his own theory of poetic strength from Freuds notion of repression which is, he argues, the im agination of a Counter-Sublim e (24). W hatever the criticism of poetry that I urge is, . . . it has nothing to do with anything now m iscalled Freudian literary criticism (25). Freud, him self the strongest of m odern poets (24), has been applied reductively (24) to literature. Freudian critics forget that tropes or defences are prim arily figures of willed falsification rather than figures of unwilled knowledge (25) (there is also willed knowing, but that process does not produce poem s [25]). To say that a poem s true subject is its repression of the precursor poem is not to say that the later poem reduces to the process of that repression. On a strict Freudian view, a good poem is a sublim ation, and not a repression. Like any work of substitution that replaces the gratification of prohibited instincts, the poem , as viewed by the Freudians, m ay contain antithetical effects but not unintended or counterintended effects. In the Freudian valorisation of sublim ation, the survival of those effects would be flaws in the poem . But poem s are actually stronger when their counterintended effects battle most incessantly against their overt intentions. (25) W hat Freud did not understand, but Vico did, is that the Im agination is the faculty of selfpreservation (25). It is a m isunderstanding of his own theory, Bloom argues, to say that the goal of criticism is so to apply Freud . . . as to arrive at an Oedipal interpretation of poetic history (25). This is the usual m isunderstanding that m y work produces (25). Rather, in studying poetry we are not studying the m ind, nor the Unconscious, even if there is an unconscious. We are studying a kind of labour that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and then taught system atically. Poem s are not psyches [Freud], nor things [Ransom ], nor are they renewable archetypes in a verbal universe [Frye], nor are they architectonic units of balanced stresses [Brooks]. They are defensive processes in constant change, which is to say that poem s them selves are acts of reading . A poem is . . . a fierce, proleptic debate with itself , as well as with precursor poem s. Or, a poem is a dance of substitutions, a constant breaking-of-the-vessels, as one lim itation undoes a representation, only to be restituted in turn by a fresh representation. Every strong poem , at least since Petrarch, has known im plicitly what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then m ust yield to a later one. (25-26) All poetry begins in what Bloom , pace Freud, calls a prim al . . . Scene of Instruction (27): a six-phased scene that strong poem s must will to overcom e, by repressing their own freedom into the patterns of a revisionary misinterpretation (27). Bloom quotes Thomas Froschs sum m ary of his theory: a Prim al Scene of Instruction [is] a m odel for the unavoidable im position of influence. The Scene really a com plete play or, or process has six stages, through which the ephebe em erges: election (seizure by the precursors power); covenant (a basic agreem ent of poetic vision between precursor and ephebe); the choice of rival inspiration . . .;the self-preservation of the ephebe as a new incarnation of the Poetical Character; the ephebes interpretation of the precursor; and the ephebes revision of the precursor.

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Each of these stages then becomes a level of interpretation in the reading of the ephebes poem . (27) Bloom s point is that the poem does not only originate in this scene of instruction but also find its necessary aim or purpose there as well (27). The long and the short of it is that it is only by repressing creative freedom , through the initial fixation of influence, that a person can be reborn as a poet. And only by revising that repression can a poet becom e and rem ain strong. Poetry, revisionism, and repression verge upon a m elancholy identity, an identity that is broken afresh by every new strong poem , and mended afresh by the same poem . (27) W hat Bloom is arguing here may be sum m ed as follows. By analogy to the psyche, every literary text finds itself located at the intersection of both paradigmatic axes and syntagmatic axes. Along the syntagmatic axis, the em ergence of a given text is one event in a diachronic sequence of sim ilar em ergences. Along the paradigm atic axis, each text forms part of a synchronic system (this can be both the system of texts which exist at a given m om ent of history--such as Renaissance literature--and the system form ed by literature as a whole). Any text is arguably thus linked to other texts by the principle of diffrance: that is, both deferral, the principle of m etonym ic contiguity which is operative along the syntagmatic axis, and displacem ent, the principle of difference along the paradigm atic axis.