How to Live with the Innite Regress of Strong Misreading

Paul H. Fry

1 One of the surprises in Frank Lentricchias After the New Criticism , a book admired in its time for an impressive but largely unsympathetic grasp of literary theory, was its pronouncement that Harold Bloom should be valued as a literary historiographer: No theorist writing in the United States today has succeeded, as Bloom has, in returning poetry to history; he has managed better than most to move beyond both the New-Critical concern with the isolated, autonomous monad and the poststructuralist tendency to dissolve literary history into a repetitious synchronic rhetoric of the aporia .1 Bloom himself had indicated, after all, that there is no literary historyno history of texts as such, that isonly literary biography, 2 but that was an acceptable manner of speaking to the historicist Lentricchia, who liked Blooms insistence that interauthorial relations are dynamic, two-directional, and constantly fluctuating. He saw this dynamism as a means of getting beyond the paradox that curiously haunts the strongest literary historiographies: namely, that the guiding principle of the most incisive writing of that record of change we call history emerges as nothing other than the eternal return of the samewhich might as well be
1 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 342. 2 So Lentricchia puts it (344).

Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (December 2008) dOI 10.1215/00267929-2008-011 2008 by University of Washington

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called, in Blooms vocabulary, apophrades. In this essay I wish to follow Lentricchia in insisting that Bloom can and should be considered a literary historian, expressing doubt that Blooms dynamism transcends this characteristically exasperating absence of change in what might be called the historiographical moment, but concluding nonetheless that history is recovered in his methods of commentary. The best way to pursue this line of thought is to isolate Bloom from his immediate theoretical contemporaries and place him among major writers spanning the twentieth century who speak of tradition, horizon change, and horizon merger. I shall begin with the special case of T. S. Eliot, elaborating the suggestion that Eliot as a theorist of traditionthough in no other respectis Blooms strong precursor and suggesting thereby that one aspect of the unchanging in literary history is the theory of influence itself.3 From there I move to some remarks on Russian formalist forays into literary history, on Mikhail Bakhtin, on Hans Robert Jauss, and on Hans-Georg Gadamer. The latter two emphasize the role of the reader, and it is part of my purpose to align them with Bloom by pointing out that any reader who counts as a reader in literary history must also be a writer.4 Considering Bloom within this framework, I want to hold his celebration of strong misreading up to the light of mere common sense, not as others have done by kicking a stone and refuting it thus with a scoff of dismissal, but in order to wonder how at the least a plausible sense of change (we know things change, dont we?) can be recovered from Blooms very strength. To this end I shall argue that Bloom distinguishes too sharply, for the good of his own position, between his own psychological wars among poets and the philological tracing of verbal influence he dislikes and that he actually reintroduces historical change in a salutary way just insofar as he himself participates in verbal source hunting.5 My feelings about these matters are autobiographically tinged. Reviewers of my first book, The Poets Calling in the English Ode (1980),
3 See esp. the discussion of Bloom and Eliot in Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 5456. 4 Graham Allen makes this point about Bloom in Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 24. 5 Blooms participation in this has been pointed out as a side issue most constructively by Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London: Routledge, 1988), 17.

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were fully justified in noticing the giant shadows of Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman that fell across it (not as covering cherubs: my indebtedness was open and palpable), and the reviewers registered their approval or disapproval accordingly. But even then there was a difference, in particular a divergence from the polemical agenda of Bloom. While I accepted both his agonistic premise and his dark themethe poets fear of death as a threat to his arrogation of an originary birth6and while I never unreservedly accepted the alternative Yale school trope of poets as skeins of performative language belated with respect not to other poets but to language as such, I did remain a verbal critic. In this regard perhaps more closely resembling John Hollander (just to confine this confessional to Yale, where I was employed then as now but had not been a student), in that book I made bridges of echoic or rhythmic allusion between poets and poems. I was less continuously devoted to metaphysical swerves and emptyings out than to what we could learn about Lamia, say (I give examples that are not in my book and that wander outside Blooms canon), by seeing its first line in the first line of Absalom and Achitophel or by considering what it meant for the strikingly original ottava rima of The Witch of Atlas suddenly and cheerfully to imitate the couplet clinchers of Don Juan for three stanzas in a row (7375) near the end of the poem. Say, then, that my self-aggrandizing misreading of Bloom amounts to the claim that he too, even though his power of abstraction and focus on ultimate things almost suppresses his allusive sources, is finally a student of verbal influence, and a good thing, too.
2
It is difficult to prophesy that Eliots criticism will prove to be of permanent value, but perhaps we need to await the arrival of a generation neither formed by nor rebelling against him, before we can justly place him.Bloom, Reflections on T. S. Eliot

The one covering cherub, the violently repudiated influence on the tetralogy and other books of Blooms midphase succeeding The
6 Death, for Bloom, is the literal meaning against which all poetic tropes, indeed all languages as tropic systems, defend (Beth Sharon Ash, Jewish Hermeneutics and the Contemporary Theories of Textuality, Modern Philology 85 [1987]: 72).

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Anxiety of Influence , is the Eliot of Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919).7 Or rather, it is the Eliot of all the essays gathered in The Sacred Wood , for the best starting place is not perhaps in the famous essay mentioned above but in Philip Massinger: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal (125). Here is the relation of ephebe to strong poet in the life cycle of the poet-as-poet, the only difference being the stronger determination of Blooms ephebe already to swerve from the precursor. What is most powerful in Eliots formula, in which one should immediately acknowledge the element of urbane, Wildean exaggeration to which Bloom responds with appreciation only when the speaker is Oscar Wilde himselfwhat is most powerful here is the idea of theft. What you steal you must hide, presumably, and that makes it seem almost as though what the mature poet takes from tradition were something other than verbal tags open to detection. No longer an apprentice or even an immature poet, John Keats writes that autumn and the sun conspire to fill all fruit with ripeness to the core. Is he stealing from Hamlet ? The verbal echo suggests that he is; it puts us in mind of Hamlet . Yet this is ripeness with a major difference, oblivious repletion rather than ultimate knowledge. This passage, like a bird feigning a broken wing to lead us away from its nest, displaces Keatss authentic allusion to ripeness is all, which makes up the whole third stanza, where the allusion is neither verbal nor intellectual but powerfully revisionary in what I take to be the strongest Bloomian sense: ultimate knowledge, says Keats there, is not ripeness but skeletal thinness, unshaven, feverish, and barely breathing, soft-dying and poised at the outermost margins of experience. If we suppose To Autumn, then, to be an extended revisionary reflection on Hamlets preparation for death, we do so because we have begun with a verbal echo that is without a doubt misleading and insufficient in itself. We know what the thief has stolen, hence we know that he is a thief, but we cannot convict him of anything, and he rejoices in his freedom. When Eliot gets down to cases, surveying Massingers work in relation to that of his contemporaries, he knows himself to be a verbal critic and quotes heavily, devoting his attention to affinities and
7 All quotations are taken from T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960). For Blooms characteristic attitude toward this essay see The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 18.

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idiosyncrasies of style. The Bloomian thief steals origins, Eliots thief steals mannerisms, yet the question remains between them how, if not via words, the thief is to be detected. I gotta use words when I speak to you. For the moment one may remark that Blooms belated fox gets into the precursor henhouse with six nonverbal ratios and six nonverbal defenses, yes, but he picks the lock with six tropes and leaves the door open as evidence behind him.
3
Yet kabbalah (literally, reception) is one of the Hebrew words for tradition, and the sacred wood in this instance is the Bible as received by medieval interpreters calling themselves Kabbalists, who claim that their understanding of the sacred text is a literal and orthodox one.Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness

Taken for granted both by Eliot and by Bloom is the gulf between tradition and antitraditionalismof which the latter is not necessarily the same as romanticism, just as the former may diverge from classicism. Literary historiographies with their attendant canons line up on just these two sides. There may be no third position. Gadamer among my exhibits aligns with Eliot; Bakhtin, Jauss, and the logic of Russian formalist historiography before them rather oddly align with Bloom. Eliot in any case reads tradition as accretion and likes to use synchronic metaphors for diachronic things (anyone who commands a whole tradition sees that a countrys literature has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order [49]), as does his successor Northrop Frye, in whom Bloom recognized this tendency at the point when he repudiated him.8 The mediation of Eliots influence on Bloom by Frye is a matter of considerable interest but falls outside the scope of my topic because Frye is not a historian, as Lentricchia rightly says Bloom is, but a Vichian cyclist for whom the return of the same is not a repressed secret but the whole point of the exercise. Despite this gulf between them, it is telling that Eliots rehearsal for Blooms Anxiety of Influence, Tradition and the Individual Talent, takes its shred of platinum cue from the poet who is contested between their two cane.g., Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30.
8 See,

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ons: Keats, the one partial escapee from modernist censure, who said that men of genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals are great. What Eliot means by tradition is as discriminatingly canonical as what Bloom means by his succession of strong poets. Eliot distances himself in his first paragraph from the notion of indiscriminate antiquarianism (archaeological reconstruction) that probably he stole from Friedrich Nietzsches pamphlet on the use and abuse of history. Eliots distaste corresponds to Blooms distaste for moldy fig philology, or verbal source hunting at its least imaginative. With this clearing away accomplished, the argument of Eliots essay proceeds. I agree in advance with the objection that it is too easy and not wholly to the point to find equivalents in this essay for Blooms revisionary ratios, yet I think the game worth playing, if only for the sake of refining the differences in each case. Eliots first gambit is Blooms sixth, apophrades : the most individual parts of the mature poets work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously (48). Arguably the return of the undead here is as uncanny as it is in Bloom, even though for Eliot the precursor is not identified as a particular poet, except in the poems of apprentices. To paraphrase Bloom, it is as though the new mature poet had written the most characteristic work of a host of ghosts.9 Soon thereafter comes Eliots acknowledgment of tessera, in which past and present supplement and complete each other: The past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past (50). Again, with his Keatsian insistence on impersonality, Eliot shies away from naming poets and poetic relationships, but we easily supply some of many names: mediated by Percy Bysshe Shelleys Triumph of Life, Dante for completion needs Eliots misreading of him (I did not know that death had undone so many, with its ominous burden of secular modernity in Eliot), just as John Donne needs the misreadingas space manof Eliots early disciple William Empsons poetry (more than of Eliots poetry) to remain vital. It will be clear already that Eliot sees the individual talents relation to tradition in more than one way, just as Bloom does, and, pace Bloom, that Eliots stances are only intermittently nonaggressive. We can seldom remain long unconscious, writes Eliot in a 1919 review
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 16.
9 Harold

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quoted by Bloom himself (Breaking, 19), of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. Eliot here sounds more like La Rochefoucauld than Bloom, but that is a matter of tone. Eliot places a high premium on innovation all the time, and why not call it rebellious innovation? Eliots clinamen is just the Poundian measure that makes it new, treating traditional materials (Robert Brownings or Walt Whitmans in the case of Ezra Pound and sometimes of Eliot) as though they had not been treated that way before: To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art (50). Eliots kenosis or personal emptying is the moment of the poets effacement before tradition, which is much more important than [the poets] private mind (51). This should be read against Blooms sense of this moment as a defensive tactic: The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet (Anxiety, 1415). It may seem that Eliots abjection is replaced by Blooms evasive feint (as though), but in truth there is no genuine loss in either case; rather, there is a counterattack against the tradition (or precursor) that allows one to maintain ones ground. Art never improves, says Eliot (51), a remark that applies as much to the ambitions of the past as to those of the present. If Shakespeare and Homer and the Magdalenian draftsman are never superannuate[d], they apparently do not improve on one another, either.10 And so in Bloom, to continue the passage quoted above, the poets self-humbled ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursors poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also (Anxiety, 15). Whitmans As I Ebbd, for example, reduces the afflatus of the crucial inland far moments in Tintern Abbey and the Intimations Ode. To proclaim, in Eliots famous punch linewhich is apparently supercilious toward the notion of our intellectual progressthat, precisely, the dead are what we know, is not in fact to deny that we know so much more than they did (52). As to ascesis, the moment in which the poet in Bloom yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment (Anxiety, 15), it is
10 Cf. Bloom: The caveman who traced the outline of an animal upon the rock always retraced a precursors outline (Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976], 4).

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quite specifically the triumphal idea toward which Eliots essay is driving: The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality (53). Of course, one can read this too as self-abasement before tradition, before something greater, confusing ascesis with kenosis just as Bloom fears they will be confused (Anxiety, 15). But to see how misleading this interpretation is, one needs to read Eliots doctrine of impersonality back into Keatss letters, whence it comes. The poet, alone of all beings, lacks an identity and feels pressed upon even by infants in a nursery, yet the ethereal chemistry of the impersonal Man of Genius is greater than the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime of the Man of Power. The poetry of power lacks the snailhorn sensitivity of true reflection, which is partly the assimilative capaciousness of Eliots impersonal appropriator of tradition; the poetry of power galumphs ponderously, even if John Milton wrote it (as Keats decided in breaking off Hyperion), whereas the poetry of genius is precisely that: as Eliot puts it, a finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations (5354). This is all very different from Blooms strong poet, whose monstrous and rapacious ego is his power, but not very different from the strong poets ascesis, the purpose of which, in dwindling, is to separate himself from others (Anxiety, 15). In one sense there is no daemonization in Eliot, because he is truly on the other side of the canonical gulf in declining to think of tradition as a sequence of countersublimities. Later, when concluding the brilliant 1944 essay What Is a Classic? in which the classical element in literature is admired but circumscribed, Eliot marks Virgils farewell to Dante as a moment when Virgil says, I, of myself, discern no further.11 This would seem to expand Eliots taste, as in parts of Four Quartets, to include at least a Christian sublime. But in the essays of The Sacred Wood the sublime is always the galumphing of power. Nevertheless, it is just here that Bloom himself comes to terms with tradition and reencounters Eliot most interestingly: The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precur11 Selected

Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harvest Noonday,

1975), 131.

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sor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work (Anxiety, 15). Suddenly Blooms strong poet, if not Bloom himself, comes face to face with at least one aspect of Eliots impersonal tradition, the mind of Europe, and so on, if only in performing yet another defense, or evasive maneuver. The sublime, the belated poet wants to say, is not a particular height or depth achieved by Longinus or Milton or William Wordsworth but a continuous truth standing behind all of their particular swerves, a truth that can be understood at least in part as the sum of everything that has been written about it: in short, the sublime is a traditional topos that the belated poet can now make new. Eliot, I think, remains a historical critic, despite his simultaneous order and mind of Europe, because we must understand him to have his own theory of influence. His historiography even includes the single moment of fissure, such as Blooms great age before the flood,12 that characterizes most such visions: the dissociation of sensibility in the long eighteenth century. As I have remarked, the inclination toward spatial metaphors is quite widespread in literary history, if only because the past coexists in the historians mind as a symposium of voices. John Dryden, for example, in a proto-Bloomian momentacknowledged by Bloomfrom the Preface to Fables (1700), wonderfully fuses time and space as a matter of lineal descents that are also clans:
Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates, that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that. . . .13

As an implied intimate in the circle of Milton and Edmund Waller, who themselves, like Edmund Spenser, aver mysterious earlier simultaneities, Dryden name-drops his elders (himself by this time near death) to turn what looks like a lineal descent into a clan. There are advantages in this maneuver that may not be available to one of Blooms strong poets.
12 Bloom came to revise his notion of a sharp break before Milton. See, e.g., Map, 77; and Breaking, 15. 13 Quoted from Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), 161.

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How many bards gild the lapses of time, writes the apprentice Keats in an uneven sonnet; unfortunately, he continues, when I sit down to write, they are all babbling in my ear at once. I pretend theyre like the birds and bells I hear outside, so that distance of recognizance bereaves, and once bardsong becomes birdsong, an excellent remedy for the superficially verbal burden of the past, everything is fine.
4
The difference between classic and baroque that rationalizes Wlfflins system and that establishes at once their radical opposition and their total identity is quite simply this: that the classic does not exist . It never existed and can never have existed, for when the classic comes into existence or manifests itself, it does so in the form of existence, which is the baroque.Marshall Brown, Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions

I shall now focus on Eliots spatial trope of a simultaneous order to confront more directly the peculiar way that not just Eliot but literary history in general, spectacularly exemplified by Bloom, at some level negates change rather than positing it. By change, here and henceforth, I mean a single and invariant principle of change as opposed to varied and variable change. If change could itself be subject to change, it would be important to distinguish between change and novelty, as change could then be either programmatically revanchist (as Samuel Johnsons poetry resists the Wartonian norms in vogue and returns to Alexander Pope) or too subtly revisionary to be called new (like many of the best writers working in culinary genres in relation to their predecessors: Raymond Chandler to Dashiel Hammett, Marjorie Allingham to Dorothy Sayers). For strong literary historiographies, however, change is nothing but the appearance of something new, something that is always perforce new in the same way. The Russian formalists, then, to their sorrow owed a great deal more to Charles Darwin than to Karl Marx, so that when in the 1920s, challenged by Leon Trotsky and no doubt sensing the changing atmosphere under Joseph Stalin, they began to reconsider their former taxonomies historically, they invoked the word evolution. Like Bloom, Jurij Tynjanov in On Literary Evolution (1927, a year after Trotskys Literature and Revolution) distinguishes strictly between the poet-as-poet and the poet-as-man. He argues that historical context (Marxs mate-

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rial or environmental base) actually disrupts the expression of those genetic transformations that are begotten upon text by text, transformations that among other things no doubt express social forces (as in Roman Jakobsons referential function):
The prime significance of major social factors is not at all discarded. Rather, it must be elucidated to its full extent through the problem of the evolution of literature. This is in contrast to the establishment of the direct influence of major social factors, which replaces the study of evolution of literature with a study of the modification of literary worksthat is to say, of their deformation.14

That is thus to say: a sudden flood washes away the emergent prehensile thumb or the gene for blue eyes forever, just as a ukase demanding socialist realism forces those who would have been symbolists and futurists to become socialist realists. We see in this bracing distinction between evolution and modification a daemonizing hyperbole similar to Blooms stance in general, but implicitly we also see, anticipating Blooms relation between precursor poem and belated poem, the sense in which the introduction of hitherto nonexistent literary devices is not something that happens but something that has always already happened and hence cannot happen. For the Russian formalists, all the devices of literariness are in any given work, genetically either latent or dominant. Boris Eikhenbaum, who introduced the concept of the dominant as a marker of literary change,15 quotes Viktor Shklovskys Rozanov (1921) to this effect, in language that no doubt deliberately echoes the weak precursor Marx, for whom dominance is also a keyword, rather than Darwin:
Dostoevsky introduced the devices of the dime novel into the mainstream of literature. Each new literary school heralds a revolution, something like the appearance of a new class. But, of course, this is only an analogy. The vanquished line is not obliterated, it does not cease to exist. It is only knocked from the crest; it lies dormant and may again arise as a perennial contender for the throne. (Eikhenbaum, 1085)
14 Quoted from David H. Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1998), 735. 15 Quoted from Boris Eikhenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1078.

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History thus consists essentially in describing a succession of dominants ebbing and flowing among an unchanging simultaneity of devices, and that is why the formalists, like modernists everywhere, focused their attention on Making It New, in an agon of texts rather than poetic psyches. After 1917 one was inclined to call it, as Tynjanov did, a struggle (1084). Yet what could be new, if each text, according to Tynjanov in Dostoevsky and Gogol , responds to its predecessor as a parody (Eikhenbaum, 1084)? Tynjanovs treatment of Fyodor Dostoevskys parody of Nikolai Gogol, writes Eikhenbaum, was overshadowed by a whole theory of parody, a theory of parody as a stylistic device (stylized parody) and as one of the manifestations (having great literary-historical significance) of the dialectical development of literary groups (1084). We naturally feel that he is stretching a useful term beyond utility, but we have our own stretched term, owing in large part to Bloom: the verb to trope. A good formalist history (this expression is certainly not the oxymoron it is often said to be) would be positively phantasmagoric, yet at the same time it would be the description of a single invariant and invariable move. The history of a chess game, with its unexpected moves, would be far more dynamicunless, indeed, the opponents answer, or counter, were viewed as parody. To anticipate my concluding remarks about Bloom: the historiographical moment in abstracto always isolates a constant: a move is never anything other than a move, distanced from what Samuel Beckett called the misfortune of beginning and staving off, like Blooms lie against time, the inevitability of the endgame. But the historical analysis of moves reintroduces change, not as trope but as a variety of tropes (four in Kenneth Burke or Hayden White, six in Bloom, sometimes as many as two in Paul de Man), with each variety harboring a finite but copious number of possibilities. Bakhtins historiography in revision of the formalists is perforce, like Marxs, teleological and is maintained as a corrective to the formalist notion of resurgent devices: like the rise of a more progressive class, the dialogic novel irreversibly becomes the dominant and squeezes feudal and allegedly monoglossal forms (epic and lyric) to the periphery. This argument applies with special force to the early nineteenth century, when, as Bakhtin shows, the novel novelizes the vocabulary and style of much poetry, especially that of Aleksandr Pushkin, Heinrich

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Heine, and the carnivalesque Byron of Beppo and its sequels, with their talk of macassar oil and John Harrisons timepieces. (Bakhtins strong precursor in this argument, every bit as much as Eliot is Blooms, is the Friedrich Schlegel of Gesprch ber die Poesie.) Ironically, this period is also the floruit of Blooms Visionary Company, the great Romantics, who could well be said (and have been said) to resist the rising novel as vigorously as they resist their strong precursors and arguably, at least in the case of Wordsworth and Keats, not to mention Byron, to resist the novel only in part. Even in Shelley, when Venus sells her boat to Apollo or when the speaker of Epipsychidion says that he has bought a trophy house in the Cyclades and lovingly details its furnishings (books and instruments of music) like a playboy inviting a starlet for the weekend, there is a whiff of the novel. Bakhtin wants to suggest, then, that something like the single fissure of strong historiographies (Virginia Woolfs on or about December 1910 human character changed) comes at this moment; hence one is shocked to find, in Epic and Novel, that the dialogic moment passes back through Menippean satire (and of course Franois Rabelais elsewhere) to the Socratic dialogues. Like the inferred swerves from unknown predecessors in the writings of Blooms J or Homer, novelization in Bakhtin has always already happened. So it is also, one may say in passing, with Walter Benjamins history of art as de-auraticization. The aesthetic of decoupage and suture distractedly received in the age of mechanical reproducibility is preceded by the commodified modernism of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the Paris Arcades, which is preceded in turn by the aesthetic of the allegorical fragment in baroque tragedy. It is somewhat harder to generalize about the historiography of Jauss, whose thoughts about horizon change emerge not just from his reading of Roman Ingarden, Gadamer, and the Russian formalists but also from the empirical study of reception and change in medieval literature. For Jauss, texts that make a difference in the future coexist temporally with texts that may at the time seem even more transgressiveas Georges Feydeaus Fanny seems more transgressive than Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary from the standpoint of prurience alonebut contain no authentic innovation, such as the deadpan voice of Flauberts style indirect libre . I have always been struck by the resemblance between the historiographical strategies of Jauss and

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Bloom, seemingly unrelated as they may be. In the first place, Jauss makes clear in the fifth section of his pamphlet Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft that to bring about a change in the aesthetic horizon of the moment one must ultimately be a writer: The critic who judges a new work, the writer who conceives of his work in light of positive or negative norms of an earlier work, and the literary historian who classifies a work in its tradition and explains it historically are first simply readers before their reflexive relationship to literature can become productive again (quoted in Richter, 935). In thus introducing the reader, Jauss makes intertextual relations dynamic, like Ingarden or Gadamer, but he goes beyond this position, anticipating Bloom, by showing that the only reading that matters for a history of change is ultimately reflected in writing. Sales demographics and studies of library circulation of the sort that were pioneered by Q. D. Leavis and that are much in practice again today are, on this view, irrelevant to anything but the study of a synchronic momentthe moment, for example, in which Feydeau and Flaubert published simultaneously or in which, according to Jane Tompkins and others, Susan Townsend Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe need to be reconsidered because they outsold Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, just as W. L. Bowles and Charlotte Smith outsold William Blake.16 If one claims in Jaussian terms that synchronic studies of this sort will almost certainly arise from historicist motives but cannot be historical, then one sees that Jauss is in fact closer to Bloom than to most theorists of reader response. Jauss would not have had to affix a criterion of value to his mechanism of change. His predecessors the formalists claimed on scientific grounds to have no interest in aesthetic valuation, and just because on the contrary they can easily be shown to have pronounced tastes that anticipate his, it does not follow that he would have needed to say, The way in which a literary work, at the historical moment of its appearance, satisfies, surpasses, disappoints or refutes the expectations of its
be sure, insofar as Warner and Stowe exerted long-term influence, we are concerned with their influence on readers as writers (including the critics who take them up in the modern academy and define a sentimental tradition), and we return to Jausss paradigm. The influence of Bowles on Coleridge and Smith on Wordsworth is also, of course, greater than Blakes on any writer until Algernon Charles Swinburne.
16 To

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first audience obviously provides a criterion for the determination of its aesthetic value (quoted in Richter, 940). Indeed, it comes almost as a surprise that Jauss introduces an evaluative factor. Yet one needs to realize that even if it is not appreciated evaluatively, the criterion of change must remain his invariant. Jauss attempts to resist this conclusion, claiming in disagreement with Tynjanov that the one-sided canonization of change requires a correction (quoted in Richter, 946). This disagreement hinges, at first blush mystifyingly, on Jausss crude misreading of the conclusion of Tynjanovs essay On Literary Evolution. The connection between literary evolution and social change, pronounces Jauss, does not vanish from the face of the earth through its mere negation (quoted in Richter, 947). But Tynjanov made no such negation. The prime significance of major social factors is not at all discarded, he said. Why does Jauss suppress the referential function in Tynjanov, apparently to challenge the link between value and change? It is a peculiar moment that we can explain only if we take Jauss to presume that Tynjanov saw any sort of social modification of art as an inhibition of change and hence as an aesthetic impediment. As I have said, I suspect that in 1927 Tynjanov had this sort of inhibition exclusively in mind, though I cannot prove it. But modification as inhibition is not a necessary part of his formula (it would be just as easy to say that the coming imposition of socialist realism radically changes conventions that would otherwise have gone on wearing themselves out), and what this evidence of a misprision bordering on non sequitur reveals is Jausss own inflexibility. Whether an invariant criterion of novelty is aesthetic or historiographical makes little difference, because after all such a criterion appears to be a simple historiographical necessity. Jausss complex methodological framework allows us to recognize that novelty does not just happen when it appears but is a phenomenon whose emergence as an influence is subject to delays, detours, and bypaths of reception. But this is only to say, in effect, that Blake had to wait for William Butler Yeats, or that Laurence Sterne had to wait for the modernists, and is anticipated in any case (as two later footnotes seem to admit [Richter, 949n, 950n]) by Jakobsons modification of synchronic cross sections in Linguistics and Poetics to include diachronic elements (archaic and anticipatory). All such collateral inheritances are entailed in what Bloom means in saying that poets find each other. The

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logic of Jausss position thus resembles that of anyone who generalizes about history, especially if we understand history as that which exists to instruct the present by surprising itaesthetically, again, or otherwise: For progress in science as for that in the experience of life, the most important moment is the disappointment of expectations (quoted in Richter, 952). In this, perhaps, Jauss would seem to differ from Gadamer, wholike Eliotchampioned tradition and the classical and spoke of the fusion (Verschmelzung) of horizons rather than of their change (Wandel ). His distrust of innovations that would disrupt or preclude the possibility of understanding, and also his interest in cultural transmission and survival rather than in literary history, places Gadamer at a distance more remote from Bloom than that of Jauss. Gadamers reader is not necessarily a writer and has decidedly limited powers of divination. Yet Gadamer too, again like Eliot, and following Martin Heidegger in his belief that hermeneutic circles not too abyssal can be negotiated, has his own principle of change. Because, as in Heideg ger, we approach the text of the past with fore-meanings from our own horizon, we cannot learn anything without testing these prejudices: How do we discover that there is a difference between our own customary usage and that of the text? I think we must say that it is generally the experience of being pulled up short by the text.17 In two ways, then, neither of which is in any sense what Bloom would call strong, Gadamers reader is a misreader. First, a reader may remain oblivious to the anomaly, the element of pastness, that should induce the necessary double take. This reader relaxes unchallenged within a present personal and ideological horizon. Second, the reader who is alert enough to be pulled up short then has to be able to enter the circle of interpretation, as Heidegger says, in the right way. Knowing that entering in the right way is not easy makes Gadamer a traditionalist. Never able to bracket fully the prejudice of a contemporary horizon, the reader in quest of correct understanding must bring that horizon into a constructive question-and-response relation with a horizon recognized as other. The unlikelihood that this process can be accomplished perfectly imposes the logic of misreading on cultural
Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. Garret Burden and John Cumming (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 237.
17 Hans-Georg

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transmission, much to the disapproval of historicists like Emilio Betti, E. D. Hirsch, and even Jrgen Habermas, who believe that personal horizons can be fully or at least sufficiently bracketed. The strong poet, then, is someone who magnifies the hermeneutic drama of merging horizons by converting the philological attempt to understand the past into the creative attempt to deny it. Insofar as he finds drama in history at all, thenand he doesGadamer too works with an invariant criterion of change.
5
He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not Be noble to myself!Antony and Cleopatra , 5.2.19192

The possibility that change could change is what remains out of play in all the historians I have considered while developing a framework for addressing Blooms historiography. I have wanted to celebrate rather than to attack his approach to literary history by showing that it is not merely idiosyncratic or aberrant but comparable in strength, to borrow his word yet again, to the arguments of those who have made the boldest influential arguments about literary history over the last century. And Blooms model of interpoetic relations harbors the same counter intuitive refusal of change as theirs. In all these historians, whether modernist, Marxist, formalist, or hermeneutic, change could have been of any kind, and itself would change, were it not for its fixed structural orientation to some default. If it is Hayden Whites hyperbole, following Burke rather than Bloom, that historiography is shaped by one or another of only four tropes, mine seems to be that it is shaped by only one: synecdoche. In Blooms case, the invariability principle can be put as follows: to misread strongly is to imagine oneself to have emptied out the afflatus or plenitude of the precursor, yet that misreading is itself nothing other than the belief that the precursor has not already performed this swerve with respect to a precursor (a belief that must be false, or it would not be a misreading) and so on back to the J-Text and its precursor. Like Satan, poetry knows no time when it was not as now. Or, where it was, there I shall be: Freud, unlike Nietzsche and Derrida, knows that precursors become absorbed into the id and not into the superego (Map, 50). True, Bloom frequently laments a kind of

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entropy or attrition of strength, a steady if stubbornly resisted decline from Milton to John Ashbery (or, more recently, from Shakespeare to Sigmund Freud), but this decline has proved difficult for him to characterize in the terms of his interpoetic dynamic. Ashbery at times still writes the most characteristic Wallace Stevens, who at times writes Whitman or Shelley, and so on. Bloom would resist the notion that his historiography is synecdochic. That term is what he would use to describe the simultaneous order in relation to poems that he finds promoted in Eliot and Frye. Yet even though he insists that we reduceif at allto another poem. The meaning of a poem can only be another poem (Anxiety, 94; this is a metaphorical relation), the infinite regress of the poet-poet relation does, after all, take in the entire sweep of tradition, as much so as Shelleys great cyclic poem or Eliots simultaneous order. In Blooms defense, however, the implicit totality of his successive scenes of instruction does not collapse into the kind of spatial trope he disapproves of. The whole remains a temporal line, or arc, and reveals its Kierkegaardian mode of repeating forward only when we remember its stages in turn: Milton to Blake and Wordsworth, Blake to Yeats, Wordsworth to Stevens, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman to Hart Crane and Stevens, among other lineal descents. These agonistic struggles, moreover, form branching patterns. Miltons strength in Blake is very different from his strength in Wordsworth, or again in Shelley. It cannot be the same to say that the meaning of Adonais is Lycidas and to say that the meaning of the Intimations Ode is Lycidas, yet both seem worthwhile statements to any adept in Bloomian misreading. I think that to his credit Bloom forces us to invent a hybrid trope to characterize his version of the historiographical moment: hyperbolic synecdoche. The Map or spreadsheet of Misprision (see Map, 84; Poetry and Repression , 1) is in itself purely synecdochic because, as the map itself indicatesfollowing Burke in the appendix to The Grammar of Motivesit is a re-presentation (my hyphen added). But it is the variability in the influence relation that becomes at once more plausible and more hyperbolic: plausible because we really do observe that Milton overpowers his worthy precursor Spenser (something that does not often happen again), hyperbolic because such localized comparisons introduce the aesthetic relation (in a poets pantheon) between higher

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and lower, reflecting the typical images, high and low, for hyperbole or litotes as indicated on the Map. Already, then, without to any extent becoming falsifiably empirical, the variability of change through time that is known to common sense, and that is reflected in the fact that a decent candidate for graduate school cannot be under a delusion in recognizing differences between Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson on an exam, begins to reappear. Yet the question lingers whether change can be registered with the precision to which even speculative criticism ought to aspire unless it attends to verbal cues. It would perhaps tax our hypothetical advanced student to quote The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves alongside And murmuring of innumerable bees, but it would reward the imagination, I think, to show that these related murmurs give off very different kinds of hum. In the Ode to a Nightingale Keats tropes the tradition of Virgils bees, setting the stage for Emily Dickinsons buzzing fly while displacing the drowsiness of low-frequency sound from the tradition of pastoral otium. His murmur reflects the indistinctness of life-sound, the hum between the ears, and is experienced as one of the poems successive opiates taken to ward off the pain and suffering of hungry generations. Its bid for universality is pointedly classless and hence perhaps an aspect of bourgeois ideology. Tennysons murmur ratchets the class status of outdoor sounds back up to something like the classical norm. With its immemorial elms, this is a manorial park, not a tangled landscape, and the bees intone a cultivated leisure, with Tennysons deft ear (honed by Keatss odes) cleverly linking the industry of the bees with his own skill by way of a sweeter unheard word, mellifluity. (Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet.) Whether in Blooms terms the meaning of Tennysons Song (Come down, O maid) is nothing other than the Ode to a Nightingale (Already with thee!) is a question that could be elaborated more than at first appears, but I would insist again that the question arises by way of allusion.18 And so it is with much of the finest criticism of Bloom himself,
18 See the comparable remarks I have made about these passages in The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language, MLQ 54 (1993): 17182, rpt. in Paul H. Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 6769.

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despite his disdain for microscopy. His commentary is never more convincingly historical than when it pursues a persisting image: the chariot of Ezekiel, culminating in The Triumph of Life ; the word blank (antithetically derived from bhel, or black), culminating in the Intimations Ode and The Prelude (or of course Moby Dick and Stevenss Snow Man); and Homers generations of leaves, paraded through Virgil, Dante, Milton, and the Romantics, culminating (like the blank) in Stevenss Domination of Black and in Auroras of Autumn . These are the interpretive high-wire acts that everyone remembers in Bloomprior, that is, to the readings of Shakespeares charactersbut the verbal basis of insight is at work elsewhere in subtle ways. In Agon, for example, speaking of criticism, not poetry, he writes of the way in which every word in a critics vocabulary should swerve from inherited words: When Emerson speaks of a poem he does not mean what Coleridge meant, but something well under way to what Whitman wanted to mean in saying that the United States were themselves the greatest poem.19 The notion of swerve here is crucially ambiguous; it can mean either choosing other words (in this case history has offered text!) or changing the meaning of a given word, as in the example itself. Either way, however, the point of departure remains a verbal cue: to an equal degree both the text of Blooms colleagues and the poem of Emerson are tropes on Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem. As de Man was the first to point out and as I now reiterate, not for my part to identify a blindness but merely to sharpen one aspect of Blooms insight into literary history, for the most part, [Blooms] examples are a priori assertions of influence based on verbal and thematic echoes.20 Thematic echo metaphorizes the notion of echo so boldly that it is hard to know how to hear it, yet it identifies just the liminal space between words and concepts that Bloom tends to occupy. De Mans critique, from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than natural or psychological models (274), is I think fully answered by Bloom from A Map

19 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 21. 20 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism , 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 268.

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of Misreading on, once he has introduced tropes to go with the revisionary ratios. Yet it may be the very pressure of this critique that returns Bloom to words more decisively than he can acknowledge.
6
Yet Edmund was beloved.King Lear, 5.3.240

A last remark on Blooms Shakespeare breakthrough, which to him is at least the second most important idea of his career, and at most the idea that more truly humanizes what he tried to do in the books about the psyche of the strong poet. He turns in this later work to the psyche of characters in relation to themselves, not of poets in relation to other poets. Bloom says that his conversion experience related to Shakespeare had to do with the moment at which Edmund in King Lear says, Yet Edmund was beloved, and then reflects on the oddity of being loved so passionately by two monstrous women who seemed as incapable of love as he, leading to the sense that there was something in him that he was not aware of and thence to the sudden urge, during his own death throes, to reverse his warrant for the death of Cordelia. Theres nothing like that in literature before Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then.21 What has happened here? Edmund as I see him in Blooms reading is a strong poet, like Miltons Satan, the character whose inwardness inspires Romanticism. But Edmunds inwardness in Blooms view is different from Satans. Satan is a strong misreader of God. It is his tragedy and limitation that he fails either to read or to misread himself and hence degenerates into a bogey as the poem advances. Edmund misreads himself as his own strong precursor. That is just why the key to Shakespeares originality (sometimes Bloom refers it back to moments in Geoffrey Chaucer) is his power of making characters change as a result of reading themselves. Even in the casual interview just quoted Bloom insists that what interests Edmund is specifically his own wordsYet Edmund was belovedas they prompt reflection. Shakespeares characters keep
Bloom: The Art of Criticism No. 1, interview by Antonio Weiss, Paris Review, no. 118 (1991): 210.
21 Harold

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reading what they have said so far;22 they are their own poem, and they revise it, the epic forms of this revisionary self-reading being the characters of Hamlet and Falstaff. An obvious response is that with the otherness of a competitor now finally eliminated,23 the solipsism of strong misreading is complete and unimpeded. But I would agree with Bloom that this new emphasis is another way, and every bit as flexible a way, of talking about the mind in evolution. No doubt we are saddened to think that we learn mainly from ourselves, that like Socrates or Shakespeares Malcolm we know all vices in ourselves or that like Sherlock Holmes we catch the criminal because we have only to look in the mirror to know what he would do, but even in the face of the pieties about other minds that all of us do try to honor as a matter of civility, we still navigate primarily with selfknowledge. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was the Bloomian Coleridge who insisted that Shakespeare acquired his knowledge of humanity not from experience but from his own imagination. Whether our misreading of ourselves can really amount to a revision of ourselves is of course another matter, as unlikely indeed as it is in the case of belated poems. Edmund has always talked about himself as natural, a force of nature whose illegitimacy has secured him an unblinkered relation to the world, and in this there is the seed of something to be valued, something that for better or worse, in all times and places, has made rogues beloved. No doubt Edmund is worse than a rogue, but he is still also a rogue. Hence in being so astonished that he could be loved, Edmund misreads himself, and his leniency toward Cordelia is not so much a conversion as a return of the same. The precursor poem is

22 For another early version of this idea see Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44. 23 In a trenchant neopragmatist notice of Blooms Western Canon that soon moves away from Bloom to distantly related concerns, Frances Ferguson argues that agonistic competition must require a belief in other minds that is at variance with the solipsism of the strong poet (Canons, Poetics, and Social Value: Jeremy Bentham and How to Do Things with People, Modern Language Notes 110 [1995]: 1151). To this, one could reply that the solipsism of strength can only repress, never nullify, that with which it competes; the repression is solipsistic, but the repressed is not. Just so, it is the other minds within the psyches of Shakespearean characters thator so Bloom argueseffect change.

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inexorable, here as hitherto, in ways that Bloom no longer discusses. But the representation of conversion is at least insisted on, as was the strength of poets misreadings in the books about influence, and both moments in Blooms career testify eloquently to the minds impatience with its limits.

Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are A Defense of Poetry: Reections on the Occasion of Writing (1995), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (2000), and Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008). His essay The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language appeared in the March 1993 issue of MLQ.

Harold Bloom in his anxiety of influence phase is often thought to insist on an intertextual dynamic that is ahistorical. This view might seem to be confirmed by comparison with the text of Blooms strong precursor, T. S. Eliots Tradition and the Individual Talent. The reason for this widespread response to Bloomand to Eliotis that although Bloom is as authentic a historian of literature as Hans-Georg Gadamer, as the late Russian formalists (e.g., Jurij Tynjanov), or as Hans Robert Jauss, he shares with all these figures a sense of a fundamental and unchanging intertextual dynamic that overrides conditions imposed by broader historical or even literary change. The essay argues that Blooms theory does in fact accommodate change just insofar as it belies his own claim that he is not interested in narrowly verbal allusion. It shows that even in Blooms most broadly imaginative moments, relations with past texts are inspired by verbal signals.