How to Live with the Infinite Regress

of Strong Misreading

Paul H. Fry

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 rep-
etitious synchronic rhetoric of the aporia.1 Bloom himself had indi-
cated, 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 get-
ting beyond the paradox that curiously haunts the strongest literary
historiographies: namely, that the guiding principle of the most inci-
sive 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
438 MLQ December 2008

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 lat-
ter 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 misread-
ing 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 Con-

flict (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 24.

5 Blooms participation in this has been pointed out as a side issue most con-

structively by Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London: Rout-
ledge, 1988), 17.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 439

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 particu-
lar 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 confes-
sional 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 metaphysi-
cal 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 Achi-
tophel 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.

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 Herme-
neutics and the Contemporary Theories of Textuality, Modern Philology 85 [1987]:
72).
440 MLQ December 2008

Anxiety of Influence, is the Eliot of Tradition and the Individual Tal-

ent (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, oblivi-
ous 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 power-
fully revisionary in what I take to be the strongest Bloomian sense: ulti-
mate 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 insuf-
ficient 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.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 441

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.

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 understand-
ing 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 tra-
dition and antitraditionalismof which the latter is not necessarily
the same as romanticism, just as the former may diverge from clas-
sicism. 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 suc-
cessor 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 can-

8 See,
e.g., Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 30.
442 MLQ December 2008

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 anti-
quarianism (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 philol-
ogy, 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 Emp-
sons poetry (more than of Eliots poetry) to remain vital.
It will be clear already that Eliot sees the individual talents rela-
tion 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
9 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1973), 16.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 443

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 impor-
tant 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 (Anxi-
ety, 1415). It may seem that Eliots abjection is replaced by Blooms eva-
sive feint (as though), but in truth there is no genuine loss in either
case; rather, there is a counterattack against the tradition (or precur-
sor) 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 per-
formed 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 intel-
lectual 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).
444 MLQ December 2008

quite specifically the triumphal idea toward which Eliots essay is driv-
ing: 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 (Anxi-
ety, 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 assimi-
lative 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 combi-
nations (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 bril-
liant 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 precur-

11 Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harvest Noonday,
1975), 131.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 445

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 particu-
lar 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 simultanei-
ties, 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.

446 MLQ December 2008

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.

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 var-
ied 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 pre-
decessors: Raymond Chandler to Dashiel Hammett, Marjorie Alling-
ham 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 atmo-
sphere 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-
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 447

rial or environmental base) actually disrupts the expression of those

genetic transformations that are begotten upon text by text, transfor-
mations 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 prehen-
sile thumb or the gene for blue eyes forever, just as a ukase demand-
ing socialist realism forces those who would have been symbolists and
futurists to become socialist realists.
We see in this bracing distinction between evolution and modifi-
cation a daemonizing hyperbole similar to Blooms stance in general,
but implicitly we also see, anticipating Blooms relation between pre-
cursor 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 hap-
pen. 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 lan-
guage 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 main-
stream 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 Con-

temporary 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.
448 MLQ December 2008

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 Dosto-
evsky 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 formal-
ist 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 periph-
ery. 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
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 449

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 some-
thing 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 medi-
eval 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 pruri-
ence alonebut contain no authentic innovation, such as the dead-
pan voice of Flauberts style indirect libre. I have always been struck by
the resemblance between the historiographical strategies of Jauss and
450 MLQ December 2008

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 histori-
cally are first simply readers before their reflexive relationship to litera-
ture 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 stud-
ies 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 mecha-
nism 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 appear-
ance, satisfies, surpasses, disappoints or refutes the expectations of its
16 Tobe 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.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 451

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 con-
clusion, 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 Evolu-
tion. 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 exclu-
sively 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 conven-
tions 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 phenom-
enon 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 syn-
chronic 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
452 MLQ December 2008

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 trans-
mission 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 preju-
dices: 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. Know-
ing that entering in the right way is not easy makes Gadamer a tradi-
tionalist. 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 hori-
zon recognized as other. The unlikelihood that this process can be
accomplished perfectly imposes the logic of misreading on cultural
17 Hans-GeorgGadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Burden and John Cum-
ming (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 237.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 453

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 his-
tory at all, thenand he doesGadamer too works with an invariant
criterion of change.

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 bold-
est 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, follow-
ing 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
454 MLQ December 2008

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 char-
acterize 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 synec-
dochic. 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 rela-
tion 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 instruc-
tion does not collapse into the kind of spatial trope he disapproves of.
The whole remains a temporal line, or arc, and reveals its Kierkegaard-
ian 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 Ste-
vens, 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 worth-
while 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 vari-
ability in the influence relation that becomes at once more plausible
and more hyperbolic: plausible because we really do observe that Mil-
ton 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
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 455

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 Dick-
insons 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 expe-
rienced 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 Nightin-
gale (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.
456 MLQ December 2008

despite his disdain for microscopy. His commentary is never more con-
vincingly historical than when it pursues a persisting image: the chariot
of Ezekiel, culminating in The Triumph of Life; the word blank (antitheti-
cally 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 Domi-
nation 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 crit-
ics vocabulary should swerve from inherited words: When Emerson
speaks of a poem he does not mean what Coleridge meant, but some-
thing 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 mean-
ing 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 the-
matic 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 psycho-
logical models (274), is I think fully answered by Bloom from A Map

19 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1982), 21.

20 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criti-

cism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 268.

Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 457

of Misreading on, once he has introduced tropes to go with the revision-

ary ratios. Yet it may be the very pressure of this critique that returns
Bloom to words more decisively than he can acknowledge.

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 them-
selves. 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

21 Harold
Bloom: The Art of Criticism No. 1, interview by Antonio Weiss, Paris
Review, no. 118 (1991): 210.
458 MLQ December 2008

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 char-
acters 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 self-
knowledge. 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 mis-
reading 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 Ben-
tham 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.
Fry Infinite Regress of Strong Misreading 459

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: Reflections 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 Litera-
ture: 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.