The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life [Underlinings pages 9-49]

Underlinings pages 9-49:

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life 

By Harold Bloom

(2011, Yale University Press)

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PRAELUDIUM

....My book isolates literary melancholy as the agon of influence....

....Shakespeare plainly is the writer of writers, and his influence upon himself has become my obsessive concern.

....Whitman ....is the strongest and most original writer of the Evening Land.

....In one's eightieth year, it is difficult to separate learning from teaching, writing from reading. 

      Literary criticism, as I learned from Walter Pater, ought to consist of acts of appreciation. This book primarily is an appreciation, on a scale I will not again attempt. In his conclusion to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton urges: "Be not solitary, be not idle." Samuel Johnson says the same. We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

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THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS A CRITIC

Literary Love

....proleptic(Adjective) Describes an event as having been assigned too early a date. proleptic(Adjective) Anticipating and answering objections before they have been raised; procataleptic.

....If women and men initially become poets by a second birth, my own sense of being twice-born made me an incipient critic.

....Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place literary, which is to say personal and passionate.

....it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

....At ten to twelve years of age, I read for the lustres, in Emerson's phrase.

....influence was the inevitable problem for me to solve if I could. Existing accounts of influence seemed to me mere source study, and I became puzzled that nearly every critic I encountered assumed idealistically that literary influence was a benign process.

....I could recognize that I had been thinking it a long time, not always consciously.

....Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still.

....So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities.

....a stand against the great awakening of the late sixties and early seventies.

....The Anxiety of Influence, published in January 1973, is a brief, gnomic theory of poetry as poetry, free of all history except literary biography. It is a hard read, even for me, because it is tense with anxious expectations, prompted by signs of the times, which it avoids mentioning. Faith in the aesthetic, in the tradition of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, is the little book's credo, but there is an undersong of foreboding, informed by the influence of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud. I did not consciously realize this then, but my meditation upon poetic influence now seems to me also an attempt to forge a weapon against the gathering storm of ideology that soon would sweep away many of my students.

....Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place literary, which is to say personal and passionate.

....it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

....I follow Kant in believing that the aesthetic demands deep subjectivity and is beyond the reach of ideology.

....Creative misreading was the prime subject

....Obsessed with imaginative literature, I trust my insights with regard to it, but know little of the law or of the public sphere.

....I strive here for a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking about influence.

....Influence anxiety, in literature, need not be an affect in the writer who arrives late in a tradition. It always is an anxiety achieved in a literary work, whether or not its author ever felt it.

....Ulysses and Finnegans Wake manifest considerable belatedness, more in relation to Shakespeare than to Dante. Influence anxiety exists between poems and not between persons.

....Temperament and circumstances determine whether a later poet feels anxiety at whatever level of consciousness.

....All that matters for interpretation is the revisionary relationship between poems, as manifested in tropes, images, diction, syntax, grammar, metric, poetic stance.

....greatness ensues from giving inevitable expression to a fresh anxiety.

....what is the origin of that light in a poem, play, story, novel? It is outside the writer, and stems from a precursor, who can be a composite figure. In regard to the precursor, creative freedom can be evasion but not flight. There must be agon, a struggle for supremacy, or at least for holding off imaginative death.

....Norman Austin, commenting upon Sophocles in Arion (2006), observes that "ancient poetry was dominated by an agonistic spirit that has hardly ever seen its equal. Athlete competed with athlete; rhapsode with rhapsode; dramatist with dramatist, with all the competitions held as great public festivals." Western culture remains essentially Greek, since the rival Hebrew component has vanished into Christianity, itself indebted to the Greek

genius. Plato and the Athenian dramatists had to confront Homer as their precursor, which is to take on the unvanquishable, even if you are Aeschylus. Our Homer is Shakespeare, who is unavoidable....

....I follow Kant in believing that the aesthetic demands deep subjectivity and is beyond the reach of ideology....

....Ulysses and Finnegans Wake manifest considerable belatedness, more in relation to Shakespeare than to Dante. Influence anxiety exists between poems....

....Temperament and circumstances determine whether a later poet feels anxiety at whatever level of consciousness.

....All that matters for interpretation is the revisionary relationship between poems, as manifested in tropes, images, diction, syntax, grammar, metric, poetic stance.

....greatness ensues from giving inevitable expression to a fresh anxiety.

....what is the origin of that light in a poem, play, story, novel? It is outside the writer, and stems from a precursor, who can be a composite figure. In regard to the precursor, creative freedom can be evasion but not flight. There must be agon, a struggle for supremacy, or at least for holding off imaginative death.

....Norman Austin, commenting upon Sophocles in Arion (2006), observes that "ancient poetry was dominated by an agonistic spirit that has hardly ever seen its equal. Athlete competed with athlete; rhapsode with rhapsode; dramatist with dramatist, with all the competitions held as great public festivals." Western culture remains essentially Greek, since the rival Hebrew component has vanished into Christianity, itself indebted to the Greek genius. Plato and the Athenian dramatists had to confront Homer as their precursor, which is to take on the unvanquishable, even if you are Aeschylus. Our Homer is Shakespeare, who is unavoidable.

....Much seemed to depend on the idea of literary influence as a seamless and friendly mode of transmission, a gift graciously bestowed and gratefully received. The Anxiety of Influence also inspired certain marginalized groups to assert their moral superiority. For decades, I was informed that women and homosexual writers entered no contest but cooperated in a community of love. Frequently I was assured that black, Hispanic, and Asian literary artists too rose above mere competition. Agon was apparently a pathology confined to white heterosexual males.

....In the wake of French theorists of culture like the historian Michel Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the world of letters is most often portrayed as a Hobbesian realm of pure strategy and strife. Bourdieu reduces Flaubert's literary achievement to the great novelist's almost martial ability to assess his literary competitors' weaknesses and strengths and position himself accordingly.

....I do not believe that literary relationships can be reduced to a naked quest for worldly power, though they may in some cases include such ambitions. The stakes in these struggles, for strong poets, are always literary.

....I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.

....Emerson said that Shakespeare wrote the text of modern life, which prompted me to the widely misunderstood assertion that Shakespeare invented us. We would have been here anyway, of course, but without Shakespeare we would not have seen ourselves as what we are.

....I seek here to guide readers though some of the "endless labyrinth of linkages that makes up the stuff of art."

....My ways of writing about literary influence have been widely regarded as relying upon Freud's Oedipus complex. But that is just wrong, as I have explained before, to little avail. Freud's Hamlet complex is far closer, or even better, your Hamlet complex and mine. Hamlet's deepest struggles are with Shakespeare and with the Ghost, who was played by the dramatist. The agon between Hamlet and his creator was the subject of a brief book I published in 2003, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. There my concern was the hidden combat with the father's spirit for

....To unname the precursor while earning one's own name is the quest of strong or severe poets. The transmutation of Walter Whitman, Jr., into Walt was accompanied by the American bard's ambivalent discipleship to Emerson. Never a transcendentalist, Whitman indeed was an Epicurean materialist: "The what is unknowable."

....Forty years and more into my explication of influence, I still had not clarified my idea of the poet-in-a-poet. But I think I can manage it now, galvanized in part by the New Cynicism's reductio of all literary relationships to base self-interest.

....What I mean by the poet-in-a-poet is that which, even in the greatest of poems— King Lear or Paradise Lost —is poetry itself and not something else.

.....The psyche is the empirical self or rational soul, while the divine daimon is an occult self or nonrational soul.

....The question is, Why is poetry poetry and not something else, be it history, ideology, politics, or psychology? Influence, which figures everywhere in life, becomes intensified in poetry. It is the only true context for the strong poem because it is the element in which authentic poetry dwells.

....Influence stalks us all as influenza and we can suffer an anguish of contamination whether we are partakers of influence or victims of influenza.

....Like Shakespeare, by influence Shelley means inspiration.

....yet he knew from experience the double nature of influence: love for the poetry of Wordsworth and a strong ambivalence toward a poem like "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."

....There are strong misreadings and weak misreadings, but correct readings are not possible if a literary work is sublime enough.

....The more powerful a literary artifice, the more it relies upon figurative language. That is the cornerstone of The Anatomy of Influence, as of all my other ventures into criticism. Imaginative literature is figurative or metaphoric. And in talking or writing about a poem or novel, we ourselves resort to figuration.

.....To practice criticism, properly so-called, is to think poetically about poetic thinking.

....I prefer the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on anxiety to Freud, but Anna Freud mapped the mechanisms of defense, and my accounts of influence are indebted to her. Anna's father defined anxiety as angst vor etwas, or "anxious expectations."

....I define influence here as literary love tempered by defense 

....This book charts varieties of defense, from repression to appropriation, through many different literary relationships, from John Milton through James Merrill.

....our two towering precursors, Shakespeare and Whitman—with both the defenses they employed and those they engendered in others.

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SUBLIME STRANGENESS

....A sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author's "nobility" of mind to enlarge its reader as well. To be a Longinian critic, for Wimsatt, however, was to flout a key tenet of the New Criticism, the tradition of which he was himself a fierce proponent.

.....The meaning of the so-called "critical object" was to be found only within the object itself; information about the life of its author or the reactions of its readers was deemed merely misleading.

.....1949, "The Affective Fallacy" launched a major assault on the then pervasive belief that the meaning and value of a literary work could be apprehended by "its results in the mind of its audience."

....strong critics and strong readers know we cannot understand literature, great literature, if we deny authentic literary love to writers or readers. Sublime literature demands an emotional not an economic investment.

....There can be no living literary tradition without secular canonization, and judgments of literary value have no significance if not rendered explicit. Yet aesthetic evaluation has been viewed with suspicion by academic critics since at least the early part of the twentieth century. The New Critics deemed it too messy an undertaking for the professional scholar-critic.

....To speak of the art of literature is viewed as a breach of professional responsibility. Any literary academic who issues a judgment of aesthetic value—-better, worse than, equal to—risks being summarily dismissed as a rank amateur.

....To speak of the art of literature is viewed as a breach of professional responsibility. Any literary academic who issues a judgment of aesthetic value—-better, worse than, equal to—risks being summarily dismissed as a rank amateur.

....there is such a thing as great literature, and it is both possible and important to name it.

....Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny.

....an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process.

....To my students and the readers I will never meet I keep urging the work of the reader's sublime: confront only the writers who are capable of giving you a sense of something ever more about to be.

....Longinus's treatise tells us that sublime literature transports and enlarges its readers. Reading a sublime poet, such as Pindar or Sappho, we experience something akin to authorship: "We come to believe we have created what we have only heard." Samuel Johnson invoked precisely this illusion of authorship when he praised Shakespeare's power to convince us that we already knew what he in fact taught us. Freud identified this aspect of the sublime in the uncanny, which returns from the flight of repression as "something familiar and old-established in the mind."

...."the Longinian bias" of "the whole eighteenth century."

....Longinus's treatise exalts the sublime yet implies ambivalence as well: "what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay."

....Shakespeare.... We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

....that greater widening of our consciousness into what initially must seem a strangeness of woe or wonder. As we go out to meet a larger consciousness, we metamorphose into a provisional acceptance that sets aside moral judgment, while wonder transmutes into a more imaginative understanding.

....Kant defined the sublime as that which defies representation. To which I would add that the turbulence of the sublime needs representation lest it overwhelm us. I began this book by speculating that the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy wrote to cure his own learnedness and that I too write to cure a sense of having been overly influenced since childhood by the great works of the Western canon. My critical forerunner Samuel Johnson also viewed writing as a defense against melancholy. The most experiential of poets, Johnson feared "the hunger of the imagination" and yet yielded to it when he read the poetry he loved best. Preternaturally active, his mind courted depressiveness whenever indolent and required labor to achieve freedom.

....Pater's aesthetic, essentially also my own, is Lucretian through and through; it is deeply concerned with the effects of the work upon its reader: "What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?" Pater freed the word aesthetic from German philosophy, restoring the ancient Greek meaning of aesthetes, "one who perceives." Perception and "sensation" are the governing terms of Pater's criticism.

....Pater, self-quarried as he was out of the odes of John Keats, and out of his favorite Shakespearean play, the be-absolute-for-death Measure for Measure. He quotes Victor Hugo's "Men are all condemned to death with indefinite reprieves," and this observation moves him to his most notorious eloquence:

     "We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion–that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

["Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1868)]

....Anything misunderstood through four generations has its own sanction, though I would point out that both Wilde's witty "nature imitates art" and Lawrence's moralizing "Art for Life's sake" are vulgarizations of the subtle aesthetic critic. What Pater analyzes is the love of art for the sake only of quickening and enhancing consciousness.

....influence anxiety, an anxiety in expectation of being flooded, is of course not confined to poets, novelists, and playwrights—or to teachers or cobblers or whom you will. It is a problem for critics as well.

....Poetry and criticism each in its own way involves coming to terms with the overwhelming flood of images and sensations that Pater called phantasmagoria. Both Johnson and Pater experimented with different genres of writing, but both made their mark primarily as critics. For each, literature was not merely an object of study but a way of life.

....All of us know, to some degree, the guilt of origins. My own memories of my father, a taciturn and restrained man, begin with his bringing me a toy scissors for my third birthday in 1933, when the Depression had left him, like many other garment workers, unemployed. I wept then at the pathos of the gift and am close to tears again as I write this. Having loved Dr. Johnson since I was sixteen when I first read Boswell and started to read the critic, invariably I fell into trying to understand him through my love, and in any case to know myself better by his example.

....following of the great critic in his quest to understand literary imitation. I turn to Johnson on Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Pope, and he induces me to reflect freshly upon them and has the knack of making all four later and himself earlier, as though they were influenced by him.

....What can be the function of literary criticism in a Disinformation Age? I see aspects of the function but only by glimpses. Appreciation subsequent to overt evaluation is vital. For me Shakespeare is the Law, Milton the Teaching, Blake and Whitman the Prophets. Being a Jew and not a Christian, I need not displace the Gospels. What could a literary messiah be? When I was young, I was baffled by modernist or New Critics. So unreal now are their polemics that I cannot recapture my fervor against them. Turning eighty had an odd effect upon me that seventy-nine did not. I will asno longer strive with Resenters and other lemmings. We will be folded together in our common dust. 

     Read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate: that is the art of literary criticism for the present time. I remind myself that my stance always has been Longinian rather than philosophical, in the modes of either Plato or Aristotle.

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THE INFLUENCE OF A MIND ON ITSELF

[Valéry]     ....We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods. 

(To go deeper into the subject, we should also have to discuss the influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author. But this is not the place.)

....Self-awareness sought entirely for its own sake is a significant journey into the interior if you happen to be Hamlet or Paul Valéry, but it is likely to collapse into solipsism for most of us. Those who now prate about either separating literature and life or yoking them together become bureaucrats of the spirit, professors of Resentment and Cynicism. Valéry, supremely intelligent, ended his great poem about the marine cemetery with the monitory outcry that the wind was rising and one should try to live.

....self-influence ought to concern us only in the strongest writers. The effect of Ulysses upon the Wake is a vital matter; the influence of earlier upon later Updike is of possible interest only to those who esteem him.

....I cannot imagine Lear or Macbeth apart from their plays, but Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra have an [independence]....

....Shakespeare, like his protagonists, overheard himself, and like them he overheard "Shakespeare." Like them again, he changed.

....Self-influence is a Valérian concept, and The Anatomy of Influence is partly a Valérian investigation, an exploration of how certain strong writers, especially Shakespeare and Whitman, were possessed by and then possessed their precursors in turn. Both Shakespeare and Whitman subsumed a vast array of strong influences in order to emerge as the strong influences on future generations. Shakespeare's influence is so pervasive that we all too easily lose sight of his giant art. Whitman is the most consistent influence in post-Whitmanian American poetry. He is and always will be not just the most American of poets but American poetry proper, our apotropaic champion against European culture.

....each exhausted his precursors

....Self-influence as I use the term is not self-reflection or self-reference, nor does it suggest either narcissism or solipsism. It is a sublime form of self-possession. That these two sublime writers came to inhabit a world of their own making reflects not weakness but strength. The worlds they made made us.

....To understand what makes poetry poetry and not something else one must locate the poem in relation to its precursors.

....These relations are the element in which true poetry dwells. And in rare instances they lead us back to the poet's own work.

....Kenneth Burke once said that a critic must ask what a writer intended to do for himself or herself by creating a specific work.

....the critic must ask not simply what the writer intended to accomplish as a person but what he or she intended to accomplish as a writer.

....Now in my eightieth year, I remain gripped by particular questions. Why has influence been my obsessive concern? How have my own reading experiences shaped my thinking? Why have some poets found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?

....Whatever one's personal tradition, one teaches in the name of aesthetic and cognitive standards and values that are no longer exclusively Western.

....If there is a single universal author, it must be Shakespeare, who places all of humanity into his heterocosm.

....All literary influence is labyrinthine. Belated authors wander the maze as if an exit could be found, until the strong among them realize that the windings of the labyrinth are all internal. No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost.