The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life by Harold Bloom
(Yale, 2011)
* * *
SUBLIME STRANGENESS
[Pseudo-Longinus]
[....]The single treatise we have from the more properly named Pseudo-Longinus properly should be translated "On the Heights." But by now we are unable to do without On the Sublime, even though sublime as a word remains bad currency. So too is aesthetic, which Pater (after its popularization by Wilde) wanted to restore to its ancient Greek sense of "perceptive."
[....]To be a Longinian critic is to celebrate the sublime as the supreme aesthetic virtue and to associate it with a certain affective and cognitive response. A sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author's "nobility" of mind to enlarge its reader as well.
[....]First published in 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."
[....]In the long Age of Resentment, intense literary experience is merely "cultural capital," a means to power and glory within the parallel "economy" that Bourdieu labels the literary field. Literary love is a social strategy, more affectation than affect. But 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.
[....] I cheerfully affirm a passion for the difficult pleasures of the sublime, from Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley on to Yeats, Stevens, and Crane.
[....] 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.
[....] 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. Northrop Frye said that evaluation should be implicit, and that was one of the disagreements between us from 1967 on. But the New Cynicism's roots in the social sciences have produced a more clinical posture still. 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.
[....] Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny.
[....] the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbery, Ammons, and, more recently, Henri Cole.
[....] 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.
[....]sublime literature transports and enlarges its readers.
[....]we experience something akin to authorship: "We come to believe we have created what we have only heard."
[....]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."
[....]Longinus's treatise exalts the sublime yet implies ambivalence as well: "what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay."
[....]sublime is at once magnificent and fraught.
[....]greatness of the sublime object induces both delight and terror: "Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of
[....]delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime."
[....]paradoxical coupling of pain and pleasure. For Shelley, the sublime is a "difficult pleasure," an overwhelming experience whereby we forsake simple pleasures for ones that are almost painful.
[....]Pater contributed to theories of the sublime in his pithy description of Romanticism as the adding of strangeness to beauty. "Strangeness" for me is the canonical quality, the mark of sublime literature.
[....]Strangeness is uncanniness: the estrangement of the homelike or commonplace.
[....]strangeness renders the deep relation between sublimity and influence palpable.
[....]In the case of the strong reader, strangeness often assumes a temporal guise.
[....]In his wonderful essay "Kafka and His Precursors," Jorge Luis Borges evokes the uncanny process by which the novelist and essayist Franz Kafka seems to have influenced the poet Robert Browning, his precursor by many decades. What is most strange in such Borgesian moments is not that the prior poet appears to have written the new poem. It is that the new poet appears to have written the prior poet's poem. Examples of this kind of chronological reordering, in which a strong poet appears miraculously to have preceded his or her precursors, abound in the pages that follow.
[....]But you cannot reformulate the sublime in the twentieth century, or now in the twenty-first, without wrestling Sigmund, whose Hebrew name, Solomon, suited him far better since he was not at all Wagnerian and very much a part of Hebraic wisdom, "Weisheit the rabbi" as Stevens hinted at naming him.
[....]Longinus, Kant, Burke, and Nietzsche are all Freud's heirs.
[....]For a strong writer, strangeness is the anxiety of influence.
[....]inescapable condition of sublime or high literature is agon
[....]Implicit in Longinus's famous celebration of the sublime—"Filled with delight and pride we believe we have created what we have heard"—is influence anxiety.
[....]transports us beyond ourselves, provoking the uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one's work or one's self.
[....]The element of strangeness in beauty has the contrary effect. It arises from contact with a different kind of consciousness from our own, different, yet not so remote that we cannot partly share it, as indeed, in such a connection, the mere word 'contact' implies. Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand: aesthetic imagination when we do."
[....]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, Pater]
[....]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.
[....]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?
[....]Does it give me pleasure?
[....]what sort or degree of pleasure?
[....]is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?
[....]ancient Greek meaning of aesthetes, "one who perceives."
[....]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,"
[....]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)]
[....]like most of Pater, this motto has been largely weakly misread from 1873 to the present. Anything misunderstood through four generations has its own sanction
[....]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
[....]a problem for critics as well
[....]for the critic as for the poet, representation may be the only defense
[....]coming to terms with the overwhelming flood of images and sensations that Pater called phantasmagoria.
[....]literature was not merely an object of study but a way of life.
[Samuel Johnson, Angus Fletcher]
[....]I regard Johnson as my critical forerunner, since my life's work from The Anxiety of Influence until now seems to me more Johnsonian than Freudian or Nietzschean, a following of the great critic in his quest to understand literary imitation.
[....]has the knack of making all four later and himself earlier, as though they were influenced by him.
[....]imaginative displacement
enters again with Pater and his Aesthetic school: Wilde and Yeats, Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens.
[....]I read [Angus Fletcher] and experience what I wish were my own thoughts coming back to me "with a certain alienated majesty," as Emerson put it. That is the critic's sublime or partial recognition.
[....]Appreciation subsequent to overt evaluation is vital.
[....]Read, reread, describe, evaluate, appreciate: that is the art of literary criticism for the present time.
[....]Longinian rather than philosophical, in the modes of either Plato or Aristotle.
* * *
THE INFLUENCE OF A MIND ON ITSELF
[Valérian investigation]
[....]Sadly, Borges idealized his account of literary influence by rejecting any idea of rivalry or competition in regard to precursors. Shelley once grandly remarked that all imaginative literature formed one comprehensive cyclic poem; Borges went further by amalgamating all writers into one, a Here Comes Everybody Shakespeare-Homer, James Joyce's composite before it became Borges's.
[....]Valéry, like the French Poe and Mallarmé, desires the power of his mind only over the mind itself, a Cartesian quest rather than a Shakespearean one. The central man in French literature is not Rabelais, Montaigne, or Molière, nor is he Racine, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, or Proust. He is Descartes, who occupies in France the place reserved in other nations for Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, or Emerson. Call it the place of the Founder. Literary influence in Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and the United States is not radically different from country to country. But because a philosopher was the Founder, they order these matters differently in France.
[....]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. "The influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author" is central to Valéry's speculations upon literature.
[....]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.
[....]Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra have an independent existence in our consciousness. Shakespeare's art of foregrounding character is such that we delight in transposing his men and women to other contexts, speculating as to how they might fare in other plays or alongside other characters. How can that be? Each of these fourfold is made up out of words and inhabits a fixed space. Yet the illusion of vitalism is nonetheless particularly strong in them, even though it goes against my deepest conviction to employ the word illusion. If Falstaff and Hamlet are illusive, then what are you and I?
[....]Valéry, so far as I know, never found the right time and place to "discuss the influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author." This book is my time and place to do so. 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.
[....] Valérian investigation.... Valéry, so far as I know, never found the right time and place to "discuss the influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author." This book is my time and place to do so. 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.
[....]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.... But I would amend Burke's law: 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.
[....] 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?
[....]Literary criticism cannot reverse authentic declines in high culture, but it can bear witness. Growing old, I intensify my personal quest to gain more vitality from the literary text.
[....]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.
* * *
Jay
9 December 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment