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The Anatomy of Influence: literature as a way of life

Harold Bloom
Yale University Press, £25
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 Tel 01420 592974

Harold Bloom conceives of literature as a sphere in which souls struggle to attain fullness of being, absorbing, or being absorbed by, other souls. In the celebrated and influential The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973, he maintained that strong poets acquire a distinct poetic stance and identity through a struggle with their predecessors: to come afterwards is to be in peril of having nothing to add, of merely repeating what has already been said. For Bloom, strong poets, anxious about being overwhelmed, create possibilities of expression for themselves through a creative “misprision” of their predecessors, interpreting them in such a way as to give themselves scope to say something more.

In Shakespeare: the invention of the human Bloom boldly extended his notion of influence to all of human life. Shakespeare, for Bloom, was so consummate a creator of human figures as to have created all the possibilities of human meaning currently available to us; we all, in our lives, imperfectly enact meanings ­contained in their fullness in the plays of Shakespeare. Taking the idea of nature imitating art to an extreme, Bloom suggests that we are all poor players, shadowing those more fully real presences named Hamlet, Lear, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Falstaff. Our way of being ourselves, of changing by “overhearing ourselves”, is Shakespearean. (To demur, saying that it follows as the night the day that one is oneself and no one else is, presumably, to turn into Polonius.) In his latest book, which he describes as his swansong, Bloom revisits his earlier reflections on influence, and on Shakespeare, in an attempt to reckon up his thought, and to evaluate a life of passionate thinking about literature.

The autobiographical strain in The Anatomy of Influence is not inappropriate because Bloom sees literature and life in the way he does because of who he is – a lifelong Yale ­literature academic and author of The Western

Canon – because of the ­experience of ­having been wholly “possessed” by the greatest works of the Western tradition from a very early age: “If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalisation, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns.” He has read, and memorised, and reread, and lived with, the works he writes about, and his reflections come from prolonged meditation. Indeed, they have the quality of soliloquy, as if Bloom is overhearing himself think something out (and – it must be said – as if he expects to be overheard by no one but himself). 

Bloom reads to gain wisdom; he believes passionately in a form of reading in which one brings to what one reads all that is deepest in oneself. He reads in the expectation of a revelation, even if the revelation is – as in Hamlet – a “labyrinth” of questioning. He affirms the private self against all attempts to absorb experience into some form of ideology; and in this he affirms something precious. But does the private world of Bloom absorb everything else? No judgement about the value of a work of art that does not come from an authentic experience of that work is worth anything, but Bloom can seem overly preoccupied with his experience precisely as his own. To see existence as a struggle between souls that absorb or are absorbed by one another is perhaps to generate anxiety about oneself: to experience oneself as imperilled by others.

It is tempting to see this as simply the expression of a false philosophy of life: to rejoin simply that meaning does not come from strong individuals but from God, and God does not compete with us. Yet Bloom isolates, and insists on, distinctively aesthetic standards of value, resisting efforts to reduce art to something else. He tries to give an answer to the question, “what makes the art of Shakespeare – or, indeed, any art – great?’” Attempts to dismiss Bloom that do not provide an alternative way of answering that question, or that imply that the question is not a real question, are merely evasions. It is true that the endless tracing and retracing of poetic influence can sometimes give little sense of the distinctive nature of the poetry being related – the struggles can seem like so many repetitions of the same story – but even if the theory of influence does not illuminate everything, it gives some illumination.

If the pronouncements of Bloom are sometimes cryptic, and wayward, his insights can be brilliant, as when he suggests that Shakespeare might be exploring his relationship to his mighty precursor Marlowe in the relationship between the half-brothers Edmund and Edgar in King Lear; or when he remarks that Milton could not have presented an unfallen Satan in Paradise Lost because he would have been too much like Hamlet; or when he explores the wide and varied influence of Walt Whitman, whom he considers the greatest of American poets. Given his status as a self-professed Jewish Gnostic heretic, and his declaration that “for me, Shakespeare is God”, Bloom would not, perhaps, object to being likened to the author of an apocryphal, ­heretical scripture, full of partly indecipherable private mythologies: impossibly erratic, ­sometimes absurd, sometimes wise.