Abstract

Harold Bloom is best known for his work on the ’anxiety of influence’, in which he argues that ’strong poets’ must struggle for priority against the overwhelming influence of their precursors; in the same way that the sons, in Freud’s conception of the ’primal horde’, must overthrow the father. ’To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father’, Bloom declares.t The newcomer or ’ephebe’ turns against the works of his precursor by means of tropes, which correspond to the ego’s ’mechanisms of defence’, mapped out by Anna Freud.:t: An inventory of the tropes of ’misprision’ literally mis-taking, together with their corresponding psychic defences, may be found in Bloom’s manifesto, A Map of Misreading (1975). Here he writes:Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend upon a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another, and that does not differ in kind from the necessary critical acts performed by every strong reader upon every text he encounters. The influence-relation governs reading as it governs writing, and reading is therefore a miswriting just as writing is a misreading. As literary history lengthens, all poetry necessarilybecomes verse-criticism, just as all criticism becomes prose-poetry. (p.3)In the following article, Bloom interprets Freud as a great ’prosepoet of the Sublime’, and traces his descent from Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer, rather than from the nineteenth-century psychologists. The Sublime is rather a confusing term: in eighteenth-century aesthetics, it referred to the quality of awesome grandeur, as distinguished from the merely beautiful. According to Kant, the sense of the Sublime may be aroused by nature’s incalculable power, manifest in whirlwinds, waterfalls, and earthquakes; but also by numerical proliferation, when the mind undergoes a ’momentary checking of the vital powers’ in the face of overwhelming multiplicity. This moment of ’blockage’, however, is quickly overcome by the mind’s ’exultation in its own rational faculties, in its ability to think a totality that cannot be taken in through the senses’.* Thus the Sublime involves two contradictory emotions, one of awe, the other of omnipotence: the mind, appalled by the experience of vastness, triumphs nonetheless in its ability to contemplate the magnitude of its beyond.