There are strong misreadings and weak misreadings, but correct readings are not possible if a literary work is sublime enough.
Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence
I’m currently reading The Anatomy of Influence by Harold Bloom. It’s pretty amazing that a book can give me so much to say when I’m only forty-five pages in (for some reason, I’ve done most of that reading at 1am when I can’t sleep). As a whole the book is about how writers struggle with the influence of other writers on their work, and how the greatest writers struggle with their own influence on themselves. In the first few chapters, though, I’ve noticed a thread of his argument that I find disturbing.
You have to be careful with Bloom. He’s a very good writer, and he can be very persuasive. He simultaneously gives the impression of being on your side, the side of the common, but serious, reader, while also being controversial in a pleasing sort of way. Snarky comments about “the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the internet” aside, Bloom often feels as if he’s saying, ‘I know, these other academics, they just don’t understand literature. But we do.’
The concerning thread I’ve noticed in the opening chapters of The Anatomy of Influence is a tendency to idolise the great writers (and their characters) beyond reasonable limits. In Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Bloom writes of his adoration for Shakespeare: “I have been willing to call such a stance Bardolatry, which seems to me only another name for authentic response to Shakespeare.” Now, Shakespeare is wonderful beyond words, and it’s easy at this point say ‘okay, so he really likes Shakespeare. Great!’ But Bloom isn’t exaggerating as much as one might think, and in The Anatomy of Influence it’s clearer the extent to which Bloom deifies his favourite authors:
“A sublime poem transports and elevates, allowing the author’s “nobility” of mind to enlarge its reader as well.”
This quote is central to the problem I’m finding with Bloom. He assumes, over and over again, that the author of a “sublime” text is in some way unshakeably superior to their readers. The author is God, and the best the rest of us can do is sit back and absorb their wisdom, try to pick up the little clues they’ve left behind them so that we can have some inkling of their understanding of the world. This, I think, contradicts the quote I opened with: the correct reading is certainly there in this model, but how can we hope to reach it when we are fundamentally less than the author?
The problem with this, of course, is that Shakespeare was, like the rest of us, a person. Bloom venerates Shakespeare for his skill with words, and that’s something I can get behind; some people, through innate talent and practice, are just better writers than others, and Shakespeare is one of the best. But Shakespeare, or any other writer, cannot be infinitely wiser than any other person, cannot know things about the world or about humanity that no other person has access to, and cannot be somehow deeper, somehow more human. Yet this is what Bloom repeatedly suggests. He conflates the incredible ability of good writers to effectively express the human experience through language with having a fundamentally deeper experience themselves.
Bloom not only argues that the author is more than us, but extends this adulation to the great characters. Discussing twentieth-century French critic Veléry, who distanced himself from poetry in a quest for “self-awareness pursued entirely for its own sake,” Bloom writes:
“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.”
This statement, about Valéry, is a continuation of the notion of the author as the insurmountable genius, but the implications of Bloom also naming Hamlet here are interesting. On the one hand, Hamlet has, as it were, permission to be a deeper person, a more rewarding subject of introspection than ourselves. He is fictional, and so not bound by the same constraints. While he is not subject to these constraints, however, his author is. Can characters really exist outside of what the author puts in their texts? Bloom argues yes, in a few special cases: “I cannot imagine Lear or Macbeth apart from their plays, but Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra have an independent existence in our consciousness.” I’m skeptical about this; both Hamlet and Hamlet are literary works, no more or less. Outside of what the texts give us there is only subjective interpretation, which is of course useful, but we cannot use our own conjectures about Hamlet to attribute to him a kind of hyper-humanity as Bloom does. Bloom claims that the greatest of Shakespeare’s characters are larger than us, and larger than can be expressed in the texts, but this belief rests on the assumptions that there can be more to a character than is found in the texts, and, still, the idea that Shakespeare and other ‘great’ authors are wiser and deeper than their fellow humans.
Of exceptional promise... 