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The Unsettling Legacy of Harold Blooms
Anxiety of Influence
Asha Varadharajan
Harold Blooms reputation, indeed his notoriety, rests on the tetral-
ogy that he produced in rapid succession: The Anxiety of Influence:
A Theory of Poetry(), A Map of Misreading(), Kabbalah and Criti-
cism(), and Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
(). Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism() is a late entrant in
the ranks, of which Christopher Ricks had already said, Bloom had an
idea; now the idea has him.1Visionary, compelling, gnomic, and, in
equal measure, willfully obscure, strangely claustrophobic, and magis-
terially cavalier in the manner of F. R. Leavis, Bloom rewrites literary
history and cultural tradition as a titanic struggle between forbidding
patriarchs and their virile, if tormented, masculine progeny. The fam-
ily romance is transfigured into a fight to the death, a tale of malcon-
tent and usurpation in which the son emerges a bloodied victor. The
spoils of his victory, however, come at a price his creative energies are
continually sapped by anxiety and his poetic effusions haunted by his
literary forebears in the moment of their apparent overthrow. In other
words, the cost of priority is originality; its fruit, repetition. I write inthis deliberately florid fashion to convey the flavor and panache of
Blooms style, which, more often than his argument or method, per-
suades readers to suspend their disbelief.
Modern Language Quarterly 69:4 (December 2008)
DOI 10.1215/00267929-2008-012 2008 by University of Washington
1 Christopher Ricks, A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry, New York Times, March
, , www.nytimes.com/books////specials/bloom-repression.html.
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I revisit familiar ground to offer a heretical paraphrase that attends
to the evoked rather than stated conclusion and that reinvents and rein-
forces the continued relevance of Blooms writings in unexpected and
revealing contexts, especially postcolonial ones. My aim is to demon-
strate that the tale Bloom tells of how one poet helps to form another
is both as simple as the paragraph that precedes this one makes it out
to be and, simultaneously, far from simple.2Indeed, The Anxiety of Influ-
ences conception of precursor and ephebe (Blooms words) locked in
fateful combat is both Blooms idiosyncratic myth and a perdurable
cultural force with implications for our present, not just for Blooms.
A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis exposes what is atstake in Blooms venture into the realm of poetic history, which he
holds to be indistinguishable from poetic influence (AI, ). Bloom
writes that acts of misreading, of clear[ing] imaginative space by
strong poets (AI, ), constitute history. While he hastens to add that
this struggle for priority occurs between equals, he insinuates that the
contest might well take place between mismatched entities, the cour-
age and persistence of the son outdone by the might of the father,
who is laden with the wisdom of generations and bestows on his son
not the rich legacy of the past but the immense anxieties of indebted-ness (AI, ). In this scenario, the triumph of self-appropriation (AI,
) is marked by both immanent and imminent failure; it is into and
of this vexed universe that the true poet is born. Bloom is immedi-
ately careful to part company with the enterprise of furiously active
pedants searching, in Wallace Stevenss disdainful words, for echoes,
imitations, influences, as if no one was ever simply himself but is always
compounded of a lot of other people (AI, ), but he is also balefully
aware that denying obligation (AI, ) is the distinguishing trait of
the newcomer puffed up with the conviction of his own priority. Bloom
delineates, in his own estimation, a more profound version of poetic
influence, one that cannot be reduced to source-study, to the history
of ideas, to the patterning of images, that can be more accurately des-
ignated as poetic misprision, and that confines itself to the study of
the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet (AI, ). These shifts in emphasis add
up, as one might expect, not to a revisionist history of modern poetry
2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry(New York: Oxford
University Press, ), . Hereafter cited as AI.
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but, in keeping with Blooms gift for sleight of hand, to a history of
modern revisionism (AI, ). Bloom thus assumes rather than dem-
onstrates that revisionism is a peculiarly modern trait and then, with
customary brashness, revises the aboriginal poetic self, the vocation
of contemporary criticism, the annals of Western imaginative life (AI,
), and the laws of cultural primogeniture. Are these objectives simply
an accelerating hubris on Blooms part, to be met with an excoriating
skepticism on ours?
Introduction functions as both prolegomenon to and synecdoche
of The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom gives fair warning of the antithetical
style that dominates the form and content of the work in its subtitle:the introduction is a meditation anda synopsis, a ruminative, uncertain
beginning and a confident, retrospective encapsulation a conclusion,
in short. This pattern of oscillation defines the works rhetoric of tem-
porality as well as the logic of (dis)continuity that informs its revisionist
poetics. I suspect that Bloom prefers the term antithesistoparadoxnot
only because of its dialectical character (it contains its opposite in the
moment of becoming the other) but also because he values its comple-
mentary possibilities (it completes its opposite) as well as its revisionist
potential (it transumes the authority it evades or from which it swerves).More to the point, antithesisis agonistic and dynamic; unlike its alterna-
tive,paradox, it will have no truck with the delicate symmetry of balance
and suspension. The law of castration (and feminization) underwrites
the significance of poetic afflatus in Blooms scheme of things; in these
conditions, antithesiscaptures the full weight of influence under which
the poet staggers, its catastrophic dimensions as well as the painful
ambivalence that its violence engenders. Anxiety, for Bloom, is primal
and, in this sense, predicated on wounding and irreparable loss. More-
over, influence cannot be willed (AI, ); anxiety, therefore, is as pre-
emptive as it is productive. The willed and artful nature of paradox, its
arduous but achieved stability, I suggest, would itself be antithetical to
the zeitgeist that Bloom takes pains to elaborate.
In texture The Anxiety of Influenceis a dense network of allusion and
quotation, none of which merits the usual scholarly obsequiousness
or the apparatus of the learned citation. Bloom assumes that he can
excerpt and select at will. He is not required to adumbrate the argu-
ment from which the idiosyncratic quotation emerges, perhaps because
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his audience comprises those attuned to the Western imaginative life,
as well versed as he is in its acknowledged architects. Bloom wants to
reproduce the inescapable power of the operations of influence; rather
than trace its formation, he experiences its effects, and his style mani-
fests an arbitrary sway. This severe poem sacrifices the commonplaces
of argument to the demands of an imaginative unity reliant upon
aphorism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly tradi-
tional) mythic pattern (AI, ). I used the epithet claustrophobicabove,
but it may be more appropriate to speak of the centripetal force of The
Anxiety of Influence, the charmed circle of the elect in which it moves,
and the structure of belonging that it ultimately discerns in the mis-prision of poetic inspiration. This is a severe poem indeed; the art-
less pastiche of aphorism and apothegm reveals itself as a magnificent
form of dissembling, beneath which lurk inexorable patterns of repeti-
tion and return. In other words, Bloom exploits the productive con-
notations of anxietywithout ever relinquishing its singular explanatory
value in the domains of poetic history and practical criticism; the vast
machinery of philosophies of history and identity, of Anglo-American
literary tradition, and of Gnostic speculation probes the riddle of anxi-
ety and celebrates, rather than challenges, its reign.The idiosyncratic intentionality on display as Bloom sifts through
the debris of tradition to light on his precursors is belied by the pre-
dictability of his choices. Bloom appears to endorse the centrality of
the author figure, but, as he reiterates, authors are no more than the
aggregate of their (disavowed) influences, and his own focus remains
on these intrapoetic relationships, which he deems analogous to life
cycles. Bloom also fosters the illusion of agency when he insists on the
perverse, deliberate acts of misreading that constitute the poetic self
as well as on poetic history itself as agon, as the oedipal strife in and
through which the anxiety of influence is born. These contentions seem
a far cry from the imperceptible, geological shifts that produce cracks
in discursive formations and inaugurate historical change in Michel
Foucaults archaeology, a form of revisionism arguably more popular
now than Blooms. The import of these shifts, nevertheless, is the same
because Blooms focus on masculine aggression and contestation does
not dismantle the regulatory fiction of the agon itself or alter the out-
come of the struggle. For this reason, Foucaults later, tongue-in-cheek
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term genealogyseemed to promise disarray rather than simply victory
and defeat. His nod to family trees is no coincidence, for they tend to
proliferate and to spite the laws of lineage and evolution. Foucaults
archaeology discerns fractures, gaps, lateral meanderings, and road-
blocks in the masquerade of historical continuity to make a revisionist
history possible: The Periodis neither its basic unity, nor its horizon,
nor its object.3Blooms history assumes that such a revision has already
taken place; this revisionist ethic controls, rather as Foucault would say,
the terms under which future deviations might occur. Both Bloom and
Foucault expose the endurance of discursive formations even as they
emphasize their accidental, unmotivated, or contingent character. Nei-ther man denies that power is at stake in the construction of the order
of things, poetic or otherwise. Both uphold Friedrich Nietzsche as the
figure to whom they are most indebted. Both believe that revisionism
is the signature of the modern, though in later texts the filial agon
remains a stubborn trace of premodernity after it should have become
obsolete. Despite their analogous resistance to periodization, the dif-
ference between their histories cannot be gainsaid: Bloom cares about
power in relation to poetry; Foucault, in relation to knowledge. Bloom
writes an archaeology of revisionism that he equates with the birth ofthe modern rather than, as Foucault does, a genealogy of the modern
that stages the return of the repressed. If the spirit of the modern is to
be equated with the revisionist impulse, Bloom seems to say that this
impulse alone cannot be subject to genealogical revision.
The figure that mediates between Blooms sacralization of origins
and Foucaults insistence on discontinuity and interruption, his chal-
lenge to historicisms claim to unimpeded development, is Edward
W. Said. The distinction that Said draws between divinely ordained
origins and chosen beginnings closes the gap between Foucault and
Bloom. Said inflects Foucaults vision of discontinuity with histori-
cal agency and individual imprint while ensuring that the difference
between origins and beginnings removes the stings of inadequacy and
belatedness in Blooms vision and transforms risk into possibility. To
comprehend the nature of the historicism at stake in Blooms argu-
3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: HarperColophon, ), . My contention is that proliferating gene-
alogies cover up the revisionist consistencies that typify the true Foucault.
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ment, or of the historicism that critical scholarship usually discerns in
it, I want to examine four essays by Said that appeared, in this order,
in The World, the Text, and the Critic: Introduction: Secular Criticism
(hereafter cited as I:SC), The World, the Text, and the Critic (WTC),
On Repetition (OR), and Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contem-
porary Criticism (RT).4Blooms writings are both incidental and vital
to Saids essays, particularly in his guise as the author of Beginnings:
Intention and Method, published two years after Blooms Anxiety of Influ-
ence. Beginningsmight be the secular counterpart to Blooms mythic
(divinely ordained?) adventure, the narratological analogue to his
revisionist poetics. Saids observations enable me to foreground theunorthodox implications of Blooms genetic hypotheses (RT, )
even as they alert me to the recuperative consequences of his revision-
ary ratios (AI, ). The remarkably similar litany of philosophers and
critical methodologies that echoes through Beginningsand The Anxiety
of Influenceis itself sufficient cause to read Bloom through the lens of
Said; far from evaluating the difference between their misreadings of
the Western philosophical and literary traditions, therefore, I want to
emphasize this similarity between the prophecy of beginnings and the
anxieties of belatedness. Saids animadversions on late style as a formof intransigence, as the spirit of contradiction that makes it possible for
him to endure in the face of mortality, marks his fascinating return, at
the end of his career, to a Bloomian vision of identity as an originary
wound and of writing as a personal struggle against extinction and as
a form of cultural survival. If influence cannot be willed, it is hardly
surprising that Blooms precursors bear a family resemblance to Saids
and that revolution and repetition (the concepts with which Said and
Bloom have, respectively and routinely, been identified) can be traced
to the same forebears.5
4 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, ). The question that informs my exploration here is, Can a his-
toricist stomach a revisionist? By the same token, does each imply the other? That is,
could only a thoroughgoing historicist become a revisionist worthy of the name? It
is thus a mistake to accuse the revisionist Bloom of being a closet historicist or the
historicist Bloom of being a secret agent of revisionism. Each is unthinkable without
the other.5 See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method(New York: Basic Books,
). Jeffrey Mehlman offers an incisive reflection on the valence of these terms
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The World, the Text, and the Criticcounters, in its estimation, a dan-
gerous trend. Textuality, Said avers, has . . . become the exact anti-
thesis and displacement of what might be called history (I:SC, ).
This declaration seems to set him at odds with Bloom, whose enterprise
he airily (and anonymously) dismisses for routinely understanding
that reading and interpreting occur in the form of misreading and
misinterpreting (I:SC, ). Bloom would take umbrage at the confla-
tion of misreading with misinterpretation. For him, misreading is the
condition of all interpretation, but it is not to be construed as mistaken
reading. Said is more careful with Bloom as his argument develops, but
his desire to affirm the connection between texts and the existentialactualities of human life, politics, societies, and events (I:SC, ) distin-
guishes his project from that of Bloom, whose concern is only with the
poet in a poet, or the aboriginal poetic self, even though Bloom knows
that the strongest poets are subject to influences not poetical (AI, ).
What is at stake for both Bloom and Said, however, is the diagnosis of
texts as fudamentally [sic] facts of power, not of democratic exchange
in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac(Berkeley: University of California Press,
). Mehlman emphasizes the narrative of usurpation and illegitimacy with whichKarl Marx allegorizes the transformation of revolution into its opposite, repetition, in
the course of a persuasive account of literatures refractions of history. Mehlmans work
appeared only two years after Saids and four years after Blooms; despite the presence
of the genetic hypothesis in Marx, it remains an absent obligation in Bloom. Moreover,
Mehlman treats history and literature as lenses through which each refracts the other,
while Bloom insists on the integrity of poetic history, of intrapoetic relationships, and
of the life cycle of the poet, all of which seem equally immune to the invasions of his-
tory. Indeed, in the special sense that Bloom accords the word, literature evadeshistory.
In The World, the Text, and the CriticSaid is aware that he is considered an undeclared
Marxist (), an accusation (made thoughtfully in Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry and
rather more controversially, if not necessarily inaccurately, in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:Classes, Nations, Literatures[London: Verso, ]; see also the responses to Ahmad
in Public Culture, no. [Fall ]) that dogged him his entire career, particularly
because Antonio Gramsci and Theodor W. Adorno played such important roles in it
and Foucault (another undeclared Marxist) was his oeuvres constant companion. The
important point is that The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapartedoes provoke Saids
curiosity in the essay that bears his books title because of its exemplary attempt to
textualize the random appearance of a new Caesar (). As Mehlman, too, observes,
Marx textualizes in order tohistoricize, and, as Said implies, the farcical repetition of
the uncle in the figure of the nephew effectively elicits the perversions of the family
romance, condemns repetition to derivation and masquerade, and masterfully trans-
forms lineage into an order of descending worth ().
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(WTC, ). My aim is to read each as the others completion and anti-
thesis as his tessera, in short.6
Said and Bloom articulate identical concerns from different per-
spectives: both explore the difficulties of belonging to texts, tradi-
tions, and continuities that make up the very web of a culture (I:SC, ).
Said undertakes this exploration from the standpoint of loss and exile,
while Bloom imagines the process as the transition from innocence to
experience. The ritual character of Bloomian self-annihilation and the
profoundly disorienting Saidian exile from sense, nation, and milieu
(I:SC, ) are disturbingly complementary even though the possibility
of each is dictated by existential actualities that Bloom disavows andSaid acknowledges. While the passion that animates Blooms imagi-
nation of the agon probably arises from his Jewishness, which makes
it less clear to him that he already belongs (although his poets do),
Bloom, like Erich Auerbach in Saids description, conceals the pain of
his exile in The Anxiety of Influence. Nevertheless, the agonistic experi-
ence of those who already belong but must earn their welcome or dis-
cover that they have never left is radically different from the agonizing
condition of exile in which deracination must be embraced before it
can be transcended. In Bloom, failure does not preclude belonging;in Said, belonging can neither be assumed nor, necessarily, achieved.
The austerity of Blooms model of poetic history stems from his desire
to transcend society or social constraints altogether and from his belief
that the strong poet transcends the physical and geographic traumas of
exile. For Auerbach, alienated from the material and symbolic dimen-
sions of the European cultural heritage with which he identified, exile
is converted into a positive mission (I:SC, ), contingent on the twin
movement of separation and transcendence. Indeed, Auerbach trans-
figures his great work of cultural affirmation into the articulation of
6 Bloom defines tesseraas the second of his revisionary ratios. Neither Said nor
Bloom can be said to function as the others precursor in the strict sense that both
employ the term; therefore both can be said to skip the first of Blooms revisionary
ratios, clinamen, in relation to each other but not to their shared precursors. The
near simultaneity of their published appearances suggests this possibility. Saids and
Blooms swerves from their shared precursors (Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche,
and Giambattista Vico) result in the misprision that allows them to retain [each
others] terms but to mean them in another sense (AI, ): Bloom names his expla-
nation for the process tessera.
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7 Said makes this argument in relation to Matthew Arnolds Culture and Anarchy.
I believe, however, that the link between poetic history as the relentless march of
strong poets and the impulse to propagate the best that has been known and thought
in the world is not difficult to make. Blooms more recent writings on the Western
canon only reinforce this connection. In any event, my juxtaposition of Bloom and
Said is meant to elicit what may not be obvious in both their arguments.
the ascetic code of willed homelessness (I:SC, ). Said transforms the
historical fact of exile from fascist Europe and in Europes putative
other, Istanbul ( ) into an existential condition of alienation and
an indispensable and universalizable element of critical consciousness
itself. Bloom allows his strong poets to be willful but renders them inca-
pable of willing, or of willing in an original way, in his mythic venture.
He would appreciate, however, the principle of divestiture, of extin-
guishing rather than extending love, in Saids admiration for Auer-
bachs courage and insight (I:SC, ).
Saids premise and conclusion make strong poets appear oddly
domesticated, ensconced in the comfort and assurance of belonging tohumanity at large (I:SC, ). The struggle for identity and the threat
of death are aspects of cultural repetition and renewal; therefore the
threat of deracination, like that of castration, bears the promise of prior-
ity and of belonging on the ephebes rather than the precursors terms.
Bloom argues that strong poets can give us vivid instances of this most
cunning of revisionary ratios [apophrades] (AI, ). In these instances
the dead do not simply return to remain intact in strong poets, but the
latter make one believe, for startled moments, that they are being imi-
tated by their ancestors (AI, ). As cautious as Bloom remains in theseformulations, such that the tyranny of time is only ever almost over-
turned (AI, ), he suggests, like Said and Auerbach, that risk is the
condition of affirmation and possibility. Unlike their model of deraci-
nation, however, Blooms revisionary ratios operate, Said claims, within
the structure of belonging or cultural orthodoxy rather than against its
assertively achieved and wonhegemony (I:SC, ). Saids illuminat-
ing discussion of the imaginative life of Western culture thus reveals
that the agon depends on the understanding that the stakes played
for are an identification of society with culture, and consequently [are]
the acquisition of a very formidable power (I:SC, ), rather than a
transcendence of society by culture.7Bloom would not disagree that,
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despite its agonistic dimension, The Anxiety of Influencedescribes the
dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture
achieves its hegemony over society (I:SC, ); however, like many
prevalent accounts of the development of the modern self, poetic or
otherwise, Blooms history of modern revisionism is unaware of its eth-
nocentrism: the consecration of poetic history institutes a system of
discriminations and evaluations that valorizes imperial culture over
its designated others (I:SC, ).
Those who regard Blooms poetic history as idiosyncratic and
arbitrary generally overlook a more intriguing feature, for The Anxi-
ety of Influenceexemplifies the naturalization of authority and culturalhegemony. Through the influence his work has exercised, Bloom has
become one of those thinkers who make their ideas seem as if they
were expressions of a collective will (I:SC, , where Said is reporting
Antonio Gramscis view of Benedetto Croce). Subsequent pedagogy has
consecrated Blooms conjurings of strong poets as the fabric of West-
ern imaginative life. Said is only too aware of this sneaky and cheeky
dimension of hegemony; he insists, therefore, that poetry must
include criticism in the terms in which he has defined it. Said retains
Blooms terms The individual consciousness is not naturally andeasily a mere child of the culture but he replaces Blooms anxious
ephebe with a more humanistic, thinking historical and social actor
in the culture, and because of that perspective, which introduces cir-
cumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and
belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism (I:SC,
). Blooms humanism is different: he rejects the anti-humanistic
plain dreariness of all those developments in European criticism that
have yet to demonstrate that they can aid in reading any one poem by
any poet whatsoever (AI, ), but he believes, equally, that the liv-
ing labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most
generous in us (AI, ). Blooms distinction here is between how litera-
ture comes to be (via the savagery and misrepresentation implicit in the
act of misreading) and what it is; the idea of literature as a repository
of humane values is, for him, merely sentimental. In Blooms Sturm
und Drang, repetition pulses on, whether or not re-imagined (AI,
), and he is impatient with Saids urbane critical detachment, which
signals the end of desire, of the individual imagination (AI, ).
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For Bloom, [Where] there is detachment in confronting ones own
imagination, discontinuity is impossible (AI, ). Matthew Arnold is
Saids covering cherub: Bloom regards detachment (or Arnoldian dis-
interest) as the moment when cultural hegemony crushes individual
strength, rather than the moment when the hegemony of Western cul-
ture is contradicted.
Saids version of autonomy is much too tame for Bloom, but Said
would fasten on Blooms comment that the poet is condemned to learn
his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves and
turn that to his advantage (AI, ). Bloom is, of course, speaking of the
paradox within which the strong poet is trapped: the poem within himis found by great poems outside him. In declaring, however, that [to]
lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread
of threatened autonomy forever (AI, ), Bloom reveals the political
significance and affective power both of Saids critical project and of
his own. At stake is the definition of heresy itself the ancestor of revi-
sionism (AI, ) and the ethical principle of Saids brand of secular
criticism. I will devote the conclusion of this essay to the implications
of this definition for a new theory of influence and a radical vision
of humanist agency. For now, I want to elaborate on the hegemonicimplications of Blooms affirmation of revisionism and to consider, in
the process, its prevalence in modern and contemporary criticism.
Said concludes his commentary on Auerbach by challenging the
quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among ones
people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected
against the outside world (I:SC, ); Said claims that [although]
Auerbach was away from Europe, his work was steeped in the reality
of Europe, just as the specific circumstances of his exile enabled a con-
crete critical recovery of Europe (I:SC, ). Saids contrapuntal method
appears in nascent form here, allowing him to locate a cooperation
between filiation [natal culture] and affiliation [adoption through
scholarship] at the heart of critical consciousness (I:SC, ). But Said
immediately abandons his hero Auerbach. In the very next paragraph
he turns to the failure of the generative impulse in modern fiction
(I:SC, ), which he treats as itself generative of modern cultural his-
tory, producing alternative forms of social relationships that no longer
require biology. For his part, Bloom retains the generative impulse, but
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only as a parallel to the story of poetic influence; indeed, he renders
poetic history exclusively affiliative (adoptively intrapoetic) and the gen-
erative impulse or the family romance purely rhetorical. While Saids
characterization of the democratic cooperation between filiation and
affiliation initially seems too complacent, it soon becomes unmasked
as a compensatory ideological ruse, designed to suture the antinomies
and atomizations of reified existence (I:SC, ). The transition from
filiation to affiliation usually signifies Auerbachs extinguishing his love
for all places to earn his love for the world. Said exposes the underside
of affiliation when it takes the form of a party, an institution, a culture,
a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision (I:SC, ). Instead of markingthe failed idea or possibility of filiation, the new order of affiliation
reinstate[s] vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with
filiative order (I:SC, ). Said includes figures as diverse as T. S. Eliot,
Sigmund Freud, and Georg Lukcs in his catalog of those with a pen-
chant for restored authority (I:SC, ). He isolates two unsavory and
related consequences of this move to convert anguished distance into
respectful adherence: it reinforces the known at the expense of the
knowable and results in the calculated . . . irrelevance of criticism
(I:SC, ). Saids aim is to defend culture against system, and, curiouslyenough, so is Blooms.
Blooms strong poets inhabit a universe that is hermetic but also vio-
lent, perverse, and transgressive; imbued with intentionality; charged
with the ambition to dislodge precursors and to quarrel about author-
ity, ownership, and force; cursed with the desire for priority that cannot
be contaminated by theft or commerce; prone to revel in the dark side
that gives culture its dominion; and commanded to speak in the pres-
ent rather than be defined by the silent past. In the previous sentence
I mix Saids and Blooms phrases (from WTC and AI) to demonstrate
the conjunction of rather than the anticipated disjunction between
their visions of modern cultural history. What is one to make of this
strange coincidence? One answer lies in their common indebtedness
to Giambattista Vico. Indeed, Saids essay On Repetition explicitly
references Bloom, while his discussion of Vico clarifies the latters place
in Blooms imagination better than Blooms own brief account of being
most convinced yet also most repelled by Vicos theory of poetic ori-
gins (AI
, ).
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For Vico, repetition makes history intelligible. Said offers a Gertrude
Stein like formulation, Human history is human actuality is human
activity is human knowledge (OR, ), which is followed by an elegant
summary: For Vico, then, whether as the beginning of sense, as repre-
sentation, as archaeological reconstruction, repetition is a principle of
economy, giving facts their historical factuality and reality its existential
sense (OR, ). The aspect of Saids explanation that is most per-
tinent to Blooms historicism is Vicos affirmation of the pasts inex-
haustible constancy; despite the proliferation of changing rhythms,
patterns, and harmonies, the ground motif recurs throughout, as if to
demonstrate its staying power and its capacity for endless elaboration(OR, ). Vicos images for historical process are invariably biological
and, more, they are invariably paternal. Repetition is the consequence
of, and indeed can be identified with, physiological reproduction, how a
species perpetuates itself in historical time and space (OR, ).8Vico
and Bloom share a vision of poetic history as the interplay of struggle
and generation, difference and repetition; both seek to contain the orig-
inal and the revolutionary within the orbit of the constant and repeat-
able (OR, ); and both seem attuned to laws of regression that
contribute to historical decline rather than to progress.Said, however, finds Vicos version of filiation inadequate in the
face of the growing evidence of cultural dispersion and diversification
(Blooms notion of poetic history is vulnerable to a similar criticism);
more to the point, he finds that the scientific inadequacy of genetic
explanations of origin also means that the fathers place loses its unas-
sailable eminence (OR, ). Generative and procreative metaphors
are insufficient for explaining social and literary phenomena. Yet they
persist on account of their wish-fulfilling character (OR, ). Blooms
revisionary ratios seem to bear out this contradiction between explan-
atory and affective or rhetorical power, because the progression from
clinamento apophradesunfolds in an anterior future. But is there room
for reading the radical conservatism of Blooms tropological machinery
against the grain of Blooms own recuperative logic?
8 Said comments on Vicos pleasure in the etymological puns that the word gens
produces while identifying this process of filiation, with Vico, as gentile. Surely
something could be made of the relationships (discordances?) between Vicos gentile
history and Blooms own investments in gnosis and the Kabbalah.
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In A Map of MisreadingBloom explicitly indicates that the revision-
ist wishes to find his own original relation to truth . . . but also wishes
to open received texts to his own sufferings, or what he wants to call the
sufferings of history.9I regard my meditation on belatedness as an
act of transumption, of lifting up and redeeming the saving sparks of
[the precursors] being (MM, ). Bloom calls attention to the ambiva-
lence that attunes transumption or metalepsis simultaneously to con-
serving and making. While I have focused thus far on this ambivalence,
I want to begin to answer the question Bloom himself raises: How do
we pass from origins to repetition and continuity, and thence to the
discontinuity that marks all revisionism? (MM, ).In the second volume of his tetralogy, Bloom argues that the
first step in this transition might be to transform belatedness into a
strength rather than an affliction (MM, ) and that the only trope
that might serve this purpose is metalepsis or apophrades. While meta-
lepsis precludes neither agonism nor ambivalence (he explains that its
characteristic affect is simultaneously one of identification and danger-
ous jealousy, of swallowing up and spitting out, or of introjection and
projection), Bloom insists on its heretical potential. He cites William
James: Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in whichwe can rest. We dont lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on
occasion, make nature over again by their aid.10This emphasis on
instrumentality or pragmatism makes room for harmonizing Bloom
not with the company of elect precursors to which he himself aspires
but with his critical heirs, who deploy revisionism precisely to open
the kingdom of culture to the sufferings of history. Revisionism, in
this sense, becomes what Susan Buck-Morss characterizes as a stringent
politics of translation; that is, the process of introjection and projection
that Bloom traces is less about the diminution of the self in the face of
overbearing ancestors and more about the tolerance of cultural inheri-
tance for assuming unaccustomed forms.11
9 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading(New York: Oxford University Press, ),
. Hereafter cited as MM.10 Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism(New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, ), .11 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left
(London: Verso, ),. Hereafter cited as TPT. Buck-Morss is quoting Talal Asad,
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Varadharajan Legacy of Anxiety of Influence 475
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . Buck-Morss is herself indebted (a nice
touch, because belatedness and indebtedness are intertwined in Bloom) to the writings
of Talal Asad on the Salman Rushdie affair, challenging both the liberal multicultural
rhetoric of tolerance and the fatwa that accused Rushdie of blasphemy.12 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry (): . Here-
after cited as HH.
In her essay Hegel and Haiti Buck-Morss writes, Where did
Hegels idea of the relation between lordship and bondage originate?
ask the Hegel experts.12Where, indeed? she remarks wryly (HH,
), before claiming that the central metaphor of G. W. F. Hegels work
stemmed from his perusal of the political journal Minervas detailed
account of the Haitian revolution. (In this admittedly oversimplified
account of Buck-Morsss research and argument, my concern is to
illustrate the transumptive character of her cultural genealogy, of her
political intent [to transform] our historical imaginaries [TPT, ].)
To avoid telling the tale of colonial liberation with Europe at its center,
Buck-Morss rescues the idea of universal human history from the usesto which white domination has put it (HH, ). The relevance of
Blooms shift from originality to priority, of his affirmation of misread-
ing, and of his vision of strife becomes only too clear in her method.
When she describes her essay as an attempt to rip the historical facts of
freedom out of the narratives told by the victors (HH, ), Buck-Morss
transforms her seemingly arcane retrieval of historical fragments into
a subtle form of vengeance. If she stopped there, however, her reversal
of cultural and historical causality would be no more than a clever, and
by now quite familiar, ploy to expose the catastrophic dimensions ofthe story of modern freedom. Her return to the past becomes more
than a run-of-the-mill form of requital, however, through her focus
on redemption and reconstitution. The metaleptic power of histori-
cal moments is contained, for Buck-Morss, in those times when the
consciousness of individuals surpasse[s] the confines of present con-
stellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom
(HH, ). In other words, her strong misreading salvage[s] Hegels
moment of clarity for our own time to show not only that Hegels phi-
losophy of history has a concrete historical whereabouts but also that
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the master-slave dialectic is very much always already a question of and
for the postcolonial.13
Hegel looks different when Haiti is put at the center of modern lib-
eration, and even more so when Buck-Morss begins to conceive of the
world-historical spirit without a center (see TPT, ). But in refus-
ing to turn these moments of historical clarity into the exclusive prop-
erty of any one part of the world (she writes that they belong equally to
Hegel and Toussaint LOuverture) in leveling the playing field, so to
speak does Buck-Morss risk turning the present, historical realities
that surrounded [Hegels text into] invisible ink? (HH, ). (I have
tactically modified her own charge against historians who silence thepast.) Hegel foregrounds the struggle to the death between master and
slave, the stark and painful choice between life and liberty that is inevi-
table in the rebellion of Toussaint LOuverture and even in the cruelty
of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Buck-Morsss point, of course, is that the
actual and successful revolution of Caribbean slaves against their mas-
ters is the moment when the dialectical logic of recognition becomes
visible as the thematics of world history (HH, ), but her dialectical
transubstantiation of the historicity of slave rebellion into the story of
the universalrealization of freedom (HH, ; italics mine) might bein danger, as Blooms tropology suggests, of subsuming her arguments
antitheticalpremise (the glaring discrepancy between the political value
of freedom and the economic practice of slavery) in the mutualityof the
dialectical logic of recognition between master and slave. It should be
clear that I admire Buck-Morsss vision; my intention, as has been the
case in my discussion of Bloom and Said, is to demonstrate how each
illuminates the other.
Whereas Buck-Morss seeks to turn the historical particular, the
perception of the concrete meaning of freedom into the realiza-
tion of absolute spirit (HH, ), Dipesh Chakrabartys analysis of the
imperatives of postcolonial thought and terms of historical difference
produces the opposite effect of provincializing Europe, of revealing
the limits of historicizing and universalizing thought, indeed modify-
13 Interview: Susan Buck-Morss, Laura Mulvey, and Marq Smith, in TPT, .
The interview first appeared as Susan Buck-Morss, Globalization, Cosmopolitan-
ism, Politics, and the Citizen,Journal of Visual Culture (): . Mulvey and
Smith, identified in Buck-Morsss book asJVC, are quoted in this passage.
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Varadharajan Legacy of Anxiety of Influence 477
ing and interrupting in practice the latters totalizing thrusts.14While
it is possible to see these two antihistoricist interventions as comple-
menting each other, a more nuanced account of Bloomian revisionism
enfolds both in a productive embrace. Chakrabarty also privileges a
politics of translation; however, his argument inserts an extra step that
makes his viewpoint of a piece with Blooms investment in the anxieties
of belatedness without lapsing into a species of ressentiment. The logic
of empire, in Chakrabartys scheme of things, ensures that the uni-
versal has already been usurp[ed] . . . in a gesture of pretension and
domination by a proxy, a particular, Europe (quoted in Dube, ).
The structure of belonging that Blooms story of influence articulatesis precisely what Chakrabarty denies is everybodys history (Dube,
). Like Buck-Morss, Chakrabarty seeks to engage in an immanent
critique of structures of domination, on the ground of the usurping
particular masquerading as the universal, just as, like her, he wishes
to blend the history of Europe with other histories of belonging that
together produce the conceptual artifacts of modernity (Dube,
). The difference is that Chakrabarty insists that the translation of
the universal into the particular, or the realization of the universal
in the particular, registers a disjunction and refuses the mediation ofthe universal. Chakrabarty simultaneously registers the agonism
and the ambivalence that are consequences of the condemnation of
Europes other to anachronism and repetition in the logic of history.
The indispensability of Europe must not, for Chakrabarty, obscure its
inadequacy: indebtedness exacts a terrible price.
Both Bloom and Buck-Morss envisage repetition and difference
as moments in a universal history; Chakrabarty, on the contrary, asks
the difficult and perhaps unanswerable question of whether displac-
ing Europe from the center of our conceptions of historical time and
of universality is possible.15Both Buck-Morss and Chakrabarty would
14 Saurabh Dube, Presence of Europe: An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty,
South Atlantic Quarterly (): , , . Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
), hereafter cited as PE, appeared in the same year as Buck-Morsss article in
Critical Inquiry.15 See Michael Hardt, The Eurocentrism of History, Postcolonial Studies
(): .
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agree with Bloom, I think, that individuation is not possible with-
out revisionary strife (MM, ) even as their revisionism combines,
as Blooms does, the processes of making and conserving. Moreover,
their version of transumption is not, as Bloom occasionally indicates,
a process in which the dead return to be triumphed over by the liv-
ing (MM, ). What is clear in their methods, rather, is the recogni-
tion that Haiti or India marks a limit and an absence (re-seeing,
in Blooms schema). This recognition produces a substitution of the
particular for the usurping and pretentious universal (re-estimating
Hegel and Europe, in Blooms schema) and results in a representation
of history or in a historiographical project that reorients the present(re-aiming, in Blooms schema). Blooms story of influence, his atten-
tion to the cultural and historical imaginary of Europe, thus can lend
itself to postcolonial imaginings that are concerned, as he is, to trace
how these imaginary representations insist and persist at our behest
and against our will.
As a concluding gesture, I want to return to the aesthetic realm
where Blooms rhetoric, ethics, and poetics of cultural belonging and
transumption find their singular place. I want, in Blooms revisionary
and cantankerous spirit, to take seriously the possibility that aspirationto the universal, rather than assertion of difference and heterogene-
ity, is the truly radical move in these troubled times. Translation then
becomes, as Chakrabarty intimates, not only one of interruption and
modification but also one of conversation. In this regard, Ross Posnocks
extraordinary reflections on cosmopolitanism are the unquiet heirs to
Blooms politics of descent.16Posnock shares the conviction that cos-
mopolitanism can serve as the instrument of cultural democracy with
the tradition of black intellectuals that he explores in Color and Culture
(). His cultural hero is W. E. B. DuBois, who, like Buck-Morss and
Chakrabarty in my characterization, sought to eliminate altogether
the inherently aversive structural position of foreignness in the name
of a transnational, deracialized kingdom of culture (DD, , where
Posnock is quoting Elaine Scarry and DuBois, respectively).
Posnock eschews both Saids detachment from place and Blooms
16 Ross Posnock, The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,
American Literary History (): . Hereafter cited as DD.
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Varadharajan Legacy of Anxiety of Influence 479
knowing ones place in favor of a cosmopolitan refusal to know ones
place. Posnocks insistence on the syncretic basis of culture denies
Blooms politics of descent, while his rewriting of the filiative logic
of entitlement and assimilation as cultural appropriation supplements
Saids celebration of deracination as indispensable to freedom and
protest. The egalitarian dimension of cosmopolitanism cannot sur-
vive within the structure of sacrifice and hierarchy common to both
assimilation and deracination; instead, willed homelessness and ago-
nism and ambivalence yield to a cultural democracy based on the
force of an ideal of shared humanity (DD, ). Posnocks vision of
cultural democracy resonates with the deracinated, interrogative, andantiproprietary spirit of Saids oppositional intellectual as well as with
the agonism and ambivalence of Blooms narrative of the struggle of
the same against itself. Posnocks cosmopolitan heretic, contrary to his
Bloomian and Saidian counterparts, renounces anxiety and asceticism
for pleasure, interrogation of the limits of identity and belonging for
betrayal of roots, and assimilation and deracination for appropriation.
His unorthodox reanimation of the ideal in contradistinction to the
uses and abuses of universalism keep[s] alive the interplay between
(unraced) universal and (raced) particular as a way to sustain thedynamic, antinomical [sic] character of modernity (DD, ).
I have resorted to a provocative constellation of contemporary
cultural critics to explore how Blooms historicism and revisionism
may be, in Chakrabartys words, renewed from and for the mar-
gins (PE, ), rather than to exact postcolonial revenge (PE, ,
where Chakrabarty quotes Leela Gandhi). Bloom comprehends revi-
sionism as the signature of the modern, but Chakrabarty contends
that historicism is the peculiar gift of European political modernity.
Saids essays reveal how historical time becomes the measure of the
cultural distance between East and West, while Buck-Morss challenges
the first in Europe and then elsewhere structure of historicist time
by rendering Hegel and Haiti coeval (PE, ). Blooms historicist
notion of poetic history as a unique whole with an identifiable logic
of development becomes the catalyst for Posnocks meditation on the
structure of inequality that underlies the hypnotic spell cast by roots
and for Chakrabartys articulation of the embeddedness and priority
of Europe in global historical imaginaries. Blooms writings seem
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tailor-made for postcolonial contexts, because the themes of failure,
lack, and inadequacy that describe his ephebes ubiquitously character-
ize the speaking subject of colonial pasts and national futures whose
historical transformation, like the ephebes desire to become a strong
poet, is always grievously incomplete (PE, ). What Bloom casts as
inescapability, Said, Buck-Morss, Posnock, and Chakrabarty recast as
indispensability and inadequacy, thus paving the way for an engage-
ment with universals, such as the idea of the human, precisely because
of Europes failure to live up to its own vaunted ideals. The affinities I
have imagined limn the contours of the history that Chakrabarty calls
for and Bloom inaugurates one that, in laying bare the inescapabilityof the poetic or postcolonial predicament, also exposes what the agon
represses in order to be (PE, ).
The undeniable conservatism of Blooms thought makes of the
anxiety of influence a filiative mechanism and a regulatory ideal, trans-
figuring inheritance into birthright. His unruly heirs, Buck-Morss,
Chakrabarty, and Posnock, make it possible for minorities, exiles, and
rebels to locate themselves within a specific inheritance and . . . use
that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that
inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded [them].17As forBloom, I believe that he would, in the spirit if not the letter of his work,
give them his blessing.
Asha Varadharajanis associate professor of English at Queens University, Kings-
ton, Ontario. She is author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, andSpivak (1995) and is at work on two other books, Violence and Civility in the New
World Orderand Enchantment and Deracination: The Lure of Foreignness in Con-
temporary Cinema.
17 Ross Posnock, After Identity Politics, in Color and Culture: Black Writers and
the Making of the Modern Intellectual(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ),
. Here Posnock quotes James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son(Boston: Beacon, ),
xii, on the limits of inheritance and the boundlessness of birthright. I believe that
my use of Baldwins words is appropriate.
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Harold Blooms idiosyncratic poetic history is a perdurable cultural force with
implications for our present, not just for Blooms. His story of influence, his
attention to the cultural and historical imaginary of Europe, can thus lend
itself to postcolonial contexts equally concerned to trace how this imaginary
insists and persists at our behest and against our political will. This essay
produces a provocative constellation of Blooms unlikely and unquiet heirs on
the contemporary critical scene who would open his kingdom of culture to
the sufferings of history and to those who have been denied a place in it.
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