How to Read Harold Bloom and Why

Urge and urge and urge,Always the procreant urge of the world.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

No other well-known literary critic elicits the kind of praise or vitriol, and not in equal measure, as does Harold Bloom. He is either championed as a professional provocateur—a "colossal" among critics—or, as is more often the case, he is condemned as a pretentious windbag. If he is not a genius, he is, in the words of Joseph Epstein in a particularly nasty hit piece for The Hudson Review, "that most comic of unconscious comic figures . . ., the intellectual equivalent of that character in P. G. Wodehouse of whom Wodehouse writes that he looked like someone who was poured into his clothes but forgot to say when" (215). "So far as one can determine," Epstein continues, "The Anxiety of Influence has had very little influence and appears to have caused anxiety chiefly in Harold Bloom, who claims that few people really understand it" (215). And, Terry Eagleton, in his Figures of Dissent, writes that Bloom's theory, "as Henry Fielding observed of the belief that the good will get their reward in this world, had only one drawback, namely that it was not true" (Figures 168). About How to Read and Why, specifically, Eagleton goes on to write, Bloom's "portentously self-important book would collapse at the faintest whiff of" irony (169).

Eagleton and Epstein are hardly alone in their critique of Bloom's project. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their The Madwoman in the Attic, suggest Bloom's theory, rooted, however nominally, as it is in Freud's Oedipus Complex, is "offensively sexist to some feminist critics" (47) while other critics follow in the same way: Geoffrey Hartman, in his Criticism in the Wilderness; Elizabeth Bruss, in her Beautiful Theories; Jonathan Arac, in his Afterword to The Yale Critics; and Edward Said, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic, all conclude that Bloom is less than what Arac labels an "iconoclast" (179) than a conservative defender of the Western, maledominated literary canon.¹

In this essay, I argue for a way of reading Bloom that allows us to give Bloom his due without taking recourse to ad hominem attacks (Epstein) or outright dismissal because his theory is not "true" (Eagleton). Rather than asking questions like "Is Bloom right?" or, more specifically, "Are poets really embroiled in a heroic struggle with their poetic fathers?"—we might instead read Bloom the same way Richard Rorty reads Plato, Heidegger, Proust, and Nabokov: as the author of a new vocabulary, a new way of talking, describing and re-describing the world. In other words, we should read Bloom ironically—that is, through a pragmatist's eyes. In this sense, Bloom, like William Blake, is not just an ironist in an agonizing struggle for self-creation. Rather, the tetralogy of books in which Bloom outlines his theory of poetic influence—The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976)—can be understood not as offering a new epistemology that must bear the burden of truth claims but, in Cynthia Ozick's words, "as a long theophanous prose poem, a rationalized version of Blake's heroic Prophetic Books" (46).²

If Ozick is correct about the how we should read Bloom, what about the why? Bloom's theory, finally, is about the relationship between what Nabokov calls "aesthetic bliss" and being (314). The former breathes life into the latter. Difficult reading, David Denby writes, "develops . . . stamina in the way that track practice builds lung power and muscle" (236). In a passage that sounds like it could have been written by Harold Bloom, Denby argues in his recent book, Lit Up,

You make a self by matching yourself against the text. When you respond to the text fully, understanding how it is constructed, and what the parts mean, you come into being. This was hardly a narcissistic exercise; the students [at the Beacon School, Mamaroneck, and Hillhouse] couldn't do what they did without the...