The Sight of Memory: Bloom's "Otherseeing" in Possessed by Memory

Possessed by Memory is Bloom's vision. It is his attempt to see his own life, through the poetry he has committed to his memory and which he uses to envision his own life. For Bloom, vision is what a person has when that person stops being afraid of those who have come before us. It is the clarity we have when we have let go of the anxiety of our influences. In this most recent text, Bloom only briefly nods to his most famous, and only somewhat ironic work, but no reader can help but no consider it.

As critics, we are all under the anxiety of his influence. He is one of the last in the lineage of outstanding post-WW II literary theorists, who vast knowledge is only matched by their academic inquiry and innovation. This current generation of critics, my generation of critics, is frequently, I would surmise, stunted in growth by the anxiety we feel faced with the greatness of that critical greatest generation. Instead, we fly to the default position of "down with theory." I cannot help but wonder if so many of us proclaim the death of theory because we are not able to produce our own.

In Possessed by Memory, Bloom, even as he ruminates and revisits, sets forth a new pattern of literary analysis. His short bursts of insight are analysis for the digital age. Even though the text is meaty, its division into small bites makes it palatable for readers, who are used to texts and tweets, not manuscripts. His lengthy citations of primary sources makes the contact with the poetry unmediated. The greatest poets of the Western canon get to speak for themselves, punctuated with tender but pointed analysis.

The histories of faiths, traditions and literatures gives the reader access to Bloom's vision of the world. Bloom delineates the different ways of seeing in "Self-Otherseeing and the Shakespearean Sublime." He writes,

There are four aspects to self-otherseeing:

1. 1. To see one's own other selves

2. 2. To see (by glimpses) the shattering reality of others and of otherness

3. 3. To see nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

4. 4. To see everything that could be there and the plentitude that already is

While within the chapter this list directly applies to Bastard Faulconbridge, a figure in The Life and Death of King John, self-otherseeing is much more than a literary trope. It is Bloom's four pronged definition of vision and it is the super-structure of Possessed by Memory.

"To see one's own other selves" is to understand that in each of us lives an other, a self either projected outward for society to see, or projected inward other to be secretly nurtured. Bloom uses Shakespeare and his contemporaries to illustrate this concept. Writing about the Bastard, Bloom explains, "He is aware of Hubert's otherness, despite the phantasmagoria of battle, yet in seeing what endures of the selfsame (as Shakespeare named individual identity) the Bastard wonders a little at his own strong personality and its survival of all the changes attendant upon war. The first of Shakespeare's self-stagers, the Bastard suddenly apprehends that the flux of action threatens him, the only joyous and exuberant spirit in all of King John" (88). Self-staging is an important concept for Shakespeare and Bloom has spent much of his career tracing the lineage of those larger than life figures: the Bastard, Mercutio, and Falstaff. In Possessed by Memory, Bloom is quietly asserting himself into that lineage. By analyzing the works that he has committed to his critical memory, Bloom is projecting those works outward as his other selves.

Bloom has spent his entire life and career grappling with some of the greatest works of poetry from the Western canon. Through his work, they have become a part of him, but they are not him. He certainly did not author the poetry, just some...