Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Tradition in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur ed. by Joanna Drynda, Alicja Krauze-Olejniczak, and Sławomir Piontek (review)

The publication of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 was a watershed moment in Anglo-American criticism, but its significance outside the anglophone world has largely been more muted and indirect, if no less extensive. A new edited volume, Zwischen Einflussangst und Einflusslust, sets out to address Bloom's terms directly, in the context of contemporary Austrian literature. The editors' foreword summarizes the objective of the book:

Die Beiträge sind Versuche, an ausgewählten Beispielen aufzuzeigen, wie Schrift stellerinnen und Schrift steller unterschiedlicher intellektueller und ästhetischer Provenienz in ihrem Schaffen auf diverse Facetten der spezifisch österreichischen literarischen Tradition reagieren, inwiefern diese Tradition als Chance der Innovation begriffen wird bzw. werden kann, ohne den Gedanken an Originalitat und Autonomie überzustrapazieren.

(7)

This formulation of tradition as an occasion for innovation is familiar to anglophone readers from T. S. Eliot's influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which would in turn provide the skeleton for Bloom's model. The key here, though, is the insistence on the specificity of the Austrian case. For if Bloom's readings of Milton or Shelley must overcome the reader's skepticism about the posited Traditionsproblematik, the location of such Einflussangst in the centermost current of Austrian literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries all but goes without saying. The question is not a theoretical one about poetry in general but a direct one about a specifically defined corpus: What does Bloom's model do to shed light on Austrian literary production of the present?

The first of the volume's fourteen contributions comes from Günther A. Höfler. "Harald Blooms ödipale Einflussmystik und die Rolle der literarischen Vorläufer in der österreichischen Gegenwartsliteratur" sets the tone for the volume and effectively elucidates the key ideas. The reader does not have to be familiar with Bloom's work to benefit from this collection. The first two sections of Höfler's essay are called "fragliche Zusammenhänge" and "Harold Blooms ödipale Geniereligion," and they offer a fine overview of what Bloom means by "Einflussangst/anxiety of influence," by "clinamen," by "poetic history," and by "genius," these being the key terms that drive his theory. But Höfler offers more than an overview or summary—he moves quickly to the discussion of specific Austrian cases. He points out a lovely affinity between Bloom and Thomas Bernhard, the latter having described to an interviewer shortly before the publication of The Anxiety of Influence that he sees himself as the enemy of his literary forebears and that the authors most important to him are those he most struggles with. For his part, Bloom included Bernhard's 1984 novel Holzfällen in his taste-making book The Western Canon.

Höfler steps directly into one of the main difficulties posed by any study of literary influence when he titles the fourth section of his essay "Niemandes Söhne und Töchter: die literarische Generation Y," without offering at least a tentative definition of this generation. After all, people are born every year, and the genealogical metaphor implies a distinct division into generations, into parents and children. He does offer one defining characteristic of Generation Y, by way of Hurrelmann's and Albrecht's book Die heimlichen Revolutionäre: Wie die Generation Y die Welt verändert. He calls them the first digital natives—a solid and familiar premise, to be sure, except that the authors he turns to first of all as examples are born as early as 1978 and as late as 1990, too wide a range to claim a shared relationship to new technology, in my opinion.

This is meant not as an attack, but only to point out how slippery these terms always are and how much Bloom is able to sidestep by putting a few centuries between himself...