postcolonial bloom

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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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462 MLQ December 2008

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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Varadharajan Legacy of Anxiety of Influence 463

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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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.


17/22


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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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


20/22


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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postcolonial bloom

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