Influence & Anxiety

“There is always room for a successor – even for ourselves –
and a different way to proceed.” — Montaigne, On Experience

   In a piece written by the critic Kenneth Gross, an ex-student of Harold Bloom, we read that “Bloom was always alive to Blake’s way of joining visionary, esoteric wildness and blunt sceptical, satirical rage. He treasured Blake’s cheerful independence, his dark sense of humour, his willingness to think through for himself all ideas and traditions, his hatred of the mind’s capacity to accept and forge limitations for itself and others, and his ambition of ‘opening up the reader’s own buried capacity for imaginative self-liberation.’”

This is as good an account as any of the spirit and preoccupations of Bloom’s work; it being the singular, original, idiosyncratic independence and radical non-compliance of Blake’s vision that Bloom celebrated, and aspired to. (Bloom said in an interview that when he read Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, it was the best book he had ever read, and that after many readings he knew it by heart.) The Anxiety of Influence—at once a history of poetic tradition, and a story about the individual development of what Bloom called “strong poets”—was the book that first fully exemplified, or theorised, what Bloom, in Gross’s account, valued about Blake. It presented a story in which, in Freudian fashion, the agonistic and conflictual displaced the collaborative, and rivalry and originality and priority were the abiding objects of desire. It would be cute but true to say that the book, among many other things, is informed and inspired by Bloom’s anxiety about Freud’s influence on him, and about Freud’s influence in general. “Every poem,” Bloom writes, “is a misinterpretation of a parent poem,” implying, haunted by an undisclosed normativity, that somewhere there was an accurate, authoritative, definitive interpretation which the new poem flaunts and distorts. Placing poetry back in the family—and centrally, in Freud’s fiction of the family romance—and making the deliberate mistake (what Bloom calls “misprision”) the heart of the matter, Bloom wants Freud to be the unwitting master-explainer of what Bloom would call the Western Canon, of how literature and its history works.

   I want to talk in this paper about Bloom’s complicated relationship with Freud as the implicit precondition for his labyrinthine story about poetry in The Anxiety of Influence, and so talk about Bloom’s Freud rather than Bloom’s poets. To take one thread in this immensely complex and ambitious book, and see what it underwrites. It is perhaps worth pointing out at the outset that psychoanalysis, in a sense, has only one precursor, Freud, in a way that poetry does not.

His title itself, as Bloom knew—he was a self-confessed ‘disciple’ of Freud—would make the psychoanalyst prick up her ears; not least because of Freud’s unassailable influence on every psychoanalyst. Also because, from a strictly Freudian point of view, you could have a fear of influence but not an anxiety of influence, so that Bloom begins with a determined misprision of Freud:in the Freudian fiction fear has a known object but anxiety has an always displaced unconscious object (if pigeons make me anxious it is assumed that something has been located in or attributed to the pigeons that I need to be unaware of). Freud often tellingly blurs his important distinction between anxiety and fear, but having so pointedly made it, he has shown us that whenever the word ‘anxiety’ is used questions need to be asked: for example, what is separation anxiety actually a fear of? So the strictly Freudian question would be, what is an anxiety of influence ( for any given person) really an anxiety, or rather a fear, about ? What initiating fear has been disguised and redescribed as an anxiety of influence? Speculatively—at least from a psychoanalytic point of view—we could surmise that the fear being as it were concealed in the anxiety is the fear of, say, dependence, helplessness indebtedness, abjection, deprivation, self-sufficiency and so on, though different for each person. But an anxiety of influence would be assumed to be, by Freudian definition, not an anxiety of influence but an anxiety about something quite else as well, for which influence would be a cover story, because for Freud, as I say, anxiety always involves a displacement.

It is also true that an anxiety of influence was not an anxiety explicitly acknowledged by Freud, while seeming, at the same time, to cover every anxiety described by Freud and his followers . Freudian through and through, The Anxiety of Influence, as a title, could be a redescription of Freud’s famous title Civilisation and its Discontents. Bloom’s references, for example, to “the difficult human effort of holding the middle ground between instinctual existence and all morality seem like standard, indeed conventional Freudian assumptions. There are of course in Freud’s work many kinds of anxiety—depressive anxiety, paranoid anxiety, neurotic and psychotic anxiety; but Freud himself tended to concentrate on the diagnostic categories of anxiety hysteria and anxiety neurosis, and the by now familiar, but nevertheless interpretable, concepts of castration anxiety and separation anxiety.

Castration anxiety, in Freud’s account, is the consequence of the anxiety, not to mention the influence, of our having two parents of different sexes, both of whom are rivals and objects of desire in the so-called Oedipus complex, which in Freud’s theory, is an inevitable and formative stage in the young child’s development. Preceding this oedipal crisis is the unsurprisingly rather more popular concept of separation anxiety, the primal anxiety that is the consequence of the child’s initial absolute and unconscious dependence on the mother, or caretaker; the person understood to be the formative and founding influence on the child’s life. All these anxieties, one way or another, are occasioned by loss, and assumed to be displacements in so far as they are anxieties. The anxiety Freud takes to be the acute distress borne of disturbing conflict Bloom elaborates as the particular anxiety of what he wants to call, for better and for worse, strong poets (for the strong poet the precursor is almost incredibly powerful, at once inspiration and potential saboteur). Bloom that is to say, displaces Freud’s account of individual development, initially in relation to the parents, on to an account of poetic development, both the development of the poet and of poetry itself (and so reading it both ways we can redescribe the strong poet as the child committed to his own development). In a sense it is a simple piece of what used to be called applied psychoanalysis. In a larger sense, when Bloom writes in this book that the “deepest pleasure [is] the ecstasy of priority, of self-begetting,” the Freudian child has become a deluded megalomaniac.

So it is worth noting, initially—when wondering about Bloom’s ambivalence about Freud, and Freud’s influence—that in the Preface to the second edition of the book in 1997, which is almost entirely about Shakespeare, with only two mentions of Freud (in nearly 50 pages), Bloom is keen to minimise—repress would be the obvious psychoanalytic term—the influence of Freud on his book. Shakespeare, barely referred to in the first edition, has now become the overwhelming precursor, the fundamental inspiration for his book. This is the Shakespeare who has, in Bloom’s view, invented us all, and possibly all of western culture. “I never meant by the anxiety of influence,” Bloom writes, backtracking while claiming not to do so, “a Freudian Oedipal rivalry, despite a rhetorical flourish or two in this book.”

A rhetorical flourish or two, as Bloom knew, rather understates the case; you would never gather from the new preface that Freud had been of much significance to Bloom; or indeed that Bloom as a cultural critic might have experienced Freud as a so-called Oedipal rival in The Anxiety of Influence. “Nietzsche and Freud are, as far as I can tell, the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in this book,” Bloom writes early in his initial Introduction. What Bloom does to Freud in the new preface, then, somewhat resembles his revisionary ratio of clinamen, in which “a poet swerves away from his precursor” because the precursor’s writing was only accurate up to a certain point and needed what Bloom calls “correction.” So that both Freud and Bloom have been corrected by Shakespeare, the writer most quoted by Freud, though it is not at all clear what a Shakesperean reading of any writer would be, even it has become all too clear what a Freudian reading is; they seem incommensurate, not least because Freud invented what came to be called a method which Shakespeare obviously did not.

   It does now seem strange that before Bloom, influence and anxiety had never been quite so starkly linked, except in child analysis, in which a parallel thing would be called attachment or dependence. After Freud the influence of parents, and instinctual life—and the connection between the two—became paramount, and, as it were, familiar; and acknowledged also to be fraught with conflict. But in Bloom’s displacement of the ordinary Oedipus complex on to the poetic tradition—in which parents are redescribed as precursors—parents retroactively begin to seem an enormous problem for the child’s development, which of course they can be, but needn’t entirely, or only be. “Poetic influence,” Bloom will write, following on from Freud, “is a variety of melancholy or an anxiety principle,” knowingly adding another principle of his own to Freud’s pleasure principle and reality principle. For parents, as I say, Bloom will use the word “precursors,” poets being precursors of other poets in a way that is suggestively different from parents being precursors of their children. It is a useful redescription, though never put quite like this, that children suffer from an anxiety about the influence of their parents, and vice versa; this would later in psychoanalysis evolve into a story about the terrors of dependence, and about adolescence.

Freud, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, “had three theories of anxiety. The first was that it was a manifestation of repressed libido; the second was that it represented a repetition of the experience of birth, while the third, which can be regarded as the definitive psychoana- lytical theory of anxiety, was that there are two forms—primary anxiety and signal anxiety, both of which are responses of the ego to increases of instinctual or emotional tension; signal anxiety being an alerting mecha- nism,which forewarns the ego of an impending threat to its equilibrium, primary anxiety being the emotion which accompanies dissolution of the ego.”

It is clear from this summary that for Freud anxiety is the informing and deforming experience of a life, that there can be no development or genealogy without anxiety. Bloom intimates that the word anxiety could be replaced with the word ‘inspiration’: “a poem,” Bloom writes in an arresting phrase in his book, “is an achieved anxiety,” which suggests that anxiety is or may be an achievement. Bloom thus makes us wonder what has to happen, or what we have to do, to transform anxiety into inspiration. In fact, Bloom described Freud as “the inescapable mythologist of our age” and was an acute and devoted close reader of Freud’s anxiety, reading Freud as the writer that Freud apparently wanted to be. Really it is Freud’s anxiety, so to speak, that interests Bloom. And in relation to Freud—a passionate life-long virtual obsession for Bloom—there is apparently more gratitude and appreciation than anxiety. Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, the great theoretician of paternity and ambivalence becomes for Bloom—and in his view, for modern literature as a whole—the inspiring cultural father. (You can’t imagine Bloom putting a mother in such a prominent position; mothers, let alone women, don’t tend to figure in his work, nor do the ideas of nurture and dependence.) But Freud’s influence is virtually everywhere in Bloom’s writing: in John Hollander’s Poetics of Influence: New and Selected criticism by Bloom, there are 131 references to Freud in the Index, at least three times more than to any other writer. Bloom’s Freud, that is to say, is the dominant influence on Bloom himself and, in Bloom’s view, on modern life as a whole. Bloom, like Freud, is given to the grandiosity of generalisation. And Bloom, like Freud, like all great generalisers, has got a lot of explaining to do.

It would be misleading to describe Bloom’s relationship to, or interpretation of, Freud, or his account of poetic tradition, as simply sado-masochistic—a matter of people making themselves big by making others feel small—though his version of maleness and the agonistic can now also seem preposterous and knock-about, and somehow organised around humiliation (the humiliation of not being the chosen one, the humiliation of not being original, or having priority). Bloom’s commitment to Freud’s usurpation seems to strengthen and inspire him and not diminish him as a critic, or a writer. “Any critic,” he wrote in the appropriately titled Wrestling Sigmund, “theoretical or practical, who tries to use Freud ends up being used by Freud,” which makes Freud, among other things, the master pragmatist( and more covertly, the master exploiter). Indeed Bloom provokes us to ask what it is to be used by Freud, and how that might get us the life we want? Freudian “usurpation,” he writes,“as a literary pattern is uniquely valuable to critics because it is the modern instance of poetic strength, of the agonistic clearing away of cultural rivals, until the Freudian tropes have assumed the status of priority, while nearly all precedent tropes seem quite belated in comparison.”

And yet why, we might wonder, is such triumphalism being cel- ebrated? One answer would be that, in the background of Bloom’s work, there is an over-controlling and stifling object whose triumph Bloom is determined to waylay rather than to suffer, to use rather than be defeated by. Belatedness, we should remember, means actually irredeemable loss. And if we don’t call this over-controlling object the mother, or the parents, or the culture—or indeed Freud—we can call it, simply, the past.

But somewhere we always run the risk of being stifled by being over-controlled, over-influenced, and strong poets are most acutely aware of this in Bloom’s account—strong poets being acutely sensitive to attacks on their own development. Bloom doesn’t want us to get stuck as readers, or critics, or writers—or to take refuge in—states of idealisation and its secret sharer, envy. He doesn’t want us to be, consciously or unconsciously, in search of idols, or servility, or mere compliance. Bloom believes we should be inspired by, and contest, what we are coerced or tempted by. So-called ‘strong poets,’ Bloom insists, use their precursors to make a new future for themselves; they do not allow their precursors to pre-empt or dictate the terms, or indeed dictate the future. In the best sense, they exploit their fathers rather than serve them.

One way of describing this would be to say that in Bloom’s work—though this is never quite spelled out, except in Richard Rorty’s praising of Bloom—William James’s pragmatism is fed into Freud’s psychoanalysis. Rorty writes, in The Historiography of Philosophy, that “we cannot get along without heroes…we need to tell ourselves detailed stories of the mighty dead in order to make our hopes of surpassing them concrete.” And this is, among other things, a nod to Bloom, as well as to Emerson and James. Bloom’s pragmatic question to Freud, like the strong poet’s question to his precursors, is, what can I use your work to do to make my own apparently unprecedented future? What kind of resource can I turn the past into? Bloom’s question is Freud’s question and William James’s question: what can you use the past to do, your personal past and the cultural past that is integral to it? What are you tempted to recruit the past to do for you? How do you prevent the past from foreclosing the future, a perhaps not unsurprising question after, among many other things, the catastrophes of two world wars. And a not unsurprising question for a Jewish American critic of Bloom’s generation. The question, put another way, is: what can tyranny and devastation and cumulative trauma be transformed into ? How can you best survive the surviving of it? What can you make of what’s left, or what you are left with? Freud, like James, like Bloom was preoccupied by how to keep the future alive as a viable—that is, a desirable—prospect. “For why do men write poems?” Bloom asks in this book, using his favourite pronoun, if not “to rally everything that remains, and not to sanctify nor propound.” To rally is in this sense to “reassemble…to bring together for united effort, to pull together, revive… to recover in some degree lost health, power, vigour, value,” as we read in Chambers’ 20^th century dictionary. Rallying is what Milton’s Satan—Bloom’s exemplary strong poet—does in Hell.

Clearly it is part of Bloom’s performance to relish what we are sometimes supposed to be appalled by, and what we are appalled by. The celebrated triumphalism of poetic progress, the promotion of the strong and the determinedly invulnerable, of course, have inspired resistance. There is much in Bloom’s writing that is now set against some of the spirit of the age. The agonistic clearing away of cultural rivals seems singularly ill-judged in the light of, say, recent and not so recent history; and the exclusionary privileging of men seems just pernicious and silly—though we may perhaps value Bloom for his willingness to risk, if not to actually court, mockery. Bloom is always asking us in his writing why we are so impressed—and sometimes so usurped—by our objects of desire, by our inspiring writers; and why we might want to be. Why are we so drawn to the saboteurs of our own development? What effect do our chosen writers have on us, on what Deleuze calls our capacity to be affected? And what do we then make of them, and with them? Why might we want, and not want, to resist being sometimes so tyrannised and diminished?

Obviously, much in Bloom’s writing affects and interests us, however ambivalent we are about his work, however much we resist and worry over his influence. If for influence we also read dependence or acculturation, or simply education, then we might read The Anxiety of Influence as a book obliquely and spectacularly about education, in spite of Bloom’s ambivalence about academia. Perhaps we should ask here whether influence, or the anxiety Bloom invokes, doesn’t bring out what we take to be best in us, not to mention in our poets. In Bloom’s account the strong poet has a very strong sense of where he doesn’t want to go. In Freudian and Jamesian terms he refuses to be paralysed by conflict or intimidation. Bloom goes in fear of procrastination, and the procrastination and deferral that is repetition. And of course he makes us wonder—by the same token, as it were—what our anxiety might be about being influenced by The Anxiety of Influence. Not to mention , as I say, being influenced by the education we have had. We note that, by keeping anxiety always in the picture Bloom ineluctably ironises and complicates the strident, forceful, determined positions he is always tempted to assert. Anxiety is the loophole: where there is anxiety there is potentially paralysing scepticism in and about the self; anxiety heralds, protects us from, and gives the lie to omniscience and omnipotence. It exposes the telling and vitalising vulnerability of the self, and its fears of its strengths and fundamentalisms. It undoes certainties and states of conviction. Anxiety is the form scepticism takes in oneself, a way of registering disturbing desires. More, as Freud showed, it is often the self-cures for anxiety—the self-cures for self-doubt—that wreak havoc and invention. By linking influence with anxiety and linking both in a theory of poetry Bloom made anxiety a term of art and not a cliché for our everyday excruciation.

Still, it should be noted again that in Freud’s account we are also always unconscious of what we are really anxious about. Anxiety is caused by as yet unknown influences, though of course Bloom’s strong poet seems to be very clear about what makes him anxious, and so what his anxiety is really about. Just to make sure we don’t get the wrong idea Bloom subtitles his book “A Theory of Poetry,” because it could seem like a theory of everything, exposing the terror of not knowing what and who we are influenced by – and then also the terror of apparently knowing all too well.

II.

   In his Seminar VI (1958), Lacan refers to anxiety as the “key to the determination of symptoms,” and it was of course in the 1960s and 1970s a key term in the existentialism of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. Lacan added that “in philosophy people have gone so far as to say that anxiety confronts us with nothingness.” In other words, with the publication of his book in 1973, Bloom was trading in, and wanting to redescribe, the by now more than current influence of anxiety, in psychoanalysis, in continental philosophy and in the wider culture: “We live increasingly in a time,” Bloom wrote, “where soft-headed descriptions of anxiety are marketable and cheerfully consumed.” Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, published in 1947, just after the end of the Second World War, won the Pulitzer prize in 1948 and explicitly announced the theme, as it were, for modern poetry. The now largely forgotten but once rightly famous American psychoanalyst Rollo May published the extremely successful Meaning of Anxiety in 1958: “In the problem of anxiety,” he wrote, “we must always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened.”

Whatever anxiety was deemed to be, in the sixties and seventies, it was a defining term. All this by way of saying that in the cultural climate in which Bloom published his book the influence of anxiety was paramount; and all the thinking, though it was not as far as I know formulated like this, was about what it could be that influenced the modern individual to feel such anxiety, and what anxiety was a way of registering. What was his or her anxiety about, and where did it come from? Why had the word so caught on? For Bloom—whose title answered the question of what anxiety was about—of course, the question was more specifically, what influenced the modern poet to feel anxiety? And the answer was influence itself. “My concern,” he writes in the Introduction to his book, “is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?”

Of course, at the suggestion that the strong maker succeeds in creating himself the psychoanalyst must throw up his hands, acknowledging that in fact we are all ‘created,’ if that is the right word, by our parents, and our parents’ parents, and so on and on, with self-invention, in the often rather too limiting language of psychoanalysis, deemed to be the ultimate omnipotent defence against dependence.

But Bloom is arch and knowing and intriguing in his provoca- tions; here Bloom refuses to be usurped by Freud, but instead uses him, like Milton’s Satan, in an informed and inspired act of defiance. Bloom is often more than alive to the ironies of the positions he takes. Considering originality as a function of indebtedness makes them inextricable and interanimating. To be sure, he concedes, “we have no common vocabulary for discussing the works of the spirit except what [Freud] gave us.” And yet, using terms borrowed and appropriated from psychoanalysis, he uses those terms without delegating his intelligence to them. If idealization is what the supposedly weak do—and Freud would concur that we idealize as a solution to our helplessness and envy—then what do the strong do with what they take and value? They use it to make themselves up, and to make up to themselves for their belatedness. It is tempting to say that those Bloom calls the strong have to idealise themselves.

But then Bloom also insists—and this is where he is distinctively Freudian rather than Jamesian—that influence cannot be and so is not consciously chosen. Poetic precursors—like parents—are not chosen. They are found—unlike parents—through an unconscious process. “Influence,” he writes, “cannot be willed.”

The implication, in Bloom, is that so-called ‘strong poets’ have an unconscious capacity to be influenced, but to be influenced in the way they unconsciously want or need to be influenced. The poet and critic John Hollander writes that “Bloom’s notion of a strong poet emerges in such a way as to suggest more immediately that poetic greatness consists in the ability to be influenced by great poets—to misconstrue them in a way their greatness merits (not therefore in a reductive diminishing).” Bloom’s notorious promotion of “misreading,” what Hollander calls more pertinently, “misconstrual,” is always a useful allusion to so-called Freudian slips and Freud’s exposing the sheer inventiveness of mistakes. The ‘ability’ to be influenced by great poets that Hollander refers to is an ability worth wondering about; for Hollander it brings out the best in both the great precursor poet and the aspiring poet. To freely misread, presumably, one must be able to manage fears of retaliation or humiliation. In this account, mutuality displaces (oedipal) conflict. Hollander goes on to say that, “it is not Bloom’s rhetorical struggle with his reader, but his ultimate will to power over texts, that is at issue.” This at least acknowledges that in Bloom’s writing Nietzsche’s will to power is somewhere always in play, and not least in the effect of Bloom’s rhetoric on the reader. Bloom is a critic that it is impossible to be indifferent to; when you read Bloom you feel something is being done to you, something is happening to you that is not wholly covered by the word ‘persuasion.’ And it is, I think, integral to the elaborate self-consciousness of his rhetoric that we as readers are being pushed to consider why we might be anxious about being influenced by Bloom, indeed, what we fear having done to us.

Consider that the very first lines in the Introduction to Bloom’s book The Anxiety of Influence are quite explicit that we are in need of correction, as poets, as readers and as critics. “This short book offers a theory of poetry,” he writes, and “one aim of [my] theory is corrective: to de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another.”

To deidealise our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another involves our remembering that to deidealise, in psychoanalysis, is to be more realistic, more in touch with reality; it is in the service of a more realistic ambivalence. In other words, in overriding or ignoring the essentialising of reality here we become supposedly more truthful and therefore more able as poets to really help one another. And the idea of fostering a more adequate practical criticism raises the same problem — adequate to who or to what; or adequate for what. In a sense, The Anxiety of Influence is a testimony to the anxiety of being influenced, if not actually driven, by the unconscious. The anxiety of being influenced by what we don’t as yet know. The unconscious being something that we can at best only be ambivalent about.

III.

   When I trained as a child psychotherapist in the late 70’s we were taught to address what was taken then to be the fundamental clinical question: What is the child or adult’s central anxiety? That is to say, it was assumed that there was a central anxiety—rather than an array and disarray of more or less linked anxieties—and that it could be recognised, described and made conscious, thereby supposedly loosening its hold. The project, so to speak, was to enhance a person’s sense of agency, of autonomy; where id was, there ego should be, as Freud notoriously put it, wittingly and unwittingly handing psychoanalysis over to the supposedly self-motivated, self-realising, self-knowing and therefore better adapted. Where ego-psychology was, there psychoanalysis should not be, as Lacan and many other critics of ego-psychology would assert. What had become the aims of psychoanalysis were the problems it initially set out to address; the cure another version of the symptom; as Lacan would say in various ways, a strong ego is the problem, not the solution. A strong sense of self is a self-cure for a founding weakness. We must, above all, distrust those who claim to know, in any absolute sense, what they are doing. After psychoanalysis strength is newly ironised, and in a way Bloom tends to ignore.

I want to suggest that Bloom is uneasily positioned among these contradictions in The Anxiety of Influence. Is Bloom’s strong poet an acceptable—indeed sometimes impressive and inspiring—literary version of the strong ego? If Milton’s Satan is the modern poet at his strongest, as Bloom insists, is the book, in all its intricate subtlety, an elaborate rationalisation of Nietzche’s will-to-power? Is Bloom’s strong poet subject to the criticisms and misgivings that Milton’s Satan has always provoked? There is indeed some intimation of this early in the book when Bloom remarks—his familiar gusto in abeyance—that ‘everything’ that makes up his book, “intends to be part of a unified meditation on the melancholy of the creative mind’s desperate insistence upon priority.” The idea of a unified meditation—of a unified anything—is anathema in Freud’s radically decentred world. The insistence on priority is desperate because it is known to be impossible, and therefore futile, and this acknowledgement is a melancholia (what is lost being so-called infantile omnipotence).

In a book written so insistently in Freud’s ethos, in the shadow of Freud’s vocabulary, we should perhaps remember, as I say, that in Freud’s view the melancholic can not locate what he has lost. What, we might speculate—though it is crude in a sense to do so—is what someone (not Bloom personally) might have lost for which his self-cure would be this fantasy of the strong poet? What is becoming a so-called strong poet a solution to ? Why, we might wonder, is priority the thing ? What is the big deal about being first, original, unprecedented, self-founding? A question not only for younger siblings. Another way of saying this is that in the book Bloom is staving off his own all-too-Freudian ambivalence about his concept of the strong poet. Bloom might say, in a Nietzschean way, that it is a symptom of our abjection that we are frightened of the strong, and want to diminish them. If I said I wanted to be a weak poet what would I be saying?

So we need to look briefly at Bloom’s Six Revisionary Ratios, akin as he says, to Freud’s defence mechanisms. And these ratios, like Freud’s defences, intimate that we are prone or tempted to attack and sabotage our own development. The ratios are there to make the future viable, or to make a viable future out of our desire. Bloom’s ratios—not unlike Freud’s fiction of the ego and its mechanisms of defence, as I say— are a testament to what is deemed to be the threatening and traumatically pre-emptive power of the past, and of the instincts. There is also the fact that the very thing the poet is inspired by—the precursor poet—he is intrinsically antagonistic to, and fearful of. What is always precarious for the strong poet—and not only the strong poet—is an inspired and inspiring future ( or, to put it more reductively, the strong poet is always up against a future sabotaged by envy, by fear of failure and fear of success). In each of these ratios there is an ambiguity—as there is in Freud’s account of the defences—about how voluntaristic, how chosen these defences are, and what they are in the service of. What does the so-called strong poet feel he needs to protect himself from? Fantasies of autonomy may be the self-cure for a founding and fundamental helplessness, but to be auton- omous is not to be unconscious. What is at stake here is the realm and scope of self-invention. What is remarkable about Bloom’s ratios is just how conscious and purposive the strong poet is taken to be; he may not always know what he wants, but he really knows what he doesn’t want.

In Clinamen—“poetic misreading or misprision”—the poet “swerves away from his precursor”; in this corrective moment what is implied, Bloom writes, “is that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved precisely in the direction that the new poem moves.” The corrective poet, that is to say, knows the direction the precursor poem should have taken. Once again, the poet, in Bloom’s words, “antithetically completes his precursor…as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.” In Kenosis there is “a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor.” That is to say, the strong poet again knows what should be continued and how to do it, and knows by the same token which continuities to disrupt or rupture.

In Daemonization, Bloom’s fourth ratio, “the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent poem that does not belong to the parent proper.” In other words the parent proper has been naïve and significantly unaware of a power he has, but is unconscious of, or fearful of. The strong poet can see something in the poet that the poet was unable to see—as if a child were to say—as well she might—I know my parents better than they know themselves (the ultimate omniscience). In Askesis the “precursor’s endowment is also truncated”: that is, with a view to separating himself from the parent poem, there is a stripping away, the strong poet again all-too-knowing of what needs to be got rid of—in himself and in his precursor—to make the singular future he is aspiring to. And then in the final—in some ways most triumphantly omnipotent ratio—the poet, having achieved his necessary solipsistic singularity, “holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself…But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor was writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”

The later poet is, then, unassailable, invulnerable to being usurped or foreclosed by the precursor. He has indeed now the power both to invite the precursor in and create the illusion that he has in fact written the precursor’s original poems that he had initially felt so threatened and inspired by. The unwitting host has become the relegated guest, the precursor merely a precondition for the strong poet, the material he will transform for his own purposes. It is indeed startling (and sometimes exhilarating), even in this most cursory account of Bloom’s ratios, just how knowing and self-knowing the strong poet is taken to be, and how much being a strong poet is an epistemological project; and how the poetry of the past is there to be—in the best and worst senses—exploited to make a relatively unprecedented future. In this story, it is only worth having a past if you have a future. But it must, in a sense, be a past of your making.

If, as Bloom writes, the “relation between poets” is “akin to what Freud called the family romance,” then we need to remember that this relation is suffused and informed by wishfulness and narcissism at its most extreme. In the family romance the child chooses his parents in the ultimate omnipotent act. Similarly, Bloom’s strong poet chooses—or perhaps more accurately senses an affinity, is drawn to—his precursors but only with a view to transforming them. The strong poet is like a child who sees the potential in the parents that the parents themselves couldn’t or didn’t want to see; and in that sense the so-called strong poet realises the potential that his precursors didn’t and couldn’t know that they had. This is not unlike the oedipal thought that if only my mother or father had married me they would have had a much better life.

IV.

   The precursor poet, like the parent to whom Bloom with his ironic Freudianism compares him, is in Bloom’s version the obstacle that has to be made into an instrument. “How can the poets receive the deepest pleasure,” he writes, “the ecstasy of priority, of self-begetting, of an assured autonomy, if their way to the true subject and their own true selves lies through the precursor’s subject and his self?” The assumption here once again is that the deepest pleasure—for Freud THE object of desire, though ecstasy is a word rarely found in psychoanalytic writing —is “the ecstasy of priority, of self-begetting, of an assured autonomy,” all of which, particularly an “assured autonomy,” was anathema to Freud, the fantasies of a child and an adult who were unable to bear their dependence, and therefore their desire. Indeed priority, self-begetting and assured autonomy could only be a description of an attempt to float free of an initial, infantile need and an eventual oedipal crisis. Untroubled by contradicting himself, by definition, Bloom will say later in the book, sensing a misgiving, “we need to stop thinking of any poet as an autonomous ego, however solipsistic the strongest of poets may be.” Autonomy and solipsism can sound virtually indistinguishable in the Freudian and Bloomian story; autonomy, we can at least say, is inevitably something of an issue, a force-field, in Bloom’s book, which endlessly wonders, as did Freud, what autonomy could possibly be, and be for.

What Bloom seems to have done here with his main precursor is to reverse his terms; a lot of what Freud pathologises Bloom privileges; everything Freud describes as wishful and evasive Bloom regards as inspirational and constitutive for the strong poet. Bloom’s strong poet, on this reckoning, is an adult for whom childhood was unbearable to him – who pre-exists his own parents, conceives of and gives birth to himself, and has no unconscious. The Anxiety of Influence is, then, a book about—among many other things—one man’s, perhaps one culture’s, anxiety about the influence of Freud; and about the anxiety of having to have parents. What after all will we want to be once our wish to be prior, self-begetting and autonomous has finally been either gratified or disqualified? Or we might wonder what kind of lives—or what kinds of poems—will we want after priority, self-begetting and autonomy are no longer in the cards, neither viable nor realistic, nor even desirable options?

These are not Bloom’s explicit questions, though his text, I think, provokes them, unconsciously as it were. But this, one might say, is the influence Bloom wants to have over Freud, his creative misreading that can turn every Freudian account of weakness into a strength; that makes defences, once in the service of adaptation, forms of inspiration; that turns the aim of development into the achievement of a higher narcissism, or a greater autonomy, if they are not the same thing. “The mystery of poetic style,” Bloom writes towards the end of The Anxiety of Influence, “the exuberance that is beauty in every strong poet, is akin to the mature ego’s delight in its own individuality, which reduces to the mystery of narcissism.”

Surely “reduces to the mystery of narcissism” is a phrase worth noting. Why is narcissism something the mature ego is reduced to , and why is ‘reduced’ the word rather than, say, elevated? And what is added to the idea of narcissism—or the idea of poetic style—by calling it a mystery? Is narcissism more alluring if it is a mystery, or more evasive? As I mentioned earlier, it is not clear, from a psychoanalytic point of view, what a mature ego is and why it might be an object of desire. We do know that Freud and many of his followers were never quite sure whether narcissism was the problem or the solution: Are we suffering from too little narcissism or from too much? Or are we suffering from the wrong kinds of narcissism ? Psychoanalysts, we can say, have always been ambivalent about narcissism, and this devolved into analysts after Freud —most notably Kleinians—talking about malign narcissism, as opposed to its opposite. But in Bloom’s account the strong poet has a mature ego and is a successful, indeed inspired and inspiring narcissist. Here again Bloom both elaborates and provocatively turns the tables on Freud’s instructive questions: what is a strong, mature ego good for? Is narcissism something to be valued? Describing himself as “a deliberate revisionist of some of the Freudian emphases,” Bloom is to be taken at his word (though the idea of the unconscious ineluctably complicates the idea of deliberateness). We need to see, as I have been suggesting, what this deliberation is in the service of, because one of the very striking things about Bloom’s book is that it is easier over time to find fault and quibble with it (as I have done), and yet to go on finding it in some way still somehow compelling. This is not, I think, simply to do with the tone and the spirit in which it is written, nor simply to do with the moment – in literary studies and beyond—in which it was written—its troubled place in the history of modern literary criticism. The pragmatic question would be, what about the book gets to us, and often despite our misgivings?

As a psychoanalyst I am only really at all equipped to answer the question, albeit briefly, about what kind of use the book may be to psychoanalysis itself. Bloom describes Freud as “the founder”—psychoanalysis being the history of the anxiety of Freud’s influence. But The Anxiety of Influence says most starkly to psychoanalysts—though of course it is not for psychoanalysts that Bloom is ostensibly writing—don’t consent to be stifled by Freud, don’t use fantasies of indebtedness to defend yourself from your own inspiration. Use Freud to resist being overly used by him. Further, Bloom makes us wonder what psychoanalysis, let alone poetry, might be once Freud has been displaced, or overshadowed. What Bloom calls for is the strong poet, a figure for what psychoanalysts call an ego-ideal.

Bloom has added to the cultural repertoire of descriptions of who we can be, of who he believes we should aspire to be, at our best. A strong poet is, for Bloom, one version of a modern person in their finest form. “The precursors flood us,” Bloom writes, “and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.” We need a capacity to be influenced, to be affected, indeed to be overwhelmed, but we also need something—some capacity for transformation, for revision, for redescription—that is renewing, and makes something new of the past, and even of the overwhelming, something no-one in the past could have predicted. (We can’t imagine what a new poem would sound like, and then, say, John Ashbery writes one.) “The mighty dead return,” Bloom writes ruefully, “but they return in our colours, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own.” The Anxiety of Influence, whatever else it does, wants to encourage us in this persistence, as though trauma is always, or can be, potentially beneficial.

A strong reader, then, more generally would be someone who could make something of what she reads—like a poet who can make a new poem out of the poems she reads—who can make a more desirable future out of a useable past; who uses the past not to consolidate, or confirm, or to conserve, or sabotage, but to innovate and improvise. Reading is, then, perhaps, an opportunity to make something and not simply learn something. Bloom’s gusto, his egotistical sublime, his often arch provocations and his strident enthusiasms, and his commitment to prejudice all bespeak, I think, a fear of being stopped in his tracks, a fear of the past as parasitic and confounding and paralysing. Winnicott wrote that depression was the fog over the battlefield. Bloom opts for the battlefield.