Review: Beyond Hyperbole

Author(s): Patrick Coleman

Reviewed work(s):
A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 44-52
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464881
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BEYOND HYPERBOLE
PATRICK COLEMAN
Harold Bloom. A MAPOF MISREADING. New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1975.
The
urgency
of Harold Bloom's critical
appeal
calls for the reader's
immediate and heart-felt
response, yet
the
very proliferation
of his
works, each
providing
a different version of his
"theory
of
poetry," gives
the reader
pause.
Are we
really
meant to answer the call, or is our even-
tual
response already
tried and found
wanting
when measured
against
the
power
of Bloom's own
response
to himself? When Bloom writes,
at
the
beginning
of A
Map
of
Misreading,
that "this book offers instruction
in the
practical
criticism of
poetry,"
the
mystified
reader of the earlier
Anxiety
of Influence (1973) breathes a
sigh
of relief, expecting
clarifica-
tion of his
perplexity.
Yet he will find that this offer is
only
another of
those
"gifts
that famish the taker" so
frequent
in Bloom's
portrayal
of
poetic
influence. Bloom's
Map
traces no more than a
Holzweg
in the
forest of
poetic symbols,
and the instruction seems all for Bloom alone.
No other
aspect
of Bloom's work shows more his identification with
his favorite
poets,
and to a certain extent Bloom claims
immunity
from
criticism outside the
visionary company. Still, for Bloom as for Stevens,
the
theory
of
poetry
is the
"theory
of life as it
is," and the
position
staked
out
by
Bloom at the heart of
poetic
creation is intended as a
perspective
on life. Not
just
life in
general,
but life as it is for us in our culture
today.
In this
respect,
his stance reminds me less of Nietzsche than, say,
of F. R.
Leavis, in that a certain
charged vocabulary-"life," "elite," "instruc-
tion," "strength," and so on-is made to
operate
on two
very
different
levels where vast
generalizations
coexist with
very specific judgments
that neither
really
illustrate nor limit those
generalizations.
There is, on
the one hand, a
description
of the
experience
of
poetry,
that is, of the
intensity
and concentration on certain
particular
verbal contexts, and, on
the
other, of a communicative situation called "the
present."
It is the
uneasy relationship
between these two
particular fields, whose articula-
44
tion consists of a series of "intricate evasions" more
irritating
than those
imposed by
Stevens's
harassing master,
which defines the
peculiar
structure of Bloom's work. As
with Leavis, a
hyperbolic
rhetoric of valuations and
judgments
marks the absence of
mediation between these two discourses, the critic
wishing
to
preserve
the
specific-
ity
of each
by avoiding
the
impression
that one
might only
be the
metaphorical
transposition
of the other, and all the while
claiming
to
pass
back and forth at will
from one to the other. So it is that the so-called
"practical
criticism" in A
Map
of
Misreading,
while
interesting
in itself, is no more
helpful
than that in Revaluation,
while Bloom's comments on the American cultural scene are sometimes
cogent
but
more often
strangely
detached.
The
comparison
with Leavis, although
not as
flattering
to Bloom as his own iden-
tification with Nietzsche and Freud, is
by
no means a
disparagement
of Bloom.
Indeed, Leavis's lack of
"helpfulness"
has had a
salutary
effect in
many ways,
and the
reaction to Bloom's
shake-up
of the American
literary
world is
producing
some of the
same results, although
some of the same faults affect both. The difference lies in
Bloom's
attempt
at a
greater systematic program
of instruction, one more
explicit
and self-contained than his forbear's, and therefore Bloom's evasions occur at a
higher,
more
interesting level, finally,
than those of Leavis. I have said that Bloom's
practical
criticism does not
provide
the mediation between the two levels of his
discourse. To be fair, I must add that Bloom does not believe such a mediation is
possible. Instead, he
proposes
what he calls a
"tropological"
articulation: his eva-
sions are "the intricate evasions of as." The
originality
of A
Map
of
Misreading
lies in
the
organization
of the rhetorical
tropes
which allow us to
pass
from one discursive
level to another, from one time to another, from one
poet
to another, and even from
poetry
to life, in
ways
that at the same time make us mistake one for the other. It is the
nature of the
organization
which needs
investigation,
if
only
to ascertain
why
it does
not constitute even a flawed mediation.
The concern with this
troping
movement was
already present
in The
Anxiety
of
Influence, but
only
in so far as the
possibility,
indeed the
necessity
of error
produces
anxiety
in the
subject struggling
for
personal
and
poetic autonomy.
Both
poetic
and
psychological categories
were
employed
to show the
pervasiveness
of this
anxiety,
and Bloom was so successful in the
attempt
that the reader was hard
put
to locate
where Bloom himself stood. On the one hand, Bloom's claim to be
writing,
not
criticism, but a
"strong poem," implied that,
like the successful
poets,
he had mas-
tered the
imaginative processes required
to countenance and
compass
the
prospect
of this
systematic pattern
of error and
anxiety.
At the same time,
he claimed not to
have
purchased power by forfeiting knowledge:
as a
critic,
he would
provide
a
discursive
report
on the
ways
of error as a
guide
to the
perplexed.
Thus A
Map
of
Misreading,
where the intricacies of
analogy
and
trope
are elucidated. Still no media-
tion, but a six-fold
sequence
of
figures defining, according
to Bloom, both the
path
of
enlightenment
and the structure of error.
The
development
from influence to
misreading
can be
briefly
traced. In The
Anxiety
of Influence, Bloom dwelt on the various
ways
in which the
young poet,
or
ephebe,
could defend
against
the
powers
of his
predecessor poets,
the
Oedipal
struggle
between
precursor
and latecomer
being
emblematic of the
temporal pro-
cess of
poetic
creation. Bloom defined six
"revisionary
ratios" or versions of
poetic
defense, and his
description
of these ratios showed their vital as well as
literary
implications.
At this
stage,
Bloom's
vocabulary was, except
for the exotic names of
the
ratios,
derived from Freudian
(Sigmund
and Anna) psychology,
with the em-
phasis placed
on the ruses involved in
psychic
defenses. Paul de Man then
suggested,
in a review of the book
[Comparative
Literature, XXVI,
3 (Summer 1974),
269-75],
the
interesting correspondence
between the mechanism of these defenses,
with their
possibilities
of self-delusion, and that of rhetorical
figures.
In A
Map
of
Misreading,
dedicated to de Man, Bloom takes
up
the idea in
formulating
his six-fold
sequence
of
tropes.
The
psychological categories remain, with this difference, that
"misreading"
is used to describe their
operation
as well as that of
linguistic tropes.
Under this
guise,
Bloom's incessant
journey
from
poetry
to life and back becomes a
diacritics/September
1977 45
more serene ramble
through
the thickets of rhetoric, as if this new
vocabulary pro-
vided a safe haven from the
contagion
of
poetic anxiety,
and the new
clarity
of the
Map
a
safeguard against
the errant excesses of
poetic power,
even his own. What lies
behind this
serenity
is
something
we must discover.
But de Man's influence is not
accepted uncritically.
The
heady
combination of
psychological
and rhetorical
categories engenders
a third kind of discourse: the
pedagogical vocabulary
of instruction alluded to earlier. This
certainly
takes us
away
from de Man, and closer to Bloom's old master
Northrop Frye (the path
from Leavis
to
Frye being
itself one of
greater serenity
before the
anxiety
of
value-judgments).
A
Map
of
Misreading may,
even in its title, be seen as a
reply
to
Anatomy
of Criticism,
with the "evasions" of the former
corresponding
to the
"displacements"
of the
latter. The
appearance, indeed, in Bloom's work of an insistent set of references to
Jewish tradition as
part
of a
polemic against Frye's
"Low Church"
mythology strongly
suggests
the burden of this other influence. To this is linked another
important
transformation. In the earlier book the six ratios were seen as
merely
six different
versions of the
process
of influence and
recovery.
No one ratio was either
primary
or
conclusive, and no order articulated their
operation.
In the
Map, despite
various
disclaimers, Bloom sets
up
a
rigorous sequence
of
tropes
endowed with an
integrity
and a
hierarchy
of its own. This of course seems at odds with the
general pattern
of
indiscriminate evasions in Bloom's work as a whole, and
any
discussion of the
pres-
ent book must therefore center around the structure of the
Map.
To some
sympathet-
ic
readers, this
may
be to direct attention to the weakest
point
in Bloom's
theory,
and even Bloom
suggests
that we should not take the order of the
tropes
as a literal
one
applying
in
every
case. On the
contrary,
I think the
principal
interest of A
Map
of
Misreading
lies in this order, and Bloom's
unwillingness
to
speak directly
to the
question
of the status of his scheme
only
obscures the real
power
of his work. For if
the influences on Bloom are not
always
what
they
seem, Bloom's own influence is
also to be
sought
in
unexpected places.
Here is the
Map, showing
the
correspondence
between the earlier ratios and the
rhetorical
tropes (the related defenses have been omitted, since
they
call for a
complicated explanation
best
postponed
to another occasion):
1. Clinamen
irony limitation
2. Tessera
synecdoche
substitution
3. Kenosis metonymy
limitation
4. Daemonization hyperbole
substitution
5. Askesis
metaphor
limitation
6.
Apophrades metalepsis
substitution
The six
tropes
are
grouped
into three
pairs according
to a
recurring, though
not
identical, oppostion
between a
"limiting"
and a
"substituting"
or
"representational"
movement. That is, the initial
figure
of each
pair
is a reductive one, undoing
the
achievement of the
previous poet (in the context of a
poetic genealogy),
or of the
earlier
stage
of the same
poet's
work (in a
poetic life), or of the
progress
of an
individual
poem-these
three levels
being isomorphic.
The second member of the
pair
restores or reinvents its
meaning
in the
place
left vacant
by
the limitation. Bloom
deploys
a
complex
set of terms derived from Kabbalistic tradition to describe this
double movement, but in essence this
aspect
of the
Map
is the most conventional,
resembling many
other
attempts
to demonstrate a "dialectic" of
poetic
creation. In a
recent
essay,
Bloom breaks
up
the
Map
into three distinct
"poetic crossings" [see
"Poetic
Crossing:
Rhetoric and
Psychology," Georgia
Review
XXX,
3 (Fall 1976,
495-
524], suggesting
that this
aspect
is also the more
important
to
him,
but in A
Map
of
Misreading
what counts is the
sequence
as a whole. The
sequence purports
to show
a
single development,
one that establishes the
poet
as
poet,
and the reader as a true
"misreader." It
is, therefore, essential to trace the line of
progression
from one
stage
to the next in order to see the
shape
of this
development.
46
Irony,
as the first
trope,
marks the clinamen, or
primary
swerve
away
from the
presence
of the
predecessor
text. The
irony
lies in that an absence of
meaning,
a
deserted
ground,
is the
only
locus of a new and autonomous
poetic
statement.
Tessera is a token or
fragment
of an "antithetical
completion,"
and
synecdoche,
as
the substitution of a
putative
whole for a
part,
is a first
attempt
to
repair
the ironic
deficiency. Metonymy
then undoes the
illusory
whole
by
a series of
displacements
and
regressions showing
what lies
beyond
the ken of what at this
stage
is
only
a
borrowed
integrity.
The term kenosis is derived from Saint
Paul, and
designates
a
process
of humiliation
undergone by
the
penitent.
Daemonization is "the
repression
or
hyperbole
that becomes a belated or counter-Sublime"
(p. 99), an "over-
restitution" of what was taken
away
in
regression
and doubt. It is
hyperbolic
in that
such a restitution
goes
far
beyond
the
support
that can be mustered for it in the
ordinary
or fallen world
previously
inhabited
by
the
poetic subject.
It is a moment of
pure imagination, which, in
linguistic terms, "has no referential
aspect" [p. 100],
although
it counts on the
expectation
of a new and
higher
world.
This last
trope
is not
very
well defined in Bloom's text, although many pages
are
devoted to it. It marks, nevertheless, the crucial articulation in the
Map.
The
rejec-
tion of
any
referential claim would seem to
signal
a failure, or at least a
gap
in the
easy analogy
between
poetry
and life, if life continues, in contradistinction to
"world," to be identified with "the
present."
For Bloom, however, the
hyperbolic
sublime is a distinctive
achievement, a liberation of the
poetic imagination
from the
mere
repetition
of earlier
stages.
The
poet
does not borrow this
totality,
he is
swept
away
with it, at least
momentarily.
Hyperbole
is a
positive
term in Bloom's
vocabulary.
On the other hand,
metaphor
is
stripped
of its usual
happy
connotations and is made a
figure
of limita-
tion. Its intervention marks the askesis or trial of the
subject compelled
to situate
himself in relation to the
power
of a
poetic
discourse
overwhelming
him. For in
casting
aside the referential
ground
of
language, hyperbole
has in effect
expelled
the
subject
from his discourse: the latter trails behind in the
missing "present."
Bloom's
view is
just
the
opposite
of the one I am here
expressing-for him, hyperbole
is a
solipsistic triumph-but
this
only
masks what is
really going
on. Bloom is
explicit
in
denying
to
hyperbole any
of its
perjoratively
"subjective" connotations, and his talk
of
solipsism, although
meant to
convey
the
objectivity
of a
pure re-presentation,
is
really
a
paradoxical expression
for a
poetic subject
devoid of a
subjection
to
subject-
hood.
Metaphor
reintroduces these constraints, including
the
polarity
between sub-
ject
and
object,
inside and
outside,
and defines the
subject's
relation to a discourse
which no
longer proceeds
from him, but which comes to him from elsewhere.
Solipsism, therefore, can
only
mean that this "elsewhere" is also in the
subject, or,
to
put
it another
way,
also in the domain of
poetry,
and that the constraint and
distinctions introduced
by metaphor
do not
open up
a new
domain, but limit the
identification of
poetry
and life
proclaimed hyperbolically.
It can
only
do
so, not
from the
perspective
of the "referent," but from a
point
both within
figural language
and outside it. This
point
is not defined
by Bloom, who
only
sees it as a troublesome
obstacle to
poetic integrity,
one the
subject
must
pass through
in order to attain its
reward in the
metaleptic
return to an "earliness," a moment when the
subject,
once
expelled
and
displaced,
and not
only by
the
precursor
but
by
his own
attempts
at
creation, overcomes the "belatedness" of his
present
and seals the
originality
of his
own text. It would
appear,
in
retrospect,
that the
point
of
obscurity
was the
"pres-
ent" as defined
by Bloom,
but this is belied
by
the
description
of the "earliness" of
the
Map's
desire. Bloom calls it
apophrades,
or "return of the dead," but this return
is not
away
from us; it is a return to us of these shades in all their vivid
presence.
Even so, the moment of
metalepsis
is not the
expected subsumption
of the
subject
under the
generality
of
poetic language.
It
is,
in Bloom's terms, a
"transumption,"
and this means a reinforcement of the
particularity
of the new and
living poetic;
poetic language
as such never
appears
on the
stage. Although
it first
appeared
that
the
subject
could
only
be
incorporated
into
figural language
if the trammels of the
present's polarities
were to be overcome (the incorporation
thus
being
more of a
diacritics/September
1977 47
disembodiment), we now find that the
subject
is the "incarnation," as Bloom
puts it,
following
the
eighteenth-century poet Collins, "of the Poetical Character"
[p. 11,
and
passim].
It is this
"incarnation," problematic
as it
may be, that is the final
representation
of the
Map.
The Poetical Character thus
exemplifies
the
victory
of and
over influence in the
poetic
and
personal struggle,
the term "character"
meaning
both a
psychic construct, the
shape
of
agency,
and the
shape
of a mark or
figure
generally.
What are we to make of this scheme?
Already
in
my
brief
exposition
I have been
forced to
interpret
Bloom's statements to make
preliminary
sense of his six-fold
sequence,
and
especially
of the fundamental revaluation of
hyperbole
and
metaphor
at the heart of the
Map.
This articulation is the central
problem
in
determining
the
Map's coherence, all
questions
of
"applicability"
aside. But nowhere does Bloom
make
explicit
the reasons behind his
elliptic
assertions. One
suspects
that there is a
connection between the different values
assigned
to these
tropes
and the absence of
real
explanation (or dialogue)
in Bloom's
dogmatic,
even
"solipsistic"
discourse.
That is to
say,
this revaluation
points
to the
place
of the
subject
of Bloom's text,
although
that
subject-call
him "Bloom"-declines to
appear.
Can we draw him out?
We must, if we are to understand the real
dynamic
of the
Map,
if we are able to
read it, as well as other texts, through
its
grid. Perhaps
the most fruitful
way
to do so
is
by adducing
other texts between whose lines Bloom
may appear.
Too direct an
approach might
confine us to the
metaphoric position
or
polarity,
and limit our
perspective. So, in the
spirit
of Bloom's
spirit
of
"farfetchedness," a
phenomenon
linked to our
metaleptic goal,
I will
align
two texts with Bloom's
Map
in the
hope
of
pinpointing
Bloom
by triangulation.
Let us
take, first of
all,
a
poem by
Mallarme. It is a
prose poem,
and one far
removed from the tradition of the
"greater
Romantic
lyric"
from which Bloom de-
rives most of his
examples.
"The Ecclesiastic" was
probably
written in
1886,
and
occupies
the
penultimate position
in a series of twelve such
poems composed
be-
tween 1864 and 1887.1 It describes what Bloom likes to call a "scene of instruction,"
1
Whether or not the
poem
is the
penultimate
one is
actually
a debatable
point.
In
Divaga-
tions, the
important
collection in which Mallarme
gathered together
these
prose poems,
there
appears
a thirteenth
text, "Conflit," which the Pl!iade editor has
placed
elsewhere. I would like
to thank
my
friend Shoshana Felman, whose comments have
greatly helped
in
my reading
of
Mallarme. In the translation of "The Ecclesiastic"
printed
as an
appendix
to this review,
I have
attempted
to
provide
a
scrupulously faithful,
and thus rather literal
rendering
of the
poem [from
Mallarmd's Oeuvres
completes (Paris: Pliade, 1961), pp. 286-88].
48
one
calling
out for
practical
criticism.
Setting
aside for the moment the
temporal
complexities arising
from the narrative situation,
we
may say
that the
poem begins
with the ironic reference to a
wintry
discontent exacerbated
by
the
presence
of
various texts whose
promise
of renewal
applies only
to
beasts,
not to
suffering,
conscious men. The move toward a naive "naturalism" constitutes a
synecdochic
gesture
in which the
poet
claims to derive
insight
and
inspiration
from a few blades
of
grass.
This mood is also that of the narrator
proposing
to draw an
example
of the
"height
of
inspiration"
from the banal
mysteriousness
of a suburban
glade.
But this
attempted
mediation of nature and
public, significance
and
banality,
is
only
a de-
graded
version of the
priestly
role
played by
the ecclesiastic in
daily life, the life he
comes to the
country,
like the
poet,
to
escape.
The
appearance
of the
priest
shows
up
the initial construct for what it is: no more than a
metonymic aggregate
of
"interstices of shrubs useless from the
point
of view of
privacy,"
whose
interpreta-
tion is irrelevant to
public
welfare. The
very term, "ecclesiastic," now alludes to no
true
assembly
of the
people,
but
only
to the
anonymity
of the urban crowd. The
fervor of the
priest's regression
reminds us of such
early
Mallarmean
poems
as
"Renouveau," and so, while the
priest
seems to be the
object
of
mockery,
the
poet
as narrator is
directing
his words
against
his earlier self. Yet the
very singleminded-
ness of the
priest's degraded quest,
his
kenosis, works
against
the
poet's scorn, and
leads him
away
from himself, and the
security
of
self-deprecation.
The
poet
is led to
reconsider his attitude and
conduct, and to make a break with the
aspect
of his vision
which
only repeats
and restates his
predicament.
Hyperbole
intervenes in the
poet's leap away
from the
spectacle
toward a
purely
imaginary
reconstruction of the ecclesiastic's mission. In the words of the Faun, "ce
pretre,
je
le veux
perpetuer."
From the
image
of the nimble foot, we
proceed
to the
"mind"
capable
of
describing
what follows in such detail that we
forget
that the
poet
is no
longer portraying
a real situation. This radical move is the
only
one
allowing
the
poet
the same "total" satisfaction
enjoyed by
the
priest.
The vision reaches its
high-
est,
or most
hyperbolic,
non-referential
point
in the
momentary
abolition of sexual
difference. But of course the flower-stalk is
only
a
parody
of the
explicitly "hyper-
bolic" ones in the
nearly-contemporaneous
"Prose
pour
des
Esseintes," and,
as in
the latter
poem,
the sexual
polarity
reminds us of the
vanity
of
any
claim to self-
sufficiency. Rather, the
hyperbolic
moment of
pure imagination
in which the
poet
is
identified with the
priest
as
pure image
and in the absence of
any "personal"
rela-
tionship (an identification as
impossible
as that of the sexes)
gives way
to a discursive
relationship involving
a third
party:
first the
"icy
silence" that alone heard the "furi-
ous
flappings"
of the ecclesiastic's chaste
frenzy;
then the
public,
whose cold com-
pany only
reinforces the solitude of the scene.
The moment of this return to a discursive situation
represents
both a retreat and
a
progression.
A retreat in that the
poet
is
deprived
of his vision; a
progression
in
that he is restored to a communicative context first named at the
beginning
of the
poem.
It is at this
point, indeed, that the
subject
becomes the narrator of the
poem,
the exhibitor as well as the nurturer of the vision. Of
course, as
narrator, the
poet
must face the reader's
implicit
reminder that the
spectacle
is
only
an evanescent one,
and that the
priest
himself has returned to the humble needs of his
ministry.
At a
further
stage
of reflection,
Mallarme takes
up
the
banality
the
poet
shared with the
ecclesiastic: the
poet
remains identified, albeit not so
happily,
with the
poem's
eponymous figure.
Yet the
poet
has
undergone
an askesis on the
way
to his narrative
position.
In
suspending
the
vision, and in
renouncing any
future for his vision other
than that afforded
by
the fate of the narrative
itself, the
poet has, paradoxically,
shaken off the
"unchangeable
texts"
confining
and
delimiting
the ecclesiastical role.
Thus the
poet
claims the
"right"
to
ignore
the outcome of the
story.
The "seal of
modernity" signals
a
metaleptic transumption
into earliness in that it does not refer
to an actual
future, but to a narrative
present
which for
every
reader is that of a
past
in the future of his
reading.
In this
poem,
the narrative time in which the reader is
included,
the time
corresponding
to the
banality
of the
spectacle (that is,
its true
significance),
is
given
two names. It is called
"baroque"
and
"modernity."
An
diacritics/September
1977 49
analysis
of
"modernity"
in MallarmLwould be a formidable task, but a sense of what
he means can
already
be seen in the
prime "baroque" analogue
to the ecclesiastic:
Hamlet, another hero-exhibitor dressed in black. Of him Mallarme writes: "Sol-
emnly,
an actor
bequeathes
to a future which
probably
will not care but which will
not at least be able to alter it, elucidated, somewhat
motley
but
very
much a whole,
as if authenticated
by
the seal of a
supreme
and neutral era, an immortal re-
semblance"
[Oeuvres completes, p. 302].
These remarks do not
pretend
to constitute an
interpretation
of Mallarme's
poem:
no mere
"mapping"
of
tropes
could
hope
to
accomplish
that. But the
applica-
tion of Bloom's
sequence
to the text shows
up
the obscured
problematic
at the heart
of the
Map.
It lies in the
quality
of the difference between the first four
tropes
and
the last two. In his concern with the
emergence
of the
poet through influence, anxie-
ty,
and defense, Bloom fails to see how the
poet
as
subject
finds his
place
in
poetic
discourse. The intervention of the
subject
in the
progress
of the
poem
cannot but
mark a
change
in the status of the
Map
as a
"tropological"
scheme. Should we not,
in fact, recall the
key position
of the so-called
"tropological"
moment in that earlier
map
of
misreading,
the four-fold scheme of
allegorical interpretation?
What moti-
vates Bloom's
apparent
indifference to this
question
once we
get
inside the
Map
and
away
from the
enveloping pathos
of his illustrative rhetoric?
One reason, surely,
is Bloom's identification with the
hyperbolic style.
In his
review, Paul de Man has remarked on how
hyperbole
is Bloom's characteristic
trope.
For Bloom, hyperbole
is the
triumph
of a sublime
solipsism
in which
poet
and
language
are one. In the face of such an
ideal, no wonder
anxiety
is so
pervasive. Any
other relation to discourse (if we
grant
that
hyperbole
can ever constitute a dis-
course) can
only represent
a fall. Yet
according
to the
Map,
we must
go beyond
hyperbole,
and the
triumph
of the
poet
is
unexpectedly
deferred to a later moment.
This is a new
phase
in Bloom's critical
development,
for until now the
chastening
moments of askesis came outside the
poem,
outside Bloom's
specifically
critical
comments, in the
vague appeals
to "humanization"
by
which he would link his
criticism to the world of the reader. In former
days,
Bloom's criticism was satisfied
with the
flight
of the
imagination.
His new rhetoric of
poetic
instruction seeks to
overcome the
gap
in his dual discourse. He must
go beyond hyperbole,
within
criticism, but cannot see where this would take him. We thus return to the dilemma
facing
Bloom's reader, having
discovered how it confronts Bloom himself, within the
Map.
Does the move
beyond hyperbole
take us further into
poetic language
and its
ruses,
or
away
from it toward a
subject
defined
by
a new discursive context in which
communication takes
precedence
over
figural
structure? Does
"poetry" encompass
both these alternatives?
From Mallarme's
poem,
we can see that the moment of
metaphor
is both a
step
forward, beyond hyperbole,
and a
regression
of a
very specific
nature.
Metaphor
re-establishes a communicative context in which
subject, speaker,
and reader are
implicated,
but which
may
or
may
not be described as a
"poetic" situation, a
stage
in
50
the
development
of the
poem
as an
entity
in its own
right.
Such a discursive relation
may
indeed run counter to the
"completion"
of the
poem,
for the new, "antitheti-
cal"
completion
of the other does not
complete
the same
thing.
Bloom himself
approaches
the
problem
when he admits that "the common reader cares little to be
taught
to notice
tropes
or defenses.
Images
must suffice . . ."
[p. 178],
but he does
seem to realize that these
images
are no
longer
those of the
pure Imagination,
although
the tone
suggests
an
implicit
awareness of this. These
images
now serve an
exchange
which is not determined
by
the
anxiety
of influence, but
by something
Bloom calls "the incarnation of the Poetical Character," which is an
image
of
agency
which refers
us,
not to a
pathology,
but to an
anthropology
of communication. For
such an "incarnation" must be seen as the
counterpart,
if not the
completion,
of the
earlier
expulsion
of the
subject
from the discursive
system,
and the "characteriza-
tion" of the
subject
as
poet implies
a
symbolic
context which that discourse exceeds
but does not abandon in its liberation from a
constraining
"reference." It
would,
perhaps,
be useful to re-examine the
late-eighteenth-century
texts from which
Bloom, following
Walter Jackson Bate, originally
derived the
vocabulary
of
poetic
"influence," to see what connection can be found between debates over
poetic
autonomy
and the hesitant
development
in the same
period
of such an
anthropology
(in both the
philosophical
and
ethnological senses).
Be that as it
may,
what Bloom can
accept
on the level of the reader he terms a
"catastrophe"
for the
poet [p.
11],
and this is
why
the
intersubjective
context
implicit
in
metaphor
is made a
limiting polarity
in the
Map.
The
only
successful
poets,
strangely enough,
are those who lack character
(pace Sartre), for
only they
are
open
to the
transumptive
force that turns the latecomer-and
every poet
is a latecomer-
into an
originator. Except
that there is no
origin
to
go
back to, only
a further
projec-
tion onto a
hyperbolic
future. For Bloom, despite
what we infer from his
Map,
hyperbole
is the
beyond;
to
go beyond hyperbole
is
only
a
momentary illusion, a
reference
signifying nothing.
Bloom
provides
no character references for his vision-
ary company.
And there is no incarnation, only
another fall.
But this is
acceptable only
if we assume that Bloom is himself not, or no
longer,
a
"common reader," one for whom
poets
do
"represent" something
other than their
mere
appearance.
Bloom of course is such a reader, as all his talismanic invocations
to the
poets
attest: he cites them
unceasingly
as references for himself. But he is a
reader who, at a crucial
point,
refuses to read, on the
grounds
that he has
already
read
enough,
and found
reading
insufficient. Bloom's
problematic
relation to his
reader's
potential response,
the
point
from which I
began,
is
ultimately
a reflection
of an internal
polarity
in A
Map
of
Misreading
itself. That is,
it would be a
polarity
if
Bloom were able to
go beyond hyperbole
to the
metaphoric moment, the
tropologi-
cal level, of his own
sequence
of
tropes,
the moment at which his
position
inside or
outside his critical discourse would become an issue. The
issue, however,
never
arises, primarily because,
in
reading,
Bloom would himself be read,
and
nothing
disturbs him more, finally,
than this
prospect.
This is his evasion: as
subject,
Bloom
disappears
into the "as" of his
analogies,
for which he claims no
responsibility.
Does
Bloom then lack character,
and does this make him a
reprobate
or a
poet?
Poets are
forgiven
for not
reading (this
is not the same as
misreading),
but not
literary critics,
and still less teachers of literature. Bloom sometimes claims that
poets
cannot be
read in
any case, but this is a different matter. To
protect
the
poets
from the abuse of
their readers is one
thing;
to defend oneself from
reading
is another. It is curious
that the term
"anxiety"
can
apply
in both cases. As Freud has
pointed out, anxiety
comes not
only
between the
subject
and the feared event, but between the
subject
and the fear of that feared event.2 The difference is crucial for the
working
out of the
subject's
relation to his
future,
for the kind of
anticipation
or earliness that
projects
him into a
temporal
world from which he feels excluded. The
problem
is too com-
plex
for
summary treatment;
I can
only suggest
the
importance
of a distinction
blurred in Bloom's work.
2
An
unpublished paper by
Richard Klein on The Anxiety of Influence develops
this
point.
diacritics/September
1977 51
Apart
from these
appeals
to other
disciplines
and discourses, can we read Bloom
with the materials at hand, that is, poetic
texts? Mallarme's
poem
took us some
distance in this direction. But there is another text whose relation to Bloom's work is
much more intimate, once we
juxtapose
its
progress
to the
dynamic
of Bloom's
Map.
The
religious vocabulary
of fall and incarnation have
already suggested
it: it is the
Bible.
Only
the Bible comes
up
to the level of Bloom's rhetoric, and if Bloom cannot
go
beyond hyperbole,
we can at least
bring hyperbole
back to Bloom.
First, it is
surprising
that in all the talk of influence and defense in
poetry
no
mention is made in Bloom's text of what in our
poetic
tradition is the most audacious
trope
of all: to take the Bible as literature. To have succeeded in
doing so, while still
taking
it
seriously-as seriously
as literature is taken-has been the
privilege
of
very
few
poets
and even fewer
literary
critics. On
just
these
grounds,
it would be instruc-
tive to see Bloom discuss it. Second, Bloom's
many
references to Jewish tradition,
Biblical and
post-Biblical,
raises the
question
of which Bible he would read. In the
light
of his own
theory
of antithetical
completion
there can
only
be one answer: the
antithetically completed
two-Testament Bible. Not
only
because the nature of this
completion
is a
poetic question
of the first
order,
all other
implications aside;
but
because a
mapping
of Bloom's
sequence
of
figures
onto the surface of the Bible is
most
revealing.
The
parallel
between
irony
and Fall
(following
some
interpretations,
we
might
even
say, Creation); synecdoche
and Convenant; metonymy
and the
"backsliding"
of the historical books; hyperbole
and the
Prophets-all
this is most
suggestive.
Bloom indeed does allude to these
parallels,
but never as
part
of a
reading
of the Bible as a text.
Perhaps
this is because, to fill out the
sequence
of
"revisions" in his
Map,
he must
go
outside the Jewish canon. Several references to
Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, however, point
to an
implicit
awareness of
the crucial articulation and difference of the two Testaments, even from the
point
of
view of influence, for Bloom's discourse of instruction. And so, the
metaphoric
askesis of Jesus, the
metaleptic
Resurrection (whether we
place
this
trope
here or in
Revelations
depends
on a debate, even
among
Christian critics, on the status of the
last book as
"completion"
of the canon) show us,
within the text of the Bible,
what is
at stake in Bloom's revaluation of
hyperbole
and
metaphor.
The
problem
of
going
beyond hyperbole
thus takes on a new
significance,
and the dilemma of whether we
are inside or outside the text,
or inside or outside the text as
poetry
or
"life,"
becomes one that reads the reader in more
ways
than one. This is not to
say
that
ultimate "communicative context" of which I have
spoken
must be defined as a
religious
one. It cannot be assumed that the Bible has
any
other than a
poetic unity
and coherence, although
the
putative analogy
between the
theory
of
poetry
and the
theory
of life can be seen here in a new
light,
one
potentially productive
of Bloom-
ian
anxiety.
On the other
hand,
Bloom's
provocative
discussion of how revisions of
texts
change
our
reading
but do not affect the earliness of the
precursor,
his au-
tonomous influence in future
readings, may
deliver us from the more
degraded
forms of the
anxiety
and from the
dogmatism
of its (belated) resolution.
The
possibility
of a measure of
serenity
in this domain
brings
us back to the
obscured influence of
Northrop Frye
at the heart of Bloom's work,
and
particularly
of
A
Map
of
Misreading.
It
may
well be that
Frye's forthcoming
work on the
symbolism
of the Bible will
help
illuminate the "secular
scripture"
of Bloom's own
quest-
romance, and lead Bloom to an antithetical
reading
of himself. It should
certainly
provide
him with the occasion for an
equally
instructive and much-needed revision
of
Frye.
52