Terrence Des Pres
PROPHECIES OF GRACE AND DOOM:
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
In
The Anxiety of Influence
Harold Bloom argues that "the
meaning of a poem can only be another poem. " He means that the poet
spends his
time
rewriting works ofearlier poets, an activity inherently perverse
because governed by the poet's maniacal need to dispossess-by tactics of
"misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance" -the suffocating pri–
ority of his great precursors, whose presence he experiences as the absence of
himself. The feeling ofdead-weight and dead-end is strong in Bloom's book,
and the revelation he offers- that we are witnessing the "death of
poetry "
-comes
as a foregone conclusion . The past piles up, fewer and fewer
poets can hope to breathe freely, and" it
seems
just to assume that poetry in
our tradition , when it dies , will be self-slain, murdered by its own past
strength. " The vitality of art is thus a negative life, a life experienced as
death ; and what Bloom puts forward, finally, is his version of The End. I say
his
version , for although his solipsistic terms sound new, the same cannot be
said for the sense of death informing his ideas (he describes critics , for
instance, as "necromancers, straining to hear the dead sing"). Ihab Hassan
has informed us in
The Dismemberment of Orpheus
that literature is a
suicidal process; soon it will self-destruct and deliver us into that happy
silence for which we yearn. And just to take a last example , Leslie Fiedler
wishes us to know that' 'serious" literature is dead, so now we can go back to
the true stuff, to a literature of gut response , by which he means
pornography.l
To mention Fiedler is to suggest another round of iconoclasm. But no,
that would be misleading. Boredom is more to the point. These
supersaturated men of letters are bored. Upon their days and thoughts the
demon of noontide rides, the
acedia
of the desert saint whose cave has ceased
to
shimmer with divine intent. Belief in art-as-religion and literature-as-sal–
vation , which inspired the evangelical tone in criticism from Wordsworth
I This, presumably, will be the poi", of
What Wal Literature?,
the book Fiedler says he is writing . It was
cenainly the poi", of a Iw ure delivered at Colgate University in the fall of 1973 .
