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PARTISAN REVIEW
("strong, " Bloom says) in proportion as it successfully works through its
struggle against its predecessor; that is, passes through all six stages .
Through struggle, new "strong" poems emerge out of old "strong" poems;
this process is "canon-formation, " the evaluative side ofliterary history that
decides which poems will live and which perish. This scheme of ratios ,
then, solves both of formalism 's problems. The poem is no longer isolated ,
but rather connected with something else of the same kind. Reading is
"historical" but still " literary," and doesn't reduce the poem to its " cause"
in biography or in social, political, or intellectual history . And the scheme
establishes an evaluative standard proposed , as it were, by the poets
themselves.
Bloom treats the invariability of the six-stage scheme as an empirical
fact rather than a theoretical postulate. He later reinterprets the scheme in
psychoanalytic terms, as a sequence of defense mechanisms countering the
"anxiety of influence . " But this psychologistic turn may have been some–
thing of a misstep, since it tends to subordinate whole poems to stages in
the poet's emerging and developing sense of his own vocation .
A Map
0/
Misreading
again reinterprets the scheme, this time in terms of rhetorical
tropes and images within the poem. Bloom thereby makes clear that the
relation is not so much between later and earlier poets as between later and
earlier poems: "the use of any psychopoetics is to find a way back to an
enrichment of rhetorical criticism." The relation is not one of "source" in
the usual sense that could be brought out by parallel quotation .
It
is a
deeply structuring principle in creation which Bloom calls " the Primal
Scene of Instruction. " Bloom's argument is difficult; but its main point is
to defend humanism -even a somewhat pessimistic humanism -against
contemporary philosophical theories of " textuality, " which deny that any
"author" stands at the origin of the text. Bloom accepts the importance of
intertextual relations, but insists that " the human writes, the human
thinks, and always following after and defending against another human. "
Around the middle of
A Map
0/
Misreading,
Bloom finally brings out
the completed map in tabular form. It charts, he says,
"how meaning is
produced
in Post-Enlightenment strong poetry by the substitutive interplay
of figures and of images, by the language strong poets use in defense
against, and response to, the language of prior strong poets ." It is worth
stressing the qualification of intent here, perhaps even narrowing it more
than Bloom himself does or seems to do. The discussion is in fact strongly
focused on lyric, first; on English lyric, second ; and on post-Miltonic
English lyric, third. The range of Bloom's reading as he ransacks Freud ,
Vico, Nietzsche, and many others on his way to the map produces poten–
tially misleading expansive gestures . An ambition to schematize the " typi-
