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PARTISAN REVIEW
history and locates it in the seventeenth century; his innoValion is to
account for this division as the change from the relative creative
nonchalance of a Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare in "the giant age
before the flood" to the acute anxiety of influence suffered by all but a
very few poets since the Enlightenment. A modern, and therefore
"belated," poet awakens to his calling when irresistibly seized upon by
one or more poems of a precursor or father-poet, yet experiences that
seizure as an intolerable incursion into his imaginati ve life-space. The
response of the belated writer is
to
defend himself against the parent–
poem by distorting it drastically in the process of reading it; but he
cannot escape the precursor, for he inevitably embodies its distorted
form into his own attempt at an absolutely original poem.
Bloom's theory, as he points out, is a revision for literary criticism
of what Freud sardonically call ed "the Family Romance." The relation
of reader and poet to his parent-precursor, as in Freud's Oedipal
relationship, is ambivalent, compounded of love and hate; but in
Bloom's detailed descriptions of reading and writing, love enters only
to weaken the result of the process, while the aspect of hate, jealousy,
and fear is alone given a systematic and creative role to perform. This
role is to deploy, with unconscious cunning, a set of defensive tactics,
"the revisionary ratios," which are in fact aggressive acts designed
to
"malform" the precursor in the attempt to disestablish its "priority"
over the latecomer, both in time and in creative strength. "Every act of
reading is ... defensive, and as defense it makes of interpretation a
necessary misprision.... Reading is therefore misprision-or misread–
ing." And since "every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem,"
he concludes that "the meaning of a poem can on ly be another poem."
"There are no right readings"; the sole alternative is between "weak
mis-readings and strong mis-readings." A weak misreading attempts,
although unavailingly, to get at what a text really means in itself; it is
the product of an inhibiting timidity, or at best of an excess of
"generosity" toward the parent-poet. A misreading is strong, hence
creative and valuable, in proportion to the boldness with which the
reader's emotional compulsions are licensed
to
do violence
to
the text
that he stri ves to overcome.
It is sometimes argued against Bloom's theory that his claim, "all
reading is misreading," is incoherent, on the ground that we cannot
know that a text has been misread unless we know what it is to read it
correctly. This argument overlooks an interesting feature of Bloom's
theory, that is, its quasi-Kantian frame of reference. At times Bloom's
idiom corresponds closely enough to Kant's to qualify, in Bloom's
