586
PARTISAN REVIEW
critical poem about poetry that it is a sustained synecdoche which puts
a part for the whole. By this device, and by his subsidiary device of
strong hyperbole, Bloom compels us to face up to aspects of the
motivation to write and misread poems-self-assertiveness, lust for
power and precedence, malice, envy, revenge-which canonical critics
have largely ignored. To those of us who yield ourselves to Bloom's
dark and powerful eloquence, the Scene of Literature will never look
the same again; such a result is probably the most that any writer
compelled by an antithetical vision can hope to achieve. But the part is
not the whole. What Bloom's point of vantage cannot take into
account is the great diversity of motives for writing poetry, and in the
products of that writing, the abundance of subject-matters, characters,
genres, and styles, and the range of the passions expressed and repre–
sented, from brutality and terror and anguish, indeed, to gaiety, joy,
and sometimes sheer fun. In sum, what Bloom's tragic vision of the
literary scene systematicall y omits is almost everything that has hith–
erto been recognized to constitute the realm of literature.
On Bloom's critical premises, I am of course open to the retort that
I have misread both his criticism and our heritage of literary texts. But
knowing from experience Bloom's geniality to his own critical precur–
sors, I am confident that he will attribute my misreading to an amiable
weakness-to my fallacy , that is, of misplaced benevolence.
Newreading and Old Norms
I shall conclude by considering briefly my third question: What
makes a text so vulnerable
to
the diverse things that Newreaders do
with it? The chief reason is that our use and understanding of language
is not a science but a practice. That is, what we call "knowing a
language" is not a matter of knowing that or knowing why, but of
knowing how, of having acquired a skill. We are born into a commu–
nity of speakers and writers who have already acquired this skill, and
we in turn acquire it by interplay with these others, in which we learn
how
to
say what we mean and how to understand what others have said
by a continuous process of self-correction and refinement, based on
what are often very subtle indications of when and in what way we
have gone wrong.
The successful practice of language depends on our mastery of
linguistic uniformities that we call conventions, or norms, or rules.
Linguistic rules, however, differ radically from the rules of chess or of a
card-game to which they are often compared. The rules which consti–
tute these games are stipulated in an authoritative code to which we
