DAVID
J.
GORDON
105
mean. On the one hand, it is the mere marks on the page. Since the
relation between word and meaning is purely metaphoric, whenever
we refer to anything we are forgetting or "repressing" this knowledge.
Moreover, in our need for presence, we "repress" the fact that writing
(unlike speech) always implies the absence of a speaker, and we
compensate by constructing the illusion of an author governing
meaning. On the other hand, writing is all of the stimuli which
imprint themselves on the memory and become unconscious (in the
sense that they are removed from the field of direct perception). But the
unconscious is nothing other than language, for Derrida quite accepts
Jacques Lacan's equation of the two. And just as any investigation of
the unconscious must finally dissolve into the unknown (Freud had
said that dreams can be interpreted only up to a point), so the probing
of any text arrives at a point where the author's control over his
assumptions can be said
to
dissolve, whereupon the text is decon–
structed. The text belongs
to
language, not to the author, and language
is not a unified field. There is nothing behind language, no base or
origin but only an abyss. Yet Derrida thinks of his deconstruction as
joyous work because it is intoxicating to look into the abyss. The
"conventional" critic protects meaning, and establishes a boundary of
relevance. But the deconstructionist, by ignoring what the author
might have meant, somehow "opens" the text and "produces" mean–
ing. He releases the text from the history of ideas, literature, and
metaphysics.
Such an approach
to
criticism seems to have a purely philosophic
interest, as Derrida apparently realizes, for he rightly calls interpreta–
tion and evaluation empiri cal activities and then rejects them precisely
because, for him, empiricism and philosophy are mutually excl usive.
This may be true for philosophy but a nonempirical criticism or
science is out of the question.
Bloom is a much more formidable
literary
critic than Derrida,
with a great deal of interpretation to his credit, much of it definitive in
the sense that anyone writing on the same subject cannot avoid taking
it into account. He has even objected to structuralist criticism on the
grounds that it does not pay sufficient attention to the meaning of
particular texts. Indeed, he is so concerned with distortion in the usual
sense that one has troubl e filling his theory to his practice.
The anxiety of infl uence is a theory that contains a fertil e insight
into the creative process. With an authority based on wide and accurate
reading, Bloom has seized upon and made his own the insight that the
poet who aspires to originality must try
to
rid himself of the very
