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into a world made up of what has been written, he does say that it is the
scene of a struggle for power; he finds both writers and critics grap–
pling in the bl ue, and claiming a total imaginative dominion over each
other-and over us. Of course he is wrong in saying that writers have
always made such total claims for what they wrote. The last century
was obviously fascinated by its wonderful but sharply particularized
and limited human agents. Novels, theories, poems, were social
presences, whose makers were viewed as subject to the limitations that
conditioned the reader's views and hopes. Leave out that peopled
public world, leave out the writer's sense of its attentive eyes and
responding voices, and you get Bloom's picture of naked wills contend–
ing in print.
Bloom is wrong about the past in the measure that writers
formerly did acknowledge that they were immersed in a social scene
which limited their extravagant claims to power. What Bloom does
inform us about is the present moment; he exposes the monstrous
claims to personal power hidden behind ostensibly self-contained
critical games. Most of those at play within the universe of texts don't
admit that they have made up games of solitaire; that he who creates
the context owns the store. In France those who use such grandly
inclusive modes of thought are assumed to have a correlative political
position, and generally do.
In the United States such grandiose claims
to
imperial power for
the self have long been familiar, but they have had the character of
substitutes or stand-ins for politics. Consider Gertrude Stein's assertion
about the writer: "I am not I any longer when I see." She goes on:
"This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the
exact opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me." Such total
appropriations of the world on the part of the seer have an effect
indistinguishable from that of Emerson's activity as seer; he also
possesses the world in the visionary mode which precludes any ac–
knowledgement of the world of little dogs and other people whose
awkward independence of his vision he denies. Our American habit is
to deny that he has denied anything-including politics-and celebrate
his affirmation of a wholly sufficient vision of things. We substitute
the privilege of universalizing ourselves for an actual politics. French
thought imported into the United States wholly loses its overt political
character and becomes one more set of strategies for claiming individ–
ual power through the use of apparently impersonal vocabularies.
Contemporary literary study offers the clearest instances of this
process. The ambitious young commentators in the graduate schools
