From: stephenjones
Category: Amis
Date: 7/1/99
Time: 11:26:31 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
From an uncredited review of Harold Blooms "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" on Guardian Unlimited
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3832174,00.html
Unlike The Western Canon, The Anxiety Of Influence is an academic work, written at the height of Bloom's involvement with Freudianism. It has been influential, in part because like so much great work it freshly activates something we have always known but lacked the precise words for. It has always been clear, for instance, that great writers need to wrestle with their literary predecessors, and that this struggle may be violent; one needs to slay the fathers the better to appear as a brilliant orphan.
Bloom, who has a talent unusual among scholars for thinking as a writer might think, merely describes this battle of the generations in Freudian terms. The key words, in Bloom's lexicon, are "repression" and "anxiety". A strong poet, say Keats, will read his strongest predecessor or contemporary, say Wordsworth. The younger poet will feel anxious about the overbearing influence and power of the older poet, because the latter, or "strong precursor", is the one whose voice it is hardest to escape. Necessarily, being anxious about this influence, Keats will "misread" Wordsworth, ie will read him differently from the way a non-poetic contemporary might, will read him selfishly and for his own purposes.
All literature, contends Bloom, is a process of such misreading, at various levels of strength: Milton misreads Shakespeare, Wordsworth misreads Milton, Keats misreads Wordsworth, and so on. The strongest poets will be those who most successfully assert their originality over their inheritance, and who most powerfully banish the traces of the precursor from their own work. Of course - and here Bloom shows his Freudianism most clearly - they do not actually banish those traces, they repress them, successfully or not. As Freud has it, the repressed always returns. The precursor can always be found, and it is the critic's task to trace out the anxieties and repressions. More than this, maintains Bloom, criticism is itself a matter of weak or strong misreading. It is never really, for the critic, a matter of accuracy to a text; it is a matter of bending that text into the form of one's own intelligent distortions.
All kinds of objection can be made to this theory (for instance, it describes the poetic lineage much better than the novelistic), but it is one of those ideas that is tougher than anything its opponents can scrawl on it. Indeed, despite its being a description of poetic influence, we could apply, as an example, the anxiety of influence to Martin Amis's work.
Though Amis claims Bellow and Nabokov as his strongest influences, a Bloomian would be bound to observe that Amis's real, unacknowledged influence, and hence "strong precursor" is his father, Kingsley, and Kingsley's very English comedy. A Bloomian might then go on to suggest that Martin Amis, because he has not banished his father from his own work, is a weak, rather than a strong misreader of Kingsley Amis, and thus a not entirely strong novelist.