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Truth in the Margin, or
Bloom’s Idiosyncratic Reader
by Camelia Elias
The best critic and human being I've known
in my life was my dear friend Paul de Man. 'The trouble with
you, Harold,' he would say with a smile, cupping my head in
his hands, and looking at me with an affection that always
made me want to weep, 'is that you are crazy: you do not
believe in the "troot".' I would look at him, shake my head
sadly and say: 'No, I do not believe in the "troot" because
there is no "troot", dear Paul.
Harold Bloom
To Harold Bloom, truth is a matter outside
definition insofar as it is subjective, personal and thus
limited. But one always wants to hear precisely about the
personal in “truth”, and the margins of what limits “truth”. A
hermeneutic desire is triggered: one simply wants to know what
truth is, even if it does not exist. All the more so when one
is told that one’s method of inquiry into “truth” suggests a
way towards fictionalizing the “personal” in truth, in order
for “truth” not to exist or cease to exist: “There is no
method”, Bloom enlightens is, “there is yourself, and you are
highly idiosyncratic.” (Salusinszky, 1987:67).
Perhaps it is from this idiosyncrasy that
Bloom is so concerned with tradition. He frequently asks
questions: “What is literary tradition? What is a classic?
What is a canonical view of tradition?” in his A Map of
Misreading (Bloom, 1975a:31), and in Anxiety of
Influence he further develops his theory in respect to
tradition. His theory of poetry is a theory of influence,
claiming that poetry is not about anxiety but is an “anxiety”
about a poet's relation to a previous poet. (Bloom, 1973:94)
For Bloom, a powerful anxiety of influence renders literature
the scene of an Oedipal struggle; the beginning poet, or in
Bloom's words, the “ephebe”, engages in a struggle in which he
uses any means of manoeuvre techniques thus to repress,
through creative acts of misreading, or misprision, the
influence of powerful “forefathers”. He writes:
Every poem is a
misinterpretation of a parent poem. A Poem is not an
overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets'
misinterpretations or poems are more drastic than critics'
misinterpretations or criticism, but this is only a difference
in degree and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations
but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose
poetry. (Bloom, 1973:94-95)
Thus, Bloom stresses the importance of
consolidating the legacy of visionary imagination as a living
tradition. He distinguishes between two types of poets: strong
poets and weak poets. The strong poets – whose ‘drives’ are
put into action by what Bloom says is the tendency “to think
of themselves as stars because their deepest desire is to be
an influence, rather than to be influenced...” (Bloom,
1975a:12) – have to define the originality of their work
against the achievement of their poetic predecessors, or
father-figure. And further he claims that even in the
strongest, “whose desire is accomplished, the anxiety of
having been formed by influence still persists" (12). Bloom
links the sense of “belatedness” felt by the “ephebe” to his
explanations of the concept of misreading. “Misreading” is the
natural, proper re-envisioning of previous poetry. It is
called “mis”-reading because a new great poet interprets the
previous poetry in a way it was not “meant” by that poet: the
new poet proves to be “belated” insofar as he experiences a
change in the degree of truthfulness of the perception of the
previous poetry. This change constitutes misreading. As he
says:
A poet... is not so
much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being
spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously more
alive than himself. A poet dare not regard himself as being
late, yet cannot accept a substitute for the first vision
he reflectively judges to have been the precursor's also.
Perhaps this is why the poet-in-a-poet cannot marry,
whatever the person-in-a-poet chooses to have done. (19)
Bloom’s deconstructive practice of reading
relies on turning tradition into an act of mediation between
various truth degrees, going from weak (non-existent) to
strong (existent). The structure of truth which exists and
truth which is denied in relation to poetry constitutes for
Bloom a hermeneutic structure of rebellion. The structure of
truth (for truth has a structure indeed in Bloomian theory) is
grounded in the idiosyncrasy of both writing and reading.
Bloom, following his kabbalistic
precursors, sees the origin of writing as a vertical movement
consisting of three phases: reduction, breaking, and
restoration. Here Bloom borrows his ideas from the Kabbalah,
which he says is “a vision of belatedness” (Bloom, 1975b:17)
Departing from the Hebraic tradition which has it that all
literary representation partook of transgression, Bloom says:
“The great lesson that Kabbalah can teach contemporary
interpretation is that meaning in belated texts is always
wandering meaning... not just interpretation is defence, but
meaning itself is defence, and so meaning wanders to protect
itself.” (82) To Bloom meaning is interpretation, which is
present and absent only in its mediated form. The mediated
form is a subject with a dialectical configuration “always
both internal and external to other configurations of past and
future texts.” (Siegumfeldt, 1994:309) This idea allows Bloom
to claim that “A poem is a deep misprision of a previous poem
when we recognize the later poem as being absent rather than
present on the surface of the earlier poem, and yet still
being in the earlier poem, implicit or hidden in it, not yet
manifest, and yet there.” (67)
Presence is problematic insofar as the
‘strong’ poet must always strive to create a space in which
his own words would be a manifestation of the presence of his
own imagination. The kabbalistic idea of the breaking of the
vessels is at work here in that it extends the nihilistic in
deconstruction to a dialectical hermeneutic which makes
possible creative achievement. Bloom further illustrates:
“This shevirah, breaking or scattering of the vessels,
was caused by the force of the light hitting all-at-once, in
what can be interpreted as too strong a force of writing,
stronger than the "texts" of the lower Sefirot could
sustain. Paradoxically God's Name was too strong for his
Words, and the breaking of the vessels necessarily became a
divine act of substitution, in which an original
pattern yielded to a more chaotic one that nevertheless
remained pattern.” (41)
Clearly, the ‘original pattern which
nevertheless remains pattern’ is “truth” in a substitution
mode, if we can say that. “Truth” swerving the margins of
idiosyncrasy breaks the circle in which it either exists or it
does not by making limitation, or the margin itself,
constitute a demand for language, or as Bloom says referring
to Hartman's formulations, “an excessive demand”. (77)
Although Bloom refuses to give “truth” a
definition, his turning of ‘strong’ poets into ‘belated’ poets
shows that he nevertheless interprets “truth” as a pattern of
lies mediating between imagination (strong) and creation
(belated). “Poetic language makes of the strong reader what it
will, and it chooses to make him into a liar. Interpretation
is revisionism, and the strongest readers so revise as to make
every text belated, and themselves as readers into children of
the dawn, earlier and fresher than any completed text ever
could hope to be.” (126)
Bloom's own idiosyncrasy as a reader
manifests itself in the understanding of the nature of “truth”
as intertextual. Bloom posits “truth” as intersubjective
against Paul de Man’s “troot” which Bloom grasps as
dialectical in character. For Bloom, “truth” which does not
exist is nevertheless a “truth” in the margin of concealment.
Truth in the margin is, in other words, an act of reducing,
breaking and restoring the idiosyncratic reader.
References:
Bloom,
Harold Deconstruction & Criticism,
et al.
(1979): Continuum, New York
Bloom, Harold
(1973): The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of
Poetry, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Bloom, Harold
(1975a): A Map of Misreading, Oxford
University Press, New York
Bloom, Harold
(1975b): Kabbalah and Criticism, Continuum,
New York
Hartman, G. H.
(1981): Saving the Text:
Literature/Derrida/Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore & London
Jabès, Edmond
(1975): The Book of Margins, The University
of Chicago Press, Chicago & London
Moynihan, Robert
(1986): A Recent Imagining, Archon Books,
Connecticut
Salusinszky, Imre
(1987): Criticism in Society, Methuen, New
York & London
Siegumfeldt, Inge
B.(1994): Orbis Litterarum, 49, Munksgaard
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