The Necessity of Misreading

Author(s): Harold Bloom

Source: The Georgia Review, Winter 2001 / Spring 2002, Vol. 55/56, Vol. 55, no. 4/Vol. 56,
no. 1 (Winter 2001 / Spring 2002), pp. 69-87
Published by: Georgia Review
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Harold Bloom

Ч'ке of
Necessity Misreading

of us live our lives in an uneasy alternation of two opposing

MOST superstitions: either everything that happens to us is arbitrary
and haphazard or everything that happens to us is determined or even
overdetermined by fate, by heritage, by societal pressures, by economic
factors, by systematic operations of one sort or another, or simply by our
own characters and personalities. Most of us, when we read seriously,
read as we live, in the same uneasy alternation, between the notion that
we choose what we read and the notion that it is chosen for us, by others
or by tradition. We read seriously, then, pretty much as we dress or as we
talk, following a range of conventions. Sometimes we may wonder at the
shape of our reading, and try to decide who is setting the shape and why.
That wonder is my starting point in this essay, a wonder at the shapes of
literary convention, and at the phenomena of literary tradition. Who or
what is the shaper of the shape? How are the phenomena of tradition
formed? What is the governing dialectic, if any, that holds together the
arbitrary and the overdetermined in these areas?
As an academic critic, one of whose concerns is contemporary po-
etry, I frequently am asked, by friends or students: "Which living con-
temporary poet ought one to read?" Increasingly I've tended to answer
with the names of four or five poets: Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth
Bishop, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery in this country, Geoffrey Hill
in England, and sometimes one or two others. However diffidently I give
the answer, I am engaged in canon formation, in trying to help decide a
question that is ultimately of a sad importance: "Which poet shall live?"
"They became what they beheld" is a somber formula in Blake's Jeru-
salem, akin to the popular formula: "You are what you eat." Yet we can
oppose to Blake's formula a maxim of Emerson's: "That which you are,
Copyright © 1975 by Harold Bloom.

[69]

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"JO THE GEORGIA REVIEW

that only can you see" and I suppose there could be a popular formula:
"That which you are, that only can you eat," though literally of course
that might seem to verge on the great taboo of cannibalism. On these
models, let us compare two formulae: "You are or become what you
read" and "That which you are, that only can you read." The first formula
gives priority to every text over every reader; the second makes of each
reader his own text. In the interplay of these two formulae, the intricacies
of canon formation work themselves out, for both formulae are true
enough. Every act of reading is an exercise in belatedness, yet every such
act is also defensive, and as defense it makes of interpretation a necessary
misprision.
The reader is to the poem what the poet is to his precursor- every
reader is therefore an ephebe, every poem a forerunner, and every reading
an act of "influencing," that is, of being influenced by the poem and of
influencing any other reader to whom your reading is communicated.
Reading is therefore misprision- or misreading- just as writing is
falsification, in Oscar Wilde's sense of "lying" ( The Decay of Lying).
A strong reading can be defined as one that itself produces other read-
ings-as Paul de Man says, to be productive it must insist upon its own
exclusiveness and completeness, and it must not deny its partialness and
its necessary falsification. "Error about life is necessary for life"; error
about a poem is necessary if there is to be yet another strong poem.
If tradition is, as Freud surmised, the equivalent in culture of re-
pressed material in the mind of the individual, then, rhetorically con-
sidered, tradition is always an hyperbole, and the images used to describe
tradition will tend to be those of height and depth. There is then some-
thing uncanny ( unheimlich ) about tradition, and tradition, used by Eliot,
say, as a hedge against the daemonic, is itself, however orthodox or soci-
etal, deeply contaminated by the daemonic. The largest characteristic
of tradition, in this view, is that tradition becomes an image of the heights
by being driven down to the depths, or of the depths by being raised to
the heights. Tradition is itself then without a referential aspect, like the
Romantic Imagination or like God. Tradition is a daemonic term.
What the Ein-Sof or the Infinite Godhead was to the Kabbalists,
or the Imagination was to the Romantic poets, tradition is now for us,
the one literary sign that is not a sign, because there is no other sign to
which it can refer. We cannot define tradition, therefore, and I suggest
that we stop trying. But though we cannot describe what tradition is, we
can describe how it works. In particular we can attempt to describe how

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 HAROLDBLOOM 71

tradition makes its choices, how it determines which poet shall live, and
how and when the chosen poet is to become a classic. Rather more im-
portant, we can try to describe how the choosing and classicizing of a
text itself results in the most powerful kinds of misreading.
The first principle that revisionism or historical belatedness insists
upon is best stated by a double rhetorical question of Novalis: "Who has
declared the Bible completed? Should the Bible not be still in the process
of growth?" It is impossible not to be moved by the noble pathos of
Novalis, but of course we all know, as he did, that the authority of in-
stitutional and historical Judaism and Christianity declared the Bible
completed. Unlike the canon of secular literature, the Scriptures of the
West are not still in the process of growth. It is instructive to consider
how the rabbis thought the Bible ended, with these words of the late-
comer prophet, Malachi:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming
of the great and dreadful day of the LORD:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and
the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite
the earth with a curse.

The Old Testament ends with this admonishing prophecy, that the
Oedipal anxieties are to be overcome, and that this will be performed by
the greatest of idealized precursors, Elijah, whose ephebe will be the
Messiah. The New Testament ends with a parallel prophecy, but only
after a fiercely defensive insistence that the canon is indeed now closed,
with these closing verses of Revelation:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the
prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things,
God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book
of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book
of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are
written in this book.
He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly:
Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
St. John the Divine declares the Bible closed, with a palpable anxiety
as to how this declaration is to be enforced. The issue is authority, as it
always is in all questions of canon formation, and it is worth noting that
both Malachi and St. John base their authority on the supposedly imme-

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72 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

diate future, on a First or a Second Coming of a reality that they seek to

introject. Proleptic representation is the inevitable rhetorical resource of
all canonizing discourse, which means that all canonizing must be done
at the expense of the presence of the present moment. When you declare
a contemporary work a permanent, classic achievement, you make it
suffer an astonishing, apparent, immediate loss-in-meaning. Of its late-
ness, you have made an earliness, but only by breaking the illusion of
modernity, which is the illusion that literature can be made free of liter-
ature. All canonizing of literary texts is a self-contradictory process, for
by canonizing a text you are troping upon it, which means that you are
misreading it. Canonization is the most extreme version of what Nietzsche
called Interpretation, or the exercise of the Will-to-Power over texts.
I am stating the thesis that canonization is the final or transumptive form
of literary revisionism, and so I am compelled to recapitulate part of what
I have said about revisionary processes in my two studies of misprision,
The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, but I hope that this
recapitulation will rise above mere repetition into a finer tone.
Influence is an ambivalent word to use in any discourse about liter-
ature, for "influence" is as complex a trope as language affords. Influence
is the great I Am of literary discourse, and increasingly I find its aptest
analogue in what the Kabbalah called the first Sefirah, the first attribute
or name or emanative principle of God, Keter or the Supreme Crown. For
Keter, like the Infinite God, is at once ayin or "nothingness" and ehyeh
or 7 Am, absolute absence and absolute presence. The first Kabbalistic
emanation is thus a dialectical entity, and rhetorically begins as a simple
irony. Influence begins as a simple irony also, as the origins of the word
indicate. Influence in the occult and astral sense was believed to be an
invisible yet highly palpable fluid pouring onto men from the star-world,
a word obviously of potencies and not of mere signs. Influence began
then metaphysically as a wholly materialistic though occult concept, and
this materialism seems to me always essential in any fresh theorizing about
influence.
We all of us take it for granted that all criticism necessarily begins
with an act of reading, but we are less ready to see that all poetry neces-
sarily begins with an act of reading also. It would move us greatly if we
could believe that what we call the Imagination is self-begotten. But, as
even Emerson had to admit, "the originals are not original," or as Yeats's
Hermit says in Supernatural Songs : "all must copy copies." Every ideal-
ized account of Classicism defines it as mimesis of essential nature, so as

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 HAROLD BLOOM 73

to fulfill and complete nature. Romanticism being antithetical or contra

naturam had to acknowledge that nature retained priority, that nature
was the primary. The antithetical or High Romantic thus had to achieve
a supermimesis of essential nature, it had to overcomplete and overful-
fill nature, which meant that mimetic representation was not sufficient.
Nature, to Romanticism, is a vast trope, and so is, by synecdoche, a part
that the so-called Imagination must complete. Overrepresentation de-
manded hyperbole and transumption, and hyperbolical and transumptive
thinking moves us into areas beyond the traditional Western balance of
microcosm and macrocosm. A deidealized vision of Classicism reveals
not that nature and Homer are everywhere the same, but that mimesis of
essential nature generally turns out to be the simpler act of directly imitat-
ing Homer. A deidealized vision of Romanticism reveals that the super-
mimesis of nature generally turns out to be the simpler act of imitating
Milton. No one ever said that nature and Milton were everywhere the
same, but also no one ever said, after Milton, that the Sublime and Milton
were not everywhere the same. To write poetry, in the past, was to read
Homer or Milton or Goethe or Tennyson or Pound, and to write poetry
these days in the United States is to read Wallace Stevens. I take it that I
am stating obvious truths. Why do we resist such truths? By "we" I mean
readers, and not just readers who have turned into professional poets.
There is an element in each of us that wants poetry always to be more
original than it possibly can be, and I think this element is worth some
speculation.
One way to understand what I mean by influence is to see it as a
trope substituting for "tradition," a substitution that makes for a sense of
loss, since influence, unlike tradition, is not a daemonic or a numinous
term. Tradition invokes the Sublime, and the Grotesque; influence in-
vokes at best the picturesque, at worst the pathetic or even the bathetic.
No one is ever happy about being influenced; poets can't stand it, critics
are nervous about it, and all of us as students necessarily feel that we are
getting or have gotten rather too much of it. To be influenced is to be
taught, and while we all, at whatever age, need to go on learning, we
resent more and more being taught, as we become older and crankier. Yet
no one genuinely resents discovering he or she has grand precursors, at
a certain saving distance. Nietzsche, increasingly wary about Schopen-
hauer, was delighted to discover fresh ancestors wherever he could, even
in as unlikely a figure as Spinoza. Influence, substituting for tradition,
shows us that we are nurtured by distortion, and not by apostolic sue-

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74 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

cession. Influence exposes and deidealizes tradition, not by appearing as

a cunning distortion of tradition, but by showing us that all tradition is
indistinguishable from making mistakes about anteriority. The more
tradition is exalted, the more egregious the mistakes become. I will ven-
ture the formula that only minor or weak poets, who threaten nobody,
can be read accurately. Strong poets must be misread; there are no gener-
ous errors to be made in apprehending them, any more than their own
errors of reading are ever generous. Every strong poet caricatures tra-
dition and every strong poet is then necessarily misread by the tradition
that he fosters. The strongest of poets are so severely misread that the
generally accepted, broad interpretations of their work actually tend to
be the exact opposites of what the poems truly are.
Milton, who declined every dualism, is thus read wholly dualisti-
cally by the dominant modern tradition of interpretation, of which C. S.
Lewis was a leading representative. Wordsworth, a wholly antithetical
poet, has been read as a primary healer, a nature-thaumaturgist. Stevens,
a qualified but still incessant Transcendentalist, is being read as an ironist
and as an exposer of poetry's pretensions. Influence clearly is a very
troublesome trope, and one that we substitute with continually, whether
we want to or not, because influence appears also to be another term for
another apparent opposite, "defense."
Defense is an odd notion, particularly in psychoanalysis, where
it always tends to mean a rather active and aggressive process. In psychic
life, as in international affairs, defense is frequently murderous. In the
realms of the interpoetic, defense is rather murderous also, because there
defense is always against influence. But the interpoetic, as I keep saying,
is only a trope for the reading process, and so I propose the unhappy
formula that reading is always a defensive process, a process that I believe
becomes severely quickened when we read poems. Reading is defensive
warfare, however generously or joyously we read, and with whatever
degree of love, for in such love or such pleasure there is a more-than-
usually acute ambivalence.
Before brooding on the defensive nature of reading, I want to de-
fend my constant insistence on acknowledging tropes as being the actu-
ality of critical discourse, even as critical argument seems to me the actual
staple of poetic discourse. When current French critics talk about what
they call "language," they are using language as a trope. Their scientism
is irrelevant, and is not the issue here, but the terms of that scientism are
necessarily the issue, since their value-words, including language and

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 HAROLD BLOOM 75

structure, are almost wholly figurative. All of their invocations of semi-

ology or the so-called archaeology of discourse conceal a few simple
defensive tropes, and they are at least as guilty of reifying their own
metaphors as any American bourgeois formalist has been. To say that the
thinking subject is a fiction, and that the manipulation of language by
that subject merely extends a fiction, is no more enlightening in itself
than it would be to say language is the thinking subject, and the human
psyche the object of discourse. Language is hardly in itself a privileged
kind of explanation, and linguistic models are useful only for linguistic
problems. The obsession with language is one of the clearest instances of
a defensive trope in modern literary discourse, from Nietzsche to the
present moment. It is a latecomer's defense, since it seeks to make of lan-
guage a perpetual earliness, or a freshness, rather than a medium always
aged by the shadows of anteriority. Shelley thought that language was
the remnant of abandoned fragmented cyclic poems, and Emerson saw
language as fossil poetry. Is this less persuasive than currently modish
views that literature is merely a special form of language?
Shelley and Emerson, for all their visionary idealism, were not wholly
out of the basic Anglo-American philosophical tradition, in which Locke
is always the central figure. Even Blake, who made fun of Locke, is not,
from the Continental point of view, a dialectical thinker, and I would
suggest that the real difference between Blake and Nietzsche is the em-
pirical strain that surprisingly persists in Blake. Dialectical thinking,
whether of the various Marxist or Structuralist kinds, adapts neatly to
the so-called linguistic model, just as Anglo-American empirical thinking
does not, or at least nowhere nearly so readily. An empirical thinker, con-
fronted by a text, seeks a meaning. Something in him says: "If this is a
complete and independent text, then it has a meaning." It saddens me to
say that this apparently common-sensical assumption is not true. Texts
don't have meanings, except in their relations to other texts, so that there
is something uneasily dialectical about literary meaning. A single text has
only part of a meaning; it is itself a synecdoche for a larger whole includ-
ing other texts. A text is a relational event, and not a substance to be
analyzed. But of course, so are we relational events or dialectical en-
tities, rather than free-standing units. The issue is how either texts or
people are to be dialectically apprehended and studied, and here Anglo-
American empiricism and Continental modes can do very little to en-
lighten one another. Though I acknowledge from the start that poems
are dialectical events, I still take up a relatively empiricist stance in regard

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76 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

to poems, though with a peculiar epistemological twist in my empiricism.

Emerson denied that there was any history; there was only biography, he
said. I adapt this to saying that there is no literary history, but that while
there is biography, and only biography, a truly literary biography is
largely a history of the defensive misreadings of one poet by another poet.
A biography becomes literary biography only when literary meaning is
produced, and literary meaning can only result from the interpretation
of literature. Poetry begins, always, when someone who is going to be-
come a poet reads a poem. But I immediately add-when he begins to read
a poem, for to see how fully he reads that poem we will have to see the
poem that he himself will write as his reading. If we are talking about two
strong poets, with a genuine difference between them, then the reading
we are talking about is necessarily a misreading or, as I like to call it, a
poetic misprision. And here I must pause to explain yet again why I insist
upon misreading or misinterpretation as being the commonal or normal
mode of poetic history.
Emerson, who disliked history enough to assert that it didn't exist,
said that this human mind had invented history and so this human mind
could understand and dismiss history. The Sphinx could solve its own
enigma, for the Sphinx had created that enigma.
Emerson, perhaps by way of Michelet or Cousin, was following
Vico, with his superb principle that we could only understand what we
ourselves had made. A reader understanding a poem is indeed understand-
ing his own reading of that poem. If the reading is wholly a received one,
then it will not produce other readings. An entire academy can convene
to declare that reading the right one, but of course it will be wrong. It
will also be weak. There are weak misreadings and strong misreadings,
just as there are weak poems and strong poems, but there are no right
readings, because reading a text is necessarily the reading of a whole
system of texts, and meaning is always wandering around between texts.
The meaning of a poem by Stevens, say "The Snow Man" or "The
Course of a Particular," just isn't in the text of "The Snow Man" or "The
Course of a Particular." Nor is it in Ruskin on the Pathetic Fallacy, Shel-
ley on the leaves and the West Wind, Emerson on the paradoxical noth-
ingness and universalism of the Transcendent Observer, Coleridge on
Dejection, Whitman on diffusing the self in air. The meaning of "The
Snow Man" or "The Course of a Particular" problematically plays back
and forth between its language and the language of those texts. It was in
this connection that I recall venturing the
apothegm that the meaning of

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 HAROLD BLOOM 77

a poem could only be another poem. Not, I point out, the meaning of an-
other poem, but the other poem itself, indeed the otherness of the other
poem.
I find it curious how many modern theorists actually talk about
poems when they assert that they are talking about people. Lacan defines
the Unconscious as the discourse of the Other. That is a fine trope, though
probably it is gorgeous nonsense. Freud's Unconscious is itself a powerful
trope, and as a representation is painfully effective. Had Lacan said that
poetry was the discourse of the Other, he scarcely would have been trop-
ing. If I can invoke a somewhat greater and more central man, then I
question also the grand formula that Poetry is a man speaking to men.
Poetry is poems speaking to a poem, and is also that poem answering back
with its own defensive discourse.
With the burden of defense, I have returned to a central problem
of my own stance, with its self-contradictory mixture of empirical and
dialectical presuppositions. There are two defenses for self-contradiction
in criticism. One would be the Emersonian-Whitmanian flamboyance of
chanting that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and that a large
consciousness contradicts itself because it contains multitudes. Unfor-
tunately, we have all of us arrived too late in the day to take on such
flamboyance. The more appropriate defense is to look at the language of
the poets, and not at any theory of language, including the poet's own,
and to observe in the language of the poems a perpetual self-contradiction
between empirical and dialectical assumptions. I knowingly urge critical
theory to stop treating itself as a branch of philosophical discourse, and
to adopt instead the pragmatic dualism of the poets themselves, as I can
see not the least relationship of what we have called poetics to the actual
problematics of reading poetry. A theory of poetry must belong to po-
etry, must be poetry, before it can be of any use in interpreting poems.
For several hundred years now, at least, poems have located themselves
smack in the midst of what Stevens called the dumbfoundering abyss be-
tween ourselves and the object, or between ourselves and other selves.
The strong poets simultaneously and self-refutingly define themselves by
an outrageous mixture of two incompatible assumptions, the first being
that the poem they seek to write will stand by itself, as a unified idea of
the poem, Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" being a defiantly parodistic
example:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill,

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78 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere,
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

But since this is a strong poem, it contradicts itself, and it also asserts,
with every one of its rhetorically defensive gestures, that it is only part of
a mutilated whole, which is the fundamental gesture of the irony of all
dialectic. Stevens' opening joke is purely dialectical: I placed a jar, not
on a hill in Tennessee, but just in Tennessee, as though the whole state
had reified into a single separate entity or substance. Tennessee is now a
single hill and a slovenly wilderness, but because of the self-insistence of
a single poetical jar Tennessee gets organized, firmed up, and so the
wilderness rises up, still sprawling, but tamed.
The jar remains firmly antithetical, and everything else in Tennessee
abides in the state of nature, and the whole poem starts to look like a
trope of pathos, a synecdoche for desire. If we run this little poem through
our dreaded poem-reading machine, our map of misreading or misprision,
we will find that it follows rather faithfully the great Wordsworthian
crisis-poem model, though it takes a pretty cheerful attitude toward
what it insouciantly regards as a merely technical crisis, that is to say,
somebody else's crisis all right, but not mine. The poem becomes rather
like someone whistling a chorus of "The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-
ling / For you but not for me," but the poem remains dialectical enough
to break off without going on to: "O death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-
ling, / О grave thy victory?" Stevens' anecdote isn't a triumph, it is just
an anecdote, and its metaleptic conclusion introjects an antithetical future
only by reminding us that all in the past is projected, and by forcing us to
see that there is no present tense in the poem at all, and indeed no presence,
no fullness of meaning whatsoever. The poet is a fellow who went about
placing jars. If you placed the jar properly, you achieved a certain per-
spective. Your placing, however well you did it, was necessarily a failed
metaphor, because all a metaphor does is to change a perspective, so that
the phrase "a failed metaphor" becomes a tautology. A jar may be a unity,

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 HAROLDBLOOM 79

and you can do with Tennessee what you will, but as soon as you troped
your jar you mutilated it, and it took dominion only by self-reduction
from fullness to emptiness.
I suggest the following formula: poems are apotropaic litanies, sys-
tems of defensive tropes and troping defenses, and what they seek to
ward oif is essentially the abyss in their own assumptions about them-
selves, at once empirically reifying and dialectically ironizing. A theory
of poetic influence becomes a theory of misreading because only misread-
ing allows a poem to keep going in its own philosophical contradictions.
Schizophrenia is disaster in life, and success in poetry. A strong poem
starts out strong by knowing and showing that it must be mis-read, that
it must force the reader to take up a stance that he knows to be untrue.
The poem is a lie about itself, but it only gets to itself, by lying against
time , and its only way of lying against time is to lie about previous poems,
and it can be about them only by misreading them, which completes our
bewilderingly perverse revision of a hermeneutic circle, and returns us
to the problematic of the reader.
It is a curiosity, as I've remarked already, of much nineteenth- and
twentieth-century discourse both about the nature of the human and
about ideas, that the discourse is remarkably clarified if we substitute
"poem" for "person," or "poem" for "idea." The moral psychologist,
philosopher, or psychoanalyst is discovered to be talking about poems,
and not about psyches or concepts or beliefs. Nietzsche and Freud seem
to me to be major instances of this surprising displacement, but examples
abound in other major speculators.
Throughout his notebook aphorisms, posthumously edited as The
Will to Power , Nietzsche speaks of ideas as if they were poems. In the
following excerpt, I have changed only one word, substituting "poem"
for "ideal":

A poem that wants to prevail or assert itself seeks to support

itself (a)
by a spurious origin, (b) by a pretended relationship
with powerful poems already existing, (c) by the thrill of mys-
tery, as if a power that cannot be questioned spoke through it,
(d) by defamation of poems that oppose it, (e) by a mendacious
doctrine of the advantages it brings with it, e.g., happiness, re-
pose of soul, peace or the assistance of a powerful God . . .
If one discovers all the defensive and protective measures by
which a poem maintains itself, is it then refuted? It has employed
the means by which all living things live and grow- they are one
and all "immoral."

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8o THE GEORGIA REVIEW

If we move from Nietzsche on an "ideal" to Nietzsche on a "thing,"

we still have revealing definitions of poetry, when we substitute "poem"
for "thing":

A poem is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a con-

cept, an image.
Nietzsche is attacking the High German metaphysical notion of the
"thing-in-itself," a notion that I suspect still lingers in the Coleridgean
exaltation of poetry that we have inherited. In the following excerpt, I
have substituted "poem" for "thing" again:
The properties of a poem are effects on other poems: if one re-
moves other poems, then a poem has no properties, i.e., there is
no poem without other poems, i.e., there is no poem-in-itself.
I wish now to turn the Nietzschean polemic against myself, and
against the residue of metaphysics in my own ideas of influence, by citing
another excerpt, and again substituting "poems" for "things," and "poet"
for "subject." One can deny the primacy of "language" over desire, yet
still acknowledge that the idea of a thinking subject, an author, writing a
poem, his poem, still partakes of a fiction:
When one has grasped that the poet is not someone that creates
effects, but only a fiction, much follows.
It is only after the model of the poet that we have invented
the reality of poems and projected them into the medley of
sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective poet, then
belief also disappears in effective poems, in reciprocation, cause
and effect between those phenomena that we call poems.

Influence, as I employ it, is not a doctrine of causation. It does not

mean that an earlier poem causes a later one, that Paradise Lost causes
The Prelude or The Four "Loas. Necessarily, therefore, influence as a
composite trope for poetic tradition, indeed for poetry itself, does away
not only with the idea that there are poems-in-themselves, but also with
the more stubborn idea that there are poets-in-themselves. If there are no
texts, then there are no authors- to be a poet is to be an interpoet, as it
were. But we must go further yet-there are no poems, and no poets, but
there is also no reader, except insofar as he or she is an interpreter. Read-
ing is impossible because the received text is already a received interpre-
tation, is already a value interpreted into a poem.
I have been citing Nietzsche, largely because he does not cease to
upset me, but I have come to the point where I abandon him for Emerson,

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 HAROLD BLOOM 8l

though the point is one he seems to share with Emerson. But this is a
seeming only, and the difference between Nietzsche and Emerson here
is a true difference, though it turns only upon a change in stance or atti-
tude in regard to an agreed-upon vision. I cite another notebook passage
from Nietzsche, this time with no words substituted for his:

"Interpretation," the introduction of meaning- not "explana-

tion" (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpreta-
tion that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only
a sign). There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensi-
ble, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is our opinions.

In another of his notebook jottings, Nietzsche brooded upon self-

divination or poetic God-making, speaking of himself in terms that else-
where he applied specifically to Emerson:

So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless

moments that fall into one's life as if from the moon, when one
no longer has any idea how old one is or how young one will
yet be.

Of Emerson, Nietzsche cunningly remarked: "He does not know

how old he is already, or how young he is still going to be." Nietzsche's
point about both Emerson and himself is that they both rejected belated-
ness, or forgot their way into a perpetual earliness. The most beautiful
passage of this sort that I know of in Nietzsche is an aphorism from Hu-
man , All-Too-Human , an aphorism on art as afterglow, indeed a remark-
able metaleptic reversal or transumption of the Zarathustrian image of the
solar trajectory:
THE AFTERGLOW OF ART. Just as in old age we remem-
ber our youth and celebrate festivals of memory, so in a short
time mankind will stand toward art: its relation will be that of
a touching memory of the joys of youth. Never, perhaps, in
former ages was art dealt with so seriously and thoughtfully as
now when it appears to be surrounded by the magic influence
of death. We call to mind that Greek city in southern Italy,
which once a year still celebrates its Greek feasts, amidst tears
and mourning, that foreign barbarism triumphs ever more and
more over the customs its people brought with them into the
land; and nowhere has Hellenism been so much appreciated, no-
where has this golden nectar been drunk with so much delight,
as amongst these fast disappearing Hellenes. The artist will soon
come to be regarded as a splendid relic, and to him, as to a
wonderful stranger on whose power and beauty depended the

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82 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

happiness of former ages, there will be paid such honor as is

not often enjoyed by one of our race. The best in us is perhaps
inherited from the sentiments of former times, to which it is
hardly possible for us now to return by direct ways; the sun
has already disappeared, but the heavens of our life are still glow-
ing and illumined by it, although we can behold it no longer.

How does Emerson differ from this transumptive stance? Only, I

think, in his insistence upon recentering the interpretative sign, though
Emerson knows also that every interpretation is doomed to dwindle down
and away into incomprehensibility, indeed into another layer in a pal-
impsest. How then can Emerson present himself so insouciantly as a
central interpreter, with a suave self-confidence that Nietzsche always
envied, yet could never emulate? I verge here on the true problematic of
my own belatedness, my conscious adoption of a Kabbalist model for
interpretation. Kabbalist models, like Emerson's Orphism or Nietzschean
or Heideggerian deconstructions, exile any reader still farther away from
any text. I too want to increase the distance between text and reader, to
raise the rhetoricity of the reader's stance, to make the reader more self-
consciously belated. How can such a reader make his misreadings more
central, and so stronger, than any other misreader's? How can there be a
central misreading?
In plain terms, I am asking: What is the difference between two
closely related interpretative stances- one that asks, with Nietzsche, Who
is the Interpreter, and what kind of power does he seek to gain over the
text?; while the other says, with Emerson, that only the truth as old as
oneself reaches one, that "It is God in you that responds to God without,
or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of another"? How, for
interpreters, do the Will-to-Power and Self-Reliance differ? Of course,
neither interpretative stance can be rigidly defined, anyway. On the one
side, there is Nietzsche's parodistic rhetoric and his bewildering perspec-
tivism. On the other, there is Emerson's subtle antinomianism of rhetoric,
and the outrageousness of his general advice: "Leave your theory, as
Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee." Still, the difference
can be defined, and it is this: for Nietzsche, the trope is an error, albeit
necessary and valuable; for Emerson, the trope is a defense, a life-
enhancing defense. Forty years or so before Nietzsche set down The
Will to Power thoughts upon interpretation, Emerson, in 1841, filled his
journal with acute insights as to why we and nature alike were tropes,

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 HAROLD BLOOM 83

and why it was the use of life to learn metonymy. Here is an Emerson
cento, circa 1841:
I have seen enough of the obedient sea wave forever lashing
the obedient shore. I find no emblems here that speak any other
language than the sleep and abandonment of my woods and
blueberry pastures at home . . .
The metamorphosis of Nature shows itself in nothing more
than this, that there is no word in our language that cannot be-
come typical to us of Nature by giving it emphasis. The world
is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist;
a Spider's Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold,
and it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light
the world converts itself into that thing you name, and all things
find their right place under this new and capricious classifica-
tion. There is nothing small or mean to the soul. It derives as
grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his universe
under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must
I call the heaven and the earth a maypole and country fair with
booths, or an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the
shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of
spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley,
a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears and
the spirit leaps to the trope . . .
... I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic,
prophesying, man-making words.
The underlying insight here, that the trope is a defense, is summed
up the strong essay, Nominalist and Realist, where both trope and de-
in
fense are subsumed in the fine New England category that Emerson calls
a "trick," which is a synonym that I gladly would accept for my more
cumbersome "revisionary ratio." For Emerson, tropes are defensive tricks:
For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on break-
ing up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what
one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a
perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even
the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned
by an acute person, and then that particular style continued in-
definitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he
would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural
defense. ... If John was perfect, why are you and I alive?

In his old age, Emerson was to redefine metonymy as "seeing the

same sense in things so diverse," and we can observe that the Emersonian

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84 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

reduction or kenosis which resulted in metonymy was usually the defense

of isolation, or solipsism carried to an ultimate and magic realism. An iso-
lating substitution brings about a recentering, however unstably, whereas
Nietzsche's sublimating substitution or perspectivizing metaphor neces-
sarily decenters. For Nietzsche, every trope is a change in perspective
in which outside becomes inside. For Emerson, every trope burns away
context, and when enough context has been dissolved, a pragmatic fresh
center appears. Again, for Emerson, societal and historical contexts
burned away into the flux as readily as literary contexts did, and so ulti-
mately his vision of self-reliance is one that cheerfully concedes the final
reliance of the self upon the self, its condition of perfect sphericity, in
which it knows and glories in its ultimate defense or trick, which is that
it must be misinterpreted by every other self.
No one would survive socially if he or she went around assuming or
saying that he or she had to be misinterpreted, by everyone whosoever,
but fortunately poems don't have to survive either in civil society or in a
state of nature. Poems fight for survival in a state of poems, which by
definition has been, is now, and is always going to be badly overpopulated.
Any poem's initial problem is to make room for itself-it must force the
previous poems to move over and so clear some space for it. A new
poem is not unlike a small child placed with a lot of other children in a
small playroom, with a limited number of toys, and no adult supervision
whatever.
I turn to that limited number of toys, whose uses are all but infinite,
the tropes or turns of poetic language, for only these allow for the para-
dox that one poem's clearing away of another, through misprision, is
manifested more by difference than by similarity. What is the difference
between a reading that is criticism and a reading that is a new poem? All
of us have read many critical readings, and at times we reflect or should
reflect on the oddity that the criticism frequently has a stronger apparent
presence than the poem upon which it comments. Indeed the criticism
can seem to have more unity, more form, more meaning. Is it just that the
critic has become more than adequate to the poem, or is it perhaps that
the critic's illusions about the nature of poetry are governing the nature
of his commentary? I will list the four largest illusions that we tend to
have about the nature of a poem:

1) There is the religious illusion, that a poem possesses or

creates a real presence.

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 HAROLDBLOOM 85

2) There is the organic illusion, that a poem possesses or

creates a kind of unity .
3) There is the rhetorical illusion, that a poem possesses or
creates a definite form.
4) There is the metaphysical illusion, that a poem possesses
or creates meaning.

The sad truth is that poems don't have presence, unity, form, or
meaning. Presence is a faith, unity is a mistake or even a lie, form is a

metaphor, and meaning is an arbitrary and now repetitious metaphysics.

What then does a poem possess or create? Alas, a poem has nothing, and
creates nothing. Its presence is a promise, part of the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Its unity is in the goodwill of
its reader. Its form is another version of the inside /outside metaphor of
the dualizing post-Cartesian West, which means that form in poetry is
always merely a change in perspective . Finally, its meaning is just that
there is, or rather 1vas, another poem. A poem is a substitution for a lost
first chance, which pragmatically means for another poem. Substitution,
whatever it becomes in life, is in poetry primarily a rhetorical process,
which returns us to the primacy of the trope.
I don't wish to repeat here anything of what I've said already about
the defensive nature of tropes, particularly in chapter five of A Map of
Misreading where I expound the map itself. My concern now is with the
history of interpretation, which means necessarily with the history of
revisionism and of canon formation in purely secular literary tradition.
My suggestion is that the history of poetry is also governed by the primacy
of the trope, and by the defensive nature of the trope. There is of course
nothing particularly original about such a suggestion. Hayden White in
his recent Metahistory has examined the governing tropes of many of the
major nineteenth-century historians, and also in an essay on Foucault,
White usefully has decoded Foucault, showing Foucault's hidden reliance
upon tropes in his deconstructions of the history of ideas. Similarly, Der-
rida and de Man have perfected the Nietzschean-Heideggerian mode of
deconstruction, in which the illusion of presence in texts is cleared away,
in favor of what Derrida calls the "supplementary difference," a rather
baroque, ornamental name for the trope-as-misreading, which Jarry
called by the Lucretian name of clinamen , a pataphysical naming that
I myself have followed. De Man has revivified the Nietzschean critique
of history, applying it to literary modernism in particular, and subtly ex-

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86 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

tending Nietzschean perspectivism so that it becomes a deconstruction of

all inside/outside dichotomies that have obscured the study of Romanti-
cism. Rather less interestingly, there have been many abortive attempts to
displace literary history into the reductive categories of linguistics, or
the scientism of semiotics. But literary history is itself always misprision,
and so is literature always misprision, and so is criticism, as a part of liter-
ature. Like poetry, the history of poetry is necessarily apotropaic. Its
prime characteristic is that it is always warding something off, always de-
fending against real or illusory enemies, or against itself. Error is too
wide a category to aid much in achieving an authentic literary history.
Within the too-large vista of truth/falsehood distinctions we can locate
and map the narrower and more poetic area of love /hate relationships,
for psychic ambivalence is the natural context in which the reading of
poetry takes place. All tropes falsify, and some falsify more than others.
But it would be a hopeless quest for criticism to follow philosophy in its
benighted meanderings after truth. How can it be the function of criti-
cism to decide the truth/falsehood value of texts, when every reading of
a text is itself a falsification, and when every text itself falsifies another?
But, at something like this stage, I always hear the protest: "What has
happened to the notion of good interpretation or of accurate criticism?"
Oscar Wilde wrote many profound and beautiful essays, but his
masterpiece is the critical dialogue called The Decay of Lying. Wilde,
as a good disciple of Walter Pater, was a superb antithetical critic. As his
spokesman, Vivian, says in this dialogue, what is fatal to the imagination
is to fall into "careless habits of accuracy." Art, fortunately, is not ac-
curate, for it "has never once told us the truth." In a remarkable vision,
Wilde's Vivian shows us Romance returning to us, by all the tropes of
poetry coming to life, by all the "beautiful untrue things" crowding
upon us. In the almost equally audacious dialogue, The Critic as Artist,
Wilde denies the supposed distinction between poetry and criticism.
Criticism, as the record of the critic's soul, is called by Wilde "the only
civilized form of autobiography." Against Arnold, Wilde insisted that
"the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not." Wilde's superb denial that interpretation is a mimesis, is a good
starting point for ridding our judgments of the notion that good criticism
establishes itself through sound descriptiveness. We do not speak of
poems as being more or less useful, or as being right or wrong. A poem
is either weak and forgettable, or else strong and so memorable. Strength
here means the strength of imposition. A poet is strong because poets after

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 HAROLD BLOOM 87

him must work to evade him. A critic is strong if his readings similarly

provoke other readings. What allies the strong poet and the strong critic
is that there is a necessary element in their respective misreadings.
But again, I hear the question: "Why do you insist upon misread-
ing ?" My answer is that a reading, to be strong, must be a misreading,
for no strong reading can fail to insist upon itself. A strong reading does
not say: "This might mean that, or again that might mean this." There
is no "this" or "that" for the strong reading. According to the strong
reading, it and the text are one. But since the strong text is itself a strong
misreading, we actually confront a doubling, in which one act of mis-
prision displaces an earlier act of misprision. As Wilde said: "Creation is
always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit and
the World-Spirit are one."
Some of the consequences of what I am saying dismay even me.
Thus, it cheers me up to say that the misreading of Milton's Satan by
Blake and Shelley is a lot stronger than the misreading of Satan by C. S.
Lewis or Charles Williams, let alone than the pitifully weak misreading
of Satan by T. S. Eliot. But I am rather downcast when I reflect that the
misreading of Blake and Shelley by Yeats is a lot stronger than the mis-
reading of Blake and Shelley by Bloom. Still, I cast my vote for Oscar
Wilde's insight: a strong poem lies against time, and against the strong
poems before it, and a strong criticism must do the same. Nothing is
gained by continuing to idealize reading, as though reading were not an
art of defensive warfare. 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. Every poem already written
is in the evening land. It may blaze there as the evening star, but the strong
reader lurking in every one of us knows finally what Stevens knew, that
no star can suffice if it remains external to us:
Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,

That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines

From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.

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