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Article Excerpt
Recently, one of my closest friends and colleagues called me to meet him. The tone of the call was familiar; he was a little jittery and asked if I was in the mood for breakfast. I knew what this meant. About once a year I receive such a call. My friend is a poet, who during graduate school won the single most prestigious--and lucrative--national graduate student award for poetry and has since published in just about every major literary journal. His first book won a national prize; his second book combines new poems with the original, platinum print photography of a world renowned photographer--these limited edition $12,000 books are sold out. He runs the poetry division of a small but well-respected M.F.A. program, and the editor of an important literary journal recently called him "one of the best new southern poets." He is as accomplished as a young poet could be, has every reason to be confident, every reason to feel secure in his poetic voice. Still, when we sat down, he handed me a new poem of his and a book by Richard Wilbur and asked nervously, "Do I sound too much like him?"
Shortly after our meeting, it struck me that, in a general sense, this was "the anxiety of influence" at work. A prolific reader, this poet-friend of mine is unable to break from his predecessors, his poetic rivals. He wants to be like them, but not. He wants to use them for inspiration, but surpass their importance. He wants his own poetic voice to be self-sustaining, autonomous, but these poets keep coming back into his consciousness, causing him daily anxiety. I try to console him, try to explain tradition and "everyone borrows from everyone," but it seems to do little good. He keeps writing, keeps fretting, and his poetry inevitably becomes the product of his attempt to be both like and unlike those others.
Like Bloom, who first developed this "anxiety of influence" as a basis for his theory of poetic history, I believe that the "anxiety of influence" is indeed an integral, crucial element of literary texts. (1) Unfortunately, Bloom provides us with the concept, but not much of a method--despite his continuous claims that he is indeed developing a "practical criticism." (2) Still, it should not come as a surprise that Bloom's theory is problematic in practice, considering that the entire conception of the "anxiety of influence" is based on the deep, dark, mysterious Freudian unconscious. Bloom asserts that all writers suffer an Oedipal "anxiety" with regards to their predecessors, or their "literary fathers." As a result, literature is a series of "misprisions" or "misreadings" of earlier texts as poets (strong poets he calls them) attempt first to undermine and eventually to overcome their "fathers'" position of superiority. He summarizes his own theory as this:
Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong, authentic poets--always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western Poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist. (Anxiety 30)
The problems with this characterization are numerous. Although the basis for his theory is indeed centered in Freud's Oedipus complex, Bloom never really demonstrates how the central Freudian "mother" figure fits in. In addition, he never really gives an adequate definition of what a "strong poet" is--even still why the "strong/weak" binaries are needed at all. He also never adequately defines the meaning of "authentic poets," nor does he seem conscious of the potential danger in reducing influence to "two" figures. (3) His theory is also marred by the obvious valorization of the "western canon," but even within that canon the female poet is seemingly absent. And why is this "anxiety of influence" largely a post-Renaissance phenomenon, especially considering the immense emphasis on literary imitation during the early modern period? (4) Bloom never really clarifies any of these issues. Perhaps the most troublesome element of Bloom is the reductive claim that "poems ... are neither about subjects nor about themselves ... they are necessarily about other poems" (Map of Misreading 18).
While problems with Bloom abound, there is the reality that imitation and influence are substantial factors in the production of literature, that "anxiety" about a writer's own identity within tradition seems valid in a general sense, and that psychoanalytic approaches to identity formation are relevant to understanding that anxiety. Certainly, some critics have taken Bloom's ideas to more "practical"--and more useful--ends, and they have at least shown that in an altered form Bloom does indeed foster some kind of useful criticism: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Thomas Greene's The Light in Troy (1982), and more recently Thomas Hubbard's The Pipes of Pan (1998), to name just a few. (5) Post-structuralist psychoanalytical thought, while grounded in Freud, has convincingly identified, implicitly and explicitly, the tremendous problems with Freud's chaotic, often elusive model of the unconscious. The proposition in this present essay is that re-reading Bloom through a Lacanian lens can further help to validate Bloom's basic ideas about poetic history, but it can also suggest possibilities of a "non-reductive" version of Bloom as well as suggest various methods needed for a more holistic approach to influence that still focuses on the importance and significance of "anxiety" as a guiding force for the production of literary texts.
Lacan's re-interpretation and reformulation of Freud's model of human psychological development are now well-known, but a brief--and necessarily simplified--overview will help establish this essay's context. (6) Lacan suggests that three orders constitute the psyche. The Imaginary Order represents the state in which an infant's self-identity is defined wholly by his/her biological dependence on the mother and the perception of preverbal images. The mirror stage for Lacan represents the beginning of self-recognition, the understanding that the self is separate from the mother and that certain things (objet a)--sounds, human waste, the mother's touch, etc.--are also separate from the physical self. (7) This creates a sense of lack and a desire to regain those things that are now "missing." The child then moves into the father-dominated Symbolic Order. In this stage, the psyche is inevitably affected by language as well as social rules and conventions, all of which are associated with the "Law of the Father." This order is characterized by fragmentation, difference, and the desire to repossess those pleasures of the Imaginary Order and to situate that desire within the "law" of the Symbolic. Finally, the Real Order represents the remote part of the psyche that exists both beyond the specular existence of the Imaginary and the linguistic existence of the Symbolic and contains those strong emotional feelings associated with birth, death, and sexuality. The absolute unity of the "Real" is largely inaccessible to the individual, manifesting itself only in fleeting moments of joy and pain, called "jouissance." Our very existence within the Symbolic and our self-identity rest within the conflict between isolation and fragmentation and a desire for wholeness with the unattainable Other.
Bloom suggests that the...
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