A Family Romance-Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom: A Study of Critical Influence

Author(s): Steve Polansky

Source: boundary 2, Vol. 9, No. 2, A Supplement on Contemporary Poetry (Winter, 1981), pp.
227-246
Published by: Duke University Press
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A
Family Romance-Northrop Frye
and Harold Bloom:
A
Study
of Critical Influence
Steve
Polansky
Anyone who has
diligently
read
through
Harold Bloom's critical
corpus of the past decade is, like a police sketch-artist, able to draft a com-
posit portrait of the influences on Bloom's critical theory.
There is William
Blake, from whom comes Bloom's belief in the power and importance of
imaginative constructs and cosmologies ('heterocosms', to use Bloom's
term); Freud, whence Bloom derives the concepts of belatedness, anxiety,
the family romance, and his system of defense mechanisms; Vico, to
whom Bloom ascribes his theory of divination, originally practiced by pri-
mordial Titans of the
imagination, resumed in our times by Bloom's cadre
of
strong
and severe poets. The universe in which Bloom and his poets
function is Nietzsche's, bereft of beneficent deity, under the sway of an in-
different, antithetical Nature. In Nietzsche too, one can locate Bloom's
tendency
to
aphorism, and the sense of
urgency
which informs his will to
power over the text. Trained early
in the Talmud, Bloom attributes his
concept of revisionism or misprision to 16th-century Kabbalists. Milton
serves as the
inhibiting phallic-father for Bloom's Romantic 'ephebe',1 and
in his
Areopagitica, and his Satan, Milton provides the
guidelines and the
prototype for Bloom's
strong
but belated poet, heroically rallying what re-
mains
against the
authority
and
priority of the
stronger precursor. In
A
Family Romance-Northrop Frye
and Harold Bloom:
A
Study
of Critical Influence
Steve
Polansky
Anyone who has
diligently
read
through
Harold Bloom's critical
corpus of the past decade is, like a police sketch-artist, able to draft a com-
posit portrait of the influences on Bloom's critical theory.
There is William
Blake, from whom comes Bloom's belief in the power and importance of
imaginative constructs and cosmologies ('heterocosms', to use Bloom's
term); Freud, whence Bloom derives the concepts of belatedness, anxiety,
the family romance, and his system of defense mechanisms; Vico, to
whom Bloom ascribes his theory of divination, originally practiced by pri-
mordial Titans of the
imagination, resumed in our times by Bloom's cadre
of
strong
and severe poets. The universe in which Bloom and his poets
function is Nietzsche's, bereft of beneficent deity, under the sway of an in-
different, antithetical Nature. In Nietzsche too, one can locate Bloom's
tendency
to
aphorism, and the sense of
urgency
which informs his will to
power over the text. Trained early
in the Talmud, Bloom attributes his
concept of revisionism or misprision to 16th-century Kabbalists. Milton
serves as the
inhibiting phallic-father for Bloom's Romantic 'ephebe',1 and
in his
Areopagitica, and his Satan, Milton provides the
guidelines and the
prototype for Bloom's
strong
but belated poet, heroically rallying what re-
mains
against the
authority
and
priority of the
stronger precursor. In
227 227
Wallace Stevens, Bloom finds his most immediate spiritual mentor. In
Stevens's poetry
Bloom locates the substantiation for his sense that an
American-Romantic lyric tradition,
stemming
from the Emerson of Na-
ture, through
the Whitman of Sea-Drift, still obtains, and indeed predom-
inates in the twentieth-century. (For Bloom this notion of an ongoing
tra-
dition that will continue to engender strong poets
like A. R. Ammons and
John Ashberry is profoundly consoling.)
The list is exhausting.
Bloom's critical forebears are many.
Like
Edward Young,
who was also concerned with the problem
of originality,
Bloom avowedly aspires
to be the Longinus
of his
age,
in restoring
a rhe-
torical dimension to criticism.2 From the nineteenth-century, Ruskin,
whose work Bloom has edited and commented on at length,
and who, like
Bloom, was steeped
in the Bible, confers an oracular prose style
and the
movement towards a comprehensive theory
of poetry. Ruskin, as did
Johnson and Coleridge
before him, essayed the stance of
tragic-critic;
a
stance which Bloom seems to find more and more appealing. Among
critics of the present century,
Bloom acknowledges
a debt to Kenneth
Burke, G. W. Knight, Angus Fletcher, Geoffrey Hartman, de Man and Der-
rida, and to Walter Jackson Bate. (Bloom acknowledges
his debt to the
Bate of John Keats, but denies the obvious and more significant
link to
Bate's The Burden of the Past. ) Northrop Frye, although
he is cited fre-
quently
in Bloom's early work, is nowhere mentioned as an important
formative influence.3
The foregoing catalogue
of influences and influencers is merely a
suggestion
of the host one is compelled to track down in a study
of
Bloom. (A deft parodist,
Bloom drops
an occasional red-herring-he
calls
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
"one of the sages
of poetic
influence"-to
make the way sufficiently perplexing.)
There is, however, an alternate ap-
proach
to Bloom. As Northrop Frye says
of Blake: "There is little point in
unravelling
all the strands of Blake's thought
back to their primeval
ori-
gins:
we shall be better advised to start wherever they
are first woven to-
gether
in a form which seems to anticipate Blake."4 Appropriately,
it is in
the work of Northrop Frye, most markedly
in Fearful Symmetry (1947)
and Anatomy of Criticism (1957), that we can find the first and most sig-
nificant conflation of the various strains of Bloom's critical theory,
al-
though frequently presented
in a radically
different manner.
To posit Frye's
influence on any English-speaking
critic or work
of criticism that postdates
him is to hazard little. As Murray Krieger says:
"Whatever the attitude toward Northrop Frye's prodigious scheme, one
cannot doubt that, in what approaches
a decade since the publication
of
his masterwork [the Anatomy],
he has had an influence-indeed an abso-
lute hold-on a generation
of developing literary
critics greater
and more
exclusive than that of any
one theorist in recent critical history."5
In 1957 Harold Bloom read Anatomy
of Criticism and reviewed it
in the Yale Review. In this review, which he called "A New Poetics,"
228
Bloom said of Frye: his is an "imagination whose power and discipline are
unique
in contemporary criticism."6 It is my contention that Frye's is a
profound and pervasive influence on the theory of criticism and poetry
Bloom is later to develop; an influence that works both positively and
negatively,
and that extends, clarifying and demystifying as it
goes, into
the reaches of Bloom's theory that seem most arcane.
In a
comparison of the critical theories of Northrop Frye and
Harold Bloom, the matter of style is of first importance. Both are
'stylized' critics. They are both
quite consciously preoccupied
with shap-
ing
a distinctive critical voice, with
pushing
the verbal texture of their
work to the limits conventionally set for critical discourse, and both drive
their prose towards artificiality and opacity. After reading the Anatomy or
The
Anxiety
of Influence, one is left, above all, with the sense of
having
encountered an artifact-something intricately structured, something
reso-
nant, rhythmic, poetic-and
it is on the level of poetry that both books
communicate most
significantly.
Bloom says of his own book that it is "a
theory of poetry that presents itself as a severe poem, reliant upon apho-
rism, apothegm, and a quite personal (though thoroughly traditional)
mythic pattern...."7 Frye and Bloom here share a debt to Ruskin
(Bloom calls Ruskin's critical apparatus a
"mythopoeic fantasia of his
own"8), and more importantly to Blake, who serves both critics as a sort
of stylistic germ-cell.
In both Frye and Bloom there is a virtual identifica-
tion of the acts of
writing poetry and
writing criticism. Bloom feels justi-
fied in
referring
to Freud, Vico, and Nietzsche as
strong poets, and
Frye
in
writing
of the
Anatomy:
"The present book assumes that the
theory of
literature is as primary a humanistic and liberal pursuit as its practice."9
One crucial difference must be noted. Frye never loses control. He never
permits himself to lapse into the sheer preciosity that characterizes much
of Bloom's work (the "Prologue" to The
Anxiety
of Influence, for exam-
ple), although both Frye and Bloom evince an equally impish insistence on
radical etymology.
This question of
style is not merely one of local texture. For both
Frye and Bloom the matter of style is, more importantly, a matter of
methodology. Like Ruskin, Frye and Bloom develop their critical theories
in direct and constant attitudes. Frye writes: "If criticism exists, it must
be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework deriv-
able from an inductive survey of the
literary field" (AC, p. 90). Bloom's
field, however, is severely limited. He is not
willing,
or his apparatus does
not permit him to deal with
any literature outside the 'Romantic' tradi-
tion. While
Frye too seems most comfortable with this tradition (the
majority of his critical
writing is devoted to it), his
theory is useful in
treating works of almost any genre or period.
Early in his career, Frye wrote: "But there are so
many symbolic
constructs in
literature, ranging
from Dante's Ptolemaic universe to Yeats's
spirit-dictated Vision, that one
begins to suspect that such constructs have
229
something
to do with the way poetry is written. For readers brought up to
ask only emotional reverberation or realistic detail from poetry, it comes
as a disillusioning
shock to learn that, as
Valery says, cosmology is a
literary art."10 Methodologically,
both Frye and Bloom derive from Blake
their belief in the importance and value of
imaginative constructs, symbo-
logical grammars,
critical cosmologies, heterocosms, or whatever else one
cares to call them. Like Ruskin, both Frye and Bloom are after a compre-
hensive, "synoptic" theory of literature criticism: a single coordinating
principle,
which for Frye takes the form of
Anagogy,
"literature as a total
order of words" (AC, p. 365), and for Bloom the Anxiety of Influence, or
"the art of knowing
the hidden roads that go
from poem
to poem"
(A/, p. 96). One need only look at Bloom's celebrated "Map of Misread-
ing"
to see his admiration for the heterocosm, and this admiration informs
Bloom's judgement
of poetic value: "If Ammons is, as I think the central
poet
of my generation, [it is] because he alone has made a hetero-
cosm. ..."11 Frye
is no less committed on the subject:
"The
great
value
of Blake is that he insists so
urgently
on this question
of
imaginative
ico-
nography,
and forces us to learn so much of its grammar
in
reading him."
This might
well be posited as the
'great
value' of Bloom. Frye
continues:
"He [Blake] differs from the other poets [as Frye and Bloom from other
critics] only
in the degree
to which he compels us to do this" (FS, p. 421).
It is particularly telling
to note what Lipking
and Litz, in their Modern
Literary Criticism, say
of Frye's critical enterprise:
"At its
highest level,
therefore, Frye's
criticism takes on an enormous project: A map [my
em-
phasis]
of the
imagination...."1
2
There are problems
inherent in a methodological approach
of this
sort. One is the tendency towards over-schematizing, towards the prolifera-
tion of charts, maps, graphs,
and other extra-textual critical paraphernalia.
Frye,
in a discussion of Blake's cosmology, displays
his awareness of this
danger:
Again, Blake, though
a very systematic thinker, sharply
warns his reader against
what he calls 'mathematic form,'
and this includes all the Euclidean paraphernalia
of dia-
grams, figures,
tables of symbols
and the like, which in-
evitably appear
when
symbolism
is treated as a dead
language.
The result is an over-schematized commentary
full of false symmetries
which itself [is] more difficult
to understand than Blake....13
To a remarkable degree, Frye resists this impulse
to over-schematize. As
Murray Krieger points out: "Such diagrammatic attempts to freeze the
dynamic fluidity
of Frye's categories
account for the simplifications
and
reductions that Frye's followers and opponents
have worked on the ori-
ginal grand mythic
scheme in order to make it hold still either to be ap-
230
plied or to be attached. And his followers have been at least as guilty
as his
opponents (NF, p. 3). While Frye succeeds in avoiding the "two-
dimensional spatial
need to
systematize" (NF, p. 3), Bloom does not. The
"Map of Misreading"
he provides,
and to which he alludes persistently, is
to my
mind his least valuable contribution. It is over-schematized, limited
in its application, static, inflexible, and ultimately more difficult to under-
stand than the poetry it purports
to explicate.
Another methodological liability
worth considering is the way in
which descriptive symbolic constructs have of becoming prescriptive. Writ-
ing
in 1947 of the critic's duty to provide a
grammar
of
imagery, Frye
says: "But with the breakdown of a tradition of
grammatical criticism,
ideas of general beauty have become the critic's chief subject-matter;
hence the nineteenth century was the
golden age
of aesthetic criticism.
Criticism reacted on art, and when critics forgot
how to teach the language
of poetic imagery
the poets forgot
how to use it. . ." (Fl, p. 220). Later,
in the Anatomy, Frye changes
his mind, or at least qualifies
his stance, on
the value of prescriptive criticism:
There may, then, be such things as rules of critical pro-
cedure, and laws, in the sense of the
patterns of observed
phenomena, of literary practice. All efforts of critics to
discover rules or laws in the sense of moral mandates tel-
ling
the artist what he
ought
to do, or have done, to be
an authentic artist, failed. . . . The substitution of sub-
ordination and value-judgment for coordination and de-
scription, the substitution of 'all poets should' for 'some
poets do,' is only a sign that all the relevant facts have
not yet been considered. (AC, p. 26)
While Frye's critical stance is occasionally prescriptive, Bloom's is relent-
lessly so. The primary thrust of his theory of poetry might justly be para-
phrased: "If you want to be a strong poet, or be recognized as one by me
at any rate, this is what you must do," and his "Map of Misreading" could
well be seen as a blueprint for writing a Romantic crisis-poem. It is clear
that Bloom is desperately concerned with the education of new, strong
poets who will help him to live his life. There is a profound, palpable ur-
gency behind everything Bloom writes, and the effect this has on his criti-
cism is manifest. "Our profession is not genuinely akin any longer to that
of the historians or the philosophers. Without willing the change," Bloom
writes, "our theoretical critics have become negative theologians, our prac-
tical critics are close to being Agaddic commentators, and all of our teach-
ers, of whatever generation, teach how to live, what to do, in order to
avoid the damnation of death-in-life."14
In the passage from the Anatomy adduced above, Frye promul-
231
gates
a critical theory free of
value-judgment,
and opposed to what Pound
calls 'excernment.' Frye, throughout
the Anatomy,
makes a
great show of
his intent to strip criticism (for the time
being at least) of its 'evaluative'
function. Conversely, Bloom is unabashedly judgmental
and evaluative-his
conception of
strong poets presupposes,
of course, weak poets-and
flaunts his personal conception of the Tradition.
With respect to this sort of approach, Frye comments: "A selec-
tive approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultra-critical joker
concealed in it (AC, p. 23). In Bloom's case, of course, Frye is
right.
In
truth, however, there is not much difference between Bloom's strong-poet
discrimination and Frye's statement: "And
among
artists we must dis-
tinguish
a Reynolds from a Milton, and follow only
the artist who is also a
prophet (FS, p. 250). Nor is the Anatomy,
that
egalitarian, all-embracing
monument to value-free criticism, entirely
chaste:
As a result of expressing
the inner forms of drama with
increasing
force and intensity, Shakespeare arrived in his
last period at the bedrock of drama, the romantic specta-
cle out of which all the more specialized
forms of drama,
such as tragedy
and social comedy, have come, and to
which they recurrently
return. In the
greatest
moments
of Dante and Shakespeare, in, say,
The Tempest or the
climax of the Purgatorio,
we have a
feeling
that here we
are close to
seeing
what our whole literary experience
has been about, the feeling
that we have moved into the
still center of the order of words. (FS, p. 117)
The ultra-critical joker lurking here, and operative
in every editorial and
critical decision Frye makes, is his archetypal, anagogic
bias. This bias re-
sults in an evaluative hierarchy based on the extent of mythic displace-
ment, which Frye
defines as "The adaption
of myth and metaphor to can-
ons of morality or plausibility" (AC, p. 365), and by
which he means the
progressive
diminution of the
power
of myth to affect us, and the subse-
quent
need for various modes of figuration
to compensate
for this loss. At
the epicenter
of Frye's "still center of words," at the very top of the hier-
archy
I am suggesting
is very
much present in Frye's work, is the possibil-
ity
of some primal apocalyptic vision; and this, although
couched in a dif-
ferent argot,
is precisely
what informs Bloom's more candid value-
judgments.
One final problem
worth noting
in connection with a critical
methodology based on symbolic constructs, concerns the distinction be-
tween theorist and critic. In the systematic
formulation of their respective
grammars, Frye and Bloom act as theorists. The ultimate goal
of such
activity, at its best, might conveniently
be termed "Poetics." A
theory
does not try to evaluate or interpret, and is measured only
in terms of the
232
consistency of its system and the rigor with which it is pursued. A theory
may
be
generated inductively through
a study of various texts, but once
formed, it stands outside and independent of those texts. About Frye the
theorist, Murray Krieger writes: "Since obviously the history of our criti-
cism has allowed many alternative
readings
of literature, we must realize
that, far from meaning an empirical claim [for the
'rightness'
of his arche-
types], Frye is rather
creating,
within the zodiac of his wit, galaxies that
respond
to his own poetic vision, even as his vision responds to Blake's"
(NF, p. 21). Conversely, and characteristically, Bloom locates the validity
of Frye's categories
"in their potential usefulness."15 As theorist, Bloom
is perhaps more consistent, more rigorous,
more systematic than Frye (al-
though hardly more
imaginative). Yet, although
it is Frye who promises in
the Anatomy a
forthcoming complementary volume of
practical criticism
(the Anatomy is virtually void of any attempt at such criticism), it is
Bloom who
transgresses
the limits of the theorist, and provides extravagant
explications of various texts. Frye is content to offer the
groundwork for a
practical criticism; Bloom, it seems, cannot brook such
delicacy. Practical
criticism becomes for him far more than mere explication: it becomes a
means of
making sense of the
autonomous, non-discursive, timeless, ana-
gogic literary universe. And the need to make sense for Bloom
appears to
be a matter of survival.
The
temperamental difference between Frye and Bloom merits
further discussion. "The Romantic 'topocosm,' like its predecessor," Frye
writes, "is, for the poet, simply a
way
of
arranging metaphors, and does
not in itself
imply any particular attitudes or beliefs or conceptions. . ."
(Fl, p. 65). Compare this sense of the poet as workman, with Bloom's no-
tion of poetic stance: "Ideas and
images belong
to discursiveness and his-
tory," Bloom writes, "and are
scarcely unique to
poetry. Yet a poet's
stance, his Word, his
imaginative identity, his whole
being, must be
unique
to him, and remain
unique or he will
perish . . ." (Al, p. 71). Murray
Krieger
sees
Frye as emphatically opposed to existentially-oriented
modern criticism (NF, p. 10), and Frye himself posits a critical fallacy he
calls 'existential projection.' Frye continues:
Mr. Eliot
distinguishes between the poet who creates a
philosophy for himself, and the poet who takes over one
that he finds to hand, and advances the view that the lat-
ter course is better, or at least safer, for most poets. The
distinction is fundamentally a distinction between the
practice of the thematic poets of the low-mimetic [read:
Romantic] and of the ironic modes. Such poets as
Blake, Shelley, Goethe, and Victor
Hugo were compelled
by the conventions of their mode to present the concep-
tual
aspect of their
imagery as
self-generated. . . . (NF,
p.
65)
233
One need only look at the lines from Stevens's poem,
"An Ordinary Even-
ing
in New Haven," which Bloom prefixes to The Anxiety
of
Influence,
to
understand the fundamental opposition
in critical attitude:
... A more severe
More harassing
master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof
that the theory
Of poetry
is the theory
of life....
In the conclusion of the Anatomy Frye
writes: "The book at-
tacks no methods of criticism, once that subject has been defined: what it
attacks are the barriers between the methods" (NF, p. 341). This is the
final locus of Frye's broadly humanistic, synoptic, synthesizing
aim. In the
formulation of his "Map of Misreading,"
Bloom's intent is equally
human-
istic and theoretically inclusive. Bloom cites Geoffrey Hartman on his own
behalf: ". . . the concern with influence, now seeing a revival,
is a human-
istic attempt to save art from those who would eliminate mind in favor of
structure,
or who would sink it into the mechanical operation
of the
spirit" (MM, p. 59).
An examination of the arrangement
of Bloom's Map reveals, for
instance, his effort to rhetoricize Freudian psychology,
to take back from
Freud, as Bloom says,
what he originally
took from poetry.16 Frye him-
self writes: "The romantic conception
of the hyper-physical
world appears
in Freud's psychological myth
of a subconscious libido and a censoring
consciousness. Freud himself has noted the resemblance of his metaphysic
to Schopenhauer's
. . ." (Fl, p. 227). And Murray Krieger suggests,
for
Frye,
"Freud as an alternative influence. Freud rather than Jung,
since
Jung's archetypes
demand a metaphysic
that Frye must reject. Frye's
mythic gods,
like Freud's neuroses, are related to our wishes and the frus-
tration of these wishes, and in each case their displacement
can give rise to
literary
creation" (NF, p. 19). Indeed, Frye posits
a Freudian concept at
the very ground
of his archetypal
criticism: ". . . in archetypal
criticism
the significant
content is the conflict of desire and reality which has for its
basis the work of the dream" (AC, p. 105).
Thus,
we
might
well expect
to find Bloom's indebtedness to
Freud prefigured
in Frye. Bloom's concept of anxiety,
the sense of it as, at
once, disabling
and enabling,
is Freudian. "Anxiety,"
Bloom writes, "is
something felt, but it is a state of unpleasure
different from sorrow, grief,
and mere mental tension. Anxiety,
he [Freud] says, is unpleasure
accom-
panied by
efferent or discharge phenomena among
definite pathways.
These discharge phenomena
relieve the 'increase of excitation' that under-
lies anxiety" (Al, p. 57). Frye,
in a study of the connection between the
neurotic and the creative, "The
Imaginative
and the Imaginary,"
discussed
the Elizabethan notion of melancholy
in strikingly
similar terms. (Indeed,
in the very
first definition of anxiety that he provides,
Bloom offers
234
'melancholy' as a
synonym.):
Melancholy was a
physiological disturbance caused by
the excess of one of the four humours, but this excess in
its turn was the cause of emotional and mental ill-
ness. . . . There were two kinds of melancholy. One was
a disease; the other was a mood which was the prereq-
uisite of certain important experiences in religion, love,
or poetry. (Fl, p. 154)
Frye,
like Bloom, is clear on the enabling
dimension of
arnxiety/
melancholy; that it is only
the anxious, repressed, inhibited imagination
that is capable of producing art that is, paradoxically, original.
"From
primitive cultures to the 'tachiste' and action paintings
of today," Frye
writes, "it has been a
regular
rule that the inhibited
imagination,
in the
structural sense, produces highly conventionalized art" (F/, p. 27).
Another concept Bloom borrows back from Freud is that of the
'family romance.' For Bloom, the strong precursor-poet assumes the role
of father-figure
in this rather simplified Oedipal-poetic process, and thus
acts as prime inhibitor or
blocking agent. The belated or new poet, like
Freud's son, is interested in
becoming
his own progenitor.
In Bloom's rhe-
torical scheme, this is accomplished by means of the ultimate trope, or
trope of a trope, metalepsis, through
which time, and thus priority, are fig-
uratively conquered
and reversed. In Frye we find this idea frequently pre-
saged. Note, for
example,
the 'metaleptic' troping against
time in the fol-
lowing family romance: ". . . we find our own being after we have out-
grown the imaginative infancy which the orthodox conception
of the
Fatherhood of God implies for us. The final revelation of Christianity is,
therefore, not that Jesus is God, but that 'God is Jesus' "
(FS, p. 53).
For
Frye, whose orientation is pervasively Christian, Jesus becomes the proto-
type for the strong poet:
To the Jesus of passion should be added the infant Jesus,
the helpless victim of circumcision and other parts of the
Jewish law, overshadowed by a father and mother. ...
The 'sin' in the sex act, then, is not that of love but that
of parentage, the bringing of life into time. It is the
father and the mother, not the lover and the beloved,
who disappear from the highest Paradise, and in the
vision of Jesus the Holy Family represents the 'soft
Family-Love' which is the wedge of society's resistance
to prophecy and the weakest link in the prophet's own
defenses. In the resurrection Jesus is a Melchizedek,
without father, mother or descent. (FS, pp. 388-9)
235
The poetic anxiety of influence, the core of Bloom's theory of
poetry-"The history of fruitful
poetic influence ... is a history of anxi-
ety" (Al, p. 30)-necessarily involves us in a consideration of Frye's and
Bloom's
respective conceptions of Tradition. For
Frye, like Eliot whom he
paraphrases in the following, the order of tradition is a simultaneous and
accommodating
one:
Science and improvement are all
right
in their
way, but
their way is not that of art, except within the advance of
the individual from apprentice to master. Art never im-
proves, even when social conditions do. There are no
"Dark
Ages"
and no
light ones:
genius is not made he-
reditary even by teaching, and all talk of "tradition," in
the sense of a
progressive improvement from one
age to
another, is only pedantic jargon. (FS, p. 100)
The alternative sense of a tradition that moves in a linear fashion
through
time, a tradition in which one can locate an
early and a late, a first and a
second, a tradition which is exclusive, competitive, and
fiercely elitist, is
pivotal for Bloom's
theory of influence, and hence he is
obliged
to con-
front Frye head on:
Northrop Frye . . . has Platonized the dialectics of tradi-
tion, its relation to fresh creation, into what he calls the
Myth of Concern, which turns out to be a Low Church
version of T. S. Eliot's
Anglo-Catholic myth
of Tradition
and the Individual Talent. In Frye's reduction, the
student discovers that he becomes
something,
and thus
uncovers or demystifies himself, by first
being persuaded
that tradition is inclusive rather than exclusive, and so
makes a
place
for him. The student is a cultural assimi-
lator who thinks because he has
joined
a
larger body of
thought. Freedom, for Frye as for Eliot, is the
change,
however
slight,
that any genuine single consciousness
brings
about in the order of literature
simply by joining
the simultaneity of such order. I confess that I no
longer
understand this simultaneity, except as a fiction that
Frye, like Eliot, passes upon himself. This fiction is a
noble idealization, and as a lie
against time will
go
the
way of every noble idealization.
(MM, p. 30)
This is not to say that Frye does not admit the
possibility of influence. His
proposal of an
anagogic order of words, for instance, leads him to claim, as
does Bloom, that one can be influenced by things
he has not read (Fl,
p. 124). The 'locus-classicus' of Frye's conception of influence is, predict-
236
ably, his chapter on Blake's "Milton" in Fearful Symmetry.
I cite the fol-
lowing passage
at length,
with some annotation, because in it one finds be-
tokened several of Bloom's ideas on influence, only
here in the context of
an
anagogic
universe. Frye
is
writing
about the choices open
to any major
English poet following
Milton:
He has three courses open to him, two of which are
wrong
. . . the third course open to the poet . . . is first,
to visualize the reversibility
of time and space [which for
Bloom is the ultimate trope, metalepsis],
to see the lin-
ear sequence
as a single form; and second to see the tra-
dition behind him as a single imaginative unity....
It is tempting
here to
equate
this foregoing unity with Bloom's composite
precursor,
but the unity Frye intends is the somewhat different, anagogic
order of words. Frye continues:
When Blake
imagines
himself to be a reincarnation of
Milton, then the
imaginative power that is reborn is not
a different form, as in ordinary life, but the same form
which in the process of transforming
itself has purged
and clarified its vision. The relation of Milton to Blake is
not the ordinary
relation of father to son, for the father
never finds that his son is his own perfected self....
There are two possible forms of rebirth [read: influ-
ence] . One is the rebirth of Ore, the reappearance of life
in a new form [atraditional], which is the ordinary pro-
cess of life [natural, hence unpoetic].
The other is the
rebirth of Los [the strong poet],
the recreation of one
vision by another. (F/, pp. 320-23)
The distinction I am suggesting
here between Bloom and Frye is one of
motive. In Frye,
the recreation of one vision by another takes the form of
a cooperation.
In Bloom it is, for the most part, an
aggressive
act that ends
in either triumph or defeat. However, in order for Bloom's ephebe
to at-
tain full maturity and status as
strong poet,
he too must reconnect himself
with the tradition; he must enable the return of his precursors;
he must ef-
fect a restitution, while
proffering
the mediating
illusion that he, in fact,
created them. In Frye, the real importance of the relation of a poet to his
precursor "is the common relation of both to the archetypal vision" (FS,
p. 356). This
archetypal vision becomes in Bloom the notion of an "inter-
text," or that the
"meaning
of a poem can only be another poem" (Al,
p. 95).
Whether the cause, or merely
a result of his conception of Tradi-
tion, time is simply not the minatory presence for Frye that it is for
237
Bloom. Accordingly,
the correlative notions of priority and belatedness,
which are of primary
interest to Bloom, seem a matter of exaggerated
con-
cern to Frye:
It is not in itself unreasonable that human culture would
unconsciously
assume the rhythms
of an organism.
Art-
ists tend to imitate their predecessors
in a slightly
more
sophisticated way, thus producing
a tradition of cultural
aging,
such as is postulated
in one form or another by
most of the philosophical
historians of our time, most
explicitly by Spengler.
The conception
of our own time
as a "late" phase of a "Western" culture . . . seems to be
one of the inevitable categories
of the contemporary
outlook. Any such view, if adopted,
could be decorated
metaphysically
to suit the tenant: but there is no reason
why
it should be "fatalistic," unless it is fatalism to say
that one
gets
older every year. (AC, p. 343)17
Frye's
contention that "many current critical assumptions
have a limited
historical context" (AC, p. 62) points directly to one of the central weak-
nesses of Bloom's theory of influence: the lack of a sense of historical per-
spective.
It is a lack that is set in dramatic relief against
an influence study
like Curtius's European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Frye has
such a sure sense of this perspective,
that he is able to place
Bloom's preoc-
cupation
with priority
and belatedness squarely
in its limited, Romantic
context: "This conception of the great poet's being
entrusted with the
great
theme was elementary enough
to Milton, but violates most of the
low mimetic [Romantic] prejudices
about creation [i.e., priority, original-
ity]
that most of us are educated in" (AC, p. 96).
Late in the Anatomy Frye,
in a rather off-handed fashion, cites
Kierkegaard's "fascinating
little book," Repetition.18
This profoundly
personal work, published pseudonymously
in 1843 as a
pendant
volume
with Fear and Trembling (published
that same year), originated
in Kier-
kegaard's
break with his fiance, Regina.
The book was written for her and
to her, and much of it is in the nature of
private
utterance. In response
to
this break, and in response
to his reading
of Job, Kierkegaard 'brings
to
light'
a radically
new category-Repetition (Gentagelsen)-which
he insists
is essentially
a religious conception.
For Kierkegaard, repetition
meant
"subjectively (on man's part)
the fruits of
repentance,
and transcendently
(on God's part)
atonement."19 For Frye, significantly, Kierkegaard's spiri-
tual category has an aesthetic resonance. In his adaptation
and transpo-
sition of this category, Frye
arrives at a conception
of Tradition and the
relation of the
poet
to it,
which despite
the
apparently
irreconcilable dif-
ferences noted above, sounds very
much like Bloom's:
238
By it
[repetition] he
[Kierkegaard] apparently means,
not the simple repeating of an experience, but the
recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the
end of the process, he says, being the apocalyptic prom-
ise: "Behold, I make all
things new." The
preoccupation
of the humanities with the
past is sometimes made a re-
proach against them
by those who forget that we face
the past: it may be
shadowy, but it is all that is there.
Plato draws a gloomy picture of man
staring at the flick-
ering shapes made on the wall of the objective world
by
a fire behind us like the sun. But the
analogy breaks
down when the shadows are those of the
past, for the
only light we can see them
by is the Promethean fire
within us. The substance of these shadows can
only
be in
ourselves, and the
goal
of historical criticism ... is a
kind of
self-resurrection,
the vision of a
valley of
dry
bones that takes on the flesh and blood of our own
vision. (AC, p. 345)
Clearly, such a vision is not far removed from the one that forms the cen-
tral strand in Bloom's reticulation of influence: the
image
of the dead re-
turning to inhabit the houses of the
living (Bloom calls this
Apophrades);
returning through the
poetry of a
solitary poet shrewd
enough
and
strong
enough to
grapple with
them, and clever
enough to make them seem his
own creation.
In
Kierkegaard's notion of
Repetition we can find
prefigured, as
well, Bloom's "Dialectic of Revisionism" (Limitation-Substitution-
Representation), allegedly derived from
16th-century Kabbalists. In "A
Little
Plea, by Constantine
Constantius, author of
Repetition,"
Kierkegaard writes:
The
concept Repetition, when it is
employed in the
sphere of individual
freedom, has a
history,
in the fact
that freedom
passes through several
stages in order to at-
tain itself. (A) Freedom first is defined as pleasure or in
pleasure. What it now fears is
repetition, because it is as
if
repetition possessed a
magic power to hold freedom
captive when once it had contrived to
get
it under its in-
fluence. But in
spite of all the inventiveness of pleasure
repetition makes its
appearance. Then freedom in pleas-
ure falls into
despair. The same instant freedom makes
its appearance in a
higher form. (B) Freedom defined as
shrewdness. Freedom is still in a finite relation to its ob-
ject and is itself
only ambiguously defined
aesthetically.
Repetition is assumed to
exist, but it is the task of free-
239
dom to see constantly a new side of repetition.... How-
ever, since freedom defined as shrewdness is only finitely
characterized, repetition must
again
make its appear-
ance, that is repetition
of the trick
by
which freedom
wants to delude repetition and make it something else.
Then shrewdness falls into despair. (C)
Now freedom
breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is defined in
relation to itself. Here everything is inverted, and the op-
posite of the first standpoint is in evidence.20
Thus
Kierkegaard's conception of Repetition is a
significant
factor in
Frye's, and subsequently
Bloom's conception of poetic tradition, although
here too, differences in temperament obtain. While Frye,
in his typical
Broad Church way, translates and tempers Kierkegaard's
severe and exact-
ing category,
Bloom finds in Repetition
the basis for another
gnostic para-
ble.21 Bloom claims to have derived his "Dialectic of Revisionism" from
the Lurianic account of the Creation:
In Luria, creation is a
startingly regressive process,
one in
which an abyss can separate any one stage
from another,
and in which catastrophe is always a central event. Real-
ity
for Luria is always a triple rhythm
of contraction,
breaking apart, and mending.
. . . Luria named this triple
process: zimzum, shevirah ha-kelim, tikkun (contraction,
the breaking-of-the-vessels, restitution).22
Frye's description,
in Fearful Symmetry, of Boehme's conception
of the
Creation and Fall, however, bears it a striking
resemblance:
This in Boehme occupies
three stages,
which Boehme
calls "principles."
The first "principle"
is God conceived
as wrath or fire, who torments himself inwardly
until he
splits open and becomes the second principle,
God as
love or
light, leaving
behind his empty
shell of pain,
which, because it is now Godforsaken, is abstract and
dead. This pure pain is Satan or Lucifer, now cast off
from God, who is also the inorganic matter of the cre-
ated universe, the created universe being the third
principle.23
Along precisely
the same lines, and perhaps
even more
significant
in its re-
lation to Bloom, is the ternary form Frye perceives
in his mythos
of com-
edy: "This ternary action is, ritually,
like a contest of summer and winter
in which winter occupies the middle action: psychologically,
it is like the
removal of a neurosis or blocking point and the restoring
of an unbroken
240
current of energy
and memory" (AC, p. 171).
Considering
what Frye teaches us about archetypes and anagogy,
the profound similarities demonstrated above should come as no surprise.
In the same way, one should see that when Bloom is operating
as an ima-
gistic critic, describing recurring patterns of lyric imagery
in the second
column of his Map, "Images
in the Poem," he is operating also as arche-
typal critic according
to Frye's definition of archetype: "A symbol, usual-
ly an
image,
which recurs often enough
in literature to be
recognizable
as
an element of one's literary experience as a whole" (AC, p. 365). However,
for Frye
the poet's choice of archetype is preemiently a practical affair,
with the archetypes conceived as a sort of repertory company
of
images at
his disposal. "Nor according
to Frye," as Lipking
and Litz remark, "do
archetypes require any mystical explanation; they are as concrete and
practical
in literature as rhythms
in music or patterns in painting."24 For
Bloom, however, there is no question
of choice, and the archetypes or
images
with which he works seem inexorable as fate, provided by a force
beyond his control, and nearly beyond
his
understanding.
Finally, in his effort to conceptualize rhetoric, Bloom currently
acknowledges Kenneth Burke as his mentor, citing specifically, Ap-
pendix D, "Four Master Tropes," in Burke's A Grammar of Motives (with
a
passing glance
at Angus Fletcher). However, in 1957 Bloom remembered
Frye. "The notion of a
conceptual rhetoric is central in
Frye," Bloom
wrote, "and defines his position among contemporary critical
theorists."25
The statement of Los, in Blake's long poem "Jerusalem"-"I must
Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's"-raises a
question at-
tendant on the matter of symbolic constructs of the utmost importance in
a discussion of Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. It is the
question of
Imagination. Frye and Bloom share a theory of Imagination that issues
from a common
grounding in, and a common perception of the Romantic
tradition-in particular, Blake-and the concomitant view of Nature this
grounding presupposes. Frye posits two kinds of
cosmology:
"the kind de-
signed
to understand the world as it is, and the kind
designed to transform
it into the form of human desire." The latter kind defines the view of the
Imagination
held in common by Frye and Bloom: "a revolutionary vision
of the universe transformed by the creative
imagination
into a human
shape."26
Such a vision is
explicit in Frye's theory of an autonomous, ana-
gogic universe, and in Emerson's statement, which serves as the
principium
for Bloom's theory of the
Imagination:
"The sensual man conforms
thoughts to
things;
the poet conforms
things
to his
thoughts....
The
imagination may be defined to be, the use which Reason makes of the
material world."27 Thus, Bloom's prelapsarian Titans, emblematic of pure
imaginative authority and
priority, a
concept for which Bloom cites Vico,
are found closer
by
in
Frye: "An unfallen world
completely vitalized
by
the
imagination," Frye writes, "suggests human
beings
of
gigantic strength
241
and power inhabiting it, such as we find hinted at in the various Titanic
myths.
The vision of such beings
would be able to penetrate all the myster-
ies of the world . . ." (FS, p. 43). Similarly, Bloom's notion of "divina-
tion," which he expands
with a characteristic etymological
flourish to in-
corporate both the
ability to foretell the future, and the ability of the
strong imagination
to attain immortality-the notion of death as a "failure
in imagination" (MM, p. 13)-takes, in Frye, a form which differs only
in
its Christian context.
The real man, therefore, is the total form of the creative
acts and visions which he evolves in the course of his
"Becoming"
life. The latter exists in time and space,
but
his
"Being"
or real existence is a work of art, and exists,
like the work of art, in that unity of time and space
which is infinite or eternal. The
imagination
or Being,
then, is immortal.... What is immortal about the man is
the total form of his creative acts. . . . (FS, pp. 247-8)
Continuing
the comparison,
Bloom's "necessity," the severe, adamantine
stance he sets as the basis for both poetry and criticism, is Frye's imagina-
tive duty:
"He who is not for the
imagination
is against
it.... Hence the
duty of the imaginative
man is to force the issue and compel decisions"
(FS, p. 55). And finally, Bloom's notion of the strong poet-solipsist,
hero
-becomes, in Frye's gentle, socializing hands, the bold imagination:
"The
bold imagination produces great art; the timid one small art" (FS, p. 91).
A crucial distinction needs to be made, however, between Frye's
positive
vision of the transcendent Imagination operating
in a
benign,
au-
tonomous cosmos of its own
making,
and Bloom's ambiguous,
existential-
istic vision of the Imagination
as the "beautiful lie," holding
a very precari-
ous sway
over a blatantly fictive cosmos, which is under constant siege by
the demands of reality
and the fact of its own falseness: "but what is the
Imagination
unless it is the rhetorician's greatest triumph of self-
deception?
We cannot reduce the Imagination
because it is the center of a
powerful mythology and because we can never persuade ourselves again,
as
Hobbes so grandly did, that this portentous entity was once only gossip.
Sense decays, and a phantom is born" (MM, p. 66).
Implicit in both critics' conceptions of the Imagination
is an anti-
thetical view of Nature as "miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic
and half dead. It has no intelligence,
no kindness, no love and no inno-
cence" (FS, p. 39). A
logical outgrowth
of this antithetical view is Bloom's
theory of the "visionary cinema," which briefly stated, asserts "that physi-
cal reality cannot be redeemed by
the art of the eye and the ear," and that
"To visualize a poem, and a visionary poem at that, is to see what cannot
be seen."28 Thus, the poet is not interested in seeing,
but in vision, and
the only landscape
worth his notice is the landscape of his imagination.
In
242
a fit of
grandiosity,
Bloom claims Einstein as his inspiration. We need look
no farther than
Northrop Frye on Blake:
A
visionary creates, or dwells in, a
higher spiritual world
in which the objects of perception in this one have be-
come transfigured
. . . the reality of the landscape even
so consists in its relation to the
imaginative pattern of
the farmer's mind, or of the painter's mind. To
get
at an
"inherent" reality
in the
landscape by isolating
the com-
mon factors, that is, by eliminating
the
agricultural qual-
ities from the farmer's
perception
and the artistic ones
from the painter's, is not possible...." (FS, pp. 8, 20)
Lastly,
with
regard
to their sense of the Romantic tradition, both
Frye and Bloom see it as still
predominating,
still
holding
as the central
tradition, despite
all attempts at anti-Romantic literature. Within this tra-
dition both locate the central myth in the
image
of the Quest, and Bloom's
trope of quest internalization, which is always accompanied by much fan-
faronade, is more than once
prefigured
in Frye.29
There is one, final
question to consider in a comparison of North-
rop Frye and Harold Bloom, and it involves the problem of
religious
orien-
tation. I am not interested in
rehearsing
here the 1. A. Richards-T. S. Eliot
dispute about literature and belief, although
in Frye and
Bloom-gentle-
man-scholar and 'nabi'
respectively-we have the
opposing sides
clearly
drawn. More
significant,
and
ultimately unbridgeable,
is the difference in
their
religio-cultural background. Frye's orientation is a sort of low
church, classicized
Christianity; Bloom's a rather orthodox Judaism with
an emphasis on Kabbalah and Talmud. This
disparity accounts for a
great
many of the dissimilarities in critical perception, and
might
well be at the
root of the temperamental difference remarked earlier. Its most far-
reaching manifestation, however, is to be found in the area of critical style
and texture, with which my essay began,
and with which it will end. I will
risk a final trope. Reading Northrop Frye is to experience a low-church
Easter service in a
throng of
beaming,
beribboned children.
Reading
Harold Bloom is to stand in a
company of
gray old men and hear Kaddish.
Princeton
University
NOTES
1 Bloom gets this Socratic term more directly from Stevens's "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction."
2 Bloom acknowledges his debt to Kenneth Burke. See, in this regard, A Gram-
mar of Motives, Appendix D.
243
3 There is another curious omission in this regard: M. H. Abrams,who, like Frye,
was one of Bloom's professors, but whose influence on Bloom is perhaps even
less public than Frye's. I am indebted to Professor A. Walton Litz for pointing
this out to me.
4 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947),
p. 150 (hereafter cited as FS).
5 Murray Krieger, Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1966), p. 1 (hereafter cited as NF).
6 Harold Bloom, "A New Poetics," Yale Review (Autumn 1957), p. 130.
7 The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 13 (here-
after cited as Al).
8 Harold Bloom, The
Ringers
in the Tower (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1971), p. 181.
9 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1957), p. 20 (hereafter cited as AC). I realize that Frye's intention here is to
combat a pervasive devaluation of the critical enterprise, and not to posit an
identity between criticism and poetry. Yet the implications are unmistakable,
when viewed in conjunction with Frye's actual practice.
10 FS, from the Preface, first included in the 1969 edition.
11 The Ringers in the Tower, p. 261.
12 Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism:
1900-1970 (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 184.
13 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 232 (hereafter cited as Fl).
14 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975),
p. 24 (hereafter cited as MM).
15 "A New Poetics," p. 132.
16 In this he is sanctioned by Lionel Trilling: "For, of all mental systems, the
Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very
constitution of the mind. Indeed, the mind, as Freud sees it, is in the greater
part of its tendency exactly a poetry-making organ . . . Freud has not merely
naturalized poetry; he has discovered its status as a pioneer settler, and he sees
it as a method of thought...." (from "Freud and Literature," in The Liberal
Imagination, 1947).
17 It is curious that Bloom, who might well be expected to, shows no real interest
in Spengler (although he does refer to Fichte, from whom Spengler's argument
is derived), while Frye's interest in
Spengler seems to grow. See Frye's recent
essay, "The Decline of the West," in Daedalus (Winter 1974), in which he
states: "Spengler is one of our genuine prophets...." (p. 13).
18 SSren Kierkegaard, Repetition:
An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans.
244
Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941).
19 Walter Lowrie's Introduction to Repetition, p. x.
20 Cited by Walter Lowrie, pp. xvi-xvii.
21 1
am grateful to Professor Dan O'Hara of Temple University for pointing out
to me the significance of Kierkegaard's book to my argument.
22 Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976),
p. 39.
23 Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 153.
24 MLC, p. 184.
25 "A New Poetics," p. 133.
26 FS, from the Preface, p.
27 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1836).
28 The Ringers in the Tower, p. 45.
29 See Chapter 7, "The Thief of Fire," in FS, and "The Mythos of Summer: Ro-
mance," in AC, especially pages 187 and following.
245
246