A Family Romance-Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom: A Study of Critical InfluenceAuthor(s): Steve PolanskySource: boundary 2, Vol. 9, No. 2, A Supplement on Contemporary Poetry (Winter, 1981), pp.227-246Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303059Accessed: 09/02/2010 09:33

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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

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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,"

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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

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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-

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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-

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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

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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)

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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

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'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)

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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-

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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

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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:

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Article Contentsp. 227p. 228p. 229p. 230p. 231p. 232p. 233p. 234p. 235p. 236p. 237p. 238p. 239p. 240p. 241p. 242p. 243p. 244p. 245p. 246

Issue Table of Contentsboundary 2, Vol. 9, No. 2, A Supplement on Contemporary Poetry (Winter, 1981), pp. 1-311Front Matter [pp. 122 - 310]The Generous Time: Robert Penn Warren and the Phenomenology of the Moment [pp. 1 - 30]Paterson's Progress [pp. 31 - 50]Edward Dorn: "This Marvellous Accidentalism" [pp. 51 - 80]Jack Spicer's Ghosts and the Gnosis of History [pp. 81 - 100]"Many of Our Waters: The Poetry of James Wright" [pp. 101 - 121]Love's Architecture: The Poetic Irony of Thomas Kinsella [pp. 123 - 135]Poems by John LinthicumSedentary Ode [p. 138]Second Anniversary of a Drowning [pp. 139 - 140]Horizon [pp. 140 - 141]The Big Game [pp. 142 - 145]

L. M. Rosenberg: A Selection of Young Poets: Mark Porteus Andrew Hudgins Suzie Unger Howard Kaplan Judas Mary-Ellen Riley Alexis KhouryHymn [p. 148]In Answer [pp. 148 - 149]Untitled [p. 149]A Rapproachement with Death [pp. 149 - 150]At Chancellorsville: The Battle of the Wilderness [pp. 150 - 151]Sidney Lanier in Montgomery: August, 1866 [pp. 152 - 155]Jackie Z [pp. 155 - 156]Holiday [p. 156]Grace Allen [pp. 156 - 161]For Kamal Jiries Khoury [pp. 161 - 162]

The Mandala in Gravity's Rainbow [pp. 163 - 180]The Town [pp. 181 - 186]On a Quote from Hofmannsthal: "What Spirit Is, Only the Oppressed Can Grasp" (From the Unpublished Festschrift Dedicated to Rudolf Alexander Schrder on His 70th Birthday) [pp. 187 - 196]The Turning Point: Eliot's: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism [pp. 197 - 218]Toba, 27 November 1910 [pp. 219 - 225]A Family Romance-Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom: A Study of Critical Influence [pp. 227 - 246]A Bunch of Carrots / Une Botte de Carottes [pp. 248 - 249]Adventures of a Toe / Aventures d'un Orteil [pp. 248 - 249]Laughing Stock / Souffre-Douleurs [pp. 250 - 251]The Farthest Face / Le Plus Lointain Visage [pp. 250 - 251]Samson [pp. 250 - 256]

Chacun: Nine Poems from "Dialogues pour la Nuit" [pp. 257 - 266]Illustrations: Captions for Partially Unearthed Chinese Artifacts [pp. 267 - 270]Two PoemsThree Rooms [pp. 271 - 275]Heat Lightning [pp. 275 - 276]

ReviewsRen Girard and the Boundaries of Modern Literature [pp. 277 - 290]The Use of "A" [pp. 291 - 294]Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein [pp. 295 - 306]

Errata for Kirsch [p. 311]Back Matter