I don’t know just when it was, but at some point in my career – likely well before I had anything one would call a career – I learned that arguments from authority are suspect. To be valid an argument must be supported by evidence. For an experimental scientist evidence is based on observations; for a theoretician, evidence consists of tight argument and mathematical proof coupled with empirical predictions which should, in time, attract observational evidence. For a humanist, evidence generally takes the form of summary, quotation, and citation of sources. In the (peculiar) case of literary criticism, one can advance a close reading of a text on little more than careful quotation and summary, though judicious citation of previous commentary the text is desirable.
Harold Bloom has published a great deal, but I know little of it. However, in The Anxiety of Influence, first published in 1973 (second edition in 1997), Bloom is advancing his arguments almost entirely on his authority alone. The book has no citations, nor do The Western Canon and Shakespeare. Oh, there are references to other thinkers, thinkers a reader may or may not know, but no full citations. The ideas offered in those books have no authority beyond Bloom’s (august) say-so, a say-so backed up by his position at Yale and later at New York University as well, that and his reputation.
It is thus not so difficult to see how it became easy for him to fuse with the objects of his own inquiry, if only in his own mind, as I argued in my previous post, The ambiguous nature of literary criticism and the strange case of Harold Bloom. The general educated public may be indifferent to such matters, and some academic devotees may be happy enough to excuses Bloom’s excesses, but I cannot set them aside, not in a series of posts using intellectual greatness as pretext for thinking about the intellectual nature of academic literary criticism. Accordingly I offer a quick sketch about how the nature of intellectual authority in literary criticism has changed since Bloom got his Ph.D. in 1955. I return to Bloom at the end.
Hartman on the Critic and the Author
I want to begin at the mid-point in this passage, with a few passages from Geoffrey Hartman’s 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press). Hartman was a colleague of Bloom’s at Yale and, along with J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man, constituted the so-called “Yale Mafia.” I have already quoted Hartman’s caution about straying over the line into “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism,” which must be avoided.
Here is a passage from the opening essay of the collection, “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis” (p. 3):
Confession. I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art. The interpreter, molded on me, is an overgoer with pen-envy strong enough to compel him into the foolishness of print. His self-disgust is merely that of the artist, intensified. “Joe, throw my book away.” Sometimes his discontent with the "secondary" act of writing—with living in the reflective or imitative sphere—makes him privilege some primary act at the expense of art or commentary on art. He turns into Mystic or Vitalist. But, more often, he compromises by establishing a special relationship to what transcends him. Having discounted other critics, and reduced art to its greatest exemplars, he feels naked enough to say: “Myself and Art.” Like Emerson, who said that ultimately there was “I and the Abyss.”
When I read that I recognized the sentiment, not because I saw it in myself – I am quite content to comment on art created by others – but because it is not uncommon among literary critics. That is one thing, but why publish it and, more to the point, why did the profession, at that time, accept that kind of personal confession as a reasonable thing for one to publish? Of course Geoffrey was not just any John, Dick, or Jane, he was by then one of the most esteemed critics in the land and, as such, was permitted things that others had best leave to themselves.
Now consider a passage from the title essay, “The Fate of Reading” (p. 267):
A great interpreter like Erich Auerbach, a great critic-scholar like E.R. Curtius, a prodigal son like Kenneth Burke, or men of letters like Paul Valéry and Edmund Wilson, who practiced the minor mode of prophecy we call criticism, are not annulled by the fact that they may be explicitly writing about the writing of others. It may be a weakness in them to prefer, at times, the indirectness of commentary to the creation of their own news, but it may also be a conviction that their identity is bound up with the writings of others—that the mind is laid waste by the false Unas of literature even as it is renewed by faith in the classic or neglected text.
Notice how Hartman again shows anxiety about his relationship with the authors of literary texts. What does it mean to call literary criticism “a minor mode of prophecy”? Are literary critics making predictions about the future, perhaps making some side-money by offering betting odds? Of course not. Hartman, a Romanticist like Bloom, is speaking metaphorically. Shelley had famously proclaimed poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and Hartman’s language is a bid to join them in the halls of governance.
This manner of reflection was relatively new to the profession. It wasn’t there two decades earlier. But what was there?
The Transformation of Intellectual Authority in Literary Criticism
The texts themselves, the canonical texts. To call them canonical is to recognize their (cultural) authority – Homer, Sappho, Dante, Petronius, Chrétien de Troyes, and so forth through the whole 17-page list Bloom was forced to append to The Western Canon. No one believed that the list had been carved on stone tablets retrieved from a burning bush. Everyone recognized that they represented the winnowing of a long-term cultural process, but critics were mostly content to take that process and the resulting list at face value. These texts are “true.” By their wisdom we shall live our lives.
But that wisdom was subject to commentary and interpretation, and the interpreters were mere mortals. In an earlier post, A Discipline is founded (sorta’), I have explained how the so-called New Critics re-grounded literary study on the practice of close-reading, which declared texts to be autonomous (aesthetic) objects independent of historical or biographical context. Interpretations thus arrived at had tacit authority conferred by the canon itself. However, by the 1960s interpretative reading became problematic when it turned out that critics did not converge on the meanings of these canonical texts. On the contrary, meanings proliferated and diverged. Some critics were content to believe interpretive multiplicity to be a product of the richness of these canonical texts (but not others?) – a position which became the discipline’s default. Others sought to ground interpretive meaning in authorial meaning, thus keeping it within the bounds of the canonical. Even if you accepted some version of this line of thinking, what practical value did it have if it did not also deliver a procedure by which any competent critic could determine authorial meaning?
No such procedure was forthcoming, not then, and not now. It is in that atmosphere, catalyzed by the 1966 structuralism symposium at Johns Hopkins, that literary criticism became an intellectual crossroads for ideas from other disciplines. Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis (especially in its Lacanian variant) and Marxism were among the most prominent and were first across the line, quickly joined by feminist and African-American exploration and interrogation that quickly broaden into a transdisciplinary colloquy of critical voices. “Theory,” with a capital “T” was adopted as a term for this movement. Theory gained its authority both from the various disciplines brought to bear on literary texts, but also from the voices that had been minimized in or excluded from the received canon.
It no longer seemed plausible to regard interpretations as more less faithful reflections of the values, attitudes, and ideas of the canonical authors. More or more interpretations seemed to be the products of mere mortals, of academics. And that gave us what has become to be called the “star system” in literary criticism.
Critical Stars
David Shumway coined the phrase in the title of an influential 1997 article published in PMLA [1]. Shumway began by pointing out that, early in the 20th century the important literary scholars, the ones who in fact, had considerable influence over the discipline, were obscure figures, little-known outside the academy. He contrasted this with the very different public profile of the actors and actresses of Hollywood films, the most popular of whom were known as “stars,” movie stars. But that began to change during the last two decades of the 20the century. Shumway gives particular attention to an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1986.
That article was entitled, “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics,” and centered on four critics, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom, each of whom was accompanied in the article by a large color portrait. Those are not the only stars Shumway mentions in his article. He mentions Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, along with Derrida, in his second paragraph and mentions others later on. But those are the exemplars he chose as primary exemplars, if only on account of that article.
In the following paragraph Shumway makes his central point, that these stars have an authority beyond that of other critics (p. 95):
Theory not only gave its most influential practitioners a broad professional audience but also cast them as a new sort of author. Theorists asserted an authority more personal than that of literary historians or even critics. As we have seen, the rhetoric of literary history denied personal authority; in principle, even Kittredge was just another contributor to the edifice of knowledge. Criticism was able to enter the academy only by claiming objectivity for itself, so academic critics could not revel in personal idiosyncrasy. They developed their own critical perspectives, to be sure, but all the while they continued to appeal to the text as the highest authority. In the past twenty years theory has undermined the authority of the text and of the author and replaced it with the authority of systems, as in the structuralist and poststructuralist privileging of langue over parole or in the mystifying readings of Marxism or psychoanalysis. Sometimes the theory seems to be to eschew all authority, as in some renderings of deconstruction. And yet these claims are belied by the actual functioning of the name of the theorist. It is that name, rather than anonymous systems or the anarchic play of signifiers, to which most theoretical practice appeals. Thus one finds article after article in which Derrida or Foucault or Barthes or Lacan or Zizek or Althusser or Spivak or Fish or Jameson or several of the above are cited as markers of truth. It is common now to hear practitioners speak of “using” Derrida or Foucault or some other theorist to read this or that object; such phrasing may suggest that the theorist provides tools of analysis, but the tools are not sufficient without the name that authorizes the procedure.
Bloom as Star
No critic has availed themselves of the privileges of stardom more than Harold Bloom.
The most obvious index of his stardom is the lack of citations, something I noted in the introduction to this piece. One would think that in books that talk about the entirely of the Western canon and about Shakespeare, that Bloom would have copious notes. Neither The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, nor, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have any notes or references. To be sure, he mentions other thinkers, but it is up to the reader either to know who they are or to track them down. The books lack either footnotes or end-notes. Now, one might be tempted to defend that practice by pleading that those books are intended for a general, not an academic audience. As a counter, example I offer Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which is written for a general audience. Setting the index aside, it has 771 pages, including 41 pages of notes and 32 pages of references. Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, in contrast, was written for a professional audience, and it lacks notes as well.
In a rather harsh article in The Hudson Review, Joseph Epstein observes [2]:
Bloom writes like a man accustomed to speaking to his inferiors-to students, that is, a captive audience beholden to him for grades and promotion. To them he may lay down the law, brook no argument, take great pleasure in his own performance, be utterly unworried about someone coughing politely and saying, “Excuse me, pal, but what you just said seems to me a bunch of bullshit!”
One might defend Bloom’s practice in these matters by pointing out that, after all, he is widely learned and obviously brilliant. That defense assumes, however, that that brilliance has given us insights and have proven indispensable to others. That is by no means obvious, but that is something I will take up in my next piece, where I take a look at those three books: The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
Let me include another passage from Shumway (p. 98):
Moreover, the star system reflects a shift in symbolic capital from the collective judgment of the discipline to individuals, a shift that further diminishes the discipline as a source of identification, breaking it down into incommensurable camps. [...] The star system depends on fans, an impoverished community focused on individuals who are not part of the community. It would be better for literary scholars, teachers, and students to stop being fans and to recognize that they can authorize knowledge without the name of a father or mother.
Recall the passages that I quoted from Bloom’s Yale colleague, Geoffrey Hartman, in which Hartman revealed great anxiety about his relationship with authors and texts. Here is another passage from the title essay, “The Fate of Reading” (p. 255):
That darkling appropriation of works of art we call interpretation is surely as much a blind drive as an objective interest. We are forced to predicate a narrative or interpretive will, the will to be an author oneself, or even the author of oneself (and others).
You take Hartman’s anxiety, turn it up to eleven, and out pops Harold Bloom, Undisputed Champion of the Aesthetic, Spokesman for The Western Canon, Uplifter of Shakespeare, the One and Only Wonder of the World.
References
[1] David Shumway, The Star System in Literary Studies, PMLA, Vol. 112, No. 1, 1997, 85-100, https://www.jstor.org/stable/463056.
[2] Joseph Epstein, Bloomin’ Genius, The Hudson Review, Vol. 55, No. 2, Summer, 2002, pp. 213-221, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3852984.
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