On The Anxiety of Influence

and King Lear

I was just lying in bed, thinking something a bit like this —

King Lear is without doubt the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

And then —

How could anyone ever write something that good again?

Immediately, I was deep into Harold Bloom territory.

I don’t know how many people still read Bloom. He does seem to have quite a presence on YouTube — getting emotional whilst being interviewed by Charlie Rose, getting transported whilst reciting Wallace Stevens, getting very passionate whilst sitting in his library describing what reading means to him. But does anyone follow up on this by reading him?

He spoke a lot against what he called ‘the school of resentment’. He thought literary studies in America, and therefore the world, would cease being a troubled engagement with the difficult books of the canon (predominantly written by dead white men). Instead, readers — mainly students — would be presented with books they were predisposed to like, agree with and (heaven help them) feel validated by.

As you can imagine, this attitude isn’t likely to gain him very many friends nowadays — unless among those on the reactionary right.

However, Bloom’s theory of literary self-making, of the truth of how great writers become great writers, which he wrote about in The Anxiety of Influence and expanded upon ever after — that had a powerful effect on me, when I first encountered it.

And I think it is still persuasive in a way that nicer, kinder views of literary influence completely fail to be.

Bloom’s vision (and there aren’t many literary critics on whom you’d say the visionary side of William Blake was a decisive influence) — Bloom’s dark, violent vision is of the canon of literature as an inescapable Oedipal struggle, an agon.

The daddies are the baddies. Shakespeare looms murderously over Milton who in turn seems ready to strangle Keats who in turn threatens to wipe Wallace Stevens off the map.

It’s a boys’ club, embarrassingly so. And Bloom’s main lineage is what he calls ‘strong poets’. How great a writer is judged as being depends almost entirely on how much of a deformative influence they become on their successors. If no-one after you can ignore you, even if they hate you — if, in some ways, they all owe their existence to you — then you are canonical. See James Joyce. But there’s something even more unlikely than this, something wholly paradoxical. As in T.S.Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, agonistic literary time can also run in reverse. The strongest writers can make it seem as if their predecessors were reading and being fundamentally deformed by them. A great enough writer becomes their own grandfather.

In the 1960s, you couldn’t go to a production of King Lear that didn’t take into account — either by aping or ignoring — Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

What I realised this morning was something very obvious. It’s not that Bloom’s nightmare vision is wrong, far from it — it is that (and I was thinking of King Lear when this broke through) is literally a nightmare vision.

The Father, in this stormy midnight world, is an absolute terror — thundering, plotting, murderous. He will end you.

And yet, if we take being a writer as including all available times — if, from experience, we know that there is being a writer in the conscious daytime as well as in the unconscious night — Bloom becomes redeemable.

His view is true but partial. It applies to the nightmarish, macho side of literary influence.

I can never be as great as Shakespeare. Why should I write at all? Everything I do comes far too late to mean anything. There’s nothing left to say, etcetera.

But we do wake up. If we’re lucky. We wake up, and we’re still here.

And the terrors of the night — looming deranged family figures — are there in the kitchen, eating cereal in their dressing gowns with mad hair and tiger breath.

You might even ask them for advice. And they might give it. And it might be good advice.

Why do Freudian analysts ask people about their dreams?

Because they want them to talk also about their nightmares.

And by talking about their nightmares, in the presence of a stranger, to begin to understand themselves.

I know this is full of appalling simplifications, but my realisation was this —

Unless we do a Freudian reading of Bloom’s Freudian reading of literary influence, we’re misunderstanding him.

Just as he said we would.

The literary universe — of influence and escape — isn’t all struggle for mere existence, just as King Lear isn’t all the storm on the heath, just as all day isn’t night.

But part of it is.