Shakespearean seductions, or, what's with Harold Bloom as Falstaff?(Critical essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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This article positions itself as an intervention in the ongoing reproduction of the authentic Shakespeare, (1) investigating how the construction of his literary authority and an investment in so-called poetic being act as a source of seduction for Harold Bloom, and are consequently available for seducing his readers. I initially present an overview critique of Bloom's theory of literary influence for its masculinist gender ideology, a theory in which the poet's being is modeled on an agonistic and homophobic masculinity. I then elaborate how this theory directs his claims in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, where Bloom addresses Christopher Marlowe's (lack of) influence on Shakespeare. Bloom's theory of poetic influence relies on the notion of the poet's work representing a sort of spiritual autobiography: his Romantic legacy is married to a version of the poet's Freudian "family romance" with the precursor, a second child that goes amiss in Bloom's laboring for invention.

Taking Bloom's book on Shakespeare as a case study, the idea of "Shakespeare," his person and sexuality, often guides critical readings. This critical investment becomes especially evident when discussing Bloomian literary influence and notional scenes of instruction and writing. A consideration of Bloom's theory of influence and his reproduction of Shakespeare's ideal authority makes apparent the ways Shakespeare's work, as a cultural text, has played and continues to play a historical role in "authorizing" subject positions. Reading Bloom for how he reads Shakespeare's authorial puissance and melancholia in influence, I unpack how his reading is inflected by a disciplining gender ideology in which the poetic self is assumed under the imagined threat of a sodomitical "castration" by the precursor, Marlowe, an influence overcome--in Bloom's pronouncement--in the surrogative creation-negation of Falstaff. (2) While Freud does not link castration to sodomy in his normative Oedipal model, the sodomitical phantasy derives from a maternal identification and the unconsciously held infantile theory "that sexual intercourse takes place at the anus," as a masochistic residue of symbolic castration by the father, and ideologically speaking, it appears in tow of the imputed emasculation of threatened or symbolic castration. These varied etiologies appear in Freud's formative case studies like the so-called Wolf Man, from which I quote above, or his commentary on the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. (3)

The paper finally looks at how Bloom positions himself as a rejected Falstaffian tutor--what I call his authoritative misprision--while speculating on Shakespeare's position as a cultural and literary ideal, setting up a transference to himself. This transference works through an erotic attachment to authority (in more Freudian parlance, an unconscious longing for the father), or in a supplemental scheme, through the melancholic draw and authority of the murdered father. Framing the contradictory imperatives of Bloom's discourse, "Shakespearean Seductions" considers how his authorial positioning as a rejected Falstaffian figure participates in Shakespeare's ideal symbolic authority, an authority adjacent to a Freudian phantasy of the father's seduction as a castrating figure at the scene of instruction or writing. (4)

Might the critical blindspot--and enabling misprision, in his own language--of Bloom's theory of literary influence be the strong poet's proper gender identification in anxiously disavowing the castrating influence of the precursor? The poet's anxiety and melancholia in Bloom's psychopoetics of influence appear as a displaced version of the agonistic consolidation of proper Oedipal (heterosexual) masculinity, a poetic self assumed under the negated threat of a phantom castration-sodomy by the precursor. Whereas Bloom's dialectic finds out the poet's blind spot in repressed influence, the poet's unknowing debt by whose recognition the theory assumes its critical authority, Bloom's blindspot is his troping of poetic identity as about proper Oedipal masculinity. The strong poet's repression of influence-as-castration apparently follows the route of a primal repression of castration in gender identification, the poet's "repudiation of femininity," that is, of a passive relation to the father, dreaming of his own originary puissance. With grandly desperate wit, Bloom's family romance narrative grafts the poet's refusal of influence onto a refusal of imitation as a passive homosexual desire, a tendentious grafting in Bloom's account from which it draws rhetorical force via the cultural interdiction on homosexuality.

Perversely following the implications of his theory, the article shows how Bloom's theory tracks the poet's incarnation of poetic character as a process of phantasmatic, melancholic identification with the precursor, an identification that repudiates imitation as a castrating, effeminate, and therefore "homosexual" desire in the revisionary ratios. At an erotically paranoid scene of writing, Bloom's strong poet disavows his always already castration by the precursor, where castration is an effect of an initial poetic covenant and emulation. In this move, masculine lack is acknowledged but displaced onto an homosexual "other," an other we will see appears to be internal to that poetic subject. Even where he substitutes guilt for anxiety, Bloom's description of the poet's guilt in eating the "portion" of the precursor is instructive. (5) The poet's guilt is perhaps the result of the "turning back into the ego of homosexual attachment," a turning back that is the consequence of unavowable, ungrievable loss that results in its internalization as melancholic identification. Bloom's theory of influence stages the heterosexual logic by which the poet's refusal to desire, in Judith Butler's apt formulation, the "sacrifice of desire under the force of prohibition, will incorporate homosexuality as an identification with masculinity." (6) Further, Bloom's Freudian rhetoric not only stages the poet's melancholic identifications as a compensation for homosexual loss, but this is staged as an "open secret" (7) in relation to the poet's melancholic genius, losses that supposedly sustain his creativity.

As well as setting up an ambivalent mourning of an unavowable homosexual loss here in an hermeneutic that recovers an originary "homosexuality," Bloom's texts on influence attribute to the exemplary strong poet a kind of homosexual panic in negotiating influence. Insofar as many within a humanist literary tradition might share this panic while discreetly enjoying its jouissance, Bloom's staging of the scene of influence can be viewed as a calculated rhetoric to engage his reader. (8) That is, the stake of a proper masculinity aligned with homoeroticism--for the strong poet "turns around" the initial seduction and castration of the scene of poetic covenant, appropriating the precursor's "being" in the submerged trope of a figurative sodomy--becomes a point of authorial seduction in his work on literary influence. This is one aspect of the male homosociality of Bloom's literary project, here in its following the Freudian hermeneutical imperative of tracing an originary, always already lost homosexuality. (9) In this narrative, the poet's rejection or his renunciation of desire promises a redemptive return in which textual creation and enjoyment are both enjoined to loss.

Along these lines, the critical focus is to unpack the rhetorical and melancholic appeal of Bloom's pronouncement, in Shakespeare, about Shakespeare's gaining artistic freedom from Christopher Marlowe with the creation-negation of Falstaff. Why not view Bloom's assertion about Falstaff's creation as grounded in the assumptions of his own theory about the catastrophic sources of literary creation? Bloom's book on Shakespeare offers an ongoing psychobiography of a "fictional" author where these originary losses are homophilic in nature. Bloom's highly speculative "spiritual biography" of the poet is largely derived from a reading of the works and a few historical anecdotes, drawing especially on two Antonios and the first person speaker of the sonnets. And the analysis extends to Bloom's own Falstaffian identification as a Socratic tutor, his vaunted misprision, where he participates in Shakespeare's melancholic authority while promoting his vision of the playwright's authority through his agon with Marlowe. The article reads Bloom's account of Shakespeare's literary negotiations with Marlowe for its critical investments in promoting Shakespeare's unimpaired masculinity and melancholic authority via his emblematic renunciation-sacrifice of homosexual desire at a scene of parricidal rivalry. (10) "Shakespearean Seductions" shows how Bloom is seduced by the poet's ideal authority in a critical trajectory of assuming Falstaffian authority, identifying with the murdered surrogate father. This seduction extends to a staging for Bloom's tacitly straight male reader who is likewise invited to participate in a communion with the great artist in his sexual-as-spiritual autobiography, an originary fable about masculine melancholia's losses and the productivity of this sublime lack. (11)

Figuring Gender in Bloom's Theory of Poetic Influence

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom offers a theory of literary influence where the precursor's influence on the ephebe poet is described in terms of a murderous repetition of family romance, a troping of Freud. (12) Reasonably enough, at the beginning of this story, Bloom posits the ephebe poet's necessary early imitation of the precursor. As Bloom reflects in "The Scene of Instruction," without a model and imitation, it is difficult to conceive of the travails of tradition and the canon, to think that anything would happen. Any number of classical or Renaissance rhetoricians might be cited to say this much. Even if they disagree on which and how many masters to imitate, they generally agree that one should emulate the master's work with an eye to its finest qualities. "Let this then be my first counsel," advises Cicero in De Oratore, "that we show the student whom to copy, and to copy in such a way as to strive with all possible care to attain to the most excellent qualities of his model." (13) Further, as Jonathan Bate observes in "The Art of Precedent," the distinction between an ape-like or slavish imitation and emulation of the master's spirit, the latter of which includes invention and difference, is a commonplace in the Renaissance. For example, in Love's Labours Lost (4.2.121-27), Holofernes's critique of Berowne's sonnet as lacking in invention contains "Quintilian's celebrated distinction between imitation and emulation." (14) Bloom's theory repeats and amplifies this line of traditional rhetoric that devalues an evidently constitutive imitation, an imitation that detracts from or hollows out the poetic self. One must imitate but not too closely, and choosing the most prestigious model possible is important. Here intent on the poet's coveted "being," Rene Girard would name this the inescapable double-bind and conflict of an appropriative mimesis.

It seems to me that Bloom's theory brings out two things that are crucial to note with this classical and Renaissance view of imitation and invention. First, Bloom casts the poet's "slavish" imitation of the master as a passive homosexual desire/position. On the most obvious level, this appears evident in Bloom's terminology when he calls the young poet an ephebe ("as Athens would have called him"), (15) making his youthful martial training into a matter of illicit sexual positioning in a classical pederastic-pedagogical configuration of influence. This phantom sodomy of the ephebe by the master at a scene of instruction is canvassed as an open secret, something made possible through the classical tradition where philosophy reproduces itself in homoerotic competition and seduction. Of course, Plato's Symposium is the locus classicus here. As Richard Halpern notes in a similar discussion of desire in literary theory, the hubris or madness that supports Socratic reason is largely homoerotic. (16) Bloom's second wrinkle then is staging the scene of instruction as a seduction of the reader to an imaginary participation in such a scene, where this participation is now underwritten by a distinctly Freudian notion of an anxious, melancholic masculinity beset with lack.

If the ephebe inheriting a rich tradition is somewhat curtailed in his range of original creation, it seems like Bloom's mistaking to make this necessitate a disavowal of influence. As many critics of Bloom and other studies on influence have foregrounded, the conscious mediation of influence and generous readings do happen. So Bloom is writing of a specific type of authorial ressentiment and some phantasies circulating within literary influence. (17) This disavowal appears necessary for Bloom to find an original and engaging "argument," where the disavowal of influence is grafted onto another disavowal, that of homosexual eros in a heteronor-mative scheme of masculinity. The result, however, is a theory of influence that leaves out the mother--except parenthetically as the Muse (18)--in a homosocial rewriting of Freud.

Bloom casts literary influence in hyperbolic terms of an impossible battle for priority and an Oedipal phantasy of power-pleasure between men, an appropriative rivalry for "being" in which the parricidal poet must fail. In Bloom's theory the repeated encounter and failure is the source of the strong poet's creativity in a model of a catastrophic poetic will. The author-son is the object of an election-love: he is...

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