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

Abstract

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 composit 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 primordial 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 indifferent, 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 remains against the authority and priority of the stronger precursor. In