Shakespearean Seductions, or, What's with Harold Bloom as Falstaff?

Abstract

Shakespearean Seductions, or, What’s with Harold Bloom as Falstaff? Alan D. Lewis This article positions itself as an intervention in the ongoing reproduction of the authentic Shakespeare,1 investigating how the construction of hisliterary 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: TheInvention 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 [End Page 125] 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 participatesin Shakespeare's ideal symbolic authority, an authority adjacent to aFreudian 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 ofa 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...