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GEORGE STADE
tion, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a
poem can only be a poem, but
another poem
-
a poem not itself.
And not a poem chosen with total arbitrariness, but any central
poem by an indubitable precursor, even if the ephebe [the influ–
enced poet]
never read
that poem. Source study is wholly irrelevant
here; we are dealing with primal words, but antithetical meanings,
and an ephebe's best misinterpretations may well be of poems he
has never read.
Antithetical criticism, when it arrives, will be a commentary on
the dark "story of inter-poetic relationships" that
The Anxiety of In–
fluence
unfolds in words portentous and sibylline. The story is a version
of our old favorite, the Family Romance; its players are reincarnations
of Oedipus, Laius, Jocasta, the Sphinx. The ephebe, the aspiring young
poet, must first get past the Sphinx, a "Covering Cherub," symbol of the
"negative or stifling aspect of poetic influence," the Primal Scene itself.
("But what is the Primal Scene for a poet
as poet?
It is the Poetic
Father's coitus with the Muse.") The ephebe then kills his Poetic Father
by misreading him. He wants to be entirely original, self-begotten, so he
tries to "engender himself upon the Muse his mother." But he fails; he
must wait in fear and trembling for the arrival of his Son, who will
murderously define him even as he defined his own Poetic Father.
A
bad business, and Bloom's gloom is no more than the occasion warrants:
If
the imagination's gift comes necessarily from the perversity of
the spirit, then the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the
ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and
must be - we are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon
literature itself, and the phrase "humane letters" is an oxymoron.
The ephebe's career points a moral informed by a mood, "the
melancholy of the creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority."
Like all Oedipal types he is wracked by anxiety, and "this anxiety, this
mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and demonic
ground." He is anxious to be first, he is anxious because he is not first,
he is anxious because of what he must do to his Poetic Father while
battling for his majority, which depends on a claim of priority. He must
misread, misinterpret, distort, revise, and usurp. The antithetical criti–
cism Bloom has in mind will be a study of the six "revisionary ratios,"
the six forms of "misprision" or wrongdoing, that govern the relations
between ephebe and precursor. And the proper antithetical critic will
keep in mind that the revisionary ratios "have the same function in
