revision

I've written before about how I'm not really convinced by a lot of Harold Bloom's views or conclusions but what draws me to him is his thinking - the way he arrives at his views. 

I think there are two key ideas that underly Bloom's theory of influence. Built on top of those ideas, there is a whole intricate system. One of those idea is belatedness and the other is about the writer's response to their own belatedness. 

So, belatedness....the strong writer realises they are a latecomer. According to Bloom, central to a writer's thinking is that perfection, as they see it, has already been achieved by their precursor(s). So the only way for them to write anything of worth is to revise the work of their precursor. Of course they don't admit that that's what they are doing, even to themselves. That's why Bloom infuriated a lot of writers. He insisted that every act of literary creation was an exercise in wilful misrepresentation of some other writer's work, and writers don't like being told that. 

Here is what Bloom identifies as his central argument in The Anxiety of Influence:

Poetic influence...always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation...the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

You might think - but here he's only talking about poetry - and technically that's true, but that's just because Bloom's main concern was with poetry. In literary scholarship, poetry can be defined in a broad way to include all literature, and Bloom does go on to apply his ideas about influence to other forms of literature in later books, like, for example, The Western Canon. 

So, that's one of the central ideas - that good writing is always misreading. Then, another big idea underlying Bloom's criticism is related to how and why writers do that. All creative writing is made up of tropes and figures. The way that you identify tropes and figures - in other words, the way that you tell whether a text is literary - is that it is not literally true. For example, if you write that 'the city was blanketed in fog', it's figurative /// there's no actual, real blanket involved. Bloom points out that, for the poet or creative writer, the literal truth is like a kind of death, because it negates their creative expression which is fundamental to their identity. They have to distort the literal truth - it's what they do. 

Bloom relates this distortion to his other idea about how all literature is a distortion of other literature, and then he introduces Freud to really develop his theory about how writers do this revision. Freud formulated a range of psychic defenses by which we evade the idea of death. Bloom relates each of 6 of these defences to a particular trope (irony, synecdoche, metonymy, etc) and then to his own invention - 6 revisionary ratios, or ways that writers revise their precursors.