On artistic inheritance
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I have been fortunate enough through writing this substack to meet and even befriend some gifted writers and historians. One such friend is Sam Jennings, who published a brilliant piece in The Point earlier this week on wrestling with the implications of the late, great Harold Bloom’s ideas regarding literary influence.1
Sam writes:
As originally laid out in his 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, “influence” for Bloom is the water in which all great writers — but especially poets — are forever swimming. To become a serious author of any real enduring merit, one must necessarily take on certain literary precursors, writers who have spurred one to write for oneself. But for Bloom this is no simple craft tradition, passed down benevolently from generation to generation. For Bloom, what begins as literary inspiration ends up as sublimated agon, as endless conflict, manifesting in the work as the buried tensions of an intergenerational competition for literary immortality.
Because each new generation of writers is in competition with all others, living or dead, for inclusion in the halls of worldly memory, each artist must develop ways of strategically, even unconsciously, “misreading” the work of the precursor. So T.S. Eliot’s poetry becomes a struggle with Alfred Lord Tennyson and, more covertly, Walt Whitman. Whitman himself is always tussling with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poetry of the King James Bible. William Wordsworth has to fend off the over-influence of John Milton and Shakespeare to achieve a comparable Romantic success. The young Shakespeare himself engages in a brief agon with his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, before becoming one of the few writers in the Bloomian cosmology to rise out of the field of influence entirely. Shakespeare, according to Bloom’s appraisal, owes nothing to anybody. In fact, all of us now owe most of ourselves to Shakespeare — so much so that any academic or critical attempts to destabilize the Bard’s preeminence only prove how embarrassing the debt has become. As the history of the written word goes on, the burden of influence accumulates, until finally young writers feel such a pang at their own belatedness, they wonder whether they’ll ever be able to add a single thing to their scandalously rich inheritance.
Bloom’s ideas on influence are scoffed at in the Academy these days, but as Sam says in his piece that all rather smacks of the bitter rankling of a generation of failed artists crushed under the weight of their forebears’ brilliance. Much easier is it to question Shakespeare’s preeminence, to problematise Milton, to dismiss entirely the brilliant sun of James Joyce, than to confess to the dream of swimming in the same waters as these literary leviathans.
But if one opens one’s eyes, influence as agon is everywhere one looks in the history of western art. What were Giotto’s frescos but a wrangling with the weighty history of Byzantine icons? What were Michelangelo’s works of terribilità but contentions with his twin burdens: the rediscovered sculptures of antiquity, and the all too-living, all too-brilliant, Leonardo da Vinci? Caravaggio wrestled with Raphael, Velàzquez with Titian, the entire French Academy with Poussin. Picasso struggled so intensely — with Cézanne’s geometry, with El Greco’s elongations, with Toulouse-Latrec’s demimonde, with the radical abstraction of African sculpture — that he, like Shakespeare, cannibalised his art form to such an extent that he appears to rise above influence altogether.
Not only does Bloom’s conception of influence strike me as both wholly and utterly true, it has the potential to be, as Sam recounts in his piece, horrifyingly crippling. But it needn’t be. It can be a call to arms.
