Volume 12, Tome IV: Kierkegaard's Influence on Literature, Criticism and Art

The Anglophone World

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351875172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Crítica filosófica

While Kierkegaard is primarily known as a philosopher or religious thinker, his writings have also been used extensively by literary writers, critics and artists. This use can be traced in the work of major cultural figures not just in Denmark and Scandinavia but also in the wider world. They have been attracted to his creative mixing of genres, his complex use of pseudonyms, his rhetoric and literary style, and his rich images, parables, and allegories. The present volume documents this influence in the different language groups and traditions. Tome IV examines Kierkegaard's surprisingly extensive influence in the Anglophone world of literature and art, particularly in the United States. His thought appears in the work of the novelists Walker Percy, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, William Styron, Don Delillo, and Louise Erdrich. He has also been used by the famous American literary critics, George Steiner and Harold Bloom. The American composer Samuel Barber made use of Kierkegaard in his musical works. Kierkegaard has also exercised an influence on British and Irish letters. W.H. Auden sought in Kierkegaard ideas for his poetic works, and the contemporary English novelist David Lodge has written a novel Therapy, in which Kierkegaard plays an important role. Cryptic traces of Kierkegaard can also be found in the work of the famous Irish writer James Joyce.

Harold Bloom:

Critics, Bards, and Prophets

Elisabete M. de Sousa

Harold Bloom’s readers are familiar with his habit of naming and citing with an ostensive lack of scholarly apparatus—footnotes, indexes, and page numbers for quoted passages tend to be rare, giving the impression, at times, that he quotes from memory. His elaborations are consistently intertwined with allusions and commentaries on a wide range of texts, and accordingly, Bloom most often cites Kierkegaard leaving the source or the page number unmentioned, when he mentions the volume (the inverse also occurs).¹ He unquestionably shows a consistent knowledge of the life and production of Kierkegaard and of his posterity as forerunner of various philosophers, theologians, and novelists, and though it may seem that Kierkegaard lags behind in the number of references, allusions, or indirect quotations in Bloom’s writings, at least when compared to Freud, Nietzsche, Vico, or Emerson, the words and the thought of the Danish philosopher, as we shall see, are a fundamental part of many operative steps in Bloom’s practical criticism, with Kierkegaard’s categories of repetition and recollection providing inspiration and substance for Bloom’s theory of influence.

The bio-biographical note contains only what is deemed necessary to provide adequate context for subsequent references in this article. We must here mention that it proved unfeasible to cover all the volumes edited and prefaced by Harold Bloom, since the continual outpouring of works published for almost five decades has brought their number to almost five hundred; however, as it is customary with Bloom, many of the anthologies include articles or chapters of earlier works, and therefore special attention is given to the founding works of his theory which discuss the major points more richly stamped by Kierkegaard’s thought, and to the works where Bloom’s practical criticism takes the Danish thinker as witness to the truth of his ideas. Following this introduction, the present article includes two parts: Section I contains general references to Kierkegaard’s work that may seem minor when confronted with the massive use of Repetition, especially in A Map of Misreading, which is analyzed in Section II. These more general uses of Kierkegaard account for the centrality of Kierkegaard’s thought in Bloom’s theory and on the other hand help to create the necessary familiarity with Bloom’s practical criticism in order to grasp the full significance of the commentaries on Kierkegaard’s works included in Section II.

Harold Bloom (b. 1930) is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at the New York University Graduate School. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955 and has served on the Yale faculty ever since; he also served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1987–88. He is the recipient of many American and International awards and honorary degrees and the author of over thirty volumes, as well as editor of hundreds of anthologies of literary criticism, aimed at different readers.

Even before the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973,² his works had already been focusing on the agonic relationships between great writers and their forerunners, manifest in their poems as readings of other poems; this is the case of Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),³ The Visionary Company (1961),⁴ Blake’s Apocalypse (1963),⁵ Yeats (1970),⁶ and The Ringers in the Tower (1971).⁷ In the 1970s, following The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom published an impressive number of works which put his theories into practice and, at the same time, consolidated his attack on Deconstruction and the School of Resentment, Bloom’s label for Cultural Studies, or better still, for “[t]hose critics who value theory over the literature itself.”⁸ Among these works, we count A Map of Misreading (1975),⁹ Kabbalah and Criticism (1975),¹⁰ Poetry and Repression and Figures of Capable Imagination (1976),¹¹ as well as Deconstruction and Criticism (1980),¹² Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982),¹³ and The Breaking of the Vessels (1982).¹⁴ Many of these texts are dialogically constructed, responding to the criticism of relevant names of literary theory, among them Northrop Frye, Ernst Robert Curtius, Kenneth Burke, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul De Man, and Jacques Derrida, and also to the thought of historians like Gershom Scholem and Hans Jonas.

Bloom has also written books on Shakespeare (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998, and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, 2003),¹⁵ and has other works deliberately intended to address literature not as a discipline, whose state of the art can be updated, but as an art whose status cannot be erased—among them, The Western Canon (1994),¹⁶ How to Read and Why? (2000),¹⁷ Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003),¹⁸ and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004).¹⁹ In the last two decades, Bloom has published a number of works focused on various features of religious texts, such as The Book of J (1990),²⁰ The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992),²¹ Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996),²² and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005).²³

In very simple terms, the kernel of Bloom’s theory deals with the belatedness experienced by ulterior “strong” poets in their agonistic endeavor in relation to one or more other strong poet, a claim that runs parallel to the defense of reading poems as “misreadings” of other poems. In Bloom’s words:

A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are themselves necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, then we can and must accept its canonical status.²⁴

In order to recognize the misreading of a poem and to give a rigorous account, to the reader and to himself, of what that misreading is about, Bloom envisioned a method, thus explained:

I propose, not another new poetics, but a wholly different practical criticism. Let us give up the fated but failed enterprise of seeking to “understand” any single poem as an entity in itself. Let us pursue instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet’s deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general. Know each poem by its clinamen and you will “know” that poem in a way that will not purchase knowledge by the loss of the poem’s power.²⁵

Clinamen is the first of the six revisionary ratios which can be traced in the poetical practice of any poet, the others being tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades. In The Anxiety of Influence these ratios are devised in terms of Freudian defense mechanisms and of rhetorical tropes, and in A Map of Misreading they are connected to the Kabbalah.²⁶ The next passage gives a general idea of the interrelations between mechanisms of defense, rhetorical tropes, and revisionary ratios:

What determines them [the crucial patterns of interplay between literal and figurative meanings] is the anxiety of influence, because it is the war against belatedness that results in certain patterns of analogous images, tropes, psychic defenses, and revisionary ratios. I do not say that these patterns produce meaning, because I do not believe that meaning is produced in and by poems, but only between poems. But the interaction of these patterns, between poems, suggests or opens up all possibilities of poetic meaning. The hidden roads that go from poem to poem are: limitation, substitution, representation; or the dialectic of revisionism….Tropism of meaning compels tropes themselves to be meaning.²⁷

Much of Bloom’s theory will become self-evident in the various quotations illustrating his references to Kierkegaard; it suffices for now to retain that the poets’ agonistic endeavor is inseparable from the desire to reach immortality, and the anxiety of influence thus generated in the poem gets to be an inescapable experience for the ephebe (the young poet), determining a weak or a strong misreading of a poem by a stronger poet, who is the ephebe’s precursor. Not even Shakespeare, who according to Bloom is the precursor of all authors, is exempt from anxiety—he may well have invented the human, but he “makes an implicit covenant with Chaucer.”²⁸ And not even the scriptures get away without scrutiny:

The New Covenant (Testament) is throughout marked by belatedness in regard to the Tanakh. But the partial exceptions are the logia, or sayings, and parables of Jesus. Their enigmatics (to coin that) are sometimes unprecedented. Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are the great ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus’ enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.²⁹

I.

This section presents a significant number of brief, quite often epigrammatic, references and allusions, many of them typically used as synecdoche for longer passages. The quotations generally belong to the works published up to and including 1846, namely, The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the upbuilding discourses from 1843–44, and among later works, The Point of View of My Work as an Author and The Changelessness of God, as well as a few passages from The Moment, Judge for Yourself!, and the journals and notebooks.

One of the key concepts in Bloom’s theory is the “uncanny,” borrowed from Freud’s das Unheimliche, and Kierkegaard and the “uncanny” are associated in different ways. The following excerpt shows Kierkegaard as a representative of the “uncanny”: “Gerda [a character from H.C. Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”] can be set against Kierkegaard at his uncanniest: The Concept of Dread, The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling, Repetition.”³⁰ In the introduction to a recent volume on alienation, it is the role of post-Kierkegaardian anxiety in the emergence of the “uncanny” that is underscored:

[But] alienation in the Age of Kafka took on the meaning of existential dread. Camus, influenced by Kierkegaard and Sartre, as well as by Kafka, shifted alienation to a category reflecting a dishonored post-war France still suffering under the stigma of the Nazi occupation….In Freud, alienation essentially is the estran...