Beyond Normative Literary Criticism
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 | I remember, as a young man setting out to be a university teacher, how afflicted I was by my sense of uselessness, my not exactly vitalizing fear that my chosen profession reduced to an incoherent blend of antiquarianism and culture-mongering.
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Despite his honest and wholly understandable ambivalence, Bloom is now ensconced as an arbiter of culture, and as such is given more to the mode of confession than most practitioners of an art once quaintly considered to have had pretensions of objectivity. After Bloom recounts a personal anecdote (it is invariably charming), he usually proceeds with an exposition of one or another of his most controversial themes. The implication, confirmed by the pragmatic basis of Bloom's theorizing, is that personal needs or desires have led him to his unique literary determinations, a statement which Bloom himself, as an ephebe of Nietzsche and Freud, no doubt would find rather banal. However, Bloom's immensely overdetermined revisionism, with its emphasis on Family Romance and the Will to Power, still does not automatically account for his insistence that normative literary criticism must free itself from "the modest handmaiden's role prescribed by the modern Anglo-American academy,"
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that professors of literature, in the end, must not merely provide instruction in reading but must "teach how to live."
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In
After the New Criticism,
Frank Lentricchia calls his chapter on Bloom "The Spirit of Revenge," but it is more than the New Criticism, or even as august a father-figure as T. S. Eliot that Bloom at his most sincere, most impassioned, and most cunning seeks to overthrow: it is nothing less than literature itself. If the deconstructionist seeks to demonstrate that all modes of meaningful discourse can be endlessly deferred because of the ambiguities and contradictions of language, then Bloom assaults those same modes of discourse by concentrating instead upon personal power:
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| | Disabuse yourself of the lazy notion than any activity is disinterested, and you arrive at the truth of reading. We want to live, and we confuse life with survival. We want to be kind, we think, and we say that to be alone with a book is to confront neither ourselves nor another. We lie. When you read, you confront either yourself, or another, and in either confrontation you seek power. And what is power?
Potentia,
the pathos of more life, or to speak reductively, the language of possession.
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