Chapter 14 Harold's Complaint, or Assimilation in Full Bloom

It has been more than a quarter century since the first publication of The Anxiety of Influence, and both the scandal it provoked and the influence it exerted have generally been forgotten. This was not, in itself, inevitable. It is easy to imagine that the late 1970s feminist appropriation of Bloom’s notions of agonistic identity construction could have been extended to illuminate the narratives of struggle for authority and symbolic capital that have been such an important part of literary criticism since the late 1980s. But Bloom’s own success and his self-presentations have militated against the re-tooling of his theory in this way. Part of the relative oblivion into which The Anxiety of Influence has fallen can be attributed to the victory of its insistent, if covert, polemic against the New Criticism. If the New Criticism is no longer a significant force, neither is the opposition that lined up against it. Furthermore, while Bloom’s theory went to great pains to differentiate itself from its immediate forebears, it also defined itself against the other modes of theory that it competed against at the time. Like “French theory” of the early 1970s, The Anxiety of Influence takes as its touchstones Nietzsche and Freud, but sets up in opposition to the French a Nietzsche untouched by the later Heidegger and a Freud unrevised by Lacan. Instead of basing his theoretical language in either the neologisms of philosophy or the technical terms of the human sciences, Bloom derives his own outlandish vocabulary from the arcana of Gnosticism and the ancient mysteries. While these moves created a place for Bloom within the genre