When he was thirty-five, Bloom fell into the deepest depression of his life. The worst of it lasted eight or nine months, through most of 1965. He started reading Freud and Emerson obsessively, everyday. Freud insincated himself into Bloom's mind and festered there. Bloom began teaching a graduate seminar on psychoanalysis which became quite popular, owing to a phenomenon that Bloom called Uncle Siggy's Revenge. Each year, as the semester progressed, Bloom gradually lost coatrol in the most rococo way. "My transference to Freud got more and more dubious," he says, "and the parapraxes would become so monstrous that in the final two classes everything was an unintended pun or a double-entendre or some terrible self-revelation. I wasn't saying what I meant to say at all. It became occult!"
One night in the summer of 1967, Bloom, still in the midst of his depression, had a hideous nightmare. He dreamed that a giant winged figure, a terrifying angel out of the Book of Ezekiel, or Blake's vision of the Covering Cherub, was pressing down on his chest. He woke up gasping for breath. The next day, he started to write what he thought of as a prose rhapsody titled "the Covering Cherub." He worked on it for six years.
For Bloom, this was an excruciatingly slow pace. He toiled, he agonized, he groaned. He phoned his friend and colleague Geoffrey Hartman and talked to him for hours, until Hartman began to feel like a midwife to whatever strange progeny Bloom was bringing forth. "It was some kind of psychomanchia, a battle within the psyche," Hartman says. "The ratios and their naming"—the theory was divided into six "ratios"—"were a kind of parturition. There were labor pains, and you could see them. Harold would struggle, and there would be a contraction, and out would come one ratio, and then another."
At some point during all his years in the wilderness, Bloom lost his faith. He decided that Blake—and, through Blake, he—had been deceiving himself. No longer did Bloom believe that real imaginative freedom was possible. It was still the duty of the poet to struggle for it, against the stifling force of his great poetic predecessors—if he avoided them, he would remain weak, a minor poet. The fight was a worthy one, a soul's crusade, but it was doomed to fail. "I really did use to believe that I could clear my optics, the inner and the outer eye," Bloom says, "I believed that the would could be remade. I thought that teaching Blake and Shelly could put people in touch with some kind of inner light. It sounds absurd now, a very beautiful delusion. But when I was young I did believe it."
As he was losing his faith in Blake, Bloom was undergoing a conversion of sorts, to the ancient heretical creed of Gnosticisim. The Gnostic—whether of the Jewish, the Christian or the Sufi variety—believes that, as the result of a primal, catastrophic splitting, the universe is utterly alienated from God. All of nature, the world as we know it, was created by an evil demiurge, and is man's prison. Man himself—his body, his mind, what he calls his soul—is also wholly fallen. All that remains of God on earth is a spark, or pneuma—a fragment of the divine that resides in humans but to which they have no access without Gnostic revelation. Salvation can be achieved only by gaining "knowledge" of this spark and thus reuniting wit the alien God. (Bloom even wrote a "Gnostic novel," titled "The Flight to Lucifer." It was a schematic, underfictionalized work, though, and he now wishes he had never published it.)
If Bloom had once, by embracing Blake's mythology, turned away from a Wordsworthian view of nature, his conversion to Gnosticism removed him infinitely further from it. Nature, he now believed, was not only not redemptive—nature was fallen, and if a man was to be saved he was obliged to reject it completely. Gnosticism was, in many ways, ideally suited to Bloom's temperament, because it rejected all worldly authorities outside the self, and because it allowed him to hold an utterly bleak view of the universe while preserving a morsel of transcendent, visionary hopefulness.
In 1973, Bloom finally, painfully, finished the book that had begun with his nightmare. The book, "The Anxiety of Influence," was dense and complicated; it employed so many obscure terms that it seemed to have been written by a kabbalistic Lewis Carroll. "We all remember the great night at Ezra Stilis College when Harold was going to unveil his new theory of poetry," says Perry Meisel, now a professor at New York University, then Bloom's student. "It was very a very big event. We didn't understand a word of it"—a year after the book came out, Bloom read it again and was amused to discover that even he couldn't figure out what he was talking about—"but we all remembered one line: 'There are no poems, only relations between poems.'"
What Bloom had done, in essence, was to distill his disappointed Romanticism through a kind of disembodied version of Freud. From Freud he borrowed the notion that the human quest for imaginative autonomy takes the form of a son struggling to deny his origins—to be, in a sense, his own father. Thus, the poet's quest for originality takes the form of struggling against his poetic influences: struggling, that is, to appropriate and warp, or "misread," his precursor's wort in a w such away that, to a later reader, it would appear that the precursor had failed. It would seem that his poem was in some way asking to be corrected by the poem of the later poet; or as though the precursor were the weak successor to the later poet, and not the other way around. This struggle was motivated by a profound ambivalence toward the poetry's influence—"the giving that famishes the taker," as Bloom put it—and it was savage. Savage, but also tricky, underhanded. The strength of the strong poet, as Geoffrey Hartman said in an esay about Bloon, "is chiefly cunning: more Jacob's strength than Esau's, more Odyssean than Achillean. The revisionary ratios are a 'typology of evasions.'"
The form of the theory was Freudian, but Freud much changed. For one thing, Bloom, unlike Freud, allowed no room for optimism; in Bloom's theory, there was no equivalent of sublimation, no acceptable substitute for the impossible goal of self-birth. A poem, Bloom wrote, was not "an overcoming of anxiety" but "an achieved anxiety." The struggle for meaning was the only meaning to be had. What's more, there was nothing sexual, or even psychological, about Bloom's theory. Bloom placed enormous emphasis on the difference between the poet-as-poet—what he called the "aboriginal poetic self"—and the human being who wrote poetry. "Anxiety" was not a psychological term. It was purely literary, having to do only with the relationship between one poem and another.
Bloom stressed this because he was committed to the idea that genius was a universal quality, separable from the arbitrary colorings of psychology or historical period. But as he banished these impurities his conception of the poet became so utterly leached of human qualities that it came to look strangely like the nonauthor he despised in deconstruction.
