I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with.

But then, why should one just accept it? After all, this is not merely a book of observations or stray essays meant for enjoyment and the refinement of judgement and little more. It is also meant to be a full-fledged theory, and generally it is accepted that a theory requires some strong proof. The major thesis here is that throughout the history of post-Enlightenment poetry, every major poet has suffered an “anxiety of influence” in relation to their major precursors, who are the literary equivalents of fathers. Already, this thesis is hard to take. Taken in the broad sense, we might say that all artists suffer from the aforementioned anxiety, but Bloom’s placing of this specific kind of anxiety in the post-Enlightenment age only begs the question. Why didn’t it exist before? He mentions at one point that before the anxiety of influence it was anxiety of style that predominated, but can the two not be seen as essentially the same thing? The reason any poet suffers from anxiety of style is that they feel the weight of their precursors’ highly individual styles weighing down upon them, and so in this sense they are very much anxious about influence. But the other reason to take the post-Enlightenment part a little less seriously is that, in Bloom’s preface to the second edition, he corrects himself and says that anxiety of influence did indeed exist before Milton, and indeed Marlowe imposed it on the greatest of all English poets. This surely means that my initial suspicion was right: if anxiety of influence exists at all, it always existed.

However, we might nevertheless question how anxiety of influence might change with time and with the literary age. Bloom posits that since Wordsworth virtually invented modern poetry in placing its emphasis more on the internal world of the poet than his surroundings, it has been harder to shake off the influence of the precursor. But was poetry ever less than highly personal, at least in the modern (post-Renaissance) age? Perhaps we can’t say of Shakespeare’s sonnets that they are as personal as Wordsworth’s Prelude, but at the least they are more obviously personal than the plays. Indeed, if Milton is to be counted as being part of the period in which anxiety of influence dominated, how can we square the apparent circle of Milton’s grand and epic poetry with this idea that it really is highly internalised? Undoubtedly, Milton’s poetry does not have to be read as distant and impersonal, but then we can hardly read Shakespeare that way, either.

So there are a few niggles here and there. Despite these, the book as a whole is a joy to read—even if the reader isn’t fully awake—and is characterised with Bloom’s highly individual style of writing throughout. And despite the highly unscientific approach to what we are meant to regard as a theory, there are numerous insights that are undoubtedly fascinating in their own right. Foremost of these for me is the last of the six “revisionary ratios” which poetic ephebes employ to overthrow the influence of their literary fathers. Called apophrades, it is in essence a kind of turning around of the forebear’s style, a reclaiming of it, such that what is produced is the strange and uncanny sense that it is the precursor who is influenced by the ephebe, and not the other way around.

It is exactly this kind of fascinating insight that would really have deserved a more systematic treatment, however much that may be against Mr Bloom’s nature. And it is exactly the fact that it is unlikely to get such a treatment any time soon (certainly not by Bloom himself, but probably not by anyone else either) that makes me seriously question, as I have done before, what the use of literary theory actually is. These are all fascinating insights, but they may be little more than lucky guesses if we have no inkling whatsoever as to their real truth-value, or indeed their predictive power. As fun as it is to read this sort of book, a serious scholar should really come along one day and attempt a proper analysis of literary influence. It is questionable, however, whether this task can be tackled by literary critics alone: it seems likely to require psychologists and anthropologists, too.

If their reasoning is flabby, then the reasoning of the canonists, as embodied by Harold Bloom, is irrational in equal measure. They see (in part, rightly) Western civilization undergoing immense change, and relativism taking over, such that no objective measures of literary or aesthetic eminence are given their due credit anymore; they see a post-cultural landscape in which nobody ever reads Hamlet, The Iliad, or Don Quixote. The aim of setting a canon, while being perfectly commendable, is also perfectly useless.

Ultimately, though, canons cannot be dictated because they form naturally to begin with. All that is being undertaken when someone makes a list and calls it a canon is cultural prophecy, and that, as Harold Bloom readily admits, is always a fool’s game. The Canterbury Tales, when it was first written, was not particularly culturally important, and certainly it was not studied in schools alongside Ovid and Homer. Why should this be? It is, of course, because it hadn’t yet had time to settle into its cultural role. The process by which that happens is purely organic. The Canterbury Tales is so different to the great literature of classical times that it may have been difficult to see how it could fit in amongst them without feeling awkward and being sniffed at. And yet, over time, it became popular with the right people, it was sufficiently widely read that it permeated what we call culture—and before long, it had acquired an importance in the English cultural landscape large enough to have influenced Shakespeare at least as much as did Ovid.

Now you might say, of course, that canons have in the past been dictated, and so it is not necessarily true that they always develop naturally. But the only canons that have been officially insisted upon are religious ones, for reasons which I think are self-evident. Judaism is an odd case, in that it is the only surviving monotheistic religion that came about by natural processes—it wasn’t intended to be a religion, and thus, on the whole, the canon of Judaism formed itself. Many of the stories of the Pentateuch had their origins in Babylonian mythology, and these stories were passed on and altered by many generations. When they were finally written down, it was only a nod to the canonization that had already taken place by, as it were, natural selection. Later, Christianity and Islam learnt from it and skipped the patient aging process, cutting straight to the instructive, theological and eschatological ends. Clearly this was intended to cut out ambiguity of interpretation, but exactly because their religious canons were in contention so early, it led to incessant theological battle and civil war.

And yet, we might still ask, is there a need for religious canons? There are certain books that are unavoidably fundamental (the Gospels and the Qur’an), but most others are fair game. After all, is there any evidence whatever that so-and-so book is truly prophetic or authentic, and another isn’t, assuming they both claim such status for themselves? An expert theologian may have all the justification in the world for labelling one genuine and another heretical, but surely it is the right of future theologians to decide for themselves the relative importance of all relevant books? The recent discovery of the so-called Gospel of Judas, as unlikely as it is to truly influence Christian theology, is an example of just how much light the non-canonical books can shed, and how much they can add to our understanding of religion.

There is only one sense in which canon-making in the past was really necessary: there was a real risk of books being forgotten forever. Indeed, many classical books such as those of Plato and Aristotle might have been permanently lost to European culture if not for Arab scholars. But as book technology evolved, most notably the invention of the printing press, such guardianship became unnecessary: there was now a surplus of books, many of which were unlikely to ever become canonical. In a world in which there are arguably too many books—many more than could ever fit into a canon—why should there ever be a risk that the great ones will be destroyed forever? There are enough Bibles in American hotels to survive the millennia. The internet has cemented the permanence of the great books. The only way in which some Nazi-style book burning dictatorship might completely destroy the canon is with complete control of the world wide web. And if they succeeded, they would also presumably destroy the work of the canon-makers, while creating their own canon in its place.

If the preservation of a canon is to serve as a record of culture’s “great conversation”, then we must not forget that the conversation is more important than the canon. The present debate is itself a conversation, and however barbaric you might think the intentions of the anti-canonists are, in the unlikely event that they win out, it is even more unlikely that their triumph should prevail for all time. If the works of Homer and Shakespeare are as great as we are told (and they are), it is absurd to suggest that there will ever be a time when nobody will appreciate that. Culture, like the economy, is not and should not be dictated by some divine authority, be it Harold Bloom or anyone else. Rather, the conversation should be left to pursue its own course. As hard as it may be to see now, this present debate will surely lead to a renewed appreciation of the classics.