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I
The first essay in Deconstruction and Criticism is Harold Bloom's "The Breaking of Form" (pp. 1-37), an appropriate opening because (as the title suggests) it focuses directly on an operative principle of deconstruction, stated succinctly in the first paragraph: "in a poem it is not form itself that gleams or sparkles. . . . the lustres of poetic meaning come rather from the breaking apart of form." In the ensuing five pages, Bloom, speaking in Emersonian cadences, utters a powerful statement of the importance, cultural and personal, of what he calls "strong reading"—the activity whereby readers struggle with poems, fight with poems
A strong reader of Bloom's essay, excited and invigorated by this opening, will look forward to the development of these ideas in the remainder of the piece—and will, unfortunately, be disappointed. This disappointment has nothing to do with agreement or disagreement: a strong reader who disagrees with the ideas of a strong essay—or, rather, breaks the structure of those ideas apart and re-creates them in a new form—would not be expressing disappointment but rather respect for the intellectual challenge posed by the essay. Such disagreement would indicate the success of the essay, and one would have no reason in those circumstances to be disappointed by it. What would cause disappointment is a fundamental weakness, in its own terms, of the process of thought underlying the essay, a flaw that would render it a weak combatant.
The first hint of such a flaw in Bloom's essay occurs on the sixth page of its printed form, where the word "textual" first appears. Up to this point Bloom has spoken of "poems," "fictions," and "works" but has said nothing about "texts." A reader alert to the difference between works and texts will have wondered whether a strong reading of a poem does not begin with being critical or combative about the constitution of the text of the poem, whether "reading well" does not entail the questioning of the makeup of the text as well as of the meaning of the work; and the reader will have assumed that these matters are to be pursued as the essay develops. But the first reference to "texts" is disquieting: "Gnostic exegesis of Scripture is always a salutary act of textual violence" (p. 6). Out of context this remark would be taken by most readers, I think, to refer to the extracting of meaning from particular sequences of words (that is, particular "texts") found in particular documents. When, however, one reads this sentence in the light of what has led up to it, the meaning of "textual" is not so clear. The violence described earlier occurs in the clash between a "strong" or "creative" reader and a "combative" poem—a poem, a work of literature, not the text of an artifact. If Bloom in this sentence is still talking about the same kind of violence, are we to conclude that he is using "text" as a synonym for "poem" and "work"?[4] If so, then what word, we wonder, will he use to refer to the sequence of words found in a particular document? Or is he not going to recognize the distinction between such a sequence of words and a "work"?
The disappointing answers to these questions emerge in the passage immediately following (pp. 7-8), in which Bloom discusses his belief that "a strong reading is the only text": "there are no texts," he says, "but only interpretations."[5] Since there manifestly are texts, in the sense of series of words handed down to us on pieces of paper or parchment,[6] he is obviously equating "texts" with "works" and asserting that works have no meanings independent of the interpretations of those who encounter them. But how do we know when we are encountering a work? How do we know that the texts we encounter in documents are reliable representations of works? We may legitimately not care whether they accurately reflect the author's, or anyone else's, intention; but if that is our position, it must be made clear. Because verbal works do not exist in physical form, as visual works do, there is no way of avoiding the question of the relation between texts and works, whatever names we call them by. I am of course using "texts" here to mean specific oral or written sequences of words and pauses (or marks of punctuation); but the issue I am raising is not one of definitions of terms. Bloom is free to use "texts" and "works" synonymously if he wishes, but he then needs another term to refer to what "texts" conventionally denotes; for he is not free, if he hopes to present a coherent argument, to ignore the distinction.
A natural opportunity to pursue this matter presents itself to Bloom at this point, as he takes up Gershom Scholem's work on Kabbalah. Scholem, explaining why "there is no written Torah here on earth," says (as quoted by Bloom): "Everything that we perceive in the fixed forms of the Torah, written in ink on parchment, consists, in the last analysis, of interpretations or definitions of what is hidden. . . . There is no written Torah, free from the oral element, that can be known or conceived of by creatures who are not prophets." How this passage fits Bloom's purpose is obvious. But what he might also have said is that it offers an analogue of the relation between every text and the work it purports to represent. Just as the Torah as work is not fully knowable through any of its written manifestations, so also are the documentary texts of all literary (and other verbal) works but imperfect guides to the works they attempt to transmit. And just as the only Torahs we can have are the interpretive results of the process of analyzing the physical evidence present in documents, so also the only texts that we can possibly have of all verbal works are the ones we construct from the evidence presented to us in documents (or, in some cases, in oral traditions), using our individual judgments to choose among variant readings or to insert new readings. Not only are the meanings of works subject to our interpretation (which may or may not be historically oriented), but also the very constitution of the texts of those works is the product of our interpretive judgment.
One thinks, at first, that Bloom is going to make this point, for he says that Scholem's statement is true not only of "Text Itself" (Scripture) but also of "all lesser texts." Immediately, however, he places "poem" in apposition with "texts": ". . . true of all lesser texts, of all poems more belated than the Torah." Once again, then, "texts" are works. If, therefore, one substitutes "work" for "text" in his next paragraph, one has no difficulty following, indeed admiring, its ridicule of professors who believe "in the real presence of the literary text . . . in editions, definitive editions, upon which responsible commentaries might be written." Those who believe that works reside in printed books and who unquestioningly accept the texts of any editions, even scholarly ones, as if they were the works themselves, indeed deserve our criticism for misunderstanding the nature of the medium that verbal works employ. But we still have a problem here, for Bloom fails (whether or not the failure is induced by his use of the word "text") to include in his formulation the indeterminacy of texts (arrangements of words) as well as of meanings (interpretations of the significance of words).
He proceeds to say, in commentary on the foregoing, "I only know a text, any text, because I know a reading of it," and elaborates, "I do not know Lycidas when I recite it to myself, in the sense that I know the Lycidas by the Milton." A primary reason for his not knowing "Lycidas" in this sense is that he cannot be sure how close his text of it is to the one Milton intended (or to any of the ones Milton may have intended at various times). But this reason is not what Bloom has in mind. He means that he can only know "Lycidas" through his, or someone's, interpretation of it and that there is no one Miltonic meaning that stands independent of those interpretations. But he does not say how he comes by the particular text he is following or what difference it might make to his interpretation if he followed a different one. He is therefore behaving in a fashion much more similar than he suspects to that of the professors he castigates and pities, for by ignoring the textual question entirely he is tying himself just as uncritically as they to some fixed text (or texts). He is tacitly endorsing the notion that editing is distinct from criticism, failing to see that editing involves critical judgments and that criticism must question the constitution of texts if it is to be concerned with works rather than documents.
Bloom's total neglect of the relation of texts to works—or, put differently, of the mode of existence of verbal statements—undercuts his eloquent arguments and reduces them to incoherence time and again. In the next paragraph, for instance, he offers a prose-poem about words, words that "refer only to other words," words that "will not interpret themselves"—and, finally, "words lying against time" (p. 9). But where
These comments on the first nine pages of Bloom's essay provide, I believe, a way of reading the rest of it. References to "a specific poem" (p. 10), to reading a poem "properly" (p. 16), and so on are simply vague, rather than alive with the intriguing indeterminacies that accompany any effort to locate a verbal work. A place does occur in the essay where a distinction between "text" and "poem" is made, but it is not the one I am making: in discussing the "revisionary ratios" that a poet uses against a predecessor, Bloom says, "As text, a ratio names intertextual differences; as poem it characterizes a total relationship between two poets, earlier and later" (p. 19). The relation of work to documentary text remains untouched.
In the second part of his essay, Bloom examines a "proof-text," Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"; and although he makes extensive quotation from some (unspecified) text of the poem, he never once questions that text as a representation of the work. Presumably he is using the text in Ashbery's 1975 volume of the same title, for one of his quotations includes a line that varies between the 1975 text and the August 1974 Poetry magazine text, and the reading in his quotation is that of 1975 book.[8] Furthermore, the division into verse-paragraphs in the text Bloom is following is the same as in the 1975 book. Bloom says (p. 27) that the first verse-paragraph closes with the line "Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything"—as it indeed does in the 1975 text (p. 70),
Just as Bloom's quotations may contain errors, so may the 1974 and 1975 texts that Ashbery authorized.[11] The few differences between them do not seem particularly significant, but one cannot rule out the possibility that some readers would find them significant. Besides, however trivial the differences may be,[12] can we assume that the 1975 readings are always the ones Ashbery wished? Is not the possibility that Ashbery made the changes itself significant? And may there not be other places, alike in both texts, that do not accurately reflect his intention? I am not suggesting that Bloom should explicitly have taken these questions up in his essay; but he should give evidence of having thought about them. As long as he is treating the poem as by a particular person (and he does comment on Ashbery's "career" and allude to other poems by Ashbery), he cannot avoid being concerned with "Self-Portrait" as a work, not merely as a text that is located in a given copy of a printed edition. His not doing so casts doubt on the whole undertaking: the textual variants in this instance may be minor, but the failure to recognize the issues is a major conceptual flaw.
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