Speculative Returns

As a revision of the Primal Scene, the family romance's falsification shows us that Oedipal fantasies are only ironies, or beginning moments merely, for truly strong poets and poems. This limitation makes the family romance a model neither catastrophic nor creative enough.... While Harold Bloom's two latest books, Agon and The Breaking of the Vessels, loudly proclaim a wilder Gnosticism, we hear in these lines from the latter work the self-wounding which marks a far more significant shift from his earlier speculations. If his Oedipal fantasy-or the Oedipal model of poetic influence-was an irony, a vexation over the fact that others also enjoy what it desires for itself (Kierkegaard's definition cited in A Map of Misreading), we must then read beyond the polemic, the anti-philosophical argument which he carries over from an earlier period even as he introduces the new transference model. Listening carefully to the repeated readings of Freud in the collection of essays and its masterful little sequel, we hear through the Gnostic recollections in both much more than the anti-epistemological, anti-linguisticizing story he often tells. The significance of the shift in models can best be understood by looking closely at the arguments with which it is introduced, as we will do here by focusing on a single reading of Freud from each book. Concepts of Defense and the Poetic Will is one of the more interesting essays in Agon since it attempts for the first time to relate precisely Bloom's concept of dialectic (which, he says in Breaking, is much closer to the pragmatic workings of poetry than the Hegelian one), to what he in at least one place contrasts with the dialectic, the relation of literal and figurative meaning. Arguing implicitly throughout against Derrida's examination of speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle cited once in passing), Bloom reads through Freud's abandonment of

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