Harold Bloom’s Antithetical Stance on Memory as Forgetting
Harold Bloom’s Antithetical Stance on Memory as Forgetting

Summary/Abstract: The paper sets out to examine the dialectical concept of memory as forgetting presented in Bloom’s Poetry and Repression. In his speculative investigations, Bloom draws heavily on two of his predecessors: Freud and Kierkegaard. He borrows the notions of trauma and repression from the former and develops them into the concept of the Scene of Instruction, which is a story of the initiation into the realm of poetry. From the latter, he borrows the concept of crop rotation, which deals with the art of remembering through forgetting, and vice versa. Bloom misreads both these concepts to create a theoretical construct of his own. Bloom follows Freud in that he shows how the poetic ego emerges through a reaction to the traumatic event of the Scene of Instruction. However, while Freud claims that it is by recollection that people can work through their traumas and return to sanity, Bloom says that both recollection and sanity are detrimental to human creative capabilities and that it is only through repression that a poet as poet can misread his predecessors and create poetry of his own. Bloom follows Kierkegaard in that he says that repression involves a dialectic of remembering and forgetting that, when put together, create an active faculty that shapes one’s individual experience. While Kierkegaard uses his concept to create an aesthetic or contemplative existence that is always new and devoid of any excessive pleasure or pain, Bloom claims that conflict is an inherent part of human existence and that this very conflict is in fact a chance for a poet to individuate from tradition understood as the eternal return of the same.

• Details
• Contents