Reductive and Nonreductive Theories of the Self: The Phenomenology of Performance

Abstract

In his book The Western Canon, Harold Bloom defends the canon against what he calls the School of Resentment, consisting broadly of Marxists, feminists and multiculturalists. This School, he says, has distracted criticism from its true purpose of “enhancing the mind’s dialogue with itself.” “The true use,” he says, “of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self,” “to enlarge a solitary existence.”⁵¹⁸ Bloom, however, does not locate literature’s strength or aesthetic autonomy in its content, morality and ideology, but in the power of its language, ultimately the signifier itself. He repudiates any definition of language based on materiality, thus merging the power of the signifier with the Author as a psychological intention, a “will to figuration.”¹² But the signifier is, nevertheless, designated as constituting “aesthetic strength,” which for Bloom resides in “mastery of figurative language … exuberance of diction,”²⁹ “linguistic energy.”⁴⁶ Shakespeare thus demonstrates “a verbal art larger and more definitive than any other.” “Rhetorically,” Bloom says, “Shakespeare has no equal; no more awesome panoply of metaphor exists.”⁶⁰