The Point is rapidly becoming one of my very favourite online essay venues, routinely putting out stuff that emphasises the personal-experiential aspect of the essay as a form, while mostly avoiding the exhausting confessional style that has until recently dominated it.

The result are pieces that I find myself reading in spite of an initial judgement that I won’t much care for the topic at hand. Point in case: this rather lovely reflection on the thought of the literary critic Harold Bloom, by a writer much younger than myself.

Artists have always had to contend with influence; every generation has always wished it could birth itself, instead of being born. But the contemporary world is burdened with the biggest glut of influences and models ever available to any people in history. It may seem paradoxical to claim, but nothing proves this essential paralysis more clearly than our era’s massive cultural overproduction, than those creative industries that churn out books and television shows and movies yet always remain fixated on contemporary trends, on context-free content, with little or no connection to any deep tradition. The paradox makes some sense psychologically: one symptom of paralyzing anxiety is compensatory overactivity.

I’ve never read Bloom: I was not raised as a literary creature, and so never encountered his stuff in my youth; and by the time I’d come in from the wilderness of my feral self-shaping, every academic and pedagogical source I encountered warned me against him, and other such dinosaurs of a supposedly obsolete epoch.

I work actively to abolish substantive regrets, but one in particular gets no easier to suppress as the years pass: I wish that, during the years when there was time to spare for reading and writing, I had read more widely and written more freely; that I’d encountered stuff like Bloom, and had the chance to make my own mind up about it.

It is good, then, to see younger writers and readers going back to thinkers who were classified as anathema. This seems often to be talked about in terms of a conservative or reactionary turn, and I suppose there’s at least some of that going on. But I think it’s also the literary and philosophical equivalent to the effect that streaming services have had on the approach that younger generations now take to music: the old tribal taste profiles are gone, for better or for worse, and the banquet of the past beckons to the hungry.

This also, of course, results in the over-production referenced in the passage clipped above, to which Jennings positions Bloom’s idea of influence (and the artistic labour that is necessary to escape it) as a potential counter. But Bloom’s canon is also to be found buried in the weights of the generative models, of course, along with the far greater number of works which express the anxiety and/of influence he described. As such, perhaps the canon will remain there, like the massive core of a planet—or perhaps, depending on your scholarly position, like an original sin—accreted with a sort of generative geology, stratum after impacted stratum of increasingly devolved imitation: no less inescapable in its gravity, but ever more blurry in its eventual influence, like a deep-fried literary memetics.

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Again, I should note that I don’t believe that we are destined for the generative-content firehose future, despite its promised inevitability. But the above may serve as a further illustration as to why that belief is rooted in something closer to necessity rather than rational assessment.