Harold Bloom The Anxiety of Influence.

A Theory of Poetry

Preface: The Anguish of Contamination

I excluded Shakespeare from The Anxiety of Influence and its immediate sequels because I was not ready to
meditate upon Shakespeare and originality. One cannot think through the question of influence without
considering the most influential of all authors during the last four centuries. I sometimes suspect that we
really do not listen to one another because Shakespeare's friends and lovers never quite hear what the other is
saying, which is part of the ironical truth that Shakespeare largely invented us. The invention of the human,
as we know it, is a mode of influence far surpassing anything literary. []
"He wrote the text of modern life" is the heart of this matter: Shakespeare invented us, and continues to
contain us. We are now in an era of so-called "cultural criticism," which devalues all imaginative literature, and
which particularly demotes and debases Shakespeare. Politicizing literary study has destroyed literary study, and
may yet destroy learning itself. Shakespeare has influenced the world far more than it initially influenced
Shakespeare. The common assumption of all the Resenters is that state power is everything and individual
subjectivity is nothing, even if that subjectivity belonged to William Shakespeare. Frightened by their irrational
social order, the English Renaissance playwrights, in this account, either became timeservers or subverters or a
mixture of both, while being caught in the irony that even their textual subversions helped to enhance state
power, a power rather surprisingly held to be reliant upon theatricality. I return to Emerson for an antidote to all
this power-mongering. Who wrote the text of modern life, Shakespeare or the Elizabethan Jacobean political
establishment? Who invented the human, as we know it, Shakespeare or the court and its ministers? Who
influenced Shakespeare's actual text more, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the First Secretary to Her Majesty, or
Christopher Marlowe? What we once used to call "imaginative literature" is indistinguishable from literary
influence, and has only an inessential relationship to state power. []
Coleridge spoke of the ever-living men and women, the canonical writers, a most archaic way of speaking in this
present age, when students are taught to scorn the Dead White European Males, or again, most simply
William Shakespeare. The largest truth of literary influence is that it is an irresistible anxiety:
Shakespeare will not allow you to bury him, or escape him, or replace him. We have, almost all of us,
thoroughly internalized the power of Shakespeare's plays, frequently without having attended them or
read them. When the German poet Stefan George called The Divine Comedy "the Book and School of the
Ages," he was speaking only about the education of great poets. All the rest of us inescapably learn that
Shakespeare's plays constitute the Book and School of the Ages. I am not speaking as an essentialist
humanist, which I do not pretend to be, or as a theorist of criticism, which is also not my role. As a theorist of
poetic influence, I am an anxious partaker of Shakespeare, the inevitable role for all of us, who belatedly
follow after Shakespeare's creation of our minds and spirits. Literature, that is to say Shakespeare, cannot be
thought of in terms only of knowledge, as if all his metaphors pertained only to knowing. Shakespeare's
pervasive terms are metaphors of willing, and so they enter the domain of the lie. Most of our understandings
of the will are Will's, as it were, because Shakespeare invented the domain of those metaphors of willing
that Freud named the drives of Love and Death. Our true relation to Shakespeare is that it is vain to
historicize or politicize him, because we are monumentally over-influenced by him. No strong writer since
Shakespeare can avoid his influence [] Frank Kermode speaks of "the fantastic range of possibilities"
that are explored by Shakespeare's tragedies, and that seems to me precisely right. Who can defend herself or
himself, if that self has any literary possibilities whatsoever, from what truly is a fantastic range of possibilities,
larger than any single one of us can hope to apprehend. Resenters of canonical literature are nothing more or
less than deniers of Shakespeare. They are not social revolutionaries or even cultural rebels. They are sufferers
of the anxieties of Shakespeare's influence. []
II
Oscar Wilde sublimely remarked that "all bad poetry is sincere." Doubtless it would be wrong to say that all
great poetry is insincere, but of course almost all of it necessarily tells lies, fictions essential to literary art.

Authentic, high literature relies upon troping, a turning away not only from the literal but from prior tropes. Like
criticism, which is either part of literature or nothing at all, great writing is always at work strongly (or
weakly) misreading previous writing. []
I never meant by "the anxiety of influence" a Freudian Oedipal rivalry, despite a rhetorical flourish or two in this
book. A Shakespearean reading of Freud, which I favor over a Freudian reading of Shakespeare or anyone else,
reveals that Freud suffered from a Hamlet complex (the true name of the Oedipus Complex) or an anxiety
of influence in regard to Shakespeare. []
influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the
story, novel, play, poem, or essay. The anxiety mayor may not be internalized by the later writer,
depending upon temperament and circumstances, yet that hardly matters: the strong poem is the achieved
anxiety. "Influence" is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships-imagistic, temporal,
spiritual, psychological-all of them ultimately defensive in their nature. What matters most (and it is the
central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a
creative interpretation that I call "poetic misprision." What writers may experience as anxiety, and what
their works are compelled to manifest, are the consequence of poetic misprision, rather than the cause of it. The
strong misreading comes first; there must be a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love with a
literary work. That reading is likely to be idiosyncratic, and it is almost certain to be ambivalent, though the
ambivalence may be veiled. Without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could
not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions. Without Tennyson's reading of Keats, we would
have almost no Tennyson. Wallace Stevens, hostile to all suggestions that he owed anything to his reading of
precursor poets, would have left us nothing of value but for Walt Whitman, whom Stevens sometimes scorned,
almost never overtly imitated, yet uncannily resurrected: []
III
In ways that need not be doctrinal, strong poems are always omens of resurrection. The dead may or may
not return, but their voice comes alive, paradoxically never by mere imitation, but in the agonistic
misprision performed upon powerful forerunners by only the most gifted of their successors. Ibsen loathed
influence more perhaps than anyone else, particularly since his authentic forerunner was Shakespeare, much
more than Goethe. []
The irony of one era cannot be the irony of another, but influence-anxieties are embedded in the agonistic
basis of all imaginative literature. []
Cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer, though Borges made a career out of exploiting his
secondariness. Belatedness seems to me not a historical condition at all, but one that belongs to the literary
situation as such. Resentful historicists of several persuasions stemming from Marx, Foucault, and political
feminism now study literature essentially as peripheral social history. What has been discarded is the reader's
solitude, a subjectivity that has been rejected because it supposedly possesses "no social being." []
the contingency that Shakespeare imposes upon us, which is that we are so influenced by him that we cannot
get outside of him. Criticism necessarily fails when it deludes itself into the smugness of not seeing that we
remain enclosed by Shakespeare. The only instruments by which we can examine him were either
invented or perfected by Shakespeare himself. Wittgenstein, who disliked Shakespeare, tried to defend
philosophy from the best mind we can know by insisting that Shakespeare was less a writer than he was "a
creator of language." It would be nearer the truth to say that Falstaff, Hamlet, and Iago are creators of
language, while Shakespeare, by their means, created us. Language, despite Heidegger and his French flock,
does not do the thinking for Shakespeare, who more than any other writer, or any other person that we
know of, thought everything through again for himself. Shakespeare did not think one thought and one
thought only; rather scandalously, he thought all thoughts, for all of us. A new Bardolatry is not the issue,
nor is hyperbole possible when we seek to estimate Shakespeare's influence during the four centuries since his
death. Doubtless Shakespeare, at heart always a player, conceived every part he ever wrote as a role for a

specific actor, but it is an evasion now to regard them as roles only, since they have become roles for us, whether
we are players or not. When we are born, we cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools. Lear echoes the
Wisdom of Solomon, but the Scriptural authority for the pronouncement is Shakespeare's and not the Bible's. We
are fools of time bound for the undiscovered country, more than we are children of God returning to heaven. The
issue is not belief but our human nature, so intensified by Shakespeare as to be his re-invention. How can we
historicize Shakespeare if we are children of Shakespeare, mapping our origins and our horizons in his
diction, in his astonishing vocabulary of some 22,000 separate words?
IV
To say that Shakespeare and poetic influence are nearly identical is not very different from observing that
Shakespeare is the western literary canon. Some would argue that "aesthetic value" is an invention of Kant's,
but pragmatically it is the aesthetic supremacy of Shakespeare that overdetermines our judgment of literary
value. []
INTRODUCTION
A Meditation upon Priority, and a Synopsis
This short book offers a theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic influence, or the story of intra-poetic
relationships. One aim of this theory is corrective: to deidealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to
form another. Another aim, also corrective, is to try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical
criticism.
Poetic history, in this book's argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since
strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.
My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong
precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for
themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of
indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself? Oscar Wilde,
who knew he had failed as a poet because he lacked strength to overcome his anxiety of influence, knew also the
darker truths concerning influence. The Ballad of Reading Gaol becomes an embarrassment to read, directly one
recognizes that every lustre it exhibits is reflected from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; and Wilde's lyrics
anthologize the whole of English High Romanticism. Knowing this, and armed with his customary intelligence,
Wilde bitterly remarks in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. that: "Influence is simply a transference of personality, a
mode of giving away what is most precious to one's self, and its exercise produces a sense, and, it may be, a
reality of loss. Every disciple takes away something from his master." This is the anxiety of influencing, yet no
reversal in this area is a true reversal. Two years later, Wilde refined this bitterness in one of Lord Henry
Wotton's elegant observations in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he tells Dorian that all influence is
immoral:
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or
burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins,
are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written
for him. []

Revisionary ratios:
I Clinamen or Poetic Misprision
2 Tessera or Completion and Antithesis
3 Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity
4 Daemonization or The Counter-Sublime
5 Askesis or Purgation and Solipsism
6 Apophrades or The Return of the Dead

PETER ACKROYD CHATTERTON

Philip Slack stared at the rows of dark books; then he switched on the electric light above his head, and in its
bright circle he could see the red, brown and green cloths of the volumes, their spines dulled and rubbed, many
of their titles so faded that only certain letters could be recognised, their edges worn at the top where other
people had taken them down to read them. And, beyond this circle of light in which he stood, the books cast
intense shadows. He was in 'the stacks', the basement of the library in which he worked, where all the forgotten
or neglected volumes were deposited. Some of these had been piled in corners, where they leaned precariously
against the damp stone walls of the basement; but some were scattered across the floor, and it occurred to him
that they had been dragged from the shelves by vermin before being eaten. Within this place there lingered the
musty, invasive odour of decay; but it was a smell which soothed and pleased Philip.
He had come down to see if he could find any references to Thomas Chatterton and, since he suspected
that in old books some forgotten truth might be recovered, he placed his trust in the principle of sortes
Vergilianae. So now he walked along the narrow pathways between the shelves, turning on the lights as he went,
lightly touching the damp spines of the volumes until eventually he took down the one on which his finger had
come to rest; the red cloth of its cover was dusty, but when he brushed it with his hand he saw the title very
clearly: The Last Testament by Harrison Bentley. It seemed appropriate for his search, and he opened the book.
The pages of the novel were slightly soiled, with light brown stains spreading across them in an arc, and when he
turned to the frontispiece he saw that it had been published in 1885 by Sullivan and Bridges of 18 Paternoster
Square. Philip held it up to his face, as if he were about to devour it, and turned the pages quickly; he might seem
slow or hesitant in his dealings with the world, but he always read swiftly and anxiously. He knew that his real
comfort was to be found in books.
And so the outline of the story soon became clear to him: the biographer of a certain poet, throughout
referred to as K, discovers that his subject, at the end of his life, had been too ill to compose the verses which
had brought him eternal fame; that, in fact, it had been the poet's wife who had written them for him. The plot
seemed oddly familiar to Philip but he was not sure if he had read this novel some years before, or if it
resembled some daydream of his own. Distracted now, he turned to the last pages of the book and then to the
endpaper which contained an advertisement for 'Mr Harrison Bentley's most recent publication'. This was
entitled Stage Fire and the prcis of its plot, in eight point type, summarised the history of an actor who believes
himself to be possessed by the spirits of Kean, Garrick and other famous performers of the past and who, as a
result, has a triumphant career upon the stage. Once more this story seemed familiar to Philip; he recognised
its shape so clearly that he was convinced that he had read it elsewhere and that this was not simply some
trick of his imagination. He understood the phenomenon of dj vu but he did not believe that it could be
applied to books: how could he trust his reading, if that were so?
He was idly tracing the watermark on the last page with his finger when he remembered: he had read the story of
Stage Fire in a novel by Harriet Scrope. He did not recall its title that was not important but it had concerned
a poet who believed himself to be possessed by the spirits of dead writers but who, nevertheless, had been
acclaimed as the most original poet of his age. And at once Philip remembered where he had read Harrison
Bentley's The Last Testament before: Harriet Scrope had written a novel in which a writer's secretary is
responsible for many of her employer's 'posthumous' publications; she knew his style so well that she was able
effortlessly to counterfeit it, and only the assiduous researches of a biographer had uncovered the fakery. This
was very close to the late nineteenth-century novel which Philip now held in his hand. He dropped it, and its fall
echoed around the basement of the library.
Philip was surprised by his discovery, particularly since he admired Harriet Scrope's novels. When
Charles had first told him that he was going to work as her assistant, Philip had read them avidly and with
pleasure; he had been impressed by her combination of violence and comedy although, when he had mentioned
this characteristic to Charles, his friend had merely shrugged and said, 'Fiction is a very debased form'. Philip felt
bound to agree Charles, after all, was more creative and imaginative than he was but he was still content to
enjoy this lower pleasure.
And so what did Harriet's borrowings matter? In any case, Philip believed that there were only a limited
number of plots in the world (reality was finite, after all) and no doubt it was inevitable that they would be
reproduced in a variety of contexts. The fact that two of Harriet Scrape's novels resembled the much

earlier work of Harrison Bentley might even be coincidental. He was less inclined to criticise her, also,
because of his own experience. He had once attempted to write a novel but he had abandoned it after some
forty pages: not only had he written with painful slowness and uncertainty, but even the pages he had
managed to complete seemed to him to be filled with images and phrases from the work of other writers
whom he admired. It had become a patchwork of other voices and other styles, and it was the
overwhelming difficulty of recognising his own voice among them that had led him to abandon the
project. So what right did he have to condemn Miss Scrope?
He picked up The Last Testament and carefully replaced it on the shelf. Then, in order to calm himself
after his strange discovery, he took down the small volume next to it. It was a selection of literary reminiscences,
edited by the Dowager Lady Moynihan, and at once his attention was drawn to the engraved plates which
illustrated the text and which were still protected by the thin, fine tissue common to that period of book
production. He looked through them, eventually stopping at one scene which was familiar; and, when he looked
down at the legend beneath the engraving, he read 'Chatterton's Monument in Bristol Churchyard'. There was a
short text on the page opposite the illustration: it concerned the novelist George Meredith 'who, in the early
months of 1856, in the utmost extremity, and with thoughts of self-murder after his wife's desertion, sat in the
gloomy environs of St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, lo, even in the shadow of Chatterton's Monument. He had
purchased a phial of mercury-and-arsenic with which he intended to end his life but, as he was about to put the
deadly flask to his pale lips, he felt a hand laid upon his wrist; looking up, he saw a young man standing over
him and forbidding him to drink. When he put down the phial, the young man disappeared. Thus was the young
George Meredith saved for literature by the intervention of the ghostly Thomas Chatterton. I do not believe my
readers will know of a more chilling and yet more noble story.' Philip leaned back against the wall of the
basement, and tried to imagine this scene . . .
He was aware that someone was watching him. It was Harriet Scrope and behind her, his face in
shadow, was Harrison Bentley. Philip jerked forward and opened his eyes; his throat was dry from sleep, and he
could feel the dampness of his shirt where he had been slumped against the stone. There were pools of light
among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an
unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to
expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and
no end, no story, no meaning. And, if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded
by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and
arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. Philip did not dare turn his back upon these
books. Not yet. It was almost, he thought, as if they had been speaking to each other while he slept. []
Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.
(Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose)
Charles stopped writing for a moment, and looked up at her. Why should the aged eagle?
What?
Its a quotation from Eliot.
It sounded like Shakespeare to me.
It was Eliot.
Well, you know these writers. Theyll steal any And her voice trailed off as she looked down at her
trembling hands.
Anything, thats right. He leant back in his chair, and smiled benevolently in her general direction. Its called
the anxiety of influence.
Is it? She seemed consoled by the phrase. Thats right. Anxiety. Of influence. And of course it must
be true of novelists, too. She paused, and licked her lips. No doubt, she went on, there are resemblances
between my books and those of other writers.
You mean like Harrison Bentley? Charles only just remembered Philips remark of the previous evening, and
now brought it out triumphantly as an indication of his wide reading.
What was that? []

Harriet sat on the edge of the bed, watching the creases in her leather shoes as she curled and uncurled her toes,
wondering how it was that Charles had found the connection between her work and that of Harrison Bentley:
this was the discovery which she had always feared, this was the revelation which she had suppressed but
which had provoked so much anxiety in her. It was inconceivable that Charles had learnt this for himself, he
was far too lazy. Someone must have alerted him . . . perhaps there was an article about her in the Times Literary
Supplement . . . perhaps she was about to be exposed. She kicked the wardrobe door shut with her foot, and in its
mirror the room swung violently around her.
This is what had happened: her first novel had enjoyed a modest success when it was published in the
early Fifties. It was the work of a stylist, and had been praised by other stylists; kind words from Djuna Barnes
and Henry Green were printed on the back of the American edition. It had taken Harriet six years to complete
(while working as a secretary for a small literary magazine) since she wrote very slowly, sometimes composing
no more than a sentence or even a phrase each day. She told herself that words were 'sacred', however, gradually
forming their own associations and gathering in their own clusters of significant sound; when they were ready,
they informed Harriet of their presence and she was content to transcribe them. As far as she was concerned, that
was all. The only continuity which her novel possessed lay somewhere within the workings of her own
consciousness.
And so after the first novel she could see no further ahead: she had brought her consciousness 'up to
date', as she put it, and she was not at all sure that she could expect any more progress from it. The words had
vanished just as mysteriously as they had once arrived. Her friends and colleagues expected another novel from
her, she knew, but the prospect of writing it bewildered her: she could not find within herself any strong
connection with the world, and so she could find no method of describing it. Even when she did manage to write
something, her inspiration seemed random and inconsequential; she would have an 'idea' when shopping, or
when sitting on a bus, but then it became clear to her that if she had not needed to shop that day, or travel in that
particular direction, the idea or phrase would never have emerged. This made her work seem frail, even
worthless. And, really, she had nothing whatever to write about.
It was then that the notion of adapting a plot from some other source occurred to her. For two weeks
she read all of the most interesting stories in the newspapers, but she found anything even remotely connected
with actual life baffling. She even tried following people in the street, to see where they went and whom they
met, but one unpleasant scene (when an old man had rounded on her and called her a 'tart') convinced her that
this was not wise. Then one late afternoon in May, bored by herself and by her failure, she walked into a
second-hand bookshop off Chancery Lane. Normally such places depressed her since she could easily
imagine her own work lying forgotten on their shelves, but now she found a strange comfort in the rows of
dusty books which surrounded her. She picked out at random The Last Testament by Harrison Bentley
and, even as she began to read it, she realised that here was the answer to her problem. Since she believed
that plots themselves were of little consequence, why should she not take this one and use it as a plain,
admittedly inferior, vessel for her own style? So she bought the old novel, and set to work. And, with the
story of The Last Testament to support her, she found that the words came more easily than before. Where
phrases and even syllables had once emerged as fragments of a larger structure which she could neither
see nor understand, now she could make her own connections; she went on from sentence to sentence, as if
she were carrying a lamp and moving from room to room in a large mansion. And she looked about her
with wonder, sensing her ability to describe what she was seeing now for the first time.
This second novel, A Finer Art, was also a success; once again she was praised for her style (the
Manchester Guardian called her a 'lepidopterist of language') and the fact that the plot of the novel was
described only in the vaguest terms encouraged her to use another Harrison Bentley narrative for her next book.
But her confidence had increased with her ability, and in The Whipping Post she adapted only the beginning of
his Stage Fire. She altered the characters, changed their relationships, and, by the end, only the barest outline of
Bentley's initial situation remained in place (of course, this was all Philip Slack had understood from the prcis
which he had read in the damp basement of the public library). The experience of employing a plot, even
though it was the invention of some other writer, had liberated her imagination; and, from that time
forward, all her novels were her own work. But in recent years even this originality had begun to bore
her. Once she had derived enormous pleasure from seeing her characters move and develop through time, but
the spectacle no longer charmed her. She recalled with pleasure only the writing of her earliest novel, with all its
obliquities and discordancies; and, for the first time, she began to admire her own nervousness and isolation

during that period. She had allowed the language to carry her forward; she had not tried to direct it. She had been
a serious writer then, a proper writer: she had not known what she was trying to say.
It was this new sense of her own life which had intensified her anxiety about the use of Harrison
Bentley's novels. She had forgotten the early episode at least, she had dismissed it as of no particular account
but, when she began to contemplate the writing of her memoirs, this act of plagiarism acquired a
prominence which she had not since been able to challenge. She could see no way around it. She could not
bring herself to admit the borrowing, and this mainly for reasons of pride; but, even if she did not herself
confess to it, the plagiarism might in any case be discovered and an unwarranted suspicion cast over the
rest of her work even over her first novel. Anxious reflection had so nourished the problem that it seemed to
encompass the whole of her past. There was no escape from it. So now she sat upon the edge of the bed, her
hand clasped to her forehead as the wardrobe door slammed shut.
But it was with a noble calmness that she eventually descended the stairs. 'Mother's back!' she shouted
when she was half way down. 'She was straining her greens she added, rather grandly, as she entered the room.
Charles did not know this phrase. 'For dinner?'
She was so intent on what she was about to say that she answered quite factually. 'No, not for dinner. I'm
thinking of spaghetti tonight.' Roused from his day-dream by her voice, Charles started making random pencil
marks on the side of the pages she had given him. She watched him with apparent fascination and then asked,
very sweetly, 'What were you saying about Harrison Bentley?' She scratched her arm viciously and then left her
hand poised in mid-air as Charles continued to be preoccupied with her notes.
'Oh. Nothing.'
'Nothing!'
Something in her voice made Charles look up, and he noticed how her left eyelid was trembling. 'I just
meant . . .' He hesitated. 'I just didn't think that it was very important.'
'No, you're right. It isn't important.' She put her hand up to her trembling eye, and Charles tried not to
laugh as the remaining eye stared calmly at him. Slowly she pulled her hand down across her face, the eyelid
peaceful now, and then wagged her finger at him. 'You've been a naughty boy, you know. You've found Mother
out. Bentley did influence me once, but that was a long time ago.' She spoke without thought since these were
words she had rehearsed many times before. 'In any case novelists don't work in a vacuum. We use many
stories. But it's not where they come from, it's what we do with them. I've found lots of material elsewhere
but no one ' and here her voice rose slightly 'no one has ever accused me of plagiarism!'
'No. That's right.' He did not quite know what to say. That's why it wasn't important. I didn't accuse you.'
Charles's benign reaction was unexpected, and at once his unconcern began to remove her own fears.
The telephone rang, but she ignored it for a few moments as she stared at him in relief. 'You mean, it doesn't
matter? You haven't read about me anywhere?'
'Of course not. Why should it matter? Everyone does it.' []

PETER ACKROYD THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE

I confess to one obsession, or fear. It always visits me when I am inside the house at my writing-desk, and
rarely follows me beyond these walls. It calls at about ten or eleven in the morning, and stays with me for an
hour or so; during this period I perspire freely, and walk throughout the house without being able to settle
anywhere or concentrate upon any one task. But why should I be haunted by an anxiety so ridiculous, so
laughable, that I can smile at myself later for entertaining it? Nevertheless it always comes back this fear that
whatever I happen to be writing comes from some other source, that I am stealing someone elses plot or
words, that I am relying upon the themes or images of other novelists. That is why there are occasions when
I leave the house and travel to the London Library in St Jamess Square. The shelves of English fiction there
are both my terror and my consolation: I search for evidence to convict me, but I find nothing. And yet, even
in that moment of relief, I am still haunted by the fear that somewhere among these volumes will be
discovered the same novel I myself am writing. My obsession is most extreme when I have finished a book,
and am waiting impatiently for its publication. In those moments the essential fear is recapitulated in a variety of
forms that I have used dialogue from the work of another novelist, that a plot comes from a book I have
read and forgotten, that I have simply written down the words of someone else. And this is the strangest
anxiety of all what if that other person were actually within me all the time? This was my state of mind
yesterday, just after I had sent my typescript to my publishers in Fetter Lane. []
And then, yesterday, it happened at last. I was in the basement of the old house, choosing the wine for my
solitary dinner that evening, when I was overtaken by the old fear. My book had been written before. I was
convinced of it. I did not understand the process involved (I presumed there was a name for such
phenomena) but I knew that, somehow, I had copied another novel word for word. Even the title was the
same. I cannot describe the horror which the realization provoked in me; it was as if my entire identity
had been taken from me, as you would take a net out of water, and I was left with nothing of my own. I left
the house at once and took the tram to High Holborn; from there I walked to the library of St Jamess Square. I
happened to see Tom Eliot by the issue desk, and I had enough civility left to greet him before I hurried up the
stairs to the shelves of fiction. Then I began what I knew to be a fatal search fatal in the sense that if I found
the book and confirmed my fears, then my life as a writer would be at an end. I would no longer be able to
trust any of my words, or believe anything which I fondly thought I had imagined. It would always come
from some other source. And then I found it. There was a book here with the title I had only recently chosen. It
had been published two years ago London, 1922 was on the spine and as soon as I opened it, I saw the
same words as I had manufactured on my typewriter. This was the novel I had just written. I am nothing, I said
out loud. Nothing can come of nothing. I came back to this house, which unaccountably I consider the cause of
all my woe, and I chose to sit here at my desk. But am I, even now, writing what others have written down
before me? And if this is so, what am I to do? []

DAVID LODGE The British Museum is Falling Down

Life imitates art.

OSCAR WILDE

It was Adam Applebys misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was
immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about. Other men, he gathered, met each new
dawn with a refreshed mind and heart, full of optimism and resolution; or else they moved sluggishly through
the first hour of the day in a state of blessed numbedness, incapable of any thought at all, pleasant or unpleasant.
But, crouched like harpies round his bed, unpleasant thoughts waited to pounce the moment Adams eyelids
flickered apart. At that moment he was forced, like a drowning man, to review his entire life instantaneously,
divided between regrets for the past and fears for the future.
Thus it was that as he opened his eyes one November morning, and focused them blearily on the sick
rose, three down and six across, on the wallpaper opposite his bed, Adam was simultaneously reminded that he
was twenty-five years of age, and would soon be twenty-six, that he was a post-graduate student preparing a
thesis which he was unlikely to complete in this the third and final year of his scholarship, that the latter was
hugely overdrawn, that he was married with three very young children, that one of them had manifested an
alarming rash the previous evening, that his name was ridiculous, that his leg hurt, that his decrepit scooter had
failed to start this morning, that he had just missed a first-class degree because of a bad Middle English paper,
that his leg hurt, that at his primary school he had proved so proficient in the game of who-can-pee-highest-upthe-wall of the boys outside lavatory that he had wetted the biretta of the parish priest who happened to be
visiting the playground on the other side of the wall at the time, that he had forgotten to reserve any books at the
British Museum for this mornings reading, that his leg hurt, that his wifes period was three days overdue, and
that his leg hurt. []
From nearby Westminster, Mrs Dalloways clock boomed out the half hour. It partook, he thought, shifting his
weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was
it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists?
One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a
personal property of events. []
At the edge of the pavement an old, old lady, white-haired and wrinkled, dressed in sober black and elastic-sided
boots, stood nobly erect, as if she thought someone really important had passed. In her right hand she held a
speaking trumpet, which she raised to her ear. Adam, drawing level with her as the traffic surged slowly forward,
murmured Clarissa! and the old lady looked at him sharply. []
The subject of Adams thesis had originally been, Language and Ideology in Modern Fiction but had been
whittled down by the Board of Studies until it now stood as The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern
English Novels. The whittling down didnt seem to have made his task any easier. He still hadnt decide which
three novels he was going to analyse, nor had he decided how long a long sentence was. Lawrence, he thought
hopefully, would produce lots of sentences where the issue would not be in doubt. []
And this morning on my way to the Museum, he concluded. I met Mrs Dalloway grown into an old woman.
[]
What exactly did the Superintendent say to you? Camel asked. I want to know exactly what he said. Did he
say, I hope you wont mind, but three Chinese gentlemen are looking at your desk?
Yes, he did, actually, said Adam, surprised. Thats exactly what he did say.
And what did you say?
I didnt say anything at first. I tell you, I felt pretty queer.

So what happened then?

Well, he looked a bit embarrassed, and said, It was Karl Marxs desk, you see. We often get visitors wanting to
see it.
So what did you say then?
Well, thats what I was going to tell you. I think I said: Mr Marx, he dead!
Camel and Pond looked meaningfully at each other. I told you, said Camel. Appleby is cracking up.
I can see, said Pond. Hes going to become one of the Museum eccentrics. Before we know it, hell be
shuffling around in slippers and muttering into a beard.
Its a special form of scholarly neurosis, said Camel. Hes no longer able to distinguish between life and
literature.
Oh yes I can, said Adam. Literature is mostly about having sex and not so much about having children. Life is
the other way round. []
What do you think of anus? said the man.
I beg your pardon?
The novelist, Kingsley Anus, said the man impatiently.
Oh, yes. I like his work. There are times when I think I belong to him more than to any of the others.
Please? said the man, frowning.
Well, you see, I have this theory, Adam who had just thought of it, said expansively. Has it ever occurred to
you how novelists are using up experience at a dangerous rate? No, I see it hasnt. Well, then, consider that
before the novel emerged as the dominant literary form, narrative literature dealt only with the
extraordinary or the allegorical with kings and queens, giants and dragons, sublime virtue and diabolic
evil. There was no risk of confusing that sort of thing with life, of course. But as soon as the novel got
going, you might pick up a book at any time and read about an ordinary chap called Joe Smith doing just
the sort of things you did yourself. Now, I know what youre going to say youre going to say that the
novelist still has to invent a lot. But thats just the point: thereve been such a fantastic number of novels
written in the last couple of centuries that theyve just about exhausted the possibilities of life. So all of us,
you see, are really enacting events that have already been written about in some novel or other. Of course,
most people dont realize this they fondly imagine that their little lives are unique Just as well, too,
because when you do tumble to it, the effect is very disturbing. []
On all sides a babble of academic conversation dinned in his ears.
My subject is the long poem in the nineteenth century
Once you start looking for Freudian symbols
This book on Browning
Poe was quite right. It is a contradiction in terms
[]
Three of the young men present were writing academic novels of manners. From time to time they detached
themselves from the main group of guests and retired to a corner to jot down observations and witty remarks in
little notebooks. Adam noticed one of them looking over the shoulders of the other two, and copying. []
Well, weve sorted out Mr Alibais little problem, Pond said. Hes going to work on the influence of the Kama
Sutra on contemporary fiction. []
As he walked unsteadily away from the phone, the people in the corridor falling back before him, he thought of
himself as a man set apart by a dangerous quest. For what was the house in Bayswater, dismal of aspect and
shrouded in fog, with its mad, key-rattling old queen, raven-haired, honey-tongued daughter, and murderous
minions insecurely pent in the dungeon below, but a Castle Perilous from with, mounted on his trusty scooter,
he, intrepid Sir Adam, sought to snatch the unholy grail of Egbert Merrymarshs scrofulous novel? If the success
of this quest, contrary to the old story, necessitated his fall from grace in the arms of the seductive maiden, then
so much the better. He had had enough of continence. []

He struggled in vain to recover the image of himself as a swashbuckling adventurer, bent single-mindedly on his
purpose, but prepared to accept imperturbably whatever willing female flesh chance threw in his path. All day
circumstances had cracked the whip and urged him through a bewildering variety of hoops, but so far he had not
been at a loss for a style in which to negotiate them. Now, when he most needed to assume a ready-made role,
the knack seemed to have deserted him. He was alone with himself again, the old Adam, a bare forked animal
with his own peculiar moral problem.
There were, of course, plenty of unfaithful husbands in literature: modern fiction, in particular, might be
described as a compendium of advice on the conduct of adultery. But he couldnt, off-hand, recall one who,
distracted and frustrated by the complexities of the married relation, had sought relief in the willing arms of
another woman only to find himself trammeled by the very same absurd scruples from which he had fled. []
As Adam stepped on to the fire escape, his trousers slipped down again. To save time, he took them off and
wound them round the Merrymarsh papers. The fog coiled damply around his bare legs, but he was grateful for
its cover. As he cautiously descended the ladder he was conscious of re-enacting one of the oldest roles in
literature. []
hes always in a dream, what was it he said, a novel where life kept taking the shape of literature, did you ever
hear anything so cracked, life is life and books are books and if he was a woman he wouldnt need to be told
that. []
[] he has this illusion that its only the birth control business which stops him from getting sex perfectly under
control its like his thesis he keeps saying if only I could get my notes in the right order the thesis would write
itself what was that he said suddenly when I thought hed fallen asleep Ive realized what the longest sentence in
English fiction is I wonder what it is he had such an idealist view of marriage when we were courting I dont
think hes recovered from the shock yet though I warned him perhaps he didnt listen to what I said then either
even that day at the sea I remember I suppose you could say that was when he proposed though wed assumed it
for some time I wasnt as starry-eyed as he was though I was pretty carried away I admit that beach with not a
soul in sight we bicycled for miles to find it because wed forgotten out costumes and we went swimming in our
underwear his pants were inside out I remember thats typical we spread our things on the sand to dry the trees
came down to the beach we sat in the shade and ate the sandwiches and drank the wine the footprints in the sand
were only ours the sea was empty it was like a desert island we lay down he took me in his arms shall we come
back here when were married he said perhaps I said he held me low down tight against him well make love in
this same spot he said my dress was so thin I could feel him hard against me perhaps well have children with us
I said then well come down at night he said perhaps we wont be able to afford to come at all I said youre not
very optimistic he said perhaps its better not to be I said Im going to be famous and earn lots of money he said
perhaps you wont love me then I said Ill always love you he said Ill prove it every night he kissed my throat
perhaps you think that now I said but I couldnt keep it up perhaps we will be happy I said of course we will he
said well have a nanny to look after the children perhaps we will I said by the way how many children are we
going to have as many as you like he said itll be wonderful youll see perhaps I will I said perhaps it will be
wonderful perhaps even though it wont be like you think perhaps that wont matter perhaps.
(David Lodge The British Museum is Falling Down)

[] O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets
and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses
and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower
of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and
how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with
my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my
arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was
going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
(James Joyce Ulysses)

AN AFTERWORD
This example of interior monologue brings me to the second aspect of The British Museum is Falling Down on
which it seems appropriate to comment in this afterword: the element of literary parody and pastiche. In looking
for a character, or pair of characters, and a milieu, in which to explore the Catholic-sexual theme, I turned to an
idea I had casually jotted down some time before, for a comic novel about a postgraduate student of English
literature working in the British Museum Reading Room, whose life keeps taking on the thematic colouring of
the fictional texts he is studying. In this I was drawing not only on my own experience of writing a thesis (on the
Catholic Novel from the Oxford Movement to the Present Day) in the British Museum, but also on more recent
research into the way fictional worlds are constructed in language work completed just before I left for the
United States on the Harkness Fellowship, and published a few months after this novel as Language of Fiction
(1966), my first book of academic criticism. That, then, was my basic concept of the novel: a young, married,
impoverished Catholic research student, racked by anxiety about his wifes putative fourth pregnancy, would be
propelled through a series of picaresque adventures centering on the British Museum Reading Room, each
episode echoing, through parody, pastiche and allusion, the work of an established modern novelist. The shifts of
tone and narrative technique involved would be naturalized by making the hero prone to daydreams, fantasies,
and hallucinations, which would in turn be motivated by his chronic anxiety about his marital circumstances.
The basic irony of Adam Applebys plight is that the only element in his life that seems authentically his, and
not already written by some novelist, is the very source of his anxiety. Its a special form of scholarly
neurosis, says his friend Camel, as Adam recounts a Conradian experience in the Reading Room. Hes no
longer able to distinguish between life and literature. Oh yes I am, Adam retorts. Literature is mostly about
having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
No doubt the use of parody in this book was also, for me, a way of coping with what the American
critic Harold Bloom has called Anxiety of Influence the sense every young writer must have of the
daunting weight of the literary tradition he has inherited, the necessity and yet seeming impossibility of
doing something in writing that has not been done before. There is a passage in Flann OBriens At SwimTwo-Birds that is propos:
The modern novel should be largely a work of reference: Most authors spend their time saying what has
been said before usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the
reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would
effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimblerigggers, and persons of inferior education from an
understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation []
There are ten passages of parody or pastiche in the novel, mimicking (in alphabetical order, not the order of
their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce,
Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo, author of Hadrian VII), C.P. Snow, and Virginia Woolf.
There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Goldings Free Fall, and to literary schools and
subgenres: the Chesterbelloc style of essay writing is caricatured in Egbert Merrymarsh, and there is a
postgraduate sherry party scene that was supposed to be a kind of distillation of the post-Amis campus novel
(three aspirant novelists are present at the occasion, and taking notes on it) but which bears the impress
especially of Malcolm Bradburys Eating People is Wrong (1959). []
I was well aware that the extensive use of parody and pastiche was a risky device. There was, in particular,
the danger of puzzling and alienating the reader who wouldnt recognize the allusions. My aim was to
make the narrative and its frequent shifts of style fully intelligible and satisfying to such a reader, while
offering the more literary reader the extra entertainment of spotting the parodies. This in turn meant that
the parodies had to be comparatively discreet, especially in the early part of the book. In the later chapters they
become longer, more elaborate and more overt. For aesthetic reasons I wanted the last of these passages to be the
most obvious, most appropriate and most ambitious parody of all. At the same time, I was aware, as the book
approached its conclusion, that Adam Applebys marital problems needed to be seen, however briefly, from
another perspective, that of his wife, Barbara. But could such an abrupt and belated shift in point of view be
contrived without an effect of clumsy improvisation? To solve this problem, and the problem of finding a
climactic parody, in a single stroke, was one of those moments of happy inspiration that make the labour of

composing literary fictions worthwhile. In what famous modern novel did the character of the wife, up to the
penultimate chapter an object in her husbands thoughts and perceptions, become in the last chapter the
subjective consciousness of the narrative, and give her own wry, down-to-earth, feminine perspective on him and
their relationship? Where but in James Joyces Ulysses, the novel which (I belatedly recognized) had, in limiting
the duration of its action to a single day, and in varying the style of the narrative from episode to episode,
provided me with the basic model for The British Museum is Falling Down. Molly Blooms famous,
unpunctuated interior monologue lent itself to my purposes with uncanny appropriateness: my novel could end,
like Joyces, with the hero returned to his home, reunited with his spouse, asleep in the marital bed, while the
more wakeful wife drowsily pondered the foibles of men, the paradoxes of sexuality and the history of their
courtship and marriage. For Mollys keyword, yes, I would substitute a more tentative word, as more
appropriate to Barbaras character and the mingled notes of optimism and resignation on which I wanted to end
the novel. I had always intended that Barbaras immediate anxiety should be relieved in the last chapter. When I
recalled that Mollys period also started in the last episode of Ulysses I knew, if I had not known it before, that
there is such a thing as writers luck.
While the novel was in production with MacGibbon & Kee (the publishers of my two previous novels,
later to be swallowed up by Granada) I discussed with my editor, Timothy OKeefe, the advisability of drawing
attention to the parodies in the blurb on the dust jacket. He was against doing so, and I accepted his advice. I
later came to think that the reader is entitled to a hint about what to look for in a book. Very few reviewers
recognized the full extent of the parodies, and a surprising number made no reference to them at all. Some
complained that it was a somewhat derivative novel without perceiving that this effect might be deliberate and
systematic. When an American edition was published later, the blurb carefully drew attention to the parodies,
and they were duly noticed and generally approved. []

DAVID LODGE Changing Places

In Morris Zapp's view, the root of all critical error was a naive confusion of literature with life. Life was
transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things,
literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be about: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was
about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it
appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel considerable ingenuity and perception were needed to
crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the
dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy could kill his uncle, or the Ancient
Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought that Jane Austen's
novels were about finding Mr Right). The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all
kinds of heresy and nonsense: to 'liking* and 'not liking' books for instance, preferring some authors to others
and suchlike whimsicalities which, he had constantly to remind his students, were of no conceivable interest to
anyone except themselves (sometimes he shocked them by declaring that, speaking personally on this low,
subjective level, he found Jane Austen a pain in the ass). He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naive
theories of realism because they threatened his masterwork: obviously, if you applied an open-ended system
(life) to a closed one (literature) the possible permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became
an impossibility. Everything he knew about England warned him that the heresy flourished there with peculiar
virulence, no doubt encouraged by the many concrete reminders of the actual historic existence of great authors
that littered the country - baptismal registers, houses with plaques, secondbest beds, reconstructed studies,
engraved tombstones and suchlike trash. Well, one thing he was not going to do while he was in England was to
visit Jane Austen's grave. But he must have spoken the thought aloud, because Mary Makepeace asks him if Jane
Austen was the name of his greatgrandmother. He says he thinks it unlikely. []
The Zapps live in a luxurious house, in some disarray when I called, at the top of an incredibly steep hill. There
are two young Zapps, twins, called rather preposterously Elizabeth and Darcy (Zapp is a Jane Austen man, of
course - indeed the Jane Austen man in the opinion of many). []

He leaned back into it, put his feet on the desk and lit a cigar. 'Well now,' he said to the three dejected-looking
students.' What are you bursting to discuss this morning ?'
'Jane Austen,' mumbled the boy with the beard, shuffling some sheets of foolscap covered with evil-looking
handwriting.
' Oh yeah. What was the topic ?'
' I've done it on Jane Austen's moral awareness.'
' That doesn't sound like my style.'
'I couldn't understand the title you gave me, Professor Zapp.'
'Eros and Agape in the later novels, wasn't it? What was the problem?'
The student hung his head. Morris felt in the mood for a little display of high-powered exposition. Agape, he
explained, was a feast through which the early Christians expressed their love for one another, it symbolized
non-sexual, non-individualized love, it was represented in Jane Austen's novels by social events that confirmed
the solidarity of middle-class agrarian capitalist communities or welcomed new members into those communities
balls and dinner parties and sight-seeing expeditions and so on. Eros was of course sexual love and was
represented in Jane Austen by courtship scenes, tete-a-tetes, walking in pairs - any encounter between the
heroine and the man she loved, or thought she loved. Readers of Jane Austen, he emphasized, gesturing freely
with his cigar, should not be misled by the absence of overt reference to physical sexuality in her fiction into
supposing that she was indifferent or hostile to it. On the contrary, she invariably came down on the side of Eros
against Agape - on the side, that is, of the private communion of lovers over against the public communion of
social events and gatherings which invariably caused pain and distress (think for instance of the disastrous nature
of group expeditions, to Sotherton in Mansfield Park, to Box Hill in Emma, to Lyme Regis in Persuasion).
Getting into his stride, Morris demonstrated that Mr Elton was obviously implied to be impotent because there
was no lead in the pencil that Harriet Smith took from him; and the moment in Persuasion when Captain
Wentworth lifted the little brat Walter off Anne Elliot's shoulders . . . He snatched up the text and read with
feeling: '. . . she found herself in the state of being released from him . . . Before she realized that Captain
Wentworth had done it . . . he was resolutely borne away . . . Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly
speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles with the most disordered
feelings." How about that?' he concluded reverently. 'If that isn't an orgasm, what is it ? ' He looked up into three
flabbergasted faces. []
Sitting there, taking it all in with the same leisurely relish as he sucked the fortified black coffee through its filter
of whipped cream, Philip felt himself finally converted to expatriation; and he saw himself, too, as part of a great
historical process - a reversal of that cultural Gulf Stream which had in the past swept so many Americans to
Europe in search of Experience. Now it was not Europe but the West Coast of America that was the furthest rim
of experiment in life and art, to which one made one's pilgrimage in search of liberation and enlightenment; and
so it was to American literature that the European now looked for a mirror-image of his quest. He thought of
James's The Ambassadors and Strether's injunction to Little Bilham, in the Paris garden, to 'Live . . . live all you
can; it's a mistake not to,' feeling himself to partake of both characters, the speaker who had discovered this
insight too late, and the young man who might still profit by it. He thought of Henry Miller sitting over a beer in
some scruffy Parisian cafe with his notebook on his knee and the smell of cunt still lingering on his fingers and
he felt some distant kinship with that coarse, uneven, priapic imagination. He understood American Literature
for the first time in his life that afternoon, sitting in Pierre's on Cable Avenue as the river of Plotinus life flowed
past, understood its prodigality and indecorum, its yea-saying heterogeneity, understood Walt Whitman who laid
end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who
split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor and smuggled into a
book addressed to the most puritanical reading public the world has ever known a chapter on the whale's
foreskin and got away with it; understood why Mark Twain nearly wrote a sequel to Huckleberry Firm in which
Tom Sawyer was to sell Huck into slavery, and why Stephen Crane wrote his great war-novel first and
experienced war afterwards, and what Gertrude Stein meant when she said that 'anything one is remembering is
a repetition, but existing as a human being, that is being, listening and hearing is never repetition'; understood all
that, though he couldn't have explained it to his students, some thoughts do often lie too deep for seminars, and
understood, too, at last, what it was that he wanted to tell Hilary. []