I think that Shakespeare had the first sense I know
of what he actually called the self-same
which is the persistence
of identity through all kinds of vicissitudes and change
In another (more recent) video about The Anatomy of Influence (2011) Bloom remarks about the meaning of "invention" in the subtitle of the Shakespeare book: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (c. 43:30):
everybody even if they more or less tolerated the book smashed at the title and saidthere's a great deal about both ourselves
what nonsense to say he invented us
obviously had they read the great Samuel Johnson
they would have known that the great man said
the essence of poetry is invention
that is to say discovery, originality
and if you say that Shakespeare invented the human
what you mean quite
modestly but accurately is
and about one another
and about all of life
that was always there
but we would not have seen it [...]
except for Shakespeare
With that in mind, I've been looking through a collection of essays, Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (Palgrave 2001), which has an essay by Richard Levine, "Bloom, Bardolatry, and Characterolatry," where he asserts (p. 76):
Finally, 1 do not think we can take seriously Bloom's claim about Shakespeare's "invention of the human." I have appended a partial list of books (I am sure there are many more) that announce the discovery that the traits we call "human"-self-consciousness, individual identity, subjectivity, etc.-were invented in some particular period (ranging from Homeric Greece to eighteenth-century England), which, by another remarkable coincidence, usually turns out to be the period in which the discoverer specializes. The obvious truth, however, is that these traits were not invented by any specific people at any specific time and place; rather, they slowly developed over many thousands of years, along with the evolution of our brains and nervous systems, since they can be found in some of the oldest texts we have, in the most "primitive" tribal cultures, and even, in a rudimentary form, in our primate cousins. Of course, there have been inventions (or discoveries) at various times of new modes of conceptualizing these traits in philosophic and scientific discourse and of new modes of representing them in literature and the other arts. I believe that we can credit Shakespeare with an artistic invention of this kind in a number of the soliloquies in his middle and late periods that show a character going through a stressful thinking process (and, in one of Bloom's favorite phrases, "overhearing himself"; see Bloom 1998, xvii), unlike the static form of soliloquy used in the plays of his predecessors (and of his own early period), where a character simply expressed and expanded upon some idea or emotion. But Bloom transforms this invention in the representation of the human into the invention of the human itself.
As the paragraph opens, Levin is obviously "smashing" Bloom's title. By the end of the paragraph, however, Levin has equally obviously granted the somewhat different and weaker claim that Bloom asserts is what he was thinking all along. So, why didn't Bloom say that, explicitly, time and again in the book? I suppose anyone with half a brain would have figured that something like that's probably what he really meant; but if he doesn't say so explicitly, how can you know? Is he playing some kind of weird power-tripping Socratic guessing game?
It seems to me the Bloom has a bad "last mile problem"? What do I mean by that? Let me quote from the Investopedia:
The last mile describes the short geographical segment of delivery of communication and media services or the delivery of products to customers located in dense areas. Last mile logistics tend to be complex and costly to providers of goods and services who deliver to these areas.
We're talking about ideas. In that context I mean "the last mile" to be the explicit formulation of an idea that is latent in some discourse. It may exist there indirectly, or in metaphor, but the idea isn't explicit. Thus, the idea is not made clear. That is certainly the case of Bloom's central idea, "the anxiety of influence." It became the title of his 1973 book (which I've read), he revisited in three subsequent books (which I've not read), and it keeps coming up over and over, and he keeps revising it and qualifying it. But he never takes it over that last mile. It remains stillborn.
