Poets tend to think of themselves as stars because their deepest desire is to be an influence, rather than to be influenced, but even in the strongest, whose desire is accomplished, the anxiety of having been formed by influence still persists. He thereby gains an illusory sense of having originated the old masterpiece rather than having been influenced by it. To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the rewriting of the father. Thus the ephebe revises, rewrites, or as Bloom usually puts it, misreads the old poem. (2) If he is strong enough he deploys certain strategies (the six "ratios" specified by Bloom) (3) that enable him to "swerve" away from the precursor at the point where the aspirant feels he deviated from what would have been the right course.
(1) It is the enactment of the latecomer's anxiety lest he be imaginatively constricted by his precursor, since "everything has already been said." The younger poet thus adopts a highly charged "oedipal" relation to his "father" poet. According to Bloom, any strong poem, no matter what its ostensible topic, is essentially about an earlier poem (or poems). My treatment of Truffaut's relation to Hitchcock draws heavily on my (mis)understanding of Harold Bloom's theory of literary influence. Such a case study should prove particularly rewarding because Vertigo holds a special position within Hitchcock's oeuvre, and it is intensely reflexive in that it is consciously concerned with the artistic act of filmmaking. (Of course the influence exceeds these works by far.) On his way toward defining his own voice (as well as shaping the modern cinema of the early sixties) Truffaut both absorbed from Hitchcock and rebelled against him.
This paper examines the influence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) on two of Francois Truffaut's films, Tirez Sur le Pianiste (1960) and Jules et Jim (1961).
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