Discussing Chaucer and Shakespeare, Bloom coins the interesting but enigmatic phrase “picnic of selves”: “A critic addicted to what is now called “language” but might more aptly be called the “priority of language over meaning” will not be much given to searching for meaning in persons, real or imagined. But persons, at once real and imagined, are the fundamental basis of the experiential art of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Chaucer and Shakespeare know, beyond knowing, the labyrinthine ways in which the individual self is always a picnic of selves.”
It’s a nice turn of phrase, but I’m not sure what Bloom means.
See Harold Bloom, ed. “Introduction,” Bloom’s Guides: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008.