William blake and the body

Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books.. Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated

Tristanne J Connolly

William Blake and the Body

Frontispiece William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion Plate 2(1).

William Blake and

© Tristanne J Connolly 2002All rights reserved No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataConnolly, Tristanne, J., 1970–

William Blake and the body / Tristanne J Connolly

p cm

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 0-333-96848-4

1 Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Criticism and interpretation

2 Blake, William, 1757–1827 – Knowledge – Anatomy 3 Body, Human, inliterature 4 Body, Human, in art I Title

5 Divisions and Comminglings: Sons and Daughters 125

6 Divisions and Comminglings: Emanations and Spectres 155

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion Plate 2(1)

Reproduced with permission from the William Blake Trust’s

edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books ii2.1 William Blake Elohim Creating Adam © Tate, London 2001. 262.2 W Pink after Agostino Carlini Smugglerius Royal Academy

2.3 William Cowper Myotomia Reformata Page 8 The

Wellcome Library, London 492.4 William Cowper Anatomy of Humane Bodies Table 45 The

Wellcome Library, London 502.5 William Cowper Anatomy of Humane Bodies Appendix 3

The Wellcome Library, London 512.6 William Blake Jerusalem Plate 25 Reproduced with

permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of

Blake’s Illuminated Books 522.7 William Blake Jerusalem Plate 24 Reproduced with

permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition

of Blake’s Illuminated Books 542.8 William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion Plate 6

Reproduced with permission from the William Blake

Trust’s edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books 552.9 William Cowper Anatomy of Humane Bodies Table 60

The Wellcome Library, London 56

2.10 William Cowper Anatomy of Humane Bodies Table 62

The Wellcome Library, London 575.1 William Blake Jerusalem Plate 69 Reproduced with

permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of

Blake’s Illuminated Books 1505.2 Francesco Saverio Clavigero A History of Mexico 1787

Plate viii, page 279 Benson Latin American Collection

University of Texas at Austin 1516.1 William Blake Jerusalem Plate 35 [31] Reproduced with

permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of

Blake’s Illuminated Books 1617.1 William Blake Jerusalem Plate 95 Reproduced with

permission from the William Blake Trust’s edition of

Blake’s Illuminated Books 200

One would think there would be nothing more to say about the body ingeneral, or the body in Blake ‘The Human Form Divine’ is Blake’s self-proclaimed central image and ultimate reality; the human body is what welive in every day, what we are, what is most familiar to us Yet, the body is

as alien as it is commonplace, as unfathomable as it is known: think of howmany involuntary movements, such as heartbeat, are essential to its regularfunctioning, and how unexpectedly and inexorably disease and death canovertake the body Blake’s depiction of the body communicates this: the bodyboth provides and threatens identity The simple question, ‘What does Blakethink of the body?’, is difficult to answer, even though understanding thesignificance of his main preoccupation would be essential to understandinghis work The body is Blake’s preoccupation not because of a confident admi-ration of it, but rather a troubled obsession He has a love/hate relationshipwith his favourite image; he at once reviles and glorifies the human body.This paradox could be swiftly resolved by claiming that, in fact, there are notreally any bodies in Blake at all The things that happen to Blake’s charac-ters could not happen to real bodies: wives do not burst from their husbands’chests in globes of blood; poets do not possess other poets by entering theirleft feet in the form of falling stars; and the city of London is not normallyaccessed by entering anyone’s bosom These are symbolic characters, it could

be argued: allegories whose bodies are mere vehicles for meaning If Blake’swere a simple dualism, then not only his characters’ bodies, but also the realhuman body, would be only vehicles which could be discarded for the sake

of their more valuable contents However, not even the most stilted allegorycan completely transcend the symbols which embody its meaning, andBlake’s allegory is much more a tangled web than a nut in a shell He takeshis symbols very seriously Coleridge saw in Blake a ‘despotism of symbols’,and Yeats christened Blake with the title, ‘literal realist of the imagination’

(Coleridge, in Bentley, Critical Heritage 55; Yeats 119) Blake’s allegorical

char-acters are endowed in both design and verse with bones and blood, fibresand flesh; indeed, they are depicted in all gory detail Because of this, I takethem as bodies; because Blake presents them as bodies, he must be makingstatements on the body through his choice of images The statements hemakes do not boil down to another possible simple answer, that the physi-cal body is bad and the spiritual body good and both ultimately separatefrom each other Blake often caricatures the mortal body as pathetic, restric-tive and painful, and there is truth in his exaggeration: again, think of allthat cannot be controlled and all that must be suffered in mortal humanform Yet, his adulation is not saved exclusively for incorporeal spiritual

forms He often celebrates sexuality, and even admires nerves and organs Inthe end, those nerves and organs are immortalized, making Blake’s eternalbody most definitely a body.

Because the body is basic to human experience and fundamental to Blake’sart and verse, it is an inexhaustible topic Anthropologist Mary Douglasargues that ‘the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system’(115) Because the range of the body’s symbolism is so broad, thinking aboutthe body involves thinking about other things The result is that, thoughthere has been recently a tangible wave of interest in writing about the body,the works which represent it do not necessarily cohere into a body of work

on one subject Of course they do not all see the body as having the samesignificance, because they study the body through various disciplines, and

in various cultures of various eras But even beyond this variation, differentworks on the body attach themselves to vastly different issues There areeconomic bodies, political bodies, medical bodies, sexual bodies, and more,each with numerous subdivisions and interrelations A book on Blake andthe body could be about many things; too many things The way I ap-proached the topic was to read Blake’s works and categorize the differentkinds of bodies I perceived there; having categorized them, I would try todetermine the characteristics of each category, and explore the significance

of those characteristics through whichever historical, cultural and literarycontexts they suggested The general categories I deduced were: texts asbodies; bodies in Blake’s designs; bodies coming into existence, or beingshaped; bodies which split off from or fuse with other bodies; the ideal,eternal body; bodies which dissolve into landscapes; bodies which are alsoplaces, such as cities or countries To focus the project, I decided that itsborder would be the border between the body and the world ConsideringBlake’s bodies in relationship to their environment, and as symbols ofnations or political systems, would be a fruitful topic for a separate study;there is a wealth of material, some of it already approached from a differ-

ent direction in Jason Whittaker’s William Blake and the Myths of Britain That

the remaining categories continued to shape my work will be seen from aglance at the Contents list, and the chapter outline provided at the end ofthis preface Concentrating on how bodies are formed and connect witheach other lent itself to a number of contexts, one of the most central beinggender

Gender has been a tortured topic in Blake studies, until recently stymied

by the division between critics who see Blake offering an ideal, liberatingvision of equality between the sexes, and those who consider that vision to

be fundamentally misogynistic There is evidence to support both stances

in Blake, and the factors involved in interpreting the evidence allow muchleeway for personal critical desires Many passages central to the questionare placed in the mouths of ‘fallen’ characters who could be speaking underdelusions the reader is meant to catch and disapprove The fallen/eternal

distinction in Blake can be a convenient trapdoor to save him from manysins: anything unpalatable can be explained away as fallen Because onemight hope to find Blake’s ideals, unfiltered through any point of view, inthe eternal realm, the question of Blake’s feminism or lack of it devolves to

a great extent on the place of the female in eternity

Though Blake creates a seemingly equal unification of male and female

in eternity, that ‘human’ is overridingly male Jean Hagstrum, in The

Romantic Body, contends that ‘Blake did break away from the prison of his

own sex long enough to define and envision an intersexual world of intensemutuality and equality’ (140), but his arguments are undermined by embarrassed explanations of exceptions A good example of the difficultiesHagstrum runs into is found in his response to the most problematic passagefor defenders of a non-misogynist Blake:

It is true that Blake says that in Eternity woman ‘has no Will of her own’

(Last Judgment, E., 562) But if woman is denied will in Eternity, we should

remember that under the Covenant of Forgiveness the new and gentleJehovah also lacks will Will tends to be absent from the state ofhighest fulfillment: other qualities and other quests and a different orientation toward the self make it irrelevant or obtrusive So it is no lossthat Jerusalem in particular and idealized women in general lack it

(138)Hagstrum must fudge definitions to hold his point; and he does not take onBlake’s preceding words which indicate that the absence of will is due to

‘Woman’ being ‘the Emanation of Man’ Brenda Webster finds, ‘althoughBlake announces the end of sexual organization, male sexuality continues

to stand as a model for the human, while the female is either incorporated

or isolated restrictively in Beulah’ She holds that ‘in his late Christian

prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, [Blake] suggests that the female should

cease even to exist independently and become reabsorbed into the body ofman where she belongs’ (‘Sexuality’ 203, 194) Alicia Ostriker agrees: ‘at itsmost extreme, Blake’s vision goes beyond proposing an ideal of dominance-submission or priority-inferiority between the genders’ (which is badenough) ‘Blake wishfully imagines that the female can be re-absorbed bythe male, be contained within him, and exist Edenically not as a substan-tial being but as an attribute the ideal female functions as a medium ofinterchange among real, that is to say male, beings’ (163) Essick, in hisarticle, ‘William Blake’s “Female Will” and its Biographical Context’, con-siders the argument that

females in Blake’s allegorical poetry must be understood metaphorically.They are the representatives of otherness within the human psyche andits projection into an alienated nature He is making use of sexual divi-

sion to figure forth more fundamental psychological and metaphysicalproblems.

(616)One might ask, what is a more fundamental problem than sexual division?One might also ask, if ‘they’ figure forth otherness in the ‘human’ psyche,does that not exclude ‘females’ from the category of the ‘human’? From afemale point of view, the female is not other Essick finds ‘forceful rebuttals’offered by ‘feminist critics’, including this: ‘the argument that females are the metaphoric vehicles for genderless meanings is blind to how tropes,and a poet’s choice of the lingual signs he manipulates into tropes, carryunavoidable ideological orientations, in part through their non-metaphoricreferences’ (Essick, ‘Female Will’ 617) Especially since Blake’s personifica-tions are so fleshy, it is difficult to consider his use of gender as meremetaphor There is nothing ‘mere’ about metaphors, which can turn thesupposedly genderless Christian God into a father and an old man Thecritics Essick refers to are David Aers, Diana Hume George and Susan Fox.Aers finds that Blake’s use of ‘dominant male ideology inevitably feedsback into the realm of human interrelations from which it has been derived’(37) For George, ‘Blake’s portrayals of sexuality and of women are prob-lems of symbol formation that express themselves in the limitations of language’ (199) Fox will not discount either of two ‘conflicting attitudes’:metaphor cannot ‘apologize away Blake’s occasional shrillness towardswomen’, yet ‘one cannot ignore the abstract quality of his sexual divisions,because to do so is to miss the vastest implications of his observations and

to make those observations much more strident and condemnatory than

we have evidence they were meant to be’ (509) Such equivocation weakensher position, falling into apology Shrillness may be part of Blake’s ‘vastestimplications’

Going to Blake’s prose to avoid statements in the mouths of unreliablecharacters does not result in a clear, definitive picture because in works such

as A Vision of the Last Judgment he is writing for a particular purpose, and at

a particular time, so his statements may not be equally applicable to hiswhole oeuvre Another trapdoor for any unattractive opinions in Blake isthe traditional theory that Blake changed between his early and late works,becoming more otherworldly and misogynistic, transferring his radicaldesires for liberty to the spiritual realm and consigning the evil natural worldand women to each other I call this a trapdoor not because I believe Blakenever altered his opinions; after all, that would breed reptiles of the mind

(MHH 19:7–9) However, in Blake’s case, it is the changing opinions that

apparently produce mental reptiles It seems to me it would be helpful tocome up with a way to account for the relationship between his apparentlycontradictory assertions, rather than to say he changed his mind, or even

to look for what caused him to change his mind This is not asking for a

reconciliation of contraries so that one of them disappears; rather, it is anattempt to answer a rather Lockean personal identity question posed byDavid Punter, which for me sums up the Blake gender debate: ‘We are forced

to ask how it can be that the same writer who sees so acutely into the pressures on individuals caused by ethical rigidity and repression seems atthe same time to construct such an apparently male supremacist space’(‘Trauma’ 481) Like Punter, I feel disappointed in Blake, because he makes

a conscientious effort toward gender inclusiveness, and to a certain extentsucceeds, but not completely He does not go far enough What blocks him?

A dark epiphany, placed at a certain historical moment, is not a fully quate answer His later works are not devoid of fervour for sexual and politi-

ade-cal liberty combined: there is the response to trials of homosexuals in Milton

found by Christopher Hobson; there are the eloquent pleas of Jerusalem andMary for forgiveness of sexual sin and against warlike sacrificial violence

(Hobson, 113–43; J 20–2, 61) Likewise, his earlier works are not devoid of

misogynist hints, or at least bugs in any system of Blakean feminism There

is in Visions of the Daughters of Albion the ‘harem fantasy’ which, for Helen

Bruder, ‘marks the moment of Oothoon’s most acute apostasy, as she offers

to become an energetically ensnaring procuress’ (82) as an early indicationthat if Blake’s women are liberated, they are liberated to give sexual plea-

sure to men There is in The First Book of Urizen Enitharmon as ‘the first

female now separate’ (16:10) as a foreshadowing echo of that embarrassinglater statement that in Eternity the female has no will of her own Morearguably, there is the failure of both Thel and Oothoon to get what theywant – perhaps a compassionate presentation of women’s frustration,perhaps even an endorsement of female community among the daughters

of Albion and in the vales of Har – but why not an imagining of femalefreedom? Why only sympathy for women in a female sphere, and womenwho fail? If Blake does not envision a full equality between genders and lib-eration for both, it is not because he could not, but because he would not

As Punter suggests, Blake was able to see through many values which wereimposed as unquestionable by his society Other concerns more important

to him clashed with the project of imagining female equality and liberty,and delineating these concerns will be a task of the following chapters

What has recently given a kick-start to the study of Blake and gender andsent it in new and prolific directions is the application of new historicismand cultural studies, and the shift from feminist criticism to gender studies.These developments occurred since the two landmark books on Blake and

the body appeared: Thomas Frosch’s Awakening of Albion and Anne Mellor’s

Blake’s Human Form Divine, both published in 1974 These new approaches

provide new opportunities to rethink Blake’s most central image My concerns and methods in doing so are comparable to those of the two im-

portant recent studies mentioned above: Helen Bruder’s William Blake and

the Daughters of Albion and Christopher Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality.

Bruder’s book is a masterwork of new historicist criticism She takes by thescruff of its neck the rather flabby argument that apologizes for Blake’s views

of women by appealing to the limitations of his historical context, and tests

it mercilessly, with positive and fascinating results She pursues in detail thequestion of what feminism was in the 1790s, and places Blake in it as arather forward-looking figure However, she still finds flaws in Blake’s femi-nism, such as that action of Oothoon’s; she ascribes Oothoon’s failure

to ‘historical considerations’ which forbid the conception of a solution (88) Other scholars notable for historicizing Blake are Jon Mee and DavidWorrall In order to give precision to their researches, it was wise for them

to concentrate on Blake’s earlier works Their practice of contextualizingBlake in the high and low culture of Britain of his time is illuminating,though, not just to works produced in the 1790s; my study, taking in Blake’swhole oeuvre, carries this approach through his later prophecies (counter-ing their reputation as otherworldly) Hobson and I both take advantage ofthe best of both worlds, combining gender criticism with historicism.Hobson takes a queer theory perspective on Blake, while mine is a widergender studies one; Hobson considers Blake to succeed in endorsing andempowering liberty for male and female, heterosexual and homosexual,while I examine the shortcomings of his ideals, and the motivations whichcontribute to them Though it was back in 1982 that W.J.T Mitchell pre-dicted critics would ‘rediscover the dangerous Blake’ since he was ‘now safelycanonized’ and ‘ready to take a little abuse’, the need and profit of such

an approach continues (Mitchell 410 –11) Hobson, who notes that critics

in the 1980s and 1990s largely ignored Mitchell’s exhortations, explicitlyresponds to the questions Mitchell asks about Blake’s obscenity (Hobson xii)

My impulse to confront the dangerous Blake comes from a deep conviction

of the strangeness of his work, that to normalize him is to lose somethingvaluable, even at the price of finding something undesirable Blake is scary;

a good part of the power of his work derives from its bizarreness, a goodpart of which in turn derives from his simultaneous adoration and abomi-nation of the human body

As explained above, this book is organized around five of the categories

of somatic imagery I found in Blake’s works: the categories dealing with thebody’s relationship to itself, to the self it embodies, and to other bodies Thetext as body is the first category of imagery, explored in the first chapter andthroughout One substantial chapter is then devoted to a particular aspect

of Blake’s textual bodies: the human figures in Blake’s graphic art Then, intwo chapters on Urizen and Reuben, I discuss central passages describinghow Blake envisions the beginnings of the material body The birth imageryinvolved in those passages becomes more alienating as I move on to treat

in two chapters multiple bodies which split from and unify with each other.The fifth kind of body imagery, upon which the others rely as either imi-

tations or parodies, is that of the ideal, eternal body, which occupies thestudy’s final chapter.

The questions of whether identity is defined or protean, how identity isaffected by birth, and how language and literature are affected by these con-cerns, beg for comparison with Julia Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic, thesymbolic, and the abject Despite their similar concerns, Kristeva is rarelyconsidered in relation to Blake They both struggle with the advantages ofhaving a flexible identity, and the dangers of being scattered and undefined.Digging back into the origins of Kristeva’s thought, I find that Mary Douglas’

theories in Purity and Danger (which Kristeva makes use of in Powers of Horror)

are also a valuable way to explain the dynamic of the relationship Blakeenvisions between his bodily text and its reader Blake makes use of whatDouglas would call the sacredness of bodily borders to gain a certain degree

of control over who his audience is and how they read his works Blakecreates different kinds of entry points, or orifices, in his works: while theyallow readers access to the body that is the text, the transgression theyrequire of readers ensures that the squeamish are repulsed, while the braveare challenged

In the chapter entitled ‘Graphic Bodies’, I examine anatomical art as aninfluence on Blake His graphic figures involve criticism of eighteenth-century anatomy books With particular reference to William Cowper (an anatomist who drew many of his own figures) and William Hunter (Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy while Blake attended), I assertthat Blake uses echoes of anatomical art to question empirical observation

of the body, and offer the possibility of dissection by imagination The arttheories of Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth and Johann Winckelmanncontextualize Blake’s radical contribution to controversies over representa-tion, and pain in art, while psychological and physiological theories of sym-pathy (Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Robert Whytt) elucidate the powerfuland intimate reactions Blake sought for his works A comparison of howBurke and Blake use the terms ‘pity’ and ‘delight’ reveals that Blake sees sym-pathy as a threat to individual identity True sympathy is not enabled byputting oneself in the place of another, but rather by becoming fully oneself.The relationship between body and soul is central to my commentary onBlake’s graphic bodies That chapter begins with a discussion of Blake’s print,

Elohim Creating Adam, an important visual depiction of how the physical

body comes to be In the two following chapters, I explicate central versepassages on the human body’s beginnings: the embodiment narratives ofUrizen and Reuben While these embodiments borrow images from foetaldevelopment and birth, they are not ordinary births I claim that Blake’svariations on the childbearing process betray an obsession with birth Thisobsession arises from a recognition of the problems of parturition: the limitations of physical existence, the pitfalls of parent-child relationships,

and the possibilities of malformation and miscarriage Blake’s metamorphicfoetal imagery takes off from Ovid’s process-fascinated descriptions ofchange to suggest that the new, strange form is our familiar human body.

It also reflects the protean nature of Blake’s creative works; the meaning ofBlake’s birth imagery applies equally to humans and artworks The terrify-ing aspect of uncanny growth and change culminates in miscarriage imagerythrough which Blake depicts the failure of creation, both human and artis-tic I offer some evidence for a biographical basis for Blake’s treatment ofmiscarriage in his poetry (Catherine Blake possibly suffering one or morefailed pregnancies), but I concentrate on explicating Blake’s poetic imagery.From it I conclude that Blake ‘perversely’ values nonreproductive sexuality

He expands the possibilities of what sexual activity can produce, such aspersonified emotions and artworks

From the bizarre birth of Urizen and the failed birth of Reuben, I move

on to examine one of the few Blake characters born normally, from awoman’s womb: Orc Through studying the Oedipal suggestions of his nativ-ity, alongside its origins in Satan’s family romance with Sin and Death in

Paradise Lost, I demonstrate that in Blake, children (and mothers) can be

seen as facets of the father’s personality: each human is a family At timesproliferating, and at times reuniting in monstrous conglomerated forms, the children of Albion enable Blake to present a vast confusion of diver-sification and unification I argue that sons and daughters (along with emanations and spectres, the subject of the next chapter) dramatize the multiplicity inherent in the Blakean human The work of RenJ Girard allows

me to connect the identity-blurring involved in Oedipal relationships to theacts of human sacrifice perpetrated by the Sons and Daughters of Albion in

Blake’s Jerusalem They are flesh-bound attempts to establish individual

iden-tity and cross bodily borders

That Blake’s human is manifold in itself, not just in its offspring or itsfallen manifestations, is revealed by his depiction of emanations and spec-tres Emanations and spectres split, painfully and gorily, from the human ofwhom they are constituent parts: psychic components separate and becomeindependent personifications This divisibility of both flesh and spirit I show

to be an exaggerated outgrowth of Locke’s and Hume’s questioning of sonal identity Unlike the emanations of another manifold being – Wisdomand the Devil, and the Son and the Spirit as personified aspects of God –the intellectual births from Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ are depicted viscerally Their separations are fantasies of male mothering which reflect

per-on other creative processes, especially that of Blake’s illuminated books inwhich they are described and pictured Emanations and spectres, like God’shypostases, can help, hinder, and even become, creative productions

Blake suggests that the multiple aspects of the human personality, which

in the fallen world may work against each other, in eternity are reunified inthe human form while retaining their individuality My final chapter con-

centrates on Blake’s few tantalizing suggestions of what life in eternity islike From these I attempt to describe the appearance and function of theresurrected body The presence of organs of sense indicates that for Blakethe ideal human form is not a disembodied spirit The imaginings of Locke,Berkeley, Swedenborg, St Teresa and St Paul on eternal bodies inspire an orig-inal ideal in which transparency and interpenetrability are valued as highly

as individual identity The conversational and sexual ‘intercourse’ throughwhich ideas are embodied in eternity is an apotheosis of male homosexualrelations which harnesses the power of female sexuality This leads me toconfront the question of why androgyny often veils a male form whichincorporates the female, rather than a genderless, or equally male andfemale, ideal I suggest that Blake’s final triumph over dualism is made pos-sible, yet made incomplete, by subordination

I would like to thank my supervisors and examiners, Kathleen Wheeler,Simon Jarvis, John Beer, John Harvey and Andrew Lincoln, for their guid-ance of this project as it took shape Scholars who provided assistance andencouragement were Steve Clark, Jon Mee, David Worrall, Keri Davies, BillGoldman, and everyone at the Blake Society, Simon Szreter, Jeremy Boulton,Ruth Richardson, John Sargent, and G.E Bentley, Jr Many thanks Specialgratitude goes to my conscientious and constructive readers at Palgrave and

my sympathetic editors, Eleanor Birne and Rebecca Mashayekh Portions of

Chapter 4 were first published in Romanticism 7.2 in the article ‘Miscarriage

Imagery in Blake’, and appear here by permission of the editors I would like

to express my appreciation for the feedback and support I received fromNicholas Roe and the reader he chose for the article Sharon Ruston andLidia Garbin organized a British Association for Romanticism Studies con-

ference and edited an essay collection, Spectres of Romanticism: the Influence

and Anxiety of the British Romantics, which were venues for a piece, ‘William

Blake and the Spectre of Anatomy’, which grew into Chapter 2: my thanksfor the excellent chance to share ideas, and again, for perceptive reading.The William Blake Trust, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Tate Gallery, the Wellcome Library, and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin kindly granted permission to reproduce theillustrations Many thanks to John Commander and the Blake Trust for gen-erosity as well as assistance, and Laura Valentine at the RA, Anna Sheppard

at the Tate, Matilde Nardelli at Wellcome, and Michael Hironymous atAustin, for their speed, skill and helpfulness in providing pictures and permissions The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, The NationalChapter of Canada IODE, The Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada, King’s College and the Cambridge University EnglishFaculty granted financial support Thanks to all at McMaster University who

have continued to aid and advise me, especially Alvin Lee and David Clark;and, at Auburn, Paula Backscheider for her unbeatable mentoring Thanks

to Patricia Simmons for, in so many ways through good and ill, being myfellow Daughter of the Empire To those who often provided practical help

as well as warm friendship – Leo Sharpston and (in honoured memory)David Lyon, George and Hilary Pattison, Margaret Watson (as well as Linda,Josie and Marleen) – thanks To Krista Johansen, for friendship: swylc sceoldesecg wesan, þegn æt Qearfe! Heartfelt thanks to my family: all the Noreykoand Connolly clans, but most of all my parents Gaiyle and Robert Connolly,

my grandmother Margaret Noreyko, my brother and sister-in-law Cal andGillian Connolly, and my godparents John and Kae Noreyko, not least forsupplying the computers on which this was written, but also for theirpatience, enthusiasm and love The final thank you goes to my husband,Ken Robinson

List of Abbreviations

Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Blake’s unengraved writings are

taken from Erdman’s edition and cited by page number (except for The Four

Zoas for which Night and line numbers are also provided), and all references

to Blake’s illuminated books are taken from the Blake Trust series and cited

by plate and line number References to the notes from the Blake Trustedition will be introduced as such, and cited by page number

E Erdman, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

In the Blake Trust editions:

SIE Songs of Innocence and of Experience

BT The Book of Thel

MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

VDA Visions of the Daughters of Albion

E Europe: a Prophecy

A America: a Prophecy

BU The First Book of Urizen

BL The Book of Los

BA The Book of Ahania

OED Oxford English Dictionary

KJV The Bible, King James Version

Textual Bodies

When Ezekiel is called to be a prophet, to speak to the hard-hearted dren of Israel, the voice that speaks to him from his vision makes a remark-able request:

chil-But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebelliouslike that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee Andwhen I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roll of abook was therein; And he spread it before me; and it was written withinand without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning,and woe Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest;eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel So I opened my mouth,and he caused me to eat that roll And he said unto me, Son of man,cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee.Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness

(Ezek 2:8–3:3)

In Ezekiel’s introduction to his mission, there is an emphasis on rebellionversus obedience, and the unlikelihood that his audience will listen to him.Eating the scroll goes against the usual rules; something is ingested whichnormally remains outside the body However, reading is an ingestion, if notusually such a complete one: a reader eats up written words with his or hereyes This episode suggests becoming one with the text, making it com-pletely part of oneself in order to deliver its message loyally and powerfullyunder circumstances adverse to communication It also suggests that goingagainst the common conventions of what remains inside and what outsidethe body is part of prophecy The voice also assures Ezekiel, ‘And they,whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebel-lious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them’(Ezek 2:5) Ezekiel will affect his audience – make them react, leave animpression on them – even if they do not wish to listen According to thevoice, someone who is not rebellious eats what is given, receives completely

without questioning or being picky This is what the prophet should do, butthis is not what his audience will do The strange crossing of bodily borders,

in eating the scroll, has something to do with getting through to an ceptive audience

unre-The unreceptive audience is a dilemma of prophecy: why would tive words be needed if all were already open to divine truth? William Blake’silluminated books are also prophecies which try to work a redemptivepurpose, and recognize that they are not preaching to the converted.However, Blake’s books are the opposite of Ezekiel’s scroll: they are morelikely to swallow up their readers Blake sees his illuminated books as

redemp-human forms When, at the beginning of his final prophecy Jerusalem, he

announces, ‘I again display my Giant Forms to the Public’, he refers at once

to his illuminated books, and the titanic characters they contain Reading

the weighty Jerusalem, then, is like being swallowed up by a Giant Form,

entering its body Blake continues, ‘My former Giants & Fairies havingreciev’d the highest reward possible’, connecting the personification of hisbooks to their appreciation by his audience He strongly asserts the salvificpotential of his writing: he claims to hear God speak, and proclaims, ‘There-fore I print; nor vain my types shall be: / Heaven, Earth & Hell, henceforth

shall live in harmony’ ( J 3) By using vocabulary specific to his medium,

‘print’ and ‘types’, Blake links the supposed power of his work to its form.However, this sanguine attitude is marred by the gouging out of words fromthe engraving plate For example, one line with deletions reads, ‘ThereforeReader, what you do not approve, & me for this energeticexertion of my talent’ (3) Friendliness toward the reader is struck out, as isconfidence in the reader’s reaction

The fact that Blake created his own books, designing, writing, ving, printing, finishing and binding them, at once enables him to claim anintimate relationship with, and strong influence over, his reader, and to

engra-illustrate dramatically the failure of that claim on plate 3 of Jerusalem The

unique form of Blake’s illuminated books makes them at first glance a ferent kind of text, a corpus embodied in a different way They require aware-ness of the textual body Unlike poetry embodied in words only, Blake’silluminated works cannot be fully reincarnated in any typeface; their bodyand soul are integrated Handmade, they include hints of the process of theirmaking Existing between print and manuscript, they emphasize transgres-sion of categories Depicting characters who enter each other and are part

dif-of each other, they dramatize the instability dif-of bodily borders From thesecharacteristics Blake draws prophetic powers for his illuminated books, toachieve a transformative purpose, and to gain some control over his audi-ence: what kind of readers he will have, and how they will be affected

As a starting point for understanding the significance of the crossing ofbodily borders which Blake seems to demand of his readers, it is helpful

to turn to two thinkers who offer two different, but interrelated, theories

on that subject: Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva Douglas, writing from ananthropological point of view and thus focusing on the social meaning of

the body, seeks in her study Purity and Danger to unravel the

relation-ship between the unclean and the sacred She looks at the abominations ofLeviticus, among other purity laws, to discover what characteristics causethe unclean to be considered unclean She comes to the conclusion that

‘holiness is exemplified by completeness Holiness requires that individualsshall conform to the class to which they belong And holiness requires thatdifferent classes of things shall not be confused’ (53) Conversely, anythingthat crosses categories or borders is an abomination Douglas pays particu-lar attention to defilement that relates to the body When writing about ‘thesymbolism worked upon the human body’ in ritual, she argues:

the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system Its aries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious.The body is a complex structure The functions of its different parts andtheir relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures Wecannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, salivaand the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society,and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced

bound-in small on the human body

(115)

As an anthropologist, she concentrates on society as the system symbolized

by the body, but indicates that the body can stand for any system: forinstance, a system of language or of thought By saying ‘powers and dangers’are ‘credited to social structure’, she implies that these are not absolute, butrather invented to support the system Perhaps, then, this can be applied

to other systems: the borders of language, mental operations, and the bodyitself can be seen as arbitrary, kept in place through the threat of danger It

is possible to distort these boundaries since they are not absolute Douglaswrites:

all margins are dangerous If they are pulled this way or that the shape

of fundamental experience is altered Any structure of ideas is vulnerable

at its margins We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise itsspecially vulnerable points Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff

of the most obvious kind Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears bysimply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body

(121)When orifices and bodily fluids figure in a prohibition, a ritual, a text, thenthat is a sign that the vulnerability of margins is at issue As this study willshow, Blake’s illuminated books are preoccupied with the orifices of the

body, particularly in the shape of sense organs, and fascinated with blood.Investing the text with these images gives the text human attributes, and itreinforces the idea that reading a Blake text means crossing bodily perime-ters The power Douglas sees in this crossing provides a way to understandBlake’s prophetic purpose Like the borders of social and other systems,Blake’s claim to transformation may be arbitrary As he recognizes, there

is always the possibility of failure; perhaps an encounter with his work willnot produce enlightenment or improvement, or even comprehension Bydramatizing the taboos of the body’s limits, especially when he often depictsbodies as not final in their form but metamorphosing and splitting, Blakeacknowledges this arbitrariness, but also borrows the power invested inborders By recreating the body in textual form, and encouraging the reader

to cross its borders as well as depicting border crossing within the text, Blakedemonstrates that the shape of the body as we know it is not absolute Thismakes possible a vision of a transformed body Not only can the humanform exceed its present potentialities, but anything the body can stand for – according to Douglas, any system of society or ideas – thus can alsopotentially be transformed

Douglas explains, ‘though we seek to create order, we do not simplycondemn disorder’ (94) What lies beyond, or threatens, the margins of asystem is not got rid of, but has a relationship to the ordered system, towhich ‘it symbolises both danger and power’ Douglas gives examples ofrituals in which a journey is made outside the system, whether into thewilderness of a forest or desert, or the mental wilderness of dreams or irra-tionality What is gained by such a journey include ‘powers and truths whichcannot be reached by conscious effort’ such as ‘energy to command andspecial powers of healing’ (94) Transformative power is found by trans-gressing the limits of the system, or the body This power is not gainedwithout risk: there is also danger on the margins Rites of passage are avariety of ritual which requires a journey outside the system Because thosebeing initiated are in a transitional state, they themselves are dangerous,

‘simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is able’ While in that ‘marginal period the novices in initiation are tem-porarily outcast’ Such rites are often said to be highly dangerous, evendeadly, to an extent out of proportion to what actually occurs in the cere-mony ‘To say that the boys risk their lives says precisely that to go out ofthe formal structure and to enter the margins is to be exposed to power that

undefin-is enough to kill them or make their manhood’ (96) Here again are the

‘powers and dangers’ which are ‘credited to social structure’: the powerseems to reside more in the idea of danger than actual danger Blake, who,

as we shall see, likens entering his text to entering a human body or eventhe underworld, must know that there is little actual, physical danger

in reading a book To compensate for this inoffensiveness, he borrows the imaginary power of transgression, and of spiritual journeys, so that his

audience, even if not attentive, ‘shall know that there hath been a prophetamong them’ Additionally, the danger (even if imaginary) of such a rite ofinitiation helps ensure that those unfit to receive the transformative power

of Blake’s prophetic books will fail, as unfit initiates will purportedly ‘diefrom hardship or fright, or by supernatural punishment for their misdeeds’(Douglas 96)

Julia Kristeva takes Douglas’ anthropological observations and applies

them to the individual psyche, and to writing In Revolution in Poetic

Lan-guage, through her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic, she considers

disruptions of the system of language, while in Powers of Horror: an Essay on

Abjection, Kristeva confronts threats to the borders of personal identity To

build her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva begins with ideasfrom Lacan: that the child is originally one with its mother and only laterrealizes its separate identity A separate identity is a condition of being able

to use language: one needs a position from which to speak, and an standing of the existence of objects to be able to form a statement Kristevaimagines the characteristics of that pre-linguistic state, as far as they can beimagined She calls that state the semiotic chora, and explains, ‘the drives,which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we

under-call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases

in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’ (Revolution 25) It

is ‘nonexpressive’, being pre-linguistic, yet it is not totally without structure

It is ‘regulated’; the mother’s body (around which the child’s drives are oriented) gives it order (27) Kristeva argues that:

the chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e.

it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another

position (i.e it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated inorder to attain to this signifying position Neither model nor copy, the

chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is

analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm

(26)The semiotic, then, is associated with drives and rhythm, and is a basis forproceeding to independent identity and the use of language Since it is abasis for language, it continues to exist and occasionally show itself in lan-guage The semiotic underlies, and as drives is perhaps the impulse or fuelthat powers symbolic language, which in turn is associated with order andmeaning To proceed from the semiotic to the symbolic a child must masterthe thetic: being able to have a thesis, make a judgment, take a position inrelation to an object

Though absolutely necessary, the thetic is not exclusive: the semiotic,which also proceeds it, constantly tears it open, and this transgression

brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice thatare called ‘creation.’ Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathemat-ics, for example) or literature, what remodels the symbolic order is alwaysthe influx of the semiotic This is particularly evident in poetic languagesince, for there to be a transgression of the symbolic, there must be anirruption of drives in the universal signifying order, that of ‘natural’ language which binds together the social unit.

(62)Being concerned with music as well as meaning, poetic language is a suit-able place to find eruptions of the symbolic, of drives, of speaking to express

an urge When looking at texts, Kristeva denotes as ‘genotext’ passageswhich ‘include semiotic processes but also the advent of the symbolic’; the

‘drive energy’ they hold can be detected, for instance, in ‘the accumulationand repetition of phonemes or rhyme’ as well as ‘melodic devices (such asintonation or rhythm)’ (86) What she calls the ‘phenotext’ shows symboliclanguage: ‘language which serves to communicate’, which ‘obeys rules ofcommunication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee’(87) Kristeva argues that ‘the signifying process includes both the geno-text and the phenotext; indeed it could not do otherwise’ (87–8) However,

‘every signifying practice does not encompass the infinite totality of thatprocess’ (88) That is, the semiotic and symbolic are both involved in allwriting, and each are revealed to a greater or lesser extent in genotext andphenotext In much writing the phenotext dominates because of socio-political constraints that make the signifying process fixed, that ‘obliteratethe infinity of the process’ (88) Kristeva insists that the semiotic is a process,and reading texts which reveal the influence of the semiotic (an exampleshe gives is James Joyce) ‘means giving up the lexical, syntactic, and seman-tic operation of deciphering, and instead retracing the path of their pro-duction’ (103) Kristeva uses words which emphasize the transgressioninvolved in the semiotic disrupting the symbolic Though the symbolicrelies on the semiotic, it is ‘torn’ by it Like the wilderness that lies outside

of Douglas’ systems, the semiotic is a powerful threat to the symbolic, andwriters who tap into it harness its power, yet not without risk of the sym-bolic being wholly ‘torn’ If there is ‘an attempt to hypostasize semioticmotility as autonomous from the thetic – capable of doing without it orunaware of it’, that is, if the play of the semiotic is pursued so far that thewriter no longer has a position to speak from nor any concept of a listener,then a ‘text as signifying practice’ will no longer be a text but fall into thecategory of ‘drifting-into-non-sense’, the babble of madness (50–1)

For Kristeva, only some texts ‘manage to cover the infinity of the process,

that is, reach the semiotic chora, which modifies linguistic structures’: she

concentrates on ‘certain literary texts of the avant-garde (Mallarmé, Joyce)’,but also finds that in ‘revolutionary periods signifying practice has

inscribed within the phenotext the plural, heterogenous, and contradictoryprocess of signification, encompassing the flow of drives, material disconti-nuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language’ (88) Blake lived

in a revolutionary period and seemed to many to be teetering on the edge

of madness Few readers of Blake have considered how Kristeva’s theory ofthe semiotic and symbolic might shed light on his work, but Thomas Vogler

finds the semiotic operating in Milton where Blake puts symbolic language

on hold to transcribe a lark singing ‘trill, trill, trill, trill’ Vogler argues, ‘the

“high ton’d Song” of the “loud voic’d Bard” gives way to “this little Bird”,whose trill, though not “words”, may concern our “eternal salvation” ’ (146).There is a hint here of the redemptive capacity of the disruption of language.Vogler also notes the similarity between Blake’s description of Beulah andKristeva’s concept of the chora: ‘As the beloved infant in his mothers bosomround incircled / With arms of love & pity & sweet compassion’ (Vogler 144,

M 30:10–12); ‘Infant Joy’ also shows Blake’s interest in the infant time

before, and transition to, expression and identity Much earlier than Vogler,Swinburne, making an admirable effort to describe the character of Blake’sprophetic books, finds in them something similar to the music of the semi-otic Notably, he places his observation in the realm of child development:

‘Blake was often taken off his feet by the strong currents of fancy, andindulged, like a child during its first humour of invention, in wild byplayand erratic excess of simple sound’ (194) He detects not just this impulse,but also a contrary one existing alongside it ‘At one time we have meremusic, chains of ringing names, scattered jewels of sound without a thread,tortuous network of harmonies without a clue; and again we have passages,not always unworthy of an Æschylean chorus, full of fate and fear; wordsthat are strained wellnigh in sunder by strong significance and earnestpassion’ (Swinburne 195) For Swinburne, at times, Blake’s verse collapsesunder meaninglessness; at others, under excess of meaning

Because Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic offers a concept

of a text that is manifold, made up of different layers of language, and isnot entirely fixed but resists finality, it is a useful model or parallel for under-standing the struggle between didacticism and openness in Blake’s poetry.Having a prophetic purpose, he decidedly has a message to get across.However, Blake is reluctant to simply offer a new fixed dogma to replace theold one He is faced with the challenge of being didactic against didacticism

An early reader of The Book of Thel, Garth Wilkinson, puts his finger on

Blake’s combination of definite message and invitation to interpret freely:

though Thel is ‘partly, an exception to the general badness or

unintelligi-bility of [Blake’s] verse and designs’, writes Wilkinson, ‘I can see someglimmer of meaning in it, and some warmth of religion and of goodness;but beginning to be obscured and lost under the infatuating phantasieswhich at length possessed its author I should say sanity predominates in it,

rather than that the work was a sane one’ (in Bentley, Critical Heritage 50).

Wilkinson recognizes the threat to sanity inherent in mixing message withopenness, and his description echoes Kristeva’s idea that a revolutionarypoetic text is not fully symbolic, or sane, or communicative, but rather isdisrupted, or obscured, by the phantasies of the semiotic Kristeva’s empha-sis on signification as a process can also be related to Blake’s apparent reluc-tance to give final form to a text He uses his control over every stage of the process in making his illuminated books to ensure that no two copiesare the same, and he takes advantage of his license to make changes duringthe production of his work in a continuous creation rather than a merereproduction Blake draws attention to the process of the work’s making toemphasize that it is not final, not written in stone Yet, it is written in metal,almost as solid as stone; to that extent it is ‘fixed’ like Kristeva’s symbolic,but Blake’s process, his self-awareness of that process, and the steps he takes

to remind the reader of it, mitigate and disrupt that fixity

Revolution in Poetic Language was originally published in French in 1974,

while Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection was published later, in 1980.

Kristeva does not weave the theory of the semiotic and the symbolictogether with the theory of abjection, and it can at times be difficult to seehow their terms relate to each other since they cover similar ground fromdifferent angles However, one might be able to differentiate the semioticfrom abjection by looking at the powers she expects of each What the symbolic offers is positive change, seen in a social context: texts which showthe influence of the symbolic can cause ‘the production of a different kind

of subject, one capable of bringing about new social relations, and thus

joining in the process of capitalism’s subversion’ (Revolution 105) Though

in excess it threatens language and even sanity, the symbolic is a necessarypart of language, and shows itself playfully within the restrained system ofsymbolic language Abjection, however, is not so benign It does not seem

to have a transformative power, but rather, as the title suggests, a power ofhorror, of repulsion; yet it can never be completely thrown away, it affectsthe self too closely What comes of abjection is apparently a facing of reality.Kristeva in her discussion of abjection rejects the idea of catharsis, because

it implies becoming rid of impurities, and because it is too ideal, too

tran-scendent (Horror 27–30) Abjection is an open wound (27) The benefits of

abjection are cast not in social but in analytical terms It is a way to name

a psychological problem, recognize its causes, and find a way to live withits results, rather than a way to transform the individual or the society Incontrast, I would suggest that when Blake faces the abject reality of the body,

he does so in a transformative way In his prophetic books, as shall be seen

in coming chapters, he displays the horrors of physical existence in order

to recognize them; not to learn to live with them but to dispel the ception that life on earth is the best and only life Yet he also questions theunadulterated idealism of transcendence Confronting the pain and disgust

of bodily existence is not a move to reject the body, but rather a step in theprocess of transforming the body.

To explicate the concept of abjection, Kristeva begins with ‘food loathing’which she argues ‘is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form

of abjection’ Kristeva describes reactions of physical disgust to ‘that skin onthe surface of milk’ Milk is, of course, a bodily fluid, one of those thingsthat crosses bodily borders; it is involved in a repeated Biblical prohibi-tion, ‘thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk’ (Exod 23:19, 34:26,Deut 14:21) The milk skin Kristeva focuses on also shows signs of category-crossing Contradicting milk’s liquidity, its skin is somewhere in the viscousarea between solid and liquid, that slimy territory often found disgusting,perhaps because of other bodily fluids which are thick and can harden, such

as blood and mucus Kristeva writes, from the point of view of the childreacting to its parents’ offer of milk,

‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen,

‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it But since the food is not an ‘other’ for

‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject

myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.

(3)The problem is, what is rejected in order to define the self is really part ofthe self: here, nourishment Kristeva pictures a body, an identity that is notpermanently defined Abjection is about deciding, labelling what is ‘me’ andwhat is ‘not me’, but as Kristeva says, this time considering the corpse as anexample of the abject, ‘it is something rejected from which one does notpart, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’ (4) Likethe nourishment that builds the body, rejecting it means rejecting the self.With the body, this is inevitable: one day, in death, it will be ‘not me’ Theabject, like Douglas’ abomination, is caused not by ‘lack of cleanliness orhealth but what disturbs identity, system, order What does not respectborders, positions, rules The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’

(Kristeva, Horror 4).

By this definition, Blake’s illuminated books, being in between the gories of manuscript and print, partly hand-done and partly reproduced,and being between the categories of word and picture, are abominations.Kristeva, perhaps to help differentiate her theory from that of Douglas, turns

cate-to examples from the world of crime When Douglas considers the complexrelationship between morality and pollution, she finds that ‘pollution tends

to support moral values’, and presupposes a desire to resolve moral wrongs

‘There must be an advantage for society at large in attempting to reducemoral offences to pollution offences which can be instantly scrubbed out

by ritual’ (135–6) This view is in line with her anthropological tive: she is concerned with whole societies, their functioning and self-preservation Kristeva, as an analyst, focuses more on the individual psyche;not only that, but on the malfunctioning psyche which does not necessar-ily have any care for gaining moral approval or aiding the smooth func-tioning of society, and so she finds the apex of abjection in amorality ‘Thetraitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist,the killer who claims he is a saviour Any crime, because it draws atten-tion to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunningmurder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they highten the

perspec-display of such fragility’ (4) Jerusalem’s plate 3 could be an example of

abjec-tion Blake has perpetrated premeditated violence upon his ‘human’ ation Granted, it is not as dire a crime as assault on an actual human being,but Blake is using his text to symbolize the human body, to avail himself ofthe powers of that ultimate symbol In plate 3 he also approaches his audi-ence with abjection: he is addressing us (‘To the Public’), confusing us (withfractured sentences) and insulting us (by refusing to call us ‘Friend’) all atonce It is a friendly overture, marred, and left contradictory, reaching outand pulling back, rejecting but not fully able to reject

cre-Jerome McGann observes, in Toward a Literature of Knowledge, Blake’s

gouging of letters from ‘To the Public’ without replacing them with thing causes ‘not simply a set of awkward transitions and distracting blankspaces’ but ‘positive incoherence’ (10) McGann argues that since Blake

any-worked on Jerusalem for

at least ten years he might have changed plate 3, given it some kind

of verbal coherence But he preserved a scarred discourse as the opening

of his text, so that plate 3 must be regarded as what textual scholars times call ‘the author’s final intentions’

some-(Knowledge 10)

To be true to Blake’s intention, the text must be left as it is, but curiosity

is sorely tempted The sentence fragments hint at what kind of words orphrases belong in the blanks, and portions of the excised letters are visible,spurring the reader to reconstruct Is Blake asking us to read under the pageand down into the depths of his copper plate, beyond the page into whatcreated it? John Wright does this, emphasizing that such a practice ‘has ageological or archeological relation to the finished pages’ (114), his vocabu-lary reflecting his (and Blake’s) view of the plates as a ‘terrain’ (96) Are we

to read back in time before the changes were made? Keynes reconstructedmost of plate 3’s single-word deletions; Swinburne and Damon guessed(wrongly) at missing words in the plate’s verses Erdman has caused the

‘large erasure of nearly four lines in the centre of the first paragraph’ to yield ‘to ocular and photographic attack’, but concedes that there are some

passages in Jerusalem he cannot restore (Erdman, ‘Suppressed’ 2–4) The lines

are not there Filling them in means reading another page Yet, as it stands,the page could be called unreadable We are not presented with the copperplates as reading material, but read the printed page embellished with water-colour and pen and ink Still, Blake does not let the reader forget the processwhich created the page Erdman sees that ‘a vigorous gouging could levelthese surfaces beyond recovery but in many instances Blake did not carryhis negating beyond a few strokes, leaving a stubble of metal that wouldprint broken outlines of letters and ghosts of words’ (‘Suppressed’ 2) Theprocess of the creation, and the destruction of the page, is made visible

in the scars from the gouging They are nonverbal elements which seem

to require interpretation, because without explaining them the sentencesthey affect are unreadable Interpretation most often follows two roads, onetoward reconstruction and one toward motivation, but both go back to themaking of the page: what did it say before, or what caused these deletions

he no longer liked or trusted’ (339) Though this might seem to be an sive desire for control over his audience – a desire for control which worksagainst the desire to be heard – it is understandable, considering the timeand care required by Blake’s handmade illuminated books, as well as theirpersonal character as compared to the work that Blake did for commeri-cal purposes There is also Blake’s prophetic purpose Viscomi turns this spiritual aspect invested in Blake’s illuminated books into an intriguingexplanation:

exces-Ideally, the study of art is analogous to the study of Christ; the student,disciple or reader undergoes a transformation or conversion; one comes

to perceive self and world differently In this sense, Blake’s audience wasselect, but also made select through reading and owning Blake’s works.The problem is that bad people sometimes own good work, which is

as troubling as Job’s undeserved afflictions In both cases self-definingbeliefs, whether about God’s existence or goodness, the value and power

of one’s own work, or the meaning of imagination, can be cast in doubt

(339)The incisions in plate 3, then, would be scars of affliction on the body ofthe text, marks of violence done to it out of frustration, a self-laceration ofBlake’s corpus enacting despair and calling for attention On the other hand,they may be openings in the text, orifices, entry points

Perhaps in deleting the words that denote the reader as ‘friend’, Blakeshows in plate 3 that he is not going to assume the reader is a friend, butrather allow (or force) the reader to fill in the blanks and decide what kind

of a relationship this will be Blake is not doing all the work of reading, or

of transformation, for the reader but requiring that the reader fulfil his orher side of the bargain In his introduction to the text, Detlef Dörrbecker

argues, about the ending of Europe: a Prophecy, that ‘Blake’s poetic strategy

forces his audience to take sides’; ‘one reads one’s own hopes into the text’and ‘it is only by bending the evidence that some commentators assumethat their preferred understanding is identical with any straightforward

“meaning” of these concluding lines’ which leave the reader on the brink

of ‘the strife of blood’ with no certainty of its result (152–3) The measuredamount of openness left in the text puts the onus on the reader to inter-pret, and to be aware that the interpretation must be tentative, a revelation

of the reader’s desires as well as the ‘meaning’ of the text Ironically, Blake’sdeletion of relationship-words from plate 3 requires an added emotionalinvestment from the reader: an admission of what he or she wants to read,

wants to believe to be the message of the text Neither Europe nor Jerusalem

nor any of Blake’s illuminated books is an infinitely open text They do not

go so far into Kristeva’s realm of the semiotic as to abandon completely eventhe rules of grammar and prosody, let alone accommodate any meaning areader may wish The texts are participatory, though, inviting the reader tofill in the blanks of missing words, or the possible meanings of archetypalcharacters and situations, working with the many variables the system

allows In Jerusalem 3, it is in an address to the reader that he leaves these blanks, and in Europe it is in his rousing conclusion that he leaves signifi-

cance undecided Points in the text where a didactic purpose is being served,where the message all previous or following hints should add up to is to

be revealed: those are the points at which Blake inserts openings In thisway he dramatizes the tension between didacticism and openness which isinevitable to his prophetic project Openness is necessary, but it is dang-erous, especially if one feels as Viscomi argues Blake does about bad peopleowning good work The apertures Blake leaves in his texts serve as possibleentry points, but they are also attempts to ensure that the right reader willcontinue and the wrong one will give up A reader unwilling to fill in theblanks, to participate, to take that risk of emotional investment in the text,may be frustrated and repulsed by the demands and the dangers imposed

by the orifices of the illuminated books Of course, such guarding devicescould never be infallible, but they can be at least an attempt to control whoBlake’s audience will be Especially given Blake’s gnostic leanings, the sal-vation held by his texts may well be meant only for initiates, for those whocan understand In Blake studies, the need to learn the associations of Blake’scryptic, invented mythology can make Blakeans seem like a cult of magiholding secret knowledge unknown (and quite possibly undesired) by the

uninitiated, and it does keep Blake’s later works secret from most who havenot proceeded to the cloister of postgraduate study Blake himself professes

a belief in exclusive understanding, when he counters Dr Trusler’s criticisms

of his otherworldly art:

You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas But you ought toknow that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men That whichcan be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care The wisest of theAncients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instructionbecause it rouzes the faculties to act

(E 702)Blake is not creating his works for the weak, or for idiots, but rather for thosewilling to be roused Being ‘not too Explicit’ is an essential strategy for hisilluminating purpose – it is ‘fittest for Instruction’ – and it also aids him inmaking sure that his audience will be, as Viscomi calls it, ‘select’

Jon Mee sees Blake’s obscurity from a less exclusive point of view; sarily, because of the context of popular prophecy in which he places Blake

neces-in Dangerous Enthusiasm Mee fneces-inds that obscurity (for example, allegories

which do not clearly match up to particular historical events) is, according

to Robert Lowth in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, an

essen-tial characteristic of prophecy Lowth’s reasons are similar to Blake’s: ‘itwhets the understanding, excites an appetite for knowledge, keeps alive theattention, and exercises the genius by the labour of the imagination’ (in Mee27) Mee argues that Lowth’s opinion ‘exemplifies and indeed profoundlyinfluenced the common eighteenth-century notion of the public and evenpolitical nature of the prophetic office’ (27) He finds that Blake agrees with a view of prophecy as ‘an attempt to persuade the people to act in aparticular way’ in his ‘most direct definition of the prophetic role: “Everyhonest man is a Prophet he utters his opinion both of private & publicmatters” ’ (E 617, Mee 27–8) The political role of prophets is clear from theHebrew bible in which they advise kings and berate Israel’s public for theirerring ways However, in Ezekiel’s example we saw that this persuasion wasnot always effective on the majority of hearers Every honest man is a

prophet, but how many men are honest? In his annotations to Watson’s An

Apology for the Bible Blake begins with the statement, ‘To defend the Bible

in this year 1798 would cost a man his life’ (E 611) Though the Bible is theultimate popular text in Judeo-Christian culture, it may have many readersbut in Blake’s terms not so many true adherents Perhaps the honest-speaking prophet addressing the public is like that prophet of Christ, Johnthe Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness In an early illuminated book,

and a late one, Blake alludes to this marginal prophet: the first plate of All

Religions are One is inscribed, ‘The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness’,

and The Ghost of Abel is dedicated ‘To LORD BYRONin the Wilderness’ (1:1).1

As Mee also contends, Blake’s obscurity reflects ‘his desire to stimulate the reader into a fuller hermeneutic engagement with the text’ (27) Whatseems to constitute membership in this elite audience is responsiveness to

the text On Jerusalem plate 3, at the top, before the title, ‘To the Public’, are

two words: ‘SHEEP’ on the left, ‘GOATS’ on the right Though the wordsstrangely float without context, they are an allusion, a precedented literarydevice Separating sheep from goats is a metaphor for separating saved fromdamned in Matt 25:31–33 Does Blake threaten to separate sheep from goatsamong his readers? Erdman finds that the words ‘SHEEP’ and ‘GOATS’ were

‘added to Plate 3 with the same tool, perhaps with the same impulse, thatdeleted [Blake’s] expressions of love and friendship’ (Erdman, ‘Suppressed’2–4) The connection has been cut, a friendly impulse edited to a judgmen-tal one How can we know what will ‘save’ us here, what kind of reading isexpected and considered the ‘righteous’ kind? Or, in a book about the dis-astrous folly of Albion’s separation from his friends, is this image of judg-ment presented to be undermined? Blake’s book itself defies categories, sowhy would it want to categorize its readers? In Christianity too, divisions aresupposed to be disregarded: ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neitherbond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in ChristJesus’ (Gal 3:28) However, there remains the distinction between saved anddamned Perhaps in Blake as in the New Testament all categories are blurred,

in favour of this one big distinction, central to the transformative purpose

of both ‘SHEEP’ is on the viewer’s left, while in the gospel passage they areplaced at the right hand of God ‘SHEEP’ and ‘GOATS’ have to be read reversed

‘SHEEP’ is on the right, looking out from the page The reader is being judged

by the text itself Is Blake looking out from his creation to see how the readerfares?2Is this page a human, giant form? The bible passage describing theseparation of sheep from goats directly follows the parable of the talents inwhich the ‘unprofitable servant’ is ‘cast into outer darkness’ (Matt 25:30).The reader has bravely cast him or herself into the inner darkness of the textbehind the door Apparently the reader came from outer darkness: ignorance,sleep, or Ulro as Blake names the dull state of ordinary existence The unprof-itable reader, presumably, will be cast by the text back into outer darkness

Jerusalem tells of chaos reigning during Albion’s sleep, and culminates in his

awakening The body of Albion contains all, and reading Jerusalem, the sheep

and goats imply, involves a participation in Albion’s redemption Swinburne,

writing about Jerusalem, pinpoints at once its evangelism and its difficulty:

‘Supra hanc petram – and such a rock it is to begin any church-building upon!

Many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits Seriously,one cannot imagine that people will ever read through this vast poem withpleasure enough to warrant them in having patience with it’ (276) Few are

called to read Jerusalem, and fewer are chosen, by the challenging text itself,

to be illuminated through it

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the prophetic purpose of Blake’s

engrav-ing is explicitly linked to the body On plate 14 Blake predicts ‘the wholecreation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas it nowappears finite & corrupt’ This transformation of the body of creation willnot arise from denial of the human body but rather ‘an improvement ofsensual enjoyment’ Blake has a part in bringing about this apocalypse:

‘But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to beexpunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives,which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away,and displaying the infinite which was hid’ (14:6–16) Blake claims forhimself and his printing the ability to spark this transformation His illu-minated book argues for the unity of soul and body; it also demonstrates it.The illuminated books depend on their medium, their physical form orbody If they are reincarnated in another form, for instance ordinary type-face, part of their being is left behind: they are no longer the same Theintertwining between word and image parallels, or even dramatizes, themutual dependence in Blake’s works between content and form, soul andbody Content could be called soul, infusing and giving life and meaning tothe body of the text, and form could be called body, giving shape to other-wise amorphous ideas However, since they are so interdependent it is dif-ficult to consider final a parallel which assumes the body is a mere containerfor the soul For Blake, between the body and the soul, which gives formand which gives meaning? The parallel seems to hold in the fallen world,where bodies serve to save from nonentity; their limitations are lesser evilsthan entire shapelessness But as we will see, considering Blake’s belief inphysiognomy, and his ideal of a transparent body like a transparent garmentwhich reveals rather than covers, perhaps it is the soul which provides thetrue form And, since Blake idealizes the Human Form Divine, and holdsthat conception and execution are inseparable,3 how could the body notparticipate in providing meaning?

Similarly, both design and verse give shape and meaning to Blake’s minated books, and sometimes it is difficult to tell where one begins andone ends Many readers have found the bodies of Blake’s works to be unusu-ally infused with life, in a way which blurs the distinction between imageand language Stephen Behrendt finds ‘the very letters that make up thewords are themselves seemingly alive: serifs metamorphose into leaves andtendrils, dependers sprout branches that hold tiny birds or shelter minus-

illu-cule humans’ (16) Erdman, in his reconstruction of Jerusalem 3’s gougings,

has difficulty differentiating a small snake from a two-letter word

(‘Sup-pressed’ 5) Easson and Easson, in their commentary on The First Book of

Urizen, emphasize how Blake’s lively decorations positivize negative space:

‘Blake clutters up the text with life, so that birds, butterflies, serpentine tendrils, flowers and occasionally little people populate these usually bleak

deserts between the furrows of letters’ (91) As for Marriage 14, leaves grow

from ‘sensual enjoyment’, and a horse gallops in a blue space as if about toleap the ‘-finite’ which comes at the end of the famed assertion, ‘If the doors

of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, nite’ (14:17–19) At the top of the plate, a male figure lies flat, and a femalehovers above him, arms spread; flames envelop them both These figuresepitomize the process of revelation through cleansing with ‘salutary andmedicinal’ corrosives; they also illustrate the identity of Blake’s plates asliving things The editors note that the design ‘plays on those metaphors’

infi-in the text of ‘the consumption of the world by fire at the Last Judgmentand the consumption of copper by acid’ (136); in fact, it personifies them.The world and plate consumed by fire are embodied by the recumbentfigure: they have a human form The fire that reveals the infinite is pictured

as female She, like the later emanation and the biblical Wisdom, is anelement aiding in the creation of the world and the work of art Also likethe emanation and Wisdom, she is an aspect of the human or of God whoonly appears to have separate being In reality, they are one In reality, theprocess of creation is part of the text, pictured in it, embodied in it Thedesign, as the editors note, recalls ‘the conventional iconography of soul

and body’, used by Blake in such works as his illustrations to Blair’s Grave

(136) The plate, then, also reflects the relationship of soul and body

explained earlier in the Marriage: ‘that calld Body is a portion of Soul

dis-cernd by the five Senses’ (4:14–15) If the female soul is part of the ing process, then it is creating through corrosion a body which reveals theinfinite which was hid, the ideas and images which would otherwise remainhidden in the artist’s mind

engrav-The engraving metaphors in engrav-The Marriage of Heaven and Hell show that

Blake’s self-conscious figuration of his texts within themselves extends to

seeing his text as human Just as ‘the Bible of Hell’ mentioned in Marriage

24 could refer not only to the text at hand, but to Blake’s view of his whole project of illuminated printing, so can the humanization of his works.David Erdman suggests that Los’s ‘numerous sons’ who ‘shook their bright

fiery wings’ (or pages) in Europe 5[6] could be Blake’s illuminated books

personified (in Tolley 127) Elsewhere, descriptions of Los and Enitharmonembodying their children can be parallelled to William and Catherine Blakecreating illuminated books As Essick argues, Los is a blacksmith, working

in metal as Blake works with his metal engraving plates; he provides the form while Enitharmon provides the colour, as Catherine would help

in the watercolour finishing (‘Female Will’ 620) A passage Essick offers

as an example of this imagery makes clear the birthlike nature of this collaboration:

So dread is Los’s fury that none dare him to approach

Without becoming his Children in the Furnaces of affliction

And Enitharmon like a faint rainbow waved before him

Filling with Fibres from his loins which reddend with desire

Into a Globe of blood beneath his bosom

( J 86:48–52)

There is, then, a sexual element to this creation, the books being sons and

daughters of their co-creators or parents Also in Europe there is a catalogue

of sons and daughters of Los, some rarely seen again, like Manathu-Vorcyon,and some prominent characters in Blake’s myth, like Orc There is a sugges-tion of a sprawling mythology Each person in the lineage has a story andsome of these stories are preserved in books while others remain mysterious

Oothoon, for instance, has her story told in five lines of description in Europe, but Visions of the Daughters of Albion is her own whole book If this is true of

Oothoon, then the other children also, here only abstracts, could elsewhere

be whole books It is as though books, as well as characters, are ‘offspring’ ofeach other.4Vincent De Luca suggests another way in which the relationshipbetween Enitharmon and her children is defined textually: they are bornfrom her name Their names – Oothoon, Theotormon, et cetera – ‘derive,anagrammatically or through slight phonetic shifts and condensations, por-tions of their own literal being’ from their mother’s name (97)

In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon, Theotormon and Bromion

share letters in the composition of their names, and they each embody adifferent position in the interactive dynamics of the poem On the fron-tispiece, Bromion and Oothoon are physically bound, while Theotormon iscompositionally attached to them, his position completing the arc formed

by the three figures, and his leg visually meeting Oothoon’s hair In thisdesign they show forth physically the different kinds of psychologicalanguish they undergo in the poem, Bromion bound and raging, Oothoonbound yet graceful, suffering, not seeing her binding as a necessity, andTheotormon wound up in self-torment (see Frontispiece) Eaves, Essick andViscomi in their notes provide a different way to see the plate: ‘We can alsotake the sun for “an eye / In the eastern cloud” (5:35–6), consider its posi-tion relative to the shape of the cave, transform the vegetation danglingfrom the roof of the cavern into residual tufts of hair, and see the entirecomposition as the profile of a skull looking to the left, an image of the

“narrow circle” into which “they inclos’d [Oothoon’s] infinite brain” ’ (236)

Because of this, the editors, drawing on Youngquist’s Madness and Blake’s

Myth, see the three characters as ‘the constituent parts of a single fragmented

personality’ (Youngquist 66; VDA 236) Not only does a reader see a logical drama acted out by personifications, but in reading Visions literally

psycho-gets inside the human head More than that, within the poem, ‘Oothoonsexualizes the connection between the subject who sees and the object ofsight’, claiming that she is

Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears

If in the morning sun I find it; there my eyes are fix’d

In happy copulation

(9:22–10:1 and note)

Beauty appears in the pages of the prophecy and the reader as perceiver is,

by Oothoon’s definition of perception, copulating with the book In returnthe book is also ‘screwing with your head’: if the reader accepts Oothoon’ssuggestions, his or her view of sex and perception may be transformed Itcould be a mutual, liberating and jealousy-free relationship as envisioned inthe text However, since Oothoon is a character from a psychological drama,

it is difficult to know whether her view of things is to be so thoroughlyembraced, or whether she is going too far: is she an ideal, or just a mentalstate? If Blake desires such abandon in participation in his texts, does hebelieve it is even possible? And if so, would Blake want everyone to becomethat intimate with his children? Can he gain any control over who does andwho does not?

In addition to weeding out the ‘GOATS’ from the ‘SHEEP’, Blake can controlhis audience simply through the fact that the labour-intensiveness of creat-ing his hand-made books means small print runs As Viscomi argues, Blake’saudience was ‘select’; individual copies, each different, of the illuminatedbooks were purchased by individual collectors Print versions of these booksare a whole different incarnation of those works, and none appeared inBlake’s lifetime Blake’s conventional publications are different from the illu-

minated books: Poetical Sketches, for example, was apparently published on his behalf by friends rather than at Blake’s own impetus, and the Descriptive

Catalogue consists of prose to accompany his exhibition The fact that

conventional publishing was to some extent open to Blake, and that his illuminated books were not created in that way, suggests that Blake did notenvision mass dissemination for them Critics have struggled over Blake’sapparent desire for an audience – that didactic, prophetic desire to get amessage across – and the practical fact that the medium he chose, illumi-nated printing, ruled out a large audience Mitchell, for instance, sees thesmall print runs as a disappointment: ‘Blake was never able to mass-producehis books as he hoped, partly because the new method was not so easy as

he supposed’ (Composite 43, in Viscomi 175) Viscomi, on the other hand,

argues that ‘Blake advertised primarily to connoisseurs, collectors, and otherartists the same audience he sought for his watercolours, which by naturewere usually unique and stored in portfolios or hung in parlours of privatehomes’ (174) Apparently, the illuminated books were, just as they seem,works of art If they are not as completely unique as a watercolour, they aremore unique than a published book, bought by collectors rather than the

general public, and treated by collectors like a work of art: displayed in thehome for the owners and their visitors To see the work, one would have tosee an original.

Now, though, with the Blake Trust editions, and the Blake Archive, Blake’schildren are becoming more promiscuous, which by Oothoon’s lights may be good The Archive allows exciting manipulation of the images in akind of cyber-sex perception which, ironically, allows one to handle theworks more intimately while not providing any ‘real’ contact with them,only virtual The Blake Trust editions are rich in colour and detail, and theircopious and enthusiastic notes can provide an experience almost like an ini-tiation – both overwhelming and enlightening – into the exclusive circle ofAntients or Blakean friends familiar with the originals However, if reading

a translation is like kissing through a handkerchief, seeing Blake’s works inreproduction, even an excellent one, is likewise.5The online Archive turnsBlake’s works into light rather than texture, and the Blake Trust editions turnthem to plain paper, again rather than texture A reader cannot perceive theimprint of the plate’s pressure, or the thickness or thinness of ink and paint,

or the inimitable substance and sparkle of gold leaf Even with the privilege

of seeing the originals, one must not touch works of art; still, the texturecan be better perceived visually on the originals

The untouchability of Blake’s books, in libraries and museums or in ductions, has repercussions for the sexual relationship of reader and book

repro-It is an interesting reflection of the frequent omission of the skin and thesense of touch in Blake’s sense catalogues In the past, for collectors anxious

to preserve their Blake books, and now, for most readers, the skin of the text, its actual surface, is inaccessible to their sense organ of touch, theirskin Here is one way in which bodily borders do not brush up against oneanother in Blake’s texts, but perhaps the skin is a border which is not per-meable enough compared to taste, sight, smell and hearing which all involveorifices rather than surfaces Yet, the sense catalogue offered by the Fairy

who supposedly dictates Europe to Blake lists five senses, not neglecting

touch, and calls them ‘Five windows’ that ‘light the cavern’d Man’ Thewindow that corresponds to touch is described thus: it is the one throughwhich Man may ‘himself pass out what time he please, but he will not’(Additional Plate 3:1, 5) This is not a surface, but rather an opening, andone which, along with its promise of liberation, is invested with anxiety and repression The fairy, like Oothoon, may be considering the sex organs

to be organs of perception What is the relationship, then, between the sex

organs and the skin? In Jerusalem Blake argues against exclusively genital

sexuality to idealize polymorphous perversity On plate 69 (an appropriateplace for perversity), Blake writes, ‘Embraces are Cominglings: from the Headeven to the Feet: / And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place’(69:43–4) Blake seems to be disapproving of penetration here, associating

it with a negative kind of secret knowledge, one used to preserve traditional,hierarchical systems of thought and belief – and to enact repressed sexual-ity – rather than rousing the faculties Yet if full-body embraces are com-minglings, then the skin through contact is not just touching but somehowmelding The skin becomes an orifice Applying this to the skin of the book,

it is a surface with openings (painfully obvious in Jerusalem’s ‘To the Public’),

not just one but many places for the reader to penetrate and comminglewith the text in participatory perception

Though this seems rather a libertine model for a reading of Blake whodesires a degree of control over his audience, it actually works as part ofgaining that control The surface of the text is untouchable, like the skin of

a person with whom one has not become intimate It is not as though theilluminated book is entirely inaccessible, like a vestal virgin, but it has to beapproached through friendship and desire By forcing the reader to partici-pate in the text, to fill in the blanks or orifices of word or meaning left byBlake, he ensures that the reader must desire the text in order to join with

it in happy copulation In their original form, these texts as Viscomi argueswere placed in the hands of friends: ‘friends were buyers but buyers becamefriends’ (339) The books also circulated through the hands of friends

The earliest comments on Songs of Innocence and of Experience are recorded

in private writings: William Hazlitt was exposed to Blake’s work on a visit

to Henry Crabb Robinson, who recorded Hazlitt’s reactions in his diary;

Coleridge borrowed Charles Augustus Tulk’s copy of the Songs and in a ‘rude

scrawl’ of thanks shared his estimation of the poems and designs (Bentley,

Critical Heritage 54–5) Blake’s illuminated books gain their audience through

a network of friendship, and the transformative powers they claim can serve

to form and strengthen links between readers They are able to do thisthrough their status as books and human forms Nelson Hilton, exploringthe connotations of fibres in Blake’s works, meditates on these lines from

Jerusalem: ‘I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine: / Fibres of love

from man to man thro Albions pleasant land’ These fibres are, among otherthings, the bodily vehicle of feeling and sympathy: the nerves Hilton findsthat these physical fibres also have a textual counterpart: ‘As we are members

of one body (“The IMAGINATION” [E273]), fibres – lines of text, for example

– are the means by which we communicate with one another’ (Literal 95–6).

Not only is Blake’s poetry made up of lines of verse, but also in his visualart Blake values line, and the ‘lineaments’ of his human figures, above allother elements An additional association of the concept of fibres is a sexualone: it was ‘commonly believed that the brain was connected to the testes

by the nerves, which transmitted “the white or spermatic components”

Fibre’s near synonym, “nerve”, was frequent in Latin for the penis (nervus), and so used in English by Dryden’ (Hilton, Literal 92) Ideally, Blake’s

audience would be a community of eroticized friendship, energized by eroticized communication, much like the eternal community he envisions

at the end of Jerusalem, conversing through ‘Visionary forms dramatic’

(98:28)

The frontispiece of Jerusalem, Blake’s final prophecy, suggests that the

reader should enter the book It depicts a figure entering a Gothic door withdarkness behind, carrying a light-giving globe The figure looks around, asthough entering with some trepidation That this is a spiritual journey issuggested by the soul-like sphere, and its introduction of light into dark-ness Ironically, though, it is usually the book that enlightens: here, it seems,the pilgrim must carry his own enlightenment, or be lost Unlike anotherarchway in another spiritual epic (‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’),this one does not offer any (even despairing) verbal advice, again suggest-ing that he who enters is on his own In an earlier version of the plate therewere words written above and around the entry; as in ‘To the Public’ Blaketakes away what might have eased interpretation for the reader Theobscured words include a line which indicates that Los ‘enterd the Door ofDeath for Albions sake’ (130) Like Dante’s, this is an entry into the world

of the dead While Dante’s inferno is a terrain which culminates in the body

of the devil as a place to be tortured, for Blake the body plays a greater role

in shaping the geography of hell Another epigram reads,

There is a Void outside of Existence, which if enterd into

Englobes itself & becomes a Womb, such was Albions Couch

A pleasant Shadow of Repose calld Albions lovely Land

(130)The figure suggested to be Los enters the door of death, also a void whichbecomes a womb, also Albion’s resting place for his repeated death anddying in this book, also Albion as Blake’s mythological England These lineslink to others within the poem:

Los took his globe of fire to search the interiors of Albion’sBosom in all the terrors of friendship entering the caves

Of despair & death

(31[45]:3–5)Los travels around the desolate London which is Albion’s interior: not justthe caves of death (or womb of death), not just a city, but Albion’s bosom.Los enters the body of his friend and explores it What kind of an entering

is this? Since where Los enters is a space that becomes a womb, or is Albion’sbosom, it is a sexual entering Yet, since he explores to see what is amisswith Albion’s interior, then it is a sort of autopsy, or vivisection as at thispoint Albion is dying rather than dead If this is the way to approach Blake,then it is not for the faint of heart A tour of someone else’s insides is not

an attractive prospect, even if it is the body of a friend A heroic braving of