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Creation from Opposition in the Works of William Blake

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Creation from Opposition in the Works of William Blake “Without Contraries There is No Progression”: Creation from Opposition in the Works of William Blake by Bailey Fernandez Committee: Lise Sanders, Polina Barkovsa, Yasotha Sriharan Division III Hampshire College May 2019 For Eli Todd , who lived with flaming fire. iii The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may perform the words of this sacred law — Deuteronomy 29:29 iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments— vi Critical Introduction— 3 Chapter I: Gen— 10 Chapter II: Mapping the East— 33 Chapter III: Symbol of Fire— 68 Chapter IV: Last Judgment— 90 Postscript — 110 Glossary — 113 Bibliography — 115 v Acknowledgments The existence of this work would not be possible without the generous care and attention of my Hampshire College Division III Committee: Lise Sanders, Polina Barkovsa, and Yasotha Sriharan. Additional feedback thus far given by Sarah Bishop. A paper which eventually became section 2.3 was graciously read and edited by Alan Hodder. This project was greatly enhanced by my relationship with the Swedenborg Society in London: and I also wish to express my gratitude for the knowledge and aid of Stephen McNeilly, James Wilson, Alex Murray, Jacob Cartwright, Maia Gaffney-Hyde, and Denise Prentice. I am grateful to other mentors and professors whose guidance has shaped my intellectual direction: Anston Bosman, Serena Chopra, Martín Espada, Damani Harrison, and my father. Lastly, I wish to thank the dedicee— Eli Todd — whose shadow is my example. vi “Without Contraries There Is No Progression” Critical Introduction It takes a contrarian to write of Genius in the current critical milieu, and it is not hard to see why. For many, the appreciation of the romantics has dwindled to the levels it faced in the time of the New Critics. Yet another thesis on Romanticism, let alone a thesis with surface Idealist sympathies, is bound to raise questions and concerns. These concerns are legitimate, and I do not seek to repudiate them. Rather, I want to read “Genius,” as it applies to Blake, using a new method. This reading will focus not on elitist intellectuals or singular minds, but rather on a complex relationship between opposing elements, which I argue is present throughout nearly all of Blake’s poetry. I will begin with an introduction to the critical history surrounding William Blake, followed by a recounting of this thesis’s arguments and organizational structure, before ending with a greeting and an invocation for the reader of this text. To make a statement about Blake’s work, no matter how simple, is to account for a spiralling network of relations. A “metaphysical” poet, such as John Donne, will focus on one lexical object which is then transmuted into another sense. In “Love’s Alchemy,” for example, Donne focuses on a simple metaphor — that is, the transference from one sense to another — of “love” and “alchemy.” The coherence we infer centers on one hinge between the two objects, which allows the metaphor to make sense. In this case, the hinge would be “unreliability.” In simple form: 1). love is unreliable, 2). alchemy is unreliable, 3). Therefore, love is alchemy. In these experiments, two words slowly begin to signify one united concept. This process fits the definition of what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the “language game.” In these games, we begin to see what a word means by seeing its application in a variety of contexts. To use Wittgenstein’s own example, one could point at a brick, then a barn, then a rose, all while saying the word “red.” Eventually, the discourse recipient would infer that “red” is the color that all of these 3 objects share. With Blake, however, the process of linguistic acquisition is far more complex than a simple game. Take, for example, the following passage from a long poem entitled The Four Zoas: Rising upon his Couch of Death Albion beheld his Sons Turning his Eyes outward to Self. losing the Divine Vision Albion calld [sic] Urizen & said. Behold the sickening Spheres Whence is this Voice of Enion that soundeth in my Couches Take thou Possession: take this Scepter! go forth in my might For I am weary, & must sleep in the Dark sleep of Death. Thy brother Luvah hath snitten me but pity thou his Youth Tho thou hast not pitid [sic] my age. O Urizen prince of Light.1 This passage is largely incomprehensible without having previously explored the language of Blake’s symbols.2 These chains of reference make the prophecies difficult to read. They also make them difficult to write about. As I have spent a large amount of time absorbed in their dialect, I often find the words slowly leaking into my speech about Blake, so that the distance between the critic and Blake collapses. The message of the critic risks becoming absorbed within Blake’s own mythology. I have not been dragged into this pit alone. Many of the great scholarly works about Blake, some of them seminal, fail to maintain a sort of critical distance. This is particularly true of Harold Bloom’s Blake’s Apocalypse, as well as, to a lesser extent, Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. These critics, who constitute what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the “classical” era of Blake criticism, were often ideologically and philosophically sympathetic to Blake. They were often American (with the exception of Kathleen Raine), and were therefore reacting against the early twentieth-century trend of “New Criticism.” The New Critics, spearheaded by T.S. Eliot, Cleanth 1 The Four Zoas. 23. 1-8; Erdman 313 (note: all Blake citations will occur both by plate and line number as well as their page number in the David V. Erdman edition of Complete Poetry & Prose) 2 By symbols, I refer to an image or word which in turn refers to a series of other words or symbols itself. 4 Brooks, William Empson, Monroe Beardsley, and others, were emphatic about analyzing poems in and of themselves. They sought to eliminate passion from the critical process, and therefore to make their approach to literature both more rigorous and more scientific. This approach naturally led to a dislike for Blake, as well as the rest of the Romantics, who emphasized passion and inspiration. Critics such as Frye, Bloom, David V. Erdman, Kathleen Raine, and Samuel Foster Damon — who championed Blake despite his unpopularity — were attracted to his philosophical idealism, his celebration of “Poetic Vision,” and his uncompromising mythology. The backlash against this movement in criticism — not just in Blake, but across all of literary studies — has been in full swing for several decades. Critics today come from a variety of perspectives. Marxist Critics detest the Idealism of these Romanticists, arguing, quite rightly, that the “spiritual revolutions” the Romanticists believed they could achieve depended largely on their class privilege. They state their belief that no Imaginative idea will bring about social change, which can only occur through the material actions of the working class. Gender and queer theorists have taken a more interested stance, but have largely shifted the conversation away from the Romantics’ mythologies and instead turned it towards issues such as the queer sexuality that underlies many of the Romantic poets. I do not seek to repudiate any of this work. And though I disagree with the (orthodox) Marxists on the validity and actionability of Imagination, I find it to be a minor, more technical point in the face of the larger and more pertinent question: can a thesis such as this one, largely focused on mythologies, have social value? In order to answer this question, it would help to turn to the actual content contained herein. *** 5 This project is organized into four chapters, each with a particular focus. The first chapter has three argumentative goals. I argue: 1). The word Genius, in Blake’s poetry, is derived from a Proto Indo-European root gen, meaning “to produce,” which is also the root for several other words in William Blake’s poetic canon, most notably “Generation,” 2). Blake conceives of the “Poetic Genius” as the Godhead consistently throughout his poetic canon; and 3). Genius functions through a series of mutual oppositions that Blake calls the Contraries. These Contraries work in mutual opposition — and are the source of all poetic production. In effect, I argue that William Blake views not a Genius but a gen — which is an opposition between two mutually incompatible ideas — and only through this can religion, vision, ideas, imagination, and poetry emerge. The second chapter explores what are called the major prophetic poems, which are what contain the central narratives of Blake’s mythology. I argue that 1). the gen can be divided into a Contrary opposition between Genius and Generation; 2). That these oppositions can be located in the Blakean direction of the “East”, 3). That the east, because of this binary opposition of Contraries, is rendered unstable. I draw on the sources that Blake was known to have read, and often borrowed from, to support these arguments. The third chapter examines these same gen-contraries in respect to the “element” that Blake associates with the “East”: fire. I argue that the symbol of fire can be divided into one of Gen-ius, which I call prophetic fire (Fp), and one of Gen-eration, which I call material fire (Fm) . These fires have different references and relations, which are connected to their respective origins. The final chapter explores the apocalypse imagery at the end of the poems Jerusalem and The Four Zoas. I argue that in both of these endings, Blake goes directly against the poetic vision 6 he has set out for us in the rest of his poetic work.
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