MINUTE PARTICULAR

Blake and Burke in Astonishment!

V. A. De Luca

Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 23, Issue 2, Fall 1989, pp. 100-104 PAGE 100 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY FALL 1989

dimension of ideology here) determines the "nature of compassing and genuinely critical understandings, as critical knowledge itself." the essays by Langland and Aers do most effectively in A similarly powerful argument for Blake's ideologi- this volume, it must be welcome. Perhaps, in the context cal blind spots is made by David Aers in his Marxist essay, of the deconstructive and self-critical methods advo- "Representations of Revolution: From The French Revo cated so pervasively in this volume, I should add, "to lution to The FourZoas," in which he analyzes the way me." And end with a personal credo that grows out of in which Blake's failure to envision particular differences my experience of gender oppression and teaching of and a meaningful plurality among the classes of the op- feminist theory: I believe that the time has come for con- pressed enables Blake to posit a polarized, two-class soci- temporary literary criticism to move beyond deconstruc- ety, and then to celebrate a "salvific violence" whereby tive theory (whose intellectual insights have by now been the sons of Los trample down the sons of Urizen in Night absorbed, even exhausted) in an effort to recuperate IX of The Four Zoas, a violence that modern readers more politically engaged, less elitist, practices of reading ought to find extremely troubling. Aers's essay, which and teaching. invokes both Bakhtin and Carol Gilligan's concept of a female ethic of care to good effect, is flawed only by its failure to incorporate into its argument an analysis of what should be Aers' primary text, Jerusalem. Nelson Hilton and Hazard Adams both pay close MINUTE PARTICULARS attention to Blake's use of particular words and rhetori- cal methods to generate convincing readings of specific texts. In "Literal/TiriellMaterial," Hilton offers another Blake and Burke in Astonishment! demonstration of what he has called Blake's literal im- agination, the way allusion and wordplay function in V. A. De Luca Blake's texts. In this case, he turns to the Concordance to show how Tirielbecomes a calculated meditation on the death of old myths, the curse of inherited language and On those occasions when Blake discloses his most impor- metrics, and the ways Blake attempts to lift off the bur- tant views on art and poetry—say, in the Descriptive Cat den of the rubbish heap of the past. In "Synecdoche and alogue, or in the Annotations to Reynolds's Discourses, Method," Hazard Adams describes the peculiarly radi- or in the letter to Butts of 6 July 1803 —the sublime cal and progressive nature of Blake's use of synecdoche, never seems far from his mind. We do not know the ex- which he illustrates with a brilliant analysis of the way tent of his acquaintance with formal eighteenth-century both intrinsic and historical clues enable us to under- theories of the sublime but we can be certain that he stand the way Blake's mind worked in composing plate read the most famous treatise on the subject —Burke's 10 of Europe. Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and the These essays provide a compelling illustration of Beautiful: "Burke's Treatise on the Sublime & Beauti- how contemporary critical theory both impedes and en- ful," he tells us in the annotations to Reynolds, "is ables our understanding and appreciation of literary founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke on this texts. When theory becomes the focus of critical atten- Treatise Reynolds has grounded many of his assertions."! tion, as it does in the essays by the editors, Stephen Cox Blake tells us that he read it when "very young," and and David Wagenknecht, it can lead to little more than what he read when "very young" usually stuck, held in a self-indulgent hermeneutic exercise, resulting in a strong clasp of love or hate. The avowed hatred in this reductive, predictable (or unconvincing) readings. Typi- case has tended to mask a rich overlay of tastes and as- cally, for all that these exercises claim to take into ac- sumptions. A few critics have recognized the link be- count the necessary self-reflexivity of both language and tween the two men,2 but our sense of the complexity of ideology, they are usually carried out with no recogni- the relation may still need some refining —such as how tion, as is the case here, of the individual critic's personal much even Blake's departures from Burke issue from a psychological profile, gender, ethnicity, religion, or Burkean ground. other ideological commitments and interests. But when One handy and efficient way of approaching a com- theory enables the critic to uncover the blind spots or plicated relation between two writers is to focus on key fault lines of both the author's and previous critics' ideo- terms that are shared in their vocabularies. Blake and logical limitations and thus opens the way to more en- Burke share "astonishment," one of the central terms in FALL 1989 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 101

the idiom of the eighteenth-century sublime, and an It is easy to comprehend the part that astonishment examination of their use of the term sheds light on the plays in the dynamics of a Burkean "terrific" sublime. parallels and divergencies of their aesthetics. In the dis- Terror and astonishment are kindred states, as Burke course of sublimity "astonishment" comes laden with makes clear in an etymological aside: ambiguity: it names a human psychological state, yet The Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the resonates with the powers of external nature, from the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple airy might of thunder (from which it derives etymologi- fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus, (thunderstruck) is cally) to the solidity of stone (which it resembles in equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the sound). Burke begins the second part of his Philosophi french etonnement and the english astonishment and amazement, cal Enquiry, an analysis of the sublime proper, with a de- point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder?5 finition of "astonishment": To be struck by lightning is literally a form of astonish- The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment ment, for etymologically the word means "thunder- is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with struck." Perhaps the prestige of the term "aston- some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with ishment" in eighteenth-century aesthetics derives its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence rea- ultimately from Longinus, who tells us that "the Sub- son on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates lime, when seasonably addressed, with the rapid force of our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.3 Lightning has born down all before it, and shewn at one stroke the compacted Might of Genius. "6 The two meta- Writers throughout the century refer to astonishment in phors that Longinus employs here for the onset of the 4 similar terms. But however much these formulas are sublime, the stroke of natural lightning and the blow of repeated, perplexities abound. The psychological state intellectual power, imply a hidden and prior third, one itself seems curiously resistant to straightforward discur- that connects the forces of nature to the forces of mind. sive explanation, as Burke's own highly figurative lan- This mediating figure is of course that of a divine being, guage demonstrates. There is a marked ambiguity in the like the Jove and Jehovah of myth and scripture, at once play of these figures. At the moment of astonishment, the author of natural thunder and of human inspiration. when the power of the sublime manifests itself, the Hence the word astonishment incorporates within itself mind becomes utterly open to the influx of what it be- two contradictory aspects of the sublime; it immobilizes holds ("filled with its object"), and yet this flood of or releases, destroys or raises up. One is either struck by power into the mind produces no kinetic transfer of the divine power and "hurried" on to participate in its energy to the mind's faculties but rather the reverse, a glories, or one is struck dead as a stone. suspension of internal motion, a total arrest. At first ap- Blake shows a surprisingly persistent allegiance to pearing entirely permeable, the mind in an instant be- Burkean settings and diction, giving us imagery and nar- comes impenetrable, like a container packed to the rative scenarios that are full of sensory deprivations — bursting point ("so entirely filled with its object, that it darkness, cloudiness, and the host of disquieting sensa- cannot entertain any other"). The mind is quite stopped tions that gather under the general term "terror".7 He ("suspended"), only to be "hurried"; its internal density also uses the term "astonishment" more frequently than becomes crushing and yet finally it is easily carried any other major poet in the period 1660-1830,8 and al- along. "Astonishment," then, cannot be so much de- ways with careful discrimination. Extraordinarily sensi- scribed as circumscribed by a ring of mutually canceling tive to the possibilities of word play,9 he is quick to hear figures such as action/arrest, penetration/resistance, in- the thunder and to see the "stone" in aj/omshment.10 ertial mass/momentum. The figures are drawn from The word thus could easily encompass the whole pro- physical mechanics, but they compose no mechanics gram of Urizen, armed with "his ten thousands of thun- that Newton would recognize. Here the continuum of ders" (5L73.28), to bring about a "solid without fluctua- cause and effect breaks down; outward forces have un- tion," "a wide world of solid obstruction" (BU 4.11,23). predictable inward consequences. As Burke presents it, Hence to experience astonishment means in one sense to "astonishment" marks the intervention of sharp discon- turn to stone, to be "filled," as Burke would say, with the tinuities in the spheres of both nature and mind: nature inducing power and filled solid. Thus in Urizen, "Won- suddenly manifests itself in so overwhelming a fashion der, awe, fear, astonishment, / Petrify the eternal myri- that normal relations of subject and object are abol- ads" (BU 18.13-14). As it is the fate of overweening ished; at the same time the mind loses its consistency of deities in Blake to be struck by their own thunder, as operation and becomes a thing of paradox, of self-con- soon as Urizen manifests himself in all his pride, he is tradictory extremes. struck down and stunned (from etonnement) into "a PAGE 102 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY FALL 1989

stony sleep" (BU 6.7) or, elsewhere, into "present but at the mag- Blake's ecstatic report of his first days at Felpham: nitude of power lost, at the degree of petrifaction re- FALL 1989 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY PAGE 103

vealed in so-called powers by the time they present them. Blake's sublime allegory serves to isolate the in- themselves as natural "terrors." tellectual powers from the other components of the Blake seeks a less melancholy sublime, and if as a mind, for the essence of Blake's sublime resides in in- poet he is to gratify desire and recover plenitude, he tellect becoming present to itself as a wholly determi- must attempt some sort of redemption of astonishment. nate form (see the Descriptive Catalogue: "The Beauty When Reynolds repeats the Burkean saw that "obscurity proper for sublime art, is lineaments, or forms and fea- . . . is one source of the sublime," Blake retorts that it is tures that are capable of being the receptacles of in- "Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of any Thing tellect" [E 544]). The analogy to this process in Burke's Else" (E 658). Yet in a famous letter to Thomas Butts system would be the recoil of delight that floods the con- where he proclaims the sublimity of his own poetry (he sciousness when it realizes its safe distance from the con- calls it a "Sublime Allegory"), Blake ventures an impor- tingent pain or deprivation that provoked the sublime tant clarification: "Allegory addressed to the Intellectual experience in the first place.12 Blake and Burke do not powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal differ in their understanding of the structure or the dy- Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime namics of the sublime experience. Blake's quarrel is with Poetry" (E 730; emphases mine). To obscure originally Burke's choice of sublime objects (ratios of the five senses meant to veil, cover, or conceal, and nothing can be rather than glimpses of Eternal Death or of Divine Vi- more thoroughly obscured than that which is altogether sion) and Burke's apparatus of transformation (nerves hidden. Thus a sublime object (in this case the poetical and muscles rather than passion and imagination). But text) becomes "most sublime" when it is altogether ob- both writers place discontinuity of consciousness at the scure to our mundane faculties. There is no apparent center of their ideas of the sublime. conflict with Burke here. Indeed, it is not immediately If anything, in stressing the determinate, the par- easy to see how this bafflement of the "Corporeal Under- ticular, and the distinct as necessary qualities of sublime standing" differs much from Burke's own opinion in the objects, as he does in the Reynolds annotations and else- Philosophical Enquiry: "It is our ignorance of things where, Blake provides for a more radical discontinuity that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our and deprivation of the ordinary senses than anything passions."11 Blake apparently has no intention of aban- that Burke can supply from his storehouse of the cor- doning the drama, the clash of oppositions, and the sus- poreally vast and terrific. The Blakean visionary symbol, pense inherent in Burke's account of the sublime. He is the reflexive emblem of the Intellectual Powers — deter- willing to exploit Burke's evocations of giddiness and minate, particular, and distinct in itself— must be radi- irresistible rush since they so easily consort with Blake's cally discontinuous with everything that is beyond its own imagery of centers opening up, gates broken down, bounding outline. Here Blake occupies a sphere of con- and forms melting. There is a need, however, to relocate ception that would be "altogether hidden" to Edmund the scene of this drama, away from a point of humiliat- Burke, but we would be wrong to ignore the elements of ing encounter between the experiencing mind and some a Burkean sensibility that lick about the borders of this thunderous externality. As Blake's own notions of the sphere like a darkness to its radiance, enhancing its out- sublime become fully articulated, the encounter is seen line. Blake always assimilates his enemies' strength be- to take place between a lesser and a greater faculty of the fore he discards their excrementitious husk. mind, made manifest through the mediation of the poetic text. Blake not only represents scenes of astonish- ment in his work but also seeks to create fresh moments :David V. Erdman, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Wil of astonishment in the encounter of poem and reader, liam Blake, newly rev. ed. (Garden City: Anchor P/Doubleday, 1982) 660; hereafter referred to as E. offering a petrific text to stony understandings and a 2 field of openings for the receptive. See, for example, Josephine Miles, Eras and'Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957) 78-99; It becomes increasingly clear that we should attach Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Devel the term "astonishment" to that moment when the opment of Blake's Thought (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1970) 18-24; and reader's mind divides into a stunned Corporeal Under- especially Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake's Jerusalem standing and privileged intellectual powers. Astonish- (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1983) 57ff. 3Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ment is thus a liminal or threshold state, dividing the Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Lon- complacent mind from the stunned understanding and don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) 57. the latter from exalted powers of intuitive reception. The "Addison, for example, tells us that "our imagination loves to function of liminal states is to mark boundaries and be rilled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its hence to provide bounding outlines for what lies beyond capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such un- bounded views. ..." According to Johnson, "[The sublime is] that PAGE 104 BLAKE/AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY FALL 1989

comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the A Twist in the Tale of "The Tyger" second rational admiration." Here is a sampling of similar contem­ porary opinions: "The sublime . . . takes possession of our attention, Desmond King­Hele and of all our faculties, and absorbs them in astonishment"; "[the sublime] imports such ideas presented to the mind, as raise it to an uncommon degree of elevation, and fill it with admiration and astonishment"; "objects exciting terror are . . . in general sublime; Most readers of "The Tyger" have their own ideas of its for terror always implies astonishment, occupies the whole soul, meaning: I shall not be adding my own interpretation, and suspends all its motions." See, respectively, Works of Joseph but merely offering a factual record of minute particu­ Addison, 6 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811) 4: 340; lars, by pointing to a number of verbal parallels with Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Cowley," Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (1905; Oxford: Clarendon P; New Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden. A few of these York: Octagon Books, 1967) 1: 20­21; James Usher, Clio: Or, a Dis­ were given in my book Erasmus Darwin and the Roman­ course on Taste, 2nd ed. (London: T. Davies, 1769) 102; Hugh Blair, tic Poets; the others I have come across more recently. "A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian," in The Poems of Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden was published Ossian, trans. James Macpherson, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and in two parts, with Part 2, The Loves of the Plants, appear­ T. Cadell, 1773) 2: 422; Alexander Girard, An Essay on Taste (Lon­ don: A Millar, 1759) 19. ing first in 1789, and Part 1, The Economy of Vegetation, ^Philosophical Enquiry 58. nominally in 1791, though it did not actually appear un­ 6Dionysius Longinus, Essay on the Sublime, trans. William til about June 1792, probably because of delay in print­ Smith (London, 1756) 3. ing Blake's superb engravings of the Portland Vase.1 7 Just as Burke's sublime rides on an aesthetics of darkness, After my quotations I give the canto and line numbers deprivation, pain, and "whatever is in any sort terrible" {Philosophi­ cal Enquiry 39) so in Blake's vocabulary dark prevails numerically from the third edition of The Loves of the Plants (1791) over light, night over day, deathover life. More notably, the word ter­ and the first edition of The Economy of Vegetation. rors) and its co­derivatives terrible, terrific, terrified, taken as a col­ One of the best­known passages in Darwin's poem lectivity, would rank in the dozen most frequently used words in his was his vivid description of a nightmare, based on concorded vocabulary (David V. Erdman's Blake Concordance Fuseli's painting (illus. 1), which features the half­visible [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967] reveals a total of 393 uses of these terms). head of a large animal with unnaturally bright eyes, Despite his stated aversion to Burke, Blake so closely associates the sublime with the terrific that the terminology of the latter often ac­ enveloped in black night. Obviously the head is intend­ quires an honorific lustre in his work. Thus we have such phrases as ed as that of a horse, but the word "nightmare" has no

"Terrified at the Sublime Wonder" (a reference to the beneficent etymological connection with horses, male or female.2 Spaces of Erin — sccj 11.8­15), "terrible Blake in his pride" (When (The nightmare is produced by the incubus, or "squab Klopstock England defied," line 2), an uncharacteristically affec­ fiend" as Darwin calls him.) Could Fuseli's monstrous tionate Enitharmon's "Lovely terrible Los wonder of Eternity" (FZ 90.160), the "terrors of friendship" (745.5), and the "terrific Lions animal, with eyes burning bright in the blackness of the & Tygers" that "sport and play" before the Great Harvest at the end night, have given Blake the cue for his Tyger? Such a ofMilton (M 42.38). In these instances terror loses most of its terrors, speculation is encouraged by a verbal parallel between and one gets the sense that in such cases Blake is not paying tribute "The Tyger" and Darwin's verses about the sleeping girl. so much to the signified feeling of terror but rather to the signifier, The nightmare induces in her an "interrupted heart­ a vocabulary of the sublime fondly preserved from the fashions of his youth. pulse" and "suffocative breath", as frightful thoughts "There are 51 uses of the terms from the collectivity (aston­ In dread succession agonize her mind. ish(ed)(es)(ing)(ment) in Blake's poetry. Among poets of compara­ O'er her fair limbs convulsive tremors fleet, ble stature, range, and sublime interests, Milton's poetry yields only Start in her hands, and struggle in her feet. 6 instances, Wordworth's, 17, and Shelley's, 11. Pope draws upon this cluster of terms 16 times, almost entirely for his translations of (Lov. PI. 3: 68­70) Homer, and Dryden, 11 times, mostly for the Aeneid. 9 This is not quite "What dread hand? and what dread See Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983) 16­17, and especially 239­ feet?," b '■ dread is powerfully present, "in her hands, 57. and ... in her feet"; and "dread" was a favorite adjective 10This connection is reinforced by the older sense of astonished with Darwin, used twenty times in The Botanic Garden. (or its variant astonied) to connote death­like paralysis and insensi­ The burning brightness of the first two stanzas of bility; thus the OED on astonied: "Stunned; made insensible, "The Tyger" has some resemblances to Darwin's picture benumbed, paralyzed (1611)"; cf. also Milton on Satan's legions, who "lie thus astonisht on th'oblivious Pool" (Paradise Lost 1.266). of Nebuchadnezzar ordering "a vast pyre . . . of sul­ ^Philosophical Enquiry 61. phurous coal and pitch­exuding pine" with "huge bel­ 12See Philosophical Enquiry 37, 40. lows" to fan the roaring flames: