Blake and Kierkegaard

Blake and Kierkegaard JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd i 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:101:51:10 AAMM Related Titles in the Continuum Literary Studies series: Coleridge and German Philosophy Paul Hamilton Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital Claire Colebrook JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd iiii 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety By James Rovira JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd iiiiii 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704, New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 © James Rovira 2010 James Rovira has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi4 ed as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-3559-9 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [To come] Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by XXXXX JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd iivv 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM For Sheridan, Thwarted goddess of commas. JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd v 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd vvii 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Blake and Kierkegaard: Shared Contexts 8 The Sources of Kierkegaardian Anxiety and Creation Anxiety 8 Denmark’s and England’s Shared Histories 9 Denmark’s and England’s Cultural Anxieties 15 Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Cultural Tensions 26 2 Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Socratic Tradition 36 Human Personality and the Socratic Tradition 36 Kierkegaard and the Socratic Tradition 39 Blake and the Socratic Tradition 47 3 Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Classical Model of Personality 60 Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Stage and Blake’s Innocence 60 Kierkegaard’s Ethical Stage and Blake’s Experience 78 Kierkegaard’s Religiousness A and B and Blake’s Visionary Personality 87 4 Innocence, Generation, and the Fall in Blake and Kierkegaard 93 Kierkegaard and the Problem of Generation 93 Generation in Blake 101 Urizen the ReE ective-Aesthetic King 114 Reason and Imagination in Blake and Kierkegaard 116 5 Creation Anxiety and The [First] Book of Urizen 121 Urizen the Creator-Monarch 121 Science and Religion in the Urizen Books 129 JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd vviiii 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM viii Contents Haufniensis, the Demonic, and Spiritlessness 134 Conclusion: Nature, Arti4 ce, and Creation Anxiety in William Blake 141 Notes 144 Bibliography 151 Index 177 JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd vviiiiii 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM Acknowledgments I would like to thank, 4 rst of all, the person at the beginning of my journey with William Blake, Terry Scott Taylor of Daniel Amos, whose song “William Blake” inspired me to seek out Blake’s work and read it 25 years ago. Michael Phillips deserves my profuse thanks for his support of this project, for introducing me to Blake’s works as material objects, for being the model of a scholar and a historian that he has always been, and for the sheer pleasure of his company. Flaws in this work are undoubtedly the result of my inability to incorporate all of his suggestions in my given time frame. I owe my parents, John and Teresa Rovira, thanks for their continual love and support, and all of my children thanks for their sacri4 ce in accepting my inability to spend time with them while working on this project. I need to thank my dear friend and colleague, Sherry Truf4 n, vexed goddess of grammar, for giving up sabbatical time to read this book not once but three times. This book would be far poorer but for her inE uence. Her generosity and sacri4 ce to her friends, family, and colleagues, as well as her character, her dedication, her scholarship, and her intelligence deserve recognition and admiration. I need to thank most of all my wife Sheridan, my 4 rst reader, for her sacri4 ce, her support, and for her reading of my work. Her inE uence upon my life and work has forever changed it and made it what it is today. I need also to thank everyone with whom I’ve argued about Blake and Kierkegaard. You’ve helped me more than you know, and for that I am grateful. JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd iixx 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM JJRovira_FM_Rev.inddRovira_FM_Rev.indd x 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:111:51:11 AAMM Introduction The ongoing popularity of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein since its publication in 1818 underscores how much the possibility of an independently think- ing, willing entity created by human technology has haunted the western creative imagination, spawning plays, novels, ! lms, and a host of iconic images. From R.U.R. to A.I., Metropolis to the Matrix Trilogy, not to mention the many ! lm and television adaptations of Frankenstein itself, we seem enthralled by the myth that our creations might attain an independent con- sciousness and then turn upon us in an apocalyptic rage. The question, of course, is why? Why do we so persistently imagine that any independent being we might create will turn against us? Why do we keep returning to this narrative again and again? What is the source of our creation anxiety? The Enlightenment and the rise of empirical science widened the imagi- native scope of western technological possibilities and completely changed our conception of the universe and ourselves within it. Newton’s mechani- zation of the universe and Locke’s concept of the mind as tabula rasa— which to critics of the Enlightenment mechanized the human mind—were radical departures from centuries-old cosmologies and from classical models of a human being as a synthesis of body, soul, and spirit. Both William Blake (1757–1827) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) drew from classical models of personality to explain complex patterns of human psychological development. They used their psychological theories to confront Enlightenment conceptions of personality and to represent the new human being implied by these Enlightenment models. Kierkegaard called the most immature of his personality types “aesthetic” subjectivities, demonstrating (as we will see) that they are one product of Enlightenment models of personality. Blake’s fallen creator, Urizen, is an aesthetic subjectivity in Kierkegaard’s terms. Because Urizen embodies the creator-human as recon- ceived by the Enlightenment, Blake’s creation anxiety narratives—and possibly all creation anxiety narratives in the West—use fears of what we may create to articulate Romantic anxieties about what we have become JJRovira_Intro_Rev.inddRovira_Intro_Rev.indd 1 22/19/2010/19/2010 111:51:351:51:35 AAMM 2 Blake and Kierkegaard because of the Enlightenment. The rebellious creature as a mirror image of its creator subsumes creation anxiety narratives under the category of mythopoesis. Rather than being creation myths, these are recreation myths, launching us from the known of an existing creation to the anxiety- inspiring unknown of a new con! guration of the human. The in< uence of classical models of personality upon Blake’s thought led him to develop a mythological system that articulated creation anxiety for the ! rst time. Kierkegaard’s use of these models led him to create pseu- donymous authors and to posit anxiety as the motive force driving existen- tial development. Therefore, Blake’s mythology represents the “creation” and Kierkegaard’s philosophy the “anxiety” of creation anxiety. Their shared debt to the same classical tradition allows Kierkegaard’s conceptual structures to help us understand Blake’s mythology. After providing a brief outline of the classical tradition and each author’s relationship to it in Chapter 2, I describe in detail in Chapter 3 how both drew from classical models a speci! c developmental pattern in which the human self grows through orientations toward the differing constituent parts of the self. In classical models of personality, the self can progress from a bodily- orientation (equivalent to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic or Blake’s innocent personality), to a soul-orientation (Kierkegaard’s ethical or Blake’s experience personality), to a spirit-orientation (Kierkegaard’s religious or Blake’s visionary personality). But none of these transitions are guaranteed. Personality is not ! xed, stable, nor determined in Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s thought, but simultaneously given and chosen, anxiety ridden both inter- nally and externally. The anxieties that motivate each author’s work were a response to speci! c cultural and political transitions described in Chapter 1 that were shared by both Blake’s England and Kierkegaard’s Denmark. Cultural tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and arti! ce in< uenced both Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s perceptions of human personality and the internal and external pressures shaping it. Denmark’s and England’s shared, overlapping, and parallel histories embed these tensions in similar historical milieus, so that my comparison of Blake and Kierkegaard has a historical basis on which intellectual, social, and political history converge. And they do so on the same speci! c points, so that this study has the potential to bridge the divide between historical and conceptual approaches to Blake’s work existing even prior to Frye’s and Erdman’s studies of the mid-twentieth century.

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