AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY Kazuya Okada on Blake's Imaginary Families VOLUME 34 NUMBER 2 FALL 2000 &}Uk e AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY VOLUME 34 NUMBER 2 FALL 2000 CONTENTS Articles Newsletter Ore under a Veil Revealed: Family Relationships Blake Exhibition at Tate Britain 62 and their Symbols in Europe and The Book of Urizen By Kazuya Okada 36 The Book ofAhania: A Metatext By Hatsuko Niimi 46 Reviews Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 Reviewed by Mary Lynn Johnson 54 Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Myths of Britain Reviewed by Alexander Gourlay 61 ADVISORY BOARD G. E. Bentley, Jr., University of Toronto, retired Nelson Hilton, University of Georgia Martin Butlin, London Anne K. Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles Detlef W. Dorrbecker, University of Trier Joseph Viscomi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside David Worrall, St. Mary's College Angela Esterhammer, University of Western Ontario David Worrall, St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill, CONTRIBUTORS Waldegrave Road, Twickenham TW1 4SX England Email: [email protected] ALEXANDER GOURLAY teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design; he is currently assembling a festschrift of Blake es• says in honor of John E. Grant. INFORMATION MARY LYNN JOHNSON, after 17 years as a special assistant to three University of Iowa presidents (and two interim presi• BLAKE /AN ILLUSTRATED QUARTERLY is published under the spon• dents), is celebrating the new century by returning to her sorship of the Department of English, University of Roch• roots as a scholar. She is author of a chapter on Blake's Milton ester. in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to William Blake. SUBSCRIPTIONS are $55 for institutions, $30 for individuals. HATSUKO NIIMI, Professor of English at Japan Women's Uni• All subscriptions are by the volume (1 year, 4 issues) and begin with the summer issue. Subscription payments re• versity in Tokyo, has published essays on British romanti• ceived after the summer issue will be applied to the 4 issues cism, including several on Blake, in both Japanese and En• of the current volume. Foreign addresses (except Canada glish. and Mexico) require a $10 per volume postal surcharge for surface, and $25 per volume surcharge for air mail delivery. KAZUYA OKADA is Associate Professor of English Literature at U.S. currency or international money order necessary. Make Okayama University, Japan. He has published articles on checks payable to Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. Address all romantic poetry. subscription orders and related communications to Patricia Neill, Blake, Department of English, University of Roches• ter, Rochester, NY 14627. EDITORS BACK ISSUES are available at a reduced price. 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Email: [email protected] Nelson Hilton, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602 © 2000 Copyright Morris Eaves and Morton D. Paley Email: [email protected] Cover: Details from illustrations on page 42. ARTICLES Ore under a Veil Revealed: Family Relationships and their Symbols in Europe and The Book of Urizen1 BY KAZUYA OKADA Introduction ttention has often been drawn to the veil of Enitharmon A(illus. la, lb), representing her relationship to her child, Ore; and its symbolic importance to Blakean mythology is generally agreed upon. But the attendant discussion has pro• duced several, often problematic, arguments. To understand the deeper significance of the imagery, we have to re-exam• ine Ore's figure in the light of a reconsideration of the tradi• tional mythic sources which throw light upon the meanings of family relationships. These relationships, which provide Blakean mythology with their interlocking dimensions, in effect systematize his idiosyncratic cosmology. His mythol• ogy is activated especially by the interaction of certain names la Europe plate 4. Glasgow University Library. which are identified with each character: namely, Los as fa• ther figure, Enitharmon as mother, and Ore or Oothoon as child. Elucidating the significance of family relationships thus helps us realize how Blake's proto-mythological framings are fundamentally based on certain family rela• tionships, extending from the earlier works—such as America or Visions of the Daughters of Albion—all through to such later works as Vala, or The FourZoas and Jerusalem. More important, perhaps, attention to these relationships can throw light upon transitional works, particularly, Eu• rope and The Book of Urizen. Here in particular, the rela• tionships, when more deeply analyzed, enable us to take a fresh look at Ore, to recognize Urizen with Jupiter as a greater father figure, Los with Vulcan as the father, or Enitharmon with Venus as the mother of Ore. I wish to argue here that this new light reveals the so far hidden position of Ore's fig• ure as the son between Vulcan and Jupiter, i.e., Cupid. It is not common to see a Cupid figure implied within the char• acterization of Ore; but it is my contention that this con• struction leads us to discover a more significant profundity which Blake intends in the figuration of Ore. The discus• sion will work towards the ultimate aim of encouraging Blake readers to reinterpret the creation of Ore as a challenge to 1 This essay was originally read at BARS (British Association for 1 b The Book of Urizen. The Picrpont Morgan Library, New York. Romantic Studies) 6th International Residential Conference, Keele PML 63139 copy B, plate 19 (Bentley 21). University, in the summer of 1999. I acknowledge with gratitude a grant from the English Literary Society of Japan which enabled me to give the presentation at the conference. 36 Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Fall 2000 _t_ Pregnant with alt eternity ran gyre ; Pregnant with til that make* archangels mile I Who murder* time, he crushes m iKt birth A power ethereal, on)/ not adored. Ah • how unjust tu nature and himself. Is thoughtless. thatikJesss, inconsistent man ' Like children babbling nooaeme in their sports, * We censure nature for a apan too ahort | That span too ahort, we tax aa tedious too; Torture invention, all expedients tire. To hmh the ling 'ring moments into speed, And whsr! aa, happy riddance ' from ourselves. Art, brainless art' our furious < hsrtotrer. For nature ■ vow* unatiRed would recall, Dnvea headlong tow'rda the precipice of deatli— Death, moat our dread . death thus more dreadful made O what a riddle of absurduy ' Letaure u pam ; take oil Dfj • IssTsw ■ WH K How heavily wa drag the load of Me > Bleat leumrt ia our curse . like that of Gats* It makes ua wander . wander earth around To % that tyrant, thought As Atlas groan'd TV world beneath, we groan beneath an hour We cry for merry to the next amusement I Slight inconvenience I pnaons hardb frown— Pram hateful time if prisons set ua free . Vet when death kindly tenders ua lelief. 2 Frontispiece to Europe. Glasgow University Library. 3 One of Blake's illustrations to Edward Young's Nigh t Thoughts. Courtesy of The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. restore Cupid's original position: a move in which Blake of the seven days of creation, i.e., a view which regards it as can be seen as discursively aligned with the contextual revo­ the depiction of "the Divine Circumscriber."4 Critics on the lutionary ethos, which in turn poses the larger question of side of the latter prefer to depend on the following descrip­ radicalism in romanticism. tion of Urizen in chapter VII of The Book of Urizen as a supplementary citation:"... formed golden compasses /And Infant/Infinity Compassed began to explore the Abyss" (E 81). Although the act of encompassing has long been thus un­ rough sketch of the Ancient of Days in the Notebook is derstood in conceptual terms, in the following discussion I Aan original design of the frontispiece to Europe (illus. want to draw the point of emphasis, at least at first, away 2 2). The original sketch contains an inscription of five words, from this to the question of the form of the compasses as an quoted within the following lines cited from the Prophecy: iconic symbol.