William Blake's Gothic imagination: Bodies of horror 9781526121950

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WILLIAM BLAKE’S GOTHIC IMAGINATION

J Bodies of horror

Chris Bundock and (Oi]DEHWh (IÀnJHr

Edited by

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William Blake’s Gothic imagination

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William Blake’s Gothic imagination Bodies of horror Edited by Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 2194 3  hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

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•



List of figures Notes on contributors List of abbreviations

page vii ix xiii

Introduction  Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger 1 Part I:  The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts

31

1 ‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations  David Baulch 33 2 The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form  Kiel Shaub 64 3 The Gothic sublime  Claire Colebrook 85 Part II:  The misbegotten

107

4 Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus  Jason Whittaker 109 5 William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen  Lucy Cogan 129 6 Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection  Stephanie Codsi 150 Part III:  Female space and the image

163

7 The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present  Peter Otto 165 •v

Contents 8 Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion  Ana Elena González-Treviño 189 Part IV:  Sex, desire, perversion

211

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9 The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence  Mark Lussier 213 10 ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and degeneracy in Blake’s Visions and James Graham’s celestial bed  Tristanne Connolly 235

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Bibliography 265

Figures

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1 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 74, detail (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. page 4 2 William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (formerly called ‘Hecate’) (c. 1795). Tate Images. 10 3 Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos [The sleep of reason produces monsters] (1799). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 11 4 William Blake, ‘Albions Angel rose …’, Europe a Prophecy, copy A, plate 12 (Bentley 14) (1794 [1795]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 12 5 William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795). Museum of Fine Art, Boston. 13 6 William Blake, Death’s Door, For the Children: The Gates of Paradise, plate 17 (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 44 7 William Blake, ‘So Cried He …’, America a Prophecy, copy M, plate 14 (Bentley 12) (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 45 8 William Blake, Jerusalem, frontispiece, copy E, plate 1 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.47 9 William Blake, Jerusalem, title page, copy E, plate 2 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 48 10 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 50 11 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 57 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 51 • vii

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LIST OF Figures 12 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 84 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 54 13 William Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy F, plate 39 (Bentley 46) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 55 14 William Blake, Ancient of Days, Europe A Prophecy, frontispiece, copy A, plate 1 (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 133 15 William Hunter, ‘Fetus in utero’, table VI, Anatomia uteri humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). US National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. 138 16 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 10 (Bentley 7) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 143 17 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 14 (Bentley 11) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 145 18 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 11 (Bentley 17) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 168 19 William Hunter, ‘Decem priores …’, table I, Anatomia uteri humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). Special Collections, Baillieu Library University of Melbourne. 175 20 William Blake, Song of Los, copy B, plate 8 (1795). The Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. 178 21 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy I, frontispiece (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 203 22 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy I, title page (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.227

viii •

Notes on contributors

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David Baulch is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of West Florida. He has just finished a book-length manuscript entitled Being at the Limit: William Blake, Difference, and Revolution. He is author of a number of articles on William Blake, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Chris Bundock is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina. He is author of Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism (2016) and has published articles on the Gothic and Romantic historiography. His current book project, Romanticism’s Foreign Bodies, concerns how the body becomes other to itself both culturally and medically in the period. He has a chapter forthcoming in Blake: Modernity and Disaster titled ‘Blake’s Nervous System: Hypochondria, Judaism, and Jerusalem’. Stephanie Codsi currently teaches eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature at Bristol University. She has published in the Journal of Literature and Science, BSLS, and an entry on teaching Blake to Erasmus students in Romantic Textualities. Her poetry and music has appeared on Bristol community radio, and her poetry will be published in the Landsdown Poets’ Anthology this year. She is currently preparing a monograph titled Creative Labour and Self-Annihilation in the Poetry of William Blake. Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College, Dublin. She edited Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (2016) and has published articles on Blake and Sarah Butler. Her research focuses on politics in the long eighteenth century as well as related topics such as gender, radicalism, and religion. Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written • ix

Notes on contributors

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books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller). Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor and Chair of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She is the author of William Blake and the Body (2002) and has co-edited several essay collections on Blake and on Romantic literature, most recently British Romanticism in European Perspective: Into the Eurozone (2015) with Steve Clark, and Sexy Blake (2013) with Helen P. Bruder. She is currently working on another collection with Bruder, Beastly Blake (forthcoming 2018), and a digital edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants. Elizabeth Effinger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and has published widely in British Romanticism. Some of her work appears in ERR; Queer Blake; Blake, Gender and Culture; and Romantic Circles. She is completing a book that explores the relationship between Romanticism and critical posthumanism. Ana Elena González-Treviño is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and current Deputy Director at the Centre for Mexican Studies in King’s College London. She has published in the field of literary and cultural studies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emphasis on the works of Thomas Traherne as well as the Arabian Nights. She currently directs a digital humanities project, México imaginario, about the representation of Mexican culture in early printed books in English and French. Mark Lussier is a Professor in the Department of English and a Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His major publications include Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (1999), Romanticism and Buddhism (2006), Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis (2008), and Romantic Dharma: The Emergence of Buddhism into Nineteenth-Century Europe (2011). His chapters and essays have appeared in a wide range of collections and journals, including Blake 2.0, Ecological Theory, Literature and Religion, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in Romanticism, and Visible Language. Peter Otto is Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne. His recent publications include Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal x•

Notes on contributors

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Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science (2007), Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (2011), and 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on ‘William Blake, the history of imagination, and the futures of Romanticism’, while also working on a project entitled ‘Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds’. Kiel Shaub is a Doctoral Candidate in English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current research focuses on the early history of arts and sciences educational institutions in England. Jason Whittaker is Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln, and has written extensively on Blake and digital technologies. His publications include William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999), Radical Blake (with Shirley Dent, 2002), Blake 2.0 (with Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark, 2012), and William Blake and the Digital Humanities (with Roger Whitson, 2013). He is currently working on two books, one on the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ and another on digital media and fake news.

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Abbreviations

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E

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by H. Bloom, rev. edn, New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1988.

All references to Blake’s written words are taken from The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, and given as in-text parenthetical citations of plate and line numbers (where applicable), and page numbers indicated by E Am BA BT BL BU DC DLJ Eur FZ Island J M MHH On Virgil PA PM SIE SL VDA

America a Prophecy Book of Ahania The Book of Thel The Book of Los The [First] Book of Urizen A Descriptive Catalogue Description of the Last Judgment Europe a Prophecy The Four Zoas An Island in the Moon Jerusalem Milton The Marriage of Heaven and Hell On Homer’s Poetry [and] On Virgil [Public Address] The Pickering Manuscript Songs of Innocence and of Experience The Song of Los Visions of the Daughters of Albion • xiii

Abbreviations VLJ OED

[A Vision of the Last Judgment] Oxford English Dictionary

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Unless otherwise specified, Blake’s visual art is referenced by title and (where applicable) plate number by Erdman’s numbering. Digital reproductions may be consulted through The William Blake Archive: www.blakearchive.org

xiv •

Introduction

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• Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger

Blake and the Gothic today In the robust and expanding field of Gothic studies, William Blake remains a spectral, marginal figure. As early as 1973 David Bindman referred to Blake’s ‘Gothicised Imagination’, inviting readers to explore potential points of contact between this influential aesthetic and historical form, and Blake’s poetry and visual art.1 Yet Bindman seems to proffer and then revoke the invitation to further exploration of this topic, concluding that Blake’s attraction to the Gothic was to its ‘simplicity and purity of style’ and that, more broadly, ‘Blake seems … to have been immune in his early years from the artistic influence of “Gothic Horror”.’2 Drawing on contemporary Gothic studies that present the Gothic as a rich and varied historical, aesthetic, political, and affective mode, the present study seeks not to establish lines of influence but to recognise aspects of Blake’s art that do in fact productively intersect with the Gothic horror taking shape contemporaneously with Blake’s career. While generally overlooked in studies of the Gothic, Blake’s art has, ironically, spawned a rich Gothic afterlife. Consider the horror fiction of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and Hannibal, which have, in turn, inspired Hannibal, an American television series. Or take graphic novels, such as Todd McFarlane’s Spawn (1992–present), Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (1993–present), and most notably British comic artist Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982–89), Watchmen (1986–87), From Hell (1991–96), and even his recently published second novel, titled Jerusalem, which is a crippling one million words in length. This ‘strange beast’, as Moore describes it, •1

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Introduction not only shares its namesake with Blake’s magnum opus, but, like so much of his work, draws on the Gothic tradition.3 As David Punter observes, Moore’s work is ‘a tissue of referentiality, taking us back to Blake, Nietzsche and the Gothic and romantic traditions’.4 Beyond the page, Blake’s Gothicism proliferates in film, including Jim Jarmusch’s noir-Western Dead Man (1995), Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller Prometheus (2012), and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). Of Von Trier’s film Roger Whitson keenly observes that the promotional poster art of a tree consisting of a multitude of writhing bodies dramatically resembles Blake’s 1808 version of ‘The Vision of the Last Judgment’. Moreover, the tormented and violent couple at the centre of the film resembles the horrific dynamic of Tharmas and Enion in Vala, or The Four Zoas, following Albion’s violent splitting into individuality.5 In a darkened Blakean vein, we should also recall the staged tableaux and photomontage of Joel-Peter Witkin’s Songs of Innocence & Experience (2004), a tour de force featuring photographs of gory, deformed bodies accompanied by Blake’s poems.6 What all of these works intuit is that if the ‘Gothic is of the soul (the phantomatic, the unseen, the fleeting)’, for Blake and for the art he inspires it is also emphatically ‘of the body (the horror, the blood, the distortion of the frame)’.7 In Gothic Riffs (2010), Diane Long Hoeveler argues that the Gothic is characterised by its highly repetitive quality, what she dubs its ‘riffs’.8 Nowhere is this clearer for Blakean iterations than in contemporary music. Blake has inspired the goth band Mephisto Waltz (Track 5. ‘The Tyger’, Immersion [2001]), and the black/death metal band Thelema, whose album Fearful Symmetry (2008) includes tracks with Blakean titles such as ‘The Fly’, ‘Tyger’, ‘The Crystal Cabinet’, and ‘The Human Abstract’. With tracks like ‘We Sleep’, ‘Blind to the World’, and ‘The Machine’ the technical thrash metal band Blake’s Vengeance (Demo 2014) imagines itself a sort of reincarnation of the poet-engraver. Even Goth-icon Marilyn Manson has given a public performance of Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’.9 The collusion of Blake and Goth/ metal music is cleverly suggested in a recent article titled ‘Death Metal Lyric or William Blake Quote?’ in which Eli Petzold lists ten aphoristic quotations – like, ‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead’ – for the reader to identify as either a line from a metal band or the great British Romantic poet himself.10 (Here, the answer is not Opeth or Meshuggah, but Blake.) It is not just that Blake’s ‘cult status’, as Whitson puts it, has ‘transformed to signify dark and daring innovation’, but that when taken together, these contemporary Gothic ‘texts’ (in the largest 2•

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Introduction sense of that term) operate as a cultural barometer for Blake’s influence, symptoms of Blake’s own profound Gothic sensibility that restlessly haunts and contaminates our vision of a brighter, more joyful Blake.11 This alignment of Blake with contemporary Gothic subculture draws on the deep political history of the term. Even before its appropriation by Jacobin and anti-Jacobin factions as a structure for political feeling in the 1790s, the Gothic played an important role in defining British nationhood.12 Sean Silver argues, for instance, that ‘The Gothic first emerged as a political category during the long and ruinous Civil War (1642–49)’ as parliamentarians sought grounds to oppose monarchal claims to absolute and divine right.13 Seeking a national origin that predated monarchy, republicans turned to England’s tribal heritage, one that ‘boasted distributed legal authority and government by a parliament of freeholders’ such that ‘the English government would henceforth be Gothic in origin, the Gothic influence on Anglo-Saxon political tradition accounting for England’s uniquely mixed mode of government’.14 This would, in short, account for the persistent counter-cultural strain in the Gothic, for its antiauthoritarian tendencies both political and aesthetic. Indeed, as a means to tell a different story about national origins, the Gothic is just as originally an aesthetic form – one, according to Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), characterised by its rebellion against ‘a neo-Aristotelian preference for order, regularity and stately symmetry’ that ‘came to be associated with centralized power’.15 It also provides context for some of the most important thematic, narrative, and psychological features of the Gothic: the uncanny return of the repressed that undermines patriarchal authority, the haunting of the present by a violent, traumatic past, and frequent obscurity or disjunction in the organisation of visual space and narrative order all find a common root in the Gothic’s political rebelliousness. It should be no surprise, then, that Blake’s art is dispositionally and aesthetically congruous with the Gothic revival of the late eighteenth century. Blake has long been recognised as a ‘Prophet Against Empire’, urging his countrymen to ‘rouze up! rouze up’ (J 96:34; E 256) to oppose the tyranny of centralised authority.16 It is also in this historiographical sense that David Punter locates Blake’s intersection with the Gothic: Both Ossian and Blake, he argues, generate the uncanny impression in their poetry ‘that the reader is being exposed to a story already told, a tale he is supposed to know already’.17 Yet, if there is the sense that, instead of linear causality, history records ‘an event which recurs throughout human history in the manner of Blake’s quasi-myths’ – something is always •3

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Introduction repeating but never coming fully into the light – this is the paradigmatic form of the ‘lost origin’ that agitates Gothic texts: ‘What Blake really wanted to find in the Gothic as he understood it’, Punter continues, ‘was an antiquity in which the whole issue of “source”, in the straightforward sense of historical antecedent, could be relativized’, with the important effect of relativising the authority and power of those ‘original sources’.18 We see the restlessness of history occasioned by this constitutive loss (Punter draws attention to the pun on ‘Los’) of the origin in Blake’s writing and rewriting of Genesis across the Lambeth books, his redemptive history of the Civil War in Milton, and his revision of spiritual history and national origins in Jerusalem. Such revisions are also insistently corporeal, the past returning like the disjecta membra or scattered body parts strewn about Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Consider, for instance, the figure on plate 74 of Jerusalem (see Figure 1). Here an androgynous body lies on its side, vegetating and enrooted with ‘streams of gore’ and ‘Fibres’ branching out of its neck, head, fingers, and lower extremities (J 74:37, 42; E 230). A composite of the mythicalhistorical figures mentioned in the plate’s text (Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dinah), this body in pain represents the sons and daughters, the generations of Albion. But, it also takes a particularly Gothic shape as a body that cannot confine those names to the past, as a body that is invaded by the branches and limbs its own mythopoeic genealogy. In Blake’s (re) visionary history, it is in ‘Lambeths Vale / Where Jerusalems foundations began’, it is the historical ground in which ‘every Nation & Oak Groves

Figure 1  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 74, detail (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 4•

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Introduction rooted’ (M 6:14–15, 16; E 99). But rather than a proud English oak rising up out of the past, we have instead a gnarled stump. Nicole Reynolds argues that ‘The Gothic privileges innovation, impulse and imagination over rule, conformity and reason.’19 In so doing, ‘The Gothic values what the Enlightenment swept under the rug.’20 So too does Blake. For Blake, the Enlightenment – personified as ‘This Voltaire & Rousseau: this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke’ (M 40:12; E 141) – produces only a ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ otherwise known as ‘Natural Religion! this impossible absurdity’ (M 40:11, 14; E 141). In his address to the Deists in Jerusalem Blake again indicts ‘Voltaire! Rousseau! Gibbon!’, asserting how ‘Vain / [are their] Grecian Mocks & Roman Sword / Against this image of his Lord!’ (J 52:22, 23–4; E 202). The Enlightenment is here aligned with Classicism and both are charged with spiritual impotence. The epistemological uncertainty that is characteristic of Gothic fiction – can I trust my senses? – and that undermines enlightened truth claims is the same lever with which Blake opens a space for the miraculous. For instance, where the guiding angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell sees horrible monsters, this is only ‘owing to [his] metaphysics’ (19; E 42), suggesting that reality might be perspectival. Indeed, where most look at the sun and see ‘a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea’, Blake, in his Description of the Last Judgment famously sees ‘an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty’ (DLJ; E 565–6). According to his reflections in the Descriptive Catalogue, moreover, Enlightenment historiography, premised on mathematical ‘probabilities and possibilities’, is only so much ‘reasoning and … rubbish’ because history is, in fact, ‘improbabilities and impossibilities; what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes’ (DC 44, 43; E 544, 543). Blake, like other Gothic writers, is interested in a type of vision that eclipses common sense, that dips below the smooth surface of enlightened empiricism and calculation into the ‘Hell’ of desire, passion, and imagination and that does not conform to discursive reason. Terror, horror, and the ‘ Gothic body ’ Blake’s Gothic resistance to enlightened forms of knowledge is perhaps most powerfully expressed in his treatment of bodies, especially their visual representation. In Steven Bruhm’s words, ‘the “Gothic Body” is that which is put on excessive display, and whose violent, vulnerable immediacy gives both … painting and Gothic fiction their beautiful barbarity, their •5

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Introduction troublesome power’.21 Recalling the revolutionary potential encrypted in the Gothic, such bodies proliferate in the context of the American and French revolutions, events to which Blake dedicates separate ‘minor prophecies’ and to which he responds more diffusely across his oeuvre. Indeed, throughout Blake’s work we are reminded ‘how the pained body troubled the intellectual enterprises of all revolutionary Romantic endeavours’.22 Images of ‘distorted sinews’ (J 65:72; E 217), leaking ‘Marrow’ (J 58:8; E 207), and other viscera – ‘The Lungs, the Heart, the Liver’ (J 49:17; E 198) – gruesomely spill out across Jerusalem. Urizen, ‘In ghastly torment sick’ (BU 13:4; E 76), is born within a bloody, excremental chaos. So too is Enitharmon extruded from Los in The Four Zoas:   I saw My loins begin to break forth into veiny pipes & writhe Before me in the wind englobing trembling with strong vibrations The bloody mass began to animate. I bending over Wept bitter tears incessant. (FZ 50:10–14; E 333)

No wonder the Daughters of Albion cry and sigh. Blake’s illuminated work is made in Victor Frankenstein’s ‘filthy workshop of creation’,23 the printing house in hell where he engraves ‘in the infernal method, by corrosives’ (MHH 14; E 39). For texts like The [First] Book of Urizen (1794) or The Book of Thel (1789) are not only about their namesakes but physically of them – similar to how Buffalo Bill, the murderous psychopath in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs (1988), is literally a patchwork composite of the sewn-together skins of his victims.24 As various critics have noted,25 Blake’s texts invite the reader into a space wherein the boundary between body and book dissolves, as it does when we notice how the frontispiece for Visions of the Daughters of Albion, as Mark Lussier notes in his contribution, resembles a bisected skull (see Figure 21). The pages of these texts, with their nervous, bloodied framing take the reader voyeuristically through a textual and physical corpus. This conflation between body and book brings Blake uncannily close to British splatterpunk author Clive Barker’s famous description of humans as ‘book[s] of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red’.26 Are Blake’s bodies terrible or horrible? Before Ann Radcliffe’s codification of this opposition, ‘terror’ played a key role in Edmund Burke’s discussion of the sublime in his 1757 Enquiry.27 The term, however, acquires a political resonance through the 1790s. As Angela Wright notes, ‘In “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing” [1793], the anonymous “Jacobin 6•

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Introduction Novelist” specifically linked the rise of the Gothic romance with the rise of the tyrannical and over-reaching Robespierre, who, by the late 1790s, had become infamous for his “reign of terror” in Paris.’28 In the wake of the Revolution’s turn to terror as official policy, ‘ “Terror” as an aesthetic Burkean concept … was summarily stripped of its intellectual credentials in relation to Gothic fiction, and became a synecdoche … for a more specifically threatening literary movement.’29 In ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) Radcliffe seems to recover something of Burke’s sense of the concept in her opposition of terror and horror. For Radcliffe, terror involves obscurity, uncertainty, or, as Punter might say, a pervasive and profound ‘doubt’,30 whereas horror follows deadly certainty: ‘Terror and horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.’31 Milton’s Satan is, for example, ‘more of terror than of horror; for it is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excited the imagination to complete the rest’.32 Like the Burkean sublime, Gothic terror spurs thought. ‘Terror, then, is that carefully regulated aesthetic experience that can use intense feeling to seek objects in the world … Conversely, horror “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates” the passions which lead to community, and forces the horrified spectator to enclose and protect the self.’33 Explicitly and implicitly, the contributions in this collection engage this crucial opposition in the context of Blake’s work. Yet, they also invite us to reflect on whether Blake’s horrible bodies produce closure or whether, through them, we might rethink the tendency to align disembodied abstraction with imaginative flexibility. All horror, Jack Morgan argues, is ‘essentially bio-horror’.34 Xavier Aldana Reyes echoes this point, stressing the need to ‘reclaim the importance of the body to the gothic text’.35 Certainly, Blake’s bodies are often horrific – fully, excessively anatomised, exposed, and visible. Even organic creation itself is a horrifying process, one that threatens to confine the divine vision to a corporeal Bastille. In The [First] Book of Urizen, for instance ‘Urizen was rent’ from Los’s ‘side’ in a violent parody of Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib (BU 6:4; E 74), only then to morph into a full skeleton: A vast Spine writh’d in torment Upon the winds; shooting pain’d Ribs, like a bending cavern And bones of solidness, froze Over all his nerves of joy. (BU 10:37–40; E 75) •7

Introduction

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The physiological composition of Blake’s famous Tyger, similarly, sounds as if it takes place in one of Giovanni Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons): And what shoulder. & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp! (SIE 42:9–16; E 24–5)

Like Urizen, the Tyger is physically crafted through hammering, firing, and twisting of the sort that easily evokes scenes of inquisitorial malevolence. The moment when the body is most bodily – that is, in the moment of its reproduction – is also when it becomes most horrific. Examples proliferate: In The Book of Los and Milton, organs ‘Dim & glutinous as the white Polypus’ tie spirit with ‘living fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space growing / A self-devouring monstrous Human Death’ (BL 4:57; M 34:25–6; E 93, 134). The image here recalls Abraham Trembley’s 1751 discovery of the hydra or polyp, a creature capable of ‘regrowing missing parts and [re-creating] complete organisms from small pieces, in a process that turns dismemberment into an opportunity for propagation’.36 Physical life was never more monstrous and deadly.37 Blake does not just describe this body horror verbally, however. He also shows it to us graphically. In this respect, his practice recalls how antiquarianism visualises the Gothic for Romantic historiography. As Rosemary Sweet notes, ‘Antiquarianism was widely regarded as the inferior partner to history – it was the “handmaid” whose primary role was to provide corroborating evidence or illustrative material for narrative history.’38 These ‘illustrative materials’ form the reliquary of tropes that define the distinct visual style of the Gothic. It was within antiquarianism that there developed an ‘appreciation of the importance of the visual record and of accurate illustrations’.39 In the Gothic, this interest in illustration combines with the fascination with the body’s otherness. Hence, ‘The Gothic in its multitude of trans-medial manifestations turns on the making visible of horror’, it revels in ‘the skeleton jumping out of the closet, the curtain drawn back, the flash-light that fleetingly illuminates 8•

Introduction an unspeakable scene of incest and/or cannibalism’.40 So, if ‘the visual has come more forcibly under analysis within Gothic Studies’ following the ‘ “pictorial turn” in intellectual and cultural life at the end of the twentieth century’, Blake’s visual art constitutes a vital if generally overlooked Gothic archive.41

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Gothic images Some of Blake’s most enigmatic bodies resemble well-known eighteenthcentury Gothic figures. For instance, Blake’s illustration of the hunched skeleton in The [First] Book of Urizen strikingly resembles the tormenting imp or incubus in his friend Henry Fuseli’s famous painting, The Nightmare (1781), a painting that Blake reworks again in Jerusalem on plate 37, where the figure of Jerusalem lies beneath a looming, bat-like Spectre (E 33).42 Blake’s 1795 colour print of The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (plate 3, see Figure 2), formerly called ‘Hecate’ is, as Robert Essick notes, ‘as neo-gothic as Monk Lewis’.43 Indeed, the owls and bats flitting over Enitharmon/Hecate’s head recall Alexander Runciman’s The Witches Show Macbeth the Apparitions (c.1771–72), and Fuseli’s The Mandrake, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785. Even Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799) (see Figure 3) resonates with Blake’s earlier composite of the ‘Kings & Priests’ who ‘copied on earth’ Urizen’s ‘brazen Book’ in Europe a Prophecy (Eur11:3; E 64): his massive bat-like wings unfurled, they partially obscure the facade of a Gothic cathedral in the background (see Figure 4). Blake’s oeuvre teems with Gothic iconography. The twisted, ominous trees of Songs of Innocence recall the theory developed by James Hall in Essay on the Origin and Principles of Gothic Architecture (1797) that trees were the primary influences for Gothic architecture.44 There are the monstrous serpents of Europe a Prophecy and creepy crawlers (toads, centipedes, and spiders) that inch along the borders of Jerusalem. Beyond the stock supernatural figures of devils and angels, Blake’s pantheon includes witches, haunting spectres, and protean shadowy figures – for example, the ‘nameless shadowy female’ in Europe a Prophecy (Eur 1:1; E 60). There are also monstrous, chimerical bodies such as Cerberus, The Red Dragon, The Ghost of a Flea, and the grotesque cat Blake designed in his commissioned illustration to graveyard poet Thomas Gray’s mock epitaph ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold •9

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Introduction

Image not available in this digital edition.

Figure 2  William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (formerly called ‘Hecate’) (c. 1795). Tate Images.

Fishes’ (1748) – a poem based on the real-life tragic death of Selima, the beloved cat of Gothic forefather Horace Walpole. While certainly there are representations of positive transformations in Blake – forms of apotheosis – there are also darker processes, Gothic ‘mutations’ that place stress on disintegrative negativity, degeneration, anatomisation.45 Illustrated in his commercial engravings are the horrors of racism and slavery depicted in the bleeding body of A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows, the first of Blake’s commercial engravings completed for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). More incredible transformations include the metamorphosis of human into animal, as in the case of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (1795–c.1805) (see Figure 5). In this remarkably Gothic print (and current cover-art for the Tate Britain’s William Blake app!), the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, sporting a shaggy mane and sharp finger- and toenails, crawls on hands and knees. As Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61) remarked, we see the ‘mad king crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures’ talons, and his 10 •

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Introduction

Figure 3  Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos [The sleep of reason produces monsters] (1799). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

• 11

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Introduction

Figure 4  William Blake, ‘Albions Angel rose …’, Europe a Prophecy, copy A, plate 12 (Bentley 14) (1794 [1795]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

12 •

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Introduction

Figure 5  William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795). Museum of Fine Art, Boston.

wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair, reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet.’46 Still more Gothic elements are found in Blake’s representations of ecclesiastical characters – corrupt, despotic priests and monks that are symbols of that ‘blackning church’ (SIE 46:10; E 27). In ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ in Songs of Experience, it is the ‘Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery’ (SIE 37:11–12; E 23), a sentiment more forcefully expressed in ‘A Little Boy Lost’ when a sadistic priest burns a young boy alive for asking an innocent question (SIE 50:17–24; E 28–9). Orc’s plagues in America a Prophecy threaten, moreover, to transform the Bard of Albion into a reptilian clergyman: Hid in his eaves the Bard of Albion felt the enormous plagues. And a cowl of flesh grew o’er his head & scales on his back & ribs; And rough with black scales all his Angels fright their ancient heavens The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in rustling scales Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of Orc[.] (Am 15:16–20; E 57) • 13

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Introduction Even Blake’s little-known poem ‘The Grey Monk’, from the Pickering Manuscript, features a Lewis-like scene of torture: ‘The blood red ran from the Grey Monks side / His hands & feet were wounded wide’ (PM 5–6; E 489).47 That ecclesiastical figures appear in various forms throughout Blake’s work speaks to what Mark Canuel identifies as a hallmark of the Romantic Gothic: the ‘complex and fluctuating role’ of religious authority.48 Canuel suggests that the Gothic both challenges the Church’s oppressive institutionalism and imagines its revision, a tactic we find at work in Blake whenever he imagines the New Jerusalem or when he projects himself into the sympathetic figure of the Grey Monk – a character likely inspired, as Morton Paley suggests, by Blake’s time in 1804 spent on trial at the Gothic Chichester guildhall, which was formerly the chancel of the Grey Friars.49 As we have come to expect from Gothic novels, priests in Blake’s work might be benevolent (like Jerome in The Castle of Otranto) but are more likely than not malevolent (like Father Schedoni in The Italian). In the 1760s, William Blackstone famously describes the English constitution as ‘an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for modern inhabitants’.50 As Jerrold E. Hogle points out, calling such architecture ‘Gothic’ was actually ‘a misnomer’, a phantasy projection ‘applied by later neoclassicists to the “barbarity” of pointed-arch buildings … which were wrongly linked to the fifth-century “Goths” ’.51 How might Blake respond to this derisive application of the term ‘Gothic’? From the formative years of his seven-year apprenticeship for James Basire (1772–79) where he copied medieval tombs in Westminster Abbey to his time on trial at Chichester, Gothic architecture played an important role in in Blake’s life. We find its mark in the entranceways, chambers, and churches of his art, as several of our contributors discuss.52 Even the architectural afterlives of other poets have been shaped by Blake’s Gothic vision: Walt Whitman famously modelled his own crypt after Blake’s illustration of ‘Death’s Door’, after encountering the design in Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863).53 So, while ‘the Gothic’ proves to be a complex tangle of historical, political, aesthetic, corporeal, psychological, and even architectural concepts, Blake’s art intersects with several of these strands, suggesting that we might reconsider Blake as a Gothic artist just as we might rethink the history of Gothic in light of Blake’s multi-media approach to embodied horror. 14 •

Introduction

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Blake ’ s Gothic legacy In Gothic Writing, 1750–1850: A Genealogy (1993), Robert Miles asserts that ‘the deepest energies of the Gothic novel announce themselves as a Blakean agon of Orc contra Urizen’.54 Yet, nowhere in that study does he actually read Blake. As Miles’s remark suggests, Blake seems like he should be central to a thinking of the Gothic, that he even provides a model for its ‘deepest energies’. Nevertheless, Blake studies and Gothic studies have rarely overlapped in substantial or sustained ways. Discussions of the literary Gothic tradition tend towards canonical novelists (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, et cetera) or ‘supernatural’ poetry that still ignores Blake.55 Similarly, while the dark and dangerous parts of Blake have been explored (see, for instance, Philippa Simpson on Blake’s pornography, Tristanne Connolly on his ‘bad sex aesthetic’, and Timothy Morton on his ‘dark ecology’56), few critics have directly linked Blake with the term ‘Gothic’. This critical silence mirrors the near absence of the term ‘Gothic’ in Blake’s work, appearing as it does in less than a dozen texts.57 Yet, readers intuit that Blake’s art embodies a Gothic sensibility even if the word itself is rare in his work. An exception to this critical disconnect is William Richey’s 1996 study, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Richey argues that the coordinates between Blake’s aesthetics and politics shift over his career: ‘In his pre-1800 texts, Blake used a largely neoclassical idiom to engage his political opponents and ridicule their repressed and repressive philosophy. By the time he was composing Milton, [however,] Blake had come to see that this kind of strategy only replicated the antagonism and self-righteousness of the classical tradition.’58 If in Blake’s earlier work the Gothic signified tyranny and repression and the classical liberty and virtue, over time Blake’s conception of the Gothic trades places with the classical, such that the Gothic in his later work embodies ‘a biblically inspired aesthetic based on imaginative vision rather than the moralistic allegory of the classical tradition’.59 While Richey illuminates much respecting Blake’s Gothic aesthetics, one limitation his analysis faces is that the Gothic remains defined exclusively by its difference from the classical. While symmetrically pleasing as an argument, the problem is that the Gothic becomes identified with whatever is anti-classical in visual art, a tendency typified by Richey’s suggestion that ‘Jerusalem becomes an image of Gothic form, not because she embodies the characteristics of actual medieval or Gothic art, but because she represents • 15

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Introduction the antithesis of those features of classicism that Blake had come to reject’.60 Continuing in this stylistic vein, Anne K. Mellor notes that, aside from the influence of ‘Michelangelo and romantic classicism’, Blake’s conception of the line was ‘strongly stimulated’ by ‘the English gothic style’.61 Mellor argues, in fact, that ‘in Blake’s late art … these seemingly contradictory Gothic and neoclassical idioms can be successfully united’.62 Moreover, as Jean Hagstrum suggests, Blake would have had access, during his time in Westminster Abbey, to a number of medieval manuscripts and may well have been influenced by these works in his own graphic design.63 All this suggests a biographical, historical, and stylistic way to link Blake with the Gothic. Yet, it also strips the Gothic of its affective, psychological, and richly varied aesthetic content. As the foregoing suggests, the Gothic is a much broader and more nebulous field than what can be defined as the inversion of Classicism. It is to a more dynamic and multifaceted sense of the Gothic that, as the chapters in this book suggest, Blake is alive. The 2006 exhibition at the Tate Britain, ‘Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination’, represents another rare occasion wherein we are invited to read Blake and the Gothic in terms of each other – an occasion that also, happily, invites a more expansive definition of the Gothic. Exploring the visual dimensions of Blake and Fuseli’s shared ‘taste for the Gothic’,64 the exhibition suggested that not only did these two artists share a thematic interest in ‘the perverse, strange and supernatural’, but ‘the same range of new strategic possibilities regarding audiences, marketing and the power of sensation’.65 As Martin Myrone notes, Blake was among the few visual artists who illustrated ‘modern Gothic subjects’ by drawing on sensational and Gothic themes in ‘the classics, national history, Dante and Elizabethan and Jacobean literature’, as if they were a ‘repository of Gothic horror, visionary excess and kinky eroticism’.66 In The Gothic (2004) David Punter and Glennis Byron sketch some lines of possible investigation for Blake scholars: In the case of William Blake (although, of course, his status as a ‘romantic’ poet is hotly disputed), his early work includes imitations of Spenser and of other writers rehabilitated by the Gothic revival. Blake had a strong interest in the ballad form, as we can see from such conventional works as ‘Fair Elenor’ (1783) and, rather differently, from the thematically highly complex but formally simple works in the Pickering Manuscript, such as ‘The Mental Traveller’. Some of the prose pieces in the Poetical Sketches (1783) appear to have been

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Introduction

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influenced by ‘Ossian’, and there is also an influence from the graveyard poets, evidenced outstandingly in Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young and Robert Blair but also in the constant preoccupation with ‘graveyard vocabulary’, as strong in Vala, or, The Four Zoas ([1797–1807]) and The Keys to the Gates (c.1818) as in his earlier work. 67

For Punter and Byron, Blake’s status as a Romantic poet may be undecided even while his affinity with the Gothic is beyond doubt: they place Blake alongside Coleridge and de Sade, naming them all ‘Gothic masters’.68 In spite of such prompting, in Blake criticism the Gothic still tends to appear – if it does at all – in passing. Steven Goldsmith, for instance, in Blake’s Agitation (2013) notes that Blake’s corrosive dissolution of the human into a series of affective intensities, such as ‘a red Globe of blood trembling’ (J 17:51; E 162) or ‘a pulsation of the artery’ (M 28:47; E 126), generate what he, following Barbara Johnson, calls ‘figures of half-aliveness’: Whenever literary texts make their readers aware of these “half-alive” emotions, it is tempting to consider such moments in terms of paranoid, gothic discovery … Blake’s work is full of such gothic moments, with selfhoods revealing their possession by inauthentic specters: the long night of Enitharmon is a night of living machines who pass themselves off as human forms.69

Goldsmith here gestures towards Blake’s Gothic potential in affective terms, citing the centrality of uncanny and haunting forces in his work that, in perfectly Gothic fashion, deconstruct categories such as self and other, alive and dead, real and imaginary. Occasionally recognised though generally underdeveloped in extant criticism, Blake’s ‘kinship’ with the Gothic was also sensed by his early readers.70 John Ruskin, the Victorian critic who greatly influenced the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, reported in a letter to Mrs Hugh Blackburn (27 May 1850) that on the subject of the German love of horror ‘[w]e have had one grand man of the same school – William Blake – whose “Book of Job” fail not to possess yourself of – if it comes in your way; but there is a deep morality in his horror – as in Dante’s’.71 Gilchrist said similarly of Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen that ‘the poem is shapeless, unfathomable; but in the heaping of gloomy and terrible images, the America a Prophecy and Europe a Prophecy are even exceeded’.72 He goes on to remark that ‘[t]he design, like the text, is characterised by a monotony of horror’.73 Likewise, Algernon Swinburne saw Blake’s work as ‘grotesque almost to grandeur, and full of strength and significance’,74 a sentiment echoed in the mid-twentieth century with Georges Bataille celebrating, • 17

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Introduction in Literature and Evil (1957), Blake’s ‘excessive violence’ through which ‘Evil attains a form of purity’.75 Taking up these scattered hints and intimations, the chapters that follow represent the first sustained and focused treatment of Blake as a Gothic artist, taking ‘Gothic’ in the fullest sense of that term. While contributions do attend to architectural and art-historical applications, they also take us beyond these confinements and into the fuller range of psychology, identity, history, sexuality, feeling, and embodied aesthetics that has occupied Gothic studies in recent decades. Contributors also frequently focus on Blake’s images – a move that, in turn, may contribute to and spur more action on this front in Gothic studies as a field. While the chapters do consider a wide range of Blake’s oeuvre, the collection is, admittedly, non-comprehensive. Indeed, as readers will notice, there are several ‘nodal points’, a selection of Blake’s images or texts or figures to which different authors often return. Rather than a complete survey of Blake’s art, the volume’s aim is rather to offer a space for concentration on some of the intersections of Blake with the Gothic, not to dictate the uniform subsumption of the one by the other. We do not deny – in fact, we hope – that this collection does not exhaust future readings of Blake and the Gothic. Descriptive catalogue Part I of this collection, ‘The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts’, includes three chapters concerned with Blake’s relation to prevailing expressions of the Gothic – visual, literary, and conceptual – in the late eighteenth century. These chapters help us to recognise when Blake is adopting and when he is innovating on Gothic forms and contents. In ‘ “Living Form”: William Blake’s Gothic relations’, David Baulch traces Blake’s treatment of the Gothic as an aesthetic form that encrypts a revolutionary potentiality in the radical difference it introduces through moments of artistic and historical repetition. Reading Blake’s art as less the product of a Gothic than of a ‘Gothicising’ imagination, Baulch argues that Blake’s conception of the Gothic as ‘Living Form’ interrupts logics of precedence, consequence, and causation more broadly, turning the sometimes conservative, regulative work of the Gothic inside out.76 In Baulch’s words, ‘[r]ecognising the political import in Living Form makes visible Blake’s dynamic conception of the Gothic, his most radical conception of being and its attendant potential for unprecedented difference’.77 Making this 18 •

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Introduction case means reconsidering Benjamin Heath Malkin’s influential though misleading representation of Blake as a Gothic artist, a representation that understands the Gothic as rustic, simple, anti-classical, and reactionary. While the Gothic may be these things in certain instances, it does not capture Blake’s more idiosyncratic engagement with the genre,78 his stretching of its tropes beyond aesthetics and into political and ontological realms by warping the sense of history the Gothic always both evokes and complicates. Recalling the contest for authority frequently staged in Gothic fiction, in ‘The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for Blake’s “Gothic” form’, Kiel Shaub traces Rahab through Blake’s oeuvre, focusing especially on Night the Eighth of The Four Zoas, in order to ‘reveal how Blake’s depiction of Rahab is at least in part a critique of … conservative aspirations of the gothic revival’. Echoing Baulch’s reading of ‘Living Form’, Shaub argues that Blake’s innovation – which is fundamentally a political innovation – has to do with his ‘understanding of “form” as a relational rather than an absolute distinction’. Indeed, it is Urizen, whose sense of order is ‘bondage’, who would impose absolute distinctions and in so doing transform the passionate Vala into the deadly Rahab: a figure – to recall Radcliffe’s terms mentioned above – of condensed horror born, reactively, from Urizen’s terror in the face of uncertainty. As Shaub argues, terror is the affective correlate of uncertainty and systemic, subjective, or ideological instability whereas horror is the affective form of paralysing determinateness. Rahab, he illustrates, physically embodies a process of ideological ratcheting-up that tends towards conservation in the name of safety, one that uses the threat of disorder as an alibi for total control. As we see in many of the contributions that follow, one of the most dangerous, nebulous, and Gothic threats to which Blake gives manifest shape concerns how fleeing from moral ambiguity leads society to invent, embrace, and then suffer the mind-forged manacles crafted by priesthood and other large codes of fraud and woe. In a move that resonates uncannily with our contemporary global-political situation, terror becomes the threat that Urizen wants to cultivate – to nurture and feed – because it creates the condition (the spectre of chaos) that becomes the raison d’être for horror: that is, for his tyrannical imposition of the one law that is oppression. Just as Shaub and Baulch ask us to think about Blake’s Gothic as a technique or style that has profound political implications, in ‘The Gothic sublime’, Claire Colebrook identifies a mode of the sublime that, unlike the Kantian sublime, destroys the integrity of the rational subject and allows • 19

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Introduction ‘multiple voices and registers to generate what Deleuze (after Leibniz) refers to as “incompossible” worlds’. For her, Blake’s work is ‘overwhelmingly committed to an intuition of the infinite’ and not simply just to thinking the idea of it. Carefully following the Gothic structure of Blake’s worlds, and the nomadic Gothic line that is ever forming and deforming, Colebrook argues that Blake’s Gothic structures are blended with their content, such as the ‘nightmarish multiplicity of voices’ that refuse ‘constitutive finitude’. Blake’s Gothic sublime arrives not at the limits of experience (as in Kant), but with expanded perception, with the ‘invasion of reason from elsewhere’. Baulch, Shaub, and Colebrook situate Blake within the larger Gothic revival and invite us to reinterpret Blake’s language, images, and thought in light of recognisably Gothic iterations in architecture, the novel, and visual art. In Part II, ‘The misbegotten’, we turn to three chapters focused more specifically on Blake’s uneasy relation to the physical body. Of all the anxieties explored through the Gothic, organic life – vitality itself – is one of the most potent. This is the genre wherein the dead are always likely to rise. The problem staged in the Gothic, then, is not, ‘what if we die?’ but rather, ‘what if we continue to live?’ Descending into the charnel house, like the familiar descent in Gothic art into dungeons and crypts, frequently reveals a world seething and writhing with life; just where we expect death, eternal life springs. This is nowhere more true than in Blake. In the Four Zoas, for instance, we come face to face with ‘horrid shapes & sights of torment in burning dungeons & in / Fetters of red hot iron’ and those ‘lying on beds of sulphur / On racks & wheels’ (FZ 70:18–21; E 347). Such pains offer vivid confirmation of life – you pinch yourself to be sure it is not a dream. Similarly, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The [First] Book of Urizen, we enter designs that bring the eye and imagination to life in the very effort to escape their tortuous, mazy, Satanic traps. Why, the chapters in this part ask, is life so mortifying in Blake and in the Gothic more generally? Why does bodily generation mirror so closely degeneration? What, they enquire, ‘Could twist the sinews of thy heart?’ Who could possibly ‘grasp’ life’s ‘deadly terrors’? How are we to survive our corporeal existence? In ‘Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus’, Jason Whittaker argues that Scott’s Engineers, a species of ‘dark angels’ who seem to have created human life accidentally, have their origin in Blake’s Zoas, thus locating the film’s action in a metaphysically distressing universe devoid of any fundamental benevolence or omniscience. Hence, 20 •

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Introduction ‘[t]he horror of Prometheus’, for Whittaker, ‘lies not so much in our disgust with the operations of the human body and in abjection as in the realisation that the secret history of the cosmos is utterly alien to us’. Human life is the product neither of a divine, infallible creator nor a natural, evolutionary process, but rather of ‘an aberrant series of alien experiments’, an idea at the root of ‘the cosmic horror of Prometheus’. Yet, horror operates at two levels here: on the first, horror is our response to an acute awareness of the mutability of metaphysical reality, which leads to existential vertigo. This vertigo is only exacerbated by Blake’s expansion of the category of ‘the human’ to include ‘Rivers Mountains Cities Villages’ (J 71:15; E 225) – in effect ‘every thing’ – and Scott’s development of the android David into the most imaginative, perceptive, and ironically human character in Prometheus. On the next level, however, what is more subtly horrifying is the ostensible solution to this problem. That is, more problematic than the absence of a central, unified rationale – the absence of a sort of grand unifying theory of Scott’s Alien franchise or of Blake’s systems in creation, respectively – is the sudden imposition of just such an explanation. Without forgiving the film entirely for its flaws, Whittaker suggests that the complication rather than clarification of the genetic relationships between humans and various alien species productively resists a totalising logic that, for Blake, represents a sort of Urizenic nightmare in its very orderliness. Readers and viewers must create their own systems with narrative materials that appear designed for synthesis and yet fail entirely to cohere, leaving us with a Frankenstein’s creature – a post-‘modern Prometheus’. Like Whittaker, Lucy Cogan in ‘William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen’ suggests that, for Blake, Gothic horror has more to do with putting together than it does taking apart the body. That is, if the experiences of terror and horror central to different forms of the Gothic often involve descriptions of physical torture – in the Gothic we always expect the Spanish Inquisition – in Blake the representation of corporeal distress extends to the process of bodily formation, composition, and birth. Cogan thus reads the physical (de)formation of Urizen in light of William Hunter’s gruesome ‘anatomical obstetrics’, transforming the former into an allegory for Enlightenment scientific methodologies that are more than content to limit sensibility to a ratio of the senses, to murder and then dissect the imagination under the guise of birthing new light. ‘Like a distorted mirror-image of the Enlightenment scientists’ – perhaps recalling also the overweening and largely incompetent scientists in Prometheus – ‘who • 21

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Introduction used the tools of compass, telescope and microscope to chart the wonders of the universe’, Cogan argues that ‘Urizen by dividing and defining the material universe is also slicing into it, tearing and mutilating the fabric of existence’. While that mutilation itself is morally distressing, so too is the ‘body’ of knowledge composed from the dissected data. Touching on similar issues as Cogan and reading medical ‘demonstration’ across a wider range of texts including The [First] Book of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and An Island in the Moon, Stephanie Codsi’s ‘Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection’ looks more closely at a Gothic constellation wherein Blake’s gruesome representations of dissection and critique of mathematical, disinterested calculation intersect with irony and self-parody. Finding a productive analogy between Gothic theatricality and spectacles of torture centring on figures such as Los and Jack Tearguts, Codsi traces the effects elicited by Blake’s art in the reader or viewer, effects that range from revulsion to laughter. In this context, a certain version of the Gothic becomes useful to Blake precisely for its regressiveness: by reading medical science as the field populated by so many absurd, blinkered Victor Frankensteins, Blake would cast rational demonstration and scientific surgery as philosophically and morally retrograde, as frighteningly primitive in their treatment of life as merely physical, appetitive, or – if we can pun on the horrible apes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – primate-ive. In several ways the chapters in Part II are concerned with how bodies in Blake are deformed, dismembered, and reformed. The contributions in Part III, ‘Female space and the image’, pursue this concern with the body’s anatomisation but with special focus on how Blake’s visual and topographical spaces do more than illustrate text, but rather mutate to form meaningful if subtextual arrangements that evolve according to their own immanent vitality. Peter Otto’s ‘The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present’ is quilted together by his reading of a series of creation scenes in Blake’s oeuvre that all feature a familiar image: a red disk. This image – variously, but also potentially simultaneously, a womb, head, pool, globe, and mirror – provides a point around which to organise the perspectival multiplicity that comprises Blake’s Bible of Hell. Using the trope of archaeology as a way to think about how the past remains uncannily present in Blake’s moment and our own, Otto invites us to approach Blake spatially and graphically, in terms of constellations and arrangements, rather than sequentially and linearly. Blake’s images themselves ask us to consider phenomena along spatial axes, 22 •

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Introduction to traverse a field divided into quadrants, regions, and organs, and to take account of layers, superimpositions, and multiple ‘grounds’: foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds, as well as over- and undergrounds. Otto argues that for Blake the Gothic provided ‘a lexicon and iconography of elemental conflict and of powerful affect’. Sensitive attention to the visuality of this Gothic iconography is at the heart of Otto’s reorientation of plate 17 of The [First] Book of Urizen, an image that proves to be doubled: it is at once male and female, creative (is it a womb?) and deadly (or, a severed head?), healthfully conglobing and imperialistically englobing. Through this and other images, we see Blake oscillate between the dream and the nightmare of history. Indeed, if it seems that the latter begins to dominate given the preponderance of ‘Gothic images of catastrophic ruin, suffering bodies, horrific cruelty, “perverse” passion, and elemental conflict’, Otto reminds us that the massive overdetermination of Blake’s images – what Judith Halberstam calls the ‘vertiginous excess of meaning’ of the Gothic79 – stresses how repetition encrypts a difference that eludes binary regulation and might break from the past in the very moment of the past’s putative dominance. ‘Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ by Ana Elena González-Treviño also encourages us to think about Blake’s art graphically and, more specifically, topographically – though, to be clear, Blake’s topography is always multilayered such that place, gender, body, and history intertwine. GonzálezTreviño reads Blake’s Thel as ‘probing … into the body of nature in order to acquire some sort of knowledge about nature and about herself ’, a knowledge from which Thel recoils but that Oothoon seems prepared to engage. Inspired by folktales and mythical precursors to read how femininity is literally and figuratively entombed in the landscapes of both Thel and Visions, González-Treviño explores how both works stage ‘female desire and the legitimacy of intuitive knowledge, especially regarding the natural world’. And yet, for González-Treviño it is not simply that female characters in Blake are more ‘natural’; rather, if femininity does open up conduits to an encounter with radical materiality, these characters react with understandable anxiety after gazing upon the unveiled face of nature. In Thel for instance, going underground is an invitation to experience a primordial organicism that is both sensuous and grotesque – something like Milton’s ‘wilde Abyss’ of Chaos, ‘The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave’.80 Thel flees from the body’s porosity, from its very receptivity to a nature that is in equal parts creative and destructive, prolific and • 23

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Introduction devouring. Yet the voice from the grave reflects on the impossibility of shutting experience out, the futility of resisting impressions and sensations, or the impossibility of evading embodied existence. Indeed, Oothoon’s sexual violation in Visions figures in more explicitly violent terms how ‘experience’ in a broader sense ignores human will and proves often damaging to the self. Through a series of rhetorical questions in Thel, the voice from the grave suggests a blunt inevitability: Thel can flee as far as she likes, but the fact is that her ear and eye and tongue cannot be completely shut against experience. Like Oothoon, Thel is stalked by a mysterious, violent power she seems fated to embrace. Blake thus appropriates the sense of inevitability from the voice of death to cast life as similarly intractable, though in so doing organic life is revealed, uncannily, as death’s mirror: an agent of horror that is given its clearest shape in Orc. While implicit in Part III, the chapters in the volume’s final part, ‘Sex, desire, perversion’, turn deliberately towards Blake’s representations of sexual desire. From Ambrosio’s incestuous rape of Antonia in The Monk to the violent pornography of Sade’s Justine and, later, Juliette, the Gothic has long served as a forum to explore sexual perversion and the subterranean sympathies between pleasure and pain, sex and death.81 In what Ellen Moers calls the ‘female gothic’, it is women’s sexuality in particular that finds, through the genre, an opportunity for expression in the midst of a generally repressive culture.82 Yet to what extent is the ostensible liberation of female desire reabsorbed by the masculine fantasies that drive so many Gothic plots? To what extent does momentary indulgence in macabre titillation serve as an alibi for reaffirming the patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family? And what happens when strange appetites – once they are exposed in the lurid light of torch and candle, once they are roused by the caress of our own alter egos – refuse to be re-domesticated? Again, the Gothic provides a forum in which to explore questions, like these, that remain difficult explicitly to pose. Hence, if both Otto and González-Treviño stress Blake’s experimentation with visual fields and three-dimensional space, Mark Lussier, in ‘The horrors of subjectivity/the Jouissance of immanence’, explores the field of subject formation from both Deleuzean and Lacanian perspectives. ‘Shaped more than most by the erotic, esoteric, and exotic elements of Gothic symbolic’, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion explore how the unconscious ‘confront[s] the phallic order that animates patriarchy’, casting subject formation as a Gothic drama. For Lussier, both texts explore how subject formation involves a sort of wounding that the action of symbolisation – especially 24 •

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Introduction when that symbolisation is comprised of Gothic forms – can never entirely suture: what the eye sees and what the heart knows will remain always slightly askew, just as the Lacanian ‘I’ will never perfectly coincide with itself. Stressing the specific psychoanalytic terrain of female subjectivity, Lussier focuses most of his attention on Visions, a work in which Oothoon ‘endure[s] dual forms of objectification: her embodiment as an object of use (for the rapist Bromion) and as an object of exchange (for her ‘beloved’ Theotormon)’. Oothoon’s fate seems grim, though Lussier permits a moment of possible recognition: ‘Bound and battered in the mouth of Fingal’s Cave, Oothoon is indeed ignored, but the anger expressed in the background eye implies that the political unconscious has registered her complaint.’ In a somewhat contrasting treatment of female desire in Visions, Tristanne Connolly notes in ‘ “Terrible Thunders” and “Enormous Joys”: potency and degeneracy in Blake’s Visions and James Graham’s celestial bed’, that Oothoon’s complaint ‘descends into a denunciation of masturbation’, reflecting her hostility towards forms of ‘unproductive’ sexuality.83 Drawing parallels between Oothoon and James Graham, a sex therapist contemporary with Blake, Connolly re-imagines the sexual dynamics in Visions: Bromion’s violence does less to blunt than to sharpen Oothoon’s own sexual desire, which she proceeds to impose upon Theotormon, whom it is possible to read as not only another victim of Bromion’s ‘thunders’ but as an emasculated onanist perceived by Oothoon – in an echo of Graham – as sexually deviant and self-polluting for his rejection of all alloerotic stimulation. Oothoon is a hybrid of Sade’s Justine and Juliette: she is a victim of sexualised violence but also sexually aggressive in her own way. Connolly’s chapter productively complicates what has too often been a simplistic understanding of Oothoon as a mere victim, a reading that founders when we attempt to square it with her Grahamian promotion of sexual union and notorious offer to procure women for Theotormon. In this way, Oothoon moves past the typical categories available to women in the Gothic – either angel or monster, either virginal victim or wicked whore. This is not quite to suggest that Oothoon is free and liberated – she remains chained to Bromion, after all – but that her victimisation does not preclude her perpetuation of a sexual ideology of which Theotormon is perhaps the most obvious casualty. ‘While for Graham it is excess and for Oothoon it is restraint that destroys wholesome sexual joys’, Connolly argues that ‘both paint terrifying pictures of the degeneracy resulting from these evils [that is, masturbation], to contrast their visions of sexual transcendence’. While each promotes a different method for achieving • 25

Introduction

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sexual health (Oothoon: use it or lose it; Graham, like General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove: best hoard your ‘precious bodily fluids’), the Gothic provides the key tropes in each case. Ultimately, Connolly argues that it is not Theotormon but Oothoon who ‘is the sexual binarist’ for ‘idealising free love and abominating restraint’, suggesting that male and female sexual desire in Visions does not conform to social or readerly expectations. Notes 1 Bindman, ‘Blake’s “Gothicised Imagination” ’, pp. 29–49. 2 Ibid., p. 30, p. 48. 3 Moore, ‘Interview’. 4 Punter, Literature of Terror, vol. 2, p. 147. For an excellent analysis of Moore’s collusion with the Gothic, see Green (ed.), Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. 5 Whitson, ‘Blakean Trees’. 6 For a more detailed account of Blake’s influence on contemporary literature and culture, see Whitson and Ault, William Blake and Visual Culture; Clark and Whittaker, William Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture; Clark, Connolly and Whittaker, Blake 2.0; and Whitson and Whittaker, William Blake and the Digital Humanities. 7 Punter, ‘Gothic Poetry, 1700–1900’, p. 212. 8 Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs, p. 6. 9 As part of Dark Blushing, a poetry evening at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Manson’s performance included music by Timmy Straw, and on-screen images of Blake’s watercolour ‘Satan Exulting over Eve’; see Manson, ‘Marilyn Manson Reads’. 10 Petzold, ‘Death Metal Lyric or William Blake Quote?’, n.p. 11 Whitson, ‘Panelling Parallax’, para. 2. 12 See Kandola, Gothic Britain; and Smith, The Gothic Bequest. 13 Silver, ‘The Politics of Gothic Historiography’, p. 4. 14 Ibid., p. 5. 15 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 16 Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire; Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose. All citations of Blake’s poetry and prose correspond to this edition. We follow standard abbreviations of Blake’s works. We follow the scholarly convention in providing the page number in Erdman following plate and line numbers. 17 Punter, ‘Ossian, Blake and the Questionable Source’, p. 31. 18 Ibid., p. 32. 19 Reynolds, ‘Gothic and the architectural imagination’, p. 86. 20 Ibid. 21 Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, p. xvii.

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Introduction 22 Ibid., p. xviii. Bruhm’s emphasis. 23 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 82. 24 For a detailed examination of Blake’s influence on Thomas Harris see Gompf, Thomas Harris and William Blake. 25 Connolly, William Blake and the Body; Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem. 26 Barker opens each volume of his Books of Blood with this epigraph. 27 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry. 28 Wright, Gothic Fiction, p. 58. 29 Ibid. 30 Punter, ‘Gothic Poetry, 1700–1900’, p. 211. 31 Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, pp. 149–50. 32 Ibid., p. 148. Radcliffe is reflecting here on the image of Satan in Book Four of Paradise Lost as he squares off with the “Angelic Squadron” (4.977) that has spotted him skulking around the walls of Paradise. 33 Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, p. 37. 34 Morgan, The Biology of Horror, p. 3. 35 Reyes, Body Gothic, p. 2. 36 Engelstein, Anxious Anatomy, p. 11. 37 On monstrosity as excessive vitality, see Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. 38 Sweet, ‘Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 15. 39 Ibid., p. 19. 40 Myrone, ‘Gothic and Eighteenth-century Visual Art’, p. 323. 41 Ibid., p. 325. 42 On Blake’s close relationship to Henry Fuseli see Paley, William Blake; and Hall, Blake and Fuseli. 43 Essick, ‘Review of William Richey’s Blake’s Altering Aesthetic’, p. 486. 44 See a reading of Hall by Reeve, ‘Gothic’, pp. 233–46. 45 On apotheosis in Blake’s work, see Fallon, ‘ “That Angel Who Rides on the Whirlwind” ’, pp. 1–28. On the mutation of Gothic images, see McCarthy, ‘Gothic Visuality in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 341–53. 46 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, pp. 408–9. 47 Paley, in ‘William Blake and Chichester’, discusses the parallels between the Grey Monk and Blake himself, both of whom are accused of sedition, p. 225. Ankarsjö, in William Blake and Religion, alternatively reads the bleeding Monk as part of the Moravian tradition, pp. 107–11. 48 Canuel, Religion, Toleration and British Writing, p. 62. 49 Paley, ‘William Blake and Chichester’, p. 225. 50 Blackstone, Commentaries of the Laws of England, p. 268. 51 Hogle, ‘Introduction: Modernity and the Proliferation of the Gothic’, p. 3. 52 Gothic architecture appears most notably in Jerusalem, plates 1, 32, 57, 84. 53 See Ferguson-Wagstaffe, ‘ “Points of Contact” ’. • 27

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Introduction 54 Miles, Gothic Writing, p. 124. 55 For instance, in spite of its wide-ranging and excellent selections, Franklin, The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse affords space to all major Romantic writers except Blake. Similarly, Blake appears only as a footnote in Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824, p. 274, fn. 95. 56 Simpson, ‘Blake and Porn’, pp. 211–18; Connolly, ‘ “Fear not/To unfold your dark visions of torment” ’, pp. 116–39; and Morton, Ecology without Nature. 57 Namely, An Island in the Moon, Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Descriptive Catalogue, Joseph of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion, A Vision of the Last Judgment, On Homers Poetry, On Virgil, Blake’s Chaucer, and the Blake-Varley Sketchbook. 58 Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic, p. 7. 59 Ibid., p. 10. 60 Ibid., p. 179. 61 Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine, p. 131. 62 Ibid., p. 132. 63 Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter. 64 Deuchar, ‘Foreword’, p. 6. 65 Myrone, ‘Fuseli to Frankenstein’, p. 35. 66 Ibid., p. 35. 67 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, p. 13. 68 Ibid., p. 72. 69 Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, p. 253. 70 See Andeweg and Zlosnik, Gothic Kinship. 71 Quoted in Bentley, William Blake: The Critical Heritage, p. 250. 72 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p. 129. 73 Ibid., p. 130. 74 Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, p. 66. 75 Bataille, Literature and Evil, p. 79. 76 ‘Like the carnivalesque, the gothic appears to be a transgressive rebellion against norms which yet ends up reinstating them, an eruption of unlicenced desire that is fully controlled by governing systems of limitation’ (Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, p. 8). 77 In an effort to make sense of the later prophecies’ resistances to narrative structure, Denise Gigante encourages us to understand ‘Blake’s living form as what I would call an epigenesist poetics,’ one that parallels the ‘natural philosophical shift from anatomical structure to the “mode of generation” ’ that takes place in Blake’s own time (Gigante, ‘Blake’s Living Form’, pp. 463, 470). ‘Living Form’, as Baulch also argues in his chapter of this book, might be best thought of as a process rather than finished product. 78 We refer to the Gothic as a ‘genre’ here with the caveat that ‘[a]t root [the Gothic is] an ethnic and historical delimiter that became a generic term only

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Introduction retrospectively’ (Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic, p. 4). It is important, in other words, to note that what we recognise as the Gothic has its origins in semi-articulate political, social, and psychological anxieties of the sort touched on above, disturbances the depths of which may prove impossible entirely to plumb. 79 Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 2. 80 Milton, Paradise Lost, pp. 910, 911. 81 See for instance Aikin and Aikin, On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror (1773). 82 Moers, Literary Women. 83 See Sha, Perverse Romanticism, for a discussion of how sexuality becomes ‘perverse’ once decoupled from reproduction and cast in terms of Kantian aesthetics as a ‘purposiveness without purpose’.

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Part I

The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts

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1

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‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations • David Baulch

W

e enter William Blake’s Jerusalem (1804–c.20) through a distinctly Gothic doorway, yet the word ‘Gothic’ never makes an appearance throughout the 100 plates of Blake’s longest work of illuminated printing. To grasp the importance of the Gothic for Blake’s late work, we might turn to the 1822 broadsheet entitled On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. This text ends by declaring that ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270).1 Although the ‘Gothic’ is accorded the highest value here, it is not clear what ‘Living Form’ is. The ‘Gothic’, we are told, is opposed to the ‘Grecian’, which ‘is Mathematic Form’ (E 270). Aristotelian unity, moral certainty, and war are the epistemological, spiritual, and political characteristics of Grecian Form: ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’ (On Homers; E 270). As a polemic against classical thought, and especially its neo-classical revival, On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil finds the stasis and mathematical abstraction of Grecian form inimical to the Gothic as Living Form. At stake in these opposing conceptions of forms are the politics of geopolitical struggle. The path of Grecian form is embodied in the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. By contrast, the Living Form of the Gothic provides an alternative that remains obscure in the broadsheet, for we never receive an example of Living Form or an explicit sense of its potential political efficacy.2 Rather, I argue, we must turn back to Blake’s figure of Jerusalem in order to grasp the ontological difference and revolutionary politics implicit in Living Form. In Jerusalem, the production of ontological difference is the necessary condition of revolution. • 33

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic Admittedly, my claim seems to place a lot of weight on a single term: the ‘Gothic’. It appears in Blake’s work only once in the eighteenth century.3 In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Gothic’ makes just ten appearances in Blake’s work – only six of which provide any insight into the political and ontological difference expressed as Living Form. Often seen as Blake’s major artistic statement in his nineteenth-century career, Jerusalem is conspicuously free of the terms ‘Gothic’, ‘Classic’, or ‘classical’. Nonetheless, Jerusalem is an epic of resistance to classical culture, and its web of associated phenomena include neo-classical art, rational thought, empirical epistemology, corporeal war, and state religion. While the connection between Jerusalem and the Gothic as Living Form in Jerusalem is not immediately evident, the assumption that the Gothic does matter for understanding Blake and his work has a long critical history, one that has done more to distort than to clarify the matter. Under the aegis of the Gothic, Blake has been presented either as a naïve artist whose visual aesthetic is always looking backward and/or as an artist who retreats politically from his late eighteenth-century radicalism to embrace conservative ideology and an apocalyptic Christian mysticism. Recognising the political import in Living Form makes visible Blake’s dynamic conception of the Gothic, his most radical conception of being and its attendant potential for unprecedented difference. Turning the frontispiece to enter Blake’s Jerusalem signifies a passage through its Gothic doorway. This passage offers nothing less than a sustained engagement with the potentiality of the Gothic as Living Form: a future that is not a repetition of the past. It is this potential that Blake’s work attributes to the Gothic as Living Form.4 Malkin ’ s A Father ’ s Memoirs and Blake ’ s Gothicism Blake’s association with the Gothic form finds its critical touchstone in Benjamin Heath Malkin’s influential biographical account of the artist in his introduction to A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806), a text that features a title page that Blake designed and engraved. Malkin’s introduction to his A Father’s Memoirs of His Child takes the form of a letter to ‘Thomas Johnes, of Hafod, ESQ. M. P.’.5 The letter is not about Blake as such, but a remarkable amount of Malkin’s epistle introduces Blake as a designer, engraver, and poet to Johnes. Perhaps it was Malkin’s intention to help find a new patron for Blake, but it seems more likely that its purpose is to rehabilitate Blake’s faltering career and to soften his reputation as a madman. For our subsequent understanding of Blake, Malkin’s account has 34 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations been widely influential, largely because it is the only biographical portrait that Blake himself influenced. Malkin’s brief biography is built on Blake’s presentation of himself to Malkin in the early nineteenth century. While less than strictly accurate in some respects, Malkin’s account nonetheless provides significant insight into Blake’s nineteenth-century period when the term ‘Gothic’ emerges and takes on a particular range of meanings in Blake’s lexicon. In characterising Blake’s poetry and visual art, Malkin freely uses the term ‘Gothic’, yet the Gothicism Malkin finds in Blake is significantly different from Blake’s sense of the Gothic as Living Form. Malkin’s account of Blake’s Gothicism has a mixed legacy, for it has significantly confused our present understanding of Blake in two ways. By presenting Blake as an artist whose creative consciousness has always been dominated by the Gothic, Malkin has invited the critics to conclude that Blake’s affinity for the Gothic marks a life-long opposition to neo-classical style in art and poetry. As a result, Blake emerges from Malkin’s description as an ‘untutored proficient’, an artist out of time, ensconced in a Gothic past that for him is an ever-present reality.6 This treatment omits Blake’s own understanding of the Gothic and the range of idiosyncratic associations germane to the complexities of his later work. Malkin describes Blake as Gothic in three distinct ways. He claims that Blake’s poetry is Gothic, that the foundational influence on Blake’s visual art is Gothic, and that Blake himself has become a Gothic phenomenon. While Blake’s poetry seems almost incidental to his purpose of introducing Blake to Johnes as a commercial designer and engraver, the poetry gets more attention than his visual art does in Malkin’s brief biography. The importance of Malkin’s interest is not to be underestimated, since it gave Blake’s poetry its greatest public exposure to date.7 For Malkin, Gothic poetry is a style, one Blake takes almost unconsciously from a simpler past that communicated its emotions more directly than the discourse offered by ‘the polished phraseology’ and ‘just, but subdued thought of the eighteenth [century]’.8 Blake’s poetry is Gothic because it reflects a personal innocence and lack of literary sophistication expressed through its formal simplicity. Blake is a charming amateur who has ‘made several irregular and unfinished attempts at poetry … [that have] dared to venture on the ancient simplicity’.9 For this reason it seems, Malkin refers to Blake as ‘Our Gothic Songster’.10 The implication is that Blake’s sensibilities were formed in a past that is no longer accessible to a contemporary writer; it is as if his poetry appears in the present as the ghost of a simpler past. • 35

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic For Malkin, Blake’s poetry is not simply out of fashion; it is from a different era. Of necessity, then, Blake’s Gothicism is immune from the influence of the literature generically identified as Gothic in Blake’s historical moment.11 Hence, Malkin fails to include any of the instances of Blake’s work that might actually qualify as Gothic in the literary sense of the term. Absent is ‘Fair Elenor’ unwrapping her husband’s severed head, for example.12 Manifestly absent too is the fiery dragon form of ‘Albion’s Angel’ in America a Prophecy, a figure not too far removed from the pyrotechnic horrors of Monk Lewis’ pages. Celebrating Blake’s Gothic songs of ‘ancient simplicity’, Malkin condemns Blake’s poor prosody and imaginative excesses. Malkin thus chastises the prophecies for ‘so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave unregarded harmony, and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of imagination’.13 In essence, Malkin nonetheless recommends that these poems submit to Alexander Pope’s neo-classical advice that a poet must ‘Hear how learned Greece her useful rules indites, / When to repress, and when indulge our flights.’14 Ultimately then, Malkin’s idea of Gothic poetry has a great deal of the Grecian in it. For Malkin, the Gothic, in fact, describes a style of neo-classical visual art that looks as much to the Renaissance as it does to the medieval period for its inspiration. The neo-classical emphasis of Malkin’s criteria for Gothic poetry is reflected in his view of Gothic art as favouring clear and distinct outlines, a criterion that lends itself to Blake’s view of art as an engraver and painter.15 Emphasising Blake’s work as an apprentice, Malkin asserts that Blake’s experience drawing the medieval monuments in Westminster Abbey was crucial for the aesthetic development of his visual art. These drawings, Malkin reports, ‘led him to an acquaintance with those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments. There he found a treasure he knew how to value’.16 Blake’s apparently precocious valuation of medieval art produced in him what Malkin memorably calls a ‘Gothicised imagination’, a characterisation so provocative as to impress numerous critics to view the Gothic as a guiding force throughout Blake’s career.17 These writers include such influential Blake scholars as Alexander Gilchrist, Roger Easson, E. J. Rose, David Bindman, Robert Gleckner, and Northrop Frye.18 Gilchrist quotes Malkin as evidence for Blake’s ‘fervent love of the Gothic’ as an expression of his ‘natural affinities for the spiritual in art’.19 By contrast, Frye’s Fearful Symmetry cites Malkin’s account as the basis for his claims about the consistency of Blake’s intellectual and artistic opposition to classicism and neo-classicism. Following Malkin, Frye asserts that after 36 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations copying the Gothic monuments of Westminster Abbey, Blake, ‘emerged from this training a full-fledged member of the Gothic school; and his pro-Hebraic and anti-Classical bias is equally typical of this period’.20 Frye conflates Malkin’s claims for the aesthetic form Blake discovers in Gothic art with the ideational content of Blake’s later opposition to classical and neo-classical art and thought expressed in On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. Here, it is instructive to look specifically at what Malkin writes. Malkin states that Blake found in the Gothic monuments he copied ‘the plain and simple road to the style of art at which he aimed, unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’.21 Clearly this description resonates with Blake’s assertions in his marginalia to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds of the importance of the bounding outline and resistance to contemporary practices of colouring. Thus, Malkin’s account helps to foster a view of Blake as backward looking both in terms of his visual aesthetic and his intellectual predispositions. Critics more attuned to the historically specific theory and practice of art have recognised in Malkin’s description of Blake’s affinity for Gothic monuments the neo-classical primitivism whose diverse historical influences and forms were very much a part of the age. According to William Richey ‘what Malkin describes [as Gothic] is a neo-classical aesthetic’, and, likewise, Bindman emphasises that the qualities Malkin lists are ‘characteristic of contemporary neo-classicism’.22 For these critics, Blake’s early interest in the uncluttered lines of Gothic monuments does not constitute an intellectual rejection of neo-classical art. At once, Malkin’s ‘Gothic’ refers both to art from the medieval period and a distinct, contemporary strain of neo-classical primitivism that embraces a broad range of influences.23 Blake is certainly less singular in his Gothicism than Malkin or Frye seem to think he is. Regardless, Malkin’s role in authorising claims for Blake’s Gothicism is instrumental in producing some of the most enduring characterisations of Blake as a unique, if reactionary genius too absorbed in his visionary speculations to be seriously engaged with politics. Even as he identifies Blake’s poetry and visual art as Gothic, Malkin presents Blake himself as a Gothic monument. He writes: He professes drawing from life always to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal from life, both at the academy and at home. In this manner he managed his talents, till he is himself become almost a Gothic monument.24 • 37

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic What puzzles Malkin is why Blake claims ‘drawing from life … is more like death’, despite the fact that he obviously engages in that practice. By way of explanation, Malkin concludes that Blake’s notorious eccentricity has nothing to do with art; rather he has mismanaged ‘his talents’. The implication here is that Blake’s contradictory statements on a subject so basic to his professional work bespeaks an unstable mind. Because Blake has not ‘managed his talents’, because he is mentally unstable, he has become a Gothic phenomenon, a ghostly monument to his own incomprehensible opinions. What Malkin could not be expected to know is that his example of Blake’s eccentricity will come to sound like a partial articulation of Blake’s own statements that ‘Living Form is Eternal Existence’ and that the ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270). Drawing from life does smack of death and mortality for Blake, but not because it is bad technique. As Blake states in his marginalia to Reynolds’ Works, ‘no one can ever Design till he has learnd the Language of Art by making many Finishd Copies both of Nature & Art’ (E 645). Blake’s objection to drawing from life, rather, is part and parcel of the ontology it imposes. If reproducing natural forms and copying the work of previous artists are the ends of art, Blake counters, such art is a lifeless repetition of the possibilities of the past. Conceived of in this way, the artist’s images always refer to a particular ideational content in the past. The inescapably political implication here is that meaningful change cannot come from images of, or thoughts from, an actual historical past. Nevertheless, it is precisely the sort of opinions Malkin sees as eccentricities that suggest the radical transformations that the Gothic as Living Form effects in Blake’s work. Malkin certainly had first-hand knowledge of Blake’s struggles as a commercial engraver and his biographical account was perhaps some small compensation for the financial disaster that Malkin had seen Blake experience in 1805, when his designs and the promise of engravings for Robert Cromek’s deluxe edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave fell through. Cromek was evidently displeased with the sample print from the engraving of ‘Death’s Door’ that Blake made for display in his shop. Blake was personally and financially devastated to find that Cromek had suddenly given the lucrative contract to engrave his designs to Luigi Schiavonetti.25 In a bitter irony, the Death’s Door engraving for The Grave marks Blake’s death as a commercial artist. It sealed his reputation as a lost cause with supporters like Cromek and Malkin. Blake would return to the ‘Death’s Door’ design, however, and transform it into the Gothic structure 38 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations that beckons the reader into Jerusalem. If Blake had become a Gothic monument, an artist effectively dead to the commercial engraving market by 1806, the figure entering the Gothic-arched doorway in Jerusalem’s frontispiece suggests the transformative potential of the Blakean Gothic as Living Form. To understand this potential and its implications for reading Jerusalem’s treatment of the past, I turn now to Blake’s treatment of Christianity’s arrival in Great Britain in the engraving known as Joseph of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion. In this engraving, Living Form emerges as the means of resisting Enlightenment historiography and biblical eschatology, the very forces that prevent the emergence of a future that does not repeat the past. Joseph of Arimathea and the Blakean Gothic Contrary to Malkin, most contemporary critics agree that Blake’s turn to what he calls the Gothic takes place after 1800. Specifically, E. J. Rose, William Richey, Roger Easson, and Seymour Howard associate the emergence of the term ‘Gothic’ in Blake’s writings with a major shift in the intellectual meaning and political implications of his nineteenth-century work.26 Both Howard and Richey attach the significance of Blake’s late embrace of the Gothic and rejection of the classics with a disavowal of the revolutionary politics of the 1790s.27 Here, the Blakean Gothic is essentially a reactionary turn to a conservative political outlook. An apocalyptic Christianity drives Blake’s antiquarian nationalism. Through this potent combination, Jerusalem seems to suggest the finality of an eschatological narrative as it enfolds Britain’s Gothic origins into the Book of Revelations, making manifest its vision of a transcendent destination: a new Jerusalem descended from the heavens. From the perspective of Blake’s understanding of the Gothic as Living Form, however, Jerusalem emerges as a text that resists biblical eschatology and Enlightenment historiography to reveal a continual state of becoming – a Living Form – that never achieves a final state.28 A clear precedent for the ontological transformation that Jerusalem employs appears in the engraving Blake eventually calls Joseph of Arimathea. In 1773, the early period of his apprenticeship, Blake engraves a detail from Salviati’s copy of Michelangelo’s The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The 1773 engraving exercise appears to be little more than an instance of Blake borrowing from his artistic idol, Michelangelo. Blake’s alters the original, however, by making Michelangelo’s marginal Roman soldier into Joseph • 39

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic of Arimathea, temporally dislocating the figure from its initial setting. As Thora Brylowe observes, ‘[t]his image uses the visual vocabulary of engraving to unite the classical, the biblical, and the English gothic’.29 While there is nothing in the 1773 state of the engraving to suggest that Blake sees his transformation of Michelangelo’s figure as a comment on the values he associates with this aesthetic trio, Brylowe notes the meaning of the image will change over the course of Blake’s career and hence demonstrate ‘Blake’s shift in regard for the classical’.30 Indeed, Blake returns to this image within three years of Malkin’s account of his Gothicism, at which time he recasts the scene as the very moment that Gothic architecture comes to England. When Blake revisits his engraving of Joseph, he inscribes the following under it: JOSEPH of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion Engraved by W Blake 1773 from an old Italian Drawing This is One of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages Wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the World was not worthy such were the Christians in all Ages. (E 671)

What was, in 1773, an apprentice engraving consistent with the tenants of neo-classical primitivism, and thus part of a visual aesthetic that is Gothic in Malkin’s sense of the term, becomes Gothic in Blake’s sense of the term thirty-seven years later. Yet, rather than a challenge to classical and neo-classical values in art, as Frye would have it, Blake’s inscription to Joseph of Arimathea is more a challenge to Enlightenment historiography. It proffers a historically impossible origin to British Gothic architecture. Here, Blake’s imagination is not so much ‘Gothicised’ but gothicising. As it gothises Michelangelo’s The Crucifixion of Saint Peter into Joseph of Arimathea, it transforms the stasis of both biblical history and Enlightenment historiography into the Living Form of the Gothic. The Gothic’s Living Form ruptures both biblical history and historical probability, transforming Joseph of Arimathea through its linking of heterogeneous and temporally disparate elements. In his chapter in this volume, Kiel Shaub is doubtlessly right to caution against finding Blake’s Gothic politics in this image altogether transparent. He notes the importance the engraving places on ‘gothic technique’ and ‘a repudiation of rationalism’.31 However, this is hardly the limit of Blake’s gothicisation of Joseph and the generative potential of Living Form. Blake’s inscription takes considerable historical liberty with the biblical accounts of Joseph of Arimathea as the man who receives and entombs Jesus’ body and the latter, apocryphal 40 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations accounts of Joseph’s presence in England. Blake’s inscription prompts the question of what it means to identify Joseph of Arimathea as ‘One of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages’. While contemporary scholarship suggests that Joseph of Arimathea becomes the apocryphal point of origin of British Christianity during the medieval period, Blake – like many in his era – probably accepted the legend as fact. However, Blake’s assertion that Joseph was a Gothic artist building cathedrals in England during the medieval period is, I believe, unprecedented.32 One is tempted to dismiss Blake’s claim as the sort of religious mania that Malkin felt had blighted Blake’s prospects as a commercial engraver. More productively, though, we can view Blake’s gothicisation of the Joseph of Arimathea engraving as an indication of the way Blake’s approach to both history and the potential for political change functions. The Joseph engraving reveals Blake’s disregard for both biblical narrative and historical teleologies.33 Instead, the engraving imputes to the artist the capacity to produce difference in the process of repetition. Blake repeats his initial repetition of Salviati’s repetition of Michelangelo’s image to produce a different figure: Joseph. These repetitions are all comprehensible as part of a neo-classical artistic practice. However, Blake’s Joseph, builder of Gothic cathedrals, is an ahistorical rupture of the disciplinary regime of Enlightenment historiography. Charges that Blake is thus insane reflect a failure to recognise the counter-eschatological thrust of the Gothic as Living Form. The rupture constituted by the unprecedented emergence of Joseph of Arimathea as a Gothic artist performs the work of repetition in the production of difference. In repeating the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, a narrative that relies on a certain Aristotelian probability and historical possibility as part of the Bible’s larger eschatological metanarrative of transcendence, Blake’s repetition of the engraving produces the contrary: historical impossibility as the site of an immanent, counter-eschatological potentiality. Blake’s Joseph brings to England a Gothic architectural form whose ahistorical emergence supplants the dissemination of Christianity as a particular ideational content or historical destination. As a visual/ verbal text that conveys the Blakean Gothic, Joseph of Arimathea derails the linear, eschatological movement to apocalypse and transcendence precisely by denying historical possibility. The ahistorical emergence that Blake’s Joseph of Arimathea performs is hardly accidental. Assigning Joseph a historically impossible role is very much a part of the Blakean Gothic as it appears in a passage on The • 41

The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

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Ancient Britons in A Descriptive Catalogue (1809). Here, Blake writes about his Gothic era subject: the aftermath of the last battle of King Arthur. Blake claims, ‘the stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion applied to a Prince of the fifth century’ (DC; E 543). Arthur is an historically specific repetition of Albion. However, aware that his claim is contrary to those of ‘[t]he reasoning historian … such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire’ (E 543), Blake cites both historical and poetical precedent for his practice: [B]elieving with Milton, the ancient British History, Mr. B. has done, as all the ancients did, and as all the moderns, who are worthy of fame, given the historical fact in its poetical vigour … the history of all times and places, is nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities; what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes. (E 543)

This production of a counter-historical model short-circuits Enlightenment historiography’s linearity and causal connections. Rather, the artist’s expression of elements of myth and legend is a practice of counter-history in which the Gothic as Living Form opens possibilities for future differences that evade historical or transcendent foreclosure. The Catalogue’s claim that ‘Mr. B. has in his hands poems of the highest antiquity’ suggests that Blake’s counter-historical vision is essential to understanding Jerusalem in particular (E 542). Indeed, the Catalogue’s Arthurian version of the Blakean Gothic as a counter-history of ‘improbabilities and impossibilities’ in The Ancient Britons is offered as a placeholder for a ‘Voluminous’ text that ‘contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of Adam’ (E 543). Given its interest in the Arthur/Albion connection and the ‘Voluminous’ size of the manuscript, the description of The Ancient Britons arguably refers to the text we know as Jerusalem. However, there is good reason to suspect that Jerusalem had not reached a state of completion by the time Blake is preparing for his 1809 exhibition. Between Blake’s Catalogue in 1809 and Jerusalem’s first printings in 1820, there is a significant intensification of the political vision of the Blakean Gothic. While the description of The Ancient Britons is primarily a nationalist political vision of world domination, wherein the British nation ‘shall arise again with tenfold splendor when Arthur shall awake from sleep, and resume his dominion over earth and ocean’ (E 542), Jerusalem dispenses with the idea that Arthur is a particular historical repetition of Albion. In Jerusalem, Arthur is first identified as ‘the hard cold constrictive Spectre’ (J 54:25; E 204), and later he is included in a satanic genealogy of rulers: ‘Satan Cain Tubal Nimrod Pharoh Priam Bladud Belin / Arthur Alfred the 42 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations Norman Conqueror Richard John’ (73:35–6; E 228). As the genealogical repetition of Satan, Arthur originates a line of English kings equated with biblical oppressors. Rather than its once and future saviour, Arthur is now a figure symptomatic of Albion’s fall. He is an earthly force for the subjection of his people, rather than a figure for the immanent potential of liberty. One reason for Jerusalem’s harsh reevaluation of Arthur has to do with the distinctive political emphasis of the Blakean Gothic in Jerusalem. Judging from his place of prominence in Jerusalem’s list of oppressor/kings, Arthur has become less a mythical figure and more an actual ruler for Blake. The Catalogue’s passage on The Ancient Britons conveyed Arthur as a mythical figure of nationalist greatness and a guarantor of a British rise to a military dominance in the future. The fact that Arthur’s greatness is measured by the geopolitical scope of his martial conquests in the description of The Ancient Britons places him out of step with Jerusalem’s political vision. In the prose prefaces to both chapters two and four, Jerusalem states that ‘[t]he Return of Israel is a Return to Mental Sacrifice & War’ (J 27; E 174) and advises ‘every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself openly & before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem’ (J 77; E 232). As ‘the hard cold constrictive Spectre’, Arthur, like Los’s Spectre in Jerusalem, is a figure whose actions are inimical to the task of realising Jerusalem as the embodiment of ontological and political difference. ‘ JERUSALEM

IS NAMED LIBERTY ’

As I have shown, in becoming Gothic, Blake’s Joseph of Arimathea presents Living Form as the site where ‘Joseph’ constitutes a mode of being contrary to historical possibility and the biblical metanarrative of eschatology. Blake’s description of The Ancient Britons likewise links this potential for difference with Jerusalem. In its gothicising repetition of both mythical past and biblical metanarrative, Jerusalem envisions a condition of ontological and political difference that is an apocalypse for the world as we know it. The world remains, but the way we know it is transformed. The frontispiece of Jerusalem repeats as it gothicises the ‘Death’s Door’ design, but here the ‘death’ that ultimately takes place is that of the subject and its subjection by the state. The frontispiece of Jerusalem repeats much of the form, arrangement, and engraving technique of ‘Death’s Door’, even as it effectively challenges the conception of the subject and the eschatological ends implicit in its earlier iterations. In For The Children • 43

The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

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as it is in his design for Cromek’s edition of The Grave, Death’s Door is the end of the biological existence for the old man seemingly blown into his tomb (see Figure 6). By contrast, in plate 14 of America a Prophecy, Death’s Door receives an overtly political content. Here the old man stepping into his grave

Figure 6 William Blake, Death’s Door, For the Children: The Gates of Paradise, plate 17 (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 44 •

William Blake ’ s Gothic relations

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may, according to Detlef Dörrbecker, ‘be seen as the representative of the Old Order who has been sent(enced) to death by the revolutionaries’34 (see Figure 7). In Jerusalem’s frontispiece, the central elements of Death’s Door are repeated, but a very different meaning emerges with regard to both death and political revolution.

Figure 7  William Blake, ‘So Cried He …’, America a Prophecy, copy M, plate 14 (Bentley 12) (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. • 45

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic About two years after The Grave debacle and Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs, Blake printed the first proofs of Jerusalem, the frontispiece of which re-envisions the ‘Death’s Door’ design as a specifically Gothic archway. Jerusalem’s frontispiece presents a young man crossing the threshold of a Gothic structure. According to Morton Paley, this man is Los, Blake’s figure for imaginative production, as a watchman.35 Rather than a crutch, Los carries a luminous globe. He is not, like the aged figure in ‘Death’s Door’ entering a death which he can only escape through transcendence. Rather, his journey in Jerusalem is a movement to ‘Self Annihilation’, an act that entails the casting off of the autonomous subject of reason (J 98:23; E 257) (see Figure 8). In venturing across the threshold, Los is not only entering into a Gothic structure in the course of making his rounds as a watchman, but he is also on the verge of envisioning the Gothic as Living Form, that is, as ontological difference. Los’s task within Jerusalem is thus twofold. As a watchman, he watches for the moment when the emergence of difference can radically transform being and through this transformation catalyse political change. In so doing, Los will recover Albion as an instance of Living Form. In this condition, Albion is no longer a conventional subject. On the contrary, his name figures a process of becoming more akin to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity.36 As multiplicity, Albion becomes a people, a geographical region, a nation, and a mythological giant, without being, in essence, any one of these. However, to transform Albion, Los must envision this radical potential through the figure of Jerusalem. It is in this sense that Jerusalem is, as the title page proclaims, ‘The Emanation of The Giant Albion’ (E 144). By simply turning the frontispiece, we effectively follow Los through the Gothic doorway only to immediately glimpse a dazzling image of the potential of ontological difference embodied in Living Form (see Figure 9). Representing the scholarly consensus, Paley identifies ‘the recumbent figure [at the bottom of the title page] as an analogue of Jerusalem herself ’.37 Superficially, her wings signal her role as a figure for difference, but this is hardly the kind of difference that matters for Jerusalem’s political vision. The suns, moons, and a field of stars contained in her wings all suggest that difference is immanent. These cosmic figures should not be read as symbolic or fanciful ornamentation. Rather they are intimations of a mode of being that conceives of Living Form as a pervasive process, one that elides distinctions between the natural body and the rest of the universe, between the autonomous subject of reason and object of empirical science, 46 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations

Figure 8  William Blake, Jerusalem, frontispiece, copy E, plate 1 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. and between the mundane and the divine in conventional Christianity. Nevertheless, it is clear that Jerusalem is altogether unconscious or worse. Hence the concern expressed by the figures on the right and left side of the plate. Why? Because, Albion has decided that Jerusalem does not exist. As the poetic text of Jerusalem begins, Albion claims, ‘Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: / By demonstration, man alone can live’ (J 4:27–8; E 147). Albion’s disavowal of Jerusalem’s existence marks his allegiance to the epistemological stance of empirical science and, by • 47

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

Figure 9  William Blake, Jerusalem, title page, copy E, plate 2 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

extension, the neo-classical techniques that make drawing from life, as Blake told Malkin, smell of mortality. Albion’s claim that Jerusalem does not exist and that ‘her daughters are indefinite’ is an admission that the nature of their being cannot be reduced to a single or stable existence, moral value, origin, and end. 48 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations While the Jerusalem of the title page is a figure for the inert, yet immanent, potential for ontological difference suppressed by Albion, she is nonetheless associated with the Gothic architecture in the visual designs of the text. The text associates Jerusalem with the Gothic form of Westminster Abbey, as opposed to the neo-classical dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Jerusalem is not’, in the terms of Albion’s epistemology, but Jerusalem as a figure associated with Gothic form, specifically in opposition to Grecian form, is clearly present on plate 32 of copy E38 (see Figure 10). Both Paley and David Erdman see the two full-sized figures as Vala, on the left, and Jerusalem, on the right.39 On the extreme left and right sides of the page are small images that resemble the neo-classical dome of St Paul’s and a Gothic structure like Westminster Abbey. The struggle between Vala and Jerusalem is effectively echoed in the polarities represented by St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Vala is appropriately self-mystifying in the folds of her Grecian/neo-classical veil, while the forms of Jerusalem and her three daughters are naked and clarified by the clouds that would obscure them. Albion’s ‘fall’, his declaration that Jerusalem and her daughters ‘are not!’ is, in part, his rejection of the clarity of line (Malkin’s notion of Blake’s Gothic influence) idealised in the figure of Jerusalem and her daughters. In the following chapter, Shaub is right on the mark in reading this image of Jerusalem and Vala as the ‘pictoral equivalent of Blake’s statement’ that the Gothic is Living Form.40 Looking at plate 32, Albion’s claim seems absurd, and thus his perspective of reality is brought into question, since Jerusalem and her daughters are visually more distinct than Vala is. Jerusalem is, as the Catalogue says, ‘what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes’ (E 543). Jerusalem’s plate 57 repeats and complicates the visual opposition of the contemporary neo-classical form of St Paul’s and the Gothic Form of Westminster Abbey (see Figure 11). Here, Gothic and neo-classical polarities define the top and bottom of a circle, suggesting a naive representation of the world appearing behind, seemingly divided by, the verbal field in the middle of the plate. The top of the circle presents the dome of St Paul’s, with the word ‘London’ to the right of it and, at the bottom of the circle, is an image of Westminster Abbey with the word ‘Jerusalem’ to the right. In terms of Blake’s mythology, the geographical polarisation of London and Jerusalem itself repeats two of the key ordinal points occupied by the ‘zoas’ after Albion’s fall.41 Associated with the rise to historical dominance of reason, empirical epistemology, and state religion, the zoa Urizen is the force that likewise dominates • 49

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

Figure 10  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. the fallen Albion. Associated with the activities the artist/watchman, the zoa Los embodies the generative impulses that have lost the ability to influence Albion. One way to explain Jerusalem’s sleep or unconsciousness on the title page, then, is to view her condition as an expression of Los’s suppressed capacities in Albion’s fallen state. What is lost in Los’s shift to the south is the ability to effectively actualise the Gothic as Living Form. 50 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations

Figure 11  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 57 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. While the opposition between Gothic and neo-classical architectural forms on plate 32 effectively defines the world as both divided by and a contest between the neo-classical Vala and the Gothic Jerusalem, plate 57 is literally framed within the field of a Gothic architectural form. Erdman identifies the golden, curved lines framing the top of the plate as a ‘gothic • 51

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic window’.42 This situation ideally performs Blake’s notion of the Gothic as Living Form, but it is more complex than Erdman suggests. For Erdman, it is clear that the women are ‘weaving a stained glass window’.43 Thus they are both the source of the russet fibres, and they are the active constructors of the Gothic window’s internal form. However, it is simultaneously possible that the women are in fact emanations of the divided earth at the centre of the design. Within this larger Gothic frame, their living forms suggest at once the becoming-world of the body and the becoming-body of the world.44 The world of Albion’s fallen condition is one that has been occupied; it has been taken over and ideologically remade in the image of contemporary London, the subject of autonomous reason, and the stasis and mathematical abstraction of Grecian form epitomised by St Paul’s. At the same time, Jerusalem’s Gothic form is not only a geographical and geopolitical potential the occupied condition of the fallen Albion, but it is the immanent condition of the world’s existence within the Gothic form of the window. The Living Form of the Gothic is thus ontologically a priori to Albion’s fallen world rather than necessarily historically prior to it. For the visual design of plate 57, Albion’s world, a world divided between the polarities of Grecian and Gothic form, is simultaneously framed by and actualised within the Gothic. This reading of the design is confirmed by the accompanying verbal text’s critique of division sponsored by the reason, moral judgment, and empirical epistemology of Grecian form. Even as it divides the visual image of Albion’s world, the verbal text of plate 57 questions this division through a series of morally charged polarities attributed to the ‘Demonstrations of Reason’ (J 57:11; E 207). Giving utterance to these illusory distinctions, ‘the Great Voice of the Atlantic’ asks: ‘What is a Wife & what is a Harlot? What is a Church? & What / Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate? / Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing?’ (J 57:5, 8–10; E 207). The implication of these rhetorical questions is that the moral distinctions and purposes are constructed by reason and underwritten by phantasmatic truths of religion. The dichotomy of ‘Wife’ and ‘Harlot’ is founded on the state disciplinisation of sex and patriarchal authority. The architectural forms of ‘Church’ and ‘Theatre’ designate worship and literature as equally sites of state-sanctioned performance. From this perspective, St Paul’s is the political performance space of London’s morality, and Westminster is the political performance space of Jerusalem’s suppressed potentiality as Gothic Living Form. 52 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations If the divisions sponsored by the unstable mix of empirical reason and morality’s transcendent authority are a means to fix identities as forms of subjection to church and state, then, the Voice of the Atlantic’s rhetorical questions about ‘Religion & Politics’ affirm that they are ‘the Same Thing’. Of course, religion and politics are intimately related in the history of Britain’s church/state relationship, but to say that they are ‘the Same Thing’ does not make the divided elements equivalent or interchangeable. Rather they are the ‘Same’ insofar as the system of meaning which divides them is the common source of their identity. By contrast, the Living Form of the Gothic is the contrary of these moral divisions as such. In this way, Living Form resists the systems that produce both legal and moral identities. It is also a resistance to the notion of a final destination of humanity in the eschatological metanarrative. Living Form is always in process; it has no essential existence as Wife, Harlot, Church or Theatre. Living Form is without a stable structure, codified laws, or political programme or permanent spiritual destination. Yet it is, for that reason, all the more politically revolutionary, precisely because it is the contrary of the subjection that characterises the relationship between the state and the individual. Like its titular character, Jerusalem itself is a process that moves towards the realisation of Living Form. When the Grecian form of St Paul’s and the Gothic form of Westminster appear again on plate 84 in Chapter Four of Jerusalem, they no longer mark the polarities of a divided world (see Figure 12). As the conflict they represent has intensified in the verbal text, plate 84 visually indicates that Gothic form has become a significant presence, one that holds the key to London’s, and by extension Albion’s, future. Now abutting each other, Westminster towers over St Paul’s, an architectural mash-up of London enlarging the importance of Gothic form at this point in the text.45 The visual design is striking, too, for its repetition of elements of the ‘Death’s Door’ design brought into the presence of St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Repeated is the figure of the aged man with crutches heading to his grave that appeared in the various iterations of ‘Death’s Door’. So too, the design powerfully evokes the bleak collusion of church and state in ‘London’ in Songs of Experience, where a young child leads an aged figure through the streets. In Blake’s ‘London’, the human figures travel towards a brick tomb similar to that in ‘Death’s Door’ (see Figure 13). The verbal text of plate 84 describes a scene that belongs to ‘London’ as much as it belongs to Jerusalem: ‘London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard’ • 53

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

Figure 12  William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 84 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

(J 84:11–12; E 243). However, Jerusalem makes a major step beyond the dark, historically accurate view of Blake’s 1790s conception of ‘experience’ in ‘London’. For despite its speaker’s awareness of the powers to which he is subjected, he cannot envision a political alternative to this situation. By contrast, on plate 84 the child is leading ‘London’ in a direction of 54 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations

Figure 13  William Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy F, plate 39 (Bentley 46) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

• 55

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic travel opposed to that depicted in the Songs and ‘Death’s Door’. Here we move past the brickwork of which the tomb consists and past the dome of St Paul’s. In Jerusalem the decrepit figure of London is being led to Westminster, to the Gothic seat of Living Form as portrayed on plates 32 and 57 and in Los’s transformative artistic vision. The child’s hand indicates the door to Westminster, recalling the scene in the frontispiece. The verbal text of plate 84 confirms the association of the Gothic form of Westminster with Los’s entry through the Gothic door on the frontispiece, for in viewing London’s condition, the Daughters of Beulah beg Los to ‘Arise upon thy Watches let us see thy Globe of fire / On Albions Rocks’ (J 84:27–8; E 243). The visual design of Jerusalem copy E in particular suggests that Los has heard their call, for the sun is rising over the rocky hill behind Westminster. London may be ‘blind & age-bent’ (J 84:11; E 243) in the moral Babylon of its own making, trapped in ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (SIE 46:8; E 27), rampant commercialism, abhorrent child labour practices, and the suffering of wounded soldiers, as it is in the Songs. Yet Jerusalem’s plate 84 suggests the immanence of unprecedented difference. The rising sun of Los’s ‘Globe of fire’ and the child leading ‘London’ to Westminster suggests that the realisation of the Gothic as Living Form holds the promise for the emergence of something new. Los’s watch song on plate 86 further confirms plate 84’s presentation of Gothic Living Form as an immanent, counter-eschatological force. If Los’s first sight after entering the Gothic structure on the frontispiece is a glimpse of Jerusalem on the title page, then Los’s watch song describes Jerusalem as a literally unimaginable expansion of being on plate 86. There is no image capable of mimetically reproducing Jerusalem, and no thought capable of comprehending Jerusalem as a radically heterogeneous multiplicity. Thus, Jerusalem is the paradigmatic example of the Gothic as Living Form. On plate 86, Los, as both watchman and Albion’s principle of artistic imagination, sings a song on his rounds that presents Jerusalem as elements that are neither historically possible nor ontologically equivalent. According to Los, Jerusalem is, at once, a woman with a ‘Bosom white’ (J 86:14; E 244), the biblical cities of Shiloh and Jerusalem, a being with six wings, a ‘Pillar of a Cloud’, a ‘Pillar of fire’ (J 86:27; E 245), the possessor of ‘Tents’ wherein one can ‘behold Israel’ (J 86:26; E 245), a being with gold, azure, purple, crimson, and silver feathers (J 86:5–8; E 244), and, as the title page announces, Albion’s emanation. Los’s watch song at once dissolves Jerusalem as a conventional subject and visual figure, even as it describes her Living Form as a becoming-multiplicity of existence. The 56 •

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations path Los repeats on his watch is thus both a repetition of previous watches and a path towards the emergence of ontological difference. In Jerusalem his radical conception of the subject is also a political solution. Entering the Gothic door of the frontispiece, Los himself performs Jerusalem’s alternative to the biological and political deaths expressed by the ‘Death’s Door’ design in its various deployments. The verbal text of the trial proof frontispiece describes ‘Los / As he enterd the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired’ (J 1:8–9; E 144).46 When he enters ‘the Door of Death for Albion’s sake’, Los does not commit suicide. Rather he sacrifices his construction of himself as a subject, be it of God or of Albion. Los’s inspiration is the sacrifice of his own selfhood to become an expression of the radical ontology of multiplicity. His sacrifice, modelled after Christ’s sacrifice in the Bible, is the realisation of the Gothic as Living Form, and it is a radical vision of Albion as multiplicity: both a political state and a state of being. To put it a slightly different way, Albion becomes the ontological difference that Los beholds in Jerusalem and which Los’s inspired sacrifice performs for Albion. Albion’s repetition of Los’s repetition of Christ’s self-sacrifice figures the dissolution of the autonomous subject. This dissolution of the subject is indirectly actualised as a political condition the text describes as a ‘fourfold’ collective of ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ ‘Creating Space, Creating Time’ (J 98:28, 31; E 257–8). Albion is thus rendered a multiplicity no longer dependent upon the determinations of time and space necessary for what Kant calls the I of transcendental apperception. Like a Kantian aesthetic judgment of the sublime, this notion of the Last Judgment in Jerusalem is both aesthetically and historically contra-final.47 It is a testament to the Blakean Gothic of Living Form, whose repetitions achieve indirect actualisations of immanent potentiality as revolutionary differences. Historically it is a ‘going forward forward … from Eternity to Eternity’, rather than the achievement of an eschatological finality beyond history (J 98:27; E 257). Likewise, the supposed anthropomorphism of Jerusalem’s penultimate plate, where ‘All Human Forms are identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone’, actually suggests an ontology whose radical heterogeneity is the political ideal. This apocalyptic condition is the text’s revolutionary step towards the actualisation of a political condition wherein ‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY’ (J 26; E 171). Jerusalem seeks a revolutionary condition that is far removed from the bourgeois human subject’s role in the French Revolution. At the end of Jerusalem, ‘Human’ is no longer a substantive entity in the same way that a Deleuzean multiplicity is not • 57

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic simply multiple. There is only a potentially endless flow of intensities, sensations that partake in an unfinalisable becoming at the site of the Blakean Gothic of Living Form. Jerusalem is a Gothic epic, as long as we understand ‘Gothic’ as the occluded signifier of the becoming that animates the text. In Jerusalem, Living Form entails the dissolution of the subject and the emergence of a politics based on ontological difference. As in On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil, Jerusalem associates Gothic form with a conception of being as a process that neither reaches a final material form nor a transcendent eschatological destination. In the figure of Jerusalem, ‘Living Form is Eternal Existence’, which is to say that Jerusalem has no essential being, no origin, and no end (On Virgil; E 270). Jerusalem is multiplicity. This is why Jerusalem is effectively invisible to Albion throughout most of the poem that bears her name. As Albion becomes ‘Grecian’, he adopts the empirical principles of Enlightenment epistemology bound up in the term ‘Mathematic Form’, and thus the mode of Jerusalem’s being is no longer apparent. Jerusalem does not exist in terms of Mathematic Form, for such form is only ‘Eternal in the Reasoning Memory’ (E 270). Rather she/it is a revolutionary break from this past: ‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY’. Jerusalem thus marks the emergence of that which is unprecedented. At the same time, Jerusalem is one figure for a pervasive and a priori process descriptive of all existence. To appreciate the Gothic in Jerusalem, is only to recognise what we have always been, before, as Blake would have it, the disciplinary regimes of classical and neo-classical thought obscured it. What is revolutionary about the Blakean Gothic’s break from the past is also, paradoxically, its return to a pre-modern era that signals Jerusalem’s unrecognised affiliation with the genre of Gothic literature. Where the Gothic novel resists the tide of modernity evident in the novel’s insistent strides towards literary realism in the eighteenth century, Blake’s Jerusalem likewise resists the legacy of realism and its attendant emphasis on the supremacy of reason. The difference is this: Blake’s return to the Gothic is the sudden eruption of a future without an image, a form of being that is not a subject, and thus it is a politics without subjection. But despite all of this, Malkin’s view of Blake having become a Gothic monument in his nineteenth-century career is half right. Blake may have been increasingly irrational and his engraving technique, emphasising line rather than tonal shifts, out of place in the commercial market, but Jerusalem is truly the Gothic monument to Blake’s increasingly invisible and unremunerative nineteenth-century career. Exactly four months before his death, Blake 58 •

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writes to George Cumberland to say that ‘the Last Work I produced is a Poem Entitled Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion … One I have Finishd It contains 100 Plates but it is not likely that I shall get a Customer for it’ (E 784). Even as Blake succeeded in bringing Jerusalem into being, his work was effectively an unknown cenotaph for a tomb that he was soon to enter. Notes 1 I have also checked Erdman’s edition against copy F of On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil at the Morgan Library and Museum. All subsequent quotations from William Blake are taken from the Erdman edition. ‘Relief etching’ is a term used to describe the engraving method characteristic of the illuminated books for which Blake is most well known today. These include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem among others. 2 In the following chapter, Kiel Shaub also recognises the importance of the same passage from On Homer’s Poetry [and] On Virgil for an understanding of the Blakean Gothic. While I see the notion of the Gothic as living form as an indication of an inexhaustible potential for ontological difference in Blake’s work, Shaub sees Blake’s living forms of the Gothic as a productive ‘resistance to absolutes’, p. 79. Shaub and I are fundamentally in agreement that the role of living form is both significant and productive in Blake’s later work. My treatment of living form emphasises a pure potentiality, while Shaub finds a more concrete/material resistance to the Urizenic will to certainty that sets the Blakean Gothic apart from the more conservative, Radcliffean Gothic. 3 Blake uses the term ‘Gothic’ once in his An Island in the Moon manuscript dated by Erdman as 1784, based on ‘topical allusions’ (E 848). The ‘Gothic’ in this instance refers to an architectural detail. 4 While we are both interested in ways of realising Blake’s notion of the Gothic’s Living Form as having a progressive or even radical political charge, my chapter treats the development of a Blakean Gothic as a topic internal to Blake’s post 1800 work in Jerusalem, while Shaub does more to recognise the broader political resonance of the Gothic revival for literary culture through his comparisons to Radcliffe’s Gothic texts. 5 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. i. 6 Ibid., p. xxv. This is far from the case. Blake’s early training gave him a solid, even relatively fashionable foundation in the practice of art and a familiarity with paintings in private collections. Thora Brylowe emphasises that Blake’s training at Parr’s Drawing School gave Blake ‘an understanding of the neoclassical aesthetic as it was handed down to “mechanical” professionals from • 59

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic the cultural elite’, see Brylowe, ‘Of Gothic Architects and Grecian Rods’, p. 91. Certainly Malkin’s account has not gone unchallenged for, as William Richey in Blake’s Altering Aesthetic points out, ‘Malkin’s account is the result of backward formation’, p. 2. Nonetheless, many influential commentators have cited Malkin on Blake’s Gothicism, see Malkin’s note 18. 7 Malkin represents Blake’s poetry by printing in full ‘Laughing Song’, ‘Holy Thursday’, and ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789); ‘Song (How sweet I roamed from field to field)’ and ‘Song (I love the jocund dance)’ from Poetical Sketches (1783); and finally ‘The Tiger’ [sic] from Songs of Experience (1794). 8 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. xxc. 9 Ibid., p. xxv. 10 Ibid. 11 According to Malkin, what is ‘ancient’ in Blake’s poetry is that which was ‘peculiar to our writers at the latter end of the sixteenth century and the former part of the seventeenth century’ (A Father’s Memoirs, p. xxv). In particular, Malkin presents Blake’s poems interspersed with poetry from Ben Jonson and John Milton as the ancients to whom Blake’s work best bears comparison. While Jonson’s work arguably does not offer the best comparison to the young Blake’s poetic aesthetic, Malkin’s comparison is, however, in line with E. J. Rose’s observation that ‘Blake does not draw a sharp distinction between the Gothic and the early Renaissance’ (Rose, ‘The “Gothicised Imagination” of “Michelangelo Blake” ’, p. 158). 12 David Bindman speculates that ‘Blake seems to have been immune in his early years from the artistic influence of “Gothick Horror” ’, made fashionable by Horace Walpole. Although there are a number of close parallels between the language of the poem ‘Fair Elenor’ in the Poetical Sketches and passages in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto’ (Bindman, ‘Blake’s “Gothicised Imagination” ’, p. 48). 13 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, pp. xl–xli. 14 Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, ll. 92–3. 15 In A Descriptive Catalogue, Blake states his principle this way, ‘The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling’ (E550). 16 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. xx. 17 Ibid., p. xxi. 18 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake; Easson, ‘Blake and the Gothic’; Rose, ‘The “Gothicised Imagination” of “Michelangelo Blake” ’; Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude; Frye, Fearful Symmetry.

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations 19 Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, p. 17. Gilchrist’s claim that Blake associates the Gothic with spiritual purity throughout his career has been authoritatively countered by William Richey, Seymour Howard, and David Bindman. Richey argues that Blake’s early work associates the Gothic ‘with man’s fall from his original glory’. See Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic, p. 8; and Howard, ‘Blake’s Classicism’, p. 167. Bindman asserts that ‘Gothic art … did not impress Blake by its piety, as Gilchrist implied’ (Howard, ‘Blake’s “Gothicised Imagination” ’, p. 30). In seeing Blake’s attachment to the Gothic as presupposing a spirituality that finds its ideal of purity in an unrecoverable historical past, Gilchrist builds upon the kind of biographical distortions Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs foster. The nostalgia for a spiritually pure domestic past Gilchrist attributes to the Blake’s love of Gothic art also produces a Blake uniformly conservative in his ideology. 20 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 148. Frye apparently ignores Blake’s 1799 letter to George Cumberland wherein he applauds Cumberland’s efforts ‘to revive Greek workmanship’ as reflecting Blake’s positive view of Greek art as fully evident until the nineteenth century (E 704). 21 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. xx. 22 Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic, p. 5; Bindman, ‘Blake’s “Gothicised Imagination” ’, p. 30. 23 Blake’s nineteenth-century conception of his own art as Gothic becomes a sign of resistance to an epistemology Blake associated with neo-classicism without indicating a change in the eclectic neo-classical primitivism of his artistic aesthetic as such. Blake’s passage on the painting The Ancient Britons in the 1809 Descriptive Catalogue defends his aesthetic against the specifically neo-classical values that would prescribe ‘Apollo for the model of your beautiful Man and the Hercules for your strong Man, and the Dancing Fawn for your Ugly Man’ (E 544). Howard observes that Blake’s characterisation of The Ancient Britons is a ‘reincarnation of the very qualities that Winklemann had previously identified as the prime characteristics of Classical art. … the archaizing Neo-Classic mode prepared the way for and helped to legitimate more ethnically indigenous and regressive Neo-Gothic works’ (Howard, ‘Blake’s Classicism’, p. 181). 24 Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. xxii. 25 Blake expresses his bitterness in a fragment of satiric verse that disparagingly refers to ‘Bob Screwmuch’ and ‘Assassinetti’ ([Satiric Verses and Epigrams] 46, 32; E 504). Although clearly sympathetic to Blake, Malkin himself must have seemed like an accomplice to Screwmuch and Assassinetti when he turned to Cromek to finish Blake’s engraving for the A Father’s Memoirs. 26 Rose, ‘The “Gothicised Imagination” of “Michelangelo Blake” ’, p. 156; Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic, p. 6; Easson, ‘Blake and the Gothic’, p. 147; Howard, ‘Blake’s Classicism’, pp. 167, 172.

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic 27 Richey, Blake’s Altering Aesthetic, p. 6; Howard, ‘Blake’s Classicism’, pp. 167, 172. 28 Becoming is a central concept in Gilles Deleuze’s work. According to Cliff Stagoll, ‘Deleuze uses the term “becoming” (devenir) to describe the continual production (or ‘return’) difference immanent within the constitution of events, whether physical or otherwise. … Rather than a product, final or interim, becoming is the very dynamism of change, situated between heterogeneous terms and tending towards no particular goal or end-state’ (Stagoll, ‘Becoming’, p. 21). 29 Brylowe, ‘Of Gothic Architects’, p. 93. 30 Ibid. 31 Shaub, ‘Horror of Rahab’, this volume, pp. 64–84. 32 First mentioned in the ninth century and first associated with Arthurian legend by the late twelfth century. 33 The Blakean Gothic thus designates a process much like that which Deleuze associates with difference and repetition. See Baulch, ‘Repetition, Representation and Revolution’, para. 2–6. 34 Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies, p. 65. 35 Paley, ‘Notes’, p. 130. 36 ‘Multiplicity’ is a pervasive concept in Deleuze’s work. It presents itself as an alternative to thinking in terms of strictly delimited subjects and objects and more in terms of being as a process. For Deleuze in Difference & Repetition, ‘multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system’, p. 182. To think of Jerusalem as a Deleuzean multiplicity is to recognise the extent to which the vast array of things that Jerusalem is said to be as more than things associated with or qualities attached to what is essentially or fundamentally Jerusalem. As a politically radical concept in Blake’s poem, Jerusalem as multiplicity is neither a utopian abstraction nor the Book of Revelation’s biblical city-as-eschatologicaldestination, although it does make reference to these. As a multiplicity, Jerusalem is immanent in the actual political situation of the world. Blake’s Jerusalem is not a transcendent escape from the world, but the realisation for the potentiality for actual change. Crucially, Jerusalem is not a revolutionary program or a pre-existing plan for a future. 37 Paley, ‘Notes’, p. 131. 38 As is typical of Blake’s illuminated books, different copies of Jerusalem are ordered differently. These variations are limited to Chapter 2 where copies A, C, and F share one ordering, while copies D and E share a different order. 39 Paley, ‘Notes’, p. 181; Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, p. 325. Jerusalem’s contrary is known as Vala. S. Foster Damon defines Vala as the ‘laws of nature’ in opposition to Jerusalem who is ‘freedom’ (A Blake Dictionary, p. 430). However,

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William Blake ’ s Gothic relations the laws of nature that Vala represents spring more from empirical science’s efforts to discipline nature as a structure of meaning than they do a truth about nature. Often Vala is less abstract than that; at times she seems to be a biological woman who wishes to seduce Albion and keep him from thinking about Jerusalem. At other moments in the text, Vala is the figure responsible for jealousy, carnal desire and war. For the purposes of this chapter the difference between Vala and Jerusalem is a question of tendency. Vala tends towards individuation, and Jerusalem tends towards multiplicity. 40 Shaub, ‘Horror of Rahab’, this volume, pp. 64–84. 41 See Damon’s classic definition of Blake’s use of the term ‘zoa’ (A Blake Dictionary, pp. 458–60). 42 Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, p. 336. 43 Ibid. Doubtlessly, here Erdman is influenced by plate 59’s visual depiction of three women at a spinning wheel. 44 See note 28 on ‘becoming’. 45 What is interesting in this meeting of architectural figures is that they are reversed in terms of their actual heights. St Paul’s Cathedral is 111.3 metres high while Westminster Abbey is only 69 metres high. 46 These lines are not visible in any of the printings of the frontispiece that Blake included with all of the known copies of Jerusalem. 47 See Baulch, ‘Reflective Aesthetics’, pp. 198–205.

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The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form • Kiel Shaub

T

he re-emergence of interest in the medieval past which later became known as the Gothic Revival took shape across various media. Antiquarians such as Thomas Percy collected ancient folk ballads, J. M. W. Turner painted Tintern Abbey in ruins, Thomas Chatterton created his pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, and Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe began employing the medieval period as a setting for their gloomy narratives. And for all the unity a term like ‘the Gothic Revival’ seems to suggest, the manner in which artists and scholars ‘revived’ the Gothic were not always compatible. Those interested in the medieval or Gothic period were actually quite selective as to the elements of the past they wished to revive. The English minister Vicesimus Knox, for instance, locates his own appreciation of the Gothic inside the cathedral in the figure of the worshipper, whose ‘pious heart has poured forth its animated devotion at the rude Gothic shrine, with a fervor not to be surpassed in the Grecian temple. The taste of our ancestors is, indeed, no longer a pattern for our own: but their beneficent virtues will for ever continue proper objects of imitation.’ 1 Knox’s praise for the purity of the devotee occurs alongside a very clear effort to distance himself from the ‘rudeness’ of the ‘Gothic shrine’ in favour of a classical structure. This sentiment was common among many more neo-classically oriented Gothic Revivalists, such as Ann Radcliffe, whose novels constantly distinguish between the simple faith of the Gothic hero and heroine and the labyrinthine architecture in which they become immured. Radcliffe’s persistent rationalisation of apparently supernatural events similarly discovers rays of 64 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form enlightenment shining through to that ‘darkened’ age. The effort to extract desirable elements from medieval life, while leaving its more ‘barbaric’ elements to ridicule, was not unique to the early Revivalists, but its later iterations took on an identifiably different form. At issue was the question of style.2 It was clear that Radcliffe’s characters and their settings evoked the medieval period, but her style still gave precedent to neo-classical rationality and order. Even more explicitly, Horace Walpole assures the eighteenth-century reader in his preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, that although ‘the principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity … the language and conduct have nothing that flavours of barbarism. The style is purest Italian.’3 In contrast to these writers’ insistence on neo-classical modes of telling and structuring events, it was the expressed goal of the lake poets, Tom Duggett writes, ‘to move beyond the generic themes and paraphernalia of Gothic fiction, and beyond Scott’s artificially animated antiquarianism, towards a purified Gothic style that would reconnect with the genuine resources of the language, and truly make English poetry new’.4 Where Radcliffe had depicted Gothic structures, the Lake poets wanted to build them. In perhaps its clearest and most well-known formulation, William Wordsworth, in his ‘Preface’ to the Excursion (1814), situates a large portion of his work by way of analogy to a Gothic building: The two Works [The Prelude and The Recluse] have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a gothic Church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces, which have been long before the Public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive Reader to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses, ordinarily included in those Edifices.5

The analogy to the ‘Gothic Church’ set the individual poems as rooms with varying importance, the words as the stone and mortar, and Wordsworth as its Gothic architect. Yet the introduction of style into the Romantic conception of the Gothic obscures a more fundamental aesthetic continuity. Extending Wordsworth’s analogy, the architect designs the church and all its rooms for its essential purpose, namely the worship of God by the faithful. Like Radcliffe’s virtuous protagonists and Knox’s ‘pious heart’, Wordsworth’s Gothic structure only further underscored medieval devotional practice as the life-blood of the Gothic Revival. In this sense the Romantic iteration of the Gothic was indeed a ‘purified’ form of its • 65

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic earlier counterpart, actually advancing a particular Gothic aesthetic to which their stylistic innovations only contributed.6 This particular thread of the Gothic Revival in England was also inextricably tied to the political ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The medieval parishioner’s ‘animated devotion at the rude Gothic shrine’ effectively idealised a moment in time before the advent of the enlightenment political discourse that would culminate in the French Revolution.7 In other words, to invoke the Gothic was an attempt both to revive a way of life ideologically opposed and temporally prior to that observed in republican France, and, by negation, to reconstitute an Englishness that was thought to have suffered under French cultural occupation for so many years. What we have, then, is a Gothic Revival whose central tenets of simple virtue and ardent devotion are both nationalist and reactionary.8 But what would a Gothic aesthetic look like that fit neither of these categories? Within the larger stylistic transformation of the Gothic Revival, is there room for a Gothic style that is not conservative? In this chapter I will examine the poetry and painting of William Blake, a figure for whom the Gothic Revival is undoubtedly important, but whose works continually resist the kind of categorisation developed above. In the previous chapter, David Baulch helpfully traces the long tradition of Blake scholarship that has equated Blake’s move to the Gothic with a step towards conservatism and mysticism in his later life and writing. Yet more recent scholarship on Blake’s politics, including, at least implicitly, that of the previous chapter, shows increasing evidence of sustained anti-imperialist tendencies throughout his later career.9 And Blake’s own statements, such as his assertion in the advertisement to ‘Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims’ (1810), that ‘Obedience to the Will of the Monopolist is calld Virtue’ (E 576) or the well-known statement of Blake’s eternal prophet Los in Jerusalem (1804–c.20), ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ (J 10:20; E 153) attest to his continual abhorrence of the rigid moral systems typically embodied in the protagonists of Gothic novels.10 For Blake, the idealisation of an obedient and virtuous medieval subject was the first sign of moral imposition by an imperial power. But we nonetheless encounter similarities between Blake and other Gothic Revivalists that force us to grapple with the relation between Blake’s politics and his use of Gothic elements. Take for example the following caption from his painting Joseph of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion: ‘This is One of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages … of whom the World was not worthy’ 66 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form (E 671). Like Wordsworth, there is an emphasis on the importance of Gothic technique (‘the Gothic Artists’) and structure (‘who Built the cathedrals’), and also a repudiation of the rationalism that coined the term ‘Dark Ages’, but extensive external discrepancies in Blake’s politics caution against any unproblematic aligning of the two. One of the most important examples of these discrepancies emerges with Blake’s portrayal of the figure Rahab. The figure appears in The Four Zoas (1797–1807), Milton (c. 1804–c.11), and Jerusalem (1804–c.20),11 and each appearance develops and enriches its inherently multivalent character. Blake’s Rahab is known by several names. One of them, ‘Mystery Babylon the Great the Mother of Harlots’ (FZ 110:6; E 379), recalls both the chaos dragon Rahab from the book of Psalms and the biblical Harlot of Jericho. This composite allusion, discussed in detail below, speaks to Rahab’s role as the embodiment of a religious imposition that has been internalised and reasserted as a justification for empire, what Blake identifies as ‘Religion hid in War’ (J 75:20; E 231, J 89:53; E 249; M 37:43; E 138). She is also ‘Namd Moral Virtue’ (M 40:21; E 142), a designation that associates the figure with the idealised medieval subject of the reactionary Gothic aesthetic I mentioned above. Tracing this figure through ‘Night the Eighth’ of The Four Zoas, I hope to show that Blake’s depiction of Rahab is at least in part a critique of these conservative aspirations of the Gothic Revival.12 Blake’s understanding of the biblical Rahab will foreground my analysis of her and her daughter Tirzah’s formation from the emanation Vala, Rahab’s counterpart ‘in Eternity’ (J 70:31; E 224). Rahab’s interaction with the prophet Los, who attempts to dissuade her from her imperial pursuits, her subsequent fall, and a discussion of Urizen’s culpability in that process, will provide a platform for working through Blake’s unusual deployment of the conventions of Gothic terror and horror in his work. I argue that thinking through the events and objects that Blake associates with either ‘terror’ or ‘horror’ can provide both temporal and epistemological structure to the Rahab sequence, and allow the reader to see the emerging horror that proceeds from a reactionary and nationalist Gothic aesthetic. At the same time, Blake’s critique provides a bridge for arriving at a conception of a radical and anti-imperialist Gothic. I conclude that Blake’s ‘Gothic’, what he calls ‘Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270) does indeed constitute a radical shift from that of his contemporaries, not by a superficial opposition to their stylistic practices, as was the case, I contend, with a poet like Wordsworth, but by reconfiguring his understanding of ‘Form’ as a relational rather than an absolute distinction, pertaining to the primacy • 67

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic of prescribed, ‘rational’ boundaries in art. That is to say, for Blake, the very notion of absolute aesthetic principles is a sign of what he calls the ‘Mathematic’ or ‘Grecian’ form, which both Radcliffe and Wordsworth, not to mention more obviously neo-classical poets such as Pope, can be said to participate in. In A Vision of the Last Judgment Blake speaks of ‘true Art Calld Gothic in All Ages ’ (VLJ 82; E 559). In accordance with this example, the ‘Gothic’ is a designation that critics would often use to condemn or explain away instances of artistic ‘liberty’, or departures from accepted aesthetic principles, of which Benjamin Heath Malkin’s biographical account of Blake discussed in the previous chapter is a rather late iteration. ‘Gothic’ form, for Blake, thus does not consist in simply opposing neo-classical perspective and outline by doing away with or de-emphasising both, but in making contraries of the attributes typically associated with either the Gothic or neo-classical aesthetic, ‘each’ instead being ‘necessary to human existence’. Thus rendered, Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form represents a kind of versatility that can make use of both the distinct and indistinct, both rational and irrational perspective. As an aesthetic category it encourages the artist to present his or her vision in the most precise and accurate manner possible, and frames the reactionary Gothic as another symptom of a will to certainty and control, no less present in the ‘purified’ Gothic style of Wordsworth, than in more overt neo-classicism. We can approach Blake’s Gothic form first through an argument about what it is not. And the figure Rahab is exactly this. As June Sturrock has already recognised, Rahab’s behavior, ‘call’d Moral Virtue’, parallels that of the chaste and pious heroine of the Gothic novel, but atypically for the period she also represents the violent and promiscuous consequences of enforcing the very moral imperatives that conserve those virtues, and hence is also called ‘The Mother of Harlots’.13 Politically Rahab signals a conjoining of the imperial and moral regulatory tendencies that Blake opposed throughout his life, what he in Jerusalem calls ‘Religion hid in War’ (J 75:20; E 231, 89:53; E 249). Laura Doyle’s work on colonialism and the Gothic novel has shown how the nationalism inherent in Gothic conventions translates quickly into discourses of imperialism, such that ‘nativist notions of Gothic freedom began to enfold racist discourses of “free” versus “barbarian” peoples to propel the new ruling classes’ notion of material progress’.14 In idealising the medieval devotee, the Gothic novelist planted a seed that apologists of colonialism nurtured, grafting its sprigs onto their own imperial project. The attempt to define what it meant to 68 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form be English necessitated a definition of its opposite. And in the effort to delimit an ‘other’ for Englishness was the implicit justification for stamping out that ‘other’ wherever it existed, even if it existed in places beyond England’s borders. G. A. Rosso’s deft handling of the biblical dynamic of Blake’s Rahab has shown her to be associated with the same imperialist tendencies that grew out of this nativist or nationalist Gothic tradition.15 A passage from plate 40 of Milton describes Rahab as the same figure that John wrote of in the book of Revelation: ‘A Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War / Namd Moral Virtue; cruel two-fold Monster shining bright / A Dragon red & hidden Harlot which John in Patmos saw’ (M 40:20–2; E 141–2). To explain the reference to John of Patmos, a figure notably persecuted and exiled by the Romans, Rosso situates Blake in terms of the biblical prophetic tradition and its continual opposition to state religion, or religious empire. Blake understands John’s vision, ‘I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast’,16 as a reference to the two figures called Rahab in the Old Testament. In Psalms 89:10 and Isaiah 51:9 Rahab appears as the chaos dragon, a figure important to Old Testament prophetic tradition, whom Yahweh conquers at creation. In the Hebrew Bible the chaos dragon recurs several times in highly politicised form as the sign or symbol of any threat to Israelite sovereignty. ‘Indeed’, Rosso affirms, ‘at critical moments throughout Israelite history, all the Near Eastern empires that oppressed the Israelites – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome – are denounced as the chaos dragon’.17 Second Isaiah, for instance, written during the Babylonian occupation of Jerusalem, shrewdly linked the chaos dragon with the Babylonian empire that was attempting to destroy the Israelites, and with them the order Yahweh had established in the beginning.18 This repurposing of Rahab transforms its signification from that of ‘a mythic dragon into a pejorative nickname’ for external powers attempting to conquer Israel, thus employing a religious and supposedly universal symbol to encourage a specific political program of resistance to imperial rule.19 The name Rahab appears again in the book of Joshua, this time as the Jericho harlot who aided the Israelite spies in their conquest of that city. For her assistance to God’s chosen people Rahab is spared by the Israelite conquerors and is generally regarded positively in both Old and New Testament traditions, despite her status as a harlot.20 But what Blake sees through the lens of John’s allusion is an Israelite people who had developed their own imperial ambitions. They had become the very chaos • 69

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic dragon whom they had associated with the empires wishing to conquer them. Blake picks up on this and his Rahab the harlot is no longer an object of veneration, but only an aider and abettor of religious conquest. ‘Blake’, Rosso writes, ‘thus fuses John’s harlot with Joshua’s Rahab through an unorthodox but politically astute hermeneutic strategy: he applies the anti-empire, anti-harlot polemic of prophetic tradition to Joshua’s Rahab in order to critique Israel’s theology of conquest’.21 But if Blake’s Rahab is the emblem of state religion and empire, she is also ‘Namd Moral Virtue’, a fact that presents a large problem for any attempt to associate Blake’s Gothic with that of his more conservative contemporaries. The reactionary Gothic that relied on the ‘pious heart’ and ‘animated devotion’ of the medieval subject held his, and more particularly her, moral virtue above almost all else. ‘Chastity and piety’ – Sturrock contends, ‘and, moreover, the reputation of unblemished chastity and piety – are the cornerstones of middle-class femininity according to the plethora of domestic and Gothic novels, and conduct books of the period’.22 These values are emphasised repeatedly in the Gothic novels of Radcliffe, where the author reveals, for instance, Ellena Rosalba’s innate generosity and devotion by showing us that she secretly weaves dresses to help support her aging aunt. In fact, a look at the passage itself showcases another important distinction between Blake’s and Radcliffe’s Gothic: But [Vivaldi] was ignorant of what was very true, though very secret, that she assisted to support this aged relative, whose sole property was the small estate on which they lived, and that she passed whole days in embroidering silks, which were disposed of to the nuns of a neighbouring convent, who sold them to the Neapolitan ladies, that visited their grate, at a very high advantage. He little thought, that a beautiful robe, which he had often seen his mother wear, was worked by Ellena; nor that some copies from the antique, which ornamented a cabinet of the Vivaldi palace, were drawn by her hand.23

The dichotomy between the virtuous Gothic heroine and the intricate evil of Catholic and hereditary authority figures, typical of so much Gothic fiction, is clearly marked here. Ellena’s ‘very secret’ generosity towards her aunt contrasts with the greedy nuns who sell the dresses she makes to the Neapolitan ladies ‘at a very high advantage’. The sacrifice of her own energy and time in the care of others constitutes the epitome of human virtue. Ellena’s unacknowledged talent for embroidery is also opposed here and elsewhere to the Marchesa’s obsession with the public display of her taste, whether in dress, painting, or music, which itself in the end may only 70 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form come from the advice of others.24 Blake aligns these opposed characters in the figure of Rahab. She is at once ‘Moral Virtue’ and ‘Mystery Babylon the Great the Mother of Harlots’ who assists in the maintenance of moral law (FZ 110:6; E 379). The rigid insistence on moral virtue generates, rather than solves, the problem of sexual transgression in Blake’s work. Those able to abide by the rigid moral law later become its enforcers, while those who cannot supply an implicit justification for the rule. And so Rahab’s daughters, called Tirzah in their aggregate form, become the ancient priestesses, ‘binding on the Stones / Their victims & with knives tormenting them singing with tears / Over their victims’ (FZ 109:28–30; E 378). The problem this presents for a reactionary Gothic so invested in the faith and virtue of the medieval subject,25 in both its neo-classicised and Romantic modes, is that the deeper continuity they share becomes cyclical, and this Gothic ‘solution’ to the problem of terror only begins anew the enforcement of virtue that inevitably results in a reiteration of the priesthood and mystery it sought to quell. The distinction between ‘terror’ and its counterpart ‘horror’, so crucial to any definition of the Gothic genre, can help to give a temporal and epistemological structure to the repetitive process that Rahab embodies.26 Radcliffe’s essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ posits ‘certainty’ as the primary distinction between the two: ‘They must be men of very cold imagination,’ said W—, ‘with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’.27

In the temporal correlate to Radcliffe’s assessment, terror is a feeling that occurs before an object or event achieves definition, while horror occurs afterward. Terror is a feeling of uncertainty, while horror is one of dreadful certainty. Terror ‘expands the soul’, while horror ‘contracts’ it. The Gothic heroine is in terror at being locked in a dark and unknown room, but she is in horror at the sight of an actual dead body. Blake makes plentiful use of the terms during the Rahab episode in ‘Night the Eighth’ of The Four Zoas. Crucial to the sequence is how Blake employs the logic of certainty and temporality that governed eighteenth-century usage of the words ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ to point out the fundamental impulse that causes these feelings. By doing so Blake proposes a more primary human tendency to certainty and control, of which these two emotions (that is, terror and horror) are the sensible results. • 71

The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic

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Earlier in ‘Night the Eighth’, in the episode just prior to Rahab’s creation, we find Vala petitioning Urizen to see her counterpart Luvah, whom Urizen has locked in his furnaces: I see the murderer of my Luvah clothd in robes of blood He who assumd my Luvahs throne in times of Everlasting Where hast thou hid him whom I love in what remote Abyss Resides that God of my delight O might my eyes behold My Luvah then could I deliver all the sons of God From Bondage of these terrors & with influences sweet As once in those eternal fields in brotherhood & Love United we should live in bliss as those who sinned not. (FZ 103:3–10; E 375)

As the primary representative of a metaphysic of certainty,28 Urizen has enslaved Luvah, whom he perceives as chaos, the antithesis of Urizen, and the primary threat to his crown. Vala calls Urizen’s victory over Luvah ‘Bondage’, rather than an honorable quelling of the threat of disorder. She says what he has produced are ‘terrors’ instead of the vanquishing of uncertainty. Vala has questioned Urizen’s decision, and to grant her petition would be to admit the injustice of his act. Accordingly, Vala’s request has disastrous consequences: that is, he transforms her into Rahab. Corresponding to Urizen’s monomaniacal quest for certainty is his overpowering selfhood, which sees everyone and everything in relation only to himself. Thus, although he might have heard the voice making the request, he only ‘saw the Shadow’ of Vala, an anticipatory glance at her transformation into Rahab. Urizen then ‘calld together the Synagogue of Satan’ (FZ 109:5; E 378).29 In the poem this group is indirectly responsible for the death of Jesus, who, born ‘In mysterys woven mantle & in the Robes of Luvah’, to the Synagogue of Satan posed the very threat of terror and disorder that Luvah had posed to Urizen (FZ 104:35; E 378). But if Urizen and the Synagogue of Satan are both in terror of the uncertainty that Jesus presents, the narration also recognises the terror of the audience at the indefinite intentions of the ‘Cold dark opake … Assembly’ of ‘rocky unshapd forms terrific’ that have threatened the life of the Lamb (FZ 109:8–9; E 378). ‘Such seemd the Synagogue to distant view’, that is, to the view of the reader 1800 years later (FZ 109:10; E 378). The temptation here is to think that these two iterations of terror are opposed in some way. If the Urizenic ‘Assembly’ is terrified at the prospect of their own destruction, we are then to think that the terror of the Christian reader at the crucifixion of 72 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form Jesus contrasts with this. But acknowledging the readership can help to align these two seemingly opposed terrors. If the ‘distant view’ implies a historical and predominantly Christian view, the typology regarding Jesus as the fulfilment of God’s promise to the Israelites has already replaced the Hebraic order and constructed its own metaphysic of certainty. The demonisation of the Jews for the murder of their saviour then becomes only a symptom (terror) of a more fundamental continuity. The indication here is that the experience of terror is only such to one who already has a metaphysic of certainty or a controlling system in place. It is the threat of this system’s destruction that triggers terror. So whether it is the Gothic terror caused by Schedoni, la Terreur en France, or the terror that the Synagogue of Satan experienced at the destructive potential of Jesus, the feeling ultimately derives from a more basic Urizenic tendency towards certainty. This tendency is embodied in the formation of Rahab. She first appears ‘amidst’ the Assembly still identified, at least in name, with Vala: Cold dark opake the Assembly met twelvefold in Amalek Twelve rocky unshapd forms terrific forms of torture & woe Such seemd the Synagogue to distant view amidst them beamd A False Feminine Counterpart Lovely of Delusive Beauty Dividing & Uniting at will in the Cruelties of Holiness Vala drawn down into a Vegetated body now triumphant The Synagogue of Satan Clothed her with Scarlet robes & Gems And on her forehead was her Dame written in blood Mystery. (FZ 109:8–15; E 378)

This is a Vala ‘drawn down into a Vegetated body now triumphant’. She is ‘triumphant’ because she has ‘smit[ed]’ the Lamb of God (FZ 113:33; E 377) and stormed ‘Jerusalems Gates’ (FZ 104:19; E 377). The conquest imagery recalls the biblical harlot Rahab that aided the Israelites in their conquest of Jericho. She has, in effect, just assisted the empire, whose prime ministers are those of the Synagogue of Satan, in quelling the threat that Jesus posed to their order. For this the Assembly rewards her, just as the biblical Rahab was rewarded for her assistance. The Assembly ‘Clothed her with Scarlet robes & Gems’ in a manner resembling the episode in ‘Night The Second’, in which the ‘The tygers of wrath called the horses of instruction from their mangers / They unloos’d them & put on the harness of gold & silver & ivory / In human forms distinct they stood round Urizen prince of Light / Petrifying all the Human Imagination into rock • 73

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic & sand’ (FZ 25:3–6; E 314). With the horses so harnessed, prideful of their golden bonds, ‘Groans ran along Tyburns brook and along the River of Oxford / Among the Druid Temples’ (FZ 25:7–8; E 314). So too, Rahab’s reward is precisely the point at which she is initiated into the service of the Urizenic empire. Immediately after, her daughters commence ‘binding on the Stones / Their victims & with knives tormenting them’, repeating the process for which Rahab was originally praised (FZ 109:28–9; E 378). She is called ‘Mystery’ (FZ 109:15; E 378), but the next passage reveals that ‘The Synagogue Created her from Fruit of Urizens tree’ (FZ 109:20; E 378). ‘The Synagogue’ has in fact hidden this fruit within ‘The false Female as in an ark & veil’ (FZ 109:25; E 378) suggesting that Mystery, or the ‘making mysterious’ of Rahab was actually an attribute imposed upon her by an external agent (that is, she ‘was hidden’ by the Synagogue). They are the keepers of the fruit’s delight and the regulators of those who may have access to it. Part of what emerges here is a clarification of the relationship between regulation and creation in the process of repetitive metaphysics of certainty. Each new metaphysic of certainty in turn creates a certainty of terror. Urizen creates the tree of Mystery, which in turn creates both the Harlot and Moral Virtue in the single figure of Rahab. Rahab’s enforcement, and by way of authoritative praise, reinforcement of Moral Law, replicates the moral system whose perception of imminent destruction results in terror. Thus, when a Gothic hero or heroine experiences terror, he or she is encountering a threat to his or her person, religion, and empire. Specifically ‘Gothic’ terror in Blake becomes one instantiation of terror in a cycle of terror that is repeated over and over again. If the logic of terror in Blake may be stated as the affective result of any perceived threat to a regulated system of which one is at least a part, what may be said about the role of horror in Blake’s poem? How does the achievement of definition or certainty function in the case of Rahab? With the advance of the Urizenic religious empire, the prophet Los arrives to provide resistance to its further expansion and reification. When ‘She stood before Los in her Pride’, a pride still associated with the praise of the imperial Assembly, Los the ‘shadowy Prophet’ attempts to warn her of the failures of her mode of thinking by telling her of the failed attempts of his sons and daughters to proceed in the same manner (FZ 105:42, 48; E 380). For Los, Rahab has achieved definition: ‘O Rahab I behold thee’ (FZ 105:51; E 380). He can now see her and recognise her as an instance of state religion, ‘Religion hid in War’, and lists for her to see, his sons and daughters who have tried and failed in exactly the same 74 •

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way. Los even lists himself among them, ‘I was once like thee a Son / Of Pride and I also have piercd the Lamb of God in pride & wrath / Hear me repeat my Generations that thou mayst also repent’ (FZ 105:51–3; E 380). After Los has finished he requests that Rahab ‘set Jerusalem free’ from the captivity in which Rahab has placed her (FZ 108:2; E 381). But Rahab, like so many others before her,   burning with pride & revenge departed from Los. Los dropd a tear at her departure but he wipd it away in hope She went to Urizen in pride the Prince of Light beheld Reveald before the face of heaven his secret holiness. (FZ 108:3–6; E 381)

When she flees Los for the protection of Urizen, she expects the same approval that she had received from the Synagogue of Satan for stabbing Jesus and capturing Jerusalem. The earlier sequence in which Vala petitions Urizen to let her visit Luvah plays out again here in modified form. To listen to Los would be to acknowledge the inferiority of the state religion of which she is the chief exponent. The gender inversion that has taken place can tell us a lot about Blake’s view of the historical process of subjugation and its reiteration through time. Understanding the Rahab sequence without taking into account the history of her formation yields a female Rahab whose will to power is diametrically opposed to that of her male counterparts. Yet Urizen’s integral role in creating her, and Rahab’s continuity with the original Vala, shows that we are dealing with a process that has different and apparently opposed individual instantiations, but maintains an underlying resemblance. What Rahab thinks is her own motivation is actually a metaphysic of certainty imposed upon her by Urizen and his councilors.30 This notion makes sense of Blake’s reference to Rahab in Milton as ‘A Female hidden in a Male’ (M 40:20; E 141), and urges us to understand Rahab in continuity with the figures Vala and Urizen, who are integral to her creation. When Los sees her he does not experience horror per se, since his is not a metaphysic of certainty, but rather of imagination. Los’s analogue of horror is vision. That force which destroyed Jesus and conquered Jerusalem has reached, for Los, the threshold of visibility. And he calls it Rahab. For him alone Rahab has taken shape, and his effort to caution her against her action is the hallmark of that prophetic resistance to ‘Religion hid in War’ for which Blake’s poetry is so well known. This point will be crucial in terms of addressing the relation of terror and horror to Blake’s own artistic process, addressed in detail below. • 75

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic Just as Los warned Rahab that Elohim ‘created Adam / To die for Satan [but] Adam refusd’ so Rahab refuses to die for the perceived Satan that is Los (FZ 107:45–6; E 381). Rahab in this case implies the maintenance of system (for example, Moral Virtue), Satan being the perceived threat to the system (that is, sin or evil). Her action is contrasted to that of Jesus who ‘Came & Died willing beneath Tirzah & Rahab’ who opposed him (FZ 107:50; E 381). This action precipitates her fall: ‘Darkness & sorrow coverd all flesh Eternity was darkend’ (FZ 106:17; E 381). When Urizen becomes certain of her fall ‘horrors of Eternal death / Shot thro him’ (FZ 106:21–2; E 381). But ‘pitying’ her ‘he began to Embrace / The Shadowly Female’, which precipitates his own fall (FZ 106:23–4; E 381). But this fall does not take place in the manner we might expect. Urizen’s fall here consists not of his being cast out of the garden of Eden, but of his inability to regain Rahab and his subsequent transformation into the serpent. The transformation begins when Urizen becomes ‘Forgetful of his own Laws’ (FZ 106:23; E 381). The threshold that constitutes the boundary of his own laws is the point at which Urizen has drawn the line between moral good and evil. When he crosses that threshold into evil he becomes what he has perceived evil to be. In this sense it is not at all surprising that he turns into a creature very much resembling certain descriptions of Orc. Urizen has become the very chaos dragon that he sought to conquer at creation. The final portion of this sequence focuses on Urizen’s reaction to his own role in Rahab’s development, and helps to elucidate the process by which regret, repentance, and forgetfulness entrench, rather than extinguish, particular ways of thinking. As Urizen’s transformation occurs the narration follows not only the emergence of his dragon form, but also the form that loses animation. ‘[S]ince life cannot be quenchd Life exuded’ from his positive to his negative form (FZ 106:24; E 381). When the dragon form begins to animate ‘And his immense tail lashd the Abyss his human form a Stone / A form of Senseless Stone remaind in terrors on the rock’ (FZ 106:31–2; E 382). Unable to ‘sense’ or comprehend the giant serpent taking shape before their eyes, Blake’s deployment of ‘terror’ indicates the usage I have been following out here.31 Its object however, or lack thereof, pertains equally to the process that has unfolded in the last several pages. Rahab’s formation from Vala, Urizen’s role in that process, Los the prophet’s cautionary tale, even the logic of terror itself, are emerging before the terrified Urizenic remains, still indefinite, but before them nonetheless. Its definition awaits experience. In the thick of the action, Urizen cannot yet ‘sense’ or comprehend the actual connection, the real continuity between 76 •

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his stony and serpent forms. When it is all over, Tharmas and Urthona at least will have learned to dread the ‘dark terrors’ of both ‘Orc & Urizen’, now considered as a composite form, but in Urizen we see only a glimmer of this perception (FZ 111:34; E 383). That glimmer comes after his fallen form has taken full shape and has begun again to bind the creatures of the abyss. On occasion he looks back mournfully on his days ‘in power’: Oft doth his Eye emerge from the Abyss into the realms Of his Eternal day & memory strives to augment his ruthfulness Then weeping he descends in wrath drawing all things in his fury Into obedience to his will & now he finds in vain That not of his own power he bore the human form erect Nor of his own will gave his Laws in times of Everlasting For now fierce Orc in wrath & fury rises into the heavens A King of wrath & fury a dark enraged horror And Urizen repentant forgets his wisdom in the abyss In forms of priesthood in the dark delusions of repentance Repining in his heart & spirit that Orc reignd over all And that his wisdom servd but to augment the indefinite lust. (FZ 111:9–20; E 382)

The ‘in vain’ of line 12 indicates that the reiterative process of the Urizenic metaphysic of certainty is far from being eliminated, but in the lines that follow there is a moment, however fleeting, of definition. For an instant there is a realisation that Orc and Urizen are inextricably linked, that they are both parts of a larger whole. The shift in power that occurs from lines 13 and 14 to lines 15–20 is one of relation and not of negation. In lines 13 and 14, Urizen rules, but not without the absolutely necessary force that ‘bore the human form erect’. Here Orc is submerged and subservient to Urizen the Prince of Light. But from line 15, the ‘King of wrath & fury’ ‘Orc reignd over all’, and the ‘wisdom’ of the unnamed Urizen ‘servd but to augment the indefinite lust’. The ‘wisdom’ that we are talking about is the metaphysic of certainty that lead inevitably to ‘terror’. And the effect it has here is only to increase, or ‘augment’, the perceived lust (Blake might call it energy) that Urizen had been intent on extinguishing. At this point Urizen is no longer in terror, but, because he can see the connection, the figure of Orc becomes a ‘dark enraged horror’. The connection has achieved definition. Another being might be able to reflect on the vision and keep it in mind when similar circumstances arise, but Urizen, the emblem of a will to certainty, is not so lucky. Instead of remembering their • 77

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic true continuity and rethinking his efforts at containment and regulation, Urizen is ‘repentant’ of his decision to embrace Rahab and follow her into death. In so doing, he ‘forgets his wisdom’ and returns to his typical behaviour ‘In forms of priesthood in the dark delusions of repentance’. In Urizen’s inability to learn from his experience is Blake’s implicit critique of his own time. Examples of more or less the same set of relations – the American Revolution and its maintenance of slavery, the French Revolution and the emergence of the Reign of Terror, and the Church of England’s reinstitution of the mystery it sought to abolish – abound. A monarchy’s will to certainty and regulation in each of these examples culminates in revolution, which replaces the regime, but leaves the will to certainty in place. This process makes enemies of the ancien régime and the revolutionaries, without taking into account the larger error in which they both participate. Urizen’s great horror, his moment of realisation, is that he (that is, his will to certainty) is responsible for not only the creation, but also the fall of Rahab (and so is responsible for the creation and fall of empires and the creation and fall of moral virtue), and that he is everywhere the cause and the chief culprit of manifestations of terror. But he forgets. The aesthetic consequences of this bring us back to the question of terror and horror in Radcliffe and the Gothic novel more broadly. If there are indeed few for ‘whom certainty is more terrible than surmise’, as Radcliffe’s essay suggests, Blake may be one of them.32 The characters in The Italian, for instance, who most clearly experience the Gothic terror that Radcliffe’s essay describes are Ellena and Vivaldi. These are the two linked most closely to the figure of the medieval worshipper whose ‘pious heart’ and ‘animated devotion’ were so important to both enlightenment and romantic iterations of the Gothic Revival. When Blake calls Rahab ‘Moral Virtue’, the connection between her and the ‘pious heart’ that the conservative Gothic attempted to revive is palpable. Thus, Wordsworth’s ‘gothic Church’, although opposed to Radcliffe stylistically, reveals a similar continuity. In this light they are not opposed, but more like variations on a Urizenic theme. So far Blake’s deployment of terror and horror has occurred at the level of the image being presented. But what can be said about terror and horror as a stylistic feature of Blake’s work? In the case of style, terror and horror refer principally to the feeling of the audience, rather than individual characters. In the experience of a terrible event within a narrative, the reader may feel a kind of terror by sympathy with the character who is 78 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form said to be actually experiencing terror. But this is dependent precisely on the clarity and vividness with which the author is able to convey the scene. We recognise in this scene, for instance, that Urizen’s horror is also our horror, his terror, our terror. But in a stylistic terror, the work itself refuses definition. While it may be laid out in its ‘minute particulars’ those very minute particulars create a sense of something grand. As Vincent de Luca suggests, ‘Blake not only represents scenes of astonishment in his work, but also seeks to create fresh moments of astonishment in the encounter of poem and reader, offering a petrific text to stony understandings and a field of openings for the receptive. The space of the poem itself becomes the site of sublime wonder’.33 The terror, or ‘astonishment’, comes at once from the sense that it has particular recognisable features, but that the actual object far surpasses that typical of everyday experience. 34 Careful readers of Blake have likely felt this. But unlike the typical transition from terror to horror, the definition that does eventually emerge in Blake’s epics is rarely, if ever, absolute. So too, the horror that we experience is tempered by hope.35 This same resistance to absolutes can help us begin to understand Blake’s conception of the Gothic. Take, for instance, Blake’s only explicit characterisation of Gothic form:36 Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form. (On Virgil; E 270)

The quotation comes from Blake’s short prose work On Virgil. Etched in 1822, these lines articulate a distinction still relevant late into the poet’s career. It voices, in very concise terms, the difference between two types of form: the ‘Grecian’ and the ‘Gothic’. These two forms are also named ‘Mathematic’ and ‘Living’, respectively. If ‘Mathematic Form’ is associated with ‘the Reasoning Memory’, it is associated with Urizen and the metaphysic of certainty that Blake is known to have resisted throughout his career. This may emerge as political, religious, artistic, or aesthetic oppression. But one form does not imply the complete eradication of the elements of the other. Rather, they imply a specific relation between these elements. In Mathematic/Grecian form existence is subordinated to the rationalised frame. But in Gothic/Living form the rational is subordinated to existence. Neither is utterly annihilated; there is only an inversion of their status, a promotion of the living human above dead nature, and thus of artistic vision above any allegiance to a supposedly more cultivated • 79

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic tradition. Something like this transformation occurs in Blake’s move to contraries instead of negations. Blake, it must be said, elevates the contrary, as he would have seen the logical paradox of negating negation. With the contrary, a categorisation is made, but no specific or absolute moral valence is attached to it. An important graphic example of the distinction Blake is making can be seen in one of his most well-known designs from Jerusalem (see Figure 10). The image is the pictorial equivalent of Blake’s statement from On Virgil.37 Two cathedrals frame the subjects. The church on the left is a neo-classical structure resembling St Paul’s Cathedral, while the church on the right is a Gothic cathedral, perhaps an imagined Old St Paul’s, or as some have suggested, Westminster Abbey.38 The figures in the illumination have typically been associated with Vala (left) and Jerusalem (middle), with Jerusalem’s children surrounding her. In this image, an actual neo-classical structure replaces the ‘Grecian’ that Blake connected to mathematical form and reason, and similarly a Gothic structure replaces the ‘Gothic’ form of the earlier piece. The various appellations (for example, Mathematic, Reason, Memory vs. Living, Existence) Blake provides for these two forms play out in the figures represented. As we scan from left to right, the figures show less association with the attributes of the neo-classical structure, and vice versa. The colour of Vala’s veil is continuous with the darkness surrounding the neo-classical cathedral, while the yellow and copper tints of the Gothic cathedral merge with the yellow of the cloud behind Jerusalem and her daughters. Another look shows that the motion or energy of each figure increases as they move farther away from the neo-classical structure. There is more life, more ‘Existence’, more of that ‘Living Form’ displayed in the figures closer to the Gothic church. The veil Vala wears is the Urizenic veil, which as I have suggested above, may indicate the very ‘hiding’ of Vala that emerges as Rahab, what Blake calls ‘A Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War’ (M 40:20; E 141).39 In addition to creating a tonal continuity with the neo-classical church, the veil also encapsulates her. Because of it her hair does not flow freely like that of Jerusalem, and her overall appearance is more contained and angular. Jerusalem’s subtle downward glance indicates Blake’s elevation of ‘Gothic’ or ‘Living Form’ in his own work. Still, this pictorial representation of ‘Grecian’ and ‘Gothic’ forms must be distinguished from the actual employment of ‘Gothic’ form. That is, if Blake is providing the depiction of these two formal options, he is employing ‘Gothic’ form to do so, and not ‘Mathematic’ form. In this sense it is 80 •

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form ubiquitous in Blake’s work. ‘Gothic’ form in his painting emerges as content and life, movement and struggle, resistant to the various ‘Mathematical’ strictures that seek to bound it. It does not negate the bounding line, as in a late Turner painting, but only subordinates it to the content of the scene. Linear perspective is subordinated to the variety of living figures, yielding a flattened tidal landscape at the bottom of the illumination, and two-dimensional architectural structures on either side. Similarly, Blake’s poems are still metrical, and he still treats meter as an important part of his poetry. But he considers the ‘Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse’ as ‘derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming’ (J 3; E 145) and so chooses instead to produce ‘a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts – the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for the inferior parts: all necessary to each other’ (J 3; E 146). There is in Blake’s Gothic form something of what Saree Makdisi has called Blake’s ‘belief in forms of life, modes of being, that are inherently open and multitudinous, that can imagine and conceive of unity with difference, rather than identity against difference’.40 Blake’s particular take on the Gothic Revival thus differs radically from his contemporaries. While he makes use of similar subject matter, the manner in which he makes use of it, and the technique or style he employs to describe it, is not compatible with the reactionary and nationalist thread of the Gothic Revival. His depictions of terror and horror in the sequence I have presented primarily serve to point out a fundamental continuity between events and actions that are commonly thought to be opposed. Radcliffe’s answer to the Gothic terror of popery and superstition reinstates a regime of natural religion with the same oppressive structure and many of the same characteristics of its predecessor. And Blake’s Gothic style, though in name similar to that of the Lake Poets, is so only in name. Amid the other iterations of the Gothic occurring around his time, Blake’s alternative Gothic form in fact provides a fitting example of resistance to the bounds under which the Gothic Revival is typically thought to have taken place. Notes 1 Knox, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Building’, p. 301. 2 Duggett, Gothic Romanticism, p. 12. 3 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, p. 5. • 81

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic 4 Duggett, Gothic Romanticism, p. 12, original emphasis. 5 Wordsworth, The Excursion, p. ix. 6 Jerrold Hogle’s concept of ‘the ghost of the counterfeit’ certainly applies to my usage of ‘purity’ here. That is to say, that any notion of purified form towards which the Romantic Gothic tended was a purified, or refined version of what eighteenth-century writers understood the Gothic, or medieval past, to be. And what they imagined it to be itself could have come from already imagined, temporally detached sources (Hogle identifies the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on Horace Walpole as an important example of this). See Hogle, ‘The Gothic Ghost’, p. 284. 7 Duggett, Gothic Romanticism, p. 8. Radcliffe almost certainly expresses this sentiment in The Italian when she writes of Olivia, the mother of Ellena Rosalba, that ‘the air of her head, and the singularity of her attitude, for she was the only person who remained kneeling, sufficiently indicated the superior degree of fervency and penitence, which the voice had expressed’ (Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 86). See Chandler, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Natural Theology’, for an in-depth discussion of Radcliffe’s ‘devotional aesthetic’. 8 Duggett, Gothic Romanticism, p. 8. 9 See Makdisi, ‘Ontology of Empire’, for a recent treatment of this. 10 Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. 11 While the dating of these works is somewhat complex, in aggregate they provide preliminary evidence that Blake was giving sustained attention to the figure of Rahab for at least twenty-five years from the mid 1790s when we know he was at work on the Four Zoas, to 1820, by which time he had completed Jerusalem. 12 The portion of the Rahab sequence which I refer to throughout this article takes place in ‘Night the Eight’ of The Four Zoas, from 103:1–111:38. 13 Sturrock, ‘Maenads’, pp. 339–49. 14 Doyle, ‘At World’s Edge’, p. 524. 15 Rosso, ‘The Religion of Empire’. 16 The Book of Revelation, 17:3 (KJV). 17 Rosso, ‘The Religion of Empire’, p. 293. 18 Ibid., pp. 296–9. 19 Ibid., p. 293. 20 Ibid., pp. 299–300. 21 Ibid., p. 290. 22 Sturrock, ‘Maenads’, p. 343. 23 Radcliffe, The Italian, p. 9. 24 Ibid., p. 10. 25 To reiterate what I mentioned above, the ‘medieval subject’ I refer to here is rather an eighteenth-century ideal, and is implicated in what Hogle has identified as ‘the ghost of the counterfeit’ (‘The Gothic Ghost’, p. 285).

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Aesthetic context for William Blake ’ s ‘ Gothic ’ form 26 For more on Blake’s familiarity with the discourse of terror and horror, see De Luca, ‘Blake’s Concept of the Sublime’. 27 Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, p. 149. 28 By this I mean one who holds absolute ontological and epistemological certainty (also definition, stasis, and so forth) as a first principle of the good and thus as an ultimate goal. Both the theological and philosophical iterations of this are encapsulated in the Four Zoas, when Luvah speaks to Urizen of their contrary states (FZ 27:14–20; E 318). 29 Blake is not demonising a particular people, but describing a tendency within any people (his English readers included) towards empire rather than love and brotherhood. The Christians of the early nineteenth century, as Blake describes here and elsewhere (see Blake’s Tractates), are just as implicated in the phrase ‘Synagogue of Satan’ as any other religion. 30 Although I do not have time to address it here, this point relates to the question of Blake’s controversial usage of the term ‘Female Will’ in reference to Rahab. Understanding Rahab as the embodiment of an external imposition, as a figure who does not actually think for herself, but instead thinks only to accomplish the political project of her Male counterpart, will force us to rethink this term with reference to that prior imposition, instead of thinking about the phrase independent from its context. 31 De Luca has also argued that Urizen’s turning to stone is indicative of a state of ‘astonishment’ or sublime terror (‘Blake’s Concept of the Sublime’, p. 20). 32 Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, p. 149. 33 De Luca, ‘Blake’s Concept of the Sublime’, p. 22. 34 Ibid., p. 20. 35 Ibid., p. 22. 36 Blake approaches a direct statement on Gothic form that supports the argument I present here in A Vision of the Last Judgment (E 559). 37 For an extended commentary on the Jerusalem illuminations in relation to Blake’s ‘Gothic’ or ‘Living Form’, see David Baulch’s chapter in this volume. 38 That the Gothic structure is an image of Westminster Abbey is suggested in the illustration description of Jerusalem plate 32 on the William Blake Archive. I have suggested Old St Paul’s as an alternative because, although the spires do not correspond to that Cathedral, the replacement of the Gothic structure by a neo-classical one after the great fire produced a fruitful architectural analogue for comparing ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Grecian’ styles in poetry. Thomas Warton in fact used the terms ‘Grecian’ and ‘Gothic’ to describe the virtues of the two cathedrals, and hence of their styles more generally. ‘Sir Christopher Wren’s Grecian proportions’, Warton suggests in The Gentlemen’s Magazine, exhibit ‘Truth and propriety’, and ‘gratify the judgment, but they do not affect the imagination’ (i.e. as the Gothic does) (Warton, ‘Review of “Milton’s Juvenile • 83

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Poems” ’, pp. 457–8. Whether Blake was drawing on Warton’s discussion directly is as yet unclear, but it is an intriguing possibility. 39 I depart slightly from Erdman and Paley here by suggesting that Rahab is as present as Vala in the figure next to the neo-classical structure, but given their continuity in the sequence from the Four Zoas I have been trying to elucidate, I do not think the suggestion is entirely without foundation. 40 Makdisi, ‘Ontology of Empire’, p. 25.

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The Gothic sublime • Claire Colebrook

Gothic architecture is indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher … But this difference is not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation, form-matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic relation, material-forces. It is the cutting of the stone that turns it into material capable of holding and coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing ever higher and longer vaults. The vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous variation of the stones. It is as if Gothic conquered a smooth space, while Romanesque remained partially within a striated space.1 To him who is tormented by the despotism of the living and therefore changing, line gives comfort and satisfaction, for it is the only perceptible expression he can attain of the non-living, of the absolute … Since in the Classical epochs the summit of this power of mental orientation has been attained, since in them the chaos has become a cosmos, it is further clear that at this stage of the historical development of man art has been completely absolved from its character of conjuration and may, therefore, turn unreservedly to life and its organic richness. … There is a linear fantasy here whose fundamental character we must analyze. As in the ornament of primitive man, the vehicle of artistic will is the abstract geometric line, which contains no organic expression, that is, no possibility of organic interpretation. Now, while in the organic sense it is expressionless, nevertheless, it is of extreme liveliness.2

T

he modern Kantian sublime is tied directly to point of view in a transcendental sense. If we accept the Kantian Copernican turn, then it no longer makes sense to strive to know or intuit the absolute: if something is to be known or experienced then it must be given to a • 85

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic subject. The objects of knowledge and experience are necessarily, then, located within limits of time and space, and are always dependent upon subjective conditions of knowing. The sublime, for Kant, is nothing other than reason feeling its limitations, when ideas of the infinite can be thought, but not experienced. Part of the problem and torsion of the sublime is how one might think about this kind of feeling: reason coming up against its own limits does not yield knowledge, but the feeling of limit is not affective. Natural objects may invite the thought of the infinite, suggesting or intimating a power beyond their sensible presentation, and yet this thought of the supersensible is given only as beyond intuition. This is what renders the sublime in its modern, Romantic, Kantian mode as subjective, and tied to the necessary syntheses of point of view. By contrast, and for all its contradictions (or because of them) William Blake’s work is overwhelmingly committed to an intuition of the infinite, not the idea of the infinite but its perception – with a strong emphasis on a direct encounter with what lies well beyond the contracted senses of the rational subject: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (MHH 14; E 39). In addition to stating that the infinite can be perceived, Blake’s poetry generates a directly counter-Kantian or (what I will refer to as) Gothic sublime by destroying the coherence of the rational subject, and allowing multiple voices and registers to generate what Deleuze (after Leibniz) refers to as ‘incompossible’ worlds.3 There can be other compossible worlds, such as a world where Adam did not sin, but there could not be a world where Adam both sinned and did not sin; such worlds are incompossible. For Leibniz, God chooses from among the best possible worlds. And, as finite perceivers, we can intuit the order and rationality of the infinite, if dimly. For Kant, however, such flights of reason beyond what we can know through experience are illegitimate, and the bounds of reason have to do not with some ultimate knowledge of the world, but with what can be permitted by logic. The subject of reason cannot assert both ‘A’ and ‘not-A’, and this has directly to do with the possibility of coherent experience and reason. As Kant puts it in a famous passage from the first Critique, the coherence of the world and the subject (or having a distinct relation between interior and exterior) are mutually necessary: This law of reproduction … presupposes that the appearances themselves are actually subject to such a rule, and that in the manifold of their representations

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The Gothic sublime an accompaniment or succession takes place according to certain rules, for without that our empirical imagination would never get to do anything suitable to its capacity, and would thus remain hidden in the interior of the mind, like a dead and to us unknown faculty. If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red; or if a certain word were attributed now to this thing, now to that, or if one and the same thing were sometimes called this, sometimes that, without the governance of a certain rule to which appearances are already subjected in themselves, then no empirical synthesis of reproduction could take place.4

What I want to suggest is that Blake is closer to Leibniz, for whom every point in the universe perceives the infinite (but according to its own range). Moreover, Blake’s worlds are incompossible; there is indeed a world in which Albion falls, and one in which he does not; a world of innocence and a world of its absence; a world of terror where the feminine is nightmarish, alien and horrific, and a world in which the feminine is essential to harmony and creativity. For now, what needs to be noted is the extent to which reason and the coherence of the law (and the sublime thought of what can be striven for by reason but never experienced) is bound to a conception of the subject. In the passage quoted above, Kant sounds remarkably like Blake’s Urizen: demanding a single law, a single vision and an all-commanding survey of the world, beyond which would lie a void or chaos. Kant talks about appearances being subjected to a rule, or ‘already subjected in themselves’. The world must be rational. For Kant, without such order there is no world, no subject, no judgment. The contrary possibility would be a world of nightmares where nothing holds secure: a world of unreason, where experience remains ‘hidden in the interior of the mind’. This world that Kant refuses as impossible is the world (or worlds) of Blake’s prophecies: sometimes in a mood of utter bleakness where all we are given is the playing out of appearances without stability, and sometimes in a mode of joy, where transformations can yield redemption. Selves can divide into emanations and spectres, but selves can be woven, moulded and built. Division in Blake can destroy coherence and create nightmarish opposition, but division can also open and unfold to infinity, allowing for progressive contraries and true friendship. • 87

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic Kant’s nightmare of a world devoid of stable representation is not only similar to the world of Blake’s prophecies; it is also radically Gothic in its destruction of coherence, where reality is anything but stable, where there is no clear border between imagination and reality, and where beings transform, mutate, and refashion themselves. At this first level, then, I would make a claim for the Gothic structure of Blake’s worlds; rather than the subject being set over and against a landscape or world, multiple bodies and voices describe various events of division, formation, building, weaving, judging, and pitying. Bodies divide into emanations and spectres; lists of bodies and places proliferate without order – sometimes suggesting the rich expressiveness of the world, sometimes indicative of fallenness and disaggregation. More importantly, it is not so much that the world perceived is multiple, but that it is perceived multiply, by different voices and registers. Such a radical perspectivism would accord with Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics, which does not argue for a subjective relativism in Blake’s work so much as a radical plurality inherent in matter itself, and with Arkady Plotnitsky’s ‘Chaosmic Orders’.5 Both these readings of Blake anticipate the queer materialism that has marked the early twentyfirst century, where thinkers such as Karen Barad argue for a matter that becomes what it is only in its varied and multiple encounters.6 Where my own reading of Blake differs from claims for a radical or visionary physics is at the level of the relation between aesthetics and the subject: rather than matter itself generating plurality and multiplicity or unity and order, Blake’s Gothic sublime combines an attention to the difference between inscription and matter, while also refusing a logic or order that is simply imposed on a disordered or indifferent matter. Consider the following passage from Jerusalem, where division results in a loss of coherence, and a disaggregation of the self. Reason, imagination and the physical self are set apart. Places divide into warring personifications, with abstract and geometric distinctions being depicted as a fall into dismemberment: Jerusalem trembled seeing her Children drivn by Los’s Hammer In the visions of the dreams of Beulah on the edge of Non-Entity Hand stood between Reuben & Merlin, as the Reasoning Spectre Stands between the Vegetative Man & his Immortal Imagination And the Four Zoa’s clouded rage East & West & North & South They change their situations, in the Universal Man. Albion groans, he sees the Elements divide before his face. And England who is Brittannia divided into Jerusalem & Vala

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And Urizen assumes the East, Luvah assumes the South In his dark Spectre ravening from his open Sepulcher And the Four Zoa’s who are the Four Eternal Senses of Man Became Four Elements separating from the Limbs of Albion These are their names in the Vegetative Generation [West Weighing East & North dividing Generation South bounding] And Accident & Chance were found hidden in Length Bredth & Highth And they divided into Four ravening deathlike Forms Fairies & Genii & Nymphs & Gnomes of the Elements. These are States Permanently Fixed by the Divine Power. (J 32:21–37; E 178)

If division is destructive and geometric form is contingent (‘Accident & Chance were found hidden in Length Bredth & Highth’), there is also a suggestion that distinction and difference are divine – and it is this sentiment that would accord with Blake’s celebration of minute particulars and his rejection of a false unity or single vision. In both content and form, Blake’s prophecies embrace both a world of clear lines that are not imposed but follow the true expressiveness of the world, and a world where distinctions break down and bodies re-form and re-unite. Such a world – in form of content and form of expression – is Gothic in a quite specific sense; it is poised between an abstraction of geometric form (where the world is formless and requires the imposition of line) and an organicism (where the world is fully coherent and already subjected to orderly representation). I draw this definition of Gothic from the work of Wilhelm Worringer, who (along with Alois Riegl and Anne Querrien) was influential for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and for Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon (who painted Blake’s death mask). In the book on Bacon, Deleuze follows Worringer’s definition of the Gothic line: A powerful non-organic life: this is how Worringer defined Gothic art, ‘the northern Gothic line’. It is opposed in principle to the organic representation of classical art. Classical art can be figurative, insofar as it refers to something represented, but it can also be abstract, when it extricates a geometric form from the representation. But the pictorial line in Gothic painting is completely different, as is its geometry and figure. First of all, this line is decorative; it lies at the surface, but it is a material decoration that does not outline a form. It is a geometry no longer in the service of the essential and eternal, but a geometry in the service of ‘problems’ or ‘accidents’, ablation, adjunction, projection, intersection. It is thus a line that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended • 89

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beyond its natural limits, dying away in a ‘disordered convulsion’: there are free marks that extend or arrest the line, acting beneath or beyond representation. It is thus a geometry or a decoration that has become vital and profound, on the condition that it is no longer organic: it elevates mechanical forces to sensible intuition, it works through violent movements.7

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari situate the Gothic as a successor of nomadic art, and place a specific emphasis on the nature of line. Against Worringer’s distinction between an abstract line that imposes form on a formless void, and organic line that traces recognised forms, Deleuze and Guattari argue for something like a transcendental Gothicism; in the beginning is a form of variation that is neither subjective nor objective, neither an imposed order by way of judgment, nor a discovered order by way of intuition. It is worth recalling that The [First] Book of Urizen opens with an expulsion of the assumed power of religion by the ‘Eternals’ – as though the order priests give to the world can only be a contraction of the infinite – and it is only after this spurning of imposed order that divine ‘dictation’ occurs: one does not inscribe an otherwise formless world, and yet form is not created ex nihilo: Of the primeval Priests assum’d power, When Eternals spurn’d back his religion; And gave him a place in the north, Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary. Eternals! I hear your call gladly, Dictate swift winged words, & fear not To unfold your dark visions of torment. (BU 2:1–7; E 70)

Like Blake’s world in which perception has an expansive and creative power, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate a Gothic line that is nomadic – wandering, dividing, re-uniting, sometimes suggesting a clear form, at other times opening out to variation. Like the lines and voices in Blake’s work, Deleuze and Guattari’s line is forming and de-forming, overcoming the division between a world that is either rationally subjective or geometrically objective. Line is neither that which divides an otherwise formless space (as in pure abstraction), nor does line merely trace the already divided and organised space of the world (as in the empathy of organicism). There is not a space (a Newtonian absolute) that is then divided by line, for it is through the variations and wanderings of line that spaces unfold. Art does not begin with geometric form that then takes on variation; art begins with supple variation. We might think here of Blake’s stated method in The Marriage of 90 •

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Heaven and Hell where poets have enlarged numerous senses, a powerful perception that animates what is perceived: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. (MHH 11; E 38)

In the beginning is animation, which seems to imply the perceiver’s attribution of life to the lifeless, and yet the animation emerges from the perception of properties. It is only a subsequent abstraction and systematisation that creates a conventional or Kantian sublime that divides subject from object, line from the delineated. A Gothic aesthetic is neither one in which a formless world requires order nor one in which the world is simply given as bounded and ordered: we are neither in the world of experience – where one regards what is other than oneself with utter terror requiring law from above – nor enclosed in innocence where all that is other than oneself can be intuited as benign, organic and familiar. Art becomes important neither as simple representation nor as pure subjective creation, but as a passage. Throughout Blake’s corpus one sees the two tendencies of line and order: innocent organicism, experienced abstraction, a Beulah of moony indistinction; and a Urizen hell of geometric rigour. Here Blake is part of a Gothic sublime where inscription is neither human nor inhuman, but an ongoing work. Line – for Deleuze and Guattari – is born from a sense of creative freedom, not a terrified need to impose order: It is Worringer who accorded fundamental importance to the abstract line, seeing it as the very beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will. Art as abstract machine. Once again, it will doubtless be our inclination to voice in advance the same objections: for Worringer, the abstract line seems to make its first appearance in the crystalline or geometrical imperial Egyptian form, the most rectilinear of forms possible. It is only afterward that it assumes a particular avatar, constituting the ‘Gothic or Northern line’ understood very broadly. For us, on the other hand, the abstract line is fundamentally ‘Gothic,’ or rather, nomadic, not rectilinear. Consequently, we do not understand the aesthetic motivation for the abstract line in the same way, or its identity with the beginning of art. Whereas the rectilinear (or ‘regularly’ rounded) Egyptian • 91

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line is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies, and erects the constancy and eternity of an In-Itself, the nomad line is abstract in an entirely different sense, precisely because it has a multiple orientation and passes between points, figures, and contours: it is positively motivated by the smooth space it draws, not by any striation it might perform to ward off anxiety and subordinate the smooth. The abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation.8

One of the manifest similarities between the work of Blake’s prophecies and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – especially in relation to the milieus in which these works were composed – is a nightmarish multiplicity of voices. In the remainder of this essay I want to argue that Blake’s use of point of view is Gothic (and counter-Kantian) and that this style (or form) relates directly to ontology (or content). In its most rigorous and ontologically articulated mode the sublime is defined through the constitutive finitude and reason of the modern subject. For Kant, it is the very nature of experience to be given, or to be something towards which we bear a relation; experience is necessarily finite, and requires a point of view, or the synthesis of received intuitions into a temporal, spatial, and conceptualised form. One cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only as it is given through the forms of reason (with reason being nothing other than the power of synthesis). We do not, Kant insists, have some dim grasp of the infinite that a more perfect reason might intuit completely. We are essentially finite, and know our conceptualised world, in a manner that is different in kind from a God-like knowledge of the world (or the world as it is in itself). Nevertheless, even though we know the world as it is synthesised we can think (but neither know nor experience) the infinite. The sublime is just this intimation of what can be felt from the very limits of knowledge. If one were to draw a stark contrast within modes of Romanticism one might say that the sublime is that which is intimated from the very limits of the given; it emerges from a feeling drawn from the restrictions of cognition. This mode of sublime is highly Wordsworthian: there is a sense of something ‘far more deeply interfused’, given in ‘intimations’ of immortality, and – most importantly – this chastening of reason expresses a highly human spirit, the ‘still, sad music of humanity’. It is just this subjective finitude and sublimity that Blake rejects. This refusal of constitutive finitude, along with the affirmed capacity to perceive the infinite is clearly articulated as a thesis (by the prophet’s voice) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; 92 •

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The Gothic sublime but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing’ (MHH 12; E 38). We encounter something similar in There is No Natural Religion: ‘He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’ (E 3). The hellish description of the subject as enclosed within a finite viewpoint takes up most of The [First] Book of Urizen, which both describes the process of organising the world in time and space (‘Times on times he divided, & measur’d / Space by space in his ninefold darkness’ [BU 3:8–9; E 70]) and then contrasts this with an expansive perception: 1. Earth was not: nor globes of attraction The will of the Immortal expanded Or contracted his all flexible senses. Death was not, but eternal life sprung. (BU 3:36–9; E 71)

Kant’s insistence on the necessary finitude of experience was directed against philosophies (such as Leibniz’s monadology) that believed that God’s creatures know the world as it is in itself (but in a contracted or lesser mode) while only God perceives the infinite absolutely. If Kant’s conception of the subject as the necessary point of view from which the world is known dominated modernity and generated the increasing importance of the necessary limits of knowledge, another philosophical tradition reversed this priority. The Leibniz and Spinoza against whom Kant articulated his theory of finitude (along with the world as knowable only to a finite point of view) maintained the possibility of a perception of the infinite, a higher type of intuition, and a world that expresses itself in every event of perception. The blade of grass, the flea, the gnat, the infant – all have some perception of the infinite, but one that would need to be expanded to arrive at the fullness of God-like intuition. Another sort of sublime is possible, one that is not felt or thought at the limits of experience but is perceived with expanded perception. Yet, this sublime requires a different mode of writing to release the multiplicity of perceptions that in all their small differences make up the expressive (rather than merely intimated) infinite. More important than Blake’s stated objections to subjectivism and its accompanying mode of the sublime, is Blake’s method of forming and composing. Against finitude, reason, point of view, the subjective synthesis of the world, and an infinite that can never be perceived, Blake’s use of voice and line generate what we might think of as a counter-sublime, or a Gothic sublime. This sublime is not the subject’s capacity to feel and think beyond reason, but the invasion of reason from elsewhere. • 93

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic In terms of voice, rather than a lyric ‘I’ whose self-reflections open to an intimated humanity, Blake’s poems are made up of multiple voices occupying different registers. Sometimes a voice is a part of the self; sometimes it is the self ’s double, sometimes it is not quite determinable whether the voice is the self ’s own (an aspect of the psyche) or the self ’s exterior (its warring spectre). If one tries to read Blake with a single layer of dramatis personae one covers over the extent to which voices do not belong to characters. Rather, voices are styles of perceiving, or ways in which the infinite expresses itself multiply. From Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Jerusalem one would have more success reading Blake if one abandoned trying to attribute voice to characters and instead looked at the ways voice or perspective is expressive of the world’s unfolding. Sometimes the world is given abstractly – cut, calculated, ordered, laid out in parts – and sometimes the world appears as barely articulated – shadowy, moony, soft. The infinite, one might say appears and disappears, opening and closing: sometimes sharply delineated in a manner that holds chaos at bay, but at other times in a manner that wavers, varies and seems to annihilate clarity and distinction. The sublime, accordingly, is not a feeling or intimation of the infinite beyond distinction, but for Blake occurs with ever finer distinction, delineation and difference – opposed to a formless void: Sublime distinct their lineaments divine of human beauty The tygers of wrath called the horses of instruction from their mangers They unloos’d them & put on the harness of gold & silver & ivory In human forms distinct they stood round Urizen prince of Light. (FZ 25:2–5; E 314)

The difference between distinction and division is crucial to Blake’s Gothic use of line and voice. Distinction is sublime and draws out different and creative forms that need to be brought to light (in the manner that the corrosives of Blake’s infernal printing burn away indistinction): ‘The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling’ (DC 63–64: E 550). Division, by contrast, imposes order and difference from above, and rather than disclosing or expressing the complexity of life, reduces all it divides to the same dull round. In Milton, Los writes despairingly of pity dividing the soul, with the clear sense of division being destructive; it was pity that prompted 94 •

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Los to ignore distinction and allow Satan to take on Palamabron’s labour. The narrative describes a productive and creative world of distinction falling into division: Loud sounds the Hammer of Los, loud turn the Wheels of Enitharmon Her Looms vibrate with soft affections, weaving the Web of Life Out from the ashes of the Dead; Los lifts his iron Ladles With molten ore: he heaves the iron cliffs in his rattling chains From Hyde Park to the Alms-houses of Mile-end & old Bow Here the Three Classes of Mortal Men take their fixd destinations And hence they overspread the Nations of the whole Earth & hence The Web of Life is woven: & the tender sinews of life created And the Three Classes of Men regulated by Los’s hammer. The first, The Elect from before the foundation of the World: The second, The Redeem’d. The Third, The Reprobate & form’d To destruction from the mothers womb: follow with me my plow Of the first class was Satan: with incomparable mildness; His primitive tyrannical attempts on Los: with most endearing love He soft intreated Los to give to him Palamabrons station. (M 6:27–7:6; E 100)

On the one hand, this passage describes a fall from distinction and the forging of differences, to division – where the differences are disjunctive, such that one is either fallen or redeemed. On the other hand, the poetic voice adopts and accepts these divisions. Such a double voice precludes any clear binary or moral dualism between differences and divisions. One way to think about the narrative drive of Blake’s prophecies is as a constant war between difference and division: between mobile or drawn differences, and fixed and law-like divisions. And this dynamic relation between seemingly fixed divisions and creative differences is given in the very compositional mode of Blake’s works, where the lines engraved are both the forms of the English alphabet and lines that waver and wander. There is, as I have already suggested, not a distinction between form and content – as implied in the Kantian sublime where the concepts and forms that synthesise intuitions reach their limit because the real is radically other than the sense we make of it. There is a form of content (as though lines traced or followed forms), a substance of content (the matters of the world that are perceived as formed), a form of expression (the voices that compose the prophecies), and a substance of expression (voice, word, letter, mark).9 If differences were nothing more than a structure we impose on the world they would be nothing more than carved up oppositions of the • 95

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic same matter, but if matters were already parcelled out into distinctions art and experience would be nothing more than passive imprints. Blake’s sense of line destroys any simple essentialism (that categories are there to be found as static unchanging qualities) and any simple relativism (where nothing is really distinct outside our point of view), and instead finds radical perspectivism: worlds unfold from incommensurable intuitions of the whole. The difference between distinction (which occurs when delineation and separation follow the expressive potential of life) and division (when a vague generality has to be imposed from without) is subtly expressed in Jerusalem, in a passage that begins with the coupling of hand and hyle. We could think, here, of what Deleuze refers to as a haptic aesthetic, with the hand feeling its way through matter (hyle). While Hand & Hyle condense the Little-ones & erect them into A mighty Temple even to the stars: but they Vegetate Beneath Los’s Hammer, that Life may not be blotted out. For Los said: When the Individual appropriates Universality He divides into Male & Female: & when the Male & Female, Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death. Hermaphroditic worshippers of a God of cruelty & law! Your Slaves & Captives; you compell to worship a God of Mercy. These are the Demonstrations of Los, & the blows of my mighty Hammer. (J 90:49–57; E 250)

In this passage from Jerusalem there is the suggestion that general or broad divisions actually generate indifference (that is, hermaphroditic forms) along with the tyranny of being subjected to a category. Throughout Blake’s corpus there tends to be a positive valence attached to a form of line or demarcation (such as weaving or hammering) that brings out more and more difference, opposed to an often-repeated depiction of a fall into division, as though the complexity of existence that might be intuited with expanded and numerous senses is deadened by bland generalities and categories. This is at once an ontological claim – saying that there is one expressive whole that gives itself through various delineations and articulations – but it is also a stylistic claim, for there cannot be a single epistemology or reason adequate to grasp all the modes in which the infinite can be expressed. The reason why Deleuze and Guattari describe this mode as Gothic has both to do with art history and their broader commitment to nomadology – or the refusal of a subject-centred reason that would enable 96 •

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The Gothic sublime a general ontology. The Gothic is at once an experience of a dizzying array of perspectives that invade and annihilate the enclosure of the self. It can be experienced as horrific and terrifying, but also sublime (but only if one thinks of a sublime that is not generated by the limits of the subject, but by the infinite expressing itself). If one approaches Blake’s work through this mode of the Gothic, then some of the problems that beset the reading of Blake become fertile rather than futile. Rather than parsing modes along an axis of good versus evil (the trusting openness, softness and vagueness of innocence versus the calculating, divisive self-enclosure of experience), one would read these two modes as delineations or states, with the imagination being beyond any of these articulations. If, for Blake, the imagination is human, it is not so much because it is finite and subjective but because it has the potential to expand senses, to exceed the range of its own perspective and to annihilate personhood and experience the infinite. It is with destruction of reason and fixed states that the genuine distinction of ‘eternal lineaments’ become discernible: And thou O Milton art a State about to be Created Called Eternal Annihilation that none but the Living shall Dare to enter: & they shall enter triumphant over Death And Hell & the Grave! States that are not, but ah! Seem to be. Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore What is Eternal & what Changeable? & what Annihilable The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated Forms cannot. (M 32:26–36; E 132)

It is Eternal Annihilation that overcomes Death, which is what occurs in States that only ‘seem to be’. Holding onto states – by way of memory or reason – can only occur if imagination is blocked, or not allowed to annihilate such fixities to reveal an eternal or Gothic line through which the infinite expresses itself in multiple ways. There are two reasons why I want to refer to this counter-sublime as a Gothic sublime. The first has to do with its destruction of the unity or reason, and the invasion of point of view by multiple perspectives; the self of reason only occurs if one halts the necessarily annihilating force of imagination, which is beyond states and persons. Further, the Gothic is not only a form of content but a mode of articulation, a destruction of • 97

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic point of view by expressions of perspective, the world seen now as ordered and articulated, now as shadowy and formless, sometimes as a horrific void without limit, sometimes as a joyous expanse that opens to eternity, sometimes as an imprisoning circumference, other times as seemingly enclosed space that at any of its smallest points unfolds to infinity. My second reason for thinking of Blake’s work as Gothic is not only its situation in a counter-Kantian tradition that is beyond reason and beyond good and evil, but the status it accords to line. Line is not simply deployed as a technique but, for Blake, has an ethical dimension that is specifically Gothic. Within Blake’s own work the negotiation of line ties aesthetics to ethics: on the one hand, forging, engraving and forming demonstrate the power of imaginative expression and enable the perception of the infinite; but, on the other hand, overly rigid cuts and divisions annihilate the power to perceive beyond fixed states. I have already suggested that one way to think about the Gothic is as a counter-aesthetic to the Kantian philosophy of synthesis: rather than the subject synthesising sensible intuitions, one might think of perspectives generated from the way the infinite unfolds. If we follow that second path, then line would not be (as it is in Platonic geometry) a transcription of an eternal and changeless form that is repeated in experience. This would be the logical realist path, where forms are universally and eternally true and are imperfectly actualised in the sensible world. If we accept such a universal realism, then it follows that there would be one truth and one reason. This is the Urizenic world that Blake’s work sets itself against. For Blake, line should be mobile, active, and continually creating and varying forms. Rather than repeating established and manageable concepts that would enable a fixed knowledge of the world, Gothic line would be living form: Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroyd it a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make. Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form. (On Virgil; E 270)

Although Deleuze and Guattari appeal to Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves as their literary example of a mode of writing that would generate multiple worlds unfolding from perceptions, their own mode of composition is closer to that of the work of William Blake.10 Each plateau of A Thousand Plateaus 98 •

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The Gothic sublime is not merely narrated by a different voice, although some plateaus are narrated in characters (such as the use of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger in ‘10,000 B.C: The Geology of Morals’); each plateau works in a different register, scale or strata. Some are concerned with the history of life, others with animality, the novella, the refrain, sign systems, space, warfare, the face, and politics. These points of emergence are not different subjects or topics that are narrated from an over-arching philosophical point of view. Rather, each is a point of view that expresses the whole in its own manner. One can begin the theorisation or perception of the whole from any point whatever. Or, to follow Blake’s Milton: ‘Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? / It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell, / Withinside wondrous & expansive: its gates are not clos’d’ (M 20:27–9; E 114). Every perception takes the form of a style or manner that unfolds to the infinite. Rather than offer a universal history from the point of view of a single synthesising power, A Thousand Plateaus takes up one aspect of the earth and then another, each one generating a way of perceiving the whole. In this respect the composition of A Thousand Plateaus takes part in the baroque aesthetic that Deleuze describes in his book on Leibniz: Then Leibniz implemented the second great logic of the event: the world itself is an event and, as an incorporeal ( = virtual) predicate, the world must be included in every subject as a basis from which each one extracts the manners that correspond to its point of view (aspects). The world is predication itself, manners being the particular predicates, and the subject, what goes from one predicate to another as if from one aspect of the world to another. The coupling basis-manners disenfranchises form or essence: Leibniz makes it the mark of his philosophy. The Stoics and Leibniz invent a mannerism that is opposed to the essentialism first of Aristotle and then of Descartes.11

One could, as Deleuze and Guattari do in one plateau, understand everything from the point of view of ‘the refrain’. In the beginning is some pulsation of rhythm, some generation of a pattern or repeatable form that takes on complexity and variation; this is how we might understand life. Equally, though, one might account for life in general as the unfolding and marking out of spaces where there needs to be some movement and mobility (smooth space), but also some marking out of distinction and relation (striated space). Each plateau in A Thousand Plateaus might appear to offer a theory of the entire book, and the entirety of life. Philosophically, A Thousand Plateaus is an anti-Kantian and profoundly Leibnizian • 99

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic book. Rather than a presupposed reason that grasps a world in terms of how it would appear for any rational subject whatever, and rather than a conception of ‘the subject’ as a formal category that is responsible for the synthesis and apparent reason of the world, Leibniz argued for a world composed of monads, each one perceiving the infinite but in its own manner. Rather than Descartes’s clear and distinct reason, the world is composed of perceptions that have a zone of clarity, but also perceive well beyond the light of reason: If Leibniz attaches so much importance to the question of the souls of animals, it is because he knows how to diagnose the universal anxiety of the animals watching out for danger, that seeks to grasp the imperceptible signs of what can turn its pleasure into pain, that will cause its quarry to flee, or turn its repose into movement. The soul assigns itself a pain that delivers to its consciousness a series of minute perceptions that it had almost failed to remark because they were first buried in its depths. Leibniz is haunted by depth of the soul, the dark depth, the ‘fuscum subnigrum’. Substances or souls ‘draw everything from their own depths’. That is the second aspect of Mannerism, without which the first would remain empty. The first is the spontaneity of manners that is opposed to the essentiality of the attribute. The second is the omnipresence of the dark depths which is opposed to the clarity of form, and without which manners would have no place to surge forth from. The entire formula of the Mannerism of substances is: ‘All is born to them out of their own depths, through a perfect spontaneity’.12

If Kantian philosophy influenced and resonated with a Romanticism in which subjects could perceive the world only by way of the understanding, and yet could think of a world beyond the limits of the sensible, Leibniz’s monadology enables a far more Gothic imaginary. Here, the Gothic is both a style – where the manner of perceiving the world composes the world – and an imperative for a certain type of content, beyond the understanding and its subjective limits. When Blake argues that the doors of perception can be cleansed to perceive the infinite, and that distinctions and lines are marked out from a chaos that seems to demand formation and expression, he is profoundly anti-Kantian, and profoundly Gothic – if we define the Gothic as an ethics and ontology of the relation between line and expression. If it is possible ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour’ (PM 1–4; E 490) this is not only because it is possible to perceive the infinite, but because the infinite opens from minute particulars. 100 •

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The Gothic sublime Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the Gothic occupies one plateau among others in A Thousand Plateaus and seems poised between the aesthetic/artistic emphases of some plateaus (such as the sections on the musical refrain, or the section on the tale and the novella), and the scientific/ philosophical sections (on semiotics, becoming, morals or abstraction). The Gothic is at once a problem of form, or how life is taken up and expressed by using specific techniques of line and articulation, and – as is more familiar to literary critics – a problem of content: Gothic art concerns forces that are not clearly of this world, not quite religious, fantastic or supernatural but occupy borderline zones. One might even say that there is, in addition to a Gothic style captured by the use of speakers whose grasp of the world is troubled and insecure, a Gothic ontology tied closely to this style: the Gothicism of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw lies not in the presentation of a ghost but in the narrative indetermination of whether the story is about the experience of ghosts, or the experience of a disturbed lifeworld populated by all sorts of spectres of evil (including the ghost but also including the child who is perceived as initially innocent and then finally and horrifically complicit). Or, to put this in more Blakean terms: one might ask whether the world of Songs of Experience is really a world of darkness, fallenness and evil, or whether it is the presentation of a form or mode of expression in which the world can only be construed as evil, mechanistic and horrifically enclosed. It is equally uncertain whether the world of innocence is truly benevolent, or whether the speaker is simply too naive to perceive the limits of the state’s happy moralism. If, throughout Blake’s corpus, there are nightmare worlds, worlds in which – in true Gothic mode – distinction and individuation is lost, with a fall back into a chaotic state of non-being, just as there are also worlds of rigid calculation and limitation, it is never certain that the world described really is the world, or whether it is the voice of the poem that has lost all sense of form, delineation, distinction, and individuation. And even if one suspends the question of whether Blake is presenting the world or a voice about ‘a’ world, there is the broader problem of indifference throughout Blake’s work. On the one hand, a world of chaos, indifference, indistinction, disarticulation, and disembodied mind seems to be the nightmarish other to a properly formed world of distinct lines, bounded forms, and organised bodies (where eye, hand, foot, heart, and mind form one mutually constitutive and self-forming whole). One might identify a Gothicism in Blake’s presentation of these other worlds where identity is lost, where • 101

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic the self falls apart and is overtaken or invaded by forces that dissolve and disaggregate the very life of the autopoetic body; but one might equally identify a contrary nightmare vision of rationalisation and dissection. The Gothic ontology that I want to explore here accepts this problem at the heart of Blake’s work: a Gothic ontology is poised between difference and indifference, both at the level of form and content. Indeed, Gothic ontology is destructive of the opposition between form and content; there is not being (what is, or content) opposed to form (how being is expressed, or form). There are rather substances that have a form that requires or generates a mode of expression, just as those modes will require a certain substance. In terms of Blake, one might say that the form of life is such that certain modes of writing (multiply voiced) become necessary and that such forms of writing demand a type and substance of expression (the illuminated manuscript, traced by the hand). There is no clear distinction between form and content in Blake, never a definitive sense that Blake is describing a state, describing a character’s perception of a state, or allowing characters and states to pass fluidly from fallen to redemptive ranges of perception. Rather, then, than asking whether the voices in Blake’s work are ironic or not, or to whom they should be attributed (and whether such voices or aspects are good or evil), the problem of reading would shift to the indetermination of voice and content: one cannot decide once and for all whether events of division and reunification are events of redemption, integration, fallenness, or indistinction. Consider the following passage from Jerusalem, describing Los’s relation to Enitharmon; their difference is at once indicative of a fruitful and creative relation, but also suggestive of lamentable division. What Blake depicts (a certain indeterminacy of separation between self and other, along with an indeterminacy of whether we are witnessing fruitful contraries or warring opposites) is related to the very style of composition, where the valence of passages and relations cannot be clearly parsed between good and evil or blindness and insight: 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 trembling in darkness Of Albions clouds. he fed it, with his tears & bitter groans Hiding his Spectre in invisibility from the timorous Shade Till it became a separated cloud of beauty grace & love Among the darkness of his Furnaces dividing asunder till She separated stood before him a lovely Female weeping Even Enitharmon separated outside, & his Loins closed

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And heal’d after the separation: his pains he soon forgot: Lured by her beauty outside of himself in shadowy grief. Two Wills they had; Two Intellects: & not as in times of old. (J 87:50–61; E 245)

The proliferation of voices in Blake’s work, coupled with the problem of temporal and spatial register, allows for a reading of his work in terms of a Gothic ontology; this is an ontology in which even the smallest and seemingly most fallen aspects are expressive of a divine infinite, and where the slightest of variations allows for modulations from major to minor. Voices that seem to be redeemed and to be open to the infinite expression of life, fall back into chaos or inertia, just as voices that seem to be expressive of the imagination become rigid and enclosed. What is important in the composition of Blake’s work is not so much the capacity for delineation and difference, but for variation and indifference. Blake both theorises and enacts this aesthetic as part of his mythology. Rather than the subject or voice being in command of space, or surveying a landscape from a single point of view, spaces unfold in Blake’s work; they are woven, or enclosed, and this ‘striation’ of space (to borrow from Deleuze) is neither good nor evil. Some striation is necessary to avoid falling into the void, but a certain smoothness or unfolding is necessary if there is to be vision and imagination. In The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake describes the marking out of space as at once a form of protection but also as hinting at imprisonment: 11. ‘Spread a Tent, with strong curtains around them ‘Let cords & stakes bind in the Void That Eternals may no more behold them’ 12. They began to weave curtains of darkness They erected large pillars round the Void With golden hooks fastend in the pillars With infinite labour the Eternals A woof wove, and called it Science. (BU 19:2–9; E 78)

Weaving and forging are ways of passing from a horrific void to a bounded space, but such uses of delineation are at once required for a certain degree of consistency and definition, even if there is a no less important function attached to the destruction of lines and distinctions. At a very general level, I would define such an aesthetic as Gothic, because the self is not a rational subject who judges and syntheses space, with space being a presupposed field across which movement takes place; everything • 103

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delineated is open to chaos and the void, and that opening to the void is terrifying, fascinating, destructive of the self, and yet required for the imagination. Usually, the weaving of a space is restrictive and destructive (a ‘black Woof of Death’ [M 29:56; E 128]): The Shadowy Female shudders thro’ heaven in torment inexpressible And all the Daughters of Los prophetic wail: yet in deceit, They weave a new Religion from new Jealousy of Theotormon! (M 22:36–8; E 117)

Weaving is more often than not associated with limiting, containing, or rendering rigid and ‘opake’: They divided into many lovely Daughters to be counterparts To those they Wove, for when they Wove a Male, they divided Into a Female to the Woven Male. in opake hardness They cut the Fibres from the Rocks groaning in pain they Weave; Calling the Rocks Atomic Origins of Existence: denying Eternity. (J 67:8–12; E 220)

Other formed spaces are more protective, even if temporarily so, until the imagination no longer finds an unbounded or Open space terrifying: She form’d a Space for Satan & Michael & for the poor infected [.] Trembling she wept over the Space, & clos’d it with a tender Moon Los secret buried Thulloh, weeping disconsolate over the moony Space. (M 8:43–5; E 102)

Line is similarly ambivalent. When it is abstract, formal, measuring, and geometric it serves to ward off chaos and the abyss, and is an initial measure when confronted with the terrors of a world that appears alien: 7. He form’d a line & a plummet To divide the Abyss beneath. He form’d a dividing rule: 8. He formed scales to weigh; He formed massy weights; He formed a brazen quadrant; He formed golden compasses And began to explore the Abyss And he planted a garden of fruits. (BU 20:33–41; E 80–1)

It is in the following section of Milton, however, that a Gothic counteraesthetic is expressed. Not only are Blake’s works composed from multiple 104 •

The Gothic sublime

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voices, all moving back and forth, sometimes open to the imagination and other voices, sometimes drawing back in terror, Blake also stages something like an aesthetic that is poised between abstraction (formal space) and empathy (organic forms): Some Sons of Los surround the Passions with porches of iron & silver Creating form & beauty around the dark regions of sorrow, Giving to airy nothing a name and a habitation Delightful! with bounds to the Infinite putting off the Indefinite Into most holy forms of Thought: (such is the power of inspiration) They labour incessant; with many tears & afflictions: Creating the beautiful House of the piteous sufferer. Others; Cabinets richly fabricate of gold & ivory; For Doubts & fears unform’d & wretched & melancholy The little weeping Spectre stands on the threshold of Death Eternal; and sometimes two Spectres like lamps quivering And often malignant they combat (heart-breaking sorrowful & piteous) Antamon takes them into his beautiful flexible hands, As the Sower takes the seed, or as the Artist his clay Or fine wax, to mould artful a model for golden ornaments. The soft hands of Antamon draw the indelible line: Form immortal with golden pen; such as the Spectre admiring Puts on the sweet form; then smiles Antamon bright thro his windows The Daughters of beauty look up from their Loom & prepare. The integument soft for its clothing with joy & delight. But Theotormon & Sotha stand in the hate of Luban anxious Their numbers are seven million & seven thousand & seven hundred They contend with the weak Spectres, they fabricate soothing forms The Spectre refuses. he seeks cruelty. they create the crested Cock Terrified the Spectre screams & rushes in fear into their Net Of kindness & compassion & is born a weeping terror. Or they create the Lion & Tyger in compassionate thunderings Howling the Spectres flee: they take refuge in Human lineaments. (M 28:1–28; E 125–6)

Here, poised on the threshold of death, the spectres are given form: a form that is not an imposed abstraction but is moulded, as the hand follows clay or wax. Blake describes the emergence of form from the hand and a golden pen, and in so doing allows both for the eternity of forms and their unfolding from time and life. The indelible line is an immortal form, something achieved by bringing out a soothing form. The ‘human lineaments’ are not (as in The [First] Book of Urizen) rigid containers that • 105

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The bounding line of Blake ’ s Gothic house a disembodied soul; the spectre is given refuge by a compassionate embodiment, where compassion is a feeling with, rather than Urizen’s mathematical and measuring lines. If moulding and forming is ‘As the Sower takes the seed’ then we are neither looking at an already formed world, nor a world that is formless without the imposition of abstraction. Both Denise Gigante and Tristanne Connolly have aligned Blake’s work with the notion of epigenesis: a form that comes into being through time and relations.13 We are poised between abstraction and empathy, between a world that is so terrifyingly other as to require rigid lines imposed in a geometrical manner (akin to the manner of Songs of Experience), and a world that is already thoroughly organic and humanised, benevolent, with nothing disruptive or variable (the same dull round, without harm or difference). The Gothic aesthetic is neither a retreat into reason in the face of a terrifyingly other and inhuman world, nor a belief in the ultimate harmony of the world. It traces an ongoing varying line between benevolent immanence and terrifying transcendence. Notes 1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 364. 2 Wilhelm Worringer, Form Problems of the Gothic, pp. 30, 31, 47. 3 Deleuze, The Fold. 4 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 229. 5 Ault, Visionary Physics; Plotnitsky, ‘Chaosmic Orders’. 6 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 7 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 46. 8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 496–7. 9 Ibid., p. 43. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 53. 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Gigante, Life, p. 123; Connolly, William Blake and the Body, p. 81.

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Part II

The misbegotten

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4

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Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus • Jason Whittaker

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illiam Blake has frequently been an influence (if sometimes an oblique one) in Ridley Scott’s films since at least the release of Blade Runner in 1982, most notably in Roy Batty’s misquotation of the lines from America a Prophecy: ‘Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc.’1 For Alexis Harley, the simple reading of Blade Runner as a retelling of Frankenstein, replete with Miltonic allusions, ignores a much greater debt to America a Prophecy, both in terms of that quotation but also the presence of Batty himself – half-naked, muscular, and with spiky blonde hair – as a filmic illustration of Orc,2 a point made more forcefully by Christiane Gerblinger who sees Batty as ‘possessed by the spirit of Orc’.3 As such, ‘America a Prophecy supplies Blade Runner with a glorifying reference point against which to contrast a nation’s inglorious acts of enslavement, colonisation and environmental destruction’.4 Turning to other movies, the unicorn theme at the end of Legend (1985) was originally recorded with vocals by Susanne Pawlitzki and lyrics drawn from Blake’s ‘The Angel’; though this version was replaced in the final release, for Laurence Raw an overtly Blakean motif remains in the presentation of a sick rose by Darkness (Tim Curry) to Lily (Mia Sara) ‘as an invitation to become his bride and forget about daylight forever’.5 More explicit references are to be discovered in Hannibal (2001), although considering the wealth of Blakean allusions in Thomas Harris’s original Hannibal Lecter trilogy these are more subtle, especially when compared with Brett Ratner’s version of Red Dragon released the following year. Nonetheless, although the print of The Ancient of Days • 109

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The misbegotten hanging in Mason Verger’s mansion according to Steven Zaillian’s original script was not included in the final film, Verger’s selection of The Ghost of a Flea for a postcard to Clarice Starling remains, and both Scott and cinematographer John Mathieson said that they drew upon Blake’s visual style for Hannibal, emulating his use of light and shadow in a way that would ‘reveal the form of objects but not the detail’.6 For Michelle Gompf, all attempts by various characters to simplify Lecter as pure evil ignore the complexities of his actions, which, in his love for Clarice Starling, are part of a marriage of innocence and experience.7 Blake’s influence on Scott should not be overstated (one would struggle to see it, for example, in Black Hawk Down), but Prometheus offered an opportunity to return to the Romantic as a foundational inspiration for Scott’s own mythmaking. In some respects, Blake is one of the few artists, along with Milton, to match Scott’s grandiose cosmological aspirations. If Milton provided the template for sublime epic, then it was Blake who most vividly furnished them with gigantic forms in the visual imagination. The director’s talents as a storyboard artist and cinematographer are well known, and he has drawn on artists as diverse as Joseph Wright of Derby, Edward Hopper, and, of course, H. R. Giger in his movies. Giger’s particular form of grotesque surrealism remains the major visual theme of Prometheus, as one would expect from a movie that returns to the mythos of the Alien films, yet Blake’s role as inspiration for the Engineers is also important, providing a counterpoint to the biomechanical xenomorph. Additionally, the origin of the Engineers in Blake’s Zoas and angelic figures provides an unexpectedly bleak vision of the universe not usually associated with the Romantic artist. That another writer, H. P. Lovecraft, is more clearly a source of cosmic horror in the movie is to be expected and could easily be seen as complementing Giger’s vision. And yet, while the vast cycles of tales such as At the Mountains of Madness are one point of departure for Prometheus (as well as an ironic nod to the cod mythologies of Erich von Däniken), the film also differs from the original Alien quadrilogy in that the role of the Engineers provides a link to a Christian mythology in which Milton is adumbrated via Blake’s retellings of stories of creation and fall. The role of Paradise Lost was made clear by Scott in a number of interviews around the release of the film, most explicitly in an interview with Sean O’Connell: In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant … they are dark angels. If you look at [John Milton’s] Paradise Lost, the guys

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus

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who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God. He [sic] goes to all the best nightclubs, he’s better looking, and he gets all of the birds.8

Similarly, in an interview for the magazine Esquire, Scott observes that the notion of a sadistic supreme deity has its roots in Paradise Lost, with Satan – ‘that son-of-a-bitch dark angel’ – being the only one to enjoy himself. Clearly Milton believed no such thing, which Scott rather grudgingly admits. While William Empson may have made the clearest argument for Milton’s God as a sadistic tyrant, the Romantic myth whereby the dark angel Satan had the most fun in a tortured universe has its roots in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, famously asserting Milton as being ‘of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. While Milton rather than Blake features most heavily in Scott’s interviews and comments on Prometheus, it is the later artist and poet who shapes the film’s reading of the Fall. The visual sources of the Engineers in Blake’s art (including his depiction of the fallen angels in Milton, as well as figures from Dante’s Inferno) was immediately recognised by a number of sources, and in an interview with the sci-fi fan site io9, creature designer Carlos Huante said that he and Scott pored over pictures by Blake and Turner as well as classical sculpture to guide them when designing life’s creators. Such allusions to Milton and Blake certainly indicate the grandiloquent ambitions of Prometheus, which certainly belong to a very different genre to the visceral body horror of filmmakers such as David Cronenberg in his early work (or, indeed, the original Alien movies). While there are moments of organic horror within Prometheus, most notably the alien abortion scene or the final birth of the xenomorph at the end of the film, Prometheus is more concerned with a coolly intellectual, indeed abstract form of horror, the slow realisation of its protagonists that we live in a universe that, at best, does not care for our survival or, at worst, actively conspires against it. With regard to Blake in particular, throughout this chapter I shall refer to such a conception of the universe as Deistic, drawing upon Blake’s sense of submission to rigid, inviolable natural laws as fatal for any notion of human agency, although in the genre of science fiction and the Gothic it has more often been referred to as existential horror. Curtis Bowman, in a reading of Heidegger in relation to horror and the uncanny, observes that ‘ontological uncanniness’ results from the ‘loss of intellectual mastery’ when confronted with the uncertainties of Dasein.9 This realisation that our optimistic assumptions of consciousness are ultimately forlorn and fragile has long been recognised as a fundamental driving force in the • 111

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The misbegotten work of H. P. Lovecraft, as well as a staple of sci-fi horror such as the Quatermass movies and Event Horizon. Revelation is always apocalyptic: the universe will resist and even destroy every attempt to reduce it to the sum of human knowledge, a process which also unveils the strange or weird nature of that our experiences and perceptions, which is perhaps one reason also why Blake’s apocalyptic visions are so appealing to those working in the fields of fantasy and science fiction. The horror of Prometheus, then, lies not so much in our disgust with the operations of the human body and in abjection as in the realisation that the secret history of the cosmos is utterly alien to us. Scott’s return to the Alien mythos in 2012, more than thirty years after the release of the original film in 1979, resulted in considerable hype followed by a not entirely unexpected panning on the part of some film viewers and critics. Titles such as ‘In Space No One Can Hear Prometheus Disappoint’ and ‘Why Prometheus is Inexcusably Bad’ were rife, with David DiSalvo’s summary of the film as ‘a visually stunning epic failure’ one that most accurately reflected my own opinion on first watching it. For many, the various plot failings seemed to capture the worst excesses of Lost scriptwriter Damon Lindelof rather than his successes. Viewed as a prequel to Alien, Prometheus left many viewers confused, with the final revelation of the xenomorph perversely parodying what could be surmised of its origin myths from the preceding quartet of films. Patricia Melzer had previously remarked that the unity provided by Ellen Ripley in the first four films, working alongside ‘expectations of the audience’,10 generally allowed it to become one of the most popular franchises in film history as well as a gold mine for critical theorists dealing with issues surrounding posthumanism and gender politics in particular. The character of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is a poor substitute for Ripley, one unlikely to replace her in discussions relating to the ‘reimagining of social orders’ around gender binaries in science fiction or how a ‘woman-signifier’ can break through traditional patriarchal roles to become the ‘strong centre of the film’.11 There are stronger claims for the android, David (Michael Fassbender) to feature in future critical work on posthumanism, and while he is not so clearly a creature made, defined, and deprived of power by patriarchy as Ash,12 he is also a more subtle exploration of some of the conditions and definitions of masculinity which could possibly be more fruitful. Nonetheless, despite the virtues of Fassbender’s performance few other films have so thoroughly trounced the expectations of an audience as Prometheus. 112 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman quotes an assessment of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness by the critic Edmund Wilson that dismisses the tale as concerned with ‘semi-invisible polypous monsters that uttered a shrill whistling sound and blasted their enemies with terrific winds’.13 Harman observes that such assessments, particularly when dealing with various forms of genre fiction, typically fall into the ‘problem with paraphrase’ and that it would be extremely easy to reduce any text to equal ridicule, continuing with his own examples for Moby Dick and Dante’s Divine Comedy in which ‘[t]he Italian and his late muse (we are not told whether she carries a lollipop or a teddy bear) magically fly past all the planets and finally see Jesus and God’.14 More than most films, Prometheus seems to invite such mocking paraphrase: having discovered the most tenuous evidence of intelligent life in the stars, a religious archaeologist convinces the apparently dead owner of a huge corporation to fund their explorations. Bringing together one of the most incompetent crews in this or several other worlds (including a geologist who prefers to get stoned, a captain who cannot fly and a representative of said corporation who can only run in straight lines), the archaeologists travel through space to discover their creators and the meaning of life, learning that it involves gigantic bald men who like to play with flutes and that the open invitation was apparently to an abandoned munitions dump – as well as the fact that the dead owner of the corporation is not deceased after all. Prometheus may deserve such an assessment (which barely scratches the flaws of its script); as Harman points out, however, the problem with paraphrase is that in assimilating texts to reductive literalism it ignores the fact that all content can be transformed to inherent stupidity. If Prometheus does not require much to reveal its foolishness, one criticism of the film by a variety of commentators at its release is flawed precisely because it depends on philosophies that undermine or overmine the actual contents of the film. A common complaint was that Prometheus raised questions that it failed to answer, particularly with regard to the origins of both human life and the xenomorph of the original Alien movie. As Damon Lindelof pointed out, Prometheus could not be seen as a simple prequel to Alien and his own work on Jon Spaiht’s script was not intended to provide a ‘definitive’ answer.15 Furthermore, the objection to notions that the film seemed to favour theories of intelligent design over evolution, thus making it a text better suited to fantasy than science fiction, ignore a much more sophisticated relation between religion and science • 113

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The misbegotten that Prometheus attempts to explore, however fallible such attempts may be, and which in turn provides a lens to regard other artistic influences on Scott and Lindelof such as Lovecraft, Milton, and Blake. As Lindelof remarks, creation is not the result of an ‘all-knowing deity’ but rather an experiment, the purpose – and results – of which are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Such a creation myth would fit well with the work of Lovecraft, whose At the Mountains of Madness provides an exposition of the origins of life on Earth as an aberrant series of alien experiments that would seem to fit most explicitly with the cosmic horror of Prometheus. Behind Milton’s war in heaven, however, as well as the psychomachia of the four Zoas, the ultimate reality of an all-knowing creator would seem to mitigate such horror: in the end, good always prevails. Yet while Lovecraft seems a more obvious source of the genre to which Prometheus belongs, the presence of the Blakean and Miltonic Engineers is important in transforming the nature of that horror. Throughout 2010, the film was referred to as Paradise, but Scott apparently changed the title because he considered it too revealing (although it currently remains a working title for the sequel to Prometheus). Prometheus, of course, refers to the modern Prometheus of Shelley’s Frankenstein, which itself invokes Milton as well as Aeschylus in a somewhat more oblique way for contemporary audiences. The role of an all-too-fallible creator lies at the heart of Scott’s film and also centres it upon more human horrors than the Alien quadrilogy. There is no explanation given for the origins of the xenomorphs in the earlier films – their biology remains as utterly alien as that of Lovecraft’s Elder Things, something as external to us as a colour out of space. The expectations that Prometheus would provide some kind of creation myth for Giger’s monster is one of the reasons that audiences experienced such disappointment with the movie: ultimately, the unique creature of the four Alien movies remains as inexplicable as ever. Instead, Prometheus is concerned with the idea that it is mankind’s creation that could be an abomination. The film in many ways is a failed or incomplete creation myth, one which both (deliberately) does not provide a coherent explanation for the origins of its creation, man, and which also sees that creature as a failure. While Lovecraft frequently elides further exposition on the role of the elder things in humanity’s creation (At the Mountains of Madness being a notable exception), man being ultimately insignificant in the great scheme of things, Blake’s own failed creation myths place mankind at the centre of his artistic concerns. Thus, the various attempts to fix what it means to be human in the Lambeth 114 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus books are presented by Blake as intrinsically fallible, resulting more often than not in grotesque and horrific forms as in Los’s act of creation in The Book of Los. As with Los becoming a fibrous polypus when he attempts to preserve his human shape against the inimitable horrors of the abyss, the original act of Scott’s Engineers in Prometheus is one not of glorious apotheosis but dissolution and decay into black, crawling chaos. Before exploring further the role of the Engineers in mankind’s creation, it is worth considering a little further the influence of Lovecraft’s vision of the universe which, as already indicated, would seem antipathetic to Blake’s. A considerable amount of scholarly work devoted to the original Alien movies has revolved around discussions of gender and sexuality, notably because of the presence of Ripley but also the revelation of the potent female in Aliens. Thus, Vivian Sobchack has written eloquently on sex as a repressive force in the films, while Bundtzen and Creed consider the role of the monstrous mother, while Vaughn has explored the fears of rape and abortion in the original trilogy.16 Although I have been fairly dismissive of Shaw’s capacity to work as a substitute for Ripley, Scott clearly invites similar critical responses to the abject horrors of sexuality in Prometheus, not least in the abortion sequence which results in the appalling birth of a squirming, Lovecraftian beast. This essay, however, is less concerned with a theory of horror as the return of the repressed, though it is clear that sexuality does have an important role to play in the film in contrast to the majority of Lovecraft’s work. Michel Houellebecq provocatively remarked that sex ‘plays no part at all in his stories’17 – a deliberate misreading that ignores the revulsion to sex and procreation in The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwich Horror in order to throw into greater contrast Houellebecq’s insistence on racism as the driving motivational factor in Lovecraft’s stories. Houellebecq concentrates instead on Lovecraft as an assault on realism, and while his essay is flawed as a polemic it does draw attention to certain factors in Lovecraft’s work that are important to an appreciation of horror. While much discussion of the techniques by which horror work will often feature some kind of visceral, emotional reaction representing the return of the repressed as discussed by Freud in his essay on the uncanny,18 Houellebecq is more concerned with horror as an intellectual reaction to extreme materialism and atheism, a kind of nihilism that recognises ‘[t]he universe [as] nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos’.19 • 115

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The misbegotten Lovecraft’s unremitting study of the universe as a ‘figure in transition toward chaos’ is perhaps one explanation of his appeal to some philosophers and theorists concerned with speculative realism, many of whom take up Houellebecq’s challenge to reconceive our investigations of ‘concept horror’.20 In ‘On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl’, Harman uses Lovecraft to argue against a normative function of philosophy, suggesting instead that rather than being used ‘as a rubber stamp for common sense and archival sobriety … philosophy’s sole mission is weird realism’,21 a task taken up more extensively in Weird Realism. Arguing against the dogmatism of conventional ‘realism’, Harman observes that Lovecraft’s skill as a writer consists of his ability to distinguish the qualities of objects from the objects themselves, employing a ‘vertical’ or allusive style, ‘the gap he produces between an ungraspable thing and the vaguely relevant descriptions that the narrator is able to attempt’, as well as a ‘horizontal’ weirdness: ‘The power of language is no longer enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality. Instead, language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing.’22 Harman refers to this as a ‘cubist’ style to match the more conventional allusive mode of writing prevalent among writers striving to convey a sense of sublime terrors. For Harman, Lovecraft is the most philosophical of writers precisely because he so readily deploys this cubist technique in a way that demonstrates the intrinsic weirdness of content, that the withdrawal of real objects (RO) and real qualities (RQ), in contrast to the full accessibility of sensual objects (SO) and sensual qualities (SQ), is not normally experienced in daily life but strikes us with full force in moments of fusion or fission where ‘we are now forcibly confronted with a marriage between objects and qualities that do not seem to fit easily together’.23 I would argue that this quality of fusion or fission is frequently encountered, in very different circumstances, in the works of Blake, and was one reason why this most sane of men was often denigrated as ‘mad’. Consider the following from A Vision of the Last Judgment: What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it. (E 565–6)

The ‘weirdness’ of Blake’s vision is that when looking at a familiar object (the sun) he sees not another familiar object (a guinea) but instead an 116 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus innumerable company of the heavenly host, an experience that tends not to be associated with common sense phenomenology. And yet in some respects it is no less weird to see a host of angels (which draws attention to Blake’s capacity for imaginative vision, offering suggestive readings that move away from common comparisons based on shape and form towards those based on intellectual and symbolic allusions) than to see a round, gold coin when looking at our nearest star. Of course, when we look at the sun (a painful enough experience that most of us do it only briefly), there is the real object that is the sun, and yet the comparison – whether to guinea or angelic host – draws attention to the fact that the sensuous objects and qualities that are fully accessible are distinct from those real objects and qualities. It is Blake’s simple acceptance of such fission and fusion and ability to invoke it at will (‘I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight’ [VLJ 95; E 566]) that marks his attitude out as especially weird. Yet I, like many Blake scholars, would argue that his sanity came from his recognition that imagination, or what he called the ‘Poetic or Prophetic character’ in There is No Natural Religion (copy L; E 3), allows us to perceive more than the ratio of our senses. This is a characteristic of what I would call (adapting from Harman) ‘visionary realism’, and in its outcomes at least it is usually very different from the weird realism of Lovecraft. Indeed, the fundamental optimism of Blake’s understanding of perception stands at odds with Lovecraft’s pessimism, even nihilism, just as his theism stands in contrast to the later writer’s atheism. Yet Blake consistently saw God as a product of imagination, and the universe of things was so fundamentally strange to Blake that he would not have been opposed to the ‘hyper-chaos’ of a world predicated on radical contingency proposed by Quentin Meillassoux. If ever there was a writer happily at home with the marriage of objects and qualities that do not seem to fit together it was Blake, and again and again in his writings the real sense of horror arises from the attempt to reduce such a marriage to an inalienable natural and moral Law. Any marriage of Lovecraft and Blake (or Lovecraft and Milton, for that matter) must be a shotgun wedding, but all three writers were more than capable of bearing witness to an ecstatic union of the weirdness of things – an ecstasy sometimes arising from a sense of abject loathing and awe. Milton’s Judaeo-Christian mythos was as easily capable of creating monsters as obscure and terrible as Cthulhu, while Blake frequently saw the qualities of Ulro compressed into the daily objects around him in • 117

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The misbegotten visions of cubist horror as disturbing as R’lyeh and its inhabitants: ‘Then view’d from Miltons Track they see the Ulro: a vast Polypus / Of living fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space growing / A self-devouring monstrous human Death Twenty-seven fold’ (M 34:24–6; E 134). The Polypus, fibrous and self-devouring, is more than a little reminiscent of one of Lovecraft’s terrible crawling chaoses. Blake’s vision, then, is often a bloody one, and certainly its effects upon spectators such as those Eternals who witness the Polypus in Ulro or Los’s creation of Urizen result in a horrified paralysis that resembles the loss of sanity among Lovecraft’s protagonists. Like Lovecraft, and indeed like Milton before him, Blake’s capacity for imaginative vision lies in his ability to see the literally unseeable, to write the unspeakable. Where this may become horrific as well as sublime is the moment when the veil which typically obscures our vision and which allows us to perceive the sun as a guinea coin can be torn aside at any moment, revealing to us a universe beyond comprehension. Though Blake in A Vision of the Last Judgment could bear witness to the sun as a host of heavenly angels, he was also aware how the weird and visionary realism of imagination could demonstrate its terrible and destructive power: By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining[;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption. & the air was full of them, & seemd composed of them; these are Devils. and are called Powers of the air. (MHH 18; E 41)

The response of the narrator to the horrors of the underworld is illuminating: when first confronted with the void, he suggests to his angelic guide that they commit themselves to it and see whether Providence is also to be found in hell, telling the angel ‘if you will not then I will’. This, of course, is a significant difference to the attitude of protagonists in Lovecraft’s works and horror stories more generally. As Peter Otto observes, Blake’s divergence from Kant as to our knowledge of things-in-themselves, based as it is on his understanding that imagination is not subservient to reason and that the ‘organs of perception’ can alter their relations to the world, allows him to adopt a very different attitude towards the sublime that, since Burke at least, has long been associated with sensations of terror.24 For Kant, operating in a Newtonian framework, the universe and its constituents are ultimately fixed but for Blake they are transformative: 118 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus things-in-themselves remain no less unknowable (or, in Harman’s terms, weird) but imagination is mobile, capable of interpreting the same sensual data in a potentially limitless multiplicity: ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ (MHH 7; E 35). It is the inability to transform our own perceptions that is the source of true horror – hence the repeated refrain in Blake’s prophecies, ‘they became what they beheld’. If understanding is, indeed, formed by the sensations with imagination restricted to a lesser, assimilative role, then the human mind must react with shock when faced with the terrors of the cosmos. This misunderstanding of the role of the imagination, I would argue, is an important part of the horror of a film such as Prometheus, and one ultimately more disturbing than the biological shock experienced at the sight of the xenomorph or visceral events in Scott’s movie. A search for a fixed, immobile truth results in the dreadful realisation that the universe is uncaring for mere human designs and destructive of its endeavours. Only two characters in the film – Elizabeth Shaw and David – are capable of interpreting this abomination of the cosmos in a more imaginative way. That Prometheus has ambitions far beyond the standard preoccupations of genre horror is indicated by its opening scene. On a barren planet a hooded figure stands beside a waterfall as a gigantic spaceship disappears beyond the clouds. Removing his robes, a pale-skinned, slightly translucent muscular man is revealed, his physiognomy the clearest indication that this creature is inspired by Blake’s mighty Zoas. His role as yet unexplained, the figure lifts a bowl containing a mysterious black liquid and drinks it, whereupon his body is convulsed by agonies and begins to disintegrate. As he collapses into the water, so the camera moves into his veins, showing his DNA dissolving and recombining, bringing life to this empty world. While the brief images of the giant’s disintegrating body are undoubtedly horrific, this is far from the primary response to this scene. While not knowing what this creature is or his purpose, the calm, ritualistic way that he prepares for his own death which will lead to new life is clearly sacrificial, and so we are caught up in what Van Erp calls the ‘complex mixture of negative and positive feelings’ caused by the awe of the sublime, a recognition of greatness and power against inability and smallness,25 a mixture perhaps of what Kant would refer to as terrifying (involving death) and noble (self-sacrifice). For Van Erp, following Kant, this aspect of the sublime is an aesthetic experience, one where we have not yet begun to rationalise or make a moral judgment but he also determines a further example from Kant of sublimity outside of the aesthetic qualities • 119

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The misbegotten of terror, nobility, and splendour, a moral sublime that arises from acting from virtuous impulses. At the beginning of Prometheus, it is impossible to judge whether the principles on which this Engineer proceeds an act of moral sublimity: by the end of the film, it is quite clear that these beings are anything but virtuous, though as dark angels they may still be sublime in other ways. While the idea that the Engineers as dark angels clearly traces its roots to Milton, the particular act of creation with which the film begins is very unlike anything in Paradise Lost, although Blake’s retelling of the creation myth as simultaneously one of a fall of man appears in various forms throughout the prophetic books, such as the formation of Urizen in Chapter III of The Book of Los: 1: The Lungs heave incessant, dull and heavy For as yet were all other parts formless Shiv’ring: clinging around like a cloud Dim & glutinous as the white Polypus Driv’n by waves & englob’d on the tide. … 4: Then he sunk, & around his spent Lungs Began intricate pipes that drew in The spawn of the waters. Outbranching An immense Fibrous form, stretching out Thro’ the bottoms of immensity raging. (BL 4:54–8, 68–72; E 93)

This is not to claim a direct influence on Scott, particularly as such descriptions tend to be obscure to anyone other than a Blake scholar (although the illustrations depicting similar activities from The [First] Book of Urizen are more widely reproduced), but the Gnostic stories of creation as fall which – directly or indirectly – informed Blake’s mythos also seems to be at work in Scott’s film. As Otto observes in his chapter on ‘The horrors of creation’, the vegetating, fibrous monstrosities that fill Blake’s prophecies offer a vision ‘akin to the life-in-death or death-in-life that Blake takes as emblematic of the fallen world’, and faced with such horror the Eternals witnessing that world suffer a state of paralysis.26 The very act of creation, suggests Otto, has become infused for Blake by the reported monstrosities of the Reign of Terror, constant references to beings born of globes having their genesis in grisly depictions of executioners holding up disembodied heads. The past, he concludes, seems to reach out to not merely colonise the spectator’s world but his body as well, locating it not merely in the 120 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus horrors of Revolutionary France but the biblical story of creation as a scene of primeval violence. James Rovira rightly points out that readings of Blake and Gnosticism tend to ignore the fact that ‘it is not Blake who was a Gnostic, but Urizen’, citing M. A. Williams’s observation that Gnosticism has become a ‘sick sign’ that by attempting to prove too much actually means very little.27 Nonetheless, the attempt to provide a story of creation that sees it as a disastrous fall binding us to an evil world (which has its source, at least in part, in Plato’s Timaeus before being developed by writers such as Mani and Valentinus) remains useful simply because it estranges us from the more typical reading of acts of creation which tend to be viewed as largely or wholly good. In relation to Prometheus it demonstrates just how misguided much criticism of the movie before and around its release was with regard to issues of intelligent design versus evolutionary science. This is not to defend Prometheus’s science − it is science fiction. One of the most ridiculous scenes in the movie is where Elizabeth realises the Engineers are mankind’s creators because of a perfect genetic match, the visual arrangement of the overlapping DNA patterns being a lazy cue to the audience. Nonetheless, it does reiterate that the film has no intention at all of presenting our creators as omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent beings: they, after all, are ultimately responsible for the present sorry state of our world. Scott presents a universe in which the extra-terrestrial design of human life (and thus metaphysical questions of origin) is not divine but thoroughly alien and materialistic. While the Engineers look very like figures from Blake’s art, such as Antaeus who lowers Dante and Virgil to the final circle of hell, or Satan in the many illustrations to Paradise Lost, Scott does not take their name from Blake’s poetry. Yet while Blake never mentions the word ‘engineer’, the motif of the architect is a familiar one from engravings such as the Ancient of Days and later prophetic books such as The Four Zoas and Milton. If Urizen is a Gnostic, seeking the fixed, immutable truth of the universe, then he is also an architect, attempting to arrange the world into an orderly, invariable shape. In Prometheus, Elizabeth Shaw and Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) are also Gnostics searching for the truth, though it is Weyland – not accidentally named after the legendary Norse and Germanic smith – who is most Urizenic. He is the ultimate architect and engineer of the ship Prometheus, and he is the one who seeks the most straightforward yet most difficult answer to the simplest of questions: how to survive death (a question that is answered with far greater subtlety when • 121

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The misbegotten Roy Batty meets his maker, Eldon Tyrell, in Blade Runner). To exaggerate for a moment, Weyland is the creationist in the film, the figure who has become convinced that the Engineers have all the answers to this most materialist of metaphysical problems. A better term to describe Weyland is not creationist (though this, of course, sums up and simplifies the current cultural landscape) but rather Deist. He is thoroughly rational, thoroughly materialist, but he has become convinced that mankind’s creators can provide fixed and definite answers, a point of origin that will provide purpose and meaning to life – if only his. As Northrop Frye, Hazard Adams and many other commentators observe, Blake identifies Deism with Natural Religion, and Blake’s opposition to Nature is one reason why he is so amenable to the object-oriented ontologies of philosophers such as Harman and Timothy Morton. As Morton observes in Ecology Without Nature, ‘[p]utting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration’.28 Natural Religionists, or Deists, exemplify an overdetermining structure which embeds our being and provides meaning to our lives, an onto-theological framework that is as metaphysical as any bearded deity sitting on a cloud. For Blake, however, this was the ultimate kind of conceptual horror and, somewhat ironically considering the appeal of Natural Religion to those of a rationalist bent, has its source in ‘the Ashes of Mystery’ (FZ 115:22; E 386). Because this kind of materialism is the ground of all being, it undermines objects as a manifestation of a more ‘real’ force, what Morton has recently taken to mocking as ‘easy think substance’.29 For Blake, the reductivism of Deism has as its inevitable consequence moral law or moral virtue, a process of reasoning negation (rather than productive contraries) that restricts and simplifies the universe so that the only possible response is obedience to its edicts. Such a universe is ultimately sadistic because when we fail to obey we must be punished – that is the law of nature from which there is no appeal even if, as in the case of the crew of the vessel Prometheus, we do not know the laws that we have broken. Ignorantia juris non excusat. This discussion of the conceptual horror of what I refer to as Deism, in which the universe seeks constantly to punish us for breaking its immutable laws, obviously ignores many other varieties of horror that could be applied to Prometheus, especially around the xenomorph and other monsters, or the various body shocks to which members of the ship’s crew are subjected. 122 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus Such visceral and emotional aspects are not, as already indicated, absent from Blake, whose works are full of grotesque births, aberrant forms and fibrous, polypous creatures that would not be out of place in Lovecraft’s mythos. When Reuben enroots himself among his brothers in Jerusalem, he re-enacts the creation as dissolution that we have already seen described as an act of Los on Urizen, and everyone who witnesses what he has turned into flees ‘at his horrible form’ and hides in terror, becoming ‘what they beheld’ (J 30:49–54; E 177). It is the following lines, however, that return us to the issue of conceptual or phenomenological horror: ‘If Perceptive Organs vary: Objects of Perception seem to vary: / If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also’ (J 30:55–6; E 177). It is too glib to say that for Blake horrors are ultimately man-made because they are perceived by mankind as horrific. The threat of death and destruction must always be a source of terror to the self, and yet that is because the Selfhood in the case of Weyland and his daughter Vickers refuses to view its own end as anything other than a cause of horror. There are, however, other responses which display the possibilities offered by imagination, that by varying the organs of perception we also vary our relations with the objects of perception, and these can be read according to Harman’s understanding of the relations between real and sensual objects and their qualities. One such response is offered by Elizabeth Shaw at the end of Prometheus, whereby she refuses to accept the terror of death as the immutable outcome of subjection to the natural (and also alien) laws of the cosmos, instead setting out with David to seek the Engineers’ homeworld and discover why they wish to destroy humanity. I am hesitant to call this a properly imaginative response because, once we are past the neat ontological trick of deferring the point of origin, her reactions stem as much from the heroics of countless action movies as anything else. Much more interesting to me is the response of David – a non-human character – to his own loss of self at the hands of the Engineers. Fassbender’s controlled and understated performance as David is easily the most impressive in the film: it is tempting, if cruel, to suggest that perhaps Scott called for deliberately wooden performances from the rest of the cast to emphasise the importance of David. In any case, as in Blade Runner, the non-human plays an important role in critiquing human interactions, and this android clearly dreams of more than electric sheep. While the rest of the crew of the vessel Prometheus sleeps, David is charged with maintenance of them and the ship and, in a memorable scene, is • 123

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The misbegotten shown modelling himself after Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, an act of imitation and mirror-imaging which stands in for the emergence of what Dissanayake calls homo aestheticus, the process of developing an aesthetic imagination in children through playful imitation and ritualised affiliative signals between them and their mothers.30 As a machine, David may be copying but, as Piaget demonstrated, such imitation as part of play and dreams is fundamental to the development of imagination: in Piaget’s cognitive model of development, the child moves from repetition to systematic imitation which allows a transition to representation and thus imagination. In an interview for the movie, Fassbender refers to David’s childlike nature and his fascination for everything, because ‘everything is information for him’.31 Information provides for imitation and assimilation, which in turn enables David to express childlike imagination – not least in the desire for approval from the Engineer who places a paternal hand on his head moments before tearing it from the android’s body. By the time that the vessel Prometheus reaches its destination, David has clearly developed a self, though one as apparently affectless as the angelic version of T. E. Lawrence portrayed in Lawrence of Arabia. His motivation and behaviour is frequently inexplicable, most notably when he infects Holloway with the mysterious black substance discovered on the alien planet, and while such motivations do not need to be explained for a non-human object it is David’s reactions which are the most significant when the secrets of the Engineers are finally revealed. Blake himself tends to be seen as presenting science and imagination as mutually exclusive, but in The Four Zoas at least he offers a potentially more nuanced reading of the two, frequently contrasting ‘sweet Science’ (FZ 51:30; E 334) with Urizen’s scientific principles that have become fixed in the vortices of space (FZ 72:13–21; E 349) though the meaning of the phrase ‘sweet Science’ is still contested. The necessity for imagination in scientific discovery has long been recognised, so much so that Warren Weaver famously defined science as ‘an essentially artistic enterprise’, one in which curiosity, imagination and faith have an important role to play.32 It is David’s non-human imagination and curiosity that allow him to vary his organs of perception, responding to the sensual qualities of the Engineers in a fashion that is very different to the limited reactions of figures such as Weyland, what I have referred to as a Deistic reading of the cosmos. It is David who discovers the star maps of the Engineers in one of the most memorable scenes of Prometheus, demonstrating himself capable of seeing the universe 124 •

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Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus as it truly is via the cleansed doors of perception: infinite. The visionary recording of the Engineers (who, in a wonderfully Blakean touch, control their spaceship by the use of music and flutes) that he witnesses allows him to respond more fully to the encounter with an Engineer woken from suspended animation than Weyland, who simply wants to barter his way to immortality. Unlike his immediate human creator, it is the posthuman android who is able to see the potential of a heavenly host in the alien dark angel rather than a source of guineas. This does not save David, of course. Indeed, following Fassbender’s suggestion that David is, in many respects, a child his perceptions – while vastly superior to the humans that he serves in a multitude of mundane ways – are not infinite. If he is indeed seeking approval from both Weyland and the Engineer, then he has mistaken the sensual qualities immediately accessible to him for the real qualities of the alien object that confronts him. Not that, in the end, he seems to mind so very much: an android beheading, as we have learned many times before from the Alien movies, does not carry the same consequences as for its human counterparts. His own grisly decoupling is an act of humbling, one for which we have been prepared when we see him attending Weyland and washing his maker’s feet. Scott may be enjoying sending up contemporary Christian notions of intelligent design and creationism, but the representation of David as Jesus indicates the ways in which the android’s self-sacrifice will function in a less cynical and more imaginative way. The dissolution of his body – and with it the destruction of the selfhood that has been constructed throughout the movie, motivated by unknown desires and jealousies – enables him to become a calm, almost beatific creature capable of offering salvation to Elizabeth even if he cannot save himself. That David can at times seem more ‘human’ than many of the other protagonists of Prometheus at first seems counter-intuitive to a Blakean view of the cosmos, especially as a posthuman view of the android clearly separates typically human characteristics – personality, desire, even emotion (assuming that David’s affectless performance is as much an act of repression as more typical robotic behaviour, for his hidden programming may function in a fashion that is similar to the compulsions of the id) – from the organic. And yet Blake’s notion of the ‘human form divine’ is complex: in early texts such as The Book of Thel and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, clouds, lilies, clods, and pebbles are described with human attributes. Typically, this anthropomorphism, which reaches its epitome in the giant form of Albion who contains all things within his body, has • 125

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The misbegotten been seen as evidence of Blake’s hostility to the natural world, but Kevin Hutchings, following Alexander Wilson, sees this radical anthropomorphic strategy is an attack on the ‘philosophical policing of the human/non-human distinction’.33 As well as eroding the divisions between the human and natural worlds, Blake challenges the theology of deism, which sees God as prime mover outside creation. Hutchings cites the following passage from Jerusalem, which most clearly demonstrates Blake’s argument that ‘everything is human’:                   Cities Are Men, fathers of multitudes, and Rivers & Mount[a]ins Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! Sublime! In every bosom a Universe expands. (J 34:46–9; E 180)34

That cities are men is a poetic trope that falls well within the boundaries of conventional perception, but seeing mountains and rivers as men, the non-organic constituents of the universe, opens the doors of perception to the infinite. That is sublime – but, as commentators since Burke have realised, it can also be terrifying. The Engineers of Prometheus are human, as is the xenomorph, all connected in an act of creation that is not anterior to the cosmos but fully bound up with it. Commentators such as Connor Malloy have noted Scott’s disdain for organised religion,35 but that places him in good company with Blake and does not preclude a spiritual understanding that recognises the importance of imagination in our responses to the universe. The horror in Prometheus is less to do with the spectacular aesthetic sublime of alien creatures and visceral disgust of shocking deaths and dismemberment than a subversion of what I have referred to as a Deist cosmography – the realisation that the universe does not care about the answers to our questions, that it may indeed be hostile to them. Such horror is ultimately conceptual, arising from the phenomenological sense of rupture when we comprehend that the objects of the universe are utterly weird. While Prometheus draws considerably from Lovecraft’s vision of a cosmos that is inexplicably alien to us, his dark angels owe much more to Milton’s mythos as reinterpreted by Blake. The Engineers, like the Zoas, can be hostile, malevolent, and destructive, but they are also visions that inspire us to see more than the projections of ourselves if only we can perceive them beyond the restrictions of the natural religion of fixed qualities and the moral law of predestined judgments that way does indeed lie universal horror. As Blake observed in There is No Natural Religion, ‘He who sees the Infinite 126 •

Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott ’ s Prometheus

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in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’ (E 3). If all we desire is to cry ‘More! More!’ then, like Weyland, despair is our eternal lot when the fallible Titans of Prometheus deliver death rather than life. When, however, we open the doors of perception to the essential strangeness of the universe then we can become more than we behold. Notes 1 The original quotation is: ‘Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d / Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc’ (Am 11:1–2; E 55). As Robin Wood observes, the substitution of fell for rose transforms the meaning of Blake’s words, marking ‘the end of the American democratic principle of freedom, its ultimate failure’ (Wood, Hollywood, p. 185). 2 Harley, ‘America, a Prophecy’. 3 Gerblinger, ‘ “Fiery the Angels fell” ’, p. 20. 4 Harley, ‘America, a Prophecy’, p. 64. 5 Raw, The Ridley Scott Encyclopedia, p. 46. 6 Cited in Bankston, ‘A Pound of Flesh’, p. 36. 7 Gompf, ‘Silence of the Lamb’, pp. 189–90. 8 Cited in O’Connell, ‘Sir Ridley Scott Explains’. 9 Bowman, ‘Heidegger, the Uncanny’, p. 73. 10 Melzer, Alien Constructions, p. 108. 11 Kavanagh, ‘Feminism’, p. 75. 12 Gallardo and Smith, Alien Woman, p. 49. 13 Cited in Harman, Weird Realism, p. 7. 14 Harman, Weird Realism, p. 8. 15 Cited in Barone, ‘Prometheus’ Screenwriter’. 16 Sobchack, ‘The Virginity of Astronauts’, pp. 103–15; Bundtzen, ‘Monstrous Mother’, pp. 11–17; Creed, ‘Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine’, pp. 44–60; Vaughn, ‘Voices of Sexual Distortion’, pp. 423–45. 17 Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft, p. 60. 18 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’. 19 Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft, p. 32. 20 MacKay, Collapse IV, p. 14. 21 Harman, ‘On the Horror of Phenomenology’, p. 333. 22 Harman, Weird Realism, p. 24, p. 25. 23 Ibid., p. 255. 24 Otto, Blake’s Critique, pp. 44–6. 25 Van Erp, ‘The Genuine Sublime’, p. 27. 26 Otto, ‘The Horrors of Creation’, this volume. • 127

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The misbegotten 27 Rovira, Blake and Kierkegaard, pp. 127, 129. 28 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 5. 29 Morton, Dark Ecology, p. 47. 30 Dissanayake, ‘Becoming’, p. 85. 31 Cited in Cornet, ‘Michael Fassbender’. 32 Weaver, A Great Age, p. 64. 33 Hutchings, Imagining Nature, p. 68. 34 Cited in Hutchings, Imagining Nature, p. 69. 35 Malloy, ‘The Irreligiosity’.

128 •

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5 William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen • Lucy Cogan

T

he disturbing episodes of birth and physical decay that insistently recur in William Blake’s poetry of the mid-1790s, particularly the works of the Bible of Hell, display suggestive parallels with politically charged tropes of monstrosity that reverberated through the British discourse of the last years of the eighteenth century. In The [First] Book of Urizen (1794) Blake invokes the ambivalence regarding the Enlightenment project that characterised contemporary manifestations of the monstrous, but rejects the reactionary dread of the plebeian or uncivilised body associated with it by aligning the monstrous not with ignorance or barbarism but with rationality itself. These outbreaks of ‘body horror’ in Blake’s work can thus be read as an oblique critical response to the convergence in contemporary culture of anxieties surrounding materialist discourses of the body, and fears as the French Revolution descended into chaos and violence that Britain, too, would fall to the rule of the mob. In Blake’s hands, the monstrous becomes instead a vehicle for interrogating the system of exploitative power-relations responsible for perpetuating the state of ‘things as they are’ that the revolution had threatened briefly to overturn in Europe. What he uncovers in The [First] Book of Urizen is the disturbing insight that lurks at the heart of the Gothic sensibility, that the assertion of rigid, totalising rationality provokes and even presupposes the eruption of its opposite: the chaos of irrationality. When Blake states in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) that ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul’ and ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body’ (MHH 4:12; E 34) his vision is of a holistic embodied • 129

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The misbegotten experience in which the joyful excesses of human desire and imagination are at once spiritual and physical. This vision culminates in the figure of the Human Form Divine in his later works, an incarnation of the divine imagination in which spirit and flesh are indivisible. It follows then that the formation of the mutilated, deadened, or stillborn bodies that crowd the poems of the mid-1790s function as dark mirrors, reflecting the cost of the denial or perversion of these holistic impulses. Significantly, Urizen, the dark patriarch driven by a will to dominate and control, is repeatedly subjected to these cycles of hideous physical formation, through which his developing body is shown not only to be horrific, but also paradoxically inanimate, anatomised, and degenerating. The rationalist Urizen – his name often suggested to be a play on Ur-reason or your-reason – may seem an ironic target for these outbreaks of ‘body horror’, but Blake intriguingly figures him both as the author of these horrors and their principal victim. This essay will consider the earliest paradigmatic iteration of Urizen’s monstrous birth in The [First] Book of Urizen, in which bodily formation is imagined as a self-induced dissection that cleaves spirit from flesh and produces a stillborn body that must be assembled post mortem in a horrific parody of medical discourses of the day. The question of where the boundary lay between the natural and the unnatural, repeatedly violated in the production of Urizen’s body, gained an additional political charge in the context of the debate surrounding the French Revolution. Chris Baldick’s influential work on monstrosity and the Gothic, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, explores how both conservative and radical sides of the argument employed the tropes of bodily disintegration, disease, and disorder as metaphors for a malfunctioning society.1 The gradual encroachment of science, including the newly respectable science of anatomy, on popular ideas of the human body in this period was doubleedged, on the one side it demystified the body’s various functions while on the other it revealed the interior of the body to be alien and grotesque. While images of the ailing body politic had long been used to represent social unrest, in the Romantic era an ironically ‘scientific’ language of innovation merged with popular ideas of the monstrous to articulate the sense that the French Revolution marked an unprecedented schism with the past. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke warned that Britain was in danger of being permanently transformed by the ‘monstrous fiction’ of revolutionary ideals, which he associated with ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’.2 Burke indulged in breathless, voyeuristic fantasies of the depravities committed by the revolutionaries, 130 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen picturing French subjects as murderous children who ‘hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians’, joining together images of parricide, anatomy, and the occult.3 Burke’s radical opponents deplored his rhetorical excesses, but the more politically astute among them like Wollstonecraft and Paine were quick to recognise the potency of his alarmist phantasmagoria. Fred Botting notes that radicals opposed to Burke attempted to ‘challenge the terms of conservative arguments to interrogate the grounds and reverse the designations of monstrosity’, re-framing the injustices of the state or the aristocracy as the source of the monstrous.4 The paternalistic tyrant Urizen can similarly be read as a refutation of the dominant conservative narrative regarding the revolution. In the cosmogony of The [First] Book of Urizen, the fallen universe is shown to be an accidental by-product of Urizen’s boundless and destructive ambition to create a better world in his own image. Through the prism of an alternative Genesis that re-imagines the fall is an ever-recurring degeneration of the imagination into mental abstraction and materiality, authoritarianism is thus exposed as the formative, perhaps originary principle of postlapsarian existence. Though this conflict occurs in the realm of myth, The [First] Book of Urizen does not turn away from the defining political struggle of the period, even as it shows itself to be less interested in the historical specificity of the moment than America a Prophecy (1793) or Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). On the contrary, it reveals a bleak fascination with the capacity of corrupt power structures to present their dominance as selfless rather than self-interested and the status quo as the natural rather than simply the contingent order of being. Yet Blake also displays an increased awareness that the victims of authoritarianism are not only found among the subjugated. Like William Godwin’s portrait of the patrician Squire Falkland’s descent into an obsessive and self-destructive tyrant in Caleb Williams, the negative consequences of Urizen’s despotism ripple inward as well as outward, debasing both oppressor and oppressed. In the moment Urizen first asserts his authority, he is counter-intuitively described as ‘Self-closd, all-repelling’ (BU 3:3; E 70), as if his act of selfassertion is synonymous with imprisonment within the self. He has set himself apart from the world he seeks to control, fatefully severing himself from the interconnected web of existence. It is the expression of a mode of individuation that defines itself negatively by what it rejects and by what it deems to be other. This introduces a paradigm of the psyche in which the dominance of reason is seen, not as a positive expression of an • 131

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The misbegotten enlightened selfhood but as a state defined by self-deception, exclusion and division – what would become the self-rationalising spectre of the later prophecies. Urizen is variously described as an ‘abominable void’, ‘unknown, abstracted’, and a ‘soul-shudd’ring vacuum’ (BU 3:4–6; E 70), terms conspicuously drawn from scientific discourse that emphasise the affinity between his destructive isolationism and the scientific world view that had revolutionised the relation between humankind and the universe in the Age of Enlightenment. In the immediate aftermath of the fall, Urizen seeks to impose his rational system upon the limitless diversity of the infinite universe. The iconic design on the frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy (1794) shows Urizen as the Ancient of Days in the act of measuring and dividing the universe (see Figure 14) The image recalls Milton’s description of God’s ‘golden compasses’ in Book VII of Paradise Lost, a phrase Blake later uses in connection with Urizen in Chapter 7 of The [First] Book of Urizen. The contrast between the sharp geometric lines of the compass and the dark, nebulous clouds gathering around the figure of Urizen illustrates the conjunction of opacity and inflexibility inherent in Urizen’s vision of the universe. Like the image of the great physicist in Blake’s 1795 print Newton, Urizen’s gaze, fixed on his calculations, is blind to the majesty of the universe around him: Times on times he divided, & measur’d Space by space in his ninefold darkness Unseen, unknown! changes appeard In his desolate mountains rifted furious By the black winds of perturbation. (BU 3:8–12; E 70)

As a satire on the Enlightenment impulse to categorise, quantify, and define, Urizen’s methods can be read as a critique of many aspects of systematic inquiry from Bacon’s natural history and Newton’s physics to the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Locke. It would seem that Blake’s objection is less to the ideas themselves, which he often treats as interchangeable, than to what he perceives to be their shared underlying urge: to set limits on the nature of existence by forcing the unlimited complexity of subjective experience into narrowly conceived and imaginatively barren theoretical frameworks. Blake rejects the imposition of any sort of ideologically driven restraints, whether political, social, or scientific, as fetters of the mind, famously writing in Jerusalem (1804–c.20), ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ (J 10:20; E 153). 132 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen

Figure 14  William Blake, Ancient of Days, Europe A Prophecy, frontispiece, copy A, plate 1 (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Moreover, Blake suggests that there is a violence, literal, and metaphorical, inherent in Urizen’s system. When he asserts himself as the categorising, centralising authority of Eternal space, he is not just evaluating it, he is inflicting his empirical methods on the infinite universe, forcing it to • 133

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The misbegotten conform to the limited parameters of his scientific vision. In an early sign of the damage caused by this act, ominous ‘changes’ begin to appear, mountains crack and fissure, spreading outward in a ‘furious’ wave of fragmentation. Like a distorted mirror-image of the Enlightenment scientists who used the tools of compass, telescope and microscope to chart the wonders of the universe, Urizen by dividing and defining the material universe is also slicing into it, tearing and mutilating the fabric of existence. Urizen assumes that by virtue of his self-conferred position as rational authority he is superior to and therefore separate from the material universe on which he focuses his tyrannical attention, immune to the detrimental effects of this scientific scrutiny. Yet by placing a comma after ‘divided’ in the lines, ‘Time on times he divided, & measur’d / Space by space in his ninefold darkness’, Blake insinuates that when Urizen coolly and dispassionately slices the universe into quantifiable units the object of these divisions is both Eternal ‘space’ and Urizen’s own rational selfhood. Before the Fall Eternity, or paradise, existed as an undifferentiated experience of universality that encompassed both the objective world he now seeks to dissect and his own subjective consciousness. Consequently, as Urizen divides and atomises the universe, so he himself is divided and atomised. This is the fundamental violence done to the holistic ‘divine humanity’ by the hubris of reason, carving up the thinking self into rational mind and physical body, denying the synergistic power of the imagination and reducing truth to that which is perceptible to the senses. All the destruction unleashed by Urizen, and by implication scientific rationalism, stems from this originary fault-line. The [First] Book of Urizen thus metaphorically explores the catastrophic consequences that obtain when the boundaries that shape and define existence, those between matter and imagination, life and death, are arbitrarily redrawn to further a desire for supreme power and knowledge. Urizen’s denial that the substance upon which he exerts his will is the same substance from which he himself was made therefore proves toxic, poisoning his every thought and inference, marring his judgment from the start. The full consequences of his flawed belief first emerge in Chapter 2 of the poem when Urizen proclaims that the larger purpose behind his disastrous project of self-assertion is, absurdly, to grant Eternity eternal life. He believes the key to accomplishing this lies in fixing the infinite variability of Eternity into a ‘solid without fluctuation’, which he will bring about by transforming it into text in the form of his ‘Book / Of eternal brass’ (BU 4:32–3; E 72). In this abstracted, concretised form the now static 134 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen universe will be laid open to and assimilated by his probing consciousness, making him its sole source of knowledge and lone authority – the God of Reason. Contained forever within his book of metal all ambiguity and multiplicity of experience will be reduced to the monolithic formula of ‘One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law’ (BU 4:39–40; E 72), echoing a popular conservative catch-cry of the time.5 But this is not preservation – by resolving the infinite variability universe into a finite, logical system he has changed its essential nature and created something new in its place. Urizen’s destructive scientific approach parodies the practices of the natural scientists of Blake’s day, who justified their often brutal methods in the name of advancing knowledge. In the spirit of the ‘new science’, what could not been verified by experiment, preferably by the practitioner’s own hands, was inherently suspect. This laudable rigour was not, however, without its drawbacks, especially when taken to extremes. Jonathan Swift’s satire of the Royal Society in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) mercilessly caricatures the excesses of empirical experimentation as pointless and disgusting, while warning of the potential for scientific investigation to lose sight of any greater moral purpose in its fixation on pushing the boundaries of knowledge.6 A cursory review of the scientific literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows much that would have struck the layperson as unsettling at best. Notoriously, René Descartes and William Harvey – two of the pioneers of Enlightenment science – subjected countless animals, particularly dogs, to the horrors of vivisection to further the study of animal physiology. By the mid-eighteenth century these practices had become an accepted if not uncontroversial part of scientific inquiry. David Perkins dates the first flowering of the animal rights movement to this period when figures such as Samuel Johnson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Joanna Baillie were among those who tried to awaken the compassion of their readers to the plight of these creatures.7 Indeed, so many scientists engaged in such experiments the science historian Richard Westfall was prompted to remark, ‘one is sometimes surprised that the canine species managed to survive’.8 Live humans could not be subjected to the same destructive curiosity as dogs, though the bodies of the poor were in certain circumstances available for a less systematic, if at times no less damaging, surgical probing. As Ruth Richardson describes in her study of the conjunction between poverty and anatomical study in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, those who were desperate enough to • 135

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The misbegotten end up in London’s charity hospitals were openly treated as a training ground for inexperienced surgeons.9 In Blake’s satirical work, An Island in the Moon (1784–5), Sipsop, a surgeon’s apprentice,10 reveals the callous attitude prevalent among the surgical profession towards these unfortunate patients, pronouncing ‘What the devil should the people in the hospital that have it done for nothing, make such a piece of work for’ (Island 6; E 454) – his rant is then mercifully cut short. The work also features a satirical portrait of ‘Jack Tearguts’ (a later substitution for ‘Jack Hunter’ or John Hunter, famed surgeon-anatomist, which was crossed out11), who hacks through flesh without the slightest sign that his purpose is to heal. As described by Sipsop, ‘[Tearguts] understands anatomy better than any of the Ancients hell plunge his knife up to the hilt in a single drive and thrust his fist in, and all in the space of a Quarter of an hour. he does not mind their crying – tho they cry ever so’ (6; E 454). Later in this volume Stephanie Codsi explores the blackly comic dimension of Blake’s grisly depiction of Hunter.12 Even so, with its connotations of sadism and rape this repellent scene evokes genuine, widespread fears that the surgeon-anatomist had little regard for the sanctity of human life and an unhealthy interest in taking bodies, living or dead, apart. Blake’s representation of the surgeon’s practice deliberately strips the profession of the respectability it was working so hard to acquire in the late eighteenth century – Tearguts is a monster and a brute to whom the helpless patient has no choice but to submit. For all the power of Burke’s vivid evocation of the Paris mob’s brutal anatomisation of their masters, the reality in Britain was, in a very literal sense, the opposite – it was the master-surgeons who preyed on the poor. If novice surgeons sharpened their skills on the live bodies of the poor, it was their dead bodies that would allow the study of human physiology to make its most significant strides forward. For, only in death could the body be opened up to the absolute power of the scientist’s examination and forced to give up all its secrets. Thus the study of life became the study of the dead, overturning in the process deeply embedded taboos involving the handling of the deceased. As Foucault remarks in The Birth of the Clinic, ‘in the boldness of the gesture that violated only to reveal, to bring to the light of day, the corpse became the brightest moment in the figures of truth’.13 For the study of anatomy, more than any other scientific discipline, held out the hope of eventual mastery over the mysteries of mortality and, by extension, power over life and death. However, there was a problem. Only a small number of bodies could be obtained from 136 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen the sole legal source, the gallows, which was by its nature a limited supply. The majority of the bodies that made their way to the anatomy tables of London therefore had to be acquired illegally, snatched from graveyards, workhouses, and charity hospitals – the eventual fate of many of the patients who acted as guinea pigs for apprentice surgeons. One scandal of the mid-1790s involved the systematic theft of newly buried bodies in a cemetery in Lambeth in what was then Blake’s own neighbourhood.14 The practice of grave-robbing for dissection caused particular distress because of the popular belief that the soul lingered in or near the body after death and that the physical body itself rose from the grave on Judgment Day. From this perspective a stolen or mutilated corpse was not just an earthly desecration, it could potentially bar the soul from rising to its heavenly afterlife, a fear that was especially acute among the disenfranchised and the poor.15 If Blake saw the psychological division of the material body from the spiritual self as a form of sacrilege enacted against the Divine Imagination, the actions of the anatomists and their agents exponentially compounded the desecration. Thus, though ostensibly part of the Enlightenment project to banish the darkness of superstition with the light of reason, the anatomy theatre was still commonly associated with ghoulish and morally dubious practices. Blake’s personal experience seems only to have confirmed this perception. Enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1779, it is highly likely he attended lectures given by William Hunter, older brother of John Hunter and famed Professor of Anatomy at the academy since 1768.16 The artistic aesthetic of close empirical observation Hunter promoted at the Royal Academy was explicitly based on his anatomical expertise. Hunter’s influence on the ethos of the academy was profound and as late as the 1850s it could still be felt in Dr Robert Knox’s disparaging description of the Royal Academy as ‘The Anatomical School’, devoted to producing images of ‘death-like dissected figures’.17 When commissioning engravings for anatomical texts Hunter’s preference was for what Martin Kemp terms an ‘an unremittingly “meaty” naturalism, openly recording such “accidental” features as moist hair, wrinkles, scabs, blotches and so on’.18 The striking effect of this naturalistic approach is plain in Hunter’s most lasting contribution to the field of anatomical studies The Female Gravid Uterus, published to wide acclaim in 1774. The work documented in exceptional detail the distinct phases of foetal growth and revolutionised medical understanding of the process of gestation. However, for the modern reader it is the gruesome illustrations that catch the imagination, forcing • 137

The misbegotten

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upon the viewer an uncomfortable intimacy with the dissected bodies. In the most graphic of a series of images of pregnant, dismembered lowertorsos, the skin and muscle of the abdomen and pubic area is cut away to reveal the foetus at almost full-term (see Figure 15).

Figure 15 William Hunter, ‘Fetus in utero’, table VI, Anatomia uteri humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). US National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. 138 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen The strange mix of vulnerability, sensuality and gore seen in Hunter’s anatomised subjects is eerily recalled in the description and accompanying image of the birth of Enitharmon from a trembling globe made of ‘Fibres of blood, milk and tears’ (BU 18:4; E 78) in The [First] Book of Urizen (see Figure 18). Nowhere in Hunter’s text does he mention how he came by the bodies used as the models for his studies; the women go unacknowledged and unnamed but readers would have understood their bodies could not have been obtained legally, since pregnant female prisoners could ‘plead their belly’ to escape execution. Like the silenced patient in An Island in the Moon, their identities have been effaced. While Hunter’s groundbreaking discoveries granted him a position of pre-eminence in intellectual society, Blake was deeply suspicious of the mechanistic conception of the body that Hunter helped popularise. In defiance of objectivist attempts to define and delimit embodied existence, Blake maintained that embodiment, however bound by physical limitation, was still fundamentally a subjective experience governed by imaginative perception rather than physiology. Not all the students reacted with the same hostility to Hunter’s philosophy. Within Blake’s circle at the academy, his close friend John Flaxman embraced the study of anatomy as indispensible to achieving life-like accuracy in the muscle movement and physical expression of human figures.19 Flaxman enthusiastically followed Hunter’s doctrine, which exhorted students of the academy to use close observation as the basis of their work and to imitate nature as accurately as possible. Blake’s opinion of such an approach is unambiguous – in his Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 he refers derisively to the ‘copier of nature’ (DC 50; E 545) and regarded even the milder ‘fitting’ of the poet’s vision to nature such as described by Wordsworth as the subjugation of the imagination to the ‘Vile Body’ and its ‘Laws’ (‘Annotations to Thornton’; E 667). For Blake, the materialist belief that humanity is only meat and bones makes the subject a willing slave to a vitiated construct, trapping it in the form of a fleshly monstrosity. It is unsurprising given his exposure to the practice of anatomy at the Royal Academy that Blake’s later work should reflect a combination of dread and morbid fascination in response to materialist discourses of the physical body. Indeed, while he was outspoken in his opposition to naturalistic art Blake’s distinctive visual style features figures of prominent and often distorted musculature reminiscent of anatomical imagery.20 Nor was the lasting impact of Blake’s exposure to Hunter’s anatomical aesthetic confined solely to the visual dimension of his work. Characterised by a language of • 139

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The misbegotten division and abstraction, Urizen’s approach, his urge to objectify, atomise and sever as a means to understand and control all creation, symbolically reflects the anatomist’s approach. Furthermore, Urizen’s wilful blindness to the effects of his actions parallels one of the most basic features of the anatomist’s perspective. According to Hunter, it was essential that the surgeon-anatomist achieve a state of clinical detachment, or ‘necessary Inhumanity’ as he called it, to perform the disturbing work of dissection effectively, allowing the anatomist to distance himself from the reality of the violence committed against another human body in the process of dissection.21 For Blake this was not merely a convenient way to screen out the distractions of sentiment, it was also a peculiarly corrosive form of self-deception. Urizen’s complacent arrogance in the superiority of his system leaves no space for dissent or for competing perspectives, epitomising the mentality that presumed it was the right of the powerful to impose their will on the rest of society, regardless of anyone else’s opinion on the matter. That he might be wrong is absolutely unthinkable, even if it also unavoidably the case. To reduce all life to the condition of a stable, univocal text, demands that all change, growth and development must cease, meaning Urizen’s quest for absolute empirical truth leads not to immortality but to sterility. His mournful, seemingly heartfelt, entreaty, ‘Why will you die O Eternals?’ (BU 4:12; E 71), exposes the irony of his mistake. In Eternity ‘Death was not, but eternal life sprung’ (3:39; E 71) but to Urizen’s blinkered mindset this ‘fluctuating’ existence lacked the certainty of the concrete. Only the inflexible materiality of the text can constitute immortal life because there it can be preserved forever unchanging, yet the beguiling logic of this position conceals a deeper contradiction. By equating eternal life with physical, temporal existence he has condemned it to mortality and ultimately to unending death. It is in this sense that Urizen’s book is, in Paul Mann’s words, ‘an ontological horizon, the horror-zone of the fallen world’.22 The text grants immortality only in so far as the dissected corpse lives on in the immortal corpus of medical science, which resurrects the body by overwriting its true ruined condition.23 In rejecting Eternity in favour of the text, Urizen is the Ur-anatomist who embraces the corpse over the living body because it cannot die. In an echo of the fates of the abusive authority figures that dominate the Gothic works of the 1790s, like Matthew Lewis’s Ambrosio and Ann Radcliffe’s Schedoni, the consequences of Urizen’s overweening subjective 140 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen ambition are now revisited upon his vulnerable embodied form, revealing his sense of omnipotence to be delusory. Having produced the degenerate material universe in a mistaken belief that he could mould it to his will, he is reborn a mindless lump of matter over which the Eternals pronounce ‘Death / Urizen is a clod of clay’ (BU 6:9–10; E 74). Transmuted into pure matter and devoid of any vitalising energy, Blake clarifies in the case the reader had missed the significance, that he is ‘Cold, featureless, flesh or clay’ (BU 7:5; E 74), his identity obliterated and his substance associated only with decomposition and the grave. No longer the ‘divine’ anatomist he is now the anatomist’s true production, as he is born not as the immortal text but as the cadaver. Reflecting the sinister association in the popular imagination between empirical science and the defiled corpse, as the first embodied ‘man’ of a perfectly rational, sterile world Urizen is an inverted Adam, not the product of a divine plan but an abomination created in error. Stripped of the last remnants of higher being, Urizen’s physical self is nothing more than a monstrous living-corpse. Like the creature in Frankenstein, his stillborn body breaches the most fundamental of rational categories since it is neither truly living nor wholly dead. In his quest to gain total mastery over the material universe Urizen has debased the scientific foundations of his philosophy to the extent that it generates this irrational contradiction from within. The cognitive dissonance produced by Urizen’s birth is reminiscent of the imagery used by Julia Kristeva in outlining her theory of the abject. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva examines the psychic shock caused by an encounter with the abject, which exists outside of the borders of the symbolic order and includes that which we instinctively recognise as filth as well as physical or moral debasement. The abject marks out the boundaries of existence necessary for the development of a coherent sense of self, but it also looms just beyond those boundaries constantly threatening to overwhelm and shatter that sense of self. Amid the many concrete examples Kristeva gives of possible experiences of the abject perhaps the most resonant is that of the corpse: The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death … No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.24 • 141

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The misbegotten ‘Thrust aside’ the abject sustains meaningful existence, but uncontained it threatens to absorb all into undifferentiated chaos. Born in the abject form of an undifferentiated fleshly mass Urizen is described at first only as ‘Unorganiz’d, rent from Eternity’ (BU 6:8; E 74). This transmutation of a towering, tyrannical figure into a literal lump of flesh parallels a famously violent scene in the literature of the period, the attack on the Prioress in Lewis’s The Monk (1796). On the day of the St Clare carnival, the mob beat ‘her lifeless body’ in an act of collective vengeance ‘till it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting’.25 Although the Prioress is guilty of horrendous crimes, the mob is depicted not as an agent of justice but a sublime force of mindless destruction with Lewis revelling in the gruesome excesses of her death – for this reason the work is generally considered anti-Jacobin in character. Nevertheless, David Collings remarks that ‘the overwhelming violence of the mob is an apt counterpart to the institutionalized violence apparently carried out in the convent, the mob’s sadism replying to that of the Prioress’.26 As in Urizen’s case, there is a sense that the abuse of power leads only to further abuse. Yet, by presenting Urizen as both chief perpetrator and victim of this cycle of abuse, Blake makes it explicit that the relationship is reciprocal rather than retaliatory – the excesses of the despotic system provoke self-generated antagonistic responses. In his cold, fleshly state, Urizen who once asserted dominion over everything, is now incapable of even the most basic level of self-cohesion. Urizen’s characterisation as chaotically ‘Unorganiz’d’ and later ‘disorganiz’d’ is, on one level, an obvious pun on his messy materiality; he lacks the organs he needs for his body to function in a well-ordered manner. It also hints, more suggestively, that in cutting himself off from Eternity, he has destroyed whatever unifying principle – his soul? – non-mortal existence afforded him. Los, sent by the Eternals to contain Urizen’s error, is ‘affrighted / At the formless unmeasurable death’ (BU 7:8–9; E 74). Frozen in place by the horror of what he sees, his response illustrates how the horror of the abject overwhelms the viewer, rendering him numb and senseless as if he has been transformed into the same substance as the corpse-like Urizen. The image on plate 10 (Bentley and Erdman, 7) shows Los screaming in a fiery void, his body contorted and his face set in a rictus shock at this perverse creation, prefiguring Victor Frankenstein’s response in the iconic Romantic era scene of monstrous birth in Frankenstein (see Figure 16). 142 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen

Figure 16  William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 10 (Bentley 7) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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The misbegotten Eventually, however, Los must move to reassert the boundaries of reality and take up the task of constructing a rational form out of Urizen’s fleshly mass, binding him in his self-isolated monstrous body. Thus embodiment does not come into being as a rejection of the formlessness of the abject, but as a fatal compromise that concedes that the substance of fallen life is wholly reliant upon it. Los’s actions, while necessary for the survival of life, implicate him, the Eternal Prophet, in the same Urizenic project that caused the initial disintegration of Eternity. Plate 11 expresses the inescapable logic of Urizen’s system, showing Los and Urizen each on one half of the design, locked in a binary relationship that forces them into one of two positions, either that of the anatomist or his anatomised subject (see Figure 17). There is no escape, Blake implies, from the corruption of materialism, not even for the poetic genius who must take up the tools of the anatomist or remain frozen in horror forever. The creation of Urizen’s fallen body then unfolds in a succession of scenes of graphic physical torment that detail the gradual imposition of systemic order on his flesh. In her reading of the many bizarre representations of physiological formation in Blake’s writing, Carmen Kreiter suggests that collectively they demonstrate ‘knowledge of a sort generally possessed only by scientists versed in embryology and anatomy’.27 Yet Urizen’s dead body cannot develop through the normal process of morphogenesis, as inanimate matter it is capable of change only in the form of dissection, manipulation or decomposition. In a perverse reflection of the suffering of Tearguts’ silent patient, Urizen endures a traumatic birth, which is also a form of autopsy in reverse. To depict this process, Blake opens up the innermost recesses of the body to the surgeon-anatomist’s gaze and the invasive procedure of dissection, evoking the alien nature of the internal landscape of the body. This effect of estrangement is particularly striking in the account of the formation of Urizen’s heart. Far from the metaphoric ‘seat of the emotions’, it is a disturbingly tangible mass of muscle and sinew, ‘Panting: Conglobing, Trembling’ (BU 11:5; E 76) into being. Kreiter calls attention to the unusual nature of this description, which seems deliberately to avoid terms like ‘beating’ or ‘pounding’ so often used in poetic evocations of the heart. Instead Blake’s description is designed to elicit ‘something seen only when the heart is viewed through a surgically opened chest’.28 The visceral imagery of the passage conjures up the fleshly, gory spectacle of the autopsy table or operating theatre, a vision of the body’s interior as pulsing, bloody, and vulnerable. 144 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen

Figure 17  William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 14 (Bentley 11) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Blake uses the distorting effect of this extreme, anatomised perspective to defamiliarise the most intimate of processes and force the reader to confront the dehumanisation of the body inherent in medical science. In seven stanzas comprising seven distinct and visually arresting phases Blake • 145

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The misbegotten maps the formation of each body part from the bones to the organs, the senses, and the limbs, like sections in an anatomy textbook. Each part of the deformed organism that is Urizen’s body is described in isolation like the horrifying ‘Portions of life; similitudes / Of a foot, or a hand, or a head / Or a heart, or an eye’ (BU 23:4–6; E 81) that emerge later to populate Urizen’s world – images reminiscent of anatomical teaching aids or ‘preparations’.29 As Codsi notes, the grotesque nature of this imagery ‘is so inflated that it collapses into the absurd’,30 and yet as with Urizen’s birth Blake does not simply retreat to an ironic distance but emphasises the very real distress of those, like Los, who bear witness to such macabre absurdities. He thus insists these events be viewed simultaneously as travesty and tragedy. Accordingly, each stanza that describes the visceral horror of Urizen being bound ever more tightly in his monstrous body also ends with the bathetic, pompous refrain: ‘And a first [second/third] Age passed over, / And a state of dismal woe’ (BU 10:42–3; E 75). The equivocal tone of the passage both satirises Urizen’s self-importance and expresses genuine grief at the loss of his Eternal being, his ‘prolific delight’ that is ‘obscurd more and more’ (BU 10:12; E 75) by the process of physical embodiment he himself unwittingly initiated. Fittingly, therefore, the first part of his body to coalesce from the jumble of disorder is the skull, ‘a roof shaggy wild inclos’d / In an orb, his fountain of thought’ (BU 10:33–4; E 75), which acts as a prison for the mind. Urizen’s senses are stillborn; his ears are ‘petrified’, implying a deadening process of calcification, and his eyes, ‘little orbs’, are shrivelled and pathetic (BU 12:13; E 76). This stunted body is a physical manifestation of a reductive model of the self derived from Enlightenment thinkers, which treats conscious experience as no more than the processing of information from the senses and the body no more than an ‘animal machine’ in William Hunter’s words. By producing what Blake believed were empty rationalisations of the fallen world, man had become complicit in the creation of the elaborate prison of the material universe by fashioning a corresponding prison for the mind. For Blake, such a model limits human existence to that of a mindless automaton adrift in a cold, indifferent universe. This dismal condition of life is later revealed to be endemic to Urizen’s world in the final chapters of the poem where his ‘sons & daughters’ experience a perverse form of physical maturation that manifests as shrinkage and deterioration, a symbol of their spiritual stuntedness beneath Urizen’s all-encompassing ‘Net of Religion’ (BU 25:22; E 82). This mirrors the process of spiritual and physical degeneration that Satan undergoes in Paradise 146 •

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen Lost through the sequence of transformations that turn him from angel to serpent. The true significance of Urizen’s chaotic, corpse-like body in The [First] Book of Urizen rests in the implication that it simultaneously represents that which is anathema to life and the condition of the development of life in the fallen universe. In order for meaningful existence to evolve, the mindless disorganisation of his material body that signals an eruption of the abject must be confined within the rational system of the medicalised body so that its true nature can be suppressed and forgotten. Yet the embodied Urizen is a slave to the involuntary sensations, instincts and processes that drive his mechanical body and are beyond the control of conscious rationality. It is a body ‘built to frustrate itself from its beginnings’ in Tristanne Connolly’s words.31 The sense of panic that accompanies his palpitating ‘birth pains’ intensifies as he grows, as if his burgeoning physicality is increasingly defined by helplessness and bewildered suffering. Weak and exposed, his newly formed body is continually needy and restless, like a grotesquely overgrown newborn infant his stomach is ‘A craving Hungry Cavern’ (BU 13:6; E 76), infinitely ravenous without any hope of satiation. The body created of and for Urizen is not just a visual horror, it is an impossible, irrational contradiction – an enclosed void, limited by its corporeal needs but limitless in its fleshly hunger. In this body he is bound within his own monstrous vision: ‘Cut off from life & light frozen / Into horrible forms of deformity’ (13:42–3; E 77). Moreover, he is bound, as Mann observes, both as a body and as a book – Blake’s own hideous progeny – a bleak commentary on the role of the author during a demoralising period of his life.32 The [First] Book of Urizen can profitably be read as part of the radical redeployment of the tropes of monstrosity with Urizen, the dark father, occupying the position of the self-corrupting and abusive authority who is made to suffer the horrors of his own system. A caricature of enlightened paternalism, Urizen believes that he is acting out of rational altruism when he is in fact driven by a disastrous combination of egotism and affective detachment. Like the learned establishmentarians of the period, Urizen reframes his acts of violence and oppression as part of a rational programme of social and epistemological advancement rejecting any deviation from his system as self-evidently irrational. His monstrous, anatomised body is therefore not simply an ironic reflection of his adherence to a degenerate, materialist philosophy, but also a comment on Britain’s • 147

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The misbegotten willingness to tolerate the endemic corruption and hypocrisy of its own body politic. The tacit acceptance of the widespread theft of the bodies of the poor, which reduced them to the status of carcasses to be fed to the ever-hungry anatomy schools, represents only one example of the way late eighteenth-century Britain exploited and debased its own people. Urizen, the self-anatomised automaton, is the emblem of this rotten society – a monstrous tyrant who has locked himself in the irrational prison of his debased body and severed himself from the imaginative faculty necessary to transcend his condition. The circular and disjointed narrative of The [First] Book of Urizen pointedly provides little hope that there is any way out of this self-destructive dynamic. Notes 1 Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, pp. 10–29. 2 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 76. 3 Ibid., p. 96. 4 Botting, Making Monstrous, p. 51. 5 For George Gilpin this vision of authoritarian schematisation is a possible satire on John Hunter’s ‘boring and egotistical lectures’. See Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’, p. 42. The caricature of pompous conservative rationalism would seem to fit his elder brother William more closely, however. John only rarely gave lectures while William as Professor of Anatomy and obstetrician to Queen Charlotte embodied the self-interested alliance between the intellectual and social elites of the era. 6 The satirical experiments described in Book III include an effort to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, turn excrement back into food, and revive a dog by inflating its intestines. See Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, pp. 167–74. 7 Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights. In the case of Baillie, her opposition to animal mistreatment is particularly notable given that she lived for many years with her uncle John Hunter, the famed surgeon-anatomist who was known to have performed vivisections on dogs and other animals. See Slagle, ‘John Hunter and Joanna Baillie’. 8 Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science, p. 88. 9 Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, pp. 42–8. 10 G.E. Bentley Jr. identifies Sipsop with the son of Blake’s then patrons Mr and Mrs Mathew whose bourgeois intellectual circle is the subject of the satire. Henry Mathew was apprenticed to John Hunter. See Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, pp. 81–2. 11 It is likely that Blake had first-hand knowledge of Hunter’s coarse manner and obsession with unusual anatomical specimens (both legally and illegally

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Anatomy and the birth of horror in Urizen obtained), lending an air of familiarity to the caricature. See Bentley, Stranger from Paradise, pp. 12, 70, 82. 12 See Codsi, this volume, pp. 150–62. 13 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 153. 14 Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, p. 57. 15 Ibid., pp. 7–29. 16 For more on Blake’s familiarity with William and John Hunter and their work, see Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’. 17 Quoted in Darlington, ‘The Teaching of Anatomy’, p. 270. 18 Kemp, ‘True to Their Natures’, p. 80. 19 Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture, pp. 100–1. 20 For a thorough discussion of the influence of anatomy and anatomical engravings on Blake’s visual aesthetic see the chapter titled ‘Graphic Bodies’ in Connolly, William Blake and the Body, pp. 25–72. 21 Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, pp. 30–1. 22 Mann, ‘The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book’, p. 50. 23 Tunzelmann, ‘Reflexive Vectors’, p. 64. 24 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, p. 3. 25 Lewis, The Monk, p. 302. 26 Collings, Monstrous Society, p. 120. 27 Kreiter, ‘Evolution and William Blake’, p. 112. Connolly sees references to both the leading contemporary theories of foetal development, epigenetic (where the structure of the foetus changes radically during gestation) and preformationist (in which the foetus simply expands in size), in Blake’s birth imagery. See Connolly, William Blake and the Body, pp. 80–2. 28 Kreiter, ‘Evolution and William Blake’, p. 114. Kreiter sees particular significance in Blake’s use of the term ‘conglobing’ but this is more likely to have been drawn from Milton than from an anatomical text. Its value for Blake is likely in its metaphorical yoking of the language of astronomical science with the imagery of anatomy. 29 Gilpin suggests that these objects may be intended to recall the kinds of unusual anatomical specimens and preparations that appeared in John Hunter’s museum. See Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’, p. 50. Many of the preparations originated as teaching aids used by William in his anatomy lessons. 30 See Codsi, this volume, pp. 150–62. 31 Connolly, William Blake and the Body, p. 93. 32 Mann, ‘The Book of Urizen and the Horizon of the Book’, pp. 50–1.

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Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection • Stephanie Codsi

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illiam Blake’s depiction of the body is frequently horrific, appealing to our sense of disgust and revulsion. From the alien vegetablelife of the ‘Dim & glutinous … white Polypus’ (BL 4:57; E 93) to the disturbing image of ‘screaming’ organs (BA 4:31; E 88), Blake’s bodies vacillate from the lifeless to the restless. In Blake’s horrific narratives, disjointed organs inhabit a life of their own: ‘a foot, or a hand, or a head / Or a heart, or an eye, they swam mischevous / Dread terrors! delighting in blood’ (BU 23:5–7; E 81). Typical of the Gothic aesthetic, the grotesqueness of this body imagery is so inflated that it collapses into the absurd. Indeed, Blake tends to use characteristics of the Gothic genre to comedic ends. Rolf P. Lessenich notes that from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), ‘the Gothic genres were self-parodic in their wellcalculated exaggerations’.1 Blake’s bodies similarly evoke a strange comedy through their very incongruity and excessive horror. This comic horror very often turns on the imagery of a spectacle, depicted as a gruesome operation on the body, and witnessed by spectators whose reactions are marked by terror and revulsion. This type of spectacle frequently occurs through the frame of a metanarrative, which itself draws attention to spectatorship and audience. Gothic spectacle is closely associated with the medium of the theatre, with its visual splendour; Blake partakes of this medium through the dramatic performativity of his work.2 Triggered by disbelief or shock, laughter turns easily to horror and horror to laughter: transgressing boundaries can be variously sincere and absurd.3 150 •

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Blake ’ s Gothic humour In Blake’s poetry, operations upon the body involve division, mapping, or exploration of the anatomy (‘The Mental Traveller’ and The [First] Book of Urizen are just some cases). These operations, in which the body is treated as a ‘calculable assemblage’4 − hearts are cut on each ‘side’, nerves are counted, or ‘number[ed]’ (‘The Mental Traveller’ 15, 17; E 484) − are nearly always witnessed by spectators. These processes of division, charting, or calculation suggest an anatomical practice that draws attention to both the performativity and subjectivity of the human body: dissection. The anatomist’s performance on the corpse is a ‘performance’ – or demonstration – to crowded theatres or lecture halls. This performance upon the body, in turn, highlights the performance of the body, that is, how the body operates. In Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture, Elizabeth Klaver writes: ‘intriguing in the medical discourse of performing autopsy is the dual significance of the word “performance” … performance as action and performance for an audience’.5 The word ‘operation’ similarly has its roots in ‘opera’ as meaning both work and public entertainment. In Blake, these dissecting operations on the body are portrayed as a horrific spectacle through the frame of metanarrative. What is more, the excessive horror of the spectacle often has a comic edge, which reinforces the sense of entertainment and show. Blake’s play with Gothic imagery in his scenes of dissection is pertinent, since dissection seeks to uncover the interiority of the body – the hidden depths in which the Gothic often dwells. This chapter considers how the body is treated through the imagery of dissection, which Blake variously illustrates through an absurd comedy of Gothic spectacle. Blake’s use of Gothic spectacle in his depictions of dissection mark an implicit critique of what he refers to as ‘demonstration’, along with the empirical obsession with ‘calculable assemblages’. My chapter focuses also on the role of the spectator, in terms of their response to the scenes of dissection that they witness: Blake draws significant attention to the spectator’s reactions of shock and revulsion, and there is a curious sense of Gothic humour in the scenes. I will first look at the use of spectacle through the framed narrative of Quid the Cynic’s song in An Island in the Moon (1784–85), and the angel’s vision of the apes in plate 20 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790). These I will compare with scenes from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), William Hogarth’s engraving, The Reward of Cruelty (1751), and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). To develop my discussion, I will also be comparing these scenes in Blake with ‘The Mental Traveller’ • 151

The misbegotten (1807) and The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), which deal with comparable operations on the body.

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The Hunter Brothers: dissection, theatre, art The Gothic is largely concerned with the instability of subjectivity: ‘theatrical excess underlines The Monk’s subliminal message, which is that identity is performative, something which changes with the words or parts that constitute it’.6 Blake clearly exploits this instability of subjectivity: bodies (are) split apart, become fragmented, divided, or turned inside out. What is curious about these events is that there is nearly always a spectator witnessing this body division (for example, Los in Urizen’s in The [First] Book of Urizen, or the witness in ‘The Mental Traveller’ who ‘heard & saw such dreadful things’ [‘The Mental Traveller’ 3; E 483]). In these scenes, Blake’s division of the body suggests Gothic spectacle in which the revulsion that a spectator experiences is in part a response to a projection of his or her own subjectivity.7 Dissection, the operations of which involve mapping, abstraction, and division, calls attention to this instability of subjectivity. The search for a ‘calculable assemblage’ requires that the body be disassembled; the operations of life are discovered through death. The irony of this empirical project did not escape Blake: ‘to Blake, the great irony of John Hunter’s experiments … was that the medical scientist, in his effort to understand “life”, had to dwell intellectually and obsessively on death … morbid anatomy and the obsessions of the curiosity cabinet thus pre-empted life and the living’.8 In the culture of the Enlightenment, Stafford explains that ‘metaphors of decoding … analysing, fathoming, permeated ways of thinking about, and representing, all branches of knowledge from religion to philosophy …, archaeology to surgery’.9 There are profound implications of Blake’s abhorrence of these ‘branches of knowledge’, connected to the ways in which the body had increasingly come under the lens of empirical scrutiny: ‘the common thread that links the scientific efforts of a Newton … and a Hunter is their shared effort to define creation by rational laws and divisive rules’.10 Lucy Cogan, in Chapter 5, also recognises Blake’s critique of the Enlightenment in his depictions of body division: Cogan sees Urizen’s divided anatomy in The [First] Book of Urizen as ‘a satire on the Enlightenment impulse to categorise, quantify and define’. These empirical methods implied an expectation of the unearthing of universal truths through a probing examination of the body. Simon Chaplin states 152 •

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Blake ’ s Gothic humour that ‘Georges Arnaud de Ronsil (1698–1774) used his lectures to extol the value of the dissecting knife as “truth’s best discoverer”, insisting that anatomy was “to a surgeon as a chart to a seaman”.’11 Professor of anatomy, Jean-Joseph Suë (1760–1830) extended this analogy of discovery when he applied it to the practice of art. Barbara Stafford, quoting Suë, asserts that ‘the critical artist “must bring the scalpel” to the human machine. He must “traverse, visit, interrogate all its paths … to finally know the entire internal mechanism”.’12 William Hunter, professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts where Blake studied, asserted that anatomical knowledge was essential for the study of art.13 This obsession with ultimate knowledge and evidence is, according to Blake, ‘worldly wisdom or demonstration’ (Annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom 12; E 603). Such knowledge betrays a lack of imagination or faith: ‘refusing to believe without demonstration’ (J 91:35; E 251). In Blake’s view, these empirical practices foregrounded the horrors of demonstration through the analysis of what Suë had put forward as an ‘internal mechanism’. In the Public Address, Blake states that ‘A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art’ (PA 46; E 575). At the same time, the mechanistic view recalled Newtonian and Deist conceptions of a detached God, rather than one that was part of the human condition.14 This method of judgmental detachment was encouraged in both artists and spectators. As Joshua Reynolds (one of the Royal Academy founders) stated: ‘enthusiastick admiration seldom promotes knowledge’ (Reynolds 55; E 647); such an attitude conflicted with Blake’s own views that the spectator of his art enter his work as a lived experience. Conversely, rational analysis and observation, empirical methods used in the practice of dissection, deaden art. Diane Piccitto calls attention to Blake’s use of ‘spectator’ in his description of A Vision of the Last Judgment: ‘Blake uses the term “Spectator” rather than viewer to indicate someone who, by seeing, involves herself in the spectacle’.15 While uncanny involvement is implicated in Gothic spectacle, Blake goes beyond it to an embodied experience: ‘to enter Blake’s work means being affected not only spiritually … but also physically as we literally take a step into them’.16 This literal incorporation is expressed in Blake’s view of the Divine Humanity – god residing in the human breast – and the role of the imagination in perceiving that state of eternity. Dissection, by contrast, served to remind the spectator of his own mortality. Stafford has drawn comparisons between Blake’s engraving of line and the work of the anatomist: ‘the engraved trace itself was nothing • 153

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The misbegotten more than an empty vein or tubular fibre. Waiting to be filled with ink, it was literally synonymous for Blake with art as energetic execution.’17 This is an intriguing analogy, though I see some differences at work. The line, equated by Blake in A Descriptive Catalogue with ‘life itself ’ (DC 65; E 550), evokes the creation of something new: the engraver creates new form and definition with his line, revealing an ‘infinite’ body of the imagination. The anatomist, however, scientifically examines the finite body of flesh; he is like Urizen, who ‘form’d a line & a plummet / To divide the Abyss beneath’ (BU 20:33–4; E 80). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the image of ‘melting apparent surfaces away to display the infinite that was hid’ implies an annihilation of the limitations (‘the surface’) of sense perception through creative processes – it takes a dramatic ‘display’ of art for the spectator to expand vision (since ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ [MHH 14; E 39]). The anatomist displays the body through the application of ‘Mathematical Proportion of Length Bredth Highth’, whereas the engraver or artist ‘display[s]’ ‘Naked Beauty’ (M 4:27–8; E 98).18 As Piccitto points out, such display is necessarily dramatic. Even though the demonstration of dissection had an educational purpose, its typical performance was theatrical. Chaplin argues that ‘as a form of public spectacle the dissections at Surgeons’ Hall were highly successful … Notorious criminal cases spurred public interest’.19 This culture of spectacle was epitomised in John Hunter’s museum, which exhibited an array of preserved body parts, along with the names of the individuals to whom these body parts were once attached.20 Hunter’s museum displays literally Blake’s ghastly catalogue in The [First] Book of Urizen: ‘a foot, or a hand … Or a heart, or an eye, they swam mischevous / Dread terrors! delighting in blood’ (BU 23:6–7; E 81). The segmentation of these body parts in the museum was likely to have had a profound effect on the observer’s sense of a coherent subjectivity in seeing these specimens that were both exterior to themselves yet a reflection of their interiority. Cogan notes that the anatomical study The Female Gravid Uterus (1774), by William Hunter, imposes ‘an uncomfortable intimacy with the dissected bodies’,21 seeing this in relation to the modern reader. I am more interested in how Blake foregrounds this sense of unease in the spectators or witnesses of dissection in An Island in the Moon and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and how the horror of the spectacle collapses into absurdity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject lends attention to the dissection of interiorities, in its contention that bodily fluids are a reminder of the 154 •

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Blake ’ s Gothic humour semiotic and are, as Sue Vice states, ‘signs of health when they are in the body, but signs of a dangerous transgression of boundaries when they are outside’.22 This transgression of boundaries – between spectator and spectacle, between interior and exterior – recalls the visual spectacle of Gothic theatre, which, in some cases is so real that it triggers extreme reactions of revulsion and fear in its audience. For instance, when Lewis’s The Captive was staged at Covent Garden (1803), Harriet Litchfield’s performance apparently caused a violent physiological effect in her audience: ‘a Man fell into convulsions in the Boxes … a Woman fainted away in the Pit’ and ‘two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics’.23 The spectators are thus so involved in the performance that they themselves become part of the spectacle: there is a suggestion of demonic possession or divine inspiration in these dramatic responses (convulsions, fainting, hysterics). The theatricality of Hunter’s museum was certainly more muted than Gothic theatre, but the catalogued body parts equally evoked shock and revulsion by its display of the hidden interior life. The sense of theatricality may also have been related to the awareness that many of the body parts were procured from criminals hung at the Tyburn gallows, London, itself a spectacle through public punishment.24 Judgment and cruelty are paralleled in the title and illustrations of Hogarth’s engraved series, The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). The final stage, The Reward of Cruelty, illustrates a public demonstration of a dissection. Fiona Haslam notes that ‘Hogarth’s “President” … sits in his chair of dignity in its elevated position, as if in judgement’.25 Albion occupies a similar position of judgment in Jerusalem, through teaching his ‘children sacrifices of cruelty’ (23:17; E 168).26 Such an elevated position of moral superiority suggests Blake’s view of Reynolds, with all the implications of rational detachment that the Discourses encourages in his students. Haslam goes on to state that, in ‘The Reward of Cruelty’, ‘the victimisation in the scene … in spite of its gruesome subject matter, contains elements of humour, realism and satire’.27 Dissection through spectacle and demonstration: An Island in the Moon Blake deploys these elements of humour, realism and satire in An Island in the Moon, a prose sketch that parodies the supposed wit and scientific erudition of certain members of the Johnson Circle.28 The song of Jack • 155

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The misbegotten Tearguts resonates with the satire of both Peacock and Swift, while drawing attention to theatrical performance through ridiculous names and dialogue; Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey uses humorous names such as the Honourable Mr Lackwit, a device used by Blake in Island with names such as Inflammable Gas, Mrs Nannicantipot, not to mention ‘Tearguts’ himself. The song about Jack Tearguts (Island 6; E 454), sung by Quid the Cynic, is a recital that frames the narrative of Tearguts’ own surgical performance.29 Although Island satirises the salon setting as an environment of pretentious wit, the song that Quid sings for the other characters punctuates the merry atmosphere to present a bloody and grotesque allegory about surgery. In the song, Surgery is personified as the offspring of Corruption (father) and Flesh (mother), who ‘would not let him suck’ (Island 6:12; E 454). Surgery and dissection, in this scene, become monstrous acts and the body a site of vulgarity. Since Flesh, in this song, resists Surgery, the latter swears revenge: ‘And this he always kept in mind / And formd a crooked knife’ (Island 7:13–14; E 454).30 What ensues is so ludicrous that disgust is temporarily suspended by absurdity: in short, Surgery impregnates a dead woman, whose offspring are ‘Scurvy’ and ‘Fever’.31 Surgery, then, causes as much damage as the diseases it would correct: For now I have procurd these imps Ill try experiments With that he tied poor scurvy down & stopt up all its vents And when the child began to swell He shouted out aloud Ive found the dropsy out & soon Shall do the world more good He took up fever by the neck And cut out all its spots And thro the holes which he had made He first discovered guts. (Island 7:25–36; E 455)

Blake’s use of the Gothic ballad exploits the narrative suspense and comic tension inherent in its metrical form. The poem highlights the horrors of demonstration and experiment for the sole purpose of ‘discovery’. Surgery’s experiments to ‘do the world more good’ merely generate scurvy and fever: malformation and deformity ensue from Tearguts’s project. This type of warped logic and ludicrous horror echoes Swift’s A Modest Proposal. The impossibility, or indeed the incredulity of Swift’s proposal turns its 156 •

Blake ’ s Gothic humour

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excessive horror into an absurd comedy.32 It also satirises the convenience and cruelty of its economy (Swift includes a list of calculations on the financial benefit of the proposal), which is what Blake does in ‘The Mental Traveller’: Her fingers number every Nerve Just as a Miser counts his gold She lives upon his shrieks & cries And She grows young as he grows old. (17–20; E 484).

This numbering and cataloguing – implicit in the study of anatomy – is portrayed as a type of avaricious occupation, and empirical knowledge as a type of possession or economy over the body. Returning to the story of Jack Tearguts, Quid’s song exposes the uneasy relationship between learning and spectacle through the demonstrations of dissection; the framed narrative of this blundering massacre functions as a sly parody of the detached demonstration of empirical operations: one is always at one remove from the tale, so that its immediacy (though not its horror) is lost on the reader. The surreal song is punctuated by an interjection of realism when one of the listeners declares: ‘there was a woman having her cancer cut & she shriekd so, that I was quite sick’ (Island 6; E 455). An extreme reaction such as this draws attention to how spectacle affects subjectivity. It also points forward to the famed reactions of spectators at the Grand Guignol.33 This dynamic between spectacle and subjectivity is developed in The [First] Book of Urizen: Los’s reaction to his own operation on Urizen’s body – just like the listener of the song in Island – is one of a heightened shock and disgust: ‘In terrors Los shrunk from his task: / His great hammer fell from his hand … sickening’ (BU 13:20–22; E 77). I see a resemblance between Los’s and Victor’s reaction on first witnessing the spectacle of their creation. When Victor ‘beheld the accomplishment of [his] toils’ a ‘breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart’.34 The abject response of Los also recalls The Monk’s Lorenzo, who finds an emaciated woman on the brink of death: ‘Lorenzo stopped: he was petrified with horror. He gazed upon the miserable object with disgust and pity. He trembled at the spectacle.’35 The similarities to Blake’s imagery are manifest: petrification, pity, and trembling are all experienced through this spectacle of corporeal disintegration. The Gothic spectacle of horror, then, profoundly affects subjectivity: the spectator uncannily experiences what he or she witnesses. As Blake remarks in Jerusalem, ‘Terrified at the sight of the Victim: at • 157

The misbegotten his distorted sinews! / … Sudden they become like what they behold’ (65:72–5; E 217).

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Dissection and spectacle in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘ A Memorable Fancy ’ Performance and spectacle are integral to the scene of the apes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (MHH 18–20; E 41–2). The ‘eternal lot’ of the angel and the devil are depicted through a visual spectacle that is revealed through the respective other. The devil says: ‘now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I shew you yours?’ (MHH 19; E 42) This exchange is presented through the frame of a visual ‘show’ or performance, which evokes a sense of comic horror: Soon we saw seven houses of brick … in it were a number of monkeys, baboons & all of that species, chaind by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another … the weak were caught by the strong and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with them & then devourd, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk. (MHH 20; E 42)

The strange interplay between comedy and horror in this scene is borne out by the apes ‘grinning’ while they perform the action of ‘plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk’. This act of dissection suggests the methodical work of the anatomist in analysing and dividing the different parts of the body. There is also a sense of victimisation in the image of the body as a ‘helpless trunk’, which is apparent in Tearguts’ savage surgery.36 The dissected body is either lifeless or restless in these scenes, but their shared savage treatment commands the spectator’s attention. The revulsion of the cannibalistic and sexually depraved monkey house, together with the extravagance of the ‘monstrous serpent’ (MHH 18; E 41) in the previous scene suggest that these are spectacles which aim to incite horror in its audience; as the angel says, ‘thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed’ (MHH 20; E 42). A reaction such as this resembles the generally hostile response of the literary establishment to Gothic fiction and drama.37 The devil tells the reader that the angel responds to his invitation to view the spectacle by ‘laugh[ing] at my proposal: but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms’ in order to ‘shew’ him his ‘eternal lot’ (MHH 19; E 42). The violence of the devil’s vision, coupled with the angel’s reaction of both revulsion and laughter, suggests a reaction to Gothic spectacle that 158 •

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Blake ’ s Gothic humour induces ‘the refusal to see and contemplate what confronts us’ though ‘we cannot help watching’.38 Just like the excessive horror of Tearguts’ performance, the dissecting and cannibalistic act of the monkeys is so horrific that it becomes absurdly comic: Sue Zlosnik and Avril Horner argue that ‘such incongruity opens up the possibility of a comic turn that deliberately exploits the fragile boundary between comedy and horror’.39 Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey garishly highlights the comic turn of the Gothic: ‘Deathshead was always grinning – not a ghastly smile, but the grin of a comic mask; and disturbed the echoes of the hall with so much unhallowed laughter.’40 This emphasis upon a garish laughter is highlighted in the ape scene, in which all the apes and baboons are ‘grinning’ like a skull’s rictus smile. Nightmare Abbey also draws upon the supposed depravity of theatre and spectacle: ‘the world being a great theatre of evil … laugher and merriment make a human being no better than a baboon’.41 The ape also makes an entrance further on in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where its comparative anatomy is used as a spectacle and performance: ‘a man carried a monkey about for a shew’ (MHH 21; E 42). The monkey here, just like in the earlier scene of the devil and angel, is the focus of the show. Where the first scene implies that the man theatrically exploits the monkey to show up his own supposed intellectual and anatomical superiority, the later scene exaggerates this absurd spectacle in order to highlight the offended subjectivity of the angel. In both these scenes, therefore, the performativity of the apes reveals to the audience something horrific and obscene about themselves: they witness a reflection of their own subjectivity through the spectacle.42 Blake thus draws attention to the nature of perception: it is only through imaginative commitment that art becomes a lived experience, rather than a dead specimen. Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment similarly invites the spectator of his art to ‘become what they behold’: ‘if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom’ (VLJ 82; E 560). Imaginative identification, however, is something that the angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is incapable of. Conclusion Gothic spectacle throws a comic light on the anatomist’s curious probing and grasping of ‘knowledge’: the Gothic withholds information, and the anatomist obsessively seeks it. Yet, mystery was at the heart of the empirical quest for knowledge that found expression in ‘morbid anatomy and the • 159

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The misbegotten obsessions of the curiosity cabinet’.43 The empiricists were seeking logical connections, which the Gothic mode thwarted. But Blake’s comic horror of dissection through Gothic spectacle had particular resonance for his own attitude to the spectator of his art. An Island in the Moon leaves the role of spectatorship unresolved, but The Marriage of Heaven and Hell finds a resolution in the angel’s eventual absorption in the spectacle: ‘I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah’ (MHH 24; E 43, my emphasis). Ultimately, the excessive horror of the bodily operations in Island and Marriage encourages a comedy that is induced by shock or incredulity. These scenes make it impossible for the reader to remain a detached and impassive spectator; as Blake would desire of his reader, these scenes demand a complete involvement of the imagination. Notes 1 Lessenich, Neoclassical Satire, p. 138. 2 I will be looking at Diane Piccitto’s idea of spectatorship in her book, Blake’s Drama. I refer here to ‘performativity’ as action, in Blake’s ‘arousing the faculties to act’. 3 See Kant’s incongruity theory in his Critique of Judgment: ‘Something absurd … must be present in whatever is to raise a hearty convulsive laugh. Laughter is an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing’, p. 161, original emphasis. 4 Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 107. 5 Klaver, Sites of Autopsy, p. 37. 6 Punter, A New Companion to the Gothic, p. 106. 7 The infamous Grand Guignol’s horror shows, for instance, had spectators vomiting or fainting during performances. 8 Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’, p. 39. 9 Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 47. 10 Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’, p. 37. 11 Chaplin, ‘The Divine Touch’, p. 226. This declaration has echoes of Frankenstein’s ambitious quest of ‘pursu[ing] nature to her hiding places’ (Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 82). 12 Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 115. 13 See Porter, ‘William Hunter’. 14 ‘I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; / Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me’ (J 4:18–19; E 146). 15 Piccitto, Blake’s Drama, p. 64. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, the Spectator is willed to ‘enter’ into the artwork through the imagination, but such an

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Blake ’ s Gothic humour entrance is evoked as an entire bodily experience. Perhaps hindering such an involvement is the Spectre in Blake. The Spectre relates to Gothic spectacle, not only etymologically, but through the genre’s larger concern with split identities (Jekyll and Hyde, for instance). The Spectre resembles Hyde in the uncanny counterfeit or imitation of the real man, and is thus a reflection of the spectators’ own interiority and mortality, a reflection which underlies the performativity at work in Gothic spectacle. 16 Piccitto, Blake’s Drama, p. 64. 17 Stafford, Body Criticism, p. 55. 18 ‘The Infant Joy is beautiful, but its anatomy / Horrible ghast & deadly!’ (J 22:22–3; E 167). 19 Chaplin, ‘John Hunter, David Hume, and the Bishop of Durham’s Rectum’, p. 225. 20 Ibid., p. 230. 21 Cogan, ‘William Blake’s monstrous progeny’, this volume, pp. 150–62. 22 Vice, Introducing Bhaktin, p. 164. 23 Lewis, quoted in Macdonald, Monk, p. 160. 24 Tyburn is depicted in Blake as a place of public sacrifice: ‘the Sun set in Tyburns Brook where Victims howl & cry’ (J 62:34; E 213). 25 Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, p. 261. 26 Albion’s children can here be seen as his students; the sacrifices are the teachings of ‘moral virtue’, but here imply the separation of Albion from his emanation, Jerusalem. 27 Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, p. 257. 28 Joseph Johnson, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Fuseli and several other eminent figures. They held regular social gatherings and intellectual debates over dinner at Johnson’s house in London. 29 In the first reading of the work, John Hunter’s name was given, but subsequently deleted. 30 In the OED, ‘crook’ has meanings of: ‘an instrument or weapon’, ‘the staff of a bishop’, and, the etymology of ‘deceit, trickery’ as in a crook or thief. If Blake had any of these meanings in mind, he is not only associating the surgeon with the priest, but both with crookedness. 31 Richardson notes the risks that surgery used to carry: ‘many patients died on the operating table, or shortly after leaving it, from pain, shock, loss of blood and exhaustion. Many more died afterward, having survived the surgery, but not the ensuing infection’, in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, p. 40. 32 Swift, A Modest Proposal. The essay is a satire against the treatment of the poor. It is mockingly addressed to the Irish poor whose burden would be eased by the proposal of selling their children as food for rich families: ‘A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome • 161

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The misbegotten food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout’, p. 53. 33 See note 7. 34 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 84, p. 85. 35 Lewis, The Monk, p. 311. 36 ‘he’ll plunge his knife up to the hilt in a single drive and thrust his fist in … he does not mind their crying – tho they cry ever so he’ll Swear at them & keep them down with his fist & tell them that he’ll scrape their bones if they don’t lay still & be quiet’ (Island 6; E454). 37 ‘In the 1790s … critics turned their attention to the moral dangers of the Gothic, and particularly to its perceived political dimensions and effects’, Halsey, ‘Gothic and the History of Reading, 1764–1830’, p. 172. 38 Saglia, ‘Gothic theatre’, p. 355. This scene resonates with Bakhtin’s theory of ‘degradation’ in view of his Carnival of the Grotesque. See Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World. Carnival – with its etymological root of ‘flesh’ – strikes a chord with the cannibalism in this scene. 39 Zlosnik and Horner, ‘Comic Gothic’, p. 321. 40 Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter 1. 41 Ibid., chapter 4. 42 The devil is thus playing on the angel’s sense of moral superiority. 43 Gilpin, ‘Blake and the World’s Body of Science’, pp. 35–6.

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Part III

Female space and the image

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7 The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present • Peter Otto There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. … Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.1

T

he accounts of creation included in Blake’s continental prophecies – America a Prophecy (1793), Europe a Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los (1795) – are summary reports, little more than an index or diagram of a catastrophe that seems still to be unfolding in the present. Despite their brevity, they tug at the surface of these poems, threatening to turn them inside out, by revealing that their subject matter (the cycle of revolution and reaction) and the historical events they re-present (the establishment of religion, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and so on) are epiphenomena of a more fundamental history. This sets the scene for the first three books of Blake’s ‘Bible of Hell’– The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), and The Book of Los (1795) – in which historical events are displaced by a narrative that explains, now in great detail, how the constellation of energies/bodies that structures this world came into being. In these works, the creation is the work of human rather than divine hands; its emergence is isomorphic with the Fall; and as such it no longer provides a foundation able to legitimate the existing order of things. But as this archaeology of the present is elaborated, it begins to fragment: each of these works provide • 165

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Female space and the image different perspectives on what seems to be the same sequence of events, and in so doing evoke a catastrophe so vast it cannot be mastered by any single observer. The narratological, epistemological, and political problems introduced by Blake’s Bible of Hell are intensified in The Four Zoas (1797–1807), which contains at least fifteen different accounts of creation, but which also sets out to describe, in detail, the relation between the sublime creation of the world, the constellation of forces it sets in place, the ruin of human history, which rests on these foundations, and its disastrous conclusion. The historical events described in the continental prophecies, which are locked in an unending cycle, and the foundational events sketched in the Bible of Hell are here coordinated with each other, producing a poem (even in the unfinished state in which Blake left it) of remarkable poetic, descriptive, and analytic power. The developments I have been tracing arguably were prompted by events in France – the September massacres (1792), the execution of Louis XVI (1793), the Festival of the Supreme Being (8 June 1793), in which Maximilien Robespierre played the part of high priest, the Reign of Terror (June 1793–July 1794), the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), and so on.2 At this time it seemed to many that the regenerated nation foreshadowed by the fall of the Bastille (14 July 1789) and glimpsed on occasions such as the féte de la fédération (14 July 1790) had slipped out of reach. Still worse, the past seemed to have reappeared in the present, albeit in new guise. Why? ‘What was the structure that enabled the past to colonise the present and supplant it – its desires, its intentions, its very identity as the moment when the future is determined afresh’?3 This is the question that animates Blake’s archaeologies of the present and conditions their form, which brings together the archaic and modern – biblical creation stories and fashionable Gothic fictions – in ways that defamiliarise them both. In the late eighteenth century, it seemed obvious to many that the rise of Gothic fictions could be linked to the social and political changes sparked by the French Revolution. According to the Marquis de Sade’s well-known formula, the Gothic is ‘the necessary fruit of the revolutionary traumas felt by the whole of Europe’,4 while for William Hazlitt ‘Mrs. Radcliffe’s “enchantments drear”, and mouldering castles, derived part of their interest … from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time’.5 For the first, the larger-than-life horrors of Gothic fiction 166 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies were the result of an attempt to compete in, and for the second a way of retreating from, a cultural environment already saturated with images of real horror. Blake always revises as he borrows and in so doing, by recontextualising motifs or arranging them in a different order, makes the familiar seem strange. This is nowhere more evident than in his borrowings from Gothic fiction, which can seem everywhere in his work and, if one is looking for a straightforward correspondence between original and copy, nowhere at all. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to say that Gothic fiction, whether directly or mediated by the work of friends such as the Swiss-born British painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825),6 provided Blake with a lexicon and iconography of elemental conflict and of powerful affect. Blake’s Bible of Hell and The Four Zoas are marked by Gothic images of catastrophic ruin, suffering bodies, horrific cruelty, ‘perverse’ passion, and elemental conflict, which provide variously distorting mirrors to ‘the revolutionary traumas felt by the whole of Europe’. But rather than foregrounding these ‘horizontal’ relations between history and popular fiction, or offering a means of reading the latter as an allegory of the former, these Gothic elements are used by Blake to represent the affective milieu that emerges when the Bible’s creation stories are aligned with human rather than divine actors and then brought into relation with the present. It is arguably this collocation of archaic creation and present violence that makes Blake such an important pre-text for and influence on the ‘all-too-fallible creator’ of humanity (one of the engineers) discovered in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, as discussed by Jason Whittaker in this volume. In what follows, I want to trace some of the contours of Blake’s archaeology of the present and, in rough outline, its relation to Gothic fiction and the political history of the late eighteenth century, by focusing on the seventeenth plate of The [First] Book of Urizen (Figure 18), Vegetating in fibres of Blood.7 This colour-printed relief etching appears in all extant copies of The [First] Book of Urizen, and in both copies of Blake’s ‘A Small Book of Designs’ (1796).8 It represents a key moment in Blake’s archaeology of the present, namely the division of Eve from Adam, which in the Bible and the Bible of Hell completes the constellation of elements that structures fallen history. The design represents, in other words, the hinge that connects a primal history with events unfolding in the present – indeed, while gazing into its ‘depths’ the past and the present seem to be superimposed on each other, creating the impression that the former • 167

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Female space and the image

Figure 18  William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 11 (Bentley 17) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 168 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies is haunting, perhaps even orchestrating, events unfolding in the latter. This uncanny resurgence of a violent past in a supposedly enlightened present is the primary source of the Gothic horror evoked by this design. And yet, as I will suggest in conclusion, it brings with it the possibility not of a return to what we ‘were before the calamity of yesterday’, but of exodus/emancipation from the present-past. Blake’s archaeologies of the present recall the primary Gothic trope of disinterment and its aftermath – the shocked recognition that the dead, buried, and forgotten still haunt the space of the present. And in so doing, they anticipate, on the one hand, Sigmund Freud’s account of traumatic origins, obsessive repetition, and the uncanny return of the repressed; and, on the other hand, Michel Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies, which teach us ‘how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin’, by revealing that the secret hidden in the origin of things is ‘that they have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’.9 Nevertheless, rather than using Freud or Foucault to frame Blake and Gothic fictions, which might imply that the former are able to master the phenomena explored by the latter, in the following pages my primary focus remains on Blake’s archaeologies, as they emerge in horrified response to events unfolding in France, and on the ways in which, as we gaze at Vegetating in fibres of Blood, it entangles the present of late eighteenth-century Europe in an archaic past supposedly dispatched by the present. In so doing I am implying a historical point of origin for a characteristically modern style of thought (as represented by Freud and Foucault), in the late eighteenth-century collapse of monarchical authority and of the metaphysical,10 which has the virtue, I hope, of making some of the most familiar of modern interpretative moves and assumptions seem strange. Gothic scenes Among the proliferating frames, plots, buildings, circumstances, events, and characters that form the disturbed surface of Gothic fiction, the same elementary scene comes again and again into view, in which incommensurate regimes, brought into focus by their respective champions, come into conflict with each other. Examples can easily be multiplied. In The Castle of Otranto (1764), the founding work of Gothic fictions, the conflict between Manfred and Alfonso brings antithetical social forms (in this case patriarchal and paternal) face to face with each other. The same can be • 169

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Female space and the image said of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–85); Vathek and Omar Ben Abdalaziz in William Beckford’s Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786); Montoni and St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); the Marquis and Carlos in Karl Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796); Ambrosio/Mathilda and Lorenzo/Raymond in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796); and so on. The elemental scene sketched by the struggle between these characters/regimes, notwithstanding the diverse contexts in which it is realised, is arguably one of ‘emergence’, understood not as the unfolding of a pre-existing essence or as the work primarily of human intention, but as a ‘conflict of forces’ that ‘produces some new historical configuration’.11 On the one hand, this scene brings Gothic fictions into dialogue with the genre’s most important political contexts: the English Civil War (1642–49), culminating in the execution of Charles I and establishment of the Commonwealth (1649); and the French Revolution (1789) and its aftermath.12 These events (amplified by many others) weaken the links traditionally thought to bind divine origin and political order to each other, making them look like a stage in the ‘play of dominations’,13 the drama around which Gothic fiction begins to orbit. On the other hand, this primal scene structures the key engines of Gothic horror, which for the ‘strong’ are produced by disturbances to the order they have established and for the ‘weak’ by the danger of interpolation in a barbaric or hostile order. Of course, if Gothic fictions were no more than a struggle between regimes, the institution of a new (or the restoration of an old) historical configuration would leave no remainder; in contrast, the struggles I have been describing are entwined with a still more destructive impulse, akin to what Grégoire Chamayou in Manhunts: A Philosophical History calls ‘cynegetic sovereignty’,14 which seems to have a life independent of the rise and fall of particular regimes. Vathek, Montoni, and Ambrosio are perhaps the most extreme representatives of this force, whose explicit or implicit links with supernatural powers (respectively Eblis, Satan, and Matilda) evoke a destructive energy in excess both of its objects and any particular regime. The horror associated with characters such as these is yoked to the despoliation and desecration of life, as seen in Vathek’s sacrifice of fifty children to the Giaour, Montoni’s predatory cruelty to Emily and his wife, and the array of suffering bodies and mutilated corpses found in The Monk. These primal scenes are inferred from surface events, and as such do not themselves become the primary object of Gothic fictions, 170 •

Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies but when we turn to Blake’s Vegetating in fibres of Blood, they move to the centre of attention.

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Vegetating in fibres of Blood At the centre of this unsettling design, a naked person, let us say a man (although the gender is indeterminate), kneels in an impenetrable darkness. With his body bent double and forehead almost touching the ground, he presses the palms of his hands firmly against the sides of his head. The horizontal band formed by the man’s powerful arms, which almost divides the design into two, is interrupted by the vertical lines formed by his hands, with their palms turned at right-angles to the viewer and fingers pointing straight up into the air. ‘What is he doing?’ The most obvious answer is that he has covered his ears in order to muffle whatever is happening around him. The darkness that engulfs him, the long hair covering his head, and the frame that crowds the image, all confirm this sense of self-imposed isolation. That much is clear; and yet the hands also seem to be holding the head in place, at the very centre of the design, at some slight distance from the body that kneels behind it and the red globe that hangs in the void below. Just as importantly, the hands draw attention to, while also helping to define, the vertical axis that draws the upper and lower halves of the picture together. We must look at these portions of the design, and the vertical axis that articulates them, in more detail. Above and behind the man’s head and arms, we can see his back, the upper part of his buttocks, and part of his legs, with his knees resting on the ground immediately behind his elbows. This seems straightforward enough until one realises that the streams, strings, or ‘fibres of Blood’ are flowing from the region of his genitals, which for viewers are hidden beneath the top of the upside-down ‘V’ formed by his kneeling body, and from his head. The blood it seems is also semen, which in the eighteenth century was still commonly thought to be a vital spirit, which originated in the brain, was a crucial element of the blood, and was gathered in the testicles.15 As Swedenborg remarks, ‘It is the Semen of Man in which lieth hid the inmost [Principle] of his Life, and thence the Inchoament or Beginning of a new Life, and from this Circumstance the Semen is holy.’16 As these rivers of blood and semen fall into the void beneath the man, they are accompanied by strands of his black hair, until the former congeals into a large globe of blood, which is suspended in the void beneath him. At first the globe looks like a planet or inverted • 171

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Female space and the image sun hovering in space; but the longer one stares at this form, the more it resembles a pool or mirror, on the surface of which there is a shadow cast, perhaps, by the man’s head, and into which he is in danger of falling. As we complete our journey along the vertical axis of this composition, and turn our gaze once more to the man’s head, the design divides again into two. The upper half is dominated by the light flesh-coloured form of the man’s back, arms, hands and fingers, which throw into relief the blacks, dark browns, and heavy reds of the lower half of the composition. The head at the centre of the design belongs to the man – that is not in dispute; and yet it seems also to belong to a shadowy female-form that can be seen standing in front of him. Can you see her? The lines marking the lower limit of the man’s forearms, trace the outline of her shoulders. The upper part of her body is draped by a scarlet cloak, over which long plaits of her hair have fallen. The globe of blood now seems to be held in the woman’s arms or, alternatively, it has become part of her body, the womb from which life will proceed. From falling blood, to globe, and then mirror, and from falling blood, to globe, and then womb, the design vividly elaborates its title: we are watching, with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief, male and female forms ‘Vegetating’ – growing and spreading – ‘in fibres of Blood’. This is of course only a preliminary conclusion to the question posed at the beginning of this section, namely ‘What is this person doing?’ As is so often the case with Blake’s work, Vegetating in fibres of Blood multiplies perspectives on the same event, and in so doing invites even as it ultimately resists attempts to make sense of it. Accepting the first and ignoring for the moment the second, we can approach this design one more time by starting to contextualise it. ‘ In

the beginning … ’

The first and arguably most important context for this design is provided by The [First] Book of Urizen, for which this design was drawn. The narrative of this work, the first book of Blake’s Bible of Hell, reaches back in time, revising and criticising Genesis, to describe the origin of the present world. According to the biblical account, creation is the work of a divine architect, who draws the contingent (chaos) into accord with the necessary (the divine plan). But in Blake’s archaeologies the world is fabricated by Urizen, Los, Orc, and Enitharmon (reason, imagination, energy, and the body), and as such is contingent rather 172 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies than necessary. Their work is done while submerged in an abyss, ‘an ocean of voidness’ (BU 5:11; E 73), which is the product of a primal tearing of the fabric of life.17 The design we have been describing illustrates a key episode in this story, in which the first ‘female form’ appears (BU 18:15; E 78). This episode begins on the thirteenth plate of this poem, as ‘Life in cataracts’ pours from Los into the void, where it congeals as a ‘round globe of blood’ (BU 13:55, 58; E 77). Blake’s text, like his design, represents this ‘globe’ in three ways: first, as a device, a kind of mirror, which divides male from female parts of Los (BU 13:52–15:2; E 77–8); next, as a planet floating in the ‘endless Abyss of space’ (BU 15:9–10; E 78); and third as ‘Fibres of blood, milk and tears’ which, as they vegetate, become in time what the Eternals describe as ‘the first female form now separate’ (BU 18:15; E 78): 8. The globe of life blood trembled Branching out into roots; Fib’rous, writhing upon the winds; Fibres of blood, milk and tears; In pangs, eternity on eternity. At length in tears & cries imbodied A female form trembling and pale Waves before his deathy face. (BU 18:1–8; E 78)

This places the visual elements of this design in a powerful verbal narrative and, in so doing, takes us to our second context, the myth of Narcissus. As is well known, Narcissus falls in love with an image of himself, which he sees reflected in a pool of water. The man kneeling in Blake’s design, who we can now identify as Los, is like Narcissus gazing at his own reflection; but the mirror that holds his image and has caught his gaze is represented as a divided part of himself, composed of his ‘fibres of blood’ and his ‘life’. This dramatically reworks the Greek myth, turning it into an account of the division of the self from the bodily sources of its life. In The [First] Book of Urizen, Blake places this event at the very beginning of human history. If the ‘first female form’ was Eve, as the Bible claims, then Los is Adam, and as we gaze at this design we can see, in vivid detail, Eve coming into being as she is drawn, in ‘fibres of Blood’, from his side. And if we focus on Eve and the pool of blood into which she also seems to be looking, we can also see the aftermath of her creation, as described in Paradise Lost, when she first wakes and is • 173

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Female space and the image entranced by her own image, which she sees reflected on the surface of a lake.18 Eve is, of course, here also nature, the womb from which all life will be born.19 This last remark draws into view another context – this time provided by an engraving labelled simply ‘Table 1’ (see Figure 19), which has been proposed by Tilottama Rajan as a key point of reference for Vegetating in fibres of Blood.20 Drawn and engraved by Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88), this engraving was published in The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus exhibited in Figures (1774), by the celebrated anatomist, physician, and male midwife William Hunter (1718–83).21 It depicts a ‘life-size section of the human body – the female trunk between the abdomen and the middle of the thighs’ – which is shown after Hunter has peeled back the skin on the ‘pregnant abdomen’.22 When ‘Table 1’ is placed alongside ‘Vegetating in fibres of Blood’, the parallels between them begin rapidly to proliferate. Most obviously, Blake’s ‘globe of blood’ echoes the womb at the centre of Hunter’s design; and although the former is already hanging in thin air, the latter seems about to detach itself from the body that once contained it. The head of the woman that emerges from Blake’s design, her scarlet cloak, and the hands clutching her head can also be glimpsed in ‘Table 1’, albeit in latent form: the first is loosely suggested by the mass of organs slumped on top of the womb; the second by the triangle of opened flesh that frames the same organ; and the third by the twin rolls of flesh that fleetingly suggest arms placed over her head.23 Just as importantly both ‘Table 1’ and Vegetating in fibres of Blood represent scenes of division. The latter divides Eve from her active powers, while the former isolates female generative and sexual organs by dividing them from those powers normally evoked by face, head, hands, heart, lungs, stomach, and feet. As Jordanova remarks, the combination of realism and amputation in anatomical engravings, such as those included in Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, represents human flesh as fresh meat, midway ‘between the full vitality of life and the total decay of death’.24 In the context of the present argument, this is akin to the life-in-death or death-in-life that Blake takes as emblematic of the fallen world. If this is what the Eternals describe as ‘the first female form now separate’, their horror can easily be understood. Terror is prompted by a fear that ‘acts immediately on the body, making it tremble and compelling it to take flight’; whereas horror ‘denotes primarily a state of paralysis’, which is caused by a strong feeling of ‘repugnance’.25 As the ‘myriads’ of Eternity watch these events, they seem affected by 174 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies

Figure 19  William Hunter, ‘Decem priores …’, table I, Anatomia uteri humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). Special Collections, Baillieu Library University of Melbourne.

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both states: first they shudder at, then they are petrified by, next they flee from, and finally they hide what they have seen: 11. “Spread a Tent, with strong curtains around them “Let cords & stakes bind in the Void That Eternals may no more behold them” 12. They began to weave curtains of darkness They erected large pillars round the Void With golden hooks fastend in the pillars With infinite labour the Eternals A woof wove, and calld it Science. (BU 19: 2–9; E 78)

As Blake’s imagery suggests, this tent is also the theatre in which (or the stage on which) the scene we have been discussing is performed. Returning once again to Vegetating in fibres of Blood, one might say that the ‘pillars’ erected by the Eternals are the margins or frame of the design, the ‘Void’ is the space they enclose, and the ‘curtains of darkness’ the black backdrop against which events are seen. When we turn from this primal scene to the beginning of fallen history, the arrival of the Serpent (Orc) or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden should come as no surprise: the tragedy of fallen history is already foreshadowed by the division of Los from the bodily sources of his life, and the creation of the sexes as binary warring opposites. And in these twin events one can already see, as if in embryo, the twin scenes that haunt Gothic fiction and, arguably, the course of human history. The first, a scene of confrontation between male adversaries, will in Blake’s oeuvre be elaborated as the apparently endless conflict between Urizen/ Los and the bodily energies of life, represented by Orc. The second, a struggle between men and women, will unfold as the long drawn-out ‘torments of Love and Jealousy’ that, Blake suggests in The Four Zoas, are coterminous with the fallen world (FZ 1; E 300).26 While gazing at this design we are therefore looking from a primal past into the future it still holds in embryo, which leads to the moment in which we are now standing.27 But so far we have provided only a series of loose links between the crowded, overlapping elements of the primal scene and the step by step unfolding of fallen history. Like conventional editions of the Bible, the text of The [First] Book of Urizen is ordered in chapter and verse, and printed in two parallel columns. This creates the impression of a single, linear, authoritative narrative of creation, into which, as we have seen, designs such as ‘Vegetating in fibres 176 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies of Blood’ can be interpolated. But the same design is also part of a visual field that leaves a different impression on its audience. Of the twenty-eight plates that comprise The [First] Book of Urizen, ten are full-page designs, and another ten carry images that crowd the text into less than half of the page. Four represent the elements: earth (plate 9), water (12), air (14), and fire (16); one is an emblem of birth (20) and another of death (8); but these represent the cardinal points of a visual environment composed of affective states, similar to those found in Gothic fictions, which often seem to lack orienting context – despair (4), command (5), powerlessness (6), horror (7), endurance (9), repugnance (11), disorientation (14), rejection (19), love and jealousy (21), torment (22), hope (26), and so on. Each copy of The [First] Book of Urizen arranges its full-page designs in a unique order, thus augmenting the already striking impression of a fluid assemblage of elemental affective states, which seem to swirl around the primal scene represented by Vegetating in fibres of Blood and the creation story told by the text, threatening to flood them both.28 In the text, the passage from affective chaos and primal scene to the expanse of history is engineered by Urizen and Los. But rather than tracing in detail this sequence, which would delay for too long the conclusion of this argument, we can introduce their work through a discussion of a second and a third creation scene, represented respectively by the eighth plate of The Song of Los (see Figure 20) and the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy (see Figure 14). The creations of Los and Urizen In our second scene of creation, as in Vegetating in fibres of Blood, creation takes the form of a globe, suspended in the void, which can be seen as a red planet, a smouldering orb, and a globe of blood. But in the latter, the globe is entangled with male and female bodies – womb, hair, fibres, milk, tears, semen; whereas in the former it stands self-balanced in the void. Female bodies are nowhere to be seen; Los, now floating on a cloud, although still with legs spread-eagled, has lifted his head into the air and, in so doing, drawn himself apart from the globe, which he evidently has now mastered. Los is here the blacksmith who, with his hammer, tongs, fire, and anvil, gives determinate form to the inchoate mass of the world. The masculine energy deployed for this purpose is indirectly represented by the large black hammer, which doubles as a huge phallus; but this tool is now held in ways intended to keep it upright, erect, contained, and at a • 177

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Female space and the image

Figure 20  William Blake, Song of Los, copy B, plate 8 (1795). The Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. distance from the body. (In marked contrast to Vegetating in fibres of Blood, where semen/blood is spread secretly, perhaps onanistically, on the void, the vital fluid is here contained by rigid forms, in an attempt apparently to ensure it is communicated only through the proper channels.)29 These 178 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies distances and absences help explain why the globe is now, depending on which copy of the Song of Los one is looking at, shrouded, partially crossed out, or otherwise obscured by darkness,30 and why it appears to have been created by Los out of nothing.31 In our third scene of creation, represented by the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, the bloody sphere seen in the first design, already reduced to a glowing mass in the second, is now a disk, an abstract form on which a pale red seems to be fading into a murky yellow,32 which occupies the upper rather than lower half of the design. At this elevation it frames Urizen in his role as creator-god (he seems emblazoned on the disk), providing a cardinal point from which his work of creation/division can begin. In contrast to the ‘fibres of blood’ that compose the first globe, and Los’s hammer/phallus that gives the second its form, Urizen’s work of creation proceeds as a transfer of the abstract forms in Urizen’s mind onto the deep, mediated only by the fingers of his left hand and the metallic limbs of the divider.33 The second mode of creation, in which the body is drawn into forms prescribed by the male imagination, seems at first sight akin to the redemptive, globalising force described by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria as ‘the imagination, or esemplastic power’.34 In contrast, the first and third modes of creation are often assumed to be destructive. In the former, the female body shapes the imagination, tying it to the forms of nature, bodily life, or the status quo. In the latter, Urizen closes life within abstract, mathematic form, where it withers and eventually dies. Yet in Blake’s work, particularly in the 1790s, any simple attempt to divide these modes of creation from each other is misleading because the second has been coopted by the third. In the continental prophecies and the Bible of Hell, Los/imagination creates the body/world of Urizen (BU 8:1–13:19; E 74–6); his ‘nets of iron’ shape both Urizen’s ‘army of horrors’ and his ‘organs for craving and lust’ (BA 4:29, 35, 33; E 88); and as fallen prophets and priests, his sons ‘give [Urizen’s] Laws to the Nations’ (SL 3:8–9; E 67). Further, this collaboration between Los and Urizen (imagination and an authority that is indifferently ecclesiastical, royal, and rational) is an attempt to complete the first creation scene, by dividing themselves from and so mastering the sources of their own life (represented by desire, the body, and the feminine). The englobing power they deploy for this purpose will bring us back to ‘Vegetating in fibres of Blood’ and forward to the history of the late eighteenth century. • 179

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Globes, englobing powers, and Medusa All-encompassing views of the terrestrial and celestial globes were traditionally reserved for God and, in appropriately diminished form, for kings, His supposed representatives on earth. The former is evoked by Piranesi’s God the Father with the globe in his hands (1764), in which God’s attention has momentarily shifted from the globe he has fashioned to the place in his heavens where it will be placed; and by Dürer’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ (1504), in which the terrestrial globe, although presumably now in time and space, is seen as a transparent sphere held aloft in the open hand of the Saviour. Divine panoptic-power is closely allied with a second, namely the power to become ‘globe-like’, to ‘form into a globe’, or to bring global forms into being, as represented, for example, in the fourteenth-century Hamilton Bible. Here, as in ‘all cosmogonies and traditions’, as Jean Clair remarks, ‘the circle is the perfect, primordial form within which the various hierarchies of creation were written and inflected’.35 The panoptic power of kings is evoked by the golden orbs often included in royal regalia; and by maps and cartographic globes, which were once closely associated with kingly power, such as the twin globes (one celestial, the other terrestrial), each 4 metres in diameter,36 made in 1683 by Vincenzo Corinelli (1650–1718) for Louis XIV. As Christian Jacob explains: To control the map and to hold the globe are royal gestures par excellence, the sign of a power without limits, one that dreams of being worldwide. The symbolic grasp of the world, held in the open palm, is coupled with a panoptic gaze – on the miniaturized representation, grasping at the same time the whole of terrestrial form and the intimate details of its places.37

Panoptic power is here again closely allied with the power to englobe, evident in, for example, the king’s ability to draw the disparate peoples of the actual world into the global forms of empire. One might at first think that gods and kings belong in the past, on the distant outskirts of globalising modernity. And yet it can be argued that, rather than being dispatched, the globalising power of gods and kings is in modernity secularised and democratised. According to Isaac Newton, for example, his conception of absolute space mirrors the contours of absolute space itself, which in turn is co-extensive with the ‘Sensorium of the Godhead’.38 This convergence of thought, being, and God, is so complete that for many in the eighteenth century the creation of Newton’s 180 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies system mirrors the creation of the world. Pope’s textual version of this conceit, composed as Newton’s epitaph, is suitably succinct: ‘Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.’39 In his early poetry, Blake uses the word ‘globe’ only a handful of times, in ways that are entirely conventional. Things change in 1793, when ‘globe’ and its cognates become key words in his conceptual vocabulary. The date is hardly fortuitous. Paine argues in The Rights of Man that ‘Sovereignty, as a matter of right, appertains to the Nation only and not to any individual’;40 but for Blake the transfer of sovereignty from individual to nation (the people) brought with it an unexpected transfer of the sovereign’s englobing or conglobing power. It is arguably this power that is evoked by elements of Vegetating in fibres of Blood that we have so far overlooked, which can be introduced by way of the guillotine. Although the guillotine was intended as ‘a painless and efficient machine of justice’, it was for the state also a source of ‘immensely good theatre’: Announcing the day’s list of the condemned, transporting them to the place of execution, observing their comportment on the way to their death and under the blade, were elements of the live drama of the guillotine. There was also an attractive gore to the spectacle. There was a great spurting of blood from the body. The decapitated head was lifted by the hair and displayed to the crowd, giving everyone a final glimpse of a life before it found its way into the hideous basket that gathered decapitated heads. … And then too, there was the fascinating but imponderable terror that went with the possibility that the severed head of the victim continued to think of his own death after its decapitation.41

As Marie-Hélène Huet notes, engravings of the climax of this drama, in which the executioner displayed ‘his victims’ decapitated heads to the people, recall the mythic image of Perseus holding the head of Medusa’. But in images from the Terror, the focus has shifted from the triumphant hero to the defeated monster. The executioner was often left out of the engravings, which showed a quasi-disembodied hand – the victor after all, was not a single individual but the people – clutching the heads of the various monsters that had attacked or betrayed the Nation (from Louis XVI to Robespierre). For the Revolutionaries, it seems Medusa never died, could not be slain. Perseus’s triumph had to be endlessly repeated to ensure victory.42

This shocking spectacle traces itself lightly across the surface of the design we have been discussing. First, the man’s posture, his head (held • 181

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Female space and the image at some slight distance from his body), and the pool of blood gathering beneath him, into which his head will soon fall, suggest that he is a victim of the guillotine. Second, while the man holds his decapitated but still-living head in his own hands he becomes the horrified witness of his own death – an emblem of the horrific possibility that victims of the guillotine could for some moments contemplate their demise, the subject matter of ‘an extensive literature of les anecdotes sur les decapités’.43 And third, the long, snaking locks of the woman’s hair, as she faces the now headless body of the man, with her head superimposed on his severed head, identify her as Medusa. Adriana Cavarero’s summary account of the horror attendant on Medusa corresponds closely with the event being described here: Medusa is a severed head. The body is revulsed above all by its own dismemberment, the violence that undoes and disfigures it … [Our horror] has nothing to do with the instinctive reaction to the threat of death. It has rather to do with instinctive disgust for a violence that, not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability.44

As this shocking image takes shape, it draws the primal scene we have been discussing into the present of late eighteenth-century Europe, and in so doing brings into a relation of correspondence with each other the archaic and the modern, the religious and the secular, mythic and historical events. More particularly, by superimposing the work of the guillotine onto an image of the work of god/Urizen (the division of Eve from Adam), Blake implies that the former is driven by the same dynamics as the latter. This haunting of the present by the past is disconcerting, disorienting, but only at first sight confusing. On the one hand, as Joseph Amato notes, the execution of Louis XVI was initially thought to be ‘the sacrifice that gave birth to a new order. Out of his decapitated head a new social body … was born. The crowd dipped its hands and clothing in the king’s blood and shouted out, “Vive la Republique!”.’45 On the other hand, in The [First] Book of Urizen the division of Eve from Adam marks a similar point of transition, this time from the ungoverned, open-ended interactions of Eternity to the closed, violent cycles of human history. This turning point is represented by Blake as a decapitation because it establishes a set of divisions (head and body, male and female, self and other, inside and outside, and so on) that can then be arranged in hierarchical order and 182 •

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies rearticulated in repressive forms by god/Urizen and his minion priests and kings. The execution of Louis XVI seems at first to destroy this violent order, by destroying its head – but already in this moment, as the executioner holds the king’s head up to the crowd, the primal scene begins to repeat itself. It is now the executioner, licensed by the state, who plays the role of secular priest. And as he lifts the now severed head of the king, and displays it to the people, he announces not just the demise of the ancien régime but the power of the state, which in this moment rehearses its power differently to articulate the relation between the head and the body of the people. In so doing, the state assumes the role of god/Urizen, as the rhetoric of the sacram sanctam Guillotinam and popular litanies suggest: Saint Guillotine, protectress of patriots, pray for us; Saint Guillotine, terror of the aristocrats, protect us; Kindly machine, have pity on us; Admirable machine, have pity on us; Saint Guillotine, deliver us from our enemies.46

Reformers like Bentham and revolutionists like Robespierre were confident that the state, ‘Like the guillotine … would prove a reasonable and just instrument for the progress of humanity.’47 But as the superimposed images of ‘Vegetating in fibres of Blood’ suggest, for others this seemed doubtful. In The [First] Book of Urizen, Urizen’s attempts to stabilise the world he and Los have created culminate, in ‘The Net of Religion’, which when drawn like a ‘spiders web’ over the world causes life to shrink ‘up from existence’ (BU 25:10, 22, 39; E 82–3). One can see an analogous development in France, with the formation of the Committee of Public Safety ‘to hold the executive power of government once held by the king’,48 and the adoption by the National Convention of the Law of Suspects (5 September 1793). This ‘Net of [State] Religion’ decreed that ‘anyone who, by thought, word, or deed, had opposed the revolution’, could be arrested and brought before the Tribunal, where the ‘sentence was usually death with no benefit of appeal’.49 But this violence: far from driving out ‘bad’ violence with ‘good’ and so ‘cementing the Revolution,’ merely precipitated further conflicts requiring resolution by bloodshed, leading, by the remorseless logic of sacrifice, to the situation represented in a post-Thermidorean print titled ‘Robespierre guillotining the executioner !after having had everyone in France guillotined’.50 • 183

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History and becoming As we turn one last time to Vegetating in fibres of Blood, the past and present now seem caught up in still more far-reaching exchanges with each other. Like Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794), which claims that the Bible encourages ‘rapine, cruelty, and murder’,51 Vegetating in fibres of Blood uncovers at the centre of the biblical story of creation a scene of primeval violence. In so doing it undermines authority that relies on the Bible for support, such as priests, kings,52 and arguably the reasoning power described by John Locke as well.53 But as we have seen, rather than stopping at this point, it elaborates this primal scene in vivid detail, as a past and present reality, creating a powerful archaeology of the present. This represents the institution of the social, its ‘generative principles’, in ways that, to quote Claude Lefort out of context, make ‘it possible to conceptualise … the articulation of its dimensions, and the relations established within it between [genders], groups, and individuals, between practices, beliefs, and representations’.54 As these generative principles are elaborated, the past seems to reach out towards the present, colonising not just the spectator’s world but his/ her body as well. We are, once again, in the depths of a Gothic fiction, in a monstrous present and an alien body, which are yoked to a violent past. Yet at the same time this archaeology of the present, by revealing the constellation of elements from which the present has emerged, represents the former as contingent and therefore able to be changed. Indeed, one might say that ‘Vegetating in fibres of Blood’, with its multivalent exchanges between male and female powers, also contains in embryo the possibility of a very different conversation, one that no longer proceeds as the agon of a binary pair. To return to a point mentioned earlier, perhaps this is why, like so many of Blake’s works, its visual forms, implied narratives, textual elements, and multiplying contexts place us in the midst of a textual/visual field that remains powerfully in excess of interpretation, including the one I have just advanced. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, which can serve as trailing contrary to the epigraph that begins my argument, ‘Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts [to] only the set of preconditions, however, recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new.’55 In Blake’s later poems such as Milton (c.1804–11) and Jerusalem (1804–c.20), as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), the 184 •

Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies problematic relation between history and becoming moves to the centre of his art.

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Notes 1 Beckett, Proust, pp. 2–3. 2 The context for these poems includes an increasingly repressive government in an England that was at war with France from 1792 until the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and again in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). However, this deepens rather than displaces the enigma represented by the course of the French Revolution. As Toby McLeod and Richard Holmes write in The Oxford Companion to Military History, ‘It is the deepest irony that the French Revolution, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, led to a quarter-century of bloody war’ (p. 329). 3 Terdiman, Present Past, p. 104. 4 Sade, ‘Idée sur les Romans’, p. 49. 5 Hazlitt, ‘On the English Novelists’, p. 123. 6 For an overview of Blake’s and Fuseli’s work in the context of the Gothic, see Myrone, Gothic Nightmares. 7 These words were added by Blake to this image, probably in 1818, when he prepared the second copy of ‘A Small Book of Designs’ for sale. The plate is now held by the Tate Art Gallery, London, UK. It can be viewed at www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-first-book-of-urizen-pl-15-t12997 [accessed 1 June 2017]. 8 Digital reproductions of copies A, B, C, D, F, and G of The [First] Book of Urizen and copy A of A Small Book of Designs can be accessed through the online William Blake Archive, www.blakearchive.org/blake/ [accessed 1 June 2017]. 9 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, pp. 371, 372. 10 The relation between Freudian psychoanalysis and the disruptions caused by the French revolution are explored in Terdiman’s Present Past. 11 Butler, Subjects of Desire, p. 181. 12 Paulson, ‘Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution’, provides a useful account of the relation between Gothic fiction and the French Revolution. See also Wright’s Britain, France and the Gothic, which argues that this relation is inflected by a longer history of relations between Britain and France. 13 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 377. 14 Chamayou, Manhunts, p. 13. 15 For a brief summary of beliefs about semen, see Stephanson, The Yard of Wit, pp. 35–44. 16 Swedenborg, General Explication, para. 94. • 185

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Female space and the image 17 For more detailed accounts of the creation story told in The [First] Book of Urizen, see Howard, Infernal Poetics, pp. 152–78; Otto, ‘Time, Eternity’, pp. 359–76; Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition, pp. 201–24. 18 Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 449–91. Thanks to Chris Bundock for pointing this out, in comments on this chapter. 19 Complementing these allusions, the picture may also be alluding to ‘the birth of Sin from the head of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost’, as suggested in Worrall, The Urizen Books, p. 43. 20 Rajan, ‘Blake’s Body Without Organs’. Rajan focuses on the uncontainable disturbance produced by the female body in Blake’s poetic ‘system’. 21 For a detailed examination of the Hunters’ influence on Blake, including The [First] Book of Urizen, see Connolly, William Blake and the Body, especially pp. 25–94. 22 Jordanova, ‘Gender, Generation and Science’, p. 386. 23 Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly offer a sympathetic reading of this plate: ‘ “Vegetating” is one of the craziest birth images conceivable. An awesome agony of expulsion is most vividly rendered. Yet there is dark comedy too, as the seeming mother is herself simultaneously birthed from some elemental vaginal maw, and still attached – though by the head – to an enormous placenta. Small wonder her palms stop her ears so emphatically: the duet of birth cries must be deafening’ (Bruder and Connolly, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–7). 24 Ibid., p. 388. 25 Cavarero, Horrorism, p. 4. 26 For an account of The Four Zoas in these terms, see Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. 27 Thanks to Chris Bundock for calling my attention to the way a similar coupling of retrospection and defamilarising prospection occurs in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book 11, in lines where the reader, having been drawn by that poem’s narrative back to the Garden of Eden, is able to see, as if through the eyes of Adam, the history that unfolds from that point. This long sequence of suffering culminates in lines 477–99, in a vision that drives Adam ‘to tears’ (497) and which is given visual form in Blake’s ‘The House of Death’ (1795, c.1805). In this design, Adam can be seen immediately beneath Death’s outstretched left hand, in a pose that closely mirrors the one assumed by Los/Adam in ‘Vegetating in Fibres of Blood’. It is not unreasonable to suggest, therefore, that all three Adams recoil from a vision of the same catastrophic future, the conclusion of which Milton compares to a ‘Lazar-house … wherein were laid | Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies | Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture’, and over which ‘triumphant Death his Dart | Shook, but delaid to strike, though oft invokt | With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope’ (479–81, 491–3). 28 For a discussion of the formal features of these designs, see Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, pp. 108–11.

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Globes, englobing powers, and Blake ’ s archaeologies 29 For a discussion of Blake’s representations of the phallus, see Otto, ‘ “A Pompous High Priest” ’, pp. 4–22. 30 Los has attempted to cool the orb, by plunging it into the deep, suggesting that what I have described as darkness also doubles as water. 31 Although not discussed in this chapter, the ‘frontispiece’ of The Song of Los, in which a priest, kneeling at a small altar, bows his head in worship of a dark globe/sun, provides a visual link between the globe/sun created by Los, and the one that, in the frontispiece to Europe, supports Urizen. 32 The disk is coloured differently in each copy of this design: the red of copy G is mixed with yellow in D and A, and in B with blacks and browns. In E and K the disk is light yellow, although the upper right-hand quadrant of the latter is smeared red and black. 33 The key interpretative contexts for this design are usually taken to be Proverbs 8: 22–8; John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book VII, lines 224–31; and the frontispiece to Andrew Motte’s English translation of Newton’s The Mathematical Principles. For more detailed discussions see Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies, pp. 161–8; Nurmi, ‘Blake’s “Ancient of Days” ’, pp. 207–16; Otto, ‘Re-Framing the Moment of Creation’, pp. 235–46; Tolley, ‘Europe’, pp. 115–45. 34 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, p. 295. See for example, Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 157. 35 Quoted in Huet, ‘The Face of Disaster’, p. 10. 36 The globes can be seen in the online exhibition ‘les Globes du Roi-Soleil’, http:// expositions.bnf.fr/globes/expo_us/02.htm [accessed 1 June 2017]. For a more detailed account, see Richard, Les globes de Coronelli. 37 Jacob, The Sovereign Map, p. 323. 38 Newton, Opticks, p. 370. The phrase ‘Sensorium of the Godhead’ was used by Joseph Addison in The Spectator, p. 335. 39 Pope, ‘Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’, vol. 2, p. 354. 40 Paine, Rights of Man, p. 66. 41 Amato, Victims and Values, p. 94. 42 Huet, ‘The Face of Disaster’, p. 7, p. 10. 43 Amato, Victims and Values, p. 94. 44 Cavarero, Horrorism, p. 8. 45 Amato, Victims and Values, p. 95. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Anderson, Daily Life, p. 18. 49 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 50 Burton, Blood in the City, p. 53, p. 55. ‘Robespierre guillotining the executioner’ is reproduced on p. 54. 51 Paine, The Age of Reason, p. 98. • 187

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52 For accounts of the political context of The [First] Book of Urizen see Worrall, The Urizen Books, pp. 19–59, and Behrendt, ‘Blake’s Bible of Hell’, pp. 37–52. 53 Locke argues in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that ‘simple ideas’, the prima materia of experience, are ‘effects produced [in the mind] by the appointment of an infinitely Wise Agent’ (Locke, An Essay, vol. 2, p. 229). 54 Lefort, ‘The Permanence’, p. 152. 55 Deleuze, Negotiations , pp. 170–1.

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8 Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion • Ana Elena González-Treviño

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wo of Blake’s early prophetic books, The Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), depict two different facets of femininity. They do so by dramatising topics related to feminine agency and sexuality both at a mythical and psycho-social level through the medium of prophetic allegory. The symbolic dynamics in both works are expressed in a poetical language that is far more immediately intelligible than the diction and imagery he used in later prophetic books. Northrop Frye has described them as a tragedy of a will and a tragedy of feeling, respectively.1 By construing them as tragedies, Frye is highlighting the unsatisfactory note on which both works end, while conceding that these two rather unusual long poems that may at first appear to belong to the light pastoral genre actually have a tragic dimension that inscribes them in the realm of a rather more ambitious literary-artistic/prophetic project, which culminated in Blake’s later works. Furthermore, since both works have female protagonists, each with their own subjectivity and varying degrees of agency, the overall design of the poems and the ambiguity of their signification mark a certain departure from conventional depictions of women in fiction as manqué victims or trophies, an artistic achievement which resonates with the troubled times when these works were written.2 Much has been said about the likely connection between Blake’s poems, especially the Visions, and the recently published work of his acquaintance and a landmark in feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman.3 While Blake did not go so far as to represent a fully • 189

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Female space and the image liberated woman, he did portray women with a new awareness of the near slavery of their condition given the tyranny of patriarchal normativity (both legal and social), with the intention of denouncing this state of affairs; additionally, he did much to relocate femininity from the mundane, feminised setting of the salon and the accompanying caricature of trivialised or domesticated sentimentality, to the contrasting mythical, imaginative dimension provided by the Gothic idiom, in particular, through symbolic locations, such as a dark underworld or a cavernous wilderness.4 Caves and underground chambers have long been considered symbols of the female organs of generation; the sites of mythical birth and death (such as Christ’s), they have traditionally been employed as places of worship associated with the beginning and the end of life cycles, their hollow, often humid quality establishing them as uterine symbols. In the eighteenth century, this gendering, or rather ‘genitalisation’ of the landscape, was part of a vogue for the recreation of untamed nature in gardens, sometimes deliberately seeking to sexualise settings such as grottoes, the depth and darkness of which were meant to imitate the womb of wild ‘mother’ nature. For the learned, caves, grottoes, pits and hollows could be read as metaphors for female bodies.5 If both Thel and Visions are read from this perspective, by sustaining an affinity with the womb-shaped cave through their cave-shaped genitals, the two protagonists would not simply be in a position of victimhood (fleeing Thel) or captivity (chained Oothoon), but they would both be at different stages in a process of potentially emancipatory identification. Both Thel and Visions portray a form of sexual liberation for women, even though the female protagonists do not necessarily embody any truly or sufficiently redeeming features: in the end, Thel escapes in terror from the underworld without appearing to have found the answers she was looking for and apparently failing to either embrace or interpret the enigmatic revelation which is presented to her, while Oothoon, despite the piercing and revolutionary quality of her pleas, remains chained and steeped in unresolved lamentation.6 Their sense of terror or captivity, which in many aspects is sexual in nature, is expressed through a pathetic fallacy extending to their physical surroundings.7 The spaces where these two poems are located have a dual quality which activates a contrapuntal sense of location: the locus amoenus of the opening, identified with the pastoral, leads to a locus horridus, identified with the Gothic, which carries the greater semiotic weight, since it has a powerful destabilising effect. Thel spends most of her time in the 190 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions seemingly idyllic vale of Har, which represents the reverse of the terror she briefly but indelibly endures in the underworld; likewise, Oothoon used to happily roam ‘Leutha’s vale’ (VDA iii:4; E 45), freely experiencing sexual enjoyment, and now lies imprisoned within the enclosed space of the wave-beaten cave in Visions. These settings, even in their duality, are metaphors for the female body that, as perceived through Thel’s and Oothoon’s consciousness, insinuate the, at this stage, terrifying vastness of female potentiality, equally in its generative and destructive facets. The rhetorical questions in both poems, which have a cumulative effect of heightening their emotional appeal, relate to the workings of body and the natural world; and the unuttered answers hint at, nonetheless, the possibility of an expanded female ecological and sexual consciousness. Additionally, the inscrutability of nature, which gave rise to such questions, is linked to a sense of an imminent yet not fully attained realisation that would crown Thel’s quest and set Oothoon free. Even though the idea of a mythical dimension of femininity may surpass the relatively limited awareness of these two characters, such a mythical reading is nonetheless enabled by the semi-obscure allegorical style of Blake’s early prophetic writings. The apparent failure to achieve what each of these two characters wants is only an initial stage, or possibly two successive stages, in the way towards a confrontation with a feminine principle that is too vast to assimilate readily, even for them as women.8 It is not that Blake, by refusing to represent their success, remains patriarchal in spirit, but that his vision of the feminine, by placing his characters within a subterranean or cavernous darkness, is reproducing the Gothic aesthetics that he knew so well in order to re-signify feminine bondage as a mental one – at least partially so. The Gothic aesthetic stands for a set of values that is diametrically opposed to prevailing Enlightenment values, which had banished, for example, both the expression of female desire and the legitimacy of intuitive knowledge, especially regarding the natural world. The prophetic ethos Blake adopts constitutes an aestheticised form of ideological resistance to the rationalistic paradigm, while insisting on the unfathomable mystery of the generative and destructive power of the natural (feminine) principle, before which superlative horror is, understandably, the immediate response.9 Femininity is here used to designate, yes, the female gender along with its patriarchally constructed connotations of irrationality and otherness, as well as its physicality, as opposed to disembodied conceptualism, and hence its possible identification • 191

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Female space and the image with symbolic topographies. My purpose is to explore the symbolism of the landscapes of these two works and to elucidate the way a magnified femininity is inscribed in them. Other Blake scholars have read Thel and Visions in terms of the feminine. To mention but a few, Gerda Norvig finds in Thel an ‘icon of resistance to sexist indoctrination’, while Elizabeth Effinger explores the notion of intrauterine experience through shared spaces and subjectivities, also in Thel. Regarding Visions, while several critics like Robert Ryan place emphasis on Oothoon’s invective against ‘the Urizenic religion of chastity’ in favour of free love, Elizabeth Bernath has argued that Oothoon’s lament petitions both sexual liberation and scientific education. As far as nature and the landscape are concerned, Kevin Hutchings has read Blake’s works in terms of ecocriticism in order to make a case for Blake’s ‘organic human cosmology’.10 Tristanne Connolly, in this volume, reads Blake’s Visions under the light of late eighteenth-century notions of sexual health, infirmity and degeneracy, in parallel with James Graham’s sexual electrotherapy through his Celestial Bed.11 Theotormon’s mostly silent resistance is read as a sign of impotence and a propensity to masturbate, which Oothoon attempts to remediate by several therapeutic means. While drawing from these studies in varying degrees, my own reading stresses how fairy and folk tales, as well as mythology, constellate these and other concerns surrounding gender, space, and the Gothic in Blake’s poems.12 I will look at the two poems in succession. Action in Thel takes place mostly in ‘the vales of Har’ (BT 2:1; E 4). Har was the senile father of Tiriel, the kingly protagonist of Blake’s first prophetic book, Tiriel, which was published posthumously.13 Thel was the youngest of the daughters of ‘Mne Seraphim’ (BT 1:1; E 3).14 Being of angelic descent, her corporeality is put into question, yet her virginity, her very desire to evanesce and the suffering she endures throughout necessarily require some measure of embodiment. Thel is afflicted by a profound sadness and bodily fatigue, expressed in these languorous, anaphoric lines: ‘Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head. / And gentle sleep the sleep of death’ (BT 1:12–13; E 3). The presence of a ‘youngest daughter’ is recurrent in fairy and folk tales. Convention would lead us to expect that the role of the youngest daughter stands for that of the most unlikely contender for some kind of prize or recompense; she is one of several participants, who will nevertheless triumph above all the rest in the end. However, in the case of Thel, the protagonist’s youth is presented as a trait of immaturity and inexperience 192 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions that serves to account for her seemingly truncated destiny. Thel’s dramatic significance could more readily be compared with the ‘little sister’ in the Song of Solomon, thus described by her brothers: ‘We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts. What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?’15 Thel, as it turns out, might be still unripe for vision and incapable of confronting great power, as represented by the disembodied voice that confronts her, as it were, from the grave, her own grave; she is not ready yet either to embrace the dynamics of mutability and the cycles of nature, including and especially sexuality and death, or to acknowledge her own creative and destructive potentialities: ‘Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? … Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?’ (BT 6:11, 17; E 6). She lacks the strength and temperance that are requisite for spiritual development. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés explains in her study of fairy tales with female protagonists, being strong ‘means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know’.16 Or, as Campbell would have it, ‘[f]ully to behold her would be a terrible accident for any person not spiritually prepared’.17 Even from her point of departure, when she sets out to seek ‘the secret air / To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day’ (BT 1:2–3; E 3), Thel starts out with a conviction that meaningless evanescence is her sad destiny. By interrogating the lily, the cloud, the worm, the clod of clay, she is merely looking for confirmation of her own separated, purposeless existence, and seems disappointed to discover that even the lowliest, most fleeting beings feel individually blessed and find great joy even in the transience of their duration and the meekness of their life purpose. While purportedly attempting to find her own feelings of dejection mirrored in another creature that is fleeting like herself, she fails to identify, and hence to form alliances, with any of them, thus confirming her self-conscious sense of separation: from ‘Thel is like to thee’ (BT 3:3; E 4), to ‘I am not like thee’ (BT 3:17; E 5), in each exchange she oscillates between hope – a sad hope – and despair. Since Thel is possessed by melancholy, she can also be related to the folkloric type of the sad princess or the Gothic motif of the damsel in distress, both of which are versions of an analogous psychic concern.18 The sad princess awaits the hero who will deliver her from her dejected state by making her laugh; her hand is usually offered in marriage by her father to the one who can achieve this seemingly impossible task. From • 193

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Female space and the image the male perspective, feminine melancholy is an enigma, and her suitors, which are often numerous, are willing to risk their lives in an attempt to decipher it. Since the sad princess is submerged in hopelessness, she is deprived of all agency and power, and lies entirely at the mercy of a hero who will have to come and restore her to a state of happiness that he alone can provide. It is another version of the sleeping beauty who is the perfect receptacle of the male gaze: her stupor is the perfect backdrop for male prowess.19 While a simple sexual interpretation may be presented as a universal key to decode the stories of sad maidens, the representation of feminine melancholy, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century had an additional connotation, one that links it with debates about the participation of women in social, political, and intellectual life. The longing for self-effacement or disengagement from the world on the part of women may be the sign of a cultural habit of lamentable consequences. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman disparages excessive sentimentality, which was fashionable at the time, as the cause of women’s weakened political and intellectual achievement: ‘Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings, a round of little cares or vain pursuits, frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally objects of sense.’20 Blake had his own ideas regarding melancholy, even though he did not relate them exclusively to women. He was no apologist of the melancholic humour, even though on occasion he suffered from it himself. From an early age he was a great admirer of Albrecht Dürer, whose engravings he emulated more than once. In particular, he admired Dürer’s famous angel of melancholy who represents the state of mind that is to be reached prior to spiritual vision. (He is said to have kept a copy of this engraving by him until he died.)21 However, he considered mundane, self-indulgent melancholy a ‘stupid disease’, contrary to the true nature of vision, which was an essentially joyous one.22 So, even while there is a degree of empathy between the authorial/narrative voice and Thel’s sadness, her refusal or failure to use this sadness constructively raises questions about the cultural expectations underlying feminine roles, about whether women can control their emotions or not. In this light, if we read the poem from Wollstonecraft’s perspective, we would then have to read it as a critique of sentimental self-indulgence, a reading that is, however, relatively precluded by the cryptic, prophetic tone of the poem. In other words, the poem’s ambiguity may suggest several readings, without actually determining any. 194 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions Now, to return to our second motif, the damsel in distress is an essential ingredient of early Gothic fiction (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis). An exacerbated version of the sad princess, she may either find herself in a position of helplessness close to obliteration, often held captive by a ruthless tyrant who threatens to rape her, or she may fall prey to some terrifying creature who keeps her in a state of extreme peril; regardless, she invites deliverance, following a model of femininity that may be read as a mere vehicle for the deployment of heroic masculinity. In The Book of Thel, however, there is no deliverer in sight. The initial setting is neither a dungeon nor a bleak landscape, but an Elysian valley where melancholy, and hence the need for rescue, seems out of place. Even in her unplanned visit to the underworld, at first there does not appear to be any sense of urgency. Only after the accumulation of shocking visions reaches a critical point that culminates in the questions pronounced by the disembodied voice does Thel flee. The solitariness of the experience speaks of an inner journey in which she is required to be her own rescuer, an enterprise at which she will, arguably, fail. While this challenge evidently calls for a model of femininity entailing initiative and willingness to answer for her own person, Thel, as an emancipatory model, is incomplete given the fact that her goal of finding her life purpose is not attained. Even though she is given the chance to visit the tenebrous underworld from which she could be expected to derive the power knowledge gives, her conscience fails to comprehend it, and her own happy valley seems less so in the end, because now it will be plagued by unanswered questions. Though not always gendered, symbolic landscapes are something Blake may have easily absorbed from other authors. Thel has been compared to Milton’s masque Comus (first performed in 1634 and published in 1637) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), which both feature a young protagonist engaged in a Thel-like journey of self-discovery through topographies that reflect states of mind.23 Indeed, the lady in Comus wanders through a forest that is both actual and metaphoric, an initially ‘kind hospitable Woods’ which, as her journey progresses, becomes a dark labyrinth where her chastity is threatened, in a way reminiscent of Thel’s passage from the vale of Har to the underworld which horrifies her.24 In turn, Prince Rasselas escapes from a Happy Valley reminiscent of the idyllic vales of Har in order to pursue happiness, both becoming ironically unhappy.25 The narrative structure in Thel appears to be very straightforward, at best didactic if not simplistic.26 Thel has successive dialogues with different natural entities, until she is offered a vision of the underworld, • 195

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Female space and the image which terrifies her. This uncomplicated design is counterbalanced by a prophetic tone, which symbolically overdetermines the work. The seemingly limpid linearity of the composition is at odds with the complexity and polysemy of its meaning: why exactly is she speaking to these particular creatures? How come they speak in the first place and why do they sound so innocent, even when they speak of dissolution and death? Why do they all seem to experience life in terms so diametrically opposed to Thel’s? The personification device through which Blake makes the Lily of the Valley, the Cloud, and the Clod of Clay speak may even seem childish, in resonance with the nursery-rhyme diction which is reminiscent of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience: ‘I am a watry weed, / And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales’ (BT 1:16–17; E 4). The Lily’s speech is as unlikely and ventriloquistic as that in ‘Infant Joy’: ‘I have no name/ I am but two days old’ (SIE 25:1–2; E 16). Each one of Thel’s successive interlocutors speaks of the joys and dignity of self-dissolution as a merely natural phase within the cycle of life; but each time, upon hearing them, Thel dissociates herself from them by claiming that she is even less worthy than the least worthy of creatures.27 While she does not count on the unexpected boon that she is granted by the humble Clod of Clay (BT 5:16–17; E 6), it is in the final passage of the poem where we can be said to properly enter the Gothic realm, and though the shortest, it is probably the most intriguing part of the poem. Thel’s visit of the underworld has been variously interpreted. The Neoplatonic analysis claims that Thel is an unfallen soul who is given a vision of mortality that she promptly and violently rejects, choosing instead to return to her Elysian world of innocence.28 The sexual interpretation, in turn, proposes that the visit to the underworld is a metaphor for sexual initiation.29 In resonance with this view, Geoffrey Keynes somewhat flatly proposes that each one of Thel’s interlocutors stands for a different life stage: the Lily of the Valley is idealistic infancy, the Cloud is youth, the Worm, adolescence, and the Clod of Clay, motherhood.30 For Frye, even though he rejects the idea of one interpretation only, Thel symbolises an embryonic or seminal stage of the imagination that fails to develop.31 Yet another reading, the mythological one, sees Thel as a version of Persephone’s visit to the realm of Hades, except that in this case there is no desire to return ever again.32 While inclining to the mythological view, I wish to expand S. Foster Damon’s foundational reading of Thel as a version of the Eleusinian mysteries by underlining the significance of the place where the action occurs. 196 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions Her admittance to the underworld and the shock that causes her to flee in terror may be read as an aggrandised version of the previous encounters in which she had also refused to embrace the self-immolating identity offered to her by the different beings. Her entrance into the subterranean realm represents crossing the threshold between the idyllic vale and the Gothic charnel-house, populated by images of decay, which also offers the possibility of an alliance, albeit through speechless visions and uncharted wanderings which put an abrupt end to the relatively self-indulgent, dialogic dynamics of the first and greater part of the poem. In the face of awe, speech is cancelled. Only when the accumulation of visions reaches a climactic peak at the sight of her own grave is an articulate voice heard: the ‘voice of sorrow’ (which might be Thel’s) pronounces the cryptic questions that compel her to flee, as a Persephone who refuses to eat from the Hadesian pomegranate or rather, who unexpectedly encounters not a violent lover but her own mother, Demeter, below the ground, as she had never seen her before, engaged in sensuous destructiveness. Altogether, Thel’s ‘adventures’ both over and underground work towards the realisation of the ultimate unity of this binary existence, a realisation she will not necessarily attain: the idyllic and the Gothic spaces are interdependent, rather than conflicting, when viewed as facets of an identitarian fluidity that is feminine precisely because it is unfixed, yet physical and inscribed in temporality. While at ground level Thel’s attitude to lily, cloud, and clod can be described as patronising (and their attitude towards her as deferential), when she is underground she decidedly does not operate from a favourable position. Thel’s mere mobility above the ground gave her a significant advantage over the meek creatures to which she spoke; her complaints are pronounced from a position of safety where she seems to be risking nothing. Underground, however, it is another story: her mobility is aimless, and wherever she goes she encounters sorrow and dissolution. This hierarchic inversion is fundamental in order to establish the relative magnitude of the underground encounter. Thel’s condescension is overthrown when the humble Clod of Clay, the least creature-like of her interlocutors, is gradually magnified until it attains a proportion that overwhelms Thel. The first sign is when she – because it is a she – is addressed as matron Clay.33 The feminisation of the Clod of Clay alludes to the widespread fable according to which God moulded humans from clay or soil, God being the masculine, clay the feminine, part of the equation. While pointing at a mythical connection with the Demeter–Persephone cycle, it also recalls the more ancient concept of the • 197

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Female space and the image earth as the primordial mother, Tellus Mater (a pun on Thel’s mother?), Mother Earth, who is the guardian of both the secrets of generation and decay.34 The clod reveals an unsuspected set of attributes before Thel’s eyes, and she is suddenly face to face with an overpowering entity that implicitly reveals the pettiness of her self-indulgence. A female entity and a locus at the same time, the embodiment of telluric motherhood reveals the tenebrous, yet inseparable counterpart of the sunny vale above; so, ironically, even after Thel returns, she continues to reside in the womb of the earth which continues to embrace her. Coming and going involves crossing a symbolic threshold twice. The ‘northern gates’ are opened by a ‘terrific porter’ (BT 6:1; E 6) whose identity remains undisclosed, but who signals the first crossing of the threshold of vision.35 Thel penetrates the earthly realm and immediately gets acquainted with its ‘secrets’, the first of which is a vision of ‘the couches of the dead’ (BT 6:2–3; E 6). The idyllic pastoral world from which she came has been left behind, and she has now entered the Gothic terrain of the graveyard with its delectation on charnel-house detail. The depersonalised human remains she sees have long since lost their individual identity and they are nothing more than unintelligible ‘voices of the ground’ (BT 6:8; E 6): bodies which have returned to their most elemental materiality, and the only remnants of their souls are their complaints. Thel realises that their hearts, the most vital of organs, the seat of love, have engaged in a voluptuous, yet brutal commingling with their new lodging, which seems inexplicably alive: ‘the fibrous roots / Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists’ (BT 6:3–4; E 6). The sensuousness of the image underscores its grotesqueness, especially because the backdrop is the hellish, Gothic setting of perpetual lamentation: ‘A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen’, a ‘land of clouds thro’ valleys dark’ where the only sounds are ‘Dolours & lamentations’ (BT 6:5–7; E 6). The climax comes at the point when she reaches her own grave plot and the groans become an intelligible yet enigmatic series of protests related to the bodily inlets of sensorial experience, expressed by an apparently disembodied, unidentified voice which could be the voice of her own semi-awakened consciousness. Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile! Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn, Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie? Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show’ring fruits and coined gold! Why a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?

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Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in? Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror trembling & affright. Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy! Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire? (BT 6:11–20; E 6)

These questions proved too much for Thel (and for Blake too, who scratched off the last two in at least some of the copies of the finished book36) and she, apparently still a virgin in body and wisdom, flees in terror crossing back through the threshold and returning to her familiar, undisturbed world. Entering and exiting across a mystical threshold is a motif that is often found in folk and fairy tales, and in one of them in particular, the crossing leads to a realm of feminine power associated with chthonic mysteries.37 In this context, there is a suggestive similarity between Thel and one of the Grimm Brothers’ stories entitled ‘Frau Holle’ or ‘Mother Holle’. In it a young girl who is tyrannised by the stereotypical wicked stepmother falls into a well and, through it, into a subterranean world where she encounters a witch-like character of unfathomable power. Since the girl is diligent and obedient, after some time she is allowed to return home by crossing a magical threshold once again and getting a shower of gold in recompense. Her lazy, greedy stepsister follows her footsteps out of envy, but fails the test because of her arrogant and slothful nature. Her reward, instead, is a shower of tar. She is the ‘schmutzige Jungfrau’, the dirty maiden who has not profited from her visit to the underworld and whose conscience has therefore remained unexpanded.38 Literally, the tale may certainly be interpreted as a conservative, cautionary tale indoctrinating young girls about the importance of fulfilling the domestic chores that have been prescribed for women. Frau Holle, however, has repeatedly been identified with a pre- Christian Germanic deity of agriculture, spinning and child-bearing.39 This fact would certainly throw a different light on the interpretive possibilities of the tale by focusing on its symbolic potential rather than on the patriarchal interferences, which may have been introduced by the Grimms.40 The two girls could simply stand for two types of encounter with a mythical feminine, chthonic deity from whom a treasure of knowledge may be obtained if served properly. Serving the witch implies being able to let go of the rational paradigm, even of the tame, all-too-nice self of the ordinary world; this must take place in an unknown, subterranean environment of the sort also important in the Gothic as a site of ostensible revelation. What is remarkable is that this is an instance of a purely feminine initiation, expressed in a traditionally feminine code.41 The motif of visiting the underworld would • 199

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Female space and the image indicate then a psychic trip, with the futility of the lazy daughter’s journey representing the generic archetype of Thel’s apparent inability to confront great (feminine) power. What is also interesting is that the sequence of events that give coherence to Thel’s trial was hinted at from the start. By talking to the different beings, she was probing, as it were, into the body of nature in order to acquire some sort of knowledge about nature and about herself. The fact that she shifts from one being to another while hearing what amounts to the same reply, could reinforce the idea of an integrated nature which, however, Thel does not claim for herself. Earth itself could be represented as an anthropomorphic being of titanic dimensions: ‘the soil is her flesh; the trees and vegetation are her hair; the rocks, her bones; and the wind is her breath. She lies spread out and we live on her’.42 Such a notion could have suggested itself to Thel, and from it she could have inferred that she too formed part of such a being. However, her sense of separation is too great to allow for this. Blake himself had envisioned nature as one colossal, anthropomorphic being, as attested, for example, by his illustrations to Milton’s L’Allegro, where the landscape is populated by ethereal giants.43 Relative size is indicative of power and pervasiveness, and such would be the mythical stature of nature as Tellus Mater in Thel. In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which has often been read as a thematic sequel to Thel, the female protagonist, Oothoon, goes one step further than Thel in this feminine psychic quest insofar as she succeeds in appropriating the joyous nature of the ‘Eternal Female’, even though social mores and constraints continue to enslave her, which is why she remains in the Gothic cavern.44 In her we encounter a contradiction between mental freedom and bodily slavery, an opposition which can be read as the awakening conscience of women and an early step towards reclaiming the goodness of female desire and sexual enjoyment in a context where both these ideas would have probably been found immoral. Blake’s recurrent trope of ‘daughters’ is not to be overlooked: Thel is one of the daughters of the seraphim; these Visions are ‘of the daughters of Albion’; and he made a picture of Lot and his daughters, to mention but a few examples. Female descendants, sometimes equated with ‘emanations’, would, from a patriarchal perspective, have the mission of reproduction. Yet, in these two poems they are hardly more than a benevolent background, almost one with nature, witnesses to the tragic action that goes on before them, both in the material world and in the mythopoeic world of Blake’s artistic vision. Albion’s daughters, the daughters of England, weep and 200 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions sigh towards America; their attributes are topographic features: mountains and valleys (VDA 1:1–2; E 45). It is not clear what Oothoon’s relationship to them is, but a certain solidarity can be assumed. Whereas in Thel the other daughters have no participation in the poem beyond the first line where they come through as peaceful shepherdesses, in the Visions they fulfil the function of a dramatic chorus which is sympathetic towards Oothoon’s suffering, but can offer no better consolation than an echo. An echo is better than nothing, but not much either, unless it is identified with something larger than itself. The connection between Oothoon and America is not entirely clear either, because she ‘wander[s] in woe’ ‘[f]or the soft soul of America’ (VDA 1:3; E 45) as if they were separate entities. However, her attacker, Bromion, claims ownership over her as if she and the land were one and the same: ‘Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south’ (VDA 2:20; E 46). The overlapping of feminine identity and territorial possession, an age-old cartographic and poetic device, is consistent with the allegorical conventions explored in Thel. In the Visions, by contrast, the socio-historical implications appear much more literal. The anthropomorphic depiction of land, in particular, the depictions of continents as female bodies, insinuated the conception of a nation as both a mother and a whore, ready for conquest and procreation. Travel writing even gave rise to pornographic texts that thrived on such representations, carrying to an extreme the cultural habit of giving woman’s names to territories, such as Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Stretzer’s A New Description of Merryland (1741) and Samuel Cock’s Voyage to Lethe (1741) are two prominent examples.45 Blake himself had drawn from the tradition of land-as-woman in his illustrations for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), in an engraving entitled ‘Europe Supported by Africa and America’. All three women/continents are young, naked, languid, and beautiful in the manner of the three Graces. ‘Europe’ is wearing a string of pearls while ‘Africa’ and ‘America’ carry the bracelets of slavery in their upper arms. The gaze of ‘Europe’ is turned down as a gesture of modesty, while the other two women, whose skin is darker by degrees, are coyly looking directly at the spectator.46 Captive Oothoon embodies both the woman and the slave, and her discourse, the rebelliousness against these two categories. While The Visions of the Daughters of Albion is written in the same iambic heptameters as The Book of Thel, a long meter, which is very suitable for the • 201

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Female space and the image prophetic tone, the narrative procedure used in the later work is radically different, since in the Visions there is practically no narrative progression once the brief prelude is over. Oothoon, yet another Persephone, is picking flowers in Leutha’s vale. In realisation of the self-renovating powers of nature and the joyous essence of sexual delight, a winged Oothoon flies to find her beloved Theotormon, when she is most unexpectedly cut short by Bromion, who rapes and impregnates her. After that, the rest of this intriguing dramatic poem happens within the oppressive enclosure of a cave, as can be appreciated in the frontispiece, where Oothoon is held captive by force, chained back to back with Bromion, whose child she carries, and in front of Theotormon, her quondam lover, who has sunken into moral and actual paralysis47 (see Figure 21). The three characters pronounce long and cryptic speeches, but they can hardly be said to be having a dialogue: each seems isolated in his or her respective mental webs. Yet, there is no question that Oothoon’s speeches are the most remarkable of the three. Visually, Oothoon, to a much greater extent than Thel, embodies the type of the Gothic heroine in a quintessentially Gothic setting. In what is probably one of Blake’s most memorable (and violent) images, Oothoon’s bound, dejected nakedness is made all the more vulnerable by her being flanked by the two men who disregard her suffering, framed by the utter darkness of the cave, and surveilled by the glaring, blood-red eye of heaven. She is modelled on Andromeda, one of the favourite mythological referents for Gothic fiction: naked and chained to a rock on a stormy seascape, Andromeda is offered as a sacrifice to a vicious monster from which the hero must deliver her. Pictorial and sculptural depictions of Andromeda seem to relish the ingredients of bondage and nudity as the fulfilment of a not-so-imaginative male fantasy. The muted woman is there for the taking and the savage setting echoes the violence of male desire. Rape had been one of the preferred topics of literary endeavour in the eighteenth century and a staple of Gothic fiction, Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and Lewis’s The Monk (1796) being perhaps two of the most prominent examples.48 The type of the heroic, violated woman also stems from classical tradition, and Lucrece, who chose to commit suicide rather than live with the stigma of rape, constitutes one of the most emblematic referents. The reason why Oothoon is such a disquieting character is that she will not conform to this model since she refuses to equate virginity with chastity, and, despite Bromion’s rape, she insists that her purity is inscribed in her 202 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions

Figure 21 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy I, frontispiece (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. very flesh and cannot be taken away. She asks Theotormon to inspect her body both at a physical and at a metaphorical level. The violence of the poetic imagery used in this passage is such that it constitutes a re-enactment of Bromion’s rape, which surpasses it in savagery. In a way, Oothoon’s • 203

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Female space and the image self-inflicted violence is analogous to Lucrece’s suicide in the sense that both actions constitute a horrific display of force originated in the unlikely source of a woman’s arguably delicate frame.49 However, there is a Gothic relish in gory detail which sets them apart – something besides the crucial fact that Oothoon not only refuses to commit suicide, but persists in her defence of sexual enjoyment. First she calls ‘Theotormons Eagles to prey upon her flesh’; then she asks them to ‘Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect. / The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast’ (VDA 2:13, 15–16; E 46). After this, ‘The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey’ (VDA 2:17; E 46) without killing her.50 Theotormon sees all and smiles, but Oothoon’s self-immolation fails to convince him, so he persists in his sadness and remains deaf to Oothoon’s protestations of love. Even if Oothoon herself proclaims free love vehemently and can envision a different reality, her failure to communicate keeps her in the same confinement as her male companions. In fact, each one of the three characters stubbornly remains chained to his or her respective discursive, mind-forged manacles in a way that prefigures Beckettian dramatic alienation. Their imprisonment, again, is metaphorical as well as literal. So is the cave in which they are held captive. The cave, an entrance to the underworld, is also a chthonic womb, at once a place of refuge, a hiding place for criminals and lovers, and a tomb. It has also been read as the skull of Urizen, the dogmatic rational deity that is central to Blake’s mythopoeia; he makes his first appearance here in the Visions, and is imprecated by Oothoon as the source of human deafness and blindness to joy.51 The cave is also reminiscent of Plato’s, in which humanity is represented as the fettered prisoners whose perception is distorted so that they take illusion for reality, just like enraged Bromion and sorrowful Theotormon. To think of the chilling acoustics of the cave also resignifies Oothoon’s sighs that are repeatedly echoed back by the daughters of Albion. Once more it serves to establish a connection between feminine entities and telluric formations. In Blake’s illustration for the biblical tale of Lot, the father is seduced by his daughters within the confines of a narrow cave so their opprobrious action would be secret.52 Blake also did a most intriguing rendition of Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry’s treatise, De Antro Nympherum, the cave of the nymphs. It represents the symbolic dimension of two passages from books V and XIII of the Odyssey. In Blake’s painting there are feminine entities in the air and in the water, but most populously so in the earth. The cave of the title is 204 •

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions positively overflowing with female figures; it is as if nature itself were a woman.53 An important clarification must be made. Feminist critique has aimed to debunk the assumption that women and wild nature are analogous on the basis that they stand at the opposite pole of masculine rationality, civilisation, and culture. By insisting that the space in these two poems is feminine and opposed to Enlightenment values, there certainly is no intention of reinforcing that old tenet. On the contrary, the fact that it is also a Gothic space subverts such a notion and tends towards a re-appropriation of symbolic topography for women, by signalling a pre-patriarchal mythical moment where feminine initiation by representations of feminine entities was empowering and loaded with meaningfulness.54 The genius of the Visions failed to be noticed for a long time. According to Peter Ackroyd, Blake coloured several copies in a rather conventional manner. It was not enough, however, to hide its controversial signification or successfully to cast its polemic nature as quaintness. The consequence was that it had relatively few buyers who are said to have acquired it only because of its ‘Gothic’ charm.55 While the term is used here with condescension, Blake would have probably taken it as a compliment. For him the Gothic aesthetic that he so assiduously studied at Westminster Abbey was true, living art; the term seems to have entailed for him a welcome resistance to unilateral orthodoxy of the kind advocated by Sir Joshua Reynolds. And even though he certainly kept his poetry away from the self-complacency of much Gothic melodrama – which he nonetheless frequented for other purposes – he managed to frame his vision with the aura of the Gothic, producing, among many other things, depictions of femininity, which continue to invite interpretation.

Notes 1 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 242. 2 Both Thel and Visions were produced in the late 1780s, early 1790s, in the context of debates about the slave trade, the rights of women and the effects of the French Revolution. 3 Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, p. 231. See Nelson, ‘In the “Lilly of Havilah” ’, pp. 83–97; and Williams, Ideology and Utopia , pp. 71–97. 4 Along with crypts, cloisters, and labyrinths, the cavern is a staple motif of Gothic topography. See Hogle, ‘The Restless Labyrinth’, pp. 145–66. On subterranean spaces as the site for passion, torture, and secrecy, see Sophia Lee’s The Recess • 205

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Female space and the image (1783–85), the anonymous novel The Cavern of Death (1795), and John Palmer’s The Haunted Cavern: A Caledonian Romance (1796). 5 See Janes, ‘Emma Martin’, pp. 111–12. Alexander Pope, who famously had an artificial, underground grotto built in his sumptuous garden, uses the image of the cave in meaningful passages of his poetry: Belinda, in The Rape of the Lock, gives vent to her passion in the Cave of Spleen, and the Cave of Poetry in The First Dunciad is described as the home of the ‘Mighty Mother’, a ‘Chaos dark and deep’ (Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence, p. 69). On feminist readings of the cave see Gilbert and Gubar (The Madwoman, pp. 93–5), Ostriker (Stealing the Language, p. 16), and Cixous (Chapman Wilcox, Women, p.7). 6 For the debate on sexual liberation in these poems, see, for example, Ostriker, ‘Desire Gratified’, pp. 156–65; Kramer Linkin, ‘Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon’, pp. 184–94; Mellor, ‘Sex, Violence’, pp. 345–70; Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters; and, more recently, Urban, Magia Sexualis, p. 52. Helen Bruder has suggested that Thel’s flight is a welcome escape from patriarchal society: ‘According to The Book of Thel life under patriarchy is a grave plot’ (Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters, p. 44); Gerda Norvig coincides when she describes Thel as resisting dominant, patriarchal culture (Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity’, pp. 255–71). 7 For the pathetic fallacy in Visions, see Wright, Blake, Nationalism, p. 62. 8 About the failure of Thel and Oothoon, see Connolly, William Blake and the Body, p. xi; and Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, pp. 76, 106. 9 This is what Joseph Campbell would term ‘the meeting with the goddess’. In this passage, Campbell dedicates most of his attention to a male hero who has an encounter with a female deity, and when he does consider that a ‘maid’ may have an analogous experience, it is no longer a goddess she encounters, but a male ‘immortal’ (Campbell, The Hero, pp. 109–19). It is my contention here that in these two works by Blake the focus is on a woman encountering a female entity of mythical proportions. 10 Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity’, p. 256; Effinger, ‘Or Wilt Thou Go’, pp. 123–31; Ryan, ‘Blake and Religion’, p. 157; Bernath, ‘ “Seeking Flowers” ’, pp. 111–22; Hutchings, Imagining Nature, p. 36. 11 Connolly, this volume, pp. 236–64. 12 Haase has noted the affinity between Blake’s Urizen books and fairy tale motifs (Haase, The Greenwood Encyclopaedia, p. 72). 13 Tiriel was first published by W. M. Rossetti in 1874. Already at this early stage can we see the interconnectedness between all of Blake’s prophetic works, since many characters reappear in various poems (Hamlyn and Phillips, William Blake, p. 44). 14 For interpretations of ‘Mne’ see Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, p. 108.

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions 15 Song of Solomon 8:8, Authorised King James Bible, p. 764. For biblical references throughout The Book of Thel see Gleckner, ‘Blake’s Thel’, pp. 573–80. Michael Ferber has established an important connection between Thel and the Song of Solomon (Ferber, ‘Blake’s Thel’, pp. 45–56). 16 Estés, Women, p. 94. 17 Campbell, The Hero, p. 115. 18 On Thel and melancholia see Munteanu, ‘William Blake’, and Morton, Ecology without Nature, pp. 155–7. One of the best-known examples of fairy tales about a sad princess is ‘The Golden Goose’ (The Complete Fairy Tales, pp. 236–8). Grimm’s fairy tales were not published until 1812, but the taste for fairy tales had been in vogue at least since 1697, when Perrault published his Contes de ma mère l’Oye. There are many folkloric variants of the sad princess motif (for examples, see ‘Tales Similar to the Golden Goose’ at Sur la Lune Fairy Tales http://surlalunefairytales.com/goldengoose/other.html [accessed 1 June 2017]), and some literary versions too. Ruth Bottigheimer includes under this classification one of the earliest literary renderings of the story: Giambattista Basile’s frame tale of Princess Zoza from the Pentamerone, also known by its Neapolitan title, Lo cunto de li cunti (Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales, pp. 79–80). The motif of the Person who Never Laughs is classified by Stith Thompson as type F591 (Zalka, Tales of Superhuman Powers, p. 27). On melancholia and the Gothic see Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, p. 250; Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime; and Howells, Love, Mystery, p. 5. 19 For a survey of the feminist critique of fairy tales, see Haase, Fairy Tales and Feminism, pp. 1–36. The tale of Sleeping Beauty is type AT410. 20 Quoted in Khalip, Anonymous Life, p. 141. 21 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 377. 22 Hamlyn and Phillips, William Blake, p. 169. Blake wrote this in a letter to George Cumberland dated 2 July 1800. 23 The Early Illuminated Books, p. 76. 24 Shullenberger, Lady in a Labyrinth, p. 109, p. 114. Blake, however, was certainly far from the puritan advocacy of Christian chastity as portrayed in Comus. 25 For a more detailed comparison between the symbolic landscape in Rasselas and Thel, see Raine, Blake and Tradition, pp. 112–14. 26 Richard C. Sha has questioned this simplicity by pointing out that in different copies of Thel the Motto is placed at the beginning or at the end. Depending on where the Motto is located, Thel either will or will not appear to have acquired something from her subterranean experience (Sha, Perverse Romanticism, pp. 222–8). 27 It is interesting to notice that, while Blake chose to illustrate the poem with an anthropomorphic lily, both the Cloud and the Clod of Clay are not represented with a graphic human form. Not so the infant (speechless) Worm, who is • 207

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Female space and the image rendered as a sleeping child, cuddled in leaves, very similar to an image he used in the frontispiece of For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. 28 After George Mills Harper’s The Neoplatonism of William Blake (1961) many scholars have continued to establish the connection between Blake and Neoplatonism. See Hilton, ‘Blake’s Early Works’, p. 196; Damon, William Blake, p. 74; Raine, Blake and Tradition, pp. 99–101. 29 See Bruder’s influential reading of patriarchal criticism in relationship to The Book of Thel (Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, pp. 38–54). Sha offers an original reading according to which Thel’s initiation is about sexuality without procreation (Sha, Perverse Romanticism, pp. 222–8). 30 Keynes, William Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet, p. 18. 31 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 232–3. 32 Raine, Blake and Tradition, pp. 136–75, p. 180; Damon, William Blake, pp. 74–6. 33 All the beings are given a gendered identity, except for the Worm: the Lily, like the Clod of Clay, is also feminine; the Cloud is masculine. In accordance with biblical and other myths, Blake had developed a connection between clay and primordial creativity. ‘Adam’ means ‘red earth’; ‘red clay’ is one of Blake’s most important symbols of God’s creative power (Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 229). 34 Blake would expound upon these two principles repeatedly, most explicitly so in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where he distinguishes between the Prolific and the Devouring portions of being: ‘The Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved (sic) the excess of his delights’ (Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, pp. 170–1). While in this case Blake ascribes them a masculine identity, in Thel it is evident that they are a part of the feminine telluric nature without which life would not exist. Norvig points out the generally accepted etymology of Thel’s name from the Greek ‘thelow’ (θέλω) which means to desire, to wish, and ‘thele’ (θηλή) ‘which by metonymy from the word for nipple or suckled breast came to mean “female,” or “belonging to the female sex” ’ (Norvig, ‘Female Subjectivity’, p. 262). Other related etymologies have been forwarded by Murray in ‘Thel, Thelyphthora, pp. 275–97; and in Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, p. 79. 35 Both Frye and Damon explain the significance of the northern gates with respect to other works by Blake and as a reference to Homer. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 232; Damon, William Blake, p. 75. 36 Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, pp. 100–1. 37 On the affinity between fairy tales and Gothic tales see Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature, pp. 111–12; and Tibbetts, The Gothic Imagination, p. 5. 38 The Complete Fairy Tales, pp. 88–91, tale 24 (AT480, the Kind and Unkind Girls). 39 Davidson and Chaudhri, Fairy Tale, pp. 106–7.

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Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in Thel and Visions 40 Such interferences have been found to have been prolific and consistent. See Haase, Fairy Tales and Feminism, pp. 10–14. 41 This reading of ‘Frau Holle’ is based on Estés’s Jungian reading of the witch Baba Yaga from Russian folklore in the tale of ‘Vasalisa the Wise’ (Estés, Women, pp. 74–114). 42 Weigle, Creation and Procreation, p. 51. 43 See ‘The Sunshine Holiday’, watercolour for Milton’s L’Allegro (c. 1816). The descriptive note Blake wrote for this image reads: ‘In this design is Introduced/ Mountains on whose barren breast/ The Labring Clouds do often rest. Mountains Clouds Rivers Trees appear Humanized on the Sunshine Holiday’ (Klonsky, William Blake, p. 84). 44 The affinity between Thel and Oothoon has been pointed out since early Blake criticism. Besides Damon (William Blake, pp. 76–106) and Frye (Fearful Symmetry, p. 238) see Ferber, ‘Towards Revolution’, pp. 64–88; Lattin, ‘Blake’s Thel and Oothoon’, pp. 11–24; Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, p. 228. The concept of the ‘Eternal Female’ appears in the ‘Song of Liberty’, which closes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 45 See Rose, Feminism and Geography, pp. 86–112. 46 Klonsky, William Blake, p. 47. 47 The names and plot are inspired in James Macpherson’s Ossianic poem, Oithona. The title-page and the frontispiece are sometimes interchanged, which is why they are both numbered 1 and 2. See Blake, The Early Illuminated Books, pp. 230, 244–5. 48 For readings of rape in Gothic fiction see Susan Brownmiller’s landmark work (Against Our Will, p. 16); and Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Horrifying Sex, pp. 107–8. 49 Helen Bruder has read a satirical attitude on Blake’s part of the stereotype of female beauty as described by Edmund Burke, which includes this delicacy of frame in his list of attributes (Blake, Daughters of Albion, p. 45). Magnus Ankarsjö has described Oothoon as ‘Blake’s first fully developed strong female character’ (Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender, p. 5). 50 Blake chose neither to describe with words nor to portray with images Bromion’s rape of Oothoon. However, on Plate 6 [Erdman plt 3, p. 47] of the Visions there is a very graphic image of an eagle inserting its beak into Oothoon’s naked, spread-eagled body. Reminiscent of Prometheus, Oothoon’s torture seems vain in the light of Theotormon’s refusal to accept her arguments. 51 Klonsky, William Blake, p. 49. 52 Ibid., p. 71. 53 Ibid., p. 105. 54 Swann, The Fairy Tale, pp. 65–6; Warner, Monuments and Maidens, pp. 202–3. 55 Ackroyd, Blake, p. 178. ‘Charm’ seems a hardly appropriate, petty attribute of the Visions.

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Part IV

Sex, desire, perversion

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9

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence • Mark Lussier

‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’1 ‘That is the eternal ambiguity of the term “unconscious” ’2

T

he gap between the eye and the heart observed by William Blake (evoked through this ‘motto’ for Visions of the Daughters of Albion) and the analysis of the gap as it serves as the condition of the unconscious analysed by Jacques Lacan (in his famous Encore seminar on feminine sexuality) often comes into view through symbolic machinery associated with ‘the Gothic’ as a semiotic network. The Gothic interweaves various elements: an appropriation of the nostalgic past; the evocation of foreboding and gloomy settings; the disturbing presence of mysterious and seemingly supernatural and/or unexplainable events; the establishment of prominent features of its architectural heritage; the utilisation of mystery, suspense and the sublime; the creation of polarised characters with enigmatic histories and qualities, and even the darkest projections of first-stage enlightenment epistemology. Of course, given our own moment and the arrival of the two-hundred-year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the cumulative judgment indicates that her masterwork remains the premiere example of this strain of Gothic fiction. The aesthetics of Gothic representation provided an active and comprehensive discursive system registered in a broad range of semiotic strata, as manifest in everything from neo-Gothic architecture and art through drama, poetry, and fiction to fashion and broader elements of style. Critical studies remain constantly uncertain whether Romanticism itself is dependent • 213

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Sex, desire, perversion upon or opposed to these elemental aspects of the Gothic mode. In the case of Blake, there is little ambiguity, since he wrote amidst the cultural crescendo of these forms, with the dates of his life (1757–1827) virtually coinciding with its emergence and subsequent dissemination across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across Blake’s lifetime the body of literature launched through Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto became a multi-formed and multi-national symbolic structure (in America, England, France, Germany, and elsewhere), arguably continuing as an active current to our own neo-Goth moment (within vampires, werewolves, and the undead). The theory of textuality (the body) and the verbal and visual designs (the spirit) of works like The [First] Book of Urizen and Europe a Prophecy clearly bear the symbolic burden of the Gothic in the colouring of the plates, the nightmarish interwoven narratives of inner conflict and outer turmoil, and the patriarchal plots at work within the mind and operative in the world. These signs are gathered into a dynamic textual form with strong yet pliable instrumental and structural elements through which to explore mentality within materiality (and vice versa). Blake’s work deeply engaged the full spectrum of semiosis that defined ‘the Gothic’ and the cultural features associated with the collective movement that gave rise to neo-Gothic architecture, art, drama, fashion, literature, style, and other connected forms of aesthetic and cultural production. However, his contact with these forms was also not just within the marketplace of taste and cultural production but more acutely personal (as scholars have long ago acknowledged), with the young artist drawing his own way through London and its effigies of Gothic sculptural and sepulchral presence during his days of apprenticeship under the caring and watchful eye of James Basire. Nearly every biographical and historical-oriented study dutifully acknowledges these abiding aesthetic and historical influences. As G. E. Bentley, Jr indicates, Blake’s visual imagination was shaped primarily within this symbolic system: ‘[his] experiences with the monuments in the Abbey and in Gothic churches round London profoundly impressed the earnest apprentice, and their echoes stayed with him throughout his life, determining his style and his subjects and his sympathies.’3 David Erdman sounded this note long ago, observing that we ‘come closer to Blake’s actual feelings when we study the residual effects in later art and poetry of his early intimacy with the extinct dynasts in their canopied tombs’.4 In Joyce Townsend’s estimation, these studies – indeed ‘the very acts of drawing in the Abbey in the mid-1770s and then engraving from 214 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence the drawings’ – track the ‘crucial step towards Blake identifying his straight and “untangled” road, and reinforcing an already partly formed view of how best to find his way along it’.5 Gothic forms and formulations (real, symbolic, or imaginary) function as the energised cultural zone within which Blake’s talents were honed, which inspires the question at hand: ‘What else might be said about this long-known influence?’ Actually, my argument is straightforward. Blake’s appropriation and transmutation of the varied idioms of the Gothic trope (after a lifetime of contact on many different fronts) remain much more complicated than previously argued, in spite of an almost constant examination of its varied manifestations in the verbal and visual fields of the illuminated books. As the interpretive text for the ‘Gothic Art’ section of the Tate Gallery William Blake Exhibit that opened the twenty-first century noted: Like many of his contemporaries, Blake was interested in medieval culture. But for him medieval architecture and sculpture provided more than forms to inspire his art: they also embodied his artistic ideal, in which spirituality and aesthetic value were inseparable. For Blake, the Gothic meant not just an historical period, nor even a style – it meant the epitome of the spiritual integrity to which art must aspire.6

Shaped more than most by the erotic, esoteric, and exotic elements of Gothic symbolics, Blake was uniquely prepared (by adoration, dedication, education, and intellection) to read through Gothic and medieval forms in order to identify the mythological and psychological elements within them. During Blake’s most productive decade (the 1790s) Gothic form functioned as the aesthetic background radiation for his art and poetry (and much else in fin de siècle London), and my focus will be on a two-work sequence standing at the headwaters of that decade, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, although more emphasis will be on the latter. The poet/prophet’s heightened interest with Gothic narrative itself opened onto the psychological undercurrents within it. The imaginative nostalgia of the Gothic idiom, given its varied yet connected plots, had brought to the level of consciousness the long buried yet long intuited zone now termed the unconscious – the hole in being Blake laboured mightily to render whole. At the same moment (the first three years in Lambeth), his understanding of gender underwent a significant advance through exposure to ‘new feminist ideas and a desire for a more egalitarian society’ and during the temporal gap he was influenced by • 215

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Sex, desire, perversion ‘Mary Hays, and certainly, by Mary Wollstonecraft’.7 Of course, such a discovery (the unconscious) by necessity must confront the phallic order that animates patriarchy – which depends upon inner repression and outer subjection of the feminine. Blake published, in the opening years at Lambeth, works that disclose the operations of the unconscious and the victimisation of the feminine/ woman, establishing a ‘de-territorializing line of analytic flight’8 that comes to an impossible and uncertain (yet inspirational) crescendo in the schizoanalytic work begun as Vala and concluded as The Four Zoas.9 The Marriage performs the impressive operation of simultaneously diagnosing the maladies of subject formation (within its surface examination of tradition), recommending treatment for the condition (within the narrative), and cultivating through a very active textuality (method dependent upon known means of reception) an antidote to the dis/ease resident in the process of subject formation, embracing the semiotic as the cure for the symbolic (in contemporary critical language). Visions relates the necessary corollary to the generic processes critiqued in The Marriage and its counter-formation as a collective consciousness, and the work does this through an overdetermined exploitation of Gothic aesthetics, narrative, and plot as the vehicle for the exploration of the horrific condition of female subjectivity within a phallic culture. The heroine Oothoon gives voice within narrative consciousness (as character) to the situation of being erased from discursive presence (in Lacanian terms ‘Woman can only be written with a bar through it [because] there is no such thing as Woman’10), providing a particularised microanalysis that complements and supplements the more generalised critique offered in The Marriage. Blake’s modest work brilliantly dramatises a method of forging linkages between inner psychological events and outer historical conditions (the plight of the feminine heard in the echoes of the daughters of Albion and their position in history). He launches his construction of individuated mythology as the antidote to the dis/eases, individual and collective, that condition subject formation in the field of culture, with Gothic art and literature providing the primary elements to end repression through expression. The reweaving of those elements constantly evolved across the Lambeth residency, often vacillating between the historical and psychological as the primary focus (for example, America a Prophecy and The [First] Book of Urizen, respectively) even as each was implicated within the other, 216 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence given the entangled interactions of materiality and mentality. The new poetics informing these works were inscriptive, carved into an evolving multidimensional form – the illuminated book of prophecy. Blake poured into his new material textuality – a metal body inscribed with mirrored writing – the emerging mythic formations of psychological functions, and the result, for lack of a better word, was a work with its own gaze and one capable of changing ‘all the perspectives, the lines of force, of my world’ re-establishing ‘it from the point of nothingness where I am’.11 The engagement of the reader in inclusive acts of reception (for example, through the deployment of a I-persona undergoing stages of development and transformation) proceeds along what Deleuze and Guattari term a deterritorialising ‘line of flight’ in its positive aspect that stimulates ‘the release of innovative processes’ capable of forming ‘melodic and rhythmic themes’ that ‘constitute semiotic systems’ which are ‘inseparable from material components’ within which they are held in stasis.12 Blake’s new textual form and its content sought, then, to capture ‘the spiritual integrity’ he perceived in Gothic art and architecture within a material form of verbal and visual representation, and through that form he simultaneously created an aesthetic counterbalance to the neo-classical revival the Gothic supplanted: ‘The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’ (On Virgil; E 270). Blake’s incorporation of Gothic elements into the body of his prophetic works resulted in an altered semiotic guise for its web of interactive sign systems, simultaneously structuring his radically individuated mythology, his pronounced views of subject formation in the field of culture and, ultimately, his articulation of a ‘sublime allegory’ of mental functions and their shared drive to inscribe themselves within materiality (mind and matter alike). Blake’s absorption and redeployment of the deep features of Gothic art and literature during his early days and practices led to his discovery of the unconscious (the gap between the eye and heart noted above), which was discernible in other literary works from the period. This claim seems supported by Joel Faflak’s fine study, which posits precisely this case: ‘If Romanticism generates an overdetermined depth model of subjectivity, an interiority inconsistent within itself, then the Gothic is surely the place to investigate its haunting and haunted locus.’13 For this reason, he continues, the symbolic tropics of the Gothic ‘have not only been rich investigative fields’ for Romantic studies but have also proven ‘to be one of the most fertile sites for investigating the prehistory • 217

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Sex, desire, perversion of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic imperatives in nineteenth-century literature and culture’.14 Jodey Castricano, in her recent examination of the Gothic through its cryptomimesis, acknowledges in similar fashion ‘that many of the familiar Gothic tropes and topoi have appeared … in the works of psychoanalysis’.15 As is well known, Sigmund Freud drew heavily upon nineteenthcentury literary works (for example, E. T. A. Hoffman) in his study of the ‘uncanny’ (unhemlich) and Carl Jung, in his peevishly oppositional response to Freud’s landmark work, did likewise, with both following a similar road to the unconscious as that mapped by Faflak.16 In Freud’s hypothesis, ‘an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’.17 However, Freud also articulated the supplement to this over-generalised quasi-clinical judgment earlier in his own essay, where he noted that ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced … or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes’.18 Here again one confronts the gap noted through Blake and discussed by Lacan, and one can also perceive in incipient form the master signifier of the phallus, hovering cloaked just off stage and only awaiting Lacan’s return to Freud through Saussurean linguistics to unveil its wide dominion within and without the subject. In Lacan’s estimation, the role Romanticism played in the articulation of the conceptual structure now associated with psychoanalysis, especially in its English guise, was crucial to the emergence of psychoanalysis, with the movement certainly providing ‘an early testing ground for psychoanalytic concepts’.19 In Blake’s case, The Four Zoas offers an exemplary Romantic work dedicated to ‘radical self-investigation [by which] the theoretical infrastructure of psychoanalysis’ comes into view,20 and the heavily revised but finally unfinished state of the poem (begun at the end of the 1790s and extending to the 1820s) functions – given its complicated relationship with the proof sheets from Night Thoughts that haunt the manuscript, its extensive revisions and their accompanying designs, its intra-textual relationship with the illuminated works as a structural presence – as the unconscious of the canon, offering a form of dream/nightmare narrative Deleuze and Guattari would recognise as ‘schizoanalysis’.21 Beyond the use of previously printed pages lurk the pencil designs that explore in extraordinary detail the horror that awaits one’s obeisance to the law 218 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence of the phallus as the price of achieving subjectivity and thereby gaining discursive presence. Lacan analysed the gap Blake evoked to open Visions (hence the juxtaposed epigrams above) with the revolution of structural linguistic at his back and through which he re-mapped the theoretical terrain of Freud in light of the operations of the signifier of desire articulated within the dialectics of courtly love, which shaped significant ‘dit-mension’ of the medievalism at the foundation of Lacan’s analysis of the mechanisms that establish and sustain ‘the relationship between theology and the explication of the truth of desire’.22 Under these conditions, ‘the annunciation of desire [inter-dit] of the speaking subject’ functions paradigmatically as the plight of the subject itself: ‘Thus I always say more than I know.’23 Lacan, here, arrives at the gap with which this essay began, ex/pressing its presence in analogous fashion to Oothoon’s ‘motto’. While the analytic instrumentation of Deleuze and Guattari are often intentionally and wilfully anti-Lacanian (that is, anti-structuralist), the combined languages of Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari often help elucidate any exploration of the degree to which Blake’s poetic constructions resist assimilation in the process of articulating a new line of flight whose ‘trajectory will only attain its fullest scope when a veritable pragmatic analysis allowing the micropolitics of desire in the social field to be explored can be constituted’.24 Visions is rather precisely such a pragmatic analysis. Blake and Lacan, then, share a perception that signs and semiotic systems map and mediate this gap between consciousness and cosmos, although admittedly from different positions (the artist and the analyst respectively) and (therefore) with differential prospects, providing an x-vector of imaginative semiosis and a y-vector of cartographic psychoanalysis to render this gap visible and unleash its latent semiotic plenitude. The opening works of the 1790s reveal an astonishing comprehension of the interactive aspects of psychological, mythological, and ritualistic operations, and Blake’s observation of the différance (the interplay of a difference and a deferral of meaning) between what the ‘eye sees’ and what the ‘heart knows’ leads, during the 1790s, to the illuminated books of prophecy, with works oriented along two lines of flight (the historical functioning as a horizontal axis and the psychological operating as a vertical axis).25 Lines of flight, as conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, are ‘bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal’ and which ‘reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists’. 26 This • 219

Sex, desire, perversion position, as argued within A Thousand Plateaus and elsewhere, proves to be an operative and viable definition for the trajectory of Romanticism itself:

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If we attempt an equally summary definition of romanticism, we see that everything is clearly different. A new cry resounds: the Earth, the territory and the Earth! With romanticism, the artist abandons the ambition of de jure universality and his or her status as creator: the artist territorializes, enters a territorial assemblage.27

While Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari differ on their respective perspectives on the unconscious – whether viewed as a mirror reflecting the psychological dominance of the phallus and its reification in the symbolic codes of cultural or as the roiling repository of semiotic potentiality periodically erupting into deterritorialising lines of flight – they equally identify the art and literature of the Romantic age as crucial to the discovery of the unconscious and the articulation of the analytic processes by which it is charted, something Faflak discussed at length. The Gothic was the pre-eminent form within which to observe the play of the micropolitics of desire and the nihilism of the drives that direct attempts to achieve and sustain jouissance within the structure of the real, which is an impossibility within Lacanian mechanics, since jouissance tends to function ‘without rhyme or reason’.28 Certainly, this description fits well with the new mental and textual territories opened by The Marriage and Visions but equally defines the turn towards interiority in numerous strains of Romantic thought and writing discussed by Faflak. For example, any reading of discrete works of Gothic fiction, whether Vathek or The Monk, would be hard-pressed to ignore the exploration of aberrant forms of abnormal psychological – an exploration honed to precise poetic perfection within the dramatic monologues in Robert Browning’s ‘madhouse cells’ (c.1838). The Marriage provides an assemblage of forms, sources and voices filtered through a scathing satiric imagination guided by an impulse akin to Heideggerian Destruktion, a ‘de-structuring of the history of ontology’ to gain purchase on the ‘onto-theological’ embedded in metaphysics as a necessary prelude for any state of dwelling capable of abiding, aspiring, surviving, and thriving.29 Blake the ‘bricoleur’ functions as artist, designer, engraver, painter, philosopher, poet, and printer – a rather audacious stance relative to the sophisticated semiotic seas in which he swam – and pursues an imaginary exploration of desires and drives, constructs symbolic repetitions of these conflicts, deconstructs the foundational binaries beneath 220 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence them, renders the mythic and psychologic dynamic and interactive, and traces them through myth into to the realm of the real.30 The fourfold structure of The Marriage frames a process begun in unlearning (plates 1–7), which unleashes a burst of unfettered creativity (plates 7–10) through which any reader must travel (akin to Satan’s swimming across chaos in Paradise Lost), with Blake positioning immediately after the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ the key to decode the process that follows – the visual design that mediates the passage from the tumultuous imaginary realm of proverbial wisdom and his effort to restructure the way the subject is shaped. The third section, which begins a rather deliberative process to reconstruct the subject (a realignment to effect a shift from passive to active reading habits and then to extend this into the structure of everyday life), unfolds in a fourfold movement established through the function of the I-persona and predicated on the phenomenological encounter with the textual gaze which it bears (plates 11–24). The manifestation of this new state of subjectivity is found in the voice that sings ‘The Song of Liberty’ concluding the work (plates 25–7), and the form of utterance, numbered biblical verses, performs visionary work that conveys Blake’s reinterpretation of prophetic discourse: a shift from the predictive to the psychoanalytic. The ‘Song’ sung presents the preliminary mytheme of Blake’s evolving mythopoetic map of mental processes (the interactions of the nuclear family: ‘The Eternal Female’, ‘The new born terror’, and ‘the starry king’ [MHH 25; E 44]) and announces the vehicle (the illuminated book of prophecy) designed to serve as method itself and to exploit lines of receptive flight leading directly to the assumption of a deliberately crafted visionary perspective.31 This method provides a material and mental framework for a freeranging intertextuality via a variable textuality that also enfolds an active and ever-expanding intratextuality. As well, its title page (in any copy) provides a visual schema for the cultivation of visionary consciousness in the abstract figuration (almost an X-ray) of a representative person with a parallel to the allegorical function of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress (which Blake illustrated later in life). However, in Blake’s innovative work, the one-to-one correspondence at the core of the allegorical trope is established between the individual traversing the intertextual terrain (the I-persona) and the individual reading it (an average – therefore phenomenological – reader). Any act of reading enters into and grapples with these features, but in the process of reception readers continuously pronounce themselves the ‘I’ of the work in hand, thereby internalising the material processes of subject • 221

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Sex, desire, perversion formation built into its technological and narratological operations. As Georges Poulet long ago argued, ‘Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. … Reading, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I.’32 This observation returns my argument to Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the gap discussed thus far, since Lacan proposes that a similar dynamic ‘is the very backbone of my teaching’, arguing that ‘what speaks without knowing it makes me “I” ’: I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know (plus que je n’en said). This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word ‘subject’ in analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me ‘I’, [the] subject of the verb.33

Within the accumulation of The Marriage and its dedicated exploitation of the ‘I’ as our narrative guide through both heaven and hell, readers both transfer (via internalisation) the subject function and thereby continuously pronounce themselves the ‘I’ of the text. Returning this reflection to Blake’s Marriage, Poulet shows the mechanism at work (transference of primary consciousness), and Lacan shows the aim of the method (the ex/pression of voice). Blake reinforced these broad structural elements though an act of repetition with a difference, since the third section of the work (plates 11–24) manifests its own four-part organisation and thereby transforms the deployment of an occasional use of a mise en abyme structural feature into both a narrative operation and a textual technique.34 Immediately after ‘The Proverbs of Hell’, Blake provides a visual key to the transformation of subjectivity through textuality, yet the verbal key to the textual method itself (a material body invested with imaginary vehicles conveyed through narratological instrumentation) precedes entry to those hellish realms, in the first ‘Memorable Fancy’ of The Marriage: ‘I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote’ (MHH 6–7; E 35). Blake inserts this verbal description to evoke his mode of production at a meta-textual level of comprehension, inaugurating an impulse to employ mise en abyme that reaches its crescendo in the mirrored language in Milton and Jerusalem.35 The technique that culminates in the last epics was first forged in the imaginary realms of fancy satirised throughout The Marriage. However, even within the closing 222 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence ‘Song’, liberty had not been achieved for all participants in Blake’s psychohistorical mythemes, since the masculine ‘king’ and ‘terror’ erase ‘The Eternal Female’ from discursive presence, a historical and psychological condition to which Blake next turns. The method in The Marriage relentlessly collides epistemic and esoteric authors and works, thereby generating the ‘energy’ and expressing the ‘humour’ of the work, but Visions, which ‘is principally a psychological study’, heralds back to another Gothic medieval form, the ‘psychomachia in which separate characters are contending aspects of a single personality’.36 Like other aspects of Gothic form adapted by Blake (for example, the frontispiece design), the use of the psychomachia technique immediately undergoes innovation along the vector of the imaginary (that is, the unconscious), a line of flight that transgresses the established genre (through its deconstructive rather than reconstructive impulses) even as it puts into play Blake’s considerable actual knowledge of the arguments surrounding the condition of women at the end of the eighteenth century (that is, his sensitivity to ‘specific sexual debates [that] he contested so thoroughly the premises of oppressive dominant ideologies’).37 The medieval form provides a symbolic (Gothic) and allegorical (psychological) vehicle that, when adapted to Blake’s purposes, can only be termed, in advance of Deleuze and Guattari, a schizoanalytic approach to poetic and textual production. The work, simply stated, analyses the plight of women, who occupy the space of jouissance (for the male subject) and thereby are forced to function as the sought object (Lacan’s objet a) in a competition between two competing forms of the masculine. This oppressive state of the feminine en/forces inner repression as the psychic dimension that stabilises broader aspects of cultural production through those oppressive practices. Visions, a work saturated with narratological and symbolic elements drawn from the Gothic, appeared at the height of the Gothic resurgence – published after Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) yet before Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and after the extended construction of Strawberry Hill was concluded (1749–76) but before the lengthy erection of Fonthill Abbey began (1796–1813). The symbolic force fields of resurgent Gothic draping this particular work reflects Blake’s sophisticated understanding of the tradition, with the first two plates of the work (title page and frontispiece) sequentially forcing an encounter with the literal plot of Gothic narrative (the title plate) and the political unconscious of that narrative (the frontispiece). In spite of its seeming emphasis on sight, the very condition of voice as vehicle for ex/press comes to the foreground of concerns within • 223

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Sex, desire, perversion Visions and takes the form of forcing the hero of the work, Oothoon, to endure dual forms of objectification: her embodiment as an object of use (for the rapist Bromion) and as an object of exchange (for her ‘beloved’ Theotormon) that ‘secure[s] for the [men their] own self-knowledge and truth’.38 Scholarship has established that the origins and resonances of her name ripple backward ‘to the heroine of “Ossian” Macpherson’s “Oithona” ’, who while awaiting the return of her beloved Gaul, was kidnapped and ravished by Dunrommath (a previously rejected suitor), who secures her in a cave located on an island somewhere in the imaginary northern geographic regions of Macpherson’s magnificent fake.39 The parallels to Visions are obvious, but as Nelson Hilton also notes, the plot of the poem also ‘reference[s] the story of Persephone as presented in the translations and commentaries of Thomas Taylor’, thereby providing a superb exemplum of ‘the mysterious tangle of his reading and his daily life, and how, finally, the eye is always more visionary that the heart’.40 Hilton’s argument also acknowledges, indeed depends upon, the hovering presence of Mary Wollstonecraft to function throughout Visions as the Oothoonian I/eye, the very one Blake perceived in Vindication where ‘Wollstonecraft’s “I” is the flowering of a rhetorical persona’, which links this technique to that of the narratological function of the I-persona in The Marriage.41 The subject through which Blake pursued his most ambitious and extended schizoanalysis is, of course, an assemblage (the collective entity named Albion), who appears within this work for the first time in the canon solely as a titular (verbal) element dependent on the allegorical identification with England, but the work also announces the arrival on-stage of Urizen in titular form (although modelled on ‘the starry king’), who will get his own book of error/terror in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Visions. Urizen is the dense centre, the black hole, of the shaping psycho-mythic elements of the sublime allegory and functions as the very embodiment of the symbolic order in all its authority (Patriarch, Phallus, Law, and Death). Within the horizon of this poetic work, Urizen’s ideological association with processes of subject formation directly connects the hidden horror that informs Gothic art and literature and the specificity of those terrors experienced by a representative woman (Oothoon) to that experienced by all women (the daughters). The enforced drama creates an echo chamber of verbal and visual semiosis within which to render audible and make visible the systemic barring of woman from discursive presence through cultural processes of subject formation, and as discussed 224 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence above, this barring forces any woman by process into the role as objet a and thereby shapes the machinic road to the masculine desire that animates the political unconscious (an illusory path to the ‘real’ impossibility of male desire achieving jouissance through her subjected state). Beneath the plot and its symbolic reinforcement of phallic potency and female victimisation, the entangled semiotic stream that accompanies Oothoon’s fluid and unstoppable lamentation increasingly endows her song of assumed sexual identity with a power capable of voicing a counter-narrative that deconstructs what Lacan terms ‘jealouissance’, the convergence of ‘jealous rage, envy, and rivalry’.42 Oothoon, more than any other character in Blake’s poetry, succinctly embodies the plight of the feminine caught within the ossified cultural machinery reflected in remnants of Gothic/courtly love established as the psychological foundation for modern love. Oothoon must endure the ‘trans-formation of [her] body into [both] use … and exchange values’, which forces her to function as a mirror of male desire, and which ‘inaugurates the symbolic order’43 and, across the work and through linguistic production, ultimately articulates, in spite of symbolic limitations, her ‘subjectivization’.44 The ebbs and flows of that poetic ex/pression verbally chart Oothoon’s evolution towards some locus ‘beyond the phallus’ yet displays the degree to which, by systemic design, her arguments fall upon the deaf ears, being disregarded by both her rapist (Bromion) and her torturer and beloved (Theotormon) alike.45 However, her transformation through this revolution in poetic language is perceived and understood by at least two distinct audiences: the daughters of Albion within the poetic landscape (who represent the historical backdrop for the foregrounded psychological exploration of feminine sexuality and subjectivity); and those entangled within the textual gaze itself (readers confronting in a mirror the darker drives of cultural process). The title page and frontispiece express mutually reinforcing but methodically different visual languages to map the symbolic containment at the core of Lacan’s analysis (title page) and the latter (frontispiece) enters the semiotic realm posited by Julia Kristeva as the ballast against the swamping effects of the symbolic order itself.46 When engaged sequentially,47 they also exhibit strong intra-textual resonances that supplement the overt intertextual connections to the verbal and visual dissection of psychological processes mapped earlier throughout The Marriage. As individual pages, both exhibit internal coherence as typical examples of the Blakean composite textual commitment, and both display in particular • 225

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Sex, desire, perversion ways the artistic heritage and pragmatic training Blake brought to the task, with intermingled figures of art and speech providing a dynamic environment through which to confront a difficult quandary via a dialogic exercise capable of stimulating re/cognition within the subject named ‘reader’. The illuminative fusion of verbal and visual dimensions in the two pages that precede the poem proper lays bare, respectively, the plot of Gothic narrative (woman in distress within a patriarchal structure) and the political unconscious that animates that narrative (woman as mirror of male desire). The first plate proceeds along a horizontal vector that forms the poetic ‘real’ of the work, while the latter takes a vertical flight into the ‘imaginary’ to disclose the phallic function as controlling ideology within and without the self (see Figure 22). Like the type of stratified layers of semiosis established on the title plate for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the complex design that leads readers into the emotional morass that defines Visions provides topological layers that can be understood either as consciousness, the subconscious and the unconscious or the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary (depending upon the preferred analytic method). Reading from head to foot with emphasis on the centre, the plate forces an immediate encounter with words clustered in critical mass at the top and centre of the design, with clouds, a rainbow, showers, and waves framing the title and its inaugural event. The verbal asserts the primacy of two collectives in the title, ‘visions’ and ‘daughters’, which immediately raises the question: What sights/sites do these daughters see/perceive? Blake etched into the title page at its foot (or foundation) an image of the primary narrative under analysis within the work, as Oothoon, fleeing from a frowning Bromion borne on fiery wings, runs with outspread arms directly towards the reader (as if reaching out beyond the textual frame to readers for rescue). The act behind this image, Oothoon’s rape, occurs in a shockingly short statement only sixteen lines into the work: ‘Bromion rent her with his thunders’ (VDA 1:16; E 46). Theotormon’s reaction to this event is conditioned by his ‘black jealous waters’ (VDA 2:4; E 46), and he commits an equally reprehensible act by binding ‘back to back’ (VDA 2:5; E 46) those who he characterises as ‘the adulterate pair’ (VDA 2:4; E 46). As the eye arrives, at last, to the motto and attribution of authorship beneath the primal scene of physical enslavement and psychological subjection, the gaze breaks to the left and right, redirected along the crests of two dark waves below Oothoon. Reading upward along the left margin, the ‘subsidiary [bounding] figures’ celebrate sequentially the ignition of 226 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence

Figure 22  William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy I, title page (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. desire yet encounter equally its restraint, a confining presence discovered while reading upward on the right side of the design, which is blocked by a dark cloud and sheets of rain that originate with a masculine figure sitting atop ‘Daughters’.48 • 227

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Sex, desire, perversion The most explicit pictorial display of Blake’s appropriation of Gothic formations occurs through the second plate for the work, the frontispiece and its illustration of a mutated form of triangulated sexual relations through which (in a truly horrifying situation) Oothoon’s betrothed Theotormon enacted a second layer of horror on her by binding her back to back with her rapist (see Figure 21). The illustration narrows the semiotic field relative to the title page for the work, with all linguistic forms of language erased in preference for pure pictorial representation, which forcibly directs the eye to the lower half of the page and its scene of retribution and suffering. As well, the plate illustrates what awaits Oothoon as she takes the next step beyond the title page and its pursuits to her punishment within the concerns of the caverned man critiqued in the later continental prophecy Europe a Prophecy. Blake shapes the iconography of the ‘cave’ by surrounding the figures with dark rock at the head and right side and with sandy soil beneath both Bromion and Oothoon. Thin green fronds hang loosely from the roof of the cavern, defining background and foreground, with a blue-green ocean and brilliant sunset of red and gray, blue, and black clouds shaping the background ‘exterior’ (outside of the cave). Deep within that ground, a black-inflected crimson sun set in a jaundiced gap in furrowed clouds frames its iconographic function as the eye of ideology and thereby matches the pivotal moment in the poem, when Oothoon perceives the motive force beyond both her rape and binding: O Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven: Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image. How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love. (VDA 5:3–6; E 48)

After this recognition, she inaugurates an extended lamentation that serves as the vehicle to achieve verbal agency and thereby voice a higher good beyond patriarchal control and phallic desire, which aligns her with Antigone as discussed by Lacan in the seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Like Antigone, Oothoon ‘reveals to us the line … that defines desire’ as she articulates ‘the tragic action’ that illuminates the event and provides illumination for the entity named the ‘subject’.49 Oothoon primarily directs her lamentative argument to Theotormon (the bearer of phallic potency and its need to bask in the social gaze, the realm of exchange) but secondarily to Bromion (the historical manifestation of control as coloniser and enslaver, the realm of use) in order to promulgate her message and achieve, 228 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence hopefully, some agency through the rhythmic communications of the poetic and semiotic within the immediate event horizon of contact (any given reader) and/or the propagation of those rhythmic waves through the vibrant matter of the material text itself and its enfolded energies. In contrast to the abstract figure of the dynamic and visionary head presented to the viewer on the title page to The Marriage, this design takes a critical step into that visionary head, addressing itself to the historical (for example, Bromion and the daughters of Albion) and the psycho-social (Theotormon and Urizen). On the left side of the plate, Bromion (whose name connotes ‘blustering’) is bound beneath the fiery eye in the background of the image as he looks to the left (beyond the frame of the page itself). On the right side, Theotormon is enfolded upon himself after his act of binding and writhes in the torment of self-affliction and self-concern. Between the two, Oothoon kneels on the hard rock and hangs her head, her falling hair separating her from her intended husband. The illustration, then, is a rather literal rendering of the short description of the situation described within the poem: Then storms rent Theotormons limbs; he rolld his waves around. And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair Bound back to back in Bromions caves terror & meekness dwell At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money. That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth. (VDA 2:3–10; E 46)

The two events (the initial rape and secondary binding) are the only physical actions narrated within the poem, with the remainder of the poem given over to speech acts that communicate the static state of the males and track the maturation and transformation of the female. The dreadful irony that intensifies the horrors of subject formation for the woman is her dual role as an idealised object (the exchange aspect) and as the object of daily presence (the use aspect) into which she is cast: ‘the idealized woman, the Lady, who is in the position of the Other and of the object, finds herself suddenly and brutally positing, in a place knowingly constructed out of the most refined of signifiers, the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity’.50 Helen P. Bruder’s various readings of Visions confirm through different yet related lines of critical argument this discursive position, with Blake • 229

Sex, desire, perversion

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offering Oothoon ‘the longest speech ever given, by the usually dialogic Blake, to a single character’51 and she too notes, in following an entwined line of intellectual flight, the direct connection between the binary structure of masculine desire and the Gothic genres with which this discussion began: Like Wollstonecraft herself, Blake’s feminist contemporaries often favored fictional forms and a study of novelistic treatments (especially gothic) of paternal tyranny and the inequities of patriarchal marriage would do much to illuminate the historicity of Blake’s sexual radicalism and Oothoon’s unending subjugation.52

Freud ‘regarded the prospect of really free sexual expression with a horror’, given its genesis in his views of ‘the essentially selfish and base nature of unfettered sexual instinct’, and Blake’s more advanced view is predicated on the understanding that it is ‘only through expansion that sex and imagination unite as functions of human creativity’.53 Otherwise, woman will be forced to function within the denigrated and nebulous zone of objects (large and small O alike [O/o in Lacanian dynamics]), through a process that reduces and displaces ‘infinite human longings to a merely sexual and false desire [of] the Sexual Machine’.54 Blake’s appropriation and transformation of the symbolic machinery of the Gothic provided a foundation for his visionary agenda but brought with it, through the modulation of the many aspects of illumination at play (from intellection to textual operations), the integrated method designed to force open ‘the five windows of the cavern’d man’ to come in the continental prophecies. Blake’s Oothoon indicted a reality that is ‘phantasmatic’, and the poet positions his schizoanalytic critique ‘at the level of fantasy’.55 Thus, while the woman occupies both the position of the Other and the object a, there is no guarantee ‘whether a woman can say anything about it, whether she can say what she knows about it’.56 The ‘it’ referred to in both uses is jouissance, the impossible aim of masculine desire and the forced position of feminine sexuality, and this reading would add the question ‘whether it can be understood or heard at all even if articulated?’ Bound and battered in the mouth of Fingal’s Cave, Oothoon is indeed ignored, but the anger expressed in the background eye implies that the political unconscious has registered her complaint.57 In my experience, across the last thirty years of teaching, the poem continues to attract student attention and continually speaks in commingled language and convoluted images well fit to evolving forms of media and mediation, confirming its success as a viable method ‘in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation’ and supporting the Blakean 230 •

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence view that what was imprinted as semiotic rhythms and resonances in ‘the forms of books & were arranged in libraries’ (MHH 15; E 40) can hold those energies in stasis until re-illuminated by individuals and collectives alike, can continue to chart history and social interactions, and can deepen a critique of psychology as semiotic and symbolic strains roiling in the turbulence of the unconscious, which is positioned in the gap with which this meditation began and provides the vitalism attained by the illuminated books of prophecy in their early iteration against the backdrop of a gathering Gothic storm of forms and the ideological and psychological dis/eases informing them. Notes 1 Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (VDA ii; E 45). 2 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 82. 3 Bentley, The Stranger, p. 41. 4 Erdman, Blake: Prophet, p. 53. 5 Townsend, William Blake, p. 14. 6 Tate Art Gallery, London, UK. “William Blake Exhibition”, n.p. Website. http:// www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/william-blake-0/william-blakeexhibition-themes/william-blake [accessed 18 November 2017]. 7 Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender, p. 61 8 Guattari, Lines of Flight, pp. 6–7. 9 See Lussier, ‘ “Rest” ’. 10 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, pp. 72–3. 11 Lacan, ‘Anamorphosis’, pp. 84–5. In light of this Lacanian discussion, the illuminated textual gaze is akin in form and function to operations of those anamorphic art objects discussed in ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’, where ‘art is mingled with science’ to achieve through ‘the anamorphic ghost . . . the gaze as such, in its pulsative, dazzling, and spread out function’ (Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 89). 12 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 334, original emphasis. 13 Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, p. 13. 14 Ibid., p. 13. 15 Castricano, Cryptomimesis, p. 6. 16 As June Singer noted long ago, following Freud’s formal announcement of the unconscious, Carl Jung followed Freud’s impulse to engage and unwind the ‘uncanny’, arguing that he ‘delineate[d] this unconscious entity as a reality with which man could consciously and deliberately attempt to carry on a dialectical relationship’ (Singer, Unholy Bible, p. 9), with the mechanism of connection, ‘the participation mystique of primitive man providing the means to move • 231

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Sex, desire, perversion both individual and culture via a participatory model of interaction within and without’ and that theories of the sublime offer the same dynamic method and connect its wellspring in similar literary locations’ (Jung, ‘On the Relation’, p. 553). 17 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, p. 249. 18 Ibid., p. 244. 19 Sigler, Sexual Enjoyment, p. 14. 20 Ibid. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 18. The form itself is described in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Schizoanalysis, on the other hand, treats the unconscious as an acentered system, in other words, as a machinic network of finite automata … and thus arrives at an entirely different state of the unconscious’ (p. 18). Their shift towards the instrumental and machinic psychic assemblage fits well Blake’s own imagery of the outer rule of Satanic mills and the inner operation under Urizenic (Phallic) control re/presented through his ‘sublime allegory’. 22 Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism, p. 133. 23 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 119. 24 Guattari, Lines, p. 9. 25 Jacques Derrida, in Writing and Difference, suggests as an element of his own technique a procedure that fits well with what Blake undertakes in his de-structuring of subject formation, since ‘structure . . . can be methodically threatened in order to be comprehended more clearly and to reveal not only its supports but also that secret place in which it is neither construction nor ruin but liability’ (p. 6). Gilles Deleuze, in Repetition and Difference, suggests that the representational embrace of difference (in language intersecting my descriptions of Blake’s textual revolutions) overcomes apparent ‘linear limitations and flat oppositions’ in order to create and enter a space that ‘lives and simmers in the form of free differences’ (p. 51). 26 Rayner, ‘Lines of Flight’, para 7. 27 Ibid., p. 338. 28 Fink, Lacan to the Letter, p. 147. 29 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 20. See also Economides, ‘Blake, Heidegger, Buddhism’, p. 17. 30 Mee, Dangerous, p. 3. 31 Even in small and large eddies of semiosis, the fourfold reappears with regularity, whether in the four plateaus discernible on the title plate (to shape an outline of the head), the quatrains of ‘The Argument’ that establish the fourfold temporal frame for The Marriage (‘Once’, ‘Then’, ‘Till’, and ‘Now’ [Blake, p. 33, plate 2]), or even the advice offered in occasional proverbs (e.g. ‘Think in the morning. Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night’ [Blake, p. 37, plate. 9]). 32 Poulet, ‘Criticism’, pp. 44–5.

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The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence 33 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 108. 34 See Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, pp. 43–53. My full analysis of the structure of The Marriage and its consequences for readers who enter its textual gaze, ‘Affective Textualities: Blake’s Marriage and the Re/shaping of Subjectivity’, is forthcoming in a special issue of Romantic Circles Praxis focused on Romanticism and affect edited by Seth Reno. 35 As Diane Piccitto has recently argued, ‘This mirrored writing is in itself an alienation from a process that should be familiar, namely, reading, and forces the audience to grapple with the work’ in unusually energetic ways (Piccitto, Blake’s Drama, p. 78). Textual technique becomes, in this situation, psychological technology. 36 Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi, Illuminated Books, p. 232, emphasis in original. 37 Bruder, ‘Blake and Gender’, p. 135. Helen Bruder comes to the judgment that, in light of Blake’s sensitivity, ‘he must be adjudged a radical and prescient sexual thinker’ (Bruder, ‘Blake and Gender’, p. 135). I view her multi-source analysis of this early period definitive. 38 Rose, ‘Introduction II’, p. 50. 39 Hilton, ‘An Original Story’, p. 60. The work appeared in dramatic form on the London stage as Oithona: a dramatic poem, taken from the prose translation of the celebrated Ossian, which was performed at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket in 1768. 40 Hilton, ‘An Original Story’, p. 60. 41 Ibid., p. 92. 42 Fink, Lacan to the Letter, p. 146. 43 Irigaray, This Sex, p. 189. 44 Žižek, ‘Courtly Love’, p. 1193. 45 Rose, ‘Introduction II’, p. 51. This imaginary space of woman as the location of jouissance, as Lacan suggests in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ‘finds its place even if we cannot find it anywhere in the real, even if all we can find to occupy this place in the real is simply valid insofar as it occupies this place, but cannot give it any other guarantee than that it is in its place’ (Lacan, The Ethics, p. 118). 46 I have analysed the similar two-part visual analytic code (although in inverse order) to open Blake’s designs for Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’. See Lussier, ‘The Contra-Diction’, pp. 205–19. 47 See copy G reproduced in Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi, Illuminated Books, p. 243. 48 Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi, Illuminated Books, p. 235. 49 Lacan, The Ethics, pp. 247–8. 50 Lacan, The Ethics, p. 163. The acuity of the work’s treatment of love equally resides in its analysis of masculine desire in primary and secondary stages of narcissism – represented by Bromion and Theotormen, respectively – intent on • 233

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Sex, desire, perversion ex/pressing that form of narcissism projected onto and then enacted through Oothoon’s body (Connolly, William Blake, pp. 16–17, pp. 112–13). As Slavoj Žižek noted in his own analysis of Lacan’s medievalism and its relation to individual and collective psychology, ‘Deprived of every real substance, the Lady functions as a mirror on to which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal’ (Žižek, ‘Courtly Love’, p. 1185). 51 Bruder, ‘Blake and Gender’, p. 143. 52 Ibid., p. 145. 53 George, Blake and Freud, pp. 139, 142. 54 McClenahan, ‘Albion and the Sexual Machine’, p. 313. 55 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, pp. 89–90. 56 Ibid., p. 89. 57 The cave projected as that within which the mythic Oithona was imprisoned is somewhat indeterminate (since it is purely imaginary but believed to be an actuality), yet ‘Uamh-Binn’ or ‘The Cave of Melody’ is a good candidate for Blake’s reshaping, since Sir Joseph Banks, when he ‘rediscovered’ the cave (in 1772), renamed it ‘Fingal’s Cave’ as a gesture towards the ubiquity of James Macpherson’s work and to commemorate its unique geological features. Felix Mendelsohn immortalised his 1829 visit to the cave with the 1832 London premiere the Fingal’s Cave Overture, which was later modified and renamed The Hebrides (op. 26).

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10 ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and degeneracy in Blake’s Visions and James Graham’s celestial bed • Tristanne Connolly Introduction: ‘ Celestial Bed ’ and ‘ stormy bed ’ Blake, as a Londoner in the early 1780s, would have found it hard not to notice the spectacular presence of medical ‘quack’ James Graham’s ‘Temple of Health and Hymen’.1 Among his patients for electrical therapy were such celebrities as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; everyone who was anyone (including Horace Walpole) attended his lectures on the benefits of electricity for fertility, great sex, and overall health.2 These were illustrated by scantily clad young women impersonating the ‘Rosy Goddess of Health’ herself, one of whom was rumoured to be Emma Lyon, later Lady Hamilton.3 The especially privileged could pay fifty pounds to spend a night in Graham’s ‘Celestial Bed’.4 He conceived of the bed when he was ‘struck with the thought, that the pleasure of the venereal act might be exalted or rendered more intense, if performed under the glowing, accelerating, and most genial influences of that heaven-born, all-animating element or principle, the electrical or concocted fire!’ He insulated a bedstead by raising it on glass pillars and ‘filled it with copious streams of the electrical fire, conveyed by metal rods inclosed in glass tubes’. On experimentation by willing friends, it was found to be a success not only in the ‘exaltation and prolongation of the pleasure’ but also in ‘opening, exciting, or enriching the generative faculties’ so as to cause conception even in difficult cases.5 In its most magnificent form (worth describing at length as Graham does in his Lecture),6 the bed was ‘twelve feet long by nine wide’ and • 235

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Sex, desire, perversion ‘supported by forty pillars of brilliant glass … of the most exquisite workmanship’. The ‘super-celestial’ dome of the bed held ‘oderiferous, balmy, and æthereal spices, odours and essences’ and was ‘very curiously inlaid … with brilliant plates of looking-glass, so disposed to reflect the various charms and attitudes of the happy couple’. On the dome were perched ‘a pair of real-living turtle-doves, who, on a little bed of roses, coo and bill’. There were sculpted figures of Cupid and Psyche, and the Loves and the Graces, ‘each of them’ with ‘musical instruments in their hands, which by the exquisite and most expensive mechanism, are made to breathe forth sounds, corresponding with the appearance of the several instruments – flutes, guittars, violins, clarionets, trumpets, horns, oboes, kettle drums, &c.’, while the pillars supporting the dome ‘are groupes of musical instruments, organ pipes, &c. &c. which, in sweet concert with the other instruments, at the commencement of the tender dalliances of the happy pair, breathe forth celestial sounds! lulling them in visions of elysian joys!’ Indeed, when the couple are ‘excited by the swelling sounds – the noble tones, and the home-strokes of the full organ, which on violent motion being given to the bed, peals forth, bracing and invigorating every spring and principle of life!’ At the head of the bed, ‘sparkling, with electrical fire, through a glory of burnished and effulgent gold’ were the words ‘Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth!’ Beneath this was a painting of a landscape with waterfalls, shepherds, shepherdesses, birds and swans, and a procession of nymphs, priests, brides, bridegrooms, and attendants ‘all entering into the Temple of Hymen’. The colour of the ‘silk or satten’ bedsheets was ‘suited to the complexion of the lady who is to repose on them’. The sheets were perfumed, and ‘no feather bed’ was used but ‘sometimes mattresses filled with sweet new wheat or oat straw, with the grain in the ears, and mingled with balm, rose leaves, lavender flowers, and oriental spices’, and sometimes ‘springy hair mattresses’ made out of ‘the tails of English stallions’ (‘the strongest and most springy hair … procured, at a vast expence’). In addition to the electrification, there was ‘about fifteen hundred pounds weight’ of magnets ‘so disposed and arranged, as to be continually pouring forth in an ever-flowing circle, inconceivable and irresistably powerful tides of the magnetic effluvium’. ‘These magnets, too, being pressed give that charming springyness – that sweet undulating, tittulating, vibratory, soul-dissolving, marrow melting motion; which on certain critical and important occasions, is at once so necessary and so pleasing’. The bed was constructed on an axis so that it could ‘be converted by the gentlemen into such an 236 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed inclined plane, as that he can follow his lady down-hill, as it is called, which is certainly the most favourable posture for the great business of conception’.7 The sublimity of this description alone, accumulating adjectives and raising multiple images, invites comparison to Blake’s own hyperbolic style. More specifically, there is an interesting resemblance between Graham’s ‘Celestial Bed’ and Bromion’s ‘stormy bed’ in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. It is also celestial since it appears to be in the sky: Oothoon runs into Bromion as she flies ‘[o]ver the waves … in wing’d exulting swift delight’ (VDA 1:14; E 46). And it is also electrical since ‘Bromion rent her with his thunders’, or in other words, struck her with lightning (VDA 1:16; E 46). The fact that Oothoon is ‘faint’ afterwards (VDA 1:17; E 46) might suggest that this sexual experience is as astoundingly powerful as Graham promises with his Celestial Bed; Bromion’s assumption that Oothoon has conceived also reinforces Graham’s guarantees of fertility with electrical treatment. I have examined elsewhere the possibility that Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a meditation on sex and electricity, with reference to meteorology and electrical experiments as well as electrotherapy.8 Here I would like to read Visions with a special focus on the way the exalted promises of Graham’s Celestial Bed are couched in horror. The transports of good sex cannot exist, in his writing, apart from their perceived opposite, the evils of degeneracy. It is not only to quiet the moral objections, and ribald mockery, the Celestial Bed invited that he insists its purpose is therapeutic, ‘to invigorate the infirm’ and ‘for promoting conception’: ‘I do not mean to be instrumental in adding to those refinements which invite to excess in voluptuous indulgencies and in venereal pleasures … I would, indeed, be extremely sorry to descend to be the pander of vice, or to stoop to be the inflamer or exciter of the animal appetites, beyond those temperate and all-blessing limits which the God of nature has so wisely prescribed to them.’9 This is not doubletalk but a principle for Graham, who even within marriage recommends what he calls ‘Long and peaceful inter-regnums … and by all means two beds in the same room, or rather in the adjoining apartment’ rather than ‘that odious, most indelicate, and most hurtful custom of man and wife continually pigging together, in one and the same bed.’10 Indeed, he goes so far as to give the name ‘matrimonial whoredom’ to ‘too frequent and excessive indulgence in conjugal embraces’ and class it with such ‘vices’ as ‘early destructive imprudencies’, ‘matrimonial infidelity’ and ‘public and promiscuous prostitution’.11 From these causes, along with careless • 237

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Sex, desire, perversion excesses in eating, drinking, and personal hygiene, Graham believes all diseases spring, blasting the health of the indulgers and their offspring. ‘Hence this present degeneracy – this luxurious enervated progeny: – irresolute; – weak in person, – and weaker still in their understanding; a puny ill-compounded – unmanly sheepish race; bearing about with them the marks of their fathers wickedness, and of their mothers folly – liable to be blown away by every rude blast of wind.’12 Graham, in this instance, is clearly the diametric opposite of Oothoon who would, like Wollstonecraft, have quite a different definition of ‘matrimonial whoredom’. However, an examination of Oothoon’s speeches alongside the rhetoric of sexual health employed by Graham reveals that her idealisation of sex also relies on horror, though they differ on what is horrifying. Oothoon envisions marriage, in luridly Gothic terms, as being ‘bound / In spells of law to one she loaths’, and asks, ‘must she drag the chain / Of life, in weary lust!’ while ‘chilling murderous thoughts. obscure / The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage / Of a harsh terror driv’n to madness’ (VDA 5:21–5; E 49). The man also is ‘bound to hold a rod / Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night / To turn the wheel of false desire’ (VDA 5:25–7; E 49). While Graham sees the sensual delights of married continence as producing the healthiest children, for Oothoon marriage itself is responsible for ‘enervated progeny’ and the married state is passed on just like disease: children ‘live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more. / Till the child dwell with one he hates. and do the deed he loaths / And the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth / E’er yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day’ (VDA 5:29–32; E 49). While for Graham it is excess and for Oothoon it is restraint that destroys wholesome sexual joys, both paint terrifying pictures of the degeneracy resulting from these evils, to contrast their visions of sexual transcendence. As a result of such a reading, which colours Oothoon’s reputation as sexual liberator with a reactionary shade, I would like to focus on the quietest of the poem’s trio: Theotormon. Critics, when they pay any attention to him, tend to view him negatively as unreasonably and unkindly rejecting Oothoon after her encounter with Bromion.13 But much of the negativity comes from what Oothoon says about him, or from cryptic descriptions of his actions by the narrator; he speaks very little for himself. By querying this vocal dominance, it is possible to have sympathy for Theotormon as someone whose desires and abilities do not accord with Oothoon’s or Graham’s programme. I will argue that he shows signs of an autoerotic 238 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed orientation, and of sexual impotence.14 For Oothoon and Graham, both of these conditions can only come from degeneracy. The horror they ascribe to his tendencies, in order to uphold their own sexual ideals, only exacerbates his problems. With their faith in sexual transcendence, neither Graham nor Oothoon can fathom the failure of desire, or discord between desire and action, body and mind. Theotormon can be seen as an unfortunate victim of such discourses of sexual health, especially when considered in light of John Hunter’s more sympathetic analysis of mental and physical causes of impotence. Theotormon shows that sex, and the mind-body relation, can be complex and fraught – ‘The Eye sees more than the Heart knows’ (VDA ii; E 45) – and this is not necessarily pathological. Defending transcendent sex Both Graham and Oothoon speak rapturously about sex and make high claims for its redemptive, revivifying, transcendent powers.15 More than once, Graham returns to the same effusive words to describe the sexualspiritual transports possible to those who follow his recommendations: after the souls of an amiable couple have been softened, harmonized, illumined, and filled with approving peace, by duties and amusements, so rational and delightful, – when they return to an early bed, sober, – serene, – and healthful! – their bodies and their souls rush sweetly together! with the fullest, purest, intensest, and most celestial transports! – and feeling themselves no longer inhabitants of this lower world – they wing their soft long-waving way, through the flowry fields of Elysium! – their souls float undulating, melting, and finally launching forth upon oceans of exstatic bliss!16

He claims his Celestial Bed is designed ‘not alone to insure the removal of barrenness, when conception is at all, in the nature of things possible; – but likewise to improve, exalt, and invigorate the bodily, and through them, the mental faculties of the human species’.17 Oothoon is well known as an eloquent advocate of the holistically liberating properties of sexual pleasure. Yet, consistently, her declarations are either expressed against their negation, or quickly derailed by complaint.   Arise my Theotormon I am pure. Because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black. They told me that the night & day were all that I could see; They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up. • 239

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And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle. And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (VDA 2:28–34; E 47)

Presumably Oothoon’s bodily and mental faculties have been improved, exalted and invigorated, by her purification, or her sexual experience, or both. But her emphasis is on the constraints that she previously felt. She even shifts to present tense, as if to revoke any change: ‘Instead of morn arises a bright shadow’. She proceeds to speak for Theotormon, saying he ‘hears me not! to him the night and morn / Are both alike’ (VDA 2:37–8; E 47), projecting her previously enclosed point of view on him instead of describing her opened one. When she insists, ‘are not different joys / Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love’ (VDA 5:5–6; E 48), it is grammatically in the form of a question. This not-quite-assertion follows directly on her complaint to ‘Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven: / Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image. / How can one joy absorb another?’ (VDA 5:3–5; E 48). When she praises ‘Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight / In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking / The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss’, she quickly turns to an extended critique – ‘Who taught thee modesty, subtil modesty!’ – which again closes with a claim to know Theotormon’s mind: ‘And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty! … Then … Theotormon is a sick mans dream’ (VDA 6:4–6, 7, 16, 19; E 49–50). Her enchantingly liberating description of herself, below, is a defence against the accusation of being an immodest whore (which, strictly speaking, she has put in Theotormon’s mouth; only Bromion actually called her a ‘harlot’ [VDA 1:18; E 46]18).   a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies 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; if in evening mild. wearied with work; Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy. (VDA 6:21–7:2; E 50)

And after her exclamation, ‘The moment of desire! the moment of desire!’ (VDA 7:3; E 50), this passage descends into a denunciation of masturbation. When she cries, ‘Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!’, the repetition (like Graham’s) verges on the manic, and she is here derailed after only one line by the issue of jealousy: ‘Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?’ (VDA 7:17–18; E 50). 240 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed Her final speech ends with a resonant climax: ‘Arise you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! / Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!’ Here the narrator provides the dark side: ‘Thus every morning wails Oothoon’ (VDA 8:9–11; E 51), as if all of her joyful cries are followed by, or are themselves, a wail. She needs so badly to believe in good sex that she becomes supercharged in defending it, and belligerent against what she perceives to oppose it. This could be a very understandable response to her encounter with Bromion, a way to own her own desire after what is, depending how her ‘woes’ are interpreted, at least a regretted liaison and at most a violent attack on her body against her will. However, if it is therapeutic for her, it will not necessarily work for Theotormon, though she seems to assume it will. Masturbation horror and the ‘ rewards of continence ’ Oothoon’s denigration of masturbation, perhaps even more than her notorious speech about trapping girls of gold and silver, stands out as a problematic contradiction of her expansive ideal of sexual and sensual liberation.19 The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin That pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from The lustful joy. shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow. Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence? The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion? Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude, Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire. (VDA 7:3–11; E 50)

One would think, for Oothoon, a ‘virgin … awaken[ing] her womb to enormous joys’ would merit applause. The first OED definition of ‘enormous’ (1a) includes ‘unfettered by rules’. And after all, the sexual awakening Oothoon experiences with the Marygold is arguably onanistic,20 and she definitely spends much of the poem redefining virginity to be ‘open to joy and to delight’. Indeed, one could conceivably read the passage as praising a ‘secret’ way to gain pleasure and exercise imagination in spite of constraint, to find ‘self enjoyings’ even amid ‘self denial’, and ultimately as a redefinition of ‘places of religion’, along the lines of ‘every thing that lives is holy!’21 But in her direct address of Theotormon, ‘Is it because acts • 241

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Sex, desire, perversion are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude’, masturbation seems decisively condemned. If it were considered an act, the question would not apply, but its previous close alignment with ‘solitude’ prevents that exception. The ‘horrible darkness’ that ends the verse paragraph damns the preceding description, after a reader has been, perhaps, entrapped into giving allegiance to the wicked practice. The imagery of Oothoon’s diatribe – a virgin ‘In the secret shadows of her chamber’ and a youth ‘shut up’, also among ‘the shadows of his curtains’ – is remarkably Gothic. ‘Are not these the places of religion?’, like the Catholic monasteries and convents that in the Gothic (and in Protestant pornography) house ‘enormous’ goings-on. Seeing as the Gothic often involves the pleasure that can be derived from horror, one would think that ‘the self enjoyings of self denial’ such as arousal at the idea of secrecy and containment would be well understood in this context. Instead, Oothoon vilifies self-stimulation by imagined ‘shadows’, even though it could be said that she excites herself inordinately with a superstitious horror of masturbation. Graham, interestingly, asserts that only those ‘who are accustomed to start at shadows’ will find his Lecture offensive.22 Graham’s discourse on masturbation is as sublime in its excess of horrors as his description of the Celestial Bed is in its excess of glory. [D]ebility of body and of mind, – infecundity, – epilepsy, – loss of memory, sight and hearing; – distortions of the eyes, mouth, and face, – feeble, harsh, and squeaking voice, – pale, sallow, and blueish black complexion, – wasting and tottering of the limbs, – idiotism, – horrors, – innumerable complaints, – extreme wretchedness – and even death itself, should often, very often – nay inseparably be the consequence of the too early, or of the too frequent discharge of that most precious liquor, the semen! even in the natural connection between the sexes, – but much, much more so – in those horrid, solitary, joyless, early practices, the very ideas of which my soul hath been reprobating and vomiting out! … [E]very seminal emission out of nature’s road, … every act of self-pollution, – and every repetition of natural venery, with even the loveliest of the sex, to which appalled or exhausted nature is whipped and spurred by lust, habit, or firey unnatural provocations; – but especially every act of self pollution; – is an earthquake – a blast – a deadly paralytic stroke, – to all the faculties of both soul and body! – striking off an irrecoverable chip from the staff of life; – blasting beauty! – chilling, contracting, and enfeebling body, mind, and memory; – and cutting off many years from the natural term of their life!23

There is much that evokes Blake’s style; in particular, ‘horrid, solitary, joyless’ and ‘an earthquake – a blast – a deadly paralytic stroke’ sound like 242 •

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they could come from The [First] Book of Urizen.24 There, as in Visions, the consequences of reproduction are at least as dire as those of masturbation. Oothoon envisions ‘pestilence’ and ‘the impure scourge’ produced and passed on in the bonds of marriage; with masturbation, the ‘youth’ shall ‘forget to generate’25 while Graham predicts either infertility, or debility of offspring. Men and women, who have originally from their parents, even the soundest, and most vigorous constitutions, may, by their own vices and imprudencies, so injure those naturally good constitutions, as to render their children feeble and delicate, and sometimes to prevent them from having any children at all … – I mean especially the too early, or the too frequent discharge of the seminal fluid, either by certain secret – selfish practices, or by beginning to perform the natural venereal act at too early a period of life.26

Graham groups masturbation with other vices and leaves no doubt that it is the worst of them all. He goes so far as to say he ‘would advise [young persons] rather to fly to Bagnio – to Brothel – into the merciless gripes of lust – poverty, and cunning, into the firey and fœtid gulph of certain disease; – nay, indeed, I would seriously advise them at once to put an end to their existence’ rather than give in to ‘this horridly unnatural – this infernal – this all-blasting practice of self-pollution’, which is ‘the inlet to, or the aggregate of all the vices and curses, of soul and body, of time and eternity’.27 Theotormon does not suffer from all of the conditions catalogued by Graham but some could be recognised in him: ‘debility of body and mind’ in his inertia; loss of memory and sight in his bewildered questions such as ‘Tell me what is the night or day to one o’erflowd with woe?’ and ‘Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth’ (VDA 3:22–4:3; E 47–8); loss of hearing in Oothoon’s complaint that ‘none but Bromion can hear my lamentations’ (VDA 3:1; E 47); feebleness of voice in that he rarely speaks. Certainly ‘horrors’ and ‘extreme wretchedness’ characterise the tormented Theotormon. His unresponsiveness to Oothoon has been ascribed to moral judgment of her and resulting rejection, but could equally be due to depletion of his own powers. In the Frontispiece, his physical posture is as turned in on itself as it is possible to be, and one wonders where his right hand is and what it is doing.28 Dennis M. Welch notes that in Plate 7, ‘he stares solipsistically into his own lap’.29 He is constantly associated with tears, a bodily fluid that could easily be symbolically associated with semen. Indeed, Wes Chapman argues that • 243

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Sex, desire, perversion ‘Theotormon’s weeping is, in effect, a form of masturbation’, but judges this very negatively.30 Both Oothoon and Graham see sexual arousal as a vital force that must be nurtured to achieve optimal well-being, but they differ on how to nurture it: Oothoon recommends freeing it, while Graham insists on conserving it. He paints contrasting portraits of the champion semen-retainer and the waster of precious bodily fluids. Contrary to Oothoon’s derision, he has zealous faith in ‘the rewards of continence’: Thrice happy! supremely blessed! in my opinion, are those young men and women, who live, till they are at least twenty years of age without ever once having had even one seminal emission in their whole life, asleep or awake, voluntarily or involuntary [sic] ! – The young man who lives in the world soberly, regularly, usefully, and perfectly continently, without ever once having known what any seminal emission is till he arrives at his twenty first – or even to his twenty-fifth year, and is married! – that young man is a hero indeed! – an Hercules! – an Angel! – a God! I had almost said, in point of health, strength, beauty and brilliancy, of body and of mind; – when compared to those poor, creeping, tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked, wretched creatures; who crawl upon the earth, spirting, dribling, and draining off, alone, or with their vile unfortunate street-trulls, or other mates, in what is called the natural way, at twelve, fourteen, sixteen or eighteen years of age; – Indeed, I can convey by words no idea of the horrors, debility and wretchedness, which are brought on by early and excessive venery.31

Graham is right: ‘a hero indeed’, considering the physiological difficulty of achieving such a feat. ‘Supremely blessed’, too, in the sense that it would be beyond one’s intentional control, no matter how sincere, if as Graham admits, seminal emissions are often involuntary. As he gives no attention to those in between, anyone so unfortunate as to spurt and dribble might understandably fear they were one of the ‘wretched creatures’ he reviles. It may be that Oothoon and Graham merely reflect the anti-masturbation discourses traced by Thomas Laqueur in Solitary Sex;32 their intensity in decrying the practice is not unparalleled. But what seems remarkable is that their horror of masturbation is not accompanied by an idea of ‘normal’ sex as simply healthy, but an equally intense endorsement of amazingly fantastic sex being not only possible, but righteous, and beneficial to the spirit as well as the body. It is not only the young person who avoids seminal emissions who is ‘a hero indeed! – an Hercules! – an Angel! – a God!’ but also ‘the votaries of the prolific god, who therein 244 •

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worship [in the Celestial Bed]’: they ‘are furnished as it were with iron loins and with steel back bones! while their souls are at the same time soothed and animated, with all that can ravish the corporeal senses!’ and once again, ‘the entranced pair! no longer inhabitants of this world, but dissolved in the soft gushing tides! are launched forth upon oceans of extacy! and then wing their long-waving way! among the flowery fields of elysium!!!’.33 Therapy: silver and gold girls Graham’s wish, like Oothoon’s, is for everyone to have great sex – according to his definition of what great sex is, and his regime for achieving it. Peter Otto has called Graham’s Temple of Health and Hymen ‘the world’s first sex clinic’.34 Since Oothoon shares so many elements of his discourse of sexual health, and, though she extends the scope of what good sex is, still pathologises what is beyond her bounds, perhaps she is less a sexual liberator than a sex therapist. In her exhortations to Theotormon, she seems to think that he can be cured of his sexual ailments, or propensities. He does not respond to the cure, perhaps because her particular methods do not agree with him, or he despairs of his own sexual regeneration (believing he is too far gone), or he is not capable of recovery (if his condition, like homosexuality for instance, cannot be successfully ‘cured’). I suggested above that the masturbation passage in Visions may be even more problematic than Oothoon’s offer to Theotormon to ‘catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’ and ‘lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play / In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon’ (VDA 7:24–6; E 50). Helen Bruder sums up the idea that Oothoon goes to an extreme here that conflicts with her previous ideals: ‘This harem fantasy marks the moment of Oothoon’s most acute apostasy, as she offers to become an energetically ensnaring procuress’.35 Oothoon endorses something too like what she previously denounced, nets being used ‘to catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore; & sell it in the night’ (VDA 6:11–12; E 49). This makes it easy to see that the girls might not be as enthusiastic about being caught as Oothoon is about the catching. But might it not be oppressive to Theotormon as well? He does not respond to her offer. It is followed by a series of rhetorical questions and ecstatic exclamations from Oothoon, and then the narrative voice observes, ‘Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits / Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire’ (VDA 8:11–12; E 51). • 245

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Sex, desire, perversion From a sex-positive point of view, and considering some stereotypes of male heterosexual desire then and now, it is surprising that Theotormon shows no interest in either watching live girl on girl action, or participating in an orgy where he’s the only male. There are many possible reasons for this: he may simply distrust the offer as too good to be true, or as suspect in what its motivations and consequences might be. But it is possible that he is genuinely uninterested. Nowell Marshall calls Theotormon ‘hypocritical because, like Oothoon, he also desires sex’,36 but, apart from Oothoon’s unsupported allegations of ‘hypocrite modesty’, what textual evidence is there that Theotormon actually does want sex? That he instead continues ‘conversing with shadows dire’ suggests his desire is directed elsewhere: the only other ‘shadows’ that appear in the poem are in Theotormon’s one short speech (‘upon what mountains / Wave shadows of discontent?’ [VDA 3:25–4:1; E 47–8]), and in Oothoon’s negative descriptions of masturbation. In addition to the shadows of the chamber and curtains of the female and male masturbators, there is Oothoon’s fear that Theotormon will persist ‘Till beauty fades from off my shoulders darken’d and cast out, / A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity’ (VDA 7:14–15; E 50), as if his masturbation were a threat to her and its ills contagious. If Theotormon’s sexual orientation is autoerotic, the scenario with the girls is not Oothoon’s one moment of apostasy, but the climax of a series of efforts to make Theotormon turn to her, turn outwards, become alloerotic. Graham says it is better to fly to a brothel than to masturbate, and he applies the advice to men and women. Oothoon, in turning procuress, takes this recommendation literally. To her mind, since masturbation is the inevitable result of being ‘shut up from / The lustful joy’, she is doing the girls and Theotormon (and herself) a favour by saving them from (sex with) themselves. Therapy: animal desire If we see Oothoon’s speeches as trying out different kinds of therapy on Theotormon, an explanation can be found for her seemingly unrelated concentration on the habits of animals. For arousal and fertility, Graham recommends watching animals copulate.37 He then spends a generous paragraph telling the story of ‘a fresh old-woman, but without a tooth in her head’ who was buying butter in the Norwich market, and had ‘inadvertently put a shilling … between her gums’, when ‘a noble, stately, 246 •

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high-fed stallion, happened to be led, by a country-lad’, and ‘saw near him a very beautiful mare. The mare at the same time had eyed the horse. Nature immediately exerted herself in both’. The old woman: attentively observing the genial Fire of the horse’s eyes and nostrils, – his amazing force, – and his turged plenitude of vigour! – She was so violently agitated by every effort the horse made to get to the mare; that no doubt, recollecting certain pleasures which she herself had enjoyed in her youth, she maddened at the sight – she was convulsed at the recollection – insomuch that she squeezed the butter through her fingers, and actually bit the shilling through and through with her watering yet iron gums!38

He presents this story as ‘the most astonishing instance, that I ever heard, of the force of the imagination, on the muscular and other powers of the human body, when excited and intensely stimulated by amorous ideas or [r]ecollections’.39 Even old and toothless, her body acts on her desire without impediment – even, apparently, without consciousness of what she is doing. Animals are pervasive in Oothoon’s speeches, and as soon as she addresses Theotormon after her rending by the eagles, the animal imagery can be interpreted as a version of Graham’s therapeutic recommendation: I cry arise O Theotormon for the village dog Barks at the breaking day. the nightingale has done lamenting. The lark does rustle in the ripe corn, and the Eagle returns From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east; Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awake The sun that sleeps too long. (VDA 2:23–28; E 47)

Theotormon might be inspired to ‘arise’ if he watches the activities of the animals. Yet those activities are not copulation; indeed, throughout the poem Oothoon’s animal imagery is never explicitly sexual. This is partly because of her potentially liberating extension of sexuality to include a variety of joys. But it is also a potentially oppressive essentialisation of desire, a universalisation that infuses sexuality into all aspects of human, and creaturely, experience. ‘With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse & frog / Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations. / And their pursuits, as different as their forms and as their joys’ (VDA 3:4–6; E 47). Though different from each other, the ‘joys’ of the many creatures she contemplates are expressed in their ‘pursuits’ and habits, and even in their ‘forms’. • 247

Sex, desire, perversion

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Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake Where she gets poison: & the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old. (VDA 3:10–13; E 47)

The repetition of ‘love’ in the passage emphasises desire at the root of these actions. Even ‘rav’nous’ implies desire in its indications of intense appetite and violent seizing of prey (OED 1a, b). These impulses are apparently irresistible; there is, it seems, no possibility that there could be doubt or incapacity. If a bee wondered how or why or failed to form cells, on this logic it would no longer be a bee. Theotormon is such a creature. ‘Tell me what is a joy?’ (VDA 3:24; E 47). As I have argued above, Oothoon sees all such failure of desire and identity as coming from constraint, whether imposed from within or without. Oothoon accuses Theotormon, as if his problems are results of his own decision, something he ‘seeks’: ‘And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty!’ (VDA 6:16; E 49) ‘Why dost thou seek religion? / Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude’ (VDA 7:9–10; E 50). Shortly after, she displaces the blame slightly from Theotormon to the external source of this internalised repression: ‘Father of Jealousy. be thou accursed from the earth! / Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?’ (VDA 7:12–13; E 50). Usually ‘this accursed thing’ is read as sexual repression, but the preceding lines are also about masturbation. Oothoon considers it a learned behaviour, like other eighteenth-century anti-masturbation writers surveyed by Laqueur: ‘Children … had to be taught, so the story went, not only the act itself but also that what they might regard as innocent pleasures were, in fact, something horribly shameful called self-pollution.’40 Only later did ‘a few nineteenth-century doctors sugges[t] that infants and children might discover masturbation inadvertently, on their own’; it was generally assumed that it would never occur to a person without a naughty schoolmate, or someone older and wiser, to propose the idea and illustrate the technique.41 (It is dark satire on Blake’s part that this puts the Urizenic God in the position of such an initiator, in this case a corrupting ‘Father’.) But perhaps for Theotormon it is not acquired or imposed, but innate; perhaps Theotormon’s identity is being a masturbator. But, I would argue, he even has trouble being that, partly because he has been ‘taught’ that it is not a valid sexual identity and that it is abominable, but perhaps more importantly because of his inability to see sex as an ecstatic, liberating ideal, as Oothoon and Graham do. 248 •

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Therapy: pure cold water Oothoon’s insistence on her regained purity is communicated in imagery of dirt and washing, in which another therapy recommended by Graham can be perceived. ‘[H]er soul reflects the smile; / As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles’ (VDA 2:18–19; E 46); she also compares herself to the ‘new wash’d lamb ting’d with the village smoke & the bright swan / By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings. / And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormons breast’ (3:18–20; E 47). Graham spends several tightly printed pages on the importance of cleanliness: The man and woman who through life attend daily and unremittingly to this partial cold bathing [of the ‘private parts’], and especially who never fail to spring up the moment after each amorous embrace, to lave and immerse the whole male apparatus, and the female apartment of pleasure in very cold water, that man and woman will not only be for ever the reigning favourites of each other; and if at any time they should be so culpable, or so unfortunate as to be connected with any other man or woman, they will sicken at, abhor, and detest the person who neglects these most useful and most charming of all personal duties, and will spring back to their former love!42

He even believes that those who regularly bathe their privates ‘will always escape every degree of venereal infection’.43 Graham repeats the point even more than Oothoon does;44 her emphasis on it could be as much to display her sexual desirability and readiness as it is to vindicate her purity – though of course the two are inextricably linked for Graham who recommends such washing habits are ‘more earnestly to be observed by women than by men’ and describes how they give ‘such cordial and retentive firmness to the female fountain of bliss!’, almost as if they restored virginity.45 He also claims: they will moreover, be able, if they are so disposed, to renew the tender combat, two or three times for once, with less expence of strength and spirits, and with ten times more intense pleasure, than they could possibly enjoy were they to neglect these sweet refreshing ablutions … and as for the male organs of generation, – the rich purse of Venus, – the manly standard of love, and the whole host of priapus, are all after the sweet engagement, rallied, cooled, replenished, refreshed, braced, crimpt, and cabbaged up afresh! by the instant application of the cold generous element, and are ready cap-a-piè to obey the summons of Hymen! or the mandates of the Cyprian queen!46 • 249

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Sex, desire, perversion Oothoon’s repetition of the point, which brings in Theotormon’s purity as well – ‘How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure?’ (VDA 3:16; E 47) – rather than abject deference to her purity relying on her subordination, could be a hint that he should try practising this bracing bathing more often. Surprisingly, Graham says, ‘rather than not wash at all … if clean water cannot be procured, let them wash with the dirtiest ditch or kennel water’.47 How does water mudded by feet of beasts grow pure and smile? Perhaps it doesn’t, but still smiles. The happy cuckold Bromion’s interference in the apparently intended union of Oothoon with Theotormon, and Bromion’s boasting, are comparable to Graham’s role as proprietor of the electrical bed: I recommended the trial of this then whimsical bed, to several of my medical, philosophical, and gay friends. They all found that my theory had been founded on nature; that it was even capable of demonstration;—and that the pleasure was, under those circumstances, rendered not only more intense, but at the same time, infinitely more durable!—insomuch, that after a few months, when they were merry over a glass … they talked not as other men might have done, of the happy minute, or of the critical moment,—no!—they talked comparatively of the critical hour!!! But this exaltation and prolongation of the pleasure, was the least important part of the business. The electrical fire was found to be actually extremely powerful in opening, exciting, or enriching the generative faculties in such a manner, as to have procured conception in some cases, where pregnancy had never before taken place.48

It is Graham’s powers that lend, vicariously, this potency to his friends; Graham is bragging about his own apparatus in its ability to prolong an unlikely ‘critical hour!!!’ (compared to Bromion’s powerful but instantaneous explosion) and to ‘procure conception’ for others as Bromion’s ‘rage’ (‘violent desire or lust; burning sexual passion’, OED 5c) is supposed to create a ‘child’ for Theotormon to ‘protect’ (VDA 2:1–2; E 46). In A Private Advice, Graham proudly claims to ‘be the moral father of many an heir to noble honours and ample estates, which but for me might have been dissolved in chaos’.49 In his Lecture, Graham even says he can influence the sex of the conceived child by influencing the act itself. ‘Many ladies, I hear, have been very desirous to know whether I can procure or insure, a boy or a girl, to those who repose in the celestial bed, as they may desire’. Because ‘the individual, be it the man or the woman, whose imagination 250 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed is the most intensely engaged, or who possesses the generative faculty in the highest degree at the time of union or copulation, gives his or her sex to the offspring’, Graham says, ‘I have several times succeeded in giving this superiority to the lady or to the gentleman, as they desired, by the arbitrary arrangement or modulations of the electrical fire, of the magnetic effluvium, and of the other influences at the time of union; and even sometimes, by the directions which were given to the parties previous to their coming to the celestial bed!’.50 The impression Graham gives of being indelicately over-involved in the sex and reproduction of others, and particularly in giving the ladies what they want, is picked up in poetic parodies. One of the poems included in the anonymous work The Temple of Pleasure,51 ‘A POETICAL EPISTLE from VESTINA the Rosy Goddess of Health, to Dr. Graham the Prince of Quakes [i.e., Quacks]’, pursues the claim that humans,   thro’ error straying, Their noble parts have began decaying, And dwindled down in little space, Unto our present pigmy race, And so we’re likely to remain, ‘Till you reviv’d the race again. Yes, Doctor, you’re the only man, That can revive the first great plan; Can renovate the human frame, And raise them all to strength and fame; For O! your noble skill is such, That by one kind etherial touch, Mankind in length, & strength, will rise, And once more be of proper size; Fresh heroes, if we right conjecture, Must surely spring from private lecture; A lecture! with such meaning in’t, As never was before in print, Seal’d up—for ladies speculation, To warm their minds—for–—; And make them ready for the minute, Of genial joy:—that’s all that’s in it; And who would not imbibe such notion, To suck in Love’s delicious potion; Such salutary draughts, indeed, Must surely, Doctor, help the breed.52 • 251

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Sex, desire, perversion These verses balance between suggesting, as many of the parodies do, that Graham is the father of the ‘heroes’ that ‘spring from’ his ‘private lecture’, and that Graham’s role is to arouse the ladies, whether the ‘potion’ they then ‘imbibe’ is his or another’s. (Note that the electrically infused medicines Graham sold at his Temple were ‘in essence seminal, describ[ed] … as ethereal, balmy, and milky’).53 It is also up in the air whether by ‘one kind etherial touch’ of his ‘noble skill’, the ‘mankind’ that ‘in length, & strength, will rise’ is Graham’s own electrified penis, or whether his touch brings other men back to ‘proper size’. Bromion, comparably, sexually masters Theotormon as well as Oothoon (on Bethan Stevens’ interpretation of the line ‘storms rent Theotormons limbs’ as another rape [VDA 2:3; E 46])54 in addition to intercepting Oothoon when she had been charged up for another. The mocking verses in The Celestial Beds55 primarily portray society ladies flocking to Graham who will endow them with sexual attractions and energies as well as offspring: Sweeter, lovelier you’ll seem, When you get a touch from him; In your husband’s doating eyes You shall prove a precious prize; His magnetic influence Ev’ry hour new joys dispense; Gives connubial love a bliss, In regions tasted—far from this. Blooming boys your years shall crown, The admiration of the town.56

The curious addition here is that not only will the ladies especially be aroused by Graham, but their husbands will find them more attractive for their fertile encounter with this other man. This is a satirical, and libertine, version of Bromion saying to Theotormon, ‘Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the child / Of Bromions rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons time’ (VDA 2:1–2; E 46). With this outright declaration, Theotormon cannot be the gullible cuckold; his tears and apparent rejection of Oothoon would indicate he cannot be the happy cuckold either. One would immediately say that Oothoon does not become more attractive to Theotormon with her sexing up by Bromion. If he feels jealous and hurt at her having, willingly or unwillingly, been with another, that is 252 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed understandable, to a degree. Rejecting Oothoon, having his eagles eat away at her flesh, and chaining the adulterers together is a bit of an overreaction. But is that exactly what happens? Though the parodies of Graham partake of the conventions of comedy in the happy cuckold figure, it is not merely burlesque that a love object being attractive to others can make them more desirable to oneself, nor that one might wish to have sex with a love object who has been aroused by another, especially if one might doubt one’s own ability to turn them on. We are told Theotormon ‘folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair’ (VDA 2:4; E 46), but not explicitly that he is responsible for binding them: they simply are declared by the narrator to be already ‘Bound back to back’ (VDA 2:5; E 46), an action without a doer, a state. His folding his waters around them could be analogous to binding them, but it could also be an embrace. Jealous can be defined as ‘zealous or solicitous for the preservation or well-being of something possessed or esteemed’ (OED). His jealousy prompts protection of the pair, or perhaps even rouses him to a sexual embrace of both of them (considering his rending with storms may mean he has already been physically intimate with Bromion, if not gone all the way with Oothoon). He may be jealous in his possessiveness of both. His one speech is far from specifying loss of Oothoon but shows great distress at the very idea of loss. He may even be jealous in a desire to compete with Bromion and show off in a threesome. But this, alas, does not seem possible to him: ‘At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears’ (VDA 2:6–7; E 46). The entrance to what, we may well ask: perhaps not only the cave, remembering that in contemporary pornography, including some of the Graham parodies, a cavern fringed with foliage (as in the Visions Frontispiece) could represent a certain female orifice, and perhaps also another shared by both genders.57 In The Temple of Pleasure, the way to the temple is described thus: Some little rivers you must cross Whose banks are fringed all with moss; But when you once are on the land, Enchanting beauties will expand … Then, in a little low descent, The fountain is of soft content; Two ivory pillars may be seen, For there the grotto lies between58 • 253

Sex, desire, perversion Examples from pornography include Little Merlin’s Cave: ‘in this very Wood, / There is a Cave … / ‘T has Shrubs and Bushes all without … / A Spring it has, gives Rapture to the Touch, / That never flows too little or too much’.59

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‘ Theotormon

severely smiles ’

If we consider Oothoon’s punishment, they are ‘Theotormons Eagles’ that ‘prey upon her flesh’ (VDA 2:13; E 46), but she is the one who calls them that, and she is also the one who calls them down: ‘The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey’ (VDA 2:17; E 46). He never commands it; it is Oothoon anticipating what she thinks he will be gratified by, as with the silver and gold girls. But in this instance it seems she is right as it is one of the few times in the poem that he actually responds: ‘Theotormon severely smiles’ (VDA 2:18; E 46). Both scenes have voyeurism in common, but with the girls (depending on how we read who does what to whom) there is at least the possibility of Theotormon being expected to perform sexually. Here he need only watch and ‘severely smile’. Hobson suggests in relation to Oothoon as rape victim that someone with sexual traumas ‘may subsequently avoid direct sexual encounters and achieve orgasm by watching (or fantasising) others’ sexual acts’60; this could be true of Theotormon too if he is traumatised by being ‘rent’ by Theotormon, or by his physical and mental sexual problems. It is difficult to interpret what a smile means; as Blake himself writes, ‘There is a Smile of Love / And there is a Smile of Deceit / And there is a Smile of Smiles / In which these two Smiles meet’ (PM 1–4; E 482), and Theotormon’s seems like yet another smile that combines more than one kind of impulse. It could be a moral judgment on Oothoon with a strong dash of repressed sadomasochism, if he shows ‘severe’ satisfaction at her being rent by the eagles. But what if it is unrepressed sadomasochism? Another scene, in the design on Plate 6, could support such an interpretation: a male figure wields a cat o’ nine tails as a female figure before him covers her face with her hands. Though the male figure could be read as slaveholder Bromion, he could also be Theotormon, if he is self-torturing and potentially sadistic. Indeed, it is hard to tell if he is whipping the naked woman (she doesn’t seem close enough to be hit, though perhaps she was a moment earlier and is now moving away) or flagellating himself (if the lashes land over his shoulder on his back, which seems possible given the position of his arms).61 Medically as well as pornographically, 254 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed it was often noted that flagellation was sometimes the only recourse for an otherwise impotent man to achieve an erection.62 Of course, going by the frequency of stories of girls birching each other in eighteenth-century porn, observing or imagining pain inflicted on others can work just as well. When Theotormon ‘severely smiles’, Oothoon’s ‘soul reflects the smile’, a moment of intimate pleasure. But this is as far as it goes: ‘Oothoon hovers by [Theotormon’s] side, perswading him in vain’; she asks ‘[w]hy does my Theotormon sit weeping upon the threshold’ (VDA 2:21–2; E 47). When she cries repeatedly, ‘arise my Theotormon’, she may be asking not for his forgiveness but his arousal. Considering the degeneration of the nation according to Graham, it makes sense that ‘[t]he Daughters of Albion hear her woes. & eccho back her sighs’ (VDA 2:20; E 46; see also 5:2; E 48 and 8:13; E 51). ‘And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations’ (VDA 3:1; E 47): like Graham in the parodies, Bromion may be the only man with enough of a spark to get it up. John Hunter: impotence and masturbation, mind and body The connection between masturbation and impotence was articulated by many writers in the long eighteenth century63 but of course it is not a medical fact. As McLaren and Laqueur64 attest, John Hunter, in his chapter ‘Of Impotence’ in A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, was the lone, brave voice insisting masturbation was not harmful.65 Laqueur emphasizes that Hunter’s views on masturbation were ‘suppressed’ by ‘his editors’66 , but this is somewhat inaccurate. Laqueur gives a summary of the following controversial passage: I think I may affirm that this act in itself does less harm to the constitution in general than the natural. That the natural with common women, or such as we are indifferent about, does less harm to the constitution than where it is not so selfish, and where the affections for the woman are also concerned. Where it is only a constitutional act it is simple, and only one action takes place; but where the mind becomes interested, it is worked up to a degree of enthusiasm, increasing the sensibility of the body and disposition for action; and when the complete action takes place it is with proportional violence; and in proportion to the violence is the degree of debility produced, or injury done to the constitution.67

Laqueur adds a note to the final sentence: ‘The comment is missing in the second edition and by the third edition, in 1810, the whole section has • 255

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been replaced by a conventional attack on masturbation.’68 It is true that this passage is missing in the second edition.69 But if it was suppressed, it was by Hunter himself who had the book printed and sold it from his house.70 The third edition, edited by Everard Home who takes his text from the first edition, in fact includes this passage, along with the ‘conventional attack’ alluded to: The Editor is induced to believe that Onanism is more hurtful than the author imagined; that its being practised before the parts have arrived at maturity in weakly constitutions, may prevent their ever doing so. He also believes, contrary to the opinion of the author, that the venereal act with a woman, where the passions are strongly excited, can be more frequently repeated with less debilitating effects, than under any other circumstances, since this particular secretion is more immediately under the influence of the passions than any other in the body.71

The only substantive deletion Home makes to Hunter’s discussion of masturbation is of the remark, ‘for upon a strict review of this subject, it appears to me to be by far too rare to originate from a practice so general’.72 Hunter lets this stand in his second edition, while he deletes the sentence ‘The only true objection to this selfish enjoyment is the probability of it’s being repeated too frequently’,73, which Home rewrites as ‘[this practice] is particularly pernicious from the frequency of the repetition, there being no want of opportunity’.74 Though his notoriety is not mentioned by Laqueur, Home is known for having, after plagiarizing from them, ‘destroyed most of Hunter’s papers in 1823’.75 With characteristic blunt and practical honesty, Hunter questions ‘how far’ it ‘is just’ to lay impotence ‘to the charge of Onanism’ considering it is ‘far too rare to originate from a practice so general’.76 Further, he questions ‘how far the attributing to this practice such a consequence, is of public utility, I am doubtful … this I can say with certainty, that many of those who are affected with the complaints in question are miserable from this idea’.77 This certainly could describe the tormented Theotormon.78 Hunter goes on to say ‘it is some consolation for them to know that it is possible it may arise from other causes’,79 the kind of ‘comfor[t]’, perhaps, that Theotormon wishes thought could bring back to him, rather than the ‘poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier’ (VDA 4:7, 11; E 48) of the predominant discourse on the subject. Hunter says, ‘I am clear in my own mind that the books on this subject have done more harm than good.’ This is particularly because Hunter pays special attention to ‘impotence depending on the mind’.80To perform this act well, the body should be in health, and the mind should be perfectly confident of the

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed powers of the body; the mind should be in a state entirely disengaged from every thing else; it should have no difficulties, no fears, no apprehensions; not even an anxiety to perform the act well; for even this anxiety is a state of mind different from what should prevail; there should not be even a fear that the mind itself may find a difficulty at the time the act should be performed. Perhaps no function of the machine depends so much upon the state of mind as this. The will, and reasoning faculty, have nothing to do with this power; they are only employed in the act, so far as voluntary parts are made use of; and if they ever interfere, which they sometimes do, it often produces another state of the mind which destroys that which is proper for the performance of the act; it produces a desire, a wish, a hope, which are all only diffidence and uncertainty, and create in the mind the idea of a possibility of the want of success, which destroys the proper state of mind, or necessary confidence.81

Theotormon labours under difficulties and apprehensions, and his one speech is full of elusive desires, wishes, hopes ‘which are all only diffidence and uncertainty’ as he worries, ‘Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made?’ (VDA 3:23; E 47). His questions show a desperate desire to give physical expression to his wishes. Tell me where dwell the joys of old! & where the ancient loves? And when will they renew again & the night of oblivion past? That I might traverse times & spaces far remote and bring Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain Where goest thou O thought? to what remote land is thy flight? If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings. and dews and honey and balm; Or poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier. (VDA 4:4–11; E 48)

These lines suggest he wishes to regain the sexual potency he once had – ‘the joys of old’ and ‘the ancient loves’ – and asks whether he can think himself back into ability to perform, if thoughts can return to him ‘dews and honey and balm’, either the ability to exchange sexual bodily fluids rather than tears (or as Graham unsympathetically puts it, dribblings), or whether thought, or advice like Graham’s, will only bring more ‘poison from the desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier’, who will insist that his degeneration is the irreversible result of his own blameable habits. As another instance of the effect of the mind on virility, Hunter notes that ‘a conscientious man has been known to lose his powers on finding the woman he was going to be connected with unexpectedly a virgin’.82 Theotormon seems to have the opposite problem, expecting a virgin and being confronted instead with an aroused and demanding woman who has • 257

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Sex, desire, perversion Bromion’s ‘stormy bed’ to compare his to. It is also possible, on the contrary, given how little is specified about what exactly happened between Bromion and Oothoon, that his boasts are hollow and the metaphorical thunders are not equivalent to penetrative sex. If Oothoon is still a virgin, and after all she continually asserts that she is, perhaps Theotormon, believing Bromion, meets with unexpected resistance in trying to penetrate her. ‘At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears’, unable to deflower her himself. Hunter actually compares ‘shedding tears’ to the sexual act since ‘if we are afraid of shedding tears, or are desirous of doing it’, we won’t be able to, ‘or at least not so freely as would have happened from our natural feelings’ – though he points out that shedding tears is ‘not so much a compound action [of body and mind] as the act in question; for none are so weak in body that they cannot shed tears’.83 Theotormon constantly weeps and cannot perform sexually, in contrast to Oothoon who ‘weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up; / But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs’ (VDA 2:11–12; E 46). Chapman, sounding rather like Graham in his moral disgust at dribbling and spurting, comments that ‘Oothoon at least has the decency not to weep, and is in general more honest and less corrupt than Theotormon’84: the motivation for critical meanness to Theotormon resembles that for beating up the weak male, and blaming the masturbator. Theotormon’s specific condition may be what Hunter classifies as ‘seminal weakness, or a secretion and emission of the semen without erection’, considering his constant flow of tears but apparent inability to perform intercourse. In this condition, ‘the secretion of the semen shall be so quick that simple thought, or even toying shall make it flow’, and sometimes ‘an emission shall happen almost without an erection’ but this occurs ‘not from debility, but affections of the mind’.85 If poor Theotormon believes that onanism is causing his impotence, he may well see such secretions as ‘poison’ and wish for thought to bring him ‘dews and honey and balm’ instead. Hunter observes that the condition can affect the consistency of the semen: it ‘is more fluid’ – less balmy, more like tears – ‘than natural in some of these cases’.86 Incidentally, Hunter also recommends bathing in cold water, or salt water,87 like Theotormon’s ocean waves. Hunter, in a case he narrates, effects a cure of impotency by prescribing a kind of restraint different from the ‘rewards of continence’ Graham recommends. As Hunter advises the patient ‘he might be cured, if he could perfectly rely on his own power of self-denial’,88 this could be called, positively, an instance of ‘the self enjoyings of self denial’ (VDA 7:9; E 50). 258 •

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed The patient only has trouble performing with one woman he is especially desirous of performing well with, so Hunter recommends he ‘go to bed to this woman, but first promise himself that he would not have any connection with her, for six nights, let his inclinations and powers be what they would’. This quickly works because ‘this resolution had produced such a total alteration in the state of his mind … instead of going to bed with the fear of inability, he went with fears that he should be possessed with too much desire, too much power … when he had once broke the spell, the mind and powers went on together’.89 Unfortunately, since, moreover, Hunter also observes that ‘every failure increases the evil’,90 all of Oothoon’s attempts to persuade and arouse Theotormon – and her intense rejection of self-denial – only compound the problem. Conclusion Graham’s career was characterised by increasing outlandishness, and recoil from his previous enthusiasms. By the late 1780s he was denouncing electrical therapy and went on to advocate earth-bathing, to the extent that he believed a person could live on air and water and nutrients from the contact of soil with the skin.91 One could say that a figure who calls eagles to rend her flesh to purify her after sexual transgression, then questions at length the very idea of purity, then advocates exhibitionistic group sex, might be characterised by extremism as well. Theotormon has been read as idealising purity and rejecting Oothoon for her sexual experience. However, this is not necessarily the case if we do not take Oothoon’s word on his character. She is a sexual binarist, idealising free love and abominating restraint; Theotormon only looks like he has a virgin / whore complex when he is seen through the eyes of Oothoon who (perhaps in an understandable response to her rather complicated sexual history) is obsessed with that duality.92 On the contrary, Theotormon cannot help seeing sex as ambivalent and inextricably mixed. In a way that will later echo in the sexual laments of Tharmas and Enion in The Four Zoas, Theotormon can only imagine unalloyed ‘joy’ in a lost past that, as far as we know, never happened. Notes 1 Graham is rarely mentioned in relation to Blake; Schuchard is the only one to have briefly pursued the connection. Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried, • 259

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Sex, desire, perversion pp. 171–4, 181–6, 189. For a detailed description of the Temple, see Graham, A Sketch: or, Short Description of Dr. Graham’s Medical Apparatus, &c.; for accounts of Graham and the various forms and locations of his Temple, see Jameson, Masterquack, pp. 112–32; Schnorrenberg, ‘A True Relation’; and Syson, Doctor of Love. For analyses of Graham, see Porter, ‘Sex and the Singular Man’; and Otto, ‘James Graham as Spiritual Libertine’, ‘The Regeneration of the Body’, and Multiplying Worlds, pp. 64–78. 2 See Syson, Doctor of Love, pp. 154–5; and Schnorrenberg, ‘A True Relation’, p. 64. 3 See Jameson, Masterquack, pp. 116–17; and Schnorrenberg, ‘A True Relation’, pp. 64–5, for debate on this. 4 Graham, A Private Advice, p. 11. 5 Ibid., p. 18. 6 Graham, A Lecture, p. 20. 7 Ibid., p. 20. 8 See Connolly, ‘ “His Stormy Bed” ’. 9 Graham, A Lecture, p. 21. 10 Graham, A Lecture, p. 11, emphasis in original. Despite Wollstonecraft’s memorable use of the phrase for the ‘nasty indecent tricks’ learned at boarding schools, the relevant OED definitions do not give ‘pig together’ a sexual connotation: ‘To huddle, live, or sleep together, esp. in a crowded or disorderly way or in dirty conditions’ (2a); ‘To crowd (people) together like pigs’ (2c). Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 288. 11 Graham, A Lecture, Preface, emphasis in original. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 Stevens has also noted the long critical tradition of being mean to Theotormon (Stevens, ‘ “Woes & … sighs” ’, p. 147. A recent article provides a good example: Welch writes, ‘Theotormon shows no sympathy for [Oothoon] but instead self-concernment, self-righteousness, and possessiveness. With outrageous gall he shakes and roils himself as if he were the offended party, now stripped of an enviable possession – his once-virginal Oothoon … Breaking his peevish ‘silence’ only for a few moments, he all but admits the benighted perspective that Oothoon sees in him’. ‘Theotormon objectifies, abstracts, and reduces Oothoon into goods once worth his possession but, having been tainted, no longer worth a thought or a glance. Rejecting any opportunity to bridge the distance he has fostered, he ‘sits / Upon the margind ocean’ (8.11–12) attempting to marginalize Oothoon’. Most revealing of all, Welch judges Theotormon ‘unworthy of [Oothoon’s] passion’ (Welch, ‘Essence, Gender, Race’, pp. 118, 120, 128). 14 Marshall, as part of a Sedgewickian reading of the love triangle, insightfully suggests that Theotormon’s main problem is his ‘failure to perform normative masculinity’, indicated by his ‘inability to first protect Oothoon’s virginity from

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed others and later to possess it himself ’ (Marshall, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence, p. 33). Marshall reads that failure in terms of male rivalry and the traffic in women rather than sexual anxiety or dysfunction. 15 See Otto, for an excellent discussion of the relation ‘between ecstatic sexual experience, the religious desire for transcendence, and the modern individual’, and ‘the sublime in Graham’s therapies and his discourse about them’ (Otto, ‘The Regeneration’, para. 6). 16 Graham, A Lecture, p. 12. Cf. A Lecture, p. 21; A Private Advice, p. 7. 17 Graham, A Lecture, p. 19. 18 Wright further observes that ‘Theotormon’s own declarations do not support [Bromion’s] view’ (Wright, Blake, Nationalism, p. 62). 19 Similarly, Hobson asserts, ‘Blake’s condemnation of masturbation is as much a deformation in his liberatory poetics as his masculinist treatment of women. In fact, Blake’s willingness to countenance sexual perversion in the ‘silver girls’ speech marks his view of masturbation as regressive, not the other way round’ (Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality, p. 37). But do Oothoon’s words give Blake’s view? Not if one applies Hobson’s wise advice in relation to the silver and gold girls, to ‘read dramatically, not doctrinally’ (Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality, pp. 33–4). 20 Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, pp. 75–6. Bruder accounts for the contradiction between Blake’s ‘validation of a woman’s right to pleasure herself ’ early in the poem and the later negative passage by arguing that different kinds of masturbation are in question: the ‘complaint’ is ‘gendered’ because the objection is to the male masturbator’s self-absorption and the female masturbator’s pining for man (p. 75, p. 76, p. 82). But this merely moves the line that still restrictively demarcates which sexual pleasures are proper. 21 For this alternative reading I am indebted to my students in Sex and Marriage in Literature (ENGL 208N, St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Winter 2014), especially Naomi Biro. 22 Graham, A Lecture, Preface. 23 Ibid., p. 10, emphasis in original. 24 Compare, in The [First] Book of Urizen, ‘Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary’ (2:4; E 70); ‘Unknown, unprolific! / Self-clos’d, all-repelling’ (3:3; E70); ‘By earthquakes riv’n’ (10:4; E74); ‘A shriek ran thro’ Eternity: / And a paralytic stroke; / At the birth of the Human shadow’ (19:41–3) (Blake, The Complete Poetry, pp. 70–83). 25 Probably in OED sense 3c (obsolete, with latest examples from Shakespeare and Milton): ‘To drop the practice of (a duty, virtue, etc.); to lose the use of (one’s senses). to forget to do = to forget how to do (something)’. 26 Graham, A Lecture, p. 9. 27 Ibid., p. 10, emphasis in original. Otto, arguing for Graham as ‘spiritual libertine’, makes the interesting distinction that he ‘deplores’ masturbation and other • 261

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Sex, desire, perversion excesses ‘on medical and commercial rather than moral grounds’, for ‘draining’ people ‘of cash and vital fluids’ (Otto, ‘James Graham as Spiritual Libertine’, p. 215). But it seems he must disapprove on moral grounds as well, given his rhetoric: ‘horrid’ and ‘my soul hath been reprobating and vomiting out’ are certainly heated moral judgments. 28 For reproductions of Blake’s designs, see The William Blake Archive. I refer to the plates by Erdman’s numbering. 29 Welch, ‘Essence, Gender, Race’, p. 120. 30 Chapman, ‘Blake, Wollstonecraft’. Chapman goes on to classify Theotormon’s weeping as ‘a particularly sado-masochistic form of masturbation at that; it feeds off suffering, both the “self denial” of the masturbator and the more genuine sufferings of those it condemns’ (p. 9). This is based on the assumption that ‘Theotormon takes pleasure from his self-righteous sorrow over sin and suffering, suffering which his religiosity only increases’ (p. 9). One wonders where in the text Theotormon shows ‘religiosity’, whose only speech is of doubt and despair. 31 Graham, A Lecture, p. 10, emphasis in original. 32 Laqueur, Solitary Sex. 33 Graham, A Lecture, p. 21, emphasis in original. 34 Otto, Multiplying Worlds, p. 64. 35 Bruder, William Blake, p. 82. 36 Marshall, Romanticism, Gender and Violence, p. 38. 37 Graham, A Lecture, p. 18. 38 Ibid., p. 19. 39 Ibid. 40 Laqueur, Solitary Sex, p. 229. 41 Ibid., p. 227. 42 Graham, A Lecture, pp. 13–14, emphasis in original. 43 Ibid., p. 13. 44 To form an idea of Graham’s insistence, consider the passage where he imagines ‘an angel arrayed in celestial glory’ descending to ‘declare to me, commissioned by the MOST HIGHEST!!! that I was to die this night, and that the welfare of my family, and the eternal happiness of my soul, depended on leaving to the world the most useful precept that could be given for the preservation of the health and strength of mankind … I would then proclaim to my fellow-creatures … BATHING THEIR PRIVATE PARTS WITH COLD WATER THOROUGHLY! AND FOR A LONG WHILE, EVERY NIGHT AND MORNING, FROM THE FIRST MOMENT OF THEIR LIFE TO THE LAST HOUR OF THEIR EXISTENCE, was in my opinion of the highest importance to the preservation of their health, strength, beauty, and brilliancy, bodily and intellectual, of any thing that can be recommended or observed’ (Graham, A Lecture, p. 13, emphasis in original).

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Blake ’ s Visions and James Graham ’ s celestial bed 45 Ibid., p. 12, p. 14. 46 Ibid., p. 14. 47 Ibid., p. 13. 48 Ibid., p. 18, emphasis in original. 49 Graham, A Private Advice, p. 10, emphasis in original. 50 Graham, A Lecture, p. 22. 51 Anon., The Temple of Pleasure: A Poem. 52 Ibid., pp. 37–9, emphasis in original. 53 Porter, ‘Sex and the Singular Man’, p. 20. 54 Stevens, ‘Woes & … sighs’, pp. 147–8. 55 Anon., The Celestial Beds; anonymous, but attributed to William Mason (Syson, Doctor of Love, p. 188). 56 Anon., Celestial Beds, p. 20. 57 For an analysis of the mythical dimensions of this symbolism of cave as female genitals, see González-Treviño in this volume. 58 Anon., Temple of Pleasure, p. 5, emphasis in original. 59 Ward, Little Merlin’s Cave, p. 111. 60 Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality, p. 36. 61 Hutchings reads the design this way, but considers the self-flagellation as part of the asceticism he argues for in Theotormon (Hutchings, ‘Gender, Environment, and Imperialism’, para 9, and ‘Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature’, p. 9). 62 See McLaren, Impotence, pp. 58–9; Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century, p. 138; and, for an example, Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, pp. 143–53. 63 McLaren, Impotence, pp. 82–4. 64 McLaren, Impotence, p. 84; Laqueur, Solitary Sex, pp. 217–20. 65 Unless otherwise noted, quotations from A Treatise are taken from the first edition: Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, 1786. 66 Laqueur, Solitary Sex, pp. 218–19. 67 Hunter, A Treatise, 1st edn, p. 200; see Laqueur, Solitary Sex, p. 218. 68 Laqueur, Solitary Sex, p. 468. 69 Hunter, A Treatise, 2nd edn. 70 See Robb-Smith, ‘John Hunter’s Private Press’, pp. 263–6. 71 Hunter, A Treatise, 3rd edn, p. 214. 72 Hunter, A Treatise, 1st edn, p. 200, cf. 3rd edn, p. 213. 73 Hunter, A Treatise, 1st edn, p. 200; cf. 2nd edn, p. 200. 74 Hunter, A Treatise, 3rd edn, p. 214. 75 Coley, ‘Home, Sir Everard’; see also Gruber, ‘Hunter, John (1728–1793)’. Hunter’s other early nineteenth-century editors, Joseph Adams and James F. Palmer, both follow the second edition. Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease with an Introduction and Commentary. 76 Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, p. 200. • 263

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Sex, desire, perversion 77 Ibid. 78 For Blake’s knowledge of John Hunter, see Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire, pp. 101–2; and Kreiter, ‘Evolution and William Blake’. 79 Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, p. 200. 80 Ibid., p. 201. 81 Ibid., p. 202. 82 Ibid., p. 203. 83 Ibid. 84 Chapman, ‘Blake, Wollstonecraft’, p. 9. 85 Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, p. 206, p. 208. 86 Ibid., p. 207. 87 Ibid., p. 208. 88 Ibid., p. 204. 89 Ibid., p. 205. 90 Ibid., p. 203. 91 See Graham, Proposals for the Establishment, pp. iii–ix, and A New and Curious Treatise; also Schnorrenberg, ‘A True Relation’, pp. 65–6; and Otto, Multiplying Worlds, pp. 75–7. 92 Bruder asks, ‘isn’t she trapped by the classic patriarchal binary opposition of virgin/whore when she tries to describe her unabashed desires?’ (Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, p. 81).

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Index

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•

abject, abjection 21, 112, 141–2, 144, 147, 154 abstraction 7, 62n.36, 89, 90, 91, 101, 105–6, 131, 140, 152 mathematical 33, 52 abyss 23, 72, 76–7, 104, 115, 118, 154, 173, 240 Ackroyd, Peter 205 Adam 7, 42, 76, 86, 141, 167, 173, 176, 182, 186n.27, 208n.33 Adams, Hazard 122 aesthetics 7, 19, 36, 40, 68, 78, 88, 98, 101, 126, 213, 215, 217 embodied 18 experience 7, 119 form 3, 18, 37 agency 189, 194, 229 verbal 228 alien 21, 87, 104, 121, 123, 124–6, 130, 144, 150, 169, 184 Alien (film franchise) 21, 110–15, 125 allegory 15, 21, 167, 189, 224 sublime 217, 224, 232n.21 allusions 65, 67, 111, 117 Amato, Joseph 182 ambiguity 19, 135, 189, 194, 214 America 1, 13, 17, 36, 44, 109, 131, 165, 201, 214, 216 America a Prophecy 13, 17, 36, 44–5, 109, 131, 165, 216 analogy 22, 65, 153–4

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anatomical, anatomy 21, 28n.77, 130–1, 136–9, 144, 146, 149n.28, 151–3, 159, 174 morbid 152, 159 obstetrics 21 school 137 study of 136, 139, 157 textbook 137, 146, 149n.28 anatomisation 10, 22 anatomists 137, 140–1, 144, 151, 153–4, 158–9, 174 ancient 42, 60n.11, 109, 121, 132, 257 Ancient Britons 42–3, 61n.23 android 21, 112, 123, 125 angels 5, 9, 13, 25, 109, 111, 117–18, 125, 147, 158–60, 194, 244 dark 20, 110–11, 120, 126 animals 10, 100, 118, 246–7 imagery 247 machine 146 physiology 135 animation 76, 91 suspended 125 Ankarsjö, Magnus 209n.49 anthropomorphism 57, 125, 200 antiquarianism 8, 64–5 antiquity 4, 42 anxiety 20, 23, 92, 100, 129, 257 apes 22, 151, 158–9 apocalypse 41, 43, 57

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Index archaeology 22, 152, 165, 184 architect, architecture 14, 20, 53, 64, 121, 213–14, 217 Arimathea, Joseph of 39–41, 43, 66 Aristotle 33, 41, 99 Arnaud de Ronsil, Georges 153 arousal 242, 244, 246, 255 art 2, 8, 11, 14, 16, 35–8, 40, 59–60n.6, 60n.15, 61n.23, 68, 85, 90–1, 94, 98, 137, 153–4, 159–60, 185, 205, 213–15, 220, 226 classical 61n.23, 89 golden rule of 60n.15, 94 neo-classical 34, 37 visual 1, 9, 15, 20, 35–7 Arthur, King 42–3 artists 16, 34–5, 38–9, 41–2, 50, 64, 68, 105, 110–11, 153–4, 214, 219–20 atheism 115, 117 Ault, Donald 88 authority 3–4, 19, 53, 131, 134–5, 147, 179, 184, 224 centralised 3, 133 monarchical 169 religious 14 autoerotic 238, 246 autopsy 144, 151 Babylon 53, 56, 69 Bacon, Francis 89, 132 Baillie, Joanna 135 Baldick, Chris 130 Barad, Karen 88 barbarism 5, 14, 65, 68, 129 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 135 Barker, Clive 6 Basile, Giambattista 207n.18 Basire, James 14, 214 Bastille 7, 166 Bataille, Georges 17 beauty 94, 102–3, 105, 193–4, 209n.49, 240, 242, 244, 246 Beckford, William 170 Bentham, Jeremy 183 Bentley, G. E. 142, 148n.10, 214

Bernath, Elizabeth 192 Bible 41, 57, 69, 167, 173, 176, 180, 184 of Hell 22, 129, 165–7, 172, 179 biblical 40–1, 43, 67, 69, 172, 204, 208n.33 cities 56 eschatology 39 metanarrative 43 story of creation 121, 184 Bindman, David 1, 36, 37, 60n.12, 61n.19 birth 21, 111, 115, 129, 136, 139, 144, 177, 182, 186, 190, 238 Blackstone, William 14 Blade Runner (film) 109, 122–3 Blair, Robert 17, 38 Blake, William archaeologies 22, 166–7, 169, 172 art 1, 3, 15, 18, 22–3, 111, 121 imagery 18, 22–3, 157, 176 oeuvre 9, 18–19, 22, 176 poetry 1–2, 35–7, 60n.11, 74–5, 81, 86, 94, 121, 151, 189, 192, 225 prophecies 87–9, 92, 95, 119–20 scholars 16, 36, 66, 117, 120, 192 visions 25, 116, 118, 192 see also titles of individual works and major figures in Blake bliss 72, 239, 241, 245, 249, 252 blood 2, 6, 14, 72–3, 102, 141, 150, 154, 167, 169, 171–4, 176–8, 181–2, 184, 186n.27 bodies dead 71, 136, 144 dissected 138, 154, 158 female 177, 190–1, 201 human 21, 112, 130, 140, 151, 174, 247 physical 20, 134, 137, 139 stillborn 130, 141 suffering 23, 167, 170 body horror 8, 111, 129–30 monstrous 144, 146 parts 4, 154–5 • 285

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Index bondage 19, 72, 81, 202 bones 2, 7, 139, 146, 200, 245, 248 Book of Los 8, 115, 120, 165 Book of Thel 6, 23–4, 125, 189–93, 195–202, 207n.15 Book of Urizen 6–7, 9, 17, 20, 22–3, 90, 93, 103, 105, 120, 129–32, 134, 139, 147–8, 151–2, 154, 157, 165, 167, 172–3, 176–7, 182–3, 214, 216, 243 Bottigheimer, Ruth 207n.18 Botting, Fred 131 boundaries 6, 68, 76, 126, 130, 134–5, 141, 144, 150, 155, 159 Bowman, Curtis 111 Britain 3, 42, 53, 129–30, 136, 147–8 Bromion 25, 201–2, 225, 228–9, 237–8, 240–1, 243, 250, 252–3, 255, 258 Browning, Robert 220 Bruder, Helen 245, 264n.92 Bruhm, Steven 5 Brylowe, Thora 40, 59–60n.6 Bundtzen, Lynda K. 115 Burke, Edmund 6–7, 118, 126, 130–1, 136, 209n.49 Byron, Glennis 16 Campbell, Joseph 193, 206n.9 cannibalism 9, 158–9 Canuel, Mark 14 captive, captivity 75, 155, 190, 195, 202, 204 Castle of Otranto (Walpole) 4, 14, 60n.12, 65, 150, 169, 214, 223 Castricano, Jodey 218 cathedrals 40–1, 64, 66–7, 80, 83n.38 St Paul’s 49, 52–3, 56, 80 see also Gothic Cavarero, Adriana 182 caves 190–1, 202, 204, 224, 228–9, 253–4 Chamayou, Grégoire 170 chaos 6, 19, 23, 69, 72, 76, 85, 87, 94, 100–1, 103–4, 115–16, 129, 142, 172, 177, 221, 250

286 •

Chaplin, Simon 152, 154 Chapman, Wes 243, 258 chastity 70, 192, 195, 202 Chatterton, Thomas 64 Chaucer, Geoffrey 66 child, children 34, 43–4, 53–4, 56, 88, 101, 124–5, 131, 156, 161n.26, 161–2n.32, 170, 202, 229, 238, 243, 248, 250, 252 labour 56 Christ 57, 190 Christianity 39, 41, 47, 65, 110 Christians 40, 43, 72–3, 83n.29, 221 churches 13–14, 52–3, 65, 80, 85 Civil War (English) 3, 4, 170 Clair, Jean 180 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 17, 179 Collings, David 142 colonialism 68, 109, 120, 166 comedy 150, 158–60, 253 absurd 136, 151, 156–7, 159 Conan Doyle, Arthur 99 conglobing 23, 144, 149n.28 conscience 195, 199–200 consciousness 35, 100, 111, 134, 191, 198, 215–16, 219, 221–2, 226, 247 continuity 71, 75–6, 78, 80 aesthetic 65, 73, 81 control 68, 71, 125, 130–1, 140, 147, 180, 194, 219, 228, 232n.21 intentional 244 patriarchal 228 total 19 Corinelli, Vincenzo 180 cosmos 21, 85, 112, 119, 123–6, 219 creation 6, 21, 69, 74–6, 78, 91, 110, 114–15, 120–1, 123, 126, 140, 144, 146, 152, 154, 157, 165–7, 172–3, 176–7, 179–81, 184, 193, 199, 213 act of 120, 126 horrors of 22, 120 scene 22, 179 creationism, creationist 122, 125 creativity 87, 208n.33, 221

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Index creators 21, 111, 113–14, 121–2, 167, 220, 228, 240 Creed, Barbara 115 critique 19, 22, 52, 67, 78, 86, 132, 151, 194, 216, 231, 240 feminist 205 schizoanalytic 230 Cromek, Robert 38, 44 Cronenberg, David 111 cruelty 23, 96, 105, 151, 155, 157, 167, 170, 184 Cumberland, George 59, 61n.20 Curry, Tim 109 Damon, S. Foster 62n.39, 196 Däniken, Erich von 110 Dante 16–17, 111, 113, 121 darkness 76, 80, 101–3, 109, 137, 171, 176, 179, 190–1, 202, 241–2 ninefold 93, 132, 134 death 9, 14, 20, 24, 37–8, 43–6, 53, 56–8, 72, 78, 93, 97, 105, 119, 121, 123, 126–7, 134–7, 140–2, 152, 157, 174, 177, 181–3, 186n.27, 190, 192–3, 196, 224, 242, 248 death-in-life 120, 174 debility 243–4, 255, 258 decay 115, 141, 174, 197–8 physical 129 deformity 147, 156 degeneracy, degeneration 10, 20, 25, 130–1, 192, 237–9, 255, 257 physical 146 deism 5, 111, 122, 124, 126, 153 Deleuze, Gilles 20, 24, 46, 62n.28, 62n.33, 62n.36, 86, 89, 90–1, 92, 96, 98–9, 101, 103, 184, 217–20, 223, 232n.21, 232n.25 line of flight 216–17, 221, 230 multiplicity 57, 62n.36 Derrida, Jacques 232n.25 Descartes, René 99–100, 132, 135 Descriptive Catalogue 5, 42, 60n.15, 61n.23, 139, 154

desecration 137, 170 design intelligent 113, 121, 125 destruction 72–4, 88, 95, 97, 103, 123, 125, 134, 142, 193, 198 environmental 109 de-structuring 220, 232n.25 devils 9, 111, 118, 136, 158–9 differences ontological 33–4, 46, 49, 57–8, 59n.2 DiSalvo, David 112 discourses analytic 222 anti-masturbation 244 medical 130, 151 political 66 prophetic 221 racist 68 scientific 132 discovery 8, 153, 156, 216–17, 220 scientific 124 diseases 130, 156, 194, 216, 231, 238, 243 disgust 21, 112, 135, 142, 150, 156–7 instinctive 182 moral 258 visceral 126 dismemberment 8, 88, 126, 138, 182 disorder 19, 72, 90, 130, 146 Dissanayake, Ellen 124 dissection 21–2, 102, 134–5, 137, 140, 144, 151–6, 158, 160, 225 demonstrations of 154, 157 scenes of 151 self-induced 130 dissolution 17, 57–8, 115, 123, 125, 196–7 divine 3, 7, 21, 47, 89–90, 94, 103, 121, 125, 130, 167, 170, 180 humanity 134, 153 imagination 130, 137 inspiration 155 plan 141, 172 • 287

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Index division 52–3, 87–90, 94–6, 98, 102, 126, 132, 134, 140, 151–2, 167, 173–4, 176, 182 events of 88, 102 moral 53 psychological 137 Dörrbecker, Detlef 45 Doyle, Laura 68 dragon 69–70, 76 dreams 20, 23, 88, 123–4, 180, 240 Duggett, Tom 65 Dürer, Albrecht 180, 194 eagle 204, 247–8, 253–4, 259 Easson, Roger 36, 39 Eden 76, 176, 186n.27 electricity 235, 237 electrotherapy 192, 237 Elysium 195–6, 239, 245 embryo 176, 184 empire 67, 70, 73–4, 78, 83n.29, 180 religious 69, 74 empiricism, empiricists 5, 58, 62–3n.39, 132, 152–3, 160 Empson, William 111 energies 15, 70, 77, 80, 129, 165, 172, 219, 223, 229, 231, 252 bodily 176 destructive 170 vitalising 141 engraving 10, 38–41, 98, 121, 137–8, 174, 181, 194, 201, 214 anatomical 174 technique 43, 58 enjoyment sexual 191, 200, 204 Enlightenment 5, 21, 65–6, 78, 132, 146, 152 historiography 5, 39–41 project 129, 137 scientists 21, 134 values 191, 205 epistemology 34, 49, 52, 61n.23, 67, 71, 96, 147 Erdman, David 49, 51–2, 59n.3, 142, 214

288 •

erotic 24, 215 eschatology 39, 41, 43, 53, 57 essentialism 96, 99 Essick, Robert 9 Estés, Clarissa Pinkola 193 eternity 57, 67, 92, 98, 100, 104–5, 134, 140, 142, 144, 153, 173–4, 182, 243 Europe 9, 17, 129, 132, 165–7, 169, 177, 179, 182, 201, 214, 228 Europe a Prophecy 9, 12, 17, 132–3, 165, 177, 179, 214, 228 Eve 7, 167, 173–4, 176, 182 evil 18, 25, 70, 76, 97–8, 101–3, 110, 159, 237–8, 259 evolution 21, 113 existence 20, 22, 44, 48, 52–3, 56, 58, 79–80, 96, 104, 131–2, 134, 140–2, 147, 183, 193, 197, 243 embodied 24, 139 experience bodily 160–1n.15 embodied 153 limits of 20, 93 lived 153, 159 sexual 237, 240, 259, 261n.15 subjective 132, 139 experimentation, experiments 21, 114, 135, 156, 235, 237 faculties 7, 71, 87, 242 generative 235, 250–1 mental 239–40 Faflak, Joel 217–18, 220 “Fair Elenor” 16, 36, 60n12 fairy tales 192–3, 199, 207n.18 faith 64, 71, 124, 153, 239, 244 fantasy 85, 112–13, 230, 254 male 202 Fassbender, Michael 112, 123–5 fathers 126, 156, 180, 192–3, 204, 238, 248, 252 moral 250 female entity 198, 206n.9 forms 172–4

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Index orifice 253 parts 173 space 22–3 victimisation 225 will 83n.30 feminine 87, 179, 191–2, 194, 197, 199–200, 205, 208n.33, 208n.34, 216, 223, 225 agency 189 code 199 entities 204–5 identity 201 mythical 199 power 199 sexuality 213, 225, 230 femininity 23, 189–92, 195, 205 middle-class 70 feminism 189 fertility 235, 237, 246 fibres 4, 8, 52, 102, 104, 115, 118, 120, 172–3, 176–8, 181, 184 films 2, 20–1, 110–15, 119–23 flagellation 254–5 Flaxman, John 139 flesh 13, 76, 130, 136, 141–2, 144, 154, 156, 174, 199–200, 203–4, 253–4, 259 fluids, bodily 26, 154, 243–4, 257 foetus 137–8, 149n.27 form aberrant 123, 220 abstract 111, 179 architectural 41, 51–2 dual 25, 224 geometric 89–90 human 17, 57, 73, 76, 94 mathematic 33, 58, 68, 79–80, 98, 179 medieval 223 formation 21, 67, 73, 75, 88, 100, 120, 130, 144, 146, 183, 222 bodily 21, 130 physical 130 physiological 144 formlessness 89–90, 94, 98, 106, 142, 144

Foucault, Michel 136, 169 Four Zoas see Vala France 66, 73, 130, 166, 169, 183, 185n.2, 185n.12, 214 Frankenstein (Shelley) 6, 21–2, 109, 114, 141–2 freedom 62–3n.39, 91, 200 Freud, Sigmund 169, 218, 231–2n.16 Frye, Northrop 36, 122, 189 Fuseli, Henry 9, 16, 167 gap 116, 213, 215, 217–19, 222, 228, 231 gaze, gazing 23, 144, 167, 169, 172, 173, 176, 180, 194, 201, 217, 226, 228 gender 23, 112, 115, 171, 184, 191–2, 215, 253 binaries 112 inversion 75 genitalisation 190 genitals 171, 190 genre 18–20, 24, 58, 111, 114, 170, 189, 223 geometry 88–91, 106, 132 Gerblinger, Christiane 109 gestation 137, 149n.27 Gibbon, Edward 5, 42 Gigante, Denise 28n.77, 106 Giger, H. R. 110, 114 Gilchrist, Alexander 10, 14, 17, 36, 61n.19 Gilpin, George 148n.5 Gleckner, Robert 36 globes 22, 93, 120, 171–3, 177, 179–81 Gnosticism 120–1 God, gods 57, 65, 69, 72–3, 75, 86, 91–3, 111, 113, 117, 126–7, 132, 135, 153, 180–3, 197, 208n.33, 244 Godwin, William 131 Goldsmith, Steven 17 Gompf, Michelle 110 Gothic aesthetics 191, 216 architecture 9, 14, 40, 49, 65, 85 • 289

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Index art 15, 20, 36–7, 61n.19, 89, 101, 215–17, 224 artists 14, 18–19, 40–1, 66–7 Blakean 39, 41–3, 59n.2, 59n.4, 62n.33 cathedrals 9, 41, 80 churches 65, 78, 80, 214 fiction 5, 7, 19, 65, 70, 158, 166–7, 169–70, 176–7, 184, 195, 202, 213, 220 forms 15, 18–19, 25, 34, 49, 52–3, 68, 79–81, 215, 223 genres 71, 150, 230 hero and heroine 64, 70–1, 74, 202 horror 1, 16, 21, 60n.12, 169–70 iconography 9, 23 idiom 190, 215 images 23, 151, 167 line 89–90, 97–8 monuments 36–7, 39, 58 novels 14, 66, 70 reactionary 67–8, 70–1 Revival 3, 16–17, 19–20, 64–7, 78, 81 sensibility 3, 15, 129 spaces 197 spectacle 150–3, 157–61 structure 20, 38, 46, 49, 56, 80, 83n.38, 88 studies 1, 9, 15, 18 sublime 86, 91, 93, 97 terror 7, 67, 73–4, 78, 81 theatre 22, 155 tropes 169, 215, 218 Gothicised 1, 36, 40 Gothicism 37, 40, 90, 101 Goths 2, 14, 33, 217 Goya, Francisco 9, 11 Graham, James 25–6, 192, 235, 237–40, 242–53, 255, 257–9, 259–60n.1, 262n.44 Gray, Thomas 9 Grecian 5, 33, 36, 49, 52, 58, 64, 79–80, 83n.38, 98 Greece 36, 69, 173

290 •

Grimm Brothers 199, 207n.18 grotesque 9, 17, 23, 115, 123, 130, 150, 156, 198 Guattari, Felix 89–92, 96, 98–9, 101, 217–20, 223, 232n.21 line of flight 216–17, 221, 230 Hagstrum, Jean 16 Hall, James 9 Hannibal (book and television series) 1, 109–10 Harley, Alexis 109 harlot 52–3, 67–71, 74, 240 Harman, Graham 113, 116–17, 119, 122, 123 Harris, Thomas 1, 6, 109 Harvey, William 135 Haslam, Fiona 155 Hays, Mary 216 Hazlitt, William 166 health 155, 235, 238, 244–5, 251, 256 sexual 26, 192, 238–9, 245 Heidegger, Martin 111, 220 hell 5, 6, 91, 93, 97, 99, 118, 121, 198, 221, 222 Hercules 61n.23, 244 hero 193–4, 202, 206n.9, 224, 244, 252 Hilton, Nelson 224 history 4–5, 8, 14, 18–19, 23, 41–2, 53, 57, 75, 99, 167, 177, 179, 184–6, 216, 220 art 18, 96 biblical 40 fallen 167, 176 human 3, 166, 173, 176, 182 political 3, 167 Hobson, John A. 254 Hoeveler, Diane Long 2 Hoffman, E.T.A. 218 Hogarth, William 151, 155 Hogle, Jerrold E. 14, 182n.6 Holmes, Richard 185n.2 Home, Everard 256

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Index Hopper, Edward 110 Horner, Avril 159 horror comic 150, 158, 160 concept 116, 122 cosmic 110, 114 excessive 150–1, 157, 159–60 see also Gothic; terror and horror Houellebecq, Michel 115–16 Howard, Seymour 39, 61n.19, 61n.23 Huante, Carlos 111 Huet, Marie-Hélène 181 humanity 13, 53, 92, 94, 123, 139, 167, 183, 204 humour 155, 194, 223 Hunter, John 136, 137, 148n.5, 148n.7, 148n.10, 148n.11, 149n.29, 152–5, 161n.29, 174, 239, 255–9 Hunter, William 21, 137–40, 146, 152–5, 174–5 Hurd, Richard 3 Husserl, Edmund 116 Hutchings, Kevin 126, 192 Hymen 249 Temple of Health and 235–6, 245 identity 18, 53, 81, 91, 101, 139, 141, 152, 160–1n.15, 166, 197–8, 208n.33, 208n.34, 248 ideology 19, 61n.19, 226, 228, 231 conservative 34 sexual 25 imagery 139, 141, 144, 146, 149n.27, 149n.28, 151, 189, 203, 232n.21, 242, 249 imagination 5, 7, 20–1, 36, 75, 83–4n.38, 88, 97, 103–5, 117–19, 123–4, 126, 130–1, 134, 137, 139, 153–4, 160–1n.15, 172, 179, 196, 218, 247, 250 aesthetic 124 visual 110, 214

immanence 22, 24, 41, 43, 46, 49, 52, 56–7, 62n.28, 62n.36 immortality 92, 125, 140 imperialism 66, 68–9, 91 impotence 5, 192, 239, 255–6, 258 innocence 9, 91, 94, 97, 110, 125, 184, 196, 240 personal 35 world of 87, 101 interiority 151, 154, 160–1n.15, 217, 220 intuition 20, 85–6, 90, 92–3 Israel, Israelites 43, 69, 73 Jacobin 3, 6–7, 142 James, Henry 101 Jarmusch, Jim 2 jealousy 62–3n.39, 104, 125, 177, 225, 240, 248, 252–3 Jericho 67, 69, 73 Jerusalem 4, 6, 9, 15, 33–4, 39, 42–9, 51–4, 56–8, 62n.36, 62–3n.39, 66–9, 75, 80, 88, 94, 96, 102, 123, 126, 132, 155, 157, 184, 222 Jesus 40, 72–3, 75–6, 113, 125 Johnes, Thomas 34–5 Johnson, Barbara 17 Johnson, Samuel 135, 155, 195 Jonson, Ben 60n.11 Jordanova, Ludmilla 174 jouissance 24, 220, 223, 225, 230, 233n.45 joy 3, 7, 25, 87, 105, 193, 196, 204, 228, 236, 240–1, 247, 251–2, 257, 259 infant 196, 241 lustful 241, 246 sexual 25, 238 Jung, Carl 218, 231–2n.16 Kant, Immanuel 20, 57, 85–8, 92–3, 95, 98–100, 118–19, 160n.3 Kemp, Martin 137 Keynes, Geoffrey 196 kings 9, 135, 180, 183–4, 221, 223–4 Klaver, Elizabeth 151 Knox, Robert 137 • 291

Index

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Knox, Vicesimus 64–5 Kreiter, Carmen 144, 149n.28 Kristeva, Julia 141, 154, 225 Lacan, Jacques 219, 220, 233n.45 Lamb of God 73, 75 Lambeth 4, 114, 137, 215–16 landscapes 23, 81, 88, 103, 122, 144, 190, 192, 195, 200, 225, 236 language 20, 60n.12, 65, 116, 139, 149n.28, 216, 222, 228, 230, 232 poetic 189, 225 scientific 130 Laqueur, Thomas 244, 248, 255–6 law 19, 53, 62–3n.39, 76–7, 86–7, 91, 96, 111, 122–3, 135, 139, 152, 179, 183, 218, 224, 238 moral 71, 74, 117, 122, 126 Lee, Sophia 170 Lefort, Claude 184 Leibniz 20, 86–7, 93, 99–100 Lessenich, Rolf P. 150 Lewis, Matthew (“Monk”) 9, 15, 36, 140, 142, 151, 155, 170, 195, 202, 223 liberation sexual 190, 192, 238, 245 liberty 15, 40, 43, 68, 185n.2, 221, 223 life eternal 20, 93, 140 Lindelof, Damon 113–14 Litchfield, Harriet 155 Living Form 18–19, 28n.77, 33–5, 39–43, 46, 49–50, 52–3, 56–8, 59n.2, 59n.4, 67, 79–80, 98 Locke, John 132, 184 logic 21, 71, 80, 86, 88, 99, 135, 140, 144, 156, 160, 183, 248 London 49, 52–4, 56, 136–7, 155, 214–15, 235 Louis XVI 166, 181–3 Lovecraft, H. P. 20, 110, 112–18, 123, 126 lust 77, 229, 238, 242–3, 250

292 •

Luvah 72, 75, 83n.28, 89 Lyon, Emma 235 Machine, machinery 2, 17, 91, 124, 153, 181, 183, 232n.21, 257 symbolic 213, 230 Macpherson, James 209n.47, 224 see also Ossian Makdisi, Saree 81 Malkin, Benjamin Heath 19, 34–41, 46, 48–9, 58, 59–60n.6, 60n.7, 60n.11, 61n.19, 61n.25, 68 Malloy, Connor 126 manifestations 8, 78, 122, 129, 146, 215, 221, 228 Mann, Paul 140, 147 Manson, Marilyn 2 maps 124, 146, 180, 219, 221, 225 marriage 13, 90, 110, 116–17, 193, 216, 220–5, 229–30, 237–8, 243 Marriage of Heaven and Hell 5, 20, 22, 24, 92, 111, 129, 151, 154, 158–60, 184, 215, 222, 226 Marshall, Nowell 246 masculine, masculinity 24, 112, 177, 195, 197, 205, 208n.33, 208n.34, 223, 225, 230, 233–4n.50 masturbation 25, 192, 240–6, 248, 255–6, 258 materialism 115, 122, 139, 144 queer 88 materiality 23, 131, 140, 142, 198, 214, 217 Mathieson, John 110 matter 85, 88, 96, 134, 141, 144, 217, 229 McFarlane, Todd 1 McLaren, Angus 255 McLeod, Toby 185n.2 medieval, medievalism 15–16, 36, 64–8, 70, 71, 78, 82n.6, 215, 219, 223 architecture 215 culture 215

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Index devotional practice 65, 68 period 36–7, 41, 64–5 subject 66–7, 70–1, 82n.25 see also form Meillassoux, Quentin 117 melancholy 105, 193–5, 207n.18 Melzer, Patricia 112 metaphors 130, 133, 144, 149n.28, 152, 190–1, 195–6, 203–4, 258 metaphysics 5, 21, 72–5, 77, 79, 122, 169, 220 Michelangelo 16, 39–41 Mignola, Mike 1 Miles, Robert 15 Milton, John 4, 7–8, 15, 20, 23, 42, 60n.11, 67, 69, 75, 94, 97, 104, 109–11, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 126, 132, 149n.28, 184, 186n.27, 195, 200, 222 modernity 58, 93, 180 Modest Proposal (Swift) 156, 161–2n.32 modesty 201 hypocrite 240, 246, 248 Moers, Ellen 24 monsters 5, 9, 11, 25, 69, 113, 117, 122, 136, 181, 202 monstrosity, monstrous 8–9, 115, 118, 129–31, 139, 141–2, 147–8, 156, 158, 184 Island in the Moon 22, 46, 136, 139, 151, 154–5, 160, 252 Moore, Alan 1–2 Morgan, Jack 7 mortality 37–8, 48, 136, 140, 153, 160–1n.15, 196 Morton, Timothy 15, 122 mother 67–8, 70–1, 95, 124, 156, 186n.23, 197–8, 201, 238 motherhood 196, 198 motifs 121, 167, 195, 199 sad princess 193–5, 207n.18 multiplicity 20, 22, 46, 56–8, 62n.36, 62–3n.39, 88, 92–3, 119, 135

Myrone, Martin 16 mysteries 71, 74, 78, 122, 136, 159, 170, 191, 199, 213 myth 42, 110, 120, 131, 173, 208n.33, 221 creation 114, 120 Narcissism, Narcissus 173, 233–4n.50 nature 23, 48, 62–3n.39, 79, 90, 92, 112, 114, 122, 132, 135, 137, 139, 144, 146–7, 159, 174, 179, 181, 190–4, 199–200, 202, 205, 230, 237, 239, 242, 247, 250 Nebuchadnezzar II 10, 13 neo-classicism 14, 36–7, 61n.23, 68 primitivism 37, 40 revival 33, 217 values 40, 61n.23 New Jerusalem 14, 39 Newton, Isaac 5, 90, 118, 132, 153, 180–1 nightmares 9, 23, 87 nihilism 115, 117, 220 Norvig, Gerda 192 O’Connell, Sean 110 On Homer’s Poetry 33, 37, 58, 59n.1, 59n.2 On Virgil 33, 37–8, 58, 59n.1, 59n.2, 67, 79–80, 98, 121, 217 ontology 33–4, 38, 46, 49, 57–8, 59n.2, 92, 97, 100, 103, 111, 123, 220 see also differences, ontological Oothoon 23–6, 190–2, 200–4, 209n.44, 209n.49, 209n.50, 219, 224–6, 228, 230, 237–9, 241, 243–6, 248–50, 252–5, 258–9 sexual awakening 241 speeches 202, 238, 246–7 Orc 13, 15, 24, 76, 77, 109, 127n.1, 172, 176 order, symbolic 141, 224–5 organicism 23, 89–91 • 293

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organs 8, 23, 142, 146, 150, 174, 179, 194, 198, 236 female 190 male 249 sexual 174 Ossian 3, 17, 224, 233n.39 see also Macpherson, James Paine, Thomas 131, 181, 184 Paley, Morton 14, 46, 49 Paradise Lost (Milton) 110–11, 120–1, 132, 173, 221 passions 5, 7, 23, 105, 167, 250, 256 past 4–5, 22–3, 25, 34–5, 38–9, 43, 56, 58, 64, 120, 123, 130, 166–7, 169, 180, 182, 184, 213, 259 primal 176 traumatic 3 violent 169, 184 patriarchal, patriarchy 24, 112, 122, 169, 191, 199, 214, 216 authority 3, 52 normativity 190 structure 226 Pawlitzki, Susanne 109 Peacock, Thomas Love 151 Percy, Thomas 64 performativity 150–2, 159, 160–1n.15 Perkins, David 135 Perrault, Charles 207n.18 Persephone 196–7, 202, 224 perversion 16, 24, 130, 261n.19 Petzold, Eli 2 phallus 177, 218–20, 224–5, 228, 232n.21 Piaget, Jean 124 Piccitto, Diane 153–4, 160n.2 Pickering Manuscript 14, 16 Piranesi, Giovanni 8, 180 Plato 98, 121, 204 pleasure 24, 100, 235, 239–42, 249–51, 253, 255 Temple of 251, 253 Plotnitsky, Arkady 88 polemic 33, 70, 115, 205

294 •

political, politics 3, 15, 18, 33–4, 37, 39–40, 44, 52–3, 57–8, 59n.4, 62n.36, 66, 69, 83n.30, 99, 130 revolutionary 33, 39 Pope, Alexander 36, 68, 181 pornography 15, 24, 201, 242, 253–5 posthumanism 112, 125 potency 25, 131, 250, 257 Poulet, Georges 222 priesthood 19, 71, 77–8, 91 priests 13–14, 166, 179, 183–4, 236 Prometheus (film) 2, 20, 21, 110–15, 119–27, 167 Engineers 110–11, 115, 120–6, 167 Prometheus, modern 21, 114 prophecy 6, 28n.77, 36, 95, 132, 217, 219, 221, 231 continental 165–6, 179, 230 see also America a Prophecy; Europe a Prophecy prophetic books 120–1, 189 psychoanalysis 25, 218–19, 221, 228 psychology 18, 215, 221, 223, 225, 231, 233–4n.50 psychomachia 114, 223 Punter, David 2–4, 7, 16–17 Querrien, Anne 89 Radcliffe, Ann 7, 15, 19, 59n.2, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 78, 81, 82n.7, 166, 195 Rahab 19, 67–81, 82n.11, 83n.30, 84n.39 Rajan, Tilottama 174 Rapace, Noomi 112 rationalism, rationality 34, 40, 65, 67, 86, 122, 129, 132, 134, 147, 191, 199 Ratner, Brett 109 Raw, Laurence 109 reactionary 19, 37, 39, 66–7, 81, 129, 238 realism 58, 115–16, 155, 157, 174 literary 58 speculative 116

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Index universal 98 visionary 117–18 religion 41, 52–3, 69, 74, 80, 90, 104, 113, 126, 152, 165, 183, 241–2, 248 natural 5, 81, 93, 117, 122, 126 state 34, 49, 69–70, 74–5 Renaissance 36, 60n.11 Revelation, Book of 39, 62n.36, 69, 112 revolution 18, 33, 45, 57–8, 62n.36, 78, 129–31, 165–7, 183, 219, 225 Revolution, American 78, 165 Revolution, French 6–7, 33, 57, 66, 78, 121, 129–30, 165–6, 170, 185n.2, 185n.10, 185n.12 revolutionaries 6, 45, 53, 58, 78, 130, 181 Reyes, Xavier Aldana 7 Reynolds, Nicole 5 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 37, 38, 153, 155, 205 Richardson, Ruth 135 Richardson, Samuel 202 Richey, William 15, 37, 39, 59–60n.6, 61n.19 Riegl, Alois 89 Robespierre, Maximilien 7, 166, 181, 183 Romanticism 2, 71, 86, 92, 100, 110–11, 213, 217, 220 Rome 69, 98 Rosso, G. A. 69–70 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5 Rovira, James 121 Ruskin, John 17 Ryan, Robert 192 Rymsdyk, Jan van 138, 174, 175 sadism 13, 111, 122, 136, 142, 254 Satan 20, 42–3, 72–3, 75–6, 95, 104, 111, 121, 146, 170, 221, 232n.21 Synagogue of 72–3, 75, 83n.29 satire 132, 152, 155–6, 161–2n.32 Schiavonetti, Luigi 38

schizoanalysis 216, 218, 223–4, 232n.21 see also critique science 103, 113, 121, 124, 130, 135, 176 empirical 46–7, 141 fiction 111–13, 121 medical 22, 140, 145 scientists 21, 135, 144 Scott, Ridley 2, 21, 65, 109–12, 114–15, 119–21, 123, 125–6 self denial 241–2, 258–9 selfhood 17, 57, 72, 123, 125, 132, 134 semen 171, 177–8, 242–3, 258 semiosis 214, 219, 224, 226 sex 15, 24, 25, 52, 115, 230, 235–58, 259 good 237, 241, 245 sexuality 18, 115, 189, 193, 247 unproductive 25 women’s 24 Shelley, Mary 213 Silver, Sean 3 Simpson, Philippa 15 Singer, June 231–2n.16 slavery, slaves 10, 78, 139, 147, 200–1, 229 sleep 2, 9, 11, 42, 192 Sobchack, Vivian 115 Song of Los 165, 177, 178–9 Songs of Experience 13, 53, 60, 101, 106 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 9, 55, 94, 125, 184, 196 soul 2, 7, 71, 94, 100, 106, 129, 132, 137, 142, 196, 198, 201, 236, 239, 242–3, 245, 249 Spaiht, Jon 113 Spinoza, Baruch 93 Stafford, Barbara 152–3 Stagoll, Cliff 62n.28 Stedman, John Gabriel 10, 201 Stevens, Bethan 252, 260n.13 Stretzer, Thomas 201 Sturrock, June 68, 70 • 295

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Index subject formation 24, 216–17, 224, 229, 232n.25 rational 19, 86, 100, 103 subjectivities 25, 151–2, 154, 157, 159, 189, 192, 216–17, 219, 221–2, 225 subjugation 75, 139, 230 sublime 6, 19, 57, 79, 86–7, 92–4, 97, 110, 116, 118–20, 126, 142, 166, 213, 237, 242 Kantian 19, 85, 91, 95, 119 see also allegory; Gothic Suë, Jean-Joseph 153 surgeon 136, 140, 153–4 surgery 22, 152, 156 Swedenborg, Emanuel 153, 171 Swift, Jonathan 90, 135, 151, 156–7, 161–2n.32 symbolism, symbols 13, 24–5, 69, 146, 190, 192, 208n.33, 218 system moral 66, 74 rational 132, 147 Taylor, Thomas 224 Terror, Reign of 7, 78, 120, 166 terror and horror 7, 21, 71, 75, 78, 81 see also horror theatre 52–3, 141, 150, 159, 176, 181 therapy 235, 245–6, 249, 259 Thompson, Stith 207n.18 Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 90, 92, 98–9, 101, 219–20, 232n.21 torture 14, 21–2, 73, 186n.27 Townsend, Joyce 214 transcendence 41, 46 sexual 25, 238–9 Trembley, Abraham 8 Trier, Lars von 2 tyranny 3, 7, 15, 95–6, 134, 142, 190, 230 underworld 118, 190–1, 195–7, 199, 204 unity 62n.36, 64, 81, 88, 97, 112

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Vala 2, 17, 19, 49, 51, 62–3n.39, 67, 72–3, 75–6, 80, 216 Vala, or the Four Zoas 2, 6, 17, 19–20, 49, 67, 71, 88–9, 114, 121, 124, 126, 166–7, 176, 216, 218, 259 Van Erp, Herman 119 Vathek (Beckford) 170, 220 Vaughn, Thomas 115 vegetating 4, 73, 89, 96, 116–17, 120, 167, 169, 172–4, 176–9, 181, 183–4, 186n.23, 186n.27 Vice, Sue 155 victimisation 25, 155, 158, 216 violence 18, 129, 133–4, 140, 142, 147, 158, 167, 182–3, 202–3, 255 institutionalized 142 self-inflicted 204 sexualised 25 virginity 192, 202, 241, 249 virtue 15, 66, 70, 71, 134 moral 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 78, 122, 161n.26 vision 110, 151, 158 apocalyptic 112 artistic 56, 79, 200 imaginative 15, 117–18 political 42–3, 46 Vision of the Last Judgment 2, 68, 116, 118, 153, 159, 160–1n.15 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 6, 20, 24, 131, 189, 200–1, 204, 213, 215–16, 225, 229, 237, 255 Voltaire 5, 42 Walpole, Horace 4, 10, 15, 60n.12, 64–5, 150, 195, 214, 223, 235 war 33–4, 62–3n.39, 67–9, 74–5, 80, 95, 185n.2, 217 Warton, Thomas 83–4n.38 Weaver, Warren 124 Welch, Dennis M. 243 Westfall, Richard 135 Westminster Abbey 14, 16, 36–7, 49, 52–3, 56, 80, 83–4n.38, 205 Whitman, Walt 14

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Index Whitson, Roger 2 Whittaker, Jason 20–1, 167 Williams, M. A. 121 Wilson, Alexander 126 Wilson, Edmund 113 Witkin, Joel-Peter 2 Wollstonecraft, Mary 131, 189, 194, 216, 224, 230, 238 womb 22–3, 172, 174, 177, 190, 198, 204, 241 Wood, Robin 127n.1 Woolf, Virginia 98 Wordsworth, William 65, 67–8, 78, 92, 139

worlds fallen 52, 120, 140, 146, 174, 176 natural 23, 126, 191 Worringer, Wilhelm 89–91 Wren, Christian 83–4n.38 Wright, Joseph 110 xenomorphs 110–14, 119, 122, 126 Young, Edward 17 Zaillian, Steven 110 Žižek, Slavoj 233–4n.50 Zlosnik, Sue 159

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