Resisting Critical Erasure,

or

Blake Beyond Postmodernity

Mark S. Lussier©2002

I. Preludium [1]

            It seems somewhat odd, at the dawn of the new millenium, to be arguing the case for Blake’s place in the canonical camp of Romantic authors. After all, his placement in that canon is a relatively recent event, perhaps only secured after World War II by critical deployment of Blake in the work of Frye, Bloom, Adams and others. However, the extended argument across the previous chapters-that Blakean critique of the diverse semiotic manifestations of Symbolic Order continues to gain authority and widen its influence within contemporary culture-might seemed flawed in light of recent attempts to measure the staying power of the ‘big six’ poets at the core of past and present constructions of Romanticism. Results emerging from recent cognitive analyses of a century of Romantic anthology-formation indicate the necessity of undertaking this mission again. At the 1997 NASSR conference, Alan Richardson presented preliminary findings from a comparative analysis of Romantic anthologies across the Twentieth Century. The "differend" for the study was variation in coverage defined by number of pages in a select test group, the "six" male poets at the core of past constructions of English Romanticism. [2] The data suggested that canonical construction only supported a "big five" hypothesis, since Blake’s poetic presence, following a slow emergence, began to slide into critical erasure during the anthology boom of the 1990s.

Richardson’s study used cognitive techniques to map ebbs and flows within Romantic Studies, although the specific instrument was yoked to textual horses of instruction (anthologies in the limited sphere of a university setting). To supplement Richardson’s efforts, I would also argue, following a line of thought associated with contemporary physical theory (especially Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg), that the instrument reveals more about the instructional (and therefore critical) construction of Romanticism than it does the cultural reception of Blake’s protean productivity. Phrased differently, the observer (critic as experimenter) constructs the experiment, crafts the instrument, and sets the parameters of observation, thereby becoming implicated in the results.

The cognitive approach registers Blake’s only periodic power when measured against the other poets, but Blake’s partial eclipse within the cognitive model actually results from a test environment too narrowly conceived to register the flow of influence across a broad range of cultural forms. In fact, when measured within a very different textual environment (websites, magazine advertising, comic books, pulp fiction, non-fiction prose, and cinema), Blake’s influence has arguably moved well beyond academic confines to become widely embedded in the textual strata of cultural information. Furthermore, Blake’s relevance for (and place in) the twenty-first century actually emerges from ripples of influence the poet-prophet exerts within these more popular ‘texts’ of Romantic ideology. I hope to bring into view this other type of Blakean influence, one invisible to the critical gaze established in a cognitive study of anthologies but visible within a wider pattern of cultural citation.

            The critical responses offered for the recent exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2001) help gloss the situation addressed in this chapter fairly precisely. Michael Kimmelman (in The New York Times) seemingly confirms Richardson’s view, lamenting that the exhibition, upon its arrival to America, unveils "the state of American education whereby Blake is now so poorly read and his art so nearly unknown" (B29) that the poet/printer disappears from the cultural gaze. Yet the review also evokes some of the other layers of cultural reception pursued in this work when he notes that "you can’t help noticing how he [Blake] has suffered in recent decades-or benefited, depending on your orientation-from association with a long line of colorful admirers":

From the Age of Aquarius or New Age, he has come to serve as the patron saint of innumerable self-styled eccentrics, disgruntled and unpublished authors, flower children, fans of psychedelia, Jungians, Freudians, alternate lifestyle advocates, occultists, spiritualists, nudists, animal lovers, socialists and teenagers of the sort who read Herman Hesse." (B29)

Perhaps the reviewer has in mind something like the premiere issue of Hellboy, a contemporary comic that evokes a dark and dangerous Blake by evoking Blake’s "The Tyger" as controlling aesthetic commitment (illustration one). Thus, the exhibition both confirms Richardson’s sense that Blake has begun to slide beyond the academic view of Romanticism espoused within "American education" while invoking the broader cultural appeal of the quirky and ‘dangerous’ Blake of popular culture.

These issues motivate the cultural cartography herein pursued, charting the breadth of cultural citation of William Blake’s art and poetry, although for reasons that will become obvious two seemingly different (yet ultimately related) aspects of cultural influence receive concentrated attention: Blake’s appropriation by contemporary fiction and cinema, and his omnipresence in discussions of the "new physics" of relativity and quantum. However, the movement into these related arenas of cultural influence will meander through ‘other’ Blakean cultural references in music and advertising.

II. Blake, Pop Culture, and Postmodernity

As was long ago recognized, Blake’s poetry and images exerted a broad counter cultural influence during the period of the Beats and across the 1960s. Allen Ginsburg proclaimed himself the ghost of William Blake, published an insightful little book on Blake (entitled Your Reason and Blake’s System), and even produced a record album of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Blake’s Songs have received symphonic, rock, and even blue-glass treatments as well). As Ginsberg argues:

Blake’s books are useful now as explorations of the same problems we have, somewhat related to the revolutionary fervor of the sixties in America and a subsequent so-called ‘disillusionment.’ So actually Blake is up to date in the psychology of wrath vs. pity, compassion vs. anger, that runs through all of his work and is visible for our own decade as well as his. [3]

The multivectored influence Blake exerts on Ginsberg, especially as such influences intersect the Beat poet’s embracing of Tibetan Buddhism, will be analyzed in more detail in the "Postludium" that follows ("Blake’s ‘Michael Binding the Dragon’: Romanticism and Buddhism"). Of course, the spread of Blakean influence remains enigmatic and provocative, functioning as a type of poetic shorthand for altered states of consciousness and phenomenological views of mind and matter.

Precisely how does Blake’s influence spread? An answer to this query can be gleamed in the circulation of literal citations and references as they pass into symbolic forms within the counter-culture itself. For example, when Aldous Huxley sought a title for his classic narrative of an LSD experience (The Doors of Perception), he borrowed an aphorism from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "if the doors of perception were cleans’d everything would appear to man as it is: infinite" (E 29). Jim Morrison, borrowing from Huxley, indirectly borrowed from Blake to name his legendary band The Doors. As well, when seeking more literal traces of Morrison’s engagement with Blake in literature classes at UCLA, one need look no further than "Lost Little Girl," a song on the first album based on "Little Girl Lost" from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Of Experience. [4]

Yet these texts, it could be argued, are identifiably "counter" to the controlling culture. Since Blake’s omnipresent emergence in the 1960s, the level of appropriation has widened considerably, now circulating within the most empowered cultural texts. For example, slighter closer to our own time, Blake’s prefatory poem from Milton ("And Did those Feet") functions as the titular portal of entry for the film "Chariots of Fire," which opens with this poem (now Church of England hymn) being sung by a choir during a funeral. Yet the same song makes a prominent rock appearance in the visionary album "Brain Salad Surgery" by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer in the 1970s. [5] While the latter retains the ‘counter-thrust’ of initial appropriation, the former points toward a newly widened audience for Blake, one capable of cross over to consumer culture. As transition to the use made of Blake in pulp narratives (fiction and cinema), consider this first image, a widely disseminated poster of Michael Jordan (illustration two). While the wingspan of Jordan dominates the visual field, the restricted verbal field (centered at the poster’s foot) asserts the Blakean proverb ("no bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings" [E36]). Of course, the bold letters spelling "wings" evoke a constant presence in the visual field of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Human figures in poses approximating that Jordan assumes appear at the foot of plates three and four and at the head of plate fourteen, while "wings" as verbal and visual flourish define a steady-state of textual concern. Interestingly, the journal First for Women offers the same quote as "Words to Ponder" on page eighty of their April 15, 2002 issue.

Not surprisingly, Blake’s appropriation by the engines of advertising is not restricted to American or English poplar culture but has emerged in Italy, as this advertisement for Frau shoes. The page provides a four-layered spatial arrangement, and in the third layer (reading top to bottom), one obviously dedicated to the body, the viewer can barely discern the phrase "L’Eterno corpo dell’ uomo e’ l’immaginazione" (illustration three). Of course, the page identifies the author as "W. Blake," and most Romanticists would recognize this borrowing from the Laocöon design: "The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination." Strangely enough, only one year later, the Italian design journal La Casa e I Suoi Colori reproduces Blake’s "The Ancient of Days" image to evoke a move toward intense oranges in contemporary fashion and design trends (illustration four).

The images discussed above indicate that Blakean influence has crept from a counterculture presence to become embedded in consumer culture, perhaps even suggesting that the counterculture has become the consumer culture of postmodernity. Further confirmations of this ‘use’ value approach to Blakean cultural citation could be extended ad infinitum, although my most recent sighting was on the packaging for Glorious Gardens’s Smoothing Hand Lotion: "To create a little flower is the labour of ages"-William Blake. Obviously, this venal appropriation economizes Blakean energies into a marketing tool but fails to evoke darker aspects of the poet’s vision that lurks at the core of initial appropriation by Joyce Cary or Ginsberg, the counter-Blake at war with all forms of cultural hegemony.

This darker aspect was long ago prophesied by WJT Mitchell under the rubric "the dangerous Blake":

[W]here we have seen some twenty years of attempts to justify Blake as a great formal artist, we will now see a kind of criticism that tends to deface the monument we have erected. Everything suggests to me that we are about to rediscover the dangerous Blake, the angry, flawed, Blake, the crank who knew and repeated just about every bit of nonsense ever thought in the eighteenth century; Blake, the ingrate, the sexist, the madman, the religious fanatic, the tyrannical husband, the second-rate draughtsman. [6]

Indeed, the emergence of this "dangerous Blake" aptly describes the nature of appropriation at work in pulp fiction and pulp cinema, where Blake’s citational presence figures rebellion against authority and loss of sanity at the margins of culture. Such uses of Blake actually pre-exist Mitchell’s prophetic prediction for the appearance of a Blake beyond the margins of cultural normalcy, extending backward to works like Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. Closer in time but still prior to Mitchell’s prophetic pronouncement, Colin Wilson’s The Glass Cage tracks a serial killer who writes lines of Blake’s poetry above the bodies of victims. In a similar vein, the more recent Dark Spectre, by Michael Dibden, whose antagonist, Sam, assumes the name of Los and creates a cult from "Blake’s so-called prophetic books." Ultimately, Sam/Los murders anyone who contests his individual interpretation of the master text. [7] And when the Blakean presence in contemporary fiction is supplemented cinematically, the impact Blake exerts broadens into eddies of culture more difficult to track with precision, given the triumph of visual reproduction of technologies. Indeed, the following sequence of cinematic appropriations (spanning fifteen years), obviously arising from the literary works at their foundation, supports such a conclusion.

In the futuristic, apocalyptic world of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Bladerunner (released the same year as Mitchell’s essay), the android replicant Roy Batty returns to Earth to seek his maker (the head of the Tyrell Corporation) and to secure an extension of his engineered five-year life span (illustration five). The textual source for the film, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, presents the plight of engineered slaves designed to die in colonial expansion, and the cinematic replicant links his revolt to a mythic one familiar to most Romantic scholars, that of Orc, Blake’s spirit of revolution in history. When the character Roy Batty first emerges as a real (versus symbolic) presence, a filmic passage from darkness into the narrative light, his words are drawn from plate eleven of America, A Prophecy:

Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc[.] (1-2)

Predictably, once the film contextualizes the rebellion of this sentient being via Orc, a circle of violence envelops most of the characters. However, the film also follows Blake’s resolution of the Orc cycle; although hunted throughout the film by the policeman Decker, the replicant, at film’s end, saves his persecutor’s life even as his own energies die, enacting a type of Promethean renunciation that renders even an enemy’s life holy. Blake’s presence in one of the ‘master-texts’ of postmodernity (the film figures in numerous discussions of the postmodern condition), I would argue, confirms his continued relevance for any discussion of the human condition, whether postmodern or neoprimitive. [8]

            A more recent cinematic evocation of the dangerous Blake was achieved in the thriller Manhunter (1986), a film based on the prequel to Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs entitled Red Dragon. Both book and film explore a series of grisly murders, and even as the police discover the major clue in the case, a Chinese symbol that translates as "Red Dragon," the film jump-cuts to the murderer basking in the illuminated image of a Blake’s painting (illustration six). The serial killer arranges his victims in the posture of "the Woman" and assumes the position of "the Dragon," therein materializing the apocalyptic madness and schizophrenia never far from the surface of Blake’s longer epics (illustration seven). [9] In the recent film "Hannibal," based on the sequel to Silence of the Lambs, Blake is visually evoked twice: 1) a postcard Hannibal Lector sends to Agent Starling of Blake’s "Ghost of a Flea," and 2) in a copy of a design borrowed from the manuscript of The Four Zoas and sent to Starling (a rather oblique citation given the few who have studied the manuscript itself).

            However, the most sophisticated and extended evocation of a "dangerous Blake" occurs in Jim Jarmusch’s provocative mid-90s film Dead Man, which transports the manifest madness of Blake to the margins of the mythic west, an appropriation allowing Jarmusch to explore Blake’s mythic concerns in a parallel mythic space (illustration eight). The film narrates the western journey of the plaid clad accountant Will Blake, who travels to the town of Machine to assume a post following his parents’ deaths. Repulsed by his supposed employer, the industrialist John Dickenson, Will Blake encounters and embraces Thel, a former prostitute who dies saving Blake from a former lover’s jealous rage. Wrongly accused of Thel’s murder and mortally wounded by a bullet of jealousy, Blake escapes into the wilderness, where he meets an outcast Native American-Nobody--and begins to kill his pursuers. Nobody (the character within/the audience without) believes Will Blake to be the dead English poet of the same name (and who utters the source of the title-"you really are a dead man") and continually quotes lines of poetry from Blake. Of the films discussed here, Dead Man most overtly evokes Blake’s work as inspiriting source, and Blake’s vision pervades the time (mythic time), space (Machine vs. wilderness), characters (Blake, Thel, Nobody), and crisis (the torments of love and jealousy) of the film. Of course, a wilderness beyond the space of industrial exploitation clearly intersects Blake’s concern for the mechanization of society and its individuals through the Industrial Revolution, rendering them "Machines" in a clockwork cosmos unconditioned by creative consciousness. Yet this space helps define a field of interaction between Mitchell’s dangerous Blake and the Blake offered in the work of Jacob Bronowski (who disseminated the poetic vision of Blake to a generation of scientists). The Bronowski Blake actually underwrites the widest appropriation of Blake in the contemporary field, Blake’s presence as a ‘strange attractor’ within theoretical physics.

III. The Blake of Physics

            Both Blake’s verbal and visual works have been pressed into the service of scientists seeking a sufficiently robust symbolic language capable of imaging esoteric insights into the fuzzy realms of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics. As entry into this citational space, consider a work by the mathematicians Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky entitled Fearful Symmetry (illustration nine). The authors credit Blake’s "Ancient of Days" image as anticipating physical theory’s discovery of bilateral symmetry, yet they imply an answer to their interrogative title ("Yes") at odds with Blake’s critique of "Mathematical Proportion" (Milton), which serves as the language for Enlightenment epistemology and underwrites the success of Newtonianism across the 18^th Century. This type of borrowing within the physics community continues unabated, with the same image recently appearing as cover art for Michael Redman’s From Physics to Metaphysics (illustration ten). [10] In a similar vein, and more in keeping with Blake’s own contestatory tendencies as an illustrator are two images from Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (illustration eleven and twelve), with Zee appropriating and transmuting Blake’s "Ancient" to evoke the entry of uncertainty into contemporary physics via quantum mechanics and Blake’s "God Creating Adam" to evoke the interplay of Blakean reality and cosmogenesis. Here Blake’s designs image opposition to Einstein’s ‘belief’ that "God does not play dice with the universe," but as Stephen Hawking asserted recently, "God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." [11] As a physicist more recently argued in The Self-Reflective Universe, "quantum mechanics is the answer to the poetic prayer of William Blake" offered in his famous November 22^nd 1803 letters to Thomas Butts: "May God us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep." [12]

Blake’s work continues to function as a "strange attractor" (to borrow a term from chaos theory) for those seeking to articulate the new physics of relativity and quantum. [13] For example, numerous discussions of the relative nature of spacetime or the function of consciousness in cosmic construction evoke Blake’s "Auguries of Innocence" to demonstrate the principle:

This specific passage-as well as and other references to Blake-appear in John Briggs and F. David Peat’s Looking Glass Universe, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, Paul Davies’ The Mind of God, Timothy Ferris’ The Mind’s Sky, James Gleick’s Chaos, Stanley Jaki’s The Road of Science and the Ways of God, Roger Jones’s Physics as Metaphor, Heinz Pagels’ The Cosmic Code, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ Order Out of Chaos, A. Zee’s Fearful Symmetry, and Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters. [14] While this list is drawn from texts discussing theoretical physics, it could be augmented by Blake’s citational presence in theoretical discussions of the neurosciences as well (whether in Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life or William H. Calvin’s The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain).

            The preceding examples clearly chart the influence Blake’s "visionary physics" exerts over those who might be considered his worst enemies, the contemporary followers of the epistemological line defined by "Bacon & Newton & Locke" (E 257). Yet physical theorists have increasingly come to recognize Blake’s relevance for the emerging sciences of wholeness (chaos and complexity), for the ongoing elaboration of macrocosmic dynamics (big-bang cosmology, `many-worlds’ hypotheses or black hole theory), and for the articulation of microcosmic principles (complementarity, uncertainty, and indeterminacy). The emergence of Blake in popular discussions of the new physics coincides with the collapse of positivism and determinism within contemporary physics (the eclipse of the Newtonian world view)-in preference for principles of complementarity, uncertainty, complexity and chaos-and the wide cultural dissemination afforded popular physics books, where Blake seems to function as the vehicle for assuring better cultural reception. Such connections suggest that Blake’s poetic descriptions of mental and material processes resonant favorably with scientists engaged in the exploration and elaboration of current physical theory, positioning Blake where those "two cultures" defined by C. P. Snow interact and interfere.

IV. Beyond Postmodernity

Perhaps of greater importance for the new century, Blake’s work has emerged at the crux of debate concerning contemporary reactions against scientism and positivism, where the "flight from science and reason" witnessed within humanities disciplines in the academy has been characterized by the phrase "higher superstition." [15] Such patterns suggest that the problematic "third culture" evoked by John Brockman (in a book of the same title) as an antidote to the "two culture" dichotomy of C. P. Snow only promotes further fragmentation, resulting in an alienation of mind and matter counter to the "spirit" of contemporary physics and its drive for wholeness. [16] This wholeness or founding symmetry, a prominent feature of all contemporary physical theory, has remained a steady-state of concern for Blake studies, and will likely remain so, since it forms just one of the bridges between this poet and the concerns of a new age. Indeed, Blake’s understanding of "fearful symmetry," like Percy Shelley’s concept of "perfect symmetry," resonates well with the exploration of material symmetries in a broad range of the sciences.

A similar symmetrical bridge undergirds Blake’s endeavor to overcome classic dualisms founded upon the division of psyche and physis by extending mental processes into material forms, a position given voice near the conclusion to Jerusalem: