Anal Blake: Bringing up the Rear in Blakean Criticism

Abstract

Following the 1982 Blake conference at the University of California Santa Cruz, Geoffrey H. Hartman characterized the proceedings as a series of Blakean ‘blockages’. Hartman relates this experience of blockage to the dif- ficulty of finding the ground, or the bottom, of Blake’s conceptual universe. In fact, Hartman suggests that groping Blake’s bottom is likely to land you on yours:

If your leg is pulled you fall on your bottom. The problem with Blake is that, to use a good Quaker expression, there is a process of unbottoming. You think you have a bottom, or you have reached the bottom, and by conversion or pressure that bottom is taken away; suddenly you sink.