Abstract
Beginning a study of the ways in which London is written and read in the first half of the nineteenth century, we hope the reader will indulge us for a moment if we consider the first part of this chapter’s title, as a way into what follows. This is not merely a self-referential gesture, but is dictated out of an attempt to comprehend the ways in which William Blake writes himself into his vision of London, as a figure in writing, and as a figure inscribed by the condition of the city itself, as that condition is perceived by the poet. As the second of the three epigraphs to this chapter suggests, Albion is not only a place but also a personification, if not a person, and for Blake that person is as much himself as another or the other of, within his identity, as readers of Blake will understand. So, to the title:
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The grammar of this is strange; it estranges even as it recirculates its terms, doesn’t it?
Yes, it opens the reader onto undecidability, rather than appearing to do some of the reader’s work for her, or him.
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How then might we read this strange and estranging phrase?
We might propose, given that bullet point, that the phrases are, if not identical then at least endowed with a certain symmetry, a fearful symmetry even, given the play of meaning, which is also marked - as are all symmetries - by displacement and inversion, by the haunting of a meaning yet to come; on its way but not yet having arrived.
The ever fluctuating colour[,] the spectral pigmies, rolling, flying, leaping among the letters … made the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries.
Samuel Palmer
… Albions city …
If thought is life …
William Blake
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, trans. Simon Critchley, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996; pp. 77–88), p. 85.
Vincent De Luca, ‘A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text’, in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; pp. 218–41), p. 232. Also of interest with regard to Blakean archetectonics is Morton Paley’s The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Paley’s discussion lights upon various ‘real’ London sites and determinate material urban referents as a means of explaining certain references within Jerusalem, although he ultimately subordinates London to a mere reality and template for Blake’s Golgonooza, which is where we part company. While London ‘and its associated symbols are the central embodiment of Blake’s millenarian theme…. [Blake’s Golgonooza] combines the quotidian reality of Blake’s London, its streets, buildings, and public places, with the visionary New Jerusalem’ (136). I would suggest that Blake’s is no mere combination but a reciprocal discursive interchange and overlay; even ‘the quotidian reality’ of London is profoundly textual for William Blake.
David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 3.
On the possible relationship between Blake and Denrida’s writing, see Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 19–21, 24–27.
Dan Miller, ‘Blake and the Deconstructive Interlude’, in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987; pp. 139–67), p. 155.
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 13.
Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), p. 92. Ackroyd’s own passionate obsession with the sublime aspects of London (manifested repeatedly in his novels) makes him in some ways the ideal biographer of Blake, even though he can be accused of ignoring certain facets of Blake’s writing, as Helen Bruder has done in the introduction to her William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 14–15. In many ways Blake is as much the biography of a city at a given moment, as it is the biography of one of its inhabitants.
Henry James, ‘Preface’, The Princess Casamassima (1886) ed. and introd. Derek Brewer, notes by Patricia Crick (London: Penguin, 1987; pp. 33–48), p. 33.
William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (London: Penguin, 1977). All references to these poems will be taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically, following quotation in the text.
Particularly interesting is Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
See also, Iain McCalman’s essay, ‘The Infidel as Prophet: William Reid and Blakean Radicalism’, in Historicising Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 24–42, and Jon Mee’s essay in the same collection ‘Is there an Antinomian in the House? William Blake and the After-Life of a Heresy’, pp. 43–58.
For more detail, refer to Ackroyd, Blake, pp. 42–6. As Ackroyd points out, Basire’s antiquarian interests provided Blake with a quite arcane and ‘other-worldly’ experience of image-making. Furthermore, while apprenticed to Basire, Blake came into regular contact with the Freemasons, whose meeting place was immediately opposite Basire’s home in Great Queen Street (p. 45). Ackroyd points out that the Masons ‘bore affinities with the Dissenting tradition’ of Blake’s family (pp. 45–6). For further information on Blake’s engraving and book-making techniques, refer to Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
and to Ruth Robbins, ‘William Blake’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 154: The British Literary Book Trade, 1700–1820, ed. James K. Bracken and Joel Silver (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1995), pp. 26–32.
Arthur Symons, ‘London: A Book of Aspects’, in Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (London: Collins, 1918; pp. 137–87), p. 173.
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1978) trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 377.
Marilyn Butler, ‘Art for the People in the Revolutionary Decade: Blake, Gillray and Wordsworth’, in Romantics, Rebels and Revolutionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 39–68.
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 137.
The understanding of Blake’s political, radical sympathies is central to E.P. Thompson’s Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I am indebted to this work for its sensitive analysis of Blake’s ‘London’ from Songs of Experience in Chapter 11 (pp. 174–94), to which I shall refer further on in this chapter.
On these plans, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992) (London: Pimlico, 1994), pp. 215, 231–2. The most immediate reference to the monarchy is the violently architectural image of blood running down palace walls in ‘London’ of course. But we could argue that Blake writes and revises Jerusalem and Milton as acts of imaginary and symbolic counter-architecture, as if such writing were an attempt to unbuild and rebuild the spiritual London in the face of the commercial capital’s simultaneous reinvention on the part of the Georges.
See also Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994; pp. 126–30) on John Nash’s urban redevelopment and its social context in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Less than a mile from South Molton Street, Nash’s ordered repetitive stucco and faux-palazzo sensibility of Regent Street is everything which Blake’s London is not, and to which Blake’s writing of London may be opposed.
J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 276.
Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem, p. 14. In his introduction, Goldsmith discusses briefly Derrida’s analysis of the ideological interests hidden within apocalyptic discourses, in his ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, Oxford Literary Review 6 (1984) (subsequently reprinted and retranslated as ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993; pp. 117–72)). Goldsmith ultimately argues against Derrida’s claims that apocalyptic discourse in its formal concerns is transformative. Goldsmith comments that Derrida can only make such a gesture by retreating from historical questions into formalist concerns with language, so that, ultimately, Derrida’s insistence on constant wariness in the face of hidden ideological structures in apocalyptic discourses is itself undermined by the apparently apocalyptic tone of much of Derrida’s own writing; what is initially discernible as a progressive politics in Derrida’s writing gives way in American practices of ‘deconstructive criticism’ to what Goldsmith terms a ‘mere political phantazia’ as the ‘by-product of ahistorical linguistic and phenomenological necessities’ (p. 16). Of course it can be argued, equally, that Goldsmith’s own reading of Derrida — though not necessarily deconstruction as an institutional critical practice in the US — is a mis-reading, based on the narrow understanding of the uses of terms ‘text’ and ‘writing’. Certainly Goldsmith seems keen to situate the formal/political, text/ history binarisms without much preliminary distrust of the ‘truth’ of such positions; and such an understanding of the narrow uses of terms such as ‘text’ is clearly there in Goldsmith’s critique, especially when he moves, all too easily it seems, from the (partly justified) critique of deconstructive formalism to Northrop Frye’s own formalistic desires as embodied in Frye’s use of Mallarmé’s comment ‘Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre’ (‘everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book’). Goldsmith gives the translation as ‘All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book’. While Goldsmith’s point concerning the political abandonment inherent in formalist acts may well be made economically, the shift between text and book implicit in his argument is far too violent and suspect. Such criticisms, and other related issues arising out of such discussion, might well be directed towards or oriented around Blake himself in a certain reading of Jerusalem. From a different critical orientation, it certainly seems to be part of Marilyn Butler’s criticism of the later Blake (Romantics, pp. 41–52). For further comparison of Blake and Derrida, see W.J.T. Mitchell’s ‘Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing’ in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
See also, David Simpson, ‘Reading Blake and Derrida — Our Caesars Neither Praised nor Buried’, in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas Vogler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Both Mitchell and Simpson’s essays are reprinted in William Blake, ed. David Punter (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 123–48, 149–64 respectively. See also those works referred to in notes 2, 5, and 6, above.
See Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem, Ch. 3, ‘Apocalypse and Representation: Blake, Paine, and the Logic of Democracy’, pp. 135–64. On the subject of Apocalypse in Blake’s writing, see Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947),
and Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1959).
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).
On the relationship between the sublime and the urban experience in Victorian fiction, see Carol L. Bernstein, The Celebration of Scandal: Toward the Sublime in Victorian Urban Fiction (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). I discuss Bernstein’s readings of the city in the chapter on Dickens, below.
Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ (1821), in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; pp. 1–80), pp. 16–37. It is not difficult to work out that De Quincey is as addicted to London as he is to opium, devoting one quarter of the ‘Confessions’ to his experience of the city.
Bill Readings, ‘Mobile supplement II: work’, in Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 140–53.
Jerome J. McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), cit. Goldsmith, p. 135.
On singularity and iterability in Derrida’s work, see principally Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988);
see also the section on ‘The Signature’, and also those on ‘The Proper Name’, ‘The Title’, ‘The Series’, in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991) trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 148–65, 104–13, 241–57, 267–83.
See as well Samuel Weber, ‘After Deconstruction’ in Mass Mediauras: Form Technics Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 129–51.
Jacques Derrida, On the Name (1993) ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 28.
Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 174.
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987) trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 113.
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© 1998 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (1998). Blake’s London • London’s Blake: an Introduction to the Spirit of London or, on the way to Apocalypse. In: writing London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372177_2
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