Abstract
One thing is clear immediately: reading William Blake’s works is profoundly different from reading the works of any other English writer. The exceptionally interactive process of reading which the encounter with Blake’s works entails is more dynamic — and frequently more disturbing — than anything for which most readers’ training and previous experience have prepared them. The transaction between author and reader that is mediated through the printed text of any conventional literary work naturally involves an intellectual, emotional and aesthetic interchange. But the nature of that interplay is infinitely more complex in an art form like Blake’s, in which verbal and visual texts make simultaneous and often quite different demands upon the reader. Reading Blake requires of the reader both equilibrium and a good deal of self-assurance, for Blake demands that his readers serve as co-creators of the work under consideration, participating fully in this shared activity of making. The reader is expected to respond to implied queries and challenges, to embedded puzzles and enigmas, and to an often daunting array of apparent inconsistencies.
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Notes
Michael Cohen, Engaging English Art: Entering the Work in Two Centuries of English Painting and Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), p. 76.
The phrase is Edward Larrissy’s via Robert Young and Jacques Derrida, who got it from Kant in the term “paraergon”, the variously defined “frame” that both encloses and contextualizes a work. See Larrissy, pp. 23–5. 4. Jerome J. McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 85.
William Wordsworth, The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (2 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); “Expostulation and Reply”, I, 356,1. 17.
See, for instance, Edwin F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973).
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Howard Anderson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 212; Vol. IV, Chap XVII.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 21. The phenomenon was not without complications for the eighteenth century; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoön (1766) is only the most strident expression of the similarities and differences that aesthetic philosophers were exploring among the arts and the varieties of aesthetic experiences they involved.
See Jerome J. McGann, “The Aim of Blake’s Prophecies and the Uses of Blake Criticism”, Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on “The Four Zoas,” “Milton,” and “Jerusalem”, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr.(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 3–21.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757).
This delightful story was first related by Alexander Gilchrist in The Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (London: Macmillan, 1863) and was repeated and slightly modified in the second edition (2 vols.; London: Macmillan, 1880), I, 112.
Robert M. Adams, Strains of Discord: Studies in Literary Openness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 164. Other critics, most notably Umberto Eco, have explored the phenomenon of the open work of art. See especially Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), and The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 78.
Eco, The Open Work, pp. 4, 15, 19. 18. Michael Davis, William Blake: A New Kind of Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 24.
Several of these are reproduced in Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); see for instance figures 2 and 11.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintruab(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 222.
See Stephen C. Behrendt, “Europe 6: Plundering the Treasury”, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 21 (1987–8), 84–94. See also David V. Erdman’s comments on Blake’s use of Gillray in The Notebook of William Blake, ed. Erdman, rev. ed (New York: Readex, 1977)
Nancy Bogen, “Blake’s Debt to Gillray”, AN&Q 6 (1967), 35–8
and Behrendt, “‘This Accursed Family’: Blake’s America and the American Revolution”, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 27 (1986), 26–51. See also Carretta, George III and the Satirists.
The fullest discussion of this aspect of Blake’s work is B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980).
See in particular Jean Hagstrum, William Blake, Poet and Painter: An Introduction to the Illuminated Verse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Blake’s Composite Art”, Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 57–81
and Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
Mark Bracher, Being Form’d: Thinking Through Blake’s “Milton” (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1985).
James A. W. Heffernan, “Text and Design in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated, ed. Joachim Möller(Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1988), pp. 100, 105, 101.
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”, Lost in the Funhouse (New York, 1968).
Blake exhibited a picture bearing this title at the Royal Acdemy in 1784, but the picture is now unknown. The subject recurs in a watercolor of c. 1790–95 which is related to a series of four subjects (completed c. 1805) comprising Fire, Pestilence, Famine and War, which is the final title of this picture. See Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (2 vols; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 73, plate 189.
In A Vision of the Last Judgment Blake wrote, “I intreat then that the Spectator will attend to the Hands & Feet to the Lineaments of the Countenances they are all descriptive of Character & not a line is drawn without intention & that most discriminate & particular” (E560). A particularly helpful study of this aspect of Blake’s visual language is Janet Warner, Blake and the Language of Art (Kingston McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984).
The tradition of the rhetoric of gesture is perhaps epitomized in John Bulwer’s Chirologia: or, The Natural Language of the Hand (London: Harper, 1644).
A particularly detailed analysis of the Preludium is Michael Ferber’s “Blake’s America and the Birth of Revolution”, History and Myth. Essays on English Romantic Literature, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), pp. 73–99.
Robert N. Esick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 102–3.
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Behrendt, S.C. (1992). Introduction: Reading Blake’s Texts. In: Reading William Blake. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380165_1
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