From: blake-d-request@albion.com Sent: Saturday, December 07, 1996 4:14 PM To: blake-d@albion.com Subject: blake-d Digest V1996 #140 ------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 140 Today's Topics: Re: Howard Roark? introduction BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS Re: Urizen Question Blake's Characters anti-patriarch-reply Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS and Nike Corp. holiday mail request Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 13:51:28 -0800 From: Steve Perry To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Howard Roark? Message-Id: <32A34F60.177D@infogenics.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit sternh@WABASH.EDU wrote: > > Obviously none of us welcomes grossly reductive spiritualistic > simplifications, any more than we welcome grossly reductive simplifications > of any other kind. > >Perhaps, in the process, someone could also lay out > the terms of a non-reductive spiritualist reading of Blake. As mythic/spiritualistic text, which is metaphorical, self referential and in a sense ontological language (unlike philosophic/scientific text which is metonymical, extra-referential, and is itself epistemological), begs for interpretation, it is easy to see how critics will want to use reductionistic techniques to try to comprehend a mythic system. The analysis of A is like B, or more likely, A is like some of B or, A is a part of B, doesn't work with this kind of language. If anything it only works when we say this part of A is like this other part of A. Nevertheless, because of the universal nature of spiritual and mythical language, it is easy to try to put it into the context of something we already know, understand and even identify with, whether it is attempts such as those by Pam or Ed Buryn's Blake Tarot, or even some of the work by Harold Bloom. In that sense then the text becomes more of a vehicle of personal spiritual interpretation, and no longer in the domain, in my opinion, of pure exegesis. Unfortunately, analysis of a system of thought through the use of another system of thought is like teaching a pig to sing, it only ends up succeeding in irritating the pig. However, the effort, which maybe all that life is anyway, can be rewarding in its own way. Steve Perry "Did he who made the Lamb make Thee?" ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 18:36:47 -0800 From: tesserae To: blake@albion.com Subject: introduction Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" greetings. I am a new subscriber to this list, but have appreciated William Blake for a long time. I am a 27-year-old female, whose interests include social psychology, literature, and music. I have been teaching piano since I was 16, and find it to be a satisfying and lucrative career. My interest in Blake is broad; my favorite work is "A Memorable Fancy." I anticipate new insights into all of his writings & creation, and hope to contribute some of my own. tesserae *------------------------------------------------------------------------* "Every year, everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation ..." (mary oliver) *-----------------------------------------------------------------------* http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7939/ * tess@deltanet.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 08:10:33 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS Message-Id: <199612031610.IAA02402@igc4.igc.org> After discussing Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin (why, I don't know), and then connecting this to Ayn Rand's non-connection to William Blake, Bert Stern poses the following question: >Obviously none of us welcomes grossly reductive spiritualistic >simplifications, any more than we welcome grossly reductive >simplifications of any other kind. But I wonder whether this >argument between historical materialism and spiritualism on the >Blake list couldn't be mediated--perhaps by Tom's spelling out >the kind of "spiritualist" criticism that offends him and by >his laying out the terms of the alternative. Ralph Dumain would >be helpful here also, if the problem appeals to him. I'm not sure how I can be helpful, because I don't understand Mr. Stern's question. Please tell me what the argument between historical materialism and spiritualism is. Is there something happening on the Blake list that I've missed? Does Mr. Stern think I'm a representative of historical materialism? If so, how have I used historical materialism in my analyses of Blake? I'm not aware of having done so. I can't answer misleading or badly formulated questions. All I can do, given what I'm given to work with here, is to clarify what distresses me about Pam van Shaik's readings, and perhaps to add further comments on the Ayn Rand connection, and on other topics that would illuminate what I consider bad methods to follow in Blake Studies. 1. Pam van Shaik: While I agree with her that Blake's fundamental direction is something quite different from that of contemporary cynicism, and that therefore Blake's view of innocence (but organized innocence!) must be taken seriously, I disagree with her spiritualism on certain grounds. One, I think her general project of spiritual interpretations of literature is extremely suspect, esp. when she brings fascists like Yeats and Jung into the picture. This approach robs literary people of their specificity, their social ties, and their ideological commitments, denatures and sanitizes them, and repackages them as abstract contributors to the perennial philosophy. Secondly, I don't think Blake was just engaged in propaganda, just spewing forth doctrines and preaching. Blake wanted to be true to real human experience, not just to preach. Thirdly, since we are critics (even us amateurs), our discourse must necessarily take the form of an explanatory and interpretative mode, not a prophetic one. I don't think you can explain a mythology by translating it into another mythology. If there is a reason Blake appeals to us atheists, it can't be because we are all closet religionists. Rather, there have to be reasons beneath mythology that enable the translation of Blake's frame of reference into ours. And there have to be motives that made Blake structure his ideas in the way that he did. I attempted an explanation of some of the underlying motives behind his statements in "There is no Natural Religion". Some people liked my commentary; others attacked it as reductive. My point is, if you look at the philosophical tensions Blake was dealing with, you may find an underlying structure that helps to make sense out of what he did, a structure you get at by delving underneath the mythology. 2. I'm glad Tom Dillingham blasted the notion of any putative connection between Blake and Rand out of the water. He saved me the trouble and helped keep my blood pressure down. The only thing Tom failed to do was to humiliate the moron who proposed the connection. I can think of no more obscene connection than to connect Blake with Howard Roark. I know Randites are idiots, but this is just too stupid. This reminds me of a recent book written by someone in business management on how poetry could be employed by managers to release creativity in business. I think there was even a Blake engraving on the cover. I can think of no more demonic misuse of the arts. Blake was a mortal enemy of the capitalist system. Anyone who would use Blake to promote this system deserves to be beaten senseless. 3. Tom Dillingham's discussion of the theory of Blake as proto-fascist reminds me of other stupid practices I've protested in the past. I don't believe in the shallow reasoning by analogy which just compares two different and even incompatible thinkers based on point by point comparisons of traits they hold in common. I can think of no intellectual enterprise more childish. I don't think Blake was a Neo-Platonist or disciple of Berkeley. I don't find Blake akin to Nietzsche in the slightest. To compare him to Heidegger, or Yeats, or Jung, or any other fascist misfit is a complete waste of time. I think it equally stupid to equate Blake with the irrationalist current in philosophy that has a historical link to fascism. I don't find any commonality between Blake and the tradition of lebensphilosophie. Lebensphilosophie and existentialism make much hoopla about concrete lived experience but are themselves empty bourgeois abstractions. Blake was not a "philosopher" nor did he dwell in vacuous abstractions. I have stated that my project is to situate Blake as a way of knowing in the universe of knowledge. The first thing to understand about him is to see how his approach is radically different from that of mere philosophers. His very point of departure with respect to the imagination and the literal truth already puts him in a different dimension from the philosophers with whom he is usually compared. Even Blake's opposition to "reason" and to science needs to be properly understood. Blake opposes Newton because he opposes the fallen world, and he refuses to allow the fallen world to occupy the heart of the human imagination. Blake is _not_ worried that modern science is going to send the Pope and idealist philosophers to the unemployment office. One must start out with a basic conception of what Blake is doing and how it differs from what conventional idealist philosophers are up to. I hope I have been clear and have made myself understood, but I fear the worst. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 09:34:28 -0800 From: lbloxham@whitworth.edu (Laura J. Bloxham) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Urizen Question Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" J. Michael, Thank you. L. Bloxham >Not wishing to beat a dead horse of instruction, I'd nonetheless like to >clarify my own attitude toward students who seek help on the list for >specific assignments. In the broad sense, we are all students of Blake >here, whether we're academics or not, and we all seek "help" or input from >others in making sense of him. But to me there is a vast difference >between saying "I've read this and this is what I think, but I'm not sure, >or I don't understand this part . . ." and saying "Can someone tell me >what "The Tyger" means" (and yes, we have had a number of such queries over >the past two years that I've been on the list). > >As an undergraduate, I was taught by old-fashioned New Critics who often >forbade us to read any outside sources in working on our papers: the task >was to be a close reading produced by our own encounter with the text. >Naturally, one can't go on like that forever--at some point you need to >know what arguments have been made so that you can situate your own and add >to existing knowledge--but in my opinion, there is still no substitute for >that direct, fresh encounter. I feel I owe my own reading skills to that >experience, and particularly my first experiences with Blake, in which I >struggled with, and learned to enjoy, the "resistance to reading" that Bill >Ruegg describes. > >There was also no Internet when I was an undergraduate (and I protest that >I'm not that old!). Finding a ready-made "panel of experts" on Blake, as >one can do simply by doing a search on Blake's name, is much easier than >searching library catalogs, the MLA bibliography, or Frank Jordan's >bibliography on the Romantic poets, let alone actually *reading* the >criticism found there. Sure, we all consult the list for things that we >could look up ourselves, and I'm not condemning that. But I worry that the >current generation of high school and college students may be growing *too* >dependent on electronic media for the quick fix. > >Sorry to sound like a curmudgeon. It's just that when I decline to respond >to such a request, or tell the student to "read the poem yourself," I'm not >trying to shut the door in their face, but rather trying to open the door >that's right in front of them--the poem itself. > >Jennifer Michael Laura J. Bloxham PHONE: (509) 466-1000 x4514 Professor of English and Acting Associate Dean for Faculty Development M.S. 2901 EMAIL: lbloxham@whitworth.edu Whitworth College FAX: (509) 466-3753 West 300 Hawthorne Rd. Spokane, WA 99218 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 17:45:13 -0500 (EST) From: bouwer To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake's Characters Message-Id: <199612032245.RAA15092@host.ott.igs.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Several weeks ago Tom Devine asked how people related on a personal level to Blake's characters. He specifically asked: "Is the struggle between Jerusalem and Vala something that women find in themselves?" To this specific question, I would like to say an emphatic no. To even consider this, would be (for me) to relegate the happenings in FZ and J to soap opera, and then not even very good soap opera. Surely what we have here is theological thinking, with Vala as the fallen concept of creation, and Jerusalem as the new earth that will arise when the old has passed away. To read FZ and J on any other level than the metaphysical, is to misread it. I think. However, I can understand to some degree why Tom Devine would ask such a question. There is the conceit in western literature and western thought of the "jealous female." With this conceit I have a problem. From my daily observa- tions I have found that females are not any more or less jealous than males. (And I want to give Blake credit here. A quick scan of the Concordance showed one and a half pages of the use of the word "jealousy" and derived words. But the jealous ones were more or less evenly divided between males and females.) Now, while I am on the subject, I want to get something else off my chest. I am irritated by another growing conceit in recent, especially "feminist" thinking: this idea of the great warm maternal pre-verbal instinctual Eden threatened by the restrictive Hierarchical (read patriarchal.) From my day by day observations both of myself as mother and of others around me, women are mostly unsentimental, matter of course and often impatient about the process of birth and child rearing afterwards. They are also, for biological reasons, the first to impose form, order (therefore hierarchies) on the young child. From my observation it is often the father that provides the warmer wider contact with the outside world, providing more of the free exploration, less of the maternal regulation for the child. From where then is this great spiel in western thought about the positive "maternal" and the negative "paternal" world? Are these trains of thought developed by men who have idealised womanhood, or by women who have never experienced the matter of fact, unsentimental day by day existence of being a mother, and have therefore also idealised the pheno- menon of motherhood? And here I want to again praise William Blake for not forcing me to think in simplistic terms. The world of Tharmas and Enion is surely where the pre-verbal, instinctual resides. And it is in the worlds of the other Zoas, fallen, that the restrictive and hierarchical can be found. Gloudina Bouwer ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 03 Dec 96 19:49:10 CST From: Lance Massey To: blake@albion.com Subject: anti-patriarch-reply Message-Id: <9612040220.AA26612@uu6.psi.com> Tom, Poststructural poetic theory is extremely difficult (for me, anyway) to articul ate clearly, especially in a short space. As a consequence, I used the "jargon " as a way to compact a great deal of Kristeva's thought into a couple lines. I guess I could also use a lesson in audience awareness, as some of the jargon was intentionally a nose-thumb at Ralph (a type of indignance or arrogance spar ked by the suggestion that my chosen profession is a pompous joke). But spite is not a good move in any circumstance, except maybe on Ricki Lake. Put as simply as possible, though, Kristeva identifies two forces at work in po etic language--those which respond to the constraints of symbolic language (gra mmar, syntax, etc.) and those which operate within the constraints of pre-verba l (and psychotic) utterance. In poetry, Kristeva asserts, the pre-verbal (asso ciated with rhythm, sound-play, even line-arrangement) is at least as important as the symbolic. She gives the example of scientific discourse, which attempt s to erase all trace of the semiotic and function purely symbolically, whereas poetic language often requires syntactical mutations and even uninterpretable p assages for satisfaction of its constraints. At the point when this language e merges in poetry, the ego which presumably holds the "meaning" of the poem toge ther disintigrates into an instinctual, drive-oriented presence. This is what makes good literature. Thus when Blake's poetry presents us with "resistance" to comprehensibility, it may in fact emerge as semiotic rather than symbolic language. Certainly Blake 's liberties with punctuation seem to perform the sort of subversion Kristeva s uggests is performed in good poetry. I think the appeal of Jung to Blake schol ars also makes sense when viewed through this lense: Blake's mysticism operate s on a largely mythic (and thus communal/anti-individual) plane, as Kristeva's conception of poetic language periodically ruptures the ego, creating a pathway to, if not a collective consciousness, then an animalistic one which we all sh are as members of the same biological species. Finally, Kristeva associates th e semiotic with the maternal--hence my original posting. This point is, for me , less important than the interesting (and useful) concepts she outlines in the process of articulating her feminist poetic. I hope this clears things up a bit. Lance. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 22:20:16 -0500 (EST) From: Bill Ruegg To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS and Nike Corp. Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Ralph Dumain writes: > I can think of no more obscene connection than to connect Blake with > Howard Roark. I know Randites are idiots, but this is just too stupid. > This reminds me of a recent book written by someone in business > management on how poetry could be employed by managers to release > creativity in business. I think there was even a Blake engraving on the > cover. I can think of no more demonic misuse of the arts. Blake was a > mortal enemy of the capitalist system. Anyone who would use Blake to > promote this system deserves to be beaten senseless. I agree. How about beating Nike senseless? Have you seen the Nike ad featuring Michael Jordan and the Blake quotation? (a 30 ft high spectral Jordan is flying with a basketball through the clouds. He haunts the wall of what looks to be a high school gymnasium. Beneath his feet a caption reads, "No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings--William Blake") One of my students included the ad in a web project on consumer ideology, attempting to grapple with the forces of conformity ads bring to bear on "us" through the power of identification (aptly summed up by the Nike slogan, "Be like Mike"). To cry out in agony and disgust as I did, point your browser to http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~rsperber/jordan.gif The evil empire strikes back... Best, Bill ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1996 08:39:39 -0800 (PST) From: Carolyn Austin To: blake@albion.com Cc: izak@igs.net Subject: holiday mail request Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I suspect many of us would appreciate a reminder about how to temporarily stop mail over the holidays, or how to unsubscribe because of an end-of-term shift. Carolyn Austin cfaustin@uci.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 07 Dec 1996 08:42:32 +0000 From: sternh@WABASH.EDU To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Dear Ralph: Christ, you make me feel miserable. Maybe I need to concede at once all my stupidity, my sloppiness, my ignorance--but then to insist that naked as I stand, I need to speak. Yes, we're critics and not prophets, but neither you nor I think that poetic systems are simply self-referential. Blake makes claims about the inner and outer worlds that we try to test against experience and other kinds of knowledge. And we end up alining ourselves or separating ourselves from his claims, both piecemeal and as a total vision. Anyway, I don't want to think that I need to speak your terms to enter the conversation. I bring in Scholem and Benjamin because I find in Blake the kind of Messianic impulse that Scholem describes: a belief in "transcendence breaking in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed into ruins because it is struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source." Isn't it to create these moments--if not THE moment-- that Los labors on the forge? Second, I brought in B and S because it seems to me that Blake, like they, views history as nothing but a series of catastrophes piling wreckage upon wreckage. In this framework, healing derives from the notion of "every second of time [as] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter." What the Messiah is for Blake, on the basis of the opening of "Jerusalm," is "the Saviour," an internal comforter, "not a God far off" but "a brother and a friend." He seems to stand also for a principle of human solidarity--witness his statement that "Ye are my members." (In that context he is like the voice of an awakened Albion.) And he is also a principle of love as mutual forgiveness: "Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!" That all seems data, unless we're to deconstruct "the Saviour." Data also is the way the Messiah is defined by the counterstatement of "the perturbed Man," who insists on human isolation, who considers friendships "deceitful," who lives by "demonstration" alone. And who, finally, carves up nature into chartered parcels. ("My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself!" Do I forfeit the critic's role to suggest that Blake's poems come out of the tension between these two voices (aren't they also Inocence (organiz'd) and Experience?) And to add that the one of them can be called--loosely, I'm sure- spiritual, in that it has to do with a reality that can be perceived only THROUGH the shell of the ordinary, and because it has to do also with a God whose eternity is the Human Imagination, to be approached only by the anhilation of the Selfhood in us. ( J5: 16-22). I know I don't talk your language. Maybe I've been in the academy too long- though I'm about out of it now. Maybe I'm just two soft-minded. You say that when we bring spiriual issues to bear (partly because they've become contaminated by Yeats and Jung), the "approach robs literary people of their specificity, their social ties, and their ideological commitments, denatures and sanitizes them, and repackages them as abstract contributors to the perennial philosophy." Maybe this is true. We could certainly talk usefully about that specificity. Again, I don't suppose that you any more than I, find it in Steve Perry's notion of literature (as opposed to Steve Perry) concede as much as he does to the positivists in seeing literature (as opposed to scientific-philospphical text) as merely self-referential. In a Blakean sense, I think that means handing reality back to "the Loom of Locke" etc. (J 15:15). And however we come down on that, I'm not at all clear about the "ideological commitment" that you believe binds literary people together, or even, exactly, what you mean by literary people--academics? writers? readers? Could you spell out the commitment you find among "literary people"? Once we work thorugh the various possibilities, I'd end up with something like proper reverence for the power of the imagination--and while I don't know about you, in my own neck of the woods there isn't a helluva lot of that left in academic practice. There's a lot more to say, but I suppose I've given you enough to demolish already. Bert Stern -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #140 **************************************