From: blake-d-request@albion.com Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 1996 4:18 AM To: blake-d@albion.com Subject: blake-d Digest V1996 #141 ------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 141 Today's Topics: BLAKE, FEMINISM, STALINISM & ACADEMIA BLAKE, SPIRITUALITY .... & MISCOMMUNICATION Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS file not found Re: anti-patriarch-reply Re: anti-patriarch-reply Re: anti-patriarch-reply Re: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings Re: Howard Roark? -Reply Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS -Reply ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 20:53:21 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: BLAKE, FEMINISM, STALINISM & ACADEMIA Message-Id: <199612080453.UAA19847@igc4.igc.org> Gloudina Bouwer, you are a breath of fresh air. Re a couple of your gems: >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.) ..... And: >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? The question of idealization cuts close to the bone. While we are at it, let me reiterate a question I posed a while back: why is it that among Blake and Romantic scholars, female feminist scholars are on the average less antagonistic toward Blake than the men, who arrogate to themselves, with the complacency of 200-year hindsight, the right to berate Blake for his allegedly reprehensible sexism? Methinks there is something rotten in Denmark. And our perspicacious Suzanne V., who finds it necessary to berate male list members for finding feminist harangues tiresome, nonetheless herself goes on to protest academic feminist scholarship, taking Anne Mellor as an example of a suspicious anti-visionary trend which conforms to the politically reactionary period in which we live. What's going on here? Is it possible for reactionary anti-visionary thinking to coexist with politically progressive positions within the soul of one and the same person? If you understand how the managerial-professional class functions, you will learn to understand the esoteric mysteries behind this seeming contradiction. I got to the bottom of it by analyzing the Stalinist approach to culture, the logic of which is every bit as much a property of identity politics and postmodern posturing. While my study of Jerome McGann's writings is still in an apprenticeship stage, already I smell a rat. He is as progressive in his attitudes as one could hope for, yet his political approach to literature has an unpleasantly familiar odor to me. McGann strikes me as a person bored to tears with his own cultural capital, and so being astute enough to see through the pretensions of high Culture, has adopted the appropriate cynical attitude, and born again politically, thinks the function of literature is to Serve the People. Culture is a scam, so is the pretension to transcendence, and the prophetic role that Blake arrogates to himself is an illusion. Blake retreats from politics, and hence relinquishes his opposition to the status quo. And because Blake is unflattering to women as he is to men, he of course is a terrible sexist who must be reprimanded at every opportunity for his blindness. I shall not quote chapter and verse, not yet, but I will stress that McGann's whining postulates a relation between theory and practice that surfaces whenever the petty bourgeois intellectual begins to detect his own uselessness. Wishing to make _himself _ useful, he thinks the artist's worst sin is not being overtly political, in not taking sides in practical struggle and extolling victims while excoriating oppressors in the tales he tells. The critic's Universal becomes, not the new society, but political activism. And the consequences for the artist of not being able to realize himself concretely in political action (or corresponding verbiage) are to be seen as a mere lack or absence. Whereas any Hegelian knows that that which cannot live concretely must become abstract. Dear reader, don't feel bad if this preliminary sketch doesn't quite jell for you. 99.9% of the intellectual left wouldn't understand what I'm talking about either, which is why I always oppose them on cultural matters. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 20:48:23 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: BLAKE, SPIRITUALITY .... & MISCOMMUNICATION Message-Id: <199612080448.UAA19735@igc4.igc.org> Bert Stern clarifies: >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? Now that you explain it, I see the similarity. And the point about creating those special moments -- I agree. In fact, I've written poems myself about those Blakean moments that Satan cannot find. Whether this comes from inside or outside history is not so important as the breakup of assumed continuity. If this is what you meant, you confused me by posing this tension as a struggle between historical materialism and spiritualism, which suggests opposing metaphysical commitments and methods rather than perspectives on hegemony and continuity. Why would a historical materialist oppose the idea of Blakean moments? Perhaps an Althusserian Stalinist, who denies agency and the subject. But what dialectician would not welcome those moments? >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 Innocence (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). Your interpretation is valid. >You say that when we bring spiritual issues to bear (partly >because they've become contaminated by Yeats and Jung), the >"approach robs literary people of their specificity, .... No, no, no, I'm not issuing any injunction against bringing in any issues whatever that people many call spiritual. I am talking -- wasn't I clear? -- about an approach to literature that just deals with spirituality as an abstraction. What do I mean? If you take people like Carl Jung, or Joseph Campbell, or perhaps Mircea Eliade, or people like these, and see what they are doing, you find that they are all removing mythologies from their social context and reinterpreting them in a symbolic manner that fulfills the spiritual needs of modern-day petty bourgeois intellectuals for a "perennial philosophy". While I do believe that anybody may recycle any mythology and use it anyway (s)he wishes, one should be honest enough to acknowledge that one's own version is not the same as the original. Jung's interpretation of Christ as a symbol of individuation is well and good, except that it flies in the face of 2000 years of actually existing Christianity, in which Christ is the _only_ son of God, not the rest of us. Jesus alone is allowed to be an individual; the rest of us are just sinning scuzbags, worshipping Him as an alienated fetish. The archetypal approach to literature is corrupt to the core. If you really want to understand Jung, look at his collaboration with Nazi psychology and his admiration of Franco as the savior of Christian civilization. >I'm not at all clear about the "ideological commitment" that you >believe binds literary people together, .... No, no, not together with each other, but each to his/her social context. By literary people I meant writers. >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 you and I agree. My point was not to devalue imagination nor "spiritual" concerns. Remember, academic practice has gone through several epochs of ideological and moral corruption. Once archetypal criticism was in; now it's postmodernism. Religious faith or cynical irrationalism -- is one approach any less corrupt than the other? And outside of academia, things are just as bad. I just returned from an afternoon of listening to obnoxious ghettocentric ranting, which is what poetry in my neck of the woods has become. I oppose all manifestations of Stalinism in the arts, e.g. that the purpose of literature is to bitch or reminisce about the 'hood. American culture has become so ugly it makes me want to puke. Can't we strive for something better? That's where imagination comes in. >I know I don't talk your language. Maybe I've been in the >academy too long- .... Bert, it seems that we agree more than we disagree. Why is it that we always talk past one another? I'm not in the academy. I can't assume that the next person talks my language. I try to talk as plainly as I can while still getting across sophisticated abstract concepts. I need people on the other end who try to make sense. Name-dropping does not impress me. Julia Kristeva is not an authority I recognize. (Yes, Lance Massey, your profession is a pompous joke.) If someone on this list thinks pretentious jibber-jabber is going to deflect or distract me, such persons had better wise up fast. Anyone who wishes to impress me had better construct a coherent argument; citation-flinging is not legal tender in my territory. But Bert, once you explain yourself I find myself agreeing with you. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 08 Dec 1996 01:49:32 -0800 From: Steve Perry To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS Message-Id: <32AA8F2C.2A85@infogenics.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Bert said: > 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. Ralph said: >While I do >believe that anybody may recycle any mythology and use it anyway (s)he >wishes, one should be honest enough to acknowledge that one's own >version is not the same as the original. I am much more aligned with Ralph here. I have no problem with the honest attempt at interpretation that identifies both the premises and the presumed course of the effort. In that sense, the de-mythologizers (forgive me), Campbell, Jung or Elliade, can only hope, at best, to leave us with some cinders of the perennial philosophy, which is the smoldering core of what could be meaning in the postmodern holocaust. But let's be honest and realize that they are champions of what they hate the most. Does it surprise you that Jung would glom on to what ever contemporary myth-maker after he and the others have killed all the rest of the gods? Blake, has it oh so right, portraying Newton with his calipers hopelessly measuring at the bottom of the ocean as all of the sea life swims about him. Once a whale has been removed from its environment where it swims, eats, mates, LIVES, is it a whale? Thus my point about religous/poetical writing. It assumes an inhabitant that exists within the way of the world that is created. Once removed from that context the whale, the poem, the myth is so much, dead flesh and blubber. In the meantime, the occupant of that world does play a messianic role, playing out his/her own redemption. But this role exists outside of history, and while it does have some ultimate role in history, Comus Agonites as opposed to Samson Agonistes, it is the process itself, not the dead text or even the goal that matters. Therefore, for Blake, building Jerusalem and cleansing the senses are one in the same. Steve Perry Meals cooked with real religious fervor! ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 09:15:44 -0800 From: David Rollison To: blake@albion.com Subject: file not found Message-Id: <32AD9AC0.73E9@marin.cc.ca.us> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Does anyone know why the URL for the Blake page--William Blake Poet and Engraver--at jefferson village edu is not responding? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:10:42 -0500 From: TomD3456@aol.com To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply Message-Id: <961210141041_1086549255@emout06.mail.aol.com> Lance- I've been out of commission with the flu for several days, so I haven't had the energy to thank you for your kind and lucid response to my irritated reaction to your one-liner summary of Kristeva's semiotics (whew!). So now I do. Thank you very much for explaining! Your second version is very much clearer. It still leaves me a bit irritated at her (rather than you), because I wonder how much of what she says is new. Underneath the difficult phrasings, she seems to be making some tried and true points: Non-"symbolic" elements of poetry ("rhythm, sound-play, even line-arrangement") both come from (in the poet) and induce (in the listener or reader) access to non-rational (non-Urizenic) parts of the mind -- what could be called the unconscious, the soul, and various other venerable names. These elements of poetic language give us a direct, body-based experience, somewhat as music does. In Bill Moyers's series "The Language of Life," Robert Hass makes that point quite simply: He recites Keats's lines "She looked at me as she did love,/ And made sweet moan." That last line, he says, was an erotic experience for him as a teenager [me too!], and the experience is carried by the sound. He then has the audience recite the lines, and then just the vowels, to see the effect of the sound alone. When I read accounts of post-structuralist theory, they usually seem too "symbolic" themselves, too divorced from the concrete and physical, like an insane Urizen blackening the sky (or blinding the mind's eye) with a web of words, abstract words. I feel like a Luddite saying this, but shouldn't literary critics write the way we teach Freshman English students to write -- using concrete terms, avoiding jargon wherever possible...?? I have so far failed to see what is gained in specificity to compensate for what is lost in intelligibility, and this applies to so many of the critical books I have seen in the past twenty years. They make my heart sink (and my choler rise). In any case, I really do appreciate your taking the time to explain these concepts to someone not versed in semiotics (who may still be missing the point), and I would have thanked you sooner had I not been ill. Thanks again, --Tom Devine ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 13:53:44 -0800 (PST) From: Ralph Dumain To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply Message-Id: <199612102153.NAA22135@igc6.igc.org> Excellent, Tom. This semiotic folderol is an even more egregious example of explication via translating one mythology into another, in this case a vastly inferior mythology. All of this French crap is like this. I'm surprised people tolerate it. I far prefer sincere religious conviction to this nihilistic flatulence. I agree that literature matters to life and is not just so much raw material for the theory industry (talk about the logic of capital!) In this I agree with Pam van Shaik. Incidentally, only today did I get to read a post I downloaded around Blake's birthday, in which Pam explains Blake's thoughts on human regeneration in a convincing way, and then challenges me to call this mere propaganda. I found this particular argument by Pam a compelling one. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 17:40:10 -0600 (CST) From: brian buckman To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: anti-patriarch-reply Message-Id: <199612102340.RAA17162@saluki-mailhub.it.siu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" linearity is ancient and dead. the brain functions at a rate comparable in course and velocity to that of a small kitten exploding from the inside out. through irrational, unsuspected, and unexpected lineage, word choice, rythym, and subject there lies a very distinct map to the shivering routes of the soul. it doesn't take a fistful of blakeaphiles to realise that blake was riding the line to the divine through destruction of rational (the crippled urizen) thought and conventional intellect. when poetry, prose, music, art, what have you, become removed from convention the sentient reality of a work replaces the dull murmuring of recitation. unfortunatley this liberation will probably also be the death of literature in the future, opening the doors to any half wit lunatic with the ability to make nonsensical yet charismatic phrasings. this will, no doubt erase the lines dividing literature and madness (which under the most prodigious conditions were already a bit shaky) and possibly open the gates of spirituality through inner relations through writing to the entire world, leaving literature dead, but helping to reawaken the divine in the devoid. could this be albion, in one of his many incarnations? could blake have sniffed out the corpse of inspiration, seeing its decayed waddle across our great planet, as it called itself literature, and, using his writing as a weapon created the magick (or at least recognized the magick to aid its realization) to destroy albion, his borders of intellect and printed snobbery, and bring about a spirituality reawakened in every man? on the side, i am doing an articl on reconditioning through the three steps of the cycle of revolution that blake talks about and fuller's synergetic geometry. my problem is i need more information on his cycle of revolution. can someone steer me in the right direction? eris@siu.edu At 02:10 PM 12/10/96 -0500, you wrote: >Lance- >I've been out of commission with the flu for several days, so I haven't had >the energy to thank you for your kind and lucid response to my irritated >reaction to your one-liner summary of Kristeva's semiotics (whew!). > >So now I do. Thank you very much for explaining! Your second version is >very much clearer. It still leaves me a bit irritated at her (rather than >you), because I wonder how much of what she says is new. Underneath the >difficult phrasings, she seems to be making some tried and true points: > Non-"symbolic" elements of poetry ("rhythm, sound-play, even >line-arrangement") both come from (in the poet) and induce (in the listener >or reader) access to non-rational (non-Urizenic) parts of the mind -- what >could be called the unconscious, the soul, and various other venerable names. > These elements of poetic language give us a direct, body-based experience, >somewhat as music does. In Bill Moyers's series "The Language of Life," >Robert Hass makes that point quite simply: He recites Keats's lines "She >looked at me as she did love,/ And made sweet moan." That last line, he >says, was an erotic experience for him as a teenager [me too!], and the >experience is carried by the sound. He then has the audience recite the >lines, and then just the vowels, to see the effect of the sound alone. > >When I read accounts of post-structuralist theory, they usually seem too >"symbolic" themselves, too divorced from the concrete and physical, like an >insane Urizen blackening the sky (or blinding the mind's eye) with a web of >words, abstract words. I feel like a Luddite saying this, but shouldn't >literary critics write the way we teach Freshman English students to write -- >using concrete terms, avoiding jargon wherever possible...?? I have so far >failed to see what is gained in specificity to compensate for what is lost in >intelligibility, and this applies to so many of the critical books I have >seen in the past twenty years. They make my heart sink (and my choler rise). > >In any case, I really do appreciate your taking the time to explain these >concepts to someone not versed in semiotics (who may still be missing the >point), and I would have thanked you sooner had I not been ill. > >Thanks again, >--Tom Devine > > eris uber alles ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Dec 96 03:28 EST From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings Message-Id: <9612110829.AA24638@uu6.psi.com> Date: Thu, 5 Dec 96 13:02 EST From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings To: blake@albion.com This message might come up twice. . . My apologies for any incovenience! --elisa - - The original note follows - - Date: Wed, 4 Dec 96 16:58 EST From: "Elisa E. Beshero 814 862-8914" Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings To: blake@albion.com Pam, --I know I've jumped in on this issue before and have said some unflattering things to you about not being open to problematize your own readings. I think, though, that I may have misjudged you, so I apologize for my harsh words on your take on Blake last year. I do think that everyone is entitled to individual holistic views of Blake's corpus. So your read is as valid as mine-- and in the difference lies a certain richness. Blake's language. his punctuation. his engraving marks are like an Aeolian harp that resonates with possibilities of meanings. We see in Blake what issues are important to us, and our reads reflect who we are. I guess my approach to Blake lies in uncovering, "unforgetting" some resonances his words may have had in the past, and in finding harmonies with resonances we find in his writing now. But that shouldn't invalidate what you sense as significant, important, vital in his work. In the end, I agree with you, Pam, that it shouldn't be a crime to find patterns and unity. Shall we deny ourselves what we find wonderful about Blake or what we majored in English for in the first place? Maybe we just need to learn to live with our own contrariness better. As Blake demonstrates, 2 contraries can indeed be equally true. Can we "make that so" in our own work? What will that involve? There is no longer one true Reading, but many fascinating possibilities. Why are these possibilities relevant to our lives and times? Can we begin to think of why we're drawn to what we're drawn to in literature? PAX VOBISCUM, and may your Gods go with you, elisa - - The original note follows - - Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 12:39:51 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: saleonar@cc.ysu.edu Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: J25: Spectre and Los -Reply....primary and secondary meanings of text Resent-From: blake@albion.com Reply-To: blake@albion.com Scott, To return to the invitation to debate an issue whixh you asked to hear more about. The example I gave re `The Clod and the Pebble' is relevant in that I was wondering to what extent we do texts justice when we import meanings that are certainly implied, but not primary in any given context. I know that all readers adduce whatever for them, personally, gives meaning to a text and in acknowledging this, literary theory has moved beyond seeing that the text has any primacy at all. (I am not at all adept at lit theory ,as you may have gathered, so am trying to express my own understanding of a shift in paradigms in jargon-less language). To my mind, feminists tend to distort Blake's meaning by coming with a ready made propensity to find maltreatment of the feminine characters and I do find this a very limiting model, having seen , despite their arguments, no such thing ...( to revive an argument which seemed satisfactorily closed by perceiving masculine-feminine in terms of yin-yang, inter alia). I think I am trying to ask whether there can not still be room to consider that the text is not simply a `virtual text' in the sense of being constructed ad lib by thousands of different readers. Without trying to define over-neatly Blake's intention at any point ( since the coinage of `intentional fallacy' one dare not so presume), it does nevertheless seem to me to be possible to arrive at some coherent and unified reading of Blake, always attempting to relate the parts to the whole. I know this is not a popular (nor tenable view in post-modernist terms ... especially if spiritual readings - or any sense of closure - are in the offing) but I am old enough to insist on my right to read Blake in this way and to defy critical proscriptions. OK, I know that I'm inviting vituperation in opening this rather unfocused corner of my mind... but ... I'd like to hear what all of you, up to date with everything via bibliographies and conferences and colleagues' mutual support have to say about such issues. Are they so out of date as to be not worth discussing? Or, through open and hopefully not insulting debate, could we initiate a new transformative reading of Blake? Is this too messianic? Pam ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 12:14:22 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, sperry@infogenics.com Subject: Re: Howard Roark? -Reply Message-Id: I'm not sure how to resolve the issues raised re spiritual reading of Blake since I find the application of currently popular literary theory to Blake reductionist for the same reasons that Steve Perry would find the application of any model so - even a kabbalistic one. Moreover, most of my work and understanding of Blake precedes any attempt to apply another, kabbalistic, model. What excites me is the the Kabbalistic model , which I began investigating many years after my original close response to the contrary images of Blake's text, fitted exactly... that is, I found that the ways in which I had interpreted Blakes' vision of the Fall initially seemed to be perfectly corroborated by every new insight I arrived at through becoming familiar with the symbols and ideas of an entirely new discipline. If you are really interested, I could put up pape by pae of my argument in my intended book ... but this would perhaps not be in my best interests if I wish to publish the ms??? Believe, me, you have seen the merest tip of a very deep iceberg in my postings. An easier way would be to do a mutual discussion of Jerusalem, as I suggested earlier, then Ralph and others could put their interpretations side by side with my own , and students and other Blakeans can judge for themselves which readings are reductionist. Since Blake's themes deal with the Fall and how to regain Eden, and Jesus is a central figure in all of his longer poems, I hardly see how a spiritual (though very unorthodox) reading can be avoided. I prefer Minute Particulars to a general , abstract discussion and Blake's words are always a pleasure to contemplate again. However, as Universities here are on vacation for the Summer, this would be an idea for next year. Meanwhile, thanks to all for a scintillatingly happy year of mental challenge. .. warmest wishes for Christmas. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Dec 1996 13:14:32 +0200 From: P Van Schaik To: blake@albion.com, sternh@WABASH.EDU Subject: Re: BLAKE, SPIRITUALISM, AYN RAND, REDUCTIVE READINGS -Reply Message-Id: I endorse all that Bert so eloquently says in his response to Ralph. .. particularly his statement that Los 's incessant labours at his Forge are intended to bring about that Messianic moment of mankind's release from the fallen worlds of `Empire' and `Mystery' created by Urizen's false reasonings. In that moment, as in Kabbalisitc teachings, the false visions of god held on earth are overthrown and the balance between wrath and mercy in all the radiances of the `Tree of Life' is restored. This moment is also equivalent to the `Grand Jubilee' in Kabbalah when the vibrations of the fallen worlds are raised and restored and the female principle who was in exile in the fallen worlds is restored to her `Groom', and the divine hierogamy (symbolic of perfect balance of contraries) re-established. This spiritual vision of Blake is not popular with critics - is scarcely seen and I can understand that those not used to perceiving the true complexity of Blake may feel resentful and hence be tempted to mock at such views as if they were reductionist. However, as in one of BLake's poems, mockers should beware lest the wind blow the spit of their despite (just a free variation on Blake's sand in wind imagery) back in their own faces. Is Blake writing a type of divine comedy or not? Is the tragedy of the fall primarily, in his view, that all eartholings are bound in mental chains which prevent them from understanding what the true face of God is? These may be good questions to hear answers from others on? A good Christian theme for Christmas? And is it not rather ironical, that Bert, coming from a Judaic, rather than Christian perspective, should be the person defending Blake's Messianism? Pam van Schaik -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #141 **************************************