William Blake's Comic Vision

307 Pages·2003·1.27 MB·English

by  Nicholas Rawlinson

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William Blake's Comic Vision

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William Blake’s Comic Vision
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William Blake’s Comic
Vision
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10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson
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© Nick Rawlinson 2003
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence 4-1
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 1-0
Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. 01
2
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication ct -
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may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. nn
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The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work e
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. gra
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FPiArsLtG pRuAbVliEs hMedA C2M00IL3L bAyN so - P
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and om
1C7o5m Fpiaftnhie As vaenndu ree, pNreeswe nYtoartkiv, eNs. Yth. 1ro0u0g1h0o ut the world et i Tr
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave bliot
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. bi
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ISBN 0–333–74565–5 (outside North America) o
ISBN 0–312–22064–2 (in North America) ed t
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully e
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managed and sustained forest sources. m - li
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. co
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data nn
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Rawlinson, Nick, 1963– ec
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William Blake’s comic vision / Nick Rawlinson a
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p. cm. al
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Includes bibliographical references and index. w.
ISBN 0–312–22064–2 ww
1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Humor. 2.Humorous poetry, English— m
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P8R2H411′i.s74t—o8r .ydC ca52n61dR 3cr9it 1ic9is9m9. 3.Comic, The, in literature. I. Title 98–50635 aterial fr
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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Contents
Preface vii
9
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Abbreviations xiii 04-
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1 Songs of Pleasant Glee: William Blake and the 2
Comic 1 ect -
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Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’ 5 o
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The Comic and Blake’s Vision 12 v
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Old Nobodaddy aloft 15 al
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2 Mirth at the errors of a foe: the Eighteenth- and s
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Nineteenth-Century Comic World 19 Tro
Satire 19 et i
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Sentimental comedy 26 ot
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The carnivalesque 32 bi
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Blake and the Fool 40 sitet
It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too 49 ver
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3 Playing the Fool: Blake’s Sense of Humour 50 d to
Absurd tales and strait waistcoats 60 se
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I must Create a System 66 m - lic
4 ‘I love the jocund dance’: The Comic in the Poetical co
Sketchesand Tiriel 67 ect.
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The Sun of loss and the Father of Los 68 co
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The Fool and King Edward the Third 81 av
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‘Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!’ The al
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Madman and Tiriel 89 w
w
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5 TThalek liunnga or fl aVnidrtsucaopues Cats: An Island in the Moon 9988 erial fro
‘I was only making a fool of you’ 104 mat
The map of a small island 108 ht
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6 To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs o
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Of Innocence And Of Experience 163
7 A Vision of the Last Judgment: The Comic in
Blake’s Designs 193
‘No man if hee be sober daunceth, except hee be mad’ 202
v
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vi Contents
8 And to conclude: A fool sees not the same tree a
wise man sees 215
Appendix 226
Notes 228 19
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Bibliography 263 11-
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Index 279 ct -
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Preface
One rainy winter’s evening, coming out of the Bodleian Library in
Oxford, I paused to raise my umbrella to the inclement weather. As I did 19
4-
so, I realized what a foolish but suitable metaphor that action was for 1-0
1
writing the preface to a critical work on Blake. Blake enthusiasts invari- 20
ably find the need to raise umbrellas of one kind or another. Sometimes, ct -
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like the tour guides here in Oxford, they do so to indicate their position on
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beside a site of Special Interest. More often, it is a vain attempt to fend ve
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off the damp fallout that is an inevitable part of entering the critical algr
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fray. It is with both aims in mind that I raise mine now. o -
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This book started life over ten years ago as a simple hunch: that the m
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reason that I and countless other readers enjoy the work of William et i Tr
Blake is due, in part, to the fact that Blake is a comic writer. Such a claim ek
ot
may seem staggeringly obvious, but believe it or not at that time the bli
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weight of serious, critical authority was against such an idea. While it s
et
acknowledged that Blake was often satirical, and of the Devil’s party, of sit
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course, still – ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’ – ‘Little Lamb who made thee’ niv
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– ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – ‘O rose thou art sick’ – not exact- o
d t
ly funny, surely? Better to argue over his politics or his madness, the se
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dominant criticism said, to see his work in historicist or psychoanalytic ce
terms, to use it as proof of this or that theory of criticism, rather than m - li
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pursue the idea he might be deliberately comic. Blake’s abundant and ct.c
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consistent use of humour was then, and often still is, dismissed as little nn
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more than a curious character trait. It is seen as a product of his wilful ec
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but amusing rebelliousness which, if it has to be explained at all, is cate- gr
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gorized as nothing more than the defensive reaction of a neglected and w.p
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rather petulant genius. His most clearly comic work, An Island in the w
m
Moon, is considered merely the tomfool doodles of a distracted young- o
ster. Even the recent critical emphasis on recovering the complexities of al fr
eri
the social struggle in which Blake found himself has done little to at
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change this attitude. Despite exciting recent research, such as Jon Mee’s ht
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fascinating study of what he calls the ‘Culture of Radicalism’, critical yri
p
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opinion still suggests that Blake’s use of the comic was, at best, nothing C
more than the sporadic application of a handy tool for destabilizing
conventional readings of texts.
But Blake has always attracted those who are, or think they are, a little
off the beaten track. So despite the prevailing critical wisdom, I pursued
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viii Preface
the idea that Blake was a comic writer and, after years of research and sev-
eral false starts my hunch began to take shape. In fact, the more I read,
the more surprising the tendency to overlook the importance of Blake’s
use of comedy became, especially given the long-established critical
recognition that Blake was passionately engaged with the world of eigh-
9
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teenth-century ideas. For the eighteenth-century thinker – whether in 4-
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Parliament or in coffee shops, whether writing for the Gentleman’s 11-
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Magazineor the cheapest of radical pamphlets – understanding and good ct -
behaviour were, essentially, a matter of ‘taste’. Literary and moral dis- ne
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course demanded a combination of aesthetics, perception, education and Co
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the social application of morality. To speak of society was to recognize a
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the complexity of the relationships between self, self-consciousness, lan- Pal
guage and government. And, as the title of one of the plays by the great o -
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eighteenth-century comedian Samuel Foote reminds us, comedy, being o
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of all things a matter of ‘Taste’, occupied a unique and pivotal position in et i
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such discourse. Even the briefest of surveys of eighteenth- and early nine- ote
teenth-century comic theory will show that many of the thinkers with bibli
s
whom Blake engages most closely – Hobbes and John Dennis, for exam- et
sit
ple – expressed strong opinions on the nature of comedy as a natural er
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corollary to their statements on social order, consciousness and aesthet- Uni
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ics. Likewise, we know that Blake was deeply interested in d t
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Antiquarianism, and many of these popular historians devoted a great ns
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deal of energy to uncovering the history of comic pastimes. Blake was, of m - li
all things, a Visionary, an artist of the spiritual world, and many eigh- o
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teenth-century moralists and sermonizers debated hotly on the impor- ct.
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tance of comedy to faith – deciding whether the joyful should also be on
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jolly and the blessed blithe. And even discussions of art used the lan- ve
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guage of comedy: Blake himself, while busy refuting the ideas of Sir algr
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Joshua Reynolds, called the use of light a ‘witticism’. When taking on the w.
w
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giants of eighteenth-century thought, then, in the fields of perception, m
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spirituality and social organization, it would be extraordinary if an atti- al fr
tude to comedy was not an important part of Blake’s mental armoury. eri
at
Of course, comedy is a difficult, paradoxical entity, a trickster among m
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literary and social genres that positively defies definition, declaring, as g
yri
Shakespeare’s arch fool Dogberry reminds us, that ‘comparisons are op
C
odorous’. Defining what makes someone a comic writer is, therefore, a
challenge in itself. But, that said, starting from the general premise that
a comic writer is one who uses humour to convey a positive, life-affirm-
ing message, assuming that Blake was a comic writer began to offer a
new and exciting perspective to his work. Indeed, it quickly became
obvious that the comic provided him with an essential key to his con-
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Preface ix
cept of Vision. For the comic is an ideal model – and perhaps, the only
model – for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. First, it
provides a popular challenge to all forms of cultural and textual author-
ity – a way to give all kings, priests and theorists a swift kick up the back-
side. Second, while it destabilizes texts, it also offers a positive
9
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alternative. The problem with undermining texts is that if you destroy 4-
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all concepts of authority, then how do you then put over your message 11-
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of hope in a Universal Humanity? When all forms of art are susceptible ct -
to deconstruction, how can you articulate faith? Recent critical thought ne
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has sought to answer this by placing considerable emphasis on the Co
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importance of ‘play’ and ‘communitas’ in Blake’s work. But these con- a
gr
cepts, while important, are rather nebulous, thus contradicting Blake’s Pal
insistence on the importance of the minute articulation of ideas. o -
s
m
Moreover, both are questioned in Blake’s portrayal of the aged children o
Tr
Har and Heva. Using the language and imagery of comedy, however – et i
k
especially of social festivities and the carnivalesque – allows Blake to ote
describe faith as a physical, emotional and intellectual experience, a joy- bibli
s
ful social act that goes beyond the isolating limitations of literary et
sit
expression. Moreover, in order to ‘see’ the joke, comedy requires that we er
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read the world afresh. In this act of creative perception the comic pro- Uni
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vides Blake with a poetics of reading, a model of how his Visionary per- d t
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ceptions could survive while being presented in physical media he ns
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consistently pointed out were limiting and potentially oppressive. m - li
Finally, comedy has a long and intimate connection with faith, particu- o
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larly in the idea of the divinely inspired fool. It formed part of a ct.
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Christian tradition that found expression in many of Blake’s major on
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influences – the writings of St Paul, the plays of Shakespeare, even ve
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London street life. To employ the comic, then, allows Blake to encour- algr
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age Vision, to celebrate the madness of inspiration, and to present a pos- w.
w
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itive message in an inherently flawed medium. m
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Recognizing the comic as a key to Vision, as well as providing exciting al fr
insights into individual lyrics, also gives a new thematic unity to Blake’s eri
at
work. Rather than being a juvenile exercise in imitation, the Poetical m
ht
Sketches can be read as the beginnings of a series of comic images that g
yri
substantially shape the presentation of ‘play’ in the Songs of Innocence op
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and of Experience. Likewise An Island in the Moon, rather than being an
idle and protracted in-joke, proves to be a significant early draft of the
sort of philosophical and spiritual education attempted in The Marriage
of Heaven and Helland later in Jerusalem.
As a conscious choice, then, Blake’s use of humour is far-reaching in
both its scope and implications. As sharp as the satirical thrusts of Swift
10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson