Repeating Yourself - Part1

Repeating Yourself: Printing, (re)Production, and Poiesis in Blake’s The Book of Urizen To Spot — The family hound with the ever-roving nose that knew: “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” -WB Abstract // Produced by William Blake in the 1790’s during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the eight extant copies of The Book of Urizen contain an irksome formal irregularity and textual instability difficult to classify. Yet at their core, the eight reproductions contain a tension between the factory copy of the Industrial Revolution and an experimental type of copy, the Blakean copy, which is a form continuously in flux. The poem exploits this tension by operating on two levels. At the level of narrative, the poem offers up a critique of type of deadening, subtractive repetition found in the factory. Written with a profusion of repetition (narrative, linguistic, and sexual) that is inlaid with the political and economic baggage of the early Industrial Revolution, the poem registers industrial reproduction as a psychoanalytical symptom, But at the level of textual form, the poem positions itself as a radical type of copy resistant to its milieu. The Book of Urizen’s poesis is entwined with a radical politics, as it was produced with a novel printing method invented by Blake, relief etching, that unified processes separated in commercial printing. Beyond this, of the eight extant copies of The Book of Urizen, each functions as a unique variant, with individual plate orders, tonal illustrations, and thematic emphases in each copy. What emerges from the analysis of The Book of Urizen’s form is a workable model of the Blakean copy. In poetic practice, The Book of Urizen effaces standard linear and spatial constructions found in the factory and suggests a radical post-Newtonian ontology verified by modern physics. Contents // Citational Note i Introduction 1 1 / The Art of Reproduction: Copying Bodies in the Early Industrial Revolution 7 2 / Secrets of Wisdom: Repetition in The Book of Urizen 14 3 / Blake’s Poetics of Poiesis I: Relief Etching as Radical Methodology II: The Book of Urizen’s Radical Physics 28 36 Looking Forward 48 Appendix 50 Works Cited 55 Citational Note // All references to Blake’s poems are to: Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. 2nd ed. Eds. Grant, John E; Johnson, Mary Lynn. New York: Norton, 2008. Parenthetical citations include initialed poem title, plate, and line numbers. BU: The Book of Urizen MHH: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Introduction // In the politically repressive climate of the 1790s, Blake’s subversive works — namely an unfinished series titled The French Revolution — became a legal liability, as journalists and writers all over England were increasingly prosecuted for sedition and treason. In particular, prophecy, with its radical politics, was identified as a contagion that had to be neutralized by law. Mark Lyle Barr cites Richard Brother’s Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Time and his subsequent arrest as an exemplar of the danger that these works posed to not just the king but to the divine source that legitimized the monarch’s powers (740). For obvious reasons, then, during the last half of this decade, Blake’s work took a turn into the opaque and trans-historical, following metaphysical and ontological concerns, as compared to his preceding works whose topical critiques were thinly concealed behind allegory (America A Prophecy, Europe A Prophecy, Africa, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). These new poems, generally categorized as the “prophetic” works, were stripped of temporal markers, sanded into ahistorical, politically neutral objects that could slip through a censor’s grip. But while the earlier works contained critically reactive elements, Blake’s prophetic works, which begin with The Book of Urizen and culminate in Jerusalem, can be judged as creative at an even more fundamental level. After all, faced with a society that reproved his fiery vision, Blake found a way to sidestep these political contingencies, while also legitimizing the status of his oeuvre: this was achieved by arcing back to the origins of the world and imagining the conditions of its creation that shaped present society, in effect, constructing a teleology for the fallen world. As W. J. T. Mitchell states, this new strain of work “delineated the beginning and the ends of a cosmos in which Blake’s kind 2 Repeating Yourself of topical prophecy would be coherent” (85). Many critical readings of The Book of Urizen have identified the various layers of textual strategy working in opposition to each other within the poem: Mollyanne Marks writes that it “perceives … simultaneously, so that the structure of the poem itself reenacts the conversion of true vision into fallen form;” (583) and Andrew M. Cooper notes that “Blake’s narrative undergoes a progressive decrescendo, a self-contradictory fall into the facticity of the present,” (187) moving in antiparallel to the gradual conglomeration of power that Urizen attains. What critics get at is the precarious logic that grounds Blake’s ontology — the selfcontradictory, unstable foundation that anticipates the myriad symptoms of a fallen world, all of its topical problems, hypocrisies, and blind spots. Published in 1794, William Blake’s grand illuminated poem The Book of Urizen imagined the origins of a universe, with the cosmic width and breadth one would expect. Over the course of the narrative, an Abrahamic God-like figure, Urizen, is exiled from the stagnant realm of the Eternals. Confined to a “self-closd, all-repelling” void, Urizen creates a “fallen world” not dissimilar to ours, which he rules with an iron fist. As retribution, the Eternals send Los, a poet-prophet figure, to bind and forge a human image for Urizen while he slumbers. At the end of the seven ages of Urizen’s embodiment, Los weeps over this pitiable bondage. From these tears, the first female, Enitharmon is born, who gives birth to Los’ son, Orc. The poem comes to an abrupt end as Urizen awakes from his sleep to survey his “generations,” before weaving a web of religion that keeps his progeny in blind subservience. Originally envisioned as parts of a straightforward trilogy, the works that followed The Book of Urizen — The Book of Ahania & The Book of Los — did less to advance the plot in a coherent temporal order than to circle around, or more accurately, dwell on, that central act of creation. Indeed, these clusters of narratives function like a disordered psyche in textual form, with each work providing a fragmented perspective that overlaps, refracts, or repositions elements of the others. And with no growth or refining of knowledge, readers studying this troubled psyche are forced to wonder why the poems are so preoccupied with reenacting its trauma. Beyond narrative, this repetition is embedded stylistically, with its linguistic repetition, and genetically, via its characters’ reproduction. Ultimately, The Book of Urizen is itself a repetition, in and of itself, because it is a reworking of Genesis that also draws inspiration from Milton’s Paradise Lost. How to understand the work of repetition that The Book of Urizen both performs and narrates? This is the question I started with, envisioning a psychoanalytic reading of the poem’s repetition confined to the horizon of The Book of Urizen. As Freud said, however, “from error to error, one discovers the entire truth.” Because Blake’s work is notoriously resistant to ideological containment — especially a school that locks itself within the claustrophobic chamber of the psyche — my study quickly expanded into the political and economic milieu of Blake’s time, as well as Blake’s material processes of engraving. Examining The Book of Urizen’s broader context, I realized that it was a special type of repetition, namely reproduction, that organizes the relevant aspects of both the Industrial Revolution and Blake’s craft. Between these two spheres, I located The Book of Urizen, a text that critiques the conditions of its time, but also pushes itself beyond the horizon of those conditions. In this respect, I am treating The Book of Urizen as a poetic form which occupies two perspectives: at once, within the present dystopian conditions of the 4 Repeating Yourself Industrial Revolution and forwards into the “real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” Importantly, this form has a different purview than a God’s eye perspective, which is only wise because of its external omniscience. Instead, The Book of Urizen is able to simultaneously embody the two perspectives because of its etched, reproducted form. This reproduced form allows the poem, on one hand, to absorb the political and economic atmosphere of its time; on the other, it allows it to fashion itself as a Blakean copy. This term, introduced by the thesis, refers to an experimental reproduction which inherits features of its prototype, but also tweaks and remodels them so as to not efface its status as a unique object with an individual identity. The structure of this argument is broken up into three regions: the germinal stages of the Industrial Revolution, the interior of The Book of Urizen, and the material processes of Blake’s poems. The first two spaces are joined together by their treatment of reproduction as a deadening, reductive form of repetition. In the first chapter, building from a survey of the political and economic theory of the time, the thesis examines how the process of commercial intaglio engraving acted as a metaphor for not just industrial labor organization, as labor theorist Charles Babbage argued, but of a production of an entire labor force writ large, churning out laborers and objects alike. Intaglio engraving is an apt model for these social and economic processes: using a great deal of force, the plate impresses its form onto a stream of papers, generating an exacting conformity to the original prototype. This “technology of conformity” becomes the key for producing, maintaining, and correcting a productive society in the early stages of industrial capitalism. The second chapter applies theory to poetic practice. By delving into the poem, we explore how The Book of Urizen internalizes its milieu and reforms it into the fantastic universe of Urizen, who might be the factory supervisor exemplar. Blake activates industrial themes in this poem, from which we assemble a theory of commercial art that he seeks to avoid. And because this chapter is concerned with the internal psyche of the poem, it incorporates a psychoanalytic theory of repetition within the text’s theme of reproduction. By shoring this gap between industrial reproduction and Freudian repetition, we can suggest how the poem registers historical concerns as a trauma at the level of the psyche. Here, the thesis relies on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle to map the mechanisms of trauma and repetition. In the final chapter, this study comes to a juncture. After all, recent research has effectively restored the political implications to Blake’s work. But from these studies, of which my work is included, a string of questions surface that relate to Blake’s progressive aesthetic and political projects. How can an artist critique without “becoming what you behold” and falling privy to those ideological errors? As an engraver whose medium is indebted to reproduction, how can Blake avoid its deadening effects? To frame these inquiries as a positive statement: Blake’s craft is necessarily mechanized by reproduction, but in order to create a working aesthetic theory not hindered by this, he must find a way to accommodate it, so that his method is not the blind spot in his scheme. To attend to these issues, the final chapter turns to the material practices of Blake’s work. By subjecting the processes of commercial intaglio engraving and Blake’s invented method, relief etching, to a close reading, we tease out their respective philosophical and ontological implications. Finally, the last section addresses the poem’s textual instability. 6 Repeating Yourself Of the eight extant copies of The Book of Urizen, each functions as a unique variant, with individual plate orders, tonal illustrations, and thematic emphases in each copy. What emerges from the analysis of The Book of Urizen’s form is a workable model of the Blakean copy. In poetic practice, The Book of Urizen effaces standard linear and spatial constructions found in the factory and suggests a radical post-Newtonian ontology verified by modern physics.