The
Cambridge Companion to William Blake Joanny
Moulin
Like
other books in the series, this Cambridge Companion is a collection
of authorised essays by some twelve eminent Blake scholars. The
targeted reader has to be the slightly improbable case of someone
who would know next to nothing of William Blake and his poetry and
yet would be well educated enough to appreciate such refined and
well-written pieces of erudition. But that is because Blake's poetry
is preceded by a reputation for difficulty which this critical reading
guide is explicitly addressing, in an effort to convince potential
readers not to let themselves be deterred. In fact, in his Introduction
subtitled "To Paradise the Hard Way," Morris Eaves is
actually striving to present Blake's very difficulty as a major
incentive to reading his poetry. By so doing, he is almost advertising
Blake as a rewarding field for new research, insisting that the
eccentricity of this poet has induced various forms of reader resistance,
the history of which calls for some synthetic study of the reception
of Blake over the last two centuries. Several of the articles then
come to confirm this strong impression that Blake studies are calling
for some critical advancement. It may be that this book is less
obviously fraught than some other Cambridge Companions with a sense
that some recent scholarly breakthroughs have just been made on
the subject, but it does convey the feeling that they are being
built up to. The
first part, entitled "Perspectives," at least as much
as the second on "Blake's works," is an exciting rendering
of the actual experience of reading or rereading Blake today. It
is likely that a greater number of early twenty-first century readers
are better prepared to respond more favourably than Blake's contemporary
did. And this would probably imply reconsidering the separation
of Blake's texts from his pictures, once advocated by Rossetti and
enforced as a sort of pragmatic bowdlerisation by the Victorian
Blake revival. Aileen Ward's biographical chapter revisits the traditional
icon of William Blake, while swerving off hagiography by insisting
on the often soft-pedalled unruly aspects of the character. Thus,
the young Blake is presented as having "voluntarily joined
the front ranks of the crowd that marched on Newgate" in the
Gordon Riots of 1780 and, more generally speaking, Blake's radicalism
in politics and aesthetics is insisted upon, so that his comparative
isolation in the London of his time is finally made to appear as
the result and necessary condition of an uncompromising genius,
recognised almost exclusively by a small circle of young originals,
calling themselves the "Ancients," who leonized the ageing
Blake as they would have "one of the antique Patriarchs, or
a dying Michael Angelo." But
what is perhaps the most fascinating piece of scholarship in this
collection is the article by Joseph Viscomi on "Illuminated
printing," explaining with breathtaking evocativeness and profusion
of details the fundamental techniques of etching and engraving as
well as William Blake's innovative marriage of the two. This essay
is illustrated by plates from the Encyclopédie in
traditional engraving, black-and-white reproductions of some of
Blakes's prints, and photographs of facsimiles of Blake's plates
in the making, with a hand holding the pen, needle or burin in the
foreground. Quasi-fictional passages offer evocations of William
and Catherine Blake at work in their shop, and the Blakes come to
life for all too short a while, as we imagine the poetry coming
out of the rolling press, one page at a time. And we realise that
Blake had invented the hybrid technique of relief etching, a hybrid
of intaglio etching and engraving, which enabled him to combine
text and picture on the same plate and into a single, quicker printing
process. Blake must be envisioned as drawing and writing directly
on copper plates cut to size, using as ink a brown asphaltum-based
varnish favoured by etchers to "stop-out" the acid from
biting the plate. One implication is that, as the printed image
mirrors the plate image, Blake actually wrote backwards and did
so with excellent dexterity. In a kind of inverted etching process,
he then poured the acid for it to bite out the copper left unprotected
by the varnish, and he did so twice, a two-stage etch being necessary
for text to be "ex-graved" in relief, rather than engraved,
but less deeply so than pictures. Aileen
Ward goes on with a wealth of details to explain the processes of
printing out and colouring, and this new style of approach does
at least as much as complicated textual exegeses to make us deeply
understand and love the poetry of William Blake. Susan Wolfson interrogates
the very notion of poetic form in a more traditional, close text
analysis of some poems. David Bindman assesses Blake's achievement
as a painter, showing that he was a life-long adversary of the mimetic
school of painting represented by Sir Josuah Reynolds, then President
of the Royal Academy. And as a case in point to prove, if need be,
that Blake could never bring his practice of visual art down to
mere illustration, it is remarked that, for instance, his designs
for Edward Young's Night Thoughts were in fact commentaries
that "corrected" the texts, by expressing Blake's disagreement
with some of the poet's ideas. Saree
Makdisi and John Mee's contributions very efficiently situate Blake's
aesthetics and politics on the complex and protean stage of so-called
English radicalism in the early nineteen century. Robert Ryan achieves
a similar task as far as religion is concerned, by showing how Blake
is the spiritual heir and continuator of a long tradition of English
dissenters, relayed and echoed in his days by such figures as John
Wesley, Edward Priestley or Emmanual Swedenborg by whom he was briefly
impressed, before he satirised his theses in The Marriage of
Heaven & Hell. David Simpson offers a critical survey of
the reception of Blake's works that makes him interestingly appear
as a marginal and problematic case in theories of Romanticism, and
it may well be that Blake's very marginality in this respect is
a token that his work retains a potential for academic research
today. The second part of this book focuses more didactically on
four periods of Blake's poetic career, with studies by Nelson Hilton
on "Blake's early work", by Andrew Lincoln on America
and The Four Zoas, by Mary Lynn Johnson on Milton
and by Robert Essick on Jerusalem. These will equal
and perhaps complement a well-documented annotated edition of Blake's
texts. The usefulness of the book is enhanced by Aileen Ward's Chronology
of Blake's life and times, as well as by Alexander Gourlay's various
contributions of a glossary of terms, names and concepts in Blake,
a bibliographical guide to further reading in addition to some indications
as to how and where to locate original engravings by Blake in various
museums and institutions around the world.
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