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Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 11:29:19 -0800
From: Robert McDonell <rmcdonell@xxxxxxxx>
To: blake@xxxxxxxxxx, Robert McDonell <rmcdonell@xxxxxxxx>,
National Association of Scholars Science News List <science@xxxxxxx>,
foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Blake's Obscurity: A Hypothesis
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>Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 14:18:55 -0500
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>Subject: Blake's Obscurity: A Hypothesis
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>Re Jennifer Michaels' question about Blake's obscurity:
>
>Thank you for bringing up this topic, Jennifer. I puzzled over it for many
>years myself, finally abandoning my dissertation because I couldn't come up
>with a satisfying answer. I think my tools (syntactic analysis) were simply
>inadequate to the problem. But I'm still interested in the leads I
>discovered.
>
>The most promising ones, I think, had to do with considering Blake's verbal
>style as that of a visual artist: that is, it seemed to me that Blake's
>poems are like fields rather than rivers, exhibits of pictures rather than
>stories. They seem to be laid out in visual tableaux, large flat areas that
>treat a certain topic. When the topic changes, it's like walking to another
>painting in a gallery: There is no narrative link -- you have to supply that
>yourself. (The tableaux sometimes stretch across several plates, though, and
>-- though I don't remember any particular instance clearly at the moment -- I
>think the boundaries of the tableaux and the boundaries of the plates do not
>always coincide. I remember finding this type of style in The French
>Revolution as well as the later prophecies.) I theorized that this kind of
>"visual" organization explained something about his syntax as well.
>
>It's the peculiar flatness of Blake's syntactical style that led me to this
>hypothesis -- a flatness that seems to mirror the predominant
>two-dimensionality of his visual style. His verbal style avoids periodic
>sentences for agglutinative ones, strings of clauses stuck together
>end-to-end, with very little subordination. If it doesn't represent a mental
>disease (just a joke, friends), I think it does represent a different way of
>thinking from the normal, Latin-trained, narrative mode of the "better
>educated" poets of his day, the Wordsworths and Shelleys, whose styles were
>more formed by traditional academic education. Blake the autodidact, lacking
>traditional tutelage, evidently developed unusual habits of thought and
>style, which were more influenced by visual modes of organizing thought than
>most poets'.
>
>Of course, the real test of a hypothesis like this is its explanatory power,
>and (like Fermat) I may just have to say that I wrote my demonstration on a
>napkin that you'll find on [here the author dies]. The proof, if any, is
>left to the reader. (But a few months ago, I think I found and shared a
>small instance of this: Reading "The Sunflower" in the context of "My Pretty
>Rose Tree" and "The Lilly." Each poem remains fairly obscure until viewed on
>the plate with the other two. But that hardly proves the main point, and
>could be explained in other, more traditional, ways.)
>
>As for Blake's insistence that his every letter and mark is in its proper
>place, I found that a stumbling block. Obvious typos (grav-o's?) abound in
>Jerusalem and other books, his punctuation is as erratic in his letters as in
>the poems, his spelling as idiosyncratic... Eventually, I decided that those
>who take a top-down approach, like Wicksteed, have more success than those
>who try to work up from an analysis of syntactic patterns, as I did. But
>perhaps others will have more success than I did in the analytic endeavor.
>
>Overall, it's Blake's integrity as an artist and a human being, apparent
>everywhere in his works, that leads me to keep puzzling over his meaning
>where I can't understand it. I've found it fruitful for my life, if not for
>my career.
>
>I would welcome any comments on these ideas, either on the list or by direct
>e-mail.
>
>--Tom Devine
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