WILLIAM BLAKE AND PHILOSOPHY:

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

Thesis submitted to the department of

Western Languages and Literatures for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts

by

Oğuz Tecimen

Boğaziçi University

2015
WILLIAM BLAKE AND PHILOSOPHY:

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

The thesis of Oğuz Tecimen

has been approved by

Professor Margaret Russett

(Thesis advisor)

January 2015

2
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I deem myself more than fortunate to work with such a committed and genuine scholar as
Professor Margaret Russett. She kindly and whole-heartedly acted as my advisor for this project.
I would like to express my gratitude for her constant encouragement, insightful critical remarks
and rigourous editorial corrections. Without her guidance this work would not have developed
and ended up this way.
I would like to “articulate” my indebtedness to Professor Suna Ertuğrul who has prepared
the ground for everything I have read in the major part of my studies and shot magnetic arrows
that pierced and gathered the things I have learned all the way through. Without this
apprenticeship of thinking and reading, this work would not have been possible.
I particularly thank my sister Azize for her undoubting support and trust throughout my
studies. She never stopped having faith in what I do in life despite my failures and
procrastinations. Withour her support, I would not have had the time and place to study and
think.
I singularly thank Selvin for the love, passion, friendship and all that we have shared and
thought together.
Finally, special thanks go to Tuğba, Nazım and Cihan for the friendship, laugh, joy,
anger, care, drinks and conversations we have shared over the time – and to Cemo for being a
jolly good company.

3
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 5

1. “The Argument”: Setting the Stage .......................................................................................... 10

2. “Opposition is True Friendship”: Blake contra Swedenborg ............................................... 12

3. “Fearful Symmetry”: Contraries, Dialectics and Marriage ................................................... 20

4. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand”: From Immanence to Transcendence ....................... 24

5. “Energy is Eternal Delight”: Argument at the Limit ............................................................. 27

6. From the “Outward Circumference” of Metaphysics to the Innermost Core of Onto-

theo-logy ....................................................................................................................................... 31

7. “Redeeming the Contraries”: A Genealogy of Reason and Desire ...................................... 35

8. “Petrific Chaos”: (De-)Mytho-logizations .............................................................................. 38

9. The “Infernal Wisdom” of the Memorable Fancy and the Proverbs of Hell ....................... 44

10. “Abstract Mental Deities” vs. “Deities in the Human Breast ................................................ 52

11. “Poetic Genius”: Religion as Art .............................................................................................. 54

12. “Within a Pulsation of Artery”: Romantic Conjunction ........................................................ 56

13. “Everything that lives is Holy”: A Song of Affirmation ...................................................... 58

Illuminated Plates ........................................................................................................................ 66

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 70

4
 Introduction

Blake’s oeuvre seems to be paradoxically both exhausted and enriched by a century of

criticism that has attempted to penetrate it to the heart. Whether systematic or non-systematic,

interpretations abound from typological to mythological, historical to textual, new-historicist to

poststructuralist – and various amalgamations of these methodologies.1 It seems that there is both

little and much to add to these approaches – considering that hermeneutical theories and

philosophical tradition that feed literary criticism have almost come to a dead end or enjoy a

constant renaissance after exhausting or enriching the dialectical and meta-critical currents that

have sustained it during the last century. Arguably, one is left to recycle and reverberate on the

previous interpretations with their pros and cons. Or rather, one can resort to demonstrating the

contemporary relevance of Blake’s work in the face of the invalidity and absence of overarching

projects in this regard. After all, our age is the one in which literature, theory and philosophy

seem to have exhausted itself, or rather an age which have been reshaping and enriching itself

through critical and postmodern re-evaluations of the literary and philosophical tradition. To put

the case otherwise, the alleged end of history and victory of capitalism over other possible world-

systems rendered impossible a crisis with the potential to open up a new epoch, a new

ontological horizon for a new understanding and experience of life, history and world. As a

result, the general panorama seems to be marked by an apocalyptic headline denouncing

“Nothing to be done” – if we are to put it in pessimistic terms– or by a cynical headline that

celebrates it by saying “Anything to be done” – if we are to put it in optimistic terms. The age we

live in is still characterized by this endless waiting that is too exhausted or precocious to be in

1
For the critical epochs Blake’s work is received by various interpreters, see “Dangerous Blake” by W.J.T.
Mitchell, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 21, No. 3, Romantic Texts, Romantic Times: Homage to David V. Erdman
(Fall, 1982), pp. 410-416; also “Blakespotting” by Mike Goode, PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 769-786.

5
search of a “what is to be done.” When we look back, we either mourn over what we have lost

and could have changed or we celebrate the things we have emancipated from thanks to our

consciousness of the grand narratives. When we look forward, we either despair over the eternal

recurrence of the same suffering we experience day in and day out or we envision a hopeful

future that will bring us the eternal recurrence of the same in a way that is freed from the

predicaments we have suffered throughout the centuries. The legitimacy of transcendental

concepts to overcome or at least alleviate our impasse has been thoroughly in question for a long

time now. Perhaps the homelessness of human beings is evident and excruciating more than

ever; or perhaps a possibility of a new home for human beings is in the horizon as have never

experienced before. Various attempts to create or escape to the imaginary, as it were, to the

ideological and transcendental harbours such as God, Reason, Nature, History, Revolution and

Science in order to have a ground for a belief in transforming the world and future have proved

themselves either untenable or transitory. These remarks might seem like a vision of impasse to

aggravate the atmosphere so as to prepare the reader for a profound truth to come. Yet they are

not. These reflections can merely claim to convey a sense of the end times we try to deal with –

quite reminiscent of the times of imminent apocalypse Blake lived in and survived. Above all,

these preliminary remarks aim to shoot flares of exigency to temporarily shed light on the world

and the times in which this work is undertaken, to sustain an endeavour that hovers over an

abyss, which one may have hundreds of means to publicize but little possibility to share.

In this manner, we –assuming that writing is always a plural act of thinking with the

others– have already been talking about in what way Blake’s work is at stake in this venture; but

to turn back to Blake, in the sense of a proper name, and to the questions opened up by this

proper name, we have claimed that there seems to be almost nothing new left to write on Blake.

6
Therefore it is precisely this closure and disclosure of meaning and historicity will be our point

of departure. But having touched upon, by way of passing, the journey of Blake’s works at the

hands of his critics, let us note that our point is not to introduce a transcendent point of view that

negates or surpasses the previous ones, but an immanent one that either works through them or

takes a critical distance from them.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the first and perhaps only work in which Blake

fleshed out his philosophy and vision of contraries in relatively clear and systematic terms.

Accordingly, from the beginning, the major cliché of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

has been the dialectic of the contraries. We will not introduce a new cliché, but re-introduce the

most petrified ones by cracking their overworked crust. First because even though it has become

the most commonplace mark of Blake’s philosophy, the operation of dialectics in the particulars

of Blake’s work has not been marked out yet in its full rigour, especially in terms of its

differential movement. And second, because more than any other way of thinking, Blake

foregrounds his war with those types of dialectics that totalize contrary terms as a whole or

segregate them by “negation”. Third, because he paradoxically rested his thinking –though in an

unorthodox way– on the system which he most ardently antagonized. In short, in the working of

Blake’s poetry, dialectic comes to mean also a meta-dialectical oscillation between dialectics and

anti-dialectics. And last but not the least, because what Blake most fiercely fights against in The

Marriage is precisely the systems of clichés, so to speak, systems of dogmas, of petrified truths

and errors that enslaved human experience and imagination for centuries on. Accordingly,

truthful clichés turned against themselves, which remain at the centre of immanent movement of

Blake’s philosophy, will be the parallel axis of this project’s critical engagement with the key

clichés of dialectic of contraries with which the truth of Blake’s poetry and philosophy have been

7
sealed and can be possibly unsealed; that is to say, dialectic of heaven and hell, of angel and

devil, of body and soul, of desire and reason, of wisdom and folly, of immanence and

transcendence, of system and anti-system, of argument and aphorism, of allegory and vision, of

mythos and logos, of mytho-logy and mytho-poesis as such – assuming that traversing such

constellations may possibly illuminate the passage to the overcoming of the dialectics and

negation, which is heralded in “A Song of Liberty” at the end of The Marriage. There the

epilogue chanted by the chorus –by a body of voice at once multiple and one– perhaps testifies to

this will to overcome the dialectics of negation, and thus calls for an affirmation: “For everything

that lives is Holy.”

Following this conceptual framework, another exigency will gradually develop into a

complementary or supplementary project on our way to dealing with these issues. Therefore we

will try to mark and act out the overt and covert relations –perhaps marriages– between Blake

and the philosophers who are also preoccupied with similar problems and themes in their work.

In this respect, we will refer to those thinkers who take issue with the metaphysical concepts that

determine the ways in which religious and philosophical thinking operates. Thus an attempt will

be made to think together Blake and the following philosophers on the points they converge:

Kant (immanent critique and immanent possibilities of transcendence); Nietzsche (genealogy of

Judeo-Christian morals); Heidegger (laying bare of the onto-theo-logical constitution of Western

metaphysics and an attempt to overcome it); Derrida (deconstruction of the metaphysical binaries

dominant in the Western philosophy); Benjamin (juxtaposition of the seemingly irreconcilable

opposites); Adorno (movement of the dialectics not as synthesis but an open negotiation –

negative dialectics). At various junctures and disjunctures, while reading Blake, it will also be

inevitable to refer to Blanchot (Blakean marriage as a “double bind”); Bataille (Blakean myth as

8
“the absence of the myth”); Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (Romantic exigency of art as religion

and religion as art); Novalis (Romantic gesture of the infinitization of the finite/ordinary); finally

a Deleuzean reading of Nietzsche (affirmation and eternal return as the trans-valuation of the

dialectics and negation).

Accordingly, coupling or marrying “William Blake” and “Philosophy” within the scope

of this long essay will gradually justify itself on our path of thinking. Here the copular “and”

does not merely imply juxtaposition of Blake and philosophy but also their association and

dissociation. Because here Blake is not treated as if he is a systematic philosopher, and yet both

the form and content of his writing cannot be limited to poetry, and the ideas he works through

present a coherent philosophical constellation. As in its grammatical operation, the “and”

between Blake and philosophy refers to a relation of both conjunction and contrariety between

Blake and philosophy in which poetic articulation and philosophical discourse challenge and

open up the limits that define and determine poetry and philosophy in their own particular way.

9
1. “The Argument”: Setting the Stage

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell2 opens with an argument, more properly with “The

Argument”, with a sense of imminence with regard to a clash about to take place. Therefore it is

an argument, in the sense that it argues with a period of time; with the set of dominant ideas and

dogmas underlying that particular period of time; above all, with the supposedly historical

denouement of the Judeo-Christian metaphysics that determines the human experience of beings

and the divinities. Hence the before-the-storm atmosphere and the mood of entropy and

imprisonment one experiences even from the first lines: “Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the

burdened air; / Hungry clouds swag on the deep.”

It conveys the sense that some sort of Energy is repressed and kept under control,

struggling to express and manifest itself under the chains of “burdened air”. It is of little

importance whether we identify Rintrah –the subject of imprisonment– with a mythological or

symbological significance. First, because we are not told of his identity in the text. Second,

because it is the first time in Blake’s work that we come across this figure. Third, because

making a mythological or symbolic identification, that is to say an abstraction via symbological

detour, is, as we will see, precisely against the character of Blake’s project in The Marriage. In

other words, those interpretations that explain away Blake’s works through motley

amalgamations of religious symbols merely reconstruct the Judeo-Christian theology with which

Blake adamantly contends. But Blake was well aware of the petrified limits and dogmas of such

theologies. Moreover, we should also add that such theological elucidations are usually done by

anti-Blakean types, namely, by Swedenborg and theologically motivated interpreters in order to

2
All references to the Marriage of Heaven and Hell follow the Copy H, 1790 (Fittzwilliam Museum) on
www.blakearchive.org. Throughout this study, references to The Marriage will be indicated following the plate
numbers of this edition.

10
rehabilitate the Judeo-Christian mythology whose world has historically withdrawn into a

mythical past. This withdrawal of mythology and religion is merely veiled and alleviated by the

modern literary-archetypal recuperation of religion and by new age psychologism that refill the

void with ersatz “religious experience.”3 In this respect, one can ask whether archetypal and

mytho-symbological interpretations that rehabilitated and re-initiated Blake into the 20th century

readers and consumers are justified in posing themselves in favour of Blake?

But let us turn to Blake instead of tarrying with the arche-typical gravediggers. Although

we do not and will not impart essential significance to the mythological or symbological

meaning of Rintrah’s identity (Ezekial, Elijah, Jesus, God, Just Man or some other

divine/divinized figure etc.) it is also true that Blake, for a starting point, does not create a new

topos of meaning or sense-making system from scratch. For “the Argument” must stage the

opposing parties of the argument. One can at most argue that the tradition he is in dialogue and

argument with is provisionally and strategically at work in the movement and structure of his

work. But one cannot necessarily argue that everything Blake wrote here can only be understood

in relation to this dialogical exchange with tradition. For this reason, without laying unnecessary

and misleading emphasis on the orthodox theological party Blake antagonized, we can say that

3
In his essay “The Age of the World Picture”, Heidegger argues that the modern age, characterized by the loss of
gods, modifies religion and reintroduces it with a more imposing force. And he implies that the “void” resulting
from the loss of gods is replaced by an ersatz “religious experience” chiefly propagated by the scholarly retrieval of
myth in the form of archetypes. In this vein, it suffices to ask whether modern archetypal literary criticism is not
complicit with this process?: “A fifth phenomenon of the modern age is the loss of the gods. This expression does
not mean the mere doing away with the gods, gross atheism. The loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one
hand, the world picture is Christianized inasmuch as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional,
absolute. On the other hand, Christendom transforms Christian doctrine into a world view (the Christian world
view), and in that way makes itself modern and up to date. The loss of the gods is the situation of indecision
regarding God and the gods. Christendom has the greatest share in bringing it about. But the loss of the gods is so
far from excluding religiosity that rather only through that loss is the relation to the gods changed into mere
“religious experience.” When this occurs, then the gods have fled. The resultant void is compensated for by means
of historiographical and psychological investigation of myth.” (my italics) see Martin Heidegger. The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013, pp. 116-117.

11
the opening scene is not an evocation of a primordial Genesis scene, not a historical panorama of

the period, but an untimely vision of the chaotic state of things as experienced and expressed by

the poet. Accordingly, with the opening lines, both a sense of a beginning and that of an end are

evoked, establishing one of the fundamental oscillations the text builds itself upon. And speaking

of oscillations, now we can touch upon the oscillations between a set of oppositions which comes

immediately after the first two lines. A set of opposite imageries is scattered throughout “the

Argument” section: “meek” vs. “just”, “roses” vs. “thorns”, “barren heath” vs. “honey bees”,

“bleached bones” vs. “red clay”, “villain” vs. “just man”, “serpent vs. “lion”. At the end, the

opening couplet, “Rintrah roars & shakes his fires burdened air; / Hungry clouds swag on the

deep” is repeated –more properly, reiterated and resituated– with a different significance, since

the repetition comes to a halt just at the point where binary oppositions are listed, perhaps in

order to foreshadow the potential transformation or destruction of the binaries that influence the

way one experiences the current states of things. Thus in the first plate, Blake, with an overture,

sets the stage for the impending philosophical drama.

2. “Opposition is True Friendship”: Blake contra Swedenborg

When we move on to the second plate, we are confronted with a prophetic pronouncement that

“a new heaven is begun and it is thirty three years since its advent.” The Marriage is written in

1790 and Blake was born thirty three years before that – in the year 1757. It is ironically also the

year Swedenborg –Blake’s philosophical enemy (and neighbour)– declared the following

statement in his Last Judgment (1758):

it has been granted me to see with my own eyes that the Last Judgment is now
accomplished; that the evil are cast into the hells [sic], and the good elevated into
heaven, and thus that all things are reduced into order, the spiritual equilibrium
between good and evil, or between heaven and hell, being thence restored. The

12
 Last Judgment was commenced in the beginning of the year 1757, and was fully
accomplished at the end of that year. 4 (my italics)

Here, anticipating Blake’s rhetoric, we observe the trope of beginning-end, in other

words, of an end that begins or a beginning that ends. The year in which, according to

Swedenborg, history ended, is ironically, according to Blake, the year a new world has begun:

“The eternal Hell revives.” For Blake was dismissive of the end-scenarios prevalent in his age,

since he believed them to be self-aggrandizing as is the case with Swedenborg. Hell must be

recalled to life since Heaven is a mere abstraction without a corporeal existence when it is torn

apart from its opposite, Hell. As we will read, Hell-Energy-Evil-Body compound is opposed to

Heaven-Reason-Good-Soul by “All Bibles or sacred codes”, but this opposition should not be

necessarily taken as a negation, since “There is a place where contraries are equally True.”5

According to Blake, for the imaginative eye that does not see in dualistic terms, binaries do not

apply: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is,

infinite.”6 For oppositions are not essentially constituted as mutually exclusive, they are posited

as contradiction by the “the Reasoning Power, / An Abstract objecting power that Negatives

everything.”7

Accordingly, the main task of The Marriage appears to be seeing beyond the surface play

of the binaries superimposed on human experience by various “abstract objecting power[s]” such

as “sacred codes”, “Reason” and rationalist theologies like Swedenborg’s.

This I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell
are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid.

4
Emanuel Swedenborg. The Last Judgment and Babylon Destroyed, Showing That at This Day All the Predictions
of the Book of Revelation Have Been Fulfilled - From Things Heard and Seen. Boston: Otis Clapp, 1830, p. 42.
5
William Blake. “Milton”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 164.
6
Plate 14.
7
William Blake. “Jerusalem”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 194

13
 If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his
cavern. 8

Before getting into an engagement with Blake’s ontological project and system thereof

(or non-system, in the manner of a Nietzschean heterogeneous ensemble), it is better to make a

brief detour via his engagement with Swedenborg to situate or dislocate Blake’s position within

the topoi of antagonisms that we are going to read. For we read Swedenborg’s name in the

pivotal moments in The Marriage. As Michael Phillips points out: “The shock [with

Swedenborg] spurred his [Blake’s] creation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the title itself

ironically alluding to Swedenborg’s A Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, which Blake so

respectfully annotated.”9

Swedenborg is a problematic figure for Blake, seen as enemy. Yet, being an enemy, one

can also say that Swedenborg is Blake’s “true friend” if we remember plate 20 where the dispute

between the Swedenborgian angel and Blakean devil culminates in a break, but the text

embedded at the bottom of the illumination says: “Opposition is True Friendship.” However this

does not mean that we reconcile Blake with Swedenborg. First, because “opposition” is the

subject, not the predicate; in other words, it cannot be synonymously read as “true friendship is

opposition.” For in Blake’s statement, what is grammatically emphasized and prioritized is

“Opposition,” not “Friendship”. Second, because when we take a look at the nine surviving

copies of The Marriage, the statement “Opposition is True Friendship” is hardly readable.10

Blake must have changed his mind and decided to erase this proclamation of antagonistic

8
Plate 14.
9
For a historical and biographical context of Blake’s break with Swedenborg, see pp. 6-15 of Michael Phillips’s
“Introduction” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011.
10
See Figure 1 at the end.

14
friendship, presumably not to give the impression of reconciliation between the angel and the

devil (between him and Swedenborg). Hence the legitimate way of writing and quoting this

statement must be as follows: “Opposition is True Friendship.”

The erasure tells us more about the relation between Blake and Swedenborg. For Blake

once had an absolute faith in Swedenborg’s visionary writings and saw them as almost as omens

of new visionary age, but later realized that these are regurgitated religious dogmas, as he puts it

in Plate 22: “Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions.”

Blake’s break with Swedenborg is very reminiscent of Nietzsche’s break with Wagner.

Nietzsche had once believed that Wagner’s music heralded a new tragic age. But he later realized

that there is no tragic contradiction in Wagner’s music, since Wagner staged the antithesis of

sensuality and spirituality only to idealize the Christian virtues of chastity and self-negation.11

Likewise, Swedenborg staged the antithesis between heaven and hell only to idealize the

heavenly and angelic virtues.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche says elsewhere the following about the breaking of friendships:

“In parting. – Not how one soul comes close to another but how it moves away shows me their

kinship and how much they belong together.”12 Therefore, Blake’s inexorable opposition

to/friendship with Swedenborg is worth further reflection to illuminate the movement of

contraries in The Marriage and to see to what extent “they belong together.”

Author of Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen 13 (1758),

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is chiefly known as a mystic, but it is crucial to mark that he

was trained as a scientist. In Heaven and Hell –a book about the afterlife– Swedenborg seems to

11
For Nietzsche’s arguments against Wagner, see Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York:
Vintage, 1989, pp. 98-101.
12
“Mixed Opinions and Maxims” in the “Appendix” to On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 177.
13
Emanuel Swedenborg. Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen. New York: Swedenborg
Foundation, 1936. (following page numbers refers to this edition).

15
describe eschatological matters in a mystical manner. However, it is not difficult to say, even by

noting the analytical division of his book (pp. xiii-xvi), that Swedenborg, as a man of

systematization, uses an almost scientific language to convey his observations. Here it is vital to

note that he was originally a mine engineer and mathematician who began to be interested in

theological matters only from his mid fifties on (p. iii).14 Thus it is no wonder that he carried his

scientifically oriented mindset into his work in theology. In this respect, it would be more

appropriate to call Heaven and Hell, an analytics of heaven and hell rather than a mystical vision

of the afterlife. So it is no wonder that his account is characterized by empirical precision instead

of poetic figuration. Thus what we read is a vocabulary of measure, magnitude, quantity, rank

and coordinates:

It has been said above that in the heavens there are larger and smaller societies.
The larger consist of myriad of angels, the smaller of some thousands, and the
least of some hundreds. There are also some that dwell apart, house by house as it
were, family by family. Although these live in this scattered way they are
arranged in order like those who live in societies, the wiser in the middle and the
more simple in the borders. Such are more directly under the Divine auspices of
the Lord, and are the best of the angels. (p. 35, my italics)

Swedenborg claims that he comes to have such a precise knowledge of heaven from what

he has personally observed during his strolls in heaven and from his conversations with angels:

“I have often talked with angels on this subject” (p.5), “I have talked with them [angels] as man

with man” (p.53), “I have seen palaces in heaven of such magnificence as cannot be described”

(p.137). Thus he can give a lucid and detailed account of life after death, of correspondences

between profane and divine levels of existence (“spiritual plane” and “natural plane”, “god

creator” and “world created” (pp. 73-84), of angels who as spiritual and more perfect beings than

human beings defend people against hell. In order to understand Blake’s siding with hell and

14
For the intellectual background of Swedenborg, see the “Introduction” of the referenced book (pp. iii-x).

16
“devil’s party”, it is also important to point out that although the title of Swedenborg’s book

gives equal emphasis to Heaven and Hell, and he announces an “Equilibrium Between Heaven

and Hell” (p. 559-567), he barely talks about hell – of the 600 pages of his book only last 50

pages are about hell, the rest is about heaven and angels. This is one of the main reasons Blake

takes side with devils and hell, in order to counterbalance Swedenborg’s overemphasis on angels

and heaven and controversial “equilibrium between heaven and hell.” So that’s why Blake

accuses Swedenborg of falsehood, precisely for this reason: “[H]e has written all the falsehoods.

And Now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with

Devils who all hate religion.”

Swedenborg, having the unfailingly precise analytic perception of a scientist, has an

inclination to dissect the heavenly realm into categories and hierarchies. He speaks of heaven,

angels, God and their relation to man as if he is talking about a chemical composition or a

molecular network. For this reason, it appears that the human relation to the divine is perversely

systematized, and therefore becomes a matter of calculation. Although his descriptions are vivid

and concrete, his method transforms divine relations into abstract mechanical formulations. This

is one of the reasons that Blake was disillusioned with Swedenborg. For once the relation of

human beings to the divine realm is calculated and clarified into its minutest details, there is left

no room for imagination. Blake complains of this “mechanical” mindset when he opposes

Swedenborg to the imaginative authors –Paracelsus and Boehme– who also produced works on

science and theology: “Hear now another plain fact. Any man of mechanical talents may, from

the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with

Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.”15

15
Plate 22.

17
 As Blake discloses this mechanical method in the fourth Memorable Fancy, through the

conversation between the angel (Swedenborg’s party) and the devil (Blake’s party), Swedenborg

merely makes taxonomical categorizations regarding Heaven and gilds them with his mystifying

rhetoric and with his supposedly firsthand account. In Blake’s words, “the skeleton of [the]

body” (Swedenborg’s writings), once seen “in the mill”, is revealed to be composed of

“Aristotle’s Analytics.”16 That is to say, when Swedenborg’s work is read in the devil’s mill in

“its infernal and diabolical sense” –Blakean hermeneutics par excellence– its analytical skeleton

is exposed as if x-rayed through the devil’s infernal flames. Likewise, at the end of The

Marriage, the angel is converted into a devil through this infernal “flame of fire” and joins Blake

to “read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense”:

When he had spoken, I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms embracing
the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah.
Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often
read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense. 17

By the same token, can we not say that Swedenborg is also converted to Blake’s party

when he is reinterpreted and resituated by Blake in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell? We can

also think about this question in terms of Benjamin’s retelling of Poe’s story “Maelzel’s Chess

Player” in first fragment of “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”18 There Benjamin re-

imagines the chess automaton: “the puppet called ‘historical materialism’” is animated by the

16
Plate 20.
17
Plate 24.
18
“The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess,
answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth
sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was
transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the
puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called
‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology,
which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” See Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. New York:
Shocken Books, 2007, p. 253.

18
“service of theology” hidden in the figure of a “hunchback” under the chess table. Hence, the

materialism without a soul is complemented by a theology without body. In this way, Benjamin

imagines a revolutionary machine that endows historical materialism with what it always denies

–namely with the soul– and incorporates into theology what it always denies –namely the body–.

That is to say, what is negated in theology –body– is re-appropriated as theology’s

complementary contrary, and what is negated in historical materialism –soul– is re-appropriated

as historical materialism’s complementary contrary. Conceived in terms of the contrariety in The

Marriage, one can argue that Swedenborg’s rationalist theology which posits body and soul as

absolute antithesis is transformed into a gnostic materialism by Blake’s chess game of

“marriage” which dissolves the antithesis and reclaims it as complementary contrariety.

This interpretation also makes sense when we think of Blake’s notion of contraries and

also grant that Blake and Swedenborg are contraries. For Blake brings up his conception of

contraries just after he expressed his contrariety to Swedenborg in Plate 3: “And lo! Swedenborg

is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up […] Without

contraries there is no Progression.” Although Swedenborg’s writings are “folded up” in “linen

clothes” by Blake –in other words, they are seen as dead bodies about to be buried, that is, as

writings that have lost their liveliness and truth value– they are recreated and resuscitated in a

novel form in the body of Blake’s work, when we think of the title of his work and the parodic

appropriation of the rhetorical strategies in the Memorable Fancy sections.

Therefore, Blake’s writings, without the complementary force of his contrary –

Swedenborg’s writings– cannot make the progression heralded in Plate 14 with the “infernal

method” of “displaying the infinite which was hid,” of seeing beneath or beyond the surface play

of contraries. Yet following Blake’s thinking of contraries, to see the unhidden and infinite, first

19
one must have their contrary, the hidden and finite. So it appears that Swedenborg is necessary to

Blake’s existence.

3. “Fearful Symmetry”: Contraries, Dialectics and Marriage

After –simultaneously with Blake– establishing the necessary and fruitful opposition between

analytically oriented Swedenborgian visionary writing and imaginatively oriented Blakean

visionary writing, we can make an in-depth reading of the “Argument” about contraries:

“Without Contraries there is no progression.” 19

By “progression”, Blake does not mean a linear progress and evolution in the sense of an

Enlightenment project. First of all, the word has a polemical connotation with regard to

Swedenborg’s eschatology. For Swedenborg posits opposites as mutually exclusive, and

subordinates Hell to Heaven; champions “Reason” at the expense of “Energy”; and degrade

“Evil” in the name of “Good”. But Blake does not concede to the subordination of one pole of

the opposition to the other, as we read: “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and

Hate, are necessary to Human Existence.” 20

Therefore, Swedenborg’s announcement of “the

spiritual equilibrium […] between good that is from heaven and the evil that is from hell” 21

remains at the center of Blake’s attack on the consummation of dialectical process in an

equilibrium. Yet that is not to say that Blake’s conception of contraries is fundamentally averse

to dialectical thinking. As soon as one speaks about an interaction and struggle between

antithetical opposites, one is implicated in dialectical thinking. However, a radical difference is

at stake in Blake’s conception of dialectics, which is what is embodied in the title word

“Marriage.” As Harold Bloom puts it: “This is a dialectic without transcendence, in which

19
Plate 3.
20
Ibid.
21
Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen, p. 568.

20
heaven and hell are to be married but without becoming altogether one flesh or one family. By

the ‘marriage’ of contraries Blake means only that we need to cease valuing one contrary above

the other in any way.”22

The passage in plate 16 of The Marriage is probably the most condensed articulation of

Blake’s dialectical ontology:

Thus one portion of being is the Prolific; the other, the Devouring: [...] But the
Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the
excess of his delights […] they should be enemies, whoever tries to reconcile
them seeks to destroy existence. Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.

As we read from this statement about the nature of being, what is at work in Blake’s

vision of being, hence in his poetry, is a dialectics of a sort that is not dialectical in the common

sense of the term. For the traditional philosophical dialectics that reigned from Plato to Hegel

operates as a synthesis of the opposites; to put in the term (Aufhebung) culminated in Hegel’s

philosophy: a particular force appropriates its relatively less powerful opposite force and

sublimates it to a transcendent plane in his own embodiment, finally producing a single more

powerful force by way of which contradiction is resolved. In contradistinction to this, Blake’s

dialectics does not resolve itself in a transcendent moment, it does not finalize itself in an

absolute resolution – it is not a transcendental dialectics but, as it were, an immanent dialectics.

Blake’s dialectics can best be illuminated by an affinity with what Theodor Adorno –in

contradistinction to positive dialectics (“Religion”23) which is “meant to achieve something

positive by means of negation”24– calls “negative dialectics,”25 in which opposites are not

22
Harold Bloom. “Dialectic in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. PMLA, Vol. 73, No. 5, Part 1 (Dec.1958), p. 502.
23
See Plate 15: “Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two [Prolific and Devourer].”
24
Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 2004, p. XIX.
25
The account given above with respect to Hegelian dialectics and the difference between positive and negative
dialectics is largely based on the account given by Adorno in the “Introduction” and Part Two of Negative
Dialectics: “Negative Dialectics. Concepts and Categories”, pp. 3-57, pp. 134-207.

21
resolved into a totalized whole but endlessly challenge each other, constantly feed on and suffer

from each other’s excesses, bring forth myriads of constellations through which one illuminates

the other.26 Hence, a dialectics that marks the tension of difference between “enemies” rather

than their facile unity: “Note. Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the

Parable of sheep and goats! & he says, ‘I came not to send Peace but a Sword.’” Thus Jesus is

opposed to religion, by Blake’s interpretation. For re-ligion as re-legere or re-ligare27 can be

read as making a league of what is separate, that is, gathering under the Same what is disparate,

which amounts to subsuming the difference under a whole. But Jesus, as opposed to religion,

brought a “Sword”, a force of differentiation rather than “Peace” which aimed at totality and

synthesis. As a result, negation operates in two ways: it either imposes a totality/synthesis that

veils or suppresses the difference and contrariety, or it severs or absences what belongs together

as contrary by way of a denigration and exclusion. (We will see in later sections, how Blake’s

dialectical “Sword” will function in different contexts where negations aim to segregate or

synthesize the contraries.)

When we follow the dialectic of contraries in The Marriage, we observe that they are

conceived in contradistinction to the synthetic or segregating force of the negation. For instance,

body and soul do not negate each other in Blake’s conception of dialectics: “But first the notion

26
Although Blake and Adorno are compatible on the conceptual and practical level, the difference between Blake’s
and Adorno’s vocabulary should be noted. In Milton, Blake wrote the following: “Contraries are Positives. A
Negation is not Contrary.” Blake uses the term “Positive” to designate the irresolution of antithetical terms, their
resistance to negation, which is called “negativity” by Adorno. And Blake uses the term “negative” to designate the
resolution of antithetical terms into a whole, that is, their synthesis through negation, which is called “positive” by
Adorno. Thus Blake uses the word “positive” for what Adorno means by “negative” and vice versa. On the
conceptual and practical level, they mean the same thing, but use the opposite words.
27
By Cicero religion is derived from relegere (gather together). By Servius, Lactantius and Augustine religion is
derived from religare (bind fast). See The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology. Ed. C.T. Onions. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1966, p. 754.

22
that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.”28 Here the distinction “to be

expunged” does not mean that what is desired is their unity, since that would mean a negation of

both body and soul, a petrification of their contrariety into a stasis, namely either a synthesis

under the dominion of body or that of soul, or rather their dissolution under a higher being which

cancels both. Here what is meant by “distinct[ion] ... to be expunged” is that the opposition

between body and soul is taken as mutually exclusive and negating. As opposed to this view,

what is projected as possibility is their belonging together in their difference if we heed Blake’s

distinction between “Contrary” and “Negation” in Milton and Jerusalem:

There is Negation & there is a Contrary: The Negation must be destroy’d to redeem
the Contraries.29

Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist; But Negations Exist Not.30

Thus Contraries are regarded as opposites that belong together, whereas Negations are

opposites that exclude each other. Hence body and soul should not be taken as distinct, that is, as

Negations that destroy each other. And such a distinction, that is, Negation “must be destroy’d to

redeem the Contraries”, to mark out their difference which makes them belong together. As in

Saussure’s model of language, each sign is meaningful only because of its difference from other

signs31; a sign is not equivalent to its own identity with itself – “I” is not simply “I” or “not-I”,

“I” is the double movement of “I” and “not-I” in their non-identity and belonging together. The

determination to stay as a monad –as Blake’s Urizen insists on doing– is impossible.32 Hence a

28
Plate 14
29
William Blake. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 180.
30
Ibid., 206.
31
“[…] the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations
with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others not.”
See Ferdinand de Saussure. Course In General Linguistics. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966, p.117.
32
Blake describes Urizen as “That solitary one in Immensity.” And a similar tendency of negation is present in
Urizen’s search’s for “joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation.” See The Book of Urizen. New York:
Dover, 1997, pp. 29-30.

23
fundamental concern for difference is at stake in Blake’s ontology – in this respect, it can be

properly called a dialectics of difference, if we leave aside the synthetic mark of dialectics. Each

element depends on the difference of its opposite force for its existence, on the flux of its

excesses, in order to reach its maximum capacity: the Prolific –reminiscent of an archaic potlatch

economy– is not fully productive without the extravagance of the Devourer; Heaven, without the

pathos exerted on the body by Hell, is merely narcotics for the mind; Good, without the violent

and transformative capacity of Evil (“French Revolution”33) to transform the immediate world, is

only charity and investment in one’s own other worldly fantasy. Thus, for Blake, dialectics is an

irresolvable movement.

Therefore “The Marriage” of heaven and hell is not a final consummation but an

impossibility that paradoxically holds the contraries together in a “fearful symmetry,”34 in what

Maurice Blanchot calls “an unthinkable union and an impossible divorce”: “He accepts hell and

heaven because they each represents necessary values but also because they fight each other. He

associates them with the elements of an eternal struggle, ferments of a relationship that nothing

can stabilize, forces of an irreducible contrast, and this marriage has meaning only insofar as it is

an unthinkable union and impossible divorce.”35

4. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand”: From Immanence to Transcendence

In Plate 3, after introducing the contraries, “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love

and Hate,” Blake moves on to demonstrate how these contraries are exploited as a set of moral

binaries in religious discourse: “From these contraries spring what the religious call Good &

33
Blake welcomed the French Revolution and celebrated it as liberating with his 1791 poem “French Revolution”
despite the violent events that happened in the process.
34
William Blake. “The Tyger”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, 31.
35
Maurice Blanchot. “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. Faux Pas. California: Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 30.

24
Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is

Heaven Evil is Hell.” Blake grants that the duality of “Body & Soul” effectively exists, but he

strictly opposes the idea that human existence can be actually reducible either to material bodily

existence or to ideal spiritual existence; neither body is conceived in an idealist way as a burden

to be get rid of in order to elevate the soul, nor soul is conceived as a spectral illusion springing

from the substance of the body. To put it in other words, the genetic relation between body and

soul is not that of a negation or derivation but of reciprocation. Therefore neither can be

subordinated to one another – both are equally “necessary to Human existence.” However, Blake

sets forth the binaries, to put it in a fashionable phrase, only to “deconstruct” them later on. But

what is at stake in the way we use the term “deconstruction”? Deconstruction makes sense above

its fashionable exploitation if it is understood as an immanent critique that does not bring the

terms of the critique from the outside, from a transcendental ideality (hence one of the ways

Derrida’s “Il n’y a pas de hors-text”36 makes sense apart from its banal sense of textual enclosure

of the meaning).

Likewise Blake does not start his ex-position from a transcendental plane; he first

undertakes a critical analysis of the givens of human existence similar to the way Kant started his

immanent Kritik to lay bare the “conditions of the possibility of knowledge”, that is, the limits of

knowledge – what the human mind is capable of knowing.37 From there, similar to Blake, Kant

ended up with the faculty of judgment’s experience of the sublime, “discordant accord”38 of the

36
“[…] as regards the absence of the referent or the transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text
[there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte].” see Jacques Derrida. “ ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’ ”.
Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 158. (my italics)
37
For the interpretation of Kant’s Critiques as a movement from immanent project to a transcendental one, see
Gilles Deleuze. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. London: Athlone Press, 1984.
38
See Deleuze: “The faculties confront one another, each stretched to its own limit, and find their accord in a
fundamental discord: a discordant accord is the great discovery of the Critique of Judgement, the final Kantian

25
faculties, as a possibility of transcendence from a priori delimitations of the natural and

intellectual world39, which is in a way very similar to where Blake ends up at the end of his

immanent critique: Imagination’s experience of vision as a possibility of transcendence. Both

Kant and Blake situate this fearful passage to transcendence in the subjective experience of

overwhelming objectivity. This movement is aptly expressed in conceptual terms in one of

Blake’s last works, A Vision of the Last Judgment (around 1818): “Whenever any Individual

Rejects Error & Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.” 40 In other words,

when the subject breaks through the natural and spiritual determinations of his existence

(“Error”) and gets in touch with transcendence (“Truth”) he is overwhelmed by the objectivity of

“a Last Judgment”; it “passes upon on that Individual.” The world of Last Judgment which

passes upon the individual is expressed in the same work as follows: “This World of Imagination

is Infinite & Eternal.”41 The transcendent world of imagination is “Infinite & Eternal” in the

sense that sequential space-time determinations cease to apply. But such transcendence is only

possible through immanence, meaning that this is a transcendence that does not negate or sublate

immanence but crosses through it. This can only make sense if we read how such a crossing

through manifests itself in Blake’s poetic experience and practice, which is perhaps best

embodied in the first verses of his poem “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.42

reversal. Separation which reunites was Kant’s first theme, in the Critique of Pure Reason. But at the end he
discovers discord which produces accord.” Ibid., p. xii-xiii.
39
In Blake’s vocabulary, they are called “Vegetative” and “Mental” world respectively.
40
Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 414.
41
Ibid., p. 407.
42
Ibid., p. 380.

26
 On the one hand, transcendence –World, Heaven, Infinity, Eternity– is incarnated and

encapsulated in immanent bodies –Grain of Sand, Wild Flower, palm of the hand, an hour–; on

the other, immanent bodies are possessed and elevated by the transcendence they incarnate.

Hence what is at stake in Blake’s experience of the transcendence, if we dare to say so, is a

peculiar immanent transcendence. But how are we to understand the measure that makes such a

fearful passage possible? There is the whole –at times discontinuous and at times consistent–

story of how this immanent critique finally ends up on a transcendent plane. At least in

theoretical and philosophical terms, it remains almost impossible to explain this momentary and

momentous conjunction between immanence and transcendence. This perhaps takes place each

time again and again as an abysmal journey for Blake himself, and which, in order to be rendered

accountable, if possible, requires a poetizing thinking that performs the same movement and

measure of the poet so as not to systematize or petrify that fearful conjunction. For it is a relation

that every time establishes itself anew and gives itself in infinitely different manifestations

according to the measure of the singular experience. “The nature of this infinity” is a “Vortex,”

and “everything has its Own,”43 which we cannot pass through within the scope and limits of this

study.

5. “Eternal Delight”: Argument at the Limit

Blake can be said to be (to use paradoxical terms to come closer to his paradoxical position)

distrustfully trustful of contraries in that they are, yet again contingently, necessary only in the

effectively real, in other words, discursive and ideological organization of human existence – if

we grant that Blake, in The Marriage, is fundamentally concerned with “melting” the surface

43
See the section on “the nature of infinity” in “Milton”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library,
1991, pp. 138-139.

27
play of contraries “away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” 44 To illuminate Blake’s

sojourn in dichotomies of body and soul, time and space, male and female, good and evil, reason

and energy, by way of a comparison, we can refer to Adorno’s remarks on dialectics as a “wrong

state of things”: “Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the

wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a

contradiction.”45 Likewise, Blake, personifying The voice of the Devil, sets out from an

immanent plane and passes through “the ontology of the wrong state of things” by way of an

argument(ation).

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles, Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is
alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True.46

After the last statement that heralds the correction of dualistic fallacies or “Errors”, one

expects that Blake will announce “the right state of things”; yet he confines himself to giving a

negative image of the “the wrong state of things,” because here he personifies “The Voice of the

Devil” – the contrary of the mouthpiece of religion, the angel. Therefore he, wearing the devil’s

mask, strategically insists on building his argument on contraries –in a modified way– to rival

the hegemony of “Errors” within their own terms. Nevertheless one should keep in mind that for

Blake, “the following Contraries” are also partially “True” since these dualities, although not

taken as mutually exclusive opposites, are still notions of the real or “wrong state of things”;

whereas “the right state of things would be free of” the denominations of duality and

44
Plate 14.
45
Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 11.
46
Plate 4.

28
contradiction peculiar to system-thinking. Besides, if we follow the necessary co-existence of

contraries in Blake’s conception of dialectics, Error, being the contrary of Truth, must be

sustained rather than eliminated. Thus by bringing together Truth and Error, so to speak –by

contrasting what is assumed to be true and false– Blake also aims to prepare the ground for a

visionary existence that is exempt from such dualistic determinations. Hence the following

statements should not be taken as Blake’s final judgment, but tentative and tactical counter-

statements on the subject.

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion
of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or
outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.47

Blake responds to “Errors”, point by point, quite similar to the way medieval theological

treatises refute the heretical readings of the scripture. But here, in using the same method, Blake

–instead of defending orthodoxy– re-appropriates the error to defend a heretical reading, turning

theological method of catechism back against itself. Yet we should acknowledge that there is an

apparent inconsistency in Blake’s contention that body is not only a portion of the soul, namely

secondary to soul but also constitutes basic element of life by being the centre of Energy. But

when we read the argument in full, we will observe that this inconsistency is fundamentally not

determined by a permanent appropriation on Blake’s part but a performative act to infiltrate his

ensuing polemic into the battlefield.

Moving further from the formal or tactical element, we should note (with regard to the

material element) that Blake does not simply contend for the unity of Body and Soul in saying

that “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul.” His response does not call for a final moment of

47
Plate 4.

29
synthesis. Triadic exposition of his response implies a dialectical movement that cuts through the

three points simultaneously without arriving at a synthetic resolution. In other words, the third

point is not the resolution of a syllogistic dialectical process; what we read here is a contradiction

that persists in contradiction, and brings the contradiction to a dead-end without resolution.

To the argument that body and soul are in opposition, Blake’s answer is that “Body is a

portion of Soul” and one has access to soul only through body. To the binary combination of

Energy/Evil and Reason/Good, his answer is that Energy is the main principle of existence and

comes from Body, and Reason is an offshoot of Energy. Here Blake’s argument seems

contradictory. First, he proposes that Body is a portion of the Soul; that is, Body has a derivative

existence with regard to Soul. Second, he argues that Energy which springs from Body is the

main principle of life, and Reason is derivative of this Energy. In the first proposition, Soul

seems to be at the centre of human existence and in the second, Body seems to be at the centre of

the human existence by way of Energy. And in the last proposition, we read a paradoxical

“conclusion”: “Energy is Eternal Delight.” First we learn that energy is a material offshoot of the

body, then we hear the juxtaposition of “Delight” with “Eternity”, the essence of which is

“Energy.” What are we to make of a delight that is eternal? Is it a spiritualization of energy that

is assumed to be material? Or is it ironing out the question of dualism by hypostatizing material

energy for soul? These questions and contradictions we must leave aside now, since Blake has

plenty of things to announce in the following sections in response to these contradictions and

questions. Nevertheless, one can certainly say that Blake is quite dissatisfied with the

petrification of these hierarchical categories, with their turning into doctrines or Errors; and

perhaps that’s why these propositions end in an incomplete way with contradictory remarks. And

30
perhaps it is precisely the point that in logical argumentation incompletion is taken to be

contradictory, whereas error remains at the centre of this questioning.

6. From the “Outward Circumference” of Metaphysics to the Innermost Core of Onto-

theo-logy

At the end of Plate 3, the text is spurred to the limit where the exigency of aphorism and

visionary allegory48 comes to the stage immediately after these propositions fail to deconstruct

metaphysically informed categories and hierarchies. That is to say, logical argumentation, at its

limit, disintegrates into opposite forms of writing – aphorism and memorable fancy. Plate 4,

which is composed of arguments, closes with a quasi-aphoristic statement: “Energy is Eternal

Delight.” And Plate 5 opens with the following aphorism: “Those who restrain desire, do so

because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” The quasi-aphoristic epigram “Energy is Eternal

Delight” can be conceived as a bridge that connects and at the same separates the two forms of

discourse: argumentation and aphorism. After the aphorism that opens Plate 5, the discourse

again turns to a form of argumentation. There follows Plate 6, which introduces the first

Memorable Fancy that interrupts the argumentative discourse in Plate 5 (the Memorable Fancy

starts on the second half of the illuminated page). Likewise, at various crucial moments in The

48
Blake makes a distinction between “Allegory” and “Vision” in A Vision of the Last Judgment. He deems allegory
to be an “inferior kind of Poetry” related to “Moral Virtues” that operates through dualities; whereas vision as a
“Representation of what Eternally Exists.” But he also grants that “Fable or Allegory is seldom without some
Vision.” If we take into account that the Memorable Fancy sections are marked by Blake’s agenda of parodying
Swedenborgian allegory and at the same time by the visionary interpretation and sight that challenge the dualistic
dogmas of allegory, the oxymoron of “visionary allegory” becomes justifiable. And this also demonstrates the
heterogeneous form of the Memorable Fancy sections, much as Blake avowedly tries to sterilize his visionary poetry
from allegory. In the very title Memorable Fancy we can read this juxtaposition of allegory and vision. Blake says of
allegory: “Fable or Allegory is Form’d by the daughters of Memory.” He alternately uses “visionary fancy” to refer
to “imagination”: “The Nature of Visionary Fancy, or Imagination.” From now on this heterogeneous form will be
referred as “memorable fancy” after the eponymous sections.

31
Marriage, aphorism comes to the stage to define the limits of argumentation or memorable

fancy. As Derrida puts it, aphorism marks the delimitation of and separation from a discourse:

As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks dissociation (apo), it

terminates, delimits, arrests (horizo). It brings to an end by separating, it separates
in order to end – and to define [finir – et definir] … An aphorism is exposure to
contretemps. It exposes discourse – hands it over to contretemps. Literally –
because it is abandoning a word [une parole] to its letter.49

With a similar operation, Blake’s aphorisms and memorable fancies, which present a

condensed counter-interpretation of religious dogmas, attempt to disclose Judeo-Christian

metaphysical hierarchies – which comes closer on conceptual terms to Heidegger’s de-

structuring of the “the onto-theo-logical constitution” of Western metaphysics and Nietzsche’s

genealogical investigation of moral binaries. In other words, Blake exposes the metaphysical

binaries to a counter-discourse, therefore to a “counter-time”, to which they belong but are

transposed in a reversed way. Hence, the rhetorical forms undertaken in the first two sections

inform the way the contextual network aphorisms and memorable fancies operate in the

remaining part of the work: as negative image of onto-theo-logical argumentation, ironic

appropriation of the self-evident biblical proverbial proposition, and critical appropriation of

Swedenborgian allegory.

First of all, the “onto-theo-logical constitution” of metapyhsical binaries that also stands

at the center of Blake’s polemics requires some explanation here. Although it is not a term Blake

himself used but admittedly, in different appellations, a historical and philosophical template he

fought against, the term bears some gravity for understanding the metaphysical constructs Blake

attempts to undo.

49
Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism Countertime”. Acts of Literature. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 416.

32
 A term Heidegger formulated, “onto-theo-logy” denotes the hierarchical stratification of

Being and beings in the Western metaphysical thinking – included are varieties of religious and

secular traditions of thought. That which characterizes onto-theo-logical constitution is the

notion of a divine being or primal substance that stands as the origin of all beings, unifying the

diversity of beings. This way of thinking postulates the cosmos as hierarchical layers, on the top

of which is the Divine Creator or Substance as the cause of its own (causa sui); the further we go

down, the further away we are from Divine Essence. Each layer precedes the other, and there is a

hierarchical dependency between the layers. Each layer is respectively derivative of the origin

which is its own cause and stands as the ground of the rest. We observe the same structure of

thinking throughout the whole western metaphysics, beginning from Plato and Aristotle, moving

into medieval theology, and consummated in various forms in modern philosophy. Even in

secular philosophical discourses, various essences or origins are postulated as the unifying

Ground of grounds: Cogito, Nature, Spirit, Idea, Human, Nothing etc. Throughout the history of

metaphysics, a primal being/essence (on) is rationalized (logos) and deified (theos) to account for

the ground of beings, and made into the essential truth of Being. This recurrent structure is

termed as “onto-theo-logy” by Heidegger.

Ontology, however, and theology are “Logies” inasmuch as they provide the
ground of beings as such and account for them within the whole. They account for
Being as the ground of beings. They account to the Logos, and are in an essential
sense in accord with the Logos, that is they are the logic of the Logos. Thus they
are more precisely called onto-logic and theo-logic. More rigorously and clearly
thought out, metaphysics is: onto-theo-logic. 50

50
Martin Heidegger. “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics”. Identity and Difference. New York:
Harper & Rows, 1969, p. 59. Towards the end of the essay Heidegger speaks of a “god-less thinking” as opposed to
onto-theo-logical thinking: “The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is
thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only; god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-
logic would like to admit.” (p. 72) In plate 11 (covered in chapter 10 of this study) Blake offers another alternative
to the god of onto-theo-logy.

33
 And it is only by reproducing or falling back upon such a constitution that certain binary

oppositions are put to use and misuse by various secular and religious metaphysics (proceeding

from the idea of onto-theo-logy, even such a difference as religious and secular dissolves – one

God/Ground is replaced by another). That is to say, the metaphysical gesture that a ground

precedes another or a ground becomes derivative of the other by way of its proximity to the

primal Ground is repeated by systems of binary thinking: “Soul” precedes “Body”, “Good”

precedes “Evil”, “Reason” precedes “Energy”, “Heaven” precedes “Hell”. As for the reasoning

behind such thinking: a Creator or the primal Ground, being eternal and immutable, cannot be

made of a finite Body; and a being as generous as to create the cosmos from his own being,

cannot be maliciously Evil; and giving measure to the beings and the relation among them,

cannot have chaotic Energy; and epitomizing the ideal of harmony and peace, cannot contain a

flaming Hell. The primal Ground is always posited as eternal, pure and perfect since, being the

Origin (arkhe) and its own cause (causa sui), it would be exposed to impurity and frailty if it

contained any “negative” quality, thus would not be deemed as an absolutely autonomous origin

as such. With such implicit presuppositions, Judeo-Christian thinking idealized one extreme of

existence, therefore moralized and subordinated the other. In other words, it is by such

“hierarchical axiology,” as Derrida puts it, “the ethical-ontological distinctions which do not

merely set up value-oppositions clustered around an ideal and unfindable limit, but moreover

subordinate these values to each other,”51 that every religious and secular metaphysics is

permeated.52

51
Jacques Derrida. “Limited Inc a b c . . .”. Limited Inc.. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988. p. 93.
52
According to Derrida, building upon Heidegger and Nietzsche’s insights in this respect, such hierarchical axiology
is not merely one aspect of the metaphysical systems, but it constitutes the heart of what he calls “metaphysical
exigency”: “All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way,
conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the

34
7. “Redeeming the Contraries”: A Genealogy of Reason and Desire

There can be no doubt that Blake consciously thinks and writes against this “metaphysical

exigency” when he makes a radical attempt to reclaim –rather than synthetic-speculative

dialectics– a differential dialectic between Body and Soul, Energy and Reason, Evil and Good,

Hell and Heaven, Devils and Angels, Satan and Messiah. However, reading or interpreting the

metaphysical history of beings, in which the degraded and disqualified pole has always been

silenced for the sake of the other, Blake now and then (and no wonder) foregrounds the

disadvantaged party, “the Devil’s party,” at the expense of forging a reversed metaphysics. On

plate 5, where Blake reconfigures the metaphysically oriented binary opposites, the upside down

figures of man and horse beholding the flaming fire below them perhaps illuminates such a

reversal.53 But let us also note that these figures are not completely sunk into fire, they are

portrayed as suspended over the fire, implying that the reversal is only provisional and is not

meant to destroy the opposite camp. Therefore such gestures can be said to signify a suspended

reversal throughout Blake’s “Argument” with metaphysical discourses. From plate 5 onwards,

Blake sets in force his suspending hermeneutics, through which he aims to expose the

determinations of Judeo-Christian metaphysical discourse that has narrativized the history of

human existence in antithetical terms that negate each other. Accordingly, for Blake, contraries –

if they are not posited as negative antithetical terms– must be maintained. But the very

deployment of the contraries as negations must be investigated. So we should again mark the

difference between contraries and negations in Blake’s writings. The difference between the two

is expressed as follows in Jerusalem: “Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist;

complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one
metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most
profound and most potent.” Ibid. p.93
53
See Figure 2 at the end.

35
But Negations Exist Not.”54 And in Milton, he expresses the necessity of “redeem[ing] the

Contraries” from the manacles of the negations: “There is Negation & there is a Contrary: The

Negation must be destroy’d to redeem the Contraries.”55 Such a clear formulation of the

polemics in later works retrospectively illuminates the necessity of genealogical investigation

with regard to the deployment of contraries as negations. Blake did it in The Marriage in many

instances, as we read in his interpretation of desire and reason in Plate 5-6.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained;

and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being
restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The
history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is called
Messiah. And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the
heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan, his children are call’d Sin & Death.
But in the Book of Job, Milton’s Messiah is call’d Satan. For this history has been
adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out.56

Accordingly, Blake’s effective polemic starts with various historical accounts which posit

contraries as negations; that is to say, reason and desire are contraries, but they are falsely

transposed as negations that contradict each other; “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was

cast out.” Blake implies that it appeared so because various moralizing narratives made it appear

so. Therefore, the critical act that takes place here can be termed as a “genealogy”, more

properly, a “moral genealogy” of desire and reason, in other words, a perspectivist account of

desire and reason as both cause and effect in their reciprocal discursive formation. Hence, in this

section, Blake attempts to foreground the “gray” regions that remained hidden between black-

and-white accounts of reason and desire, which is the task of the “genealogist of morals”

according to Nietzsche:

54
William Blake. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 206.
55
Ibid., p. 180.
56
Plate 5.

36
 For it must be obvious which colour is a hundred times more vital for a
genealogist of morals than blue: namely gray, that is, what is documented, what
can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long
hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind!57

With a kindred motivation and method, Blake attempts to lay bare the narratives that

moralized desire and reason as antithetical forces that negate and exclude each other. As opposed

to these narratives, Blake follows a true genealogical strategy, a perspectivist one par excellence;

thus he opposes different narratives of reason and desire in which desire is championed over

reason (or vice versa), or in which desire wears the mask of Messiah and reason that of Satan (or

vice versa). To relay the stakes in precise terms: on the one hand, Milton champions Messiah as

Reason over Satan as Desire, and posits Desire as the culprit of the fall; whereas in the Book of

Job, Messiah as Desire is championed over Satan as Reason, and the culprit of the fall is posited

as Reason. Hence one story is the reversed image of the other (“For this history has been adopted

by both parties”58), which demonstrates the arbitrariness of attributing, once and for all, Desire or

Reason either to Messiah or to Satan, hence the absurdity of moralizing Reason or Desire as

good or evil in the figures of Messiah or Satan. Blake’s point is that such strict categorizations

operate only for the benefit of certain discourses and to the detriment of the strict separation of

contraries, which ends up making them negations that seemingly exclude each other: “It indeed

appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out.” For this reason, Blake brings up a third story from

the Gospel, which illustrates that Desire and Reason, rather than excluding each other, belongs

together in the figure of Jesus: “He prays to the Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that

Reason may have Ideas to build on.” In Blake’s interpretation of the Gospel, Reason, rather than

denouncing its contrary (Desire), calls for it in order to “have Ideas to build on”; in other words,

57
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage, 1989, p. 21.
58
Following quotes in this chapter are from Plate 5-6.

37
the task of Reason –which produces “Ideas”– is only possible with the presence of Desire.

Adjunct to this interpretation, Jehovah is re-construed as the one “who dwells in flaming fire.” In

this vision of Jehovah, on the one hand, God is subjected to the very wrathful fires which Bible

claims that He inflicts on people; on the other hand, the traditional image of Satan as dwelling in

flames is transposed to God himself. And after his death Christ becomes none other than this

God himself: “Know that after Christ’s death, he became Jehovah.” As opposed to this intricate

and dynamic matrix of transpositions and metamorphoses, Milton’s supposedly rebellious vision

of the trinity remains static, traditional and dogmatic: “But in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the

Son a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost Vacuum!” However, with a final note, Blake,

instead of condemning, therefore negating Milton, redeems him. Blake affirms that Milton as “a

true poet” originally did not mean to make such strict categorizations and to construct negations.

While Milton avowedly stands with the Angel’s party, he viscerally belonged to “Devil’s party”

by writing about “Devils & Hell” in ecstasy.

8. “Petrific Chaos”: (De-)Mythologizations

We can recapitulate these histories of reason and desire also as mythologies of reason and desire,

or as dialectics through which reason and desire are mythologized. This was the object of

Blake’s immanent genealogical investigation. For this reason, we do not see any further or

transcendental point as to how this relation between desire and reason might be construed. In The

Marriage, although Blake intimates a possibility of “a marriage” between reason and desire

through different interpretive and rhetorical strategies, he does not establish a new mythology for

the conjunction between contraries; rather he is preoccupied with exposing the premises that

caused an ideological disjunction between them. Through this exposition of the ideological

presuppositions, it can be argued that Blake paves the way for his attempts at mythical

38
figurations in his later works. In this regard, The Book of Urizen perhaps signifies the genesis of

such an attempt through which we can discuss the problem of “mythology” in Blake’s work. It is

important to touch upon this issue, for it plays a crucial role in understanding the various acts of

demythologization operative in The Marriage. But first of all, the mention of “mythology” in

quotation marks (or suspension) carries a significance that should be touched upon. Because

taken as a mythological narrative and symbolic figurations to replace the Judeo-Christian

mythologies, Blake’s later mythical works are allegorized away through archetypes and lexical

symbolic systems. Although such interpretations are not erroneous in themselves, they fail to

take into account the simultaneous operation and disoperation of the myth in Blake’s poetry. And

by simply calling it “mythology” without reservation, they unwittingly fall in the trap of mytho-

logizing Blake – producing mindless amalgamations of mythos and logos. As a result, any

attempt to mythologize the figurations in Blake’s poetry ultimately proves itself untenable.59

As is evident from its etymological root, mythology (logos affixed to mythos), taken in

its proper meaning, denotes a logos-ized mythos, in other words, mythos articulated within the

59
Alexander Gourlay, in the “Glossary” he prepared for The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, also admits
the absurdity of systematizing the figurations of the names in Blake’s poetry. It is worth to quote the entry in full
since it is upon this entry on “name” that the whole Blake glossary and the mytho-logical interpretations based on
petrified symbols and meanings collapse. “When Blake created characters he invited us to think about them as
people, and to imagine their words and deeds as those of human beings somewhat like ourselves. He provided no
glossaries to explain their names or tell us what they ‘really’ represent, even though he must have expected that
readers would find the names confusing, alarming, amusing, or sublime. Many of his characters correspond roughly
to more familiar beings from various mythologies, but renaming them suggests that Blake hoped we would start
afresh with them as characters, before someone has told us who they are and what they mean. At the same time,
most of his characters are multivalent allegorical beings corresponding simultaneously to such things as mental
faculties, emotions, psychological categories, political figures or positions, geographical entities, body parts, and so
forth. Consider the various polyglot etymologies that have been proposed for their names, though many of them
appear to be puns in English with echoes of familiar names from other mythologies. But one should also savor the
human dramas in which Blake’s characters interact before allegorizing them away. One more caveat: Blake’s
characters may change in radical fashion, especially when separated from their emanations, and characters from
one context may be presented from a very different perspective elsewhere, even in the same work, and may be known
by several different names; this glossary greatly oversimplifies such complexities.” (my italics) See The Cambridge
Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 280-281.

39
limits of logos, as it were, logicized mythos, in Blakean terms, “petrific [...] chaos.”60 It should

also be marked that the term mythology is a modern coinage; it has come to mean a systematic

symbolization of meaning and values ascribed to divinities and beings in the cosmos. Such

mythology, as fabricated and systematized by modern scholarship, and materialized in

handbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedies of mythology, conceals the original meaning and

function of myth developed in Blake’s poetry, where myths do not petrify into static and

definitive lexical meanings or significations. Myths are not reified into signs and symbols to the

end of dramatizing a pre-conceived narrative – even when it is the case, such moments merely

mark a peremptory drama only to be disintegrated in the later stages. Hence Blakean myth is not

the myth of a scholarly constructed mytho-logy or that of a monotheistic objectification. Read in

these terms, and also based on our reading of the contraries in The Marriage and elsewhere, the

appellation of mythology seems inimical to what Blake performs in his poetry.

In The Book of Urizen, various mythical figures –Urizen and the Eternals– hardly succeed

at establishing or crystallizing themselves in permanent forms once and for all. Each time Urizen

attempts to impose a system or attempt to “petrify the chaos”, the imposed order encounters a

violent resistance. Besides, the system enforced by Urizen equally imposes on himself and

causes him to suffer from his own impositions. W.J.T. Mitchell aptly expresses this dialectical

movement of the contrary processes in the following way:

The basic pattern of Urizen’s activity may be described most simply as a

paradoxical process of contraction and expansion, unification and fragmentation.
His institution of a homogeneous, static order of “One Law” is simultaneously the
creation of multiplicity and disorder. Each re-enactment of this central pattern
involves the same impulse to retreat into the self, or confine the other. Both

60
William Blake. The Book of Urizen. New York: Dover, 1997, p. 29.

40
 impulses amount to an attempt at unification or solidification, and both imply a
division or fragmentation.61

Thus a mythic figuration cannot succeed in congealing itself into mytho-logy and when

it can do so, it is erected as “a Tent” called “Science”62 or as a “Net of Religion”63 which bring

simultaneously “unification and fragmentation.” What happens in Urizen can also be formulated

as a dialectic between mythos and logos. By keeping it in a dialectical movement, Blake resists

the mytho-logization of the relation between mythos and logos. Because such mythologization

would lead to a predominance of abstract and general symbols at the expense of concrete and

individual particularities that originally constitute the irresolvable dialectic of creation and

destruction that characterizes the cosmos of The Book of Urizen.

In a similar vein, Adorno speaks of negative dialectics’ siding with the particularities and

its resistance to mythologization: “Dialectics inclines to content because the content is not

closed, not predetermined by a skeleton; it is a protest against mythology.”64 In Blake’s case, the

dialectical protest works both through and against mythology. For such protest takes place in

The Book of Urizen as a dialectical process that enmeshes itself in the abstractions mythology

imposes on existence. By implication, a vision of existence without mythological enclosures can

only be possible when one passes through myth and goes to the limit of mythology. Indeed,

going to the limit of mythology is no different from what, in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics,

becomes an imperative of crossing abstraction in order to reach concretion: “one had to ‘cross

the frozen waste of abstraction to arrive at concise, concrete philosophizing.’”65

61
W.J.T. Mitchell. “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s The Book of Urizen”. Eighteen-Century Studies,
Vol. 3, No. 1, Special Issue: The Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Autumn, 1969), p. 93.
62
The Book of Urizen. New York: Dover, 1997, p. 37.
63
Ibid., p. 41.
64
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 56.
65
Ibid., p. xix. Adorno cites Walter Benjamin’s remark on his immanent epistemological critique.

41
 The cyclical drama of creation and destruction in the Book of Urizen testifies to this

process: “A seventh Age passed over, And a state of dismal woe.” 66 The same line –with a

variation of number– is repeated seven times from plate 13 to 15. Each time the chaos is

contained by a set of vessels created by Urizen or the Eternals, these containers are violently

exploded by unknown forces intrinsic to the chaotic universe. Each time an order is established,

it degenerates into a chimerical myth. That is to say, logos reverts back to its other, myth, and

vice versa, which is reminiscent of the way Adorno and Horkheimer express the dialectical circle

between reason and myth: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step

enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.”67 In other words, myth petrifies into

reason, and reason reverts to myth. Blake, well aware of this schema, on the one hand, is in

pursuit of a dynamic myth that does not petrify into imposed reason; on the other a dynamic

reason that does not revert back to chimerical myth. But the conjunction of mythos and logos

usually means the subsuming of the one under the other, the cloak of the one put on by the other.

But as for Blake’s conception of myth and reason, one can argue that what has been so far called

Blakean mythology in scholarly discourse –when stripped of its scholarly cloak– can be properly

called Blakean mytho-poetics. For what is envisioned by Blake can only carry an appellation that

covers the dynamic and creative mytho-poesis at work in his poetry. Admittedly, this mytho-

poesis carries a partly ideal or utopian character that does not realize itself completely in Blake’s

visionary writings. Nevertheless, one can read the circles of destruction and creation, and the

clash between the Eternals and Urizen, as an attempt to keep such dynamism between myth and

reason.

66
The Book of Urizen, New York: Dover, 1997, p. 35.
67
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. California: Stanford University Press,
2002, p. 8.

42
 Accordingly, such conception of myth, in mytho-poetic terms, can be regarded as an

attempt to redeem the myth from its ideological yokes, which intimates the possibility of making

sense of the universe and human existence through mytho-poetic creation by emancipating it

from the enclosures of the logicized myths (“Net of Religion”) or mythified logos (“Tent of

Science”). On the other hand, the Janus-faced conception of myth as both destructive and

creative force also implies a tragic understanding of myth – a tragic consciousness of myth with

regard to the impossibility of myth’s giving a permanent meaning to existence. Hence with such

consciousness, myth is driven to its extreme limit – “absence of myth.” Bataille argues that

Blake’s poetry is both a response to the impossibility of taking over previous mythical structures

and to the impossibility of establishing a new one.

Blake’s mythology generally introduced the problem of poetry. When poetry

expresses the myths which tradition proposes to it, it is not autonomous: it does
not contain sovereignty within itself. It humbly illustrates the legend whose form
and meaning can exist without it. […]Thus autonomous poetry, even if it only
appears to be the creation of a myth, is a mere absence of myth. Indeed, this world
in which we live no longer engenders new myths, and the myths which poetry
seems to establish only really reveal the void, unless they are objects of faith. To
talk of Enitharmon is not to reveal the truth about Enitharmon. One might almost
say that it is to admit the absence of Enitharmon in a world to which poetry
summons him in vain.68

For someone like Blake who is aware of the “Chasmal [sic], Abysmal, Incoherent” nature

of “the Mundane Shell,”69 the “absence of myth” means, on the one hand, a fundamental

disbelief towards the idea that existence can make sense once and for all, and on the other, a

historically situated consciousness that we can no longer make sense of the world through myths

regardless of their being ancient or modern. And on a third level, in a world and a historical

period in which ways of making sense of the world have deteriorated into ideological constructs

68
George Bataille. “William Blake”. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 2006, p. 85.
69
William Blake. “Jerusalem”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 200.

43
(“Tent of Science”, “Net of Religion”), an imperative to claim to be the subject of one’s own

existence, to be the creator of one’s own meaning, is called for in Jerusalem: “I must Create a

System or be enslaved by another Man’s.”70

9. The “Infernal Wisdom” of the Memorable Fancy and the Proverbs of Hell

Blake’s dialogic memorable fancies –especially the second and last “Memorable Fancy”– and

idiosyncratic aphorisms –especially those of the “Proverbs of Hell”– in The Marriage

retrospectively illuminates his imperative to create a system. But lest it be figured as a subterfuge

to replace or regurgitate previous systems, this peculiar imperative to create a system should be

read: first, as an immanent critical project to situate existing systems, that is, as an imperative to

lay bare the assumptions and premises that underlie systematicity of all systems. If we are to

articulate the stakes of this venture in a condensed expression, the stasis of all systematologies;

thus the Devil gives an anti-systematic interpretation of the ten commandments in the last

“Memorable Fancy”:

now hear how he [Jesus Christ] has given his sanction to the law of ten
commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God?
Murder those who were murder’d because of him? Turn away the law from the
woman taken in adultery? Steal the labor of others to support him? Bear false
witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? Covet when he pray’d
for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against
such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking
these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from
rules.71

Second, Blake’s venture operates as a subversive hermeneutics to suspend and de-structure

hegemonic systems through their counterparts; in other words, as an exigency to expose such

systems to counter-time and counter-discourse; thus the proverb reads: “Prisons are built with the

70
Ibid., p. 194.
71
Plate 23.

44
stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”72 Third, as a poetic resoluteness to create its

own authentic operation of systematicity, and simultaneously as a poetic negativity to un-create

in itself the disoperation and destruction of such holding together as system; that is to say, a

negative dialectical movement between will to system and call to anti-system:

But the first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul to be expunged;
this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are
salutary and medicinal, melting appearances away, and displaying the infinite
which was hid.”73 (my italics)

These epistemological, hermeneutic and ontological projects do not necessarily follow a

causal or cumulative sequence, namely, from simple to complex or from empirical to

metaphysical; these three types of critiques belong together and operate in The Marriage and

elsewhere in Blake’s oeuvre in different combinations and juxtapositions. The performance of

these different types of critical acts can be observed upon reading those sections in which they

operate effectively.

The first Memorable Fancy74 introduces the “Infernal wisdom” of hell as opposed to the

sterile wisdom of angels. This “Infernal wisdom” is collected in proverbs by the narrator of the

Memorable Fancy. Proverbs are chosen as the source of this wisdom: “As the sayings used in a

nation mark its character.” By definition, proverbs are witty clichés and generalizations that

enable one to understand the effective reality of a culture in practical terms. The choice of

proverbs as a way of introducing hell and its “Infernal wisdom” can be compared to the work of

an insider ethnologist who learns the norms and practices of a culture by learning its language

and dwelling among the natives – as the saying goes, by “going native.” This approach can be

contrasted with Swedenborg’s encounter with and reaction to the divine realms of his visions.

72
Plate 7.
73
Plate 14.
74
Plate 6-7.

45
Instead of “going native,” learning orally and practically, Swedenborg takes a distance towards

the strange regions of heaven and hell. With the approach of a scientist who works analytically

and with the method of a stereotypical philosopher who relates to the outer world with a

theoretical gaze, Swedenborg observes, describes, measures, analyses, and categorizes the

heavenly realms of his visions.75 Hence those places and beings he encounters turn into the

objective data and information that an outsider anthropologist collects and systematizes for

scholarly use – and possibly for colonial abuse. What motivates Swedenborg to such

objectification is undoubtedly his ambition of objectivity and demonstration. As opposed to

Swedenborg’s scientific objectivity of an outsider anthropologist, Blake is driven to a method

characterized by the subjective perspective of an insider ethnologist. This approach not only

carries no claim to any objectivity but also mocks the spurious objectivity of Swedenborg’s

method.

[…] so the Proverbs of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any
description of buildings or garments. When I came home, on the abyss of the five
senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty
Devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rock: with corroding
fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved [sic] by the minds of men, &
read by them on earth.76 (my italics)

Although the proverbial sayings given by Blake seem less material and concrete than the

unmediated phenomenological outcomes of Swedenborg’s method, Blake is closer to conveying

the gist of his visionary explorations. First of all, unlike Swedenborg, he does not pretend to be a

permanent dweller in the divine realms of which he has a vision. For Blake, vision is always

grounded on the empirical earthly existence without which one can only speak of “fancy”

abstractions. For instance, Blake’s Milton is founded upon a dialectical movement between

75
See chapter 2 of this study for the contrast between Swedenborg and Blake.
76
Plate 6-7.

46
visionary inspiration and authorial inscription, between visionary topography and earthly

geography: “Reach’d to the depths of direst Hell & thence to Albion’s Land, / Which is this earth

of vegetation on which now I write.”77 Thus the vision is grounded on the “abyss of the five

senses,” and the “present world” is not merely an appearance or copy of those beings of the

divine realms, as is the case for Swedenborg’s correspondences. Moreover, Swedenborg’s

correspondences claim to objectively accommodate the divine realm in human terms, which is

not the case for Blake. This observation leads us to Blake’s infamous “Proverbs of Hell”, here

and there quoted out of context in snippets as justificatory aphorisms.

But before the proverbs, there is the “mighty Devil”s message that is read as an interlude

between the “Memorable Fancy” and the “Proverbs of Hell”: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird

that cuts the airy way, /Is an immense world of delight clos’d by your senses five?”78 The

statement written in “corroding fires” on the one hand illuminates the impenetrable alterity of a

non-human experience that is impervious to the human sense-perception. On the other, coming

from Hell by mediation of the Devil, in contradistinction to the divine words of Heaven that

elucidate the earthly existence of beings human and non-human, this “corroding” statement and

the following proverbs can be read as aiming both, for a good reason, to obfuscate and illuminate

the open region of existence supposedly disclosed by the divine words transmitted by Angels

from Heaven.

Hence these proverbs do not merely mean to illuminate and inform what is already

known or partially intuited in a concise and digestible form, as is expected from wisdom-saying,

but also to de-illuminate and de-inform the self-evident facts and clichés established over time.

Hence the proverbs of hell deliver these facts and clichés to a counter-setting and counter-time,

77
Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, 138.
78
Plate 7.

47
finally to a counter-wisdom; as the proverb puts it: “Improvement makes strait roads; but the

crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”79

We can follow the force of counter-wisdom through the first proverbs of the Proverbs of

Hell. The first proverb reads: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”80 “Seed

time”, namely spring, conventionally signifies the season people go out and sow, but the proverb

commends us to “learn”, that is, stay inside and gather. The harvest season, which is summer or

autumn, signifies the period people collect the productions of their work, but proverb commends

us to “teach”, that is, to give and distribute rather than take or gather. Winter signifies the season

people usually brood at home out of cold and dark weather, but the proverb commends us to

“enjoy.” What is the point of these counter-intuitive statements beyond gratuitous subversion of

customary practice and wisdom?

A possible answer can be conjectured with reference to the following proverbs that

subvert customary ways to wisdom. First we read: “The road of excess leads to the palace of

wisdom.”81 In philosophical and religious doctrines, wisdom and its supposedly spontaneous

outcome happiness are associated with moderation and measure, but the proverb argues on the

contrary that what leads to wisdom is “excess.” Second we read: “Prudence is a rich ugly old

maid courted by Incapacity.”82 Prudence is by definition the capacity to behave with common

sense and to restrain oneself from excessive acts, but the proverb compares it to a wealthy

spinster accompanied by lack of desire; by implication, to someone who represses his or her

desire. Then we read: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”83 In reference to the

proverbs about restraining desire in order to reach wisdom or prudence, this proverb

79
Plate 10.
80
Plate 7.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.

48
demonstrates the adverse effect of the traditionally recommended spiritual discipline that is said

to pave the way for wisdom. In other words, for the traditional way of wisdom, being common-

sensical and rational stipulates the repression of willing and desire. But such wisdom, on the

contrary, inevitably “breeds” unwholesome psychic complications by blocking the venting of the

desire, which results in –articulating avant la lettre Nietzsche’s account of origin of bad

conscience– the internalization of instincts: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves

outwardly turn inward – this is what I call the internalization of man […] all those instincts of

wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself.”84

Blake’s proverbial diagnosis is called “pestilence” for the good reason that the word

implies an infectious disease; meaning, the repression of one’s own desire might easily negate or

infect the other’s desire through the self-imposed internalization of the desire that one has for the

other, or through the moral injunction to condemn those who do not internalize their desire. Then

what we read in this proverb is a certain economy of desire invested in the name of wisdom but

returned with interest as pestilent sickness, much to the chagrin of the wisdom which is supposed

to serve human well-being.

Perhaps upon these grounds one can affirm that impulse and the imperative of counter-

wisdom in the proverbs are motivated by a distrust of the bettering wisdom that is founded upon

erroneous assumptions; that is to say, such wisdom or Reason, as acquired at the expense and

exclusion of desire or Energy, is likely to produce more harm than improvement to human

existence. In other words, a wisdom that thrives upon the negation of contraries is clearly against

the fundamental commitment of The Marriage to the contrary terms of human existence, which

call for the negotiation of contraries rather than their negation. Blake’s fundamental antagonism

to such exclusionary wisdom is repeated in many instances throughout his poetic output; for
84
Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage, 1989, pp. 84-85.

49
instance, a statement from one of his late works, A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810), reads as

follows:

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their
Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their
Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but
Realities of Intellect, from which All Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal
Glory.85

In this respect, the counter-wisdom declared in the proverbs does not mean a downright

denunciation of wisdom. Rather, wisdom should be complemented by a counter-wisdom, namely

by its contrary, lest the dethroned common wisdom merely be succeeded by its opposite, which

will no doubt lead to similar disturbing repercussions. This gives us yet another way to make

sense of the marriage of heavenly wisdom and infernal counter-wisdom that the title “Marriage

of Heaven and Hell” implies. Within this frame, the exclamation that closes the Proverbs section

(“Enough! or Too much!”)86 can perhaps give us a key to multi-faceted reading of the other

proverbs; that is to say, one should read them with the “Enough!” (measure) of heavenly wisdom

and “Too much” (excess) of infernal wisdom to make sense of their ambivalent proverbial

significance.

Such a reading strategy can also be found in the proverbs that posit contraries as

interdependent or complementary terms. For instance: “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise

man sees.”87 Read in the terms of heavenly wisdom, the proverb says that wise man sees more or

better than a fool does. But following the infernal counter-wisdom, one can also say that the wise

man also fails to see the tree from the perspective of a fool. Hence the wise man should also

become a fool to see the world from a different perspective; an imperative suggested in another

85
Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 420.
86
Plate 10.
87
Plate 7.

50
proverb: “If others had not been foolish, we should be so.”88 We can read a similar ambivalence

in another proverb where the contraries operate in the same way: “You never know what is

enough unless you know what is more than enough.”89 Read from the perspective of heavenly

wisdom, the proverb says that one should admit excess ultimately as a limit to “what is enough”

against “more than enough.” Read from the perspective of infernal counter-wisdom, the excess

becomes the measure that decides “what is enough,” so it stands not as a negative limit to be

abstained from, but as a positive limit to be experienced so as to have a measure of both the limit

and excess.

Nevertheless, the illumination at the end of the Proverbs of Hell tells something else

regarding the interaction of heavenly wisdom and infernal counter-wisdom.90 A reddish devil (of

counter-wisdom, perhaps) mediates the roll written by two angels (of wisdom, perhaps). The

devil points at the page with his index finger and faces the angel on the left. The devil either

gives directions or dictates his words to the angel; namely, the words of counter-wisdom written

by a scribe of wisdom. Or one can also say that first the words of wisdom are written by the

angel on the left; second the devil, with his finger, turns them into counter-wisdom, third the

angel on the right tries to see the “original” page/wisdom of the angel on the left, but gets partly

hindered by the devil and partly sees through the devil’s wings. Accordingly, the original text of

wisdom goes under double erasure; first by the devil, second by the angel on the right (perhaps

the first angel’s double). The resulting text becomes a multi-layered hieroglyphic without an

original script, on which wisdom and counter-wisdom appears to be intimately intertwined and

inevitably divorced as the ambivalent juxtaposition of angels and devil illustrate.

88
Plate 9.
89
Ibid.
90
See Figure 3 at the end.

51
10. “Abstract Mental Deities” vs. “Deities in the Human Breast”

In Plate 11, Blake carries out a genealogical investigation of the systematic religions of priestly

origin and contrasts them with poetical conception of the sacred, which is grounded in the

existence and dwelling of human beings on earth. Blake gives a concise account of the shift from

the poetic conception of deities to the priestly conception of the Gods:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling
them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous sense
could perceive [sic].
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under
its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by
attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began
Priesthood.
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.91 (my
italics)

According to Blake’s account, the poetic experience of nature “animates” the entities in

nature by endowing them with “Gods or Geniuses”, that is, sacred spiritual existences. Thus the

spiritual and material plane is not conceived as disjointed stratification but as a composite

figuration that incorporates both into the dwelling of human beings on earth. Blake names

particular topographies and collective organizations that comprise the essence of human

habitation on earth: “woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations.” The natural settings where

human beings first came together and formed communities (“woods, rivers, mountains, lakes”)

and the collectivities they formed thereupon (“cities, nations”) characterize the worldly and

existential significance attributed to the sacred by human beings. That is to say, the organization

and experience of the sacred can be said to have laid the ground for the possibility of human

91
Plate 11.

52
dwelling and existence on earth, which shows the immanent character and value of the sacred for

those ancient people. But afterwards “a system was formed,” that is to say, animating poetic

relations and associations between “Geniuses” and “sensible objects,” between “each city &

country” and “its mental deity” came to be petrified into a system. In other words, the experience

of the sacred as an existential relation to organize and make sense of life and the cosmos came

under the yokes of systematic abstract principles that would be exploited as laws of transcendent

Gods, to the interest of those who could make people believe as they believe: “thus began

Priesthood, / And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.”

Two verbs Blake uses interchangeably –“to realize or abstract”– to articulate the

alienation of “mental deities from their objects” carry a paradoxical significance here. On the one

hand –if we read the affinity of the verb “to realize” to the preposition “from” as “realize apart

from or over against”– “to realize deities from their objects” suggests the self-sufficient standing

of the deities on earth, independent of their dwelling object, that is, a material hypostasis of the

spiritual deities on profane plane, which amounts to the reification of deities in sacrilegious

terms – a priestly idolatry par excellence cloaked in spiritual costume. On the other hand, “to

abstract deities from their objects” suggests the self-sufficient standing of the deities above earth

independent of their dwelling object, that is, absolute spiritualization of deities on a

transcendental plane, which amounts to the abstraction of deities to the point of non-existence – a

priestly atheism par excellence cloaked in theistic costume.

In the last line of Plate 11, Blake sets in force the visionary moment that moves beyond

materializing abstraction or abstracting materialization of the deities executed by priestly

religions: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”92 Thus the marking “in

the human breast” can be read as an attempt to dethrone the “abstracted” deities of priestly
92
Ibid.

53
religions from the transcendental plane and to smash the “realized” idol deities of the profane

plane and to reclaim their truth “in the human breast.” The “human breast,” possessing a bodily

immanence and a spiritual transcendence of the heart, becomes the proper dwelling in which

deities are affirmed – a vision that bears the mark of the Blakean marriage as the coexistence of

contraries against the contradictions that negate.

11. “Poetic Genius”: Religion as Art

Following an investigation into the emergence of deities and religions from a historical

perspective, the second Memorable Fancy93 challenges the authenticity of revelation through an

intimate conversation with prophets. Here, the distant historical gaze that discredited the idea of

an abstracted or materialized God is complemented by the intimate perspective of conversation.

Therefore, instead of being content with the explanation stemming from a retrospective gaze into

the history of deities, Blake immerses himself into that history through a conversation with

Jewish prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Hence Blake moves back and forth in time, alternates

between a distant gaze and an instant involvement with the forces effective in the ideological

construction of deities and poetic invention of Gods, which activates the true force of the

dialectical investigation through contrary perspectives of distance and instance, of theoria and

praxis, of history and ethnology.

When Blake questions Isaiah and Ezekiel as to how they “assert that God spoke to them,”

Isaiah responds that his experience is not a revelatory contact with a transcendent God, but a

discovery of “the infinite in every thing,” in Blakean terms, a visionary experience of the eternity

in the world.94 As an adjunct to his task of re-situating and re-figuring the deities in the “human

93
Plate 12-13.
94
Plate 12.

54
breast”, Blake at once de-grounds a heavenly origination of the sacred, at the same time affirms

its immanent genesis through “Poetic Genius”95 – to put it in the words of Ezekiel. The vision of

the infinite in the finitude of human existence can be illuminated by a short piece Blake wrote

around the same time he started working on The Marriage (1788-1790): There Is No Natural

Religion (1788). Even from the title, it can be understood that religions have no natural, in other

words, inherent truth value originating from a realm external to human existence. But this is not

a materialistic or atheistic denunciation or profanation of religion or God. On the contrary, it is

related to Blake’s “firm perswasion [sic]” that “Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of

perception: he percieves [sic] more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.”96 That is to say,

besides his “finite organic perception,”97 as Blake’s Isaiah puts it, human beings, once opened to

their “Poetic Genius”, testify to the gift of visionary faculty which discloses the infinite in the

finite; as it were, the transcendent in the immanent. Thus follows the testimony of Blake’s Isaiah:

“I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discovered the

infinite in every thing.”98

This simultaneous event and act of infinitization as God’s infusion into one’s own corpo-

reality and Poetics Genius’ visionary in-corporation of the sacred gift is affirmed at the end of

There Is No Natural Religion: “He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. Therefore God

becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.”99 It is here that we read, in a most condensed

expression, Blake’s con-ception of religion authentically born through infinitizing imaginative

vision and at the same time its contra-ception within the limits of religion and reason, of the

sterile systemacity of “Natural Religion” and “Reason.”

95
Plate 13.
96
“There Is No Natural Religion”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p.6.
97
Plate 12.
98
Ibid.
99
“There Is No Natural Religion”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p.6

55
 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in their work on early German Romanticism, speak of a

kindred unorthodox conception when they read the Athenaeum’s figuration of “art as

religion”100: “[…] the religion in question here is not religion ‘within the limits of reason alone,’

but rather religion within the limits of art – that is, the illimitation that art confers on the ‘subject-

work’ existing within its limits.”101 For Blake, the reverse of this schema is also true: besides art

being a religion as an “infernal method” of “displaying the infinite which was hid,” 102 religion

becomes an art of “discover[ing] the infinite in every thing.”103 And the reciprocal embodiment

inaugurates not only the subject of “Poetic Genius” incorporated as the work of “the infinite in

all things,” namely the “subject-work,” but also the work incorporated as subject, in other words,

“work-subject;” in Blake’s words, “God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.”

12. “Within a Pulsation of Artery”: Romantic Conjunction

With this constellation of poetry and religion, of poetry as religion, and of religion as poetry in

the Poetic Genius’ visionary capacity to illuminate the infinite in the finite, Blake comes closest

to the Romantic conception of the world and poiesis, and of the poetizing figuration of the world

as such. The essential articulation of this romantic conception was no doubt given by one of

Blake’s Romantic contemporary, Novalis – perhaps more kindred in spirit than his English

contemporaries. Understood in these terms, perhaps Novalis’ fragment can show in what

constellations Blake’s poetry shines with a Romantic illumination:

The world must be made Romantic. To make Romantic is nothing but a qualitative
raising to a higher power [Potenzierung]. In this operation the lower self will become one
with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a qualitative exponential series. This
operation is yet unknown. By endowing commonplace with a higher meaning, the
100
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988, p. 76.
101
Ibid, p. 77.
102
Plate 14.
103
Plate 12.

56
 ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite
with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it romantic.104

What Novalis articulates as “raising to a higher power”, in other words, as potentiating of

the ordinary and finite, can be deemed the essential romanticizing gesture, which is also at work

in Blake’s visionary transformation of the world on both poetical and philosophical levels. As a

triangular poetic-philosophical-religious constellation, it can be said that the task of his visionary

poetry is to potentiate the particular and finite moments into eternal infinite visions; in the

phrasing used in Milton, to potentiate “a Pulsation of the Artery” to “Great Events of Time”:

“For in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done, and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are

conceiv’d in such a Period, / Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.”105 Accordingly, the

philosophical axis of his poetry is complemented with the poetical practice of the “infernal

method” of printing, “melting the apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was

hid,” as we read in plate 14 just after the discussion of the “Poetic Genius.” Such an act of

unveiling the “apparent surfaces” and “displaying the infinite was hid” testifies to nothing but

potentiating the finite and ordinary, which further underscores the way theory and praxis belong

together in a peculiar differential relation in the performance of Blake’s art. In other words, what

is at stake is a poetic-philosophical journey to traverse the gap between theory and practice, and

at the same time to mark out the difference between the two, that is to say, the irreducibility of

the theory into practice and the surplus of practice that inundates the theory thereof.

This point is best characterized by the way Blake brings together poetry and painting in

terms that are untranslatable to each other. W.J.T. Mitchell was the first to speak of this

asymmetry at length: “In Blake’s view, the attempt to make poetry visual and to make pictures

104
Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, p. 60.
105
Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 161.

57
‘speak’ and tell a story was bound to fail because it presumed the independent reality of space

and time and treated them as irreducible foundations of existence.”106 In other words, neither are

words arranged in a manner to allegorize or narrativize the illuminations, nor do the images serve

to illustrate or clarify the meaning of the poetic saying – a resolute resistance to the ideology of

the representability of words by way of images and vice versa. Each art has its own autonomous

rhythm and structure. Nevertheless, the characters of words and images stand out by way of this

unrepresentability, of this persistent difference, which lets them speak to each other and endow

each other with a capacity to present what they cannot represent. “Each art was expected to

transcend its temporal or spatial limitation by moving toward the condition of its sister.”107

13. “Every thing that lives is Holy”: A Song of Affirmation

In Plate 24, we read Blake’s final remarks on the opposition between angel and devil: “Note.

This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together

in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.” The angel is

converted into a devil. Yet the devil and convert angel still read the Bible which is usually

preached by the angels rather than devils. But they read this Bible in its infernal sense; by

implication, the Bible is transfigured through an act of diabolical interpretation just as the angel

is converted when the infernal sense of the Biblical words is unveiled by the devil: “I have also;

the Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no.” How can we understand

this peculiar juxtaposition called “the Bible of Hell?” To make sense of it, we should follow the

contraries in Plate 3-4 in a new light. The coupling of active “Energy call’d Evil” with

Hell/Devil/Body, and the coupling of passive “Reason call’d Good” with Heaven/Angel/Soul can

106
W.J.T. Mitchell. “Blake’s Composite Art” in William Blake: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom. New
York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, p. 73.
107
Ibid., p. 71.

58
be read as signifying two differing modality of forces that constitute the axis The Marriage turns

around; that is to say, active vs. passive, action vs. reaction, positive vs. negative, affirmation vs.

negation, becoming active and desiring vs. remaining passive and restraining. When we read

these differing forces that is associated with Hell/Devil and Heaven/Angel respectively

throughout The Marriage, the trans-figuration of angel into devil and trans-scription of the Bible

of Heaven into the Bible of Hell takes the significance of a redemption and regeneration

culminated in “A Song of Liberty”; namely, redemption of activity/action (joy, desire, energy)

from passivity/reaction (hatred, restraint, reason); regeneration of human existence with the

positive forces of action, affirmation and becoming. We can observe the foreshadowing of this

redemption and regeneration earlier through the illumination in Plate 14108 (if we grant that there

is no strict linear symmetry between the drama of the text and illuminations). There, a pale blue

body figures in a reclined position of lying dead. And flaming fires wave over this corpse-like

body. Over this body another figure with stretched arms and a fleshy complexion soars among

the fires. The scene can both be interpreted as the redemption from the pale blue/passive soul or

from reclining/restrained passive body without desires. It can be further read as the regeneration

of the human existence through activity, becoming and desiring, which is signified by the figure

soaring with the force of fire.

Simultaneous destruction and transformation of negative-reactive party of Heaven by the

positive-active party of Hell leads us to “A Song of Liberty” that consummates The Marriage.

For the affirmation in the song is characterized by destruction and transformation. And these take

place through the element of fire, namely activity. The major part of the song tells us of the

downfall of an Empire, its violent destruction by a fire storm – perhaps a further figuration of the

infernal fire which acts as a transformative force throughout The Marriage:

108
See Figure 4.

59
 11.The fire, the fire is, falling. [...]
15.Down rush’d, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king; his grey brow’d
councellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and
chariots, horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings, and rocks,
16.Falling, rushing, ruining! Buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens:
17.All night beneath the ruins, then, their sullen flames faded, emerged round the
gloomy King.[...]
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her
golden breast.
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing
the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying. Empire is no more!109 (my
italics)

The king is characterized by the reactive affects that we also observed in the angel:

“jealous” and “gloomy”. The empire is characterized by the oppressive powers Blake attributed

to priesthood and religion: “clouds written with curses” and “the stony law”. Hence the

fundamental theme of “A Song of Liberty” can be properly called: the downfall of the empire of

negation. Thus, the destruction of negation constitutes the essential act of affirmation that

inaugurates the consummation of The Marriage. But destruction by itself cannot be deemed as

affirmation and cannot consummate the marriage on its own, since it would degenerate into yet

another reign of negation if it contents itself with mere annihilation. Thus, the second part of

affirmation is related to liberty and becoming (“loosing the eternal horses”), in other words,

release from the forces of negation and becoming active of joy, freedom and desires, as we hear

from the hymn of the chorus:

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note
curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, who, tyrant, he calls free: lay the
bound or build the roof. Not pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes
but acts not!
For every thing [sic] that lives is Holy110 (my italics)

109
Plate 26-27.
110
Plate 27.

60
 The hymn of the chorus affirms the liberation from priest’s calumny of joy, from tyrant’s

imposition of oppressive laws over his people, from religion’s suppression of the desire and

activity so that the destruction of negation would not return as reactive and negative, so that

liberation and activity can be rendered eternal. Hence the hymn of the chorus constitutes the

second level of the affirmation; that is to say, affirmation of liberation from negation and the

ensuing affirmation of becoming active. In other words, now affirmation is transfigured as

affirming what is affirmed in the hymn, that is, joy, freedom, desire and activity as opposed to

curse, tyranny, restraint of the desire and reactivity.

Finally chorus chants the final principle of affirmation that complements and

consummates the marriage: “For every thing that lives is Holy.” Ultimately, nothing is destroyed,

nothing is opposed; there is only pure affirmation of being and becoming. Every being is

affirmed not as opposed to negation, neither are they affirmed in the name of a higher being;

“every thing” is affirmed for their own sake, for their own particularity. But through the final

moment Holy-ness is declared, affirmation of the song does not affirm something; it affirms that

which affirms, that is to say, it affirms affirmation as Holy. Read in these terms, Blakean

affirmation can be further illuminated by the Nietzschean affirmation. Deleuze characterizes the

Nietzchean affirmation in its difference from the act negation and its movement towards self-

affirmation:

Affirmation has no object other than itself. To be precise it is being insofar as it is

its own object to itself. Affirmation as object of affirmation – this is being. In
itself, and as primary affirmation, it is becoming. This is why affirmation in all its
power is double: affirmation is affirmed. [...] If we understand affirmation and
negation as qualities of the will to power we see that they do not have a univocal
relation. Negation is opposed to affirmation but affirmation differs from negation.
We cannot think of affirmation as “being opposed” to negation: this would be to
place the negative within it. Opposition is not only the relation of negation with
affirmation but the essence of the negative as such. Affirmation is the enjoyment

61
 and play of its difference just as negation is the suffering and labour of the
opposition that belongs to it.111

Thus, affirmation differs from negation and overcomes the dialectical movement of the

contradiction. And the song heralds the overcoming of the opposition and contradiction

perpetrated by the totalizing will to power of dialectics of negation that suppresses and

calumniates multiplicity of joy, freedom, desire and activity: “Empire is no more!” The chorus

seals the fall of the empire with “no more!”; they do not even condemn the reactionary forces of

religion. In a way, they embrace a Nietzschean conception of “eternal return” that only wishes

affirmation for that which affirms becoming active and is affirmed in becoming active. 112 Thus

“no more!” epitomizes the expression of affirmative return. The static and unifying totality that

negates the freedom of becoming active is “no more!” False dialectical oppositions of the Empire

of negation that suppress the activity of human affects are “no more!”: “And now the lion & wolf

shall cease.” The reactive force of religion that suppresses the joy and idealizes the pale suffering

conscience is “no more!”: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer, in deadly black, with

hoarse note, curse the sons of joy.” After the fall of the empire of negation, only those who know

how to affirm becoming active can return.

Affirmation and transmutation was also Nietzsche’s ultimate project in his late works that

aimed at a “Revaluation of All Values.” Within the frame of this affinity, The Marriage can also

be read as a revaluation of all moral values that restrained desire and Energy. Like Blake,

111
Gilles Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 186-189.
112
Deleuze gives a succint account of Nietzschean eternal return in its relation to affirmation and becoming:
“Firstly, there is the selection of willing or of thought which constitutes Nietzsche's ethics: only will that of which
one also wills the eternal return (to eliminate all half-willing, everything which can only be willed with the proviso
‘once, only once’). Secondly, there is the selection of being which constitutes Nietzsche’s ontology: only that which
becomes in the fullest sense of the word can return, is fit to return. Only action and affirmation return: becoming has
being and only becoming has being. That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly speaking,
is not. The negative as the lowest degree of power, the reactive as the lowest degree of force, do not return because
they are the opposite of becoming and only becoming has being. We can thus see how the eternal return is linked,
not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation.” Ibid., xi-xii (Preface to English Translation)

62
Nietzsche also takes an issue with the moralizing values perpetrated by the church, Christianity

and theology through the dialectical weapons of negation. Nietzsche expresses his polemic with

dialectics and negation most emphatically in The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize

with a Hammer. There, he articulates affirmation both as destruction and transfiguration of those

who negate – very much in the way Blake did in the Marriage.

Morality, to the extent that it is just condemnation, without any attention to,
interest in, or concern for life, is a specific error that you should not pity, an
idiosyncrasy of degenerates that has caused incalculable damage!... But we who
are different, we immoralists, have opened our hearts to all types of
understanding, comprehending, approving. We do not negate easily, we stake our
honour on being affirmers. We are increasingly opening our eyes to that economy
that both needs and knows how to make use of everything rejected by the holy
insanity of the priests, the sick reason of the priests – to that economy in the law
of life that can take advantage of even the disgusting species of idiot, the priests,
the virtuous –what advantage? – But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer
to this...113

When it is read in the terms of The Marriage, the angel preaches negative virtues that

assume the cloak of virtue only through its dialectical opposition to energy, desire, joy. The

virtue of the angel was reactive and negative in that it vindicates itself only through negating

what it does not have: “An Angel come to me and said: ‘O pitiable foolish young man! O

horrible! O dreadful state! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou are preparing for thyself to all

eternity, to which thou are going in such career.’”114 Religion opposes Good to Evil, Reason to

Energy, Heaven to Hell, only by conjuring an exclusionary opposition and by cursing the active

side, only by reacting to the active side it justifies itself: “From these contraries spring what the

religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing

113
Friedrich Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 175-176 [translation modified].
114
Plate 17.

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from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”115 Swedenborg denigrated the dogmas of the church

but only to prove himself wiser; he declared an equilibrium between heaven and hell only to

establish another religious system based on the degradation of Hell, Energy and Body. The work

of Swedenborg was reactive and negative in that it merely replaced a system of negation with yet

another system of negation: “It is so with Swedenborg: he shews the folly of churches & exposes

hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious & himself the single one on earth that ever broke

a net. [...] He conversed with Angels who are all religious & conversed not with Devils who all

hate religion.”116 Therefore, Blake’s two statements on the Contraries and Negations must be

thought together to understand the double nature of the affirmation that both destroys and

transmutes the negations:

Contraries are Positives! A Negation is not a Contrary!117

Negations must be destroy’d to redeem the Contraries!118

Negations only justify their existence through their reaction to the self-conjured

oppositions. But contraries are positives, they are not defined by their reaction and negation, on

the contrary, they can not only become active on their own but also activate their contrary – they

do not negate, but affirm their contrary. Contraries do not operate through moral evaluations of

contraries but valuate through affirmation. When reason acts upon energy, it does not react as

good is reacting to evil; reason acts and elevates itself in the coupling with desire: “This is shewn

in the Gospel, where he [Messiah] prays to Father to send the comforter, or Desire, that Reason

may have Ideas to build on.”119 When energy and reason are coupled with moral determinations

of evil and good and opposed to each other, they become negations and turn into mutually

115
Plate 3.
116
Plate 21-22.
117
William Blake. “Milton”. Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991, p. 164.
118
Ibid., 180.
119
Plate 6.

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exclusive terms, thus begin to be evaluated only through the reaction to their opposite, only

through the contradiction with their opposite: “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast

out.”120 Hence the first level of the affirmation is an active destruction of the negations –hostile

opposition of good and evil, heaven and hell, reason and desire– imposed by the Empire of

negation whose rulers are the angel, church, priests and Swedenborg. Second level of the

affirmation is their conversion and transmutation, as the angel is transfigured into a devil by the

flames of the devil; as the Bible is transformed into “Bible of Hell”; as Swedenborgian pseudo-

prophetic vision is transformed into poetic vision; as the dialectical argumentation and negation

are transformed into “A Song of Liberty” and affirmation. For negation cannot be affirmed; it

must be destroyed and transfigured. Third level of the affirmation is affirmation of liberation, of

becoming active and joyful. Finally that which consummates “the marriage” is the affirmation of

the Holy-ness of being and of becoming Holy. That is to say, only by affirming the Holy in being

and affirmed by the Holy becoming can “the marriage” be consummated; only then redemptive

voice of the chorus affirm every thing as Holy – only then affirmation affirms as Holy: “For

every thing that lives is Holy.”121

120
Plate 5.
121
Plate 27 (Final words of The Marriage).

65
Figure 1 - Plate 20, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy H, 1790).

66
Figure 2 - Plate 5, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy H, 1790).

67
Figure 3 - Plate 10, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy H, 1790).

68
Figure 4 - Plate 14, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Copy H, 1790).

69
Bibliography

Works by William Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Copy H, 1790 (Fittzwilliam Museum).

www.blakearchive.org.

Poems and Prophecies. London: Everyman’s Library, 1991.

The Book of Urizen. New York: Dover, 1997.

Other Referenced Works

Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 2004.

Bataille, George. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Marion Boyars, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 2007.

Blanchot, Maurice. Faux Pas. Trans. Charlotte Mandel. Stanford, California : Stanford
University Press, 2001.

Bloom, Harold. “Dialectic in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. PMLA, Vol. 73, No. 5, Part 1
(Dec. 1958).

de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course In General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York:
McGrawHill, 1966.

Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
London: Athlone Press, 1984.

——. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983

Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992.

——. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

——. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1976.

Eaves, Morris (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004

Goode, Mike. “Blakespotting”. PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 769-786.

70
Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Rows,
1969.

——. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New
York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.
California: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Literary Absolute. Trans. Philip Barnard
and Cheryl Lester. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Dangerous Blake”. Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 21, No. 3, Romantic Texts,
Romantic Times: Homage to David V. Erdman (Fall, 1982), pp. 410-416.

——. “Blake’s Composite Art” in William Blake: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom.
New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.

——. “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s The Book of Urizen”. Eighteen-Century
Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, Special Issue: The Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Autumn, 1969).

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——. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Trans. Judith
Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.

Onions, C.T. (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology. New York: Oxford University Press,
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Phillips, Michael (ed.). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen. New
York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1936.

——. The Last Judgment and Babylon Destroyed, Showing That at This Day All the Predictions
of the Book of Revelation Have Been Fulfilled – From Things Heard and Seen. Boston: Otis
Clapp, 1830.

71