Jason Whittaker

From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture

Since his death in 1827, William Blake has often been associated with the devil’s party: Algernon Swinburne (1867) wrote of Blake that ‘he was born and baptised into the church of rebels’ (3), while Georges Bataille (1973) saw the poet as a satanic visionary in whose work ‘evil attains a form of purity’ (9). As one inspiration behind the occult art of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast’, and the transformation of Saladin Chamcha into a devil in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the association has been a curiously tenacious one considering Blake’s judgement of himself as a Christian prophet. The source of the connection was, of course, Blake’s early illuminated prophecy The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he declared that energy, often called evil by the religious, is from the body and ‘Eternal Delight’, while Milton ‘was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it’ (pl. 5, E 35).

Dark Webs: Goth Subcultures in Cyberspace

While Goths tend to be neglected in more mainstream media, they are thriving as part of online communities as part of the phenomenon of net.Goths. This paper considers some of the recent manifestations of such subcultural activities online, especially in relation to the practice of demarcating the boundaries of participation through displays of cultural capital (such as music and fashion), and aspects of communication that have emerged on the Internet such as ?trolling?. The overarching concern of this paper is to explore some of the ways in which defining a subculture virtually may reinforce activities of the group in other environments.

Mental fight, corporeal war and righteous dub: the struggle for 'Jerusalem', 1979-2009

Blake himself rejected the text, omitting it from later versions of Milton (Essick and Viscomi, Milton 39–40), yet although the original architect cast out the stanzas beginning ‘And did those feet’ from the Preface to Milton, they have since become the cornerstone of his subsequent reputation and, indeed, a cornerstone for the study of Blake’s reception. Whatever Blake may have intended by those cryptic quatrains, it was Hubert Parry, encouraged by Robert Bridges, who discovered a fiery desire within the words which their original author for some reason turned against. As adapted by Elgar for the Last Night of the Proms in 1916, so powerful was the imperial fire of ‘Jerusalem’ that George V reputedly wished immediately to institute it as the national anthem (Glancey 9). In the first decades of its incarnation, the Blake–Parry hymn became a powerful exposition of national desires and political aspirations of the left and right. Following the Second World War, however, and for a wide range of reasons, those very political aspirations appear to have become more frequently a subject of ridicule. In Monty Python’s 1969 Buying a Bed sketch, ‘Jerusalem’ is used to mock an old, class-bound order, while the overblown cover version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer on Brain Salad Surgery (1973) exemplifies prog rock kitsch. As Cold War consensus gave way to neo-conservative struggles for dominance over the failing Soviet Empire, however, so ‘Jerusalem’ was treated once again as an ideological tract that sometimes invoked the assumed intentional stance of its author(s), but which more often was simply manipulated to position different instances of the hymn within a mutable and highly contested series of interpretations.

Blake and the New Jerusalem: Art and English Nationalism into the Twenty-First Century

For over a century, Hubert Parry’s hymn ‘Jerusalem’, taken from Blake’s stanzas that preface his epic poem Milton, has been a defining factor in the reception of Blake’s work. This article concentrates on the influence of the Blake–Parry hymn on arts and culture since the turn of 2000, concentrating on events such as the 2012 London Olympics, its various invocations as part of the EU Referendum, and visual responses to the Blake–Parry hymn as part of the 2016 exhibition ‘And Did Those Feet?’ at Roundhay, Leeds.

Tactical Electronic Bodies: Noise and Mutation in Canadian Industrial Music

This chapter places Canadian industrial music of the 1980s and 90 s in a North American and European context. Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly, bands whose members overlapped in the small Vancouver scene which was the ‘cyborg heart’ of the movement in Canada, are Whittaker’s focus. He shows how, in the pre-Internet period when live shows and independent record stores provided an alternative to mainstream media, the Vancouver scene picked up on a culture already developed in Europe and the United States (particularly nearby Seattle) and formed its own which differs in its political commitments and aesthetic connections. Whittaker uses the theories of Attali and Bataille to understand the way industrial music deploys noise as a weapon, not in order to ritualistically sublimate violence, but rather to enact ‘squander and waste’ as the ‘truly sovereign act’. The European industrial scene had exaggerated the symbols of totalitarianism to create ‘chaos out of order’; Skinny Puppy used vivisection imagery as a way to disturbingly assert the rights of animals and the unfreedom of animal and human bodies, a vulnerability very different from the aggressivity that marks the European and particularly the American industrial. As both bands evolve, their incorporation of dance and techno connects industrial to cyberpunk: Whittaker argues, ‘by dancing to electronic music, the body becomes a cyborg’. He sees this ‘electronic body music’ as a way to go beyond the opposition between nature and culture, human and technology, without mistaking such a move for liberating transcendence.

Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World, 1830–1930, by Colin Trodd

At the time of his death in 1827, William Blake’s reputation was, at best, that of a marginal artist on the fringes of London’s literary and visual culture, and over the next three decades that reputation declined almost to nothing as the few friends he had known in his lifetime aged or died. It was the publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake in 1863 that saved him from complete neglect, while his art and poetry were celebrated by figures such as the Rossettis and Swinburne. By the beginning of the twentieth century, far from being an unknown artist, Blake had become one of the pre-eminent figures of British Romanticism whose influence far exceeded anything he could have conceived in the early nineteenth century. The study of Blake’s influence on subsequent generations has long been recognized, at least since Deborah Dorfman’s 1969 Blake in the Nineteenth Century, while in the past twenty years understanding his reception has been a significant part of Blake studies. For much of that period, however, the emphasis has tended to be on Blake’s literary rather than artistic influence. In an extensive, indeed thoroughly exhaustive, study, Colin Trodd’s Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830–1930 returns proper attention to what was the primary sphere of Blake’s reputation until the early years of the twentieth century, as a visual artist whose frequently disturbing inspiration was an important contributing factor to the development of the arts in Britain. Much more than a simple historical survey, Trodd’s book presents an extremely sophisticated account of what he terms ‘Blakeland’, which is sensitive to the shifting nuances of Blake’s reception from one decade to the next (for example, in the relative fall from favour in the art world at the time of the First World War when, in visual terms at least, Blake came to be associated with a rather old-fashioned Pre-Raphaelitism). In addition, the critical ferment surrounding Blake becomes the crucible in which molten attitudes can be recast as criticism of the Victorian and Edwardian art world, which Trodd contrasts to the artworld, the entire system of academic rationality that Blake’s followers – for better or for worse – saw him as wishing to replace. Blake, then, is important for the opportunities he provides as a lens for practice and the standards of the market from 1830–1930, and Visions of Blake explores the nexus of cash, art and academia in the century following Blake’s death that, in some respects, serves as a useful counterpart to Morris Eaves’ similar explorations at the turn of the nineteenth century in The Counter Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake. Such a role inevitably divided opinion, and this is perhaps one of the most important functions of Blake’s reception, that responses to him tended towards extremes that clarified underlying trends in Victorian culture: ‘Blake, more than any other artist in the putative British School, was regenerated by Victorian discourses on art as a set of problems requiring critical solutions’ (p. 20).

Blake 2.0: Introduction

What precisely constitutes Blakean ‘mineness’? Is it an act of identification or possession, or even, somewhat paradoxically, disavowal? As Galen Strawson has recently observed, the self may be conceived as a phenomenological mineness, but this bears little relation to traditional, metaphysical conceptions of selfhood. These are also difficult to reconcile with contemporary debate on the implications of technology, specifically digitalization, to which the title of this volume alludes. The dissemination of Blake’s work across a wide variety of media across the twentieth century, and the possibilities raised by a new generation of more decentralized, interactive Web 2.0 software, create a variety of virtual selves for Blake, his works, and his audience, currently being explored, for example, via elements of the Blake 2.0 Cloud. Such selves, like Blake’s Cloud in The Book of Thel, may ‘vanish’ and be ‘seen no more’, or ‘pass away … to tenfold life’ (3:9–11, E5). The reinventions of twentieth-century Blake, as well as his ongoing regeneration within Web 2.0 media, require a more sustained examination of what this second life entails — Blake 2.0 alongside Blake 1.0.

Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art

Blake’s influence on post-war artists in Britain and North America often makes for surprising encounters. Where we might expect to find some indi- cation of his impact is with those artists who, in some shape or form, engage with the human figure, which is at the centre of Blake’s paint- ing— his ‘human form divine’. Thus the fact that Anthony Gormley, for example, cites the life mask of Blake in the National Gallery as one of the sources behind his moulded human forms (Hutchinson et al. 1995, 44) - whether represented as expanded hollow forms (such as the lead body-case works of the 1980s and 1990s) or as solid blocks (Critical Mass, 1995) - is hardly surprising; nor, likewise, is the central role played by Blake in Christopher Bucklow’s art, such as the abstract figurative ideograms in the exhibition ‘I Will Save Your Life’ (2004). More surprising is the role played by Blake in the art of Chris Ofili, for example, his 1995 paintings Satan and Seven Bitches Tossing their Pussies before the Divine Dung, both of which were directly inspired by Blake paintings, Satan in all his Original Glory (c.1805) and The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne (c. 1803–5), and which form part of what Lisa Corrin describes as a series of playful dialogues with artists such as Blake, Picabia and Mike Kelley (1998, 16).

Introduction: Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture

When William Blake died on 12 August 1827, he left behind him, in the words of his most recent biographer, G. E. Bentley, a ‘fading shadow’. While Bentley notes that the number of obituary notices that appeared were ‘more … than might have been expected’ (BR 465), those expectations were very low. Although Blake was a minor footnote in the established histories of British literature and art, it is not true, as Richard Holmes (2004) has remarked, that by the time of his death ‘he was already a forgotten man’; indeed, plenty of nascent biographers were keen to use the deathbed scene of this obscure engraver, painter and sometime poet to establish their visions of a reinvigorated sentimental aesthetic and to serve as the foundation for their own future reputations. Allan Cunningham ventriloquised Blake thus in his 1830 Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects: ‘Why should I fear death? Nor do I fear it, I have endeavoured to live as Christ commands, and have sought to worship God truly — in my own house, when I was not seen of men’ (cited in BR 654–5). The author of Jerusalem might have approved, although it is hard to imagine the diabolic engraver of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell being quite as complacent.

The Matter of Britain: Blake, Milton and the Ancient Britons

Throughout the eighteenth century, Milton’s posthumous reputation had developed to such an extent that, for a writer such as Blake, he had become the obvious candidate for the role of Albion’s prophet. Lucy Newlyn has demonstrated how the poet fulfilled a variety of roles during the eighteenth century — biblical primer, role model for the sublime and proponent of blank verse — and Joseph Wittreich has examined the importance of Milton’s biblical views for Blake in particular.1 Recent work has tended to concentrate on the similarity between Romantic and ‘pre-romantic’ poets with regard to Milton’s influence, the fact that (as Southey commented on Thomas Warton in 1824) writers from the late eighteenth century provided models for recuperating the past and found in Milton a ‘loving and nurturing’ literary parent.2 It is such similarity rather than difference that is most important here, particularly with regard to one source for Blake’s strange history of Britain, in particular as it appears in Jerusalem: Milton’s History of Britain was written during the late 1640s and published in 1670 and, as the chronicle of Albion became more important to Blake’s soteriological history of mankind, was a significant text in shaping Blake’s ideas of the ancient Britons.