Mark Lussier

Blake’s Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness

The matter motivating this chapter, which analyzes an emergent ecological criticism manifest in a wide range of disciplines through the poetry of William Blake, seems both controversial and necessary. It is controversial, in that it applies a contemporary political view to past poets and their poetry, which might seem anachronistic at best or pure projection at worst (the twin traces of contemporary desire, one might say). Yet recent research has firmly established the ecological dimension of Romantic poetics, obviating, for the most part, any controversy in such applications. It is necessary, because it directly responds to a physical crisis in which all are implicated and requires us to rethink our intellectual enterprises and institutions.1 Most Romantic poetics, which carries with it responsibilities, urges such a recognition of all human activities that impinge upon the active universe. Thus, ‘Ecological criticism’ is well adapted to approach Romantic poetic events, since all ecocriticism ‘shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it’ (Glotfelty and Fromm xix). Ecocriticism will not simply slip away into the forests of the night, to paraphrase Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, since the crisis with which ecological thought grapples will deepen in relation to the supposed success of what Fredric Jameson describes as ‘late capitalism’ (Postmodernism 3).

Mirrored Text/Infinite Planes: Reception Aesthetics in Blake’s Milton

William Blake’s illuminated prophecy, Milton, invites a wide range of methodological approaches: artistic conception, biblical connections, mythic construction, narrative progressions, subject formation, textual production, visual representations.1 In this chapter I wish to return to the central issue of the poem itself — the transmission of poetic and intellectual inheritance — by exploring the wide spectrum of possible reception and response dynamics. My aspiration here is to move beyond a simple summation of past positions (Bloom, Easson, Mitchell) to achieve a higher synthesis on a more energetic plane of critical reception where ‘understanding, interpretation and application [meet]’ (Jauss 143). The difference between ‘reception’ and ‘response’ is a complicated one and reflects a broad cultural versus a more personal interaction with a text. Indeed, in his brief preface to Reception Theory, Robert C. Holub acknowledges the inherent difficulties in clearly separating these terms: ‘Nonetheless, the most frequent suggestion has been to view Rezeption as related to the reader, while Wirking is supposed to pertain to textual aspects — an arrangement that is not entirely satisfactory by any account’ (xi). In the current case of Milton, Blake seems to work in both dimensions, with his printing technique employing a textual dynamic (mirrored writing) designed to highlight the necessity of active readership, while the thematic concerns relate to his own reception and response to the dead poet John Milton and his works.

The Romantic Book of Living and Dying

Blake’s view of death, as its poetic exploration in Milton suggests, was more complicated than most standard interpretations of it as simply the closing event of consciousness, and when Milton accepts his visionary mission to redeem his emanation Ololon, crying out “I go to Eternal Death” (E 108: 14.14), readers are left to ponder the implications of such a commitment for the poet of Paradise Lost, who had already been dead for over 120 years at the time Blake wrote his mini-epic. Milton could only assume his role as an “awakener” by descending into a realm of “Eternal Death” located in the “Sea of Time and Space,” and Blake’s representation of material existence as the plane of death functions across the span of his work as a poetic constant (from The Book of Thel to Jerusalem). As Jerome McGann indicates, the type of “redemption through death and the annihilation of the righteous selfhood” envisioned in Milton originated, for Blake, in Christian myth, and as argued in the preceding chapter, “The Life of Jesus, along with all the economies of the Christian mystery, properly stands at the pivot of what Blake sought to accomplish” (McGann “Blake’s Prophecies” 10) in his prophetic assemblage. However, McGann also immediately acknowledges that this mythic structure of self-sacrifice, for Blake, has “nothing to do with religion as we commonly know it,” given Blake’s complete refashioning of Jesus and of Christianity itself.

Blake beyond Postmodernity

For at least two reasons, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s recognition of the ‘incommensurability between popular narrative pragmatics [and] the question of legitimacy’ as a symptom of the postmodern condition affords an appropriate perspective for this essay’s cartographic pursuit of Blakean influence across diverse forms of contemporary semiotic expression. First, Lyotard’s view of ‘incommensurability’ provides a widened context for the essays published in this volume, since both conference and collection explore and contest the concept itself. Second, my reception of this tension between a popular narrative base and a legitimising structure of semiotic authority provided the impetus for this work. This essay, then, seeks to extend the type of analysis of ‘reception’ performed in Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker’s Radical Blake and actually provides, through an independent stream of information, confirmation of their discovery of a ‘rich and vital’ tradition of ‘appropriations and misappropriations’ of Blake’s verbal and visual works (RB, 8, 6). And yet, even the transatlantic triumph of the recent Blake exhibition and the explosion of exemplary critical studies confront a contradiction, an apparent waning of academic and educational interest in the protean printer, painter, poet and prophet in spite of his broad popular appeal.

Methodic Sadism/Symbolic Misogyny: Romantic Responses to Science as Ideology

While some might find the intellectual parameters of this chapter somewhat obvious — that science and sexuality have an intimate historical relationship, a relationship severely critiqued within Romantic thought — the critical exploration of such relations within Romantic studies is a relatively recent development. Such concerns have emerged through the interdisciplinary application of physical theory to literary processes, resulting in what I earlier termed a physical criticism (Chapter 1, 41–46), and this book has attempted a concentrated application of this critical principle. However, my collision of Romantic poetics, theory and practice, with twentieth-century physical theory has been somewhat restricted to the most exotic scientific theory associated with quantum physics and cosmology. This approach has, perhaps, unwittingly reified the repression of the feminine by a masculinist canon and science alike.

Blake’s Vortex, or The Quantum Bridge in Milton

The verbal and visual works of William Blake have, in recent decades, acquired a new relevance for those writers seeking to popularize the emergent fields of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics, as briefly discussed in Chapter 1 (pp. 36–41). This situation seems somewhat ironic, in that Blake has often been considered the Romantic poet most opposed to science, especially empirical and material paradigms associated with Newtonian dynamics. As Paul Gross recently proposed, ‘William Blake rejected all the forms of inquiry upon which modern science was built’ (Gross, Levitt and Lewis ‘Introductikon’ 1). Although this is an overstatement, it does intersect early critical constructions of Blake’s relationship to science. For example, Douglas Bush proposes that ‘Within a century [of Newton’s “deification”] William Blake assailed, as a great evil triumvirate, Bacon, Newton, and Locke’ (53). As well, Marjorie Hope Nicolson argued that ‘[Newton] would have been puzzled and perplexed by the adulation of the poets in the period of his deification; perhaps the one poetic response which would have seemed to him justified was that of William Blake, who presided over his damnation’ (Newton 5).

Reconstructing Byronic Time, or Temporality and Memory in The Giaour

John Bender and David Wellbery, in their introductory comment to Chronotypes, propose that ‘[t]ime belongs to a handful of categories (like form, symbol, cause) that prompt universal concern’: Time touches every dimension of our being, every object of our attention — including our attention itself. It permeates simple everyday experience no less than the most abstractly theoretical speculation. Time therefore can belong to no single field of study. (Bender and Wellbery 1)

Romantic Dynamics, or Towards a Physical Criticism

In Romantic studies and in wider spheres of critical theory, a dynamic approach to the interpretation of poetic events has emerged in the last decade (what I term ‘physical criticism’), and this critical mode manifested itself in the interpretive communities of several canonical Romantic authors, especially Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shelleys. In part, this examination of Romantic poetics mapped direct connections between various writers, including poets and natural philosophers, and explored the ways in which Romantic poetical practices engage, even undermine, Enlightenment thinking and its mechanical by-products, the industrial progeny of Newton and Descartes. Physical criticism, to my mind, developed from the energetic exchange between two broadly cast categories, literature and science, and, fortunately, this interdisciplinary interchange unfolds on both sides of the dividing conjunction (‘and’), although some claim otherwise. Most recently, physical criticism has explored the rhythmic and imaginative resonances between thought experiments crafted by Romantic poets and the full range of contemporary physical theory.

Preludium: On Synchronicity

I begin with a ‘preludium’ rather than a ‘preface’ or ‘prologue’ as a gesture to William Blake’s same practice in his prophetic books and to evoke the term’s etymological richness, a provocative difference within its linguistic unconscious, in opposition to the latter terms.2 The term originates from the Latin prœlud-ere, a combination of prœ- (pre-) and ludere (to play); the direct translation, then, is ‘to play beforehand’ in something ‘as a prelude or preliminary action … to prepare the way before [and] to foreshadow’ (II: 2279). Yet a second connotation is equally important in regard to ‘purpose’ for the text that follows, where a prelude functions as ‘an introductory performance to some later action’ (II: 2279).3

At the Limit of Physical Theory, or Quantum Dynamics in Coleridge’s Rime

Expressing his opposition to the emergence of quantum indeterminacy within his own mathematical computations, Albert Einstein asserted that ‘God does not play dice’ (Gribben Schrodinger 3) with the universe. Through a well-known series of thought experiments directed to Niels Bohr, the ‘father’ of complementarity, Einstein sought to eliminate what has become known as quantum indeterminacy.1 However, Einstein never succeeded in overturning this probabilistic aspect seemingly fundamental to the structure of matter. In the face of experimental evidence, to borrow phrases from David Z. Albert and Jim Baggott respectively, the emergence of physicality at the smallest dimensions of matter ‘has got to be a matter of probability’ (Albert 16) and is usually ‘interpreted as a probability amplitude’ (Baggott 36). For Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, ‘it seems that the uncertainty principle is a fundamental feature of the universe we live in’ (155–6), and, as Hawking later argues, ‘God not only plays dice but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen’ (Black Holes 113).