Steve Clark

‘Labouring at the Resolute Anvil’: Blake’s Response to Locke

I read Burkes Treatise when very Young at the same time I read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancement of Learning on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions & on looking them over find that my Notes on Reynolds in this Book are exactly Similar. I felt the Same Contempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now. (E660)

“BANG AT ITS MORAL CENTRE”: IDEOLOGIES OF GENRE IN BUTOR, FUSSELL, AND RABAN

Four hundred years of imperial experience had given the travelling Englishman a very clear idea of where he stood in the world- bang at its moral centre.

Isabella Bird, Victorian globalism, and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880)

ABSTRACT Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880, written 1878) is one of the rare Victorian travelogues about Asia that has not only won continued readership and critical prestige in the West, but has also been frequently valued by readers in the country it describes as an insightful perspective by an outsider. Our introduction to this special issue on Bird’s travel writing of Japan creates multiple frameworks for understanding this text. We position it within post-1850 representations of Japan and travelogues of the country by women writers, the overall development of Bird’s literary career, and recent theories of Victorian globalism. We argue that Unbeaten Tracks can be read as simultaneously radical and conservative, sympathetic and denunciatory, staunchly imperial and anticipatory of postcolonial critique, making it a rich object of study and an important touchstone in Victorian travel writing. If Bird’s writing occasionally seems to confirm (and to revel in) familiar stereotypes of Victorian travellers as condescending, repressed, and parochial, it can also be linked to more recent understandings of a global nineteenth century already possessing cosmopolitan awareness and utopian horizons.

Isabella Bird, Rudyard Kipling, and the “bandobast” of East Asian travel

ABSTRACT Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks (1880) has often been read as a quest-narrative into the unknown interior of Japan, which centres on the resolute individualism of the female travel persona. This essay will instead regard Bird as a representative figure, insofar as (like other contemporary Victorian travellers) she is the beneficiary of newly established networks of trade, transport and communication in South-East Asia. I compare her journey with that of Rudyard Kipling, who undertook a similar Asian version of the Grand Tour in 1889, recounted in From Sea to Sea (1899). Focusing on Kipling’s idea of the “bandobast”, a Hindi word adapted into English to mean “systematic arrangement”, I explore the mutual interdependence of Victorian representations of Japan with other East Asian cultures, particularly China. Instead of contrasting masculine and feminine modes of response, I show how their overlapping itineraries allow engagement with the multicultural cosmopolitanism of the major cities of the region, and examination of the impact of aggressive Western expansionism in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

‘Something’s Lost but Something’s Gained’: Joni Mitchell and Postcolonial Lyric

In this chapter, Clark remarks on the apparent absence of Canada in Joni Mitchell’s work and in writing about her and examines the extent to which she is fundamentally influenced by, and representative of, the Saskatchewan origins she left behind. Does she conveniently assimilate Canadian experience into generic American identity for mass appeal, or continue to express a uniquely Canadian perspective? Focusing on her early work, Clark argues that Mitchell represents a post-colonial identity involving an ‘urge for going’ that means both departure and return. With reference to Northrop Frye, Clark explicates the symbolism of history, geography, and climate that resonates within the lyricism of her songs, while tracing allusions to poetic tradition including Shakespeare, Milton, and Yeats. By seeing a social dimension in her love lyrics, Clark argues that Mitchell develops a ‘civic appeal’ envisioning ‘a new kind of communal belonging’. In describing erotic love, Mitchell also describes the love of country, and the interplay of tensions and desires inevitable in both, illuminating the troubled romances of English and French, Canada and US, individual and collective, self and other.

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.

‘Only the wings on his heels’: Blake and Dylan

The inspiration to which Blake aspires in ‘An Imitation of Spenser’ is personified by the messenger of the gods: ‘O Mercury, assist my lab’ring sense, / That round the circle of the world would fly!’ (‘An Imitation of Spenser’ E421). The narrator of a ‘Song’ from the same precociously early selection, Poetical Sketches, proclaims, ‘My feet are wing’d, while o’er the dewy lawn, / I meet my maiden, risen like the morn’ (E416). A young Dylan Thomas confides to Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are in sight’ (43). On the album sleeve of Desire, Bob Dylan reflects, ‘Where do I begin … on the heels of Rimbaud moving like a dancing bullet thru the secret streets of Babylon.’ For Dylan Thomas, the personification of mercurial inspiration is Blake himself; whilst for Bob Dylan, it is Arthur Rimbaud, on shore leave from his ‘magic swirlin’ ship’, as well as ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’ (as Thomas describes himself in a letter to Vernon Watkins; 548). Influences can obviously be composite and far from mutually exclusive. Though the French poet is explicitly designated as precursor, the ‘dancing bullet’, an oxymoronic expression of exuberant creativity, has a thoroughly Blakean trajectory: ‘I see London, blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon’ (J 84:11–12, E243).1

‘Yet I am an identity/I wish & feel & weep & groan’: Blake’s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative

One recurrent motif of the essays in Helen Bruder’s Women Reading William Blake (2007a) is the re-evaluation of sentimentalism. Blake’s verbal and con- ceptual indebtedness to the movement has been established as far back as the lexicographical studies of Josephine Miles (1957), with an intellec- tual genealogy economically sketched by Stephen Cox (1980). This has not prevented the routine identification of Blake’s poetry with masculin- ist prophetic and sublime modes (as Tilottama Rajan demonstrates) to be safeguarded at all costs from the contamination of a feminized sen- sibility. (One symptom is the reflex vilification of the much-maligned William Hayley.)1 Once this stark dichotomy is challenged, it becomes possible to situate Blake’s poetry within the milieu of female contem- poraries, opening up tantalizing possibilities of more specific reciprocal influences, moving away from the separate-spheres model of gender in the period.

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.

‘There is no Competition’: Eliot on Blake, Blake in Eliot

Probably the majority of contemporary Blake critics would wholeheartedly endorse these sentiments about a writer who has become something of a hate figure in recent years: even the usually courteous and urbane Northrop Frye is moved to describe Eliot’s ideas as ‘fantastic and repellent’ (1963, 10). This is partly owing to the continuing impact of specific negative judgements, partly to commitment to an Anglo-Catholic royalist politics that has gone terminally out of fashion (though when was it ever in?), and partly to the promotion, in both poetry and criticism, of an ideal of elite culture which is now widely regarded as oppressive.