Tristanne Connolly

William Blake and the body

List of Plates Preface Abbreviations Textual Bodies Graphic Bodies Embodiment: Urizen Embodiment: Reuben Division and Cominglings: Emanations and Spectres Divisions and Cominglings: Sons and Daughters The Eternal Body Notes Bibliography Index

‘Mean, Mean Pride’: Rush’s Critique of American Cool

With particular attention to the first decade of their career, this chapter examines the way Rush are at once popular and obscure, cool and uncool, a position on the sidelines that resonates with a critical Canadian perspective on American culture. While music fandom depends on passionate affiliation, Rush, who do not fit the standard rock and roll image, insist on a more dispassionate examination of what one stands for. They show a compulsion to see both, or more, sides of any issue, which may be called particularly Canadian. American heroes, or heroes of any kind, are treated at once with admiration and scepticism. Values that equally belong to American culture and to rock ‘n’ roll, such as individualism, rebellion, and freedom, are thoroughly queried; not rejected, but examined to find the balance of pros and cons. Idealistically confronting the problems of idealism, Rush powerfully acknowledge, in songs like ‘2112’, all that stands against diverse individual expression, while also, in songs like ‘Closer to the Heart’, seeing the benefits of benevolent leadership.

Introduction: ‘Get Away From Me’: Anglo-Canadian Music and the Globalization of American Culture

This introductory chapter seeks to establish, query, and view through a musical lens, some of the key ideas that have been associated with the study of Canadian identity and the cultural relationship between Canada and the United States. It does so primarily through a reading of The Guess Who’s ‘American Woman’, its composition, its place in rock history, and its reception. Particular attention is given to the song’s presence in Canadian writer and actor Mike Myers’ film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and the accompanying cover version by Lenny Kravitz. Canadian responses to the monolithic American culture machine, and that quintessentially American invention, rock ‘n’ roll, are set in a larger picture of export and appropriation, particularly the British Invasion which, from a more culturally and politically powerful position, similarly sang America longingly and imitatively, but also with the critical insight of distance. The focus on anglo-Canadian music from the late 1960 s onward allows the collection to examine what could be called the soundtrack of the golden age of Canadian ‘left-nationalism’ and trace that era’s cultural legacy, as it spawned many of the givens which still inform discussion of Canadian identity, whether those concepts are upheld or challenged. The anglo-Canadian focus, and the focus on rock, folk and alternative traditions, sets the critical gaze on that place where the differences between Canadian and American culture are most troublingly unclear. The introduction also considers the perspective of music in the new North American studies, and the light it can shed on the meaning of nation in a proclaimed post-nationalist world.

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.

‘He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Blake and Jim Morrison

Every rock fan knows that the Doors are named for the doors of perception. But exactly what kind of relationship with Blake does this entail? In telling the story behind the name, it is most often credited to Huxley, with Blake mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought (see Manzarek 102, 78; Densmore 52–3; Hopkins 57). The filtering through Huxley suggests a kind of second-hand knowledge disdained by purists, literary and popular alike (akin to thinking ‘You Really Got Me’ is a Van Halen song), and yet, like cover versions in rock, highlights at once the importance and the flexibility of genealogy and inheritance.1 Morrison comes up with his own phrase, which, as Rocco notes, mixes Blake and Huxley: ‘There are things known and unknown, and in between are the doors’ (in Rocco xxi). Curiously, though there is no such sentence in The Doors of Perception or Heaven and Hell, many sources attribute it to Huxley: from online quotation repositories such as BrainyQuote (‘Aldous Huxley Quotes’) to a book published by Norton, After Photography by Fred Ritchin (69), professor of photography at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Some books even credit the line to Blake: most memorably, Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock ’n Roll, The Modern Years confidently states that these lines from Blake appeared on the flyleaf of Huxley’s book (Nite 133). (Of course, Huxley’s epigraph is the correct quotation from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Introduction: ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’

Over twenty-five years ago W.J.T. Mitchell expressed the hope that in future critics would give attention to the ‘dangerous… nasty… filthy’ Blake sanitized by earlier scholars in the process of making him ‘safely canonized’, and the study of his works properly professional (Mitchell 1982, 410, 411, 414). During his prophetic musings, Mitchell identified a fat streak of Blakean sexual obscenity, which often took very queer forms and though it’s now uncomfortable to witness his herding of homosexual fellatio, effeminacy and lesbian voyeurism along with rape, lust and sadomasochism under the single (dirty) banner of ‘abnormal sexuality’, the vivid— heterosex- confounding— scenes he revealed (414) made it reasonable to assume that when queer came in from the cold, Blake Studies would offer a warm welcome. At that decade’s end Camille Paglia’s (1990) lurid account of Blake as ‘the British Sade’ (270) certainly suggested a similar critical future. Her apparition of the poet may tremble and thrash beneath ‘the Great Mother’ but Oedipal terror gifts queer insight too, for ‘Blake’s dreadful fate was to see the abyss from which most men shrink: the infantilism in all male het- erosexuality’ (287). And, in the 1990s, queer glimmers did occasionally flash out from scholarship on gender, particularly that which tried to leap the brick wall that feminist criticism had come up against in trying to adjudge Blake’s ‘misogyny’.

‘Fear not/To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic

David Bowie describes Tracey Emin as ‘William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh’ (1997, 24). What connection between them would prompt this catchy sound bite? A certain emotional nakedness, it would seem; a compul- sion to bare secrets and lies. Plus, a transgender aptitude: Emin is able to be Blake as a woman; Blake is able to be a woman in Emin; and Leigh’s films are able to portray raw female emotional experience. Bowie goes on to empha- size, at once, ‘the dawning of late eighteenth-century self-consciousness, that first realisation of self you find in early nineteenth-century portraits’ and ‘the deeply dysfunctional work found at Gugging Hospital in Vienna, the bastion of working“Outside” artists’ (ibid., 24). The link to ‘“Outside” artists’ may have to do with craziness, but also technical skill. Can Blake or Emin draw properly? Or spell properly either? And Leigh, strictly speaking, doesn’t exactly write his films; he’s famous for having his actors improvise, a much looser way to compose. Bowie’s characterization, then, links emo- tional excess and technical sloppiness. Yet the juxtaposition with portraiture suggests a strange combination of naivety with high and deliberate skill. These people make messy art; but successful messy art which ‘realizes’ the modern self.