William Blake and the world's body of science.(Critical Essay)

THE BOOK OF URIZEN, CONCEIVED AS THE "FIRST" BOOK OF THE DEVILISH "Bible of Hell" that William Blake announced in 1793 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Plate 24), (1) satirizes theories of creation favored by the reason-bound and theoretical science of the Enlightenment. The abstraction and inhumanity of the prevailing science and philosophy had been a target of Blake as early as his burlesque of a fashionable salon of intellectuals in An Island in the Moon (1784), and The Book of Urizen (1794) follows as an intellectual satire of the familiar target in the Juvenalian tradition of the great Augustan writers Pope and Swift. In its text and visual designs, the poem depicts scientific versions of the creation of the world and of man as horrifying gothic imaginings. Allan Cunningham, Blake's first biographer and a reader educated in the conventions of satiric commentary, clearly recognized the poet's method and message. In 1830 he wrote of The Book of Urizen: "The spirit which dictated this strange work was undoubtedly a dark one.... There are ... designs, representing beings human, demoniac, and divine, in situations of pain and sorrow and suffering. One character--evidently an evil spirit--appears in most of the plates; the horrors of hell, and the terrors of darkness and divine wrath, seem his sort portion.... Something like the fall of Lucifer and the creation of Man is dimly visible ... ; it is not a little fearful to look upon; a powerful, dark, terrible, though undefined and indescribable, impression is left on the mind--and it is in no haste to be gone." (2) In these haunting images Cunningham clearly saw Blake's satiric artistry in depicting Enlightenment notions of creation--of the universe and of man--as the perverted imaginings of a Miltonic Satan seeking to create in exile and in spite, from a point farthest from the truth. Blake first provides allusions to moral counterpoints that reveal Urizen as a false creator of grotesque scientific work; and, as with most of his works, the poem is cast as parodic imitation in which the work selected for imitation immediately raises issues of value by which we are to evaluate the contents and meaning of its parody. In keeping with the poet's intention to write "The Bible of Hell," the whole of The Book of Urizen is conceived as a hellish parody of the King James translation of Genesis. Just as the title of Genesis in the translation is "The First Book of Moses," so too is the satire's title (in its earliest version) The First Book of Urizen; the text of Blake's parody, moreover, looks to the reader like the King James Genesis because it is comprised of short verses that are numbered and organized into chapters. The plot of the sacred parody also mirrors the accounts in Genesis of the creation of the world, of Adam of Eve, of the fall, of Abraham and Isaac, and of Moses' flight from Egypt in search of the Promised Land. In addition to its evocations of the King James style and the Biblical parallels of narrative, the poem also provides a blatant comparison of Urizen's rebellion with that of Satan in Paradise Lost as announced in its "Preludium" and then maintained by allusion through the satire:

 
   Of the primeval Priests assum'd power, 
   When Eternals spurn'd back his religion; 
   And gave him a place in the north, 
   Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary. 
   (Plate 2: 1-4) 

The Biblical and Milton overtones leave no doubt but that we are examining Urizen's work of creation in mock-heroic prospect. If Pope in the Dunciad shows the literary dunces of his age establishing a kingdom ruled by Dulness, "coming," as the satirist says, "'in her Majesty, to destroy Order and Science, and to Substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth," so also does Blake in The Book of Urizen show the scientific dunces of his age establishing a kingdom ruled by Urizen, coming in his majesty to destroy imaginative order and poetry, and to substitute the kingdom of unenlightened science upon earth. (3)

The plates and the text of Urizen mock the abstraction of contemporary science and its inhumane indifference to human suffering. The poem's plot of the progress of Urizen's reign, cast as a parody of Genesis and a parallel to Satan's unsuccessful rebellion, begins with a "scientific" version of the creation of the world conceived in mockery of the mathematical rules for the universe of Isaac Newton (1642--1727) and the theories of a catastrophic geological formation of the earth of natural historians like James Hutton (1726-1797); it ends with the creation of Adam and Eve and the fall of the family of mankind conceived in mockery of the gruesome anatomical studies of William Hunter (1718-1783) and John Hunter (1729-1793). The common thread that links the scientific efforts of a Newton, a Hutton, and a Hunter is their shared effort to define creation by rational laws and divisive rules. In so doing they become, in Blake's view, a "Priesthood"--mediators who claim the divine role of gods in comprehending and then imposing their perspective of the world on the rest of creation. For Blake, the intellectual error of these scientists is no different from that of Milton's Satan: self-absorption and a half-knowledge born of pride. As Blake railed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "Priesthood" in their intellectual arrogance "forgot that All deities reside in the human breast" (Plate 11).

The eighteenth century had celebrated Newton as a figure of light and enlightenment; he was elegized upon his death (by James Thomson) as ascending to a heaven which becomes a festival of lights at the coming of "our philosophic sun!" (4) In contrast, Blake in his satire offers an anti-elegy to the scientific progeny of Newton, and we see the Satanic Urizen not in an apotheosis in which he ascends to a joyous Heaven but, rather, descended into the dark hell of a world comprised of his own crazed nightmares. Urizen in the anger and violence of his conception of the mortal body resembles the surgeon "Jack Tearguts," Blake's vicious caricature of John Hunter in An Island in the Moon. Hunter was the most prominent example of the scientist-at-work in the London of Blake's time, and medicine was the most prominent branch of the prevailing sciences. Blake would have initially become familiar with anatomical demonstrations and with the surgical experiments of John Hunter through his older brother William Hunter, who as Professor of Anatomy was giving lectures with demonstrations at the Royal Academy School when the artist became a student there in 1779. (5) William Hunter by that time was famous for the oratorical skills of his lectures on anatomy, and for a decade he had maintained a residence in Great Windmill Street where he had built dissecting rooms and a theater in which he lectured to fee-paying audiences for two hours at a time, and where he kept an anatomical and natural history collection. As a surgeon, William specialized in obstetrics, and in 1774 he published a highly graphic work on The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, exhibited in Figures (a new edition of which appeared posthumously in 1794, the publication year of The Book of Urizen). In 1780, William had a very public quarrel with his brother John at the Royal Society over which of them had first discovered the circulation of blood between the uterus and the placenta, an anatomical subject that would certainly have caught Blake's attention.

John Hunter lived near Blake in Golden Square when he first began his medical practice in London, and there is evidence to suggest that the artist and the surgeon were personally acquainted. (6) Hunter became famous for his operations to repair arterial aneurisms, procedures that involved opening the chest cavities ...