"Sublime labours": aesthetics and political economy in Blake's Jerusalem.(William Blake)(Critical essay)

FROM THE OUTSET OF HIS EPIC POEM JERUSALEM, BLAKE HIGHLIGHTS THE importance of aesthetic perception. Above the archway in the original frontispiece, Blake describes "A pleasant Shadow of Repose calld Albions lovely Land / His Sublime & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd in the Earth / His Reason his Spectrous Power, covers them above / Jerusalem his Emanation is a Stone laying beneath" (1:3-6). (1) Northrop Frye argues that Blake's opening image suggests a Druidic trilithon, which "represents a geometrical or abstract form of the perversion of the three classes" that Blake identifies in Milton and thus symbolizes fallen aesthetics: the "Sublime & Pathos" are "uprights" with "the fallen reason coveting them." (2) Similarly, David Baulch sees this as "an image of the divided aesthetic," and he notes how it "resonates with Blake's description of ... The Ancient Britons where he indicates the visible presence of a threefold division amongst postlapsarian humanity as the aesthetic qualities of the beautiful man of pathos, the strong man of the sublime, and the ugly man of human reason." (3) In addition to these canceled lines, Blake also stresses the notion of correct aesthetic perception and the integral nature of these aesthetic categories later in his preface to the first chapter, "To the Public," where he describes his ordering principles of this poem: "Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts--the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other" (3). In a poem that seeks to show how Albion (England) can become reunited with his Emanation, Jerusalem, the fallen condition is one of fallen perception. Blake thus begins Jerusalem by providing a model of correct aesthetic perception for his poem, which itself demonstrates how such perception can overcome the division inherent to fallen humanity.

These opening plates of Jerusalem also emphasize the important associations that Blake attaches to aesthetic categories. In particular, Blake correlates the sublime with labor and the beautiful with repose, but he also connects his notion of the sublime with the ideal of unity. In Jerusalem, Blake makes it clear that the repose associated with the beautiful can be dangerous and that Los's task is to rouse Albion from his slumbers through his sublime labors. Blake describes himself as having a similar task, for he also has been roused to work: "After my three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public" (3). He wants the reader to love him for "this energetic exertion" of his talent, yet he also points out that the purpose of Los's (and his own) sublime labor is to create unity. Los must help Albion reunite with Jerusalem, and Blake wants his readers to reunite with himself and the Divine Body of Jesus: "I also hope the Reader will be with me, wholly One, in Jesus our Lord, who is the God and Lord to whom the Ancients look'd and saw afar with trembling & amazement" (3). The figure of the Divine Body of Jesus, which Blake develops as one of multeity in unity, thus becomes a sublime object, and, indeed, the sublime object of this poem.

Blake's focus on aesthetic perception continues throughout the poem, for Jerusalem is a text that is saturated with references to the sublime. While Blake critics recently have begun to focus more on Blake's use of the sublime, these readings do not take into account that Jerusalem, through its emphasis on Los's work of building Golgonooza, also foregrounds labor. (4) This combined emphasis on the sublime and labor is not merely coincidental but integral to Blake's aesthetics. As Tom Furniss has demonstrated, the discourse of the sublime did not emerge autonomously but was interrelated with the discourse of political economy. (5) Jerusalem presents a similar connection, for Blake's use of the sublime connects the idea of aesthetic perception with the problems of division and labor, and indeed, the division of labor. This concern is especially important to Blake, since he was both an engraver and a painter and thus experienced firsthand the practical effects of the division of labor upon art and the artist's role in society. This essay, then, will explore how Blake's concept of the sublime, which delineates a labor that can bring about unity, intersects the discourse of political economy. Like Edmund Burke, Blake valorizes the sublime and connects it with labor, while he also denigrates the delusive repose of the beautiful. Blake, however, uses these images to critique the idea of the division of labor--a critique that may, in the end, be contradicted by his image of the sublime imagination, the Divine Body of Jesus.

This apparent contradiction within Blake's aesthetics reveals not some inconsistency in his thought; rather, his sublime object demonstrates the deep-seated contradictions of social relations themselves. Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology, which builds upon Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe's discourse theory, provides a useful model for reading the contradictions in Blake's aesthetics. For Laclau and Mouffe, the discourses within the social field are structured by social antagonism, an original trauma that cannot be symbolized. (6) Zizek links this fissure, this unrepresentable trauma, to the Lacanian Real, and thus ideology becomes a "fantasy-construction" that "structures our effective, real relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel." (7) For Zizek, the sublime object likewise conceals and occupies this void and, consequently, resembles the object petit a: "the object causing our desire and at the same time posed retroactively by our desire" (Zizek 65). In this sense, Blake's sublime object of the Divine Body can be seen as a fantasy that responds to the antagonism of society, an attempt to suture an impossible cleft within the social field. Though he strives to create an aesthetic that reconciles the division inherent in a capitalist society, his discourse is structured by the very social antagonisms that are constitutive of other discourses such as political economy. Thus, Blake ends up with a similar social fantasy that attempts to mask this fundamental social fissure but also mediates its structural effects. Tracing this connection between the discourses of aesthetics and political economy helps elucidate Blake's aesthetics in Jerusalem, yet it also demonstrates how resolving the apparent differences in aesthetics and politics can also overcome a fundamental split in Blakean criticism itself. Historicist and Marxist readings of Blake tend to focus on his early poems and read them in the context of contemporary radical religious and political discourses. Critics that focus on Blake's later works, like Jerusalem, tend to ignore his practical political concerns and highlight instead Blake's mythic, imaginative, and aesthetic concerns. (8) Analyzing Blake's connection of labor and the sublime in Jerusalem shows how Blake mediates politics through his aesthetics and testifies to the need of further study of his aesthetics that is integrated with an analysis of his ideas about labor. (9) Only through such attention to the interrelated discourses of aesthetics and political economy can we gain a fuller understanding of Blake's "sublime labours."

I

In an often-cited passage from his annotations to Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, Blake records his "Contempt & Abhorrence" for Burke's Enquiry (660). He rejects Burke's aesthetics primarily because they "mock Inspiration & Vision" (660), for they, as Reynolds' aesthetics, are founded upon the empirical theories of Newton and Locke. (10) Though Blake rejects the philosophy behind Burke's theory of the sublime, he still sees the importance of this aesthetic category. As Morton Paley puts it, "It is Burke's reductive theory, not the concept of the sublime itself, to which Blake is hostile. In fact, in his view of the nature and function of poetry, Blake has much in common with a number of other poets, critics, and literary theorists who wrote about the sublime in the eighteenth century." (11) Similarly, Vincent de Luca argues that "Blake's relation to the sublime is not superficial but profound" and that "the traditions of the sublime extant in his time play an important role in his aesthetics, the style and organization of his chief poetical works, and indeed, his outlook on the world" (3). Paley, de Luca, and others have situated Blake's theory of the sublime in a wider aesthetic context; however, they do not take into account the discursive relationship between aesthetics and political economy that recent scholarship has revealed. For example, Peter de Bolla, focusing especially on the period during the Seven Years War, demonstrates the connections between the discourses of debt and the sublime, especially in regard to their production of "the autonomous subject." (12) More significant for this essay, however, is Furniss' study, which highlights "the embedded relations... between aesthetics, politics, and economics" and examines "how the theoretical assumptions which shape Burke's aesthetics emerge out of a larger debate about the social and political consequences of the commercial revolution in the first half of the eighteenth century" (1). Thus, it is useful to turn back to Burke and examine the extent to which Blake's sublime partakes of this discursive context.

The standard narrative that describes the development of the sublime throughout the eighteenth century focuses on the shift from exterior to interior--that is, from theories that emphasize the outward object to theories, such as Burke's, that highlight the importance of the subject rather than the object. (13) Furniss, however, ...