"Jerusalem is scattered abroad": Blake's Ottoman geographies.(William Blake)(Critical essay)

They came up to Jerusalem; they walked before Albion / In the Exchanges of London every Nation walkd / And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony / Albion coverd the whole Earth, England encompassd the Nations,/ ... From bright Japan & China to Hesperia France & England. / Mount Zion lifted his head in every Nation under heaven: / And the Mount of Olives was beheld over the whole Earth: / The footsteps of the Lamb of God were there: but now no more.

--Blake, Jerusalem (24:42-51) (1)

WHAT PLACE IS THERE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY FOR EXALTED talk of any country 'encompass[ing] the nations"? For all its religious fervor, this is a dangerous kind of nostalgia. Blake's utopia, rendered as Albion (2) covering the earth, sounds a bit like any other imperialist campaign, and his imagination of "bright Japan and China" just another stop along the Silk Road. There is a fine line between Blake's imagined Jerusalem-at once the holy city and London, at once a temple and a financial exchange--and the imperialism it aims to disavow; it may at first seem there is little room between eternity and global capitalism. (3)

Blake is generally saved from charges of imperialism by recourse to his "madness"; a self-proclaimed prophet is not imagined to have much use for the Real World. Though his is a spatial poetry (littered with chasms, voids, abysses, vacuums, and shells--its lands, books, and bodies described in terms of contraction, circumference, and direction), it is easy to read Blake's spatiality as metaphorical and apolitical, "imaginative" in the sense of being impossible. His geographic orientations are materially unimaginable--"West, the Circumference: South, the Zenith: North, the Nadir: East, the Center"--and appear symbolic: the directions are aligned alternately with the senses, the features of the face, and the limbs of the body. This metaphoricity seems to suggest that Blake's spatial interest is in the eternal rather than the "real," the symbolic rather than the material.

But what we see in Jerusalem is that these binaries of real/imaginary, lived/symbolic, are themselves inadequate to account for the experience of reading the poem or building the city. Rather than reduce Blake's insistent focus on the material conditions of England and his (equally insistent) use of visionary language to one or the other, either the literal or the metaphorical, I suggest that the imaginary process proposed in Jerusalem is the move by which the visionary city becomes the material city. To the extent that this process makes use of space and reveals the imaginative aspect of spatial experience, we might read Blake as a precursor to twentieth-century spatial theorists, who understand that space is neither Newtonian nor Kantian--is not a thing so much as a practice, what Marcus Doel calls "the event of geography." (4) Blake's insistence on the mutability of space(s)--and on the power of the imagination to transform material space--is what enables him to undertake, in earnest, the building of Jerusalem. And yet Britain's own insistence on the mutability of spaces (spaces that might be conquered, harvested, settled, or annexed) is the basis for another order altogether; the most prominent "event of geography" in the early nineteenth century is the event of imperial expansion, itself a negotiation between imaginative and material spaces. This article aims to understand how Blake sustains a distinction between his own vision of Jerusalem-as-Albion encompassing the earth and England's transformation from a tiny island to the most powerful empire in the world--how, in fact, Blake uses the materials of England's empire to produce an anti-imperial, global vision.

Though it is in his preface to Milton that Blake famously calls on his readers to build Jerusalem "In Englands green & pleasant Land," it is the encyclopedia Jerusalem--on which Blake likely worked for sixteen years (roughly 1804-1821)--that synthesizes the national and apocalyptic interests of his earlier prophecies. The simultaneity of history and vision in Jerusalem requires a constant negotiation and renegotiation of Britain's inheritance and legacy; at any given moment in the poem, Britain is at once the descendant of and the precursor to Jerusalem. Late in the third chapter of Jerusalem we find a roll call of the "Thirty-two Counties of the Four Provinces of Ireland," the "Land of Erin." The counties are a mixture of Irish and biblical inheritance; each Irish county is a direct descendant of one of the sons of Jacob. This gesture to the non-English history of Britain, however, is short-lived, for we soon learn that

 
   All these Center in London & in Golgonooza. from whence They are 
   Created continually East & West & north & South And from them are 
   Created all the Nations of the Earth Europe & Asia & Africa & 
   America, in fury Fourfold! 
 
(3:72-28-31, my emphasis)