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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
The late David Erdman once called attention to S. Foster Damon's "eccentric and occasionally oracular" style--a statement of more than passing interest from a brilliant critic who in many ways could have been speaking of himself. (1) Blake scholars have long engaged in the sport of calling one another prophet or mystic, imputing the characteristics of their author to those who study him. Taunts of "oracle" and "occulist"--alternatingly maddening and clever, petty and spot-on, depending on the circumstances--lurk in Blake articles, monographs, reviews, notes, and conference papers. (2) The prophetic trope is more often than not delivered as a throwaway and read accordingly.
Two decades ago, in 1982, Studies in Romanticism published a special issue on Blake that turned the prophetic trope on its head. Conceived as a tribute to David Erdman, the issue included an interview with him and a round-table on the future of Blake studies edited by Morris Eaves. (3) Eaves not only found the soothsayers in his midst, but took things one step further by giving them an assignment. How he persuaded ten esteemed Blake scholars, all of presumably sound mind, to try on for size the mantle of prophecy I can't say, but the results make for startling reading, even--or especially--at this late date. (4) Regardless of whether or not individual predictions have made the transition from counterfactuals to factuals in the twenty years that have lapsed since their publication, the round robin gives a bracing look at how its contributors imagined the future landscape of Blake criticism. The time is ripe to assess their prophetic hits and misses, as well as reach out to the next generation of Blake scholars who will one day stand in the same relation to these pages as I do to their prototype.
Because 2002 marks not only the twentieth anniversary of that remarkable issue of SiR, but also the tenth anniversary of the conception of the electronic William Blake Archive, (5) a project that for some has come to iconify the future of Blake studies, I asked its editors--Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi--if they'd be willing to do the mantic honors again, this time around as a threesome. (6) In the text of the interview that follows--conducted via email in January, February, and March of 2002--they've done just that, reprising their prophetic roles, and at my bidding reflecting on their own scholarship--past, present, and future. While topics of conversation run the gamut from the winsome (Blake kitsch) to the peculiar (hypothetical extensions of Blake's canon), such diversity is subordinate to recurrent themes that shape the momentum of the four-way exchange, particularly those of reproduction, materiality, and representation. Perhaps in the hands of this interviewer things couldn't have been otherwise. It is in this context that I have used the interview as an occasion to draw from Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi a view of the Blake Archive as they see it from the scaffolds and a sense of its place in the history of Blake reproduction and editing.
Because we live in an age when rapid technological obsolescence is a truism, the more technical questions and answers of the interview are likely to acquire a patina before their time. If today they hold the promise of new knowledge and research tools, tomorrow they will remind us that the future is always refracted through the eye of history, distorted by the force and limitations of a collective imagination. "What is now proved was once only imagined," Blake tells us (MHH 8, E 36), (7) on the face of it suggesting perfect agreement between conjectural and empirical truth, the one co-extensive with the other, although temporally disjoint. In this view, history plays the role of generative grammarian, transforming the subjunctive mood in which we cast our speculations about the future into the indicative mood of fact and experience. Yet it is a representation that fails to take into account the prima facie truth of prophecy, irrespective of its fulfillment in time. The high jinks of the fool's prophecies in King Lear or the incandescence of the conjectures Of A. E. Housman or the loud proclamations of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his Futurist manifesto are specimens of a genre whose merits are measured by criteria other than provability.
The kind of prophecy practiced by Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi in the discussion that follows takes the more elementary form of a "personal accounting" and a "directive for future acts." The quotation comes from Poems for the Millennium, whose editors, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, (8) are describing manifestoes, not prophecies but its aptness points to a kinship between the two genres deserving of further attention. In her anthology of manifestoes, Mary Ann Caws notes that the manifesto "is always opposed to something, particular or general" (Caws xxi). In 1982, that something for Eaves was the myth of a Blake industry, the idea of a central command center responsible for overseeing traffic in Blake criticism. Using his introduction to the chain prophecy as a bully pulpit from which to knock down some wrongheaded ideas about Blake scholarship, Eaves had his fun with the prevailing conspiracy theory of the day. While the present interview makes no attempt to update Eaves's send-up for the new millennium, it shares with its predecessor other manifesto-like qualities, particularly in the way it "positions itself between what has been done and what will be done, between the accomplished and the potential, in ... an energizing division" (Caws xxi). To borrow Eaves's words of twenty years ago, I hope the results make for interesting reading. (9) [K. K.]
Kari Kraus: I want to begin at the most obvious place by having each of you take another look at Morris' original occasion for the 1982 round robin. His injunction at the time was to assess "the state of the art in Blake studies and to prophecy: what has been done and how well, and what needs to be done?" (390). It's a directive that prompted some highly variable responses twenty years ago. How would you answer the same directive today?
And to complicate the question somewhat, I'd like to get your thoughts on what kind of reading the round robin makes in retrospect. From my vantage point, for example, the Golden Age of Reproduction that has flourished in the decades after 1982, of which the Blake Trust series and the William Blake Archive are exemplary products, (10) looks like a largely unanticipated development. My sense is that there was a certain amount of complacency about reproductive issues among the various participants, a feeling that much of the necessary spadework had been accomplished and that it was time to turn to the more heady work of interpretation. Is that a fair assessment of how things stood in the early 80s?
Robert N. Essick: Yes, I think that is a fair assessment. No one anticipated--perhaps no one could have anticipated--the impact of computerized presses (essential to the Blake Trust series of the 1990s) and the internet. Both the editing of Blake's texts and the reproduction of his pictorial images have been profoundly affected by these technical innovations. And I can't recall anyone saying much about the importance of exhibitions, both as a medium for scholarly investigation and as a way of making Blake the artist better known to the public. But prophecy is more fun than history, so I'll try my hand at some predictions once again.
It seems to me (this is all very subjective) that there have been two major developments in Blake studies, over the last twenty years, in addition to the electronic revolution already noted. Certainly the School of Erdman has triumphed over the School of Frye. Situating Blake within various historical contexts has been a major occupation on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, Blake's technologies as a printmaker have been eagerly explored There is also some interesting work underway (but little published to date) on Blake's media and techniques as a painter. To these two recent strands of Blake studies let me add a third and seemingly outdated one. Some of us have not totally given up on explication, at least in the classroom Erdman's [Blake:] Prophet Against Empire [1954], generally seen as the godfather of the modern historical approach to Blake, is a work of interpretation as much as contextualization. I think that the next development in Blake scholarship may well be an attempt to synthesize these three approaches in ways that engage context (political, religious, social) in the direct service of interpretation and explore the interconnections among Blake's methods of writing, drawing, etching, printing. The ideological implications of graphic technologies, as it were, coupled with the ways Blake's texts and images were both shaped by and point toward their methods of production and their producer's social context. I'm cheating a little in making this prophecy because I have already seen this type of synthesis unfolding in Saree Makdisi's book on Blake, forthcoming from Chicago, and Rosamund Paice's essay on Blake's Laocoon engraving, forthcoming in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly. (11)
Joseph Viscomi: Although Gleckner, Adams, and a few others warned against reading the poetry to support theories (still excellent advice), you may be right about "reproductive issues" taking a backseat to "the more heady work of interpretation." But I guess you had to be there. Entering the 1980s, we seemed a long way from needing Bob's "Finding List of Reproductions of Blake's Art" (1971). What was once scattered was now coming together in a manageable number of reference works. Martin Butlin's magnificent 1981 catalogue raisonne of the paintings and drawings (twenty years in the making, though actually begun by William Michael Rossetti for Gilchrist's Life of Blake in 1863) was now available, as were Bindman's Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (1978), Bob's William Blake, Printmaker (1980), with his catalogue raisonne of the separate plates in press; we had the Clarendon edition of Blake's Night Thoughts (1980); reproductions of Dante (1980); the illustrations to Thomas Gray (1971); facsimile editions of Job, Grave, Vala, Tiriel and the Notebook; and catalouges for exhibitions at Kunstalle Hamburg, Tate Gallery, and Yale Center for British Art (1975, 1978, and 1982). In addition to the Blake Trust/ Trianon Press facsimiles, we had Erdman's Illuminated Blake (1974) and affordable editions of Marriage, Milton, Songs, and Urizen in full color. We had two journals (Blake Studies and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly); an annual bibliography; a reprint of Damon's dictionary with a helpful index by Morris (1979); Bentley's enormous Blake Books, describing every copy of every illuminated book and every engraving (1977); and fine editions of the poetry and prose by Keynes, Erdman, and Bentley. We even had a Norton critical edition (1979).
All this industry culminated in Blake finally making it into the standard reference of romantic studies, Jordan's fourth edition of The English Romantic Poets (1985). Missing from the first three editions, Blake was no longer "preromantic"; Blake Studies had affected and benefited from ongoing re-evaluations of romanticism itself, resulting in Blake becoming an essential figure of the movement. So, not only were we ready to get on with the "heady" stuff of interpretation, but we fully expected and hoped art historians would join in. Many of us recognized that reading Blake's art required more than translating pictures into text and interpreting the translation We recognized the need for more dialogue across academic disciplines if, as Adams noted, "there is any hope of a language being developed that will deal more successfully with Blake" (401). Paley was so optimistic that he feared "a rash of iconographic `readings'" and a misuse of all the new scholarly tools (427). Blake had been served very well by a few British and European art historians (Blunt, Butlin, Bindman, Lindberg, Dorrbecker), and what Bob saw as the prerequisites to legitimizing Blake in the eyes of American art historians were met: catalogue raisonnes, higher prices at the auction houses, and exhibitions. So why did American art historians not join the feast?
I'd like to think that the quality of the reproductions (black and white, too few in color, very few to size) failed to entice, but that can't be it. Art historians have been relying on poor reproductions for years. I suspect, as Adams noted, that art historians are still "too deeply submerged in assumptions that don't allow for Blake's existence" (401), or, as Grant put it, are trained to see by Reynolds (442). At the time, I said that art historians were usually no better informed about graphic art than their literary counterparts Even in art history departments where British Art is not an oxymoron, print remains the bastard child and Blake continues to fall between the cracks. He is a graphic artist and a painter tied to the word, working small--primarily in watercolors--and painting idealized figures in the great ages of portraiture and landscape painting in oils. Blake's place in literature required changes in literary taste; apparently, as Bob noted all those years ago, a similar change of "taste" in art history is still needed if Blake is to move from "naive genius" outside the "main course of European art" to an essential part of that course.
If we were complacent about reproductions, it was because we seemed to have so many--and expected so little from them. Celebrating the publications of Butlin's catalogue and the Clarendon Night Thoughts, Grant said: "Although many of the reproductions in both volumes are not of good quality, their shortcomings are not seriously misleading" (442). This is true so far as it goes--compositions are represented in their entirety, but the images are not true to size or color (even the ones in color) and are but shadows of the originals. They point to the original rather than reproduce it. What you refer to as the largely unanticipated "Golden Age of Reproduction" that occurred in the 90s is golden, I think, less for the number of new (and affordable) color reproductions than for the incredible fidelity now possible. We now have digital reproductions that can be studied in place of the originals by editor, literary scholar, and art historian. And as Blake's popularity increases, resulting in more exhibitions and higher prices at the auction houses and, ironically, less access to the originals, the need for such reproductions will only increase. With print reproductions, we were satisfied with basic information about the composition. Now, with high-resolution, color-corrected digital images we have information about the artifact; we can tell if something has been erased from the paper, added to the print, or altered in pen and ink, and much more. I hope that this kind of bibliographical, aesthetic, and technical information, as well the ability to manipulate images on one's home computer to detect what has heretofore required examination of the originals, stimulates new ways to teach, research, and think about art in general and Blake in particular. Bob's and my "Inquiry into Blake's Method of Color Printing" is a case in point. (12) It uses new technology and digital reproductions in the service of scholarship and could not have been written twenty years ago. Digital reproductions of Blake's color prints and of our facsimiles provided incredible details that enabled us to marshal material facts about production and technique that fall below the threshold of vision, even in the originals.
Our reliance on reproductions will increase, and changes in the mode and quality of reproduction will necessarily affect the what and way we know. These kinds of epistemological questions inevitably arise with changes in representation and are, in the wake of the internet, affecting intellectual culture at large and not just the study of Blake. Nevertheless, it seems our hopes today echo those made twenty years ago. As Gleckner said then, we now have the scholarly tools to "ready a more intelligent interpretation" of Blake (435). The Blake Archive will continue to grow over the next decade with Blake's paintings, prints, sketches, drawings, and manuscripts; with its excellent reproductions, diplomatic texts, and searchable images, it will provide the raw material for critical, interpretive, bibliographical, and art historical analyses. May complacency about reproductions turn to enthusiasm and art historians take note.
Morris Eaves: To some extent the 1982 assessment was correct. Joe gives the details that lay behind the sense of satisfaction that most of the basic scholarly tools and materials were finally in place--and, as he says, maybe you had to be there. It's also true that, as predicted, a healthy flow of criticism and interpretation continued in the 80s (and 90s), but for the most part it didn't, I believe, build on any consensus established in the previous period. That is, it refused to be fully part of any continuing project. Scholars like to talk about the "community of scholars" and their ongoing "conversations." Much of the published critical work in the last two decades of the century started more or less new conversations in tune with larger conversations in the humanities. Insofar as they've focused on political and historical issues they're in the line of Erdman, you might say, but by and large they haven't engaged directly with Erdman's interpretations of Blake.
But one of the chronic problems that Blake presents is information overload, and I comment further on this a bit later. Information overload is a problem that comes with being in the world these days, but Blake does exacerbate it--and makes the work of scholar-critics especially painful. Consider the prediction Bob made at the start of the interview, that "the next development in Blake scholarship may well be an attempt to synthesize these three approaches in ways that engage context (political, religious, social, in the direct service of interpretation and explore the interconnections among Blake's methods of writing, drawing, etching, printing." Whew--that's a pretty tall order. There are advantages, after all, of having your field of vision limited ("English" and "art history" are useful disciplinary limits; the unillustrated printed edition of Blake is an imposed technical and economic limit, also useful sometimes). Some of the most brilliant work on Blake has been done in ignorance of the total picture. That sounds perverse and irresponsible, but it's true, and ignorance is one of the enabling conditions of scholarship. Hypothetically, if we were to provide critics with a virtual copy of all the information relevant to understanding Blake, we would give them the London of Blake's time (for a start, before giving them the rest). That's why people go digging into archives of old papers and pictures, to simulate that recovery of the past as best they can two hundred years after the fact. But aren't they lucky that the number of surviving documents is so limited! That's a line of argument that lands us back in 1952, before all those wonderful resources for studying Blake became available.
I agree with Joe's assessment that "with print reproductions, we were satisfied with basic information about the composition. Now, with high-resolution, color-corrected digital images we have information about the artifact; we can tell if something has been erased from the paper, added to the print, or altered in pen and ink, and much more." No sooner did "we" have the reproductions in Butlin's catalogue and Erdman's Illuminated Blake, Bob's catalogues, and even the six Blake Trust volumes than we saw that, with new media, we could have more. As someone once wrote, or rather etched, "less than All cannot satisfy Man" (NNR [b], E 2). (And I easily looked that up in the electronic Erdman in the Blake Archive.)
Kari: Bob, in your answer to my first question you touch on two venerable genres of scholarship as leading indicators of the state of the art in Blake studies; let me ask you about another in which you've had a longstanding interest. If editions and critical monographs, which you discuss above, are two obvious yardsticks by which we measure an author's critical reputation, then the scholarly biography is a clear third. Though I haven't tallied the number of Blake biographies that have been written to date, it's a fairly sizeable lot; lining them up side by side would offer visual proof--if any was needed--that the idea of a definitive biography is as much a myth to be debunked as that of a definitive edition. We keep churning out new biographies of Blake because each generation of biographers has its own totems and taboos; the question of Blake's sanity, for example, is one that has waxed and waned in popularity over time.
In 1982, you sounded the call for a new biography of Blake, one "informed by modern psychological insights" (399). By 1995, Peter Ackroyd had come out with a life of Blake, with G. E. Bentley, Jr. following suit a few years later in 2001. In your opinion, what kind of Blake does each of them give us? And is the rich psychological portrait you imagined twenty years ago still a desideratum of Blake scholarship today?
Bob: I think that an interpretive life of Blake, one that takes into account modern insights into psychology, is still a requisite. To paint with a very broad brash, Ackroyd's Blake (1995) could be placed in the category of a "popular biography." Unlike some of my academic friends, who found some factual errors in the book and thus dismissed it, I think that Ackroyd does a good job, although the portrait of Blake that emerges is not all that different from what we knew about Blake's character from earlier biographers Alexander Gilchrist (1863) through Mona Wilson (1927). Bentley's The Strange from Paradise (2001) is a thorough documentary life, one that further narratizes his indispensable Blake Records (1969) and updates it. Bentley's portrait of Blake has a curiously (but perhaps accurately) split personality. While the book is filled with quotidian facts (commissions, money, work, patrons), Bentley's sense of Blake, as the title suggests, is of a very other-worldly personality. The transcendent and the mundane never quite come together, but perhaps they never did for Blake either.
The current biographical scene still allows room for the sort of interpretive life I envisioned back in 1982. Although it would run the danger of falling into the biographical fallacy (if that beast still exists), the type of biography I have in mind would make more use of Blake's poetry as a portal into his character. To repeat a point I made twenty years ago, Blake wrote one of the most complex psychological and biographical poems in the language, Milton a Poem. If Wordsworth's biographers delve into The Prelude, why can't Blake's biographers have a go at Milton? Other psychologically-oriented approaches also come to mind, including a more self-conscious struggle with the spirit/matter split indicated by Bentley's biography.
Tom Mitchell raised the issue of Blake's sanity in 1982. The topic still seems resistant to critical inquiry. Most of Blake's admirers, from John Linnell to the present, have felt compelled to defend their hero against charges of insanity (or even the sorts of emotional instabilities we are all prone to) so that Blake's work would be taken seriously. Those who write about Vincent Van Gogh feel no such need, but a prejudice against unusual forms of brain chemistry still inhabits Blake studies. I've had trouble dropping any hints about Blake's possible schizophrenia (although I may have sneaked a sentence or two past Morris for his forthcoming Cambridge volume). Having known a few marginal schizophrenics (it's always a matter of degrees, and takes many forms), I find that they make startling connections among things that "normal" (but less insightful?) people do not perceive. If they could write poetry, they would create long, rambling poems filled with polymorphous metaphors that would lead any scholars who took such writings seriously to respond with long, detailed critical studies seeking out the full range of the text's radiant meanings. Remind you of anyone you know?
Kari: Morris, I can't resist bringing up that cranky tone you adopted in the SiR introduction all those years ago. For readers who may not have seen the original, here are a few of your opening words: "I have been noticing more than usual lately just how wrong people can be about Blake scholarship. In the past decade many a loose-tongued author has tossed off complaints about a `Blake industry' or a `Blake establishment.' Stretching the meaning of `industry' to include the collective curriculum vitae of Blake scholarship is as parochial as stretching the definition of `universal' to include your favorite Victorian poem, and it only goes to show that most scholars would have a hard time spotting a real industry or a real universe across the library quadrangle" (389). As a reality check, you go on to substitute the "little, homemade, bumptious, and entirely unintimidating world of high Blake scholarship" for the fiction of a Blake industry that you found all around you.
A lot has transpired in Blake studies since you wrote that introduction twenty years ago. As Joe notes elsewhere in this interview,...
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