Mimicry against mimesis in "infant sorrow": seeing through Blake's image with Adorno and Lacan.(Jacques Lacan)(Theodor Adorno)(William Blake)(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los ...

So saying the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder Albion stood in terror: not for himself but for his Friend Divine, & Self was lost in the contemplation of faith And wonder at the Divine Mercy & at Los's sublime honour--Jerusalem (1)

Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind.--Jacques Lacan (2)

THE CULMINATING VISION AFFORDED ALBION IN "THE FURNACES OF affliction" (E256) at the end of Jerusalem leads to an apocalyptic dream ("All was a Vision, all a Dream" E256) in which, famously, "All Human Forms [are] identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone" (E258), a consummation reasonably described as an "identitarian" ideology of art, one which is "realistic" in some platonic sense. But it is not sufficiently remarked that this consummation is only made possible, as the quotation above clearly shows, by a skewed or avoided mimesis. A few plates earlier in the poem Los has been reminding Blake's readers in stentorian tones that insofar as "identification" might involve the assumption of "Universal Characteristics" (curiously described as characters in the Bible even beyond "the Lord") it is a very bad thing, perhaps even the root of all evil ("they become an Eternal Death" E250), and so when the poem approaches its final identitarian rapture it only does so in a dream by virtue of a peculiarly controlled and distanced identification, almost a parody of the real (platonic) thing. Albion sees the Lord as the "likeness and similitude of Los," and--in an even odder translation of crucifixial sacrifice--Jesus allows an opacity ("the Cloud") to screen him, even in this disguise, from Albion, making his "identification" even more (literally) difficult, even more a matter of faith. My purpose in this discussion is not to interpret Jerusalem but to use these few lines of it as a kind of template for constructing a warning against identitarian tendencies in the interpretation of Blake. These tendencies seem relatively innocent in themselves, since they express themselves often by repeating the poet's own propaganda mythos about clarity and image, but taken in conjunction with the current antiquarian/archival taste for locating Blake in the context of his contemporary dissident protestantism (at the expense of Northrop Frye's effort to make him a contemporary), they are contributing to the image of a Blake who has little to say to the modern imagination, especially that theoretical imagination which associates apocalyptic totalization with the Terror and with the Holocaust and with Jonestown. In this discussion, therefore, I am concerned to restore Blake's dialogue with a modernism one can decently take an interest in, but my local target is specifically the undivided image so dear to the whole tradition of Blake scholarship, arguing that, whatever this means to interpreters, to Blake its clear function is to divide and separate--that is, to prevent identification--rather than platonically to "mean." In the criticism I analyze I want to uncover an anxious dialectic not only in the poet but also in some of his most faithful readers between a tendency to apocalyptic totalization of meaning (which I understand as "identitarian") and something much more radical, something that shakes meaning fundamentally, that perhaps only the dangerous approach of totalization would pave the way toward in Blake's historicized vocabulary. The opposition to totalization, according to the terms of this dialectic, is therefore not mounted by ambiguous or uncertain meanings (though I believe Blake suffered much more from uncertainty than is usually allowed) but by an idea of expression closer to mimicry than mimesis. I believe this idea--which permeates every aspect of his writing and illustrating--is one significant thing that is "modern" about Blake, and I invoke it to license my attempts to align him more generally with modern thought.

The illuminated writings, as everyone knows, entered the American canon through the door his conductor Northrop Frye conveniently left ajar to the subsequent "theory revolution," and it is no small paradox therefore that each successive wave of disciplines constituting that revolution, while not powerless to affect the reception and interpretation of his works, has tended to make Blake less, rather than more, available to contemporary culture. In homage to the poem I want to highlight here, "Infant Sorrow," one could claim in fact that Blake has been "sulking" on that theoretical breast (offered by Frye) ever since. Contrarily, but to similar effect, although historical studies (usually energetically opposed to the metaphysical obsessions of post-structuralism) specify the neighborhoods and atmosphere of Blake's political and religious thought as never before, the effect of this mapping has often been to fit Blake in at the expense of what is distinctive about him. Or at least to what we want to think is distinctive, since insofar as he functioned as a kind of bricoleur Blake has only himself to blame if we have trouble separating what is original from what he borrowed. Academic study of Blake, moreover, which understandably has never managed to escape the eccentricity of its subject entirely, has always been attracted to a compensatory normalization, and historicization has been more useful to this end than theorizing. It would seem that, whether he was a universal guru or a Muggletonian, Blake had to fit in somewhere, and even brilliant historical studies like Morris Eaves's The Counter-Arts Conspiracy, which is by no means given to alibis, find ways to explain, almost to normalize, even Blake's most amazing fulminations. (3)

The fact that Blake was unusual in practicing two arts simultaneously has obviously been useful for absorbing the stress of such operations (though specialized art-historians have always been more sceptical than literary critics about normalization--and indeed about Blake's quality), and I venture to emphasize therefore the near breakdown of relations between two distinguished literary critics-cum-art historians--John Barrell and Morris Eaves--over the political ideologies implied by Blake's views about integrity of conception. (4) These views are usually housed in Blake's own strenuous admonitions about "the bounding line" (E550) and "Minute Discrimination" (E643), (5) and despite the fact that his verbal practice is nearly always ventriloquial or parodic and his illustrations often emulate the manners of caricature, his own idealization of his technical practice has traditionally led to a fudging of the difference in Blake between (virtually platonic) mimesis and a mimicry more relevant to eighteenth-century satire than to romantic elevation of imagination. In fact all parties, whether more attracted to Frye's archetypalism, to the purity of religious antinomianism or to the autographic spontaneity of Blake's artisanship (as revealed by Joseph Viscomi (6)) seem unable to escape Blake's avowed ideology of the undivided image--even while they agree on little else about the fundamental nature and motivation of their subject. My purpose in this essay is twofold: to suggest a place in contemporary theorizing for Blake's actual practice (as distinct from its advertised ideology), which will no doubt seem gratuitous to some readers (the psychoanalytic culture-critique of the Lacanian school and the anti-Hegelianism of the Frankfurt School), while demonstrating that the "ideology of undividedness" in commentaries on Blake will turn out after all, at least in a dialectical sense, to have been all along pointing us towards the same place. "Going to Eternal Death" in Blakespeak and Lacan's application of the aim of psychoanalysis to cultural questions will be shown to be mutually relevant, and demonstrating that this is so will enable me to rehearse progressively a criticism of the role of the "undivided image" among Blake's interpreters. This criticism, which encounters a persistent if unintended dialectic between the demands of identitarian imaginary clarity on the one hand and, on the other, "apocalyptic" symbolism (hostile to the actual) is prone to pretending that clarity of image is the same as apocalyptic design, a pretense that probably owes much to Frye but which recurrent contradictions in argument--whether on behalf of "civil humanistic" or antinomian universalism--make doubtful. That these arguments, either in fact or in their theoretical logic, make it terribly difficult to disentangle humanism from antinomianism is one signal that it is high time to rethink Blake's relation to our own convictions, and my insistence that the only reason to continue to associate Blake's illustrations with an ideology of wholeness is that a certain undivided opacity of illustration is required to fulfill their function of divisiveness and obstruction will turn out to be more useful than it sounds.

In the Songs of Innocence & Of Experience particularly, the relationship of picture or image to word is only one aspect of a deeper division--or tendency to decomposition--which seems to have befallen all aspects of the Blake song's expression. More plainly, the division between word and picture needs to be theorized alongside a parallel division within discourse between carefully separated narrative and dramatic registers. Verbal expression is not, of course, directed to two different senses, but neither should the "sister arts" implications of a Blake plate encourage the belief that we are dealing with simply some version of "show and tell." The decomposition in question is much more radical than this functional division. (Dreams, I might add, likewise "show," and the Freudian commentary stresses the pre-verbal aspect of their developmentally primitive construction, but stresses as well that their meaning can hardly be regarded as visual, even if their expression seems to be. (7) Their expression is also at least theatrical or performative, and Freud's metaphors often display his awareness that this is so.)

For Blake's practice, the consequence of the way these poems are designed is not, I think, three equal and exclusive means of expression (narrative, drama, image). (8) Discourse is divided with extraordinary clarity between an eonciation (by the speaker of "The Tyger," for instance) and the symbolic enonce, the range of allusion and association to which the speaker is apparently oblivious, and the illustration underlines rather than undermines the division; it is moreover true that the division itself endows the picture with meaning-resonances that it would not otherwise have: the picture, presumably because of the reader's hesitation as to which "level" of meaning to assign it to, becomes the stage for an obstruction of meaning totally different from conventional "titling" or "illustration," even as the speaker, on account of naivete, becomes a kind of parody of his own implication. As between rival tendencies towards mimesis (especially "sister arts" ekphrasis) or divisive mimicry, these meaning-resonances tip the balance firmly towards the latter, often producing the impression that Blake's plates, while they may require to be decoded like rebus puzzles, also firmly resist totalizing solutions.

Part of my argument has to do with how well this integrates with an ideological division between the claims of the individual and the claims of the civis (say, Lacan's Symbolic), but there is more at stake here than the sorting of culture between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. For the effects I have been describing, especially the effect of the picture, are more than a consequence of a process of distinction. The illustration, by obstructing union, has the effect characteristically of repressing or concealing something, if only the possibility of composition, and it is the relationship between this quality of repression and Blake's simultaneous and overwhelming tendency to the mythological absolute that is so striking. The ideological implication of such a relationship is not obvious, nor its alignment or lack of alignment with modern political tendencies, but hyperdevelopment of parallel tendencies to separation/division in the expressive socius and absolutist claims for his aesthetic method are potentially troubling in ways that seem to me to transcend the terms employed in current attempts to place Blake on our political horizon. Not only does Blake's procedural idiosyncracy make it hard to define whether he is liberal or conservative in terms significant to us, it seems from the very beginning to have been interested in precluding the possibility of such a distinction by interrogating the whole tradition of its evolution. The destructive potential of such an interrogation is generally ignored in commentary, and as well the possibility that it might reflect badly on attempts to locate Blake's position historically. The paradoxical passion everywhere in evidence in Blake's writing for "identifying" what is already distinct by dialectical insistence (so that Blake is the poet who sophisticates innocence even as he separates it from experience, just as he is the poet who savages Christianity from a point-of-view he describes as Christian) I want to identify as a signature of his style and of his way of thinking, strategies hard to contain in any ideology, let alone an ideology of the undivided image.

In a remarkable passage of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer remark that the modern (fallen) ego has evolved from primitive mimicry (motivated by the need to exert control over Nature) to a rationalized and much more dangerous "direct equality of mimesis and the mediated equality of synthesis" in the concept. (9) Blake's use of the image, likewise consciously opposed (I believe) to the controlling purposes of the culture industry, represents a deliberate if anachronistic retreat to the value of a...

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