Blake's awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World.pdf

7/27/2019 Blake's awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/blakes-awareness-of-blake-in-a-newtonian-worldpdf 1/13

History of European Ideas 31 (2005) 237–249

Blake’s awareness of ‘Blake in a Newtonian

World’: William Blake, Isaac Newton, and

writing on metal

Jason Snart

College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137, USA

Available online 17 August 2004

Abstract

Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as ‘‘opposites’’: Newton the great

systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this

direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks theintricacies of each thinker’s work. Further, this straightforward ‘‘opposition’’ fails to account

for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position,

applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful ‘‘Newton’’ and a useful ‘‘Blake’’

with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre’s technique of ‘‘critical

thirding’’ (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for ‘‘an-Other’’ position in the dialectic

of ‘‘Blake’’ and ‘‘Newton’’. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar

than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself

mobilizes (or indeed ‘‘creates’’) its own, subjectively useful, ‘‘Blake’’ and ‘‘Newton’’ in order to

make particular arguments.

r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stuart Peterfreund published Blake in a Newtonian World in 1998. I adopt a

similar, but fundamentally different title here: ‘Blake’s Awareness of Blake in a

Newtonian World’. What does Blake’s art foreground in terms of Blake’s awareness

of his alignment with Newton and Newtonianism, and of his art’s production in

ARTICLE IN PRESS

www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.010

Tel.: +1-630-942-2033.

E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Snart).

Downl

oadedby[CentralU Library

ofBucharest]at12:2629Jan

uary2013

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

http://www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas



what Blake likely felt was a ‘Newtonian world’? My aim is to reconsider the

relationship between Blake and Newton, and to suggest both similarities and

differences between the two in order to nuance what has perhaps become a too-easy

opposition between ‘Blake’ and ‘Newton’, as though the terms themselves referredconsistently and transparently to the same thing. Blake and Newton were great

systematizers, forced to confront and deal with gaps in systems of explaining human

experience and natural phenomena. Yet to the gaps any system seemed to have,

Newton and Blake reacted very differently. Newton looked for a suture: a predictive

method which could describe and unite the variability of the micro- and macrocosms

he explored. Blake, however, forced disruption, discontinuity and incommensur-

ability, producing an art he likely hoped would reflect and embody his experience of

being in the world, and which would communicate the primacy he placed on the

individual imagination. I will consider a few of Blake’s self-referential poetic

moments as comment on his awareness of the materiality (or on the ‘Newtonian-

ness’) of artistic production, along with moments in Newton’s work in which he

expresses doubts about the unity of his own system. These examples suggest

similarities between the often contrasted projects and personas of Blake and

Newton, or, at the very least, they illuminate the complexities at stake in projects of

contrast and comparison.

Part of the purpose here is to question what or who ‘Blake’ and ‘Newton’ are,

since such questions figure heavily in how they can be aligned relative to one another.

Are they textual, or con-textual, constructions or re-constructions, psychoanalytic

products (and of whose psyche)? Do they, or can they, exist beyond exegesis—even if Richard Westfall provides us with a 900-plus page biography of Newton, what do we

know of how he walked? Not that we must know that particular detail to be able to

talk of Newton, Newtonianism, or of any relation he had to contemporaries or to

those who followed, but it is risky to assume that the biographical ‘Newton’ operates

consistently in relation to other figures or ideas, and that it is itself a stable and

consistent object against which comparisons and contrasts can easily be made.

Projects involving comparison and contrast thus involve lacunae and erasures, and

are potentially incommensurate with other such projects, since they involve making

subjective choices, whether or not those choices or the factors that mitigate them are

implicitly or explicitly acknowledged. These choices involve decisions about what isincluded and excluded and about how certain categories—like ‘Newton’ for

example—are to function. Here, I attend to rewriting the traditional opposition

between Blake and Newton (expressed by scholars as much as by Blake himself, at

times), though I want to foreground the fact that I am choosing to make ‘Blake’ and

‘Newton’—as nominal, methodologically useful tropes—do specific things.

Donald Ault writes that, ‘to most Newtonians there was no question whether a

logical system could explain the whole of the world; the only question was, which

system could best characterize nature’s inherent logical structure’.1 Newtonianism

became the set of keys—even the key—that would reveal the logic of action at a

distance, light, alchemy, and the Bible. Newton sought an all-embracing model of

ARTICLE IN PRESS

1Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 28.

J. Snart / History of European Ideas 31 (2005) 237–249238

Downl



uary2013



the universe on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Richard Westfall notes

that Newton presented himself often as a ‘natural philosopher confronting the entire

sweep of Nature’,2 and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs writes that ‘to Newton himself all his

diverse studies constituted a unified plan for obtaining Truth’.3

Blake sought just as obsessively as Newton to find a system which would represent

(even if it could not axiomatically explain) phenomena and human existence, and

both men were, at various times, considerably uneasy with the projects they had laid

out for themselves; certainly these projects changed over time, yet both were explicit

about their goals and aims. In a letter accompanying his ‘Hypothesis on Light’

(1675) Newton claims that the letter itself, as with the introduction to the

‘Hypothesis’, is to illustrate his optical papers only: ‘that no man may confound this

with my other discourses, or measure the certainty of one by the other’.4 But, as

Westfall notes, ‘it is quite impossible to reconcile the actual ‘Hypothesis’ with

Newton’s deprecations of it . . . The ‘Hypothesis’ contained much more than an

explanation of optical phenomena’.5 For example, Newton spends half the

‘Hypothesis’ offering what Westfall describes as ‘a general system of nature’.6 And

as Newton must have foreseen, the ideas he expressed began a new round of disputes

and controversies with Hooke and the Royal Society. Newton’s fear that his ideas on

light, no less than his ideas on a general system of nature, would surely ‘ingage [him]

in vain disputes’ and ‘controversy’ suggests the degree to which he was aware that

even his most experimentally sound system would not satisfy all those in the scientific

community, given the potential gaps and inconsistencies it was sure to have.7 In

short, Newton was extremely sensitive to the way in which his work would circulateonce it left his control; a great deal of his rhetorical strategies are in fact attempts to

maintain control over the text even in the face of readerly variability.

Traditionally, Blake and Newton are set in opposition because the nature of what

each was trying to produce has been construed as mutually exclusive. However,

Blake is as tense as Newton about the way in which his own work is to circulate once

it leaves his hands, and indeed what happens to textual productions once they leave

the proverbial ‘workshop’. Blake is concerned that as he creates a new visionary

system, the system itself can become fixed, betraying the fluid imaginary he is looking

to represent. If Newton seems concerned with retaining a certain explicit fluidity, or

at least a separability between his discourses, even while constructing a generalprescriptive system, Blake also seems caught in the tension between contextual

fluidity and the fixity of his own vision once it is given shape on the page. Clearly,

Blake and Newton worry over the gaps in their respective systems, whether those

systems are poetic or scientific.

Blake is not anti-system, as he is often claimed to be. Even claims against Blake as

a systematizer fall back into the language of systems. Donald Ault attempts to

ARTICLE IN PRESS

2Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 270.3B.J.T. Dobbs. The Janus Faces of Genius. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 17.4Newton quoted in Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 269.5Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 270.6Ibid., p. 270.7Newton quoted in Ibid., p. 269.

J. Snart / History of European Ideas 31 (2005) 237–249 239

Downl



uary2013



reassert the context of Los’s statement, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by

another Mans’.8 Ault reminds us that it is not necessarily Blake’s statement: ‘Blake’s

treatment of Los’s system . . . is not without irony . . . Blake’s reaction was against all

systems’.9 Yet Ault writes, ‘Blake’s ‘system’ is poetic or visionary’.10 Ault mightplace ‘system’ in hesitant quotation marks, but there still seems to be some type of

poetic construction going on for Blake in terms of a framework which is systemic if

not systematic (that is, Blake’s art almost always foreground his confrontation with

crises of representation, and as such even his most diverse productions seem to stem

from the same set of artistic, textual, and material problems he faced). There is a

project going on in Blake’s work which is not so unstable as to elude the ‘systematic’

entirely. Robert Gleckner writes that ‘each of Blake’s two song series . . . comprises a

number of smaller units . . . so that the relationship of each unit to the series as a whole

might be stated as a kind of progression’.11 Gleckner’s ‘progression’ model is overly

linear, though the relationship of units he suggests is both productive for reading

Blake’s work, and evidence for a kind of Blakean system. W.J.T. Mitchell, whose

Blake studies capture more of the poet’s fluidity than do Gleckner’s, cites instances of

‘illustrations which do not illustrate’ to show how Blake forces us to read pictures ‘in

the context of other, similar compositions’.12 This suggests a sort of archetypal system

or network in which illustrations import symbolism from other contexts in which they

have appeared. This is all to say nothing of the degree to which Los, introduced above,

is figured explicitly as ‘creating’ a system, and thus how Blake may have envisioned the

possibility that one could be both systematic and creative at the same time.

Where Newtonianism requires that gaps and inconsistencies be either filled orerased (or avoided with covering letters), Blake’s system highlights incommensur-

abilities as fundamental to the human condition. Blake’s system is clearly established

to oppose what he understands to be Newton’s system.13 Yet much of our, and

perhaps Blake’s, view of Newton as mythic systematizer is the result of the

accumulation we call Newtonianism. Newton was said to have told his nephew,

Benjamin Smith, ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I

seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself, in

now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the

great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.14

The social and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre offers a particular dialecticalframework which suggests a way of thinking about the differences and similarities

between Blake’s and Newton’s systems. This framework highlights the way in which

the ‘opposition’ of Blake and Newton as polarities can be artificially reductive, and

ARTICLE IN PRESS

8William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York:

Anchor, 1988) Jerusalem, Plate 10, line 20.9Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 29.10Ibid., p. 29.11Robert Gleckner. ‘Point of View and Context in Blake’s Songs’. Blake. Ed. Northrop Frye. (New

Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966) 10.12W.J.T. Mitchell. Blake’s Composite Art. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) 4–5.13Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 28–29.14Newton quoted in Michael White. The Last Sorcerer. (Massachusetts: Helix, 1997) 343.


Downl



uary2013



further provides a way to situate Blake in relation to Newton, or Newton in relation

to Blake, which takes account of the perspective from which the analysis itself takes

place. That is, Lefebvre’s dialectical strategies highlight the ‘object’ of study as

persistently contingent on the ‘position’ of the subject. Thus we can begin to think of ‘Blake’ as a subject of study ‘from the perspective of’ Newtonianism. Or vice versa,

we can imagine ‘Newton’ as, more correctly, ‘Newton from the perspective of the

study of Blake’. This dialectic allows for opposition, but does not synthesize the

‘opposites’ as a traditional dialectic might. Lefebvre’s dialectic preserves the thesis

and anti-thesis as fundamentally important to how each is a product of the other.

In The Production of Space (1974, translated in 1991), Lefebvre practices what

Edward Soja has called a critical thirding, in which ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are

. . . made to appear simultaneously’.15 There must always be, for Lefebvre, ‘An-Other’

third term in any binary set, whose operation and existence depends on perspective.

Holding incommensurabilities without resolving them into a unity is central to both

Lefebvre’s theorizing (and practice) and Blake’s practice. Perspective is one of the

fundamental conditions in Blake’s vision of the fallen world, for it is an inescapable

result of division. And it is individual perspective which is fundamental to the spatial

dialectic in Blake’s system, but which must be repressed in the temporal dialectic

characteristic of the Newtonian system. Donald Ault writes that ‘‘Perspective’’. . . is a

product of the drive toward the suppression of multiplicity into unity, a drive which we

have seen is overwhelmingly strong in Newton.16 When, in Blake’s The [First] Book of

Urizen, Urizen divides and separates from the Eternals, he looks ‘back’ and says, ‘Why

will you die O Eternals?/Why live in unquenchable burnings?’.

17

Yet the Eternals’‘burnings’ are, from another perspective (or, to use Lefebvre’s term, ‘An-Other’

perspective) the imaginative fire of creativity invoked in the ‘Preludium’: ‘Eternals I

hear your call gladly,/Dictate swift winged words’.18

Urizen, from his perspective, seeks to organize himself and his world in order that

he might take action on his own behalf. Yet where Urizen sees himself as law giver,

the Eternals narrate a process of limitation (Blake’s parody of the account of

creation in Genesis). Throughout Blake’s work, multiple and often irreconcilable

perspectives (and textual versions) vie for centrality; indeed, scholars puzzle over

which version of The [First] Book of Urizen is to be considered ‘standard’.19 Yet that

ARTICLE IN PRESS

15Edward Soja. Thirdspace. (New York: Routledge, 1996) 9.16Donald Ault. ‘‘Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blake’s Anti-Newtonian Text’’. Studies in

Romanticism 16:3 (1977) 299.17William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York:

Anchor, 1988) 4:10.18Ibid., 2:3–4.19See especially Joseph Viscomi. Blake and the Idea of the Book . (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1993). Erdman describes the books of The Book of Urizen as on 28 plates, known in seven (now

eight) copies, plus some scattered plates. However, his description of what he believes to be the correct

plate order betrays, even as it tries to assert, textual stability. Erdman writes, ‘There is only one possible

arrangement of the text, since it is organized into numbered chapters— except that Plate 8, duplicating the

numbers of Plate 10, may have been meant to replace it . . . Yet Plate 2 is out of order in Copy E, 15 follows

18 in A, and 8 follows rather than precedes 10 in copies B and F . . .’ (William Blake. The Complete Poetry

and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) p. 804; my italics).


Downl



uary2013



centrality is denied to any singular position, character, perspective, or version, for

centrality (if it exists in Blake’s work at all) is a space reserved for each creative,

individual reader. The smoothing, universalizing effect of the temporal dialectic,

with its progression towards synthesis, is denied in place of the spatial dialectic whichcan manage contraries as equally ‘true’.

Blake’s work is constantly reminding us that perspective is shifting and not fixed.

As we read in the Songs of Innocence, for example, we can note that we are reading

from our world of adult experience; thus we are able to hear irony from characters

like the Chimney Sweeper who himself, despite his desperate situation, seems

immune to the emptiness of his belief that ‘if all do their duty, they need not fear

harm’.20 In addition to poetic fluidity, Blake practices a material fluidity in his work,

switching poems from the Innocence to the Experience collection and often back

again in various printings. Ultimately, we are faced with the question: ‘what happens

to an ‘innocent’ poem when it is moved to the collection titled Experience?’ Does the

poem change, or do we, or do both? That these questions persist suggests something

unsatisfactory about a system which prescribes universals in the face of local,

individual, contextual exigencies.

Edward Soja argues that Lefebvre’s The Production of Space ‘is a bewildering

book, filled with unruly textual practices, bold assertions that seem to get tossed

aside as the arguments develop, and perplexing inconsistencies and apparent self-

contradictions’.21 This seems an apt description of Blake’s work as well, which is not

surprising given that both authors worry over the systematization of their ideas, as

that systematization erases perspectival and vocal multiplicity. Both authors areinterested in thesis and anti-thesis as equally accessible and endlessly complex given

the fluidity of perspective.

Ironically, Blake seems as dissatisfied with ‘Newtonian’ perspective as Newton

himself does. Only, where Newton looks to limit perspective and deny its multiplicity

(as does all normal science, according to Thomas Kuhn), Blake looks to exploit it.

Kuhn writes that ‘normal science . . . often suppresses fundamental novelties because

they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments’.22 And further, certain

experiments are often ignored if they ‘[yield] neither consistent nor simple results . . .

they [remain] mere facts, unrelated and unrelatable’.23 Umberto Eco describes

discovery in terms of the suppression of novelty: ‘we travel knowing in advance whatwe are on the verge of discovering . . . Someone discovers something different and

tries to see it as absolutely analogous to what he already knows’.24

Such discoveries or novelties suggest the necessity of fluid perspective, or multiple

systems for explanation and description, which experimental method does not invite.

Each system of explanation competes against all others to account for phenomena.

Donald Ault, following Kuhn, writes, ‘in the years following the emergence of

ARTICLE IN PRESS

20Ibid., p. 24.21Edward Soja. Thirdspace. (New York: Routledge, 1996) 8.22Thomas Kuhn. Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970) 5.23Ibid., p. 35.24Umberto Eco. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. (New York: Columbia Press, 1998) 54, 74.


Downl



uary2013



Newton’s paradigm . . . Newton’s system insinuated itself into a vast range of

intellectual disciplines’.25 And it did so to account for all of their ‘facts’. But again, to

speak of ‘Newton’s’ system and Newtonianism in this context is to do a potential

disservice to the complexity of what is at stake. For even if the Principia is taken tobe an explication of all micro- and macrocosmic phenomena, Newton is clearly

aware of the gaps in his own system, and even, perhaps, the impossibility of closing

the systematic project he has set himself to accomplish. His questions (including

those in the Principia itself) highlight those gaps, in a way not too distant from the

ways in which Blake’s own poetic techniques highlight, indeed depend upon, the

ultimate unanswerability of certain kinds of gaps between vision and material

representation.

Questions, even propositions, certainly invite a reworking of perspective. What

Arnold Thackray describes as ‘the profound failure of the Newtonian program

[specifically in chemistry]’26 is more a result of assuming that Newton believed that

his own system was, as the Enlightenment believed, ‘a fully predictive’ and sutured

method, where in fact Newton did not seem to believe anything of the sort.27 Newton

is misrepresented by the Age of Newton if we forget that he began with what Joseph

Priestley called ‘bold and eccentric thoughts’.28 For Priestley at least, Newton was, in

his way, visionary. What the Newton biographies written by Stukeley and

Brewster,29 for example, fail to give us is a Newton who remains hyper-aware that

his general system of nature is one of many possibilities, and informed by the

cultural, social, and historical climate in which it took shape.

Blake might have sensed that behind Newtonianism was a visionary whoseconsiderable imagination deserved attention. As Jean Hagstrum has written, ‘[Blake]

was deeply involved even in what he rejected’.30 And Donald Ault begins his

Visionary Physics: ‘William Blake and Sir Isaac Newton both saw things few men

see’.31 Even amid Blake’s most adamant criticisms of Newton and Newtonian

science, we find such works as Blake’s ‘portrait’ of Newton and Newton’s

redemption in Blake’s vision of the apocalypse. Further, we see Blake implicating

himself in the material, ‘Newtonian’, world through constantly self-referential poetic

images. So rather than settle on a final opposition between a clearly defined ‘Blake’

and a clearly defined ‘Newton’, I want to suggest that these ‘contraries’ can align in

many different ways (not all of which may be reconcilable with each other).

ARTICLE IN PRESS

25Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 46.26Arnold Thackray. Atoms and Powers. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 6.27Ibid., p. 5.28Priestley quoted in Robert Schofield. Mechanism and Materialism. (Princeton: University of Princeton

Press, 1970) 3.29William Stukeley. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life. (London: np., 1752); Sir David Brewster.

Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and

Co., 1855).30Jean Hagstrum. ‘‘William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment’’. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays.

Ed. Northrop Frye. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966) 142–155.31Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) xi.


Downl



uary2013



Wordsworth would write of Newton in the 1850 Prelude, ‘the statue stood/Of

Newton with his prism and silent face,/The marble index of a mind for ever/

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’.32 Wordsworth evokes Newton as

a lone, exploratory mind, suggesting a figure whose visionary capacity was not so fardistant from Blake’s own. In fact, Blake casts himself as ‘the voice of one crying in

the Wilderness’.33 Northrop Frye, in his early Blake study, Fearful Symmetry,

suggests that Blake paid homage to such figures as Locke, Newton, and Bacon, since

excavating what Blake perceived as their errors might lead (in Blake’s vision) to the

redemption of their imaginative selves. It is important to remember the poetic

method in which Blake tended to engage other thinkers: they were cast as contraries.

For Blake to engage contraries at all was to work towards an understanding of their

idiosyncrasy by way of disregarding their claims to empirical, and so universal,

objectivity.

Frye reminds us that, as Blake himself makes clear, it may be the idea of

Newtonianism, or certainly the cultural grip Newtonianism had on his age, that Blake

wants to investigate. Frye writes that ‘it is not so much that Blake is unfair to them

[Newton, Bacon, or Locke] personally’,34 and later ‘not one of these thinkers are as

opposed to Blake’s mode of thought as, for instance, Hobbes, whom [Blake] never

mentions’.35 Blake elsewhere signals two of the fundamental strategies of his poetic

project: ‘Opposition is true friendship’ and ‘without contraries is no progression’.36

One reason Blake may seem unfair to Newton personally (that is, Newton is made

responsible for Newtonianism), is that Blake believed that some imaginative error

led Newton’s otherwise admirable visionary capacity astray. But Newton is worthpoetic space, for Blake, because opposing Newton’s ideas can lead to new

understanding from previous error. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake

speaks of an infernal printing process, printing ‘by corrosives, which in Hell are

salutory and medicinal’.37 Blake’s use of Newton as poetic material is a version of

infernal reading, whereby error is revealed—that is, corrosives eat away at

accumulation—and we are left with Newton, the mind for ever voyaging, the

visionary. Thus, in the apocalyptic vision that concludes Jerusalem, Newton is

redeemed. In the revelatory moment, ‘in forgiveness of sins which is Self

Annihilation’, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer converse

in what Blake calls ‘visionary forms dramatic’.38

They create space and time‘according to the wonders Divine of Human Imagination’.39 Blake thus gives

primacy to individual perspective and creativity, and more importantly links creation

ARTICLE IN PRESS

32William Wordsworth. Prelude 1850. (New York: Norton, 1979) 3:60.33William Blake. ‘‘All Religions Are One’’. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David

V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) 1.34Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947) 187.35Ibid., p. 188.36William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York:

Anchor, 1988) Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Plates 20 and 3.37Ibid., 14.38Ibid., 98.39Ibid., 98:32.


Downl



uary2013



as dependent upon the perspective of the creator. Here, space and time do not

subsume the individual in a predictive and prescriptive system. Liberation from

universal systems does not deny the intellectual power of Newton or Locke; rather,

they are celebrated as individual visionaries. Newton and the others are worth savingin Blake’s poetic universe because they have been integral to the construction of that

universe all along.

The degree to which Blake and Newton are opposed by critics and scholars is not

surprising, given that Blake himself sets up the oppositional paradigm. In The Song

of Los, Urizen gives the ‘Philosophy of Five Senses . . . into the hands of Newton and

Locke’.40 Newton is deployed as all that the Enlightenment had accumulated around

him. Urizen is Blake’s figure for reason, divorced from imagination. Urizen is

horizon: he is limitation and division, and his knowledge of the world comes via

‘massy weights . . . a line & a plummet . . . scales to weigh . . . [a] brazen quadrant . . .

golden compasses’.41 ‘Newton’ is responsible for what Blake calls, ‘Single vision’.

‘May God us keep’, Blake writes, ‘From Single vision and Newtons sleep’.42 The

single vision is that way of constructing knowledge and regarding experience which

denies all but the empirical, and all but what the five senses can deliver. ‘Newton’ is

deployed by Blake as a poetic character who represents not just ‘a’ Newton, but a

phenomenon that by Blake’s time had taken on a tricky multidimensionality.

Thackray writes, ‘Newtonianism [meant] many things to many men’.43 And Perry

Miller argues that Newton himself was not quite a ‘Newtonian’.44

Ault writes that ‘Newton was arguing for a single unified proto-philosophy and

religion’,

45

and that ‘One of Blake’s central purposes in constructing anti-Newtoniannarrative was to create in his readers an experience of the bankruptcy of the kinds of

assumptions about the interconnections in knowledge, perception, and reality in the

doctrine of the prisca sapentia’.46 Central to Blake’s creation of that anti-Newtonian

narrative is the book: both as symbol and as material production. The book, the metal

plate, is the site where Blake writes himself both into and out of the Newtonian world.

Kuhn, writing on scientific revolutions, argues that ‘textbooks expound the body

of accepted theory [and] define the legitimate problems and methods of a research

field’.47 Prior to such textbooks, Kuhn argues, works like Aristotle’s Physica and

Newton’s Principia and Opticks performed a similar function. The book’s power to

normalize lies partly in the way it can present perspective as fixed and singular (or,put another way, in how it can function as a representational technology capable of

erasing perspective). The Principia and Opticks gain cultural legitimacy from their

ARTICLE IN PRESS

40Ibid., 5:15.41Ibid., 20:35ff.42Ibid., Letter to Butts, 722.43Arnold Thackray. Atoms and Powers. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 5.44Perry Miller. ‘‘Bentley and Newton’’. Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letter on Natural Philosophy. Ed. I

Bernard Cohen. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958) 277.45Donald Ault. ‘‘Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blake’s Anti-Newtonian Text’’. Studies in

Romanticism 16:3 (1977) 285.46Ibid., p. 277.47Thomas Kuhn. Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970) 10.


Downl



uary2013



being grounded in the ‘facts’ as established by mathematics. The printed page takes

on, as metonym, the full weight of the argument written upon it. The ink is fixed in

place, sunk into the cotton filaments; the pages are bound with string and glue and

set in a hard shell. The material book is fixed and contained.At least this seems to have informed Blake’s view of the book , and of books as they

circulated as cultural productions with particular internal values attached to them

(that is, not only to their content, but to their ontological status as ‘books’). It is not

surprising that the material act of production and the final material product of that

act play such a central role in Blake’s poetic thinking, since he worked as an

engraver. He dealt with acids and metal along with ink and water-colours. The page

became the locus of metal and paint and as such must have become for Blake an

immediately material metonym for the tension between the fixity of single

perspective on the one hand, and the fluidity of imaginative vision on the other.

Blake, in fact, begins his Songs of Innocence by way of introducing the tension he

has encountered in fixing his poetic vision on the page. The Piper/artist of the

‘Introduction’ receives his inspiration to pipe, sing and finally write his ‘happy

songs’.48 Yet the closer the creative act gets to the material page, the closer is the

disappearance of inspiration. Inspiration calls, ‘Piper sit thee down and write/In a

book that all may joy to read’. At that moment, ‘he vanish’d from my sight’. And so

the artist begins to transcribe vision into materiality: ‘I stain’d the water clear,/And I

wrote my happy songs/Every child may joy to hear’. Blake captures the artist’s

dilemma in the ambiguous wording of the line, ‘I stain’d the water clear’. The water,

as visionary imagination, may be clear, but subsequently ‘stain’d’ by the artist’s inkas vision is fixed upon the page. Yet the water might be made clear by the artist’s

vision, as though readers are offered greater clarity thanks to the artist’s effort. Blake

is, in the end, willing to stain the waters, for at least ‘every child may joy to hear’ his

work, even given the materially constraining conditions of book production and

selling. Without the fixity of the book, poetic vision remains unorganized, inactive,

and uncirculated. Perhaps what Blake has written regains some of its fluidity when it

is read, even read aloud, and thus the children ‘hear’ his ‘songs’.

The fixity of the printed page is metonymic of the ‘Newtonian’ world in The

[First] Book of Urizen. Blake’s preoccupation with books is, in fact, one dimension

of his imaginative investigation of ‘Newton,’ and as such a consideration of Blake’simplication as bookmaker in The Book of Urizen helps to nuance the ‘Blake and

Newton’ tradition more generally. Urizen, as he is ‘organized’ into human form,

performs a cognitive and material organization in the act of writing: ‘Here alone I in

books formd of metals/Have written the secrets of wisdom . . . Lo! I unfold my

darkness: and on/This rock, place with strong hand the Book/Of eternal brass,

written in my solitude . . . One command, one joy, one desire,/One curse, one weight,

one measure/One King, one God, one Law’.49 In the Four Zoas, Urizen is pictured

ARTICLE IN PRESS

48William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York:

Anchor, 1988) 19.49Ibid., 4:25–40. Curiously (perhaps perversely), Blake has not included Plate 4 in all the extant copies of

Urizen; and nowhere in Blake’s work do the characteristics most often attributed to Urizen (for example,


Downl



uary2013



tracing the dreadful letters of his book, as though to strengthen their weakening

argument by fixing them even deeper into the metal surface. When faced with the

material world his books have created, Urizen can only justify himself: ‘Read mybooks’.50 He all the while ‘Traces the wonder of Futurity in horrible fear of the

future’.51 Urizen fears the future he has created, for his dependence upon the single

perspective that his one command and one law require has paralyzed him into all but

further measurement, division, and metallic re-inscription. Without the chaotic and

destructive (though also reconstructive) energy of imagination, Urizen is stuck in his

world of solid obstruction. The solidity of his world depends on Urizen keeping at

bay the very chaos and destruction which could liberate him:

And self balanc’d stretch’d o’er the void

I alone, even I! the winds mercilessBound; but condensing, in torrents

They fall & fall; strong I repell’d

The vast waves, & arose on the waters

A wide world of solid obstruction

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Fig. 1. William Blake’s ‘‘Newton’’ (1795). (Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY).

( footnote continued )

that he represents measurement; imposes universality; writes his laws on books of metal; and denies

multiplicity) crystalize more clearly. It is thus important to consider, even as I make my case for Blake’s

self-implication as a ‘Urizenic’ bookmaker, that the very book in which this self-implication seems to occur

remains textually and materially unstable, conditions very unlike those that Urizen desires for his own

books.50Ibid., Four Zoas VII, 90.51Ibid., Zoas VII, 79.


Downl



uary2013



. . . Here I alone in books formd of metals

Have written the secrets of wisdom52

In Blake’s ‘portrait’ of Newton, the character is a body of material potential(Fig. 1). He traces or measures—activities also associated with Urizen—a Euclidean

figure that both mimics and mirrors his own. In one sense, the figure’s body bends to

produce the Euclidean triangle on the page, yet the placement of the scroll at the

figure’s feet also causes the body to take the shape it does; he must bend if he is to

reach it. The ‘Newton’ of the picture is producing and produced by his

measurement in a circular fashion not too distant from the inescapable circularity

of Urizen measuring the world that he has produced; there seems no escape from the

process of creation-as-measurement that each is caught in. Again, to nuance what

might now be an overly simplified opposition between Urizen/Newton as measurers

and Blake as creator, I stress that Blake does figure Newton and Urizen as creative.

They are not denied that capacity in Blake’s poetic vision, any than more Blake

himself denies his own ‘Urizenic’ involvement in producing books by the process of

engraving on metal plates (a process that involved tracing, in the form of re-

engraving plates for re-use in the printing press, and measurement coupled with

constant attention to the constraints imposed by the material size of the plate at

hand).

Yet in the ‘Newton’ painting, set in apparent contrast to the definite outline of the

figure Blake offers an ambiguous background which seems at once ocean, land, rock,

vegetation and an accident of water-colour. Are these the ‘vast waves’ Urizen repelsto raise his ‘wide world of solid obstruction’?53 It is most tempting perhaps to align

‘Blake’ (assuming Blake positions himself in the work intentionally or otherwise)

with the indefinite background whose fluidity suggests the fluid multiplicity denied

by the Euclidean triangle. But in fact Blake could be aligning himself as much with

the Newton figure as he is with the chaos of the setting. Peter Ackroyd has suggested

that the Newton face is that of a younger, idealised, Blake:

there is no reason to believe that Blake thought of Newton as a very different kind

of writer from himself. Indeed there is an intensity about this image that suggests

he recognised the creative importance of the scientist’s vision . . . Perhaps also, inthis contemplative figure, there is some suggestion of the obsession and isolation

that were part of Blake’s own experience.54

Ultimately, Blake was too aware of himself as an artist in a Newtonian world to

extricate himself completely from the material conditions of that world. Nor, does it

seem, did Blake want to remove himself from the tensions and contradictions that

accompanied his work as a poet and engraver. They were, in many ways, his source

material for thinking through the fluidity of poetic vision and the necessity of

activating that vision by fixing it on (or to) the printed page.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

52Ibid., Urizen, 4:19–26.53Ibid., Urizen 4: 23–24.54Peter Ackroyd. Blake. (London: Minerva, 1995) 201.


Downl



uary2013



So finally, how to reconcile Newton and Blake? Perhaps, as Blake has written, the

‘Contrarieties are equally True’.55 To align Blake with the fluidity of imagination

and Newton with the fixity of the printed page is to miss some of the most important

qualities in each creator’s work: the ‘systematicity’ in Blake’s work, that is, hiswillingness to engage his social and cultural moment in a concentrated and

productive way through an art that required a degree of systematicity to produce its

meaning; and the creative impulse in Newton’s work to engage the problems of

representation he, like any other creative artist, continually faced.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

55William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman (New York:

Anchor, 1988) Milton II, 30:3.


Downl



uary2013

Blake's awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Blake's awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World.pdf