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• W211739765 abstract "INCREASINGLY, IN THE PROPHETIC WORKS OF 1791-94 THAT FOLLOWED Songs of Innocence, Blake faced a formal, organizational problem. How to add the structural stiffening of narrative to his displaced, perspectivistic, reflexively ironical symbolism, thereby incorporating into his social critique the explanatory power of a full-blown myth able to stand up against the orthodox view of human weakness as, ultimately, an expression of a metaphysical Mystery, Original Sin--a view gaining renewed strength through conservative reaction to the French Revolution? How to rebut this position, without in the process debasing his symbols to the status of representations liable to reinforce some of the very literalisms he wanted to oppose? He found the answer in The Book of Urizen. Moving beyond lyric and pastoral, Blake here exploits the temporality of storytelling to dramatize the fall of his invented ur-myth into the received Christian one that constitutes the main object of his satire. The gradual convergence of the poem's several subnarratives into a plot able to be seen retrospectively as unified and coherent depicts history as a Whiggish Idea and a Coleridgean Symbol. But it is a symbol and idea readers are invited to reject, for its unity is purchased at the cost of debilitating abstraction from the emotional turmoil of the verse when read forward in real time. What is represented at the level of the outer narrative is a Burkean triumph of legitimization, whereby Urizen's authority becomes established, via the mystifications of the sublime, as the necessary and providential basis for society as it presently exists. At the micro level, however, Blake's continually collapsing rhetoric demonstrates Urizen's power to be a usurpation resulting from a metalepsis or causal reversal that is extremely precarious, inasmuch as it is upheld only through mankind's agonized efforts at self-abnegation. In a countermovement to the process by which Urizen comes to represent himself as a metaphysical absolute, Blake's narrative undergoes a progressive decrescendo, a self-contradictory fall into the facticity of the present. The Book of Urizen thus proves to be a self-consuming artifact designed to liberate readerly agency from the fixed horizon of representations constituted by the text. The poem is an obstacle for overcoming. In this way, Blake confronts readers with an ethical crisis, the only real crisis any literary work can effect: namely, a fresh engagement with ordinary, practical life, whose duties and routines are found, upon inspection, to dissolve, being in truth abstracted from countless contingent, mostly improvised, individual choices and decisions. Here, at the grass-roots level of act[ing] from impulse: not from rules, (1) resistance and change begin. The reader's final repudiation of the inert, fully self-represented Urizen--a figure who subsumes the completed poem itself, which, as a closed book belonging to the past, becomes his Book--offers an inspirational model for confronting and overcoming Urizenic beliefs, traditions, and institutions in the rest of life. Urizen was likely written sometime in the second half of 1794. According to Joseph Viscomi, the first copies were probably produced by early November. (2) Commentators have long surmised that Blake's noticeably darker perspective in Urizen reflects his reaction to Pitt's clampdown on dissent in early May. The repression began with a wave of arrests throughout the country, habeas corpus was suspended, and that summer a government propaganda campaign trumpeted the existence of a vast conspiracy against Church and King supposedly organized by Jacobin sympathizers and radicals of the London Corresponding Society who had swept into their clutches large numbers of otherwise well-meaning reformers and harmless millenaries. After much anticipation and delay, on 2 October 1794, the alleged ringleaders, Hardy, Thelwall, and Tooke, stood trial for treason. …" @default.
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• W211739765 date "2009-06-22" @default.
• W211739765 modified "2023-09-24" @default.
• W211739765 title "Freedom from Blake's Book of Urizen" @default.
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