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  William Blake’s Comic Vision

  

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William Blake’s Comic

Vision Nick Rawlinson

  © Nick Rawlinson 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave

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  ISBN 0–333–74565–5 (outside North America)

  ISBN 0–312–22064–2 (in North America) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rawlinson, Nick, 1963–

  William Blake’s comic vision / Nick Rawlinson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–312–22064–2

  

1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Humor. 2. Humorous poetry, English—

History and criticism. 3. Comic, The, in literature. I. Title PR4148 .C56R39 1999 98–50635 821′.7—dc21 CIP

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  1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

  Contents Preface

  vii

  Abbreviations

  xiii

  1 Songs of Pleasant Glee: William Blake and the Comic 1

  Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’

  5 The Comic and Blake’s Vision

  12 Old Nobodaddy aloft

  15

  2 Mirth at the errors of a foe: the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comic World

  19 Satire 19

  Sentimental comedy

  26 The carnivalesque

  32 Blake and the Fool

  40 It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too

  49

  3 Playing the Fool: Blake’s Sense of Humour

  50 Absurd tales and strait waistcoats

  60 I must Create a System

  66

  4 ‘I love the jocund dance’: The Comic in the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel

  67 The Sun of loss and the Father of Los

  68 The Fool and King Edward the Third

  81 ‘Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!’ The Madman and Tiriel

  89

  5 Talking of Virtuous Cats: An Island in the Moon

  98 The lunar landscape

  98 ‘I was only making a fool of you’ 104 The map of a small island 108

  6 To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience 163

  7 A Vision of the Last Judgment: The Comic in Blake’s Designs 193

  ‘No man if hee be sober daunceth, except hee be mad’ 202 vi Contents

8 And to conclude: A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees

  215 Appendix

  226

  Notes

  228

  Bibliography

  263

  Index

  279 Preface

  One rainy winter’s evening, coming out of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I paused to raise my umbrella to the inclement weather. As I did so, I realized what a foolish but suitable metaphor that action was for writing the preface to a critical work on Blake. Blake enthusiasts invari- ably find the need to raise umbrellas of one kind or another. Sometimes, like the tour guides here in Oxford, they do so to indicate their position beside a site of Special Interest. More often, it is a vain attempt to fend off the damp fallout that is an inevitable part of entering the critical fray. It is with both aims in mind that I raise mine now.

  This book started life over ten years ago as a simple hunch: that the reason that I and countless other readers enjoy the work of William Blake is due, in part, to the fact that Blake is a comic writer. Such a claim may seem staggeringly obvious, but believe it or not at that time the weight of serious, critical authority was against such an idea. While it acknowledged that Blake was often satirical, and of the Devil’s party, of

  

course, still – ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’ – ‘Little Lamb who made thee’

• – ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – ‘O rose thou art sick’ – not exact- ly funny, surely? Better to argue over his politics or his madness, the dominant criticism said, to see his work in historicist or psychoanalytic terms, to use it as proof of this or that theory of criticism, rather than pursue the idea he might be deliberately comic. Blake’s abundant and consistent use of humour was then, and often still is, dismissed as little more than a curious character trait. It is seen as a product of his wilful but amusing rebelliousness which, if it has to be explained at all, is cate- gorized as nothing more than the defensive reaction of a neglected and rather petulant genius. His most clearly comic work, An Island in the

  

Moon, is considered merely the tomfool doodles of a distracted young-

  ster. Even the recent critical emphasis on recovering the complexities of the social struggle in which Blake found himself has done little to change this attitude. Despite exciting recent research, such as Jon Mee’s fascinating study of what he calls the ‘Culture of Radicalism’, critical opinion still suggests that Blake’s use of the comic was, at best, nothing more than the sporadic application of a handy tool for destabilizing conventional readings of texts.

  But Blake has always attracted those who are, or think they are, a little off the beaten track. So despite the prevailing critical wisdom, I pursued viii Preface

  the idea that Blake was a comic writer and, after years of research and sev- eral false starts my hunch began to take shape. In fact, the more I read, the more surprising the tendency to overlook the importance of Blake’s use of comedy became, especially given the long-established critical recognition that Blake was passionately engaged with the world of eigh- teenth-century ideas. For the eighteenth-century thinker – whether in Parliament or in coffee shops, whether writing for the Gentleman’s

  

Magazine or the cheapest of radical pamphlets – understanding and good

  behaviour were, essentially, a matter of ‘taste’. Literary and moral dis- course demanded a combination of aesthetics, perception, education and the social application of morality. To speak of society was to recognize the complexity of the relationships between self, self-consciousness, lan- guage and government. And, as the title of one of the plays by the great eighteenth-century comedian Samuel Foote reminds us, comedy, being of all things a matter of ‘Taste’, occupied a unique and pivotal position in such discourse. Even the briefest of surveys of eighteenth- and early nine- teenth-century comic theory will show that many of the thinkers with whom Blake engages most closely – Hobbes and John Dennis, for exam- ple – expressed strong opinions on the nature of comedy as a natural corollary to their statements on social order, consciousness and aesthet- ics. Likewise, we know that Blake was deeply interested in Antiquarianism, and many of these popular historians devoted a great deal of energy to uncovering the history of comic pastimes. Blake was, of all things, a Visionary, an artist of the spiritual world, and many eigh- teenth-century moralists and sermonizers debated hotly on the impor- tance of comedy to faith – deciding whether the joyful should also be jolly and the blessed blithe. And even discussions of art used the lan- guage of comedy: Blake himself, while busy refuting the ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds, called the use of light a ‘witticism’. When taking on the giants of eighteenth-century thought, then, in the fields of perception, spirituality and social organization, it would be extraordinary if an atti- tude to comedy was not an important part of Blake’s mental armoury.

  Of course, comedy is a difficult, paradoxical entity, a trickster among literary and social genres that positively defies definition, declaring, as Shakespeare’s arch fool Dogberry reminds us, that ‘comparisons are odorous’. Defining what makes someone a comic writer is, therefore, a challenge in itself. But, that said, starting from the general premise that a comic writer is one who uses humour to convey a positive, life-affirm- ing message, assuming that Blake was a comic writer began to offer a new and exciting perspective to his work. Indeed, it quickly became obvious that the comic provided him with an essential key to his con-

  Preface ix

  cept of Vision. For the comic is an ideal model – and perhaps, the only model – for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. First, it provides a popular challenge to all forms of cultural and textual author- ity – a way to give all kings, priests and theorists a swift kick up the back- side. Second, while it destabilizes texts, it also offers a positive alternative. The problem with undermining texts is that if you destroy all concepts of authority, then how do you then put over your message of hope in a Universal Humanity? When all forms of art are susceptible to deconstruction, how can you articulate faith? Recent critical thought has sought to answer this by placing considerable emphasis on the importance of ‘play’ and ‘communitas’ in Blake’s work. But these con- cepts, while important, are rather nebulous, thus contradicting Blake’s insistence on the importance of the minute articulation of ideas. Moreover, both are questioned in Blake’s portrayal of the aged children Har and Heva. Using the language and imagery of comedy, however – especially of social festivities and the carnivalesque – allows Blake to describe faith as a physical, emotional and intellectual experience, a joy- ful social act that goes beyond the isolating limitations of literary expression. Moreover, in order to ‘see’ the joke, comedy requires that we read the world afresh. In this act of creative perception the comic pro- vides Blake with a poetics of reading, a model of how his Visionary per- ceptions could survive while being presented in physical media he consistently pointed out were limiting and potentially oppressive. Finally, comedy has a long and intimate connection with faith, particu- larly in the idea of the divinely inspired fool. It formed part of a Christian tradition that found expression in many of Blake’s major influences – the writings of St Paul, the plays of Shakespeare, even London street life. To employ the comic, then, allows Blake to encour- age Vision, to celebrate the madness of inspiration, and to present a pos- itive message in an inherently flawed medium.

  Recognizing the comic as a key to Vision, as well as providing exciting insights into individual lyrics, also gives a new thematic unity to Blake’s work. Rather than being a juvenile exercise in imitation, the Poetical

  

Sketches can be read as the beginnings of a series of comic images that

  substantially shape the presentation of ‘play’ in the Songs of Innocence

  

and of Experience. Likewise An Island in the Moon, rather than being an

  idle and protracted in-joke, proves to be a significant early draft of the sort of philosophical and spiritual education attempted in The Marriage

  of Heaven and Hell and later in Jerusalem.

  As a conscious choice, then, Blake’s use of humour is far-reaching in both its scope and implications. As sharp as the satirical thrusts of Swift x Preface

  and Gillray and as wryly observant as the social comedy of Austen and Dickens, it also bears comparison to the divinely inspired humanism of Chaucer and Shakespeare. His use of comedy is not only fully consistent with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral and literary debate, it is a vital tool for expressing his Vision of perceptive, inclusive, humanist Christianity. Rich with the scents of both street and cloister, Blake’s comedy shows him to be, on the one hand, the spiritual inheritor of Cervantes, Rabelais and the joyful prophets and preachers of the Bible, and on the other, a writer whose sense of absurdity and dazzling linguis- tic gymnastics anticipate Monty Python and Spike Milligan by more than a century and a half. Not a conventional comic writer, perhaps. But in his own rude, anti-authoritarian, deeply spiritual way, a great one.

  Of course, a reader’s hunch is not the same as the ‘proofs’ demanded by literary criticism. There is a hoary old joke that to ‘assume’ is to make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’. It must be acknowledged from the outset that, in the course of writing this book, I have, without wishing to make an ‘ass’ out of anyone but myself, made some fairly sweeping assump- tions. For a start, my hypothesis rests on the belief that Blake intended his work to have a critical, educational aspect. I am claiming that he wished to teach the art of Vision, and moreover that this was an aim he strove towards throughout his life. This implies that his work can be read as a whole; that images he uses at different times and in very differ- ent works can nevertheless be interpreted (or translated) consistently. This is not to say that I am claiming any image has only one meaning, or even that Blake had the entire system fully formulated from the word go. Rather, his work is accumulative: each time he uses an image it gath- ers a history, a significance to be carried forward to its next appearance, like a semantic snail’s shell. To support this argument, I have also assumed that biographical and historical information is fair game in building patterns of critical meaning. Perhaps most significantly of all, I have assumed that literature and faith are intimately connected and that Blake’s Visionary aim – to promote the notion of Universal Humanity – is not only possible, it is desirable.

  As you can no doubt tell from this, my critical approach has been, to say the least, eclectic. It was once fashionable to talk about a book as if it were a body. To use this analogy, I would have to say that this book has such a contorted critical posture it is in danger of getting lumbago. I have not subscribed to any particular critical theory, blithely assuming that one can talk of a ‘poetics of reading’ without spending the obliga- tory pages, chapters and lifetimes discussing what that means (to me it just means a way of approaching a text). Moreover, many important

  Preface xi

  schools of Blake criticism appear here as no more than the most cursory of tattoos upon the book’s skin. To take one example to demonstrate the whole: when discussing Blake’s use of the term ‘female’, I quite happily assume this is his shorthand for ‘having physical existence’ without dis- cussing the alchemical, philosophical, theological and social back- ground to, or the considerable feminist criticism surrounding, his use of it. This doesn’t mean that I am unaware of Blake’s position as an artist working within a patriarchal system of male power, or that his imagery can sometimes appear gynophobic. Rather, this is outside the scope of my study. For the record, I read Blake’s characters as not either ‘male’ or ‘female’ but as representatives of states of perception and existence. Oothoon, Thel, and the youthful harlot, as well as being part of Blake’s examination of the roles and rights of women in society, are aspects of all of us, of all readers and creators: rational and sensual, abstract and physical. That Blake’s female characters are more associated with the physical is because Blake chose to celebrate the creative power of birth and rebirth (as he does on plate III of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). That such power involves women intimately with the adoption of the potentially limiting mode of physical existence – the essential prelude to the expression and renewal of Universal Humanity – does not mean he assigned any lesser place to women in his creative system.

  So, in relation to feminist criticism of Blake, all I can say is that there are other books on this topic, like Helen Bruder’s intriguing William

  

Blake and the Daughters of Albion. And as it is for feminist criticism, so it is

  for many other critical schools and theories. I simply promise that I have done my best not to make any false claims or willfully misrepresent Blake, nor pursue any critical byways that would leave non-academic readers floundering. This study is meant to open up a new area of discus- sion, and perhaps offer some lesser known sources of information about the comic and Blake’s use of it – for example such splendid tomes as J. Roberts A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; Its Dignity, Antiquity, and

  

Excellence, With a Word upon Pudding And Many other Useful Discoveries, of

great Benefit to the Publick (London, 1726). Of course, whatever borrow-

  ings I have made, all mis-readings and mistakes are all my own.

  In writing this book and thinking about Blake’s work, I have benefited from the insights of a number of exceptional Blake scholars. I should therefore like to acknowledge the invaluable, scholarly and generous help of Cornelia Cook in shaping not only this book but also, from its earliest beginnings and over a great many cups of coffee, my thinking about Blake’s work. I would also like to thank Andrew Lincoln, Jon Mee, Lucy Newlyn, Nicholas Shrimpton and Edward Larrissy for their xii Preface

  courteous and perceptive comments on this manuscript over the years, and my editors, Charmian Hearne, Eleanor Birne, Beverley Tarquini and Rebecca Mashayekh, for their infinite patience.

  I think that’s everything for now. ‘So’, as it says in that classic work of English comedy, Willans and Searle’s superb Down with Skool, ‘okay, come in’. Just remember, as you peruse the following pages, one thing:

  Stultorum numerus infinitus est* and I’m only one of them.

• The number of fools is infinite.

Abbreviations

  (B**) Plate number reference in The Complete Graphic works of

  William Blake, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

  (D**) Plate number reference in Drawings of William Blake: 92

  pencil studies, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Dover, 1970).

  (E**) Page number reference in The Poetry and Prose of William

  Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

  (K**) Page number reference in Blake Complete Writings with variant readings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1972). (L**) Plate number reference in The Paintings of William Blake, ed. Raymond Lister (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

  An Island An Island In The Moon. The Marriage The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Songs Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience. Innocence Songs of Innocence. Experience Songs of Experience.

  Textual note For quotations from Blake’s work I have followed the text in David V.

  Erdman’s The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Just occasionally I have also given a reference to Keynes’ Complete

  

Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1972), because

  although Keynes alters the punctuation, he does include lines deleted or altered in the original manuscripts and which are not present in Erdman’s edition. References to Shakespeare are from William

  

Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. R. N. Alexander (London: Collins,

1980).

  

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1 Songs of Pleasant Glee: William

  Blake and the Comic

  Since the days of his earliest biographers, critics have always recognized the presence of humour in the work of William Blake. His first formal biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writing in 1868, characterized Blake’s

  1 work as a ‘mingling of the sublime with the grotesque’. In 1868 A. C.

  Swinburne praised the ‘harmonious and humorous power’ of The

2 Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Robin Hamlyn, in the catalogue to the Tate

  Britain Blake Exhibition 2000–2001, calls Blake ‘a discerning lover of

  3

  pleasure’. Humorous moments abound in Blake’s work. There is the famous print of Newton, for instance, that blows a loud raspberry at whatever ‘science’ the viewer believes threatens their conception of art, intuition and the human spirit. There are the amusingly scurrilous annotations and the guffaw-inducing frankness of his scatological note- books. There are numerous satirical gibes at the concepts of kingship and priesthood from America to Jerusalem. There are plenty of comic characters, too: the pretentious philosophers in An Island in the Moon, the smart wit of the chimney sweep in Songs of Innocence, the subversive narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In fact, Blake’s work seems to pulse with a comic energy, a mixture of vibrant sensuality and joyful irreverence at all our rigid conventions. Moreover, there is considerable critical recognition of his borrowing from comic sources: Martha England’s great study of An Island, for example, uncovering Blake’s debt to the famous comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote, or Marcus Wood’s comparison of Blake’s imagery and that of eighteenth-century satirical prints.

  However, give almost anybody a copy of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ or

Milton to read, and the last thing you would expect them to do is laugh.

Blake has been called many things, from a priori communist to God’s portrait painter, but comic writer is not one of them. In popular modern

2 William Blake’s Comic Vision

  criticism Blake is still seen as only occasionally writing on the side of ‘the Devils party’ (E35). He does it, the argument runs, simply to be devil- ish, to be contrary, to use whatever tool comes to hand to disrupt our complaisancy. At best he is seen as the great bricoleur, as Jon Mee calls him: deliberately blending material from diverse sources as a way of challenging the hegemony of conventional discourse so as to disrupt

  4 the ‘manuscript assumed authority of the dead’, in Tom Paine’s phrase.

  There is good ground for this assumption. Blake’s work is highly eclectic; moreover such a magpie approach was popular with the late eighteenth century radicals and Millenarian visionaries with whom he sympa- thized. It had even been recommended as a poetic style in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Blake’s poetry, Mee argues, uses parody deliberately to disturb our sense of allegorical form, and in doing so was part of a wider pattern of radical response to

  5

  the use of hegemonic allegory as a means of teaching ‘Moral Virtue’. He also points out, however, that the aim of such an ‘heterogeneous repertoire’ was to make a ‘complete reorganization of the structures

  6

  involved’. The implication of such an approach – scrupulously fair- minded and historically based as it is – is that parody is simply another tool for destabilizing the text. Blake is, in effect, merely borrowing comic structures and imagery like popular trinkets in order to ‘pound [them] into dust & melt [them] in the Furnaces of Affliction’ (E205) and so forge them into fiery arrowheads of prophesy under the heat of his wild, but sober, imagination. As a result, we should no more consider Blake a comedian because he uses comic images than we should call him an alchemist because he borrows terminology from Paracelsus. The fact that he uses the comic to destabilize texts because the comic itself has an intrinsic value, a divine message, is easily overlooked. And as a percep- tion of comic intention is a prerequisite to comic appreciation (a fact that anyone who has ever mouthed an apologetic ‘I was only joking’ knows), our impression of Blake remains the moody bourgeois anti- hero. He is the cool rebel-of-choice for the Industrial age, the artist- psychologist with a dash of the socio-linguist who goes about his work with the merest trace of a wry smile on his face as he pits himself against any and all forms of oppression. He is an artist who uses comic elements. He is not a comic writer. ‘The Tyger’ is not funny. QED.

  Of course, the purpose of this book is to argue that, on the contrary, Blake was a subtle, profound and skilled comic writer. His understanding of the comic formed a key component of his concept of Vision, a corner- stone in his attempts to build a New Jerusalem ‘in Englands green and

  Songs of Pleasant Glee 3

  ‘Thro’ (E492) the material existence of signs, whether that be written language or one’s own mortal presence, to reveal God – and not God as some far-off judge, but as having existence and authority because He exists in us: ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ (E39). Such a reading requires a twofold response to texts, whether linguistic, visual or physical. First, as Blake does with his parodies, they must be decon- structed – their authority must be challenged, whether that authority is in the form of a king, a code of religious prohibition, or the false impres- sion that because language represents reality, it represents the only form ‘reality’ can take. Deconstruction, however, is a potentially limitless activity, leading to a ‘void boundless’ of meaninglessness (E41). Vision must therefore also be a creative act, an act of building, of prayer, of reorganizing the ‘Architecture’ of perception (E125). It must offer some- thing that, while it can be found in the ‘Minute Particulars’ (E205) of representation, goes beyond it: the promise of the eternal renewal of life and the hope of divine salvation. This twofold process, the degradation that goes hand in hand with a blessing, has long been recognized as the special attribute of the comic. Comedy deflates pretensions, disrupts patterns, and lurks behind the façade of reality to prove that reality to be false. But it goes beyond deconstruction because it insists on a meaning even in meaninglessness – and ‘always meaning’ leads to God. Moreover this meaning is at once both intellectual and emotional; a physical example of the incomprehensible joys of the salvation that awaits us when the physical is no longer our concern. For Blake, the comic formed an ideal pattern for Visionary perception. Its paradoxical nature provid- ed him with a wonderful, accessible and popular poetics of reading, the end of a ball of ‘Golden string’ (E231) that leads to a ‘Last Judgement’ (‘an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science’, E565). Politically sharp and spiritually enlightening, ancient and thoroughly contemporary, arcane and widely accessible, the comic could be both theologically sophisti- cated and yet linked to simple human experience in a way that simul- taneously acknowledges and celebrates its temporal and hegemonic vulnerability. It was a method, conscious of its own flaws and celebrat- ing the possibility of alternatives, of ‘rouz[ing] the faculties to act’ (E702) by accentuating the importance of the reader in creating meaning. It is more than a simple undermining of the concept of authority, it is a relo- cation of authority to share it with ‘a brother and friend’ (E146). The comic leads from the self into the wider community of humanity and God combined. For Blake, it was a Visionary aesthetic. His work was not just a mingling of the sublime and the grotesque; it was a relocation of the sublime from the polite, fear- and obscurity-dominated aesthetics of

4 William Blake’s Comic Vision

  Reynolds, Burke and Addison to a more robust and more human form: the ridiculous, that comic exaggeration that emphasized the interwoven significance of art, humanity and Christ. In a turbulent age of oppres- sion and revolutions, scepticism and prophecy, Blake found Faith in Foolery, and from the Fools in King Edward the Third to the carnival rhythms of Jerusalem, from the smallest engraving to the grandest water- colour, Blake’s work became, essentially, comic.

  Painting a red nose on to our accepted portrait of Blake will require several coats, of course. Comedy is a highly contentious issue: we will need to attempt a definition of ‘comic vision’ that defends its positive aspects from those who claim laughter is merely a symbol of bitter tri- umph. Then we will need to prove that the structure and function of such a comic vision would indeed be vital to Blake’s artistic and spiritual Vision. This will require a brief look at what might be called the mechanics of comedy (being the two-stage pattern of our comic percep- tion rather than the six buffoons of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Clearly we will also have to place Blake within the theory and practice of the comic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to see what sort of comic inspiration might have been available to him. As the idea of Blake the comedian is an unusual one, it might also be appropri- ate to offer a quick summary of the biographical evidence that Blake’s use of the comic was indeed deliberate and not simply the accidental

  

7

  outpourings of a ‘wild enthusiast’. Only having established this con- nection between comic vision and Visionary Art, will it be possible to turn our attention to individual works. This book will concentrate primarily on his early work, from the Poetical Sketches to The Marriage of

  

Heaven and Hell. Such a focus will allow us to examine how Blake’s ideas

  about the comic developed, so that by the time of The Marriage they have become thematically embedded into his concept of Vision. I will, of course, be including many examples from his later work, both to elu- cidate ideas found, but not always fully expressed, in the earlier poetry and design, and to endeavour to demonstrate the consistency of his application of comic imagery. But I leave it to the reader to discover these images in the longer prophetic books in any detail.

  In this first chapter I will explore the grounds of Blake’s comic vision.

  Chapter 2 looks at Blake’s contemporary comic world and establishes what influences will have been available to him. Chapter 3 discusses examples of biographical and unpublished material that give a clear indication of Blake’s comic purpose, as well as suggesting the reasons why we no longer see the joke of his mythopoetics. Chapter 4 explores

  Songs of Pleasant Glee 5

Poetical Sketches and Tiriel. Chapter 5 demonstrates the hitherto neglect-

  ed significance of An Island in the Moon as Blake’s statement of a comic Visionary manifesto. Chapter 6 investigates the comic as an alternative sublime in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and chapter 7 looks at the surprising way the comic influences some of Blake’s designs.

  Chapter 8 reviews Blake’s use of the comic, as well as suggesting how its thematic use influences his later prophetic books. First, then, remembering that ‘Roses are planted where thorns grow’ (E33), let us begin our examination of what ‘comic vision’ might mean by addressing the difficult and perennially thorny problem of defining comedy.

  

Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’

(E54)

  We all know what we find funny, but defining comedy is not easy. As a term it is used to describe such an immense range of human activity that its meaning becomes blunted ‘Comedy’ encompasses anything that makes us laugh, from bodily noises to the subtlest literary bons

  

mots, from formulaic presentations of comic material to sudden acci-

  dents. In addition, as Northrop Frye reminds us, Dante even gave the name commedià to the grand scheme of redemption and resurrection that is the pattern of both regenerating life and Christian salvation. Although some would argue this is not strictly speaking ‘comedy’, laughter has a long and respectable history in religious practice. In fact, comedy is claimed to fulfil many widely differing functions in our society. It is used as a mark of linguistic and emotional development, a political weapon, a survival mechanism, a social lubricant, ‘a subsidiary

  8 language’, a seduction technique, even a parable of earthly existence.

  It is generally agreed to have a specific purpose: laughter, we are told, is the best medicine – but whether this is to cure social ills (as argued by Aristotle, Jonson, Foote) or to provide psychic relief (Plautus, Lamb, Freud) or spiritual enlightenment (Erasmus, Fry, the Bible) is open to debate. Moreover, defining comedy is exceptionally difficult. This is partly because of its encompassing nature, which is so expansive no two critics ever agree even on the names of its constituent parts, using terms such as ‘ridiculous’, ‘risible’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘wit’ and ‘humour’ inter- changeably. To make matters worse, comedy thrives on defying, flouting and subverting the tools of definition. It is not chaos, although it is often to be found there. It delights in mischance, but loves happy endings. Its

6 William Blake’s Comic Vision

  structure and intelligence. It thrives on rules, particularly when borrowed or ransacked from the respectable worlds of physics and linguistics, but only when they can be abused, stretched, or pursued to absurdity. Of course, it is precisely this slipperiness, this status as an accompanying counter-culture, reflecting and challenging the prevailing modes of order that makes the comic such an attractive model for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. But Edward Galligan’s lament is typical of every comic theorist from Aristotle onwards when he writes that the comic defies definition, preferring double meanings, gestures and

  9

  dances. The comic theorist, almost inevitably, must do the same, per- forming an elaborate and suggestive dance to convey their meaning. To paraphrase Dr Johnson, no one but a fool ever writes about folly.

  Most theories of comedy follow a familiar pattern and few, if any, are a practical demonstration that the soul of wit is brevity. First comes the apology: for example, Caesar, in Cicero’s De Oratore, admitting that com- edy is ‘exceedingly difficult to summarize’, or Dr Johnson, in his turn, noting that ‘Comedy has been unpropitious to definers’, or Morton Gurewitch claiming that it is positively ‘hazardous to declare that

  10

  comedy has a single meaning’. Then the theorist proposes an origin for comedy, usually locating it in the plays that developed from ancient Greek religious festivals (while ignoring the fact that this involves an unseemly conflation of comic drama with the generally risible). Many critics, from the sixteenth-century writer Evanthius to the twen- tieth century’s F. M. Cornford have made this connection, although lately there have been a number of studies suggesting the plays of Aristophanes, so pivotal to this theory, do not, in true comic fashion,

  11 conform to the definitions they are purported to have engendered.

  The theorist then feels obliged to point out that in any case, comedy is

  12 highly subjective (often quoting Molière’s ‘we do not laugh alike’).

  Moreover, they say, the desire to produce a single definition of comedy is like trying to create a single punchline to fit all jokes. (Or as Blake might say, ‘One Law for the Ox and the Lion is Oppression’, E44). Nevertheless, the hapless critic finally attempts to approximate a defin- ition by calling up snippets from a huge supporting cast of names that are, in this field, as familiar as household words, and all of whom dis- agree: Bahktin and Baudelaire, Arnold and Nietzsche, Jonson and

13 Johnson. Many writers bring illumination to the subject, like Freud

  (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905), uncovering the hostil- ity of the joker, or Bergson (Laughter, 1900) tabulating the mechanical inelasticity of the comic victim, only for their brilliance to reveal darker

  Songs of Pleasant Glee 7

  the spiritual significance of laughter. Sensitive, then, to the inevitable disappointment of their readers, most would-be theorists finally add the coda that comic theories are never as amusing as comic practice. The most elegant formulation of this is undoubtedly the novelist Peter DeVries’ wry comment that listening to a lecture on comedy is about as

  14

  funny as being struck in the face with a recipe for custard pie. Of course, there is little reason why theories of comedy should be funny: theories of tragedy would gain little by attempting to be tragic (‘Hamlet! Dead!’). However, there is a sense of incompleteness about the defin- ition process which is all the more frustrating because the comic often ends happily: marriage, escape, celebration, understanding, resolution. And yet this ending is also a beginning, the brink of the next chapter, a restart in an ongoing journey, rather than the neat finality of the tragic journey. A joke is seldom alone; it begs others. To define comedy com- pletely would be to kill the joke.

  As a result, definitions of comedy tend to be somewhat broad. For our purposes, however, the version offered in the 1973 A Dictionary of

  

Modern Critical Terms is as succinct and apposite as any. This states that

  ‘comedy’ is simply that which ‘arouses and vicariously satisfies the human instinct for mischief’ and in itself is ‘neither morally useful or

  15

  immoral’. Having accepted this general chortle of human mischief as a starting point, it is possible then to identify and separate certain elem- ents of comic expression as having a particular purpose. To borrow a lit- erary term, the phrase ‘the comic’ can be used to distinguish those aspects of comedy which involve ‘a sense of triumph over whatever is

  16

  inimical to human or social good, however that ideal is defined.’ That triumph can come in many forms. It may be the deflation and degrad- ation of pomposity and authority, including the authority of the con- trolling ego. It may be social control exerted over those whose folly or vice runs against the social grain: by extension, it can therefore be a political weapon. It can hold up a pattern of good behaviour, celebrate the uniqueness of having a good heart, or rejoice in marriage, birth and even death as part of the process of constantly renewing youth and en- ergy. It may also be the triumph of life over death itself: both through fecundity and, in the Christian tradition within which Blake worked, the rejoicing brought by the knowledge of our salvation through God’s infinite love.

  Comic vision, then, may be defined as a writer’s ‘particular insight and sense of the world that allows him or her to find or ‘excite’ mirth, to justify life, and to imagine the means of its benevolent regeneration in

  17

8 William Blake’s Comic Vision

  this by means of an extraordinary two-stage process. It is at once both

  18

  ‘triumphant and deflationary’, generating a ‘double attitude of both

  19

  sympathy and criticism’. The key to this dual nature lies in the comic’s property of stimulating and celebrating the imaginations of both the joker and their audience by means of its unique structure.

  While admitting that there are anomalies (such as tickling), most the- orists try to explain the structure of comedy by focusing on what makes us laugh. Inevitably, most do this by extrapolating backward from their beliefs about comic function. For example, those who see it as primarily a civilizing force will explain laughter as a cackle of triumph over an enemy, a view famously espoused by Hobbes (On Human Nature, 1650). Psychic relief theorists, on the other hand, will point to the sudden exposure of hidden aggression. Nearly all theorists, however, state that laughter is a result of surprise. A good example of this can be found in the work of the sixteenth-century writer Madius. His On the Ridiculous (1550) is particularly suitable for our purpose in that it contains the seeds of three major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of comedy. On the one hand, drawing on much earlier comic theory, he states his belief that comedy deals with characters of low type and is to provide moral lessons. In this, his work is a clearly part of a theory that would influence Jonson, Dryden and the early eighteenth-century critic John Dennis. This is the credo of that would-be social reformer, a satirist, and satire was a powerful comic force in the eighteenth century. Madius also gives us the beginnings of what will become the psychic relief theory of comedy. Earlier theorists had noted the importance of comedy in diffusing social tensions, likening it to a safety valve on a wine barrel

  20 ‘that must be opened from time to time to prevent [it] from bursting’.

  Madius goes further: in tracing the origin of the low subject matter of comedy back to Aristotle, he extends this idea to claim that comedy fre- quently contains a sense of trespass onto the lower end of the social and the emotional scale. Dirt, greed, hate and lust were, he felt, as much the motivation of comedy as its proper object (a point later amplified by Freud). In addition, what makes his contribution truly remarkable, is that he also begins to identify another source of laughter in ‘incon- gruity’. This is also important to eighteenth-century comic theory, in that it offered a basis for an explanation of the origin of laughter in something other than triumph. Ridicule, Madius warned, could be cruel, and he makes a point of listing objects improper for satire: serious accidents, deformity and poverty. To find humour in the incongruous opened the way for later theorists to claim the function of laughter was a

  Songs of Pleasant Glee 9

  differences. Comedy became, for them, a matter of eccentric good nature rather than savagely witty humour.

  Madius’ keywords, then, were novelty, incongruity and surprise. The best jokes, he theorized, thus came from the sudden exposure of some- thing forbidden, ungainly or absurd, in a creative and witty manner. This wit was often achieved by a reversal of expectation, associating the high with the low and thus finding value in the worthless. This defini- tion covers one part of the comic process, but there is a second import- ant element to be considered. In order for us to find something funny, the comic has to appeal to something within us, which delights in the creative transgression of boundaries and the disturbance of rules. If that delight were not there, we would simply find such transgression odd, not funny. Our delight in that transgression is increased when our sense of the importance of following rules – social, linguistic or behavioural – is heightened. It will appeal even further if a rule is broken by a triumph of the simplest over the most sophisticated, the most human over the most stern. In a sense, Hobbes was right, laughter is about triumph, but not over others, or over our former selves, but over all those things which oppose the organic effulgence of life itself.