Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law

Rating:
Summary: "A Long, and Perhaps Strange, Way Into Blake"
Review: The cumbersome challenge E.P. Thompson sets for himself in this book is to unearth Blake's obscure philosophical and literary heritage. Chiefly, he seeks to correct prior notions of Blake as a self-alienated figure who was almost wholly out of touch with his time. The result is an occasionally unreadable but ultimately significant contribution to Blake scholarship.

The book, meticulous in detail and enormous in scope, is so dense and fraught with an overwhelming amount of research and knowledge that, in the end, it seems Thompson wrote it not for the casual Blake enthusiast but for the Blake scholars with whom he quarrels in frequent disputes. As Thompson himself pauses to note: "I have been engaged, throughout the first part of this book, in an exceedingly difficult argument, and I am not wholly sure myself what this argument adduces." When the author himself has to take a step back to warn the reader that he is not entirely certain of what he is doing, it is a pretty good way of posting up a fat and bold "BEWARE" in plain view of the reader.

Though Thompson seems to have written this book for himself, the radiant intensity with which he attacks his subject makes for a deeply probing text. He even investigates the etymology of Blake's poetic vocabulary to flesh out his suspicion that the foundation for the poet's thought was laid over a century before his birth. In his quest to assign Blake a particular tradition, Thompson often succeeds so well as to contest Blake's very originality. Encouragingly, though, the sheer luminosity, energy and power of Blake's more inspired verse withstands most skepticism. Perhaps Blake's ideas themselves were not as original or isolated as other critics and biographers would have one believe, but we remember him still because of his talent for transforming into stark and masterful art the literary heritage Thompson uncovers.

Thompson concedes that "if Blake read any or all" of the antecedent works he cites as his possible influences, "he read them in his own way. He employs an inherited vocabulary to make statements directly opposed to those authorized by the "Tradition". He appropriates old symbols and turns them to new purposes." Specifically, the tradition Blake is identified with is that of the Antinomians and Muggletonians (I know, sounds like something out of Gulliver's Travels), both of which closely resemble Blake's own beliefs on reason, liberty, the Fall, the book of Genesis, the trinity, desire and the notion that there is no God but man himself. The two sects abound with anticipations of Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles" and "chains of reason." Even Blake's own mother is implicated as a Muggletonian (a marvelous distinction if I've ever heard one).

Because Blake is writing out of this "tradition" Thompson assigns him, the conclusion is that the poet's work "has the confidence, an assured reference, very different from the speculations of an eccentric or a solitary . . . this man does not feel himself to be alone." Gone is the image of a wild-eyed and fierce-jowled eccentric basking in the nude with his wife in their garden (which he did).

For my tastes, the book labors too long over many uninteresting rhetorical debates and theoretical religious arguments between various 17th and 18th century sects. It is in this regard that the book requires a lot of patience, especially since Thompson keeps the reader waiting for any specific discussion of Blake's work until well over one hundred pages into the book. Then again, if learning that "Naamah is sister to Tubal-cain" is the kind of thing that gets you frothing at the mouth for more, then by all means, have at it. The problem is that Thompson seems to be writing two books at once, probing so extensively and thoroughly into Blake's alleged influences as to lose sight of the big picture which, presumably, is Blake's own life and work. The pattern is one in which Thompson will spend an inordinate amount of pages on a few forgotten religious movements in 17th or 18th century London and following that up with a sudden "hmmm . . . so maybe these were Blake's guys . . . but let us look a little further" sort of thing.

Nonetheless, the reader who refuses to lose sight of the topic at hand as easily as Thompson does at times will come away from the book with a feeling of having really gotten somewhere. In his investigation and analysis Thompson confirms some critical readings of Blake while replacing many others with some well-founded suppositions of his own, offering as clear and meaningful an understanding of Blake as this dramatically ambitious book can possibly allow. His discussion of Blake's prescient use of the word "chartr'd" in "London," one of his most definitive poems, is nothing if not revelatory. The same goes for his discussions of "London's" various influences as well as the prolonged explication of Blake's "The Human Abstract." It is here where Thompson most successfully endorses David Erdman's cause to demonstrate Blake's work as a reaction to the social and political realities of his day. Thompson's love for the poetry itself weans him off of his abstruse historical commentary in favor of a refreshingly plainspoken understanding of the work's origins and issues. Thankfully, this is the warmer tone with which the book concludes; I only wish Thompson could have stayed as close to the ground throughout the book as he does at its final stages.