In my end is my beginning
-T. S.
Eliot, "East Coker"
The man who never alters his opinion is
like
standing water, & breeds reptiles of
the mind
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 19
In The Early Illuminated Books, volume 3 of the recent
Blake Trust series of reproductions, we briefly explained why the genre and
structure of The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell are among the book's "most distinctive, most unsettling
primary features." Depending on how one counts, the Marriage text is divided into thirteen
or more sections or units consisting of one, two, three, and more copper plates
[1], plates with and without
illustrations, with and without titles; some of which are "theological
or philosophical, others proverbial, others variously narrative (myths of
origin, interviews, mock travelogues, conversion stories),” with "few
if any characters or settings in common." Moreover, "time and space
are freely manipulated: the narrator travels to hell and back, hangs over
abysses with an angel, and dines in the approximate present with Isaiah and
Ezekiel, while the order of events and the relation of one narrative space
to another are seldom specified." [2]
Is the book "varied and pregnant fragments"; a mere "scrap-book
of Blake's philosophy"; a "structureless structure" about "as
heterogeneous as one could imagine"? [3]
Or is its structure classifiable in terms of genre, as many scholars have
attempted to show, perceiving it as variously as anatomy, Bible, manifesto,
primer, prophecy, or testament? In The
Early Illuminated Books, we assigned it to a subcategory of Menippean
satire identified with the "Greek prose satirist Lucian of Samosata (c.
A.D. 125-200), whose works such as Dialogues
of the Dead, Voyage to the Lower
World, and The True History
(third edition in English, 1781) exemplify the Lucianic 'News from Hell type'"
(p. 118).
Clearly, the Marriage
is an intellectual satire, and its disjointed structure fits reasonably well
into the Menippean category.
Nevertheless, as I argue here, it would be a mistake to infer from this
fit Blake's original intentions for the Marriage—to
assume that he set out to write a Menippean satire or modeled his book on any
one specific work. In this essay, the
first of a three-part study on the evolution of the Marriage, I argue that the idea of a disjointed, miscellaneous work
entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
emerged only after Blake had written and executed plates 21-24 and planned his
"Bible of Hell," and that the structure of the whole work is in some
measure the result of a production history in which sections were written and
executed at different times.
Narrative
discontinuity alone suggests that textual units were not composed in the order
in which they are now read. But it only suggests and does not prove disjointed production, and it does not provide the
clues necessary to establish the sequence in which the textual units were
composed. Analysis of the text cannot answer basic questions, such as whether
individual units or groups of units committed were committed to copper plates
soon after they were written, or only after the entire manuscript was
completed. For clues and for answers, we need to examine technical features
unique to illuminated printing; the first printing of plates 21-24; the
different lettering styles among the Marriage
plates; and, most important, the manner in which plates 21-24 and the other
plates were supplied from larger sheets of copper. This examination will
demonstrate that the four copper plates carrying the text of pages 21-24—which
constitute a sustained attack on Swedenborg—were quarters cut from the same
sheet of copper, were executed soon after their text was written, and were the
first unit produced. They appear to have been written and printed (at least
once) as an independent (though probably unissued) pamphlet, but became instead
the core of what became the Marriage,
generating twenty of its subsequent twenty-three plates. These plates, also
quarters of larger sheets, can be reconfigured into their original sheets; and
the sheets, once sequenced by their lettering styles, confirm the textual units
as revealed by linguistic codes and identify the larger sections or likely
printing sessions to which the units belong. Material evidence provided by the
bibliographic codes—by which I mean lettering style as well as reconstructed
sheets—establishes the sequence in which the units were most likely written and
executed. [4]
When we read the Marriage
units in this sequence—that is, in a chronology of plate production—we begin to
see visual and verbal connections heretofore obscured, connections that illuminate
Blake's composing process and the creative logic underlying the book's
composition. We can trace the development of key ideas and the relation between
unit composition and book production—or, in Blakean parlance, between invention
and execution. In this hands-on, workshop style of composing, in which poet and
printer could execute plates upon completing autonomous textual units, Blake
could think nonlinearly and behave like an artist: ideas and images of a unit
already executed could direct the subsequent creative process. We begin to see how Blake interacted with
his graphic medium and how such interaction encouraged an ever-evolving (what I
have called "organic") mode of composition. Witnessing the Marriage unfold through its production
enables us to answer basic questions about the Marriage's form and Blake's original and final intentions, as well
as general questions about Blake's mode of composing his texts and books. In
short, it enables us to see more of Blake's mind at work
The second essay in my study of the Marriage substantiates the claim made here that plates 21-24 were
written and executed before the other units, probably as an independent,
anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet. I examine
their thematic, aesthetic, and rhetorical coherence and date Blake's interest
in and disillusionment with Swedenborg, placing the latter within the context
of other critiques most likely known to Blake. I identify the primary
Swedenborgian texts that Blake satirizes and examine the major themes that
figure in and help to generate the subsequent plates and units. The third essay
traces these themes and texts through the remaining textual units in the order
in which the units were produced. It focuses on Blake’s allusions to
printmaking and their connection to Swedenborg, examining in detail the image
and symbolism of the cave. The last essay reveals, in effect, that the Marriage is a series of variations on
basic themes first raised in plates 21-24. [5]
I.
Composition in Illuminated Printing
Blake did
not date or sign the Marriage. Until recently, most scholars dated it circa
1790-93. [6] A set of complex allusions
to
Swedenborg, Blake, and Christ on plate 3 suggests
the beginning date. [7] The "June 5 1793" inscription on Our End is Come, an engraving used as
a
frontispiece in Marriage copy B, one
of the earliest copies printed, suggests the conventional end date. The
three-year gestation, the perfunctory mention of Swedenborg on plates 3 and 19,
and the vociferous attack on plates 21-24 suggest that Blake broke from Swedenborgianism
slowly and cautiously, but this conclusion is mistaken. First, the evidence
that the composition of the Marriage
continued beyond 1790 is very weak (see Early
Illuminated Books, 113-16). The engraved frontispiece, for example, is not
printed on a sheet of paper conjunct with the title page, as thought earlier
(see Bentley, Blake Books, 287 n. 3).
With no documentary evidence to prove otherwise, we should accept Blake's
implied date of 1790, which is implied on plate 3 and, more persuasively,
penned-in on plate 3 of copy F—color printed in circa 1794 (see Early Illuminated Books, 145)—as the
end-date. Second, the autographic nature of relief etching encouraged moving
quickly from text to plate (as I will argue below)—or at the very least did not
present any technical obstacles to composition—making it unlikely that a book
of twenty-seven small plates would have taken three years to produce, a good
deal longer than any of the other books Blake was working on during the same
period. The schedule suggested by Blake's professional commitments also
supports a 1790 date: the years 1789 and 1790, which saw the first illuminated
books, were almost completely void of (known) outside commissions for
engravings, whereas during 1791-92 Blake engrave at least seventy plates for
book publishers. [8]
The hypothesis that the Marriage
was in progress for three or more years—
The suspicion that Blake wrote the units of Marriage out of order is neither new nor surprising. Narrative discontinuity, as noted, suggests as much to the readers of Blake. Logic alone indicates that plates 21-24—which explain the grounds of Blake’s attack on Swedenborg—were probably written before plates 3 and 19, where perfunctory mention of Swedenborg appears to rely on information already provided, compositionally speaking. But even those who have seen in Blake's eclectic texts the mind of the bricoleur, or a reviser and cobbler of fragments, still imagine him pulling the fragments together conventionally. [9] In this view, the narrative's disjointedness is a matter of Blake's drawing on disparate discourses and traditions. When one speaks of Blake writing illuminated texts, even a text as “seemingly ad hoc” as the Marriage, [10] one is hard pressed not to envision him writing and rewriting the entire composition on paper before committing it to copper, because one still imagines Blake working as a poet in the manuscript tradition and using illuminated printing subsequently as a mode of reproduction. It is exceedingly difficult to think outside the letterpress paradigm, to conceive of a mode of printing that did not require a finished text or fair copy before execution began; or of a mode of execution in which aesthetic decisions regarding page designs could have an immediate effect on the text, shaping and directing it. In the letterpress paradigm, one simply assumes that a text is written on paper and then set in type, that is produced and completed before being reproduced, with labor moving determinently—and unidirectionally—from author to compositor. Indeed, authors and compositors were not collaborators, and endings were not set before beginnings. [11]
It is commonplace in Blake studies to assert that
illuminated printing united invention and execution, and to view it as a
reaction against the division of labor characteristic of letterpress printing;
but, this assertion has remained mostly theoretical and contradictory. Not
much thought had been given to how—let alone exactly where in production—invention
and execution intersect, except in the person of Blake himself, as author and
printer. But the same laborer does not necessarily mean undivided labor; the
acts of writing and printing in the creation of an illuminated book were still
perceived as occurring separately. This perception is particularly evident
in
Ruthven Todd's theory of illuminated printing, which attempts to explain how
Blake could have avoided writing directly on plates, that is, backward: he
must have transferred from paper first.
Like many before him and since, Todd assumed that Blake produced his books
on paper before reproducing them in metal; this effected a modeling relation
between text and plate and, furthermore, required fair copies. These are
perfectly reasonable assumptions, given that the illuminated page is a print,
which
by definition reproduces images made in other media, whether visual or verbal.
In fact, only by understanding the reasonableness of Todd's proposal can one
fully appreciate how radically Blake broke with conventional modes of composing
and printing by not transferring texts or images. [12]
Todd's theory presupposed that Blake’s adaption of the
“counterproof,” a method of transferring outlines that preserves the direction
of the original in the print. He
proposed that Blake, instead of rewriting his text in graphite on paper,
rewrote it in an acid-resistant ink on leaves coated in gum arabic (otherwise
the ink would enter the fibers of the paper). He rewrote text clearly and
legibly, exactly as he wished it to appear on plates, on leaves cut
specifically to fit their designated plates—or within the outline of the plates
drawn on the leaves—for the plates of an illuminated book are not uniform in
size or shape. He would then carefully register each leaf or page face down
onto its designated plate, pass leaf and plate through the press, and soak the
pair in water to facilitate the transference of the text—which would then
appear backward (“counterproofed”) on the plate and be left standing in relief
after the plate was etched. . Furthermore, the leaves, taken together, would
have constituted a fair copy, but they would have been destroyed in the process
of transference (this, Todd believed, explained the absence manuscripts for the
illuminated books). [13] Producing the leaves in advance in this
manner necessarily divided the manuscripts into pages that corresponded exactly
to plates. Hence, Blake would have been able to cast off copy—and thus execute
plates in order. And, in advance of production, he would have known which pages
were to be illustrated and the size and position of the illustrations. He would
thus have known ahead the proportion between text and image per page, even if
he had not yet determined the illustrations, and have had general mock-ups of
pages. What is produced in metal would be, as Gilchrist mistakenly assumed, an
"imitation of the original drawing," that is, a "facsimile"
of what had been invented on paper. [14]
Todd’s theory breaks down quickly when examined historically
and technically. Conventional methods
of transferring texts in etching and engraving do not work in relief etching,
which is why Todd imagined Blake radically adapting one. The method he and
Hayer describe, however, is strikingly similar to the one invented in 1798 by
Alois Senefelder (an actor who did not know reverse writing) for use in
lithography. In Blake’s time, moreover, all engravers were trained in reverse
writing. The evidence shows that Blake drew his illustrations on plates
directly, without the assistance of transfers; and when he had sketched an
illustration beforehand, he merely redrew it on the plate to fit. The vignette
of Nebuchadnezzar in the second state of Marriage
plate 24 (see illus. 3) is a case in point: When the plate was first printed,
for Marriage copy K, the vignette had
not yet been drawn on it (illus. 1), which meant that Blake had to mask the
plate's unetched bottom half during printing (see n. 22 below). Only after
printing plate 24, with the three accompanying plates, did Blake decide to
continue designing it, at which point he added the vignette of Nebuchadnezzar
from his Notebook (illus. 2). Because Blake redrew this image freehand on the
plate, the printed image is the reverse of the drawing (illus. 3).
The Notebook drawing has no
indication of text and appears not to have been drawn as part of an
illuminated-page design. It may have been drawn as part of an emblem series
that Blake began circa 1789-90 and thus before the writing and execution of
plates 21-24. In any event, Nebuchadnezzar was not chosen randomly; Swedenborg
points specifically to Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2: 44 as foretelling
the New Church as the last and eternal church, a passage reprinted in the Minutes (p. 130) of the first General
Conference, which, as I have noted, was attended by Blake. Whether Swedenborg
reminded Blake of an earlier drawing of his or generated a new one, Blake
continued to invent plate 24 and deepen the meaning of his text by responding
creatively to his own first prints. If, on the other hand, he was merely
reproducing a preexistent design, then plate 24 as first printed would probably
have included its vignette, and/or the vignette in the Notebook would probably
have had text, or some indication of its placement in the design. Instead of
transferring or copying the appearance of a page already designed, Blake
designed his page while executing it,
combining his raw materials—text and image—for the first time on the plate
itself instead of on paper.
To assume, then, that Blake counterproofed texts—which
preserves the direction of the original—while drawing illustrations directly on
the plate—which reverses the original—is to assume not only that he could not
write backward but also that he was completely indifferent to the relation of
text and illustration that he supposedly had designed on paper and was
attempting so fastidiously to reproduce in metal. Rather than complicating the
composing process with anachronisms and contradictions, we should assume that
Blake treated his texts as he did his illustrations. He did not need to prepare
a fair copy for a compositor any more than he needed to prepare a detailed
drawing or page design for himself. He merely needed to rewrite his
texts—however they were first prepared and in whatever condition—legibly
(albeit backward) on the plates, placing word and image at the same time, using
the same brushes and pens, the tools of "the Painter and the Poet" (E
692). Thus, Blake probably never had what he did not need, a fair copy of an
illuminated book, let alone a manuscript divided according to its final form on
plates; he did not know—or need to know—the length of any of his illuminated
books when he began to etch their plates. In the case of Marriage, where the bibligraphical evidence indicates that units
were executed at different times (see below), Blake presumably ended up with an
assortment of texts written at different times, probably on various sizes and
kinds of paper, but never a fair copy of a completed manuscript. As with his
other illuminated books, Blake did not know the number of plates the Marriage would be until after it was
executed.
Blake's technique and tools allowed him to combine the raw
materials of text and image on the plate to produce original page designs, as
opposed to reproducing or facsimilizing preexistent designs. The amount of text
written on a plate, the line breaks, letter size, line spacing, and the size
and place of illustrations were not predetermined by a mock-up of that page;
they were aesthetic decisions made during production, which ensured the
marriage of invention and execution. [15] The technique also allowed Blake to begin
etching plates as soon as he had completed writing a section or chapter—that
is, upon completing an autonomous textual unit, or one that he thought was
auto-nomous at the time—should he want to. This unprecedented interplay between
graphic execution and textual composition is easily seen in the structure of Songs of Innocence, Milton, and Jerusalem.
The first work consists of independent texts whose various lettering styles
indicate various plate-making sessions; the second was printed circa 1811 in
two books but was dated 1804 by Blake and begins with the ambitious prediction
that it will be complete "in 12 Books," indicating that production
began long before the text itself was completed; and the last work, which was
also dated 1804 though not completed until circa 1820, has two sets of plate
numbers etched in the metal, the result of Blake inserting plates and changing
his mind about the book's organization.
Being able to execute and design plates before completing
a manuscript made it technically possible for Blake to think and work outside
the
letterpress paradigm—if not also to conceive of producing a disjointed work
like the Marriage. It made it
possible for a text to progress through production, with sections produced at
different times and out of order. However, if it is credible that plates 21-24
were the first unit of Marriage
written and executed, to describe the production of these plates as “out of
order” seriously confuses the issue, for at the time of production there was
no order to be out of. To assume that an order existed at this time is either
to
think in terms of completed manuscript production or to imagine Blake beginning
the Marriage with only a vague idea
of a disjointed, miscellaneous work of which these plates, numbered 21-24 only
later, were to become part. Besides relegating invention to paper, or the mind,
such assumptions raise numerous problems. Why start here? Did Blake think this
episode would make a good opening for the Marriage,
only to change his mind later? Not likely; the "Note" announcing the
forthcoming "Bible of Hell" at the end of plate 24 functions
rhetorically as a conclusion, exactly as it does in the Marriage as a whole. Announcing a forthcoming work at the end of
a
publication is reasonable if the work carrying the announcement is completed,
but it is very odd for Blake to have included such an announcement here if he
had only vague notion of wanting to compose a miscellaneous book. He would have
had to have had to know not only that this text was a section of something
larger but also that it was the last unit of that still unwritten text. [16]
The "Note" contributes to the Swedenborgian
satire, in that it calls to mind Swedenborg's announcement near the end of True Christian Religion: "Inasmuch
as the Lord cannot manifest himself in Person . . . and yet he foretold that
he
should come, and establish a New Church, which is the New Jerusalem, it
follows, that he will effect this by a Man, who not only can receive the
Doctrines of that Church in his Understanding, but also publish them in
Print." [17] Printing Swedenborg's text was the raison
d'etre of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1783 by Robert Hindmarsh and
other Swedenborgians to promote "the Heavenly Doctrines of the New Jerusalem,
by translating, printing, and publishing the Theological Writings of the
Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg." [18] The Society was itself modeled after the
Manchester Printing Society, which began in 1782 to print and publish
Swedenborg's works in English. The Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church emerged
in January 1788 from a splinter group of the Theosophical Society led by
Hindmarsh. Publishers, including Blake’s friend Joseph Johnson, typically
announced forthcoming books at the ends of pamphlets, but the Swedenborgian
context suggests that Blake had Hindmarsh in mind. [19]
Blake's "Note" ends in the middle of the plate,
but instead of starting another episode, Blake left the space blank, printed it
in that state, and then added a vignette, creating a second state of the plate
(see below). He is clearly thinking of plates 21-24 as an autonomous unit, but,
as will become clear, it was probably not one of several units he was then
planning to write but rather the unintended model for what he was to write. Blake's
"Note" ends a text that at four plates in length was nonetheless the
second-longest narrative in illuminated printing when it was written in 1790.
The longest was The Book of Thel,
which, as we will see, appears to have consisted only of plates 2-7, with just
five text plates, at that time. At four pages, then, the autonomous text
attacking Swedenborg would not have seemed unusually short for Blake to print
as an independent work. The earliest and only extant independent printing of
plates 21-24, known as Marriage copy
K, strongly supports this hypothesis.
II. Marriage copy K: Pamphlet, Proofs, or
Incomplete Marriage?
Plates
21-24 were printed in black ink on both sides of one conjunct half-sheet with
a
bottom deckled edge. [20] The sheet was folded to form a pamphlet with
the following configuration: 21/22-23/24. These four monochrome prints are not
proofs (a correction to the views we expressed in Early Illuminated Books, 115; and see Viscomi, Blake and the Idea
of the Book, 394 n. 10), despite their ink color and uncolored condition and
the presence of two first-state plates (21, 24). Plates 22 and 23 were printed
together as an inside forme and were carefully registered onto the paper and
aligned to one another by eye. They were printed first, with plates 24 and 21
printed as the outside forme and registered by eye to plates 23 and 22, so that
the lines of text on recto and verso of the leaves roughly align. There would
have been no reason for Blake to take such pains with his printing if he were
merely pulling working proofs—that is, checking to see if the design is
finished or stands sufficiently in relief, or if the printing pressure is
correct—but it is perfectly appropriate for producing illuminated pamphlets and
books.
More revealing still, the borders of all four plates were
carefully wiped of ink so they would not print, a practice Blake followed
almost without exception when printing illuminated books between 1789 and 1795. [21] In preparing intaglio plates for printing,
printers wiped clean the beveled edges to ensure an aesthetically pleasing
platemark (the plate’s embossment into the paper); wiping the borders of relief
plates is an adaptation of this practice—though its effect was the erasure of
the tell-tale signs of graphic reproduction—because relief plates were printed
with less pressure and did not leave pronounced platemarks. This erasure
transforms an otherwise overt imposition of metal onto paper into an image that
looks as if it were drawn by hand on the paper, executed spontaneously like
sketch and autograph. Printing relief plates to appear like manuscript pages
would have been unnecessary if Blake’s intent was merely to proof.
Only one other textual unit in the Marriage was printed with this kind of care and attention—and it
too was produced as a pamphlet. "A Song of Liberty," which consists
of plates 25-27, was independently printed at least twice. These printings are
referred to as Marriage copies L and
M; the latter is untraced but described in a 1918 Christie's catalogue (see
Bentley, Blake Books, 287); the
former is now in the Robert N. Essick Collection (illus. 4).
Copy L consists
of
three uncolored impressions that were printed in black ink, with wiped borders,
on a conjunct sheet of laid paper folded in half, forming a four-page pamphlet:
25/26-27. (They are not proofs, but are the only extant illuminated impressions
on laid paper [a correction to our statements in Early Illuminated Books, 115; and Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 394 n. 10]). Plates 25 and 26 were
carefully registered recto-verso so that their lines are aligned; facing plates
26 and 27 are equidistant from the paper's top edge and the center fold. Plate
25 is in its first state; plate 27 is in a second (and final) state. [22] Though printed separately at least twice,
"Song" may not have been issued as a pamphlet—or at least, despite
its potential for separate printing and issue, no such copies are extant. The
extant and untraced copies both appear to have passed through John Linnell's
family, which indicates that they remained with Blake until at least 1818, when
he met his young patron (see Bentley, Blake
Books, 301). Yet, while these two copies were apparently not issued, one
cannot infer from the absence of other copies that the “Song” was never issued;
by that logic, the unique copies of The
Book of Los and The Book of Ahania
demostrate that those works were never issued. We can say with reasonable
assurance that whatever his original intentions for the "Song," Blake
attached it to the Marriage. These
three unillustrated pages of twenty numbered statements and "Chorus"
read—and look—like a "coda." As we will see, "Song" was
probably written after the Marriage's
first twenty-four plates, appears to have been generated in part by Marriage's theme of a new age (plate 3),
and is the size of Marriage plates
because it was executed using materials left over from the production of the Marriage.
Textual and visual features of plates 21-24 also support the
hypothesis that the plates were intended as a pamphlet. The absence of a
catchword on plate 24 implies that Blake did not anticipate subsequent plates;
there is also no catchword on plate 20, suggesting that plates 21-24 were also
composed independently of the preceding textual unit, plates 16-20. The text
is
polemically coherent, with well-defined objectives: to undermine Swedenborg's
credibility and to champion Blake and his positions. The former objective
required Blake to refute the New Church's essential claims that it was
"distinct" from the old and that it was founded on the true or
"internal sense" of Scripture (resolutions 1, 12-15, 17, 29, 32; Minutes 126-29). The latter required
Blake to position himself as authentic visionary and offer his own readings of
the Word. The attack also belongs to a turning point in Swedenborg's English
reputation, when his "news from the spiritual world" was wearily
dismissed by his critics but eagerly awaited by his followers. [24] The awareness by both camps of Swedenborg's
claims that he spoke directly with angels provided the requisite context for
Blake's seemingly unprepared-for first sentence on plate 21: "I have
always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves. . . " (see Viscomi, “Lessons of
Swedenborg”). [25]
The unit is structurally and rhetorically as well as
polemically autonomous. Its three features—statement, "Memorable
Fancy," and "Note"—provide the well-defined beginning, middle,
and end of the rhetorically complete pamphlet. The unit begins with an entrance
whose objective is to catch the audience's attention and an exposition that
sets forth the facts, defines the terms, and presents the issues to be proved.
The entrance is beautifully and yet confrontationally realized by Blake's
“divine humanity” (illus. 5);
the exposition consists of distinct paragraphs
forcefully explaining why Blake thinks Swedenborg is neither original nor new.
The following section, in which an angel and devil debate the nature of God
functions as the confirmation, in that it sets forth through the two parties
the arguments for and against Swedenborg's idea of God, the central issue
dividing the two visionaries. The devil wins the debate, as is evinced by the
angel's conversion. The text ends with a "Note" that teasingly
promises more infernal readings if the world should "behave well,"
while confidently announcing Blake's future project, whether the world
"will or no." As first written and printed, with Nebuchadnezzar
missing, the "Note" was the entire conclusion; it restates Blake's
basic premise that "infernal" is better than “internal sense”, and
it
leaves the reader wanting—or fearing—more. With the addition of the vignette,
exposition and confirmation are framed by a visual and verbal entrance and
conclusion. [26]
Moreover, the three-part structure of plates 21-24 differs
from other units in the Marriage. In
the other units with these features, the "Note" (on plates 6 and 17)
was placed before the Memorable
Fancies, thereby preventing the unit full closure effected by a Note. And no other unit in the Marriage works as autonomously or, when
finished, returns the reader to its beginning. Plates 21-24 effect this kind
of
closure both thematically and materially. The concluding announcement on plate
24, that "I have also: The Bible of Hell," returns the reader to the
"I" and the resurrected figure on plate 21. When reading the four
plates on a folded, conjugate sheet—that is, as a pamphlet as in Marriage copy K—the reader would return
physically to plate 21 after reading plate 24; flipping to the beginning moves
the reader from defeated tyranny and oppression to the liberated New Man. The
same movement occurs if the pamphlet is opened when one reads plate 24, in
which case plate 21 would be on the right, facing 24 (see illus. 5, 3).
As we can see, the claim that plates 21-24 were the first of Marriage's twenty-seven plates written and executed is certainly plausible; and no technical facts now
known about illuminated printing contradict it. The division of the Marriage plates according to the
formation of the letter g into three
distinct sets significantly strenghtens it.
III. The Letter G and Three Sets of
Marriage Plates
David
Erdman was the first to notice that Blake moved the serif of his gs from the
right to the left. [27] In Blake's first illuminated books, All Religion are One and There is No Natural Religion (both
1788), Blake used a roman script with a right-serifed g; in "The Argument" (plate a3), he also employed the
sans-serifed, italic g that he used
in his manuscripts, including Island
in the Moon (c. 1784) and Tiriel (c.
1789). Blake used the roman right-serifed g
in all but two of the poems in Songs
of Innocence; using the sans-serifed g in
the title of "Night" and the text of "The Voice of the
Ancient Bard." [28] He used the sans-serifed g in all The Book of Thel plates except 1 and 8, which is to say, on plates
2-7, the core of the narrative. (The first and last plates of Thel have long been recognized as
additions to the core narrative [E 790], but I have argued that they were added
sooner than has been supposed; see Viscomi, Blake
and the Idea of the Book, chap. 25, and below). Thel plate 8 has both sans-serifed g and the new left-serifed g;
the sans-serifed g was occasionally
used with a serifed g—right and
left—in the Marriage as well (for
example, plates 21 and 26 [see illus. 5, 4]), but no plate in Thel and only plate 7 of the Marriage has both kinds of serifed g. The leftward g replaced the rightward g
during the production of the Marriage,
and the sans-serifed g dropped out
altogether in the next illuminated books executed, Visions of the Daughters of Albion and America, a Prophecy (both 1793). The right-serifed g reappeared for the major epics, Milton and Jerusalem, begun in 1804, long after all the early illuminated
books were executed.
Why the rightward g
reappeared is not known. The reasons for abandoning it in favor of a leftward g, however, and using the latter
consistently for years, seem easier to determine. Erdman does not propose a
reason, but it seems evident that the change ensured aesthetic consistency in the
script, for the serifs (when present) on other letters, like b, d,
h, l, k, p, and t, lean leftward. They do so because Blake began the letter with a
pen stroke moving to the letter's stem, which is to say, moving in the same
direction that the hand moves while writing (this is true whether writing
forward or backward). A rightward serif on the g, however, requires a backward/downward stroke if the g, like the other letters, was to be
written without lifting the pen; or it required an upward stroke moving in the
direction of the hand but added to the letter last, requiring a two-step
gesture. The leftward serif, then, allowed Blake to start his g at the serif and to write it, like the
other letters, in one continuous act (stroke/serif, top loop, stem, bottom
loop). Once adopted, the new g was
consistently used because it was easier and more efficient to make and, equally
important, its style and execution were continuously reinforced by the style
and execution of the other letters.
Erdman believes that Blake changed his g in early 1791, while working on the Marriage. Consequently,
because Thel plates 1 and 8 have this
new g, he believes that Thel was not finished until 1791 (E
790). Erdman is correct that work on
the two books overlapped (see below), but the overlap probably took place in
1790. As previously argued, the evidence for extending the period of the Marriage's production beyond 1790 is
weak. Erdman also proposes that the Marriage
plates can be divided into sets according to the style of their g; again, he is correct, but he
incorrectly identifies the sets and misinterprets their meaning.
Erdman discerns two sets of plates in the Marriage: plates 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13,
21, 22, 23, 24; and plates 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26,
27 (E 801). But in this scheme, the
plates with the earlier type of g are
not sequential, nor are they the first eleven plates of the book. Why, then,
do
they share the same g? According to
Erdman, "after Blake had a complete version of The Marriage (probably minus the 'Song') on copper, he began
thinking of improvements and amplifications . . . and made them by inserting
new plates, onto which old and new matter were inscribed (at a time when he had
changed his g)." [29] Erdman proposes, in other words, that Blake
completed writing and executing the Marriage
plates before or by early 1791, when he believes that Blake introduced his new g, and that Blake continued to make
changes for the next few years that required making—and thus rewriting—entire
plates. [30] The
plates sharing the early g are from the original “complete
version,” those that were not replaced.
What was on the plates that were replaced is impossible to determine,
because no impressions are extant.
Hence, Erdman can argue that Blake worked on the Marriage for three years—though during most of that time he may
have been merely fine-tuning the text—and at the same time make no attempt to
trace the text’s evolution. Plates with
leftward gs simply replaced plates
whose texts may have been either mostly the same as the replacement’s or
completely different.
Although this hypothesis does not address the issue of plate
chronology, it does subtly suggest that Marriage's
final form was affected by execution, by the remaking of plates—a suggestion
possibly meant to account not only for the change in lettering style but also
for the Marriage's disjointed
structure. Nevertheless, the hypothesis proposes a composing process so
impractical and costly—with Blake replacing over 50 percent of his earlier
work—that it is surely mistaken on economic grounds alone. Mostly, though, it misreads, the
bibliographic evidence because it fails to recognize the flexibility built into
illuminated printing. Blake could execute plates as soon as text became
available. In this light, text with the earlier lettering style reflects the
first parts of the Marriage written
and etched, and text with the latter style reflects portions written and etched
later. Lettering style, combined with narrative integrity, can be used to
identify sets of plates and the textual units within those sets, which is the
first step in tracing the evolution of the Marriage.
Inspected in this manner, the plates form three sets, instead of two, and can
be sequenced (sets A, B, and C).
Set A consists of plates 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, and
24. Plates 2, 3, and 11 are self-contained units, meaning that their texts do
not carry over to other plates. Plates 12 and 13 constitute "A Memorable
Fancy" as a self-contained unit. Plates 21-24 are an autonomous unit that
includes another Memorable Fancy. Plate 12 has a catchword and this indicates
that its text continues and ends on plate 13; plates 21, 22, and 23 have
catchwords, indicating that they are part of a larger narrative, which ends on
plate 24. Plates 13 and 24 do not have catchwords, nor do plates 2, 3, or 11;
they neither acknowledge nor anticipate subsequent plates—which is to say, the
plates that now follow these may or may not have been produced immediately
after them. The first set of plates, then, appears to consist of five
autonomous units (2; 3; 11; 12-13; 21-24).
Set B consists of plates 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, which form
three interconnected and continuous textual units, with catchwords on all but
the third and last plates. The three sections include "infernal"
readings of Paradise Lost and the Book of Job (plates 5-6), the narrator’s
trip to hell (plates 6-7), and the Proverbs of Hell (plates 7-10). These six
plates form a set that can be sequenced after set A plates: the text carries
over to plate 6 and from plate 7; and plate 7 (illus. 6)
has in its first line
the rightward g used on plates 5 and
6—which, however, is immediately followed by the leftward g used on plates 8-10. Plate 7, integral to this group of plates,
is thus a transitional plate, making the entire set transitional as well. [31]
Set C consists of plates 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, which, like
plates 21-24, constitute one autonomous unit with "A Memorable Fancy"
written and situated as an integral part of the text. Catchwords are on all but
plate 20. These plates have the leftward g
exclusively and form a narrative unit, including Blake's and the angel's trips
to leviathan's abyss and the cannibalizing monkey house.
Sets A, B, and C are not difficult to identify, and the sets
so constituted indicate that plates 21-24 were among the first Marriage plates written and executed.
But the constitution of the three sets also raises new questions: where do
plates 1, 4, 14, 15, 25, 26, and 27?
Plate 1 is the title plate and has no lowercase g; plates 4, 14, and 15 have the leftward g and are autonomous textual units, although each has some direct
tie to hell and/or the devil (see below). And plates 25-27 also have the
leftward g and form the autonomous
textual unit known as "A Song of Liberty." Were these plates produced
along with the set B or set C plates? After plate 10 but before plate 16? Or
after plate 20? Or were plates 1, 4, 14, and/or 15 produced after plates 25-27?
We can now begin to determine where these plates belong and, more importantly, to
recover the production chronology of all the plates. This may seem like a tall
order indeed, but these objectives are realizable if we examine fully the
bibliographical and technical evidence.
The style
of script provides a material basis for classifying Marriage plates and establishing the roughest kind of production
sequence. The copper on which the script lies provides even more information.
Most illuminated plates were etched on both sides. That
Blake used both sides of his plates can be inferred from the presence of
platemaker's marks, which were stamped into the verso of the sheets, visible in
impressions from Experience, Urizen, Europe, and elsewhere. The versos of the Innocence plates, for example, were used for Experience; the versos of the Marriage
plates were used for Urizen; the
versos of America were used for Europe. The plates that are recto/verso
can be identified by shared measurements (see Bentley, Blake Books, 145, 167, 382, on the likely pairing of plates). In
intaglio graphics, etching the versos of plates still in use was extremely
unusual, because designing, etching, or printing the verso places the recto on
the workbench, brazier, or press bed, where it can be scratched. Scratches on
intaglio plates, like all incised lines, hold ink and thus print as blemishes.
When the design is in relief, however, lines slightly incised across it usually
fill with ink and do not show; if they do show, it is as fine white lines that can
be filled with pen and ink or covered over with watercolors. For aesthetic
reasons, then, etching both sides of an intaglio plate is highly unorthodox,
but these considerations do not apply to relief etchings, and thus Blake could
take full economic advantage of this practice.
Blake also saved money on materials by etching over old
designs—that is, over discarded etchings or engravings—which he presumably
purchased from platemakers at a reduced price. Jerusalem plate 47 (illus. 7)
, for example, was drawn and written
over an etching; it is important to note that Blake did not erase the intaglio
line system but simply drew over it, using it as a patterned ground, knowing
that the white lines of the previous design would not interfere with the bold
relief outline and that alterations could be made if necessary when coloring
the impression. And it is equally important to note that he did erase the
incised lines in the area he used for text, a decision probably more practical
than aesthetic, since the text was written with a pen, which requires a
smoother ground than the brush used for the illustration. Removing the
underlying line system makes it easier to write with a pen and easier for the
small letters to be read. Blake did not try to erase the entire design, but
only those areas required by his new page design. The erasure was presumably
done by burnishing the incised lines and then possibly hammering up that area
from the back (a technique called repousage)—assuming
its verso was not to be used. [32]
Perhaps Blake's most astute economic decision—and presumably
one open to other printmakers as well—was to cut his small plates from larger
sheets of copper himself. The Innocence
plates, for example, are quarters of larger sheets (see Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, chap.
5). Blake cut plates out of sheets using relatively simple methods, such as
deeply scoring the hand-hammered sheet of copper with a needle and burin and
then snapping it between two plates or boards; or cutting the sheet in half
with a hammer and chisel on an anvil. [33]
The Marriage
plates are quarters of sheets the size of The
Approach of Doom (approximately 30 by 21 cm). Doom (illus. 8),
in
fact, was quartered, and these were used for Marriage plates 12, 13, 20, and 27. We know this because on the
versos of these plates are The Book of
Urizen plates 27, 5, 14, and 16. The white lines from Doom can still be seen in Urizen
plates 27 (illus. 9) and 14, revealing that the plates are the top- and
bottom-left quarters of Doom
respectively.
When flipped upside down, plate 16 fits neatly into the top-right
quarter, and very faint traces of the earlier design are visible in some
impressions. The only Urizen plate
that fits the bottom right quarter is plate 5, a surprise at first, because
this means that its text was written over relief lines and shallows (the white
areas of the figures' robes). But Doom
was probably etched very shallowly, for nothing more is required of plates
whose relief lines are dense or closely arranged, and, as noted with Jerusalem plate 47, Blake could plane
textured ground to accept text. Moreover, the impression of plate 5 in Urizen copy D shows slight traces of the
earlier design. In the other impressions, these traces are obscured by color
printing and/or washes added to the print. Also, when reconstructed, the
bottom-right corner matches that of Doom;
corners of sheets were usually rounded (from slightly, as here, to markedly,
as
in most of the Job plates) by the
commercial platemaker.
The quartering of Doom
provides crucial information about how Blake cut his sheets into plates and
about the kind of variants we can expect when trying to reconstruct those
sheets. Doom is recorded as being 29.7 by 21 cm (Bentley, Blake Books, 167 n. 1). These
measurements are close but not exact and actually give the wrong idea of the
plate’s shape. They imply that the sides are the same length and the top and
bottom are the same width, and they hid the slight bowing out across the
plate’s middle. But the plate was not a
perfect rectangle, as the four measurements for Doom reveal: 21.25 cm (top); 21.02 cm (bottom); 29.80 cm (right);
29.95 cm (left). The sheet was first cut in half vertically, and then its two
vertical halves were cut in half (see below, and the appendix, diagram
1). All
four quarters are different sizes and, like the parent sheet, imperfect
rectangles, from which we can infer that the three cut-lines were estimated by
eye rather than measured with a ruler. These variations from perfect rectangles
allow us to reconstruct the parent sheet and determine which quarter was used
for each Marriage plate.
From reconstructing Doom,
we learn that correctly reconfigured quarters form the same shape as the parent
sheet, with a variation of only a few millimeters. The variation in size is minimal,
to be sure, especially given the crude method of cutting sheets into plates and
the loss of metal due to cutting. Variation also exists among impressions
pulled from the same plate. Indeed, plate sizes are inferred from the plate's
slight embossment into paper—that is, from impressions—and impressions from the
same plate may vary slightly in size because different printing papers absorb
more or less dampness and shrink differently. [34] By measuring the plates of seven copies of
the Marriage and six copies of Urizen, I discovered that plate
measurements could vary from impression to impression as much as 3 mm, but the
shape of the plate (and hence the fit of the quarters) almost always remained
the same because the paper shrank evenly. For example, if the top of the plate
was wider than the bottom, that relation remained, despite variation in the
between different impressions.
We learn from the quartering of Doom that sheets could be cut either vertically to produce two long
halves that were then cut in half, or horizontally into two wide halves that
were then cut in half. The two plates cut from one vertical half will share the same width (bottom and top of the two resulting plates) but rarely the
same length; together, though, they will be the same length (or within 1 mm of
it, depending on the variance of the impressions measured for the
reconstruction) as the combined length of their paired vertical half. Likewise,
the two plates cut from a horizontal
half will share the same length
(right and left margins of the resulting plates) but rarely the same width;
together, though, they will share the same width (or within less than 1 mm) as
the combined width of the sheet's other horizontal half. Because of these
proportional relations, the quarter plates cannot be arranged into sheets
arbitrarily; a plate must share its width or length with another plate, and
then those two plates together must share their combined width or length with
another pair of plates. The reliability, then, that the four plates forming a
sheet are the plates originally cut from that sheet is quite high.
We also learn that sheets of copper Blake started out with
were often irregular, and combined with his method of cutting plates from
sheets and estimating the cut-lines by eye, this irregularity explains why
illuminated plates are slightly uneven—not perfectly rectangular, and never
uniform within a book. Consequently, four measurements must be made to describe
accurately the shape of an illuminated plate. [36] By closely measuring all four sides of the Marriage plates, and noting the shape
and any distinguishing marks in the platemarks—a convex or concave edge, or a
slight nick or swelling inward or outward, or corners that are round, pointed,
dull, or cut—I began to piece together the quarters and reconstruct the
original sheets, much as one would a jigsaw puzzle. [37] Most of Urizen's
plates are on the versos of the Marriage
plates, and knowing the measurements and distinguishing marks of the former
helped me to verify the latter's plate configurations. [38]
On the next page is a table of reconfigured sheets is based
on minute examination of Marriage
copies A, C, D, E, F, G, and I, and Urizen
copies A, B, C, D, F, and G. In
addition to measuring all four sides of the plates, I also traced in most cases
the right and left margins and used the tracings to find and verify the plate's
pair in the half-sheet and each plate's position in the sheet. (For the
measurements of the Marriage plates,
see the appendix.) The plates are repositioned as quarters: an upside down A next to a plate indicates that plate
fits upside down; an arrow between the vertical or horizontal halves indicates
that sheet was first cut vertically or horizontally, respectively. The second
column shows the probable Urizen
plates that are on the versos of the Marriage
plates reconstructed into sheets. The Marriage
sheets are identified as I-VII and are sequenced according to the A (rightward g), B (rightward g and leftward g), and C
(leftward g) sets discussed earlier.
Small case x refers to a blank
quarter; uppercase X refers to a
quarter that had been already cut and used; lowercase o refers to a quarter whose identity is indeterminate.
From this evidence, we can conclude that Blake used seven
sheets of copper to produce the Marriage.
Had all of them been cut into plates at the same time—as his sheets of paper
were when he printed his illuminated books in small editions—then the resulting
twenty-eight plates, each one a quarter of a sheet,
would
almost certainly have been stored as a group. The plates forming multi-plate units,
such as plates 21-24, or 5-10, or 16-20, would have been chosen from that large
group and would not consistently come from the same or sequential sheets of
copper. But because the plates forming multiplate and contiguous units do
indeed form sheets, the sheets were most likely cut in preparation for those
units—that is, cut as needed rather than cut in advance for a long, let alone
twenty-seven-page, manuscript. That plates 21-24 form one sheet substantially
verifies the hypothesis that these plates were written and executed as an
autonomous unit (see appendix, diagram 2); to support the hypothesis that this
autonomous unit preceded the others as an independent, anti-Swedenborgian
pamphlet, it is necessary to prove that its sheet was the first one cut, which
is the objective of the following section.
In reconstructing the seven sheets, I found just one
anomaly: plate 11 is among the set B plates. I expected to find it cut from
sheet III, which yielded plates 1, 2, and 3—the other set A plates. Instead,
plate 11 was cut from sheet IV, along with plates 6, 7, and 8. It does not
belong to their unit, which contains the Proverbs and their introductory
material, but like plate 6, plate 11 has the right-serifed g, whereas plates 7 and 8 have the left-serifed g. From its place in the sheet sequence,
plate 11 appears to have been executed between plates 6 and 7, after the story
of usurpation and Milton that begins on plate 5 and continues to the middle of
plate 6; but before the Memorable Fancy that starts in the middle of plate 6
and continues with four lines on plate 7—that is, the transitional plate with
both rightward and leftward gs. The
production sequence appears to have been 5-6, 11, 6-10. Are we seeing traces
of a moment of inspiration? Did Blake momentarily stop committing the Proverbs
and
its introductory material to copper to write and execute plate 11? Or had he
brought that text to the printshop along with the texts for plates 1, 2, 3, and
5-10? These nine plates seem to have been executed in the same session (see
below). [39]
V. Sequencing Seven Sheets of Copper
Reconfiguring
the Marriage plates into their seven
original sheets and sequencing them according to their sets A, B, and C
provides a rough idea of the work’s evolution.
Clearly, if we are to understand the genesis of the Marriage in greater detail, we need to sequence the individual set
A plates and determine which of these plates or units was produced first. The
reconfigured sheets suggest four possibilities for the first position: 1)
plates 21-24; 2) plates 12-13; 3) plates 2 and 3; and 4) all or some
combination of these set A plates, produced together. Of these possibilities,
the first is by far the most likely. It is strongly supported by the way in
which the quarters from The Approach of
Doom were and were not used at the beginning of production, and by a
process of elimination that takes bibliographical as well as linguistic codes
into account.
The Approach of Doom (c. 1788), possibly Blake's first
experiment in relief etching (Viscomi, Blake
and the Idea of the Book, chap. 20), predates the Marriage. It was thus on a sheet of copper already on hand when
Blake wrote the set A plates, it is very unlikely to have been the first sheet
cut, because only two set A plates—the textual unit consisting of plates
12-13—were cut from it. This means that two quarters were left untouched at
this time, raising a troubling questions: If Blake cut Doom for the set A plates, why did he not use all four quarters
immediately? If it were cut first, why weren't two of the plates from the unit
21-24, or plates 2 and 3, on those remaining two quarters? These two unused
quarters indicate that Doom was most
likely cut after the sheet yielding plates 21-24; they also indicate that Doom was most likely cut before the
sheet yielding plates 1-3, and 5.
That plate 5 was executed on the fourth quarter of the sheet
that yielded plates 1-3 suggests that these plates were executed near in time;
that the text of plate 5 continues on a plate cut from a new sheet suggests
that Blake knew the text did not end with that one plate but required more.
That this new sheet (IV) yielded plates 6, 7, 8, and 11—plates with both
rightward and leftward gs—and not any
of the plates in the textual units of plates 12-13 and 21-24, indicates that
sheet IV was transitional and that its four plates—and plates 1, 2, 3, and 5
from sheet III and plates 9 and 10 from sheet V—are related and were all
executed after the six plates from sheets I and II.
To assume that Blake began the Marriage with the plates of sheet III (1, 2, 3, and 5) makes no
sense technically, because it also requires assuming that after quartering
sheet III and executing plates 1-3, Blake skipped plate 5 and proceeded to
quarter sheets I and II, whose plates (21-24, 12-13) also have the rightward g of plates 2-3. A plate sequence of
1-3, 21-24, 12-13, 5-10 means a sheet sequence of III, I, II, III, IV, V, which
raises this question: why was the fourth quarter of sheet III used for plate 5
and not for one of the “subsequent” plates, that is, 21-24, or 12-13? Even if we assume that plates 5-6 were not
part of the larger unit as identified here, we are faced with the same
question. For example, if plates 5-6 followed plates 12-13, then why were they
not written on the two remaining quarters from sheet II (Doom)? Why would Blake go
back to sheet III for plate 5 and acquire sheet IV for plate 6? If plates 5-6 followed plates 1-3 for a
plate sequence of 1-3, 5-6, 21-24, 12-13, 7-10 and a sheet sequence of III, IV,
I, II, IV, V, then why weren't the three quarters from sheet IV used for the
subsequent plates?
Blake is highly unlikely to have executed plates 11, 12, and 13 together as one unit, even though plate 11—about "ancient Poets" and their distorted derivative, "Priesthood,"—now introduces the visionary episode about prophets, an episode that exemplifies ideas raised on plate 11. It is unlikely because, as mentioned, plate 11—along with plates 6, 7, and 8, which continue the text begun on plate 5—came from sheet IV; and plates 12 and 13 came from sheet II. Had they been written and executed together, one would expect that plate 11 would have appeared on one of the quarters from sheet II (Doom), or at least on a quarter from a contiguous sheet (e.g., III)—like all other related plates in the Marriage. [40]
There is a logic to using and not using materials, as is
evinced by the pattern of plates that form units also forming sheets. Doom's
unused quarters imply a hiatus in production between sheets II (Doom) and III. The hiatus suggests that
Blake executed the plates of sheets I and II before those of sheet III; and
that when he returned to the studio to execute the next group of plates for
what was now evolving into a book, he brought with him three sheets (III, IV,
and V) and the texts and ideas for plates 1-3 and 5-10—and possibly for plate
11, although this may have been written and produced while Blake was executing
plate 6; and he may have brought plates 14 and 15 as well. Blake either forgot
he had the two Doom quarters or,
because he knew he needed many more plates than two, began using the plates
quartered from the sheets specifically acquired for his new texts. [41] Thus,
the process of elimination yields the same chronology of plate production for
the
set A and B plates that is suggested by the reconfigured sheets of
copper: 21-24, 12-13; 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10, followed by plates 14 and 15.
The linguistic code does not falsify this sequence; in fact,
it independently suggests the same. It suggests that plate 3, with its
perfunctory mention of Swedenborg, was written after plates 21-24; and
moreover, that Blake almost certainly did not start with plates 12 and 13.
These plates form "A Memorable Fancy," which retells the narrator's
dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel. But what is "A Memorable Fancy" and
why is the narrator telling us about this visionary encounter? Three of the
five Memorable Fancies in the Marriage
are on set B and set C plates, which means that they were not yet executed. And
yet the parodic intentions of plates 12-13 seems to require some preparation
or context, nicely provided by plates 21-24, where Swedenborg is attacked by
name;
and his Memorable Relations parodied as "A Memorable Fancy." [42]
The episode on plates 12-13, in which Isaiah states that his
"senses discover'd the infinite in every thing," may have been
inspired by the contrary vision exemplified by Nebuchadnezzar, whose
animal-like posture resembles that of the figure on plate b11 of There is No Natural Religion (see also
the reproduction Nebuchadnezzar, color
plate XVI). Together, the prophets and Nebuchadnezzar—the latter symbolizing
both Swedenborg and the mad King George III—dramatize the theme of plate b11:
"He who sees the infinite in all things sees God He who sees the Ratio
only sees himself only" (E 3). Moreover, Isaiah and Ezekiel, two prophets
whom Swedenborg quotes extensively, are exactly the right witnesses to prove
Blake's claims that Swedenborg's readings of scripture are old and weak and
that his ideas of Christ and the Ten Commandments are ordinary and orthodox
(plates 21-23). Swedenborg says that he, like the prophets, sees angels. He
also claims that
I have been informed how the Lord spoke with the prophets
through whom the Word was given. He did not speak with them as with the
ancients, by an influx into their interiors, but through spirits who were sent
to them, whom He filled with His look, and thus inspired with words which they
dictated to the prophets; so that it was not influx but dictation. And because
the words came forth immediately from the Lord, they are each filled with the
Divine, and contain within an internal sense, which is such that angels of
heaven perceive them in a heavenly and spiritual sense, when men perceive them
in a natural sense.
He
clarifies this in Apocalypse Revealed,
where he states that the prophets distinguished between vision and dictation,
being in the spiritual state for the former and in the body for the latter:
"when they spoke the Word, they were then not in the spirit, but in the
body, and heard from Jehovah Himself, that is, the Lord, the words which they
wrote." [44] Blake's
prophets, however, identify themselves as "poets," affirm an internal
voice, refute external instruction, and make no distinction between vision and
writing, or between spirit and sensual body. In the Marriage, Isaiah says:
I saw no God. nor heard any. in a finite organical
perception: but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was
then perswaded. & remain confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is
the voice of God. I cared not for consequences but wrote. (Plate 12)
Isaiah ironically echoes Swedenborg's
description of Adam and the ancients:
So with the man of the Most Ancient church; whatever he saw
with his eyes was heavenly to him; and thus all things and everything with him
were as if living. From this it may be seen what his Divine worship was, that
it was internal and not at all external. [45]
Blake
will advocate a return to this visionary state on plates 3 and 11, with the
return of Adam to Paradise and the mythopoeic perception of the "ancient
Poets."
Writing as "poets" without fear of consequences
contrasts starkly with the "systematic reasoning" of angels (plate
21); the first alternative also alludes to the poet Blake writing this
prophetic prose and to his every other tract, and to Christ, whom the Devil
defines as acting "from impulse; not from rules" (plates 23-24):
behavior characteristic of the artist. The devil’s and angel’s debate over
whether God is internal or external echoes a debate recurring in Swedenborg’s
writings about whether salvation depends on “faith [in Christ] alone, without
the works of the law—which faith is mean by the dragon”—or in Christ as well as
the law (Apocalypse Revealed, n.
539). The debate is reconfigured on plates 12-13, where the connection of art
and Christ is made explicit when the prophets state that "in ages of
imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains." Christ states,
"If ye have faith . . . ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to
yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto
you" (Matthew 17: 20). By appropriating poets, prophets, and Christ for
the devil's party, Blake has further defined the dialectic that unfolds on
plates 21-24 between angels and devils on plates 21-24 in terms of religion and
art. More to the point, he has strengthened the devil's refutation of the
angel's claim that Christ sanctioned the Ten Commandments (plate 23) and
strengthened his own claim that the New Church is anything but "new"
and "distinct" (plate 21-22). Indeed, Blake again implies that
Swedenborg misreads the Word and its prophets and thereby subjects people to
false ideas, exactly like the Church he criticizes. Ezekiel states: "from
[his and Isaiah's] opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at
last be subject to the jews . . . [which] is come to pass, for all nations
believe the jews code and worship the jews god, and what greater subjection can
be[?]" (plate 13). The "code" refers to the "law of ten
commandments" advocated by the angel and New Church but "broken"
by Christ (plates 23-24). Swedenborg's worship of this code and God, then,
reveals that he oppresses Christ. What Swedenborg worships confirms Blake's
accusation that despite his showing "the folly of churches &
expos[ing] hypocrites," he still "has written all the old
falshoods" (plates 21-22). By tying Swedenborg to the very
"code" the impulsive Christ rejects, Blake again refutes both of
Swedenborg's claims—that the New Church is distinct from the old and that he
recognizes the true Christ—and again affirms the message of plates 21-24, that
the problem lies not in the Word but how it is read. Is it read diabolically or
systematically, infernally or internally?
Swedenborg's God, if perceived "infernally," is
revealed to be the dominating external God of the "jewish code" and
as such "merely derivative," having, like "all Gods,"
"originate[d] in" "the Poetic Genius" (plates 12-13; see
also All Religions are One plate 9).
While Blake does not mention "poetic genius" and "origin"
on plates 21-24, he implies both. The "poetic genius" is implied
through the hierarchy of writings, with the "sublime" of
"Shakespeare" and "Dante" representing the truly inspired
works of "masters," and Swedenborg's "recapitulations" of
"superficial opinions" representing memory and the perpetuation by
followers of "all the old falshoods." The ideas of origin and originality are implied in Blake's claim
that Swedenborg is a copyist and is so because he fails to consult devils who,
as the origin of Blake's "The Bible of Hell," represent the
"poetic genius." The idea that the "poetic genius" is the
origin or "first principle" of perception and creativity is proposed
on plates 12-13, while creativity's symbolic connection with hell will be made
explicit later, on plate 6, by the narrator's trip to hell, where
"fires" are "the enjoyments of Genius."
Blake started the text of plates 12 and 13 on new plates, as
opposed to starting it on a plate as
a continuation of the preceding and contextualizing text or narrative; the
Memorable Fancies on plates 22, 6, and 17 begin midplate. This is consistent
with the hypothesis that plates 12-13 were written and executed independently
of the plates and narratives that now precede them, and were composed in light
of a previously executed text that now follows them. As an autonomous textual
unit, plates 12-13 seem to develop or extend contraries and themes propounded
in plates 21-24, including originality and imitation, impulse and law,
inspiration and memory, liberation and subjection, reading and misreading. The
thematic relation between plates 21-24 and plates 12-13 places the former unit
first, verifying the bibliographic code and significantly strengthening the
hypothesis that plates 21-24 were not only executed first but also originally
intended as an anti-Swedenborgian pamphlet. It seems reasonable to speculate
that after Blake wrote and executed plates 21-24, where the Memorable Fancy is
thoroughly contextualized and of a piece with the text as an independent unit, he
began to imagine more visionary episodes in this satiric vein.
It also seems reasonable to suppose that "The Bible of
Hell," which is announced before
the Marriage was composed, might be
referring to the Marriage itself, as
it was anticipated at the time of Blake's anti-Swedenborgian text. Or, as I
argue in “Lessons of Swedenborg,” it may refer either to the Proverbs of Hell,
intended as an ironic inversion of Proverbs—one of the books of the Bible that
Swedenborg excluded from his list of thirty-three books of Holy Writ for
"not having the Internal Sense" (proposition 12, Circular Letter, 122)—or to a series of illuminated works written
from the infernal perspective that was to include Blake’s Proverbs as the first
book or volume. [46]
If so, then their inclusion into the Marriage reflects
Blake changing his mind, from publishing a separate volume or pamphlet of
a projected series of illuminated works to including it as a section of his
new book. From available bibliographical and thematic evidence, Marriage appears
to have originated in what were originally two separate projects, an anti-Swedenborgian
text, presumably meant as an independent work, and "The
Bible of Hell," cobbled together with introductory material and a few more
Memorable Fancies.
If so, that sheet I was the same size as Doom begins to make practical sense. The
size, approximately 30 x 21 cm, was probably common one, selected because Blake
wanted the plate size it yields when quartered. He probably did not start by
cutting Doom, because he was
unwilling at the time to destroy that design. On the other hand, without a
manuscript divided into pages, Blake did not know how many plates his
anti-Swedenborgian text would require, given such variables as letter size,
line spacing, and illustrations. He may have purchased a sheet the size of Doom as insurance, in case the text went
long and required a fifth or sixth plate. He could then quarter Doom to finish it rather than purchase a
second new sheet. Or he may have cut both sheets at the same time, using the
plates from the new sheet first and expecting to use the plates from the old
sheet for his next project, "The Bible of Hell" announced at the end
of plate 24. I suggest that the temptation to broaden his satirical attack
beyond Swedenborg through parodying his Memorable Relations inspired Blake to
write the dinner-with-prophets episode. At this point in the action, we see a
break in production, apparently followed by the writing of new texts (that is,
plates 1-3, 5-11) and the eventual purchase of three more sheets.
VI. Marriage Plates
Lost and Found, and "The
voice of the Devil"
As we
have seen, the Marriage plates can be
roughly grouped by lettering style to reveal the basic chronology of plate
production, although where in this scheme plates 1, 4, 14, 15, 25, 26, and 27
belong is less easily determined. By reconstructing the sheets from which the Marriage plates were cut, we have
exposed a deeper layer of the Marriage's
evolution and have located where all the plates fit into the chronology. All,
that is, but plate 4, "The voice of the Devil."
The first stage, in which plates 21-24 were produced, was
soon followed by a second stage in which plates 12-13 were written and
executed. The third stage produced plates 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10, including plate
1, the title page. It was cut from sheet III, which also yielded plates 2, 3,
and 5, plates with the early form of g.
Thus, Blake etched the title page of his new work after executing at least six
of its plates. This is particularly telling, given that a title page for the
non-existent "Bible of Hell" may have been designed (see note 46) and
that the work had been announced on plate 24 of the Marriage. The position of the Marriage
title page in the chronology of production is consistent with the theory that
the work it names was not yet conceived at the time plates 21-24 were produced.
Indeed, the conception of a satire of miscellaneous episodes appears to have
followed the completion of the anti-Swedenborgian text and to lie in Blake's
decision to combine it with his anticipated Proverbs (possibly "The Bible
of Hell" or one of its volumes). Plates 12-13, the second Memorable Fancy
written, appear to have been the first step in realizing this conception. The
second step consisted of writing introductory texts (plates 2, 3) to the newly
conceived work and texts to introduce and contextualize the Proverbs (plates
5-6). Plate 11 was executed in the same lettering style as these plates but
appears to have been composed and executed after the text on plates 5-6 and
before the Memorable Fancy and the Proverbs it introduces—which is to say,
during this third stage of plate production.
We have found plates 14 and 15 in the chronology of plate
production; both have the leftward g
and are independent though thematically related units, filled with “information
from hell,” printmaking allusions, and cave imagery. Together they function as
a two-plate unit of introduction and Memorable Fancy, a structure that had by
this point in the composing process established itself. They were cut from the
sheet that yielded plates 9 and 10, the last two plates of the Proverbs of
Hell. They were executed after plates 1-3, 5-11, but they may belong to the
same stage of production, which would suggest that their texts were written along
with or even during the execution of these plates. They may also, however, have
been written and executed afterward, in response to the previously executed
texts and images, as suggested by narrator's trip to hell, his picturing
himself writing the devil's proverbs, the animated island of the ancient poets,
and the cave in which the island is placed (plates 6, 10, and 11). [47] If this is the case, plates 14 and 15 would
constitute a fourth stage in the evolution of the Marriage.
Plates 16-20 constitute the next textual unit executed. The
text for this unit, he probably anticipated, required at least one sheet's
worth of plates. Blake seems unlikely to have acquired sheet VI with sheets
III, IV, and V, the three used previously, because at approximately 31 x 20.5
cm it was noticeably larger than these others, yielding the four tallest plates
in the Marriage. It probably was
purchased specially for this section, suggesting that the text was written
after those executed on sheets III-V. The text went nineteen lines long,
requiring a fifth plate (plate 20). Instead of buying a new sheet of copper,
Blake returned to the third quarter of Doom
and used it for plate 20, which is much smaller than plates 16-19—a fact (like
poor registration of plate to paper) that did not seem to bother Blake (see
note 35). This autonomous unit constitutes either the fourth or fifth stage of
production. Blake appears to end it with a wink and a nod toward Swedenborg.
Whereas the image of Nebuchadnezzar and the axiom "One Law for the Lion
& Ox is Oppression" end plates 21-24, expressing Blake's anger at
church and state, plates 16-20 end less aggressively: "Opposition is True
Friendship." Through the course of his composition—and, one could argue,
by venting his wrath—Blake appears to move from the conviction that Swedenborg
symbolizes religious and political oppression to something more like gratitude
for his adversary’s role in generating the Marriage,
and thus in revealing or clarifying Blake's views in his own mind. Blake sees
what he has accomplished, and sees the creative import of passionate response.
In the Marriage he not only expresses
opposition but at the same time engages in the intellectual combat—or
"Mental Fight" (Milton 2:
13)—that he believed essential.
On that note, Blake appears to have ended his composition.
The Marriage now consisted of
twenty-three plates, which appear to have been executed in the following order:
21-24, 12-13, 1-3, 5-6, 11, 6-10, 14, 15, 16-20.
The fourth quarter of Doom
was used for the next, and last, textual unit, "A Song of Liberty"
(plates 25-27). Because only one of its
plates came from Doom,
"Song" almost certainly followed plates 16-20; and because only one
plate remained from Doom at this
point, the subsequent two plates (25 and 26) had to come from a different
sheet. A sheet (or half-sheet) was chosen that produced plates similar in size
to the last quarter of Doom. The size
of the "Song" plates, then, may have been a matter of economic
convenience and efficiency—Blake using metal on hand—or deliberately chosen so
"Song" would match the Marriage
in size as a supplementary text. As mentioned, "Song" appears to have
been originally designed as an independent pamphlet, as is evinced by its two
early printings (Marriage copies L
and M). If so, then it does not really represent a fifth or sixth stage in the
production of Marriage—unless Blake
originally intended "Song" to have a dual life, as independent text
and as unit concluding the Marriage.
It seem equally likely, though, that Blake decided to use "Song" as
a
"coda" soon after the production of both works. [48] The diversity of the Marriage could accommodate one, or many, more sections, even one
with slightly larger script, new mythic characters, and numbered poetic prose,
perhaps as an example of the mythopoetic prose of the "ancient
Poets." Though more oracular in tone and overtly political, the “Song”
fits the Marriage thematically. It
too attacks priestcraft, kingship, the "stony law," and "ten
commands," and it connects their defeat with the return to Paradise:
"Empire is no more! and now the lion and wolf shall cease" (plate
27).
We have now located all of the plates in the chronology of
plate production, including those missing from sets A, B, and C, except plate
4. This plate was not cut from any of the seven sheets yielding Marriage plates. It is the smallest Marriage plate (13.6 by 10.1 cm), almost
2 cm shorter on average than all the others. The exclusively leftward g (a correction to Early Illuminated Books, 114) suggests set B or set C. The plate's
four sharp corners reveal that it is not a quarter sheet, which would have one
dull or slightly round corner, and suggest that it was cut from the center of a
sheet. But what sheet is this, and when was the plate composed? Plate 4 appears
to have been executed around the time of, if not actually with, Thel plates 1 and 8—Thel's Motto and the
concluding plate. Answering our question requires taking a brief detour through
the final stages of Thel's
production.
Like Marriage
plate 4, Thel plates 1 and 8 appear
to be orphans, unconnected to the sheets that supplied plates for the larger
works. By applying the methods used to reconstruct the Marriage sheets, we can configure Thel plates 2-7 back into their original sheet. Together, they form
a square sheet approximately 30.7 by 32.5, in the following configuration:
These six
plates form the core of Thel, and
they employ the sans-serifed g of
Blake's italic script exclusively. But a sheet that would be square rather than
rectangular, and the absence of round corners on plates 6 and 7 despite their
position in the sheet, raise red flags. A closer examination reveals that the
six plates were probably cut from two-thirds of a 30.7 by 46.65 cm rectangle,
with the missing third, 30.7 by 14.15 cm, yielding Thel plate 8—which is 14.15 cm long—and Thel plate 1 and Marriage
plate 4, whose lengths, added to the width of plate 8, total 30.7 cm. Moreover,
plate 1 has a round top-right corner and plate 8 has a round bottom-left
corner, which becomes the sheet's top- and bottom-right corners; and the bottom
of plate 4 appears to fit neatly on the right side of Thel plate 8 (see diagram 3 in the appendix).
Plate 1 has the leftward g
exclusively, and plate 8 has it and the sans-serifed g, as well as the only interlinear decorations in Thel (line 15)—a feature present
throughout the Marriage. These two Thel plates were certainly written after
the core text, but how long after is unknown. Plates 2-7 are divided into three
parts, with plates 3 and 6 having catchwords and plate 5 having a catch-number,
indicating that the text continued on the next plate. Like plate 5, plate 7
ends with the catch-number IV, which merely indicates that there will be a Part
IV; there is no catchword to indicate that it had been written. Apparently,
Blake planned to conclude his tale with Thel entering the "house" of
the "matron Clay," which he mentions on plate 7 (E 6); but if Thel copy a, a proof copy printed in
black ink and missing plates 1 and 8, is evidence of production, then Blake had
not yet written—or at least had not yet executed—the ending when he executed
and proofed the core plates. While we can only guess how much time transpired
between Thel plates 7 and 8, we can
be reasonably sure that Thel plate 8
was executed after the first and second stages and possibly after or during the
third stage of the Marriage's
evolution.
Among the Marriage
plates Thel plate 8 followed are
plates 6 and 7, which record the narrator's infernal descent and the devil's
message. In Thel plate 8, Thel too
descends into the netherworld and sits besides her grave listening to the voice
therein. She goes below the surface, as it were, a metaphor possibly suggested
not only by Blake's infernal visit but also by the tour he and the angel took
"down the winding cavern" to "the infinite Abyss" inhabited
by the Leviathan (plates 17-18). The idea that we perceive superficially—see
the surface and not what lies below it—is visually expressed by the Marriage title page itself, where
two-thirds of the design, including the words "Heaven" and
"Hell," occur just below the surface, a space defined and hidden by a
thin line, which, if "melted" away, would reveal "the infinite
which was hid" (plate 14). Any one or all of these Marriage plates may have influenced Blake's depiction of Thel's
descent, but it is the way her perception affects experience that seems
especially close to the Marriage.
Like angels who see the "fires of hell" as "torment and insanity" instead of the "enjoyment of Genius" (plate 6), or see the "leviathan" instead of "a harper" singing by "a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight" (plate 19), Thel sees the world of sexual experience as death, a netherworld filled with lamenting sounds. The angel's perception of the "fires down below," be they creative energy or sexual desire, is refuted by the narrator’s leisurely stroll through hell and by the harper. Thel's perception is also disproved; like the angel witnessing the leviathan, Thel fled the scene, but the image and gestures of the tailpiece—three naked children playfully riding a very phallic, leviathan-looking serpent—challenge the idea that Thel should fear her sexual desires, revealed as the true source of her restlessness in the last two questions spoken from her grave: "Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?" and "Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?" The interrogative form challenges preconceptions, and, before executing Thel plate 8, Blake used it to that end on Marriage plate 7, where a "mighty Devil" writes/etches: "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five[?]"
Thel plates 1 and 8 appear to have been
written and composed at the same time and presumably came from the same sheet
of copper. I think Marriage plate 4
was probably composed and executed with them; its top margin shares the bottom
measurement (10.1 cm) of Thel plate
1, a strong indicator that they shared margins and were cut from the same
sheet; and the bottom of plate 4 fits along the side of Thel plate 8 (see diagram 3, appendix). If so, then it is
reasonable to assume that, just as Marriage
plate 6 (the trip to hell) may have influenced the netherworld location of Thel plate 8, the idea of Thel's voice
revealing the truth from the "pit" may have influenced "The
voice of the Devil" of Marriage
plate 4—or vice versa. Both plates have leftward gs, and in both, the "voice" knows what is hidden and
symbolically represents the deep recesses of the mind.
I suspect that Thel
plates 1 and 8 and Marriage plate 4
were from the same sheet of copper, a third of the sheet originally cut for Thel plates 2-7, but I do not know with
certainty exactly where plate 4 fits into the composition of the Marriage. It responds to plate 3
thematically by inverting its rhetorical structure. On plate 3, the vignettes
depict the joyous copulation and laborless birth characteristic of our
prefallen state ("Now is . . . the return of Adam into Paradise"),
and the opening lines express Blake's optimistic anticipation of a new age, but
the "religious" are given the last and seemingly authoritative word:
"Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." Plate 4 inverts this pattern, giving
the religious the opening lines and vignette and the devil the last word. The
vignette depicts a woman and child fleeing a man in flames, presumably the
"fires of hell" as perceived by the "religious." But what
the woman and child flee is no more frightening than Thel's sexually charged
serpent, as the devil's voice makes clear: "Energy is Eternal
Delight." [50]
Plate 4 visually echoes the relation between perception and
experience as expressed on plates 5, 6, 7, 14, 16, and 20, but it explicitly
corrects the last lines of plate 3: "From these contraries spring what the
religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." After plate 3, though, Blake appears to
have gone on to plate 5, which attacks the idea of passivity. Its first lines
state: "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to
be restrained . . . and being restraind it by degrees becomes passive till it
is only the shadow of desire." The
rest of plate 5's text and the textual unit to which it belongs (the trip to
hell and the proverbs collected there) set out to prove the
"religious" wrong. By this time in the composition, Blake has
profiled Christ, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, and the narrator
as unrestrained figures, as active members of the devil's party. Surely, their
actions and membership challenge the validity of passivity and the moral
categories imposed by the "religious." Thematically, plate 4 seems
unnecessary, almost ad hoc, like the Motto in Thel—or "A Song of Liberty" in the Marriage. Perhaps Blake thought his critique of the linguistic
origin of what the religious call moral categories was too subtly ironic, or he
simply wished to make explicit the relation between creative and procreative
forces, between energy and desire.
Plate 4 continues the satire on Swedenborg by numbering the
angels' and devils' particulars of faith, recalling the opening of True Christian Religion, where the New
Church's "five particulars of faith" are presented without
contraries. Plate 4 clearly responds to the "particulars" of plate 3,
but a closer look reveals a relationship to other plates as well. The first
error, "That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a
Soul," is acknowledged on plate 14 as "the notion that man has a body
distinct from his soul." The second error, "That Energy calld Evil. is alone from the Body.
& that Reason. calld Good. is
alone from the Soul," fuses "soul" and "body" to
"Good" and "Evil," in response to plate 3's "what the
religious call Good & Evil. Good
is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good
is Heaven. Evil is Hell." The third error, "That God will torment Man
in Eternity for following his Energies," echoes the angels' fears as
expressed on plate 6, that "The fires of hell" are "torment and
insanity." On the evidence of its lettering style, plate 4 was executed
after plates 3 and 6; its thematic awareness of plate 6 suggests that it was
written afterwards as well. But what is its connection with plate 14? Is plate 4 or plate 14 the first to question
this Cartesian dualism? The union of soul and body was implied on plate 11,
which precedes both plates 4 and 14 in composition; it showed that the
separation of "mental deities from their objects" resulted in
"Priesthood." As I propose in “The Caves of Heaven and Hell,” the
union of spirit and matter was inherent in Blake's incarnational aesthetic, as
stated explicitly on plate 16: "God only Acts & Is. in existing beings
or Men," itself a clarification of plates 22-23's "The worship of God
is. Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius . . . for
there is no other God." Contrary to Swedenborg, who believed vision
required leaving the body, Blake knew as an artist that it could occur while in
the body and through the physical body of art. In short, plate 4 appears to
recognize more than just plate 3.
Like the texts of plates 14 and 15, that of plate 4 is
short, autonomous, and thematically it is derived from hell. On plate 15, Blake
states, "I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which
knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation," and then proceeds
to describe the book-making process in all its visionary splendor. On plate 14,
Blake notes that he "heard from Hell" when "the whole creation
will be consumed [in fire] and appear infinite. and holy," and implies
that he, as printmaker and publisher, partakes in this apocalyptic energy. Now,
on plate 4, we, like the narrator, hear news from hell, only this time we hear
it directly.
In identifying the cause of the primary "Errors"
as "All Bibles or sacred codes," this news from hell appears aware
that the "jews code" and "ten commandments" have already
been criticized on plates 13 and 23 (and 27?). The devil's "Contraries to
these" errors are "True," and thus the devil implies another set
of contraries, Error and Truth, which is a variation of Imitation and Original,
implicit in Blake's condemnation of Swedenborg, Priests, and the "sneaking
serpent," in contrast to Christ, Prophets, the "just man," and
presumably Blake (plates 21, 11, 2, 3, 12-13). The corrections are indeed
"True" from the devil's perspective, but there are no third parties
in the Marriage. Blake belongs to the
devil's party, and the devil and members of his party have expressed—on plates
6, 12, 13, 14, 15, and, most important, 7 and 23—what are presumably Blake's
positions. On plate 7, the "mighty Devil," like Blake, speaks by
writing/etching his preconception-challenging sentences "on the sides of
the rock." On plate 10, he is pictured dictating the proverbs. On plate
23, the "Devil answer'd" the angel's assertion that Christ sanctioned
"the law of ten commandments," that God is an external law-giver
indifferent to man, by creatively reading Christ's acts to show that "Jesus
was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." The narrator
witnesses the debate, which the devil, presumably speaking for Blake, clearly
wins. [51]
Plate 4, then, while the only plate or section designated
as
"The voice of the Devil," is not the only occasion on which the devil
speaks. And like the other debating and writing devils, he speaks with
authority and conviction—and therein lies a serious critical problem. The devil
is, as most Blake scholars acknowledge, a partisan, and as such cannot
represent unbiased perception. Admittedly, the metaphysical framework of
contraries, which can imply theoretically the "polar nature of being"
as well as a "dialectical symmetry," and thus the idea that opposing
views are equally valid, occasionally undercuts Blake's authority. [52] But to assume that this was Blake's
intention is to dismiss the way in which, in practice, the satiric convention
of turning the world upside down loads the dice—in Blake's and the devil's
favor. When plate 4 is placed within the composing process and read in light
of the many plates it in fact follows, Blake's intentions for this plate and
for
the devil's views throughout the Marriage
begin to reveal themselves.
On plates 4, 14, and 15, Blake presents “information from
hell,” but on plate 4 he does not speak for himself, nor does he use the cave
imagery present in the other two plates. The script poses difficulties. The
italic of plates 14 and 15 closely resemble one another but differ from plate
4
(illus. 10).
In fact, the italic of plate 4 is stiff and occasionally awkward
and does not closely resemble any of the Marriage
plates—or the Thel plates, for that
matter. Plate 4 does not look as though it was written with plates 14 and 15,
or 16-20, or 25-27, but how long after—or before—these plates is impossible to
tell. The appearance of one's usual writing hand will vary if the writing tools
and materials vary; for example, the difference could be owing to a different
pen, a thicker writing solution, a more textured writing surface, or a
combination of all three.
Another troubling feature of plate 4 is that it was not one
of the two quarters from Doom left
over after plates 12-13. These unused quarters suggest that there was a hiatus
in production between plates 12-13 and the plates cut from the subsequent three
sheets. If Blake forgot about the Doom
quarters after a short hiatus, then it is possible that plate 4 was written
around the time of plates 14 and 15 and before 16-20. These three texts
required three plates and could be executed out of order. Blake wrote the texts
for plates 14 and 15 on the quarters from sheet V, but instead of buying a new
sheet for plate 4, he wrote it on a plate from a sheet he was then presumably
cutting for Thel plates 1 and 8.
If, however, Blake remembered he had the two Doom quarters in stock, then plate 4 may
not have been executed until after plates 16-20 and 25-27, for the two Doom
quarters were used for plates 20 and 27. But this scenario suggests that plates
25 and 26 came from a sheet half the size of the others (20.8 by 14.9 cm). If
the sheet had been the size of the others, there would have been two unused
quarters, and one of them would presumably have been used for plate 4. Or one
must imagine the half-sheet being used or cut up for other projects, none of
which I have been able to identify. Unfortunately, whether plates 25 and 26
were quarters cut from a horizontal half-sheet or halves cut from a sheet half
the size of the others cannot be determined.
Perhaps the most that can be said about Marriage plate 4 is that it was certainly not the fourth plate
written or executed. Materially, it appears to have been connected with Thel plates 1 and 8; thematically, it
appears to have been associated with Thel
plate 8 and Marriage plates 14 and
15. It was introduced no earlier than two-thirds into the composition of the Marriage, if not added to the Marriage last, after "A Song of
Liberty."
VII. Conclusion:
