The Social Vision of William Blake

by Michael Ferber

Overview

This fresh look at the social and political themes of Blake's poetry shows that he was a phenomenologist of liberation," who contested the dominant ideology of his time and who still speaks passionately to our fears and hopes.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611464
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #550
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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The Social Vision of William Blake

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By Michael Ferber

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08382-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Concept of Ideology

For the past fifteen years or so English and American scholars have been catching up with the Continent in their theoretical discussions of the concept of ideology and its application to literature. A good deal of their work has been to translate, interpret, and extend the major theories: those of Georg Lukács (especially during his brief phase around 1922 as an independent Marxist), Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse), Jean-Paul Sartre, and French structuralist Marxists such as Louis Althusser. In England, almost alone, Raymond Williams has been patiently working out his own theory of "cultural materialism"; he has now incorporated it with the work of younger English thinkers and of Europeans like Lucien Goldmann.

In the hands of "vulgar" orthodox Marxists ideology could break butterflies on the wheels of history; thus Wordsworth was "objectively" a reactionary petit bourgeois whose poetry expresses only the nostalgia of a doomed and marginal class, and so on. But ideology has been rescued from reductionists and given greater conceptual reach and subtlety by heterodox thinkers who have, on the whole, taken their young Marx with their old, absorbed Weber and Freud, felt the pressure of anti-Marxist critiques, faced up to Stalinism, and retained their love of literature. That theoretical problems remain, and that effective use in any concrete case demands a great deal, are no excuses for ignoring ideology any longer.

If universities — and in America, at least, it is mainly there that literary theory is produced — are to live up to their name, some such coordinating and cross-disciplinary notion as "ideology" will have to come into use. It is indispensable for connecting the conventions of literature, in form and content, with the experience and interests of groups in society. The connections may be very complex and densely "mediated," but without such a way of trying to connect literature to its place in the social totality, literary history will remain anecdotal and claustrophobic. And without a grasp of the power and persistence of ideology, even in literature departments — the "departmentality" of universities, in fact, being a major ideological force — we risk falling prey to ideology in our own literary theories. We find today, for example, the widely propagated idea, born in part of the very desire to break out of the confines of a department or discipline, that everything is a text and that reading is the basic mode of human comprehension. It begins by taking what used to be called "works," a word with its own presuppositions, and naming them "texts," founding thereby a certain kind of critical activity which, however rich and brilliant it sometimes is, forgets what it erased in its opening gesture. To take the object as text is to fail to take account of its nontextual features. This school's next move is to globalize "text" to include not only other forms of culture but all of history and even nature. One hardly needs to say that this is not the same as situating a text or work in a larger context (the normal use of "context" invites this text-model); it is to assimilate the context under terms set by texts. There are even "Marxist" versions of this textual imperialism, according to which a text "produces" meanings, or ideology, or even the reading subject itself. It is not to deny their power if one points out the kinship of such theories to the ideology of Melville's "sub-sub-librarian" and the division of whales into folios, octavos, and duodecimos. In Blake's words, they "view a small portion & think that all, / And call it Demonstration" (J 65.27-28).

The task — if this needs to be said — is to study everything and fit it all together. To put it practically, it is to learn something of the different planes of knowledge and how they intersect, to respect the integrity of an object or event in culture while trying at the same time to "explain" it, to trace its nearer ramifications and at least acknowledge the farther ones, indeed, to gain a standard of near and far in relevance, and to accept and enjoy the communality of scholarship. To put it negatively, the task is to avoid the twin temptations of premature synthesis and chronic analysis, the hypertrophy of a single method or set of terms and the noncommittal pluralism of insulated approaches. The concept of ideology, of course, is not immune to overgrown pretensions, but I will try to live up to my brave words and offer a definition and defense of it, if not as a sovereign conceptual key, then as a useful coordinating or regulating idea.

Blake presents some special problems. Faced with his heroic efforts to hammer his eccentric and multifarious thought into unity, those of us who take Blake seriously may become what we behold, and do the same with our own critical commentary. Northrop Frye's well-titled Fearful Symmetry is the greatest example of Blake's contagion, greatest in being most Blakean in its formal spirit and intuitive understanding, though for those reasons losing some of the distance proper for critical leverage. In other critics Blake seems to have magnified the general tendency to methodological exclusiveness; they have unified their commentaries by finding one or another outside standpoint from which to pry him up, and so we have the series of one-dimensional contractions of his work to Neoplatonic, Cabalistic, or Swedenborgian sources or to Jungian, Freudian, or Marxist analogues that have made the Blake shelves in the library so unbecoming to behold. A reaction against such books has set in, and many Blakeans are now content modestly to labor in their patch of the common field and leave to future generations the gathering in. Much of the ground for their work and my own has been cleared magisterially by David Erdman; his own caution before grand generalizations certainly warns me sufficiently. It is my impression nonetheless that some of the careful studies of this or that minute particular have come up against limits not surpassable by tying the particulars together link by link, as it were; rather, the particulars demand a multiplanar organizing interpretation to situate them properly. Blake's own example of persisting in folly also remains before us, and life is too short to await all the returns before trying to assess him. I am one, too, who believes Blake can make an essential contribution to the vision and program we need in order to reconstruct the damaged societies of the world, and we do not know how much time will be given us for that work.

Blake may seem peculiarly resistant, finally, to a specifically ideological analysis. His difficulty and eccentricity kept him even from readers of his own time who shared his social status and political allegiances; his effect on readers now, even after all the scholarly attempts to attach him to familiar traditions, begins with the strong impression that he is like nobody else in the world. That his idiosyncrasies will test any comparative or triangulating method, however, is no reason to shrink from trying it. Rather the opposite: his obvious orneriness may help keep the method honest, and his very difficulty may be the best place to begin.

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We may distinguish at the outset the ideology of a social class, the ideology of an individual, and the ideology of a work. There is nothing simple, however brief our labels might be, about specifying the ideology of a social class, for classes are always changing their characteristics as the structure of the economy changes, merging older classes, splitting into new ones, struggling against competing ones, and so on. Their ideologies change similarly, blending, Assuring, hardening, and absorbing new experiences. Among complications there are the permeation of an underclass's ideology with crucial features of the ruling ideology, as in the wide acceptance of the middle-class values of self-help and individual upward-mobilism by a working class for whom only concerted action will bring progress, and the reverse process, no doubt weaker, the "trickling up" of democratic and populist traditions, which may limit the options of the ruling elites, or at least force them into hypocrisy. The history of Christianity from its plebeian provincial origins to its adoption by the patricians and overlords illustrates this permeation in both directions, and it reminds us too of another factor, the "drag effect" or conservatism of ideology, its persistence after its appropriate social basis has altered, as well as the persistence of archaic institutions in the base itself. There are different tempos of change in culture, all bearing complexly on each other.

One component of class ideology we may call aesthetic ideology: a body of conventions, genres, styles of discourse, themes, and notions of the artist's function and means of making art. One of the most important studies in aesthetic ideology is Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel; whether or not he has got them right, Watt is making the sort of connections between the common life of a social class and the forms and styles of its literature only seldom attempted. Another example would be Lukács's effort to correlate the shift in mode from "realism" to "naturalism" in the French novel with the bloody class war of 1848. Within the region of aesthetic ideology we might want to distinguish an ideology of artists, a slant or bias in favor of the producers of works that express overall the ideologies of the classes that sponsor and consume artworks. To give a charming if obvious example, in the Odyssey the role of the bards is more or less what it probably was in reality — to sing at aristocrats' tables and memorialize the deeds of their ancestors — but we can detect a whiff of "bardic ideology" in the special protection they are granted, Odysseus' deep response to one of them, and the bardlike traits of Odysseus himself.

From these kinds of class ideology we should distinguish an individual's ideology, which may be a very complicated affair. As Sartre memorably put it, "Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery." The biographical point of insertion into class ideology is mediated at the very least by the family, itself a changing historical institution but with certain features that may cut across class lines and persist over centuries. Moreover, some individuals rise or sink in their class affiliations, or they serve another class and identify with it, or they think for themselves and reflect on their own situation and may rebel a little or a lot, and so on. I do not want to suggest that a measure of objectivity or "truth" is beyond reach, nor would I confine it solely to the very abstract "science" that some French Marxists say is the only realm free of ideological contamination. But ideology touches all experience, and the sense of having transcended ideological illusions is very often itself an illusion born of the clash of two or more of them. Yet such a clash may also genuinely remove illusions, I would argue; Blake's peculiar insight into ideology, which we will note throughout this book, may owe a good deal to the conflicts to which his social position exposed him.

Finally, I think it makes sense to say that all literature has an ideology, or components of an ideology. Some Marxists, as I mentioned earlier, would prefer to say that literature produces an ideology, a way of putting it that seems to bring out the active process of reading, but that also seems to assign that activity mainly to the text itself — as if by being so good as to read it a reader becomes putty in its hands — rather than distributing the determining activity between text and reader as co-producers of the "ideological effect." I suspect too that this parlance is itself a product of a new desire for rigor among Marxists who are restating aesthetic theory in terms of production, Marxism's founding concept. But we may leave aside this refinement; it will do for now to say that all literature "has" an ideology.

To put it simply, literature has designs on us, palpable or not, and those designs have social bearings, however remote. All literature teaches, even if it claims only to delight. In fact, the claim only to delight not merely is false but has a fairly evident ideological ring. Certain highly self-conscious works, deliberately critical of prevailing ideologies and alert to their social bases, might make an exception to this rule, though of such works it might be truer to say that they project an anti-ideological viewpoint that is itself partly ideological. So one might argue of James Joyce's Ulysses that, while its many narrative stances and styles seem to sweep away all Archimedean points from which to comprehend, or at least speak about, the world, the careful continuity of its "realistic" level beneath all the devices, and the final surfacing of that level in the seemingly artless soliloquy of Molly, endorse after all the standpoint of "life," of empathy, of realism, of something like Albert Camus's anti-ideological decency, whose ideological features are not hard to discern.

Perhaps, too, certain very short works, such as sonnets or haiku, do not carry much of an ideology, perhaps only fragments or gestures vaguely consonant with more than one, yet we can see that the very forms of sonnet and haiku trail little ideological clouds from their former uses in courtly games, their conventional sublimation of desire, or their equally conventional adumbrations of satori. The apparent purity of some forms of art, ritual, and game, it could be argued, serves precisely to ratify as Olympian and objective the way of life of a leisured group with very particular interests. There are, in any case, ideologies of form, or ideologies in form. For Shakespeare to write a play about a merchant-adventurer, a Jewish usurer, a soldier of fortune, and an heiress "richly left" in the form of New Comedy in the "scapegoat" subgenre is to organize obviously political and economic material into a form in which love and "nature" always successfully bring about a social renewal and resolution, a universal pattern of action and value governing anything-but-universal interests or positions.

The ideology of a work is combined in complex ways with the ideology of the author. Marx and Engels themselves anticipated modern suspicions of the intentional fallacy in their praise of the reactionary Balzac. We might say there are artistic methods and conventions with enough momentum of their own to transform the conscious and unconscious attitudes of the artist, and that even if the form, to put it simply, does not undermine the manifest tendency of the content, it may by "foregrounding" it put it at a distance sufficient for scrutiny and critique. Althusser speaks (somewhat mysteriously) of the "internal distantiation" of art, a retreat that lets us see "the ideology from which [the work of art] is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes."

Not only forms, of course, but discrete, seemingly innocent stock objects, characteristic human types, and historical individuals may gather an ideological nimbus from their changing contexts in real social life as well as in extended ideological argument. The name "Milton" might mean a safe religious writer or a republican and regicide, according to what associations a context triggers. Why does Blake make his hero Los a blacksmith? One factor might have been an aura of subversiveness or at least political loquacity that higher classes sensed in real blacksmiths. They might, to borrow Fredric Jameson's term, have been potential "ideologemes" ready for activation, seconded by older traditions about the volcanic Vulcan, in a particular narrative context. Certain highly specific, seemingly neutral systems of thought may gain, or lose, a political edge. Along with the associations of blacksmiths, it would be interesting to know why Jacobins like Thomas Holcroft and Blake's friend Henry Fuseli were seriously interested, as Blake was, in Johann Kaspar Lavater. Was there something we can meaningfully call "left physiognomy"? These are examples of the sort of thing I shall pursue in this book, though often I will only raise them as questions.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Social Vision of William Blake by Michael Ferber. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. v
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xiii
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xv
• 1. The Concept of Ideology, pg. 1
• 2. Blake's Ideology, pg. 13
• 3. Brotherhood, pg. 67
• 4. Nature and the Female, pg. 89
• 5. Liberty, pg. 116
• 6. Labor, pg. 131
• 7. Time, Eternity, and History, pg. 152
• 8. Blake's Apocatastasis, pg. 184
• APPENDIX. The Seven Eyes of God, pg. 213
• NOTES, pg. 223
• INDEX, pg. 249