A chapter from Ben Watson’s book, Blake in Cambridge. 

Ben Watson: Blake in Cambridge
Paperback : 168 pages
ISBN-13 : 978-0956817686
Product dimensions : 12.7 x 0.99 x 20.32 cm
Publisher : Unkant Publishers (30 April 2012)
Language : English
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Like all great writing, Blake immerses us in a maelstrom of meaning, where – to our wide-eyed amazement and gasping incredulity – the connection between language and social intent is electrically restored. Blake criticised the Enlightenment, not as a reactionary, but as someone who understood where the Cartesian emphasis on the individual would lead: to Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society”, to abject surrender to the anti-social force of money, to war, fascism and death.

In Blake’s milieu, debates about religion were still the lingua franca of politics. E.P. Thompson’s final book (Witness Against the Beast, finished but unpublished in his lifetime)15 was a study which explained how the peculiar Christianity of Blake’s upbringing – legacy of a civil-war sect which saw Jesus as a radical humanist abolishing all hierarchical mysteries, a sect Thompson called ‘Muggletonian’ – allowed him to improvise a system which anticipated the best thoughts of Marx and Freud. Although such a definition runs counter to Blake’s own terminology, in Marxist terms, Blake was a materialist: “God only Acts & Is in existing beings or Men”.16 This is a Protestant version of Giambattista Vico’s discovery that heroes and Gods are the invention of particular social groups, and so history is made by people.17 The epigraph to Blake’s Milton – “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets”18– bears witness to the anti-hierarchical radicalism which bursts out in all revolutions.

Whether or not Thompson is right about the Muggletonians (given the paucity of sources, he presents his case with a certain scepticism), Blake certainly grew up with the arguments and politics of the British Civil War ringing in his ears. Not the ‘Roundheads versus Cavaliers’ of school history lessons, but the teachings of the religious sects which flourished as new mercantile wealth mobilised mass forces against the Crown. The Christianity Blake grew up with was disrespectful, argumentative and inventive. There is an anti-authoritarian, almost comedic aspect to it. It anticipates the ‘stoned’ tone of the 60s counter-culture, where metaphysical speculation becomes an entertainment to be enjoyed with friends, and whole universes balloon and pop in wraiths of dope smoke. I suppose I could make my point here in Cambridge by referencing Ed Dorn,19 but the anguish and scorched turmoil of Blake’s writing is closer to the late work of Philip K. Dick (Valis). A defiantly amateur, ungainly attempt to wrest back reality from priests and authorities, and make it an object of discussion and transformation for the people immediately around us.

Blake said that if he read a book by someone, it had to be by an equal, or it wasn’t worth reading

For institutional thinkers, there’s a clear hierarchy: the big abstractions are immoveable and eternal, only the incidental illustrations move and change. In Blake’s milieu, it was the big abstractions which wobbled and toppled. Blake writes powerfully because he’s transcribing phrases which could be shouted across a noisy meeting hall or used during an intense one-on-one where the point of issue was whether or not to attend a particular meeting or join a particular sect (the only writer with a pinch of this quality today is Stewart Home): our ongoing, unending collective speech. The idea of stirring up all this subliterary passion and strife (quite literally ‘cobblers’, the free discussion which Josef Dietzgen, himself a master tanner, noted among leather workers) 1  into a soup worthy of an epical tureen is indeed comical, but it’s a comedy Blake milks. 1  Blake said that if he read a book by someone, it had to be by an equal, or it wasn’t worth reading. He didn’t accept superior authority. This insistence on the supreme everyperson anticipates Dada, Allen Ginsberg’s Flower Power, Surrealist and Situationist agitation, the Punk Rock movement and (most recently) the Joyce celebrated in Théorie du Bloom. 1  This Jedermann sein eigner Fußball is the opposite of institutional book-keeping, which traps literary excellence in an amber which the student studies at a distance. Commodity fetishism: a value sundered from the labour which made it happen (and could make it happen between us now).

Blake’s anti-hierarchical politics anticipated the future. They also provided a power tool for excavating the contours of history. His passion for Milton was based on the fact that, for him, Milton’s arguments about church and state and grace were still alive. In 1936, T.S. Eliot published an attack on Milton which prepared the ground for postwar poetry in English. What Eliot wanted was conversational fluency, domesticity, freedom from grand-narrative thunder. Milton didn’t provide it. His syntax was overcomplex and Latinate, the verse turgid and badly-written. His sentences were too long. Eliot claimed this was a ‘technical’ criticism, but he was actually setting bounds to the scope of poetry: what was to be admired was the felicity of a poem’s expression, not the weight and thrust of its subject matter. In contrast, Blake discovered in Paradise Lost a direct transcript of the pressing doctrinal issues which made him a political animal. Blake didn’t agree with Milton’s conclusions, but his critique was expressed via engagement with Milton’s doctrine, rather than via style-choice concerning rhetoric or long sentences. Eliot quotes Henry James to show that long sentences can be sensitive and fine. A better comparison to Milton would be Calypso songform. With Lord Kitchener or King Short Shirt, long sentences are indications of an entire community’s exalted level of political wit and understanding. The common root for both Milton and Calypso is of course preaching, where the most articulate members of a community are given a platform and an engaged audience for extended expostulation of doctrine, up-to-date references, witty asides – and very long sentences.

In fact, despite being the epitome of ‘modernism’ in English Studies, Eliot’s attack on Milton stooped to a strategy which became ubiquitous in postmodernism: bury a genuine radical from the past with censure which sounds up-to-date and democratic, but actually serves a reactionary agenda. Citing a convoluted speech by Satan from Paradise Lost, T.S. Eliot declares Milton “inaccessible” (this from a poet who made his name with The Waste Land, replete with avant garde techniques of bamboozlement). What Eliot hates is Milton’s low-church egalitarianism. As a High Anglican, Eliot defended what Milton attacked: the church hierarchy. In Milton’s first pamphlet, Of Reformation in England (1641), he quotes Chaucer versus worldly bishops, and twice excoriates Thomas Becket in terms which will be shocking to anyone brought up on T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. 1  A reading of Milton’spamphlet reveals Eliot’s play as blatant High Church propaganda: non-specific religiosity (also known as oppressive boredom) deployed versus concrete – i.e. political and social – doctrinal disputes. Milton is conversant with the chronic medieval dispute concerning Church and State: Eliot’s religiosity is nebulous, pretentious and abstract (existentialist).

T.S. Eliot decries Milton, not because he’s ‘inaccessible’, but because he says things he doesn’t want to hear: that bishops should be elected by the congregation and live at their level, not in episcopal palaces, for example. Today, Milton’s polemic reads like an exposé of the role of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War or Berlusconi’s Italy. All criticism, Marx said, begins with the criticism of religion; hence real criticism of English Literature should start with these issues in Chaucer, Milton and Blake. By eliminating Milton, Eliot muddied the clear stream of great English literature, which is anti-clerical and populist (setting up John Donne against Milton is like setting up Little Feat against Hendrix – ludicrous).

In 1947, talking to a BBC Home Service studio audience, T.S. Eliot ‘recanted’ on his anti-Milton position, but his adjustment was like his contemporary remarks on Russia (Communism isn’t really too bad now, he said, its respect for authority reminded him of the Papacy): worthless. “We cannot, in literature, any more than in the rest of life, live in a perpetual state of revolution”, said Eliot. 1  Having been ‘too modern’ in the 1920s and 1930s, English literature could now do with a little respect for tradition, so reading Milton was now a good thing. In the general relief that Milton was back in the canon, the banality of Eliot’s opposition between cobwebbed ‘tradition’ and suburban ‘modernity’ was missed. We, however, can take courage from Eliot’s (unwitting) alignment of Finnegans Wake with Trotsky’s central concept, Permanent revolution! Not as some wilful concept dreamed up by revolutionaries, but as unclouded recognition of what capitalism is already doing.

Of course, arguing for the centrality of Milton to English letters is not the same as vouching for his every word. Blake needed to write Milton to explain the hold Milton had on him, whilst contesting Paradise Lost’s underwriting of secular power. Milton is written in the mode of a sacred text in order to wreck the authority of sacred texts. The dreamlike turns of plot and twisted chronology propose a changing weave of subjectivity versus a static world order: resolution comes from the developing understanding of the reader, not from the narrative. What Blake loved in Paradise Lost, the visions and surprises and struggles, become the main event, released from their role as symbols of orthodox doctrine. Blake wants to let the machinery of Paradise Lost grind on and find its own voice, beyond the crabbed authoritarianism he discerns in Milton. In this, he does what true artistic heirs do to their forebears: rather than adopting technique as an array of readymade tools for some arbitrary task, technique is pushed to see what it has to say.

Milton’s Of Reformation in England has amazing force, but also the kind of fire-and-blood abuse liberals, since Ian Paisley and Enoch Powell, condemn in politicians (I’m not arguing for anti-Papism as a viable political creed – nor does Milton actually). In his forthright defence of the Crown, Milton took a position which later, as an apologist for the beheading of Charles I, he had to renounce. But it is worth experiencing the onslaught of Milton’s rhetoric to appreciate how Blake transfigured it: rather than projecting fear and loathing on a different social group (‘bishops’), they become vectors of tension within the suffering subject. In declaring war on the bishops, the faithful are also declaring war on that part of themselves which harbours episcopal daydreams.

Milton has the reputation of being a more practical man than Blake the Mystic. But like most pundits who shape public opinion, he could get things spectacularly wrong. A year before the outbreak of the Civil War, Milton declared it would never happen:

Nor shall the wisdom, the moderation, the Christian piety, the constancy of our nobility and commons of England, be ever forgotten, whose calm and temperate connivance could sit still and smile out the stormy bluster of men more audacious and precipitant than of solid and deep reach, until their own fury had run itself out of breath, assailing by rash and heady approaches the impregnable situation of our liberty and safety, that laughed such weak enginery to scorn, such poor drifts to make a national war of a surplice brabble, a tippet scuffle, and engage the untainted honour of English knighthood to unfurl the streaming red cross, or to rear the horrid standard of those fatal guly dragons, for so unworthy a purpose, as to force upon their fellow-subjects that which they themselves are weary of, the skeleton of a mass-book.20

What Milton couldn’t predict was that war would break out, but between king and parliament rather than over religion. In fact, his sentence (and it is a long one) has the tone of a Social-Democratic politician assuring everyone of peace just before World War I: evidence of pious wishes rather than “honest indignation” (the “voice of God” according to Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Milton’s argument peters out into an abstract call for virtue. This was the ‘moral’ stance – in cahoots with secular power, denying the specifics of an occasion – which Blake wrestled in Milton. All this as an aside, since my main point is that the class politics of the day was configured through the right to religious freedom, and that Milton’s progressive point of view was grasped by Blake, amplified and deepened. Having no eye for a role within the establishment, Blake evidenced none of the linguistic vacuity of Milton’s polemics, driving instead towards a clinical objectivity which made his books inscrutable to contemporaries, whilst they anticipated twentieth-century psychoanalysis and revolutionary politics.

In short, you can’t understand English Literature without admiring the funky radical politics behind its flowerings of poetry: no roses without horse manure. Following E.P. Thompson’s line of argument, if you don’t appreciate the low-church indignation and class fury which spurred Blake, and reduce him to another example of some Great Tradition of otherworldly mysticism, you misconstrue both his work and his relationship to Milton.

[In the past] the spirit of unity and meekness [did] inspire and animate every joint and sinew of the mystical body: but now the gravest and worthiest minister, a true bishop of his fold, shall be reviled and ruffled by an insulting and only canon-wise prelate, as if he were some slight paltry companion: and the people of God, redeemed and washed with Christ’s blood, and dignified with so many glorious titles of saints and sons in the gospel, are now no better reputed than impure ethnics and lay dogs; stones, and pillars, and crucifixes, have now the honour and the alms due to Christ’s living members; the table of communion, now becomes a table of separation, stands like an exalted platform upon the brow of the quire, fortified with bulwark and barricado, to keep off the profane touch of the laics, whilst the obscene and surfeited priest scruples not to paw and mammoc the sacramental bread as familiarly as his tavern biscuit.21

I’m immediately reminded of Johnny Rotten’s “fat pig priest sanctimonious smiles” from ‘Religion’ on the first Public Image Limited album, though I wouldn’t argue any direct ‘influence’. Anti-clericism is a vital oral tradition which keeps phrases and images alive outside attested literature. The 60s counter-culture – from ‘Come Together’ by the Beatles to the Situationist critique of alienation – protested ‘separation’, but it’s interesting to see its opposite in Christian Communion. It’s only when you plough through the individualist crust of ‘taste’ promoted by T.S. Eliot (actually a trivial form of consumerism) that you reach the rich loam of class struggle in great writing: defence of the social practices of humanity against the incursions of capitalist logic; invention of a new communion to replace that taken over by priests.

To wrest the radicalism of tradition from the pseudo-modern conformism of the literary spectacle… another long sentence. Milton is arguing for direct recourse to the authority of scripture versus the ‘custom’ cited as justification for the status quo.

If we will but purge with sovereign eyesalve that intellectual ray which God hath planted in us, then we would believe the scriptures protesting their own plainness and perspicuity, calling to them to be instructed, not only the wise and learned, but the simple, the poor, the babes, foretelling an extraordinary effusion of God’s Spirit upon every age and sex, attributing to all men, and requiring from them the ability of searching, trying, examining all things, and by the Spirit discerning that which is good.

 

Blake’s step beyond was to not only read The Bible himself, but to write one; of course, in a way Milton did this with Paradise Lost, though he used the conceit of writing a classical epic to avoid charges of blasphemy. Paradise Lost was a bravura application of Milton’s powers, a fantastic presentation of human conflict in a zone framed by gilt and giddy with nitrous oxide. There’s no depth, no psychology, no apology. It’s an explosion of pre-bourgeois storytelling on a par with Goethe’s Faust. As popular epic it is so vivid and visual (some involved speeches notwithstanding) that it vies with the Odyssey and Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon (1980) as an example of popular form carrying crucial ideas. 1  Milton’s pamphlets, on the other hand, lack the creative radicalism which makes A Fiery Flying Roll by Abiezer Coppe (1649) or Pigs’ Meat; Or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude by Thomas Spence (1794) leap out of their time. These tracts convey the absolute disdain for capitalist exchange value which makes the Situationnists and Sex Pistols so flawless and inspiring. Milton doesn’t.

Paradise Lost gave expression to the dialectic between subjective honesty (‘faith’) and objective action (‘works’) which propelled Protestantism. Milton’s success at populist epic inspired Blake to propose myth-making as a new form of action on society. Though critical of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon and Bolingbroke propose an “impossible absurdity”;

 Bacon, Locke and Newton must be “cast off”),22 Blake’s proposal that we all invent our own religions is as subversive as anything in Diderot. Nor is his debt to Milton simply a matter of doctrine: the Shakespearian range of Milton’s language, running the gamut from Biblical and Classical references to technical terms and unattested slang, were what enabled him to make the hoary Christian oppositions fresh and pressing. An example, again from Of Reformation:

… for in his very deed, the superstitious man by his goodwill is an atheist; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear; which fear of his, as also is his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship, issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality.

Blake concentrated on this side of Milton: the forensic description of bodily states as symptoms of philosophical and religious crisis. This is where literature becomes objective, although because this effort requires terms unknown to positive science – alienation, commodification, ego armature, paranoia – it’s rarely appreciated. Blake followed Milton’s imagery rather than his ideological conclusions, and in so doing translated the tensions and strains of Christianity under capitalism (the betrayal of mercy involved in the logic of commerce) into a protest non-believers can learn from. Non-believers, that is, in a transcendent God and ecclesiastical unction, but emphatic believers in our actual earthly existence as the crucial meeting-ground of cosmos and consciousness, eternity and time, love and the stars. Poets! Prophets!!

Milton’s language anticipates that of ‘Old Fart at Play’ on Trout Mask Replica. This is no accident. In 1969 Don Vliet was reading The Apes of God. The jagged objectivity of Wyndham Lewis’s word choices – steeped in the radical tradition of Chaucer, Milton and Blake – lifted Beefheart above run-of-the-mill Beat effusion. The secret history of Modern Art in the twentieth century is Vorticist, and depends upon a social stance which has nothing to do with metaphysical polarities such as ‘abstraction’ versus ‘representation’ (or ‘straight lines’ vs. ‘curves’, ‘bareness’ vs. ‘ornament’, ‘object’ vs. ‘subject’ or ‘masculine’ vs. ’feminine’, to name just a few copyrighted oppositions). The Vortex was invented by Blake to deal with the sense of time and history induced by the dramatic agony of Paradise Lost in contrast to conventionally-pious concepts of eternity and heaven; it was developed by Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce in their struggle over the future of English in The Childermass and Finnegans Wake; it is there as the guiding light and conscience of J.H. Prynne and Iain Sinclair; and it was most perfectly embodied in the mass art of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, whose records indeed provide everyone with “the skeleton of a mass-book”.

I’m no Milton scholar or Civil War historian (as is probably obvious). However, what I’m trying to do is apply the paranoid ear Adorno applied to music-listening – hearking to responses from every level of his being – to Milton’s prose (I believe this is what Simon Jarvis meant when he calls for attention to ‘prosody’). This is why I’m analysing particular sentences rather than reviewing Milton’s doctrinal development: I’m attempting to register the immediate affect of Milton’s language on the receiver. In Deconstruction, such fragment-analysis (lacking, I would argue, the drive-to-body-truth of Adornoite phenomenology) leads to perverse glosses which permanently postpone holistic interpretation, inviting one to a Saturnalia of carnivaleqsue reversal. That is not my intent. Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce  remains a salutary blast against Deconstruction and the highhanded way Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan exploited Finnegans Wake, ripping out neologisms and phrases for fantastic speculations without any regard for context.23 ‘Prosody’: how the neologisms and phrases make you feel when you read them yourself, as they come at you in the order established by the artist; the importance of the ‘segue’ in albums and radio broadcasts; what Zappa called “the placement of a detail in the larger structure”.24

Revolutionary times rock the stability of received ideas for good reason; new social possibilities are appearing. Reversing this revolution, a ‘radical’ method for reactionary times, Deconstruction turned dialectic into nonsense, brandishing (briefly) a monstrous semantic nihilism, only to usher in some avenging Charles Bronson who will solve the problems of aesthetics by purely external means (love of the Other, hatred of the fascist within, feminism, ethics, etc., etc.). Blake’s Vortex suggests something altogether different, a criticism of capitalist time and space which rises out of primal feeling and can refashion everything in its wake.

25

I’m immediately reminded of Johnny Rotten’s “fat pig priest sanctimonious smiles” from ‘Religion’ on the first Public Image Limited album, though I wouldn’t argue any direct ‘influence’. Anti-clericism is a vital oral tradition which keeps phrases and images alive outside attested literature. The 60s counter-culture – from ‘Come Together’ by the Beatles to the Situationist critique of alienation – protested ‘separation’, but it’s interesting to see its opposite in Christian Communion. It’s only when you plough through the individualist crust of ‘taste’ promoted by T.S. Eliot (actually a trivial form of consumerism) that you reach the rich loam of class struggle in great writing: defence of the social practices of humanity against the incursions of capitalist logic; invention of a new communion to replace that taken over by priests.

To wrest the radicalism of tradition from the pseudo-modern conformism of the literary spectacle… another long sentence. Milton is arguing for direct recourse to the authority of scripture versus the ‘custom’ cited as justification for the status quo.

If we will but purge with sovereign eyesalve that intellectual ray which God hath planted in us, then we would believe the scriptures protesting their own plainness and perspicuity, calling to them to be instructed, not only the wise and learned, but the simple, the poor, the babes, foretelling an extraordinary effusion of God’s Spirit upon every age and sex, attributing to all men, and requiring from them the ability of searching, trying, examining all things, and by the Spirit discerning that which is good.

 

Blake’s step beyond was to not only read The Bible himself, but to write one; of course, in a way Milton did this with Paradise Lost, though he used the conceit of writing a classical epic to avoid charges of blasphemy. Paradise Lost was a bravura application of Milton’s powers, a fantastic presentation of human conflict in a zone framed by gilt and giddy with nitrous oxide. There’s no depth, no psychology, no apology. It’s an explosion of pre-bourgeois storytelling on a par with Goethe’s Faust. As popular epic it is so vivid and visual (some involved speeches notwithstanding) that it vies with the Odyssey and Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon (1980) as an example of popular form carrying crucial ideas. 1  Milton’s pamphlets, on the other hand, lack the creative radicalism which makes A Fiery Flying Roll by Abiezer Coppe (1649) or Pigs’ Meat; Or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude by Thomas Spence (1794) leap out of their time. These tracts convey the absolute disdain for capitalist exchange value which makes the Situationnists and Sex Pistols so flawless and inspiring. Milton doesn’t.

Paradise Lost gave expression to the dialectic between subjective honesty (‘faith’) and objective action (‘works’) which propelled Protestantism. Milton’s success at populist epic inspired Blake to propose myth-making as a new form of action on society. Though critical of the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon and Bolingbroke propose an “impossible absurdity”;

 Bacon, Locke and Newton must be “cast off”),26 Blake’s proposal that we all invent our own religions is as subversive as anything in Diderot. Nor is his debt to Milton simply a matter of doctrine: the Shakespearian range of Milton’s language, running the gamut from Biblical and Classical references to technical terms and unattested slang, were what enabled him to make the hoary Christian oppositions fresh and pressing. An example, again from Of Reformation:

… for in his very deed, the superstitious man by his goodwill is an atheist; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear; which fear of his, as also is his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship, issuing from the native strength of the soul, run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality.

Blake concentrated on this side of Milton: the forensic description of bodily states as symptoms of philosophical and religious crisis. This is where literature becomes objective, although because this effort requires terms unknown to positive science – alienation, commodification, ego armature, paranoia – it’s rarely appreciated. Blake followed Milton’s imagery rather than his ideological conclusions, and in so doing translated the tensions and strains of Christianity under capitalism (the betrayal of mercy involved in the logic of commerce) into a protest non-believers can learn from. Non-believers, that is, in a transcendent God and ecclesiastical unction, but emphatic believers in our actual earthly existence as the crucial meeting-ground of cosmos and consciousness, eternity and time, love and the stars. Poets! Prophets!!

Milton’s language anticipates that of ‘Old Fart at Play’ on Trout Mask Replica. This is no accident. In 1969 Don Vliet was reading The Apes of God. The jagged objectivity of Wyndham Lewis’s word choices – steeped in the radical tradition of Chaucer, Milton and Blake – lifted Beefheart above run-of-the-mill Beat effusion. The secret history of Modern Art in the twentieth century is Vorticist, and depends upon a social stance which has nothing to do with metaphysical polarities such as ‘abstraction’ versus ‘representation’ (or ‘straight lines’ vs. ‘curves’, ‘bareness’ vs. ‘ornament’, ‘object’ vs. ‘subject’ or ‘masculine’ vs. ’feminine’, to name just a few copyrighted oppositions). The Vortex was invented by Blake to deal with the sense of time and history induced by the dramatic agony of Paradise Lost in contrast to conventionally-pious concepts of eternity and heaven; it was developed by Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce in their struggle over the future of English in The Childermass and Finnegans Wake; it is there as the guiding light and conscience of J.H. Prynne and Iain Sinclair; and it was most perfectly embodied in the mass art of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, whose records indeed provide everyone with “the skeleton of a mass-book”.

I’m no Milton scholar or Civil War historian (as is probably obvious). However, what I’m trying to do is apply the paranoid ear Adorno applied to music-listening – hearking to responses from every level of his being – to Milton’s prose (I believe this is what Simon Jarvis meant when he calls for attention to ‘prosody’). This is why I’m analysing particular sentences rather than reviewing Milton’s doctrinal development: I’m attempting to register the immediate affect of Milton’s language on the receiver. In Deconstruction, such fragment-analysis (lacking, I would argue, the drive-to-body-truth of Adornoite phenomenology) leads to perverse glosses which permanently postpone holistic interpretation, inviting one to a Saturnalia of carnivaleqsue reversal. That is not my intent. Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce  remains a salutary blast against Deconstruction and the highhanded way Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan exploited Finnegans Wake, ripping out neologisms and phrases for fantastic speculations without any regard for context.27 ‘Prosody’: how the neologisms and phrases make you feel when you read them yourself, as they come at you in the order established by the artist; the importance of the ‘segue’ in albums and radio broadcasts; what Zappa called “the placement of a detail in the larger structure”.28

Revolutionary times rock the stability of received ideas for good reason; new social possibilities are appearing. Reversing this revolution, a ‘radical’ method for reactionary times, Deconstruction turned dialectic into nonsense, brandishing (briefly) a monstrous semantic nihilism, only to usher in some avenging Charles Bronson who will solve the problems of aesthetics by purely external means (love of the Other, hatred of the fascist within, feminism, ethics, etc., etc.). Blake’s Vortex suggests something altogether different, a criticism of capitalist time and space which rises out of primal feeling and can refashion everything in its wake.

Author: Admin

The site Admin posts historical articles, quotes and unattributable odds and ends. It is not an easy job, but someone has to do it.

Notes

  1. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: CUP, 1993.
  2. Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790, pl. 16.
  3. See Capital, 1867, Chapter 15 Section 1, footnote, p. 406.
  4. Numbers xi.29.
  5. Dorn introduced pop-culture references and jokes to the high plane of Poundian poetics. If you’re sceptical about Pound and ‘poetry’ as an elevated discourse the jokes aren’t particularly funny.
  6. Of Reformation in England, p. 40.
  7. Of Reformation in England, pp. 14-15.
  8. Milton, pl. 43.
  9. Geert Lernout, The French Joyce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
  10. Frank Zappa, ‘Memo to All Warner/Reprise Avantgarde Executives who might have Something to do with Merchandising the Mothers of Invention’, International Times #115, 1971.
  11. Of Reformation in England, p. 5.

  12. Milton, pl. 43.
  13. Geert Lernout, The French Joyce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
  14. Frank Zappa, ‘Memo to All Warner/Reprise Avantgarde Executives who might have Something to do with Merchandising the Mothers of Invention’, International Times #115, 1971.
  15. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, Cambridge: CUP, 1993.
  16. Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790, pl. 16.
  17. See Capital, 1867, Chapter 15 Section 1, footnote, p. 406.
  18. Numbers xi.29.
  19. Dorn introduced pop-culture references and jokes to the high plane of Poundian poetics. If you’re sceptical about Pound and ‘poetry’ as an elevated discourse the jokes aren’t particularly funny.
  20. Of Reformation in England, p. 40.
  21. Of Reformation in England, pp. 14-15.
  22. Milton, pl. 43.
  23. Geert Lernout, The French Joyce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
  24. Frank Zappa, ‘Memo to All Warner/Reprise Avantgarde Executives who might have Something to do with Merchandising the Mothers of Invention’, International Times #115, 1971.
  25. Of Reformation in England, p. 5.

  26. Milton, pl. 43.
  27. Geert Lernout, The French Joyce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
  28. Frank Zappa, ‘Memo to All Warner/Reprise Avantgarde Executives who might have Something to do with Merchandising the Mothers of Invention’, International Times #115, 1971.