‘Soul‐shudd'ring vacuum’: space for subjects in Later Blake

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Notes

Nancy Moore Goslee is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. Correspondence to Nancy Moore Goslee, Department of English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996‐0430, USA. Email: ngos [email protected].

See my ‘“Soul” in Blake's Writing: Redeeming the Word.’ The title of this earlier essay is more appropriate to the two essays taken together, since the earlier one considers only Blake's earlier works. Two excellent starting‐points for pursuing materialist investigations of ‘soul’ are G. S. Rousseau and Reed.

For the earthly church as Christ's body, cited by Essick and Viscomi 113, see Romans 12.5 and I Corinthians 12.12–26. For the resurrected individual body modeled on Christ's resurrected body, see I Corinthians 15.35–44. Essick and Viscomi, as well as Paley in Apocalypse and Millenium 24, 34, and 74, cite Boehme and Swedenborg as further influences on this synthesis of a corporate divine body as a form of personal immortality. See also Welch. Riede distinguishes Blake's criticism of a dogmatic, dualistic Paul from his admiration of a revisionary, contentious Paul, particularly as mediated through Milton's own prose. Riede does not, however, consider Paul's figures for the afterlife.

See Foucault, ‘What is an Author’ and ‘Nietzsche, History, Genealogy’ in Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice 136–138, 162–163; Rorty 6–7, Hutchings 291n2; Rothenberg 4–6.

See, for example, Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 51, 149, 204–207, and Feminine Sexuality 143–145.

See Harold Bloom's note in Erdman 406. Tannenbaum focuses on a negative, satirical reading of the continued divisions of deity in Genesis (201–224). Behrendt, arguing for a ‘bricolage’ that challenges a single authorized reading of the Biblical text, like Tannenbaum, condemns Urizen's challenge to the status quo of eternity.

This essay originated as part of a longer essay solicited for a project on ‘The Soul in Romanticism’ and was to be one of a pair of essays on Blake. Because Stephen Behrendt had been asked to write the other essay of the pair, I speculated that his strong background in Blake's illustrations and illuminations would lead him toward the visual. Thus I developed the somewhat Urizenic analysis of verbal shifts in meaning that I pursue here. [A version of the complementary essay by Behrendt also appears in this issue of ERR—ed.] For the history of visual and verbal rivalry as analogous to body and soul, or to female materiality and male spirituality, see Mitchell, Iconology, ch. 4, and ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ in Picture Theory, esp. 172; and for the complex issues involved in even attempting to talk about a ‘word’ like ‘soul’ as if transparent, see his ‘Blake and the Art of Writing,’ also in Picture Theory. The latter essay, like Essick's ‘William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution,’ leads to a mixed, even sympathetic, reading of Urizen and thus perhaps of Urizenic approaches.

In addition to Lincoln, see Rosso ch. 1, and Freeman 19–33 for helpful analyses of critics’ responses to The Four Zoas.

See E 836, as proposed in BiQ 12 (1978): 135–190. Lincoln's proposed order, in the same issue of BiQ, is to enclose VIIa within the two parts of VIIb (115–133). Rosso argues that the ‘personal integration’ of Los and Enitharmon at the end of VIIa gives a sense of false optimism and turns readers away from the continued ‘social and cultural fragmentation’ that occurs in Night VIII—thus he prefers Lincoln's ordering (135–136).

Otto's similar goal of integrating political and individual narratives of redemption in an ordering of Night VII differs from mine most specifically in its argument that the ‘spiritual body’ is a Urizenic trap or delusion (see, for example, 215, 221).

For commentary on this difficult passage, see The Anchor Bible: I Corinthians.

See Mitchell's interpretation of Blake's merging with Los as homoerotic in ‘Style and Iconography in Blake's Milton’ 67.

See Frosch 159–177; Doskow 165–166; Paley, Continuing City 201–202; Purinton 128–137; Sturrock; Persyn, esp. 57–59 and nn2–3, 9, 11–12; and Mellor. For a very thorough reading of this passage and an overarching approach to the continuity of material and spiritual bodies that I find sympathetic to my readings of ‘soul’ here, see Connolly, esp. ch. 7, ‘The Eternal Body.’

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Nancy Moore Goslee

Nancy Moore Goslee is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. Correspondence to Nancy Moore Goslee, Department of English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996‐0430, USA. Email: ngos [email protected].