Rice University Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Rice University
Blake Reads "The Bard": Contextual Displacement and Conditions of Readability in

Jerusalem
Author(s): Molly Anne Rothenberg
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth
Century (Summer, 1987), pp. 489-502
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/450437
Accessed: 29-01-2018 22:57 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Rice University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies
in English Literature, 1500-1900
This content downloaded from 79.143.175.124 on Mon, 29 Jan 2018 22:57:04 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
SEL 27(I987)
ISSN 0039-3657
Blake Reads "The Bard": Contextual

Displacement and Conditions
of Readability in Jerusalem
MOLLY ANNE ROTHENBERG
The reader who seeks to unlock Jerusalem must devise a reading

strategy to handle the poem's apparent incoherencies. At the outset
of the poem, the reader's situation is complicated by assurances that
the "origin" of the work guarantees its coherence; the much-quoted
address to the public provides for two possible, and mutually
exclusive, sources of the poem. Blake explains first that the origin is
some external power which "dictated" the poem to him, but he
immediately contradicts himself by claiming responsibility for the
choice of a novel type of verse that encompasses a variety of meters
and styles:
When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a

Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakespeare
& all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the
modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indis-
pensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of
a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as
much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a
variety in every line, both of the cadences & number of
syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into
its fit place.1
The "dictated" poem and the poem constructed syllable by syllable

do not arise from reconcilable sources.2
However, Blake offers yet another possibility for the "origin" of
the poem at its conclusion:
Molly Ann Rothenberg is Assistant Professor of English at Beloit College and

Chair of Comparative Literature. She has completed a book on Blake's
Jerusalem.
490 BLAKE READS T HE B A R D"
All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth 8c Stone.

all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning
wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours

reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the life of immortality.
And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named
Jerusalem
The End of The Song
of Jerusalem
(Plate 99, E258-59)
This conclusion suggests that Jerusalem may be the composer of the

"song" that we know as the poem entitled Jerusalem. And since
"Jerusalem" is not simply a character in the poem, but also the name
of the emanations of all human forms, this poem can be understood
as being produced by itself, as a form of auto-citation. This poem
announces itself as coextensive with its source, its location, its
readership: above all, this text takes itself as its own context, or (what
may be the same thing) treats all possible contexts as determining its
meaning. This property of self-citation and recursive contextual-
ization creates the conditions of "readability" that Blake presents as
Vision in this poem.
Contextual Rupture and Readability

Blake's rhetorical problem was to write a poem that did not
recreate in its relations to its readers the social and intellectual
tyranny he was seeking to subvert. Blake believed that tyranny arises
from a misconceived relationship between self and world, what he
called the "possessive Self-hood"; his primary task was to help his
readers confront the ways in which they established that tyrannical
relationship to the world. Since all perception involves an act of
interpretation, a poem that calls a reader's interpretive strategies into
question could help re-educate that reader into a visionary relation-
ship with the world. By undermining the position of the author as
the origin of the text, by making the source of the text both internal
and external to the work, by refusing to provide a stable contextual
determinant, by positively disallowing any recourse to such a
context, Blake forces the reader to confront the ways in which he uses
such contexts (such as the concept of author-as-origin) to create his
interpretations. In fact, Blake compels the reader to recognize both
MOLLY ROTHENBERG 491
the necessity for and the artificial and

contexts in the production of any mea
Language can mean only if it can be s
determinate context: we produce the meaning of words not by
finding their source but by appropriating them to new contexts-our
own. The "readability" of a text depends upon its dissociation from a
definitive context or consciousness. It requires the disruption of
context-from a particular reader, a particular point of view, a
particular author-so that other contexts, other readers, other
"writers," may come into play. The possibility that language will
escape the intention of its author, that the text will free itself from its
supposed referent, that the poem will sever itself from any determinate
context, is the way language is able to mean at all. This must be true
since language is composed of signifying forms, recognizable as
such, without the imposition of conditions of intention. This is
what makes it possible for us to appropriate the signifying forms of
language for our own uses, although those language events necessar-
ily carry with them the potential for their being used or understood
in ways not under our control. Given that every signifying form can
be put in quotation marks (cited), it can break with every given
context, "engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner
which is absolutely illimitable.... This does not imply that the mark
is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary, that there are only
contexts without any center or absolute anchoring."3 The text that
cites itself, that disrupts its own original or teleological context,
brings to the surface the inherent freedom to make language
meaningful. In presenting itself as a citation, Jerusalem makes itself
available for use in the unlimited production of meaning: "JERUSA-
LEM IS NAMED LIBERTY AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION"
(Plate 26, E171).
The poem anticipates the formalist objection that such an
approach requires us to lose the hope of uncovering the significance
of the poem, relegating the text to a chaotic jumble of senseless signs.
As Derrida's quotation explains, all signifying forms achieve their
validity within a context, and in the commentary on Chaos in the
eternity of "readability" that appears in the closing plates of the
poem, chaos is rescued from meaninglessness by the renewed and
continuous production of meanings by the creation of different
contexts. Thus Chaos "Brighten'd beneath, above, around! Eyed as
the Peacock / According to the Human Nerves of Sensation" (Plate
98, E257). Here we see the power of multiple viewpoints, derived
from the "expansion and contraction of the organs of perception."
492 B L A K E READS T HE B A R D"
These contextual shifts bring shifts in consciousness an

perception, but they are not dominated by a single aim
unifying factor in Blake's Eternity as presented in th
the poem is the continually transforming and transformative
text/context of Jerusalem, not some essence that pervades all things
or a determinate origin. Without a multiplicity of viewpoints and
contexts, there is no possibility of creation, no possibility of
significance.
Without contextual rupture, writing becomes a kind of bondage, a
"spectrous oath," linking word and object in an absolute symmetry.
The interpretive strategy that insists on equating the origin and the
meaning of the text is the same strategy that believes in the denotative
nature of language, using nature as referent. But Derrida has shown
that this founding origin, whether in nature or in consciousness, can
never appear anywhere as absolutely present. It can only be figured
in a series of substitutions:
There has never been anything but writing; there have

never been anything but supplements, substitutive significa-
tions which could only come forth in a chain of differential
references, the "real" supervening, and being added only
while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation
of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read,
in the text, that the absolute present [and] Nature . . . have
always escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning
and language is writing as the disappearance of natural
presence.4
In the final plates of Jerusalem, the contextual rupturing that founds

the signifying process presents itself as a rhetorical function-the
metonymic displacement of contexts. Plate 94, which begins the
process of Albion's awakening, and thus serves as the climax of the
poem, institutes a dramatic figuration of metonymic displacement.
Each displacement results in an "awakening" and the appearance of
a new subjectivity. At the same time, these individual metonymic
displacements are successively gathered together into ever larger
contexts: "England who is Brittannia enterd Albions bosom rejoicing
... So spake the Vision of Albion & in him so spake in my hearing /
The Universal Father" (Plates 96-97, E255-56). This process cul-
minates in the ultimate identification of every thing by means of
mutually transforming contexts: "All Human Forms identified even
Tree Metal Earth &c Stone . . . And I heard the Name of their
Emanations they are named Jerusalem."
Each "awakening" makes language possible-this is the moment

of "readability," the rupturing from a determinate context that
permits signification: "And England who is Brittannia awoke from
Death on Albions bosom . . . her voice pierc'd Albions clay cold ear.
he moved upon the Rock / The Breath Divine went forth" (Plates
94-95, E254). The rupture is followed by the conferring of a name, a
designation of a new context, which functions as a substitution or
metaphor for the subject until the next rupture occurs. England
becomes Brittannia and in so doing awakens Albion; at this point
Albion becomes the sun which in turn reveals Jesus, who then
appears in a simile as Los.
The conferring of the name, then, involves two modes of
language. First, it functions as a mark of identity, of what is proper
to the subject. This is the first step in the regeneration of a
"determinate" meaning after the contextual rupture. (It is necessary
for purposes of explication to describe this as a chronological
process, although logically neither step is prior.) This first mode
corresponds to the one-to-one designation of absolute reference so
often marked in Blake's text by the activity of the Spectre of Reason,
- the "oath" or "law." This referential moment, however, is absolutely
necessary for signification to appear, because it provides the element
of sameness, of presence, on which signification depends. We can
recognize that this is language seen in what Paul Ricoeur calls its
hermeneutic function, its denotative or referential function, which
requires a phenomenal here and now, a fixed point of view, a definite
origin that governs the relationship between sign and referent.5
The second mode of language concerns its rhetorical function:
Blake re-figures this referential moment as a rhetorical trope, a
substitution by metaphor or simile. A name is already a metaphor, a
turning away from identity as inherent; it consequently inscribes the
possibility/necessity of difference or contextual definition. The
rhetorical figure, then, functions as the sign of difference or context.
Ricoeur says that we have recourse to the rhetorical function when
the "original" authority appears as textually or rhetorically consti-
tuted. This rhetorical moment in the text, the stabilizing by a troping
that is itself unstable, calls attention to the renewed possibility for
contextual rupture, and the process begins again. By the end of the
poem, Blake writes this continual movement of the figures, this
continual troping, as producing Jerusalem itself.
Re-Citing "The Bard"/Re-Visioning the World

Plate 94 marks a turning point in the narrative and an interpretive
crux. This plate instigates the series of metonymic substitutions that
move us from Albion's death-like trance to his four-fold, Eternal

form, but the cause of the transition is elided in the narrative:
Albion cold lays on his Rock . . .
The weeds of Death inwrap his hands & feet blown incessant
And the Body of Albion was closed apart from all Nations.
Over them the famishd Eagle screams on boney Wings and
around
Them howls the Wolf of famine deep heaves the Ocean black
and thundering
Around the wormy Garments of Albion: then pausing in
deathlike silence
Time was Finished! The Breath Divine Breathed over Albion
And England who is Brittannia awoke.
This account represents its own lack of narrative causality by

inserting the screaming eagle, howling wolf, and thundering ocean,
whose meaningless sounds effect the ultimate rupture of "deathlike
silence." More importantly, the text re-marks this rupture by means
of an intertextual suturing, an allusion to Gray's "The Bard" which
also comments upon the interplay of the referential and contextual
signification.
According to Gray, "The Bard" reproduces the curse laid upon
Edward the First by the last Welsh bard in reaction to Edward's
execution of the Welsh poets; that is, the poem itself is a kind of
citational rupture concerned with the disruption of the process of
meaningful language. The Bard bemoans the loss of nature's voice
that followed the murders:
'Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave,

'Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
'Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,

'To high-born Joel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.6
The death of the poets renders nature's voice unintelligible, but the
last bard is unable to change this until the dead poets reappear. The
conditions preceding their return are these:
MOLLY ROTHENBERG 4 495
'Far, far aloof th'affrighted ravens sail;

'The famished eagle screams, and passes by.
'Dear lost companions of my tuneful art,
'Dear, as the light that visits these sad eyes,
'Dear, as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,
'Ye died amidst your dying country's cries-
'No more I weep. They do not sleep.
'On yonder cliffs, a grisly band,
'I see them sit.
(lines 37-45)
Upon their re-appearance, they join the Bard "in dreadful harmony
... And weave with bloody hands the tissue of [Edward's] line" (lines
47-48). The effectiveness of the curse as a prophecy of Edward's
demise depends upon the multiplicity of voices, the conjoining of
prior texts. Here, as in the climax of Jerusalem, "the famished eagle"
announces a transfiguration and a renewed access to signifying
power.
However, in Gray's poem the loss of "natural" language marks the
crisis. The Bard needs "natural" language to prophesy the actual
destruction of Edward and his (un)natural descendants of his union
with the "she-wolf of France." Consequently, the Bard privileges the
referential power of language, its presentation of itself as a natural
sign, a sign that "erases" its own representing, tropological function.
In Gray's poem and in Blake's, the screaming of the eagle signifies
the breaking of the link between sign and (natural) referent,
subverting nature as a determinate context. In "The Bard," however,
the break occasions despair; in Blake's poem, the rupture is
liberating.
We know that Albion's stony sleep is a figure for the domination of
just that referential aspect of language, the priority of the designated
object as origin, as "property," as fixed identity. We only need to
refer to Albion's opening speech in the poem for a description of this
mode of language. His reply to Jesus' request for mutuality and
metonymic displacement ("I am in you and you in me") establishes
Albion as a centralized, possessive selfhood, totally unaware of the
rhetorical function of his own self-proclaimed denotative discourse:
But the perturbed Man away turns down the valleys dark;
Saying. We are not One! we are Many, thou most simulative
[deleted in most printings]
Phantom of the over heated brain! shadow of immortality!
Seeking to keep my soul a victim to thy Love! which binds
496 BLAKE READS T H E B A R D"
Man the enemy of man into deceitful friendsh

Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite:
By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith.
My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself!
The Malvern and the Cheviot, the Wolds Plinlimmon &
Snowdon
Are mine. here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue!
Humanity shall be no more: but war & princedom & victory!
So spoke Albion in jealous fears, hiding his Emanation
Upon the Thames and Medway, rivers of Beulah:
dissembling.
(Plate 4, E146-7)
These lines are usually cited as instancing the error that leads to
Albion's fall: his empiricist blindness to the limitations of the
rationalist method leads him to privilege demonstration over faith.
Yet Albion errs only in not recognizing the rhetorical mode of his
own language, the truth he speaks despite himself. He appears to
assert that man must rely solely upon demonstration rather than
faith, but the line may also be read "By relying upon demonstration
alone, without faith, man will only be able to live in solitude." In his
denial of the figurative properties of language, its rhetorical mode,
in his condemnation of Jesus' "simulative" or simulating powers,
Albion establishes himself, his intention, and his property as the
total context within which language is to function. Consequently he
loses access to the truth of his own discourse, a truth that appears
only when his words receive another context. Blake signals Albion's
refusal of figuration with a trope: Albion "away turns"; he is without
trope, a-verse. The attempted elision of the rhetorical results in a
"stonified," denotative, referential language with pretensions to
univocity (one law) that its very forms belie. For the key to this speech
lies in its figuration: in the polysemy of "alone," for example.
Albion's own language escapes his authority, since he must have
recourse to the very "simulative" language he deplores in Jesus.
Although Albion correctly sees that the mode of existence Jesus
embodies subverts the central, possessive selfhood (Albion has
"jealous fears," fears of being displaced), he must himself rely upon
tropes, metonymically re-figuring Jesus as a "phantom of the over-
heated brain! shadow of immortality!" Here he confirms Jesus'
claim that Jesus resides in Albion as a representation of his own
eternal state. Thus Albion reproduces the "simulative" characteristics
of Jesus, a rhetoric of similitude that permits metonymic dis-
placement, at the very moment that he seeks to deny them. Blake
reminds the reader of this recourse to rhetoricity by the word

"dissembling," an operation that denies similarity-dis-
semblance-and affirms it, by substituting a lie for the truth. Once
the reader sees the interdependence of referentiality and rhetoricity in
the production of meaning, Albion's speech no longer stands in
opposition to Jesus' as a negation, but rather as a kind of reflection or
incorporation. Each implies the other.
In Gray's poem we also find that troping makes referentiality
possible and gives it a provisional stability. At the moment that
language achieves its fullest power in the poem, the power of the
prophetic curse, the poetic voices create a metonymy in the meta-
phorical "weaving" of the "line." Here too Gray provides Blake with
the figure for the metonymic substitution that makes Albion appear
in his fourfold guise in Plates 96 and following. The Bard taunts
Edward and then throws himself from the cliff into "endless night,"
dying in order to "triumph":
'Fond impious man, think'st thou yon sanguine cloud,

'Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day?
'To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
'And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
'Enough for me: with joy I see
'The different dooms our fates assign.
'Be thine despair, and sceptered care,
'To triumph and to die are mine.'
He spoke and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.
(lines 135-44)
The Bard proposes as his substitute the figure of the sun who
"repairs the golden flood, / And warms the nations with redoubled
ray." In Plate 96 Albion also sacrifices himself, throwing himself
into the "Furnaces of Affliction," but he has already appeared in
Plate 95 as the fulfillment of the Bard's sacrifice, as the figure of the
sun who arises from the "endless night" of his "stony sleep."
Albion's reawakening as the sun parallels the Bard's vision. Blake
even puns on Gray's "redoubled ray" for Albion and his Bow are
four-fold, re-doubled. The cloud, the gold flood, the nations of the
earth, the mountain all appear in the climax of Jerusalem through
the regeneration of Edward's "sanguine breath"-the Breath Divine,
an analogue for the rhetorical power of language:
Albion rose in anger: the wrath of god breaking bright

flaming on all sides around
498 BLAKE R EA D S "T HE B A R D"
Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds

Struggling to rise above the Mountains. in his burning
hand
He takes his Bow, then chooses out his arrows of flaming
gold
Murmuring the Bowstring breathes with ardor! clouds roll
around the
Horns of the wide Bow, loud sounding winds sport on the
mountain brows
the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder
So Albion spoke & threw himself into the Furnaces of

affliction
All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became
Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity
Divine
And all the Cities of Albion rose from their Slumber
Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds

Of Heaven Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity
(Plates 95-96)
Here the movement of the allusion, begun by the scream of the eagle
which both linked and divided Blake's and Gray's texts, has trans-
figured the rhetorical figures of "The Bard," figures which project
the necessity of their transfiguration in order to achieve efficacy or
significance. Blake has managed to use the oppositional categories
established by Gray's poem without replicating their mutual
negation: they are regenerated to a redemptive purpose.
Blake's presentation of Albion's mistaken reliance upon denotation
and demonstration, as presented at the outset of the poem, effects
another contextual rupture/suture, for his "demonstrative" credo
echoes and transforms the text of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness.
We can see the relevance of this allusion easily by focusing upon the
function of citation (as a contextual rupture which calls for a
determinacy that can only be given tropologically) itself in the New
Testament text.7
When Jesus is offered the option of satisfying his hunger by
turning stones into bread, he answers Satan: "It is written, Man shall
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God" (Matt. 4.4). Unlike Albion, who organizes the world
around himself, motivated by "jealou

of available contexts for producing meaning, Jesus refuses to assert
the priority of his self (his hunger) as motivation or origin. Jesus will
not produce a univocal, tyrannical relationship between word and
thing, between self and world. The life of the self that asserts
referentiality as the only principle of language is no life at all.
Instead, Jesus performs the transformation of stone into bread
through a trope, referring to "bread" that does not exist in the world
before him except in potentia, in his power to transfigure the stones.
Bread and stones are equivalent in their inability to satisfy and in
their availability for rhetorical transfiguration, metaphorically
identical in Jesus' discourse that posits another principle by which
meaning emerges-"every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God."
Jesus' reference to the Mosaic text seems to suggest God as the
definitive context for meaningful language/existence. Satan's second
temptation makes it clear that he, at least, interprets Jesus' allusion
as privileging a hermeneutic view of language, as an attempt to
provide a unique origin that governs meaning: the Word of God as
"it is written" in Scripture, Satan reasons, must have the same
meaning and power, no matter what the scriptural context. Scripture,
therefore, is to be read univocally rather than figuratively. This
encourages Satan to quote another text from Scripture as his
authority for tempting Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of
the temple. In so doing, Satan displaces Jesus, moving him from
wilderness to city, providing a new context for his actions. Jesus,
however, follows this rhetorical strategy and performs the same
contextual displacement in the scriptural text itself, citing a counter
text and thereby undermining the univocity of Scripture and
opening up a gap between God's word as origin and God's word as
intention, emphasizing the rhetorical rather than the hermeneutical
foundation of interpretation.
For Jesus, Scripture is not a univocal text that can be applied, or
referred to, with the same result in every situation or context. Instead,
he sees it as a collection of tropological maneuvers which allow
referentiality to appear as an effect. Jesus' troping does not privilege
referentiality, but it does produce a designation of the tempter as
"Satan." The name-which we are accustomed to think of as
denotative-appears out of a tropological moment in the text (which
has its representation in the action Jesus proposes, the "turn": "Get
thee behind me"-Luke 4.8). Furthermore, the entire process by
which names emerge from tropological gestures that efface themselves
in a simulation of grounded referentiality appears in this text as a
500 B LBA K E READS T HE B A R D"
re-contextualization of its predecessor text, Deuteronomy 8.3.

In the predecessor text, Moses chastises the Israelites for com-
plaining of hunger when they are receiving the Law. Moses explains
that God sent manna in place of bread-an entirely new creation, a
substitution they had never conceived before-in order to make them
familiar with the tropes by which meaning emerges: "And he
humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna,
which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might
make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live."
The literal manna, therefore, stands in for bread, but it also figures
what it literally is not, the Word of God. Moses' text sets up a
dominating referential principle-the Word of God-that governs
the meaning of every thing in the world. Yet that principle appears
in a figurative moment in the text. Thus, when Moses produces the
commandments, the "Moral Law" that Albion holds so dear and
Blake despises, he is binding language into its referential function by
means of figuration.
Here we are faced with a complex intertextual relationship that
speaks to the issue of authorizing interpretation by reference to a
"stable" referential system or an intentional act. We can say that
Albion, unlike Moses and Jesus, displaces the Word of God with his
own intentionality, but that in order to achieve this position of
centrality he must at the same time rely upon the primacy of those
predecessor texts and their rhetorical strategies. I believe that Blake
does not criticize Albion on the grounds of impiety but rather
provides the reader with an opportunity to see that the illusion of
referentiality is created rhetorically. Blake uses these allusions to
criticize our reliance upon any determinate grounding for meaning,
whether divine or natural, while demonstrating the function of
context in the creation of meaning. For example, in his effort to
make himself the origin of all texts, the guarantor of language,
Albion must resort to the secondary nature of his self-naming-its
figurative constitution-which always returns to haunt him as a
"simulative phantom." In a precise contrary to Albion's gesture, the
"naming" of the emanations of "All Human Forms" as Jerusalem is
a kind of liberating un-naming, since it undermines the denotative
function of proper names that isolate individuals.
In any event, the act of reading the text itself requires that we
become authors who do not stand in an "originary" position
vis-a-vis their own texts because the texts are always constructed out
of the rupturing/suturing of other texts/contexts. Ricoeur comments
that "by any supposition reading is a linking together of a new
MOLLY ROTHENBERG5 501
discourse to the discourse of the text" (p. 14

for Blake, the meaningfulness of this lin
emerge solely by recourse to the intention
"natural" sign but rather by the rhetorical
and the tropological play that shifts us from
categorical oppositions.
Blake struggles against our need for determinacy, but he does not
deny the need. The figurative and the denotative are interdependent;
where one creates a sense of giddiness at the infinite plenum of
meaning available, the other halts the glissade into meaninglessness
that lingers on the dark side of linguistic polyvalence. Yet Blake
finally seems more concerned that our fears of indeterminacy will
goad us to produce increasingly constricted visions of reality. In
particular, he forces us to confront our tendency to mistake our time-
and culture-bound interpretive groundings, the limits on language
we impose by positing the equivalence of origin and aim, for eternal
truth. The institutionalization of interpretation is a striking case
among many to be found in our everyday perception of the world, of
our willingness to sacrifice creativity and liberty for security, since
any interpretation will only seem inevitable within a given context.
Blake shows us that the tropological strategies of contextual
displacement are necessary to undermine the tyranny of that seeming
inexorability. In so doing, he displaces himself as the determinant of
the text. Readers who follow his example will find in Jerusalem the
tools for breaking their own "mind-forg'd manacles."
NOTES
'The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdma
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), pp. 145-46. All subsequent Bla
quotations are taken from this edition and will be cited in the standard way
plate number and by page number preceded by the letter "E".
2A third possible "origin" emerges in the address, when Blake exhorts
reader to "[forgive] what you do not approve, & [love] me for this energ
exertion of my talent" (Plate 3, E145). Although the bracketed words a
conjectural readings, they accord with a prior statement that the author ho
the "Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord, [whose] Spirit i
continual forgiveness of Sin." In identifying the reader with Jesus, the origi
the coherence of the poem may be found in the reader's unifying (bec
forgiving and loving) conception of the work. This possibility only strengt
the argument I make subsequently.
3Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context" in Margins of Philosophy,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 186.
4Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 159.
5David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-symbolic Language and Philosophical

Anthropology, A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 148-49, "What is a Text?"
6Thomas Gray, "The Bard," in The Complete English Poems of Thomas
Gray, ed. James Reeves (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 77-82, lines 23-28.
All subsequent references to "The Bard" are from this edition.
7All biblical references are from the King James version. My readers no doubt
see that the tracing of citations and allusions can have no end. All writing is
already a "citation." At this juncture, I am concerned with the way in which the
citation in the text functions as a sign of intertextuality, rather than simply
meaning the content (enonce) of the quotation itself. Antoine Compagnon, in
La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), has
described the citation as "un operateur trivial d'intertextualite" (p. 44). We are
not so much interested in the material contained in the citation, since "elle n'a
pas de sens hors de la force qui l'agit, qui la saisit, l'exploite et l'incorpore"
(p. 38). This force, seizure, incorporation are all part of the contextual rupturing/
suturing that produces meaning. The citation, then, is the paradigmatic case-
or the most trivial case, the most obvious case-of reading as contextual
displacement. It is clear that in the act of citing, the subject of the enunciation
becomes displaced, with the result that writing viewed as citational appears
without recourse to one single, originating intention. Compagnon says "en un
sens, il n'y a de sujet de la citation qu'en regime democratique de l'ecriture"
(p. 39). This democratizing effect accords well with the liberating aims of the
Blakean text.

Rice University Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Rice University Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rice University Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Rice University

Blake Reads "The Bard": Contextual Displacement and Conditions of Readability in

Blake Reads "The Bard": Contextual

The reader who seeks to unlock Jerusalem must devise a reading

When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a

The "dictated" poem and the poem constructed syllable by syllable

Molly Ann Rothenberg is Assistant Professor of English at Beloit College and

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth 8c Stone.

Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours

This conclusion suggests that Jerusalem may be the composer of the

Contextual Rupture and Readability

the necessity for and the artificial and

These contextual shifts bring shifts in consciousness an

There has never been anything but writing; there have

In the final plates of Jerusalem, the contextual rupturing that founds

Each "awakening" makes language possible-this is the moment

Re-Citing "The Bard"/Re-Visioning the World

move us from Albion's death-like trance to his four-fold, Eternal

Albion cold lays on his Rock . . .

And England who is Brittannia awoke.

This account represents its own lack of narrative causality by

'Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave,

'Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,

'Far, far aloof th'affrighted ravens sail;

Man the enemy of man into deceitful friendsh

reminds the reader of this recourse to rhetoricity by the word

'Fond impious man, think'st thou yon sanguine cloud,

Albion rose in anger: the wrath of god breaking bright

Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds

the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder

So Albion spoke & threw himself into the Furnaces of

Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds

around himself, motivated by "jealou

re-contextualization of its predecessor text, Deuteronomy 8.3.

discourse to the discourse of the text" (p. 14

3Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context" in Margins of Philosophy,

5David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-symbolic Language and Philosophical

You might also like