English, 2018, vol. 67 no. 259, pp.

301–320
doi: 10.1093/english/efy043

ENCHAINED DIVISION:

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

BLAKE’S ORC, DIALECTICAL
SACRIFICE, AND THE
REVOLUTIONARY’S PATH OF
RESISTANCE
Zachary Tavlin*

Abstract
In this essay, I read the birth, binding, and degeneration of Orc in Nights
V–VII of The Four Zoas alongside other occasions of Orc’s births, including
in America and The Book of Urizen, in order to argue that Orc – rather than
simply the doomed figure of Frye’s ‘Orc cycle’, or the inevitable transform-
ation of the revolutionary into the tyrant – is Blake’s figure for the contin-
gent failures of dialectical thinking about history. To that end I reconsider,
as an informative theoretical field surrounding Blake’s longer poems, the
structure of Hegel’s dialectical sacrifice and Georges Bataille’s critique of its
implications for subjective sovereignty. By contrasting the logics of sacrifice
in Hegel and Bataille, which centre around the significance of the dialectics
of loss and gain, I find in Blake’s births and falls of Orc a compelling repre-
sentation of the revolutionary figure who runs into the same deadlocks –
articulated on a psychological-epistemological level – facing the Hegelian
revolutionary subject.

Northrop Frye’s famous account of the ‘Orc cycle’ in the work of William
Blake (introduced in his seminal Fearful Symmetry [1947]), where the revolu-
tionary Orc overthrows the tyrant Urizen only to become a tyrant himself,
can be located in a number of forms throughout Blake’s oeuvre, although
not only in the poems where Orc appears. ‘The Grey Monk’, a short poem
from The Pickering Manuscript (1801–03), ends when the ‘iron hand’ of the
title figure ‘crushd the Tyrants head / And became a Tyrant in his stead’.1 In
The Book of Ahania (1795), an Orc-like Fuzon rebels against his father,

* Correspondence to Zachary Tavlin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

1
William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. by David V. Erdman
(New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 490. Henceforward, page references to this
volume are given parenthetically in the text.
# The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English
Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
302 ZACHARY TAVLIN
Urizen. After his attack on the tyrant, Fuzon declares himself God and con-
tributes to the springing up of the dreaded Tree of Mystery, an object of op-
pression throughout Blake’s work, when his father responds to the threat by
binding him. This rough pattern – rebellion, binding, symbolic crucifixion

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

on the tree of natural religion – is regularly repeated with Orc, both in
Blake’s shorter and longer poems.
This regularity, as Christopher Z. Hobson has argued in The Chained Boy,
is evidence of the social vocation – rather than the oft-assumed mystical vo-
cation – of Blake’s poetry. Hobson’s impressive project is the most extensive
Orc-centric reading of Blake’s oeuvre, and by tracing the figure’s appearances
throughout that corpus he challenges Frye’s monolithic system with a rigor-
ously socio-political alternative. I follow Hobson in one large respect (and
deviate from his approach in another, which I will mention shortly): I do not
presume that the Orc cycle is ever actually completed. Rather, it is precisely
its structural incompleteness, one I associate with sacrifice, that interests me
as one way to understand Blake’s Orc figure as ‘the energy that is bound’ by
various forms of social repression.2 This essay focuses on the birth, binding,
and degeneration of Orc in Nights V–VII of The Four Zoas (1797–1807)
alongside other occasions of Orc’s births, including in America: A Prophecy
(1793) and The Book of Urizen (1794). Rather than reasserting the presence of
a young revolutionary who grows into a tyrant, I will argue that Orc divides
continually as an exemplar of a Hegelian dialectical mise en abyme. Revealed
finally as the fallen Zoa Luvah, Orc’s own fall occurs as the result of his bind-
ing at the hand of his father, Los, and is completed with his ambiguous sacri-
fice to Urizenic religion. This capitulation and incorporation of a powerful
revolutionary energy is not quite representative of the reign of a new tyrant.
Instead, the betrayal of Orc’s opposition is the end result of the dialectical
divisions of binding and unbinding that infiltrate and dominate his self-
identity. Orc is not a figure for the inevitable failure of the revolutionary but
rather a figure for the contingent failures of dialectical thinking about history.
Frye makes of the Orc cycle an abstract, cyclical narrative pattern that
could be repeated ad infinitum and never lose a bit of its structural truth: ‘Orc
can be at the same time a St. George, a Prometheus, a Moses (in Egypt, not
in the wilderness), and an Adonis; a dragon-slayer, a bound Titan, an initiator
of a new human culture, and a dying god. . . . The Orc cycle has now
expanded into the entire process of life and death which goes on in our
world’.3 Like in the progress of some Hegelian world spirit, the concept takes

2
Christopher Z. Hobson, The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1999), p. 53.
3
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1947), pp. 225, 234.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 303
over. I contend that Frye’s schema, as helpful as it has been for our under-
standing of systematic archetypes and modes of repetition in Blake, too clear-
ly projects a state of rest towards which the cycle tends, if not in the ceasing
of the process then in the eternal round of the unmovable plan. The regular-

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

ity of the dialectical cycle turns into a wheel that, even while moving rapidly,
appears to be stationary with its spokes ablur. Steven Shaviro recognizes anti-
dialectics as the poet’s general principle when he writes, ‘Blake’s system of
Contraries is generated by a movement which is endlessly contradictory, in-
admissible by the standards not only of formal logic but also of Hegelian dia-
lectical logic.’4 That is, Blakean contraries are neither logical negations nor
prone to synthesis at a higher level of abstraction. The emphasis is on infinity
and restlessness, and any systematic politics to be found in Blake must accom-
modate opposition without rest. Moreover, as contemporary Blake critics
turn to new domains of reading – an exemplary case being Steven
Goldsmith’s use of affect theory in his recent Blake’s Agitation – the assump-
tion that Blake ‘disqualifies revolution’ throughout his corpus is given new
critical life. ‘If a revolution claims to embody true principles of justice and
thus to fulfill history’, Goldsmith says on behalf of Blake, ‘it puts an end to
conversation and shuts down historical dynamism’.5
Nevertheless, sentiments like this are shot through with affective economies
of sacrifice, even as explicit commentary on the revolutionary figure and its
place in the formal structure of the prophetic works is pushed to the margins of
Blake scholarship. Goldsmith’s theory of agitation – in which ecstatic ‘self-anni-
hilation’ is seen as the ‘primary aim of his late prophecies’, modelled ‘on the self-
sacrificing Passion of Jesus’ – does not disqualify as illegitimate all consideration
of Orc as a sympathetic figure operating at the nexus of continual revolutionary
failures, even as it seems to disqualify old leftist readings of Blake as a revolution-
ary poet (Goldsmith begins by asking, ‘is our enthusiasm for Blake to be
trusted?’).6 I hope to show that Blake’s politics do not live or die on the question
of the end of history. This recent critical turn suggests, rather, that instead of
focusing primarily on the Blake–Marx axis (as Hobson has done by calling
Marxism ‘Blake’s most fruitful contextualization’ even as he distinguishes Blake’s
work from that tradition’s ‘univocal’ character), we might be better off moving
in another direction: to that end I reconsider, as an informative theoretical field
surrounding Blake’s longer poems, the structure of Hegel’s dialectical sacrifice

4
Steven Shaviro, ‘“Striving with Systems”: Blake and the Politics of Difference’, Boundary 2
10.3 (1982), 229–50 (p. 234).
5
Steven Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation: Criticism & the Emotions (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 343.
6
Ibid., pp. 18, 1.
304 ZACHARY TAVLIN
(of the Hegelian Christology and historical process of sublation) and Georges
Bataille’s critique of its implications for subjective sovereignty.7
By contrasting these sacrificial logics, which centre around the significance
of the dialectics of loss and gain, I hope to find in Blake’s births and falls of

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Orc a compelling representation of the revolutionary figure that nonetheless
runs into the same deadlocks – articulated on a psychological-epistemological
level – that the Hegelian revolutionary subject does (from the perspective of
Bataille’s critique). By considering Bataille’s critique of Hegel in its family re-
semblance to Blake’s ‘eccentric idea of dialectic’, as Lorraine Clark puts it in
her study of Blake and Kierkegaard, I will foreground the sacrificial logic of
the figure of ‘the chained boy’ as a conceptual critique of dialectical history, a
critique apparent as such from the retrospective vantage of Bataille’s commen-
tary.8 I will relate my reading to one clear example of Blake’s historical and
political vision, Orc’s role as the rebel in America, where the possibilities of a
transformational politics are still ripe (if precarious). There the epistemological
enclosures that elsewhere doom Orc to eventual servitude open up to possible
infinitudes and disinterested sacrifice, and revolutionary passion merges with
imaginative capability in a moment of the Orc cycle that may not inevitably
fall and divide once again into further catastrophe and terror. Moreover, I
claim that, at the height of Orc’s binding sequences in Nights V–VIIa of The
Four Zoas, we glimpse a critique of historical dialectics that anticipates
Bataille’s inversion of Hegelian-Christian martyrdom, and which suggests by
negation a properly Blakean notion of sacrifice that refuses to be grist for any
revolutionary mill, preferring the fate of splendid waste to a spiritually sublated
body. Such is, at least, the unactualized utopic impulse repeated throughout
Blake’s work in the births of Orc, where Jerusalem flashes into the poem mo-
mentarily, through the sheer incommensurability of the event.
Much political upheaval and subsequent repression occurred between
Blake’s writing of America in 1793 and The Four Zoas from 1797 to 1800. Many
scholars have traced the changes in Blake’s thinking and practice over these
years, when nobody in Western Europe could escape the ripples of France’s
Terreur and the fall of Robespierre. Although I will not recapitulate this history
in what follows, it is important to note that, in the proportion that Blake is
treated as a Romantic in his later phase, he tends to be considered a liberal
democrat rather than a genuinely revolutionary poet (reinforced in literary
criticism, of course, by Frye’s ‘Orc cycle’). Competing scholarship sometimes
keeps Blake revolutionary by focusing on earlier poems such as ‘America’, as
in Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, which

7
Hobson, p. 310.
8
Lorraine Clark, Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 2.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 305
positions Blake outside of mainstream Enlightenment thought, arguing that he
was ‘unwilling to accept the hegemonic radical notion that the individual
could have ontological priority outside human history and could hence be
taken for granted as the transcendental and transhistorical basis for liberty’.9

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Nicholas Williams organizes the development of Blake’s thought by sepa-
rating his career into (earlier) cases of referential history and (later) prophecies
turned inwards, the trajectory of his utopian thought magnetized around the
‘realization that, if there really is no place from which to critique ideology,
the ideology critic must position him/herself in the ‘nowhere’ of utopia’.10
Nevertheless, by showing how the figure of Orc links Blake’s politics of his-
tory in texts that cross the post-Revolutionary period, I hope to set up a dia-
logue between the poet and belated thinkers while remaining faithful to
those elements in Blake which, historically mediated as they certainly are,
hold on to an as-yet-unattained utopian ‘understanding of freedom, the free-
dom offered by our being in common . . . always becoming anew, tracing
and retracing different trajectories of actualization, existing in and as and
through striving’, against but not wholly subordinated to our cold masters.11

Orc’s ‘Infernal Fibres’

Orc’s birth in Night V of The Four Zoas is an example of primal energy in
proximity to its source, a wild freedom that springs paradoxically out of the
cold winter and ‘the caves of deepest night’. Los has stonified and left his
anvil cold, ineffectually swinging the hammer of Urthona and creating noth-
ing; Enitharmon, also stranded in the windy freeze, creates Orc:

The winds around on pointed rocks

Settled like bats innumerable ready to fly abroad
The groans of Enitharmon shake the skies labring Earth
Till from her heart rending his way a terrible Child sprang forth
In thunder smoke & sullen flames & howlings & fury & blood. (p. 339)

Here, Orc is generated directly from the heart of the Emanation. He appears
bloody, in smoke and fire, a thoroughly ambivalent sight both horrible and
suitably unbounded as a child of the heart. These moments in Blake’s verse
are captured, if they can ever be quite captured, by Morton Paley’s analysis of

9
Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 11.
10
Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 26.
11
Makdisi, p. 320.
306 ZACHARY TAVLIN
(libidinal and political) liberatory energy ‘erotic in origin’ and ‘revolutionary
in expression’.12 There is nothing more antithetical to the state and environ-
ment of Los than the appearance of Orc, red instead of black, giving off a
heat that would melt the icy boundaries Los has capitulated to and giving off

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

more light even than the Prince of Light, Urizen, who is here ‘bound in
chains of intellect among the furnaces’ (p. 339).
In the ‘Preludium’ to America, one finds Orc ‘red’ once again, confronted
by the Daughter of Urthona, fed ‘food she brought in iron baskets, his drink
in cups of iron’ (p. 51). In both passages, his appearance is contrasted with the
cold and dark of fallen nature and here also with the ‘shadowy’ Daughter.
Orc is either a fiery spark or bloody abject, both the energy that generates a
revolutionary consciousness and an unwelcome stain (from the perspective of
the negativity of Urizenic death) on the surrounding darkness. Already born
and thrust into imprisonment and boundedness (as he will find himself again
and again), Orc’s condition of fire has not yet ceased. That is, blood and fire
is not here merely placenta but a Promethean light, albeit one possibly
doomed already to cyclical generation and decay: the ‘fourteen suns’ that
‘faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode’ indicate a particular position in a solar
cycle, and a fire that, perhaps, eventually has to set (p. 51).
Still, the births of Orc seem to represent a frontal assault on that natural
cycle. Flaming and bloody, his spirit soars on high despite being materially
enchained (later in The Four Zoas, by Los immediately after his birth):

Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion,

Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash
The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding
Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,
On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds. (p. 51)

Avatars of rebellion, Orc’s forms, screaming and stalking and lashing against
the ‘fathomless abyss’, struggle to merge voice and passion with the wasteland
of Urizenic nature. In Night V, Los binds Orc (this ‘terrible child’) to a
mountaintop with chains of jealousy, and Orc strengthens amidst his chains,
his wild voice waking Urizen himself from his slumber. Orc’s voice, his pas-
sion, is an immediate threat to Urizenic order, and Urizen vows to ‘find that
deep pulsation that shakes [his] cavern with strong shudders’ (p. 344).
What we then find in The Four Zoas is a clear correspondence between
Orc and the Zoa Luvah – associated with emotion, passion, and

12
Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 10.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 307
etymologically, love – which provides a fuller narrative of Orc as a fallen
rebel. But, the question, for anyone trying to categorize the failure of Orc’s
revolution (or the structural failure of the ‘Orc cycle’), is the following: of
what exactly does Orc’s fall consist? The motivation behind this question is

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

that, perhaps, it is not merely Luvah who falls (into Orc) but Orc himself
from one state of division to another. The further question, then, is how does
his eventual failure relate to his stunning birth and consequent binding? Orc’s
birth in Night V contains a heroic (and truly prolific) resonance that is then
modulated and diminished by external circumstances and internal ambiguities.
In the Christian tradition, the paradoxical union of the external and in-
ternal – of the material world and the pristine dominion of the soul – occurs
in the body of Christ. Hegel’s Christology, developed throughout his corpus
but most prominently in his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821–31),
functions as an exemplary case of substance’s split (the Hegelian notion that
all seeming self-identity actually contains self-contradiction) and the way this
split produces the subject through an element of productive sacrifice. In
Christianity, one’s alienation from God is precisely historical spirit’s manifest-
ation of the alienation of God from himself. According to Hegel,

Christ says, ‘Be ye perfect, as My Father in heaven is perfect.’ This lofty demand
is to the wisdom of our time an empty sound. It has made of God an infinite
phantom, which is far from us, and in like manner has made human knowledge
a futile phantom of finiteness, or a mirror upon which fall only shadows, only
phenomena. How, then, are we any longer to respect the commandment, and
grasp its meaning . . . since we know nothing of the Perfect One, and since our
knowing and willing are confined solely and entirely to appearance, and the
truth is to be and to remain absolutely and exclusively beyond the present?13

The answer, paraphrased eloquently by Slavoj Z  izek, is that ‘our re-

presentation of God is God himself in the mode of representation, that our
erroneous perception of God is God himself in erroneous mode’, a radical
sublation of epistemological failure by ontological incompleteness:

If we can think our knowledge of reality (the way reality appears to us) as hav-
ing radically failed, as radically different from the Absolute, then this gap (between
For-us and In-itself) must be part of the Absolute itself (emphasis in original), so that

13
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 3 vols., ed. by E. B.
Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1895),
Vol. 1, p. 36.
308 ZACHARY TAVLIN
the very feature that seemed forever to keep us away from the Absolute is the
only feature which directly unites us with the Absolute.14

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Hegel is quite clear about the concretely historical nature of this divine
movement, ‘the history of Jesus Christ’ which is not to be ‘taken merely as a
myth in a figurative way, but as something perfectly historical’.15 This gap in
the Absolute is the prime mover of the dialectic, and is clearly operative in
the Christian experience, where the God-substance is separated from itself in
the figure of Christ: ‘the point is thus not to “overcome” the gap which sepa-
rates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God himself –
only when I experience the infinite pain of separation from God do I share
an experience with God himself (Christ on the Cross)’.16
Orc’s sacrifices isolate, within the structure of Blake’s long poems, the
same sort of paradox that Hegel’s Christology celebrates, whereby the revo-
lutionary subject’s striving connects him with an eternal principle shot
through with contradiction. In the outcomes of his poetry’s dialectical move-
ments, Blake is closer to Nietzsche than Hegel, particularly to Nietzsche’s
pessimistic recognition (in On the Genealogy of Morals [1887]) of the paradox-
ical relation between sacrifice, guilt, and debt:

God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of mankind, God himself makes
payment to himself, God as the only being who can redeem man from what
has become unredeemable for man himself – the creditor sacrifices himself for
his debtor, out of love (can one credit that?), out of love for his debtor!17

For Nietzsche, in the context of the development of Christianity apart from

Hegel’s dialectics, God’s sacrifice through Christ leads eventually to a new,
eternal debt and the particular self-flagellating sickness of mankind he calls
the ‘ascetic ideal’, ‘a madness of the will which is absolutely unexampled’:

[The] will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can
never be atoned for; his will to think himself punished without any possibility
of punishment becoming equal to the guilt; his will to infect and poison the

14  izek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Brooklyn,
Slavoj Z
NY: Verso, 2012), pp. 612, 636.
15
Hegel, 1, p. 146.
16  izek, p. 636.
Z
17
Friedrich Nietzche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. by Walter Kaufmann;
trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989),
p. 92.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 309
fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt . . .
his will to erect an ideal – that of the ‘holy God’ – and in the face of it to feel
the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness . . . . Here is sickness,
beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man; and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

whoever can still bear to hear . . . how in this night of torment and absurdity
there has resounded the cry of love, the cry of the most nostalgic rapture, of re-
demption through love, will turn away, seized by invincible horror.18

The same sort of self-flagellating repetition of dialectical sacrifice within the

soul of the believer that Nietzsche traces back to the crucifixion is played out
by Blake in his poetry’s compulsive repetition of Orc’s eternal debt, material-
ized in his replayed binding at the hand of Los. Paolo Diego Bubbio distin-
guishes between ‘suppressive and kenotic sacrifice’ in Hegel, each of which is
potentially subject forming: whereas the former leads to the guilty conscience
of Nietzsche’s diagnosis and the firm separation between self and other
(premised as it is upon a creditor–debtor relation), the latter is a ‘withdrawal’
that makes room for the position of the other, ‘which is also liberation from
one’s perspective to embrace other perspectives’.19 In Blake’s epics, the possi-
bility of a kenotic sacrifice of one’s own selfhood is constantly glimpsed in
lyrical form, standing as a regulative possibility for action even as suppressive
compulsions win out in the narratives of Orc’s subject formation.
The lyrical power of kenotic sacrifice, as well as the violent disturbance it
causes in its surrounding field, is most obvious in Orc’s births. In The Book of
Urizen, ‘Howling, the Child with fierce flames / Issu’d from Enitharmon’
(p. 79). Prior to this birth, the child is described in Enitharmon’s womb as a
serpent ‘casting its scales’; the birth itself, as a ‘shriek [runs] thro’ Eternity’, is
a movement into a higher form of being (p. 79). This excess of energy is too
much for the Eternals, who ‘closed the tent / They beat down the stakes the
cords / Stretch’d for a work of eternity; / No more Los beheld Eternity’
(pp. 79–80). Frightening and incomprehensible, the child Orc leads the
Eternals to close their tent (and thus eternity itself) to Los, Orc’s father. The
disruption Orc’s birth causes from the perspective of the Eternals is mirrored
on the level of the family (in Jerusalem [1804–20], Blake will say that ‘A man’s
worst enemies are those / Of his own house & family’ [p. 173]). Los’s jeal-
ousy towards his son, either or both owing to the eternal price of Orc’s birth
for Los or because of an Oedipal arrangement between the child and his
Emanation (Orc ‘grew / Fed with the milk of Enitharmon’), manifests itself
in a ‘tight’ning girdle [that] grew, / Around his bosom’ (p. 80). Continually

18
Ibid., p. 93.
19
Paolo Diego Bubbio, Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and
Recognition (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014), p. 76.
310 ZACHARY TAVLIN
broken by Los as they form around him again and again, the girdles fall and
form an ‘iron Chain’. With this material, the Chain of Jealousy, Los binds
Orc’s ‘young limbs’ to a rock at the top of a mountain.
This sequence is repeated in Night V. The context for Los’s binding of

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Orc here is the mad dance of Los that opens the section: ‘Infected, Mad, he
danc’d on his mountains high & dark as heaven / Now fixd into one stedfast
bulk his features stonify / From his mouth curses & from his eyes sparks of
blighting / Beside the anvil cold he dancd with the hammer of Urthona’
(p. 338). Swinging his hammer vainly, since his anvil has been left cold, Los
dances into confinement and contraction. There is a self-afflicted binding al-
ready in this passage as Los and Enitharmon freeze and stonify their creative
potential withering like plants in the winter (the latter ‘Felt her immortal
limbs freeze stiffning pale inflexible’, the former’s ‘feet shrink withring from
the deep shrinking & withring’ [p. 339]). There is a loss of (imaginative) po-
tential here that mirrors the subsequent fall of revolutionary energy.
There may be a sense, although, that Orc’s birth in Night V is a breaking
of the chain of natural contraction: Orc’s ‘thunder smoke & sullen flames &
howlings & fury & blood’ is contrasted with, earlier in the stanza, ‘the caves
of deepest night’ and an imagery of winter that mirrors the dismal cold of Los
and Enitharmon’s state (p. 339). As in America and Urizen, Orc’s own fiery
state is transferred into an Oedipal embrace of the mother, who ‘nursed her
fiery child in the dark deeps’ (p. 340). Energy and a condition of fiery passion
are maintained in this relationship, which Los cannot abide: ‘over her Los
mourned in anguish fierce / Coverd with gloom’ (p. 340). The cycle of gir-
dles, or chains of jealousy, repeats itself almost exactly as it occurred in
The Book of Urizen. Finally, Los

seizd the boy in his immortal hands

While Enitharmon followd him weeping in dismal woe
Up to the iron mountains top & there the Jealous chain
Fell from his bosom on the mountain. The Spectre dark
Held the fierce boy Los naild him down binding around his limbs
The accursed chain O how bright Enitharmon howld & cried
Over her son. (p. 341)

It seems clear that Orc, even bound on the mountain by his father, has not
yet divided and fallen, for there is an aspect of his soul that has not been con-
strained, his limbs still ‘immortal’, his howling a transgression against the
reign of terror that is jealousy and fear of hellish life and energy.
Here, it is not that Orc is initially naturalized into a condition of jealousy.
Instead, it is Los’s chain that is naturalized, whose ‘strong Fibres’ had ‘inwove
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 311
themselves / In a swift vegetation round the rock & round the Cave / And
over the immortal limbs of the terrible fiery boy / In vain they strove now to
unchain’ (p. 342). As a secondary transformation, Orc’s limbs become one
with the ‘infernal’ Fibres, ‘a living Chain sustained by the Demon’s life’

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

(p. 342). Orc’s binding is also a binding into a state of eternal recurrence and
the cycle of generation and corruption. The Chain of Jealousy, now fully a
part of Orc, cannot be removed but will, in the succeeding Nights, grow
into the Tree of Mystery that perverts – at the hands not of Los but of Urizen
– Orc’s rebellion into natural religion, a materialist and rationalistic deism
often associated by Blake with modern Druidism. It is, then, on this reading,
jealousy that begins (what Frye called) the Orc cycle, not Orc’s primal revolu-
tionary energy itself (that contains the seeds of its own negation).
The cycle appears to begin at this point in a number of places. In Night V
and in The Book of Urizen, Orc’s howls wake Urizen from his slumber:
Urizen arises to explore his dens to ‘find that deep pulsation / That shakes
[his] caverns with strong shudders’ (p. 344). If Orc represents negativity here,
it is only in relation to Urizenic Reason. What I want to suggest is that an
over reliance on the machinery (and internal logic) of Frye’s Orc cycle can
skew a reader’s perception of Orc’s own role in the process. What we actual-
ly see in looking at these passages (above and in what follows) is not an Orc
growing old – and thus eventually into Urizen like the common view of the
revolutionary who matures into conservatism and state power – but an Orc
dividing against his will.
This division is marked throughout by a dualism in imagery. Orc’s condi-
tion of fire marks his character as Promethean, expansive, and infinite. He is
not only born enflamed but also his ‘nostrils breathe a fiery flame’, ‘his locks
are like the forests / Of wild beasts’, and his ‘bosom is like starry heaven
expanded all the stars’ (p. 341). Linked to the animals (lions, tigers, wolves)
that often stand for both creative and destructive energy, Orc’s senses are
often also described as infinite and unfallen, more poetic than Los at this stage
of the Zoas and the only perceived threat to Urizen’s reign. However, when
Orc reveals his true identity (the fallen Luvah) in Night VIIa, he begins to
take on the body of a serpent:

I well remember how I stole thy light & it became fire

Consuming. Thou Knowst me now O Urizen Prince of Light
And I know thee is this the triumph this the Godlike State
That lies beyond the bounds of Science in the Grey obscure
Terrified Urizen heard Orc now certain that he was Luvah
And Orc began to Organize a Serpent body. (p. 356)
312 ZACHARY TAVLIN
Revealed as Promethean, Orc’s division and final capitulation to Urizen is
sealed with his transformation into a serpent, where he is compelled (his revolu-
tionary will incorporated and matched by Urizen) to ‘stretch up & out the mys-
terious tree’. Urizen ‘sufferd him to Climb that he might draw all human forms

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

/ Into submission to his will nor knew the dread result’ (p. 356). His revolution
sacrificed and incorporated into Urizen’s religion of death, and foundering as a
serpent like Milton’s Satan, Orc falls here as a result of his curse of Urizen’s
‘Cold hypocrisy’. It is not a capitulation to Urizen’s cold state of self-regard and
error that is represented here but an inevitable incorporation of the rebel-
against-nature into the status of the martyr for natural religion, an inevitable
waning of Orc’s primal energy against his will, which is the end result of the
(dialectical) binding and unbinding that comes to dominate Orc’s psyche.

Of wrath and revolutionary splendor

Bataille, in ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, follows Alexandre Kojève in his
claim that Hegel’s philosophy is a ‘philosophy of death’ wherein ‘man’s
negativity, given in death by virtue of the fact that man’s death is essentially
voluntary (resulting from risks assumed without necessity, without biological
reasons), is nevertheless a principle of action’.20 And like Kojève, Bataille
relies heavily on the significance of the master-slave dialectic as presented in
the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Like the figure of the slave, it is the strug-
gle for dialectical transformation that produces consciousness, which is pri-
marily consciousness (through the ‘negation of Nature’) of one’s own
death.21 According to Bataille, since death is postponed for human con-
sciousness until annihilation, the only way to deal with the negativity at the
core of one’s consciousness is through a form of sacrifice that overcomes the
dialectical mediation of the negatives in an experience that is nearly direct, a
sovereign act of transformation in which the sacrificer can experience death
through an identification with the actual victim: ‘at all costs, man must live
at the moment he really dies, or he must live with the impression of really
dying’.22
While Hegel understood the significance of negativity, which structured
the activity of consciousness, according to Bataille, his dialectic always
domesticated negativity by putting it to work, as Bubbio notes:

Hegel has the merit of having identified in the sacrificial dialectic the funda-
mental strategy to dealing with the negative. However, Hegel has forgotten

20
Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 9–28 (p. 10).
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., p. 20.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 313
that the death or annihilation that happens in sacrifice is a representation – it is
not my death. By doing so, Bataille claims, Hegel made that death somehow
‘livable’ and integrated it into a system whose ultimate goal is wisdom – by
doing so, he has removed its power.23

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Like Nietzsche, Bataille elsewhere relates Hegel’s domesticated sacrifice to a
form of cultural politics that seeks to maintain itself through hidden hierar-
chies, economies, and homogeneities (by always turning loss into recupera-
tive gain) rather than wasting or destroying itself in acts of pure autonomy
and sovereignty.
David Punter has found similar critical inclinations towards proto-
dialectical sacrifice in Blake’s poetry, although he recognizes Blake as a dia-
lectical thinker: ‘for him the part and the whole cease to be separate, and fuse
in moments when each individual object becomes irradiated with a sense of
totality’.24 But Blake’s attitude towards work and labour complicates the
Hegelian notion that labour is ‘desire restrained and checked, evanescence
delayed and postponed’.25 Often, Blake’s depiction of ‘false reconciliations’
and profane sacrifices comes in the character of Urizen, who attempts ‘to
show that mere productivity as such [is] an absolute good, [which] in practice
[ignores] the relation of labour to the quality of life’.26
Now, as has already been generally noted, according to Frye, Blake’s ‘Orc
cycle’ involves a demonstration of the revolutionary figure’s role as a rational
successor to the tyrant insofar as he completes the transition from slave to
master by occupying a political space wherein the internal contradictions of
the master’s position have been (temporarily) removed:

Following out the conception of Orc, therefore, we go around the cycle

which that conception itself traces, from a revolutionary millennial optimism
to a cyclic Spenglerian pessimism . . . [as] we find out more about Orc, he
seems to take on an increasing resemblance to Milton’s Satan, who also begins
as a Promethean rebel and ends as a banished and execrated serpent.27

Oddly enough, however, Frye’s explanation of the mechanics of this trans-

formation – which involves a series of intricate (dialectical) negations in
which ‘[life] in this world apparently springs from the lifeless’, articulated
23
Bubbio, p. 150.
24
David Punter, Blake, Hegel, and Dialectic (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), p. 170.
25
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. and trans. by Arnold V. Miller
and J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. 156.
26
Punter, p. 228.
27
Frye, p. 219.
314 ZACHARY TAVLIN
through the various images of ‘dead matter’ and their concrete and doomed
emanations – can sound quite a bit like neo-Hegelian mechanics of the pro-
gress of historical spirit.28 As Terry Pinkard concisely describes it:

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

When a form of life develops a certain set of reflective practices, such as
occurred in ancient Greece, it generates a skepticism about its own practices and
its own accounts of what counts for it as authoritative; these skeptical doubts are
the self-generated ‘negations’ of the accounts they had given themselves, and
they motivate that form of life to try to reassure itself that what it has taken as au-
thoritative is indeed true, is well founded. In trying to reassure itself, a form of
life will deploy a set of strategies and new accounts. If they succeed in offering a
satisfactory reply that allays these doubts, they renew their form of life; if they fail,
then there is a breakdown of the reason-giving activity.29

In the case of breakdown, the members of the social organization develop

‘unhappy consciousness’ – an apt way of describing Orc’s initial mode of sub-
jectivity, according to Frye – or alienated consciousness, which can only be
allayed by ‘the generation of new types of accounts whose internal aims are
consistent with what the old account actually accomplished . . . or new
accounts whose internal new aims supersede the old aims by including them
as components of itself’.30
Orc’s revolutionary characteristics do not necessarily diminish because his
energy is too great to be sustainable. Rather, Orc changes in a material way in
the midst of his father’s chains: it is only with the chains that Orc comes to
define himself as the opposite-opponent of his oppressor(s) and the dialectical
reversal of Urizen (tasked with superseding ‘the old aims by including them
as components of’ himself). As his voice shakes Urizen’s dens, and as he
throws ‘rage on rage’, demanding of Urizen that he ‘scatter [his] snows else-
where’ (p. 354), Orc’s powers are already dependant upon his Sisyphean
chains. The moment the chains wrapped around the centre of the earth, it
‘became one with [Orc] a living Chain / Sustained by the Demons life’
(p. 342). The chain itself is alive then, attached to Orc like another restrictive
limb or a fallen sense organ. Thus, Orc’s Demonic rage contains within it, as
a structural necessity, its own failure to break free of itself, an inevitable turn
to resentment that manifests itself in a fall into the Orc cycle. This fall is pre-
cisely what Bataille saw in the structural logic of the dialectic, where loss is
turned to gain only by making nice with negation, by repeatedly

28
Ibid., p. 225.
29
Terry P. Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 333.
30
Ibid., p. 334.
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 315
recuperating new social antagonisms into one’s psychic economy. Or as
Robert R. Williams argues, it is the form of Hegel’s dialectic of tragedy,
which ‘exhibits both a division and conflict within a social whole that threatens
it with dissolution, and a resolution by which the right and social justice in that

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

whole are maintained and preserved against disruptive forces’; for Blake, as
for Bataille, this tragic form can ossify in the dialectic of mind.31
The problematic status of wrath for Orc is an important aspect of the con-
flict between him and Urizen in Night VII. Before Orc turns into a serpent,
Urizen addresses him directly: ‘No other living thing / Dare thy most terrible
wrath abide’ (p. 353). It is pity for Orc, Urizen claims, that moved him ‘to
break [his] dark & long repose’, and to reveal himself before Orc ‘in a form
of wisdom’ (p. 354). Urizen continues: ‘Yet thou dost laugh at all these tor-
tures & this horrible place / Yet throw thy limbs these fires abroad that back
return upon thee / While thou reposest throwing rage on rage feeding thyself
/ With visions of sweet bliss far other than this burning clime’ (p. 354).
Wondering whether Orc is the fallen Luvah, Urizen perhaps sees the ‘bright
Expanses’ of Orc’s potential vision as a memory of eternity. However, there
is a fundamental misunderstanding on Urizen’s part: although his pity may be
sincere, he cannot make sense of Orc’s laughter and asks whether Orc’s joy
‘is founded on torment which others bear for thee’. Urizen’s fear, which is a
common fear of the old guard, is that Orc is a properly messianic figure, suf-
fering for the sake of an apocalyptic revolution.
Orc’s response, a condemnation of Urizen’s pity and the aforementioned
demand that Urizen scatter his snows elsewhere, is initially one of truth and
understanding (and, thus, is quoted here at length):

I rage in the deep for Lo my feet & hands are naild to the burning rock
Yet my fierce fires are better than thy snows. Shuddring thou sittest
Thou art not chaind. Why shouldst thou sit cold groveling demon of woe
In tortures of dire coldness now a Lake of waters deep
Sweeps over thee freezing to solid still thou sitst closd up
In that transparent rock as if in joy of thy bright prison
Till overburdend with its own weight drawn out thro immensity
With a crash breaking across the horrible mass comes down
Thundring & hail & frozen iron haild from the Element
Rends thy white hair; yet thou dost fixd obdurate brooding sit
Writing thy books. Anon a cloud filld with a waste of snows
Covers thee still obdurate still resolvd & writing still
Tho rocks roll oer thee tho floods pour tho winds black as the Sea

31
Robert R. Williams, Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and
Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 125.
316 ZACHARY TAVLIN
Cut thee in gashes tho the blood pours down around thy ankles
Freezing thy feet to the hard rock still thy pen obdurate
Traces the wonders of Futurity in horrible fear of the future. (p. 354)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

Orc here lyricizes an epistemic stalemate, mirroring physical and mental
crucifixions: if Orc’s ‘feet & hands are naild to the burning rock’, Urizen is ‘fixd
obdurate brooding’, his feet frozen ‘to the hard rock’ as his ‘obdurate’ pen com-
passes the unknown. As Russell Prather perceptively notes, at this point, Orc’s
resistance takes the form of anti-form, for as Urizen has ‘conjured the cruciform
tree’ in expectation that Orc and others will ‘become what they behold’, the
latter’s transformation into the figure of a serpent makes him ‘utterly ill-adapted
for crucifixion’.32 Orc’s refusal to ‘become what he beholds’ temporarily effects
a minimal distance from the ‘transparent rock’ of error, and he retains the cap-
acity to acknowledge and name Urizen’s ‘fear of the future’, of the chaos that
can and will disrupt all false pretensions to reason’s boundedness and mastery.
Nonetheless, Orc’s clarity of diagnosis and vision is in decline. Following
Urizen’s speech about the poor, perhaps the most explicitly parodistic (polit-
ical) passage in The Four Zoas, in which Urizen argues that the poor should
be made to ‘live upon a Crust of bread’, and that their children should be left
to die when sick (in a nearly Malthusian fear of overpopulation), Orc curses
Urizen’s ‘Cold hypocrisy’ (p. 355). However, he senses his own weakness:
‘[Already] around thy tree / In scales that shine with gold & rubies thou
beginnest to weaken / My divided Spirit Like a worm I rise in peace un-
bound / From wrath Now When I rage my fetters bind me more / O tor-
ment O torment A Worm compelld’ (p. 356). Reaffirming in his weakness a
memory of his Promethean acts of defiance against Urizen, the power that
now holds him in his chain, Urizen can be sure that Orc is fallen Luvah.
Essentially, Orc has completed a further division here and recognizes intern-
ally a new division that complicates his revolutionary stance: he rages against his
oppressor but feels himself weakening and slowly submitting to Urizen’s natural
religion. Wrath in its pure form, which previously sustained Orc’s fury amidst
the chains, is diminishing in Orc (‘Like a worm I rise in peace unbound / From
wrath’, emphasis added). This loss is consonant with the loss of revolutionary
energy and opposition to a particularly Urizenic form of oppression. Viewed
this way, we would no longer say that the Orc cycle (at least here) consists of a
simple continuum and reversal between two opposed but intricately mingled
forces. Rather, it is the logic of division that weakens Orc and incorporates his en-
ergy into its opposite. Orc does not grow into a tyrant naturally and inevitably:
‘In strong deceit / Thou dost restrain my fury that the worm may fold the tree’
32
Russell Prather, ‘William Blake and the Problem of Progression’, Studies in Romanticism,
46.4 (2007), 507–40 (p. 521).
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 317
(p. 356). Division has not allowed Orc’s rebellion to reach its logical conclusion;
we do not yet know what that utopia might look like, for good or ill.
Orc’s binding was an initial setting of (severe) limits on his power and the
narrowness of his experience, ultimately a result of jealousy, could be seen as

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

the driving force behind his capitulation. Orc lacks a creative vision in which
his wrath could be imaginatively articulated: from his transformative, phan-
tasmagoric, disturbing (from the position of the Eternals) birth, there has
been a clear regression and fall into bounded wrath. This second state, limited
physically and sensually by the chains, constitutively falls short of prophetic
vision, and, thus, cannot distinguish between wrath and Urizenic, ordering
power. The resulting division undercuts Orc’s passion and keeps it from
reaching its negative conclusion, the state in which the slate could be wiped
clean in preparation for an imaginative creation.
The ambiguity in the relation between worm and serpent, two forms Orc
takes, either physically or metaphorically, contributes to the representation of
the liminal state Orc finds himself in as his wrath turns into submissiveness.
Orc begins to see himself as a worm, ‘a worm compelld’, or to wonder
whether he is indeed a worm (‘Am I a worm’). Explicitly related to Orc’s
bounded state is the following line, ‘The Man shall rage bound with this Chain
the worm in silence creep’ (p. 356). If man rages and worms creep, Orc begins
to undergo a self-reflexive re-evaluation of his divided self. What is left of his
oppositional rage, then, is consonant with a wormlike deference and smallness,
not yet even the more violent slithering of the serpent he will become.
Although Orc breaks free of his chains, he perceives the exact opposite
condition: ‘When I rage my fetters bind me more’, he cries, though in fact as
a serpent he is not bound by his chains any longer (p. 356). This is yet another
ambiguity in this section of Night VII: what is internalized psychologically
by Orc – that his wrath, and thus his negative capacity for true opposition, is
waning – is a form of binding that replaces, in the narrative, his physical
binding. The concurrence of these two forms of restraint suggests once again
that Orc’s fall was a result of boundedness, of finding himself the subject over
and against which he can position Urizen as his opposite. Already, then,
Orc’s wrath was becoming bounded, stonifying like his own father’s limbs
had. To the ‘cold hypocrite’, Orc notes that ‘I am chaind or thou couldst not
use me thus’, a line that directly precedes the aforementioned rumination on
the creeping worm (p. 356). The chains are a necessary aspect of Orc’s ca-
pitulation, an objective correlative in which the waning of his productive
wrath can be represented, not only just to the reader but also to Orc himself.
When he loses his chains, he remains bounded by a new kind of fetter: an
epistemological enclosure that doesn’t require material binding in order to
incorporate revolution into its ordering principles.
318 ZACHARY TAVLIN
When one looks back at the various births, bindings, and revolutionary
cycles of Orc throughout Blake’s corpus, and traces the relevant historical
parallels, one can concretize the notion of the fall of Orc through the epis-
temological binding and capitulation to Urizenic order (and the concomitant

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

release of wrath) politically. Here, I will focus on one particular case and re-
turn to America after the ‘Preludium’. First, we find the King of England rep-
resented as a dragon (the same form that Urizen takes elsewhere), the
‘Guardian Prince of Albion’, whose ‘voice’, ‘locks’, ‘awful shoulders’, and
‘glowing eyes’ appear to Americans ‘upon the cloudy night’ (pp. 52–53).
Orc, free of his chains, is depicted as a ‘Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea’:

Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge

Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire
With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers
Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere
The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision (p. 53).

The King, now Albion’s Angel, ‘stood beside the Stone of night’, a building
block one would later associate with Urizenic creation and natural death,
beholding the red ‘terror’ of Orc.
Orc’s subsequent speech, which ‘shook the temple’, plays on the notion of
a slave enchained:

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh into the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. (p. 53)

The spirit of revolution, looking towards The Four Zoas, is conceived here in
a similar dialectic of binding and release. However, it is quite explicit (per-
haps, more than in the longer poem) that it is the soul that is enchained in a
darkness that could easily accompany the dark imagery of bounded Urizenic
reason, an enclosure that is as much epistemological as it is physical (the
chains that bind a slave’s wrists or ankles).
Albion’s Angel refers to Orc as ‘serpent-form’d’, himself binding the revolu-
tionary with the tyrant, the serpentine dragon. Orc’s reply, which acknowl-
edges that he is ‘wreath’d around the accursed tree’, further demonstrates the
problematic logic of the revolutionary who, in an attempt to uproot the Tree
of Mystery (which, of course, returns in The Book of Urizen and The Four
 ENCHAINED DIVISION 319
Zoas), irreparably binds himself to it and risks being crucified once more like a
Christ to be worshipped at the altar of continued (political) oppression (p. 54).
But, once again, we do not see Orc as a revolutionary who inevitably grows
into the tyrant, who must become the dragon to be slain once again. Here,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

and in direct conversation with the actually existing American Revolution, the
end of the explosive moment of rebellion is far more ambiguous.
Orc’s prophecy of ‘the soul of sweet delight’ that ‘can never be defil’d’
foresees an accomplished humanity and, in context, a genuine political sub-
ject whose parts and limbs have improved, and whose breast and head, ‘like
gold’, have been brought into equal relation (p. 54). The Angel’s reply,
sounding his ‘loud war-trumpets & [his] Thirteen Angels’, representative of
the thirteen American colonies, is countered by the figures of Washington,
Paine, and Warren, the ‘terrible men’, the figures of revolution against the
crown, standing ‘with their foreheads reard toward the east’ (p. 54). The
American Revolution depicted here is in some ways the obverse of Orc’s
revolutionary failure in The Four Zoas, containing at its core the promise of
an imaginative catharsis to match its vision of material freedom:

On those vast shady hills between America & Albions shore;

Now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea: call’d Atlantean hills:
Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world
An ancient palace, archetype of mighty Emperies,
Rears its immortal pinnacles, build in the forest of God
By Ariston the king of beauty for his stolen bride. (p. 55)

This is a vision of unity, of Atlantis figuring as the fulcrum re-joining the

fractured world, like the balanced relation of the heart and mind that Orc’s
final division in The Four Zoas precluded (as productive wrath was colonized
and neutralized by jealousy and natural religion).
The use of ‘wrath’ here is as loaded as it is in the longer poem; when the Angel
releases a series of plagues against America, ‘all rush together in the night in wrath
and raging fire / The red fires rag’d! the plagues recoil’d! then rolld they back
with fury / On Albions Angels’ (p. 56, emphasis added). The ‘red flames of Orc’
rolled the plagues back, countering wrath with wrath, and transform the chaos
into ‘streaks of red’, the fires of rebellion concentrated and fully formed. In con-
trast with Orc’s fate in his battle with Urizen, the ‘Priests in rustling scales / Rush
into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of Orc, / That play around the golden
roofs in wreaths of fierce desire’ (p. 57). Here, it is the guardians of natural religion
that take on serpentine forms, not Orc. The poem ends with the Guardians across
Europe, in France, Spain, and Italy, ‘unable to stem the fires of Orc’, while ‘the
fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of men’ (p. 58).
320 ZACHARY TAVLIN
Most importantly, because of Orc’s fires, ‘the five gates were consum’d, &
their bolts and hinges melted’ (p. 58). As elsewhere in Blake’s corpus, the
gates are the gates of the five senses and of sensory perception. This, the end
of the poem, is a melding of the political with the epistemological, a yoking

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/english/article-abstract/67/259/301/5224768 by Bethel University user on 11 April 2019

of the two together that will make Orc’s capitulation to Urizen in The Four
Zoas all the more problematic and catastrophic, since, as we’ve seen, the fail-
ure of the revolutionary is not pre-given but has been historically repeated as
a concomitant internal failure of the self, of jealousy and division that enters
the psyche from without but tears it asunder from within. If history and
Blake’s schema in the Zoas prove that Orc does not come out on top, here,
we have a vision of the revolution that incorporates the imaginative under-
standing and operates on the level of the faculties, in defence from the enclo-
sures and bindings of reason. When the gates are consumed and their hinges
melted, the revolutionary desire based upon and fed by its negation (Urizenic
power) is opened up to an infinitude of possibilities undetermined by the
naturalized epistemologies of empiricism and natural religion.
Whether or not Blake’s revolutionary possibilities, open futures, and
Urizenic repressions speak to our contemporary political situation is a (wel-
come) question for another investigation. In Orc’s sacrifice, can we see the
binding of our own critical or activist energies to that which we already be-
hold? Is Blake’s world sufficiently biopolitical, entrepreneurial, and post-
bourgeois to recognize from our impoverished vantage? I anticipate such ques-
tions from other corners. I have limited myself to the figure of Orc for Blake
and Blake studies, of which the latter still seem generally split between theses
of anti-political ‘internalization’ (Romantic imaginative escapism completed in
Jerusalem by the artist figure Los) and radical political critique (usually of a leftist
variety). My Bataillean approach was designed to join both aspects of Blake’s
poetics without loss of interpretive energy. If the former camp, led by Frye,
tends to psychologize figures such as Orc, I have tried instead to uncover a his-
torical (although, perhaps, not eternal) truth Blake helps us see more clearly:
political contradictions join with and exacerbate splits inside ourselves, and so,
our epistemological limitations are mediations, points at which internal and
external causes and determinations meet and are made legible.