BOOKS
Or this:
If we have to choose between imagery of epithalamion and of elegy . . .
we are only dealing with a problem familiar
to
us from
The/.
There the
agonized fears of a virgin demanded elegiac forms, and in
Visions of
the Daughters of Albion
a wedding which is prevented by rape and
obdurate jealousy refers demonically in a repeated line of its chorus
to
Spenser's
Epithalamion.
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Yet it may be unfair to the enterprise of which Wagenknecht is an
extreme instance not to recognize how the attempts to place Blake firmly
within a recognizable tradition can also be read as honorable gestures toward
making him more widely accessible. Hence in
Blake's Sublime Allegory,
a
collection of fourteen essays by various critics, Stuart Curran, one of the
volume's co-editors, grandly assures us on his opening page that
"jerusalem
is the most lucid of Blake's major prophecies" and that "no sophisticated
reader confesses himself lost in its midst. " We recognize the tone, of course.
It's the same note of positive thinking we used to get when Joyce studies
were peaking-that, for example, all we had to do was listen in order to
resolve most of the alleged difficulties of
Finnegan's Wake.
Nor should we
be surprised that before slipping us an extremely large pill concerning the
"seven structures" of
Jerusalem,
Curran first adds to the sugar-coating of
his opening by further assuring us that the poem is "relatively simple until
the beginning of Plate 18" and that there are comforting analogues to be
found between it and
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained.
As for Curran's
co-editor, Joseph Wittreich, Jr., his strategy of accessibility is to place Blake
within something he calls' 'the Milton tradition." But to avoid our sensing
too radical a distance between the two poets, Wittreich is then constrained
to persuade us of a Milton in relation to whom-near the end of his essay-a
quotation from Mao Tse-Tung is supposed to fall with the grand appro–
priateness of an inevitable summation. (It thuds, rather, with the dismal
clunk of outdated modishness.)
My point, however, isn't to quibble over the details of earnest academic
criticism like Curran's and Wittreich's. Instead, what I want to suggest is
how much the effort they both make to demystify Blake seems, in a sense
larger than their arguments, to involve an inevitable distortion of his actual
impact. And it may be that the very notion of literary "tradition," not to
speak of the assimilating nature of getting Blake's poems "ready" for
presentation in the classroom, is from the start a fatally compromising
approach to so fiercely individual and energetic a vision as his. Indeed, two
of the most successful essays in the Curran-Wittreich collection-those by
