NeMLA Conference Panel: “Making Sense(s) of William Blake”

I presented a paper for an invigorating Blake panel this Friday at the Northeastern Modern Language Association in Rochester, NY, 3/15-18 2012. The panel was chaired and organized by Richard Tayson (from the CUNY Graduate Center) and is titled “Making Sense(s) of William Blake.” Here is a list of the participants and their presentation titles:

“Connective Tissues: Blake’s Bodily Fibers as Contraries and Negations”
Karen Guendel, Boston University

“Clearing away the Rubbish: Reinventive Virginity in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”
Aaron Richman, Oakland University

“Blake and the Dancing Body: Human and Eternal Kinesthesia in Milton”
Katherine Cook, University of Oregon

“Holy Entrails and Schismatic Bodies: Esoteric Embodiments of Islam in William Blake’s Art”
Humberto Garcia, Vanderbilt University

Here is the Calls for Paper panel description, the overarching theme commonly addressed in all our presentations:

This panel explores Blake’s contradictory depictions of the body in his texts and images, finding new ways to explore the wide range of figurations pertaining to the senses and to foster inquiry of concepts crucial to the analysis of Blake’s time, including identity, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics. Blake, according to Tristanne J. Connolly’s William Blake and the Body, both “reviles and glorifies the human body” a contradiction documented by Blake’s early nomination of the senses as “the Chief inlets of Soul in this age” and his later lamentation, in reference to the fallen zoas, that “Beyond the bounds of their own self their senses cannot penetrate.” With these two contrary positions in mind, this panel seeks to find new ways to explore Blake’s incorporation of a wide range of figurations pertaining to the senses and to foster inquiry of concepts crucial to analysis of the period: identity, gender, sexuality, text and image, politics, aesthetics, phenomenology, self and community, and an array of subjects trenchant to post-Revolutionary experience.

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And here is one of the Blake illustration slides that I focused on extensively during my presentation:

William Blake, Illustration to Dante’s Divine Comedy (1824-7) Hell, Canto 28; The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mahomet

The panel discussed certain cutting-edge research ideas that should prove very relevent to the topics students are exploring in class discussion and in their research papers:

1. Blake’s denial of the body-soul dualism; the body and soul as deeply interconnected, not separate.

2. The spiritual significance of body parts: fibers, veins, muscles, genitals, intestines, bones, etc.

3. The relationship between corporeal and textual bodies; Blake’s printmaking process as a form of embodiment.

4. The importance of the five senses for accessing the Poetic genius (the imagination)

5. The body as the crucial site for warring tension, contradictions, negations, and contraries in Blake’s poetry and art

6. Eroticism and the sexual body as central to Blake’s spiritual visions

These are just some of the key ideas (among others) currently debated among Blake scholars. I hope that students might find these ideas helpful, if not inspirational, for their own work.

I’ve included an abstract of my Blake conference paper below:

Holy Entrails and Schismatic Bodies: Esoteric Embodiments of Islam in William Blake’s Art

This paper argues that William Blake’s image of the split and porous body offers a productive site for investigating radical Protestant and mystical depictions of the Orient and Islam in particular. I propose an esoteric interpretation of Islam’s schismatic body in his watercolor illustration to Canto 28 of Dante’s Inferno, “The Schismatics and Sowers of Discord: Mahomet” (1824-27). Whereas Mahomet’s and Ali’s demonic punishment through perpetual bodily splitting echoes Dante’s unsparing condemnation of these heretics for their schismatic separation from Christianity and the sectarian split between Sunnis and Shiites, the Prophet’s split torso suggests an alternative esoteric interpretation: the future reunification of the eternal body of man (Christ) as celebrated in Blake’s poetic myths. Building on Tristanne J. Connolly’s William Blake and the Body, I argue that Blake’s anatomical portrayal of the Prophet presents the intestinally exposed body as a microcosm of the universe. In offering such a reading, I want to complicate postcolonial criticism that either categorically praises or condemns Blake’s engagement with Islam, without considering how mystical representations of religious bodies enact a spiritual correspondence between negative and positive opposites: the Prophet’s dangling entrails and Ali’s cleft head literally confirm their heretical crimes only to figuratively exalt their prophetic-messianic mission.

The first half of the paper explores Blake’s illustration in the context of his allusion to the Qur’an in The Song of LOS and recurrent images of split bodies in The Four Zoas. My purpose here is to situate the poet-painter in a radical mystical tradition inspired by Jacob Böhme. He saw Islam as a divinely ordained proto-Protestant schism and ascribed a cosmological symbolism to penetrated bodies, as illustrated in the Third Table of William Law’s edition of the seventeenth-century mystic’s works. The paper then focuses on another illustration of Muhammad: Blake’s Visionary Head of Mahomet (1819-1825). In this image, the Prophet resembles a younger version of the poet-painter, a literal and physical embodiment/identification. Comparing this image with his Dante illustration, I conclude that representations of Islam indirectly helped define his heterodox conceptions of embodied prophecy and religious enthusiasm.

Tearing the Virgin Mantle in Two: The Cherubim and the Ark

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split (Matthew 27: 50-51).

As we discussed in class last Friday, I think these lines from Matthew are central to the allegorical “Argument” that prefaces “Visions of the Daughter of Albion,” particularly the last two lines “But the terrible thunders tore / My virgin mantle in twain.” In order understand the significance of this biblical allusion for Blake’s sexual politics, we need to discover how and why this moment of vaginal penetration as rape (why rape?) is ironically related to the holy place of the tabernacle: an inner room called the holy of holies, or the most holy place.

As decribed in the Old Testament, this inner room of the temple was a most sacred room, because it was God’s special dwelling place in the midst of His people during the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness. The Holy of Holies was a perfect cube separated by a thick curtain, known as the “veil” (in Hebrew means a screen, divider or separator that hides). What was this curtain hiding? It was shielding a holy God from sinful man. Whoever entered into the holy of holies was entering the very presence of God and anyone other than the high priest who entered the holy of holies would die. Even the high priest, God’s chosen mediator with His people, could only pass through the veil and enter this sacred dwelling once a year, on a prescribed day called the Day of Atonement. “But only the high priest entered the inner room, and that only once a year, and never without blood, which he offered for himself and for the sins the people had committed in ignorance.” (Hebrews 9:7). So the presence of God remained shielded from man behind a thick curtain during the history of Israel. However, Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross made direct access to God available to all people–not just the priests. When Jesus died the curtain in the Jerusalem temple was torn in half, performing the sacrificial atonement that could finally unveil the holy of holies.

But what exact does the holy of holies look like? To answer this question, we need to know about the figure of cherubim (plural term for hybrid lion/human angels) that were embroidered onto this curtain. They were spirits who serve God, and God was thought to be present in between these two spirits. The cherubim serves as a reminder of what use to be housed in this inner room: the Ark of the Covenant. This transportable ark was said to contain the testimony of the people of Israel, or the Law of the original Ten Commandandments written on stone tablets. A special lid or “mercy seat” covered the top of the ark and was ornamented with two cherubs whose outspread wings overarched the cover and touched one another (see image below).

illustration from the 1728 Figures de la Bible; illustrated by Gerard Hoet (1648–1733) and others, and published by P. de Hondt in The Hague; image courtesy Bizzell Bible Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries

According to Kabbalists, Moravians, and Swedenborgians, the golden sculpture of male and female cherubs that guarded the Ark were entwined in the act of marital intercourse, thus forming an emblem of God’s joyful marriage with his female counterpart, Jerusalem. When the Temple was sacked by pagans, the erotic statuary was paraded through the streets in order to embarress the Israelites. In other words, God manifests through sexual union and guides those who work with this holy mystery.

This indicates a profound relationship with Hindu and Buddhist Tantra, as displayed in the santuaries of their temples:

So to return to Blake’s image of virginal penetration as rape. Oothoon, in picking the ideal feminine flower of beauty from Leutha’s vale, or sex regulated under the law, has freely choosen the joys of sexuality but also, ironically, the very patriarchal law that probits womem’s full enjoyment of sexuality: Bromion’s “terrible thunders” of reason, acting on behalf of Urizen (“your reason”). In other words, the holy of holies–sexual union of the cherubim–is violated by reason’s violent penetration (rape). Hence, the holy of holies cannot be made universal until humanity is free from sex under the law, especially for women, as revealed in Christ’s bodily crucifixtion (for Moravians, Christ’s death wound/womb). This allegorical argument, I believe, aligns Blake’s sexual (Moravian) theology with his feminist politics, which is clearly very different from Mary Wollstonecraft’s more secular feminism.

I’m offerring a provisional reading here…any other thoughts?