William Blake: A radical visionary

William Blake: A radical visionary

An article from 2000 on the (largely forgotten) radical politics of William Blake.

Blakean Humanism: Romantic Messianism Democratized

When writing a particular life (Genet's, Flaubert's, even his own), Jean-Paul Sartre sifted his data for what he called, borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty, the "differential": that which placed his subject out of step with the prevailing spirit or presumptions of his time and, as a consequence, permitted him to undertake a life-project that reflected the peculiar stamp of his individual consciousness. For Sartre, every life is filled with opportunities to step away from the drowse of "bad faith" that encumbers it and embark upon a career of existential authenticity.

In his difficult and challenging Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin theorized a Marxist historiography; whereas Sartre focused his biographies on specific individuals, Benjamin attempted to take in the sweep of history itself. And yet he, too, was in search of the "differential" that impregnated historical moments with "chips of Messianic time" (Addendum A): those historical junctures which presented historical actors with opportunities for revolutionary action. In Thesis XV, Benjamin wrote:

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.

Likewise, the recognition of such moments in the course of sifting one's historical data presents the critical historian with the opportunity to salvage them from the ash-heap of the victor's narration about the past and, thereby, transform her scholarship into a mode of revolutionary praxis.

Hubert Babinski was correct to point out the "mystical messianism" or hero worship that, for better or worse (and usually worse), has afflicted Romantic sensibilities since they first came into their own as such in the late 18th-early 19th centuries C.E. This is, without question, one of the frailties to which the Romantic movement has always been heir. For some, the Mazeppa legend represents yet another iteration of this unfortunate tendency.

But not for the latter-day Mazeppist.

For the latter-day Mazeppist is, after the recent example of Northrop Frye, a Blakean humanist. That is to say, an individual who sees his/her own reflection in Harold Bloom's description of William Hazlitt, whose religious background, "like that of all the English Romantic poets ... was in the tradition of Protestant dissent, the kind of nonconformist vision that descended from the Left Wing of England's Puritan movement" (Bloom, The Visionary Company, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971): xvii).

Bloom continued:

There is no more important point to be made about English Romantic poetry than this one, or indeed about English poetry in general, particularly since it has been deliberately obscured by most modern criticism. Though it is a displaced Protestantism, or a Protestantism astonishingly transformed by different kinds of humanism or naturalism, the poetry of the English Romantics is a kind of religious poetry, and the religion is in the Protestant line, though Calvin or Luther would have been horrified to contemplate it. Indeed, the entire continuity of English poetry that T. S. Eliot and his followers attacked is a radical Protestant or displaced Protestant tradition (ibid).

Like Benjamin, like Blake, the latter-day Mazeppist performs a variety of displaced Protestantism and, in the process, democratizes Romantic Messianism.

The "differential," the productive combination of longing and loss that the figure of Mazeppa represents, is not the franchise of an aristocratic few, but the birthright of the long-suffering many. For the Blakean humanist, the Mazeppa/Christ figure is a metonym for the proposition that every human soul carries within itself the capacity to emerge from the most unpromising of fates to take its seat within the "visionary company" of "seers"; those who have been gifted by their trials upon this earth with new eyes to recognize a given moment as a chip of Messianic time and with the revolutionary will to act upon it appropriately.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane (of course).

The Romantic Imagination

From Hubert F. Babinski, The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1972):

Mazeppa's use in European Romanticism is at once the story of a minor figure who captured the imagination of many important artists and of an unbroken chain of artistic influence and inspiration. As a result, one can see the Romantics' minds at play with a subject that had wide and deep cultural appeal throughout Europe in the Romantic period (p. 148).

By understanding how one figure was utilized by Romantic artists in different ways, one can, perhaps, see a little more clearly some of the qualities considered characteristic of the Romantic mind: gothicism, new uses and meanings of history, the transformation of subject from one art form to another, the preoccupation with the artist in society and with the creative process, the emphasis on individual suffering (which moves from Ichschmerz toward the spiritual or mystical), and the relation of politics to art. Although these characteristics existed to varying degrees in artists of different countries at slightly different times, there is a general sense that Romanticism as a movement underwent an evolution in Europe between 1789, to use a convenient though imprecise date, and 1840. It seems to me that, for better or worse, the end point of that evolution, reflected in the matured Romantic imagination, is messianic mysticism (p. 149).

The Romantics were extremely interested in liberators who could deliver nations from political oppression, an interest prompted no doubt by their contemporary history and political idealism. Such liberators, the Romantics felt, had to be tried and refined by suffering in order to be purified for their messianic task. Often the Romantics looked to myth and history for their examples, or, like Blake, they created new myths. The suffering of the liberators, or heroes, was usually beyond the range of human experience; or, perhaps more aptly, what the Romantics thought and felt was usually beyond the range of human experience. Such suffering gave these heroes a special spiritual character in the minds of the Romantics, and often, as a result, they so appeared in Romantic art. That special quality can be called, in a broad sense, mystical. Since many Romantics shied away from institutional religions, the quality of the mysticism in their works often seems areligious. It is a mysticism that acknowledged a spiritual dimension in man that can work either good or evil, though the Romantics generally tended to avoid such orthodox classifications of the spirit. Very few were able to accept the total goodness of the human spirit, though such total acceptance seemed to be the point of a good deal of Romantic art and philosophy. Notable exceptions are Blake, the late Slowacki, and Krasinski. The mysticism that most often appears in Romantic art, then, resembles the implicit Christianity of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Sermon on the Mount with variations of gnosticism. The work of Blake, the late Wordsworth, and the late Shelley was mystical in this way. Slowacki and Mickiewicz carried the mystical in their work to a maturity equalling if not surpassing Blake's (pp. 149-150).

"On the Road" to the "Postmodern"

In a perceptive and well-balanced article from the mid-1990's, Robert Holton examined Kerouac's appropriation of the Spenglerian notion of the "fellaheen" and concluded that

While a sense of racial alterity had long been a central topic of white American literature--examples from Freneau to Faulkner come to mind--one can argue that in Kerouac and the Beats a quite different manifestation of this American preoccupation appears. In Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radical desire to challenge the existing social order through a fore-grounding of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates as much as it challenges the master narratives that post-modernism seeks to undo.

[Robert Holton, "Kerouac Among the Fellahin: On The Road to the Postmodern" in Modern Fiction Studies 41:2 (1995: Summer), pp. 265-283].

I like to say that there are two kinds of white Americans (though one need not be white to fall into one or the other of these categories): racists and recovering racists. Kerouac seems to have been among the former at several points in his life and among the latter at other times. In this regard, his personal story is not all that exceptional. As Northrop Frye continually reminded us, artists are often unexceptional in many ways; Kerouac was an artist. We have no warrant to be surprised.

Rather, we should bear witness to his struggles with race and class and ideology as they found articulation in his life and his art and turn them to our own advantage: as opportunities to reflect upon our own struggles with race, class, and ideology.

By his stripes we may be healed.

Kerouac Among the Moroccan "Fellaheen"

His best time in Morocco was a solitary hike to a Berber village in the mountains. These were the original fellaheen (the very word is Arabic) who had impressed him in the pages of Spengler with their endurance. Here in real life he was even more respectful of their simplicity and humility. In his notebook he made pencil drawings of their huts, imagining himself retired there to paint for the rest of his life. One of the peasants gave him a machete with a gold-braided handle, which he treasured ever after. Characteristically, Jack's response to Islam was based not on any intellectual apprehension but on his love for these villagers. The glory of their religion, embodied in their stolid faces, moved him to observe the fast of Ramadan. A few months later he would tell Malcolm Cowley that Islam and Buddhism were the only two religions capable of lasting another fifty years. --Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, London: Penguin Books (1986), p. 546.

Chasing Our Faustian Tails

In the decade following the Allied victory, church attendance and religious affiliation grew at an unprecedented rate, and critical debate over the significance of the increase reached a fevered pitch in intellectual circles as well as popular culture. During an era that witnessed the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Nuremberg trials, a neo-orthodox revival, the beginning of the cold war, and the Korean conflict as well as congressional investigations into un-American activities, the postwar "turn to religion" took place within a heightened atmosphere of crisis, conspiracy, and conformity. John Lardas, The Bob Apocalypse, p. 38.

It is instructive to re-visit the era which saw the rise of the Beats and, as John Lardas rightly did, place that social and literary phenomenon within its cultural context. Then, to step back (as Lardas neglected to do), and--drawing from the Spenglerian inheritance that the Beats themselves cherished--bear witness to the sorry repetitions of the American religious imagination.

The Beats were, as Lardas acknowledged, Spenglerian Transcendentalists. Their strong American literary precursors were Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Collectively and individually, the Beats attempted to renew the promise of the American experiment that Emerson articulated in Nature. Unlike Emerson, however, the Beats did not draw their inspiration from a romanticized view of the natural world but from a Spenglerian (romantic) view of a cultural type: the fellaheen.

Echoing Tolstoy's peasants (themselves an echo of Rousseau's "noble savage" figure), the Beats attempted (like the mysterious W.D. Fard of the Nation of Islam before them) a transvaluation of racialist stereotypes. In the process, they performed what Northrop Frye named as the goal of ethical criticism: "... to look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who is able to compare them in some degree with the infinite vision of possibilities presented by culture. One who possesses such a standard of transvaluation," Frye argued, "is in a state of intellectual freedom. One who does not possess it is a creature of whatever social values get to him first: he has only the compulsions of habit, indoctrination, and prejudice" (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 348).

It is difficult for one who regards the religious imagination as a source of cultural fecundity to observe the present American scene with equanimity. The bizarre revisionist history (participated in and approved by no less a figure than the current occupant of the Oval Office) that seeks to valorize the Reagan era as a time of peace and prosperity represents a kind of moral effrontery that leaves one not only speechless but gasping for air.

Those who lived during the Reagan years and witnessed that Administration's irresponsible saber-rattling-as-foreign policy combined with its war on organized labor and the middle class recognize the Obama betrayal for what it is: an unabashed continuation of rule by the militarized corporatocracy. The Christian Right's blessing of this travesty of democracy exposes the moral bankruptcy of early 21st century Protestantism. At the same time, American embrace of Catholic social teaching seems to be a quaint relic of the first half of the 20th century. The Mazeppist advocates the renewal of post-Spenglerian cultural criticism of the kind practiced by such unlikely bedfellows as Kerouac and Frye (On The Road and Anatomy of Criticism both appeared, if I'm not mistaken, in 1957).

Frye's strong precursors in the historical reflection upon culture were Vico and Spengler. Hayden White was right to celebrate Frye as a thinker who, like Sartre, "was nothing if not a philosopher of human freedom, of artistic creativity, and beyond that of a generally human power of species self-creation" (White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 266). His eclipse in the field of literary criticism is but one more symptom of the tragic onset of Faustian winter.

Hayden White on Frye (on Spengler)

In a 1994 essay (collected in White, The Fiction of Narrative, pub. by John Hopkins in 2010), Hayden White reiterated his previously stated belief that Northrop Frye was "the greatest natural cultural historian of our time." He then mentioned that

Frye remarks somewhere that "the great synthesis of Marx and Spengler has yet to be written..."

and hints that the theory of history which underlies Frye's incomparable Anatomy of Criticism is, in fact, just the sort of synthesis that Frye was looking for.

White goes on to point out that Vico's distinction between human history and natural history is foundational in Frye's thought--a distinction one finds echoed in Frye's review of The Decline of the West.

For Frye, as for Spengler, the way in which human beings can come to know nature and the way in which human beings can come to know culture is qualitatively different.

Once this Vichian distinction is admitted, Spengler's methodological innovations in historical investigation demand serious consideration.