William Blakes Comic Vision free download ebook

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William Blake’s Comic

Vision

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No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

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Rawlinson, Nick, 1963–

William Blake’s comic vision / Nick Rawlinson p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22064–2

1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Humor. 2. Humorous poetry, English— History and criticism. 3. Comic, The, in literature. I. Title

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Preface

One rainy winter’s evening, coming out of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I paused to raise my umbrella to the inclement weather. As I did so, I realized what a foolish but suitable metaphor that action was for writing the preface to a critical work on Blake. Blake enthusiasts invari-ably find the need to raise umbrellas of one kind or another. Sometimes, like the tour guides here in Oxford, they do so to indicate their position beside a site of Special Interest. More often, it is a vain attempt to fend off the damp fallout that is an inevitable part of entering the critical fray. It is with both aims in mind that I raise mine now.

This book started life over ten years ago as a simple hunch: that the reason that I and countless other readers enjoy the work of William Blake is due, in part, to the fact that Blake is a comic writer. Such a claim may seem staggeringly obvious, but believe it or not at that time the weight of serious, critical authority was against such an idea. While it acknowledged that Blake was often satirical, and of the Devil’s party, of course, still – ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’ – ‘Little Lamb who made thee’ – ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – ‘O rose thou art sick’ – not exact-ly funny, sureexact-ly? Better to argue over his politics or his madness, the dominant criticism said, to see his work in historicist or psychoanalytic terms, to use it as proof of this or that theory of criticism, rather than pursue the idea he might be deliberately comic. Blake’s abundant and consistent use of humour was then, and often still is, dismissed as little more than a curious character trait. It is seen as a product of his wilful but amusing rebelliousness which, if it has to be explained at all, is cate-gorized as nothing more than the defensive reaction of a neglected and rather petulant genius. His most clearly comic work, An Island in the Moon, is considered merely the tomfool doodles of a distracted young-ster. Even the recent critical emphasis on recovering the complexities of the social struggle in which Blake found himself has done little to change this attitude. Despite exciting recent research, such as Jon Mee’s fascinating study of what he calls the ‘Culture of Radicalism’, critical opinion still suggests that Blake’s use of the comic was, at best, nothing more than the sporadic application of a handy tool for destabilizing conventional readings of texts.

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the idea that Blake was a comic writer and, after years of research and sev-eral false starts my hunch began to take shape. In fact, the more I read, the more surprising the tendency to overlook the importance of Blake’s use of comedy became, especially given the long-established critical recognition that Blake was passionately engaged with the world of eigh-teenth-century ideas. For the eigheigh-teenth-century thinker – whether in Parliament or in coffee shops, whether writing for the Gentleman’s Magazineor the cheapest of radical pamphlets – understanding and good behaviour were, essentially, a matter of ‘taste’. Literary and moral dis-course demanded a combination of aesthetics, perception, education and the social application of morality. To speak of society was to recognize the complexity of the relationships between self, self-consciousness, lan-guage and government. And, as the title of one of the plays by the great eighteenth-century comedian Samuel Foote reminds us, comedy, being of all things a matter of ‘Taste’, occupied a unique and pivotal position in such discourse. Even the briefest of surveys of eighteenth- and early nine-teenth-century comic theory will show that many of the thinkers with whom Blake engages most closely – Hobbes and John Dennis, for exam-ple – expressed strong opinions on the nature of comedy as a natural corollary to their statements on social order, consciousness and aesthet-ics. Likewise, we know that Blake was deeply interested in Antiquarianism, and many of these popular historians devoted a great deal of energy to uncovering the history of comic pastimes. Blake was, of all things, a Visionary, an artist of the spiritual world, and many eigh-teenth-century moralists and sermonizers debated hotly on the impor-tance of comedy to faith – deciding whether the joyful should also be jolly and the blessed blithe. And even discussions of art used the lan-guage of comedy: Blake himself, while busy refuting the ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds, called the use of light a ‘witticism’. When taking on the giants of eighteenth-century thought, then, in the fields of perception, spirituality and social organization, it would be extraordinary if an atti-tude to comedy was not an important part of Blake’s mental armoury.

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con-cept of Vision. For the comic is an ideal model – and perhaps, the only model – for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. First, it provides a popular challenge to all forms of cultural and textual author-ity – a way to give all kings, priests and theorists a swift kick up the back-side. Second, while it destabilizes texts, it also offers a positive alternative. The problem with undermining texts is that if you destroy all concepts of authority, then how do you then put over your message of hope in a Universal Humanity? When all forms of art are susceptible to deconstruction, how can you articulate faith? Recent critical thought has sought to answer this by placing considerable emphasis on the importance of ‘play’ and ‘communitas’ in Blake’s work. But these con-cepts, while important, are rather nebulous, thus contradicting Blake’s insistence on the importance of the minute articulation of ideas. Moreover, both are questioned in Blake’s portrayal of the aged children Har and Heva. Using the language and imagery of comedy, however – especially of social festivities and the carnivalesque – allows Blake to describe faith as a physical, emotional and intellectual experience, a joy-ful social act that goes beyond the isolating limitations of literary expression. Moreover, in order to ‘see’ the joke, comedy requires that we read the world afresh. In this act of creative perception the comic pro-vides Blake with a poetics of reading, a model of how his Visionary per-ceptions could survive while being presented in physical media he consistently pointed out were limiting and potentially oppressive. Finally, comedy has a long and intimate connection with faith, particu-larly in the idea of the divinely inspired fool. It formed part of a Christian tradition that found expression in many of Blake’s major influences – the writings of St Paul, the plays of Shakespeare, even London street life. To employ the comic, then, allows Blake to encour-age Vision, to celebrate the madness of inspiration, and to present a pos-itive message in an inherently flawed medium.

Recognizing the comic as a key to Vision, as well as providing exciting insights into individual lyrics, also gives a new thematic unity to Blake’s work. Rather than being a juvenile exercise in imitation, the Poetical Sketchescan be read as the beginnings of a series of comic images that substantially shape the presentation of ‘play’ in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Likewise An Island in the Moon, rather than being an idle and protracted in-joke, proves to be a significant early draft of the sort of philosophical and spiritual education attempted in The Marriage of Heaven and Helland later in Jerusalem.

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and Gillray and as wryly observant as the social comedy of Austen and Dickens, it also bears comparison to the divinely inspired humanism of Chaucer and Shakespeare. His use of comedy is not only fully consistent with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral and literary debate, it is a vital tool for expressing his Vision of perceptive, inclusive, humanist Christianity. Rich with the scents of both street and cloister, Blake’s comedy shows him to be, on the one hand, the spiritual inheritor of Cervantes, Rabelais and the joyful prophets and preachers of the Bible, and on the other, a writer whose sense of absurdity and dazzling linguis-tic gymnaslinguis-tics anlinguis-ticipate Monty Python and Spike Milligan by more than a century and a half. Not a conventional comic writer, perhaps. But in his own rude, anti-authoritarian, deeply spiritual way, a great one.

Of course, a reader’s hunch is not the same as the ‘proofs’ demanded by literary criticism. There is a hoary old joke that to ‘assume’ is to make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’. It must be acknowledged from the outset that, in the course of writing this book, I have, without wishing to make an ‘ass’ out of anyone but myself, made some fairly sweeping assump-tions. For a start, my hypothesis rests on the belief that Blake intended his work to have a critical, educational aspect. I am claiming that he wished to teach the art of Vision, and moreover that this was an aim he strove towards throughout his life. This implies that his work can be read as a whole; that images he uses at different times and in very differ-ent works can nevertheless be interpreted (or translated) consistdiffer-ently. This is not to say that I am claiming any image has only one meaning, or even that Blake had the entire system fully formulated from the word go. Rather, his work is accumulative: each time he uses an image it gath-ers a history, a significance to be carried forward to its next appearance, like a semantic snail’s shell. To support this argument, I have also assumed that biographical and historical information is fair game in building patterns of critical meaning. Perhaps most significantly of all, I have assumed that literature and faith are intimately connected and that Blake’s Visionary aim – to promote the notion of Universal Humanity – is not only possible, it is desirable.

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schools of Blake criticism appear here as no more than the most cursory of tattoos upon the book’s skin. To take one example to demonstrate the whole: when discussing Blake’s use of the term ‘female’, I quite happily assume this is his shorthand for ‘having physical existence’ without dis-cussing the alchemical, philosophical, theological and social back-ground to, or the considerable feminist criticism surrounding, his use of it. This doesn’t mean that I am unaware of Blake’s position as an artist working within a patriarchal system of male power, or that his imagery can sometimes appear gynophobic. Rather, this is outside the scope of my study. For the record, I read Blake’s characters as not either ‘male’ or ‘female’ but as representatives of states of perception and existence. Oothoon, Thel, and the youthful harlot, as well as being part of Blake’s examination of the roles and rights of women in society, are aspects of all of us, of all readers and creators: rational and sensual, abstract and physical. That Blake’s female characters are more associated with the physical is because Blake chose to celebrate the creative power of birth and rebirth (as he does on plate III of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). That such power involves women intimately with the adoption of the potentially limiting mode of physical existence – the essential prelude to the expression and renewal of Universal Humanity – does not mean he assigned any lesser place to women in his creative system.

So, in relation to feminist criticism of Blake, all I can say is that there are other books on this topic, like Helen Bruder’s intriguing William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. And as it is for feminist criticism, so it is for many other critical schools and theories. I simply promise that I have done my best not to make any false claims or willfully misrepresent Blake, nor pursue any critical byways that would leave non-academic readers floundering. This study is meant to open up a new area of discus-sion, and perhaps offer some lesser known sources of information about the comic and Blake’s use of it – for example such splendid tomes as J. Roberts A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; Its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence, With a Word upon Pudding And Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick (London, 1726). Of course, whatever borrow-ings I have made, all mis-readborrow-ings and mistakes are all my own.

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courteous and perceptive comments on this manuscript over the years, and my editors, Charmian Hearne, Eleanor Birne, Beverley Tarquini and Rebecca Mashayekh, for their infinite patience.

I think that’s everything for now. ‘So’, as it says in that classic work of English comedy, Willans and Searle’s superb Down with Skool, ‘okay, come in’. Just remember, as you peruse the following pages, one thing:

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Abbreviations

(B**) Plate number reference in The Complete Graphic works of William Blake, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

(D**) Plate number reference in Drawings of William Blake: 92 pencil studies, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Dover, 1970).

(E**) Page number reference in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

(K**) Page number reference in Blake Complete Writings with variant readings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1972). (L**) Plate number reference in The Paintings of William Blake,

ed. Raymond Lister (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

An Island An Island In The Moon.

The Marriage The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Songs Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience. Innocence Songs of Innocence.

Experience Songs of Experience.

Textual note

For quotations from Blake’s work I have followed the text in David V. Erdman’s The Poetry and Prose of William Blake(New York: Doubleday, 1988). Just occasionally I have also given a reference to Keynes’ Complete Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1972), because although Keynes alters the punctuation, he does include lines deleted or altered in the original manuscripts and which are not present in Erdman’s edition. References to Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. R. N. Alexander (London: Collins, 1980).

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1 Songs of Pleasant Glee: William

Blake and the Comic

Since the days of his earliest biographers, critics have always recognized the presence of humour in the work of William Blake. His first formal biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writing in 1868, characterized Blake’s work as a ‘mingling of the sublime with the grotesque’.1_{In 1868 A. C.}

Swinburne praised the ‘harmonious and humorous power’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.2_{Robin Hamlyn, in the catalogue to the Tate}

Britain Blake Exhibition 2000–2001, calls Blake ‘a discerning lover of pleasure’.3 _{Humorous moments abound in Blake’s work. There is the}

famous print of Newton, for instance, that blows a loud raspberry at whatever ‘science’ the viewer believes threatens their conception of art, intuition and the human spirit. There are the amusingly scurrilous annotations and the guffaw-inducing frankness of his scatological note-books. There are numerous satirical gibes at the concepts of kingship and priesthood from America to Jerusalem. There are plenty of comic characters, too: the pretentious philosophers in An Island in the Moon, the smart wit of the chimney sweep in Songs of Innocence, the subversive narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In fact, Blake’s work seems to pulse with a comic energy, a mixture of vibrant sensuality and joyful irreverence at all our rigid conventions. Moreover, there is considerable critical recognition of his borrowing from comic sources: Martha England’s great study of An Island, for example, uncovering Blake’s debt to the famous comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote, or Marcus Wood’s comparison of Blake’s imagery and that of eighteenth-century satirical prints.

However, give almost anybody a copy of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ or

Miltonto read, and the last thing you would expect them to do is laugh. Blake has been called many things, from a prioricommunist to God’s portrait painter, but comic writer is not one of them. In popular modern

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criticism Blake is still seen as only occasionally writing on the side of ‘the Devils party’ (E35). He does it, the argument runs, simply to be devil-ish, to be contrary, to use whatever tool comes to hand to disrupt our complaisancy. At best he is seen as the great bricoleur, as Jon Mee calls him: deliberately blending material from diverse sources as a way of challenging the hegemony of conventional discourse so as to disrupt the ‘manuscript assumed authority of the dead’, in Tom Paine’s phrase.4

There is good ground for this assumption. Blake’s work is highly eclectic; moreover such a magpie approach was popular with the late eighteenth century radicals and Millenarian visionaries with whom he sympa-thized. It had even been recommended as a poetic style in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews(1787). Blake’s poetry, Mee argues, uses parody deliberately to disturb our sense of allegorical form, and in doing so was part of a wider pattern of radical response to the use of hegemonic allegory as a means of teaching ‘Moral Virtue’.5_He

also points out, however, that the aim of such an ‘heterogeneous repertoire’ was to make a ‘complete reorganization of the structures involved’.6 _{The implication of such an approach – scrupulously}

fair-minded and historically based as it is – is that parody is simply another tool for destabilizing the text. Blake is, in effect, merely borrowing comic structures and imagery like popular trinkets in order to ‘pound [them] into dust & melt [them] in the Furnaces of Affliction’ (E205) and so forge them into fiery arrowheads of prophesy under the heat of his wild, but sober, imagination. As a result, we should no more consider Blake a comedian because he uses comic images than we should call him an alchemist because he borrows terminology from Paracelsus. The fact that he uses the comic to destabilize texts because the comic itself has an intrinsic value, a divine message, is easily overlooked. And as a percep-tion of comic intenpercep-tion is a prerequisite to comic appreciapercep-tion (a fact that anyone who has ever mouthed an apologetic ‘I was only joking’ knows), our impression of Blake remains the moody bourgeois anti-hero. He is the cool rebel-of-choice for the Industrial age, the artist-psychologist with a dash of the socio-linguist who goes about his work with the merest trace of a wry smile on his face as he pits himself against any and all forms of oppression. He is an artist who uses comic elements. He is not a comic writer. ‘The Tyger’ is not funny. QED.

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Reynolds, Burke and Addison to a more robust and more human form: the ridiculous, that comic exaggeration that emphasized the interwoven significance of art, humanity and Christ. In a turbulent age of oppres-sion and revolutions, scepticism and prophecy, Blake found Faith in Foolery, and from the Fools in King Edward the Third to the carnival rhythms of Jerusalem, from the smallest engraving to the grandest water-colour, Blake’s work became, essentially, comic.

Painting a red nose on to our accepted portrait of Blake will require several coats, of course. Comedy is a highly contentious issue: we will need to attempt a definition of ‘comic vision’ that defends its positive aspects from those who claim laughter is merely a symbol of bitter tri-umph. Then we will need to prove that the structure and function of such a comic vision would indeed be vital to Blake’s artistic and spiritual Vision. This will require a brief look at what might be called the mechanics of comedy (being the two-stage pattern of our comic percep-tion rather than the six buffoons of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Clearly we will also have to place Blake within the theory and practice of the comic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to see what sort of comic inspiration might have been available to him. As the idea of Blake the comedian is an unusual one, it might also be appropri-ate to offer a quick summary of the biographical evidence that Blake’s use of the comic was indeed deliberate and not simply the accidental outpourings of a ‘wild enthusiast’.7_{Only having established this}

con-nection between comic vision and Visionary Art, will it be possible to turn our attention to individual works. This book will concentrate primarily on his early work, from the Poetical Sketchesto The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Such a focus will allow us to examine how Blake’s ideas about the comic developed, so that by the time of The Marriage they have become thematically embedded into his concept of Vision. I will, of course, be including many examples from his later work, both to elu-cidate ideas found, but not always fully expressed, in the earlier poetry and design, and to endeavour to demonstrate the consistency of his application of comic imagery. But I leave it to the reader to discover these images in the longer prophetic books in any detail.

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Poetical Sketchesand Tiriel. Chapter 5 demonstrates the hitherto neglect-ed significance of An Island in the Moonas Blake’s statement of a comic Visionary manifesto. Chapter 6 investigates the comic as an alternative sublime in The Songs of Innocence and of Experienceand chapter 7 looks at the surprising way the comic influences some of Blake’s designs. Chapter 8 reviews Blake’s use of the comic, as well as suggesting how its thematic use influences his later prophetic books.

First, then, remembering that ‘Roses are planted where thorns grow’ (E33), let us begin our examination of what ‘comic vision’ might mean by addressing the difficult and perennially thorny problem of defining comedy.

Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’

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We all know what we find funny, but defining comedy is not easy. As a term it is used to describe such an immense range of human activity that its meaning becomes blunted ‘Comedy’ encompasses anything that makes us laugh, from bodily noises to the subtlest literary bons mots, from formulaic presentations of comic material to sudden acci-dents. In addition, as Northrop Frye reminds us, Dante even gave the name commedià to the grand scheme of redemption and resurrection that is the pattern of both regenerating life and Christian salvation. Although some would argue this is not strictly speaking ‘comedy’, laughter has a long and respectable history in religious practice. In fact, comedy is claimed to fulfil many widely differing functions in our society. It is used as a mark of linguistic and emotional development, a political weapon, a survival mechanism, a social lubricant, ‘a subsidiary language’,8_{a seduction technique, even a parable of earthly existence.}

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structure and intelligence. It thrives on rules, particularly when borrowed or ransacked from the respectable worlds of physics and linguistics, but only when they can be abused, stretched, or pursued to absurdity. Of course, it is precisely this slipperiness, this status as an accompanying counter-culture, reflecting and challenging the prevailing modes of order that makes the comic such an attractive model for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. But Edward Galligan’s lament is typical of every comic theorist from Aristotle onwards when he writes that the comic defies definition, preferring double meanings, gestures and dances.9_{The comic theorist, almost inevitably, must do the same,}

per-forming an elaborate and suggestive dance to convey their meaning. To paraphrase Dr Johnson, no one but a fool ever writes about folly.

Most theories of comedy follow a familiar pattern and few, if any, are a practical demonstration that the soul of wit is brevity. First comes the apology: for example, Caesar, in Cicero’s De Oratore, admitting that com-edy is ‘exceedingly difficult to summarize’, or Dr Johnson, in his turn, noting that ‘Comedy has been unpropitious to definers’, or Morton Gurewitch claiming that it is positively ‘hazardous to declare that comedy has a single meaning’.10_{Then the theorist proposes an origin}

for comedy, usually locating it in the plays that developed from ancient Greek religious festivals (while ignoring the fact that this involves an unseemly conflation of comic drama with the generally risible). Many critics, from the sixteenth-century writer Evanthius to the twen-tieth century’s F. M. Cornford have made this connection, although lately there have been a number of studies suggesting the plays of Aristophanes, so pivotal to this theory, do not, in true comic fashion, conform to the definitions they are purported to have engendered.11

The theorist then feels obliged to point out that in any case, comedy is highly subjective (often quoting Molière’s ‘we do not laugh alike’).12

Moreover, they say, the desire to produce a single definition of comedy is like trying to create a single punchline to fit all jokes. (Or as Blake might say, ‘One Law for the Ox and the Lion is Oppression’, E44). Nevertheless, the hapless critic finally attempts to approximate a defin-ition by calling up snippets from a huge supporting cast of names that are, in this field, as familiar as household words, and all of whom dis-agree: Bahktin and Baudelaire, Arnold and Nietzsche, Jonson and Johnson.13 _{Many writers bring illumination to the subject, like Freud}

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the spiritual significance of laughter. Sensitive, then, to the inevitable disappointment of their readers, most would-be theorists finally add the coda that comic theories are never as amusing as comic practice. The most elegant formulation of this is undoubtedly the novelist Peter DeVries’ wry comment that listening to a lecture on comedy is about as funny as being struck in the face with a recipe for custard pie.14 _Of

course, there is little reason why theories of comedy should be funny: theories of tragedy would gain little by attempting to be tragic (‘Hamlet! Dead!’). However, there is a sense of incompleteness about the defin-ition process which is all the more frustrating because the comic often ends happily: marriage, escape, celebration, understanding, resolution. And yet this ending is also a beginning, the brink of the next chapter, a restart in an ongoing journey, rather than the neat finality of the tragic journey. A joke is seldom alone; it begs others. To define comedy com-pletely would be to kill the joke.

As a result, definitions of comedy tend to be somewhat broad. For our purposes, however, the version offered in the 1973 A Dictionary of Modern Critical Termsis as succinct and apposite as any. This states that ‘comedy’ is simply that which ‘arouses and vicariously satisfies the human instinct for mischief’ and in itself is ‘neither morally useful or immoral’.15_{Having accepted this general chortle of human mischief as a}

starting point, it is possible then to identify and separate certain elem-ents of comic expression as having a particular purpose. To borrow a lit-erary term, the phrase ‘the comic’ can be used to distinguish those aspects of comedy which involve ‘a sense of triumph over whatever is inimical to human or social good, however that ideal is defined.’16_That

triumph can come in many forms. It may be the deflation and degrad-ation of pomposity and authority, including the authority of the con-trolling ego. It may be social control exerted over those whose folly or vice runs against the social grain: by extension, it can therefore be a political weapon. It can hold up a pattern of good behaviour, celebrate the uniqueness of having a good heart, or rejoice in marriage, birth and even death as part of the process of constantly renewing youth and en-ergy. It may also be the triumph of life over death itself: both through fecundity and, in the Christian tradition within which Blake worked, the rejoicing brought by the knowledge of our salvation through God’s infinite love.

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this by means of an extraordinary two-stage process. It is at once both ‘triumphant and deflationary’,18_{generating a ‘double attitude of both}

sympathy and criticism’.19_{The key to this dual nature lies in the comic’s}

property of stimulating and celebrating the imaginations of both the joker and their audience by means of its unique structure.

While admitting that there are anomalies (such as tickling), most the-orists try to explain the structure of comedy by focusing on what makes us laugh. Inevitably, most do this by extrapolating backward from their beliefs about comic function. For example, those who see it as primarily a civilizing force will explain laughter as a cackle of triumph over an enemy, a view famously espoused by Hobbes (On Human Nature, 1650). Psychic relief theorists, on the other hand, will point to the sudden exposure of hidden aggression. Nearly all theorists, however, state that laughter is a result of surprise. A good example of this can be found in the work of the sixteenth-century writer Madius. His On the Ridiculous

(1550) is particularly suitable for our purpose in that it contains the seeds of three major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of comedy. On the one hand, drawing on much earlier comic theory, he states his belief that comedy deals with characters of low type and is to provide moral lessons. In this, his work is a clearly part of a theory that would influence Jonson, Dryden and the early eighteenth-century critic John Dennis. This is the credo of that would-be social reformer, a satirist, and satire was a powerful comic force in the eighteenth century. Madius also gives us the beginnings of what will become the psychic relief theory of comedy. Earlier theorists had noted the importance of comedy in diffusing social tensions, likening it to a safety valve on a wine barrel ‘that must be opened from time to time to prevent [it] from bursting’.20

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differences. Comedy became, for them, a matter of eccentric good nature rather than savagely witty humour.

Madius’ keywords, then, were novelty, incongruity and surprise. The best jokes, he theorized, thus came from the sudden exposure of some-thing forbidden, ungainly or absurd, in a creative and witty manner. This wit was often achieved by a reversal of expectation, associating the high with the low and thus finding value in the worthless. This defini-tion covers one part of the comic process, but there is a second import-ant element to be considered. In order for us to find something funny, the comic has to appeal to something within us, which delights in the creative transgression of boundaries and the disturbance of rules. If that delight were not there, we would simply find such transgression odd, not funny. Our delight in that transgression is increased when our sense of the importance of following rules – social, linguistic or behavioural – is heightened. It will appeal even further if a rule is broken by a triumph of the simplest over the most sophisticated, the most human over the most stern. In a sense, Hobbes was right, laughter is about triumph, but not over others, or over our former selves, but over all those things which oppose the organic effulgence of life itself.

To take a simple example: imagine someone sawing through a branch on which they sit. They are obeying simple rules – like the laws of tool use – but unexpectedly disregarding much more serious rules, like the laws of gravity and the instinct for survival. In order for this to be a com-edy rather than a potential tragcom-edy, the person must take on a symbolic function.21_{They may do this by exhibiting certain sexual or racial}

char-acteristics, social status or a famous public identity, in which case they become an object of politically aggressive humour. But this symbolic function can be achieved simply by doing something ordinarily human – foolish, vulnerable, accidentally untoward. This symbolic identity can be made even clearer by nuances that identify the person as a public per-former, a clown. In the example of our clown on a branch, by deliberate-ly (as a performer) and involuntarideliberate-ly (as a character) ignoring her own safety, she is symbolically taking on those things that cause us pain – our stupidity or the immutable laws of physics – and by enduring and tri-umphing over the consequences in some way lessening them. The clowning scenario is often enough to produce laughter in itself; the childish pleasure brought on by the clash of experiences in the antici-pated fall; the seriousness of gravity ameliorated by the established dur-ability of clowns.

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exposure. This is the comedy of satire, and it often relies on comparison: the stupidity of the person on the branch suggests that all those sharing such characteristics are stupid. In this sense, Hobbes’ definition is right: we laugh at others, or at former selves who would have been similarly stupid. There is a problem with satire, however, and that is it offers a very limited range of possibilities. The satirist is always right, occasional-ly if onoccasional-ly because they are clever to have made their observation: the vic-tim is always wrong. To take an eighteenth-century example, several of Gillray’s cartoons show Prime Minister Pitt farting in the face of his opponents. Depending on which political party you support, this could be an attack on Pitt, on his opponents, or on the whole political system that sees such heated debate as no better than an exchange of bad air. The satirist, and by extension the viewer, think themselves in some way better than the politicians, despite or perhaps especially because they suffer their tyranny while being cleverer than those depicted. Although insightful and capable of exposing the corrupt inner workings of society, this aspect of the comic offers no alternative.

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modes grew out of religious celebrations, and part of the special signifi-cance of the carnivalesque is its capacity to express spirituality uninhibit-ed by dogma and priest craft – to offer, in Christopher Fry’s famous phrase, ‘a narrow escape’ from tragedy ‘into faith’.22

Humanity has been called both homo ludens and homo festivus: the comic and spiritual impulses are not only deep-seated, but share attrib-utes: joy, playfulness, unself-consciousness, awareness of being part of a greater whole.23_{In many ways, the creativity, novelty, incongruity and}

surprise at the heart of Madius’ definition help to connect comedy with faith. The way that the comic does this is, by making us aware of our own creativity, it reminds us that we share in the creativity of God. Christ is the word made flesh: he shared our physicality with us. To understand Him, we must also joy in our physicality.24_{The comic turns}

the word into flesh too, in the muscularity of laughing. Blake believed that, by partaking in a joyful physical existence, we can become aware that we are all part of the divine ‘Eternal Body of Man’, that is ‘The Imagination’

God himself

that is [. . .] Jesus: we are his Members

The Divine Body (E273)

Joking has often been called a creative act25_{and creativity rests as}

much in the joke’s recipient as in the joke teller. As Shakespeare put it:

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it.

(Love’s Labours Lost, V.ii.849–51)

Whether presented in terms of a recognizable structure, a variation on a known formula26_{that invites resolution, or in the opportunity to view}

an event in more than one way, a joke will succeed only if the recipient ‘sees’ it. That may mean sharing a prejudice, but it may also empower them to reshape their world, because to see a joke requires recognition that all perception is an act of interpretation, of reading the world.

It is this act of creative re-reading that makes the comic so important to Blake’s Vision. At its most obvious it can be seen in the operation of a simple pun (although even the simplest require the listener to hold sever-al ideas in their head at once). Again, to take a facile example: ‘A man walked into a bar. Ouch. It was an iron bar.’ The accepted linearity of the storytelling mode has been disrupted and the comic has revealed a

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stagnation of interpretation, a formulaic expectation of what is to come next – ‘it was a noisy / crowded / empty bar’. Of course this process is pos-sible because ‘bar’ has more than one meaning. Arthur Koestler, follow-ing Baudelaire, uses the term ‘bisociate’ to describe this intersection of ‘matrices of thought’, the activity that make jokes, especially puns, not only possible but enjoyable.27_{Like Wittgenstein’s famous Duck-Rabbit,}

the fun is partly in the fact that you can see both meanings at once. As well as recognizing and co-operating in the semantic play, however, the listener / reader is also asked to register, even if for a brief moment, their own power to re-order the world creatively. Alongside the breakdown of their usual assumption that language is a logical progression of rule and order there is the possibility of recognizing that social institutions based on linguistic absolutes, the ‘Thou Shalt Not’ of Religion and Law, are themselves neither fixed nor absolute. The comic, even when not very funny, is always side-splitting, a teasing revelation of static views; not so much a counter-culture as an under-the-counter-culture. Moreover, the graphic ‘Ouch’ also asks the joke’s recipients to imagine themselves as, and so sympathize with, the bar-walker.28_{Thus even a simple verbal joke}

offers the recipient a chance both to recognize their usual interpretation of the world as an act of subservience to convention and to re-vision it with a potentially revolutionary empathy and creativity. It is brief, of course, and in the majority of cases these thoughts will not have been articulated in the indulgent and slightly wearied grin that marks the ‘I get it’ moment. Nevertheless, they were present, rewarded by pleasure and significantly, empowered the individual while using the same lan-guage that served as a vehicle for dogmatism. It could, of course, be argued that the recipient is only rewarded for making the connection expected of them. However, all cultures treasure the uncontrolled cre-ativity that joking unleashes in the recipient: if we value wit, we set a pre-mium on the capping rejoinder, the fine retort, the unexpected riposte.

Even in its simplest form, then, the comic offers a model of creative, empathetic re-reading. It exposes a false conception of reality and empowers the recipient to create a new vision based on an experience of shared humanity and creativity that ultimately suggests the joy of divine salvation. And this empowering of the reader is a cornerstone of Blake’s concept of Vision, as even a brief exploration of it will show.

The Comic and Blake’s Vision

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than the simplest of outlines here. However, the repetition of a few sig-nificant (and if for that reason overused) quotations should be sufficient to establish that creative interpretation and reader-empowerment are indeed its basic tenets. At its simplest, Vision is a matter of seeing beyond material existence to eternal truths. Those who do so are ‘Poets & Prophets’ (E554) and this is a state attainable by anyone: ‘Every hon-est man is a Prophet’ (E617) when he utters his true opinion. In The MarriageBlake has the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah explain the nature of prophecy as ‘firm perswasion’ based upon an act of ‘imagination’ that transforms ‘human perception’ to discover the ‘infinite in every thing’ (E38). It is important that this act of ‘Imagination’ is not passive: Blake told Crabb Robinson that imagination must be actively ‘work[ed] up’ to become Vision.29_{A Visionary imagination is one that actively interprets}

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(E490), a pattern that afflicts all areas of human experience: ‘A Tyrant is the Worst disease & the Cause of all others’ (E625).

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory. It Thence frames Laws

and Moralities

To destroy Imagination! The Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.

(E229)

It is the job of the Visionary artist, therefore, to teach us that ‘Man’s per-ceptions are not bounded by the organs of . . . sense’ (E2) and to show us how to ‘see with, not thro’ / The Eye’ (E520). Of course, the Visionary artist too must use the ‘text’ of physical signs to convey their ideas, the ‘Drapery’ which alone reveals ‘the Shape of the Naked’ (E650). There is a danger that this will lead to a ‘stain[ing of] the water clear’ (E7), but Visionary art teaches us to recognize the world as an ‘Allegory’ (E544) that has to be read creatively. Blake constantly insists that every act of perception is an act of interpretation: ‘All that we see is Vision’ (E273), and that the power of interpretation lies within us: ‘As a man is So he Sees’ (E702). ‘The Writings of the Prophets illustrate . . . the Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine images as seen in the Worlds of Vision’ (E555, my italics). By recognizing that creative power, and hence meaning, rests both in us and in others (‘Every body does not see alike’ E702) we can come to recognize ourselves as part of the Divine creative power: ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (E562). While this suggests that all readings are merely interpretations, and hence all readings are equal-ly valid, it also avoids the potential meaninglessness inherent in that position by also suggesting that all readers are valuable. All readers, by being creative, are part of God; we are interpretations of God and God exists because we interpret Him: ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ (E40).

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Old Nobodaddy aloft

This rather scurrilous fragment, written in a jaunty, nursery rhyme style, was composed around 1793, a prolific time for Blake in which he pro-duced The Marriage, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, some of the Songs of Experienceand America.

Clearly, here is a comic deflation of religious, literary and social authority, achieved by the simple comic expedient of reversal – the sur-prise of associating what is high, important and abstract with what it claims to despise, the low and bodily. God, pictured here in the terms of the religious doctrines of polite society, of fear and prohibition, is an almighty and judgmental Jehovah. Blake has re-christened him ‘Nobodaddy’, a comic baptism that reveals His true nature – he is both ‘No-body’ – abstract and worthless – and ‘daddy’, a comic deflation of the stern ‘father’. This Jehovah’s awful edicts of absolute law are mocked by being likened to the lowest bodily pronouncements – farts, belches and coughs. His solemnity is mocked by his ‘oath’ that makes heaven quake, not from admiration of His divine wisdom and awful power, but recoiling in the face of bad language and immoderate temper. Blake is challenging our idea of God as a protective father simply by extending the idea that, if His control over us is to be represented in physical terms (fear of the father), then we had better accept the consequences of that physicality (farts and temper). In true comic fashion, opposition to this domineering God on His almighty throne comes from the lowest possi-ble source – Blake picturing himself as being on the humpossi-blest sort of throne there is: the lavatory.30 _{This both pokes fun at Nobodaddy’s}

throne and establishes an alternative kind of authority. Blake describes himself as being beneath the ‘poplar’ trees, a lovely image that carries three pictures for us: the first of trees standing tall and solemn around Blake, natural courtiers with more dignity than the abstract roaring deity; the second of Blake as being a tribune of the London citizenry, Poplar being a dockyard area in that great city; and third, with a deft gag on a London accent, of what is ‘pop[u]lar’. He sits as the representative of us all, a Rabelaisian figure unstoppable in its need to eat, excrete and live. The conventional picture of God’s authority, Blake suggests, is based on physical discomfort, embarrassment and denial, while being perceived and maintained in purely physical terms – dominion and threat. In response, Blake starts up from his seat and performs ‘a brief rit-ual of scatological magic’.31_{His turning round ‘three times three’ and}

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the ceremonies of the conventional church and to comment on the ways that church and the rest of polite society have sought to demonize the ordinary and human. To challenge them, Blake is aligning himself with the tradition of the devilish Fool, a tradition we will trace more fully later. His rebellious action, mooning the Moon, brings a wide reaching series of consequences. The Moon blushes ‘scarlet red’, an image which both reveals the embarrassment of polite society (in An Island in the Moon the Moon is the home of a society ‘so much’ like England ‘you would think you was among your friends’, E440) and gives Blake an authority over the universe which defies conventional religious and scientific thinking. Blake’s power then extends to the literary world, tying Klopstock, a man known as the German Milton and with whose ideas of God as a stern, unforgiving father Blake disagreed, in knots. Appropriately, as Klopstock’s view of God is expressed in terms of phys-ical domination, reducing the soul to little more than a gas trapped in the body, Blake’s triumph is to give him wind. Generating guilt at bodily existence, Blake suggests, is the weapon of those who seek to control us. Klopstock’s ‘soul’ is ‘lockd’ in his body by his ‘bowels’ and cannot be separated except by death, an image for the oppressions of polite reli-gion that reappears in There is No Natural Religionand ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Songs of Innocence. Blake makes clear elsewhere in his work that this imposition of guilt, especially on our sexual drive, is used to control us by perverting our energy into war: ‘I am drunk with unsatiat-ed love, / I must rush again to War: for the Virgin has frownd & refus’d’ (E222). War can mean either international or internecine conflict: ‘Then old Nobodaddy aloft . . . said I love hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering . . . / To kill the people I am loth, / But If they rebel they must go to hell’ (E499). ‘Hanging & drawing & quartering’ was the fate of Guy Fawkes and the punishment of ‘traitors’: the British government is, by implication, setting itself up as Jehovah and attacking the liberty of the individual.

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literally, taken on the divine creativity, remaking ‘Blake’ as the narrator of his poem. And his action of mooning Nobodaddy, the bodiless deity, has made Nobodaddy human, making him aware of his ‘feeling[s]’ and, as a result, of his fallen status. The positions are reversed: it is now Jehovah who must beg for help from Blake. By stressing their common physicality, Blake debunks the idea of an all-powerful Nobodaddy and demonstrates the potential of a common uprising. Moreover, his joking, crude ditty is successful without access to polite literary form: ‘If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite / What might he not do if he sat down to write’. The excremental references are only offensive to an ideology that denies shared humanity. In saying that he can rebut Nobodaddy’s claims even when engaging him in forms of expression that Nobodaddy would class as impolite, Blake is championing the low-est form of human experience over the sterility of polite rlow-estraint. And if Blake’s ‘shite’ is better than Nobodaddy’s world-view, the poem implies, how much the better Blake’s writing, which can transform matter into an expression of the spiritual: the power to see heaven in a grain of sand. ‘Shite’ has been both degradation and blessing, a pattern common in comedy. Blake uses it to condemn bad art and bad religion, an accusa-tion he repeats elsewhere in his work. In his Annotations to Reynolds

(c.1808) he notes that ‘To My Eye Rubens’s Colouring is most Con-temptible His Shadows are of a Filthy Brown somewhat of the Colour of Excrement’ (E655) and in the Note-book 1793he rebukes those who use the Bible to support the system of prohibitive law necessary to maintain the capitalist economy with the couplet ‘The Hebrew Nation did not write it / Avarice & Chastity did shite it’, (E516). This is not mere name-calling – in comparison to the history of eighteenth-century jibes at authority, Blake’s language is mild32_{– but the comic use of a symbol of}

human equality that uses the basest form of creativity to defeat the pro-hibitive and repressive image of Nobodaddy. The Blake-narrator is, to borrow Henderson’s term, an ‘obscene hero’ who brings creativity and justice.33

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century. It was implicit in the debates surrounding the Millenarian pro-nouncements of ‘prophets’ such as Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, Sarah Flaxmer, Ann Lee and others. These prophets insisted that ‘views of futurity’ were not confined ‘to any particular rank, age, sex or condi-tion’ (Brothers, Wonderful Prophecies, 1794), but while the idea of equal-ity was dearly held in many radical spheres, these prophets believed that the power of prophecy lies in the interpretation. Unlike political enlightenment, which was invariably ‘given’, spiritual enlightenment depended on the reader. W. Sales, in Truth or Not Truth; or A Discourse on Prophets(London, 1795), describes prophetic writing as a ‘light’ that falls onto the hitherto dark, ‘Worldly’ mind of the reader, but it is up to the reader to judge for themselves the ‘wisdom’ of that light. Blake’s comic vision operates in the same way, but unlike these other prophets, he felt the best medium to convey his message was not in the sublime of fear and beauty, light and darkness, but in a ridiculous enlightenment that challenges the authority of light itself.

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2 Mirth at the errors of a foe:

the Eighteenth- and

Nineteenth-Century Comic World

Fielding warned in the Covent-Garden Journal that ‘Of all Kinds of Writing there is none on which . . . Variety of Opinions is so common as in those of Humour’,1_{and it would of course be a mistake to assume that}

the eighteenth-century comic world was any less rich or complex than our own, or that we can do more than point to general trends and themes of development.2_{Nevertheless, while recognizing that such}

dis-tinctions are inevitably arbitrary, it will help our understanding of Blake’s comedy to classify his sources of humorous influence into a number of distinct types.

The most obvious starting point is in the humour that was inherited from the classical authors, shaped by Ben Jonson, and was arguably the defining literary mode of the age: satire.

Satire

The eighteenth century teems with satirists, from Dryden to Gillray, Swift to Fielding, and a whole host of political scribblers in between. At its most obvious satire is, as Brown wrote in 1751, ‘that Species of Writing [or drawing] which excites Contempt with Laughter’.3_{It had a}

long and honourable tradition, justified by Aristotle’s supposed opinion that the purpose of comedy was to expose vice as a form of moral instruction. John Dennis expresses this idea succinctly in his Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter(1722): comedy ‘should expose Persons to our View . . . whose follies we may despise; and by shewing us what is done upon the Comick Stage, to shew us what ought never to be done upon the Stage of the World’. In similar mood, the great stage comedian Samuel Foote, in

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his introduction to The Comic Theatre, being a Free Translation of all the Best French Comedies(1762), insists that the ‘original purpose of comedy was to expose particular follies for the punishment of individuals, and as an example to the whole community’. Like many satirists, Foote used the image of satire as an ‘important medicine’, purging vice from those who saw it. This image was a development of the medieval concept of the bodily ‘humours’ and had been famously espoused by Ben Jonson: ‘wholesome remedies’ and ‘fair correctives’ for the ‘diseased’.4

As I mentioned in the last chapter, eighteenth-century satirical theory often cited the work of Thomas Hobbes to justify its programme of ridicule and chastisement. (This was only to be expected, of course: virtu-ally everyone who contended that social relations were based solely on power used Hobbes as a kind of noumenal gunslinger to support their cause.) Hobbes had claimed that laughter was provoked by the ‘new and unexpected’. Such triumphing could be painful, but while the satirists might exempt certain groups from censure (the poor, sick, evil and virtu-ous), they nevertheless saw its socially abrasive nature as a proof of its worth. Dryden claimed that ‘there’s a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even when it hurts’.5_{It was also, with its rebellious mocking of}

official restrictions and the sudden reversal of social norms, an extremely useful political weapon. In 1729 Anthony Collins argued that satire was the only recourse of the oppressed;6_in_{The Rights of Man}_{(1791), Tom}

Paine identified the power of laughter in effecting social change.7 _It

made an ideal vehicle for the emerging political consciousness of the arti-san class and Blake’s radical sympathies brought him into contact with many dissenting movements that, in their pamphlets, sermons and meetings used satire as a means for political challenge and education. Among others, David V. Erdman and Heather Glen have made invaluable contributions towards establishing the similarities between Blake’s Songs

and the language of contemporary satirical radical writing, with its paro-dies of adverts, political statements and nursery rhymes for ‘Children Six Feet High’.8_{It is a major feature of Blake’s notebook jottings and}

margin-alia, where he tried his hand at both personal and political invective. One example of this is an epigram in the Note-book 1793that attacks the hypocritical capitalist interests of orthodox Christianity:

Why of the sheep do you not learn peace Because I dont want you to shear my fleece.

(E469)

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usual satiric fashion, parodies the language of his opponent to expose the hypocrisy of the motives behind it, and offers an alternative that appeals to the reader as a glimpse of truth. It creates a sense of right-thinking by juxtaposing the parson’s sterile, archaic, apolitical and pas-toral imagery with the modern, urban vocabulary of Piggot’s Political Dictionary (1795) and contemporary slang such as might be found in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue(1785), where ‘to be fleeced’ meant to be cheated or robbed, in the style of a witty and populist proverb – a folk or biblical saying.

Sharp as it is, this epigram also demonstrates the difficulty of separat-ing eighteenth-century comedy into different strands. The kind of asso-ciation it plays upon – sheep, fleece, fleeced – could be cited as a good example of the sort of incongruous humour recommended by Francis Hutcheson in 1729, and to which we will turn shortly. But Blake had clearly observed the structures of his satiric forebears. The parodying of well-known texts (what might be described as forging, in both senses, cultural coinage) was a feature of the socialist movements of the Inter-regnum in the late 1640s and 1650s whose output greatly influenced eighteenth-century radicalism. One example is the Lord’s Prayerof 1647: ‘Our fathers, which think the Houses of Parliament to be Heaven . . . you lead us into rebellion and all other mischiefs, but cannot deliver us from evil’.9_{Blake recognized this tradition when he produced his}

paro-dy of Dr Thornton’s new translation of The Lord’s Prayer:

Jesus our Father . . . Thy Kingdom on Earth is Not nor thy Will done but Satans . . . Give us This Eternal Day our own right Bread & take away Money or Debt or Tax a Value or Price as we have all things common among us . . . Leave us not in Parsimony . . . For thine is the Kingdom & the Power & the Glory & not Caesars or Satans Amen.

(E668–9)

These are just a couple of simple examples, but they show Blake using satire to make political and moral statements, a style Blake continues to employ in his longer works, including America, An Island, The Marriage

and The First Book of Urizen, as I will discuss later.

Another part of Blake’s work where satire can be seen to exert its influ-ence is in his designs. The period from the 1760s to the 1790s saw the growth of an unprecedented public obsession with satiric prints.10_The

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epigrams, they were the sort of thing that, according to Addison, might appeal to the ‘Upper Gallery Audience in a Play-house’.11_{They brought}

a new kind of political and iconographic literacy to the population of London and their development coincided with, and to a certain extent inspired the popularity of the Anti-Jacobin and ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movements. Over time, the caricatures grew increasingly sophisticated, showing a complex interplay of style, content and imagery that was both familiar and de-familiarizing, at once re-visioning classical art, contemporary politics and street language. Ironic and informed, they relied on a constant referentiality as a source of meaning. For example, Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’ is reworked in Rowlandson’s ‘The Covent Garden Nightmare’ (1784). By making the female subject of Fuseli’s original a voluptuous denizen of Covent Garden with the face of Charles James Fox, Rowlandson is suggesting that while Fox takes his politics seriously, his attitude is as pretentious as ‘high’ art, his opinions are as disturbed as a nightmare and his political morals little better than an expensive and dramatic version of prostitution, which may end up revisiting him like an avenging ghost.12_{There was also a great deal of crossover between}

caricature images and satirical writing. In Piggot’s Dictionarythe entry for ‘pig’ suggests the populace was held in contempt by political masters who regarded them as the ‘swinish multitude’. In Gillray’s print ‘Presages of the Millennium’ (1795), Pitt is shown running down a herd of pigs. These pigs may be the cowering French revolutionaries, the can-nibalistic destroyers of freedom and liberty, in which case the print is sympathetic to Pitt. However, his skeletal, threatening figure, with the serpent-like King trailing in a cloud like a bad fart behind him, also pres-ents him as a threat to the British underclass.13

As a youthful collector and professional engraver, tavern-dwelling rad-ical thinker, one-time owner of a print shop and even as a London pedestrian, Blake was constantly surrounded by such prints. They were everywhere from shop windows to magazines, on playing cards, pottery, even on handkerchiefs. They graced the walls of private libraries and public inns, art galleries and street corners and formed the backdrop to the puppet and live theatres. Blake clearly responded to them by adopt-ing elements of this radical language into his own work. Among others, Jon Mee, Marcus Wood and Vincent Carretta have found satirical ele-ments in many of Blake’s designs and, again, more will be said of this in a later chapter.

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1696, ‘as apt for mischief as for good purposes’.14_{It could either be}

com-pletely misunderstood – as happened in the famous case of Swift’s canni-balistic The Shortest Way with Dissenters– or it could be used as a form of repression. It relied on the implicit claim that the satirist was ‘holier than others’ (E201). While the satirist’s stated target was ‘Affectation’ – Swift defended satirizing personal deformity by claiming he ‘spare[d] a hump, or crooked nose / Whose owners set not up for beaux’15_{– it is}

always down to the satirist to decide what was affectation, what natural beauty. Fielding likewise claimed that ‘natural imperfections’ should not be objects of derision; ‘but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness aims to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate cir-cumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth’.16_{Those who admit they are ugly get pity (and Blake often}

ques-tions the motives of such a reaction) and those who do not are laughed at, with the intention of separating them from the crowd and control-ling them. The satirist claims to be representing a ‘widely-held norm’ to which all ‘right-thinking’ readers would subscribe, clearing the air of obfuscation and providing a glimpse of the truth, but in fact that truth ‘exists nowhere but in language’.17_{Satire operates in a fictional,}

stereo-typed world, usually contrasting an amoral urban culture with a stupid-idyllic, often almost pornographic pastoral, all manipulated by a false logic based on sleight of hand. For example, in the graphic prints of the 1780s, if a satirical victim could be caricatured as a large person, he could thereforebe represented as an elephant and thereforehe was slow-witted. Of course, the satirist would argue that the victim had had plen-tiful, even unfair amounts of representation in another discourse, in the dominant commercial or social sphere, for example. But satire’s essential mode was that of the ‘Hypocrite’. Blake felt that such hypocrisy was the way of the ‘Pharisees’ and ‘Moral Law’ and was opposed to ‘the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin’ (E201). Despite his own frequent use of satire, he is quick to criticize its limitations. He complained that ‘Aristotle says Characters are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character’ (E269) – rather, he felt, good-ness and badgood-ness are conditions imposed by society. Satire, in trying to impose a unity of view, produces ‘a Moral like a sting in the tail’ (E269), akin to having to undergo a second fall. Later Blake would remark that ‘Caricature Prints’ could ‘Pervert’ the eye so that one could only ‘See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity’ (E702).18_{The chief problem, he felt,}

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‘Grecian Mocks & Roman sword’ (E202) to the sword that spilled the blood of Jesus and tried to deny the doctrine of forgiveness for sins.

The limitations of satire were, of course, well rehearsed in the eight-eenth century. Addison noted in The Spectatorof December 1711: ‘If the Talent of Ridicule were employed to laugh Men out of Vice and Folly, it might be of some use . . . but instead . . . we find that it is generally made use of to laugh Men out of Virtue and good Sense . . . attacking every thing that is . . . Decent and Praise-worthy in Human Life.’19_As

the century progressed many comic theorists and practitioners turned their backs on the divisive nature of satire. By the 1760s Lord Kames was attacking satirists for showing a lack of taste and by 1776 James Beattie, distinguishing between the ludicrous (the amusing) and the ridiculous (satire), was calling the latter ‘unnatural’.20_{In the 1780s a whole host of}

voices was raised against satire. Hugh Blair, in his famous Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, while admitting that the ‘general idea of Comedy, as a satyrical exhibition of the improprieties and follies of mankind, is an idea very moral and useful’ at the same time confesses ‘that ridicule is an instrument of such a nature that . . . there is hazard of its doing mischief . . . to society’.21_{Knox, in his}_{Essays Moral and Literary}

(1782) went further, to declare that ‘Ridicule . . . seems to become a weapon in the hands of the wicked, destructive of taste, feeling, moral-ity and religion’.22_{This theoretical disdain was matched in the literary}

field. While Richard Steele, in his epilogue to The Lying Lover (1704) could dismiss it as the bitter art form of rival playwrights – ‘Laughter’s a distorted passion, born / Of sudden self-esteem and sudden scorn; / Which, when ‘tis o’er, the men in pleasure wise / Both him that moved it and themselves despise’ – at the other end of the century, William Cowper felt able to condemn it to the dustbin of history, stating in his poem ‘Table Talk’ (1782) that satire ‘has long since done his best’.

The problem was, in the satiric world there were no moral absolutes. In many ways the great satirical artist Gillray personified this ambiva-lence: a radical in the pay of conservatives, his satiric thrusts lent power to their victims by confirming their status as worthy of caricature. It is reported that even the Royal family he so scabrously portrayed eagerly awaited each new offering. If the reforming power of the poet-satirist had become tainted, then one resolution was to change to the poet-ironist. Of course, it is impossible to separate the terms irony and satire23

and they were often used together in the eighteenth century.24_{But irony}

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superiority in itself. Certainly a number of the end lines of Blake’s lyrics seem to use irony in this way, for example in An Island(‘Good English Hospitality O then it did not fail’, E461) and the Songs(‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’, E10). However, the trouble with irony is that its moral absolutes are even less certain than those of satire. At least satire claims the moral high ground, however divisively: irony is often a matter of tone and invites the possibility that, ultimately, no absolute moral meaning exists. Pursued to an end ‘an ironic temper can dissolve everything, in an infinite chain of solvents’.25_{And as Kierkegaard notes,}

if nothing has any meaning and everything is open to question, then the self is unable to perceive any consciousness higher than itself and is thus unable to receive God’s benediction.26_{Blake agreed: ‘sin and the}

destruction of order are the same’ (E584). As with satire, the effect on the conscious self is once more to create a sense of isolation and fear, leaving it ripe for the exploitative superstitions so profitable to the rule of law and commercial interests.

What was to be the alternative? A clue comes in John Dryden’s preface to An Evening’s Love: or, The Mock Astrologer (1671). While citing the usual satirist’s creed that comedy deals with ‘human imperfections’ and prompts laughter at the ridiculous to ‘reform’ the laughers, Dryden nev-ertheless feels that some objects are too low for comedy. He calls it ‘farce’ and derides those authors who would write ‘so ill as to please their audi-ence’. Here is the voice of an emergent middle class, objecting on the one hand to the po-faced Puritanism of the Interregnum and on the other to the excesses of the Restoration rake.27_{Instead of vulgarity,}

Dryden suggests, it is ‘things unexpected’ that makes us laugh, because the fancy has a strange appetite, ‘like that of a longing woman’. In 1729 Francis Hutcheson took that argument a step further, criticizing Hobbes’ view of ‘superiority’ and, picking up on the term Madius had used, stat-ing that laughter arose from the brstat-ingstat-ing together of incongruous ideas.28_{Incongruity, uniqueness and eccentricity came to be something}

to be cherished, the origin of a gentle humour that could make ‘every body smile, and no body blush’.29 _{This new type of gentle joviality,}

adopting Falstaff as its hero, appealed to a class of Englishmen content to forgive themselves small foibles because they believed in civility, tol-erance and consideration, facing life’s difficulties with ‘Chearfulness & Good Humour’ (E710) for all ‘and no objection to the pudding’.30