‘Without Contraries There is No Progression’: Cinematic Montage and the Relationship of Illustration to Text in William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen

My claim is that Blake’s illustrations are not a supplement depicting what happens in the text, but a translation into visual terms of his central tenet, at play throughout The [First] Book of Urizen, that ‘[w]ithout Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3). And I am claiming further that this strategy is comparable to the cinematic technique of montage: whereas the collision of two contrary images in montage creates an explosion famously described by Benjamin as ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’. Blake, too, creates tension and ‘collision’ in his illustrations in order to depict not the actual image of Los delivering his hammer blows, for example, but rather the hoped for effect of these blows – the breaking apart of Urizen’s ‘solid without fluctuation’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 4). This ‘solid,’ if allowed to stand, imposes a restrictive view of the cosmos that reduces our visionary capacity to that of ‘two little orbs. . .fixed in two little caves/Hiding carefully from the wind. . .’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 12).