The Iconic Mode of William Blake

The Iconic Mode of William Blake Nicholas O. Warner Claremont McKenna College In 1810, William Blake produced the article "A Vision of the Last Judgment," an explanatory piece designed to elucidate certain features of a now lost painting of the same name. In describing the painting, Blake actually gives us some advice on approaching it that has intriguing implications for understanding the rest of his work, particularly the fusion of text and design in both his own composite art and in his illustrations to the literary work of others. Towards the conclusion of "A Vision of the Last Judgment" Blake writes, "If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination...or could make a Friend and Companion of one of these Images of Wonder which always entreats him to leave mortal things as he must know, then would he arise from his Grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air and then he would be happy."1 This is an ambitious promise (most of us would say an impossible one), even for so confident a visionary as Blake. Yet it contains an important clue about our own role in responding to Blake's work — namely, the need to become active participants in, rather than merely passive observers of, Blake's "Images of Wonder." Elsewhere in his writing Blake expresses a similar attitude: "The Sun's light when he unfolds it, depends on the Organ which beholds it"; "As a man is, so he sees"; "the eye altering alters all."2 This emphasis on the activity and shaping power of perception has double significance — it recalls the way that Blake himself manipulates traditional images, and it implies our need to participate more actively in decoding Blake's fusion of traditional elements with novel conceptions and to enter imaginatively into the process of Blake's recasting of established images into symbols expressive of his own philosophy. What we discover as the result of 1.William Blake, "A Vision of the Last Judgment," in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 550. 2.Blake, pp. 257, 476, 677. 220ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW such activity is that Blake's work often becomes a kind of critically evaluative antitext, which ironically and even satirically comments on and subverts past symbolic associations. We in turn, as Blake's reader-viewers, have our own expectations subverted, our responses manipulated by Blake's rebellious use of tradition. How does Blake achieve this level of manipulative power? As we will repeatedly find, Blake uses traditional motifs as thematic signals to his reader-viewers. Yet he rebelliously alters these motifs or combines them with others so as to shock us into a heightened awareness of his own, often subversive, meaning. This blend of satire and symbol, of traditionalism and revolt, is the unrecognized hinge on which much of Blake's work moves. Blake's longer poems especially are based neither on dramatic action nor lyric effusion, his paintings neither on literal illustration nor private fantasy, but on the unexpected, deliberate juxtaposition and modification of traditional images. Thus it is that the longest prophetic books — The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem — function not as linear narratives but more as progressions of collage-like clusters of symbolic imagery. Through these clusters Blake constantly absorbs earlier symbols while radically revising them, grafting them onto other images, or transplantingthem into unfamiliar soil. Both in his designs and texts, Blake manages to unite diverse, even clashing symbolic elements and to arrange them into coherent, richly suggestive wholes greater than the sum of their disparate parts. Their success of communication depends, in part, on our ability to recognize the traditional images Blake uses as well as his manipulation of their original values. In the fullest sense, then, Blake's work is "re-visionary," expressing his own startling vision but doing so primarily through the audacious transformation of preexisting icons taken from widely (and wildly) divergent sources. An awareness of Blake's iconic mode of symbolic transformation, first discussed here, not only provides us with a new way of reading Blake's poetry and art, but enables us to reinterpret the major body...