Bloom - Blake's Dialectics

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Dialectic in the Marriage of Heaven and HellAuthor(s): Harold BloomReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 73, No. 5, Part 1 (Dec., 1958), pp. 501-504Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460292 .Accessed: 21/02/2012 09:44

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DIALECTIC IN THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

BY HAROLD LOOM

THE Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaultswhat Blake termed a "cloven fiction" be-

tween empirical and a priori procedure in argu-ment. In content, the Marriage compounds eth-ical and theological "contraries"; in form itmocks the categorical techniques that seek tomake the contraries appear as "negations." Theunity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, andcannot be grasped except by the mind in motion,moving between the Blakean contraries of dis-cursive irony and mythical visualization.

Apocalypse is dialectical in the Marriage, asmuch so as in Shelley's Prometheus or the poems

by Yeats written out of A Vision, or in Blake'sown "Night the Ninth" of The Four Zoas. Thegreat difficulty of dialectical apocalypse is thatit has got to present itself as prophetic irony, inwhich the abyss between aspiration and institu-tion is both anticipated and denounced. The spe-cific difficulty in reading The Marriage of Heavenand Hell is to mark the limits of its irony: wheredoes Blake speak straight? In Blake, rhetoricsubsumes dialectic, and usurps its place of privi-lege. But the process of usurpation is not clear,though this is no flaw in Blake as poet and polemi-cist. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a minia-ture "anatomy," in Northrop Frye's recentlyformulated sense of the term, and reserves toitself the anatomy's peculiar right to mingle sa-tire with vision, furious laughter with the tonalcomplexity involved in any projection of the fouror more last things.

I suggest that we need to distinguish betweenthe Marriage as in itself dialectical and the dia-lectic it attempts to present. The same distinc-tion, rigorously set forth, would clear away muchof Yeats's deliberate perverseness in A Vision,and might help in the comprehension of the epics

of Blake. The schemata of those epics, though di-alectical, are yet systematic; the local life in themmaddeningly (but gratefully) defies the system.The schemata, as Frye in particular has extractedthem, present the dialectics, early and late, ofBlake; the texture, of Jerusalem especially, is sodialectical as to put the dialectics in doubt. Notthat Blake mocks himself; only that he mocks theCorporeal Understanding (including his own)and refuses unto death to cease setting traps forit. There is, in consequence, a true way of read-ing Blake, put forward by Blake himself, a first-class critic of his own works. But this is a trueway which, as Kafka once remarked of true

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ways in general, is like a rope stretched severalinches above the ground, put there not to bewalked upon but to be tripped over.

I shall attempt to reduce the Marriage toBlake's own overt dialectic in what follows, butbecause it is not primarily a discursive work Imake this attempt in a spirit of tentativeness,respecting its innate trickery.

The poem that opens the Marriage as "argu-ment" has not been much admired, nor muchunderstood. Rintrah, the angry man in Blake'spantheon, rears and shakes his fires in the bur-dened air; clouds, hungry with menace, swag on

the deep. The poem is a prelude, establishing thetone of prophetic fury which is to run beneaththe Marriage; the indignation of Rintrah pre-sages the turning over of a cycle.

The poem itself has the cyclic irony of TheMental Traveller. The "just man" or "Devil"now rages in the wilds as outcast, having beendriven out of "perilous paths" by the "villain"or "Angel." This reversal is simple enough, if itis true reversal, which it is not. The initial com-plication is provided by the sixth to ninth linesof the poem:

Roses are planted where horns grow,And on the barren heathSing the honey bees.

Grow, not grew; sing, not sang. We are alreadyinvolved in the contraries. Cliff is opposed toriver, tomb to spring, bleached bones to the redclay of Adam (literal Hebrew meaning). Theturning of this cycle converts the meek just maninto the prophetic rager, the easeful villain intothe serpent sneaking along in mild humility. Thetriple repetition of "perilous path" compoundsthe complication. First the just man keeps the

perilous path as he moves towards death. But"then the perilous path was planted ... / Till thevillain left the path of ease, / To walk in perilouspaths."

We grasp the point by embracing both con-traries, not by reconciling them. There is progres-sion here, but only in the ironic sense of cycle.The path, the way of generation that can onlylead to death, is always being planted, the justman is always being driven out; the villain is al-ways usurping the path of life-in-death. Whenthe just man returns from being a voice in thewilderness, he drives the villain back into thenonexistence of "paths of ease." But "just man"


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and "villain" are very nearly broken down ascategories here; the equivocal "Devil" and "An-gel" begin to loom as the Marriage's contraries.The advent of the villain upon the perilous pathmarks the beginning of a new "heaven," a "mildhumility" of angelic restraint. So Blake leaves hisargument and plunges into his satiric nuptialsong:As a new heaven is begun and it is now thirty-threeyears since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives.

Swedenborg, writing in his True Christian Re-ligion, had placed the Last Judgment in thespiritual world in 1757, the year of Blake's birth.In 1758 Swedenborg published his vision ofjudgment, Heaven and Hell. Now, writing in1790, at the Christological age of thirty-three,Blake celebrates in himself the reviving of theEternal Hell, the voice of desire and rebellioncrying aloud in desert places against the institu-tion of a new divine restraint, albeit that of thevisionary Swedenborg, himself a Devil rolledround by cycle into Angelic category.

Before the Marriage moves into diabolicalgear, Blake states the law of his dialectic:Without Contraries s no progression. Attraction andRepulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, arenecessary o Human existence.

The key here is Human, which is both descriptiveand honorific. This is a dialectic without tran-scendence, in which heaven and hell are to bemarried but without becoming altogether oneflesh or one family. By the "marriage" of con-traries Blake means only that we are to ceasevaluing one contrary above the other in any way.Echoes of Isaiah xxxiv and xxxv crowd throughthe Marriage, and a specific reference to thosechapters is given here by Blake. Reading Isaiahin its infernal sense, as he read Paradise Lost,Blake can acknowledge its apocalypse as his own.As the imaginative hell revives, the heaven ofrestraint comes down.

And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and theheavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and alltheir host shall fall down. (Isaiah xxxiv.4)

The Promethean release that has come toBlake with his full maturity is related to the ti-tanic fury of French revolution and English unrestthat is directly contemporary with the Marriage.'The Revolution is the active springing from En-ergy, called Evil by the "religious," who assignit to Hell. Frye has stated the central idea of theMarriage as being the analogy of this unrest tothe Biblical time of troubles that precedes the

end of the world.2 The Marriage thus enters the

category not of "How long O Lord?" prophecybut of the "turn now" injunction based on Hil-lel's famous question, "If not now, when?" Sothat its dialectic must cease to be purely descrip-tive and cyclic, which is to say, must cease to bemerely dialectic. Apocalypse does not argue, andhardly needs to convince. The verse of the Negrospiritual carries in a kernel the authoritativemessage of apocalypse, taking place between thesardonic warning and the dreaded effect: "Youwill shout when it hits you, yes indeed."

Therefore, the contraries, when next stated inthe famous "Voice of the Devil" passage, haveceased strictly to be contraries. Blake's lower orearthly paradise, Beulah Land, is a state of beingor place where contraries are equally true, butthe Marriage is written out of the state of Gener-

ation, our world in its everyday aspect, whereprogression is necessary. Christian dualism istherefore a negation, hindrance, not action, andis cast out beyond the balance of contraries.Blake does not build truth by dialectic, beingneither a rational mystic like Plato nor a mysticrationalist like Hegel. Nothing eternal abides be-hind forms for Blake; he seeks reality in appear-ances, though he rejects appearance as it is per-ceived by the lowest-common-denominator kindof observer. Between the cloven fiction of St.Paul's mind-body split and the emotionalism ofthe celebrator of a state of nature exists the com-plex apocalyptic humanism of the Marriage,denying metaphysics, accepting the hard givenof this world, but only insofar as this appearanceis altogether human.

Here it has been too easy to mistake Blake-for Nietzsche, for D. H. Lawrence, for Yeats, forwhatever heroic vitalist you happen most toadmire. The Marriage preaches the risen bodybreaking bounds, exploding upwards into psychicabundance. But here Blake is as earnest asLawrence, and will not tolerate the vision ofrecurrence, as Nietzsche and Yeats do. The

altogether human escapes cycle, evades irony,cannot be categorized discursively. But Blakeis unlike Lawrence, even where they touch.The Angel teaches light without heat, thevitalist-or Devil-heat without light; Blakewants both, hence the marriage of contraries.The paradise of Milton needs the heat of hell; theearth of Lawrence needs the light of Eden, therational fire of intellect and creation. Rhetoricnow carries the Marriage through its implicit

1 David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire(Princeton, 1954), pp. 160-166.

2 Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947), p. 194.

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irony; Blake speaks straight for once before sub-jecting Paradise Lost to the play of dialectic:

Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; andReason is the bound or outward circumference ofEnergy.

Energy s Eternal Delight.This does not mean that Reason, the bound, is

Eternal Torment; it does mean that Reason'sstory would hold that unbounded Energy is suchtorment. Hence the Marriage's curious doubleaccount of fall and negative creation, whether ofhell or heaven:

For this history has been adopted by both parties.It indeed appear'd o Reason as if Desire was cast

out; but the Devil's account s, that the Messiah ell,and formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.

Incrude terms, the problem is where the stuffof life comes from; where does Reason, divinity

of the "Angels," obtain the substance that itbinds and orders, the energy that it restrains?By stealing it from the Urgrund of the abyss, isBlake's diabolic answer. We are almost in thescheme of The Four Zoas: the Messiah fell, stolethe stuff of creativity, and formed "heaven." Onecontrary is here as true as another: this historyhas been adopted by both parties. One party,come again to dominance among us, now con-demns Blake as a persuasive misreader of Para-dise Lost. When, in another turn of the criticalwheel, we go back to reading Paradise Lost in itsinfernal or poetic sense, as Blake, Shelley, and ahost of nineteenth-century poets and scholarsdid, we will have to condemn a generation ofcritical dogmatists for not having understoodthe place of dialectic in literary analysis.

The "Memorable Fancies," brilliant exercisesin satire and humanism, form the bulk of theMarriage, and tend to evade Blake's own dialec-tic, being, as they are, assaults, furious and fun-ny, on Angelic culpability. The dialectic of theMarriage receives its definitive statement oncemore in the

work,in

the opposition of the Pro-lific and the Devouring. If one grasps that com-plex passage, one is fortified to move frontallyagainst the most formidable and properly mostfamous section of the Marriage, the "Proverbs ofHell," where dialectic and rhetoric come togethercombatively in what could be judged the mostbrilliant aphorisms written in English, seventygnomic reflections and admonitions on the themeof diabolic wisdom.

The Titanic myth, the story of "the Ante-diluvians who are our Energies," is always pres-ent in Blake, though frequently concealed in

some contrapuntal fiction. In the Marriage the

myth is overt and "Messiah or Satan" is identi-fied with these Giant Forms. The or establishesagain the marriage of contraries. The GiantForms, huge Ids, or Orcs, to use Blake's vocabu-lary, are bound down by the cunning of weak andtame minds:

Thus one portion of being is the Prolific, he otherthe Devouring: o the Devourer t seems as if the pro-ducer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takesportions of existence and fancies hat the whole.

But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless heDevourer, as a sea, received he excess of his delights.

This terrifying vision of the economy of exist-ence is mitigated by its irony, and yet moves intomystery in its final statement. Reason and thesenses do not bound our energies; Eternal De-light, the primal Exuberance that is Beauty,exists beyond the bounds. Blake is not predicat-ing an unconscious mind, for that would be onlya widening of the circumference of the bound.The Freudian hypothesis of the unconsciouswould have represented for Blake what it doesto the phenomenologists-a premature cessationof mental activity, a refusal to analyze all of thegiven. But Blake more than anticipates Husserlhere; he gives a definitive statement of the phe-nomenology of existence, the ceaseless dialecticof daily appearance. Yeats, in A Vision, proudlyasserted his refusal to be logical, lest he be

trapped by his own dialectic. He had never be-lieved with Hegel, he wrote, that the springvegetables were refuted because they were over.In this he was caught up in Blake's spirit, in thevision of existential contraries. The Angel orDevourer takes all the negative force of Blake'srhetoric, but dialectically he is a necessity. TheProlific will not be confined, but it needs con-straint, it thirsts for battle. The Devourer is asea, a moat imprisoning the creator, who wouldotherwise be choked in the excess of his own de-light. Without the hard given (a wall is as gooda symbol as a moat) we do not engage in themutable struggle. This war cry passes into themost defiant sentences in the Marriage:

Some will say: "Is not God alone the Prolific?"answer: "God only Acts and Is, in existing beings orMen."

These two classes of men are always upon earth, andthey should be enemies: whoever tries to reconcilethem seeks to destroy existence.

Religion s an endeavour o reconcile he two.

The nontheism of Blake is never more clearlystated than here, and yet is still being misread bymany. If God only acts and is in Men, then Godhas become an unnecessary hypothesis, having

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no abstract being beyond our powers of visualiza-tion and confrontation. To destroy enmity be-tween Prolific and Devourer would destroy ex-istence, such destruction being religion's attemptto inflict upon us the greatest poverty of not liv-ing in a physical world. Blake's dialecticalstance, with its apotheosis of the physical and itsrejection of the merely natural, is most frequent-ly misunderstood at just this point. Against thesupernaturalist, Blake asserts the reality of thebody as being all of the soul that the five sensescan perceive. Against the naturalist, he assertsthe unreality of the merely given body as againstthe imaginative body, rising through an increasein sensual fulfillment into a realization of its un-fallen potential.

Religion seeks to end the warfare of contraries

because it claims to know a reality beyond ex-istence; Blake wants the warfare to continue be-cause he seeks a reality within existence. Milton'sheaven knows no strife, and therefore no progres-sion, and is to Blake-hell.

We can see Blake's interplay between dialecticand espousing one pole of the dialectic mostvividly in the "Proverbs of Hell," where the reve-lation of the laws of process and a fierce antino-mianism are frequently interleaved:

The road of excess eads to the palace of wisdom. 3)Prudence s a rich, ugly old maid courted by Inca-

pacity. (4)He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. (5)If the fool were to persist in his folly he would be-

come wise. (18)The Tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of

instruction. (44)You never know what is enough unless you know

what is more than enough. (46)Exuberance s Beauty. (64)Sooner murder n infant n its cradle han nurse un-

acted desires. 67)Where man s not, nature s barren. 68)

Each of these proverbs depends for its true

meaning on a dialectic definition of desire and

act, though rhetorically the meaning is overtlyantinomian. Desire is positive; it leads to an ac-tion which is not the hindrance of another. Act ispositive and is virtue; Blake, commenting onLavater, defines its contrary as "accident":

Accident s the omission of act in self & the hinder-ing of act in another; This is Vice, but all Act isVirtue. To hinder another s not an act; it is the con-trary; it is a restraint on action both in ourselves &in the person hinder'd, for he who hinders anotheromits his own duty at the same time.3

The road of excess has therefore nothing to dowith sadism or self-destruction, but is the way tothat all, less than which cannot satisfy us. Inca-pacity, which courts Prudence, is a mode of hin-drance. Desire which does not lead to action isalso "accident," vice, and is self-destructive. The

fool persisting in his folly at least acts; ceasing,he is merely foolish, and falls into self-negation.Instruction may draw you on, but wrath willtake you sooner into wisdom, for wrath embodiesdesire. The boundary of desire you learn onlyby moving beyond, and the furious energy of thisliberation is definitive of beauty. To nurse an un-acted desire is to murder an infant in its cradle;overt murder is at least more positive. Last, takeman and his struggle of contraries out of nature,and you are left with the barren, with the samedull round over again, the merely cyclic move-

ment,if such it can be

termed,of

negations.The last plate of the Marriage has upon it thefigure of King Nebuchadnezzar eating grass likean ox, in a hideous emblem of the return to astate of nature. Nebuchadnezzar haunted Blake;Blake meant him to haunt us. When you forgetthe contrary of vision, when waking you rejectthe lessons of the night, then you suffer the nega-tion: you feed like beasts upon the grass.

YALE UNIVERSITYNew Haven, Conn.

3 Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes(London, 1948), p. 735.

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