Blake’s Composite Art
Posted by admin on October 17, 2008, 5:03 pm
Chose a single plate from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and discuss the interrelations or disconnections you see between its verbal and visual elements.
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October 21st, 2008 at 9:55 pm
One of the major themes of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (MHH) is the criticism of Enlightenment thinking. Enlightenment argues that one should endeavor to overcome desire and emotions, which Blake calls energies, by governing themselves with reason. In effect the colder or less ‘human’ one acts, the better one is in many cases. Throughout MHH Blake expresses the idea that opposites need to exist together for a complete human experience of life. Emotion, rather than being sidelined, should be embraced. His ideas therefore address opposites, emotions and the idea that Heaven and Hell are getting married and fusing together. One good example of Blake’s embrace of opposites is in plate 3.
On lines 11-12 Blake says that religion has demonized opposites and claimed that only one must be right. Therefore Blake argues that it is religion, rather than God, that created the ideas of good and evil. The image at the top of plate 3 shows an angelic woman engulfed in fire. In the image at the bottom of plate 3 a woman giving birth alone juxtaposed against a man and a woman copulating, both set against clouds. The two scenes therefore appear to illustrate a chase woman ablaze in the fire of hell and a woman that had sex outside wedlock in the clouds of heaven. However traditional Christian teachings suggest that the opposite would be true. That is to say that the angelic chaste woman should be in heaven and the fornicator should be in hell. Therefore Blake is using these illustrations to emphasize the dichotomy that he believes religion has created.
On lines 12-13 Blake says that “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.” Thus Blake argues that traditionally good was seen to be like Reason, still and passive. In this light a “good” Christian would be one that is quiet and obedient to the will of God. In contradiction, evil, according to Blake, is the label given those that do no passively do what they are told. Blake’s arguments are again illustrated in his images. The ‘passive’ woman is shown to be burning in hell whereas the ‘active’ persons are floating in heaven.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:52 am
William Blake’s vision of hell is unconventional, almost blasphemous when compared to the standard Sunday School’s portrayal of heaven and hell. The traditional beliefs teach that hell is reserved for sinners who pay for their trespasses of their lifetime by suffering in agony for an eternity. However, in “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (MHH), Blake paints another image of hell, almost as an escape from rigid morality and institutionalized religion that knows of no gray areas. In the fourth plate from MHH, Blake presents the voice of the devil, who offers contrary but ‘true’ statements to the codes of the Bible. In offering three opposite but equally true arguments to the ’sacred codes,’ the voice of the devil successfully shows the fallacy in these codes, even equating hell to ‘eternal delight’ in a logical manner.
Such daring verbal claims made in plate four are matched by the visual of the plate, not only in the vividness of the plate but also through the message and symbolism the pictures convey. The plate shows three figures, one standing over the ocean and close to the sun, tightly grabbing onto the second figure. The third figure stands to the right, reaching out from the fire trying to get in touch with the second figure. One could interpret the figure to the left as the Reason, the significantly smaller, second figure as Man, or humanity, and the third figure as Energy. Keeping in mind that in MHH, Reason is equated with heaven and Energy with hell, it is interesting that despite the firm hold Reason has over humanity, that humanity seems to be struggling to break loose from Reason and reaching over to Energy, who seems almost desperate to claim humanity. The picture conveys and adds meaning to the Contraries. The Contraries rebuke the sacred codes which claim that “Energy, called Evil is alone from the body and the Reason, called Good, is alone from the soul,” by retorting that “Man has no Body distinct from his soul.” This contrary in particular goes against the separation of body and soul, as something that is not human and natural, as body feeds the soul through the senses. The picture, therefore, compliments such argument by showing the agony and desperation in humanity and Energy as Reason tries to pull man away from Energy. Such separation is unnatural, illogical, or, as one might daresay, unreasonable.
The picture also complements for the third sacred code, “That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.” This code lays out the basis for the traditional definition of hell, that if a man pursues sinful thoughts and activities, that he will be punished in hell. However, ironically, the third code also is used to support MHH’s vision, highlighting the stern severity of God and rigidness of laws of morality. Energy, which MHH claims is innate for men as it is from the body, is deemed wrong according to the sacred codes, even though it is natural. The painting on the fourth plate features a severe, stern look on the face of Reason and the firm grasp it has on man, despite his cries for freedom. The picture therefore captures the rigidity of the law that forbids men from doing something that is not only appealing but natural to them, which is “following his Energies.”
On a more personal note, I found it particularly interesting that the third figure, or Energy, is chained chained, perhaps to a shackle, around his ankle. The chain could stand for the phrase in the plate in which Reason “is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.” However, despite Reason being the boundary for Energy and therefore the more powerful of the two, one could argue for the uselessness of a chain or a shackle when there is nothing for it to tie down. Therefore, these black lines drawn in on the plate suggest for an explanation for the title of the work, MHH, in which these two contrasting forces, Reason and Energy, or heaven and hell, need each other for the dynamics of their relationship, for both to fully serve their functions.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:41 am
While the contraries Blake calls attention to throughout MHH are present in the upper image of Plate 11, the text offers an explanation for the creation of the priesthood and religion that is not as inherently involved in the exploration of contraries as Plates 3 and 4 in the above posts.
The image at the top of Plate 11 varies drastically in color and setting in the six viewable copies on the Blake Archive. In all of the copies there are three prominent figures, a “woman” trapped in (or emerging from) the ground, a muscular figure, a “man” who in five of the six copies is depicted with fins, and a small child-like figure reaching up toward the “man.” Between the man and the woman is a bearded face etched into or protruding out from either a jagged tree stump or a bit of high grass, depending on the copy. Other variations in the copies include changes to the setting of this scene. In copies C, H, and G, the figures are on a small island, and in G and I, the viewer appears to be looking at the scene from inside a cave. In copies F, D, and I, the figures appear more grounded, as the water imagery is less prominent.
The text of the plate describes the act of naming by “The ancient Poets,” who “animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” these objects are then “adorn[ed] . . . with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.” The plate goes on to explain how the system of Priesthood was formed, and this “enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects.”
What I find interesting is not only the theoretical implications of Blake’s words but also my own inability to draw a direct connection between the words and the image(s). Blake asserts that Priests and those who subscribe to religion have forgotten that deities, religions, and the idea of God began as a human construct in order to explain how the world works, but I’m hard-pressed to say whether the image coincides with this assertion. The image at the top of the plate (in copy D—the only copy where the “man” is depicted as a “man” and not a “merman”) can be interpreted as a continuation of the depiction of contraries discussed in the above posts. The woman on the left side of the image is reaching upward, has flowing hair, and seems to be wearing a crown. She is surrounded by sunlight from the sun on the horizon at the left edge of the frame, and yet only half of her body is visible. It is unclear whether she is emerging from the ground or being drawn into it, but she is clearly confined yet enveloped by light and reaching upward–one might assume she is reaching toward heaven. Her position is juxtaposed by the two figures on the right of the image. The man is looking downward toward the child lying in a bed of billowy grass; they appear free and content, but the right side of the frame gets progressively darker, and the man is facing darkness while the child is looking up to where the light and the dark meet in the frame. The face of the old man in the center of the frame is also interesting. This image appears exactly where the light and the dark meet, and the pointed protrusion where the face appears (my best guess is that it is a patch of high grass)—forcing its way out of “nature”—is perhaps Blake’s representation of an adorned deity, one of the Poets’ Gods or Geniuses.
Blake’s words tell us that religion is a human construct: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” Blake’s images throughout MHH show us the contraries of Heaven and Hell. The combinations of his words and his images, even when they aren’t explicitly connected, encourage us to engage in the polemic of contraries he makes clear to us; Blake argues for a multi-perspectival view of the world through his composite art, and asks us explicitly in Plate 11, to consider that perhaps Heaven and Hell, like gods and religion, are also human constructs like words and images.
December 12th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Tim Burt
Blog post #4
Blake writes On Plate 14 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.” The plate is headed with a striking image: a male body lies limp, flames springing from his body, as another person (of ambiguous gender) floats, arms outstretched like wings, above. The image is suggestively sexual; the flames like unrestrained passion, exploding from the body and merging with another. Yet the lying man evokes death. In almost every version his body is colored in pale, lifeless tones.
This is the plate where Blake declares, “…the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged. This I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
The burning body breeds a flying personage, springing from the fire and towards the reader. This may suggest destruction as a source of energy, analogous to Blake’s corrosive plate making. Or we can see the hovering body as committing some sort of diabolical ritual, basking in the flames of destruction; arms open to the infinite. Perhaps both figures are participants.
However, the image seems to be most directly a reference to the fire to come at the end of six thousand years (the Biblical apocalypse). This fire is to “consume the world,” yet only the body of one burns in the picture. Perhaps we can claim that to Blake, the individual is not a small part of the universe, but that they are one and the same. We see this theme repeatedly throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Blake’s interview with Isaiah and Ezekial, Isaiah speaks of his revelations being derived from his senses discovering, ‘the infinite in every thing.” This posits our sensual perception (seemingly the most individual thing we experience, by definition) is the voice of God. And God is everything. Blake finds the universal in the most individual, like a single object containing the infinite. These are the impossibilities that fuel Hell, the contradictions that defy Reason.
A burning body, a dead man, a flying figure in the heat of the flame. It is a simultaneous depiction of life and death, pain and energy. Perhaps such contradictions are Blake’s method of communicating the sublime, the struggle to reconcile opposing ideas producing fervor to grasp the expansion of what is inarticulate.