Hacking the System
Posted by admin on October 17, 2008, 5:04 pm
In what way or ways can Blake be seen as hacking the system in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?
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October 20th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
When one considers the term, “hacker,” it usually conjures images of a genius computer criminal that misuses technology for personal means including, but not limited to, activities like identity theft, viruses, and sending out political or artistic messages. Yet, despite today’s preconceived notions of hackers, they are actually not an exclusively technological idea. Generally speaking, the word, “hacker,” can describe anyone who subverts an established system. This expanded definition of “hacker” is especially pertinent to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, through which Blake expresses his own biblical prophecies, much different than those in the Bible. Blake writes during the French Revolution, a tumultuous time in European society during which Protestant dissidents sought to overturn the authority of the closely linked monarchical government and Church establishment. Blake himself was one of these Protestant dissidents who respected the words of the bible, but disagreed with the church’s orthodoxy, laws, and narrow definition sin. It is also important to note that The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is composed of prose and paintings, written and illustrated using his own original printing technique. Blake’s paradoxical opinions of traditional religious doctrine combined with his distinctive choice of printing technique present him as a “hacker” because he subverts both the sociopolitical system and artistic tradition of the time during which he writes.
Blake hacks the artistic or more specifically, the publishing system of the late eighteenth century through his use of illuminated printing. Blake invented illuminated printing, also called relief etching, to display his messages. Illuminated printing is actually a reversal of the process of etching, the standard method of printing used during the late eighteenth century. Conventional etching involved the artist’s design being carved into a copperplate background, with the words and pictures below the surface of the background. Blake’s method actually carves away the background leaving the design standing out, in relief, from the copperplate. Also contributing to this idea of Blake as a “hacker” of the publishing system is that he did not invent illuminated printing with pecuniary intentions. In fact, Blake was very poor and the vast amount of detail and time that went into his plates detracted from their ability to be more widely available to readers.
Blake also hacks the sociopolitical system of the late eighteenth century through his paradoxical descriptions of heaven and hell. His “hacking” of the religious establishment is especially apparent in Plate Three when he presents heaven in a negative light and hell in a positive light:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence….From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy….Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. (xvi)
Given that Blake’s writing was strongly influenced by a Revolution, the very embodiment of progression, this passage serves to show that the so-called “virtues” of “Attraction,” “Reason,” and “Love,” praised by the religious establishment are the same ones that have the potential to stagnate a society. Blake views the negative aspects of life, like “Repulsion,” “Energy,” and “Hate,” as the fuel of change, or revolution. The “Good” are portrayed as those who blindly follow the words of the Bible and the ways of the clergy, rather than actually stopping to consider why they believe and live as they do. On the other hand, the “Evil” possess the fuel of imagination, or the ability of the individual to use their full intellectual potential to come to their own conclusions about the world. When he refers to “Good” as “passive and “Evil as “active,” he completely hacks the code of the religious establishment by making the “Good,” seem undesirable—after all, one would rather be active and energetic than null of any individual opinion.