The Evolution Of William Blake's The Marriage Of Heaven .

The Evolution of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and HellPage 1 of 61The Evolution of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part I]Joseph Viscomi *In my end is my beginning-T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"The man who never alters his opinion is likestanding water, & breeds reptiles of the mind-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 19In The Early Illuminated Books, volume 3 of the recent Blake Trust series of reproductions, webriefly explained why the genre and structure of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are among the book's"most distinctive, most unsettling primary features." Depending on how one counts, the Marriage text isdivided into thirteen or more sections or units consisting of one, two, three, and more copper plates [1],plates with and without illustrations, with and without titles; some of which are "theological orphilosophical, others proverbial, others variously narrative (myths of origin, interviews, mocktravelogues, conversion stories),” with "few if any characters or settings in common." Moreover, "timeand space are freely manipulated: the narrator travels to hell and back, hangs over abysses with an angel,and dines in the approximate present with Isaiah and Ezekiel, while the order of events and the relationof one narrative space to another are seldom specified." [2] Is the book "varied and pregnant fragments";a mere "scrap-book of Blake's philosophy"; a "structureless structure" about "as heterogeneous as onecould imagine"? [3] Or is its structure classifiable in terms of genre, as many scholars have attempted toshow, perceiving it as variously as anatomy, Bible, manifesto, primer, prophecy, or testament? In TheEarly Illuminated Books, we assigned it to a subcategory of Menippean satire identified with the "Greekprose satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. A.D. 125-200), whose works such as Dialogues of the Dead,Voyage to the Lower World, and The True History (third edition in English, 1781) exemplify theLucianic 'News from Hell type'" (p. 118).Clearly, the Marriage is an intellectual satire, and its disjointed structure fits reasonably well /2004

The Evolution of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and HellPage 2 of 61the Menippean category. Nevertheless, as I argue here, it would be a mistake to infer from thisfit Blake's original intentions for the Marriage—to assume that he set out to write a Menippean satire ormodeled his book on any one specific work. In this essay, the first of a three-part study on the evolutionof the Marriage, I argue that the idea of a disjointed, miscellaneous work entitled The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell emerged only after Blake had written and executed plates 21-24 and planned his "Bibleof Hell," and that the structure of the whole work is in some measure the result of a production history inwhich sections were written and executed at different times.Narrative discontinuity alone suggests that textual units were not composed in the order inwhich they are now read. But it only suggests and does not prove disjointed production, and it does notprovide the clues necessary to establish the sequence in which the textual units were composed.Analysis of the text cannot answer basic questions, such as whether individual units or groups of unitscommitted were committed to copper plates soon after they were written, or only after the entiremanuscript was completed. For clues and for answers, we need to examine technical features unique toilluminated printing; the first printing of plates 21-24; the different lettering styles among the Marriageplates; and, most important, the manner in which plates 21-24 and the other plates were supplied fromlarger sheets of copper. This examination will demonstrate that the four copper plates carrying the textof pages 21-24—which constitute a sustained attack on Swedenborg—were quarters cut from the samesheet of copper, were executed soon after their text was written, and were the first unit produced. Theyappear to

-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 19 In The Early Illuminated Books, volume 3 of the recent Blake Trust series of reproductions, we briefly explained why the genre and structure of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell are among the boo