William Blake and ‘Allegory Addressed to the Intellectual Powers’

Abstract

William Blake (1757–1827) is routinely presented as preoccupied by the unities of symbolism and dismissive of the divided levels of allegory. In contrast, this chapter argues that in Blake’s oeuvre, where no secure transcendental anchor for allegory’s ‘other speaking’ and symbolism’s organic form is offered, allegory becomes a vehicle for representing and contesting the genesis of phenomena (and therefore experience) in the exchanges between particulars (experience) and supposed universals (convention). In Blake’s hands allegory can therefore take a variety of forms and inspire a variety of reading practices, which range from those antithetical to vision to those that enable it. In the most iconoclastic of these forms, allegory becomes a device able to hold incommensurate voices, energies, and narratives in contingent, nonhierarchical relation with each other, in a whole that is processual, includes the reader as active agent, and is therefore not finally totalizable.