"And I stain'd the water clear"
(Introduction, Songs of Innocence, line 18).
Collin, Brian, and I are currently reading Roland
Barthes' S/Z for our Contemporary American Fiction class. Barthes, in
his wild analysis of Balzac's story "Sarrasine," addresses the problem
of gendered language, but also of antithesis, of opposites that remain separate
and do not resolve and yet somehow allow passages to run between them. Barthes
writes: "Every joining of two antithetical terms, every mixture, every
conciliation -- in short, every passage through the wall of the Antithesis --
thus constitutes a transgression…it is the paradoxism (or alliance of words):
an unusual figure, it is the code's ultimate attempt to affect the
inexpiable" (27). He concludes by describing this transgression, this transgressive act that goes against Antithesis: "it is at the level of the body that the two inconciliabilia of the
Antithesis…are brought together, are made to touch, to mingle in the most
amazing of figures in a composite substance (without holding together)"
(28). A composite substance, which doesn’t hold together, as an attempt to
reach beyond the two opposites, to "affect the inexpiable."
Blake, by setting up his book into two
strands, invites the fragments to elicit a divided reaction, to say that one
poem in Innocence says this
and the Experience provides a subversive corollary, or antithetical
poem, which says that. I would posit,
using Barthes' analysis of transgression in Balzac’s story as a guide, that
Blake actually attempts to "affect the inexpiable" through
transgression and co-mingling of separate substances -- that is, discussing
what cannot be pardoned, forgiven, what is beyond the "thou shalt
not" written on the Chapel door in "The Garden of Love" --
ultimately, what is both human (physical) and not (Godlike) (line 6). If read in terms of Blake's "All Religions Are One"
this transgression against divided "thou shalt not" authority becomes clearer, but the poems in Innocence and Experience are
songs concerned with the staining of the clear waters, or, by use of ink-stain,
creating paradoxically clear waters – both meanings simultaneously exist and are equal. The
poems are divided but, as can be superficially noted in most of the text, the Innocence poems
do not shy away from woeful experience, and the Experience songs do
not fail to address joy, as in spring, which does not "hide its joy"
("Earth's Answer" line 16), a "Tyger" created (fearfully?
hopefully?) by the same hand that made the Lamb, the ability to tell wrath so
that wrath may end ("A Poison Tree," line 2). The transgressions
between the antithetical tones and subjects are not so great to overflow the
overall tone of each section (else they would not be transgressions) -- the
bleakness of Experience is not overcome; the joy of Innocence not
overshadowed, despite parodic gesture; however, read together, passages are created
between the two sections and within the individual poems themselves.
I don't mean to say that the simple
presence of contrary themes creates transgression. Instead, it is the binding
of disparate elements, of different bodies, of parts of nature, that beckons
transgression. "Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like
me?" the speaker of "The Fly" asks, introducing an orgy of
pronouns. "Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, / Or if I die." The
binding together of these elements is both discouraging -- if a man is no more
than a fly, what real value does he have? -- and encouraging -- if one can see
humanity in something as small and as insignificant as a fly, one, perhaps, can
share empathetic feeling for all of creation, no matter how small. The point is
that these two meanings simultaneously exist and one does not triumph over the
other – bound together, they create an “amazing figure,” to use Barthes' phrase. They are placed side
by side, not for an either/or scenario anticipating a final decision, but for the purposes of transgression
to reach beyond the binary.
Some poems do not bind together contrary
elements, so it wouldn't be useful to identify this Barthesian analysis as the “primary” reading
for all of the poems. Yet, even poems like "The Sick Rose" feature
the flying, invisible worm mingling in the bed "of crimson joy," evil
and joy for a minute as bedfellows (line 6). If the “dark secret love” destroys
life, there is still a moment where the sickness and the living are bound up
together, both beating at the same instant. "Is that trembling cry a
song?" the speaker of Holy Thursday in Experience asks (line
5). He means to say that no, the cry is not a song, for "it is eternal
winter there" (line 12), but for a moment there is a wavering, as if the
trembling cry could be a song, and in
fact it is a type of song in the parallel poem first seen in Innocence (as
Collin mentioned in his post), singing of the "hum of multitudes"
(line 7). The two pieces exist simultaneously, each one bolstering the other
and also tearing down the other. The joy of the infant is first expressed as
"I have no name" (line 1, "Infant Joy). Joy, nameless,
flutters empty as a hum. Once named, it can be Joy; however, once named, one
can ask, “is that actually joy?”
The Norton Anthology tell us: “[Songs of
Innocence and of Experience] was reprinted at various later times with
varying arrangements of the poems” (118). Perhaps Blake's continual fascination
and re-working of this unified text (though bifurcated, yet bound, so
simultaneously one text and two texts) involves a horrible anxiety in presenting one reading over another, or in finally "binding" the two
texts together and presenting them in fearful (and linear) symmetry, thus
ending the tension and initiating a kind of bondage found at the end of
"The Garden of Love": "And binding
with briars my joys and desires” (line 12). Books must be, when finished,
literally bound and held together, but this submits them to the coffins of the
chimney sweep boys. And yet, this allows them to be shown to others, no longer
sleeping in the soot of the imagination. The child's command -- "Piper sit
thee down and write" (line 13, "Introduction" Innocence)
-- is actually a terrible break from the imagination. One must stop
"Piping down the valleys wild," sit in the contours of a hard chair
and "stain" the pure waters with a "rural pen." The pen of
Blake can be the Bard's pen, the Bard's voice subjected to ink and some kind of
permanence, or it can be a pen for hogs, a pen that contains the natural world
and tries to subdue it for human want and desire. The only "non-equalizing" factor (an untrue symmetry) is that Innocence is followed
by Experience and one cannot, like a
true diptych picture or painting, see both at the same time. As readers we are
trained to see the Innocence thesis
and then the Experience antithesis;
however, in re-reading, we can see them as two sides of the same coin, its twin
Janus face flipped back and forth.
But binding can also exist positively, as
all men seeing themselves throughout the universe and beyond it. "Can I
see anothers woe / And not be in sorrow too…Can a mother sit and hear / An
infant groan an infant fear?" starts off "On Anothers Sorrow"
the last poem in Innocence (lines 1-2, 9-10) The "I"
extends to a father, then a mother, then to God, all equalized in their ability
to share in suffering, to "sit by us and moan." "He became a
little child; / I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name,"
as the speaker of "The Lamb"relates (lines 16-18). Human bondage, or suffering,
can be saved by a different kind of empathetic binding. "Thorns" become the
speaker's "only delight" in "My Pretty Rose Tree" (line 8).
And, as an extension of "On Anothers Sorrow," "London"
displays the speaker's awareness that "In every cry of every man, / In
every Infant's cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg'd
manacles I hear." The bondages are mind-forg'd manacles, chains of the
"Human Brain" (line 24, "The Human Abstract) but we are all bonded
together in this cry, this wild piping, this shared song.
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