[Download] "William Blake and the Problem of Progression (Critical Essay)" by Studies in Romanticism ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: William Blake and the Problem of Progression (Critical Essay)
- Author : Studies in Romanticism
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 243 KB
Description
THIS PAPER'S GOALS ARE TO DEMONSTRATE, FIRST, HOW ARISTOTELIAN logic influences William Blake's fourfold conception of the human and, second, how his manuscript epic The Four Zoas uses the figure of synecdoche to confound that logic. The paper begins by considering Blake's appropriation of the term "contraries"--and its limitations--in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It then focuses on a short passage at the beginning of The Four Zoas that extends the Marriage's twofold conception of contraries into a fourfold complement of contraries and subcontraries: four possibilities that the passage, disregarding basic rules of logic, synecdochically embraces. Lastly, the paper tracks these ideas as they play out in The Four Zoas narrative, about the deathly disintegration of a fourfold man. My account foregrounds a struggle between two of the man's four constituent zoas: Urizen, who tries to save his fellow characters by imposing upon them an eschatological ideology conditioned by an Aristotelian logic of opposition, and Urthona, whose own four constituent protozoas (1) ultimately resist Urizen's ill-conceived efforts, using their synecdochic equivalence to the fourfold man to reconstitute him in a new and more enduring form. The Problem of Progression. On plate 3 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake makes his well-known claim that "Without Contraries is no progression." (2) A subsequent reference to "Aristotles Analytics" on plate 20--alluding either to the Organon in general or to a specific work, most likely the Prior Analytics, or perhaps De Interpretatione--suggests Blake has appropriated the term "contraries," directly or indirectly, from Aristotle's work on logic. And yet Blake's own conception of "contraries" departs radically from Aristotle's. For Aristotle contraries are two propositions; though one or both can be false, they can never both be true. For Blake "contraries" need not be propositions at all; on plate 3 of The Marriage he lists as examples mere pairs of words: "Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate." More scandalously than this though, Blake thinks of contraries as always both true. His claim that the aforementioned contrary pairs "are necessary to Human existence" suggests as much, as does, even more so, the Proverb of Hell that insists "Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth" (8:38). Apparently if both of a pair of contraries are "believable" then Blake would regard them both as true, no matter what Aristotle would say.