Mapping Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell': An exercise in textual cartography.

摘要

William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is, both visually and verbally, one of the most brazenly transgressive and militantly seditious of texts to be composed during the incipient phase of British Romanticism. This dissertation proffers a capacious and full-fledged analysis of the verbal and visual texts of The Marriage using diverse poststructuralist textual strategies and paradigms to interpret the protean complexities the text foregrounds. It attempts to achieve a rapprochement between the contestatory polyvocalities and the re-visionary enunciations circulating inside the Blake text and the textual and discursive liberations inaugurated by contemporary critical theory.;This dissertation contends that the text's semiotic exuberances, intertextual resonances, polyphonic ironies, scrutinizing self-reflexivities and, above all, the array of meta- and immanent critiques it ratifies are intended to deconstruct the homogenizing propensities and the reifying proclivities of the reader, and thereby "rouze" his/her dormant visionary powers. It examines the ways in which Blake, by unveiling a counter-Enlightenment discourse and aesthetic, offers those insurgent formal grids and nuanced symbolic spans that effectively link Romantic epistemological and hermeneutic preoccupations with contemporary critical strategies in parallel, engaged, and dialogic ways. These textual and theoretical articulations are explored in the context of the implied Bildung motif. The argument maps the apprenticeship, maturation, and performance of a fledgling prophet through his continual encounters with the counter-epistemologies and counter-hegemonic discourses proffered by 'diabolical' mentors in the Inf(t)ernal academy. His progressive alienation from social and cultural master-codes implies that his 'trans-formation' is pivotally a dialogic process, combining critical, hermeneutic, performative, and, importantly, visionary modes and stances that 'de-struct' the legitimated narratives of subjectivization legislated by authority. These mutinous modalities de-constitute the imposing master-narratives of Enlightenment epistemology and orthodox Christianity, thereby 'emptying' the fledgling's psyche of coercive identitarian positions, and inaugurating in their place a fluid and dialogic horizon capable of accommodating heterogeneous polarities.;The composite argument charts the labilities of the Bildung theme operating at various textual levels, divulging, in the process, Blake's 'designs' on his audience, and also casting his own millennial, historical, and communitarian visions in the form of utopian patterns. It concludes by positioning the prophet figure in the public sphere, viewing him as an empowered deep reader of the psychohistorical manifestations and disclosures seen in the material sphere.