The code of war : William Blake's secret language
Date
2017-11-01
Authors
Kohan, Carolyn Mae
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Beneath the rather comical-looking serpent slithering across the bottom of plate 72 of Jerusalem, William Blake has engraved in mirror-writing the cryptic but decidedly bitter sentiment, “Women the comforters of Men become the Tormenters & Punishers.” If this were not misogynist enough, later in the poem Blake's Spectre warns someone (it is difficult to say exactly who) that “you are under the dominion of a jealous Female” (J88:41), and that “The Man who respects Woman shall be despised by Woman” (J88:37). Meanwhile, the female Enitharmon justifies the Spectre's sexual paranoia by mocking the male Los's loss of liberty through feminine entrapment, telling him, “You are Albions Victim, he has set his Daughter in your path” (J87:24). “This is Womans World,” Enitharmon triumphantly concludes, warning Los “in scorn & jealousy” (J88:22) that she “will Create secret places / And the masculine names of the places Merlin & Arthur” (J88:17–18).
Such pieces of textual evidence have convinced a good many Blake critics that the
poet, psychologically shaky at best, really did fear and loathe women—at least when he was
not veering to the other extreme and idolizing them. But other critics, aware of the forked
tongue with which Blake’s “Serpent Reasonings” (KG) typically express themselves,
suspect that something more subtle is going on beneath the surface of these undulating
lines. It is one thing, for example, to create secret places bearing the masculine names
“Merlin” and “Arthur,” quite another to create the places by creating the names.
This dissertation argues that Blake suffered from a misogyny not literal but allegorical, a misogyny better understood as logolatry—that is, the unreasonable worship of words and an excessive regard for verbal truth. Casting himself in the role of a heroic “Soldier who fights for Truth” (J38:41) and yet haunted by the fear of seeing his thoughts betrayed by the words to which they have been entrusted, Blake takes up arms in an “Intellectual Battle” (FZ3:3) or “Mental Fight” (M1:13) against a dark sea of metaphysical and epistemological troubles, fiercely determined to protect his mind from being read and perverted in its intentions by his intellectual enemies, those whose ignorance of the holy human spirit (particularly its sense of humour) doom them to membership in what Milton would call an unfit audience. Chief among Blake's defensive weapons is his “Code of War” (SL3:30), a secret method of writing erected upon a misused and badly abused body of English nouns. The “stubborn structure of th[is] Language” (J36:59), likely worked out before 1785, has remained intact ever since Blake began imposing his beliefs on the largely indifferent world, beginning with the publication of There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One in 1788.
Looking back at the Jerusalem passages, we ought to see the dazzling names Albion, Los, Spectre, and Enitharmon as what Enitharmon herself says they are: “secret places” for Blake's thoughts, always vulnerable to misinterpretation, to go and hide. But so too are the plain English words woman and man, daughter and female—in Blake's hands, even these are transformed into code names, redefined in obedience to the fearful structural symmetry of his code of war. In Blake a “woman”' is not a woman, and a “man” is not a man (but there is a male character named “Antamon” who would tell us, if we would only rearrange his letters, that indeed he is “not a man”). Blake's Human Form Divine is the personification of something other than what it appears to be, and this fact has rendered his poetry virtually unintelligible to generations of readers, with the exception of those hardened sufferers who manage to find even provisional ways of turning their verbal tormentors and punishers back into the comforters they were originally intended to be.
Description
Keywords
Blake, William