"Soul" in Blake's writing: redeeming the word

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Nancy Moore Goslee

Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly (Erdman 302, 167) (1)

To show outrage at this objectifying examination by a person who was once a part of the speaker's own self, each of the speakers in this repeated passage invokes the rhetorical weight of the word "soul," a word that in the Christian tradition defines the most essential, sacred, and inviolable aspect of the human self. By insisting on its materiality, however, -- "every little fibre ... spread [...] out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry," a dessicating "anatomy/Horrible Ghast & Deadly"--the speaker is not simply literalizing an imaginative metaphor but bringing together with ironic force a cluster of older spiritual meanings and newer materialistic meanings for "soul." In this ironic constellation, a precarious Judeo-Christian unity of the self as an autonomous subject claiming moral agency and thus capable of redemptive choice is pulled in one direction by a Platonic, dualistic definition of soul as a repudiation of bodily materiality for spiritual redemption and pulled in another by an Enlightenment science that was discovering the "fibres" of a nervous system linked to a material brain. Associated with this Enlightenment science through the speaker's invocation of a materialist "infant joy" is still another shift of meaning for "soul," a center of emotional response to the senses, a soul defined by sensibility.

To read these lines from Blake's late epics as totally material is to make the speaker sound like a victim from an Amnesty International report--or like the dismembered traitor Foucault so famously describes in his opening chapter of Discipline and Punish. To read the punishment as psychological is to make Enion or Albion, the "examiners," into agents of surveillance like the prison workers in Bentham's Panopticon, which Foucault describes in a later chapter. Such a reading would seem more "modern" in Foucault's historicizing schema of punishment, and of social order more generally, as an increasingly internalized discipline. Yet the history of usages for the word "soul" in Blake's time--and the practice of his own usages--traces changes in subjectivity or selfhood that are messier than Foucault's powerful model for epistemic change in Discipline and Punish. This pattern in usage for the word "soul" during Blake's era is historically opposed to Foucault's model, which turns from spiritual or mental to physica l and material--and then, a little later, back to a secularized psychological meaning. In Blake's own writing, the linguistic polyvalence is wonderfully fluid, with many usages appearing even in the same work. Richard Rorty claims that such multivalence in a single, culturally central word reflects a gradual, collective, and only semi-conscious shift in episteme (Rorty 6-7); in an era of transition the multiplicity of meaning in "soul" would generate ironies even without conscious artistry or intention to direct them. I will argue, however, that Blake is aware of these historical shifts in the meaning of "soul" and that he plays creatively with those shifts. A deconstructive argument like Molly Rothen-berg's might conclude that even Blake's intentional creative play with meaning can act only as a critique of existing structures and beliefs and cannot build new structures and beliefs. That is, creative play with multiple meanings of "soul" might use materialist meaning to criticize a rigid dualism or a rigid a nti-corporeal morality, but it could assert no coherent new synthesis--irony would destroy agency (Rothenberg 4-6). In another critical space, I suggest that Blake uses these multiple meanings of "soul" to aim toward a resurrected spiritual corporeality, an embodied and imagined self based both upon Enlightenment materialism and upon Paul's I Corinthians 15:3944: "All flesh is not the same flesh.... There are ... celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial.... It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and thee is a spiritual body" (KJV). Yet this difficult, monistic embodiment changes its balance in the course of Blake's work, which never abandons the body and its premise of material energies but struggles to include the material in the spiritual body.

In this confined space, I will defer discussion of Blake's later work, and of the tortured "souls" of Tharmas and Jerusalem, to focus upon Blake's textual usages of "soul" in the 1 780s and early 1790s. (2) Though these usages are indeed multiple, the most striking constellations of meanings are, first, an "affective semiology" of the passions expressed through the body (Markley 219), particularly a melancholy Ossianic pathos, then an assertive, sensuous energy that celebrates and is continuous with the unloosed, unbound body. At the risk of resembling Blake's contemporaries who criticized his illustrations to Blair's The Grave, I will also resist an analysis of Blake's visual representations of the soul (Damon, Bentley, Jr., Blake Records; 166-74; Mitchell, Iconology 151) and of the material texts' graphic reproduction of the word "soul" (Mitchell, "Visible Languages," 80-86; Essick 202, 209; Wolfson 27-70; Gleckner 209-13). Though both of these aspects warrant further investigation, particularly because "so ul" is linked so closely both to "logos" and to "image," I will leave their complexities to others. I will explore, however, the verbal analyses through which other visual artists formulated the relationship between bodily expression and their varying definitions of an inner self or "soul," particularly as these definitions followed scientific and philosophical formulations.