Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' - William Blake - Rhetoric and Poetics

Style, Summer, 1996 by Michael Simpson

Although the poem can be said to provide, at different junctures, thoroughly different narrators who can thus be fashioned into coherent alternatives, there is no necessity that these characters be so rigorously polarized throughout. While the narrator who kills the fly and the one who does not may be mutually exclusive, the destructive narrator is not incompatible with the one who then doubts his or her identification with the victim even as she or he proposes it. The opposed alternatives in the grammar that I have been suggesting need not be correlated to distill a perfect narrator on the one hand and a highly imperfect one on the other, because a narrative of moral progress, or degeneration, can be interpolated to allow less consistent narrators to emerge. While my own reading, much more than even Hirsch's, invests in the extreme of the virtuous narrator, much of the criticism follows the more promiscuous trajectory, described above, to find a changing narrator. Pagliaro (78-79), for instance, finds a speaker who knows more about what s/he is saying at the beginning of the poem than she or he does at the end; Wagenknecht (109), on the other hand, reads the final two stanzas as more sagacious than the preceding three because they are the speaker's version of what the fly might say to him.

What compels my reading to commit itself to the extreme of the virtuous narrator, even as it claims to be able to account grammatically for other trajectories, is that none of these readings acknowledges its implication in a grammar that will accommodate a range of options that stops, or starts, with this extreme. Also enjoining a commitment to this extreme reading is its implication that to read otherwise, once this specific choice is constituted, is, first, to participate in the fly's destruction by arranging the grammar so that the narrator kills it and, second, to repeat the crime by assassinating the narrator's character in the same grammatical arrangement. Once we acknowledge an alternative to this grammar, to read otherwise is also to abandon a narrator whom we have abetted in destruction and are now in turn destroying. But we may find at least one obvious objection to the construction of a diplomatic narrator: such diplomacy might be no more than a self-idealization performed by the reader. We behold what we would like to think we are. What answers this objection is that the alternative, ventured by Wagenknecht and company, produces a self-idealization of the reader that is similar, but actually more reprehensible because contingent on a denigration of the narrator.

The same gestures whereby we deny the reader's agency in the text can be seen in how criticism has treated the illustrated plate of "The Fly," and specifically in its account of the relations between text and illustration. Although Wagenknecht usefully observes that "The Fly is unique among the Songs in that it is etched in two columns" and that the second column is the fly's fictional "rejoinder," he does not consider that this typographical departure might allow us to read the poem from left to right and then downwards instead of downwards and then across the page.(10) This is an arrangement that would yield the following sequence: