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

The last two stanzas of "The Fly" and especially the relations between them, have been generally acknowledged as the most enigmatic portions of the poem.(7) Another reading of these stanzas might be just as plausible as the one advanced above: the fourth stanza could be a speculation that "life" may consist only in an awareness of itself, thus precluding any awareness of its absence, while the fifth stanza could be drawing the inference that death is not to be dreaded because it is merely the absence of "thought" about both itself and everything else. If thought is what constitutes a subject in relation to itself as object, the "want" of thought will cancel both subject and object, so that oblivion will be its own consolation. The rhetorical project of these stanzas seems once again to be to urge the narrator's identification with the fly, since he is shown in the process of endorsing its apparent nonchalance about death. And yet again, this identification is highly resistible: only if the subjects "thought" and "want of thought" and their predicates "life" and "death" are read as applicable to both narrator and fly is this identification at all possible. If, on the other hand, we suppose that these subjects and predicates are not all generally applicable to narrator and fly and that it is specifically the narrator's thought or want of it' that determines life and death, specifically for the fly, then the alleged identity of the two figures is denied by the unilateral characteristic of the narrator's "thought" about the fly. There is a similar denial of identity if we assume instead that it is the narrator's "thought" that assigns "life," "want of thought," and "death" to the fly. The fourth stanza will support at least three permutations of how these subjects and predicates can be correlated with the fly and the narrator.

What is perhaps most resistant in all of this to my claim of identification is not merely the power that accrues to the narrator's thought in two of the permutations above, but that it is the narrator alone who forms these propositions about "thought" and indeed about everything else in the poem. By appearing as the only discursive subject in the poem, the narrator enacts the unilateral thought that can be read in the fourth stanza. David Wagenknecht, however, suggests a provocative complication of this notion:

But The Fly is unique among the Songs in that it is etched in two columns, the first three stanzas in one column and the two-stanza rejoinder to the right, the typographical form suggesting a dialogue with two speakers and perhaps implying "two laws." In fact we can see the last two stanzas as constituting a "reply" . . . to the first three, the reply of the fly addressed in the first stanza. We assume that the speaker of the final two stanzas is in fact an interlocutionary fiction of the speaker of the first, a fiction resulting from his successful identification with the fly in stanza 2. (109)

Although Wagenknecht countenances the possibility of a second speaker, he concludes nonetheless that this persona is only a projection of the narrator. Wagenknecht assumes that this speaker is an interlocutionary fiction because he has already presupposed that the fly has been destroyed by the narrator. If we accept his presupposition, we intensify the unilateral component of the narrator's identification with the fly, and the identity itself is thereby falsified, because all the predications about this identity are made in the absence of the fly, which cannot therefore assent to, challenge, on propose alternatives to this identification. How can there ever be an intimate similarity between these figures when its articulation depends on one of them, and only one of them, being dead?