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

III.

Although I shall go on to argue that the poem can be read to ask this same question of itself, so far I have operated mainly within the parameters of a critical consensus that supposes this question to be asked only by the reader. The narrator is enabled, or made, to avoid ever acknowledging this question because he has already conflated all the attributes of himself and the fly so that they become conditions of an identification: he glosses the impulsiveness of the "thoughtless hand," the exuberance of the "summer's play," and the oblivion of "death" all as a common innocence. To accept this conflation, as do the narrator and critics such as Hirsch and D. C. Gillham (218-19), is to repeat the act of destruction that the poem is trying to rationalize. That this rationalization is such a repetition becomes the extremity of the narrator's crime. While the narrator claims that the cause of the fly's destruction is the impulsiveness that identifies him with it, he also maintains that this identity justifies that destruction by allowing the narrator himself to compensate for the fly's absence. Cause, justification, and reparation are alleged to be identical. Their identity, however, depends crucially on the identification of the narrator with the fly, which is in turn disrupted by the unilateral component in those gestures of explanation, justification, and compensation. Each of these two logical circuits needs the other to validate itself, but when they intersect, both of these circuits are radically broken.

If the "thoughtless hand" is read as the hand of the writer or engraver, the complicity of the poem with the destructive act that it claims to investigate could even be registered in the first stanza. The obliteration, or dismissal, of the fly would thus be caused by and partly contemporaneous with the acts of writing and engraving, because the fly would be despatched not before but during the writing. This incriminating proximity of the writing hand to the fly's fate, however, is once again a function of how we construe the relevant lines. Our very attribution to the writing hand of an extreme power over life and death is itself figured, by the starkly alternative reading of the first stanza, as a mere attribution that originates in the more awesome power of the reader. If this reader is to be characterized by features other than the power of choice, which is the property with which the poem itself figures this persona, it is the poem's genre that must supply these elusive details. Signing itself as an instance of the chapbook and hence as a form of morally edifying literature, Songs of Innocence and of Experience projects a reader who must be induced by exemplary and cautionary tales to make moral discriminations between those tales. Since the chapbook was a means, in a culture with few books, of teaching literacy as well as moral judgment, the reader it supposes and consequently figures is a persona to whom considerable work is assigned.(8)

So much labor is in fact required of this reader, who must do the work of actually becoming a reader, that the text implies the presence of another, more competent reader who might mediate, on the one hand, between the competence assumed and demanded by the text, and, on the other, the lack of such competence it also assumes of its illiterate or semi-literate addressee. "The Fly," in common with the other poems in the collection, implies an adult reader who must assist a juvenile subject to modulate from non-literacy to the condition of literacy. Explicitly invoking such an adult reader to help her or his junior counterpart is the preface to John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published in 1767. Inscribed at the outset 'TO THE PARENTS, GUARDIANS, AND NURSES IN GREAT-BRITAIN and IRELAND,' this text features a preface that effectively instructs this adult audience how to use the succeeding text, comprising simple fables and morals.