"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom": Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake's Continental Prophecies

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2006 by Castellano, Katey

The immense social and political turmoil accompanying the French Revolution prompted William Blake to reactivate a religious and political tradition, antinomian religious dissent, that had been actively repressed in British history. Blake's energetic revival of his religious heritage in the Continental prophecies-America, Europe, and TheSongofLos (1793-95)-allows a reading of his politics in the prophecies as both traditionalist and conservative. This claim complicates the long-established reading of Blake's radicalism as emerging from the secular Joseph Johnson circle, which included Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, and William Godwin. Reading Blake as a radical, progressive liberal narrows our understanding of the source of Blake's antirationalism, which dominates the Continental prophecies. David V. Erdman, for example, outlines in compelling detail Blake's support for the French Revolution throughout his lifetime, but he concludes from this that Blake's prophecies represent a "revolt of Energy against the restraining reason of kings" (209). Blake's relationship to revolution is far more complicated, however, for his critique of reason and mathematical justice were in fact precisely contrary to the systematic reasoning of Jacobinism that opposed the anachronism of monarchy.

Blake scholars have recently recognized that the reading of Blake as a radical liberal underestimates the amount of diversity within 179Os "radicalism." The oft-assumed stable dichotomy between loyalist and radical in Blake scholarship is insufficient for understanding Blake's political position, as Jon Mee argues:

Terms like "the English Jacobins" serve us ill if they are used to suggest that radicalism was part of a binary opposition with loyalism in the decade. Such an opposition obscures that fact that radicalism, or for that matter loyalism, was far from being a stable entity either in terms of ideology, membership, or organization. ("'Doom'" 99)

As Mee argues, the loyalist/radical binary is unstable and problematical to the point that it collapses, a point I want to attend to while arguing for Blake's "radical conservatism." Furthermore, Mee argues elsewhere that there were pronounced differences between radical religious and secular/Unitarian dissent. While rational dissenters "wanted to align themselves with a narrative of progress and reason," the "enthusiasts" of radical religious dissent had "a perspective from which the Enlightenment cult of reason could be viewed, quite self-consciously, as simply another means by which the power and knowledge of an educated elite were perpetuated" ("Anxieties" 179). The various factions of radicals were divided not only by religious as opposed to secular commitments, but also by the particular interests of their respective class. Modern scholars tend to view Blake as a man of genius, for both his poignant social criticism and his artistic ability, and rightfully so, yet Mee's research into the letters written by Joseph Johnson's radical group indicates that he was most often referred to as "Blake the Engraver," thus affiliating him with his tradesman status ("'Doom'" 103). Mee infers that Blake may have been intellectually and artistically disregarded by this radical circle on the basis of his class.1

In addition to Mee's historical redefinition of 179Os radicalism, my claims resonate with those of Saree Makdisi, who has also contested the view that Blake was aligned in sentiment and goals with the Johnson circle. Makdisi defines the political philosophy of the Johnson circle as "hegemonic radicalism":

The hegemonic radical critique of the ancien regime and its "traditional culture" of despotism, patronage, ritual, corruption, and privilege helped to define an emergent culture of modernization based on a universalist discourse of rights and duties, rather than inherited privileges; a discourse of merit, rather than religious inspiration; and above all, a discourse of sturdy, rational frugality, control, virtue, and regulation, rather than emotional (let alone sensual) excess. (206)

The "discourse of merit" reflects a belief that society should be reorganized on the basis of "equality" so as to allow free competition among individuals, and thus the radical "liberal" Johnson circle held beliefs more in common with libertarians and anarcho-capitalists than with present-day liberals.2 Furthermore, their rational frugality and regulation hardly figures into the economy of excess that Blake repeatedly advocates in his work. Therefore, Blake's critique of reason and rationality arises less as a consequence of his critique of the monarchy, as Erdman suggests, but rather more from his experience that the capitalist work ethic is increasingly dominating his own sphere of radical religious dissent.

W.J.T. Mitchell also notes Blake's departure from liberal radicals, and he associates Blake's anti-rationalist tendencies with conservative thinkers: "The pure negativity in Blake's attack on rationalist writing is scarcely distinguishable from that of Burke, Coleridge or Carlyle" (132). Blake's anti-rationalism places him squarely into a conservative ideology that distrusts the recurrence and regularity of any rational concept; such a distrust, as J.G.A. Pocock maintains, produces an "antinomian and anarchic strain in conservatism" (269). Blake manifests that antinomian strain in conservatism, and, moreover, his anti-rational prophecies resist the assimilation of radical religious dissent to radical secular dissent. Blake's Continental prophecies attempt to revitalize a type of radical religious dissent on the cusp of dissolution-threatened both by the growing power of a nationalist church-state and by radical secularist capitalism.