"Jerusalem Is Scattered Abroad": Blake's Ottoman Geographies
2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Moravian Church and William Blake
ResumoThey came up to Jerusalem; they walked before Albion / Exchanges of London every Nation walkd / And London walkd in every Nation mutual in love & harmony / Albion coverd whole Earth, England encompassd Nations,/ ... From Japan & to Hesperia France & England. / Mount Zion lifted his head in every Nation under heaven: / And Mount of Olives was beheld over whole Earth: / The footsteps of Lamb of God were there: but now no more. --Blake, Jerusalem (24:42-51) (1) WHAT PLACE IS THERE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY FOR EXALTED talk of any country 'encompass[ing] nations? For all its religious fervor, this is a dangerous kind of nostalgia. Blake's utopia, rendered as Albion (2) covering earth, sounds a bit like any other imperialist campaign, and his imagination of bright Japan and China just another stop along Silk Road. There is a fine line between Blake's imagined Jerusalem-at once holy city and London, at once a temple and a financial exchange--and imperialism it aims to disavow; it may at first seem there is little room between eternity and global capitalism. (3) Blake is generally saved from charges of imperialism by recourse to his madness; a self-proclaimed prophet is not imagined to have much use for Real World. Though his is a spatial poetry (littered with chasms, voids, abysses, vacuums, and shells--its lands, books, and bodies described in terms of contraction, circumference, and direction), it is easy to read Blake's spatiality as metaphorical and apolitical, in sense of being impossible. His geographic orientations are materially unimaginable--West, Circumference: South, Zenith: North, Nadir: East, Center--and appear symbolic: directions are aligned alternately with senses, features of face, and limbs of body. This metaphoricity seems to suggest that Blake's spatial interest is in eternal rather than real, symbolic rather than material. But what we see in Jerusalem is that these binaries of real/imaginary, lived/symbolic, are themselves inadequate to account for experience of reading poem or building city. Rather than reduce Blake's insistent focus on material conditions of England and his (equally insistent) use of visionary language to one or other, either literal or metaphorical, I suggest that imaginary process proposed in Jerusalem is move by which visionary city becomes material city. To extent that this process makes use of space and reveals imaginative aspect of spatial experience, we might read Blake as a precursor to twentieth-century spatial theorists, who understand that space is neither Newtonian nor Kantian--is not a thing so much as a practice, what Marcus Doel calls the of geography. (4) Blake's insistence on mutability of space(s)--and on power of imagination to transform material space--is what enables him to undertake, in earnest, building of Jerusalem. And yet Britain's own insistence on mutability of spaces (spaces that might be conquered, harvested, settled, or annexed) is basis for another order altogether; most prominent event of geography in early nineteenth century is of imperial expansion, itself a negotiation between imaginative and material spaces. This article aims to understand how Blake sustains a distinction between his own vision of Jerusalem-as-Albion encompassing earth and England's transformation from a tiny island to most powerful empire in world--how, in fact, Blake uses materials of England's empire to produce an anti-imperial, global vision. Though it is in his preface to Milton that Blake famously calls on his readers to build Jerusalem In Englands green & pleasant Land, it is encyclopedia Jerusalem--on which Blake likely worked for sixteen years (roughly 1804-1821)--that synthesizes national and apocalyptic interests of his earlier prophecies. …
Referência(s)