I had a voluptuously multimedia reading experience of William Blake tonight. I was at the library at school, for one thing, which always seems more volumptuous to me because the library for me was (and is) the original pleasure dome, the palace of imagination, ever since I first picked up a book. It helps that I have a desk at MITH, the humanities computing lab, where I can drink tea as I read.
So I was in a library, for one thing, where I feel very comfortable, and was drinking tea. But the multimedia voluptuousity was due to the fact that I was reading Blake--America a Prophecy, to be exact--using the Tate Gallery (Princeton University Press) version, and reading it at the Blake Archive at the same time.
What makes the Tate Gallery edition so voluptuous is that not only are there reproductions of the original, 1793 edition of America, but also an introduction to the narrative text, AND another introduction to the plates (describing each plate visually), AND endnotes on text and images together, all done by D.W. Dorrbecker, and done well. There's also a transcription of the text available in this edition when I couldn't read the plates themselves.
So I was reading the book, with one finger bookmarking in the introductory materials, another finger bookmarking the endnotes, and when these were exhausted I would reach for the mouse and bring up the plate at the Blake Archive.
I'm finding that the Blake Archive does not present (at present) the most optimal reading of Blake, but as a scholarly tool, accompanying a well-made book such as the Tate Gallery's, it makes for a...well...voluptuously multimedia experience.
The tool function of the Archive that I find most valuable is the compare function. It's an excellent way to look at Blake's publishing history, and the larger history in which Blake's history is embedded.
For instance, looking at the Archive's four versions of America plate 4, you see, in some versions, some text at the bottom, in other versions no text. What is this text? It's text that describes the Bard, ostensibly the speaker of the previous speech (which forms the preludium to the book), destroying his harp, out of a sense of shame in what he has previously uttered which, most readers will know, describes Orc breaking his chains (and, it must be stated, his rape of the daughter of Urthona). I am not going to go into the implications of most of that (I'll save it for my seminar--and my dissertation), but it is important to note that many commentators, surveyed by Dorrbecker, suggest that in this passage Blake is expressing his disillusionment with the French Revolution and revolutionary violence in general.
The compare function at the Archive helps the reader evaluate this interpretation. Is it a coincidence that the disillusionment text does not appear in the first, 1793 edition of America, before the excesses of the Revolution and the Terror became well known, but does appear in (was written for) the 1795 edition, after those excesses were well known (it should be noted that the coloring of this 1795 edition is the darkest of the four versions in the Archive)? This seems to confirm those commentators who construe this passage as a commentary on the Revolution. But then why does Blake blank out the text in the 1807 edition, and then return the text in the last, 1821 version? An enigma certainly, but one that tempts investigation.
And I will say nothing about the whale (symbol of Orc, derived from orcus, the killer whale) that appears and disappears in various versions of plate 6.
Fascinating questions, fascinating reading, and a reading which would be very difficult without the multimedia publication of America at the Blake Archive, in conjunction with the book media (Dorrbecker's introduction, transcription, endnotes). A multimedia reading. A voluptuously multimedia reading (especially when you add it all up, including the library and the tea!).
Afterthought: there must be some theorist out there who has claimed the term "voluptuousity." If not, I do. Is this what Marshall McCluhan is talking about when he says, "the media is the massage"?
Posted by jeb at October 6, 2004 11:49 PM | TrackBack