Honors Thesis Excerpt - William Blake’s Corporeal Code: A Study in Embodiment, Disembodiment, and Re
Brief introduction:
Below is a selection from my senior year thesis at Skidmore. I attended a thesis class entitled William Blake: The Poet Prophet, taught by Professor Goodwin. She asked us to identify Blake’s poetic prophecy and I selected Blake’s vision of the human body. In this segment of my thesis, I discuss Blake’s works in relation to the more contemporary theory of Embodiment.
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William Blake’s Corporeal Code:
A Study in Embodiment, Disembodiment, and Re-Embodiment
“1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” –BPD[1] 70
This assertion, located in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, shows William Blake’s conception of the intertwined mortal body and immortal soul. Blake calls into question the nature and value of form, and specifically of the human form. For Blake, this became a profound dilemma: a contradiction in logic. How can the individual attain divinity while inside a confining, mortal body? Contrarily, how can the divine poetic imagination exist as a material entity in the mortal world, if not in bounded, perceptible forms?
Because of this tension, human bodies fascinated William Blake. Blake both revered and detested the material human body, but he solved this paradox in stages over the span of his life as he realized that the corporeal body and the infinite soul are inseparable and thus must unify as one. Blake’s illuminations adhere to this unification to create a powerful and visionary canon of works. The body and soul must merge in order for humans to achieve a perfectly imaginative state because the human body is a tabernacle: a dwelling place for God.
His poetry and artwork teem with bodies in motion, bodies in chains, bodies exulting in joy, and bodies in pain. He arrays these bodies in the heavenly clouds, on the earth amid the sublimity of nature, or depicts bodies fleeing from hellish, fiery destruction. This is because the human body is the soul seen from the perspective of the mortal world. Blake also chose to depict the inner mechanizations of the human body; his drawings and poetry include references to anatomical bone structures and the various systems of the body: digestive, nervous, and circulatory. He viewed the heart as a seed; the brain as a tree; the spine as a chain; and each human body as its own isolated and divided Earth. Furthermore, Blake perceived his industrial society as congested with horrifying disembodiment, and so he envisioned a way for humans to attain re-embodiment by cleansing their “doors of perception” (the human senses) through reformatory personal apocalypse. He conceived of a world where all these isolated bodies would perceive divinity through the five senses and rejoin as one infinite human form.
My paper functions in three parts. First, I will represent Blake’s ideal vision of embodiment, or the inherent linkage of body and soul. Next, I will reveal Blake’s vision of his society as filled with disembodiment: the disassociation of body and soul. In a disembodied state, the “doors of perception” are necessarily closed and the human body is impenetrable; the ebb and flow between the interior and exterior is halted and the human body becomes a prison for the soul. Blake would have seen this disembodied state as stemming from society’s industrial, unholy pre-apocalyptic state. Naturally, a divine connection between body and soul is hard to realize in a profound and integral way. However, Blake hoped to provide the way, through his poetry and art, by utterly breaking down our pre-conceived perceptions and rebuilding the divine human spirit. And so, finally, I will establish Blake’s prophecy of re-embodiment: the necessity for a fiery apocalypse to reunify the body and soul. This reconsolidation was Blake’s vision and ambition embodied.
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Blake chooses to prophesize by depicting the human body through art and poetry. In The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, Robert Pinsky (1998) describes poetry as corporeal and visceral. He writes: “ …poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth…The reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual” (8). Every poem must necessarily be a perfect unity. This unity has two aspects: a unity of words and a unity of mental images. The rhythm of poetry is metrical like the beating of a human heart and symmetrical like the human body.
Poetry is a combination of a constrictive structure and creative freedom. The meter and rhyme restrict the poetic lines, but the poem’s meaning is creative in nature. The human body is analogous to poetry in this sense. The bodily shell cannot change form and remains constrictive, but the human soul that soars within the corporeal body is not limited by structure and form. In Blake’s writings, there is an anatomy of poetry: a unified vision of the constrictive form of poetry and the creative mind, which work in tandem to present his poetic vision. There is no creativity without structure.
Blake includes works of art—etchings of human anatomy—alongside his poetry to further awaken and illuminate the sensorial nature of the human body. Blake studied the human form during a five-year apprenticeship with James Basire and, after, at the Royal Academy of Art to complete his training. During his six years at the Royal Academy schools, Blake was exposed to anatomy under Sir William Hunter, brother of John Hunter (the Immanuel Kant of modern anatomy). The bodies of criminals were sometimes allotted to the Academy so art students could watch the dissections. These anatomy classes informed Blake’s attention to detail and his understanding of the human body, visible throughout his work (Ackroyd 66).
Interest in human anatomy started early in human history and soon developed into a medical discipline that sought to understand the structure and functioning of the human body. The study of anatomy flourished and the knowledge of the human body became more accurate and accessible due to the coming age of the Renaissance, the legalization of human dissections, and the invention of the printing press. Indeed, artists had a crucial role in uncovering the secrets of human anatomy. Numerous renowned artists including Michelangelo (whom Blake idolized) studied human anatomy for artistic reasons. Blake biographer G. E. Bently Jr wrote about Blake’s experience with anatomy in The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. In this, he explains the importance of Blake’s lessons with William Hunter:
William Hunter’s lectures on anatomy were especially important to an artist whose drawing and poetry were to celebrate the Human Form Divine. Hunter may have occasionally persuaded his brother John the surgeon to demonstrate the layers and lay-out of muscles and intestines with a cadaver acquired from the resurrection men. (50)
William Hunter was a leading teacher of anatomy and guided and trained his ultimately more famous surgeon brother, John, who later suggested that life characterizes animal matter down to the smallest particle. Thus, the blood, which circulates throughout the body to enliven it, and coagulates when necessary to rebuild it, is alive. John Hunter had an anatomical museum in Leicester Square, which Blake may have visited. The Hunterian Museum was a body Bible and became internationally renowned. Blake’s anatomy training with William Hunter influenced his poetry (as he describes the functions of the human body) and also his artwork, where his bodies are etched scrupulously and anatomically correctly.
Northrop Frye writes in Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake that “Art proves the inadequacy of abstract and rational ideas by the rule that examples and illustrations are ‘vivid,’ which means alive. They are addressed to the body which is the form of the soul…Art is based on sense experience, and what we see or hear is taken in directly by the imagination” (86). Art provides a deeper connection between the text and reader; we are partially disembodied as spectators, but at the same time, the act of “looking” is physical—requiring use of the body.
Blake’s etchings (gothic frescos of sorts) depict human nakedness; men, women, and children are etched with nude muscular and androgynous bodies (and a few occasional flimsy nightdresses) in order to fully illuminate the human bodily form, because clothing restrains and constricts the human form divine. By presenting the human form in varied ways, Blake revealed and celebrated the holiness of every mortal limb, hand, bone, and hair. Even his late poetry and prose emphasize the infinity of the human form divine, and Blake portrays the actual appearance of the divine human body in his etching “Albion Rose.”
Again, Blake works in the context of restraint and freedom. His etchings are wildly creative. Tristanne J. Connolly spent time with this paradox of creativity coupled with restraint. As he describes in his book William Blake and the Body, “Blake [was] a poetic anatomist working feverishly at engraving his texts, cutting into the metal with his engraving tools like a physician would cut into a cadaver, in an attempt to penetrate into reality in order to reveal the secrets hidden within” (121). In one sense, Blake attempts to cut deep and reveal a hidden truth, similar to cutting into the supple human body. However, his creative etchings are all constrained by the shape of the plates: a rectangle. Frye comments: “Blake would perhaps have said that the rectangle is one of the boundaries of the medium, like language in poetry, whereas the couplet is a barrier thrown across the medium” (95). Thus, as Blake cuts into the body of his work to reveal his creative vision, he is still constrained by the shape and size of the rectangular etching. In this sense, art and poetry are analogous to the paradoxical nature of the limited human body coupled with the freedom of the human soul.
[1] Blake’s Poetry and Designs