Blake and Roy
Prophets against Empire
1. Possible Blake topics
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Blake’s work (general: titles, years)
Blake’s life
Innocence and Experience (titles of poems)
Blake’s art (illuminations) contemporaries’
reaction to his art
• Symbols (the Sun as a symbol of the Soul)
• Themes (unease with rationalism?)
• Favourite images (angels?)
2. Discuss “Jerusalem” (“And did those feet
in ancient time”)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCYG5Z9
MXjs&feature=related
• a short poem by William Blake from the
preface to his epic Milton a Poem.
• Composed around 1804 -1808
• is best known as the hymn "Jerusalem," with
music written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916
• Why do you think this hymn is so popular?
Jerusalem
• And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land
3. Innocence and Experience
• “the two contrary states of the human soul”
• Songs of Innocence (1789)
• Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Songs of Innocence
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Introduction
The Shepherd
The Echoing Green
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
The Blossom
The Chimney Sweeper
The Little Girl lost/ found
The Little Boy lost/found
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Laughing Song
A Cradle Song
The Divine Image
Holy Thursday
Night; Spring
Nurse's Song
Infant Joy
A Dream
On Another's Sorrow
Songs of Experience
• Introduction
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Earth’s Answer
The Clod and the Pebble
Holy Thursday
The Little Girl Lost/Found
The Chimney Sweeper
Nurse’s Song
The Sick Rose
The Fly
The Tyger
My Pretty Rose Tree
Ah! Sun-Flower
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The Lily
The Garden of Love
The Little Vagabond
London
The Human Abstract
Infant Sorrow
The Angel
A Poison Tree
A Little Boy/ Girl Lost
To Tirzah
The Schoolboy
The Voice of the Ancient
Bard
4. William Blake, ”my favourite poet”:
fetishizing (?) Blake
• The Dead Man (available in the Central
library)
http://ramhornd.blogspot.com/2011/01/blakedead-man.html
• fetishize, fetishise [ˈfɛtɪʃˌaɪz] = to be
excessively or irrationally devoted to (an
object, activity, etc.)
PS I love you
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you were so cute, trying to impress me with William Blake and all your grand plans. I
had no idea what you were talking about... ...but I couldn't help loving the way you
talked.
"I must create a... " Something. "... or be enslaved by another man's... " Something.
Wait, "I will not... I will not reason or compare. My business is to create…”
- Something. Oh, God.
- Did you just make that up then? No, it's William Blake, but I completely screwed it up.
No, you didn't, you made it better. I understood it. I didn't have a clue, actually.
All I know is, if you don't figure out the "something," you'll just stay ordinary. And it doesn't
matter if it's a work of art, or a taco, or a pair of socks. Just create something new and there it
is.
And it's you, out in the world, outside of you. And you can look at it, or hear it, or read it, or
feel it... ...and you know a little bit more about you. A little bit more than anybody else does.
Does that make any sense at all?
Yeah. You're saying you want to paint socks.
Maybe.
I loved you right then and there.
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/a1/ps-i-love-you-script.html
Blake and Sting
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScjBaZ0_
ZU
• Sting, ‘Send your love’ - re-writes the
beginning of “Auguries of Innocence”
• See also “William Blake Singing for England,”
especially the attachment of people like
Kathleen Raine, Tom Paulin, Jah Wobble
(John Wardle), and Adrian Mitcell
(BBC Documentary -VCR in the Central Library)
Blake and popular culture
~Indie Blake~
• http://www.indiegogo.com/William-BlakesSongs-of-Innocence-and-Experience-the-CD
5. London: Structure and
meaning
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How many quatrains?
Basic rhyme scheme?
Overall meaning. Main ideas.
What feelings does the poet convey?
Key words
• "charter'd"
• "mark" Can you find a synonym? Is there a
difference between your synonym and Blake's
word?
• What are the "manacles"? Why are the
"manacles" "mind-forg'd"?
Aural imagery
• stretches the impact of the poem on the
reader's senses. Example: "every cry... In every
voice".
• What is the purpose served by aural imagery?
• humanises the people who he is trying to
generate sympathy for?
Alliteration
• the repetition of a particular sound in the first
syllables of a series of words and/or phrases to
reach a certain effect.
• examples of alliterations in "London"?
Anaphora
• Rhetorical device: repeating a sequence of
words at the beginning of neighbouring
clauses, thereby lending them emphasis.
Examples?
What is the effect of using these repetitions?
6. Choose a Blake poem and talk about it.
“The Voice of the Ancient Bard”
Youth of delight, come hither,
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled, & clouds of reason,
Dark disputes& artful teasing.
Folly is an artful maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways.
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead,
And feel they know not what but care,
And wish to lead others, when they should be led.
NB Dr. Donald Kerr would be delighted if you used Special Collections
resources.
7. Quiz
• If you wish you can write a Blake quiz for the
rest of the class
• E.g: http://www.funtrivia.com/triviaquiz/Literature/William-Blake-The-ProphetPoet-141731.html
8.Blake facsimile
• Latin "made alike”
• a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other
item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible.
• replicates the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale, color,
condition, and other material qualities.
• For books and manuscripts: a complete copy of all pages; an incomplete
copy is a "partial facsimile".
• used by scholars to research a source that they do not have access to
otherwise and by museums and archives for museum and media
preservation
• sold commercially, accompanied by a volume of commentary
• Limited editions (500–2,000) copies, and cost the equivalent of a few
thousand NZD
9. Roy and Blake. Discuss similarities and
dissimilarities
• Themes: edges, boundaries, and
limits: crossing boundaries (eg of
race “The Little Black Boy”
Uneasy with “meta-narratives” (big
stories, all-encompassing official
narratives that do not consider the
“small things/people”)
• The ideologies of the
Enlightenment (rationalism), of
power, of (British) colonialism
Prophets against Empire
• considered “strategic threats”
• of caste: Velutha-Ammu
• the ideology of power, of
(American/corporate) colonialism
“the greater common good”
http://www.narmada.org/gc
g/gcg.html
http://www.dangerousminds.ne
t/comments/arundhati_roy_
vs._india/
Blake & Roy (cont.)
• Untraditional (unorthodox) Christians
• Lent a voice to the under-priviliged
• Activist artists
• Preoccupation for the well-crafted phrase
“every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place”
(Blake, Jerusalem)
• Reflected on their art & believe that the mission of the artist is
to change the world
Roy’s article “Not Again”
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~peer/arundhatiRoy.html
• Had an impact on popular culture – both have thousands of
friends on facebook
Compare Blake’s and Roy’s “agendas”
Similarities? Differences?
• We have to lose our terror
Blake:
of the mundane. We have to
I rest not from my great
use our skills and
task!
imagination and our art, to
To open the Eternal
re-create the rhythms of the
Worlds, to open the
endless crisis of normality,
and in doing so, expose the
immortal Eyes
policies and processes that
Of Man inwards into the
make ordinary things - food,
Worlds of Thought, into
water, shelter, and dignity Eternity
such a distant dream for
ordinary people.
Blake’s hope, or Imagination,
Images, and Happiness
• “If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his
Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot
of his Contemplative Thought, if he could Enter into
Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom or could make a
Friend & Companion of one of these Images of
wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal
things as he must know then would he arise from his
Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then
he would be happy” (Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue.
“Vision of the Last Judgment”)
Roy’s self-proclaimed aim as novelist
and political activist
• To try to help people understand what is being done
to them
• …, by contrast, try to prevent this (The Chequebook
and the Cruise Missile 2004: 120)
• To never simplify what is complicated or complicate
what is simple.
• To be able to communicate to simple people what is
happening in the world
10. Arundhati Roy: writer and
activist (or the writer as activist)
• We have to lose our terror of the mundane. We have
to use our skills and imagination and our art, to recreate the rhythms of the endless crisis of normality,
and in doing so, expose the policies and processes
that make ordinary things - food, water, shelter, and
dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary people.
(Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to
Empire, 2004)
Roy’s political manifestoes.
• Roy reads out from ‘Come September’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbZMUInKDGI
• To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar
disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is
complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength,
never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To
never look away. And never, never, to forget." - Arundhati
Roy, Come September
• What is Roy saying here?
• http://www.weroy.org/
Roy and Politics
Sardar Sarovar Project
-the Narmada dam project
•-displace half a million people, with little or no
compensation and other benefits
•donated her Booker prize money as well as royalties
from her books on the project to the Narmada Bachao
Andolan.
•Franny Armstrong's Drowned Out, a 2002
documentary about the project.
•criticised as "maligning Gujarat" by Congress and BJP
(Bharatya Janata - National, conservative) leaders in the
state.
US foreign policy, the War in Afghanistan
• In a 2001 opinion piece in a British newspaper, Roy responded
to the US military invasion of Afghanistan, finding fault with
the argument that this war would be retaliation for the
September 11 attacks. She disputes U.S. claims of being a
peaceful and freedom-loving nation, listing China and nineteen
3rd World "countries that America has been at war with - and
bombed - since the second world war", as well as previous
U.S. support for the Taliban movement and support for the
Northern Alliance (whose "track record is not very different
from the Taliban's").
Roy’s other campaigns
India's nuclear weapons
•“The End of Imagination” (1998), a critique of
the Indian government's nuclear policies.
- published in The Cost of Living (1999)
•Criticism of Israel
In August 2006, Roy, along with Noam Chomsky signed a letter
in The Guardian called the 2006 Lebanon War a "war crime" and
accused Israel of "state terror."
2008 Mumbai attacks
• the November 2008 Mumbai attacks cannot be seen
in isolation
• wider issues in the region's history and society such
as widespread poverty:
• the Partition of India, the atrocities committed during
the 2002 Gujarat violence, and the ongoing conflict in
Kashmir.
• Her remarks were strongly criticised by Salman
Rushdie: condemned her for linking the Mumbai
attacks with Kashmir and economic injustice against
Muslims in India.
Views on the Naxals
(communists)
• Roy criticised government's armed actions
against the Maoists
• "war on the poorest people in the country".
According to her, the government has
"abdicated its responsibility to the people" and
launched the offensive against Naxals to aid
the corporations with whom it has signed
MoUs.
Field notes on Democracy
• Hope
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkTsE8fU1KY&feature=fv
wrel
Roy against India? Colonising nature? Current issues and
‘Slumdog Millionaire’
Will Roy write fiction again?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ZSlO4554&feature=related
Australian interview
India’s greatest security threat?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnTS9gHC
ZoI
• Any connection to Blake?
11. Roy in pop art
• Pranava Prakash Pic/Mid Day: way of
protesting against Roy’s supporting Naxals
and Kashmiri separatists
• http://www.midday.com/news/2011/mar/030311-news-delhiArundhati-Roy-artist-paints-nude-paintingwith-Osama.htm
12. Power, Stories and Storytelling
• Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm
beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's
actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the
world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative,
the private narrative -- they colonize us. They commission
us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only
different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully
understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched
out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.
Power and powerlessness
Story-telling