Chapter III. – The Book of Urizen
43
The Book of Urizen
The years 1793 and 1794 mark a crisis for William Blake and the group of radicals
with whom he was associated. The September Massacres in 1792, and the execution of the
King and Queen in 1793, followed by the Terror, made those whose support for the
Revolution was combined with humanitarianism gradually change their views. Further, the
reaction of Pitt's government to the new development in France led to a violent repression of
all radicalism in England. Some, like Thomas Paine, fled to France; others were brought to
trial, and though Holcroft escaped conviction, many of his friends were less fortunate and
were condemned to deportation. The intellectual members of the group found various
solutions to the disillusionment which they felt at the failure of the hopes they had placed in
the Revolution and the breaking up of their movement. Mary Wollstonecraft devoted herself
to propaganda against social evils and the battle for the rights of women, and Godwin spent
the rest of his life in pure speculation and the creation of anarchist Utopias.1
Blake's solution was in many ways similar to Godwin's. He foreswore political activity and
turned inward toward "mental strife", seeking a philosophical and religious solution to the
problems of the universe rather than aiming at the immediate improvement of man's state on
earth. He gave his most moving expression to this reincarnation of his belief in revolutionary
activity in "The Grey Monk", written some years later:
But vain the Sword & vain the Bow
They never can work War's overthrow.
The Hermit's Prayer & the Widow's tear
Alone can free the world from fear.
For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.
An a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of a Martyr's woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighty's Bow.
But this solution was not to be found all in a moment, and for the next five years Blake was to
plunge into a despair from which he only slowly emerged after 1800, as he gradually
discovered a final, mystical solution to his problem. The poems, which he produced during
these years, called the Lambeth Books from his new place of residence, are the darkest and
gloomiest in the whole range of his work, both in their text and their illustration.
1
Blunt, Anthony - The Art of William Blake. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.] (Chpt. IV.: The First
Illuminated Books). (p. 59.)
Chapter III. – The Book of Urizen
44
Blake's bitter awareness of the evil of the world led him to a dualist belief which
insisted on the existence of an original force of evil, which he called
Urizen.2 The name
"Urizen" comes from the Greek , "to fix a limit" and is identified with the Jehovah
(IHVH) of the Old Testament by Blake in opposition to Jesus of the New Testament, whom
he identified with the force of good. This basic opposition he extended by adding to UrizenJehovah the attributes of reason, restraint, and law, as opposed to imagination, freedom, and
love for one's neighbour, which he associated with Christ.
The [First] Book of Urizen is known in seven copies, containing from 24 to 28 plates
plus some scattered plates – including the title page and ten full-page designs. The first copy
was published in 1794. As in the Bible, the text is divided into two columns and set out in
chapters and verses. Designs are chiefly restricted to blocks at top or bottom of the page, often
however filling more than half the page and dominating it. The figures are often gruesome: a
crouching skeleton, for example, or the blind Urizen opening his book of corruption. Earth,
air, fire, and water become elements of oppression and death. Only a few of the designs are
lighter and more hopeful. Blake's theme now is not the overthrow of tyranny, but a horrified
fascination with its origin.
The Book of Urizen – written in a rough anapaestic trimeter3 – is Blake's Genesis, and the core
of his Bible of Hell, re-shaping the Fall and the Creation of the physical universe. It is also the
locus for his mythology in 'A Song of Liberty', America, Europe, The Song of Los, The Book
of Ahania and The Book of Los, all of which rest on the ideas presented in this poem. Urizen,
like Milton's Satan, was an angel enjoying the immoral life, though among democracy of
immortals. He is not cast out for rebellion against law, but separates himself by demanding
that Law be established. Los, the immortal artist, emerges to define, clarify and make sense of
the disaster, by the power of imagination. Blake works in many more allusions. Los becomes
Adam, and Enitharmon his Eve. Orc is born to her, like Cain, but also the Serpent.
2
The name "Urizen" was pronounced by Blake with primary stress on the first syllable (not on the second). For
the clear metrical evidence see: Metcalf, Francis Wood – "The Pronunciation of Blakean Names" in
Blake Newsletter 21. [1972.] (pp. 17-18.)
3
Keynes, Geoffrey (ed.) - The Complete Writings of William Blake. [Oxford: Oxford Universitiy Press, 1996.]
(p. 913.)
Chapter III. – The Book of Urizen
45
The storyline of the poem is as follows: Urizen – a god of Reason who separates himself
from other Eternals, demands obedience to his self-proclaimed principles, and falls into Chaos
– is an abstract, vain and punitive deity. A body is created for him by Los, 'the eternal
prophet' or Divine Imagination. But Los, exhausted, divides into male (Los) and female
(Enitharmon). Their child Orc – who represents Rebellious Energy – is born but
immediately chained to a rock. Urizen then explores his deadly world, and mankind shrinks
up from Eternity. Finally, some of Urizen's children begin an exodus.
It is important to note that for Blake the Creation and the Fall are one event. This event occurs
in stages, each of which shows unity lapsing into duality and spiritual energy lapsing into
material passivity. Humanity as we know appears only at the very end of a long cataclysmic
process, and is – from the point of view of Eternity – almost wholly pathetic. In Urizen,
Apocalypse is genesis; creation is fall – conflations that obviously clash with the logical flow
of the biblical (and Miltonic) hexameral paradigm. Urizen, at the centre of both binaries,
additionally confounds the reader who expects a Manichean division of good and evil in the
characters. 4 Understanding the text thus must necessarily be a recursive act. Urizen cannot be
read – it can only be re-read. Yet, a distinct temporal progression does characterize the events
of Urizen. The narrator's response to the muse-like Eternals "I hear your call gladly,/ Dictate
swift winged words" [Prel:5-6]5 suggests that the process of composition proceeds in a
continuous (hence linear) manner. Structurally the book also evinces a recognizable
architecture: the title page submits to the preludium, which precedes sequential chapters, each
subdivided and numbered.
Fibres and chains, webs and nets: Blake's illuminated poetry is replete with objects
that snag and bind. Nearly every character in The Book of Urizen is caught up in something;
Los nets and binds Urizen [8:6], Enitharmon and Urizen chain Orc [20:20]; the Web of
Religion enmeshes all [25:20]. The reader, too, finds navigation difficult; the collapsed
temporal framework of Blake's cosmogony thwarts the linear, easy read. This dialectic
between bookish linearity and conceptual chaos is not, of course, abnormal in Blake, a writer
who fuels his works with the friction of opposition. But the tension between linearity and nonsequentiality (or multi-sequentiality) in the text of Urizen is exacerbated by the illustrations,
4
The "bounding line": Verbal and Visual Linearity in Blake's "Laocoön" and Book of Urizen. [http://www.
mindspring.com/~jntolva/blake/#5]
5
All Blake quotations are from Erdman, David V. - The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. [New
York: Doubleday, 1988]. In-text references to poems cite first the plate then the line number.
Chapter III. – The Book of Urizen
46
all of which deny interpretation as mere portrayals of the textual narration. Not all the plates,
for example, depict scenes mentioned in (or even suggested by) the text itself. (The title page
is a good example of this. Urizen as writer of course is a major theme in The Four Zoas,
though it is only alluded to in Urizen.)
The most obvious subversion of order is the fact – as W.J.T. Mitchell has noted – that ten of
the plates are full-page illustrations and that their order is different in each of the seven extant
copies of Urizen. Mitchell sees this "atemporal, antisequential quality" as a "deliberate formal
device, a way of augmenting the anti-narrative elements disclosed by the text."6 And yet,
again, the book maintains a certain fixity: the title page, preludium, and (most of) the textual
plates follow in the same basic sequential order in all copies of the poem. So, it seems that
linearity in Blake's Urizen inheres neither in the text nor in the images but rather in the format
of the book itself. This tension is a function of a narrative constrained by its own materiality.
No one knows for sure how to proceed through The Book of Urizen. That is, none of
the seven extant copies of the illuminated books is composed of plates arranged in the same
order. At this most basic level there is a sense that Blake toyed around with the meaning of
linear progression through his textual picture book. It inheres in multiplicity, for the various
and tangled narrative lines in Urizen can bewilder the reader and stymie the sense of a logical
flow. Commenting on the motif of the "Fibrous form" (one of many kinds of organic
filaments in Blake's poem), Mitchell notes that the "temporal manifestation of this form is the
structure of intricate, labyrinthine interplay between various narrative lines, and the feeling
that our movement through the poem is like watching the uncontrolled growth of a cancer, an
explosive series of mitoses, divisions, and subdivisions, or the proliferation of genealogical
‘branches' from a single root."7
The narrative lines in Urizen – of the Eternals, of Urizen, of Los, and of Enitharmon – do not
merge into a singularly definable narrative "trunk"; they are rather separate and discrete
(though they do intersect). In a word, Urizen is multi-linear. One "storyline" constructs Urizen
as the God of creation whose "Words articulate" "rolled on the tops of his mountains"[4:4-5];
another fashions a demonic, fallen Urizen, "Unseen in tormenting passions;/ An activity
6
Mitchell, W.J.T. - Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1978] (p.137.)
7
Mitchell, W.J.T. - Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1978] (p.130.)
Chapter III. – The Book of Urizen
47
unknown and horrible;/ A self-contemplating shadow"; another depicts Urizen as the Adamic
first human "rent from Eternity," a "clod of clay"[6:8-10]. Navigating these lines requires
surrendering the very notion of line, for to follow a particular line to its end is to be led astray,
or not to be led anywhere. Only by moving associatively through the forest of signification
can sense be constructed. The figure of Urizen (and the other polymorphous characters)
literally is the intersection of these storylines, a kind of node moving among the bifurcating
elements of the narrative.
Nelson Hilton believes that Blake was aware of textual accordioning to the extent that his
word "fold" is a self-conscious referent. Hilton describes the spatializing feat that the reader
must execute in trying to manoeuvre the narrative lines of Urizen: "To stave off the madness
of proliferating extensions and regression, we "chunk," or shrink, together the levels not
directly before us... As words have no direct relation to things, so the "chunks" of image,
belief, perception, and so on have no direct relation to reality; perception becomes a localized
function of past and present environment."8 Reality here corresponds to the material artefact
that is the book of Urizen. Perceptually we distort the neat physical lines of the book; we
crumple them together in order to perform the most basic readerly task of understanding the
poem. We must effect a stasis like Urizen in plate six, one that cuts across the lines of
signification, rather than hanging ourselves in them like the figures in the next plate. As the
agents of the perception, we readers stand at the centre of a tangle of lines, echoing Urizen
caught in the Web of Religion.
8
Hilton, Nelson - Blakean Zen . [in Studies in Romanticism 24. (Summer 1985.)] (p.184.)