| DAVID STEN HERRSTROM takes
issue with the view advanced by leading Blake scholars that Blake's Laocoon
is a group of "disconnected sentences" engraved "wherever Blake could find
room" (Geoffrey Keynes) around an image of the statue. He asserts
that order and sense can be found in the arrangement if we ask ourselves,
"How and where can text and picture be unified?" (39).
According to Herrstrom, they are unified in two places: on the copper plate that enables the entire piece to be reproduced; and in the Divine Body. Herrstrom writes "the Laocoon plate is . . . without precedent because Blake pushes his metaphor of art as incarnation beyond its figurative limits into the literal" (42). This revision of the figurative and the literal, and of the way that each plays out in the Imagination, is central to understanding the full implications of an engraved sentence such as "Christianity is Art/ and not Money/ Money is its curse." Confusing the literal with the material at the expense of the figurative is a grave error in Blake's paradigm, one that results in the loss of visionary capacity. While Herrstrom goes on to unpack the text as a gloss on the image, I think the more interesting point of the essay lies in the point just made. Over-insistence on the material at the expense of the figurative condemns viewers to see things that are the same as different, to see word and image as unalterably separate, and to privilege one or the other, when to understand their meaning it is necessary to embrace both. (Joan Menefee.) |
Michael Hancher Department of English, University of Minnesota URL: <http://umn.edu/home/mh/txtimjm2.html> Comments to: mh@umn.edu Created 24 November 1997 Revised 23 December 1997