Abstract
According to Blake’s Europe, as history moved towards the crisis of the French Revolution, God became a ‘tyrant crown’d’ (Eur. 10.23, E63). One of the ways this paradigm shift — from God to crowned tyrant — manifests itself, both in the history of the late eighteenth century and in Blake’s prophetic books, is through the altering role and power of speech acts. God is presented in the first chapter of the Bible as the ideal user of language that is action, or of what twentieth-century philosophers and linguists have called performative utterance: God spoke and it was so.1 By contrast, the words of the ‘tyrant crown’d’ also issue in immediate action, but it is because he has authority over his subjects, not over the matter of the universe; because he can compel behaviour, not because he can bring about the absolute unity of signifier and signified; because he has assumed or been granted a kind of authority that is only conferred in the first place through political or institutional pronouncements, not because he is the Logos itself. This essay is an attempt to trace the devolution of performative language from the God of Genesis to the tyrant in The Book of Urizen. To put it differently, I would like to consider the way utterances are seen as creating a phenomenal world in the one case, but a world of political relations and social distinctions in the other.
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Notes
To provide a focus for the aspects of language being discussed in this essay, I have used terminology that derives from the ‘classic’ formulation of speech-act theory by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975),
and John R. Searle in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
and John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Austin’s and Searle’s contention that utterances do not just refer to or describe the world but alter or act on it — a quality that they called ‘performative’ or ‘illocutionary’ force — and their attempts to account for illocutionary force and classify its forms, have been adopted and adapted in various branches of philosophy, linguistics, legal theory, anthropology, and literary criticism. (For an overview of the reception of speech-act philosophy by literary theorists up to the early 1990s, see Chapter 1 of Esterhammer, Creating States.) I have deliberately not emphasized contemporary models or presented them in detail here because the present essay is intended primarily as an exploration of ideas about language and action that appear in late eighteenth-century texts, not as the application of a modern theoretical paradigm to these texts. In particular, the branch of literary theory that derives from Jacques Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s deconstructive interpretations of the performative (in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Gerald Graff [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990]
and Gerald Graff, in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], respectively), along with the most recent applications of the performative to gender studies and cultural critique (especially in the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), is bracketed off here as a quite different understanding of the performative than that which I attempt to relate to eighteenth-century reflections on language and creation. While Butler stresses that in her ‘poststructuralist rewriting of discursive performativity’, the performative is to be understood ‘not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ [New York: Routledge, 1993], 12, 2), the writers discussed in the present essay (Blake, Lowth, Paine) did regard utterance in terms of a subject-centred act of bringing into being what one names. They also, I will argue, intuited a discrepancy between transcendent, ideal or phenomenal creativity and oppressive, divisive, sociopolitical effectiveness. One might say that poststructuralist scholarship ‘resolves’ this tension by regarding the performative as inevitably iterative (i.e., non-transcendent and non-original) and inevitably politicized; in this context, it would be hard to speak of an ‘ideal’ performative. But in eighteenth-century texts a view of speech acts as ideally creative coexists with a view of them as institutionally or politically determined, in an interesting tension that seems indicative of a paradigm shift running through literature, philosophy and political thought. For that matter, the concept of a transcendent, non-political performative still coexists in a confused and unsystematic manner with the concept of a sociopolitical performative in the first explorations of speech acts undertaken by Austin and Searle (see, for example, Searle’s bipartite definition of declarations as either ‘institutional’ or ‘supernatural’ in his influential essay ‘A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts’ [Expression and Meaning 18]).
Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 2 vols, trans. G. Gregory (1787; rpt New York: Garland, 1971) 1: p. 350.
Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God: a Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) p. 64.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 5.564–70 (henceforth abbreviated as PL).
See Lubomir Dolezel, ‘Truth and Authenticity in Narrative’, Poetics Today 1 (1980): p. 11.
See, especially, Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984),
and Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988).
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (New York: AMS, 1967) 4.47, 58, 62, 66 (my italics).
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Esterhammer, A. (1999). Calling into Existence: The Book of Urizen. In: Clark, S., Worrall, D. (eds) Blake in the Nineties. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27602-8_7
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