Drawing Lines: Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas

Abstract

In The Four Zoas, Blake appropriates elements of the spiritual system elaborated by the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, drawing in particular on his The Delights of Wisdom pertaining to Conjugial Love [sic] and A Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, in order to construct a ‘lan- guage’ able to describe the rigid bodies formed in accordance with Urizen’s rational/religious laws, while also indirectly presenting the ungrounded, contingent bodies formed through performance. Discussions of Blake’s views on bodies and sexualities are often divorced from his aesthetics and poli- tics, but in this poem Blake’s account of contracted, expanded and dynamic bodies is closely related to his radical experiments with line and to his delineation of a politics concerned with what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘dis- tribution of the sensible’ (2004, 12–19). The following pages develop these remarks. They provide an overview of Swedenborg’s ‘sexual’ religion, focus- ing in particular on the prominent role played by the sexes in his thought, before turning to pages 40 and 112 [108] of The Four Zoas (Figures 3.1 and 3.2 below).¹ The former portrays a key moment in the emergence of the fallen world’s ‘Sexual Machine’; the latter pictures the moment when it grinds tem- porarily to a halt. Between these two points, the vast panorama of human history (as portrayed in The Four Zoas) again and again takes shape, ‘joint after joint… burning / In love & jealousy’.

O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Sampson shorn by the Churches!

Shewing the Transgressors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven: Heaven as a Punisher & Hell as One under Punishment…

(M22[24]:50–3, El 17–18)

Forming a Sexual Machine: An Aged Virgin Form. In Erin’s Land toward the north, joint after joint & burning In love & jealousy immingled & calling it Religion

(J 39[44]:25–7, E187)