Portrait of William Blake by Thomas Phillips, painted in 1807. The original hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Martin and Barresi in “Paradise Lost,” their chapter on twentieth-century challenges to the discourse of the self, name as demystification’s major figures Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the thinkers most influential for current literary study. In fact, neither Lacan nor Derrida scotched the topic of the self; they adduce the bafflements of the self’s desire for masterful selfhood with some degree of sympathy. More clearly influential for this particular species of demystification is the received Foucault, the poststructuralist sloganeer who coined the catch phrase “the subject is dead.” (I will return further on to a subtler, deeper Foucault.) The dogmatic reception of these thinkers has promoted wholesale disdain for psychological discourse.
This disdain sometimes reaches the level of unthinking caricature. The trend is so common that I hardly know where to begin citing instances of it. Consider this example, chosen at random from an undergraduate textbook on literary criticism. Catherine Belsey opens her essay “Literature, History, Politics” with a mocking portrait of the literary psychological subject: “The sole inhabitant of the universe of literature is Eternal Man (and the masculine form is appropriate), whose brooding, feeling presence precedes, determines and transcends history.” Belsey reflexively, and symptomatically, conflates attention to subject-life with sexism, ahistoricism, and gross metaphysical illusion. (The strangely, unintentionally Blakean phrase “Eternal Man” gives one pause be- cause it would have so radically different a resonance in his poetry) The assumption seems to be that analyzing the experience of selfhood automatically means endorsing a bogus concept of Self. But that is the very concept perpetually under siege in ordinary psychological experience.
The Self is always with us, already undermined, but there can be no progress in understanding its problematic relation to the actual experience of selfhood if the very discourse is declared taboo. Both James and Reed describe with admirable clarity the distortion that results from fixed inattention to subjective experience. It is ironic that literary study should have come to join in this neglect because subjective experience has since the Enlightenment increasingly become the province of literature and of other discourses dismissed as “merely” literary (such as psychoanalysis). Many literary texts have devoted themselves to dramatizing the experience of interior schism and struggle that science, the most authoritative discourse of our day, refuses to address. Yet a good deal of literary criticism now also refuses to address it.
As Socrates’s citation from the Odyssey suggests, Western literature has always paid attention to the self’s experience of itself and, particularly, to its experience of its own disunity. Yet literary treatment of these topics seems to accelerate from the late eighteenth century onward, and any number of compelling examples could be adduced from Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist novels and poetry. To give a smattering, consider the representation of the subject divided against itself or puzzled by its own nature in such canonical works as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Dejection,” George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The popularity of these topics is no accident.
As Reed shows, the later eighteenth through early twentieth centuries witness the official splitting of the subject between conscious and unconscious, with the result that the testimony of consciousness is demoted. Literary focus on the experience of subjectivity occurs simultaneously with the bracketing of subjectivity in scientific discourse, and it can be interpreted as a response. Literature picks up where some other contemporary discourses leave off, drawing on the fascinating new anatomies of the subject formulated in contemporary science and philosophy but seeking to explore them as they are experienced in psychological life.
The major philosophical debates in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain revolve around the clash between religion and the New Science. For our purposes, the important form of this clash is the dramatic challenge scientific materialism and a newly naturalistic psychology pose to traditional ideas of self and soul. Can the old theological discourse of the “soul” serve any function in a scientific environment? Can it be replaced with a naturalistic concept of “self,” which emphasizes the preservative instincts of the organism? Should that concept, too, be superseded by theories of mind and brain functioning founded on sensory atomism?
Essentially there is a showdown between scientific materialism and subjective intuition. The important intervention of literature is this: it shows that the questions raised by scientists and philosophers already influence the self’s experience of itself. The self carries on these debates and feels the force of these questions in the form of anxiety and self-bafflement. To give an example: the exploration of self-division might be said to climax in the period’s emblematic text on the subject, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Jekyll’s last testimony, he reflects with repugnance on his “other” half.
[Jekyll] had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead and had no shape, should usurp the office of life.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Reed discusses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the context of contemporary speculation about the existence of a rational “unconscious.” To my mind, it more obviously dramatizes the contemporary discussion of “soul” in its relation to matter. Does matter think? Does mere neural activity create the “illusion” of consciousness and the intuition of soul? Regardless of whether Stevenson takes a position on the controversy, he makes a claim that the contemporary science does not: namely, that the intellectual debate is experienced as conflict by and within an individual psyche. For a tear is an intellectual thing. Jekyll is tormented by the gulf between subjectivity and material being; his horror at the errant vitality of Hyde reflects the subject’s alienation from the body and its autonomy.
Consciousness balks but cannot extract itself from its entanglement with the body. The body is neither inert nor, by contrast with Plato and Descartes, is it merely a source of deception and temptation; it has its own ways and will from which consciousness or reason can by no means detach themselves. Clearly Jekyll’s experience is not universal. Yet the novel does what horror stories commonly do: it raises everyday conflicts to the register of the supernatural. The literary text takes up the philosophical issues, translating them into psychological crisis: the center of consciousness, or “I,” reacts to material being with dread and uncertainty.
But the quandary from which Jekyll suffers is not necessarily substance dualism, for the “I” in him that quarrels with material being does not identify itself as a different order of being (an intelligible substance, something divine). Instead his anxiety seems topical; it reflects the pressure that scientific materialism exerts over the sense of self. (Not that materialism was invented in eighteenth-century Britain, but then and there it established a major cultural empire it had never had before.)
It was the Romantic poets, two generations before Stevenson, who first began to explore the impact of materialism on self within the experience of the subject. The isolation of consciousness in the material world is a topic uniquely associated with Romanticism. The contemporary prestige of materialism made the isolation of consciousness a more acute problem because, stripped of its transcendent provenance, consciousness must struggle to make sense of its existence. Why must one labor tinder the burden of subjectivity if there is no intelligible world to which the soul belongs, or if mind itself reduces to the firing of neurons?
One Romantic reaction is to reinstate the transcendent provenance of the spirit, although usually with considerable new refinements. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge borrows from German Idealism to oppose the living Subject and the “dead” object world. Instead of arguing the issue in the abstract, the Romantic crisis lyric — Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — dramatizes the plight of a subject struggling to understand its relation to the object world. Such dramatization can reach impressive heights of complexity: Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode presents the traumatic experience of consciousness awakening to its alienation from actuality and seeking, with all deliberate if uncertain will, to create for itself a faith in its transcendent provenance. No dramatization of this plight is starker than the anguished soliloquy of Shelley’s Alastor Poet, who addresses his urgent questions about the purpose of consciousness to a swan who cannot understand him.
And what am I that I should linger here,
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?
Alastor,” 11. 285-90, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose 81
Shelley presents as psychologically tormenting the experience of the subject marooned in a no-man’s-land between lost transcendence and reductive materialism. With his intellectual sophistication and keen historical sense, Shelley might have thought the Alastor Poet’s anguish premature or primitive. But the whole body of his work, right down to the Neoplatonic poignancy of Adonais, with its fierce claim that “Life … Stains the white radiance of Eternity” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose), manifests his respect for the aspirations of the subject and his insistence that pat formulas are insufficient to cure its unease.
This is where Blake comes in. Of all the Romantics, Blake was keenest and most systematic in his critique of materialism; more to the point, he was the one who insisted in the most explicit terms that the intuition of selfhood does not dissipate just because it has been renounced. For Blake the intuition of selfhood includes the intuition of its transcendence — its superiority to the material world — and he maintained that if this intuition is simply discounted as an illusion, it will not die down but rather rankle and torment. Martin and Barresi rather complacently say that it is progress to “shed illusions” and that it shows how important the repudiation of the concept of self is that “it may be psychologically impossible to embrace [it] wholeheartedly.”
But what happens when we are unable to embrace it? We become avatars of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness; we find ourselves living at odds with our own subjectivity. Blake satirized the proponents of such dead-end unbelief in the person of the Idiot Questioner, “who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge, whose Science is Despair” (M 41:15, E142). His target was equally the empiricists and the philosophes — “[Francis] Bacon, [Isaac] Newton & Locke,” “Voltaire Rousseau Gibbon Hume” (M 41:5, E142; J 52, E2o1) — all to his mind reductive skeptics who superciliously disregard the torment of subjectivity.
But Blake thought Lockean empiricism especially guilty of imposing cruel strictures on the subject, requiring it to regard its experiences as irreal [vocab: Not real. irreality], shadowy epiphenomena of a “real” physical world. This theory outraged Blake — he thought it entailed forcible suppression of the subject’s need and its nature; its just and unavoidable need to esteem subjectivity and its natural intuition of transcendence.
Blake claimed that the subject laboring under the injunctions of empiricism will suffer from a kind of schizophrenia in which it has to treat as phantasmal (the inner life) what at the same time presses upon it with the utmost urgency. In short, he found empiricist psychology simplistic and grossly inadequate.
Blake thought of himself as providing what his philosophical contemporaries had abjured: an account of inner realities from the subject’s point of view. For he perceived that the science and philosophy of his own day had become increasingly committed to discounting the value of perception and introspection, and that they were thereby simply abandoning the subject to its vexed experience of itself. The subject’s bewildering intuition of transcendence, in particular, was definitively discharged, which left it with no choice but to go seek a home in False Religion.
