Comparative Study of William Blake's illuminated books and Alan Moore's graphic novels

TESE DE DOUTORAMENTO COMPARATIVE STUDY OF WILLIAM BLAKE’S ILLUMINATED BOOKS AND ALAN MOORE’S GRAPHIC NOVELS María Cecilia Marchetto Santorun ESCOLA DE DOUTORAMENTO INTERNACIONAL DA UNIVERSIDADE DE SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA PROGRAMA DE DOUTORAMENTO EN ESTUDOS INGLESES AVANZADOS: LINGÜÍSTICA, LITERATURA E CULTURA SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA 2020 DECLARACIÓN DA AUTORA DA TESE Comparative Study of William Blake’s illuminated books and Alan Moore’s graphic novels Dna. María Cecilia Marchetto Santorun Presento a miña tese, seguindo o procedemento axeitado ao Regulamento, e declaro que: 1) A tese abarca os resultados da elaboración do meu traballo. 2) De selo caso, na tese faise referencia ás colaboracións que tivo este traballo. 3) A tese é a versión definitiva presentada para a súa defensa e coincide coa versión enviada en formato electrónico. 4) Confirmo que a tese non incorre en ningún tipo de plaxio doutros autores nin de traballos presentados por min para a obtención doutros títulos. En Lincoln (Reino Unido), 17 de Decembro de 2020 Asdo. AUTORIZACIÓN DO DIRECTOR/TITOR DA TESE D./Dna. J. Manuel Barbeito Varela En condición de: Titor/a e director/a Título da tese: Comparative Study of William Blake’s illuminated books and Alan Moore’s graphic novels INFORMA: Que a presente tese, correspóndese co traballo realizado por D/Dna María Cecilia Marchetto Santorun, baixo a miña dirección/titorización, e a utorizo a súa presentación, considerando que reúne os r equisitos esixidos no R egulamento de Estudos de Doutoramento da USC, e que como director/titor desta non incorre nas causas de abstención establecidas na Lei 40/2015. En Santiago de Compostela, 18 de Decembro de 2020 Sinatura electrónica Table of Contents I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... 7 II. ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 9 III. NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS FOR BLAKE’S ILLUMINATED BOOKS ..................... 11 IV. RESUMO EN GALEGO ............................................................................................................. 13 0. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 23 0.1. THESIS STATEMENT .............................................................................................................. 25 0.2. EXPLANATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE THESIS STATEMENT ................................. 25 0.3. ARGUMENTS AND CRITERIA ................................................................................................ 26 0.4. OBJECTIVES AND HYPOTHESES .......................................................................................... 28 0.5. LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................................... 33 0.6. METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................... 34 0.7. CORPUS SELECTION CRITERIA............................................................................................ 35 0.7.1. Formal criteria ............................................................................................................ 35 0.7.2. Thematic and organising criteria ........................................................................... 35 0.8. STRUCTURE ........................................................................................................................... 38 0.9. RESULTS ................................................................................................................................. 40 1. BLAKE, MOORE AND THE ROMANTIC TRADITION ....................................................... 41 2. MOORE’S ANARCHIST MAGIC AND BLAKE’S RADICAL ANTINOMIANISM ........... 49 2.0. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 49 2.1. ENLIGHTENMENT RADICALISM, ANTINOMIANISM AND TWENTIETH CENTURY COUNTERCULTURE ............................................................................................. 50 2.2. POPULAR MYTHOLOGISATIONS OF BLAKE ....................................................................... 54 2.3. ESOTERICISM, OCCULTURE AND MOORE’S RECEPTION OF BLAKE ............................. 62 2.4. WILLIAM BLAKE IN BRITISH COMICS: ALAN MOORE VS GRANT MORRISON ........... 71 2.5. BLAKE’S IDEAS ABOUT SEXUALITY AND MOORE’S ANARCHO-ECOLOGICAL EROTICISM ................................................................................. 74 3. THEORY AND METHODOLOGY ....................................................................................... 77 3.0. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 77 3.1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND TOOLS ....................................................................... 78 3.1.1. Bloom’s theory of influence and the concept of misprision: the reception of Blake ........................................................................................................ 78 3.1.2. Williams’ theory of structures of feeling and its applicability to Blake’s and Moore’s works ....................................................................................... 81 3.1.3. Instrumental reason and Gothic excess and transgression: a selection of concepts from cultural studies, psychoanalysis and Gothic studies ............................................................................................................... 84 3.1.3.1. Instrumental reason ....................................................................................... 84 3.1.3.2. Eagleton’s analysis of alienation, evil and terror ...................................... 91 3.2. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 95 4. ANALYSIS OF THE THEMES OF PERCEPTION AND VISION ................................ 97 4.0. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 97 4.1. REASON AND IMAGINATION ................................................................................................ 97 4.1.1. Notions of reason and imagination vs rationalist materialism ........................ 97 4.1.2. The contrary relationship between reason and imagination and its consequences ................................................................................................. 105 6 4.2. PERCEPTION AND VISION ................................................................................................... 110 4.3. CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................................................... 135 5. ANALYSIS OF THE TOPICS OF GOOD AND EVIL .................................................... 139 5.0. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 139 5.1. MOORE’S RECEPTION OF BLAKEAN IDEAS OF EVIL ...................................................... 142 5.2. BLAKE’S CONTRARIES AND NEGATIONS AND THE TOPIC OF EVIL IN MOORE ......... 145 5.2.1. Swamp Thing and the meaning of evil ................................................................. 146 5.2.2. From Hell and alienated Contraries ................................................................... 150 5.2.3. Promethea and the acknowledgement of the inner Satan ............................... 155 5.2.4. The Gothic representation of evil in Moore and Blake ................................... 166 5.3. BLAKEAN KATEGOROI IN MOORE’S GRAPHIC NOVELS ................................................. 173 5.4. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 174 6. ANALYSIS OF THE THEMES OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY .............................. 177 6.0. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 177 6.1. WOMEN AND MONSTERS: EROTICISM, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN BLAKE AND MOORE ........................................................................................................... 179 6.1.1. V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing and the Blakean influence on their depiction of gender and sexuality .......................................................................... 179 6.1.2. Gender contrariety vs gender negation in Blake’s Visions, America and Milton and Moore’s From Hell ...................................................... 183 6.1.3. Blake’s redemptive female Emanations and Promethea ................................. 189 6.1.4. Unnameable couplings and heavenly cominglings: Blakean influence on the treatment of sexuality in Moore’s Lovecraftian graphic novels ............................................................................................................. 193 6.2. BLAKE’S AND MOORE’S CONTRADICTIONS AND PROBLEMATIC DEPICTIONS OF GENDER ..................................................................................................... 203 6.3. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 214 7. CONCLUSIONS ....................................................................................................................... 217 7.0. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 217 7.1. RESULTS, RELEVANCE AND FULFILMENT OF OBJECTIVES ........................................... 219 7.2. SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH ........................................................................... 225 8. WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................ 227 9. APÉNDICE: PUBLICACIÓNS PROPIAS MENCIONADAS NA TESE ................. 239 I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the help and guidance of Prof Dr José Manuel Barbeito Varela (USC), my tutor and supervisor, whose knowledge, critical insight, experience, patience and generosity have supported my efforts throughout the years. His corrections, teaching, proofreading, criticism and even material aid (providing me access to books, materials or opportunities) have made this work possible. He has also inspired this work before I considered writing a PhD thesis, in several undergraduate courses, through his reflections on philosophy and poetry. I would not have achieved the necessary depth of knowledge and understanding of the subjects without the inestimable help and advice of Prof Jason Whittaker (U of Lincoln), who went out of his way to facilitate my work in every manner available to him, with countless Blake seminars, meetings, by putting at my disposal all material resources he could and introducing me to the academic world of Blake Studies. His audacious approach and enlightening teaching have become a true model of both academic achievement and human for me. Other Lincoln scholars and staff were also wonderfully kind and helpful during my research stay, including Katie Dorr, whose hospitality and efficiency with paperwork was instrumental in the process; Sam Greasley, who put U of Lincoln library resources at my disposal and also accompanied many of the meetings with Prof Whittaker; and Prof Sibylle Erle (BGU), who invited me to her conference, engaged with my work, helped me find publishing opportunities and kept in touch during this stage. I also need to thank Prof Dr Laura Lojo Rodríguez, head of the USC research group Discourse & Identity (GRC D431C 2019/01, Regional Government of Galicia), for her availability, hard work and continued support when offering research group resources whenever possible. She deserves to be mentioned as well for her thoughtfulness and talent as teacher of literature and subject coordinator. Other members of my research group and professors at the faculty of Philology of the USC have given me encouragement and inspiration to pursue the path of academic research, including Prof Dr Manuela Palacios Gonzalez and Prof Dr Constante González Groba, with their appreciation of my undergraduate work and their equally deep sensibility and rigour. I also have to thank Prof Dr Palacios González for her support and openness through our brief shared teaching period. Manny thanks to all the group, department and faculty I have interacted with during this stage. A special thanks should go too to my USC PhD colleagues and friends, especially Dr Nerea Riobó Pérez, Daniella Pettersson Traba, Regina Martínez Ponciano, Dr Iván Tamaredo Meira, Dr Lara Lorenzo Herrera, Dr Yolanda Iglesias Cancela, Dr Noelia Castro Chao and Büke Arne Saglam, whose constant company and solidarity eased the path towards the completion of this thesis. Among them is also Fernando López Casal, our superb librarian, who was always very serviceable in matters bibliographic or otherwise and provided support for all of us. I am grateful as well to my personal friends, Olalla Buceta Lojo, who has always been there despite all odds; philosophy students (by now seasoned philosophers, I hope) Roberto Novás Silva, Diego Gabriel Emilio Horshovski and Jaime Arnau Aguilera García, who shared with me their intellectual wealth, thoughts and opinions about my work, helping me with some glimpses of philosophy from the inside at the beginning of my journey. At the end of it, I have 14 a Bad Thing, right?’: Form and Function from William Blake to Alan Moore” (2012), Green estuda a relación entre as ideas de Blake e de Moore sobre a percepción e as súas técnicas formais. Nesta tese expándese e afóndase nesta liña de investigación aplicando a un corpus máis amplo perspectivas semellantes e usando os resultados dunha análise comparativa para trazar a evolución en Moore da influencia de Blake. Ademais, inspírome en estudos previos sobre Moore, tales como Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (2009), por Annalisa Di Lido; o volume Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels (2012), editado por Todd A. Comer e Joseph Michael Sommers; e a colección Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition (2013), editada por Green. Para poder analizar as obras de Blake e de Moore e comparalas para defender a tese de que teñen unha idea similar de imaxinación visionaria coma o poder que diviniza o ser e o expande máis alá das convencións sociais, a comparación enmarcouse no proceso moderno de secularización. Tentouse definir en que momento de dito proceso se atopaban Blake e Moore. Tanto Blake coma Moore desenrolaron as súas actividades literarias e artísticas ca idea de contrarrestar certos efectos do proceso de secularización tratando de reencantar o mundo, pero ao mesmo tempo sendo moi críticos co encantamento feito pola relixión institucionalizada. Blake tentou, entre a Ilustración e o Romanticismo, emancipar aos seres humanos da relixión convencional utilizando as estratexias da propia relixión, aproveitando o mito e seu potencial utópico. Moore, escribe nunha época de crecente secularismo, pero unha que ao mesmo tempo estimulou certo reencantamento, máis que un maior desencanto (Partridge 1-2). Mentres Blake loitaba por rexeitar a opresión da relixión estatal sen desencantar o mundo no proceso, Moore intenta tamén reencantar o mundo sen caer nos fanatismos violentos e convencións castradoras que agroman de novo na sociedade a finais do século XX e principios do XXI. No estudo de Blake, téñense en conta o contexto e a filosofía dos séculos XVIII e XIX. Na liña de moitos pensadores ilustrados, Blake criticou a relixión institucionalizada, a adopción supersticiosa de crenzas relixiosas e o uso ideolóxico destas crenzas para a enxeñería social. Ao mesmo tempo, en contra de ditos filósofos ilustrados e racionalistas, para Blake non se seguía desta crítica que o mito relixioso fose en si malo ou tivese que ser erradicado; de feito, defendeu que a esencia do Cristianismo (e de tódalas relixións) non reside na repetición da doutrina ou no cumprimento de normas, senón na capacidade imaxinativa que reside no amor, no perdón e na cooperación de toda a humanidade para a creación mediante a arte e a ciencia. No caso de Moore, a idea de reencantamento deriva das nocións contraculturais neorrománticas de relixión e da espiritualidade xurdidas nos anos sesenta do século XX. Destes movementos toma unha actitude politicamente crítica, ao mesmo tempo que defende espiritualidades alternativas baseadas na creatividade contra a imposición da formas relixiosas tradicionais e convencionais. Neste eido contracultural, Blake xa era unha icona de revolución profética e liberdade artística, imaxinativa e mesmo sexual. Malia a súa formación nestes ideais, Moore desenvolveu unha mirada crítica e cauta fronte á superficialidade, simpleza e inxenuidade que ocasionalmente se atopa nas ideas utópicas desta época. Xunto con este obxectivo máis xeneral de situar os reencantamentos que propoñen Blake e Moore nos diferentes momentos do proceso de secularización, o segundo obxectivo é explorar a noción da natureza nas obras de Blake e Moore; en particular, o seu interese polos aspectos da natureza que a razón abstracta non pode conter e polo tanto exclúe. O terceiro obxectivo é analizar os termos artísticos e poéticos nos que os autores presentan a posibilidade de rexenerar o mundo mediante a transformación dos aspectos da natureza convertidos en negativos ao ser 15 excluídos pola convención, en forzas positivas. O cuarto e último obxectivo é explicar as particularidades da interpretación de Moore das ideas de Blake. A metodoloxía aplicada na análise deste estudo comparativo incluíu: 1) a comparación das ideas de natureza, visión e mal en ambos autores; 2) o estudo de literatura crítica sobre estes temas; 3) a exploración dos contextos culturais que inflúen na comprensión destas ideas polos autores 4) o estudo das súas críticas da moralidade convencional, en particular das normas de xénero e sexuais; 5) a análise da representación da transgresión e da alienación das percepcións mediante a técnica gótica de distorsións e transformacións de personaxes en ambos autores; 5) o estudo comparativo de pasaxes de Moore con pasaxes de Blake nas que directa ou indirectamente se inspira. En canto ao corpus, seleccionouse primeiro en base a criterios formais: escolléronse libros iluminados nos que a mestura e o equilibrio entre o visual e o verbal é maior, para poder contar con suficientes datos tanto acerca do texto escrito por Blake como do aspecto visual, é dicir, os gravados que tamén compoñen estes libros. Deste xeito facilítase a súa comparación coas novelas gráficas. O segundo criterio de selección é temático: escollín as obras que tratan os temas da percepción, o mal e a sexualidade que hai que entender en relación coa crenza de Blake e de Moore na imaxinación como medio para superar as convencións. No tratamento destes temas pode verse con claridade a influencia da heterodoxia relixiosa, artística e política Blakeana en Moore. O primeiro tema que se analiza é a percepción, xa que en ambos autores se ve a necesidade de transformar os modos habituais de percepción dun modo que responda á imaxinación máis que a modos de percibir habituais desenrolados para a autopreservación. O segundo tema é o mal. En Blake o mal procede nun nivel antropolóxico dunha disfunción da facultade da razón e nun nivel social da opresión que o opresor xustifica cun uso distorsionado da razón. A crítica Blakeana á idea de razón que se enarbola para xustificar a explotación leuse en tempos Posmodernos frecuentemente como un rexeitamento da razón que Blake en realidade sostivo durante un corto período de tempo e posiblemente de forma un tanto irónica (como ocorre por exemplo en The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, impreso en 1790). Para Blake, en realidade, o mal procede dunha razón caída, abstracta, que domina ao resto de facultades, separando ao ser humano do principio divino do xenio poético e a imaxinación. Esta razón condena como pecado as manifestacións do xenio creador. Blake, sen embargo, pasa pouco a pouco de poñer o énfase na representación desta forza maligna a poñelo, nos libros iluminados máis tardíos, no perigo dunha liberación descontrolada de enerxías naturais. Isto implica que contra os abusos do poder e as xerarquías políticas e relixiosas Blake oporá formas de revolución imaxinativas máis que literais e violentas. O terceiro tema é a sexualidade. A convención reprime as manifestacións eróticas da imaxinación. Blake inicialmente chama a estas enerxías “Evil” ou “Hell,” (MHH 3-4; E34) empregando de modo irónico a terminoloxía do moralismo hipócrita que condena a expresión do desexo que provén da imaxinación e rompe a orde estabelecida. As obras onde estes temas aparecen reflectidos con máis frecuencia e profundidade son os libros iluminados Blakeanos The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel (composto en 1789), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), America, a Prophecy (1793), The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), e Milton, a Poem (impreso c. 1811); e en canto a novelas gráficas de Moore, analicei V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Swamp Thing (1984-1987), From Hell, Promethea (1999-2005), Neonomicon (2010-2011) e Providence (2015-2017). 16 A tese ten unha estrutura bipartita. A primeira parte consta dos capítulos do 1 ao 3, que tratan o contexto e a teoría. A segunda trata as análises de cada un dos tres temas arriba mencionados, ás que corresponden os capítulos do 4 ao 6. No capítulo 1, situouse a Blake e Moore no proceso de secularización, e estudáronse os movementos culturais do Romanticismo e o Posmodernismo nos que se enmarcan a miúdo e nos que a secularización adquire diferentes formas. A exploración das actitudes dos dous autores fronte ás culturas dominantes dos seus respectivos contextos axuda a evitar malinterpretacións e adquirimos unha base para explorar o contexto cultural en máis detalle. Neste capítulo vemos a diferencia entre o reencantamento de Blake e o de outros autores románticos, a pesar de que Blake se estuda comunmente como parte deste movemento literario. Vemos tamén que o reencantamento que propón Moore ten tanto herdanza romántica como Posmoderna. Blake respondeu á Revolución Industrial e ao proceso de secularización divinizando ao ser humano e uníndoo a enerxías creativas e instintos tradicionalmente considerados malos. Criticou a distorsión producida pola abstracción da ciencia e polo interese egoísta que reprimen o auténtico poder visionario humano. Con mitos e lendas, desafiou a noción ilustrada de realidade e traballou por superar a división entre suxeito e obxecto. Cría no carácter sagrado da natureza, pero sen seguir a noción de natureza e da unión con ela que encomendaban outros románticos coma William Wordsworth. En Wordsworth a natureza é esencialmente boa, non está afectada pola caída, mentres que en Blake hai unha duplicidade na idea de natureza, xa que está dividida entre os aspectos aceptados nos discursos da ciencia e da relixión e os que non teñen cabida neles. Estes últimos quedan relegados, resultando hostís e alleos ao ser humano, que queda incapacitado para comprendelos. Moore responde ao mundo secularizado Posmoderno e aos seus cambios tecnolóxicos cunha divinización das capacidades creativas do ser humano, recuperando unha noción do ser humano como divino na que o corpo non é un elemento negativo. Na liña romántica, Moore pon ao Eros e ao inconsciente como fonte das capacidades visionarias e oponse á explotación da natureza; pero estas ideas adquiren nel rasgos Posmodernos: unha maior énfase no individualismo, unha noción non tradicional de xénero e un materialismo que explora aspectos do corpo, como a súa animalidade ou calidade de estrañeza, que non exploraba o romanticismo. Como Blake, Moore rexeitou a relixión institucional e, como outros Posmodernos, explorou unha espiritualidade ecléctica e multicultural. A posición complexa de Blake, que criticaba o rexeitamento ilustrado do mito ao tempo que combatía, como os ilustrados, o poder e a opresión, favoreceu o interese Posmoderno nel. Mais Blake, a diferenza dos Posmodernos, tiña fe en ideas universais fóra destes ámbito. Moitos autores Posmodernos identificáronse coa repulsa de Blake das convencións e institucións que presentaban o seu discurso como universalmente válido. Moore, que desafía o Posmodernismo cómplice das formas culturais do capitalismo tardío e recoñece a banalidade, superficialidade e comercialismo que forman parte do panorama cultural e social, aproveitou recursos desta mesma cultura dominante para achegarse ao transcendentalismo romántico mediante a ironía do Posmodernismo. O capítulo 2 trata os contextos socioculturais dos que xorde a cosmovisión particular de Blake e os discursos que afectan á interpretación de Moore da obra de Blake. Entre eles destacan a contracultura dos anos sesenta nos países de fala inglesa e os novos movementos relixiosos, tendencias psicanalíticas e escolas esotéricas. Estes marcos condicionaron a aproximación de Moore ao antinomismo e á heterodoxia Blakeanos e centraron a súa atención nos aspectos de rebelión e de misticismo de Blake. A cultura popular dos sesenta mitificou a Blake. Moitas 17 correntes de pensamento e círculos culturais que inflúen en Moore son anti-ilustrados e propoñen, para ir máis alá de formas estabelecidas de ser e de vivir, procesos de liberación de enerxías internas. Isto determina que se lese a Blake como máis anti-ilustrado do que realmente era. A exploración de estas influencias facilita distinguir onde Moore se separa das ideas de Blake e cando é máis fiel ao Blake histórico. O capítulo 3 explica os conceptos teóricos de influencia (Harold Bloom), structures of feeling (Raymond Williams) e razón instrumental (Theodor Adorno e Max Horkheimer), e explica a relación entre razón, lei, poder e exceso seguindo a Terry Eagleton. Máis especificamente, dentro da noción de influencia de Bloom, exploráronse os termos “misprision,” “clinamen” e “tessera.” Escolléronse algúns conceptos dos estudos do Gótico para explorar a transgresión e a alienación con respecto ao mal, e os conceptos de diabolismo, satanismo e kategoros que utiliza Whittaker en “From Hell” para falar do mal en Blake e Moore. Das teorías de Bloom, empregáronse os conceptos de “misprision,”, “clinamen” e “tessera” para explicar omisións deliberadas ou accidentais, distorsións e engadidos que conforman o Blake de Moore. Os conceptos de Adorno e Horkheimer e Eagleton axudan a traballar os aspectos específicos do racionalismo que Blake e Moore critican. Tendo en conta estas teorías de Adorno e Horkheimer e Eagleton defínese o concepto de mal co que se traballa nas análises. En canto a Eagleton, utilízase a noción de “holy terror” e a súa visión do problema da liberdade para encadrar os aspectos controvertidos da idea de enerxía Blakeana, así como o uso de Moore do tema da liberdade e do sublime. Tamén se ten en conta a explicación psicanalítica do mal en Eagleton como imposición dunha fantasía na realidade allea para traballar nos conceptos de mal satánico e negación como formas deste tipo de fantasía que se impón. A continuación preséntanse aqueles conceptos dos estudos do Gótico a ter en conta na análise dos conceptos opostos que engloban a idea do mal nos dous autores: a transgresión e a alienación. É dicir, as ferramentas para analizar cando símbolos tradicionais do mal encarnan a rebelión fronte á opresión ou a opresión mesma; cando encarnan resistencia ao poder, ou o poder e o dominio mesmo. Do Gótico tómanse os conceptos de transgresión e de monstruosidade como formas de transformación cultural e de diverxencia das normas culturais. Por último, incorpóranse os conceptos de diabolismo, satanismo e kategoros para falar de figuras que representan nocións positivas ou negativas do mal. Nas análises dos textos compáranse elementos narrativos, personaxes, imaxes visuais, imaxinería literaria e artística, e ideas das obras de Blake e de Moore. Analízanse tanto puntos de influencia directa de Blake sobre Moore (por exemplo, citas, alusións ou imaxes tiradas dos libros iluminados nas novelas gráficas) como puntos de influencia indirecta, como poden ser pasaxes das novelas gráficas que inclúen ideas Blakeanas recibidas a través de outros autores como Aldous Huxley. Tamén se analizan as diferenzas entre os autores e se sinalan os puntos de converxencia de ambos autores no uso que fan de mitoloxías e tradicións. Estas análises amosan que en ambos autores a natureza aparece como un poder interno, visionario e inmanente, moitas veces conectado a arquetipos femininos. En Blake, a natureza é inseparable da idea do divino, unha forza interior, que, anque corrompida e denigrada polas convencións sociais, debe ser recoñecida tal como é. A noción de natureza en Moore tamén é visionaria e, como en Blake, pode amosarse monstruosa, vista a través do utilitarismo e de estruturas convencionais. Tras ler a Blake máis a fondo, a idea da natureza en Moore pasa de ser panteísta e primordial a conectar con ideas de arte e creatividade humana. A diferenza é que, mentres Blake acentúa máis o elemento divino do humano, Moore fai ao humano máis 18 continxente, estraño e perturbador. A unión de natureza e mente humana en Moore baséase na confusión dos límites entre un e outro ámbitos, reflectindo un universo caótico que asolaga as vellas ideas de dominio humano. O neorromanticismo das novelas gráficas é interrompido por dúbidas Posmodernas sobre o individuo que levan a perspectivas posthumanas. O capítulo 4 sobre a percepción e a visión amosa que en ambos autores a imaxinación permite experimentar a natureza tal como é, non distorsionada polo interese e pola razón instrumental. O modo visionario de percepción que tratan ambos autores implica un modo de vida e de habitar no mundo baseado na interconexión con outros seres, cos elementos naturais e cos universos internos e externos, os cales se entende que están constituídos á vez pola natureza e pola imaxinación, entre as cales o límite faise impreciso. En ambos a imaxinación e a razón concíbense como capacidades que deberían estar nunha contrariedade positiva, confrontándose dialecticamente a unha á outra e sostendo así a existencia. Moore emprega a Blake para rexeitar o materialismo que privilexia a razón por riba da imaxinación. Non obstante, elementos como a referencia á psicodelia das drogas, unha imaxe menos sublimada das forzas inconscientes e a representación metaficcional da revelación, distíngueno de Blake. O capítulo 5 estuda o tema do ben e o mal, con particular énfase no mal, comezando co diabolismo inicial de Blake e a súa influencia nas representacións transgresoras de Moore. Analízase a dinámica de opostos de Blake, na que se distingue entre contrarios (opostos complementarios que coexisten e se recoñecen como mutuamente necesarios) e negacións (opostos nos que unha parte é dominante e excluínte da outra). Blake centra esta crítica no interese egoísta, mentres que Moore a centra na intolerancia. Blake reaccionaba á utilización dos discursos ilustrados para lexitimar a explotación; Moore reaccionou aos discursos do antiterrorismo utilizados para fomentar a xenofobia. Nos dous casos, a negación é unha fantasía de poder que exclúe outras, entrando nunha relación con elas oposta á de contrariedade positiva. Hai continuidades entre o diabolismo de Blake e a rebeldía contracultural de Moore, pero tamén características máis Posmodernas no xogo con puntos de vista satánicos en Moore e crítica Posmoderna ás contradicións da Modernidade. Nas novelas gráficas de Moore, personaxes coma William Gull, o obispo Lilliman e Robert Suydam son kategoroi Blakeanos que representan unha incapacidade para entender as enerxías instintivas, especialmente as sexuais. Estes personaxes parécense a Urizen, que anticipa a negación hiper-racionalista e o seu descenso á loucura á que supostamente pretende opoñerse. No capítulo descríbese a evolución do diabolismo en Blake cara o rexeitamento de Satán, un cambio que corresponde en Moore cunha visión máis complexa da liberación das enerxías instintivas e a imaxinación; a transgresión xa non só aparece asociada ao diabolismo romántico senón tamén á negación, e a imaxinación non só aparece como dimensión de realidades utópicas senón tamén terroríficas e violentas. O capítulo 6, sobre o erotismo e a sexualidade en Blake a Moore tendo en conta a perspectiva de xénero. Fronte á visión negativa do corpo dende posturas relixiosas convencionais ou doutrinas filosóficas o corpo para ambos é positivo. As representacións do corpo en ambos autores como a parte tanxible da alma inflúen en todos estes conceptos. En Moore, o corpo pode ser o núcleo de resistencia última fronte a imposicións, e está representado de xeitos grotescos e abxectos que se diferencian das ideas tradicionais de beleza e de normas de xénero. O capítulo reflexiona sobre a posición críticas de ambos autores diante do patriarcado, especialmente en relación ca relixión. O capítulo confirma as críticas de ambos autores aos puntos de vista mecanicistas e naturalistas do ser humano, do corpo e da 19 sexualidade. Os dous conectan estes temas ca imaxinación e amosan como a ideoloxía afecta a estes aspectos negativamente. O desexo sexual é bo en si nun principio en ambos autores, pero está suxeito a manipulacións perversas que impulsan a posuír a un outro deshumanizado. Esta visión está determinada polas ideas Blakeanas de independencia de sistemas impostos e de “sensual enjoyment” (Blake, MHH 14; E39), en parte transmitida indirectamente por outros autores a Moore. Este reproduce na súa lectura de Blake elementos da contracultura dos 60 e a súa liberación sexual, se ben tamén reflicte críticas e dúbidas que recordan ás de Blake cando dixo que as técnicas místico-sexuais do visionario Emmanuel Swedenborg podían ser prexudiciais (véxase Schuchard, Introduction). Analízanse as concepcións místicas da sexualidade nos dous autores en relación co tema da expansión e a liberación da consciencia, así como as relacións de xénero segundo o patrón de contrariedade ou negación, e sinálanse as contradicións que en ambos autores aparecen en relación co seu tratamento da muller. É importante sinalar que malia estas críticas ao patriarcado, Blake tamén representou actitudes e accións en conflito coa defensa da muller. Nas súas obras máis tardías, utiliza figuras femininas de poder dun xeito negativo para representar o aspecto terrible da natureza caída. Ademais, os Zoas aparecen como personaxes masculinos orixinarios dos cais as Emanacións femininas só son derivacións. En canto a Moore, representa ás mulleres como vítimas do patriarcado, que en última instancia non poden evitar a súa opresión; noutros casos, utiliza arquetipos femininos que se arriscan á universalización. A denigración e a destitución de figuras femininas aparece moito en Moore como forma de dar significado poético ao sufrimento sen sentido experimentado polas mulleres, máis non en tódolos casos en que se trata o tema do abuso sexual é posible estabelecer dita interpretación. Ambos producen representacións que poderían potencialmente xustificar normas sexistas. Mentres que Blake limita a liberación ás veces á esfera sexual, en Moore os requirimentos dos modos do gótico, da parodia ou da transgresión toman prioridade por riba da mensaxe feminista que lanza noutros lugares. Ca axuda destas análises, respónderonse as preguntas da tese satisfactoriamente. Comezando polo tema da natureza, vemos que en Blake e Moore o concepto expándese para incluír capacidades humanas convencionalmente opostas ao non humano, sendo a máis importante a imaxinación. Blake usa o antropomorfismo para favorecer a empatía do ser humano ca natureza e menoscabar a oposición entre eles, mentres que Moore fai o humano monstruoso, animal, sagrado, estraño e diabólico para desestabilizar as definicións que opoñen o humano ao natural. En ambos o desexo e a visión conectan o corpo e a mente. As conclusións da tese aportan elementos que poden axudar a comprender mellor a recepción e evolución de ideas derivadas do Romanticismo e de Blake, e presentan suxestións para futuras investigacións. O estudo dos temas da percepción e a visión amosa semellanzas e diferenzas entre ambos autores sobre a relación entre as facultades. Imaxinación e razón deben entrar nunha relación de contrariedade para a expansión da mente. Moore emprega a Blake para defender esta contrariedade positiva. Dito uso de Blake podería ser de relevancia no estudo da súa influencia noutros autores e contextos. Os resultados con respecto ao rexeitamento dos conceptos tradicionais de moralidade demostran que tanto Blake como Moore critican a imposición das fantasías de poder. Nos dous casos, dita fantasía é unha negación no sentido que Blake lle daba á palabra. Este é outro patrón que suxire a pregunta de se está presente noutros autores influenciados por Blake, e se aparece en combinación coa preocupación que Moore amosou pola intolerancia que se agocha detrás 20 de moitos discursos hexemónicos actuais. As continuidades entre o diabolismo de Blake e a rebeldía contracultural de Moore, así como o foco no punto de vista satánico en Moore como crítica Posmoderna ás contradicións do suxeito moderno tamén son elementos que poden aportar ferramentas de comparación entre o Romanticismo e a cultura popular actual, especialmente no que se refire á contracultura e tendencias alternativas nos medios. Por exemplo, moitas personaxes poden ser analizados como kategoroi Blakeanos e explorar se as súas características responden a interpretacións similares ás que fixo Moore ou non. As críticas de ambos autores a ideoloxías mecanicistas e naturalistas e a como estas afectan á sexualidade, así como as súas estratexias para superar estes puntos de vista mediante concepcións místicas e imaxinativas da sexualidade permítennos entender mellor a xénese, a recepción e a evolución de ideas derivadas do Romanticismo, e tamén exploralas con precisión noutras épocas e autores. O impacto das ideas Blakeanas de independencia de sistemas impostos e de “sensual enjoyment” (Blake, MHH 14; E39) en xeracións posteriores coma as de Allen Ginsberg ou Moore transformou a visión da sexualidade en xeral e da interpretación do tema da sexualidade en Blake en particular. As ambivalencias presentes nos elementos derivados da contracultura dos 60 en Moore e as súas críticas e dúbidas indican que autores actuais continúan preocupados por estas ideas. Moore tenta resolver un problema básico: a revolución sexual non saíu como tiña que saír, polo que hai que volver a Blake, o pioneiro da liberdade sexual, para atopar respostas. Ao estudalo, atópase con que non era unha figura tan heroica como na mitoloxía contracultural se entende a Blake: tiña inmensos problemas e preocupacións con respecto á sexualidade e que facer con ela unha vez que a imaxinación recobra o seu lugar primordial entre as facultades mentais. Este problema esténdese en ambos autores no conflito coa defensa da muller e o seu papel nun escenario post-apocalíptico utópico. Estes achados poden ser útiles para explicar por que Blake aparece a miúdo na literatura contemporánea para abordar os problemas da sexualidade e a opresión patriarcal. En resumo, a influencia de Blake sobre Moore e outros autores Posmodernos pode explicarse polo interese nas súas ideas de rexeneración e reencantamento, así como na súa defensa do mito en tempos anti-míticos, entendidos como intentos radicais de devolver poder aos mulleres e homes comúns, máis que como un impulso de retroceso cara á seguridade dun universo relixioso convencional. A arte, a mitopoeia e a narración liberan a imaxinación e permiten estabelecer relación ca natureza, xa non considerada allea, inerte ou externa. Mentres que Blake anima a ver a natureza como humana como modo de xerar empatía con ela, Moore chega ao mesmo fin resaltando o animal, natural e estraño no humano. Pódese tentar empregar este esquema para investigar como intentos neorrománticos de reencantamento reflicten de novo estas similitudes e diferenzas con respecto a épocas anteriores. Tomar o relevo da “Human Form Divine” (SI 18.11, 18.15; E12-13) de Blake é en sí unha crenza radical na igualdade de tódolos homes e mulleres máis alá de formas hexemónicas de xerarquía e poder. Sen embargo convén continuar investigando se sempre foi ou é así, e preguntarse por outras posibilidades. En canto a suxestións para futuras investigacións, esta tese relaciona dous proxectos diferentes de reunión entre o suxeito e o obxecto en diferentes momentos culturais, o cal é útil para estudos actuais sobre o Romanticismo e o Posmodernismo, sobre influencia na cultura popular, novos movementos relixiosos ou espiritualidades alternativas na literatura e os medios e tendencias neorrománticas na literatura contemporánea en inglés. Podemos incluír tamén como suxestións para investigacións futuras, o estudo das referencias a Blake en outros autores de novela gráfica como pode ser Grant Morrison. Ademais podería ser de interese explorar o 21 impacto das personaxes de Blake a súa representación visual no mundo da banda deseñada e o cine, especialmente de terror, ciencia ficción e fantasía, e incluso o estudo dun corpus que comprenda as novelas en prosa de Moore, como a recente Jerusalem (2016) e outras obras de Blake tales como Vala, or The Four Zoas (comezado c. 1796 e inacabado). BIBLIOGRAFÍA SELECTA Adorno, Theodor W., e Max Horkheimer. The Dialectics of Enlightenment. Editado por Gunzelin Noerr Schmid, Stanford UP, 2002. Blake, William. America, A Prophecy. Erdman pp. 51-59 ---. The Book of Thel. Erdman pp. 3-6 ---. The [First] Book of Urizen. Erdman pp. 70-83 ---. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Erdman pp. 33-45. ---, Milton, a Poem in 2 Books. Erdman pp. 96-144. ---, Songs of Innocence. Erdman pp. 7-17. ---. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Erdman pp. 45-51. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. OUP, 1973, NY. Clark, Steve et al., editores. Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture. Palgrave, 2012, Basingstoke. Clark, Steve, and Jason Whittaker, editores. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Palgrave, 2007, Basingstoke. Comer, Todd A., e Joseph Michael Sommers, editores. Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels. McFarland, 2012, Jefferson (NC). Eagleton, Terry. Holy Terror. Oxford UP, 2005. Eaves, Morris, et al., editores. The William Blake Archive, 1996-2020, <http://www.blakearchive.org/> Data de acceso: 23 Abr. 2020. Erdman, David V., editor. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Anchor / Doubleday, 1988, Nova York. The William Blake Archive, http://erdman.blakearchive.org/. Data de acceso: 23 Abr. 2020. Green, Matthew J. A., editor. Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester UP, 2016, Manchester / Nova York. ---. “‘The End of the World. That’s a Bad Thing, Right?’ Form and Function from William Blake to Alan Moore.” En Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, editado por Steve Clark et al., Palgrave / Macmillan, 2012, Basingstoke, pp. 175-86. ---. “‘She Brings Apocalypse’: Sex, Imagination and Redemptive Transgression in William Blake and the Graphic Novels of Alan Moore.” Literature Compass, núm. 8, 2011, pp. 739-56. Moore, Alan et al. Promethea. Vol. 1, DC Comics, 2000, NY. 5 vols. ---. Promethea. Vol. 2, DC Comics, 2003, NY. 5 vols. ---. Promethea. Vol. 3, DC Comics, 2003, NY. 5 vols. ---. Promethea. Vol. 4, DC Comics, 2005, NY. 5 vols. ---. Promethea. Vol. 5, DC Comics, 2005, NY. 5 vols. ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 1, DC Comics, 2012, NY. 6 vols. ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 2, DC Comics, 2012, NY. 6 vols. 22 ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 3, DC Comics, 2013, NY. 6 vols. ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 4, DC Comics, 2013, NY. 6 vols. ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 5, DC Comics, 2013, NY. 6 vols. ---. Swamp Thing. Vol. 6, DC Comics, 2014, NY. 6 vols. Moore, Alan, e Jacen Burrows. Neonomicon. Número 1, “At the Mansions of Madness”, Avatar, 2010, Rantoul (IL). ---. Neonomicon. Número 2, “The Shadow Out of America”, Avatar, 2010, Rantoul (IL). ---. Neonomicon. Número 3, “The Language at the Threshold”, Avatar, 2010, Rantoul (IL). ---. Neonomicon. Número 4, “The Lurker Within”, Avatar, 2011, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 1, “The Yellow Sign”, Avatar, 2015, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 2, “The Hook”, Avatar, 2015, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 4, “White Ape”, Avatar, 2015, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 5, “In the Walls”, Avatar, 2015, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 6, “Out of Time”, Avatar, 2015, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 8, “The Key”, Avatar, 2016, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 9, “Outsiders”, Avatar, 2016, Rantoul (IL). ---. Providence. Número 10, “The Haunted Palace”, Avatar, 2016, Rantoul (IL). Moore, Alan, e Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001, Paddington (Aus.). Moore, Alan, e David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 1990, NY. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West. Vol. 1, T & T Clark / Continuum, 2004, Londres / Nova York. Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination. Century, 2006, Londres. Whitson, Roger. “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore.” ImageTexT, vol. 3, núm. 2, 2007, http://www.english.ufl.edu//imagetext/archives/v3_2/whitson/index.shtml. 23 Abr. 2020. Whittaker, Jason. “From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture.” Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture, editado por Steve Clark e Jason Whitaker. Palgrave, 2007, Basingstoke, pp. 192-204. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. Penguin, 1976, Londres. ---. Marxism and Literature. OUP, 1977, Oxford / Nova York. 0. INTRODUCTION William Blake’s imagination has had an enormous impact on contemporary literature and popular culture. His idea of imagination presents it as a capacity to create a spiritual dimension of reality that liberates humanity from the limits of convention and from the imposition of hegemonic modes of living, thinking and being that impoverish existence. This thesis explores the relationship between Blake and Alan Moore, a contemporary comic book writer who invokes Blake as a crucial predecessor, to investigate whether he shares with Blake this idea of imagination. The comparison between Blake’s and Moore’s ideas of perception, morality, and sexuality helps to define these artists’ strategies before the crisis of meaning that came as a consequence of the modern process of secularisation. The comparison between the authors will also characterise their attempts at re-enchantment of nature and discover the continuities and discontinuities between the Romantic and contemporary countercultural currents of thought. Blake is often considered and studied as an early representative of the Romantic tradition. Although Blake engaged with Enlightened philosophy and science in many critical ways, this thesis will necessarily consider ideas of Blake in later periods of history while maintaining real, historical Blake as a frame of reference. This includes exploring the emphasis on Blake’s aspects that have been studied as part of the Romantic tradition. I will work with a combination of definitions of Romanticism. According to M. H. Abrams, Romanticism was a literary reaction to the growing scientific explanation (and exploitation) of the world consisting in the “displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference” (Abrams 13). Robert Langbaum speaks of a relocation of the old concept of God in the Self (Langbaum 241), and Edward Larrissy, taking Jean-François Lyotard’s theory as a basis, centres Romanticism around the mission of “present[ing] the unpresentable” (Larrissy, Romanticism 4-5).1 Moore’s countercultural re-enchantment is part of a Neo-Romantic tendency in contemporary pop culture that began around the 1960s when the first alternative youth movements began to emerge as an autonomous social group. This tendency continues practically until the present day, completely independently from previous Neo-Romantic movements such as Late Victorian Neo-Romanticism and the Neo-Romantic reaction to early Modernism. Contemporary popular Neo-Romanticism often manifests in a set of ideas on religion and spirituality that are present in Moore’s works. Among these ideas are the rejection of authority and of universal truths, the blurring of the fiction / reality opposition, and the inclusion of sexuality in spiritual practices. Although some of such Postmodern ideas developed independently, they often evolved from the Romantic tradition and, more particularly, from Blake, who was considered a prophet of rebellion, artistic imagination, and sexual liberation. 1 See chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion of the definitions and characteristics of Romanticism that will be used in this thesis. 30 the exploitation of nature, which they see as caused by the desacralisation entailed by secularisation. Both Blake and Moore’s re-enchantment pivots on two aspects: distancing from conventional religion and use of religious mythical and mystical elements. Like Blake’s, Moore’s re-enchantment is partly derived from alternative religions and revivals of heterodox traditions that formed part of Blake’s initial interests, Swedenborg, Paracelsus and Böhme being the main ones. But Moore’s re-enchantment is influenced by a historical moment of greater scepticism than Blake’s, and for this reason it contains less explicitly religious elements, in contrast with Blake who identified Christ with imagination. In sum, although religion is not substituted by secular imagination in Blake and Moore, it is deeply transformed and partly secularised by its identification with it. Against secularisation, imagination and inspiration are divinised, they are not a simple synthesis of sense perception. However, the influence of secularisation allows the authors to discern the poetic aspects of religion from its coercive components. Blake and Moore’s re-enchantment opposes aspects of religion that repress poetic genius, which becomes the original source of spirituality. This independence of the poetic genius from a transcendent entity stems from the influence of secularisation. My second aim is to explore the notion of nature in the work of Blake and Moore, and their concern with those aspects of nature that abstract reason excludes because it cannot contain them. Blake and Moore see nature not only as an external entity, but also and most importantly internal to the human being. For Blake and Moore, nature is the living universe as well as our own bodily and mental powers, which become inert when detached from the living whole. The result of our interactions with nature, be them a building or a poem, are also considered natural. For Blake and Moore, nature is not only the sphere of science, the physical universe, but also our imagination and its capacity to connect with nature and interact with it. In both Blake and Moore, nature includes ecological aspects that are excluded from hegemonic discourses. References to the scientific approach to nature appear in both Blake and Moore. Blake often uses the scientific view of nature, for example, to characterise Urizen’s fallen creation and the abstract Deist idea of nature. Moore denounces those scientific discourses used for the exploitation and objectification of nature and uses the scientific discourse to suggest that existence can be vaster than diminished modes of perception can show. Blake’s idea of imagination as the distinctive capacity of humankind is an example of his conception of nature as inherent in humanity. Nature in Blake is not opposed to imagination, or a prison for the human spirit, as some traditional criticism stated. The opposition is between the scientific reduction of nature to a mechanism ruled by blind and abstract laws and forces and the poetic idea that “Nature is Imagination itself” (E702) and that “Truth is Nature” (E609 [see also Hutchings, Reimagining 37-39]). Imagining is the way in which humans are part of nature. Traditional criticism such as Northrop Frye’s works with a single definition of nature as passive raw matter. In this view, nature is a prison to the freedom of spirit and imagination is the only escape from it. Consequently, according to these critics, some aspects of human nature are not wholly human, which leads them to ignore the interrelations and exchanges that Blake defends. For Blake, nature is only a prison if conceived as mere raw matter; imaginatively conceived, it is our creative force. In this sense, like other Romantic poets, Blake challenged the opposition between art and nature, as art is created by imagination. Conversely, he thought that whatever denied, repressed or sought to destroy the impulses of imagination was an unnatural product of oppression and social control. When the artificial is the product of creative activity (strictly 31 artistic or of any another kind), it enters into continuity with the natural; however when the artificial is the product of economic or selfish interest, it is considered unnatural. Moore often questions the divide between the natural and the artificial and understands both as part of the same natural whole. The artificial also expresses the creative power of nature: “All things are precipitated by the nature of existence. Nothing, therefore, is unnatural, be it bee-hive or termite mound or all our shining, poisoned cities. Everything is universe. Everything is holy, life and consciousness creation's rarest embers” (Moore et al., Promethea vol. 5; ch. 6). This does not mean that harmful elements in creation (such as the poison created by cities) are “holy” in the sense that they are good; it means that the universe is not evil in itself, and although there is evil that must be acknowledged, the vision is redemptive and “holy” because good and evil are necessary parts of existence; without experience of both, there is no process of development and renewal, no life. As Moore character’s Promethea says to a dying young man sent to fight at Ypres, “God's universe is not itself unkind. There is love, and there is comfort ….” (1.5) Blake questions the absolute divide between culture and nature and understands both of them as “human”, as animate and conscious. In the vision of nature described in the poem he included in the letter “[To] M r [Thomas] Butts, Great Marlborough Street”, dated on the 2nd October 1800, everything is conscious and responsive: In particles bright The jewels of Light Distinct shone & clear— Amazd & in fear I each particle gazed Astonishd Amazed For each was a Man Human formd. Swift I ran For they beckond to me Remote by the Sea Saying. Each grain of Sand Every Stone on the Land Each rock & each hill Each fountain & rill Each herb & each tree Mountain hill Earth & Sea Cloud Meteor & Star Are Men Seen Afar (15-32; E712). This kind of vision reappears in Jerusalem, where “Every thing is Human” (34.48, E180). Here, Blake’s poem presents the artificial (the cities) as expressions of imagination, like works of art. According to some surrealist interpretations, Blake treated the tiger as a machine in the poem “The Tyger” (Jennings qtd. in Hopkins 312), a suggestion prompted by the language of the poem, which presents the tiger as artificially produced by a demiurge with hammers, anvils, chains and furnaces. Technological imagery like this has Urizenic and satanic connotations and applies to the fallen materialistic world. Artifice in Blake is ambiguous. It can be part of imaginative nature, constantly creating through us; but it can also be the result of destructive forces in the service of egoistic interests. 32 Blake’s humanising vision entails the transformation of the human, the expansion of consciousness to include everything. This anticipates Moore’s posthuman vision of a living universe in everything. Blake went beyond the classical humanist notion of the human; only through a visionary state the truly human essence is revealed. In the letter to Thomas Butts, Blake’s Felpham vision suspends ordinary perception: My Eyes did Expand Into regions of air Away from all Care Into regions of fire Remote from Desire (8-12, E712). Visionary consciousness is not reduced to human individuals. On the contrary, in the letter to Butts, Blake describes his poem as the “verses such as Felpham produces by me” (E712): the creative subject is not an individual, and humanity is not simply the sum of human individuals as we commonly conceive it. However, Blake still needs the term “human” to refer to a higher form of consciousness, and the male human body (Albion’s or Jesus’) is still the paradigmatic form to represent a higher, imaginative consciousness. Moore does not privilege human form. His visionary passages show oppressive elements as part of a larger universal whole that introduces a problematic aspect that does not exist in Blake. In order to make sense of the evil in the world, he adopts a cosmic, rather mystical posthuman perspective that, because it is independent from ethics, risks accepting oppression. From this posthuman perspective, however, forces that tend to liberation and good are ultimately stronger than evil. As quoted above, Promethea says: “the universe is not itself unkind” and “Everything is universe. Everything is holy, life and consciousness creation's rarest embers.” The exploration of ideas of nature will allow me to proceed to the next objective: to analyse the secular terms in which these two authors present the possibility of regeneration of the world. For both Blake and Moore regeneration depends on the transformation of the excluded negative aspects of nature into positive energies. Nature as conceived by the discourses criticised by Blake is a product of instrumental reason and its Cartesian notion of self. When Blake treats natural energies as problematic it is because he fears the annihilating violence of these unleashed forces in the fallen world. But this is not because he thinks they are essentially evil; on the contrary, if they appear as monstrous from the perspective of the established system it is because they threaten its oppressive structures. To the rational control of nature by the established system, Blake opposes the liberation of perception and sexuality as the basis of a positive approach to it. This objective serves as another step to provide a specific focus to the comparison. Finally, this thesis will explain the particularities of Moore’s interpretation of Blake’s ideas. This interpretation will be based on a comparative analysis of those texts by Moore and Blake that deal with the causes of the fall (in the mythical sphere) and of oppression (in the historical sphere). In Blake, the causes are expressed in mythical terms on one hand, and in poetic but nonetheless historical terms on the other. In the mythical plane, the fall is caused by a disfunction of the faculties. In the historical plane, it is caused by the conventional discourses of religion, science and philosophy that have erected power structures that corrupt human nature. Blake’s texts do not always distinguish very sharply these two levels, and the mythical and the historical are very often mixed. Like Blake, Moore vacillates between the idea of evil as a result of the imbalance of faculties and of external oppression. However, whereas in Blake 33 evil becomes ingrained in human satanic energies and power-thirst, in Moore evil is presented as the product of erroneous ways of seeing and of limits in understanding, an illusion of separateness from the world that, if overcome, leads to the conclusion above that “everything is universe”. In other words, a realisation of an underlying, monistic unity with nature. 0.5 LITERATURE REVIEW For descriptions and elaboration on Blake’s works, I have used a combination of traditional Blake criticism, including Frye’s Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947) and S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (1965) and other works by Harold Bloom, David V. Erdman, Robert N. Essick, Anne K. Mellor, Alicia Ostriker, Jean H. Hagstrum and many others. E. P. Thompson’s Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993), where Thompson balances out the tensions between the Frye-like focus on poetic archetypes and symbols and more historical and political perspectives derived from Erdman by digging up Blake’s working class opposition to gentility and exploring the politically subversive aspects of his heterodox spiritual beliefs. These authors provide authoritative and comprehensive perspectives on Blake that are fundamental to understanding the author from a traditional critical perspective. I have complemented these critical sources with more up to date studies that reveal new discoveries, avoid some biases inherent to traditional types of study and explore more unaccustomed angles from which Blake can be read. Among these works, I followed Jason Whittaker’s William Blake and the Myths of Britain (1999), which provided a detailed account of the historical national myths that Blake developed in his poetry and interpretations of the most difficult prophecies. Kevin Hutchings’ Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (2002), for example, was fundamental in rethinking the role of nature in traditional Blake criticism, which often fell into the habit of limiting nature in Blake to a series of tropes that reinforced anthropocentrism and favoured a reading of Blake as a proponent of the exploitation of nature by man. A third set of works has helped me to enquire into more specific topics in the area of Blake Studies: Helen P. Bruder’s William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997) is a historically and contextually rich feminist analysis of Blake’s works. Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger’s William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018) is a valuable collection of essays that allow to address specifically questions like horror the grotesque, and the different types of metamorphosis in Blake from the point of view of Gothic Studies. For biographical information, I have used G. E. Bentley Jr’s Blake Records (1969), which contains all events of Blakes’ life along with documental evidence from catalogues, letters and notes from Blake’s notebooks, and Leopold Damrosch’s Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (2015), which is a critical account that combines Blake’s life events and his works. To inform the interpretation of Moore that will be developed in this thesis, there were not as many sources to choose from, considering that Moore has only been recently begun to be studied in academic contexts. There are, however, a few scholarly volumes dedicated specifically to Moore, namely Analisa Di Liddo’s Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (2008), which covers Moore’s comics and graphic novels since his beginnings to Lost Girls (2007). Most other volumes dedicated to Moore are collections of articles and essays, such as Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore (2012), edited by Todd A. Comer and Joseph M. Sommers, which I have used to draw critical support for the topic of 34 sexuality and for the general debates around the interpretation of From Hell (1989-1996). Maggie Gray’s recent study, Alan Moore: Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent (2017) delves into the unexplored field of Moore’s first stages in the underground cartooning and comics circuits. Most of the scientific production concerning Moore can be found in collected essays, book chapters or journal articles, such as “London (and the Mind) as Sacred-Desecrated Place in Alan Moore’s From Hell” (2010), by Emily Taylor Merriman, “‘The Magic Circus of the Mind’: Alan Moore’s Promethea and the Transformation of Consciousness through Comics” (2010), by Christine Hoff Kraemer and J. Lawton Winslade, and Matthew J. A. Green’s “‘Everything’s interconnected’: Anarchy, ecology and sexuality in Swamp Thing and Lost Girls” (2016). For biographic information I have consulted The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore (2008), an extended interview by George Khoury, and other interviews from a variety of media. I have drawn also from Kraemer’s “The Undying Fire: Erotic Love as Divine Grace in Promethea” (2012) and Green’s collection of essays Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition (2013) to explore the same themes they study (alternative spiritualities and the Gothic respectively) not in Moore in general, as they do, but, more specifically, in Moore’s reading of Blake. Few studies have performed a comparative analysis of Blake and Moore and of Moore’s reception of Blake. Roger Whitson’s “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore” (2006) was the first of a series of book chapters and articles that paved the way for this thesis. These studies have analysed the paradoxes and political significance of the relationship between Blake and Moore (as is the case of Whitson’s article), the Romantic notions of evil in Blake and Moore (Whittaker’s “From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture”, 2007), the prophetic and feminist aspects of both authors (Green’s “‘She Brings Apocalypse’: Sex, Imagination and Redemptive Transgression in William Blake and the Graphic Novels of Alan Moore”, 2011) and the relationship between Blake and Moore’s views on perception and their formal techniques (Green’s “‘The End of the World: That’s a Bad Thing, right?’: Form and Function from William Blake to Alan Moore”, 2012). My contribution to this line of research is to expand and deepen it by applying similar views on a larger corpus, thus using the new results to build a picture of the evolution in Moore’s works of the influence of Blake. 0.6 METHODOLOGY The methodological procedures applied in the analyses of this comparative study involved: 1. An exploration of the cultural contexts that affect the authors’ understanding of nature, vision, and evil and their criticism of conventional morality, gender, and sexual norms. In the case of Blake, I have focused on the confluence of eighteenth century Enlightened radical criticism and popular antinomian religious movements. In the case of Moore, I have focused on the countercultural atmosphere of the last third of the twentieth century in Britain, including ecologism and Postmodern alternative spiritualities and radical attitudes towards gender and sexuality. The study of the influence of countercultural discourses of nature, vision, and evil on Moore allowed me to identify patterns such as Contraries and Negations that derive from Romanticism and Blake and show how Moore adopted Blake’s criticism of his culture and society for similar purposes. 35 2. Analysis of the Gothic distortions and transformations of figures, such as Blake’s Urizen, Orc, and Ololon and Moore’s William Gull, Promethea, and Asmodeus, to explore the implications of transgression or of oppression. For example, Urizen transforms into a cadaverous form when he divides himself from eternity and tries to reduce the universe to laws, and Gull transforms into Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea (1819-1820), which signals his oppressive nature at the same time that his incapacity to open his perception. Ololon and Promethea take the form of little girls, signifying the irruption in the world of an innocence that comes to balance a corrupt order. The analysis reveals the empowering potential in Blake’s and Moore’s imagery, but also the contradictions or problems between the intended message and the implications of the works. 3. Comparative study of selected passages from Moore either directly or indirectly inspired by Blake. Some passages contain striking similarities in the treatment of the same topics; others, despite the parallels, show their different positions as regards the topics that this thesis concentrates upon. Although in general I have focused on passages where the written and the visual interact, I have often focused on written passages relevant for my argument where there is no corresponding visual image, and on visual images that lack a written correlative. After the description and interpretation of each authors’ passage, I point out the similarities and differences in both text and visual imagery, and I elaborate on the reasons for these similarities and differences, and on their cultural implications. 0.7. CORPUS SELECTION CRITERIA 0.7.1. Formal criteria The analysis of the combination of words and images in Blake’s illuminated books and Moore’s graphic novels shows the authors’ ideas about the union of intellect and perception, and their beliefs about the relation between mind and matter. They thought the relationship between mind and matter should be collaborative, rather than oppositional. This is also the case of the related oppositions between body and soul, good and evil, ordinary sense perceptions and vision, reason and imagination, and between the genders. I have selected those illuminated books in which the mixture and balance between the visual and the verbal is greater. For this reason, books such as Blake’s The Song of Los (1795) or Vala, or The Four Zoas (commenced in 1796 and unfinished; published posthumously in 1893) have not been analysed, apart from a few examples. Likewise, works by Moore which consist solely of written text, such as the novel Voice of the Fire (1996) or recorded performance works such as Angel Passage (2001), have been discarded. 0.7.2 Thematic and organising criteria Among the illuminated books and graphic novels, I chose the works that treat the topics of perception, evil and gender, sexuality and eroticism because the study of these themes illumines the collaborative relationship between mind and matter, reason and imagination and between the genders. The study of these themes also reveals the negative consequences of their opposition, when instead of collaboration there is imposition. The relationship of collaboration is proposed by the authors in response to the idea that one faculty or one entity is superior to 36 the other and therefore must dominate. Such has been the case in Western culture with the superiority of mind over matter, of reason over imagination and of the masculine over the feminine, to the point of the deprecation of the material, the imaginative and the feminine. The establishment of this relationship is fundamental for the process of re-enchantment the authors aspire to promote, although the authors sometimes fail to produce a totally consistent representation of re-enchantment according to these terms they defend. This thesis explores the topic of perception and vision in my whole corpus: Blake’s Marriage, The Book of Thel (composed 1789), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), America, a Prophecy (1793), The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), and Milton; and in Moore’s V for Vendetta (1982-1989), Swamp Thing (1984-1987), From Hell, Promethea (1999-2005), Neonomicon (2010-2011) and Providence (2015-2017). According to Blake and Moore, the transformation of perception and the attainment of imaginative vision liberate the mind from social and religious conventions and entail concepts of good and evil beyond them.6 In order to explore this angle of the argument, we will look, among Moore’s works, at V for Vendetta. The analysis of Marriage will explore many ideas that would later permeate Moore’s notion of perception: the mental conditions of bondage and of liberation from conventions, the idea that visionary experience is achieved through the senses and the idea that mental heavens and hells depend on the modes of thinking. Moore’s Swamp Thing is connected to Blake’s Marriage through the theme of perception as capable of creating mental heavens and hells. Moore’s Promethea contains crucial references to Blake with respect to the topics of imagination, vision and perception that follow Blake’s notions of liberation from conventions in Marriage. The question of the basic visionary origin of religion suffocated by religious power, present in Marriage, reappears in Promethea under the form of imaginative creation as the most sacred capacity of the human. The human form divine is Blake’s immanent divinity. I will analyse these elements using Marriage, and Thel will be used to illustrate the idea of interconnectedness that characterises the human divine in Blake. I will also analyse Visions of the Daughters of Albion to show how Bromion’s perception is determined by the patriarchal domination of nature and by his use of scientific knowledge for power and exploitation. In contrast to Bromion, Vision’s main character, Oothoon, represents visionary consciousness. Blake’s Urizen constitutes, together with America, an exploration of the dangerous side of the vision resulting from the separation of reason from the other faculties (represented by the imposition of Urizen’s laws on nature) and from oppressive religion. Moore’s Neonomicon and Providence develop darker reflections on vision that result from the effects of materialist and oppressive domination, the madness this oppression breeds, and the failure of a world constricted by convention to assimilate the radical change brought about in reality by imagination. These allusions to an overly materialistic faculty that dominates and prevents the 6 Both authors also suggest (although perhaps with less frequency) that a previous liberation from conventions can lead to a transformation in perception, such as happens in Marriage when the poet rejects the Angelic conventional perspective and instead of Leviathan in the Abyss he sees a placid riverbank. In Moore’s Promethea, the characters, already in a magical journey that implies transformed perceptions, realise they still have conventional perspectives clouding their understanding of the demon Asmodeus. When they have rejected these conventions, Asmodeus transforms into a less frightening form. This indicates that the authors view the transformation of perception and the liberation from convention as circular processes. In general, however, a mental change or liberation must occur before breaking down conventions, such as the changes in characters occasioned by previous psychedelic experiences in Swamp Thing, and the imaginative state of inspiration that precedes the rejection of conventions in Marriage (the book starts with Rintrah’s prophetic wrath and finished with Orc enacting the revolution). 37 redeeming effects of imagination allow us to compare Neonomicon and Providence to Blake’s Urizen. The study of Milton will show the way in which instrumental reason distorts knowledge and explain the use of Druidic symbolism to characterise the oppressive institutions of Church and State. The distortions caused by the domination of instrumental reason appear in Milton often as monstrous allegories of the natural world as empty mechanism; the imaginative liberation from the domination from instrumental reason causes instead other transformations more akin to transfigurations of things into their divine human form. Moore’s Neonomicon and Providence use imagery in a similar way (as indicated above) and have echoes of Milton. The topic of evil in Blake’s and Moore’s selected works forms a significant part of this thesis. In Swamp Thing, evil is treated through the focus on the monster from a Neo-Romantic perspective, in which there is a tendency to rethink evil and monstrosity. Marriage will be used to analyse the influence of Blake’s early Romantic diabolism on Moore. Thel provides some interesting visual examples of evil conquered by innocence to which Swamp Thing and Promethea can be related. From Hell offers a fictional in-depth study of evil related to various misreadings of Blake. In From Hell, Moore chooses to allude to Visions to underscore the intimate association between patriarchy, the domination of energy and the will to power of reason. Milton contains passages that are fundamental to understand Blake’s changes in his conception of evil, natural energies and the satanic. I will focus on the figure of Satan and the qualities he represents. These satanic energies are opposed through self-annihilation, i.e. a refusal to dominate the other and establish one’s superiority. Parallels with this topic in Milton can be found in Moore’s Promethea. America will be dealt with to study Blake’s depictions of the dangerous aspect of natural energies manifested in violent revolution, and how they are encapsulated in the Gothic language of the monstrous. Urizen was selected for the analysis of the topic of evil due to the importance of the depiction of Urizen, one of the most archetypal figures representing Blakean satanic evil. Both America and Urizen will be compared to passages from Neonomicon and Providence, where the horror elements also contain reminiscences of Blake’s darker depictions of vision and dangerous energy. Another important theme is that of gender and sexuality in Blake’s and Moore’s works. The utopian visions offered by both authors consist in a more equal relationship between the sexes that results from the changes in perception and in conventions. These visions, however, do not always find a perfect realisation in the representations created by the authors, giving way to many inconsistencies. I will discuss desire and transgressive forms of sexuality in Swamp Thing and how these find an important antecedent in Blake’s early illuminated books, such as Marriage. These positive and emancipatory views continue in some ways in Milton’s union with Ololon (Milton), a Romantic gender union utopia, as well as in other female figures such as Enitharmon, the Nameless Shadowy Female, the Daughters of Albion and the doubleness of Babylon and Jerusalem. The positive and negative connotations of these figures are contrasted to similar ones in Moore’s Promethea. Another aspect that I have analysed in Milton is the unusual sexual connotations of some of the illuminations, which underscore a psychosexual angle to the relationship between consciousness and imagination also present in Moore’s Neonomicon and Providence. 38 I will deal with cases in which the authors’ feminist positions are compromised. The idea of purification of the male characters in Visions became part of characters in Moore’s graphic novels, especially From Hell. In both Blake and Moore, the topic of gender and sexuality requires discussing the representations of rape, as on one hand they seek to denounce patriarchal violence, but on the other, it is also used as an allegory of the violence and transgression of the primal revolutionary impulse that should precisely end with oppression. America will also be used to analyse the problematic relationship between revolutionary liberation and sexual liberation. I will also show the specific effect on sexuality of the narrow perceptions dominated by instrumental reason, apparent in the relationship between Los and Enitharmon in Urizen. In Moore’s Neonomicon and Providence, his points of view on sexuality, art and magic still show the influence of the Blakean importance of the human as the source of imagination and emotions that can change reality. The comparison between Neonomicon and Providence and America and Urizen will be used to study Blake’s and Moore’s beliefs about the thread that connects the transformation of perceptions through art and magic and the topic of sexuality. The works selected for all the topics will be supplemented with specific passages from other Blakean illuminated texts, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience (composed 1789, 1794) and Jerusalem or other material from Blake’s annotations, paintings and engravings when the analysis requires additional data and evidence. Some of Moore’s famous graphic novels have been left out for several reasons. Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-1986) is excluded because it does not discuss the topics studied in this dissertation. As the philosophical, religious, and spiritual angle of the topics here analysed is more prominent than the political in this thesis, I have decided to focus on works that develop the topics of magic, imagination and art. I have also decided to leave out Watchmen (1986-1987), because the graphic novel is much more connected to the criticism of the genre of superhero comics than to the topics that will be analysed in this thesis. 7 Another work of less relevance for the topics explored in this thesis is Lost Girls (2006) which, despite being dedicated to the topic of sex, does not treat this topic in light of Moore’s ideas about magic and spirituality, but it is rather an attempt to create an artistic and liberating type of pornography away from the clichés, sexism and objectifications of the sex industry. 0.8 STRUCTURE This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part contains two background and one theoretical chapters. The second part contains three chapters dedicated to analyse the topic of perceptions and vision (chapter 4), the topic of good and evil (chapter 5), and the topic of gender and sexuality (chapter 6). Chapter 7 develops the final conclusions. The chapters of the first part follow the notions that affect the argument from the most general to the particular. First, the introductory chapters consider secularisation, Romanticism and Postmodernism to frame Blake’s and Moore’s ideas of the divine power of imagination and re-enchantment. Then, these ideas will be explored in the specific countercultural and radical contexts in which Blake and Moore worked. Finally, with this context designed, I will explain the theoretical tools that will be used in the second part. 7 Among other studies and articles, there is a monograph on Watchmen written by Sara J. Van Ness, Watchmen as Literature (2010). Watchmen was also discussed by Di Liddo in Alan Moore. Lastly, Watchmen has already been discussed in connection to Blake by Whitson in “Panelling Parallax”. 39 The structure of the second part is determined by the same thematic and organisation criteria used for the selection of the corpus. As outlined in the previous section, there is a thread that connects the visionary transformation of perceptions, leading to the rejection of conventional morality and the gender and sexual liberation that would follow the freedom from conventional religious prejudices. For this reason, I have divided the analysis into three parts: one for perception and vision, a second one for good and evil and a third for gender and sexuality. In chapter 1, I will focus on Romanticism and Postmodernism and how Blake and Moore relate to them. This will allow to locate Blake and Moore in the secularisation process that bereft nature of spiritual meaning and in the Romantic and Postmodernist attempt at reenchantment by newly investing nature with poetic meaning. It is equally important to contrast the authors’ attitudes towards their respective cultural, philosophical and social contexts. This chapter deals with Blake’s complex position as regards Romanticism, which favours Postmodern interest in him, and shows Moore’s project of re-enchantment of reality, the world and culture as shaped by both Romantic inheritance and Postmodernism. Abram’s notion of natural supernaturalism and Larrissy’s views on Romanticism and Postmodernism will guide this exploration. Chapter 2 will deal with Blake’s and Moore’s attitudes towards their contexts by using Raymond Williams notion of structures of feeling and present an overview of the main discourses that frame Moore’s understanding of Blake. The internal approach to emancipation and the ideas about the liberation of imagination connect Moore’s countercultural structure of feeling to Blake’s radical antinomianism and heterodox interests. This chapter elaborates on Blake’s antinomianism and his opinions about politics and spirituality, which led to him being perceived as both rebellious and mystical by late twentieth century writers. Chapter 3 explains the theoretical concepts I employed in the treatment of the association between Blake and Moore: Harold Bloom’s theory of influence, Williams’ theory of structures of feeling, the notion of instrumental reason, and Terry Eagleton’s concept of the excessive and perverse dimension of power, sometimes hidden behind pretences of rationality and law (see Eagleton 118). I have also made use of Eagleton’s psychoanalytic explanation of evil as a stubborn imposition of fantasy over an evidently independent reality (11), David Punter and Fred Botting’s treatment of the Gothic in terms of excess, transgression, and monstrosity. With respect to the analysis of Blake’s approach to the topic of evil, I explain diabolism, satanism and kategoros (accuser) as key terms that differentiate positive and negative uses of the notion of evil. The chapters of the second part compare characters, figures, imagery and ideas in Moore’s and Blake’s works. These chapters include a detailed analysis and interpretation of both the points of direct influence of Blake on Moore (quotations, allusions, similar imagery, and ideas) and examples of more indirect influence, such as passages presenting Romantic ideas passed down through contemporary Neo-Romantic cultural tendencies. Moreover, the chapters examine the divergences between Blake and Moore. Finally, the authors’ convergence in their use of mythology and tradition and their reflections on mythopoeia will also be discussed. Chapter 4 focuses on Blake’s and Moore’s notions of nature, imagination, and reason, and compares their treatment of the themes of perception and vision. The chapter deals with the authors’ faith that imagination enables the individual to see nature as it is, undistorted by self- 46 and on discourses of dissent existing in Protestant culture to defend his views in a historical moment where traditional religious conventions were still strong. Recent discourses about spirituality do not have a project of institutionalisation that requires a solid theology; in fact, they struggle both against the imposition of institutionalised religion and traditional creeds, as Partridge says (2). Even though groups such as Wiccans or Satanists strive for institutionalisation, most groups are critical of institutional religion. They promote a return to a supposedly instinctive and spontaneous experience of spirituality, in which vague ideas of immanence, the world and the body play an important role. In my comparison of Blake and Moore I will follow Langbaum’s theory that “romantic intuition that man’s highest nature derives from his lowest, that religion and art are erotic and unconscious in origin” (9). This intuition is behind both Blake’s rejection of the old paradigm of conventional religion and Moore’s ideas about spirituality. In fact, Larrissy maintains Blake transmitted a “sensuous kind of natural supernaturalism” (Blake 120) to Postmodern authors such as Allen Ginsberg, through principles like “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul” or “Energy is the only life and is from the Body” (MHH 4; E34). In Blake’s mythology, the natural world is only barren when apprehended through ordinary perception, dominated as it is both by conventional religion and the Enlightened explanation of reality. Deep reality and the sources of creativity are revealed and realised in the poet’s vision. For Blake, vision is the innate original spontaneous way of seeing, which is thwarted by ordinary perception. The visionary perception of reality enables human beings to break the subject-object distinction established by abstract reason and thus live according to their divine being. Moreover, as Abrams explained, the figure of Los embodies imagination and the idea of human divinity, which necessarily rejects institutional religion: “William Blake’s archetypal poet, Los, labouring at the construction of the imaginative city of Golgonooza, declared that he must ‘create a System’ or be enslaved by the ready-made system of the current Christian creed, institutions and morality (Jerusalem I.10)” (Abrams 67). Blake rejected religious convention and focused on the visionary aspects of perception that allow the discovery inside the human being of a dimension that used to be associated with the supernatural. This tendency often appears in Moore’s work and favours his use of Romantic forms and imagery. In order to show the Blakean influence on Moore I will situate Blake in the panorama of Romantic culture and identify the specific Blakean elements. I will first establish the commonalities and the differences between Blake and Wordsworth, in whom Abrams exemplifies many Romantic motifs and attitudes, contrasting him often with Blake. Moreover, I will consider interpretations of Blake that differ from the traditional idea of a radically antinaturalist poet, and show the contrast between Blake and Wordsworth in a light different from Abrams’s. Larrissy’s analysis supports the idea that Blake became a popular canonical Romantic figure to a great extent for the characteristics in him the deviate from the rest of Romantic authors (Blake 1). In fact, the focus on these characteristics influenced the development of an understanding of Romanticism that is more attractive for Postmodernism (1), including, for example, the idea of Blake as a devil’s advocate promoted by decadents and aesthetes like Swinburne (2). According to Abrams, Wordsworth believed in a benevolent universe, whereas for Blake this was “the illusory result of the fall of man” (25). Abrams’s interpretations of Blake are based mainly on Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, which reads Blake in radical opposition to Wordsworth. Frye interpreted Blake as a detractor of nature. This is a traditional interpretation of Blake that 47 is being challenged at present. According to Frye, Blake conceives nature as inherently barren, unresponsive, lifeless and hostile entity that must be conquered and shaped by man’s imagination and art in order to be rendered hospitable (Frye 39-42). In Wordsworth, nature is already a “goodly” (Wordsworth qtd. in Abrams 25), beautiful place, even a paradise just a step away if the mind is willing to fuse with it (Abrams 26-27). These debatable views on Blake conditioned the frequent comparisons between Blake and Wordsworth. For Blake, Wordsworth’s idea of nature and of the union of mind and nature was too idyllic and simple, as his note to lines 63-68 of The Recluse (1880) indicates: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted” (Blake, Annotations E666-67). This “fitting & fitted” ignored the negative aspects of nature that resulted from the fall of man into ordinary ways of thinking, living and being. Both Blake and Wordsworth agreed that the human being needed to get rid of the prison house of conventions, as a condition to live a true life. The difference between them was that for Wordsworth nature remained intact, while for Blake it had been affected by the fall. Recent studies affirm that Blake’s notion of nature is not as monolithically negative as Frye’s interpretation suggested. As Hutchings states, “[i]n much of Blake’s visionary poetry, representations of nature and natural objects embody a sense of doubleness” (Imagining 14). There is, on one hand, the nature that is “unbounded and uncontaminated by human intervention” (14) and on the other, the Nature (usually with a capital N in Blake’s texts) that results from our social and cultural discourses. These discourses shape our understanding of nature; they make up its “discursivity” (14). The scientific construct or the idea of nature promoted by conventional religious doctrines are part of this discursivity. In other words, Blake’s nature, like Wordsworth’s, lies beyond social conventions. The difference is that for Blake there is an aspect of nature produced by the fall; religion and science are the discourses of the fall. Nature in Blake is divided between its fallen and its unfallen aspects and Blake’s vision reveals this division rather than the union between mind and nature that Wordsworth aspires to. Fallen nature is present in different female figures in Blake’s works. In Jerusalem, Albion is seduced by Vala, the illusory beauty of fallen nature (Abrams 263). Vala’s beauty is not the intrinsic beauty of the earth but that which man bestows on nature through reason. Fallen nature is the one that fits into our categories and conventions. Only some parts of nature are acknowledged by discourse because they fit religious conventions or rational structures and forms. The rest is excluded and when this happens, these excluded parts of nature turn hostile. The mind divides nature in this way, turning our energies destructive (see Eagleton, Holy Terror and the mythical narrative of Pan and Pentheus). This division of nature, with a part of it turning hostile and the mythical figures embodying it, finds no counterparts in Wordsworth. This means a certain idea of nature – one that is the product of reason – seduced the eternal man and led him to exclude the part of nature that did not fit into this idea. For Blake, this Nature, with capital N, constitutes “the illusory result of the fall of man” (Abrams 25). For the idea of the world to be complete, a “regenerate” (263) Vala (“Nature”) must be reintegrated into Jerusalem; this will turn her negative energies into positive ones. This implies there is a form of nature with which humanity must interact and cooperate even if from a conventional perspective it seems to be negative. This entails a return of humanity to a nature, which is both external and internal, that cannot be contained in conventional categories, whether these are religious or scientific. Blake attributes the same problem to religion and science: dependence 48 on conventions and rejection of imagination, the tendency to be guided only by ideas adopted from others, making creation and changes in the way of seeing impossible. The way towards the full experience of the aspects of Vala that were, since the Fall, left in the shadows, is imagination, the faculty that can take the human mind beyond established ways of seeing, thinking, living, and being. Hutching’s argument that Blake’s anti-naturalism is not as radical as Frye thought allows a better understanding of the difference between Blake’s apocalyptic marriage of reason and energy, of the eternal man and regenerated nature, and Wordsworth’s marriage of nature and mind. In Blake’s view, Wordsworth’s idea that the struggle to free oneself from conventions could lead to the union with pure nature ignored that nature is fallen. An apocalypse was necessary to regenerate nature by integrating the excluded and transforming the negative into positive forces. Both Blake (Hutchings, “Ecocriticism” 175) and Wordsworth (185, 188) reacted against the effects of industrialisation. Blake favoured a notion of the interconnection of all life (177) and Wordsworth understood the concern for nature in a holistic way (188). Blake opposed instrumental notions of value (181), while Wordsworth was also conscious of the inherent value of the natural world beyond the growing centrality of exchange value (185). But for Blake this interconnection necessarily required the integration of the excluded. His emphasis on the inherent value of humble beings such as “earwigs, maggots, fleas, tape-worms and slugs” (M 27.11-24; E124) involves an approach to nature that is quite different form the kind of conventional Romanticism that leaves out the unpleasant and apparently irrelevant parts of nature (Hutchings, “Ecocriticism” 182). Wordsworth certainly values humble beings ignored by the conventional eye, like the reaper, the blind beggar, or the discarded soldier. Even so, in Blake’s vermin and bugs we may see contrast with Wordsworth’s clouds, peaks and crags. This is an aspect of Blake that resonates in early Moore. In Swamp Thing, for instance, the poetic language of issue 34, “Rite of Spring” (vol. 2; ch. 8), attempts to remove the conventional discourses that clothe nature and accept those parts of it that are usually considered unpleasant, frightening or even repulsive. Like Blake’s illuminations, Stephen Bissette’s, John Totleben’s and Tatjana Wood’s accompanying designs show worms, rodents, maggots and insects that dwell on depredation and violence (Moore et al. Swamp Thing vol. 2; p. 217). 2. MOORE’S ANARCHIST MAGIC AND BLAKE’S RADICAL ANTINOMIANISM 2.0. INTRODUCTION To understand Moore’s attitude towards Postmodern re-enchantment, it is necessary to delve into the importance of countercultural circles, which, in Britain and America in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, adopted elements from Blake’s biographical persona and characters, events, images or quotes from Blake’s poems, pictures and illuminated books. This adoption of Blake is a mixture of “Modernism, surrealism, symbolism and the influence of popular culture” (Larrissy, Blake 91). Among the reasons for countercultural proponents to do this was the need to legitimise their claims by connecting them to a figure that had been regarded as an outcast and a rebel, but that had also become a canonical figure. In this way, on one hand, the countercultural ideas could be given more credit, and, on the other hand, countercultural authors would set themselves apart from the establishment. I would like to find out Moore’s particular reasons to rewrite Blake within this general framework. Many of the countercultural movements that inspired and even directly formed Moore’s sensitivity were the hippie movement and the beatniks, punk anarchism and other youth subcultures and Postmodern Western esotericism, especially the tendencies that could be called magic. The topic of magic will be dealt with in this chapter, as it is vital to understand Moore’s own particular version of Postmodern re-enchantment and his view of Blake’s attitude towards system, which he summarised in the motto “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans” (J 8.20; E153). This chapter will explore Moore’s background as a means to explain those concerns that lead to Moore’s interest in Blake. Moore receives Blake through the popular culture of which he is a part and its countercultural channels. In this chapter, I will briefly study the structure of feeling of the comics milieu, of esoteric circles and of other literary influences through which Blake reached Moore. This structure of feeling involves anarchism, ecologism, and the thread of ideas that makes these political and spiritual questions linked in Moore’s writing. This network of interconnected areas comprises an idea of sexuality as “interconnectedness and mutuality” (Green, “Everything’s” 99), concepts which have a larger, social, environmental and political resonance in Moore’s context. Interconnection and mutuality had been the focus of both anarchist and environmental thought, for example, as Green suggests, in Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom, published in 1982 (“Everything’s” 99). Moore combines this type of social and political anarchism with the “hermetic belief in the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm” (“Everything’s” 100). Thus he combines the political dimension with the spiritual, and furthermore, reinforces his own brand of natural supernaturalism through an “investment of natural systems with magical meanings” (“Everything’s” 100). I will first explain the links between Blake’s radical and antinomian ideas and Moore’s countercultural beliefs; secondly, I will explore the different ways in which Blake became mythologised in popular culture, especially in countercultural contexts and authors. Thirdly, I 50 will explain how Blake is often evoked in certain branches of occultism with which Moore got involved. In the fourth section, I will elaborate about the comics industry and compare Moore with Grant Morrison and comment on their use of Blake. In the fifth, I will focus on Moore’s vindications of ecological anarchy and on his struggle against the discrimination of nonnormative sexualities, which are understood through the same framework of opposition between convention and freedom. I will show how these vindications can also find an analogue in Blake’s works. Finally, I will explore how the mutual implication of these topics in Moore’s view is a key factor in his relation with Blake, who also believed in the inherent association between spirituality and politics. Behind the occult readings of Blake, Moore’s use of them, and his belief in the interconnectedness between natural energies and spiritual meaning lies the Romantic idea of the “lower” origin of the “highest” aspects of the human self, the movement of dark, negative energies from below to the heavens (Langbaum 9). 2.1. ENLIGHTENMENT RADICALISM, ANTINOMIANISM AND TWENTIETH CENTURY COUNTERCULTURE Radical counterculture in Britain at the time Moore was writing his first famous graphic novels expressed itself as discontent and dissent over the economic, political, religious, and gender cultural norms of contemporary Western society. These included capitalist market economy with its military and colonial exploitation, religious fanaticisms and indoctrination, and patriarchal domination. In Moore’s earlier works, The Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta or Swamp Thing, Thatcherism was the specific target of social criticism. More specifically, its conservatism, its liberal individualism, its draconian cuts on welfare, the repression of workingclass movements, and its legal measures against non-normative sexualities. One example of the latter was Clause 28 (1986), which banned any reference to homosexuality in school curricula (Green, “Everything’s” 100). The criticism was also directed at the ruthless exploitation of nature in the name of progress and economic benefit, especially in Swamp Thing. Moore also criticised the nostalgia for imperialism he perceived in the political atmosphere in later works like From Hell, and later on, in Promethea, made a call for religious and cultural tolerance in the face of the American “War on Terror” of the Bush era and the racism and prejudice it allowed to flourish. The apocalyptic theme in Promethea captures a millenarian revolutionary zeitgeist that found its expression in some actions of the Anonymous hacker group and later movements like Occupy Wall Street and its global extensions11, with demonstrators wearing the iconic V mask. In Providence, the author reflects on the repressive side of American culture. The graphic novel, initially published as a series from May 2015 to April 2017 registers the worsening of this repressive tendency, exacerbated by the backlash of reactionary, homophobic and racist populism leading to the election of Donald Trump as president. Moore follows a line similar to Blake’s criticism of rationalism, of the excessive reliance on science, of materialism and of the subject-object binary, all of them part of the instrumentalisation of knowledge by the institutions of power. Like Blake, Moore thinks that all these elements are intertwined in the same system of domination and mental slavery (the “mind-forg’d Manacles” in “London” [SE 46.8; E27]). Part of Blake’s appeal to Moore arises 11 I refer to Occupy Wall Street as an example of these movements in the English-speaking world, although it should not be forgotten that “Occupy” was inspired by the previous Arab Spring and the Spanish movements Indignados and 15-M, where Moore’s iconography was also used. 51 from the fact that Blake himself was involved in a particular countercultural moment at the end of the eighteenth century, when he also was writing against vested interests in politics, culture and gender. Blake’s ideas regarding politics, religion and gender followed some of the main radical currents of thought in Enlightenment, but in certain aspects Blake had his own interpretation of the social changes espoused in these circles. He questioned the institutions of monarchy, war, colonialism, science and philosophy, religious fanaticism and indoctrination, moral hypocrisy, patriarchy, prudery, virginity and marriage as part of the same system of domination. Blake was influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas about the rights of woman; however, he disagreed with the concept of modesty, which Wollstonecraft defended in her works. Blake saw the American and French Revolutions as opportunities to bring down this system of oppression, and initially supported them with enthusiasm, until the Terror in France changed the perception of the French Revolution all throughout Europe. His later greater focus on mythopoeia, however, rather than radical sceptical critical strategies, is not devoid of political significance (Fallon, Blake 16). Blake had been greatly influenced by American radical ideas such as Thomas Paine’s and by French deism through Volney, although he gave these lines of thought his own different turn. According to Thompson, unlike radicals, Blake thought political reform was not enough, that there should be a change to a more imaginative consciousness to make a better humanity (Thompson 193); unlike deists, he thought a naturalistic psychology based on self-interest could not be the basis to liberate people (Thompson 221). David Fallon emphasises Blake’s more Enlightened literary strategies, especially his adoption of apotheosis as a form of criticism of hegemonic power, but also and very importantly as a way to exalt a popular and communal experience of nationhood beyond the institutional forms (20). He also linked this collective energy intrinsically to mythical forms through which he dramatised human universal renewal in Christian visionary terms (Fallon, Blake 20). For Thompson, the cause of evil in Blake “lies in class-society, in which contraries have become polarised, and the pity of one feeds on the misery of the other”; self-love in an innocent state does not cause any evil (219). In Jerusalem, the cause of evil is “naming” (Blake qtd. in Thompson 220), in other words, categorising. Love or self-love can’t be “rationalised or moralised” (Thompson 220); they are corrupted only in the context of the society where one’s misery is another’s gain. In short, he disagreed with conventional religious morals derived from a literal interpretation of the scriptures, but he did not totally concur with radicals and deists because they were missing a fundamental aspect of the human in their theories. Fallon suggests a very useful set of theoretical positions that clarify Blake’s complex stance. On one hand, Blake participated of the Enlightened culture of critique of superstition and explanation of mysterious narratives (Fallon, Blake 14). On the other hand, he was a myth maker, despite believing religion and myth were not as separate as many apologists of conventional religious doctrine liked to state (6). Considering these attitudes, Fallon proposes to understand him through modern Biblical hermeneutics from the twentieth century. They help to clarify Blake’s approach by combining criticism and faith. Fallon here uses Rudolf Bultmann’s theories, which establish that interpretation should not necessarily entail accepting the supernatural in the way the ancients did, but could entail demythologisation, not in the sense of elimination of myth, but in the sense of reading of its deep meaning (17-18). Another theoretical perspective that Fallon suggests to illuminate Blake’s apparent contradictions is that of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur’s idea of a “conflict of interpretations” between 52 a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and another of “restoration of meaning” (Ricoeur qtd. in Fallon, Blake 2) helps make sense of Blake’s ambivalences. Ricoeur thought “extreme iconoclasm” could be a part of a larger “restoration of meaning” (qtd. in Fallon, Blake 2). Blake was concerned by the issue of interpretation (Fallon, Blake 7), stimulated by his background in certain heterodox Christian traditions. However, he combined these perspectives with an antiauthoritarian critical position (Fallon, Blake 7). He interpreted Enlightened physiognomy supporting universal equality among humans as “true Christian philosophy” (Blake qtd. in Fallon, Blake 7), but considered the site of this equality was the Poetic Genius (Fallon, Blake 7). This basic universalism was also present in Enlightened philosophy like Hume’s, although Blake resisted the tendency towards abstraction. Ricoeur also understood myth as a way to give a “worldly form to what is beyond known and tangible reality” (qtd. in Fallon, Blake 18) and to “embody the divine as it is experienced by humans” (Fallon, Blake 18). He thought Friedrich Nietzsche’s, Karl Marx’s or Sigmund Freud’s atheism was something more than a mere negation of religion, but that it rather opened the way for a “postreligious faith” (Ricoeur qtd. in Fallon, Blake 18) that turns away from the obsolete aspects of religion symbolised by God the Father: protection and accusation (18). As for his ambivalence towards Enlightened radicalism, Blake shared a sceptical attitude with radical writers, and his “spiritual” history draws from Enlightened writers conjectural histories such as David Hume’s or Voltaire’s, even to the point of incorporating Enlightened atheist elements (Fallon, Blake 5-6). But critics who analyse Blake in a more political manner, often forget the other side of Blake as a myth maker, which was actually an integral part of his participation in radicalism. In other words, his mythical aspects are not separate from his social and political. He considered Paine’s criticism of priestcraft was true Christianity, strategically adopting Paine’s egalitarianism but remaining detached from radical materialism and scepticism by proposing collective emancipation as miraculous (Fallon, Blake 16-17). Blake supported the most utopian aspects of Enlightenment. An erroneous use of reason ultimately pervades the old religious oppression and the seemingly emancipatory postulates of Enlightened radicalism and deism. This sense that spirituality should be politically responsible and tend towards imaginative freedom and that politics alone cannot improve society in the long run without acknowledging the immaterial realm of the mind is a crucial aspect that Moore embraces and vindicates through his works. A determining influence on Blake’s spirituality and politics is seventeenth and eighteenthcentury antinomianism, the rejection of the religious moral law based on the belief that after Christ’s sacrifice, the faithful were delivered from the law (Thompson 11). The orthodox condemned the antinomian as “the devil’s respondent,” a phrase used in the anonymous letter Antinomianism Explained and Exploded; in a Letter to a Friend (Thompson 13). The antinomian, and among them Blake, thought following the Law meant actually going against Christ’s teachings of forgiveness and love (Thompson 13-14). This opposition between Mosaic Law and the Gospel of Jesus became tantamount to the opposition between the abusive authorities and the oppressed (14). In Milton, Milton’s self-annihilation is Blake’s antinomian antidote against Satan’s moral law, which is seen as a negation of the other. In order to avoid becoming like Satan, Milton refuses to destroy Satan and sacrifices himself. Blakean antinomianism entered the 1960s American counterculture, a great influence on Moore, through the work of Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley and Theodor Roszak among others. The American counterculture was deeply inspired by Blake, but not by the historically accurate 53 Blake, but by its more esoteric aspects associated to Neoplatonism, Kabbalah and “eroticmystical thought” (Kripal 101). This interest coincided with the momentum of the civil rights movement, radical feminism, gay rights, the sexual revolution and a heightened curiosity for Asian religions “in eroticized or Tantric forms” (101). Jeffrey Kripal argues that counterculture implies at a basic level the same ideas than antinomianism (101). Through Ginsberg, according to Kripal, a “Blakean possession in 1948 led to the birth of the beatniks” (103). This possession led Ginsberg to his attainment of a sort of understanding of the eternity of poetic consciousness and perception, which made him to experience that remaining in this mode of consciousness for too long was incompatible with everyday life and society (Kripal 102103). Huxley’s mescaline experiments were devised by him to understand Blake’s states of consciousness and test his theories that the brain selects the information it needs to perceive from the surroundings for the purposes of survival (Kripal 105). He believed this mechanism could be circumvented through psychedelic drugs or mystical states (such as he thought Blake could go into), where reality can be accessed in its entirety (Kripal 105). In this sense he also suggested that this consciousness was too disruptive to be sustained along with an ordinary existence (Kripal 105). Blake’s improvement of sensual enjoyment was often interpreted as a “metaphysically grounded eroticism” (Kripal 108). Roszak argued the counterculture was basically Blakean (Kripal 110) and adopted Blake’s voice often to refer to the new age: “Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age!” (Blake qtd. in Kripal 110), although Blake’s expression is more political (Kripal 110). He also referenced him in The Making of a Counterculture (1969) in the last chapter, “Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire”, where he questions the labels imposed on vision as madness, poetry or the product of religious eccentricity, because it cannot be understood through reductive terms from technocracy and rationalism, and lied beyond “the faith of churches and the instrumental reason of modernity and the universities” (Kripal 110-111). The countercultural eroticisation of the spiritual and the refusal to pertain to a single tradition are in keeping with the Blakean spirit (Kripal 112). In Moore, eroticism is one of many revolutionary weapons or arts that can bring about changes both at an individual and social level. It is portrayed as magical in the sense that magic is defined as a technique to alter reality, a property that is also attributed to sexual acts. The problem is that these “counter” / anti aspects have become part of the cultural / nomos, and that is for the moment the unresolved problem that will influence debate on these topics (Kripal 112). Like Blake’s, Moore’s revolutionary politics also come under the form of a spiritual revelation that shatters the mental constructs imposed on human beings; for both Moore and Blake, it is the imagination that makes liberation possible and both express this through the arts. As in Blake, in Moore this is a process of re-enchantment that involves the divinisation of humanity and a sexual liberation that entails the equality of women and men. This is a controversial aspect in Blake’s work, taking into account the contrast between early works like Thel or Visions, where the social roles of women are questioned and where the legitimacy of female desire is defended at the same time that the role of visionary prophetess is attributed to a female character, and later works like Jerusalem, where the bêtes-noires of Blake’s worldview—deism, tyranny, moral law and chastity—are finally unambiguously identified with the principle of the Female Will and the female figures of Enitharmon, Vala or the daughters of Albion. In the case of Moore, this concern is shared with the counterculture of the 54 1960s. This counterculture’s “sexual revolution” and its derivatives explore freedom from sexual repression. The result is a less changing view, where women as such are never seen as capricious oppressors, but on the contrary either victims that fight oppression bravely or agents of a positive change in gender conflicts and also in the process of human liberation at large. In fact, Moore focuses on early Blake in From Hell to raise awareness of gender oppression. All these beliefs and interpretations of social conflicts hark back, in many cases explicitly, to Blake’s influence. In his works Blake defended revolution, freedom, imagination, the arts and sexual revolution. He championed liberation from religious convention in favour of free expression of poetic genius and the humanisation of God and divinisation of humanity. To an extent he defended the equality of women and men, up to a point in his career. Final freedom, according to Blake, would arrive with a collective revelation and transformation of human perception brought about by the event of an Apocalyptic liberation of imaginative, emotional energies, from “the mind-forg’d manacles” (SE [“London”] 46.8; E27). As I have so far discussed, Moore’s works depict a revolutionary apocalypse, the translation of the freedom of the mind into our everyday world through vision and the overcoming of conventions, the realisation of the status of reality fiction occupies, making gods creations of humanity to be loved and a triumph of desire and vision over ordinary ways of being. 2.2. POPULAR MYTHOLOGISATIONS OF BLAKE Alexander and Anne Gilchrist’s biography of Blake marks the beginning of the mythologisation of the poet-prophet. He began to be conceived as a mystic, solitary figure (Clark and Whittaker 7). This evocative, but sometimes partial biography resulted in a greater popularisation of Blake and informed the reception of Blake by authors and artists like the Pre-Raphaelites and Charles Algernon Swinburne (Clark and Whittaker 8). Swinburne and other late nineteenth century authors created a “decadent reading of Blake” mainly based on Marriage, where they saw a celebration of sin (Larrissy, Blake 2). The decadent reading of Blake influenced Huxley, who was in turn the source of early Moore’s Blake. After the Second World War there was “a proliferation of Blakes … which could, rather loosely, be termed Postmodern.” This means that he was often reinterpreted as a “poststructuralist writer whose complex prophetic works deconstructed any sure ideological meaning” (Clark and Whittaker 7). Postmodern writers like Angela Carter, or Salman Rushdie “wish to use him as a playful, iconoclastic figure of subversion, yet he must also remain [for them] a writer who retains sufficient individuality and authority to repay more traditional forms of homage” (Clark and Whittaker 7). In Postmodernism, Blake gets immersed in a mixture of high and low culture. There are two tendencies in Postmodernism, the “adoption of Blake as a brand” and the championing of Blake the rebel “by no-logo, anticapitalist adherents” (Lussier 10). The first tendency refers to the fact that Blake has also been subject to commercialisation, and the uniqueness of his style and aesthetics has been often taken advantage of for economic reasons: “The Blakean style is immediately recognisable as a brand name – or even a logo for a certain intimation of visionary (or pseudo-visionary) poetics – and one that thus has a peculiar relationship with the logic of late capitalism” (Clark and Whittaker 7); this is a very interesting argument, as not only has Blake’s style been adopted as a brand for its uniqueness, but also as bait for alternative, critical audiences to assimilate them into the mainstream public, disguising 55 mere products as dark, visionary or revolutionary manifestations. The second tendency was characteristic of the 1960s and 70s, which were the time of greatest popularity of an antiestablishment Blake (10). In order to understand his visions, advocates of counterculture either associated him with hallucinogens or carried out psychiatric speculations about his mental health (10-11). Although they meant to be sympathetic towards Blake, they were returning to the same old prejudices against which Blake fought, seeing madness and “pathology” where for Blake there was only “inspiration” (Clark and Whittaker 11). This was the case for Huxley, who had read and been inspired by Blake by the time The Doors of Perception was published in 1954. Huxley’s readings of Blake are key to many of the differences between Moore’s Blake and the historical Blake (see chapter 4 of this thesis, pp. 114-117). Iain Sinclair’s uses of Blake’s mythology were also important for Moore’s reception of Blake. Ironically, Sinclair and his friends, part of the Cambridge School of poets from the 1980s, disavowed any status as a “counterculture, alternative or underground, an Albion in place of England” (Crozier and Longville qtd. in Keery 101), in an attempt to distance themselves from the 1960s utopian approximation to Blake. However, they were deeply submerged in the dark aspects of Blakean myth. Sinclair uses mythical figures such as Slayd, Hand and Kotope and other fallen children of Albion from Jerusalem, who represent the satanic oppressors of Britain (Keery 102). Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappel, Scarlet Tracings (1987) were fundamental in inspiring Moore to write From Hell, where Moore also puts into practice the psychogeography Sinclair elaborates in his works. In Lud Heat, London is presented as haunted by its own monuments, especially Hawksmoor’s churches and Egyptian-inspired monuments, which acquire the Blakean meaning of human sacrifice (Larrissy, Blake 129). Specifically, the obelisk that overshadows Blake’s tomb is presented as a device that contains irrational energies represented by the poet, an element present in From Hell: “Lautreamont warns that ‘the weight of an obelisk stifles the spread of madness’. Hawksmoor risks an obelisk over the grave of William Blake” (Sinclair qtd. in Keery 102). Sinclair explicitly mentions Blake as an antecedent in the mythical mapping of the urban space (Larrissy, Blake 128). Haunted London, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Egyptian monuments also appear in From Hell, where they recall, just as in Sinclair, Blake’s use of Egypt as evil, based on the Biblical tradition of the Exodus (Larrissy, Blake 13). Moore takes other elements of Sinclair’s reception of Blake, such as the typically Postmodern parodic references to the occult and the paranoid and lunatic aspects of Sinclair’s, Blake’s and his own psychogeographic conceptions of the city (Larrissy, Blake 13). Sinclair also precedes Moore in the tendency to reflect on the dangerous implications of a misreading of Blake, some of whose descriptions are associated with “a sense of menacing irrationality” (Larrissy, Blake 130). Thus, in the following passage, Jack the Ripper’s murders are associated with Blakean inspiration: “The sunspot code has been activated, the radio message of the Ripper … With a taste of metal, the iron of Los … malarial blood heat … Blake’s ‘sulphur sun’ … life is a disease” (Sinclair qtd. in Keery 102). There is also in Lud Heat an idea of the “sinister interdependence and similarity of good and evil”, at least in their conventional definitions (Larrissy, Blake 130-131). In Blake, this interdependence comes from the association of evil with poetic genius and of good with reason, rather than from purely moral ideas of good and evil. The theme of the constructedness of myth determines his (as well as Moore’s) Postmodern attraction towards Blake’s world (Larrissy, Blake 132). Suicide Bridge (1979) is a story Keery qualifies as a “Blakean family romance” (102) focusing on the children of Albion, and expressing Blake’s idea that “A man’s worst 62 emphasise a tolerant, alternative notion of Englishness but also co-opted by consumer culture as a brand. Still, as we will see, Moore’s understanding of Blake evolves from a more superficial treatment to a deeper understanding not only of Blake, but of the concept of vision. 2.3. ESOTERICISM, OCCULTURE AND MOORE’S RECEPTION OF BLAKE Long before Moore, one of the most renowned admirers of Blake was William Butler Yeats. Yeats is famous for his initial Romantic interest and study of Irish mythology, folklore and traditional esoteric doctrines. He explored the occult by joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organisation based on ritual and psychodrama and devoted to an eclectic and romanticised version of ancient Greek and Egyptian mysteries. Romanticism entailed a reenchantment inspired by traditional sources like the Corpus Hermeticum14, the Kabbalistic teachings or medieval alchemy, as was the case of Coleridge’s poetics. Yeats’s reading of Blake was initially heavily inspired by occultism, which led him to focus especially on mythology and archetypal symbolism (Larrissy, Blake 3-4), to attribute to Blake more systematicity than he used (Langbaum 365 n. 11), and to structure much of his poetic work in terms of contrariety (Larrissy, Blake 2-3). Yeats was also aware of Blake’s interest in Swedenborg and became himself a reader of the Swedish author. The Swedenborgian element that Yeats focused the most on when editing and publishing with Edwin J. Ellis The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) was the way he analysed the relationship between material creation and the spiritual world of imagination (Antonielli 14). According to Swedenborg, the world is divided into discrete realms or “degrees” that could only be connected through “correspondence” (Antonielli 14), an idea that Blake himself reflected upon in his annotations to Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1762-1763; Blake annotated it in 1788). Yeats was aware of these annotations, as there is evidence that he copied Blake’s annotations from the original at the British Museum on his own copy of the Swedenborgian treatise, given to him by Ellis (Antonielli 14). Ellis and Yeats also read Blake through Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary, of which they had a 1883 copy, and Arcana Coelestia, dated 1891 (Antonielli 14). The theory of correspondence is the basis for the centrality of symbol in Yeats’s interpretation of Blake. In the theory, the sensible is shaped by the mental, which makes it possible to read the sensible to know the spiritual; in other words, sensible signs, and practically all of nature, can become symbols (Antonielli 14-15). For example, the physical body of a person, according to the theory, can reveal their personality, and in that sense the body is a symbol (Antonielli 14). Swedenborg distinguished three different degrees that would determine Yeats’s vision of Blake’s system: natural, spiritual and celestial, interpreted by Yeats as natural, intellectual and emotional (Antonielli 15). Yeats believed the highest of these degrees, the celestial or emotional, corresponded to Blake’s notion of the poetic genius, from which, Blake effectively said, the rest are derived (Antonielli 15-16). The reason that the celestial degree was the most important and identified with the visionary capacity in Blake was the fact that it allows the individual to enter an impersonal part of themselves where all minds meet beyond physical and 14 Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translations were printed c. 1500-1641, but the original sources were centuries older. 63 mental boundaries (Antonielli 16). Yeats believed this territory was “a great memory, the memory of Nature herself” and that symbols, by referring to this memory or specific items in it, could awaken it (Yeats qtd. in Antonielli 16). Needless to say, while Blake used merely imagination at will to evoke vision, Yeats relied on symbols (Antonielli 17). From this basic threefold division of the universe, Yeats derived his study of Blake. Thus, the intellectual degree corresponds to the Father (energy), the emotional to the Son (imagination) and the natural (nature) to the Holy Spirit (Antonielli 17). The latter is also divided into two, giving way to a fourth degree that the occultists called “mirror” or “lookingglass” that is a “universal matrix, or heaven, or abode” where everything else exists (Yeats qtd. in Antonielli 17). This fourfold division served Yeats to understand Blake’s four Zoas. Consequently, Urizen belongs to the intellectual degree of the Father and reason, Luvah pertains to the degree of emotion and he is the Son; Tharmas corresponds to the natural degree, that of sensation, and he is identified with the mirror; and Urthona, the Holy Spirit, is associated to the rest of the degree of nature (Antonielli 18). The division both in Blake and in Yeats’s study also assigns a cardinal point to each degree and Zoa: zenith (South) is Urizen, nadir (North) is Urthona, centre (East) Luvah and circumference (West) Tharmas (Antonielli 18). Each of them represents one of the four elements: Urizen was fire before he fell and became a “cold and rational light” (18); Luvah is air, stading in between fire and water; Tharmas is water and Urthona is earth (18-19). Yeats thought that, as according to occult lore, each Zoa corresponded to one of the steps in Jacob’s ladder or stages between the world of matter and the world of the spirit, and associated them with the names of the realms created by Blake: Beulah, Alla, Al-Ulro and Or-Ulro (Antonielli 19). The highest before Eden, Beulah, stands for the zenith and rules the eyes, “first point of contact between objective and subjective reality” (19); Alla, the centre, rules the nostrils; AlUlro rules touch and taste, and Or-Ulro rules hearing (19). Very frequent in Blake are also the references to three body parts: head, heart and loins, identified by Yeats with Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas. Urthona corresponds to the stomach and womb, since his realm is Or-Ulro (Antonielli 19). Yeats made other more daring comparison, such as that of the Zoas with the Hindu tattvas or elements (Antonielli 19). He used Blake’s description of the fall of Urizen from North to South to explain the predicament of the fallen humanity, with the head in the earth, the heart full of water and the loins in the air (Antonielli 20). This change means that various positions are possible, where man or woman is dominated by one of the elements (20), as in ancient Greek medicine. The fallen position with Urizen at the North is, although fallen, harmonious (20). It is when the states are at war that each state separates from its space; the state (Zoa) becomes a spectre, and the space his separated Emanation: Ahania, Vala, Enion and Enitharmon (21). The Swedenborgian doctrine was also very influential on Blake’s division of the Covering Cherub into twenty-seven Churches or personages that are grouped into three different religious eras. These three are the Churches of Beulah, to which is added a fourth that is the Christian Church, that of those who have recognised imagination as the eternal humanity (Antonielli 22). Before the fall, the churches were one, but afterwards the three Churches of Beulah followed Albion into the material world; the Christian Church refused to descend, for which reason their Master was persecuted and crucified (22). This one Swedenborg identified with his own New Church (Antonielli 23). In Swedenborg’s texts, this one is the Church where body and soul are in perfect communion, while the others represents gradual stages of incipient or total separation 64 (Antonielli 23). The last Church signals the moment when Moses receives the Commandments, the least imaginative moment in human history from Blake’s perspective, and relates to the Tree of Good and Evil (Antonielli 23). The fallen churches are divided into: the hermaphroditic church, composed by Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah and Lamech; the male within a female (war hid in religion), formed by Noah, Shem, Arphaxad, Cainan II, Salah, Heber, Peleh, Reu and Serug; and the female within a male, integrated by Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Paul, Constantine, Charlemagne and Luther (22). Each group is divided to symbolise the initial, central and final phase of the corresponding religious era, as well as “the fourth phase that indicates the beginning of another” (23). Paul, Constantine, Charlemagne and Luther have a special significance, as they are associated to the Zoas, and to Christ’s three days at the sepulchre and resurrection (23). Yeats tried to combine this division of churches to the cardinal points of the Zoas, which resulted in groups of characters describing an evolution from one Zoa to the other (Antonielli 24). The one starting with Luther goes from zenith to west and marks the creation of law and oppression, the separation between creation and God (24). The Church starting with Noah and going from west to nadir corresponds to the flood and the fall of Atlantis (24), and the one starting with Abraham is the Hebrew Church (24). Although he followed Swedenborg’s teaching for a time, Blake stood in a very controversial position as regards the occult. On one hand, he drew substantial influence from Paracelsus and Böhme. On the other hand, he despised the occult tendencies towards mathematisation, systematisation and diagrammatisation, as is the case in astrology, Pythagorean sects and certain aspects of the Kabbalah (Frye 155). In his essay “Fossil Angels” (2002), Moore also proposes a rejection of the traditional notions of the occult and magic and a renewed, artistic concept of them, as well as a reenchanted vision of art through its alliance with magic. He believes that in this way, both magic and art would recover their original sense. In order to understand this position and the relation between Blake and Moore, we need to explore both Blake and Moore’s countercultural and esoteric sources. As I have outlined when explaining Blake’s Postmodern reception, Moore grew up in the context of the Age of Aquarius boom in the 1960s and was immersed in the New Age movement (partly included in Partridge’s notion of the occulture) in his early adulthood. I will use the term occulture for its inclusivity. However, I will occasionally use the term “New Age” to refer specifically to the mainstream aspects of esotericism. Specifically, I will understand by “New Age” the currents popularised since the 1960s. In his interview with Khoury, Moore himself talks about the ideas circulating in his early youth and how they affected him: … around this time I’m what, 14? 15? So we’re talking what, ’67, ’68? Something like that, ’69? The hippie thing is happening … this was all happening, … there was a groundswell of young people who had an opinion and a more critical view of the way society was going …. During the hippie thing I was able to delude myself, that the counterculture, the hippie revolution, was going to destroy all outmoded notions of class; that, hey, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a guy or a chick and the color of your skin doesn’t matter either or whether you’re rich or poor—we’re all brothers in the Age of Aquarius (Khoury 18). 65 We will encounter many of the precepts of the New Age occulture in the themes of his works. Most notably, and in connection with anarchist and environmental attitudes, New Age spirituality is pervaded by the idea of “connectedness” and a “rejection of authority” (Partridge 33). It is not strange to find common traits between Blake and twentieth century New Age spirituality. In sociology and religious studies, the origin of the New Age is traced back to the Romantics. More precisely, to the hodgepodge of beliefs emerging from the different spiritual doctrines that appeared in Blake’s times. These included groups such as “deists, freethinkers, Swedenborgians and others … who rejected orthodox religion in favour of a sacralised rendering of nature” (Heelas 41-42). Blake studied Swedenborgian doctrines and belonged to the New Church during a period of his life, and probably also experimented with Theosophy, founded in London in 1783 (Heelas 42). Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) developed further the ideas put forth by the original eighteenth century Theosophical Society (Heelas 43). Alexandra David-Neel, a former student of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, wrote Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1965), a book that became popular with New Agers (Heelas 43). In London, 1888, the Isis Urania Temple opened. This was the local Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to which Yeats belonged for some time and which Aleister Crowley joined the following year (Heelas 43-44). I will devote more space to Crowley specifically below (see page 66 of this chapter), as he later quit the Golden Dawn. He took up leadership of the German Ordo Templis Orientis in 1912, and finally founded his own magical order called Thelema in 1920 (Heelas 44). He has a great influence on occulture, specifically on neopagans and ceremonial magicians (Heelas 44) and is a frequent source of inspiration for Moore. Theosophical and Golden Dawn teachings went through a period of consolidation and diversification during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, when they became integrated with George Gurdjeff’s teachings and Karl Jung’s psychology, until they were taken up by authors such as Huxley (Heelas 44-49). After Huxley published Perennial Philosophy (1946) and the Blakean Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (1956), Zen became popularised in America thanks to the work of the Japanese Zen master Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki. D. T. Suzuki had, in fact, edited Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in Japanese (Wada 171) and taught Zen and English to Japan’s foremost Blake scholar, Sōetsu Yanagi, who studied the similarities between Zen philosophy and Blake’s thought. Yanagi is still an important referent in Blake studies in Japan, and the subject of many debates that continue to explore this association between Zen and Blake. Ayako Wada comments Blake’s Marriage passage in which Isaiah explains to the poet that when unity is attained, the individual and God are not two, but one, and everything can be perceived as infinite beyond Cartesian and empiricist concepts of the world (166). Great Zen masters such as Suzuki also contemplated this idea of a “continuum” of existence (Suzuki qtd. in Wada 167). Yanagi saw this focus on the expansion of self as a trait in Blake that connects with the Orient (Wada 167), interpreting Blake as a pantheist. Yanagi, following Swinburne, thought that Blake’s idea of “self-abnegation” (Swinburne qtd. in Wada 167) was distinct from other pantheist’s because of its more oriental and mystic character. Like him, Yanagi argued that Blakean selfannihilation was not “self-denial” (Yanagi qtd. in Wada 167), but an expansion of the self made possible by its union with the universe. Yanagi attributed Blake’s oriental philosophical traits 66 to the influence of Brahmanism (the Upanishads in particular) and its central idea of the union between Brahma and Atman (Wada 167). The ending of Jerusalem, according to Wada (who follows Yanagi in her essay), is an infinite vision of oneness between self and inner divinity, whereby the latter becomes universally present, erasing the barrier between inside and outside (168). Hatsuko Nimii interprets the union of Milton and Ololon as another similar event to Zen enlightenment, which Suzuki called “Absolute Emptiness” (Suzuki qtd. in Nimii 179), an affirmation beyond opposites. This overcoming of opposites lies in the realisation of their common origin in a higher principle (Nimii 179).15 The spread of these aesthetics, Oriental philosophies and alternative spiritualities16 led to the 1960s explosion of the New Age movement (Heelas 49), characterised by the rise of an increasing growth of what in the study of religion is called “Self-spirituality”17 (51). Huxley, along with other artists like Joan Baez, studied for a time in the Esalen Institute, probably the best known centre promoting New Age teachings in the US. Moreover, Paul Heelas relates the beginnings of the New Age movement to the beatniks as well (49-50), who had a tremendous impact upon Moore. In North America, the Beat poets and other psychedelic proponents (Huxley, Ginsberg, Leary, etc.) mixed in their discourse and poetry elements of Zen and of Blake (Clark and Suzuki 11). Among them, Ginsberg, for example, played a prominent role in the transmission of Blake’s poetry. The Aquarian movement was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century Arts & Crafts aesthetics and artists who, like William Morris, shared a radical utopian perspective. Morris was himself highly influenced by Blake and both Blake’s theme of the transformation of perception through vision and his poetic rejection of social conventions appealed to the emerging pacifist, ecological and psychedelic culture of the 1960s and 70s that continued in the 1980s and 90s New Age circles. The more occultist branches of the New Age movement drew inspiration from the teachings of Crowley (London, 1875-1947), the British magician, poet, painter, writer, and mountaineer. Crowley influenced the 1960s and 70s rock and roll musicians like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and the counterculture in general (Dent and Whittaker 157). During a trip to Egypt, he “channelled” The Book of the Law (1904), also called Liber AL Vel Legis. In this text, he established the principles of his own doctrine, Thelema (from ancient Greek θέλημα, “will”). The precepts of Thelema are “Do what Thou Wilt” and “Love is the Law, Love under Will”. According to the “Do what Thou Wilt” principle, each individual exists to undertake a unique purpose in accordance with the original impulse of creation: the True Will. The individual must discover what this True Will is, and strive to realise it, a process Crowley identified with the 15 There are also voices that warn of Yanagi’s misreadings and therefore certain points of incompatibility between Zen and Blake. Kazuyoshi Oishi centres around the contradiction resulting from Yanagi’s misreading of Blake, pointing out that Yanagi’s insistence to find something akin to Zen oneness in Blake’s imagination neglects Blake’s “physical vitality, masculine energy and spiritual enthusiasm” (Oishi 183). Yanagi’s version of Zen is also considered polite by Oishi (187), unlike Blake’s heterodox leanings, which were often based on popular radical and antinomian discourse, rather than on learned academic traditions. Yanagi tended to see Blake as well as a “moderate moral reformer,” a definition that corresponded more to himself than to Blake (Oishi 187). After Yanagi, Kenzaburo Ōe strengthened the continuity between Japan, Blake and Zen with his use of Blake references in his novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (1983), linking Los’s entrance into Blake’s soul through his foot to the Zen expansion of the individual through submission to an older tradition (B. Turner 250), a concept that goes back to Yanagi (B. Turner 250-251), but is also (again) somewhat at odds with Blake’s more radical side. 16 This spread of Zen had many ramifications, but was also taken advantage of by cults that distorted the tenets of Zen and other mystical schools. One of such cults appearing in this period is L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. 17 “Self-spirituality” refers to practices and beliefs that involve the sacralisation of the Self, i.e., the individual in all or any of its aspects (Heelas 2). Previous groups like Theosophy already disseminated teachings of this kind. 67 alchemical Magnum Opus. “Love is the Law” elevates the true desire that would tend towards said goal to a supreme principle that is in harmony with the universal will.18 Crowley derived from this a theoretical basis for his practice of ritual magic as a psychodramatic way of transcending the illusory lower self through an arduous meditative exercise conducive to the “Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel”, a reunion with one’s deeper and higher self, connected to the universe. The process entails the integration of dark forces through sexual rites that symbolise the union of the masculine and feminine principles in the higher self. The meaning of love for Crowley thus acquires a material sexual dimension. Crowley believed that taboo acts could release powers from the depths of the mind and return the individual to his or her essential self. One of the outstanding figures in Thelemic belief is Babalon, a redeemed version of the Biblical Babylon, reinterpreted as a goddess of nature, that was to recover the supposedly original sexual nature of the female aspect of divinity. Babalon became unavoidably bound up with patriarchal assumptions about female identity and sexuality. Thus, Babalon’s characterisation as a harlot and her sexual availability is on one hand presented as sexual liberation, but on the other hand results very convenient to promote predominantly heterosexual, male fantasies. In my analysis of Promethea, I will describe Moore’s criticism of the problems inherent to the figure of Babalon such as the essentialist notions of femininity and the practices that objectify women involved in Crowley’s interpretations of hierogamy. Crowley’s understanding of magic fell into the traps Blake loathed such as rigid structures, tedious and unproductive lists of correspondences, and unoriginal ideas (his supreme laws were copied from Augustine and François Rabelais, and his poetry from Swinburne). In purely technical terms, Crowley was a good synthesiser of previous magical lore, including Eliphas Levi’s and Papus’s fusion of the Tarot trumps with the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Hebrew alphabet. Each of the thirty-two major arcana is identified with each of the thirty-two letters, each one ascribed to a path leading from one attribute of God to another, from the ultimate divine source to material creation. This conceptual map allows the magician to understand the universe according to this singular key. Moore takes from Crowley the practicality of his system and fully explores the concept of the Tarot Arcana as Sephirotic paths in Promethea. Crowley considered Blake the last in a line of esoteric masters beginning with Pythagoras (Dent and Whittaker 158). This clearly indicates that he ignored Blake’s aversion to mathematical abstractions; his knowledge of Blake was limited to Marriage (Dent and Whittaker 158). Crowley, like Moore, identified Blake with the archetype of the Holy Fool (158) and connected his own revelation with the apocalyptic nature of Blake’s works. He believed Blake’s proverb that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (MHH 7; E35) and through following the principle of the derangement of the senses, he thought he had achieved experience of “holy but diabolic powers”: the “angel” Aiwas and the devil Choronzon (Dent and Whittaker 158). Crowley saw Blake as more of a decadent, blasphemous iconoclast than Blake really was and used him to legitimise and emphasise his belief that sexual energies should be used for spiritual enlightenment. He used Blake’s antinomian opinions to support his own opposition to conventional religious morality and moral law. This reading of Blake would 18 This is a modern reading of Augustine’s “Love and Do what thou Wilt”, which Crowley took from François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. This association was acknowledged by Crowley, who in fact included Rabelais as a Thelemic Saint in his Gnostic Mass. 68 nonetheless become very widespread in Postmodernity, due to the generalised moral relativism and a readiness to invoke Blake to defend “bohemian wildness” (Larrissy, Blake 88). Crowley’s Blake is relevant to our exploration of Moore’s readings. At the time of writing Swamp Thing, Moore’s knowledge of Blake was based on Huxley. His initial references to psychedelia are intertwined with the identification of vision with altered states of consciousness and a primitive communion with nature, two topics Crowley had also seen in Blakean vision. But later, in From Hell, Moore presents libidinal forces as powers that can as easily be creative as destructive, as in “The Tyger”. This time, Moore goes back to Crowley to show how his reading of Blake overemphasises blasphemy and confuses the celebration of Energy with the justification of violence and domination. In other words, the confusion of the theory of Contraries and Negations, which I will summarise in the next chapter. In From Hell, this misreading is criticised through the point of view of the villain Gull. In Promethea, Moore creates an alternative to Crowley’s problematic misreading whilst referencing Crowley’s more useful contributions to occultism. In this work, he uses Blake’s idea of the need to redeem natural energies from their conventional negative connotations and turn them into liberating forces, and he also insists on Blake’s theme of the rebellion against moral law. As an artist and writer Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) also influenced Moore, who expresses a deeper admiration for Spare than for Crowley. Spare was also a London artist, writer and occultist. But unlike Crowley, with whom he was personally acquainted, he had a profoundly original and heterodox view of magic and art that resounds much more with Moore’s proposals to merge both disciplines. Spare invented radically new ways to practice magic, like the use of magical sigils, which often implied for him the use of sexual energies to achieve meditative states and focus on the will. Sigils are symbols made up of real or invented letters and ideograms. They serve the purpose of condensing an idea or goal. To activate them, the magician focuses on them in an altered state of consciousness so as to communicate directly with his unconscious and avoid the rational mental obstacles that unconsciously prevent him to reach his desired goal (Miles 65). This altered state that is necessary to communicate with the subconscious could be achieved through sexual climax or any other extremes of pain, pleasure or exhaustion. This technique of using sexual acts as ritual practice was also developed by Crowley and his predecessors. The difference lies in the creative component; they used symbols and diagrams taken from the traditional sources, but Spare’s sigils were unique creations, and he often used them to generate automatic drawings through which he could express inner desires he could not achieve through conscious effort (Miles 65-66). Spare’s art achieved a very complex and personal style by mixing the monstrous, the erotic, and his alphabet of desire, one of the sets of symbols that he designed for his sigilisation techniques. During his youth he edited Form: A Quarterly of the Arts (1916-1922), to which Yeats was a contributor (Dent and Whittaker 162). Spare also experimented with “pseudo-collage,” and anamorphosis (Dent and Whittaker 162). His spirituality, like Crowley’s, was highly inspired by Eastern mysticism. The central idea of his works is Kia or “freedom of self beyond belief systems”, which is similar to Tao (Dent and Whittaker 162). As in Zen, Spare strived to overcome opposing dualities and achieve a state of vacuity he sometimes termed NeitherNeither, which gave access to Self-Love, a transcendent mental state based on laughter and joy with a basis in the sexual drive (Miles 60-63). Spare’s persona and works were compared to Blake’s by occultist, writer and poet Kenneth Grant (Dent and Whittaker 161). Spare’s The Focus of Life (1921) features four characters 69 similar to Blake’s Zoas, one of whom, Zos has “forgotten the freedom of his desires and fallen into a dull round of reincarnation” (Dent and Whittaker 163). This state resembles Blake’s Albion, whose sleep also implies a fall from unity with his originally uncorrupted desire and into generation, that is similar to reincarnation insofar as both entail the repetition of a cycle downwards into organic life. Zos gets trapped into the cycle of existence in a way that resembles Buddhist reincarnation; that is to say, he is trapped on the material plane and cannot escape to a different spiritual order. Zos’s saviour, Aâos, redeems him after being tempted by his virgin sister Tzula, whom Dent and Whittaker compare to Enitharmon (163). The Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites, an Automatic Writing (1927) condemns religious hypocrisy: “O Self, my God …. Free me of morals, lead me into the temptation of myself, for I am a tottering kingdom of good and evil.” (Spare qtd. in Dent and Whittaker 163). Dent and Whittaker conclude that while Blake ends up annihilating self, Spare seeks fulfilment in it, but his self is not the “mundane, post-Enlightenment ego” (163). While Blake was a radical Christian, Spare’s beliefs are based on the neopaganism of the nineteenth century occult revival and some witchcraft elements, allegedly acquired via his mentor Mrs. Patterson, who is often believed to be a witch with connections to Salem (Miles 69).19 However, the most important manifestation of witchcraft in Spare is a text called “The Witches’ Sabbath”, a collaboration between Spare and Grant (Miles 72). The text consists in a description of the Sabbath as a ritual orgy conducted to materialise a predetermined wish or rather exteriorise a hallucination that would help to understand a magical reality (72). Blake and Spare blasphemed against different gods: Blake against the “god of this world,” Spare against the Christian God (Dent and Whittaker 163). Both Crowley and Spare shared Blake’s antinomianism (Dent and Whittaker 163). Moore also highlights the opposition to conventional religious morality, but like Spare, Moore involves sometimes affirmation of the Self rather than Self-Annihilation. The difference in the role of the self is due to the influence of pagan or pantheistic worldviews on Spare and, subsequently, Moore. If for Blake, “Christianity is Art” (“The Laocoön” E274), for Spare or Moore, magic is an art and all art is magic. Chaos Magic, one of the latest Postmodern developments in the occult, took from Spare the technique of sigilisation, and the idea of the communication with the unconscious. Chaos Magic adherents posit that the magician should be able to assimilate or discard systems of belief according to the needs dictated by his or her will. Moore’s statements concerning his veneration of the Roman deity Glycon resonate particularly with this school, as he admits Glycon was a fabrication from its very origins. Actually, for Chaos Magic, no system of belief, great narrative, or scientific theory can be erected as absolute truth; these only function as ephemeral and provisional tools. Anything goes as long as it works. Staple of Chaos Magic is the admixture to magical practices of grossly simplified scientific concepts taken from chaos theory or quantum physics. This radically secularised and half ironic modality of magic encourages individuals to develop their own systems and adopt or modify them as they wish; even to make their own pantheon out of any entities, fictional or real, concrete or abstract, classical or kitsch. The Chaos magician is in a certain sense an atheist: he believes the gods are fictions created by the human mind, but consciously uses their mythical and symbolic power. Chaos Magic took this point of view from Spare, who was not interested either in whether there really were disembodied spirits capable of communicating with mortals or not; he was interested in the phenomena of individual 19 These are theories spread by Spare himself and Kenneth Grant, although as other sources also suggest (see Louv “Strange Life”), it is possible that Mrs Patterson was imagined by Spare, and not a real person. 70 consciousness (Miles 67). This attitude has a special relevance because it has a precedent in Blake’s previous acknowledgement that “All deities reside in the human breast” (MHH 11; E38), rather than on celestial heights or in the laws of nature. As I outlined on page x of this chapter, Moore follows the belief that gods are human fabrications, but also that discourse and fiction have the power to determine reality, and that it is in this sense that gods are “mankind’s very best… friends” (Moore, Promethea 3; 3). Moreover, there is not any moral code to be followed in Chaos Magic, only techniques to be developed to achieve the desired results, as if the efficiency maxim of capitalism was applied to occult practice. It is this emphasis on creation, individuality, and epistemological and moral relativism that attracts Moore and that he will read in Blake’s defence of creative freedom and authenticity when he studies Blake’s works during the writing of From Hell and Jerusalem. However, a Chaote way of understanding magic, especially as regards its amorality and degree of relativism, never persuaded Moore of the inherent value of the system (Moore, “Alan Moore”)20. He was much more interested in individual magical practitioners like Spare or Grant, who inspired Chaos Magic, but who demonstrated outstanding creative skills in their individual works. However, Chaos Magic is useful to study Moore’s concept of magic insofar as it provides an antiauthoritarian metasystem that resonates with Moore’s ideas about anarchy, and to the degree that it is still an influential part of the occultural world Moore is part of. An important reason to consider Chaos Magic as part of Moore’s background is the fact that other comics writers in his same context, such as Grant Morrison, have publicly declared the inspiration and interest they take in this type of esotericism. In the next subsection I will succinctly discuss this author and his own involvement in Chaos Magic. A basic notion of G. Morrison’s opposition to Moore is relevant to the study of the latter, because it aids to show Moore’s Blakean references not as an isolated occurrence, or a mere throwback to a hippie or beatnik reading of Blake, but as a habitual practice of their own generation. But what transpires from Moore’s aspects that lean more towards Chaos Magic is that his interest in Blake is focused on Blake’s awareness of the fictional and imaginative nature of deities and supernatural beings and his rejection of the rules of the arts in favour of creative freedom. Although less central to Moore, neopaganism plays some part in the occulture that permeates the creation of his works. Kraemer points out that neopagan elements are notable in Promethea. As she says, contemporary paganism and magic in general are based on a “syncretic polytheism and creative rituals” (Kraemer 152). This kind of esoteric faith also bases part of its structure on Crowley. The best known branch of this faith is the Wicca, a system of beliefs structured by Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente in the 1950s. Among other rites, heterosexual sex in neopaganism is a symbolic representation of creativity (Kraemer 152). Sex represents both in these traditions and in Moore “the movement of cosmic forces”, “union of active and receptive energies: primal Force flowing into primal Form” (Kraemer 153). It is easy to see here the parallels with Blake’s ideas of positive contrariety, of energy and reason, Heaven and Hell, as well as an image of the regenerating and apocalyptic union between Albion and Jerusalem. Neopaganism has its own misreading of Blake; a kind of Druid Blake, pantheistic or naturalistic, whose forests and dolmens could be interpreted as positive symbols of nature, fertility and energy. One example of this kind of misreading is Philip Carr-Gomm’s idea of Blake in In the Grove of the Druids (2002), where he devotes entire chapters to Blake. In the 20 See also his references to Chaos Magic in “Beyond Our Ken” and Fossil Angels. 71 chapter, “The Mystic Shapes of William Blake”, Carr-Gomm states that he considers Blake an “occultist-mystic” (77), a classification refuted by critics like Frye which does not correspond to Blake’s works or philosophy. His interpretation of Blake is also somewhat limited to an identification of Blake’s fourfold division of the universe with other occult concepts, giving them a supernatural instead of a poetic, historical, literary or imaginative meaning; for instance, he claims “Twofold vision … is psychic vision, Blake’s normal condition, when man begins to see” (79). In this way, Carr-Gomm falls into the error of considering Blake’s capacities abnormal, instead of being a manifestation of inspiration and imaginative power. Moreover, the author reproduces a letter from the Chosen Chief Ross Nichols where argues that Blake was indeed a Druid and became a Chief of the Order in 1804, citing as proof the Chichester Assizes for 11 January of the same year (Nichols qtd. in Carr-Gomm 80-81). Nichols argues as well that Blake decided to maintain his position secret. By these means, Carr-Gomm, himself a Druid, tries to claim that Blake’s system is Druidic and is integrated in the teachings of the Order. Most of Blake’s references to ancient Norse, Celtic or Classical religions diverge from modern Druidic teachings, though he occasionally refers to the unfallen Druids, suggesting that he believed the Druids were in origin positive figures. But Blake’s central idea is that religion is in itself oppressive when it ceases to be poetry. Except in those branches of neopaganism that adopt Chaos Magic assumptions about the fictionality of myth, Blake and neopaganism (especially of a New Age kind) are quite at odds. Although Moore’s early works convey a sense of ancient religions more akin to New Age concepts, as in V for Vendetta, in later works such as From Hell, he reads ancient religious symbols and druidic practices through Blake’s lens as oppressive instruments of mental tyranny. The interest of occulture in Blake was motivated by its affinity with his ideas about contrariety and polarity, the revitalising power of sexual energies, his opposition to conventional religious morality, and to prescriptivism in the dimensions of art and spirituality. Moore’s understanding of Blake was coloured by the misreadings of Huxley and Crowley, which initially led him to overlook Blake’s notion of Self-Annihilation and to occasionally conflate Blake’s vision with the psychedelic experiences that ultimately insist in the notion of an abnormal or pathological Blake. In my analysis I will highlight the presence of these occult interpretations of Blake in Moore’s texts and how he became increasingly aware of their problems. 2.4. WILLIAM BLAKE IN BRITISH COMICS: ALAN MOORE VS GRANT MORRISON Moore was not the only comics writer to draw inspiration from Blake. On the contrary, his work must be understood as a product of the interplay of different voices that converged in the environment of British comics in the 1980s. I will show that there was often a dialogue, commentary and reply, although not necessarily explicit, between the authors of comic books. Large numbers of comics writers have used Blake in their works, among them J. M. DeMatteis in “Kraven’s Last Hunt” (1987), Mike Mignola in Hellboy (running from 1993 to the present), Garth Ennis in The Punisher: Tyger (2006) and Robert Crumb in his Book of Genesis (2009). I am going to focus specifically the controversial relationship between Moore and a famous contemporary, the Scottish writer G. Morrison. The reason why I discuss this relationship, rather than, say, the relationship Moore and Neil Gaiman, another famous comics author and Moore’s personal friend, is that Morrison shares several commonalities with Moore; 78 instrumental reason, which is relevant to explain the opposition established by the Enlightenment between reason and imagination, and perception and vision. Eagleton’s approach to reason, law and transgression (3.1.3.2) accounts for the socio-political and individual dimension of the opposition between alienation and freedom, law and desire. This will complement the notion of instrumental reason. I will also deal in the same section with some of the psychoanalytic concepts Eagleton takes from Slavoj Žižek’s to support his theory, among them those of superego and fantasy. I will complement them with ideas about horror from Gothic Studies in order to account for the moral dimension of the opposition (soul and body, good and evil, repression and transgression). This section includes a detailed explanation of the terms diabolic, satanic and kategoros (from Whittaker “From Hell”) which, as I have explained in the introduction, provide more precision to the analysis of the opposition good / evil. 3.1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND TOOLS 3.1.1. Bloom’s theory of influence and the concept of misprision: the reception of Blake A part of this thesis is dedicated to the study of Blake’s influence on Moore. Moore’s reading of Blake is partly faithful, but also full of deliberate or accidental omissions, distortions, and additions that make up Moore’s Blake. I have found Bloom’s theory useful to understand the process of influence and of misreading. According to Bloom, it is the divergence from the original predecessor that constitutes the strength of an author: “[s]trong poets make … history by misreading one another” (Bloom, Anxiety 5). Misreading, or misprision will be one of the central concepts to understand Moore’s omissions, distortions, and additions as part of his creative process. In Blake, the workings of influence, reception and (mis)reading acquire a rich significance, but Bloom’s theory needs some revision before being applied to Blake’s and Moore’s case. For Bloom there has been a “diminishment” (Bloom, Anxiety 10) of poetry from the Renaissance to its “post-Modernist heirs” (10), which is incompatible with Blake’s notion of a vision that gets ever more crystalline and pristine with each rewriting. As Frye explains, Blake understood art as an improvement of understanding through time and history, not of aesthetic “quality” (Frye 260), let alone personal fame and immortality. In the sense that he rejects this transhistorical collective achievement in favour of the virile conquests of the individual strong poet rebelling against paternal authority, Bloom is a negation of Blake. On the contrary, in Blake, successive rewritings conduce to an advancement of consciousness and of art understood as a collective human creation: “Art does not improve its quality in the course of time, but it may lead to a visionary crisis in time as more and more of its palace becomes visible to poets” (Frye 323). A poet, by clarifying more the ideas of previous poets, reaffirms the eternal edifices they are erecting (Frye 323). Moore’s rendering of Blake can be observed through this lens as a result of a cumulative process of understanding. As the latest in a line of literary descent, Moore condenses what he thinks Blake was aiming at by changing or omitting what is accessory according to his own sensibility and reinforcing what is, in his view, the deeper meaning of Blake’s vision. Bloom’s notion of influence is inspired by the Freudian Oedipal myth; accordingly, the “strong poet” must murder the father, diverge from and distort his predecessor’s voice as a 79 crucial step in the process of poetic individuation. In the case of Moore and Blake, it is difficult to see any animadversion, however buried, in Moore’s reading of Blake. Moore takes on a great deal from Blake’s philosophy of contraries and negations. Blake’s philosophy of contrariety is inherently incompatible with negation, with killing the predecessor’s voice inside oneself, as Bloom has it. It encourages collaboration (even if it means opposition) across centuries with the predecessors. This means Moore is not a strong poet in Bloom’s sense. Bloom’s Nietzschean reading of Blake also determines the problems implied in his notions of influence. There have been many critics before him, especially in the Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist periods, that based their appreciation of Blake on ideas of vital power (Trodd 289). Count Harry Kessler, for instance, wrote about Blake’s art in his diary in 1895, after being shown his artwork in London. His view is of a “primal” Blake (Trodd 290) whose visual art he associates with “power” and “absolute freedom,” focusing on plates from America and Europe a Prophecy (1794) showing “isolated or combative figures” (Trodd 291). Following this tendency, other critics have read Blake as a Dionysian between 1890 and 1920, focusing on the idea of energy as an all-pervading “spirit of life” and on the self-affirmation of the individual against external forces (Trodd 293). These ideas led to valuing Blake as a spontaneous creator, as opposed to an idea of art as “constant refinement and elaboration of cultural forms” (293). One of these critics was Arthur Symons, who saw Blake as a struggling artist that defended “self-creation as primary human act” (Trodd 295), and applied to Blake the Nietzschean idea that energy goes beyond the dualism of Judaeo-Christian morals (295). This view does justice to some aspects of Blake, like the initial notion of energy in Marriage, and Blake’s dynamic monism. However, it entails a series of problems. Symons saw energy as entirely good (Symons qtd. in Trodd 295), whereas Blake moved past this notion towards that of imagination in later books, acquiring a more nuanced view of energy. He also considered Blake an anti-rationalist (Trodd 295), when in reality he adopted many aspects of Enlightened culture, especially critical thought and the defence of universal equality and human rights. Symons focused on Blake’s prophetic wrath against dogmatic rationalists (Trodd 295), instead of other merciful aspects of Blake, and on the grandiose, heroic and epic side of Blake. His is a Blake that joys and thrives in the division and conflict of the fallen world, instead of suffering, as he often did, and that ignores collaborative aspects of Blake’s poetics, celebrating a self-sufficiency (Trodd 295) that neglected Blake’s calls for self-annihilation and collaboration. In 1916, John Cowper Powys identified Blake with the Nietzschean child and his self-sufficiency (Trodd 298), and most critics at this time thought Blake belonged to this strong type of battle-hardened artist (Trodd 300). A. R. Orage, inspired by Yeats’s works on Blake, went as far as saying that Dionysos is the destroyer of forms, and that Blake was a Dionysian, a prophet of “pure energy”, ostensibly destroying forms to liberate the infinite (Orage qtd. in Trodd 300). Blake’s vindications of outline severely contradict this idea of Blake as an artist that would practise the “worship of raw energy” (Trodd 302). This tense, muscular, hammer-wielding Blake contributed to Bloom’s idea of Blake as a strong, lonely, powerful poet that finds his own voice by antagonising his predecessors and traditions. A clear example of Moore’s attitude towards influence is in Providence, where the protagonist embodies a tragic but collaborative notion of authorship. Robert Black dies, and his inspiration becomes integrated with H. P. Lovecraft’s work, which in turn is redefined as a collective effort of several generations of writers and artists, rather than the result of a male ego triumphing over a predecessor, which would be the case if Black’s voice overcame Lovecraft’s. 80 This mechanism has more to do with Blakean Self-Annihilation and Blake’s notion of the construction of the eternal edifice of art than with Bloom’s struggle between ephebe and predecessor, which at some points appears like a phallocentric, narcissistic game.25 Blake’s attitude towards Milton, even where he disagreed with Milton’s vision is of opposition and not of negation. Due to these objections to the notion of “strong poet”, I will not focus on that aspect of Bloom’s theory, but on the terms of misreading, misprision, clinamen and tessera, which can prove useful for my study of Moore’s reception of Blake, and specifically for the kinds of effects of Moore’s readings of Blake. My objection to the strong poet’s violent, Oedipal and patriarchal connotations, does not mean that I exclude the anxiety component from the process of influence. There is an obvious component of anxiety in Blake whenever we turn to the material conditions of creation of the illuminated books. Blake and his wife Catherine went through times of precarious subsistence and poverty. In the psychoanalytic sense Bloom refers to, Blake, even if he was a “denier[s] of influence” (Bloom, Anxiety 56),26 went through anxiety, evident in his need to distinguish Milton from his own Shadow or Covering Cherub (Damon 279). Milton’s Shadow haunted Blake, who thought this Shadow was Milton’s “delusion” (Damon 369). Blake assimilated Milton and sorted the parts where he thought Milton was wrong or unclear. Although this might seem to contradict my earlier rejection of the notion of strong poet, it is not: distinguishing when one’s predecessor is writing from his most authentic imagination or when he is being limited by the social conventions he is bound by is not killing his voice inside oneself. It is a painful process by which the poetic heir (mis)understands more deeply the predecessor and finds his own voice. The same goes for Moore’s reading of Blake. We could even speak about Blake’s Shadow in Moore’s terms: the Blake who depends on Biblical discourse and terminology, who ends up confusing woman with the Female Will, who cannot liberate humanity without recourse to Messianism. Of course, once the aspiring poet completes this process, the Shadow is acknowledged, as happens in Milton when he successfully confronts his Spectre, Satan, through opposition instead of negation, and Ololon’s Sixfold Emanation transforms into a dove and enters Milton’s Shadow (Damon 279-280). Bloom’s theory is important because it reminds us that, as Borges said, poets create their own predecessors (Bloom, Anxiety 141). This creation of the predecessor cannot take place but through the process of misprision. This is because “[t]he poet confronting his Great Original must find the fault that is not there, …. The lover is beguiled to the heart of loss, but is found, as he finds, within mutual illusion, the poem that is not there” (Bloom, Anxiety 31). In the case of Blake and Moore, it is possible to consider some of Moore’s Blakean echoes as actually his own projection to fill his perceived gaps in Blake’s poetics. Misprision takes place through the already described process of searching what the poet thinks is the truth of his master: he might 25 It is worth pointing out here that Lovecraft’s racism is acknowledged and subverted in Moore’s references to the author in Neonomicon and Providence. While in Neonomicon we start with a white male protagonist, the narration moves to a female point of view and in Providence Moore consciously substitutes the white, rationalist, post-Enlightened subject of Lovecraftian fiction with a Jewish, homosexual, imaginative subject. In the original Lovecraftian fictions, set in a universe that is indifferent to humanity, it is from the racist point of view from which the horror emerges: the sublime powers of the universe reveal to the insignificance of his anthropocentric and racist identitarian constructions of Western male control and agency over nature. The Blakean subversion of traditional notions of subjecthood, authorship and influence described in this paragraph are consistent, if not an integral part, of Moore’s attempt to subvert of the racist Lovecraftian subject. 26 Blake was a denier of influence in the sense that he tried to create his own system and become independent of the influence of previous authors. Even if he saw himself as part of a poetic edifice where everyone’s influence is important, he aspired to discover the element in his own voice that allowed him to clarify the vision of his predecessors. 81 be wrong, seeing something (or seeing a lack) that is not there, but this is the stepping stone for him to achieve his own voice. There are in Moore specific traits of some of Bloom’s revisionary moments. As in clinamen and tessera, Moore tries to “correct and complete” (Bloom, Anxiety 121-122) the legacy of predecessors like Blake. Clinamen is a swerving away from the direction of the predecessor (Bloom, Anxiety 14). It is characterised as a condition “whose fundamental assumption is that the precursor went wrong by failing to swerve …” (85). Moore swerves from Blake by striving to find other forms of salvation outside of Christian formulas, by giving a more central role to woman and by trying to step out of systems instead of creating his own. Tessera is also another useful concept that consists in a completion of previous legacy going further from where predecessors had stopped. According to Bloom “the later poet provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise ‘truncated’ precursor poem and poet, a ‘completion’ that is as much misprision as a revisionary swerve is.” Tessera entails that the disciple’s contribution is presented as essential to the continuity of the predecessor: “the tessera represents any later poet’s attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor’s Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe” (66, 67). With his Blake, Moore appears to be attempting to enhance the contours of the revolutionary, visionary and gender-conscious Blake into a postmodern Blake in which these aspects are the focus. Moore’s reading implies he thought those were the ideas Blake was getting close to, but could not develop to their conclusions at the historical moment he occupied. I would like to stress here that I do not mean that Blake is a sort of Postmodern relativist, but that Moore’s way of reading Blake provokes this distortion, as did Carter or Rushdie’s reworkings (see chapter 2 of this thesis, p. 54). In conclusion, Bloom’s theory of influence provides me with the notions of misprision, clinamen and tessera, which will be used to explain Moore’s reception of Blake. These terms will help me to find the points of swerving, what Moore adds to Blake’s mythology and thought; in other words, what parts of his Blake are his and which are not, and in the process of misprision, what points reveal significant differences. 3.1.2. Williams’ theory of structures of feeling and its applicability to Blake’s and Moore’s works Williams’ structures of feeling are constructions, attitudes and ideas about the world transmitted through emergent discourses that writers simultaneously create and are immersed in. This idea helps to understand Moore’s inspiration in Blake both as a result of a similarity in their structures of feeling and of the circulation of ideas they share through channels that have not been fully institutionalised. The notion of “structures of feeling” allows me to account for common interests, themes and patterns in Blake’s and Moore’s works that cannot be traced through methods that involve empirical connections, objective and positive data. I have already outlined some of the cases in which the connection between a characteristic in Blake and Moore is supported by literal quotations, by Moore’s statements, explicit allusions to works by Blake or explicitly inspired by Blake. This is the case of Moore’s quotations from Jerusalem in V for Vendetta or of Visions in From Hell. These objective methods do not grant evidence that Moore has read or understood all of Jerusalem or Visions, however much they refer to the aforementioned sources. 82 To counteract the problems of a purely objectivist viewpoint, it is possible to recur to the phenomenology and hermeneutics of the Konstanz School, particularly Hans Robert Jauss’s theories of reception, and the notion of horizon of expectations specifically. A horizon of expectations is the framework of assumptions that determines the constitution and interpretation of a text (Jauss 22). A structure of feeling, therefore, favours a particular horizon of expectations. For example, following Jauss’s distinction between narrow and wide horizons (24), the structure of feeling of 1960s counterculture allows the wider horizon of expectations of a psychedelic Blake, even when a narrower horizon of expectations would have the 1960s reader assuming that what he is reading is English Romantic poetry (just to mention the common, popular school notion of Blake, and not the academic). This is possible because the developments that mediate between Blake and postmodernism created the “new reception”, the “altered aesthetic attitude” through which “an unexpected light falls back” on past literature (35). While many twentieth century readers have used their readings of Blake to support their own ideas, instead of using Blake to challenge themselves, many other artists living in the postmodern re-enchantment claim to have their philosophical grounds deeply shaken by Blake. This is the case of Ulver, the 1990s black metal band that turned to industrial music after reading Marriage. Marriage demanded from them what Jauss terms a horizonal change (25): their horizon of expectations (presumably that of a satanic artist) was defied by Blake’s complexity and depth. Jauss’s theory warns us against believing ourselves completely objective in our interpretations of past texts (29). Like Williams’s theories, Jauss’s remind us that literature does not merely reflect history, it creates history by liberating humanity from social, religious and natural conventions by showing us different ways of seeing the world (Jauss 43-44). There is an overwhelming number of cases in which the resemblance between a given image and another, or an idea contained in one text and mirrored in another, cannot be attributed to objective types of evidence. For instance, there is a striking resemblance between Blake’s passage of Marriage where the Poet’s visionary capacity reveals the Angel’s vision of Leviathan as an illusion created by his metaphysics, and Moore’s passage of Promethea where the devil Asmodeus explains to the protagonists that his monstrous appearance is due to an illusory perception determined by convention rather than vision. There is no explicit reference to Blake in the passage, no quotations or references to the inspiration on Blake beyond other unconnected quotations and references in other parts of the text. Yet the emphasis on the topic of perception and vision and the way the problem is treated point at the possibility that the idea behind Blake’s plates became ingrained in Moore’s inspiration through the similarity of the structures of feeling they were imbibed in and through Blake’s importance in Moore’s structure of feeling. Thompson already used the structure of feeling of eighteenth-century radical London to explain Blake’s unorthodox and apparently outlandish ideas and aesthetics. He proved that Blake’s vocabulary, style, ideas and imagery, are connected to several circles and discourses being passed on by the city’s dissenters in formats and channels outside of the official, and outside the usual education institutions. Until Thompson, Blake’s ideas had been more often studied through polite culture, ignoring that his mythology could be better understood by looking at popular pamphlets and sermons from religious and political minorities whose origins go back to the seventeenth century, like Anabaptists or Ranters (Thompson 8). Blake’s works diverge in many ways from the beliefs of these sects, but an awareness of the London radical atmosphere, composed of fluid and ephemeral forms of communication and culture, allowed 83 Thompson to unlock a more transparent and immediate aspect of Blake’s texts, instead of understanding them as obscure allegories. This is due to the fact Williams insists upon, that “[t]he pattern of change was not background … it was, rather, the mould in which general experience was cast” (Culture 49). Moore participates of a particular structure of feeling in Postmodernity that, like Blake’s radical London, includes an unorthodox view of spirituality, revolutionary politics and anticommercialism in art. This structure of feeling owes to the influences I have mentioned in chapter 2: occulture, psychedelia, 1960s counterculture and ecologism. In this structure of feeling, Blake is an important referent and is perceived (often in a simplistic way) as predecessor. Moore’s reading of Blake is an example of how, as Williams asserted, “the substance of the past” is “always moving” (Marxism 128). Blake is an institutionalised figure, but it continues to be dynamic, and Moore’s readings contribute to this dynamism. The same as Blake’s profoundly original vision is indebted to a wide array of popular discourses, the Blakes we can see in Moore’s texts and Moore’s own ideas, characters and aesthetics have their origin in an ample network of discourses. Without taking any merit away from his imagination, it is important to note that Moore’s works are also a product and a manifestation of these subterranean, popular currents of thought. Blake and Moore’s works are often considered to be of an “idiosyncratic, and even isolating” nature, but Williams’ methodological approach aims at understanding seemingly isolated traits in relation to a generation or period (132-133) and its structures of feeling. Michael Sanders follows Thompson’s arguments that Blake’s radicalism is a result of the cultural atmosphere, rather than an eccentricity: “this cluster of ideas, values and ways of interpreting the world was in no way the individual possession of Blake. Rather they were common to a milieu which can be described as antinomian, artisanal London” (Sanders 360). In my analysis of Blake I will use Thompson’s account of Blake’s cultural environment and the structures of feeling present in it. In my analysis of Moore, I will use the background information about counterculture, occulture, New Age, the comics milieu and anarchist and environmental ideas to define the structure of feeling he is part of. Blakean inspiration is in itself a characteristic element of the structure of feeling shaping Moore’s literary language, and to which his language contributes. This makes it easier to explain the influence of Blake in specific cases where it is unclear if Moore is particularly alluding to Blake’s works, but expresses similar thoughts and ideas. The notion of differentiated structures of feeling is associated to class differences (Williams, Marxism 134). Blake was an artisan and not a gentleman, which Thompson stresses in his reading, and Moore is also a writer from a working-class background. It is, therefore, more accurate to speak of “contradiction, fracture, or mutation within a class” (Williams, Marxism 134) rather than between different classes. My analysis will take an angle similar to Sanders’s when he compares Blake to Ray Davies, leader of the British rock band The Kinks, and their portrayal of the nostalgic image of the village green: Through their art both sought to represent and interpret the wider forces shaping their historical period. Moreover, both were critical of the social and economic changes they were witnessing and, crucially, grounded their critique in the values and practices of a local subaltern class fraction, understood to be under 84 threat (or even already destroyed) from those same social and economic changes (360). Sanders’s work helps me illustrate my use of Williams’s structures of feeling, and at the same time, provides another example of the structure of feeling I will be talking about when dealing with Moore. As I explained in the introduction, he is a direct heir of countercultural 1960s artists like Davies, and will produce similar readings of Blake, although I have tried to give a more specific and comprehensive picture of Moore’s background, adding other influences that have contributed to his unique readings. To conclude, I will analyse the selected passages considering the concept of structures of feeling. In order to do this, my blueprint for Blake’s will be Thompson’s comprehensive picture of radical London. In the case of Moore I have combined the different authors and cultural trends I have presented in the introduction and chapter 2, including contemporary occulture, counterculture, the world of comic books and political movements like anarchism and ecologism. These elements of the background will help me identify and highlight the points of convergence and divergence between the authors and their respective structures of feeling. 3.1.3. Instrumental reason and Gothic excess and transgression: a selection of concepts from cultural studies, psychoanalysis and Gothic studies 3.1.3.1. Instrumental reason So far, I have put forward the theoretical tools I will use for the study of the general aspects of Blake’s reception by Moore: Bloom’s notion of misprision and Williams’ structures of feeling. In this subsection, I will deal with the theoretical tools I have used to approach Blake and Moore’s specific concerns. These are the problems derived from the opposition between reason and imagination, perception and vision, alienation and freedom, and law and desire. All these are expressions of one basic opposition between natural energies and artificial conventions. It is the imposition of conventions and rules that causes the division of nature into what fits convention and what is excluded by conventional norms. Both Blake Moore are concerned with the relation between imagination and reason. Imagination for them allows human beings to perceive truth and make humanity creative, thus divinising it; reason helps give instinctive energies concrete forms. The reliance of the Enlightenment on abstract reason caused both a misunderstanding of reason and a disparagement of imagination that led to the opposition between these two faculties and to a dramatic reduction of the world to mere object of knowledge and exploitation. When abstract reason becomes dominant, the natural energies are smothered and imagination stifled. For both Blake and Moore, the devaluation of imagination leads to a stagnant and oppressive world, without vitality and joy, and to a humanity without an access to self-knowledge and creativity. In Blake, if energy becomes dominant it is formless, becomes corrupted, and engenders violence. In Moore, imagination without rational structures traps the subject in a maze of illusions and feelings that isolate them from the real world and leave them unable to create. The combination of reason and imagination is impossible without creative energies in Blake; similarly, the combination of reason and imagination produces art in Moore. 85 In order to analyse Blake’s and Moore’s criticism of abstract reason, I will take from Adorno and Horkheimer the notion of instrumental reason. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) they criticised the manipulation of reason by power and the notion of knowledge based on self-preservation. The concept of Enlightenment is used by Adorno and Horkheimer to speak about the oppressive consequences of eighteenth-century ideology rather than about the philosophy of the Age of Reason in general, for which the term “Enlightenment” is more commonly used. Moreover, the word is also applied to other moments in history where power employed similar strategies to dominate nature. In contrast to the promise of the Enlightenment “to rule over disenchanted nature” once the mind has been set free from superstition (2), Adorno and Horkheimer define the “ideology of the Enlightenment” as an “idolization of the existing order and of the power by which technology is controlled” (xix) and reason is transformed into an instrument of “enslavement” (2). The expression “ideology of the Enlightenment” is thus useful to identify those aspects of Enlightenment that have been used to justify the exploitation of nature and of human beings, and to distinguish them from those that genuinely contributed to philosophy, science, and art. This notion also allows me to understand certain aspects of Moore’s contemporary world, such as the banishment of myth, as part of this ideology: “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1). Both Blake and Moore seek to counteract this aspect of Enlightenment through a poetic re-enchantment that is humanistic and Christian in Blake and more constructionist and relativistic in Moore. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the ideology of Enlightenment appeared first in Bacon. Bacon argued against myth and metaphysics, restricted the good to the useful and expostulated against animism and anthropomorphism as remnants of primitivism (Adorno and Horkheimer 1-4). Blake severely criticised Bacon’s ideas and defended the concept of humanised deities and the divine humanity. Moore has also challenged Enlightened values by depicting aspects of nature denied by Enlightened worldview, often presenting them as monstrous returns of the repressed, abject from the perspective of the Enlightened subject and conventional religious morality. Enlightened “demythologizing” thought is denounced as reductive: The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter. …. Formal logic was the high school of unification. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable. …. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry (Adorno and Horkheimer 4-5). The Romantic criticism of Enlightenment denounced “the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection” (18). But for Adorno and Horkheimer, the target of criticism was the reduction of the “[t]he multiplicity of forms” (4) to numbers, the identification of particular unknown forms with abstract, already-known elements in a previous system. This approach to knowledge distorts new elements, making them more similar to something already known than what they really are, and homogenising them. Conversely, this makes it difficult to recognise and understand anything that is different from the already known. 86 This redounds in denying the existence of anything new, because this mechanism implies that nothing can work in a different manner. Its [the Enlightenment’s] untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It equates thought with mathematics (18). Blake criticised the preponderance of mathematics in his annotations to Joshua Reynolds (“God forbid that Truth should be Confined to Mathematical Demonstration” [E659]) and his distrust of abstraction and of the classical geometric formulations of nature can be seen in his emphasis on these to characterise the fallen universe created by Urizen. Blake thought that the mystification of calculation eliminates all metaphysical questioning and that it could be potentially disastrous for freedom and imagination, and hence for the human attitude towards nature. Emancipation from the mythical order through this supreme power of number and order over other means of meaning production led to the self-legitimation of rational system, to the rule of power without principle. This means that it is power itself, by virtue of instrumental reason, that defines the terms on which it is to be erected as the highest authority. As a consequence, power does not follow a higher guiding principle nor does it stop at any goal, it is completely limitless and arbitrary. In this way, the instrumentalisation of reason, has helped release the freedom of the markets from any external constraints, and has generated efficiency priorities that are actually “organized anarchy” (Adorno and Horkheimer 71). The circularity of this self-legitimisation of Enlightened ideology is also present in the fact that ideology determines perception so that every observation made by a viewer is going to confirm the worldview he has grown into: “The senses are determined by the conceptual apparatus in advance of perception; the citizen sees the world as made a priori of the stuff from which he himself constructs it” (65). Although this can be said of any ideology, it is the more adequate to define the ideology of reason, because reason having been set as the highest position of judgment in our culture, it is impossible to refute its primacy, which cannot be said about other faculties. As Blake pointed out in several texts, the sole adherence to rational analysis of sensorial perceptions keeps the mind closed to the perception of “the infinite which was hid” (MHH 14; E39). I am going to explain some of the processes involved in the entrapment in ordinary perceptions as opposed to vision in terms of an absolutised ideology of reason. In There Is No Natural Religion (c. 1788), Blake stated that the problem of rationalistic systems of thought was their self-containment and that they ignored everything that could not be measured by pre-existing structures: “Man by his reasoning power. can only compare & judge of what he has already perciev'd” (E2). Blake’s response to this was a re-enchantment of nature through poetry and prophecy, which included those aspects of the reality excluded by abstract reason: “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & 87 Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again” (E3) and “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only” (E3). Moore’s From Hell is also an interesting example of the thin line that has sometimes divided Enlightenment from barbarism throughout history, being the narrative of how a man of science ends up committing acts as savage as a lobotomy or even murder to maintain a particular order. This order, akin to the totalising use of mathematics denounced by Adorno and Horkheimer, is a Procrustean mythical architecture to which is attributed the power to contain everything. What cannot be contained in this architecture, however, is denied existence. The philosophical mutilation of the idea of reality to force it to conform to pre-existing rules becomes physical, political violence. This takes place when the worldview of instrumental reason informs power, and power takes advantage of it to justify and reinforce oppression. One example of this in history can be the consequences of the advancement of cartography on political, physical spaces; once foreign, far off lands could be represented, measured and divided, the West used these rational methods to redistribute entire continents into pieces and relocate entire indigenous populations (Harvey 251-252). When a subject does not conform to the rules that dictate what should be acknowledged as natural and how the natural is to conform with its rational organisation, physical and political violence are easily justified as civilising interventions. Rational organisation is not inherently harmful; what is harmful is its instrumentalisation. Blake battled these consequences of demythologisation. In plate 11 of Marriage, the loss of poetic meaning of the surrounding natural world brings about the beginning of priesthood, and thus the displacement of power from the poetic capacities of every individual to a caste of elect who uniformise society. There is also a parallel change from deities and spirits attached to particular creatures, plants and features of the landscape to the worship of an abstract deity that pervades all. The former corresponds to animism; the latter to the domination of nature and its differences to an absolute One. Blake was not an animist; he did not think spirits were inherent in objects themselves but were rather a product of the interaction of nature and the human mind before priesthood began. In animism, natural elements and beings help the individual to engage imaginatively, whereas in later religions, nature and natural objects are seen as distractions, illusions and obstacles blocking the way to God. Blake considered animism a type of spirituality that is closer to poetry and art and that the inherently abusive hierarchy and the human sacrifices of later types of religion, like Druidry. Adorno and Horkheimer pointed out that Enlightenment was also a form of myth insofar as it elevated abstract reason to a kind of absolute knowledge and power over the world which either subsumed or ignored and excluded the irreducible multiplicity of the real world. This is just another attempt to dispel obscurity in the line of ancient solar myth: “As a totality set out in language and laying claim to a truth which suppressed the older mythical faith of popular religion, the solar, patriarchal myth was itself an enlightenment, fully comparable on that level to the philosophical one” (7). In Moore’s From Hell, the villain Gull epitomises Adorno and Horkheimer’s enlightened subject. He identifies himself with the principle of light and the chthonic gods with darkness. He formulates his Enlightening mission in the mythical terms of solar Gods conquering telluric chaos Adorno and Horkheimer used to characterise the domination of Enlightened ideology: “The dark, chthonic gods of the original inhabitants are 94 denounced as monstrous (as in Blake) when contrasted with the figure of the marginal monster (Botting 172), that is now in a more central position and appears more often; see, for instance, the fate of Abby Cable’s father in Swamp Thing. This is directly associated with postmodernism and the demise of metanarratives (172-173). Systems, norms, conformity and the institutions that uphold them become more often and more clearly the sources of dread (172). These were already present in Blake, although Blake also struggled with the Gothic fear of the danger of revolution despite his radical viewpoint. Moore, however, goes on to question through Gothic strategies “identity, reality, truth and meaning” (Botting 173), thus going beyond Blake to challenge yet more fundamental narratives and concepts. Although both find difficulties in picturing a “final human order and unity” (Botting 173), Moore explores this uncertainty closer than Blake allowed himself. We will see this difference more clearly in the comparison between Blake’s America and Urizen and Moore’s Lovecraftian graphic novels. There is a basic difference between Blake’s “strong” and Moore’s “weak” Postmodern values. Although Moore criticises conventions and restrictive morality, he is careful not to create new impositions, which in Blake’s case end up emerging after the crisis of America and Urizen. In Milton and Jerusalem, he increasingly tended to find again strong solutions in Christian salvation, while emphasising more often than before the ways in which the world of matter becomes problematic for vision rather than the ways it enables imagination. Moore’s works have clear notions of good and evil, but stress open-endedness more often than the pinnacle-like quality of Blakean vision, which ends up restoring a new equilibrium based on a restructuration of a previous order. Moore leaves more often processes unfinished, loose ends, imperfect utopias and dubitative protagonists that must begin to take more responsibility and decide what to do after the revolutionary apocalypse (or apocalyptic revolution) has taken place. Satanic evil can be studied, following Eagleton’s theories, as having an excessive dimension. In order to explain this, Eagleton proposes a number of modern day examples of the evil effects of power when it supposedly defends a greater good, such as US foreign policy or Islamist terrorism. These are especially adequate to understand Moore’s concepts of good and evil, since they are directly contemporary to Moore’s works. As in the Lacanian perversion hiding behind good, these acts have an excessive dimension. Even if in some part they can be rationally explained as destruction motivated by the consecution of some goal (defending democracy, for instance), they are “excessive of its [their] purpose” (Eagleton 118). Was it necessary to torture and humiliate the prisoners at Abu Ghraib or at Guantánamo to protect democracy? When actions do not adhere strictly to what is necessary to achieve an alleged purpose, there is always some hidden pleasure derived from this excess. The judicial process in which Abby is involved in Swamp Thing is a good portrait of this perversity. Both the authorities and the society around her appear to take pleasure in her public humiliation rather than simply accomplishing their duty of removing a member who is (allegedly) a moral danger and a corrupting influence on nature, children and the community as a whole. Eagleton points out that in extreme cases, such as Nazi Germany, this perverse dimension of the law and power was expressed as an utterly necrophiliac fanaticism where death and destruction are celebrated as a tragic, apotheosic telos towards which the nation is conducted by the messianic leader (118-119). We can find another manifestation of this perversion in Spanish history in the fascist cry of “¡Viva la muerte!” According to Eagleton, behind this gloating in death lies a world-hating theology of depravity, where creation itself is also the fall (119). This kind of theology is portrayed by Blake in Urizen, where Urizen is the demiurge who 95 shudders with horror at the world of matter he has created, and then writes mysterious laws to control it. He perceives physical life as horrific and disgusting because it has trapped him in perishable matter and pain; he does not realise that if Los had not built the (mortal) human body to save him, he would have fallen further down. Blake occasionally presents life’s terrifying appearance from Urizen’s fallen point of view, but more often he emphasises the opposite perspective showing a world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour, as in “Auguries of Innocence”. Moore tends to emphasise the point of view of Blake’s visionary innocence. Although he also represents existence as an incomprehensible horror in certain cases (the point of view of some characters in Swamp Thing, Neonomicon, Providence, etc.) this is usually finally revealed as an illusion and in some cases is the product of the influence of different authors, like Lovecraft. Blake’s doctrine of contraries could be understood through the perspective of their having a hidden connection. This will be an important aspect of my reflections on the topic of evil in Blake and Moore, because it connects with the Lacanian idea that radical Evil hides behind supreme Good, duty and the law (Žižek 161). Blake’s Marriage is a very good example of the identification of Good with a hidden perversion of hypocrisy, presumption, self-righteousness and the enjoyment reaped from them. But apart from Marriage (the most cited text to emphasise a demonic, blasphemous Blake), we can find further examples of this awareness of how evil can masquerade behind apparent good, such as in the figure of Urizen, whose lofty attempt to find eternity and permanence actually results in sadomasochistic torment. Satan’s passiveaggressive holiness in Milton also reveals how destructive tendencies can hide behind injunctions to pity and meekness. As opposed to the abstract external law, Blake and Moore relied on an internal dimension that Blake identified with imagination or Christ and posited as the ultimate source of guidance for humanity. It is hardly surprising that this is also the source of passions which, though unruly from a conventional perspective, are secretly a “good” kind of “evil” energies. Moore takes up the notion of self-created imaginative humanity through a psychedelic perspective where the self is sacred rather than a Christian idea of internal guide associated with a particular deity. Žižek’s concept of the Other (150) complements and supports Eagleton’s theories. According to Žižek, alienation is not simply a result of the imposition of a purely mechanical and lifeless external law, but springs from the hidden connection between authority (superego) and the desiring subject. This connection is necessary to understand Orc’s associations with rebellion and transgression but also sometimes coercion and tyranny, or the ambiguity of figures like Moore’s V. Žižek finds the origin of the excessive, obscene aspect of the law in repressed desires (152), a connection that helps to clarify some great difficulties in Blake’s and Moore’s search for their utopian liberation. 3.2. CONCLUSION Influence, structures of feeling and instrumental reason are the fundamental concepts that will help to analyse the selected texts. The concept of alienation, understood as the imposition of the fantasies of absolute power, will be of capital importance to define satanic evil. This will be contrasted to the search for an internal, self-created guide that allows the self to be celebrated instead of condemned as the product of a fallen creation. Although in Blake the formulation of this problem is Christian, this formulation will be transformed in Moore’s works to a different 96 rendition based, first on psychedelia, and later on a subtle understanding of the occult and critical adoption of postmodernism. In order to apply these ideas to their optimal productivity, the methodology adopted will use a combination of theoretical tools from Bloom’s reception theories, Williams’ structures of feeling and Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea of instrumental reason. The procedure by which the selected passages from the above mentioned works will be analysed involves: 1) the comparison of both authors’ ideas about nature, vision, and evil; 2) the study of critical literature about these themes; 3) The exploration of the cultural context that affects the authors’ understanding of nature, vision, and evil and their criticism of conventional morality, gender, and sexual norms; 4) an analysis of the Gothic distortions and transformations of figures, such as Blake’s Urizen, Orc, and Ololon and Moore’s Gull, Promethea, and Asmodeus; 5) a comparative study of selected passages from Moore either directly or indirectly inspired by Blake. After the description and interpretation of each authors’ passage, I point out the similarities and differences in both text and visual imagery, and I elaborate on the reasons for these similarities and differences, and on their cultural implications. 4. ANALYSIS OF THE THEMES OF PERCEPTION AND VISION29 4.0. INTRODUCTION In the following chapter, I will analyse selected passages from Moore’s works Swamp Thing, From Hell, and Promethea, and contrast them with the passages from Blake’s works that have either inspired them or with which they have relevant similarities or meaningful differences. Additionally, I will complement these analyses and comparisons with some examples from V for Vendetta, Neonomicon, and Providence where they serve to provide background, explain, interpret or draw conclusions from the comparison. The first section of this chapter contains an exploration of the concepts of reason and imagination in Blake and Moore. This will be subdivided between a presentation of these notions and how they contribute to the authors’ critiques of materialism, and a discussion of the relationship of contrariety between reason and imagination in Blake and Moore and its consequences. These considerations will give way to the next section, which is the analysis of the themes of perception and vision in Blake and Moore and finally the chapter will include a conclusion that summarises the main results of the analysis. Inside these sections, the order of the works analysed is chronological wherever possible. This order helps to understand the evolution of Moore’s understanding of Blake until his knowledge of Blake’s works became more integrated in the narratives beyond simple quotation or allusion, and to underscore how initially simple ideas and imagery are later developed. 4.1. REASON AND IMAGINATION 4.1.1 Notions of reason and imagination vs rationalist materialism The idea of imagination present in Moore is developed at length in Promethea. The protagonist, the demigoddess Promethea, coming from the realm of the Immateria (Moore’s “Ideaspace”30 [Moore qtd. in Di Liddo, Alan Moore 86]), stands for human imagination. She is consistently referred to as an “emanation”, a term that recalls Blake’s myths (Green, “She” 740). According to Di Liddo, it is “the same conception of imagination that Frye developed in his 1962 essay ‘The Imaginative and the Imaginary’—a force that can transform mankind because it can create ‘everything that we call culture and civilization’” (Alan Moore 101). Not only does it create culture and civilisation, but also literally our physical world, an idea shared by both Blake and 29 In this chapter I will make references to my article “‘The War ‘twixt Sun and Moon’: Evil and Gender in William Blake’s Early Illuminated Books and Alan Moore’s From Hell”. María Cecilia Marchetto Santorun, Department of English and German Philology, Research Group Discourse and Identity (GRC 2015/002, GI-1924, Xunta de Galicia) Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Complete reference: Marchetto Santorun, María Cecilia. “‘The War ‘twixt Sun and Moon’: Evil and Gender in William Blake’s Early Illuminated Books and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” English Studies, vol. 100, no. 4, Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2019, London, pp. 387-406. DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2018.1555983. ISSN: (Print) 0013-838X (Online) 1744-4217. 30 Di Liddo defines it as an “immaterial dimension acting as repository for both individual fantasies and the collective imagination” (Alan Moore 86). 98 Moore (Green, “She” 742). Promethea presents similar distinctions between literal war and imaginative confrontation to those Blake presents in the preface to Milton. In Promethea, the advocates of Corporeal War defend abstractions (systems, politics, economies, flags, banknotes) and seek to maintain mental slavery to preserve their self-interest. The answer must be Mental Fight: the abolition of conventions, of the abstractions used to send people to corporeal war against each other. The first convention that must be destroyed is that which associates “the flesh” with “sin” (Green, “She” 741), that condemns matter, bodily realities, instead of the wrong ideas we have built around them. Urizen and his book of brass are holier in this fallen world than everything that lives. Promethea comes to help humanity claim their birth right, their true holiness, the “Promised Land” that is Imagination (Moore et al., Promethea 1; 5). This section will analyse some passages of Promethea and other works by Moore alongside extracts from Blake’s works that show precedents for Moore’s ideas about imagination. In previous work by Moore, like Swamp Thing, the consequences of Moore’s idea of imagination can already be seen. The monster is presented as a being that cannot be understood through an exclusively scientific and rational perspective; analysis and calculation are incapable of defining it. As we learn in issue 21, “The Anatomy Lesson”31, the Swamp Thing’s organs are not functional (1; 4). This seems to suggest that understanding his lifeform is not merely dependent on a conceptual arrangement of sensorial perceptions, which echoes the Blakean critique of empiricism. As stated in chapter 1, Blake and other Romantics thought empiricism produced a reductive idea of the mind, and failed to acknowledge the important role of imagination in unifying the perceptions of the world. He also feared the implication entailed in empiricism that the individual remains ensconced in his particular perceptions, unable to go beyond the ultimately meaningless data provided by physical senses. Without any capacities other than memory and reflection, Blake claimed, one could very accurately describe nature, but could never relate to it as a living entity, let alone create. In this section we will treat the notion of reason as the Blakean contrary to imagination. Reason is not necessarily a negative notion in Blake, which is why I refer to this relationship as one of contrariety. It is only when reason is erected as superior that it becomes problematic in his works. I will refer from now on to this negative aspect of reason in this chapter as Reason (with a capital letter) to distinguish it from the notion of reason Blake recognised as good. In any case, whenever I refer to “instrumental,” “instrumentalised Reason” or the “ideology of Reason” I will also be referring to these negative aspects, distinguishing them clearly from reason as a positive force. The consequences of the notions of reason are explored more than imagination in works like From Hell. Blake serves Moore to frame Gull's reflections on madness and civilisation, apparently based on rational structure. In Hercules Buildings, Gull remembers “London”, Blake's poem about the “Hellish city, haunted by the street-cries of its damned” (Moore and Campbell ch. 4; p. 22). Unlike Gull’s perverse relish on the suffering of the oppressed, the speaker in Blake’s poem (the Bard) sympathises with the sufferers and attacks the oppressors (Thompson 190). The cause of suffering is related to charter, the mark that authority has dispossessed people of what belongs to them by right, and concedes it back in false magnanimity. In Paine’s view, which was very influential on Blake, this was a mark of the buying and selling of the people’s freedom as living beings (Thompson 190-191). Gull’s references to Blake also highlight the myth of Blake’s madness, as he says that, for 31 Notice that anatomy is also a frequent Romantic concern and metaphor for the cold abstraction and unfeeling treatment of nature on the part of instrumental Reason. I will develop further the parallels between Blake’s theme of anatomisation in Urizen (pp. 123-124). 99 the poet, Bedlam was where “the mad had locked away the sane” (Moore and Campbell 4; 22), referring to the confinement of the individuals that were made sick by a mad established order. This reversion of values manifests, in the context of Gull's narrative, that civilisation is built upon wrong premises and that it uses mental health as an excuse to purge society of deviant individuals. According to Gilchrist, James Ward also defended Blake against accusations of insanity, with a remark similar to Gull’s: “there are probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so: that possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane people” (Ward qtd. in Bentley 373). In Promethea, Margaret, a prior avatar of Promethea, tells Sophie that for those who try to maintain the social and political structure as it stands, the idea of imagination the narrative presents must be avoided because it implies the unreality of the limits they have set or want to maintain: “There are some people with a vested interest in keeping the world as it is, because that's the world they have power over. You see, in the Immateria there's no rent, no tax, no property. There's no real estate, no boundary fences... no limits” (1; 5). This is what Margaret teaches Sophie: Promethea makes people more aware of the vast immaterial realm. Maybe tempts them to explore it. Imagine if too many people followed where she led? It would be like the great Devonian leap, from sea to land. Humanity slithering up the beach from one element into another. From matter to mind. We have many names for this event. We call it ‘The Rapture’, we call it ‘The Opening of the 32nd Path’. We call it the Awakening, or the Revelation, or the Apocalypse. But ‘End of the World’ will do (1; 5). What ends on this event, what is destroyed, is not literally, as Promethea herself explains, “the planet, or the life and people on it”, but rather “our systems, our politics, our economies… our ideas of the world! It’s our flags and our banknotes and our border wars” (1; 5). Another aspect in which imagination is approached by Moore in a way that is very close to Blake’s is his replacement of the supernatural by human imagination. Blake made light of artist and astrologer John Varley for believing that his “Visionary Heads” (drawn c. 1818) were really supernatural visions of spirits who had an objective presence in the room where he was sketching. Moore suggests that magic works, like Blakean vision, in an imaginative and not a literal way; that it is primarily a matter of mental forms and not ectoplasmic apparitions. The spiritual in Blake and magic in Moore work through imagination, without complicated, rigid systems and pretensions of objectivity. This way of conceiving the spiritual is a marginal, excluded point of view that is missing from hegemonic discourse in a post-Enlightenment world. The recovery of this conception of magic and spirituality and its re-adaptation to our times could transform it into the “new way of seeing the ordinary universe, and ourselves as creatures in that universe” (Moore qtd. in Kraemer and Winslade 288). Such a change of perspective would transform the world. When magic is explained to the reader in Moore, it is clear that it is not a question of following a set of rules and obtaining predictable physical, causal results, as a scientific paradigm would expect of any valid method. The following dialogue illustrates this distinction: [PROMETHEA.] How do I get back there [to the Immateria]? Do I open a gateway, like those demons did? [BARBARA.] No. No, that's physical magic. It's always sort of brutal and unnecessary. You oughtta be able to do it in your mind…. The imagination's the most important thing…. 100 [PROMETHEA.] Uh... So if I were to kind of imagine, say, these columns growing up through the floor, just as an example...? [BARBARA.] The ones with snakes and stars on top? Yeah, you're getting it. Now, the trick is, you gotta believe in those columns more'n you believe in this hospital. Imagine them more solid, and this world more ghostly.... (1; 3) The way to access the spiritual dimension is through imagination, not physically. The double page where this dialogue is illustrated emphasises the gradual unveiling of another dimension of reality through a process involving imagination. Imagination necessarily leads to empathy and responsibility for global problems, as it implies the capacity to imagine solutions that are not destructive, and it can foreclose the need to intervene violently in physical matter by changing first the way we see it. These are the arguments why Moore treats anti-militarism, like Blake, by arguing that war is opposed to imagination. The difference here is that Blake wanted to use imagination through the senses, and not in a Platonic sense, without them. This passage, for its emphasis on the mental, would be at odds with Blake’s idea that the body is important for the development of imagination. Even if he opposed a blind materialism, like Moore does, he did not oppose the body or physicality, which is the basis of art, and the very same paintings and books he made. In any case, Moore is here treating a very specific point of mysticism, which is very important in Promethea, but will later also criticise esoteric notions of magic in favour of more artistic ideas of it that of course require the mind to act on physical reality. Margaret tells how, when she became Promethea, she started to feel that her visionary capacities entailed social responsibility: All of a sudden I felt responsible for the problems of the world, for every avoidable disaster and plague. When the First World War erupted, it felt like a personal failure … war, all war and conflict is naught but the failure of imagination …. Mankind must imagine a way to rise above the perilous material situation that it has created. That's why Promethea is necessary (1; 5) The idea that war is a failure to achieve more imaginative solutions recalls Blake’s distinction between “Corporeal War” and “Mental Fight” (M 1; E95). Imagination in Moore appears as a threatening force for those who deny in the physical world the freedom of the imaginative inner space that is the equivalent of the human form divine in Blake. The human form divine in Blake is love, as the poem “The Divine Image” says. It is also imagination, because imagination, like love, allows humanity to perceive the unfallen aspect of the surrounding world and of other beings (Frye 124), in which aspect some of the original sense of unity between humanity and nature still survives. Imagination often takes the form of a great spiritual self composed by the human collectivity in a prophetic, visionary state (43) that would reveal what we really are: “Every one a translucent Wonder: a Universe within” (J 14.17; E158). Blake’s giants, universes of imagination in themselves, their dimension and unity with a humanised nature, and the language of building the city of imagination, create a sense of the spatialisation of this enormous human imaginative body. Imagination as the inner self of humanity and simultaneously as a spatial dimension connect Blake’s human form divine and Moore’s imagination qua Ideaspace. It is important to highlight how, according to the above mentioned passages from Promethea, Reason can constitute law in Moore’s works. This is the origin of the problem of moral law that has a great precedent in Blake’s criticisms of it. We can observe this aspect in 101 earlier works by Moore as well. Issue 53 of Swamp Thing, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, reflects on the interlacing of civilisation (more associated with Reason than with reason) and savagery (irrational monsters), and emphasises the authoritarian embodiments of Reason as law. Alec Holland attacks Batman’s Gotham City to force the authorities to release his beloved Abby, prosecuted for “crimes against nature”. This is the category society has used to label her relationship with Alec due to the impossibility to ontologically classify him. The court considered that her maintaining a sexual relationship with Alec, a being of uncertain nature (viz. a cluster of vegetable organisms with the consciousness of a dead man) constituted a crime. The authorities have to face a dilemma: if they give in to the monster’s demands, they will lose power, but if they do not, the monster threatens to take the city back to “primordial wilderness” (5; 60.4). The story develops an idea that we can describe through Eagleton’s proposal in Holy Terror. Disrespecting Dionysus by too staunch an adherence to rational law causes a worse relapse into barbarism. As Green suggests, in Swamp Thing issues 51 to 54 “Batman (…) becomes an unthinking agent of law, describing the eruption of the wilderness as ‘terrorism’” (Alan Moore 7). The contrast between an innocent perspective and an experienced one (almost as in Blake’s Songs) can be appreciated in the difference between, on the one hand, the narrator’s voice and, on the other the authorities and the media reports on the events taking place in the city. The testimony of people who are finding the return of the city to nature liberating, inspiring and fulfilling rather than distressing reinforce the narrator’s poetic language used to depict the changes in Gotham. In the episode “Natural Consequences”, issue 52, it is the children, the criminals, the dispossessed and the lovers who first become responsive to the transformation of the city operated by the Swamp “God”: “The children are first to embrace the jungle, shrieking in the low branches with juice on their chins. After them come the criminals, the derelicts, the lovers. By dusk, deep in the October cold, the first few converts remove their clothes and go naked amongst the hanging gardens of Gotham” (5; 54). In “Garden of Earthly Delights”, the media describe the placid return to nature in very different terms: …And all major highways leading in and out of Gotham are mossbound, making effective transportation impossible. As the greening of Gotham continues, almost every aspect of city life is being radically disrupted. Despite the advice of Mayor Skowcroft earlier this evening, many citizens seem reluctant to stay indoors until the crisis is over… And police are already reporting a high incidence of assault, looting and public indecency (5; 59). The study of the topics of perception and vision in Promethea shows the profound link with Blake’s ideas of Reason and imagination. Promethea evidences how these definitions are codependent, for which reason here it is necessary to start introducing the relationship between them, which will be further explored in the next section of this chapter. In the first chapter of Promethea, imagination is defined as “[t]he mythic bough that Reason strains to bend” (1; 1). In this definition, imagination is an organic force (a bough), and Reason is external to it, a force that tends to dominate or deform. This negative version of Reason appears, as in Blake’s Marriage as an external force that gives shape to things: “Energy is the only life and is from the Body” and reason is “The bound or outward circumference of Energy” (MHH 4; E34). Alternatively, if it negates imagination, Reason deforms objects, as Blake’s Reasoners, Angels, and the fallen Urizen do. The positive aspects of reason are more often highlighted in Promethea than in From Hell, 102 as in chapter 6, where Sophie, the new incarnation of Promethea, is taught the way of the sword, of intellect (1; 6), following the traditional esoteric pattern of the four magical weapons that represent the natural and spiritual elements or humours, the four Kabbalistic worlds, the cardinal directions, the four Archangels, etc. In this chapter, the Promethea Grace teaches Sophie: “Swords stand for reason and discrimination. Frankly, dear, they cut through bullshit. … reason slices through illusions and hallucinations” (1; 6). This highlights the purposes reason should serve to work in harmony with imagination, its beneficent effects of detecting deceit and giving accuracy. These notions of reason and imagination in Moore, and their relationship go back to traditional Romantic topics of dreams and the irrational. These constantly appear in Moore, starting from the Swamp Thing series, and the “sleep of reason” in issue 25 “Roots” is presented as a failure of reason (McGillis 203). This allusion to Goya acquires new meanings in the context of the ecological vindications of the series. The creature undergoes a gradual process of union between his human side and the natural consciousness he has access to by virtue of his botanic physical self. This allows the series to adopt his perspective, and to deal with problems such as nuclear pollution, the exploitation and destructions of the environment, and also to show certain social impositions against desire and freedom as equally anti-ecological. In the comic book, the sleep of reason is the refusal of instrumental Reason to acknowledge the destruction it brings to the planet, and the monster is the natural consequence, or the earth’s answer before the aggression of anthropocentric technocracy. The monster learns throughout a number of story arcs and issues, that the answer is not violence. The answer of the green does not imply the idea of a revengeful nature (represented by Dr Wooodrue), but rather, a deeper collaborative wisdom that patiently allows humanity to evolve, learn and take responsibility for their habitat. The swamp creature’s very nature questions the modes of perception derived from the concept of Reason that is criticised in Moore. The concept of Reason and the way it affects perceptual modes recalls Blake’s ideas, but only to a certain extent, given that Blake’s criticism of Reason diverged from later anti-rationalist Romantic criticisms; his critique was based on the recovery of myth, but also on Enlightened criticism itself. He tried to articulate a reason that was selfcritical.32 The Swamp Thing is an “unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope” (VDA 4.16; E48), as Bromion, the kategoros figure in Visions, calls the natural others that Western scientific discourse objectifies. For Bromion, there are “unknown” beings and places in nature waiting to be consumed and conquered; an attitude that criticises the eighteenthcentury idea of the infinite scientific and technological progress. The scientific and technical aspect of this knowledge is evident in the allusion to the “microscope”, which makes it possible to perceive more parts of the world. This empiricist approach to objects unknown, not unperceived, causes a “split between the world and self”; it is a Urizenic epistemology entailing the “objectification of the body” where “cognition is separated from perception and becomes two operations, sensation and synthesis” (Whittaker, William Blake 40). Visions also emphasises Bromion's ambitious thirst for domination and possession characteristic of the Enlightened theory of knowledge associated with progress, and colonial enterprises. This 32 At least partly, this critical position towards the ideology of Reason might be due to the influence of Muggletonian beliefs on Blake. Blake’s mother, Catherine Blake (née Harmitage) might have inculcated these attitudes on young Blake, as she learnt them from her father, who might have been a London Muggletonian leader (Worrall 13). Blake, in fact, maintained a certain notion that reason is in conflict with the innocence faith requires (Worrall 13) despite his rationally motivated criticism of religion. Muggletonians also preceded his belief that reason is not the central quality that defines Christ’s humanity or the human divine (14). 103 concern with the ways in which instrumental Reason distorts knowledge is commented upon in Milton. Plate 29 questions the way in which the scientific instruments distort the organs of perception: The Sky is an immortal tent built by the Sons of Los And every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place: Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe; And on its verge the Sun rises & sets. the Clouds bow To meet the flat Earth & the Sea in such an orderd Space: The Starry heavens reach no further but here bend and set On all sides & the two Poles turn on their valves of gold: And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move. Wher'eer he goes & all his neighbourhood bewail his loss: Such are the Spaces called Earth & such its dimension: As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner, As of a Globe rolling through Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope. they alter The ratio of the Spectators Organs but leave Objects untouchd…. (29.4-18; E127) This distortion creates the astronomical universe that Blake thought was a delusion, a construct that should not be mistaken with direct, imaginative personal experience. This is not necessarily a reactionary outrage on the part of the poet against scientific discoveries. What was problematic for him was the contradiction between the universe of “immediate sensuous and imaginative perception” (Damon 417) and that of “geometrical logic; psychological, not material,” (417) i.e. of mathematical abstraction reached through reflection. Blake thought this mode of understanding was beginning to completely negate and replace the former. Moore manifests a similar preoccupation with the absolutisation of Reason and the modes of perception it generates in From Hell. From Hell is a graphic novel retelling the Ripper murders, where the focaliser is mainly the criminal, whose identity in the narrative is attributed to Queen Victoria’s physician, Gull. In this novel, Gull’s theory is a mythical justification for the oppression of women. He thinks that “Symbols have POWER, … enough … to deliver half this planet's population into slavery” (Moore and Campbell, From Hell 4; 23). In his view, order is maintained by the prevalence of one great archetypal principle over the other. This he expresses as the “harnessing” of a great female “ocean”: “Man... attempts, like her [Diana], to bind the ocean to his will” (4; 25). This would ensure the predominance of light, good, Reason, and men over darkness, evil, passions, and women. In the narrative, power is held by white males who impose their notion of rationality and order. The consequences to this appear at several levels: political (the imminent fall of the British Empire), social (the few but decisive ways in which the women in the story endanger the stability of power), and psychological (the irrational violence by the suppression of affects, empathy and imagination). Gull’s esoteric theories are an example of a literal obsession for rigid systems and their application to society. His attitude is also a result of a lack of imagination, and precipitates its own failure for its lack of flexibility. Characterised as a scientist, thus associated to elements of the Enlightened subject and especially to the instrumentalisation of Reason, Gull is criticised from a Romantic or NeoRomantic point of view. He commits savage acts such as Anne Crook’s lobotomy, believing 110 demons, goes into a rest home where he begins to change his perspective, as is proclaimed on the streets of New York: “he announced a new, more spiritual direction for the band, influenced by ‘William Blake and that guy from VERVE” (1; 6). In issue 25, “A Higher Court”, Monty Sykes has changed his lyric style and tone at the onset of the collective Revelation taking place in the narrative. He now seems to be a parody of John Lennon, singing verses by Blake: “And did those feet, in Penny Lane, develop dark satanic blisters?”; “The long and winding Abbey Road of excess leads to wisdom”, or “Prudence in the sky with tigers burning brightly from afar” (4; 7). The former echoes Blake’s proverb “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (MHH 7; E35) and the latter evokes both “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity” (E35) and the first line from “The Tyger” that Moore had already used in Watchmen. This Postmodern collage of Blake with 1960s counterculture is combined with parody of Postmodern culture through the character and the vertiginous flow of information shared through TEXTure, a futuristic public information device. The same cultural collage is replicated on the cover of issue 10, “Sex, Stars and Serpents”, which mimics the cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. William Blake is among the crowd behind the main group of figures together with Lovecraft. These are some examples of overt references that connect Blake with psychedelic topics, but throughout this chapter more subtle and less explicit parallels will be examined. 4.2 PERCEPTION AND VISION In V for Vendetta, the first graphic novel scripted by Moore that has Blake references, we can already note the influence of 1960s counterculture, which will determine Moore’s reception of Blake in subsequent works with respect to the topic of perception. In Book 3, chapter 4, “Vestiges”, Finch, one of the secondary characters in charge of persecuting V, the anarchist terrorist, undergoes a process suggestive of Huxley’s Blake-inspired cleansing of the doors of perception. Investigator Finch decides to take drugs to understand the abnormal mind that is committing the terrorist attacks. Under the effects of LSD, Finch visits the deserted Larkhill concentration camp, where the totalitarian regime in the story had held V captive before he became a terrorist. Initially, the experience is terrible and upsetting, and he starts fancying he is an inmate at the camp. During his trip, he reencounters the people he knew before the regime executed them: non-whites and homosexuals. He experiences the suffering and destitution V must have felt and realises, like V, his inner ontological freedom (Moore and Lloyd 215). This revelation causes (in the trip) a deflagration like the explosion V engineered to escape the camp, and Finch runs off into the fields, taking off his clothes and finally standing arms raised in a V in the middle of a megalith circle: “Vaulting, veering, vomiting up the values that victimized me, feeling vast, feeling virginal… Was this how he felt? This verve, this vitality… this vision” (216). The imagery of the last panel can be compared to Blake’s picture “Glad Day”, depicting naked Albion with arms raised in an attitude of joy. It also refers to the ideas of British nation, vision, revolution and freedom from oppression. Finch refers to V as the figure in the hymn “Jerusalem” (Moore and Lloyd 230), which refers to Joseph of Arimathea, although popular assumption identifies it with Jesus Christ. The reference connects V with the values of alternative Britishness I have mentioned in chapter 2. Finch’s LSD experience presents a number of ideas that will be later associated to the use of Blakean references and imagery. First, the reference to a drug-induced type of vision inspired 111 in Huxley’s Doors of Perception. Second, the allusion to resistance to political oppression. Third, the visionary experience of freedom. Fourth, the association of liberation with a fiery consumption of limits, and fifth, the use of symbolism popularly associated to Druidry, which, however, meant human sacrifice in Blake. The difference between the use of Druidism in V for Vendetta and Blake’s works is due to the fact that probably Moore had not yet studied works such as Milton, where the imagery of Druids as oppressive figures is more frequent and salient than in previous works with which Moore might have been familiarised at this stage. In Blake, prehistoric structures such as dolmens and cromlechs are used in the illuminations and associated to Druidism, and to “tendencies towards repression and imaginative failure” (Johnston 414). On plate 4 of Milton, two figures representing the Daughters of Albion, stand with heir spinning tools by a rock on which a female victim lies huddled in fear, ready to be sacrificed, while the background depicts three dolmens looming over the figure. This contrasts starkly with Finch’s triumphant, Albion-like pose at the centre of the stone circle. By examining these passages, it is easy to see how Moore might have connected these previous ideals and images of psychedelia and counterculture and to his later growing acquaintance with the works of Blake. Some of them reappear unchanged in later works, such as the psychedelic narrative, while others change their meaning, such as the Druidic imagery in From Hell, which acquires a more sinister connotation of human sacrifice, like the one it has in Blake. Issue 34 of Swamp Thing, “Rite of Spring”, is one of the first examples of Moore’s focus on the passage from ordinary perception to visionary imagination that can be more specifically linked to Blake via Huxley. At this early stage of his career, as I have pointed out in the introduction, the ideas of imagination and vision were deeply connected to the culture of psychedelia. His reception of Blake is at this time determined by this lens, but it will be combined with Moore’s emphasis on the monstrous. V was already a monstrous character, especially from the point of view of his prosecutors. However, in Swamp Thing the protagonist is not a destitute, tortured human of unknown identity, he is literally a hybrid monster, whose abjection is even more emphasised when we see him through the point of view of characters that represent social convention. Another element that becomes more central than in V for Vendetta is the instrumentalisation of reason and science. Monsters appear as representations of that which has no place in a scientific, rational view of the world. They are the parts of nature that remain unknown. In “Rite of Spring”, Alec (the Swamp Thing) and Abby find that Abby’s consumption of the fruits Alec’s vegetable body produces is a means of achieving a deep erotic closeness in an act that could be considered sexual. Abby and the Swamp Thing’s rite is an “‘erotic’ exit from the rational and autonomous Cartesian subject of knowledge” (Johnson 23). Pages 210-211 convey graphically the characters’ change in perception once Alec’s fruit produces its effects. It distorts Abby’s visual perception, while the panel organisation remains relatively linear and conventional. From page 212 on, this change is amplified, not only does she perceive shapes, colours and light in a different, harmonious way. The panel arrangement begins to reflect the interruption of habitual patterns of perception and thought. On page 212, the succession of panels is semi-radial around a centre displaying the beautifully altered aspect of the vegetation. The dialogue reflects on the cause of these sensations: 112 [ABBY.] Oh, look at the swamp… It’s all of fire… Millions of birthday candles… And… look at me! All these strands of pearly stuff… Alec… what’s happened to everything? [ALEC.] You ate… the fruit… Abby… You absorbed a little… of my consciousness… my perceptions… [ABBY.] You mean… You mean… This… Is how you see things? [ALEC.] Not… all… of the time… Only… when I… wish to (2; 212). This passage reflects on the relativity of perceptions and how perspectives and modes of consciousness change our surroundings. In this particular work the visionary experience is dependent on intersubjectivity. Abby has access to this mode of vision by participating of Alec’s consciousness, which suffered a substantial change after his death and transformation into a vegetable-human consciousness. As Di Liddo puts it, Alec “can perceive the vital pulse of the earth and of the natural world. Swamp Thing is thus endowed with a proper ‘pantheistic consciousness’” (Alan Moore 51). As the action progresses, new changes are introduced in the representation of the perception of reality. Notice on page 216 panel structures are completely removed to reflect the change towards visionary experience. These passages evidence the affinities between psychedelic notions in counterculture and the Blakean idea of vision. In vision “the objects of perception … have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism;” (Frye 8) it is a “perceptive rather than a contemplative attitude of mind” (8). Equally, in the psychedelic experiences in Swamp Thing, what is perceived acquires a different, powerful significance, be it wondrous or terrible, and it is a state that rather than divorcing the individual from her physical senses and making her retreat into a mental world, vision takes its roots in sensorial perception, so that the visionary has physical sensations of unusual intensity from external stimuli. Both authors, Blake and Moore, attempt to substitute the Urizenic division and separation of the Cartesian Enlightened subject. In Blake’s Thel, for instance, the interconnection between all forms of life and natural elements is crucial. In this book, the Cloud explains to Thel that, even if he will live but some hours, he participates of the lives of other beings and feeds them, having thus his life continuity in them: “Every thing that lives / lives not alone nor for itself ….” (3.26-27; E5). Hutchings has analysed Blake’s defence of this idea as proof that his concept of nature and life draws inspiration from hylozoism, and is more interrelational than previous studies had shown (Imagining 62). Moore criticises the limits of the Cartesian subject by proposing “a paradigm of interconnection” (Johnson 27). The difference is that at least in Swamp Thing, “the expansion of consciousness is linked to the ingestion of a psychoactive organic compound” (Green, “Everything’s” 110), a pattern that immediately refers us to 1960s counterculture. On page 217 we can also see how in their union, Abby and Alec can access the consciousness of every creature on earth, each perceived now almost as “an immense world of delight” (Blake, MHH 7; E35), including vermin like rats and processes like death or decay. These natural elements and processes are contemplated as part of a larger order of nature in which the Blakean dictum “every thing that lives is Holy” (MHH 27; E45), implying that “all true desire is sacred” (Bloom, Introduction 23) is applicable. Like Blakean visionaries, the characters see beyond appearances and go deeper than superficial perceptions: “The imagination in seeing a bird sees ‘an immense world of delight’; the imagination in looking at society not only sees its hypocrisies but sees through them, and sees an infinitely better world. 113 The prophet can see an infinite and eternal reality ….” (Frye 59). This opening of vision caused by the ingestion of Alec’s tuber is the imaginative change that will start the transformation of the characters, until they realise the wrong in society and begin to explore what the world could be like. Without this, Abby would probably not start her environmental group, and Alec would not learn that despite his enormous powers, he must let humanity acquire enlightenment on its own, and take responsibility to protect the planet. In this aspect, Moore’s idea of vision departs from Huxley’s reading of Blake to the degree that Huxley conceived Blakean vision as passive and contemplative. As in Urizen, where Urizen discovers that “life liv’d upon death” (Blake, BU 23.27; E81), in Swamp Thing life and death are experienced as a continuum where conventional morality and values are out of the picture, as they delight even in the rat killing its prey: “There is no contradiction… only the pulse. The pulse within the world. Within us, Within me” (2; 217). From a visual perspective, it is important to note that “Rite of Spring” is full of representations of opposites in union that reminds of the visual contrast between heaven and hell in Marriage. Pages 214-215 show the human and the monstrous hand clasped together from each side of the page, with a symmetrical disposition of two red eye-shaped orbs at each side; from the Swamp Thing’s side, the orb extends roots, and from the one at Abby’s side has a spine growing from it, underlining the complementarity and union of vegetable / natural and animal / human selves. Another example is pages 218-219 with Abby on one side and the Swamp Thing on the other, again as the animal and the vegetable, the human and nature, united through a heart-shaped form composed of leaves, roots and organs. These representations repeat symmetrical motives of union of opposites that can be found in Marriage, for instance in the title plate, where from each side of the plate two different characters representing Heaven and Hell (a man and a woman respectively) embrace. Eaves, Essick and Viscomi have explained that in Swedenborgian doctrine, the basis for Blake’s The Marriage, this apocalyptic marriage is a mental event happening in the individual rather than an objective, external culmination of human history (William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books 131). The vision of the union of opposites as an event occurring in the human soul (131) is a perspective that is shared by Moore. The contrast of the opposites in union is reinforced in Blake’s plate through the colours (blue for heaven and red for hell in copy H), and the different elements accompanying the figures. Thus, there are clouds on the heavenly side and flames on the hellish side. Instead of good and evil, reason and energy, Moore visually opposes human and natural, vegetable and animal. These depictions reinforce the belief in contrariety, in relationships of mutuality and collaboration rather than negation or domination that nurture the visionary possibilities addressed both in Marriage and Swamp Thing. Another Blakean resemblance in this work is from Visions. Although it is less likely that Moore had read Visions before scripting Swamp Thing, there is a striking interest in both works in excluded natural elements and beings, conventionally neglected as insignificant, repellent and prophane. In both works, they are associated with connotations of eternity and regeneration, subverting their usual association with death and decay. In the illuminated book, the protagonist, Oothoon, attempts to persuade her beloved, Theotormon, to embrace a more imaginative consciousness that would help him rise above moral law. His anguish is caused by his belief that Bromion’s sexual violence has corrupted Oothoon, and his inability to see Oothoon’s true infinity, her divine form, beyond the limits of the situation. In this passage, 114 Oothoon precisely recurs to the hidden aspects of nature, to make Theotormon understand how mistaken is his distinction between pure and impure, life and death: Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering church yard? And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave Over his porch these words are written. Take thy bliss O Man! And sweet shall be thy taste & sweet thy infant joys renew! (VDA 5-6; E49) The non-dualism of Blake’s Marriage has probably been an influence on these passages, through the intermediation of Huxley’s work. It is clear that Abby and the Swamp Thing, and other characters like Dave and Sandy, whose story arc is described below, learn to perceive “the infinite which was hid” (Blake, MHH 14; E39). They discover eternity beyond the appearances of ordinary perception through acts of “sensual enjoyment” (14; E39). The effects of Swamp Thing’s fruit not only depend on personal and ecological interconnection, but also on each individual’s perceptions. This aspect is explored in issue 43, “Windfall”. This issue contains evidence that a Blakean understanding of perceptions was assumed by Moore through Huxley, as Chester, a character introduced in this episode, is depicted reading a volume of Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell (4; 33). In this episode, the difference between the diverse states the Swamp Thing’s fruits provoke is expressed as heaven (or at least some spiritual consciousness) and hell (pp. 24-25). This happens when Chester finds a tuber proceeding from Alec’s body, the same kind of fruit Abby consumes in “Rite of Spring”. At the beginning of the chapter, Chester first receives a visit from his friend Dave, whose wife Sandy is dying of cancer. Dave is desperate to alleviate her wife’s pain and he mentions that Huxley took a psychedelic drug at the moment of his death (Moore et al., Swamp Thing 4; 17). Chester offers him a piece of the tuber he had been studying, in the hopes that its effects might ease Sandy’s final moments. After this visit, a man called Milo rudely barges in, looking for recreational drugs. Despite the fact that Chester says he has not got anything that fits Milo’s requests, Milo sees a piece of the tuber on a dish and asks Chester about it. Chester warns him he has not tested its effects, but Milo obtusely and disrespectfully insists in buying it, greedily picking the largest portion. As a consequence of their attitude and mindset, Sandy and Milo achieve very different results from the consumption of the same substance. While Sandy’s experience is peaceful, comforting, beautiful and spiritual, Milo’s is painful and terrifying. Sandy sees the world like Alec does and like Abby saw it in issue 34: with every living thing emitting its own light, and she feels at one and interconnected with all living creatures. On page 25, she is depicted in golden yellow, with a radiant halo on her head, while she compares her death to a loss of form, a physical change of state not unlike that of an icicle melted by the sun. The sun becomes here a symbol of the totality of life, its source, undivided into different beings. The page is correspondingly undivided into panels, the different scenes being merely juxtaposed. In this state, Dave and Sandy make love, believing that this act enables a temporary transcendence of individuality. This fact is expressed through natural imagery of water, following the previous metaphor of the icicles melting under the sun: 115 Droplets. All distinct, individual, with their own little highlights, their own little reflections of the world… And they run together and lose their individuality, becoming a puddle, a lake, an ocean, merging with all the other droplets… Flowing together… We spend our lives, pressing our bodies against each other, trying to break the surface tension of our skins, to unite in a single gleaming bead… (4; 27) Moments prior to her passing, Sandy remarks she can feel the sunlight. Dave replies that it is night-time, and it is raining, upon which Sandy clarifies she was not talking about any physical sun, “not that sun” (4; 29). After this dialogue, Sandy expires while her partner kisses her. Milo also sees the world like Alec after consuming his fruit, but in his case, he feels like Alec when he went up in flames after the bomb exploded at his lab (4; 22). Milo feels, like the Swamp Thing, insects crawling inside him, but for Milo it is a horrible sensation, the same as the roots tangling around him. He sees himself reflected on a puddle and is repelled at his monstrous appearance, closely resembling that of Alec: green-brown and red-eyed, with all kinds of vegetable parts growing on his skin (4; 24). As the action proceeds on page 26, he encounters other people on the street, whom he sees also as monsters: “Oh, God, this is what the world’s really like, isn’t it? I can see it now, we’re all monsters! We’re all deformed things, living in hell…” (4; 26) He is seeing what he actually knows he is, as later we know that he is not only an impertinent, reckless character, but also morally despicable: “In Jersey, I sold junk cut with rat poison. In Arkansas I pushed Juliette downstairs so she miscarried…” (4; 28) Finally, scared out of his mind, thinking he has been sent to hell while living, Milo is run over by a lorry. The contrast between Sandy’s beatific experience and this horrific vision resounds of Blake’s vision of Leviathan in Marriage, caused by the Angel’s “metaphysics” (19; E42), where the Poet sees a pleasant riverbank. The relativity and changes undergone by perceptions in Moore’s passages seem to follow a similar succession to that in Marriage, where the Poet experiences his fate as seen by an Angel, and then perceives it through freedom from the Angel’s impositions. In the section starting on plate 17 of Marriage, the poet is visited by an Angel, who tells him he is condemning himself. The poet dares him to prove it by showing him his “eternal lot” (19; E42). The Angel takes him through several places until, under the vault of a church, passing a mill, they see “a void boundless as a nether sky” (17; E41). Apparently, the poet will spend eternity in the Abyss. He dares the Angel to fling themselves into it; the poet is not afraid and suspects the Angel is. But the Angel indicates him to stand still, as they will attain a vision of the poet's fate: By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining [;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption. & the air was full of them, & seemd composed of them; these are Devils. and are called Powers of the air, I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot? he said, between the black & white spiders But now, from between the black & white spiders a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro the deep blackning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea & rolled with a terrible noise: beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire and not many stones throw from us 116 appeard and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. at last to the east, distant about three degrees appeard a fiery crest above the waves slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks till we discoverd two globes of crimson fire. from which The sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw, it was the head of Leviathan. his forehead was divided into streaks of green & purple like those on a tygers forehead: soon we saw his mouth & red gills hang just above the raging foam tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence (18-19; E41). After the Angel leaves, terrified by the nightmarish vision of Leviathan, visually depicted on plate 20, the vision changes into a placid reverie: “I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light hearing a harper who sung to the harp. & his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind” (19; E4142). Keynes (pl. 21) compares the illumination on plate 21 to plate 6 of America, and with the description of the poet in the “Memorable Fancy” where, after the Angel’s illusions had vanished, he finds himself sitting on a riverbank. The image seems to be in contraposition with the content of the paragraphs, speaking of the Angels’ arrogance. Blake offers an account of the illusions created by perceptions when they are influenced by religious conventions rather than by imagination. In plates 17-20, the representations of destiny are different according to the perspective of each character (the Angel and the poet). The idea of perceptions in this passage has surely inspired the contrast between the interpretations of the visions experienced by the characters in Moore’s graphic novel. The poet concludes all the terrible visions were due to the Angel's “metaphysics” (19; E42); conversely, when the Angel sees his own lot as a bunch of wild apes cannibalising each other, he exclaims at the poet “thy phantasy has imposed upon me” (19; E42). The Angel's perceptions were influenced by biased philosophical and religious concepts, such as simplistic concepts of good and evil and the idea of natural morality (Damon 240); the ironic theme the harper sang states the Angel's problem. Leviathan is revealed to be merely a reptile of the mind; its enormous and terrific appearance was caused by the Angel's prejudice, because of which he could not deal with the eternity contained in manifestations of energy. To the poet, they are enjoyable, and they appear as they really are, pleasant and inspiring. What is hell for the Angel is paradise for the energetic poet. In Swamp Thing, Alec’s pantheistic consciousness proves to be terrifying for the narrow-minded and selfish Milo. These passages are similar in their conception of perceptions as dependent on each individual’s consciousness, although other graphic novels will also treat these differences in a more philosophical vein. I will shortly go back to these plates from Marriage in the discussion of Promethea in this chapter (p. 129). “Rite of Spring” and “Windfall” express the imaginative, visionary capacities as the revelation of one’s true being and connection with the world. In “Windfall”, such revelation is depicted as potentially terrifying for those who do not possess imaginative sensibility, are not ready to confront such radical self-knowledge, or are too selfish and mean. There is another passage in the series that stresses the negative side of imagination and vision in issue 1, “Loose Ends”. On page 23 of volume 1, alcohol addiction is presented as another monster, through Abby’s first partner, Matt. Due to an electroshock treatment, he starts materialising horrific visions that could be associated with delirium: “There were things with no eyes and things like damp, furry rugs that giggled with children’s voices. There were things I can’t tell you about… but I fought them” (1; 23). However, Matt lies to Abby, as he can secretly control his visions 117 and uses them to satisfy his sexual appetite while both the visions and the drink isolate him from Abby. Thus, Matt’s visions are different from Abby’s or Sandy’s; they are a refuge in an imaginary world where he has control, away from the complexities of real relationships. They are also different from Milo’s, which at no moment appear even deceitfully attractive, neither they respond to the individual’s will as do Matt’s; in Milo’s case they reflect his stupidity and moral foulness. Matt’s are, rather than visions, hallucinations, although his control of them and the use he puts them to do indicate a darker side of imagination that tends to lock the individual away from the outside world, instead of uniting him with it as the visions (pleasant or otherwise) caused by the ingestion of Alec’s consciousness. In the case of From Hell, visions are also an important element in the narrative. These are mainly the visions experienced by Gull in several moments of the story, although other characters have visions as well. In both cases many of these visions have a premonitory nature, they are disruptions of the linearity of time (Germanà 145-146), and their content in many cases turns out to be true. Due to Gull’s perversion of imaginative capacities, some of his visions are more akin to Matt’s than to the other characters of Swamp Thing. From the reader’s point of view there is a great deal of uncertainty concerning the reliability of Gull’s standpoint as regards the authenticity of the visionary passages of the graphic novel. For example, in pages 26 and 27 of chapter 2, Gull's first vision is depicted. It is a mystical vision of the Masonic deity Jahbulon caused by a heart attack. However, Gull, despite being perfectly aware that it was the heart attack that caused it, chooses to interpret it as a genuine epiphany: “Quite recently I had a heart stroke, did I tell you that? It caused Aphasia: a fluxion of the Brain’s Right side that caused hallucinations. Netley, I saw God. I knelt before him… and he told me what to do. And Gull the doctor says ‘Why, to converse with Gods is madness.’ And Gull, the man, replies, ‘Then, who’d be sane?’” (4; 22) Whether to interpret it as an epiphany or a product of Gull’s deranged mind depends on the reader’s decision, because the narrative constantly undermines “rational knowledge and logic” (Germanà 145): fortuitous coincidences end up having global consequences, speculation and make-believe get amplified into prophecy and pretence turns into reality. Unlike in Swamp Thing, where Milo’s morality determines his capacity for vision and his impotence to induce, control and make sense of his “trip”, Gull’s morality does not prevent him from deliberately provoking himself more visions and interpreting them to reinforce his idea of reality. The result of this is the continuity of the violence he exerts and originates. In other words, Milo is stupid, but Gull is intelligently wicked, apart from insane. In several passages, especially in the chapter “Gull, Ascending”, we can see that Gull’s visions show him scenery, people and events the reader knows extradiegetically Gull could not have possibly known, because they happen decades and centuries after he dies. We can cite examples such as the TV set and the Marilyn Monroe poster on page 24 of chapter 7 or Peter Sutcliffe’s real-life murders, alluded to on page 14 of chapter 14. This proves that at an intradiegetic level, these could be understood as true visions. He has, nonetheless, a great incapacity to understand his visions in the right sense, and this perverts his visionary capacity. Corrupt interpretations and outcomes of vision is also an important concept in Moore’s later Lovecraftian graphic novels, and a point in common with Blake, since, as Green suggests: “Like predecessors such as William Blake, Moore not only understands imagination’s potential to redeem is bound up with its capability for destruction, but also unflinchingly explores the darker dimensions of human experience” (Green, “Darker Magic” 272). This deadly aspect of Blakean vision is present most of all in 118 America and Urizen among the works analysed in this thesis. In America, revolutionary energy appears as potentially violent and monstrous, not only from the point of view of its opponents, but also intrinsically bound to the Urizenic. Urizen shows how vision can also present to us the horrors of a wrong interpretation of the universe as merely material and mechanical. The most important and explicitly mentioned source for Gull’s ideas is William Blake. According to Gull's interpretation, Blake was a Druid, who saw the sun of Reason as a cruel deity: “Blake was a throwback from beyond the Age of Reason, from a time of magic thinking when the Gods yet walked with men. By faith, he was a Druid, such as praised the sun from Parliament Hill, yet Blake abhorred the sun. Talking to Calvin, pointing to the sky, he cried ‘THAT is the Greek Apollo! He is Satan!” (Moore and Campbell, From Hell 4; 12) This account does in fact remind of Los’s invectives against the “detestable” Gods of Priam and Apollo in plate 25 of Milton, who are said to have ruined Lambeth: And you shall Reap the whole Earth, from Pole to Pole! from Sea to Sea Begining at Jerusalems Inner Court, Lambeth ruin'd and given To the detestable Gods of Priam, to Apollo: and at the Asylum Given to Hercules, who labour in Tirzahs Looms for bread Who set Pleasure against Duty: who Create Olympic crowns To make Learning a burden & the Work of the Holy Spirit: Strife. Thor & cruel Odin who first reard the Polar Caves Lambeth mourns calling Jerusalem (25.47-54; E122). Gull is right insofar Blake thought the solar deities in this passage are sacrificial and tyrannical, and associated them to the absolutised Reason and abstraction he disliked. Asylum and workhouse (the looms) appear as concrete images of the human suffering cause by the order imposed by what these deities represent, under which education and religion degenerate into burden and strife respectively. Gull's lecture about Blake reflects the Victorian concept of the artist as a visionary but a madman. The source of this vision is Gilchrist's biography, mentioned in page 11 of chapter 4. Gull speaks of Blake with admiration, but places him among his enemies, “soldiers of the moon” (4; 21), representatives of the irrational of dreams, madness and poetic inspiration. He also defends the idea of vision and the supernatural as a product of a deranged perception of reality, which reinforces the idea of an abnormal or pathological Blake. From Gull's point of view, drawn from Gilchrist’s work, “Blake spiritually belonged to earlier ages of the world, since when, as Hazlitt has remarked, ‘the Heavens have gone further off.’ Our lunatics were prophets once, and had a prophet's power” (4; 11). Although not a throwback, as Gull implies, Blake did seem to follow theories about the loss of certain visionary capacity that was more spontaneous in ancient times yet became atrophied throughout the centuries. However, Blake’s version of this fall was vastly different from Gull’s. Blake blames the appearance of priesthood for the fall of vision, as we can see in plate 11 of Marriage, where he describes this capacity in the following terms: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. 119 And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood (E38). The passage is reminiscent of the Classical theory of the Golden Age, but its end is attributed here to the rise of religion and its use for social engineering. Later, he extended the reflection on this fall in his Urizen, where the Zoa Urizen embodies the primeval priest and all the errors of organised religion, together with its effects on human perceptions as the diminishment of imagination (see pp. 124-125 of this thesis). In Urizen, Blake develops his own myth of the origin of man, religion and social and political systems (Worrall 9), concluding the book with the message that his contemporary societies are subjugated under the Net of Religion (11). Urizen subjugates humanity through his holy book, Blake’s allegory for the problems with the authority and interpretation of the Bible, which other radicals were also debating at the time.34 Gull talks about Blake sometimes in a certain condescending manner, as if Blake was mistaken in rejecting the deification of Reason. In fact, Gull calls Blake “England’s greatest Holy Fool” (4; 12). Blake represents the visionary aspect of madness for Gull, “a transcendental guide, a druidic master revealing the secret mysteries that science and reason have failed to uncover,” an example he follows to derange his senses further and commit his atrocious crimes (Whittaker, “From Hell” 202). However, at the same time, Gull takes the side of what for Blake is evil, Heaven, Urizenic Reason (Green, “She” 742), with all its negative connotations in Blakean cosmology. Gull points out that the unconscious prophetic forces Blake represents for him are symbolically kept at bay by the shadow of the obelisk in Defoe's tomb, which fell on Blake's (Moore and Campbell, From Hell 4; 12) at Bunhill Fields. As he explains to his coachman Netley, the obelisk is “consecrated to the Sun God Atum” and is “phallic, for the Sun's a symbol for the male principle” (4; 12). Although in an urban environment, these architectural features are still both physical and symbolic devices of contention of the natural forces that would disrupt the established order (Murray 221-222). This explanation on the meaning of obelisks comes after Polly Nichols's dream about her brother setting Cleopatra's Needle on fire, and the meaning of the dream is thus made clearer and turned into a premonition of the women's fate encoded in the symbols of Gull's narrative. Notice that Gull prefers Egyptian architectural features when Blake consistently used them (especially pyramids) to signify mental slavery and the tyranny of geometry over living form. Thence how pyramids are depicted in All Religions Are One and Tiriel (c. 1789). In plate 7 of the former, the image shows 34 Gilbert Wakefield highlighted that the recording of revealed divine knowledge in writing made possible that priesthood took advantage of divine words to rule others for their benefit (Worrall 25). Alexander Geddes, in his volume The Holy Bible; or, The Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians otherwise called the old and New Covenants (1792), said Genesis had its origins in ancient indexes and oral tales, while the Pentateuch, he proposes, had been altered and it had not been demonstrably written by Moses (21). Volney’s The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791) had also put into question the authority of Mosaic writings (20). Blake’s parody was aimed at questioning the authority of Mosaic writings, and demonstrating that writings derived from them cannot be divine revelation (Worrall 20). At the same time, Paine spoke of the Bible as the work of “inspired penmen” (Paine qtd. in Worrall 25), thus casting scepticism over the divine authority of the Word. Dissenting religious sects, such as the Muggletonians, to which Blake’s maternal family belonged, were concerned with this problem. A Muggletonian author wrote “how can an Infinite Faith be fixt upon a Finite word[?]” (Silcock qtd. in Worrall 25). Even Blake’s mythological source, Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (1770), reflects on the myth of Odin’s invention of runes, thus contributing to Blake’s reflections on revelation, writing and their problems (25). That might have inspired Urizen’s depiction as a scribe, transcribing the sacred books in the title plate in a position that resembles that of the character Doctrina in Minerva Britanna, a book by Muggletonian writer Henry Peacham (25). 126 occult teachings, and thought Blake’s visions were supernatural rather than natural, albeit no less prodigious, imaginations. On page 16 of chapter 14, the images depict again Gull’s firstperson perspective, where he sees his scaly hands once more before the scene where Blake and Varley are sitting in a parlour talking. Blake is describing his vision of the creature Gull has become as having “a face worthy of a murderer” (14; 16). Instead of realising his fatal mistakes when acquainted with Blake’s vision of his spirit, Gull, when noticing the gentleman before him is Blake, wallows in the fact that he is one of his visions and takes this as a portent that confirms his macabre mission. On the last panels, while Gull entertains these thoughts, Blake copies him onto a notebook and Varley remarks: “It is indeed a fearful beast” and “What a horror!” (14; 16) On the following page, Gull’s voice is superimposed on a close-up of the final picture of Ghost of a Flea: “It is a marvel. Beyond death, he has caught me to the life. Caught me red-handed in the fourfold city” (14; 17). In Bentley’s Blake Records, we can find more details that prove the exact nature of Blake’s and Varley’s attitude and comments on the circumstances around the creation of the image and its meaning. From Blake’s friend John Linnell’s journal we learn that “Varley … devoured all the marvellous in Blakes most extravagant utterances” (Linnell qtd. in Bentley 341). However, he says “Blake claimed the possession of some powers only in a greater degree that all men possessed and which they undervalued in themselves & lost through love of sordid pursuits— pride, vanity, & the unrighteous mammon[.]” (341-342) Blake sketched the “Visionary Heads”, among them a first draft of Ghost of a Flea, from visions he had those nights, copying while the vision was before him (354). Varley thought these were appearances of spirits (355), although Linnell’s journal annotations above seem to suggest Blake did not literally believe these were spirits in the same way Varley believed so. Linnell’s autobiography describes Blake’s attitude as reasonable and open-minded, in contrast to Varley’s obsession with occult systems: “Varley could make no way with Blake towards inducing him to regard Astrology with favour. … Varley beleived [sic.] in the reality of Blakes visions more than even Blake himself—that is in a more literal and positive sense that did not admit of the explanations by which Blake reconciled his assertions with known truth” (368). Linnell also describes in the same text his sketch of Blake and Varley conversing, and comments on how it reflects the two different attitudes, thus providing more indications of the way Blake regarded both his own visions and Varley’s persuasion that they were genuinely supernatural: “Blake by the side of Varley appeard decidedly the most sane of the two” (368). As for the nature of the creature represented in Blake’s sketch, Bentley states “[t]he oil version is inscribed by Varley: ‘The Vision of the Spirit which inhabits the Body of a Flea & which appeared to the Late Mr. Blake . . . […] A Flea he Said drew blood. . .’” (Blake Records 359). The cup in the monster’s hand serves “to hold blood”, according to Cunningham (qtd. in Bentley, Blake Records 359). This is similarly recorded in From Hell, where Blake says “I shall have him wear a cup for holding blood” (14; 16). All these clues indicate that the passage where Gull identifies with the Ghost of the Flea proves Gull’s erroneous interpretation of Blake, as Whittaker commented: According to Varley, Blake considered the ghost of a flea to be the reincarnation of those murderers who were made so small because otherwise each one would be “a too mighty destroyer” (BR 352). Gull, in his depraved quest to become more than human, the great man who will dominate woman forever, has sunk to the lowliest of demons, the spectre envisaged by Blake who foolishly assumed that Blake spoke with his voice. Gull, ultimately, is an idiot – and far from a holy one at that – gulled by his own literal failure to match knowledge 127 with love and imagination and corrupted by his pursuit of a power rooted in repressed sexual desire (Whittaker, From Hell 203). According to this interpretation, Gull is a fool in the sense that his libido is fatally misdirected towards violence. He has failed to follow his energies in the sense Blake gave to them. It is clear he misunderstands both Blake and his own desire, which explains the reversal of Blake’s apocalypse of sensual enjoyment that Gull’s acts constitute. The last vision from From Hell is Gull’s spectral visitation of Marie Kelly’s cottage, and its striking parallel with Ololon’s descent upon Blake’s Felpham cottage in Milton. This scene is precisely associated to the reversal of Blakean vision: where in Blake a redemptive female spirit visits the poet, who asks her for help to heal his ailing spouse, in Moore a male murderer visits the victim he failed to kill, who shoos him away to protect her daughters. This last scene is the only glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak narrative, and an illusory one if we are to believe that Gull’s vision is not somehow showing the truth. The scene shows that, at least on a mythical dimension, Gull’s mission was futile since he cannot destroy or dominate the forces he wanted to vanquish. This passage is, however, deeply connected to the gender angle of the narrative, for which reason it is analysed more thoroughly in chapter 6 (see pp. 187-189). The theme of perceptions and vision in Promethea makes a return to the psychedelic concepts from Swamp Thing, which are reformulated through more overtly esoteric forms. The visions appearing in this work are strongly associated to imagination, more so than in From Hell. This time, in Promethea, Blake is not evoked as a counterpoint to false delusion and madness, but rather as a precedent in the philosophical positions that appear in the narrative. It is important to note for the purposes of this thesis, that Promethea is a secular apocalyptic narrative that inherits the Romantic conception of apocalypse as the consumption of our “illusory constructions of reality” (Kraemer and Winslade 276). This consumption is possible via an awakening of the imagination, understood as “a way to participate in the ongoing creation of the universe” (276). This is a utopian rather than an eschatological view that combines, as explained in chapter 2, a political kind of revolution and a change in consciousness of aesthetic and artistic nature (276). We will see how Promethea, as Kraemer and Winslade posit, reinterprets this Romantic apocalypse through feminism, contemporary politics and esotericism (276), which results in a Postmodern re-enchantment. As in the previous works analysed, Promethea also follows the premise that perceptions can shape reality, an idea to which Blake was an important contributor. The protagonist, the student Sophie Bangs, enters into contact with Promethea, the spirit of imagination, and becomes her mortal vessel. Most of her learning consists in her gradual realisation that “[w]e’re not experiencing any of this [reality, life] directly. It’s all a tapestry of our perceptions. Matter’s just a state of mind” (Moore et al., Promethea 3; 1). The whole of the graphic novels can be understood as an enormous exercise of vision. For the theme of the series, the development of an imaginative consciousness in the protagonists and in humanity, continuously requires the representation of vision, sometimes of a more poetic or surreal character, other times more theological, occult or mystical. There are several examples of passages depicting transformations that respond to this idea of the malleability of reality. The most representative have been selected to illustrate the theme of this chapter. Characters change their appearance depending on the mode of perception with which they are beheld. The most salient case is the protagonist herself. She can pass from looking like an average young student to be imaginatively transfigured into a radiantly beautiful demigoddess with a shining caduceus, wearing vaguely Classical-Egyptian armour and apparel. This is presented differently from traditional superhero comics, as this transformation is not explained 128 as the effect of supernatural powers or science-fiction engineering; it is inspiration that transforms Sophie, and many characters in the book are capable of this feat (like Jack Faust, Sophie’s friend Stacia or the previous Prometheas) or are imaginatively invested with a fantastic appearance by someone else (as is the case of Barbara or Sophie’s mother, Trish). Perhaps the best example of the transformation of a character in Blake is Ololon, Milton’s female emanation, who is initially described as a river of milk and pearl in Eden (M 21.15; E115), but later acquires the form of a girl (36.17; E137) before she reintegrates into Milton. Like Promethea, she is also linked to inspiration, an inspiration Milton feared but needed to reconcile with (Damon 307). Another parallel is found in the role of these characters garments. When Ololon reunites Milton, her clouds turn into a bloody garment that clothes Jesus at the moment of Apocalypse (42.11-15; E143); Promethea also changes her white and gold clothes for a scarlet tunic in order to preside over the end of the world. In Blake it is the imaginative eye of the very author that determines these allegorical transformations, although in Moore it is the characters that exemplify this process inside the narrative. Although not as often, and with the same complexity there are also cases where elements of the transformation are also symbolic, such as happens with Promethea’s garments. Ultimately, in both authors the whole world is the object of this transformation in the event of the apocalypse. The whole of reality is perceived under a new light and in Promethea this is accordingly represented in a more realistic, but also more luminous, style that stands out from the other styles employed in the rest of the series. Other changes include the spatial collapse of all cities in the world and history in the New York of the story, and different visions experienced by various characters. Each of them experiences these visions in a different way. FBI agent Karen Breughel, for instance, under the influence of the apocalyptic Promethea, faints and gets the illusion she has fallen through the floor upwards to a “roof” of her two-dimensional graphic existence. In her vision (Promethea 5; 3), she is lying on a roof composed of all the comics strips of Promethea we have been seeing, dressed only in a baby’s nappy. By her side, three titanic figures in deep blue robes with spinning-top heads showing multiple faces. One of them holds her by her arm, preventing her to slide down on the slanting roof. When Karen or the blue-clad giants speak, the bubbles are not circular, but spherical, and the words are freely floating inside them, in an apparently random order. In short, Karen Breughel's vision is a revelation of a higher reality outside her flat comic-strip, which takes advantage of the metafictional dimension of the story to represent the passage from ordinary reality to a higher dimension or mode of perceiving. Finally, when all normal perceptions have been disrupted and everybody has attained a visionary mode, in the final apocalypse, the first result is a chaos where dreams, both sublime and terrible, and ordinary reality coexist: a mother identifies with Virgin Mary while she holds her child up to the angels, a man walks hand in hand with a colossal angel-like creature, children chase fairies while demons eviscerate another individual, while a woman turns into a cubist Picassian figure (5; 5). However, the spatio-temporal crunch culminates in a series of visions everybody experiences: the primordial vision of Promethea as Hestia (5; 5), the Hermetic sun (5; 6), the Biblical Beast and the Whore conjoined (5; 6), and Promethea’s message. While she watches the universal hearth, she communicates humanity the ultimate unity of nature and mind, of humanity and divinity, of good and evil. This occurs throughout the last issues of the novel, 28 to 31. The tearing down of conventions and limits is brought about by an experience of interconnection (Kraemer and Winslade 286) akin to the one Moore already described in Swamp Thing. While Blake and Moore share to a great extent the idea that apocalypse entails the awakening to the reality of imagination, their focus is different. Blake initially depicted the Apocalypse as a very violent event, such as happens in Vala; this is because at the time he wrote 129 this work, he still believed in a historical revolutionary Apocalypse (Damrosch 186-187) that would naturally require the literal destruction of tyrants. In Milton and Jerusalem, though, Apocalypse acquires the more internal, imaginative meaning mentioned above. However, it recedes from view or is understated, as critics like Leopold Damrosch point out (187-188). Milton, for example, ends at the beginning of apocalypse, and does not go beyond that point. Moore luxuriates in the apocalyptic ecstatic visions and union of all mankind through the downfall of the psychic limits of the mind, describing multiple and colourful examples. Blake was more interested in the process that leads up to revelation, the struggle for union and regeneration, rather than the end itself (Damrosch 188). Imaginative revelation is, for this reason, a common goal for both authors, but rather than in Apocalypse, it is in the visions leading up to it that the parallels can be more fully appreciated. In order to better fulfil the objective of this study, and since depictions of vision are so numerous in Promethea, I will focus now on two larger passages where the contrast between ordinary perception and vision is more manifest through changing visions, through transformations of perception that change what is being seen. Not only can perceptions of places and figures (and accordingly their graphic representations) change with respect to point of view, but they can also convey different ways of understanding the process of perception and vision. Such is the case of issue 18, where the protagonists visit the sphere of Geburah, the realm of universal strength and severity, attributed to Mars. There, they meet the demon Asmodeus, regent of the place, who torments them. He appears first through the conventional Gothic figuration of a gigantic black spider, surrounded by a swarm of other arachnids that form nets around him. Behind the red background of the fiery sphere a black background with green fractals represents the chaos behind the ordered spheres of the universe the characters are visiting (3; 6). At the moment when they acknowledge him as part of their own human nature and take responsibility, the demon acquires a tractable human appearance, and they manage to return to the Sephira. Asmodeus proclaims: “Approach us with fear, with hatred and revulsion, and we will be fearsome, hateful and vile. Approach us humanely and with respect, and we will be human and respectable” (3; 6). The passage implies an important distinction between ordinary perception (associated with conventions and prejudice) and vision (associated with imagination and empathy). This metamorphosis dependent on perceptions leads us again to the Blakean change from Leviathan rising in a stormy sea of fire to the harper singing by the river bank in Marriage, plates 17-20. In the first case, an Angelic perspective had determined a conventional vision of hell and chaos, where for the Poet there was pleasant reverie and inspiration. Unlike in Swamp Thing, now what we have is not a character who is too small-minded to experience the consciousness of infinity without fear as opposed to other characters whose openness and honesty help them assimilate a psychedelic experience. Here, in Promethea, we have the same characters confronting a force of the unknown they first associate to a conventional idea of evil, and then they realise its true proportion, nature and meaning. This is more similar to the Marriage passage than the example analysed from Swamp Thing insofar as it is liberation from conventions, rather than the moral qualities and readiness of the characters what transforms perceptions. The visions in the chapter “The Wine of her Fornications” involve the knowledge of the feminine aspect of the divine, symbolised in the cabalistic sphere of Binah. This aspect is twofold and appears as the Crowleyan Babalon, who defines herself in negative sublime terms: “Then am I the World’s Destruction. / Then am I that Understanding wherein all things are concluded” (4; 3) and as Marie, who is characterised in more approachable humane terms: “Then am I the font of Pity without end” (4; 3). The disturbing and profane quality of her 130 apparition is none but the product of our incomplete understanding of the sacred feminine. After she has revealed her overwhelming taboo nature, the characters see her changed: [SOPHIE.] Barbara, look. She's changing. [BARBARA.] You're right, she's... No. No, she isn't changing exactly. What is that? [JOHN DEE.] She changes not. 'Tis but thine eye alone is changed, with comprehension (4; 3). On the page, we see Babalon transformed into Marie, who explains her previous apparition as a product of her fallenness. Her fall is itself a sacrifice made out of compassion for humanity: “In my Compassion have I not stooped Low, so that my aspect is cast down? Behold, I am the Shekinah. I am the Bride, and on the World's streets ragged go I, and reviled” (4; 3). This selfsacrifice makes her a female equivalent of Christ, and invests Promethea with the same sense, as this chapter reveals she is an emanation from Binah. The Shekhinah’s self-abasement is a Fall in a mythical plane, although as Dee makes clear to the protagonists, this mythical dimension is comprehended inside our perception, which is after all the factor determining the appearance of the deity. If we consider her through ordinary perceptions, she is an abject universe; our capacity for vision redeems her into a more serene form. This duality caused by the gap between perception and vision is replicated in the origin story of Promethea, also developed and revealed to the protagonist in this chapter. Pages 20 and 21 oppose the traditional, biased notion of the female embodied in Crowley’s “Scarlet Women”, resulting from a “bad” kind of vision, impaired by the inability to shake off the worldly ideas that bind us to ordinary perceptions. Crowley’s Scarlet Women were often talented individuals, but the role Crowley appointed to them, inspired on the myth of sacred prostitution, was often degrading and humiliating. Moore is here suggesting that such a magical role cannot bring any good into the world, at least while there are systems of oppression that make innocent love and freedom impossible, as in From Hell. This is “The Vision of Sorrow”. This is opposed by an apocalyptic and revolutionary vision of female divinity embodied in “The Child” Promethea, which ends in “The Vision of Compassion”, resulting from an imaginative power that is not “in its downward path corrupted” (Moore et al., Promethea 4; 3). The duplicity of the female side of God as Babalon and Marie goes back to the traditional association of the female with nature and matter, the corporeal and the animal. Moore’s rendition of this conflict can be seen as derivative from Blake’s interpretation of it. In Blake, Vala is fallen nature, and she is associated with figures like the Shadowy Female, the Female Will, Enitharmon, Babylon, Rahab and Tirzah. Especially these last three figures are forms inspired in the Biblical Babylon. In Blake, these are cruel goddesses of sacrifice, often depicted as harlots, or as castrating, virgin goddesses (Whittaker, William Blake 135, 165-166). Crowley’s Babalon, which then appears by the same name in Promethea, is also inspired in the Biblical character of Babylon, but she ceases to be a symbol of corrupted empires. Although there is no evidence that Crowley’s or Moore’s character is based on Blake’s, Moore’s allegorical interpretation of it as a fallen deity of the abject that can be transformed and redeemed into a positive figure of compassion does pose the question whether there is a Blakean influence in the way this duality is associated to the question of the transformation of perceptions.38 The nature of apocalypse is revealed as the consumption of appearances (as in Blake’s 38 See chapter 6 for a full development of these passages with respect to the topics of gender and sexuality (pp. 211-212). 131 illuminated printing) through fire: “Revealed to Man, then is my Inspiration come unto the Earth a child. And is that child become a blaze, where in thy time, Man’s World must be CONSUMED” (4; 3). This is comparable to Blake’s description of apocalypse in Marriage: “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true. as I have heard from Hell. … the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (14; E39). Blake conflates the mythical dimension of the prophecy and the abolition of conventions with his artistic technique of illuminated printing: “But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (14; E39). Similarly, Moore associates the change in the way of perceiving with the language of comic books and its combination of the visual and the verbal: “It’s also appropriate that I’m talking to you through the medium of a comic-strip story. … Words being the currency of our verbal ‘left’ brain, and images that of our pre-verbal ‘right’ brain, perhaps comic strip reading prompts both halves to work in unison?” (5; 7). This commentary made by Promethea directly to the reader suggests that there are also important differences between Blake’s conception of a change in perceptions and Moore’s. Illuminated printing becomes a metaphor for consumption of appearances, of an illusion of separateness between body and soul. Promethea refers too to the burning of the erroneous ideas about the world and the imposition of social conventions, but he formulates this in the last issue through the Postmodern popular belief that each brain hemisphere controls different faculties that should work in harmony. Although this is reminiscent of Blake’s collaborative union of opposites through contrariety, Moore’s formulation hesitates between different languages, the mythical, and the natural or (pseudo)scientific. In his last graphic novels, Moore has focused more on the Gothic and horror implications of his view of the opposition between ordinary perceptions and vision. This is especially patent in his Lovecraftian narratives. In Neonomicon, FBI agent Merril Brears is implicated in the investigation of a series of gruesome murders not unlike Gull’s in From Hell. However, in this graphic novel, unlike Abberline, she experiences a shocking, direct contact with the dimensions of reality we class as supernatural. The protagonists’ boss, Carl Perlman, does not believe these strange events are really happening, as when Brears tells him of the mysterious metamorphosis of the subject she was pursuing, the uncanny Johnny Carcosa, into a picture (Moore and Burrows, Neonomicon 3). After she refers the incredible happening, he answers: “That was some sort of illusion, some sort of fucking David Copperfield shit. No. I want you two chasing down the supplier in Salem. Let’s show the world we still know how to handle a witch trial” (4). They are more interested in tracing the origin of the unusual and suspicious pornographic material found at Carcosa’s domicile instead of focusing on the anomalous events. It would seem that the connection to Blake has grown much fainter here, overshadowed by the influence of Lovecraft, and the reception of Lovecraft in occult circles and authors such as K. Grant. As in Carcosa’s fusing with the wall painting and then disappearing, art in Neonomicon and Providence is visionary, but the vision is Lovecraftian. This choice serves Moore to exemplify the danger and violence implied in the capacity of art and imagination to erase the boundaries between worlds (Green, “Darker Magic” 269). This is a kind of vision that does not render the world more responsive to the human in the way Blakean vision did. If it is a responsive vision, it is responsive in a way humanity cannot handle. What is more, we are made unresponsive before the world to which these doors of perception open. It is humans that are more unreal, that become objects in this bewilderingly superior world of Lovecraftian entities. However, a series of important products of Blakean influence remain: imaginative vision, the [Document text truncated for crawler view.]