Christopher Rowland's Blake and the Bible is misleadingly named, since it says next to nothing about Blake and the Bible; instead, this is a set of extended captions to Blake's visual work, such as one might find on a placard affixed to a museum wall, but Descriptions of Blake's Drawings on Biblical Themes and the Prophetic Tradition in 18th Century London lacks the felicitousness of the former. Gather those placards for his etchings and illustrated books (but not for the paintings), flip though them, and you have this book, more or less.

William Blake was not only a painter and a poet, but considered himself a prophet of God, and thought every Christian should be one too. His work has attracted critical attention from its earliest days, and his body of poetic work is among the most-considered we have in English. Entering a critical arena so staffed with strength is then, itself, a bold—almost an aggressive—act, but Rowland is a bit timorous as a scholar. Often, rather than make a claim, he'll merely hint at a possible interpretation. His main method for this interpretation by implication is the questioning parenthetical, as in "There are also four cherubs at God's side (the four Zoas?), and above, two smaller angels," as though the statement, taken directly, would be too direct.

Sometimes, the evasion is harmless: "in the margins [sic] we have angels with trumpets possibly proclaiming a solemn moment." Others are rather more glaring: "Job's head is turned … looking heavenwards before a stone altar, seemingly offering a sacrifice" [italics mine]. When people see a stone altar and a flame on top of it, the smoke rising up to a celestial presence whose rays beam back as though receiving it, and penitents kneeling before it, that's definitely a sacrifice scene; there isn't any ambiguity present.

Sometimes, the waffling is downright silly. Having described one engraving in which "the open palm of the Almighty, which faces the viewer … has a mark at its centre," Rowland mouses forward this reading of what should seem an obvious symbol: "is it too far-fetched to suggest that this may be a reference to 'the print of the nails' on the palm of the crucified and resurrected Jesus?" No, Prof. Rowland, when one sees nail-scarred palms on the hands of a deity who has raised them in the classical posture of benediction, it is not too much to "suggest" that the artist may be invoking the Christ.

Perhaps Rowland's better off taking these baby-steps to claim-making, though. When he does come out swinging, I tend to disagree with his pronouncements. Of the Job series Engraving 17, which depicts a righteous Job kneeling with his wife, their hands folded in their laps and eyes raised in supplication while an embodied Jehovah lays his hands over their heads in blessing, Rowland writes "there is no subscription here to the notion of humanity having to grovel before a transcendent deity. This is insight, not submission." I don't think he could be more wrong. Not only do all the visual cues tell us the exact opposite (see aforementioned kneeling, supplication, etc.), but isn't the very message of the book that insight happens through submission? They aren't opposing principles for Christians. Realizing who God is allows us to realize who we are, which is, perhaps, the ultimate insight.

I don't want to belabor the point that Rowland is wrong about this reading (and many others besides in this book[1]), but it is an interesting way to be wrong. What I mean is, Blake is sort of a humanist. It's not at all impossible to imagine his holding a position like the one Rowland foists on him here; it's just that he's very much not doing it in this instance. Blake's caption beneath this image reads "I have heard thee with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth thee."

This, as it turns out, is a common problem. When an artist reaches a certain level of abstraction, weaker readers tend to take every gesture (textual or otherwise) as artistically significant. Two examples: Blake, working long hours on painterly minutiae around toxic chemicals, misspells the word "receive." A quick search reveals that "receive" is the 10th most-commonly misspelled word in the English language; I had to doublecheck it just for the purpose of this illustration. Rather than look over the error, which seems to me the gentlemanly thing, or inserting that adorable and passive "[sic]," Rowland suggests that the misspelling may be pregnant with meaning, noting a scholar who argued that Blake's rendering the "a" in "adultery" backwards (remember that the process of engraving involves making all the figures backwards) implies a resistance "to endorse a prohibition against adultery." This is a readerly technique in vogue since the grand dame Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Poetics, which argues that every 2nd-rate poet who can't be bothered to make a clear image is automatically trying "to problematize" the scene.

The second example of this every-move-is-meaningful approach has further-reaching repercussions because it impedes the actual experience of reading this book. Rowland opts to keep Blake's original punctuation and capitalization throughout, which borders, to put it mildly, on the eccentric. And so we read, "I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more that I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it."

There's no reason to do this. Blake was not, like e. e. cummings or Apollinaire after him, a graphic poet, wherein the capitalizations and/or misspellings of words are part and parcel in the process of making meaning. He was a graphic artist, and a poet, and a publisher of sorts, but not a very careful editor. When Blake fails to place a comma in a sentence where one is, by modern grammatical standards, required, he's not making a point, or bucking the system; he's just not being careful, and it doesn't help modern readers to leave his whimsical punctuation in place as though it's authoritative. It is authorial, but that's not the same thing.

Blake made some sketches for The Book of Enoch, left incomplete at his death in 1827, illustrating the rape of the daughters of men by the Sons of God, a curious aside in 1 Enoch 19:2. As he often does, Blake draws the figures nude, or mostly nude. In one drawing, two men are standing next to a supine woman. Here's how Rowland describes the sketch: "The two figures have halos and beams of light coming from the centre of their bodies. In the very middle of this halo of light, with massive beams projecting forth, there appears to be a worm and a drop of liquid coming out of it."

Right. Naked muscular men are depicted with "beams" coming from the "centre of their figures," and one has a "worm" leaking "a drop of liquid." The woman looks "uncomfortable," Rowland notes. Remember: these aren't Sunday school variety angels; they're the ones who "lay with the daughters of men," impregnating them, in which practice, it must be said, those "towers" and "dripping worms" would have been useful. I'm not trying to be crass, I just don't know what we get by avoiding the obvious description: Blake draws two nude figures with engorged genitalia. It's just another instance of Rowland's tip-toeing around the issue.

Of the Enoch series as a whole, he writes "these remarkable drawings lose nothing for being sketches." But they do. They're barely there. Blake was a considerate, if not a terribly disciplined painter. His genius is evident in his most considered work: paintings as colorful and intricate and artfully designed as his poetry. To claim that his notes-to-self about possible future paintings to make are every bit as good as the paintings they might have become is to cheapen the artist's actual work, and to be disingenuous in the process. These sketches lose everything for being merely sketches: not only the obvious things like form, color, a sense of weight, and clarity (the problem of what exactly is being rendered in the rape scene would presumably fade away were the subjects themselves more filled in) but also less tangible things like intentionality. For Blake to have sketched some sexually disturbing images in the margins of a private notebook is a rather different gesture than had he rendered them in his usual painstaking method, had his wife hand-color them, had them printed and offered for sale to the general public.

This is a problem endemic to modern academia, and perhaps to modern cultural institutions generally. When a (usually American) museum can't afford to mount a show of Picassos, they'll often hang some sketches, a transcription of a letter, and a notebook draft of a well-known work and have ten-foot banners printed claiming "PICASSO IS COMING." Still, I understand Rowland's instinct here. Romantic criticism is a rather well-trod path, having attracted nearly every major scholarly figure of the last century (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Northrop Frye, and W. K. Wimsatt all started as Romanticists). The burden of scholarly material extant on a popular author like Blake tends to push writers to the margins of his corpus in the hope of finding something "new" to say.

In a letter to his friend Thomas Butts in 1803, Blake explains something about his compositional process, that he had written "an immense number of verses … from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes thirty at a time, without premeditation and even against my will." In this practice of writing by otherworldly possession, Blake stands in a long tradition among not only prophets but poets as well. W. B. Yeats, though a Shelleyan in style, is a Blakean in substance, and would write by putting his wife into a trance, channeling spirits through her, and writing down what they said. More recently, James Merrill wrote his magnum opus The Changing Light at Sandover completely through spirited dictation received through the medium of a Ouija board.

It's hard to know what to make of these back-stories. On the one hand, they are compositional fictions that lend a kind of street cred to imaginative literature: "the lady of the lake raised up a sword and called to me" has more purchase than "I got this from Milt the blacksmith, but I'd be a really good king." Coleridge used it to such great effect that "the man from Porlock," who allegedly interrupted his opium-inspired composition of Kubla Khan, is now as much a part of the poem as its actual words.

Nor have the authors themselves always maintained faith in these supernatural methods. Yeats writes,

Some will ask if I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake called 'the pulsation of an artery', are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes … I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered.

If such stories of "possession," automatic writing, Ouija boards, and their ilk make you queasy, you're in good company. C. S. Lewis visited Yeats at his house in 1921, and wrote to a friend the next day that it terrified him, going on to explain about mediumship: "First, the record of proved fraud in such matters is usually very big and black. Second, it very often has extremely bad effects on those who dabble in it," and "the whole tradition of Christendom is dead against it."[2] Frederick Buechner, who was very close with James Merrill, wrote of his inspired methods, "I have always found something dim and slightly unwholesome about it."[3] I have too.

Rowland's book does provide a useful guide to the content of Blake's illustrations of books on biblical themes. He also builds a very convincing historical context for Blake's understanding of the role of prophecy in the late 18th century. But there are many important things to be said about William Blake and his relationship with the Bible. Is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell a satire, none of whose propositions Blake holds and which we should read like The Screwtape Letters? Was Blake's faith, if founded on a latter-day prophet model, destroyed by the failure of any of his prophecies to come true? What view of scriptural authority must one hold if indeed "every man" is to be his own prophet, re-writing Scripture through imaginative engagement? Alas, none of them are said here.

Mischa Willett is scholar-in-residence at the University of Tübingen for the academic year 2011-2012. His poems have appeared in regional and national publications.

1. Another example: Rowland claims that "one of Blake's depictions of the death of Jesus, 'The Soldiers casting Lots for Christ's garments,' does not show the crucified Christ at all, but foregrounds the … soldiers." Oddly, this claim is made about a painting that Rowland includes among the color plates, and so the reader can flip to plate 11 and see, as clear as anything, Christ crucified. He's right there, shown. It's the "at all" that jars, since, while the painting's focus is not on the Christ's body, he is still present: there are his arms, and the light coming from his face, and the cross bigger than anything.

2. To MHD, December 14, 1958.

3. Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: A Memoir of the Lost and Found (HarperOne, 1999), p. 171.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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