Few writers are more intriguing and provocative as instances of this ambivalence than William Blake. In his work we can clearly see both the revisionary approaches to the canonical text alluded to above in operation. Blake's most famous critic, Northrop Frye, idealized Blake's later efforts in the major Prophetic Books as a "secular scripture," working in a culturally vitalizing dialectic with the Bible, the model of canonicity in the West, and the most uncompromising model of any culture known. Harold Bloom has more recently questioned the dis- interestedness of this project by emphasizing the appropriative nature of Blake's, and indeed any writer's, imitation. More recently still, critics like Jerome McGann and Tilottama Rajan have called attention to what Rajan calls Blake's "counterpractice," that is, his "heresies against his own system" (198), pursued in his earlier productions, and typified by the vertiginous performance of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake's early attack on "all Bibles or sacred codes" as Rajan demonstrates, brilliantly marshals the ironic and intertextual resources of parody in order to enact a "heuristic" or "counterhermenuetic" reading of the Western religious tradition by arranging a series of visionary narratives into perspectival reversals which even have the tendency of relativizing affirmations that elsewhere in Blake's work are presented as unequivocal (215). The result of this strategy is a sense of the "genealogical" (as opposed to "genetic") capacity of romantic myth- making- - its negating prerogative to disclose the intentional, fictive character of attempts to recover origins through linguistic means (216). This perspectivizing also has the effect of juxtaposing with the traditional, canonical model of scriptural and literary tradition an intertextual model that questions the organic status of canonicity and encourages us to recognize it as a belated, revisionary "supplement of reading" (221). However, Rajan goes on to stipulate, this project is not radical. Rather, Blake's anti- canonical counterpractice tends toward the pole of what she, utilizing Kierkegaard's term, calls 'infinite absolute negativity'. "Even as it negates everything," a perspectivism that eschews relativism "may ask the reader to imagine that it does so from the standpoint of a truth that it does not yet embody" (256). Although Rajan wishes to revise a teleological reading of Blake's production, her careful analysis nevertheless repeatedly highlights the pervasive gesturing that takes place throughout the earlier works toward the canonical closure authorized by the later.

One of Blake's several strategies for consolidating his canonical practice (the one that we will principally consider here) takes the form, as Vincent De Luca demonstrated in Words of Eternity, of the iconic sublime, showcased with unprecedented richness in Jerusalem. Phenomenologically considered, the iconic sublime is the language of the redeemed and ineffably recombined senses, a language that approaches the apocalyptic condition of what Robert Essick has called the motivated signifier, or "language of Adam." Considered structurally, it strongly resembles what Thomas Weiskel termed the "hermeneutical sublime":

Here meaning is overwhelmed by an over- determination which in its extreme threatens a state of absolute metaphor, "a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else." Such a state is apocalyptic: it abrogates temporality, which is the necessary dimension of the syntagmatic flow. We are reading and suddenly we are caught up in a word (or any signifying segment) which seems to "contain" so much that there is nothing we cannot "read into" it. The word dissolves into the Word. (26-27)

The iconic sublime confronts us with the anarchic threat of unreadability, only to complete itself by producing the effect of an unforeseen and unspecifiable polarization of meaning. Weiskel's allusion to Northrop Frye's famous definition of anagogy ('a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else'), it must be noted, strikingly evokes Girard's description of the mimetic crisis, or crisis of non- differentiantation, the deadly social analogue of literary unreadability. In the hermeneutical sublime, the new and chronic threat of unreadability that Rajan documents in such detail is intensified to a breaking point. And this breaking point is experienced as an ecstatic recovery of transcendent meaning. And so with Blake's iconic style. Rajan, for example, has commented upon the "hermeneutical," or interpretation- delimiting function of the famous "vortex" passage in Milton (206), adduced by De Luca as the paradigmatic instance of the iconic sublime (81). As a verbal or textual incarnation of "identity," the iconic must sublate the differential structure that all critics of the sublime have noted concerning it into the sign of a radical monism- - in Blake's terms, our primal identity with the True Man, the Imagination. De Luca has explained that the iconic sublime differs from the more naturalistic sublimes theorized by Burke and realized by Wordsworth in that it "slips the poetic artifact into the privileged position of the sublime object or stimulus" (26), and thus humanizes it. And in fact the redeemed human body is invoked everywhere in Blake's writing as the fully revealed, canonical form of all discourses.

And yet, significantly, Jerusalem labors with particular emphasis to insist that the human being proper is androgynous. As Jerusalem herself reminds Vala in Chapter Four, "Humanity is far above Sexual organization" (79. 73- 74). True human identity is devoid of the very attributes that have defined humanity's historical being. This is to say that the eternal ground of all iconography is only known to us as an icon. Androgyny is iconographically significant precisely because it signifies a denial of historical being. It is thus a strikingly appropriate emblem for the feigned, or the fictive. Canonicity as it has operated historically, that is, as a "sacred code," is emblemized by Blake as that hermaphroditic monstrosity, the Covering Cherub. Chapter Four's climactic description of the Cherub, with its typological identifications between Egypt, Babylon, Rome, the priestly Judaism of the Second temple, and the very institutional Christianity that authorized such a typology, constitutes an indictment of normative religion-- a critique whose affinities with the Enlightenment are evident. The "selfhood" which occludes identity is an imperial unity maintained by "Druidism"-- blatantly authoritarian structures rooted in immemorial sacrificial violence.

Against sacrifice as a principle of institutional and canonical exclusion and inclusion, Blake opposes an array of terms that invoke a more benign principle of organization, one of the most prominent of which is Brotherhood. "Brotherhood" is how Blake refers to the androgynous sociality that characterizes eternal or Edenic life. It can also be seen as a discursive formation for the canonical organization of meaning. In a climactic harangue in Chapter Four, delivered by Los to a recalcitrant Enitharmon, Los schematizes, with a characteristically iconic effect, this redeemed sociality:

	When in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter
	Into each others Bosom (which are Universes of delight)
	In mutual interchange. and first their Emanations meet
	Surrounded by their Children. if they embrace & comingle
	The Human Four-fold Forms mingle also in thunders of Intellect
	But if the Emanations mingle not; with storms & agitations
	Of earthquakes & consuming fires they roll apart in fear
	For Man cannot unite with Man but by their Emanations
	Which stand both Male & Female at the Gates of each Humanity
	How can I ever again be united a Man with Man
	While thou my Emanation refusest my Fibres of dominion.
	When Souls mingle & join thro all the Fibres of Brotherhood
	Can there be any secret joy on Earth greater than this? (J 88. 3-15)

Those familiar with Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire will recognize that the triangular structure that Girard posits as the schema of human interaction, the triangle that consists of two rivals and a jealously shared object of desire (that may also, as in the case of the sexual triangle, complicate the situation with her own reciprocal and conflictual desire), is in this passage transfigured into a linear, chiastic, and therefore benign symmetry. The most significant thing we notice about this "hyper-conversation," as Robert Essick has styled it (219), is that its two subjects still require mediation. According to Girard's theory the only alternative to the deadly and unavoidable mediation of the shared object of desire is the reconciliatory mediation of the scapegoat or sacrificial victim, from which is mythically elaborated the prohibitory figure of divinity, who continues to transcendently mediate desire so long as the sacrificial mechanism remains functional. Clearly, at least in this passage, Man's Emanation performs simultaneously the function of the shared object and the sacrificial victim, with the transcendence symmetrically apportioned between the titanic identities (who are neither male nor female, but Man). In Eternity, this "Mutual Covenant Divine" (J 98.41) is accomplished without the cost or liability, presumably, of either object or victim, despite the ominous reference to "fibres of dominion." The sublime totality is only malformed when either Man or Emanation becomes discontent with it. Los is of course concerned with the perverse discontent of the Emanation, expressed by her obstinate (and terrified) resolution to remain female. Elsewhere he struggles with Albion's sullen insistence on remaining male. The desire to be male, we may surmise, is the desire to possess objects, rather than to fuse Emanations. The desire to be female in Blake's myth would then seem to be the desire to be an object, rather than an Emanation, to be aggrandized as an object of conflictual desire. It cannot escape notice that although Blake is clearly dissatisfied with the conventional roles that gender play in the production of desire, he does not reject its underlying structure, since although the divine Humanity is not male, it is Man. And although Eternity is a realm redeemed of objects, these redeemed objects are represented in a distinctly gendered, i.e. feminine, manner. This is a refinement of The Four Zoas' revelation that

	In Eden Females sleep the winter in soft silken veils
	Woven by their own hands to hide them in the darksom grave
	But Males immortal live renewd by female deaths.   in soft
	Delight they die & they revive in spring with music & songs
			(5. 1-4)

By the composition of Jerusalem, "female" by itself has become an exclusively negative term, as has "male" ("Males immortal" is therefore refined to the expression "Man"). Humanity, nevertheless, can only become immortal, become Man, by the willingness of Emanations to "die." It is this willingness, it seems, that distinguishes Emanations from females, just as Man is distinguished from males by his willingness to allow female deaths, to relinquish the insistence on unqualified continuity and indemnity against loss. ( In fact, this willingness to relinquish, or disposition to forgive, is itself often referred to as a self-willed or sacrificial death, as it is climactically in the case of Albion in Chapter Three of Jerusalem). The cyclical death and revival of Emanations, permitted, and perhaps even enforced by each Humanity, is what prevents them from becoming reified into objects. The feminine acquiescence to this cycle is what Blake also admiringly terms "Pathos." "Sublime" is the term reserved to describe the masculine negating act of forgiveness-- renunciation-- annihilation that perpetuate the Wars of Eden, or Eternity.

This reciprocity is, among other things, another version of the Blakean fictionalism-- epitomized by the sublime Poetic Genius of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell-- whose activity prevents Poetic tales from either ossifying into forms of worship, or, crucially, decomposing into mere intertextuality. That a sacrificial logic remains operative in this is also impossible to overlook. The relative innocence of this operation of sacrificial logic is due to the fact that the Edenic state is accomplished only in language, not in "history," and is indeed so configured that a historic implementation is impossible to imagine. The sacred passes through the fictive, to re- emerge as the sublime. But this is purchased through a perpetual deferral of the very closure that a canon exists to signify.

Mark Trevor Smith, in an interesting treatment of this problem, attempts to account for the perplexing engagement with closure and deferment that is symptomatic of Blake's cultural condition by taking his cue from what seems to be a self- representation of the poet/prophet's essential practice: "Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems" (E 154). This characterization turns upon a play on the preposition "with," and suggests the strategic status of the systematic (and canonical) in Blake's "cultural praxis" (Rajan 274). Smith's argument is most relevant to the issue of canonicity when he considers the passage from Chapter Two of Jerusalem, in which The Savior employs the scriptural canon as a kind of existential safety net:

			Hope is banish'd from me.
	These were (Albion's) last words, and the merciful Saviour in his arms
	Reciev'd him, in the arms of tender mercy and repos'd
	The pale limbs of his Eternal Individuality
	Upon the Rock of Ages. Then, surrounded with a Cloud:
	In silence the Divine Lord builded with immortal labour,
	Of gold & jewels a sublime Ornament, a Couch of repose, 
	With Sixteen pillars: canopied with emblems & written verse.
	Spiritual Verse, order'd & measur'd, from whence, time shall reveal.
	The Five books of the Decaloque, the books of Joshua & Judges,
	Samuel, a double book & Kings, a double book, the Psalms & Prophets
	The Four-fold Gospel, and the Revelations everlasting (E 196)

The passage catalogues the essential, orthodox Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments. It iconically depicts canonicity as the preserver of human identity from the peril of non- entity into which a revulsion from the plenitude imagination must plunge him. The ecphrastic character of this catalogue, its catachretic identification of textuality with architecture, mimics a state in which determinate meaning in its beautiful totality is advanced as a substitute for a catastrophic loss of being. But as Smith goes on to point out, the Rock of Ages is also in Jerusalem represented as the site of authoritarian usurpation:

This couch of repose, the pillars of which are books of the Bible, is from another point of view the same couch/tomb which the Sons of Albion have just brought for Albion:

	In stern defiance came from Albions bosom...
	...Albions Sons: they bore him a golden couch into the porch
	And on the Couch reposd his limbs, trembling from the bloody field.
	Rearing their Druid Patriarchal rocky Temples around his limbs.
			(46. 10-14)

Once again, the site of disaster is the site of blessing. (166-167)

As Smith concisely and somewhat hopefully phrases it, "Blake is constructing systems most coherently when he is smashing systems; Blake is smashing systems most vigorously when he is constructing systems" (175). In the context of this paper, we may rephrase his insight by saying that canonicity in Blake in inoculated by a certain quotient of anti- canonicity, or rather, that Blake's practice is never completely distinguishable from his counterpractice, despite Rajan's somewhat exaggerated assertion that Jerusalem pursues "a cultural praxis quite different from that of the earlier poems" (274). But cultural history casts it shadow over practice and counterpractice alike. Although Blake's myth advances the vitalistic canonicity of a visionary fabric like Jerusalem as a sacramental recovery of the very Emanation herself of the Giant Albion, it is impossible to enter into any explication of Blake's imitation of the Great Code without evoking the negating spectre of a sacred code.

We might briefly consider our own relation to this spectre. It seems clear that literary- intellectual activity today, so much more centered around the university than in Blake's day, takes its inspiration from the intertextual, heuristicizing counterpractice that is stressed in Blake's earlier production. That is to say, our characteristic stance toward canonicity is the more "readerly" of the two referred to at the beginning of this paper in that it adopts the more tactical strategy of dismantling the canon to the more strategic approach of entering into active competition with it, like so many of the monumental texts we address our own critical writing at. For example, in his essay "Blake and the Apocalypse of the Canon," Nelson Hilton makes a bid to recommend the Blake of Rajan's "counterpractice" over the Blake of Frye's "secular scripture." "As one grows more interested in how we make sense, and less concerned about what sense one should make, the canon's traditional works have less to communicate" (147). Blake's critical ascendancy, moving from 'mad' to 'visionary' to "contemporary" is, both through and despite Frye's monumental labor, a response to this acanonical or anticanonical pre- occupation with the intertextual process of signification (147). It seems to me however that we are responding to the same immemorial split between meaning and being postulated in the mis- recognitions enacted in Girard's primal scene, only we are actuated by the growing suspicion that meaning has traditionally functioned as a substitute for being, and that henceforth all quests for being (sought perhaps most recently in the critical pre- occupation with such concerns as "history,""embodiment" and "performativity") must therefore subsist upon the sacrifice of meaning. Blake of course wants meaning and being to perfectly converge, nowhere more than in "The Return to Logos" (Essick 195) that culminates in the cosmic Epithalamion of Jerusalem. We are acutely aware of his involuntary and unconscious sacrifices, committed in this ostensible bid to end sacrifice. What we may not be so aware of is our own dependence upon authority and its repertoire of mystifications that we so vigilantly scrutinize and interrogate. Perhaps the very insistence upon a rigorous distinction between practice and counterpractice as is implied in the recent celebration of the twice- heretical Blake has the advantageous effect of minimalizing our awareness of to what extent they really are inter- implicated as responses to a common dilemma.

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Works Cited

Essick, Robert N. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

_____. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Hilton, Nelson. "Blake and the Apocalypse of the Canon." Modern Language Studies 18 (1988): 134- 149.

Rajan, Tilottama. The Supplement of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Smith, Mark Trevor. "Striving With Blake's Systems." in Blake and His Bibles. Ed. David V. Erdman. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.