Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:15:53.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Blake's Laocoon: A Degree Zero of Literary Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David E. James
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , March 1983 , pp. 226 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In his Illuminations. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. New York: Schocken, 1969, 217–51.Google Scholar
Bentley, G. E. Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake's Writings. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.Google Scholar
Colie, Rosalie L. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. New York: Dutton, 1971.Google Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1978.Google Scholar
Erdman, David V. William Blake: Prophet against Empire. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.Google Scholar
Erdman, David V., ed. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.Google Scholar
Flaxman, John. “Sculpture.” The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Science and Literature. Ed. Abraham Rees. London, 1802–20, n. pag.Google Scholar
Frye, Northrop. “The Road of Excess” (1963). In his The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970.Google Scholar
James, David E. “Angels out of the Sun: Art, Religion and Politics in Blake's America.” Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): 235–52.Google Scholar
Keynes, Sir Geoffrey, ed. The Drawings of William Blake: 92 Pencil Studies. New York: Dover, 1970.Google Scholar
Lindsay, Jack. William Blake: His Life and Works. New York: Braziller, 1979.Google Scholar
Mellor, Anne K. Blake's Human Form Divine. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Paley, Morton D. William Blake. Oxford: Phaidon, 1978.Google Scholar
Sherry, Peggy Meyer. “The ‘Predicament’ of the Autograph: ‘William Blake.‘” Glyph 4 (1978): 131–55.Google Scholar
Tayler, Irene. “Blake's Laocoön.” Blake Newsletter: An Illustrated Quarterly 10 (1976–77): 72–81.Google Scholar