BLAKE, EAGLETON, ROSSI-LANDI & ALL THAT JAZZ

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I doubt I have the patience or stamina to straighten out Brian
Sinclair-James's confusion.  I will restrict myself to a couple of
very specific points.

>However, Dumain asserts Blake's uniqueness in positing a
>complete reversal of heaven and hell, when Blake read,
>appreciated (and to my understanding drew upon in an
>acknowledged way) the work of other mystics, most notably
>Swedenburg.

There were many symbolic reversals in the so-called Romantic era.
For example, Byron reversed the Cain and Abel story: his CAIN
caused quite a scandal.  Blake himself commented on this in THE
GHOST OF ABEL.  I have yet to see anyone else of that era go the
level of depth that Blake went to in criticizing the foundations
of every single social institution and the logic of domination
that governed all of social life that Blake did.  The very depth
of his insight at that time would have tended to isolate him.  It
is not an accident that the Blake industry didn't really come into
its own until the 1960s.  But imagine how frustrated Blake must
have been having '60s insights in the 1790s!  As for Swedenborg,
Blake absorbed him and then criticized him, rejecting his
cosmology and reversing that too.  Blake absorbed many influences:
the decisive question is, the transformations that the source
material underwent in Blake's own philosophy.

>Indeed, counter to Dumain's dismissal of Eagleton and
>Rossi-Landi, these materialists contribute a significant point
>in demonstrating how the presence and influence of these other
>writers might have helped shape the work Blake did.

Let's be precise here.  I never dismissed Terry Eagleton in toto
as a Marxist literary critic.  However, Eagleton wrote a review of
fellow-marxist E.P. Thompson's book WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST:
WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE MORAL LAW in which Eagleton evinces
bewilderment in the face of Thompson's work.  Don't you think Mr.
Sophisticated Literary Theorist should have done better?  Thompson
was brilliant.  Some people haven't caught on that Thompson is
asking fundamental questions about traditions.  He is not simply
trying to pigeonhole Blake as a Muggletonian.  He is as interested
in discontinuities and originality as in continuities and
traditions.  The question is one of reference points.  Blake as an
autodidact rejected polite learning, which means the entire
official tradition of polite society's elite education -- the
Classics.  No contemporary multiculturalist whining about the dead
white males ever complained about the Classics more bitterly than
Blake did.  Now how was it possible for Blake, working mainly from
the Bible and antinomian Christianity as primary reference points,
to transform the raw material of marginalized religious crackpots
to forge a critical philosophical tool of the highest
sophistication?  By investigating Blake's sources and possible
lineage, by pointing out traces of the Muggletonian tradition in
Blake's writings, Thompson gives some clues as to how Blake
proceeded.  But he starts out by challenging taken-for-granted
notions about what Blake's reference points may have been.
Thompson calls into question the practice of assuming that
everybody has undergone the same assimilative and educational
process that academically trained people -- such as literary
critics -- undergo.  Why didn't Eagleton detect the profundity of
the basic questions addressed here?

Now what the hell does Rossi-Landi have to do with Blake?  What
makes him a materialist?  I read his works on linguistics and
economics years ago, and he is a total charlatan.  I suggest you
look up a review of Rossi-Landi's garbage by a real linguist,
Frederick Newmeyer (who calls himself a Marxist and rejects
Marxist "linguistics").  The reference is too deeply buried in my
files, but I suppose one of the bibliographical databases will
have it: try LLBA.

I would also advise you to study some real linguistics.  People on
the left are notoriously incompetent in this area, and not just
the incompetents who are versed in literary and sociological
structuralism, which shares nothing with scientific linguistics
other than a common ancestry in Saussure.

Might you be referring to a Rossi-Landi other than the
intellectual swindler Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, author of such
useless anti-scientific shit as LINGUISTICS AND ECONOMICS and
LANGUAGE AS WORK AND TRADE?

>I sometimes wonder, Ralph, if you are posting contradictions as
>an educational device, but I sometimes wonder if there is a
>point at all.

Time will tell, won't it?


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