{"id":1843,"date":"2017-12-11T13:52:27","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T13:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1843"},"modified":"2017-12-11T18:03:02","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T18:03:02","slug":"five-questions-david-fallon-on-blake-myth-and-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1843","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: David Fallon on Blake, Myth and Enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

David Fallon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton<\/a>.\u00a0 He has published widely on topics including the debates surrounding the French Revolution, London bookselling and Romantic-period notions of sociability, but has a particular interest in William Blake, on whom he has published a series of articles and book chapters that have now culminated in his first monograph, Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment<\/em><\/a> (Palgrave, 2017), which we discuss below.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in Blake’s tangled relationship with Enlightenment thought?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d originally got interested in Blake through music and he seems to combine the dreamy utopianism of psychedelia with the hard-headed opposition and disillusionment of punk.\u00a0 I was always drawn to Blake as a contradictory writer and artist, whose difficulty to pin down was part of his fascination.\u00a0 From my undergraduate days I found him sitting uneasily with traditional notions of Romanticism.\u00a0 I\u2019d always been captivated by the deep and creative spiritual vision in his poetry and art, but I felt that Blake was too hard-headed to simply be a flaky mystic dreamer, in the way he can sometimes be dismissed.\u00a0 The work of a number of Blake specialists, including Donald Ault and Matthew Green, suggested there was more to Blake and Enlightenment than opposition and I was keen to trace how this intellectual side emerged through the structures of meaning in his art and poetry.<\/p>\n

2) How did you come to choose apotheosis (in Samuel Johnson’s words, ‘Deification; the rite of adding any one to the number of the gods’) as your key point of focus in the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The original project, in the earliest days of the PhD was rather broad, looking at Blake and the idea of heroism.\u00a0 As part of this, I was looking at the pair of \u2018spiritual form\u2019 paintings of William Pit and Horatio Nelson from the 1809 exhibition.\u00a0 They were pretty bewildering, but I noted that the Descriptive Catalogue<\/em> labelled them \u2018grand apotheoses\u2019.\u00a0 I started tugging away at the key term \u2018apotheosis\u2019 and that became the end of the golden string that I spent many years unravelling.\u00a0 I\u2019d always been fascinated \u2013 albeit confused! \u2013 by Blake\u2019s interest in transformations and his use of star imagery in his poetry and designs.\u00a0 I felt I had discovered a context in which these began to make more sense.\u00a0 The term\u2019s many strands (art history, anthropology, classical culture, religion, political satire and so on) were particularly appealing, as they took me towards a focus which allowed me (hopefully) to do justice Blake as an artist who gleefully capered across disciplinary boundaries.<\/p>\n

3) What for you are the most important insights that we can gain from seeing Blake as actively engaged with Enlightenment, as opposed to ‘an exemplary Romantic opponent’?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blake can be a bit straightjacketed by the label \u2018Romantic\u2019, so I hoped that this approach might make room for a lively, different sort of Blake to wriggle out.\u00a0 The book hopefully allows us to situate Blake\u2019s hermeneutics and myth-making historically.\u00a0 While rather unBlakean in resisting the embrace of Eternity, this helps to show how his poetry and art could have been more meaningful to his contemporaries and it shows how his model of \u2018contraries\u2019 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em> is fundamental to the ways in which he conceived of his creativity.<\/p>\n

4) You contend that ‘Blake came ultimately to give precedence to mythopoesis over critical thought’.\u00a0 How do you conceptualise Blake’s early position on this issue?\u00a0 Do you see his movement towards mythopoesis as happening in a relatively smooth manner across his artistic career, or was his engagement with Enlightenment and myth (as expressed in his works) more complex and conflicted?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To me, there always seem to be two key features at play in his work, one partaking of Enlightenment scepticism towards myths of power, the other celebrating myth as a powerful mode of collective vision.\u00a0 Approaching Blake\u2019s visionary imagination in a dynamic relationship with Enlightenment critical approaches allowed me to sketch out shifts in his thought over his career, with his later works representing something of a recovery from his pronounced radical scepticism of the mid-to-late 1790s, albeit still attacking institutions of state repression and deploying that critical impulse productively to enable creative, utopian imaginings.\u00a0 Some of his annotations from the 1780s and early 1790s suggest he saw himself as a sort of philosophe<\/em> and the later works are clearly more emphatically Christian, but rather than there being a linear progression, these identities seem to rub along together in different permutations throughout his career.\u00a0 I\u2019d go for \u2018complex and conflicted\u2019\u2026<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m gleaning grains of information about the lively world of eighteenth-century and Romantic publishing, working on my next monograph which is on literary sociability, production, and booksellers\u2019 shops from about 1740 to 1840.\u00a0 I\u2019ve also co-edited a special issue of Romanticism <\/em>with Jon Shears on Romanticism and Ageing, which will appear in 2018.\u00a0 I have an essay on Caleb Williams<\/em> in the pipeline for William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures<\/em>, which should be out in 2018 too.\u00a0 There will undoubtedly be a few essays on Blake, too, developing material which has been sparked off by writing the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Fallon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.\u00a0 He has published widely on topics including the debates surrounding the… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1870,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions\/1870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}