[In the following essay, Latané argues that the first plate in Blake's Jerusalem is a critical one for the reader as it helps formulate the context within which to read and interpret the text.]

The Man who does not know The Beginning, never can know the End of Art.

(Blake's annotations to Reynolds.)

According to formula, epic poems begin with invocations, and Blake's Jerusalem is no exception—except in the fact that the reader first confronts not the address to the Saviour on plate 3, but the problematic plate known as the “Frontispiece.” Edward W. Said has told us that the “beginning … is the first step in the intentional production of meaning,”¹ and Blake's beginning for Jerusalem is peculiarly troublesome with regard to intentionality, since it is both a picture and a text quite literally (to misuse a term from Derrida) “under erasure.” On this first plate there are no words: a hatted and cloaked figure enters a doorway. Almost all critics, I think, concur with David Erdman in identifying this suspiciously clothed person as “Los in his London human form as William Blake.”² In Erdman's Poetry and Prose of William Blake, however, Jerusalem opens with eleven lines ascribed to plate 1. For most readers, then, these lines begin the poem.

There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if entered into
Englobes itself & becomes a Womb, such was Albions Couch
A pleasant Shadow of Repose called Albions lovely land.
His Sublime & Pathos become Two Rocks fixd in the Earth
His Reason, his Spectrous Power, covers them above [.]
Jerusalem his Emanation is a Stone laying beneath [.]
O [Albion behold Pitying] behold the Vision of Albion
Half Friendship is the bitterest Enmity said Los
As he entered the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired
The long sufferings of God are not forever there is a Judgment
Every Thing has its Vermin O Spectre of the Sleeping Dead!(3)

Blake thinly engraved these lines on the already etched plate, but then obliterated them with ink in the printing; the text has been recovered from a proof, in which Blake highlighted the lines.⁴ The posthumously printed copies of the poem contain the lines, but they are immersed into the brickwork by vertical and horizontal scratchmarks in drypoint. Naturally enough, these lines have been taken as commentary on the design; the commonest interpretation has been to see the figure of Los entering through the “Door of Death” into the “Void, outside of Existence” in order to “behold the Vision of Albion.”

What we must ask is to what extent beholding the vision and reading the poem are the same, or different, things. In this initial plate Los steps cautiously over a rather high threshold; would-be critics would do well to remember Swinburne's warning that in reading Jerusalem, “many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits.”⁵ With my wits about me, I hope warily to raise two questions about this Frontispiece. The first is, what are we, as readers and critics, to do with the erased inscriptions? The second is, if the Frontispiece is the opening of the poem, what does it mean? What does it mean not just as a design to be interpreted with the tools of art history, but as the beginning intention of a great epic poem?

For the textual critic, the answer to the first question is that all of Blake's words must be placed before the reader, who can then best judge what to do with them. Modern textual scholarship, with its knowledge that the ideal uncorrupted intention of the author never did exist, that the ideal text is a necessary but dangerous fiction, is correct to print these lines, accompanied by the proper brackets and textual notes—but it must give us pause to recall that Blake never saw a complete copy of his poem with these lines legible. He pulled a proof of this plate, highlighted the lines, and then (over a course of years) assembled five copies of the poem, obliterating the lines on the Frontispiece each time. If we want to see the poem as Blake saw it—if it is not too far-fetched to speculate on this phenomenon—we must regard the Frontispiece with knowledge of the submerged lines, but seeing with the “corporeal eye” only the design. The problem with modern, unilluminated texts of Jerusalem, for readers if not for critics, is that we are given writing as a substitute for image, and Blake clearly intended his poem to begin another way.

The problem of Jerusalem's beginning is complicated by its lack of an orderly narrative—the very notion of a beginning implies the sequence of so-called objective time which Jerusalem presumes to abolish. Hazard Adams questions whether the poem can be said to possess a beginning at all. His answer is, “not in the conventional sense. Instead let us say that we begin to read Jerusalem. We locate Blake making the poem, or the poem in the eternality of its being made.”⁶ But Jerusalem, despite the reshuffling of the plates in Chapter 2, does possess a sequence of plates, with the Frontispiece in the position where the reader invariably begins. For the reader, Jerusalem begins with a picture, perhaps because for Blake the visionary experience is the node from which the poetry springs. In his excellent new book on Blake's thought, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., states: “I cannot emphasize too strongly, because I believe that this underlies Blake's lifelong vocation as an artist and prophet, the immediacy with which he perceived his visions,” and in another place Damrosch notes that Blake's “conceptions must often have begun in pictorial rather than verbal form.”⁷ Readers puzzled by the impossibly early date of 1804 on Jerusalem's titlepage need only to think of this as the date of the initiating vision (which in an instant would compass the entire work) rather than the date of publication, or even the beginning of the “writing” of the poem. When we disregard the inscribed writing which Blake obliterated (but which opens the poem in most modern printed texts), we begin the poem not only as Blake meant us to, but as Blake himself probably began, with a moment of vision. The immediacy of a spatial apprehension of the picture is only temporized by a reading of the lines; language does not add to the first welling up of the poetic image, at least not in the initiation of Blake's poem, but in a mysterious and yet literal way, underlies a vision which precedes (or prefaces) the poem. This is why it is important to interpret Blake's plate as we see it, with illegible traces of writing, an almost hieroglyphic premonition of writing. Blake's buried writing places language at the beginning, at the moment of entering in—erased language is thus coterminous with the originary poetic image, and latent within it. Language, as in Heidegger, is part of the house of being (in Blake's plate the writing is part of the wall), and emerges through the immediacy of the image; rational language follows—beyond the hidden, mysterious words of the Frontispiece is the Titlepage, familiar and readable, and then the poem itself.

But if the reader can grasp this first image, like a Bachelard, and revel in its archetypal immediacy, he also is quickly confronted with interpretive problems. If Blake conceives of his poem's beginning as a moment of vision, an epiphanic prime-mover, he also realizes that his vision cannot be communicated in the fallen world without art. The graver's tool already tells a remembered vision, and we are confronted in the Frontispiece with interpretation and commentary, even if we disregard the erasure of the lines and look only at the thorns and batwings in the surrounding border (copy E only). As viewers, we must thus interpret a design which is already an interpretation (Blake's). In my interpretation the most important thing is the image of the act of entering, of going within. Blake begins Jerusalem with this inward motion, Los simultaneously moves inward to labor to redeem Albion, and the reader, too, must step forward and go in. The poem demands it.

While several commentators speculate about what is beyond the door in the Frontispiece, or relate the picture to the similar design called “Death's Door” in Blake's illustrations for Blair's Grave, the very act of entering signifies much. Gaston Bachelard, whose poetics of the image is the ne plus ultra of modern phenomenologies of reading, suggestively discusses the dialectics of inside and outside in The Poetics of Space. His comment on doors is pertinent to Blake's illumination: “For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact it is one of the primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings.”⁸ For Blake, the hidden center of being must be inwardly opened, and the outside made inside by the action of the poet. His aim is stated early in Jerusalem's first chapter:

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God …

(5:18-20).

It is only by opening the door and peering into the depths that Los can see the sleeping, butterfly-winged Jerusalem on the Titlepage. But the action of opening, as it precedes the poem, may be read in several not-so-positive ways as well; there is something ominous in a man entering a crypt-like door. In Stephen Carr's recent study of the variations in the printing of the uncolored copies of Jerusalem, he singles out the Frontispiece as a “prime example of a design that is suggestively indeterminate in its particulars.”⁹ In terms of Blake's thought, might not this step across the threshold be an act of exposing all, of opening “without” rather than “within,” thus blurring demarcations and creating what Blake condemns over and over, the indefinite? To enter too swiftly may be to fall further, to merely change one “state” for another. The half-open door may also be a symbol for Blake's ambiguous dualism: is the World now the One or the Two? While the weight of the evidence lies on the side of a positive interpretation, none of these questions can be answered easily. A further quotation from Bachelard's reverie on doors may prove useful. He asks, “Is there one of us who hasn't in his memories a Bluebeard chamber that should not have been opened, even halfway? Or—which is the same thing for a philosophy that believes in the primacy of the imagination—that should not even have been imagined open, or capable of opening half-way?”¹⁰ Los in his garb as printer-poet opens a door which the conventional thought of Blake's age says should not even be imagined open: behind the grim door, however, is the beautiful Jerusalem. Blake, as Damrosch has demonstrated, re-opens the Bluebeard's doors of western philosophy, and honestly grapples with the paradoxical ogres of thought within. With pictorial simplicity, Blake's Frontispiece shows a man entering to shed light on darkness.

Just as the act of entering is itself crucial, so it is important to consider the nature of the opening through which the figure steps. For Blake the ideal opening is perhaps one which permits a reticulation in which each form is distinct yet interconnected. He uses most often not “door,” but “gate,” and in Jerusalem the gates should be open and we should be “in” the gates, that is, in the act of entering or connecting. In the second chapter, Blake exhorts: “open O thou World / Of Love & Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates” (39:41-42). Looking at the Frontispiece, one concludes that the rigidity of the stonework belies any expansion; however, the erased writing can be seen as a trace of an attempt to expand consciousness into the masonry. The arch can be seen too as a kind of frame for the Los figure, just as the edge of the plate frames the entire impression. In copy E, Blake expands this limit by drawing outside the plate impression on the page. But the real expansion of the plate is inward; Blake's method allows for greater than usual continuity between images—designs or paintings are usually severely demarcated in galleries by the imposition of frames.¹¹ The joining together of the fragments of an artist's designs is imaged by the figure walking into the book, an image which also adumbrates the important thematic statement found in plate 4, when the Saviour, in a kind of proem to Jerusalem, speaks to the sleeping Albion:

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro Albions pleasant land

(4:6-8).

Thus, the space through the opened door is found on the titlepage, lit by the beams of the poet's lamp (especially clear in the colored copies); it is a light which forms a loving connection with the vegetating Jerusalem.

Near the end of the poem, Blake's metaphor for this interconnectedness after man's regeneration is a conversation, one which combines both the visionary moment and language: “And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright / Redounded from their Tongues” (98: 28-29). The interanimation of this complete conversation “redounds,” a word whose meanings allow for both the absence of “openings” in the conversation and the continuous opening of the self to the other's self.¹² Looking from these lines to the Frontispiece, retroactive observations are possible; we are immediately aware that “mutual love” is not yet achieved. The Frontispiece is divided spatially between the group of arch, door, Los, and the space within; Los tentatively presses against the half-open door, with one foot over the threshold. W. J. T. Mitchell has noted how in Blake's art “the space ‘external’ to the human form is nonobjective, a created entity or projection of the consciousness it contains.”¹³ Applying this dictum to the Frontispiece, we may speculate that the door is created by Los in order to be opened, the dark otherness of space within is created in order to be illuminated. The fact that the figure is clothed, and its consciousness projecting such an ominous, unexpanded “gate,” indicates that regeneration is not yet occurring, though the act of entering with light is a very positive sign. Furthermore, the traces of writing can be read—not as words, but a potential, emergent “conversation.” Since conversation plays such an important part in the poem's closure, it is noteworthy to find it at the beginning, especially since there is an obvious parallel, noted by many critics, between the Frontispiece and the design of plate 97, which, in Cary Nelson's words, “celebrates the ecstatic rippling poise of the naked Albion,” who carries “a light as powerful as the sun.”¹⁴ Just as the weak, earthly light of the figure in the Frontispiece is transformed, so the beginning's illegible script is metamorphosed to the perfect merging “conversation” of the end (emblemized in plate 99). The poem begins and ends with pictures, silent and devoid of language as it customarily reverberates in the reader's mind, although the repose of plate 100 can only be achieved by the reading of thousands of lines.

When the figure of the Frontispiece is interpreted as an emblem of the reader as well as Los/Blake, it can be viewed as an inscription of the reader directly into the text, where he will be addressed by Blake in the preface to the first chapter, entitled “To the Public.” The reader enters the text carrying some measure of his own illumination—the lamp of the reader's imagination must participate in the creative action of the poem, which of course makes the reader a kind of Los. Jerusalem, which at times may seem all “gaps” and “indeterminacies,” would seem to be a paradigmatic text for the reader-response criticism of theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, since the model of the active reader can be seen as necessary to the beginning of the poem. All of the Romantic poets were aware of the necessity of creating the audience for their poems, since their modes of perception were not shared widely by the readers of the time. Blake's final major poem, as perhaps the most radical of the Romantic experimental epics, is also the one most conscious of its audience and the problem of reading. Its “fit audience, tho few” is guided into the poem by the figure in the Frontispiece, performing the primal act of entering.

As readers, then, we cannot afford to ignore the first plate, since it prefigures that act of reading which we are about to begin. In a recent essay George Steiner has hypostatized the often interchangeable terms of “critic” and “reader.” He states that it is the critic's obligation to argue “his distance from and towards the text,” and that the “motion of criticism is one of ‘stepping back from.’” The reader, on the other hand, seeks ontological plenitude; in Steiner's words, “the reader opens himself to the autonomous being of the text.”¹⁵ Blake himself is both a fine critic—his annotations testify to the fertility of his distance from antithetical texts like Reynold's Discourses—and a great reader, especially of Milton and the Bible: his poems and his graphic work attest to this. The exact words which Blake later erased from his opening plate seem to me to occupy critical space, not readerly consciousness. To begin the poem with “There is a void, outside of existence …” devalues the power of Blake's unique epic opening. In the immediacy of the poetic vision, paradoxically, language distances; for Bachelard, the poetic image “puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest.”¹⁶ In Bachelard's phenomenology, the organized rhetoric of the poem is made possible by the poetic image, and in Jerusalem, the reader must enter through this image into the poem. For the reader, the half-emergent writing on the arch, if it is visible at all, should be viewed, not read. It is only when we step back from the poem into the posture of the critic that we should read the writing. The reader of the poem, as distinct from the critic, begins with the image of entering.

Notes

1. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 5.

2. David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 5.

3. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1965), p. 143. All subsequent references to Jerusalem will be noted in the text by plate and line number from this edition.

4. Mitchell argues that the plate was engraved rather than etched; see Blake's Composite Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 194-95. For more complete descriptions of the variations in the Frontispiece, see David V. Erdman, “Suppressed and Altered Passages in Blake's Jerusalem,” Studies in Bibliography, 17 (1964), 11-12, and Stephen Leo Carr's “William Blake's Print-Making Process in Jerusalem,” ELH, 47 (1980), 531-33.

5. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868; rpt Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 276.

6. Hazard Adams, “Blake, Jerusalem, and Symbolic Form,” Blake Studies, 7 (1975), p. 156.

7. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 47 & 114.

8. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Books, 1969), p. 222.

9. Carr, p. 531.

10. Bachelard, p. 224.

11. For an interesting discussion of the relation of the frame to the continuum of art, see Germano Celant's “Framed: Innocence or Gilt?” Artforum, 20, No. 10 (June, 1982), 49-55.

12. The OED lists over twenty obsolete meanings for “redound.”

13. Mitchell, p. 59.

14. Cary Nelson, The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 140.

15. George Steiner, “‘Critic’/‘Reader,’” NLH [New Literary History], 10 (1979), 423, 441.

16. Bachelard, p. xxiii.