[In the following essay, Rothenberg argues that the key to understanding Blake's Jerusalem is to start with the premise that the poem produced itself and is its own context.]

The reader who seeks to unlock Jerusalem must devise a reading strategy to handle the poem's apparent incoherencies. At the outset of the poem, the reader's situation is complicated by assurances that the “origin” of the work guarantees its coherence; the much-quoted address to the public provides for two possible, and mutually exclusive, sources of the poem. Blake explains first that the origin is some external power which “dictated” the poem to him, but he immediately contradicts himself by claiming responsibility for the choice of a novel type of verse that encompasses a variety of meters and styles:

When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakespeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of the cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place.¹

The “dictated” poem and the poem constructed syllable by syllable do not arise from reconcilable sources.²

However, Blake offers yet another possibility for the “origin” of the poem at its conclusion:

All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all
Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the life of immortality.
And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem
                                                                      The End of The Song
                                                                                          of Jerusalem

(Plate 99, E258-59)

This conclusion suggests that Jerusalem may be the composer of the “song” that we know as the poem entitled Jerusalem. And since “Jerusalem” is not simply a character in the poem, but also the name of the emanations of all human forms, this poem can be understood as being produced by itself, as a form of auto-citation. This poem announces itself as coextensive with its source, its location, its readership: above all, this text takes itself as its own context, or (what may be the same thing) treats all possible contexts as determining its meaning. This property of self-citation and recursive contextualization creates the conditions of “readability” that Blake presents as Vision in this poem.

CONTEXTUAL RUPTURE AND READABILITY

Blake's rhetorical problem was to write a poem that did not recreate in its relations to its readers the social and intellectual tyranny he was seeking to subvert. Blake believed that tyranny arises from a misconceived relationship between self and world, what he called the “possessive Self-hood”; his primary task was to help his readers confront the ways in which they established that tyrannical relationship to the world. Since all perception involves an act of interpretation, a poem that calls a reader's interpretive strategies into question could help re-educate that reader into a visionary relationship with the world. By undermining the position of the author as the origin of the text, by making the source of the text both internal and external to the work, by refusing to provide a stable contextual determinant, by positively disallowing any recourse to such a context, Blake forces the reader to confront the ways in which he uses such contexts (such as the concept of author-as-origin) to create his interpretations. In fact, Blake compels the reader to recognize both the necessity for and the artificial and unstable existence of these contexts in the production of any meaning.

Language can mean only if it can be separated from an original, determinate context: we produce the meaning of words not by finding their source but by appropriating them to new contexts—our own. The “readability” of a text depends upon its dissociation from a definitive context or consciousness. It requires the disruption of context—from a particular reader, a particular point of view, a particular author—so that other contexts, other readers, other “writers,” may come into play. The possibility that language will escape the intention of its author, that the text will free itself from its supposed referent, that the poem will sever itself from any determinate context, is the way language is able to mean at all. This must be true since language is composed of signifying forms, recognizable as such, without the imposition of conditions of intention. This is what makes it possible for us to appropriate the signifying forms of language for our own uses, although those language events necessarily carry with them the potential for their being used or understood in ways not under our control. Given that every signifying form can be put in quotation marks (cited), it can break with every given context, “engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. … This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary, that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring.”³ The text that cites itself, that disrupts its own original or teleological context, brings to the surface the inherent freedom to make language meaningful. In presenting itself as a citation, Jerusalem makes itself available for use in the unlimited production of meaning: “JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION” (Plate 26, E171).

The poem anticipates the formalist objection that such an approach requires us to lose the hope of uncovering the significance of the poem, relegating the text to a chaotic jumble of senseless signs. As Derrida's quotation explains, all signifying forms achieve their validity within a context, and in the commentary on Chaos in the eternity of “readability” that appears in the closing plates of the poem, chaos is rescued from meaninglessness by the renewed and continuous production of meanings by the creation of different contexts. Thus Chaos “Brighten'd beneath, above, around! Eyed as the Peacock / According to the Human Nerves of Sensation” (Plate 98, E257). Here we see the power of multiple viewpoints, derived from the “expansion and contraction of the organs of perception.” These contextual shifts bring shifts in consciousness and transform perception, but they are not dominated by a single aim or origin. The unifying factor in Blake's Eternity as presented in the conclusion of the poem is the continually transforming and transformative text/context of Jerusalem, not some essence that pervades all things or a determinate origin. Without a multiplicity of viewpoints and contexts, there is no possibility of creation, no possibility of significance.

Without contextual rupture, writing becomes a kind of bondage, a “spectrous oath,” linking word and object in an absolute symmetry. The interpretive strategy that insists on equating the origin and the meaning of the text is the same strategy that believes in the denotative nature of language, using nature as referent. But Derrida has shown that this founding origin, whether in nature or in consciousness, can never appear anywhere as absolutely present. It can only be figured in a series of substitutions:

There has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the “real” supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present [and] Nature … have always escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.⁴

In the final plates of Jerusalem, the contextual rupturing that founds the signifying process presents itself as a rhetorical function—the metonymic displacement of contexts. Plate 94, which begins the process of Albion's awakening, and thus serves as the climax of the poem, institutes a dramatic figuration of metonymic displacement. Each displacement results in an “awakening” and the appearance of a new subjectivity. At the same time, these individual metonymic displacements are successively gathered together into ever larger contexts: “England who is Brittannia enterd Albions bosom rejoicing … So spake the Vision of Albion & in him so spake in my hearing / The Universal Father” (Plates 96-97, E255-56). This process culminates in the ultimate identification of every thing by means of mutually transforming contexts: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone … And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem.”

Each “awakening” makes language possible—this is the moment of “readability,” the rupturing from a determinate context that permits signification: “And England who is Brittannia awoke from Death on Albions bosom … her voice pierc'd Albions clay cold ear. he moved upon the Rock / The Breath Divine went forth” (Plates 94-95, E254). The rupture is followed by the conferring of a name, a designation of a new context, which functions as a substitution or metaphor for the subject until the next rupture occurs. England becomes Brittannia and in so doing awakens Albion; at this point Albion becomes the sun which in turn reveals Jesus, who then appears in a simile as Los.

The conferring of the name, then, involves two modes of language. First, it functions as a mark of identity, of what is proper to the subject. This is the first step in the regeneration of a “determinate” meaning after the contextual rupture. (It is necessary for purposes of explication to describe this as a chronological process, although logically neither step is prior.) This first mode corresponds to the one-to-one designation of absolute reference so often marked in Blake's text by the activity of the Spectre of Reason, the “oath” or “law.” This referential moment, however, is absolutely necessary for signification to appear, because it provides the element of sameness, of presence, on which signification depends. We can recognize that this is language seen in what Paul Ricoeur calls its hermeneutic function, its denotative or referential function, which requires a phenomenal here and now, a fixed point of view, a definite origin that governs the relationship between sign and referent.⁵

The second mode of language concerns its rhetorical function: Blake re-figures this referential moment as a rhetorical trope, a substitution by metaphor or simile. A name is already a metaphor, a turning away from identity as inherent; it consequently inscribes the possibility/necessity of difference or contextual definition. The rhetorical figure, then, functions as the sign of difference or context. Ricoeur says that we have recourse to the rhetorical function when the “original” authority appears as textually or rhetorically constituted. This rhetorical moment in the text, the stabilizing by a troping that is itself unstable, calls attention to the renewed possibility for contextual rupture, and the process begins again. By the end of the poem, Blake writes this continual movement of the figures, this continual troping, as producing Jerusalem itself.

RE-CITING “THE BARD”/RE-VISIONING THE WORLD

Plate 94 marks a turning point in the narrative and an interpretive crux. This plate instigates the series of metonymic substitutions that move us from Albion's death-like trance to his four-fold, Eternal form, but the cause of the transition is elided in the narrative:

Albion cold lays on his Rock …
The weeds of Death inwrap his hands & feet blown incessant
And the Body of Albion was closed apart from all Nations.
Over them the famishd Eagle screams on boney Wings and around
Them howls the Wolf of famine deep heaves the Ocean black and thundering
Around the wormy Garments of Albion: then pausing in deathlike silence
Time was Finished! The Breath Divine Breathed over Albion
And England who is Brittannia awoke.

This account represents its own lack of narrative causality by inserting the screaming eagle, howling wolf, and thundering ocean, whose meaningless sounds effect the ultimate rupture of “deathlike silence.” More importantly, the text re-marks this rupture by means of an intertextual suturing, an allusion to Gray's “The Bard” which also comments upon the interplay of the referential and contextual signification.

According to Gray, “The Bard” reproduces the curse laid upon Edward the First by the last Welsh bard in reaction to Edward's execution of the Welsh poets; that is, the poem itself is a kind of citational rupture concerned with the disruption of the process of meaningful language. The Bard bemoans the loss of nature's voice that followed the murders:

‘Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave,
‘Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
‘Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,
‘To high-born Joel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.(6)

The death of the poets renders nature's voice unintelligible, but the last bard is unable to change this until the dead poets reappear. The conditions preceding their return are these:

‘Far, far aloof th'affrighted ravens sail;
‘The famished eagle screams, and passes by.
‘Dear lost companions of my tuneful art,
‘Dear, as the light that visits these sad eyes,
‘Dear, as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,
‘Ye died amidst your dying country's cries—
‘No more I weep. They do not sleep.
‘On yonder cliffs, a grisly band,
‘I see them sit.

(lines 37-45)

Upon their re-appearance, they join the Bard “in dreadful harmony … And weave with bloody hands the tissue of [Edward's] line” (lines 47-48). The effectiveness of the curse as a prophecy of Edward's demise depends upon the multiplicity of voices, the conjoining of prior texts. Here, as in the climax of Jerusalem, “the famished eagle” announces a transfiguration and a renewed access to signifying power.

However, in Gray's poem the loss of “natural” language marks the crisis. The Bard needs “natural” language to prophesy the actual destruction of Edward and his (un)natural descendants of his union with the “she-wolf of France.” Consequently, the Bard privileges the referential power of language, its presentation of itself as a natural sign, a sign that “erases” its own representing, tropological function. In Gray's poem and in Blake's, the screaming of the eagle signifies the breaking of the link between sign and (natural) referent, subverting nature as a determinate context. In “The Bard,” however, the break occasions despair; in Blake's poem, the rupture is liberating.

We know that Albion's stony sleep is a figure for the domination of just that referential aspect of language, the priority of the designated object as origin, as “property,” as fixed identity. We only need to refer to Albion's opening speech in the poem for a description of this mode of language. His reply to Jesus' request for mutuality and metonymic displacement (“I am in you and you in me”) establishes Albion as a centralized, possessive selfhood, totally unaware of the rhetorical function of his own self-proclaimed denotative discourse:

But the perturbed Man away turns down the valleys dark;
Saying. We are not One! we are Many, thou most simulative [deleted in most printings]
Phantom of the over heated brain! shadow of immortality!
Seeking to keep my soul a victim to thy Love! which binds
Man the enemy of man into deceitful friendships:.
Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite:
By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith.
My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself!
The Malvern and the Cheviot, the Wolds Plinlimmon & Snowdon
Are mine. here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue!
Humanity shall be no more: but war & princedom & victory!
So spoke Albion in jealous fears, hiding his Emanation
Upon the Thames and Medway, rivers of Beulah: dissembling.

(Plate 4, E146-7)

These lines are usually cited as instancing the error that leads to Albion's fall: his empiricist blindness to the limitations of the rationalist method leads him to privilege demonstration over faith. Yet Albion errs only in not recognizing the rhetorical mode of his own language, the truth he speaks despite himself. He appears to assert that man must rely solely upon demonstration rather than faith, but the line may also be read “By relying upon demonstration alone, without faith, man will only be able to live in solitude.” In his denial of the figurative properties of language, its rhetorical mode, in his condemnation of Jesus' “simulative” or simulating powers, Albion establishes himself, his intention, and his property as the total context within which language is to function. Consequently he loses access to the truth of his own discourse, a truth that appears only when his words receive another context. Blake signals Albion's refusal of figuration with a trope: Albion “away turns”; he is without trope, a-verse. The attempted elision of the rhetorical results in a “stonified,” denotative, referential language with pretensions to univocity (one law) that its very forms belie. For the key to this speech lies in its figuration: in the polysemy of “alone,” for example.

Albion's own language escapes his authority, since he must have recourse to the very “simulative” language he deplores in Jesus. Although Albion correctly sees that the mode of existence Jesus embodies subverts the central, possessive selfhood (Albion has “jealous fears,” fears of being displaced), he must himself rely upon tropes, metonymically re-figuring Jesus as a “phantom of the overheated brain! shadow of immortality!” Here he confirms Jesus' claim that Jesus resides in Albion as a representation of his own eternal state. Thus Albion reproduces the “simulative” characteristics of Jesus, a rhetoric of similitude that permits metonymic displacement, at the very moment that he seeks to deny them. Blake reminds the reader of this recourse to rhetoricity by the word “dissembling,” an operation that denies similarity—dissemblance—and affirms it, by substituting a lie for the truth. Once the reader sees the interdependence of referentiality and rhetoricity in the production of meaning, Albion's speech no longer stands in opposition to Jesus' as a negation, but rather as a kind of reflection or incorporation. Each implies the other.

In Gray's poem we also find that troping makes referentiality possible and gives it a provisional stability. At the moment that language achieves its fullest power in the poem, the power of the prophetic curse, the poetic voices create a metonymy in the metaphorical “weaving” of the “line.” Here too Gray provides Blake with the figure for the metonymic substitution that makes Albion appear in his fourfold guise in Plates 96 and following. The Bard taunts Edward and then throws himself from the cliff into “endless night,” dying in order to “triumph”:

‘Fond impious man, think'st thou you sanguine cloud,
‘Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day?
‘To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
‘And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
‘Enough for me: with joy I see
‘The different dooms our fates assign.
‘Be thine despair, and sceptered care,
‘To triumph and to die are mine.’
He spoke and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

(lines 135-44)

The Bard proposes as his substitute the figure of the sun who “repairs the golden flood, / And warms the nations with redoubled ray.” In Plate 96 Albion also sacrifices himself, throwing himself into the “Furnaces of Affliction,” but he has already appeared in Plate 95 as the fulfillment of the Bard's sacrifice, as the figure of the sun who arises from the “endless night” of his “stony sleep.” Albion's reawakening as the sun parallels the Bard's vision. Blake even puns on Gray's “redoubled ray” for Albion and his Bow are four-fold, re-doubled. The cloud, the gold flood, the nations of the earth, the mountain all appear in the climax of Jerusalem through the regeneration of Edward's “sanguine breath”—the Breath Divine, an analogue for the rhetorical power of language:

Albion rose in anger: the wrath of god breaking bright flaming on all sides around
Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds
Struggling to rise above the Mountains. in his burning hand
He takes his Bow, then chooses out his arrows of flaming gold
Murmuring the Bowstring breathes with ardor! clouds roll around the
Horns of the wide Bow, loud sounding winds sport on the mountain brows
the Cloud overshadowing divided them asunder
So Albion spoke & threw himself into the Furnaces of affliction
All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became
Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine
And all the Cities of Albion rose from their Slumber
Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds
Of Heaven Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity

(Plates 95-96)

Here the movement of the allusion, begun by the scream of the eagle which both linked and divided Blake's and Gray's texts, has transfigured the rhetorical figures of “The Bard,” figures which project the necessity of their transfiguration in order to achieve efficacy or significance. Blake has managed to use the oppositional categories established by Gray's poem without replicating their mutual negation: they are regenerated to a redemptive purpose.

Blake's presentation of Albion's mistaken reliance upon denotation and demonstration, as presented at the outset of the poem, effects another contextual rupture/suture, for his “demonstrative” credo echoes and transforms the text of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness. We can see the relevance of this allusion easily by focusing upon the function of citation (as a contextual rupture which calls for a determinacy that can only be given tropologically) itself in the New Testament text.⁷

When Jesus is offered the option of satisfying his hunger by turning stones into bread, he answers Satan: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matt. 4.4). Unlike Albion, who organizes the world around himself, motivated by “jealous fears” that limit his perception of available contexts for producing meaning, Jesus refuses to assert the priority of his self (his hunger) as motivation or origin. Jesus will not produce a univocal, tyrannical relationship between word and thing, between self and world. The life of the self that asserts referentiality as the only principle of language is no life at all. Instead, Jesus performs the transformation of stone into bread through a trope, referring to “bread” that does not exist in the world before him except in potentia, in his power to transfigure the stones. Bread and stones are equivalent in their inability to satisfy and in their availability for rhetorical transfiguration, metaphorically identical in Jesus' discourse that posits another principle by which meaning emerges—“every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

Jesus' reference to the Mosaic text seems to suggest God as the definitive context for meaningful language/existence. Satan's second temptation makes it clear that he, at least, interprets Jesus' allusion as privileging a hermeneutic view of language, as an attempt to provide a unique origin that governs meaning: the Word of God as “it is written” in Scripture, Satan reasons, must have the same meaning and power, no matter what the scriptural context. Scripture, therefore, is to be read univocally rather than figuratively. This encourages Satan to quote another text from Scripture as his authority for tempting Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple. In so doing, Satan displaces Jesus, moving him from wilderness to city, providing a new context for his actions. Jesus, however, follows this rhetorical strategy and performs the same contextual displacement in the scriptural text itself, citing a counter text and thereby undermining the univocity of Scripture and opening up a gap between God's word as origin and God's word as intention, emphasizing the rhetorical rather than the hermeneutical foundation of interpretation.

For Jesus, Scripture is not a univocal text that can be applied, or referred to, with the same result in every situation or context. Instead, he sees it as a collection of tropological maneuvers which allow referentiality to appear as an effect. Jesus' troping does not privilege referentiality, but it does produce a designation of the tempter as “Satan.” The name—which we are accustomed to think of as denotative—appears out of a tropological moment in the text (which has its representation in the action Jesus proposes, the “turn”: “Get thee behind me”—Luke 4.8). Furthermore, the entire process by which names emerge from tropological gestures that efface themselves in a simulation of grounded referentiality appears in this text as a re-contextualization of its predecessor text, Deuteronomy 8.3.

In the predecessor text, Moses chastises the Israelites for complaining of hunger when they are receiving the Law. Moses explains that God sent manna in place of bread—an entirely new creation, a substitution they had never conceived before—in order to make them familiar with the tropes by which meaning emerges: “And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.” The literal manna, therefore, stands in for bread, but it also figures what it literally is not, the Word of God. Moses' text sets up a dominating referential principle—the Word of God—that governs the meaning of every thing in the world. Yet that principle appears in a figurative moment in the text. Thus, when Moses produces the commandments, the “Moral Law” that Albion holds so dear and Blake despises, he is binding language into its referential function by means of figuration.

Here we are faced with a complex intertextual relationship that speaks to the issue of authorizing interpretation by reference to a “stable” referential system or an intentional act. We can say that Albion, unlike Moses and Jesus, displaces the Word of God with his own intentionality, but that in order to achieve this position of centrality he must at the same time rely upon the primacy of those predecessor texts and their rhetorical strategies. I believe that Blake does not criticize Albion on the grounds of impiety but rather provides the reader with an opportunity to see that the illusion of referentiality is created rhetorically. Blake uses these allusions to criticize our reliance upon any determinate grounding for meaning, whether divine or natural, while demonstrating the function of context in the creation of meaning. For example, in his effort to make himself the origin of all texts, the guarantor of language, Albion must resort to the secondary nature of his self-naming—its figurative constitution—which always returns to haunt him as a “simulative phantom.” In a precise contrary to Albion's gesture, the “naming” of the emanations of “All Human Forms” as Jerusalem is a kind of liberating un-naming, since it undermines the denotative function of proper names that isolate individuals.

In any event, the act of reading the text itself requires that we become authors who do not stand in an “originary” position vis-a-vis their own texts because the texts are always constructed out of the rupturing/suturing of other texts/contexts. Ricoeur comments that “by any supposition reading is a linking together of a new discourse to the discourse of the text” (p. 144), and my point is that, for Blake, the meaningfulness of this linking/writing does not emerge solely by recourse to the intention of the author nor to the “natural” sign but rather by the rhetorical construction of authority and the tropological play that shifts us from set to set of constricting categorical oppositions.

Blake struggles against our need for determinacy, but he does not deny the need. The figurative and the denotative are interdependent; where one creates a sense of giddiness at the infinite plenum of meaning available, the other halts the glissade into meaninglessness that lingers on the dark side of linguistic polyvalence. Yet Blake finally seems more concerned that our fears of indeterminacy will goad us to produce increasingly constricted visions of reality. In particular, he forces us to confront our tendency to mistake our time- and culture-bound interpretive groundings, the limits on language we impose by positing the equivalence of origin and aim, for eternal truth. The institutionalization of interpretation is a striking case among many to be found in our everyday perception of the world, of our willingness to sacrifice creativity and liberty for security, since any interpretation will only seem inevitable within a given context. Blake shows us that the tropological strategies of contextual displacement are necessary to undermine the tyranny of that seeming inexorability. In so doing, he displaces himself as the determinant of the text. Readers who follow his example will find in Jerusalem the tools for breaking their own “mind-forg'd manacles.”

Notes

1. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), pp. 145-46. All subsequent Blake quotations are taken from this edition and will be cited in the standard way, by plate number and by page number preceded by the letter “E”.

2. A third possible “origin” emerges in the address, when Blake exhorts his reader to “[forgive] what you do not approve, & [love] me for this energetic exertion of my talent” (Plate 3, E145). Although the bracketed words are conjectural readings, they accord with a prior statement that the author hopes the “Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord, [whose] Spirit is … continual forgiveness of Sin.” In identifying the reader with Jesus, the origin of the coherence of the poem may be found in the reader's unifying (because forgiving and loving) conception of the work. This possibility only strengthens the argument I make subsequently.

3. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 186.

4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 159.

5. David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology, A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 148-49, “What is a Text?”

6. Thomas Gray, “The Bard,” in The Complete English Poems of Thomas Gray, ed. James Reeves (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 77-82, lines 23-28. All subsequent references to “The Bard” are from this edition.

7. All biblical references are from the King James version. My readers no doubt see that the tracing of citations and allusions can have no end. All writing is already a “citation.” At this juncture, I am concerned with the way in which the citation in the text functions as a sign of intertextuality, rather than simply meaning the content (énoncé) of the quotation itself. Antoine Compagnon, in La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), has described the citation as “un operateur trivial d'intertextualité” (p. 44). We are not so much interested in the material contained in the citation, since “elle n'a pas de sens hors de la force qui l'agit, qui la saisit, l'exploite et l'incorpore” (p. 38). This force, seizure, incorporation are all part of the contextual rupturing/suturing that produces meaning. The citation, then, is the paradigmatic case—or the most trivial case, the most obvious case—of reading as contextual displacement. It is clear that in the act of citing, the subject of the enunciation becomes displaced, with the result that writing viewed as citational appears without recourse to one single, originating intention. Compagnon says “en un sens, il n'y a de sujet de la citation qu'en regime democratique de l'écriture” (p. 39). This democratizing effect accords well with the liberating aims of the Blakean text.