2 - Text

Summary

There are striking theological and political implications to Blake's engagement with the idea of an open and decentralized text, a text that encourages us to generate meanings as we move among and between the elements of which it is composed rather than seeking to make us submit to its unilateral dictates, or forcing us to treat it as a sacred object to be decoded according to a set of interpretive principles revealed only to (or by) a priestly or scholarly hierarchy. For, whatever else it may be, how we imagine or conceive of the relationship between reading and authority is also inevitably a political question. The notion that authority is grounded in a text, the idea that authority can be conferred by reading, possessing, or claiming to possess the special or hidden knowledge to read a text, the belief that there exists a monopoly on interpretation available only to some (an initiated and licensed elite) and not to others – these all rather easily lend themselves to restrictive, not to say coercive, forms of both doctrine and politics. Whereas the contrary notion that reading and interpretation are open to all, and that authority is something to avoid – or at best to share, rather than to aspire to – lends itself to very different and inherently more inclusive and democratic ideas of both religion and politics.

These contrasting notions of textuality, authority, and the politics of reading were central to the theological and political controversies of the seventeenth century from which Blake derived many of his ideas, including his disavowal of elitist textual politics and his contrary interest in forms of reading open to all. (“Christ & his Apostles were Illiterate Men,” he notes, not members of the educated elite; he adds that “the Beauty of the Bible is that the most Ignorant & Simple Minds Understand it Best.”) After all, the English Revolution had challenged and disrupted long-established religious and political monopolies, especially those of the monarchy.