ȘCOALA DOCTORALĂ DE STUDII LITERARE ȘI CULTURALE [612636]

UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREȘTI
FACULTATEA DE LIMBI ȘI LITERATURI STR ĂINE
ȘCOALA DOCTORALĂ DE STUDII LITERARE ȘI CULTURALE
TEZĂ DE DOCTORAT
Profesor coordonator :
Prof. Dr. Mihaela Irimia
Docto rand:
Andreea -Cristina Paris -Popa
BUC
UREȘTI
2018

UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREȘTI
FACULTATEA DE LIMBI ȘI LITERATURI STRĂINE
ȘCOALA DOCTORALĂ DE STUDII LITERARE ȘI CULTURALE
THE
ABOMINABLE SHADOW
OF THE MIND. WILLIAM BLAKE’S
URIZEN AS A FIGURE O F
MEMORY FOR ALLEN
GINSBERG’S MOLOCH
ABOMINABILA UMBRĂ A M INȚII
PERSONAJUL URIZEN AL LUI WILLIAM BLAKE
INTERPRETAT DREPT FI GURĂ A MEMORIEI PENTRU
PERSONAJUL MOLOCH AL LUI ALLEN GINSBERG
Profesor coordonator:
Prof. Dr. Mihaela Irimia
Doctorand: [anonimizat]
2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
NTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………………. 5
I. ON MEMORY STUDIES:
HOW MEMORY CAN BE CULTURAL ……………………………………………… 15
I.1. From Individual, to Collective, to Cultural Memory ………………………………….. 15
I.2. Breaking the History -Memory Polarity: History as Literature …………………….. 35
I.3. Memory, Literature and Their Performative N ature ………………………………….. 50
I
.4. From Sites and Images to Figures of Memory ………………………………………….. 62
II.FROM MOUTH TO MOUTH:
HOW BLAKE’S VISION REACHES GINSBERG ………………………………. 77
II. 1. Ginsberg’s Communicative and Cultural Recollection of Blake …………………. 77
II. 2. Blakean Madness as Formative Element for Ginsberg’s Beat Generation ….. 98
II. 3. Blake, Ginsberg and Artistic Creation as Sacred Incarnation …………………… 120
III.A STORY OF MEMNO NIC GENESIS:
HOW URIZEN AND MOLOCH ERR ON THE SAME PATTERN ……. 137
III. 1. Urizen’s Embodiment and Proliferation of the Primordial Error …………….. 137
III. 2. THE ABOMINABLE I: The O.T. Moloch of Sacrificial Filicide
and Ginsberg’s God of Urizenic Error ………………………………………………………….. 163
IV.THE NECESSITY TO REMEMBER AND ACTUALIZE:
HOW URIZEN AND MOLOCH RULE ……………………………………………… 185
IV. 1. THE MIND. Urizen, Moloch and the Spectral Single Vision of Hyper -Rationalization …………………………………………………………………………… 185
IV. 2. THE ABOMINABLE II. Urizen and Moloch’s Illusio n of Order
and Fall into Tyranny… ……………………………………………………………………………… 215
IV. 3. THE SHADOW. Urizen, Moloch and the Shadowy Sleep of Death …………… 227
IV. 4. THE ABOMINABLE III. Urizen’s Emanation and Moloch’s Emasculation ….. 255
CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………………….. 289
WORKS CITED ………………………………………………………………………………… 299

INTRODUCTION

In the midst of Cold War rationalism, materialism, spiritual slumber and
enforced capitalist conformism, Allen Ginsberg’s revolutionary spiritual
message was delivered in the shape of a wild, anguished, yet impassioned howl
that seemed to fade into a distinc t plea: remember William Blake, remember
Urizen! Yet, how could a figure so distant in terms of time and space have the power to reverberate in an entirely different cultural context that was
intrinsically bound to the development of a military -industrial complex
1 and the
constant threat of a nuclear war? In order to become relevant to Ginsberg’s contemporary American society, the eighteenth century English spirit of Urizen
had to inhabit a late twentieth century American body that would ensure the
travelling of its mnemonic energy and in this sense Allen Ginsberg created a
literary, modern Moloch.
The prophetic connection that allowed Ginsberg to hear the English
bard’s voice was extended into a type of poetic inspiration and mystical
mentoring that decisiv ely influenced the nature of his artistic endeavors.
Throughout his life, the American poet constantly stressed his indebtedness to William Blake and critics such as Tony Trigilio and Francesca Bellarsi (who
focused on Blake and Ginsberg’s apocalyptic writ ing and spiritual warfare),
Alicia Ostriker, C hristopher Pellnat , Gregory M. Dandeles and Mihai Stroe
(who stressed their prophetic tradition), C had John Pevateaux (who highlighted
their esoteric awareness), John Tytell (who discussed their naked human for m
divine), along with Gary Schmidgall and Eliot Katz (who laid emphasis on their
similar political stances), among others, have sought to analyze the particular strings that strengthen the association between the two writers. Apart from
conservative critic s such as Harold Bloom, who refused to place Blake and
1 The term ‘military -industrial complex’ was coined by U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower
and introduced in his 1961 Farewell Address to the nation, in which he warned against the
possibility that politically financed and industrialized nuclear arms race may get out of
control and threaten the democratic fundamental principles of the nation.
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Ginsberg on the same level in terms of literary talent and creativity, there has
been almost no challenging of the Blake -Ginsberg bond. However, when
acknowledged, this link is rarely treated in isolat ion: for instance it is not just
Ginsberg, but the Beat Generation in general that is considered (Dandeles,
Tytell), or it is not just Blake, but also Whitman (Schmidgall), Thoreau (Stroe)
and H.D. – Hilda Doolittle – (Trigilio) that are brought into the e quation.
Moreover, despite the two poets’ similar prophetic indignation, social
criticism and poetics of vision based on an insistence to bring about a different
type of enlightenment that is not of the mind, but of the spirit, the link between
their most significant villainous gods, Urizen and Moloch, respectively, has
received very little critical attention. Out of the above mentioned critics, Tony Trigilio, Alicia Ostriker and Gregory M. Dandeles most notably and overtly
bring the two gods together, yet their analyses do not exceed a few paragraphs
which advance the characters’ common allegiance to reason over imagination,
singularity over multiplicity and materialism over spirituality. In addition,
although Allen Ginsberg himself taught a course on Will iam Blake and a class
on Urizen in particular at Naropa University during which he stressed the
Urizenic mind frame of his contemporaries and although in “Howl” he gave a
nod to his Blakean heritage by opposing Moloch to the hipsters who
hallucinated “Blak e-light tragedy among the scholars of war” (9), no full length
study has ever been specifically centered on Urizen and Moloch.
Consequently, the present thesis aims at filling this critical gap by
providing an in- depth and focused analysis of the two chara cters that will shed
light over the extent to which the construction of Ginsberg’s Moloch can be
interpreted as a cultural reminder of Blake’s Urizen. In this respect, the two
main primary works that will be tackled are William Blake’s The Book of
Urizen (1794) and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), two poems that revolve
most closely around the two antagonists. Although references will be made to various works of the two canonical authors, since Urizen (as opposed to
Moloch) develops throughout multiple prophetic writings, the choice of these
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specific poems allows me to take a closer look at the origin of the
aforementioned gods and at the premises according to which they were built, as
well as the essential attributes that grant them a foundational role in th e personal
mythologies envisioned by Blake and Ginsberg.
Furthermore, the study will offer a nuanced and systematic inquiry into
the connection between the two characters’ secular impositions and divine pretenses via the use of the late twentieth century t heories of cultural memory.
More precisely, the chosen methodological framework will rely primarily on Jan and Aleida Assmann’s apprehension of cultural memory, its application in the
field of literary studies and the delineation of what Jan Assmann calls ‘figure of
memory’. It should be noted, however, that in the final chapter of this work,
cultural memory is blended with social criticism, psychoanalytical criticism as
well as feminist and macho criticism in order to reveal different facets of Urizen’s an d Moloch’s oppression. Yet, without a spatiotemporal, generational
or genetic link, Ginsberg ‘remembers’ Blake and revives his prophetic warnings through literature and, as a teacher, influential counter -cultural artist of his
generation and canonized author, he assumes the role of a specialized bearer of
cultural memory, whose work has the power to re -embody Urizen in the image
of Moloch, turn the former into a figure of memory, as well as ensure its circulation and literary resurrection.
Not only does this critical approach legitimize the building of a bridge
across time and space between two visionary artists living in different cultural
milieux , but it is also relevant through the fact that it enters Western tradition
whilst leaving behind ineffaceable traces of spirituality rooted in the Old Testament Zakhor (the Hebrew word for ‘remember’), the command given by
Yahweh to the Jewish people who are urged to remember their past and their role as a holy nation. Thus, the spiritual element implicit in the a ct of cultural
remembrance is very suitable for the subject matter of this thesis, as Ginsberg’s implied imperative to remember is shrouded in Blakean mysticism and founded
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on the conviction of the holiness of the poet -prophet’s message delivered in the
shape of a poetic sermon that addresses the American people.
In this interpretation, Ginsberg turns Urizen into a figure of memory for
his modern Moloch through the implementation of what Jan Assmann considers
to be the three basic features of figures of me mory: “ a concrete relationship to
time and place, a concrete relationship to a group, and an independent capacity for reconstruction” (Cultural 24). Since figures of memory are stripped of their
original context, they become floating islands which are able to transcend their initial surroundings and subsequently become anchored in new cultural
environments. Accordingly, the figure of Urizen travels to 1950s America where
it takes the form of Moloch, which allows it to acquire a concrete relationship to
the temporal and spatial coordinates of Ginsberg’s society. In its Molochian
reinterpretation, Urizen is Americanized and presentified,
2 becoming valuable in
the construction of a group identity that is firmly lodged in its zeitgeist. Through
Moloch, Urizen helps Ginsberg shape the collective identity of the hipsters of
his Beat generation that is purposefully described and simultaneously construed in “Ho wl” in opposition to the figure of the reprehensible deity of the mind.
In order to account for the Urizen- Moloch mnemonic transfer of energy,
I have identified what I call three mnemonic cores which are fixed points in the
formation of the figure of memory and around which (re)interpretable gaps are
revealed. As the title of my thesis implies, the essential characteristics that are
carried from Urizen to Moloch, are organized around the concepts of ‘abominable’, ‘shadow’ and ‘mind’. While Urizen is explicitly named “this
abominable Void” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44), Ginsber g’s Moloch uses his
biblical tradition in order to underline the inherently abominable character that links him to Urizen. In addition, the latter’s “shadow of horror” (Blake, The
Book of Urizen 44) is reflected into the distorted vision of Moloch’s multiple
eyes which can no longer perceive the truth through the thick fog of his factories
2 The verb ‘presentify’ is derived from J.P. Vernant’s French concept présentification , which
is used by Jan Assmann in its acceptation of “making something present” ( Cultural 73),
expressing a key attribute of memory figures.
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(Ginsberg, “Howl” 21) and the “eternal mind” of The Book of Urizen (51)
travels to “Moloch, whose name is the Mind!” in “Howl” (22). Placing these
three mnemonic cores in a different context ensures their cultural continuity, but
also their reinterpretation in accordance with their new frame of reference. In
creating a modern, Urizenic tyrant that aims to take over the mind and drag his
worshipers in a shadowy sleep of abominable selfishness, greed, soul –
mechanization and sexual rigidity , the American poet uses “memory [as] a
weapon against oppression” (J. Assmann, Cultural 69), as a path towards
liberation and as a tool for teaching and identity forging.
The present thesis is structured into four chapters dealing with an
exploration of the chosen critical approach, an analysis of the multi -faceted
connection between William Blake and Allen Ginsberg, an inquiry into the
origin and sources of inspiration for the creation of U rizen and Moloch and a
thorough investigation of the characteristics that are symbolically passed on
from the Blakean Zoa to the American immortal idol, whether they are
remembered as such or presented in an entirely different light.
The first chapter, On Memory Studies: How Memory Can Be Cultural , is
further divided into four subchapters, all of which provide a necessary
methodological scaffolding for the subsequent building of the thesis. To begin
with, “ From Individual, to Collective, to Cultural Memory ” tackles the
development of the modern field of memory studies, tracing its roots to the Henri Bergson’s pure memory, Sigmund Freud’s inherited memories and Carl
Gustav Jung’s collective unconscious which are most notably countered in the
first half of th e twentieth century by Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory
and Aby Warburg’s social memory. The social element of remembering that the last two critics insisted upon led the way to what Astrid Erll calls the second
phase of the field’s development, the 1980s memory boom which was brought
about by Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and arguably peaked with Jan and
Aleida Assmann’s distinction between collective and cultural memory. It is within the context of the latter that figures can be of memory take shape.
9

“Breaking the History -Memory Polarity: History as Literature ” stresses
the intricate connection between memory and history, challenging the antithesis
between the two cultural spheres established by founding fathers Halbwachs and
Nora and accounting for the Assmanns’ more inclusive understanding of
memory through the use of Hayden White’s perception of history as poesis . The
constructivist, rather than the positivist apprehension of history provides valuable insight into the cultural understanding of memory, since the both them
value imagination over authenticity. Moreover, the nature of cultural memory as
a literary critical approach is examined in relation to reader -oriented criticism, in
“Memory, Literature and Their Performative Nature”, so as to highl ight crucial
stances such as the focus on agency, relativism, dynamism and plurality that are
taken on by Jan and Aleida Assmann in the molding of the concept of cultural
memory. The last subchapter of this section “From Sites and Images to Figures of Memo ry” lays decisive emphasis on Jan Assmann’s ‘figure of memory’, its
conceptual roots in the classical tradition of loci memoriae , in Halbwachs’
images and Nora’s lieux , bringing to the surface the traits that distinguish
Assmann’s mnemonic symbol from those of his predecessors.
The second chapter, From Mouth to Mouth: How Blake’s Vision
Reaches Ginsberg furnishes me with an opportunity to defend the selection of
these two authors by marking Ginsberg’s peculiar prophetic, psychological,
spiritual and literar y attachment to his mentor. In “Ginsberg’s Communicative
and Cultural Recollection of Blake” I prove that there can be an overlapping between the Assmanns’ two seemingly opposite notions, as I consider
Ginsberg’s life -changing auditory hallucination of Wil liam Blake’s voice as an
instance of immediate, verbatim communicative transmission of memory that is
from mouth to mouth, from prophet to prophet, but I also draw attention upon
the more long -term cultural connection between the two poets established
through the institution of the literary cannon which enables the American Beat
to access Blake’s works and enliven Urizen as a figure of memory for his god
Moloch.
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Acknowledging Ginsberg in the context of his literary generation,
“Blakean Madness as Formative Element for Ginsberg’s Beat Generation”
considers the cultural reflection of William Blake’s literary madness in the
shaping of the identitary image of “Howl”’s Beats, with the beat being
interpreted as the beatifically mad. After defining what I deem to be a peculiar
type of Blakean madness, I underline its dual effect upon the hipsters that
inspired and became inspirational through the groundbreaking American poem
which portrayed madness as both a consequence of social stigma and a source of
prophetic se lf-confidence. Last, but not least, “Blake, Ginsberg and Artistic
Creation as Sacred Incarnation” reveals the powerful influence that Blake exerted over the American visionary’s poetic art, as an esthetic of incarnation
central to the English poet -prophet’ s work infiltrated “Howl” on both linguistic
and conceptual levels.
The mythological roots that led to the formation of Urizen and Moloch
are regarded through the lens of a defining erroneous pattern that is depicted in
A Story of Mnemonic Genesis: How Urizen and Moloch Err on the Same
Pattern . The identity of both gods can be traced back to the Old Testament and
although they relate to the Holy Scriptures in different ways (Urizen’s coming
into existence mocks Christian Genesis, while Moloch’s behavior im itates his
biblical counterpart), they follow very similar abominable paths. “Urizen’s
Embodiment and Proliferation of the Primordial Error” follows the protagonist
of Blake’s ‘Bible of Hell’, from the moment of his biblical inception as
Ezekiel’s Zoa to the purely Blakean interlacing of Christian, Gnostic and
Hermetic creational myth elements that turn him into a contagious
personification of the primordial error.
T
his error is repeated and reinterpreted in “The Abominable I: The O.T.
Moloch of Sacrificial Filicide and Ginsberg’s God of Urizenic Error”, which
stresses the manner in which Ginsberg makes use of the scriptural and literary
legacy of Moloch in order to bring forth the cultural memory of Urizen. As the
embodiment of abomination itself, the Old Testament Moloch is a merciless,
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idolatrous ancient Canaanite deity which commands worshipers to sacrifice their
own children to him which offers Ginsberg the possibility of creating an analogy
with the sacrificed individuality, spirituality and imag inative abilities of the
misfits of the young generation of American hipsters in the 1950s. In taking Moloch’s name, the American god also appropriates his personality, which sets
him on a destructive path that ties him even more closely to Urizen’s Satani c
rebellion, idolatry, self -gratification, insistence on division and generation of
death, all of which illustrate an initial aspect of a broader understanding of
abomination, the first out of the three mnemonic cores that reveal Moloch’s
cultural indebtedness to Urizen.
The fourth and final chapter, The Necessity to Remember and Actualize:
How Urizen and Moloch Rule delivers an in -depth analysis of the two
characters, organized around the constitutive factors that bind them in the
process of cultural remem brance. “The Mind. Urizen, Moloch and the S pectral
Single Vision of Hyper -Rationalization” portrays Urizen as a god of reason who
is in the power of what William Blake calls the Spectre, the most selfish side of
him that negates everything which is not rea sonable. This Urizenic destructive
intellect, self -absorbed to such an extent that it can no longer accept a
multiplicity of perspectives, but is bound to single -vision is transferred to
Moloch as such, when Ginsberg names his god ‘the mind’ (in both its i ndividual
and universal acceptation). However, the necessary fluidity embedded in the
travelling of the figure of memory from one context to another is given by
Ginsberg’s association of hyper -rationality not to promoters of the
Enlightenment, as Blake had done, but to the creators of the atomic bomb and to
the immorality behind the reductive logic of the scientific and military
endeavors of his time.
“The Abominable II. Urizen and Moloch’s Illusion of Order and Fall
into Tyranny” exposes the dangerous soci al consequences of blind reasoning
which present itself under the guise of order. Toppling the traditional opposition between beneficial order and detrimental chaos, this subchapter reveals Urizen’s
12

and Moloch’s simulation of divine order that is abominabl e since it becomes
oppressive and goes against eternally ordained principles by replacing kosmos
with taxis (to use Friedrich Hayek’s distinction between natural and artificial
order), in an attempt to mask the usurper -gods’ limited perception under a veil
of exaggerated uniformity that inevitably leads to tyranny.
The shadow -aspect that defines the two charact ers is discussed in
relation to its strong association with sleep and death. In “The Shadow. Urizen,
Moloch and the Shadowy Sleep of Death” the Zoa’s deadly slumber of
forgetfulness which resurfaces in the “Nightmare of Moloch!” (Ginsberg,
“Howl” 21) takes shelter under a dreadful shadow that converts the human body
into Plato’s cave and brings the spirit into a state of deep trance that obliterates all knowledge of Eternity and reconceptualizes the notion of death, making it a
part of life. Although in thi s case, the ancient and Christian death -sleep allegory
gives way to a Gnostic interpretation of spiritual death as a shadowy realm of
oblivion, it contains within it a seed of light that can be a potential saving grace
for Urizen and Moloch. Consequently, with the help of the Jungian and
alchemical connotation of the word shadow, I describe their negative role as a
necessary obstacle that not should not only be transcended, but also embraced as an indispensible part of the self, the understanding of which o ffers the promise
of individuation and personal salvation.
Articulating the gender -related abomination that completes the third and
last part that makes up this mnemonic core, “The Abominable III. Urizen’s
Emanation and Moloch’s Emasculation” depicts the t wo deities’ abominable
suppression of femininity and sexual energy. Instead of aiming towards an androgynous inner regeneration that results from a harmonious unification of
each Zoa with his Emanation (representative of his feminine side), Urizen
prefers to cast off his female counterpart, Ahania, label her sexuality as sinful
and display an excessively misogynist, unbalanced and abusive behavior towards her. Ginsberg’s Moloch offers a cultural reminder of Urizen’s
suppression, as he too is a deity who is not able to accommodate any markers of
13

femininity and therefore emasculates all males who do not conform to his
standard of masculinity . Subscribing the memory figure of Urizen to the
imposed gender roles of his era, Ginsberg condemns the American
Governme nt’s politicization of sexuality and its shunning of nonconformist
masculinities and rebellious homosexual or homosocial identities represented by the hipster and underlines the harmful effects of such a unilateral vision. The
fact that neither Blake, nor Ginsberg counter hard masculinity with excessive
femininity, but rather mark this abomination by offering an example of the
androgynous image of the Eternal Man and hipster, respectively, they expose
the simplistic and static nature of gender polarity and replace it with a more
inclusive, fluid system of complementarity.
Through the lens of cultural memory and Jan Assmann’s specific
understanding of the concept of ‘figure of memory, Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch is
interpreted as recasting the abominable shadow of William Blake’s Urizen over
a modern society so engulfed in materialism and so keen to justify the existence
of the Cold War that it becomes oppressive and oblivious to spiritual values.
Urizen’s Enlightenment obsession with the faculty of reason, his ty rannical and
self-absorbed personality, as well as his adamant repudiation of femininity and
sexual enjoyment are mirrored in Moloch’s overly -intellectual yet immoral
nuclear development, capitalist greed and selfishness, oppressive conformism and heterono rmative masculinity, which simultaneously revive the Blakean
figure of memory and reconstruct it so as to suit t he sacrificial proneness of mid –
twentieth century America.

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I. ON MEMORY STUDIES:
HOW MEMORY CAN BE CULTURAL

I.1. From Individual, to Collective, to Cultural Memory

Up until the twentieth century, memories were regarded as being merely
personal, particular experiences and the act of remembering was considered to
be primarily an individual, solitary activity. However, the present academi c
focus on the field of memory studies and its continuous development is founded on the apprehension that there are facets of memory that are social and cultural,
that revolve not only around the individual, but around a group of people whose history, identity and understanding of their cultural environment is strengthened
by common memories, be they direct, passed on from previous generations or
internalized by means of different media, allowing for the continuity of
tradition, for the construction and per sistence of (group) self -imagery, as well as
for the perpetual reconstruction of the past viewed through the lens of the present.
According to theorist Astrid Erll, there have been two main phases in the
development of modern memory studies: the first one is rooted in the first half
of the twentieth century and it is based on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg, among others, who have constructed and put forth a
collective and a social understanding of memory, res pectively, while the second
phase of the development of the cultural memory field blooms in the 1980s, along with Pierre Nora’s pivotal concept of lieux de mémoire. Building on the
latter, a fourth pillar of support for the foundation of cultural memory wa s built
by Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, who envisioned a cultural (and communicative) side to memory and who stressed the importance of
distinguishing between what was previously called collective memory and what
can be described as cultural memory. The domain has since been enriched by
the theories of Astrid Erll, Ann Rigney and Cathy Caruth, among many others.
15

The present subchapter aims at offering an overview of the expansion of
the term “ memory ” that transitioned from an individual to a social conce pt, after
which it eventually acquired a purely cultural understanding. In order to better
grasp the collective theories of memory, a short excursion into Henri Bergson’s,
Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Gustav Jung’s perspectives upon this matter and the
relatio n of recollection to the individual mind is in order. Subsequently, I will
trace the 1920s rejection of the individual model, as well as that of the
genetically inherited model of memory in the shape of Maurice Halbwachs’
collective memory and Aby Warburg’ s social memory. Last, but definitely not
least, the other two of what I call the four pillars of support for the foundation of modern memory studies will be tackled, in reference to Pierre Nora’s lieux de
mémoire and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s ‘cultural mem ory’.
In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson discusses the
interpenetration of spirit and matter that are bound together by means of memory (Lawlor, “ Henri Bergson. ”). Hence, memory is divided into two types:
habit -memory and independent recollection, with the latter being considered
pure memory that is not located in the brain, but is stored in time ( durée ) and
represents the “ spirit in its most tangible form” (Bergson 82). Both types of
memories are depicted as being part of a person’s subjective cons ciousness,
stressing the individual character of remembering: “ In short, memory in these
two forms . . . constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in
perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of things ” (Bergson 26).
Moreover, despite the fact that, according to Bergson, “ the deeper we go within
ourselves to the source of memory within us, the more that we find increasingly
pure manifestations of durée ” (Barnard 226), the critic’s attitude towards
recollection memory is ambivalent, depicting it at times as a passive recorder and other times as active creation based on imagination, with the latter being
more in tune with Bergson’s highlight on the fluidity, unpredictability and
creativity of durée . This pure representation of memory i s also present at the
level of dreams, which, according to the French philosopher, seem to be a
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spontaneous mix of perception and memory, a “ combination of vaguely
apprehended sensations fused with a shifting overlay of recollection memories ”
(Barnard 227) that stresses once again the individuality and uniqueness of each
person’s subjective workings of the mind.
Another instance of reliance on memories as relevant recollections at the
level of the individual’s dormant representations of the past can be found in
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The latter work is founded on the
theory that a person’s dreams are symptoms of possible psychological illnesses and that they are constructed on the principle of the association of different,
individual memories. However, as opposed to conscious recollections, dreams
bring to the surface chaotic, repressed events of the past, mingling them into
fragmented, elusive, seemingly unimportant pieces that the patient is not aware
of having. “ No one who occupies himself with dreams can . . . fail to discover
that it is a very common event for a dream to give evidence of knowledge and
memories which the waking subject is unaware of possessing” (Freud 47),
dream thoughts constructed “ in accordance with principles other than those
governing our waking memory, in that [they] recall not essential and important,
but subordinate and disregarded things ” (Freud 188). Furthermore, memories
can be interpreted in a similar manner to dreams, and in his paper Screen
Memories (1899), Freud describes the concept in the tit le as a type of memory
“that is seemingly emotionally insignificant but is actually a substitute for a
more troubling [traumatic] memory with which it bears an associative connection. Such a memory thus is partly determined by the mechanism of
displacement which Freud had encountered in his study of dreams ” (Mollon 53).
Just like dreams, memories are deceptive, wishful fantasies “ created in response
to current difficulties ” (Mollon 56). Presumably, all memories are recorded in
the unconscious, many of them are suppressed and only a few of the latter can be brought to the surface by means of “the chain of associations back in time ”
(R. White 40) induced by the therapist and some can even be created by the therapeutic process, bringing forth false memories.
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In a later series of essays, entitled Totem and Taboo: Resemblances
between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), Freud embraced
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of “ inherited memories ”, agreeing with the
assumption that memories can be passed on from generation to generation and consequently accepting the theory that individual memories can be compris ed of
other people’s memories.

Freud’s inherited- memory theory is at odds with the idea that the mind of an
individual is self -constituted on the ba sis of experience and cognition. Instead it
is proposed, insistently so, that the individual mind is at its inception not its
own: others’ memories are there already, the memory of others’ experiences
exists at the outset. (R. White 40)

However, the mechanism by which this transmission of memories occurs is
understood by Freud to be represented by a person’s genes, which allow for a
passive conveyance of memories.

humans [to] pass on some of their memories to their offspring. . . . Genetically
inheri ted memory may be responsible for traumas and conflicts held
unconsciously but outside an individual's capability to recall; and such
phenomena as Oedipal complexes may result from trace memories held and
amplified in racial memory. ( “Sigmund Freud & Freudian Psychoanalysis. ”)

Similarly stressing the importance of racial, genetic memories in the
context of the group unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung coins the phrase “ collective
unconscious ”, or objective psyche, to describe a structure that is genetically
inherited, marking dormant tendencies towards receiving inherent archetypal
patterns and dispositions. In addition, the collective unconscious is “ a part of the
psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by
the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience
and consequently is not a personal acquisition” (Jung, The Archetypes 42).
Therefore, Jung categorizes the unconscious into personal and collective, with the form er being similar to Freud’s id – in that it represents the most intimate,
repressed desires and memories collected throughout a person’s life – and the
latter being an aspect of the unconscious that predates a single person’s mind
and is genetically inherited from his or her predecessor s.
18

Arguing against Bergson’s subjectivism and individualistic philosophy,
as well as against Freud’s psychoanalytical depiction of memory as pertaining
solely to the individual mind and distinguishing himself from the Lamarckian –
based theories of inherite d memories, Maurice Halbwachs is arguably the first
critic to embrace the collective aspect of memory, while discarding the genetic
argument in favor of the existence of a social imperative behind all memories
and renouncing the philosophy of mind approach or the psychological
understanding of memory in relation to the unconscious in support of a more general, communal apprehension of it as a conscious act that necessarily
involves a group. Consequently, Halbwachs is often considered to be the
founding father of modern social memory studies, paving the way towards a
highly influential conceptualization of memory as a collective notion that is
intrinsically linked to an individual’s social milieu. In his seminal work, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) ( The Social Frameworks of Memory ),
partially translated in On Collective Memory (1992), Halbwachs coined the term
“mémoire collective ” in order to stress the fact that all memories resort to social
structures and external factors that inevitably convert seemingly intimate, individual acts of remembrance into group -related phenomena. Further
elaboration of this concept was put forth in La Mémoire collective, published posthumously in 1950 and translated in 1980 as The Collective Memory.
As a student of Émile Durkheim, who “ located creativity not as an
individual accomplishment, but rather as a collective phenomenon” (Whitehead
128), Maurice Halbwachs builds on the latter’s theory of collective representations, adding elements from Marx’s apprehension of class
consciousness and insisting on the fact that both the creation of memories and
their ability to persist in time are dependent upon social schemata or
frameworks. Hence, not only do “individuals remember . . . through dialogue
with oth ers within social groups . . . [but also] the most durable memories tend
to be those held by the greatest number ” (A. Green 38). The dialogue with
others is also at the basis of one’s dialogue with oneself: “One cannot in fact
19

think about the events of one ’s past without discoursing upon them. But to
discourse upon something means to connect within a single system of ideas our
opinions as well as those of our circle ” (Halbwachs, On Collective 53). And
whether used to put together thoughts or dreams or memor ies, discourse and
dialogue are constructed with the use of language, which is in itself a social
activity par excellence, a binding element that necessarily involves a connection
between individuals and groups. Yet, if for Bergson and Freud memories and dreams are intimately connected, Halbwachs clearly distinguishes the two, since
a person’s state of sleep is “ the one area of human experience which is not
rooted in a social context or structure ” (Whitehead 127).
In addition, Halbwachs goes beyond Durkheim ’s focus on the sacred
memory of societies by insisting on “ the importance of memory in all types of
societies ” (Misztal 51). Even more notably, he exceeds Durkheim’s reliance on
the social by seemingly “abandoning the fine distinction between individual a nd
collective representations ” (Whitehead 129) in maintaining that a person’s
freedom of thought and independence of conviction are presumably illusory and
cannot exist without reference to a group Similarly, “the events of our life most
immediate to ourse lves are also engraved in the memory of those groups closest
to us ” (Halbwachs, The Collective 46). Therefore, individual memories offer
only a one -sided perspective of collective memories and cannot stand alone. In
Halbwachs’ words, “ just as people are members of many different groups at the
same time, so the memory of the same fact can be placed within many frameworks, which result from distinct collective memories ” (Halbwachs, On
Collective 52). Individual memories are a matter of perspective that is eas ily
influenced by social circumstances and cannot occur in the absence of a broader,
common recollection: “ I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a
viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes, that this p osition changes itself as my relationships to other milieus
change ” (Halbwachs, The Collective 48). Hence, individual memory is
20

“displaced by Halbwachs and absorbed into the collective memory ” (Whitehead
129).
However, collective memory is an abstract term that does not denote the
memory of a single, universal, supreme, collective mind, but is itself dependent
upon individual recollections: “ One may say that the individual remembers by
placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the
memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories ”
(Halbwachs qtd. in Erll 16). But because individual memories are themselves regarded as collective memories, Wulf Kansteiner comes up with a useful
distinction between coll ective and collected memories, maintaining Halbwachs’
definition of the former, while introducing the latter as “ an aggregate of
individual memories which behaves and develops just like its individual
composites, and which can therefore be studied with the whole inventory of
neurological, psychological, and psychoanalytical methods and insights
concerning the memories of individuals ” (186). According to Halbwachs,
differences that arise between the memories of individuals can be accounted for by the fact th at the people involved belong to different groups, and “individual
remembrance changes as the individual’s affiliation changes ” (Misztal 53).
Groups, in turn, are bound by specific space and time limitations, and whose
endurance of memories is dependent upon the group’s existence. In this respect
and many others, Maurice Halbwachs opposes collective memory to history, a
discussion that will be touched upon in the next subchapter.
Henri Bergson’s influence upon Halbwachian theories can be easily
noticed in t erms of the French critic’s association of memory with duration.
However, instead of perceiving durée as the stream of consciousness that is the flux of individual psychic life, time itself is regarded as being collective:
“thoughts and events of individua l consciousness can be compared and relocated
within a common time because inner duration dissolves into various currents whose source is the group” (Halbwachs, The Collective 125).
21

It is group cognitive patterns that guide seemingly individual memories,
the formation and resurfacing of which would not be possible without the cadres
sociaux , or the sociocultural environment that they are attached to: “ according to
Halbwachs . . . social groups determine what is ‘memorable’ and how it will be
remembered ” (Misztal 51). Albeit Halbwachs mentions the fact that these social
frameworks are primarily formed out of the people around us, the communities we belong to, historian Marc Bloch has famously criticized the father of
collective memory for not specifying exact ly the manner in which
intergenerational memory is transmitted from the older members of the group to the younger ones, for not studying the fact that errors in collective memory
result in the perpetuation of false memories (Bloch 154) and for using the te rm
cultural memory as a near synonym for communication: “ we are free to use the
term ‘collective memory’, but we must remember that at least a part of what we are referring to is simply everyday communication between individuals ” (Bloch
153). Criticism with respect to the over -reaching socialization of the substratum
of memory has also been expressed by French psychiatrist Charles Blondel, who
insisted on the necessity that “reconstruction consist, at least partly, of
something more that commonly shared materials ” (156), prompting Maurice
Halbwachs to dedicate parts of his The Collective Memory to a defense of
Blondel’s accusations of ungrounded collectivization of psychological phenomena.
Moreover, in depicting the act of remembrance as an active
recons truction and “creation of shared versions of the past ” (Erll, Memory 15),
Halbwachs mentions the solidification of the group’s identity as a consequence: “through [memories], as by a continual relationship, a sense of our identity is
perpetuated ” (Halbwach s, On Collective 47), but also as a necessary condition
of this process. However, one could argue that his theory overlooks conflicting
memories – seen as inevitably destined towards oblivion – in favor of memories
that bind and cement group consciousness: “Halbwachs’ theory views collective
memory as ‘a record of resemblance’ which ensures that ‘the group remains the
22

same’ ” (Misztal 52). This stance is also founded on Durkheim’s “ emphasis upon
community, consensus and cohesion” (A. Green 38) in order to le gitimize the
formation of national representations. Later on in the subchapter, the connection
between collective memory and national identity will be underlined in the
context of Pierre Nora's memory places.
The second pillar of support for the social understanding of memory was
erected by Aby Warburg by means of his interest in art history and the
transmission of symbolic patterns throughout time. The lack of an easily
comprehensible and unified theory with respect to the mnemonic system he
envisioned led to a relative neglect of Warburg in the context of tracing back the
origins of cultural memory. Nowadays, the scholar is mostly remembered for having founded the Hamburg library, which was transferred to London in 1933
and became The Warburg Institute of London. Yet, Aby Warburg’s legacy in
terms of social memory provides a lot of insight into the basis of perceiving the
process of memory through a cultural lens that allows for the apprehension of
material objects as carriers of the energetic formulas of t heir time that can be
then reused and re -appropriated in different times and cultural contexts.
Although Warburg was focused mainly on the Renaissance period and on visual
representations of memory, he was keen to highlight the importance of an
interdiscip linary approach to culture that could bring together artistic
expressions as markers of a certain milieu that has to be reconstructed and brought to life again in order to be analyzed and understood.
As opposed to the aforementioned theorists of the time, who relied on
the idea of genetic or racial transmission of memory, and in contrast to
Halbwachs who focused mainly on memories passed on from one member of a
group to another through social interaction, throughout the life span of a certain
community, Wa rburg believed in memory’s “ codification in material
objectivations ” (Erll, Memory 22) that enabled social recollection and
reconstruction of specific images, irrespective of racial ties or distance in time.
In other words, the hypothesis Warburg advanced in the field he called
23

iconology envisioned art as a recipient and carrier of pathos formulas . As such,
it acquires the function of “ an organ of social memory ” (Gombrich 104) that has
the power to maintain and transmit markers of a bygone epoch. Whether what
was embodied and conveyed was described as being mnemonic energy, a
formula, a pattern, an engram (this is where Richard Semon’s influence can be
seen), a deposit of emotional experience or a symbol (a term that echoed a Romantic worldview), it offered material objects the possibility of an afterlife. It
is important to note that the apparent materialization of memory does not imply
for Warburg the portrayal of “ works of art as mechanical derivations from the
material basis, nor . . . their distillation into a pure history of ideas. In both he criticized the fabrication of false continuities and the arbitrary identification of
causes ” (Forster 171). In this respect, Walter Benjamin was keen to be
associated with Warburg’s circle, since he too believed in the “interplay
between the material conditions of culture and their symbolic after -life” (Emden
211). In fact, many critics, among whom Christian Emden and Matthew
Rampley, discuss the common points in Warburg’s and Benjamin’s perceptions
upon culture.
Warburg’s interest in artistic iconography, as well as the German critic’s
passion for collecting visual material came together in the form of the highly
ambitious, albeit incomplete project he called Mnemosye Atlas (also known as
Atlas of Memory ). Laying par ticular stress on the Greek word mnemosyne ,
3 the
German equivalent for which was Nachleben (afterlife), Warburg made sure to
inscribe it above the door of the library he founded (Bruhn, “ Aby Warburg ”),
thus ensuring the perception of the institute as “ a mn emonic record ” (Gombrich
104) or as “ a vastly enlarged memory ” (Forster 171). The atlas, considered by
3 According to Greek mythology in general and Hesiod’s Theogony in particular, Mnemosyne
(the Titaness of Memory) was the mother of the nine muses: Calliope (poetry), Clio
(history), Erato (love), Euterpe (mu sic), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (rhetoric),
Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy) (Mojsik, “Music”). For the
importance of Mnemosyne see Notopoulos’ “Mnemosyne in Oral Literature”. According to
Jan Assmann, the Greeks’ personifi cation of memory and her association with all cultural
activities implied a view of culture “not only as based on memory but as a form of memory
in itself” ( Moses 15).
24

its creator to be an “art history without words ” (Gombrich 104), consisted of
more than eighty panels on which various photographs and representations,
from antique pieces, to medieval artifacts, to Renaissance paintings, from fine
arts reproductions, to twentieth century images on stamps, inscriptions on coins
and contemporary newspaper cut -outs. By placing all of these images next to
one another or even juxtaposed, without any textual explanation, Warburg hoped to demonstrate the continuity of classical forms and their transformation
into symbols that allowed for their reinterpretation in different times,
accentuating the closer relation between the visual and the unconscious. In a
similar manner, Walter Benjamin maintained that memory “‘weaves’ an image
of the past that relies, above all, on the minute details triggering the mémoire
involontaire ” (Emden 220).
Moreover, the interpreter should be able to creatively and imaginatively
reconstruct these vehicles of social memory by “ concentrically expanding rings
around the artifact ” (Forster 172) until the original context in which they were
created was brought to light. In Warburg’s own words, “ the task of social
memory emerges quite clearly: through renewed contact with the monuments of
the past the sap should be enabled to rise di rectly from the subsoil of the past ”
(Warburg qtd. in Rampley 52). The origin of this idea, as well as the stress laid
on the usefulness of an interdisciplinary methodology can be found in the main
argument of Warburg’s dissertation thesis that was focused on the manner in
which two of Botticelli’s paintings carried through ancient models and classical residues that should be referred to in relation to the works of other fourteenth
century Florentine artists (be they writers, sculptures or painters) who hel ped
create the necessary cultural milieu that may advance and encourage a predisposition for these symbols by means of the social function of art that fuels
memory (Rampley 42).
Another key aspect of Warburg’s theory that helped pave the way
towards mode rn cultural memory was that the critic considered the energy
encoded in a material object to be latent. Its value was inaccessible until
25

someone recharged it and reinterpreted in accordance with the different context
in which it resurfaced. The initial neu tral value of the engram allowed it to be
charged either positively or negatively: “ only through contact with the ‘selective
will’ of an age does it become ‘polarized’ into one of the interpretations of
which it is potentially capable ” (Gombrich 107). Ther efore, the actualization of
social memory and the intertwining between continuity and reinvention, as well as between expression and orientation – Warburg’s two basic aspects of
civilization (Gombrich 106) – are necessary conditions for its existence,
“bring[ing] to light the collective psyche that creates these wishes and postulates
these ideals ” (Erll, Memory 20). The survival and release of the same energy in
different historical circumstances, regardless of their distance in time and space,
ensuring the retention of a mnemonic core, while allowing for the absorption
and reinterpretation of the formula to match current needs and interests seems to
be the very foundation upon which Jan Assmann’s concept of figure of memory
was created. Further details about the latter will be discussed in the final
subchapter of this section.
Moving on to the so called ‘new memory studies’ of the 1980s or what
Astrid Erll calls the “ phase of national memory studies ” (“Travelling ” 6), one of
the best known contributors to the development of cultural memory can be said to be Pierre Nora and his monumental national memory project entitled Les
lieux de mémoire, published in France in three parts and seven volumes between
1984 and 1992 and comprising more than one hundred and fif ty-five articles
authored by one hundred and six social and cultural historians. The project was partially translated into English as Realms of Memory: The Construction of the
French Pas t in 1996- 1998, compressed in three volumes and as Rethinking
France 2001- 2006. In the author’s own words, the first volume deals with the
immaterial (the legacy), the second volume tackles the material (the territory)
and the third volume is concerned with the ideal (the glory) (Nora, “From
Lieux ”, xvi). Therefore, in Pierr e Nora’s perspective, memory may be attached
to both physical and non- material ‘sites’ (Hoelscher and Alderman 349).The
26

reason for which it was important for Pierre Nora to bring these memory sites to
the public was that the French author considered that t hey may fill in the gap left
behind by the disappearance of milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory: “‘lieux de mémoire’ are established institutionally when the
environments of memory, the milieux de mémoire, fade. It is as if the ritual of commemoration could help to patch up the irreversibility of time (Boym 453).
In other words, because natural memory inevitably fades along with the
passing of time and the changing of generations, artificial memory, in the shape
of lieux , needs to maintain the memory alive by means of recognizing and
continuously commemorating the constructed elements that make up the core of a nation. The latter, according to Nora, is “ the most important community of
memory ” (Whitehead 137). In this sense, sites of memory “function as a sort of
artificial placeholder for the no longer existent, natural collective memory ”
(Erll, Memory 23). Yet, a lieu de memoire can only exist inasmuch as
imagination endows it with symbolic significance, in which case its function is “to stop time, to block the work of forgetting ” (Nora, “Between Memory ” 19)
and to fight the historical attempt of abolishing the tradition of memory by
objectification. In doing so, they are used “ as a tool to reconstruct – and at the
same time, wittingly or un wittingly: to actively construct – national memory ”
(Erll, “Travelling ” 7). In order to associate the elements of French remembrance
to the collective heritage of the nation he belonged to, Pierre Nora made sure to distinguish between history and memory. I n a similar vein to Maurice
Halbwachs’ argument in favor of the unbridgeable discrepancy and even polarity of the two terms, the author’s introduction to the original French Lieux
de mémoire
4 is dedicated almost entirely to the depiction of memory in
opposition to history. In order to recover memory, one needs to “ look beyond
historical reality to discover symbolic reality ” (Nora, “From Lieux, xvii).
Accordingly, Pierre Nora views realms of memory as an escape from history.
4 For and English presentation of these arguments along with the distinction between lieux
and milieux de mémoire, see Pierre Nora’s essay bearing the title “Between Memory and
History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, published in Representations , 26 (1989).
27

Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de memoire have no referent in
reality; or rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self -referential
signs. This is not to say that they are without content, phys ical presence, or
history; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that
by which they escape from history. ( “Between Memory ” 23-24)

Pierre Nora’s work was also founded on a desire to study national
feeling and understand Frenchness, as the author held the conviction that there
was a certain “ French specificité , a kind of French Sonderweg compared to the
English monarchy and the German Empire ” (Den Boer 21) and that the relation
of France to its collective memory was a special one that needed to be unveiled.
Critics of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire have pointed out the irony behind the
widespread applicability of a project rooted in Fre nch exceptionality, as well as
that behind the revival of memory studies and the stimulation of its boom by
means of a work that is based on the premise according to which (living)
memory no longer exists and has been smothered by history (Rotherberg 3- 4):
“We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” . (Nora qtd. in
Erll 23) In addition, the presumably static connotation of words such as places,
sites or realms (and even of Halbwachs’ frameworks), has determined critics such as Ann Rigney and Michael Rothberg to come up with other concepts
(‘dynamics of memory’
5 and noeudus de mémoire6 respectively) that may more
accurately portray the dynamism and complexity behind the workings of memory. The concept of lieux de mémoire is further discu ssed in the last section
of this chapter.
Although, Jan and Aleida Assmann acknowledge the foundation laid by
the aforementioned critics of memory and particularly Halbwachs’ first step in going beyond a biological understanding of the concept
7 and steppin g into a
5 See Ann Rigney’s 2008 article “The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between
Monumentality and Morphing”. The concept of dynamics of memory will be further
discussed towards the end of this chapter, in the context of its connection to literary studies.
6 See Michael Rothberg’s article “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory. From Lieux
de memoir e to Noeuds de memoire”, published in Yale French Studies , 118/119 (2010).
7 “As Jan Assmann pointed out, Halbwachs’ research shifted our understanding from a ‘biological framework into a cultural one’” (Green 37).
28

social dimension of memory based on group interaction,8 they sought to further
develop the term ‘collective memory’, which was perceived to be too broad and
abstract. Also, Jan and Aleida Assmann seem to have had as starting point Yuri
Lotman and Boris Uspenski’s definition of culture as the “ non-hereditary
memory of a collective ” (qtd. in A. Assmann, Cultural 10) and in an
extrapolation of Nietzsche’s survival of the species in the field of culture.
Consequently, they created a useful theoretical distinction between four types of
memory:9 mimetic memory (centered on learned behavior), the memory of things
(in reference to the material objects that surround us), communicative memory (created through interaction within a group) and cultural memory (a merge of
the other three types of memory inasmuch as they go beyond their practical role and reach a symbolic function) (J. Assmann, Cultural 6). The term ‘cultural
memory’ was introduced by Jan Assmann in his article “ Collective Memory and
Cultural Ident ity” (1995)
10, developed in Cultural Memory and Early
Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination (2011)11 and also
tackled by Aleida Assmann in her Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Functions, Media, Archives (2011). The German crit ics focus particularly on
communicative and cultural memory in order to explain what they perceive to
be a division of Halbwachs’ ‘collective memory’ into two types of
remembering. Evidently, as Astrid Erll reminds us, “ ’memory’, here, is used
8 In this sense, Jan Assmann agrees with Halbwachs that “every individual memory
constitutes itself in communication with others” (J. Assmann, “Collective” 127).
9 This categorization differs in Jan Assmann’s “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion
of Cultural Memory”, where he states that memory is either personal or collective and
within the collective category, one can distinguish between communicative, cultural and
political memory, with the latter being “a top -down institution which depends on the
political organization that institutes it, whereas cultural memory grows over centuries as an
interaction between uncontrolled, self -organizing bottom -up accretion and controlled top –
down institutions more or less independent of any particular political organization” (122).
Aleida Assmann also mentions political memory as one of the main categories of memory.
According to her, memory can be individual, social, political or cultural (A. Assmann, “Memory” 211- 21).
10 An earlier version of Jan Assmann’s article had been published in German i n 1988 under
the title “Kollektives Gedächtnis and kulturelle Identität” in Kultur und Gedächtnis (edited
by Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, Suhrkamp).
11 The volume was originally published in German as Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift,
Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen in 1992 and translated in
English in 2011.
29

metaphorically. Societies do not remember literally; but much of what is done to
reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the process of individual
memory ” (“Cultural Memory Studies ” 5). One the one hand, there is a type of
memory that is based on the tran smission of symbols through everyday
communication and on the other hand, there is memory transmitted via an
institutionalized framework grounded in tradition (an aspect ignored by
Assmann’s French predecessor).

For Assmann, Halbwachs does not take systematic account of those collective
memories which extend beyond the span or range of a lifetime. Once “the
contemporary reference [was] lost ” he contents, “ Halbwachs . . . stopped at this
juncture ” and too readily assumed that ‘[ m]émoire ’ [was] transformed into
‘histoire ’. (Whitehead 131)

As opposed to ‘communicative memory’, the temporal horizon of which
encompasses at most eighty to one hundred years (since it is dependent on the
members of the group being physically alive) and in contrast to Pierre Nora’ s
understanding of cultural memory as a concept closely related to that of ‘nation’, Aleida and Jan Assmann’s perspective on what they call ‘cultural
memory’ is based on a temporal and spatial framework the borders of which are more elusive and difficult to pin down, encompassing a timeframe of around
three thousand years. Moreover, while communicative memory relies on face –
to-face, everyday linguistic interchanges between equal, non -specialized carriers
of memory in a manner that is informal, natural and usually oral,
12 cultural
memory takes a more formal and ceremonial approach, since it is carried
through via rituals, media and canonic representations, with the help of
specialists (elites) who ensure the constant symbolic revival of a distant past.
Because cultural memory exits in a form that is ‘disembodied’, it requires
institutions destined for its preservation: “ groups which, of course, do not ‘have’
a memory, tend to ‘make’ themselves one by means of things meant as
reminders such as monuments, museums , libraries, archives, and other
12 It is important to note that “the distinction between the communicative memory and the
cultural memory is not identical with the distinction between oral and written language” (J.
Assmann, “Collective” 131).
30

mnemonic institutions. This is what we call cultural memory ” (J. Assmann,
“Communicative ” 111).
The two types of modi memorandi presented above require a different
understanding of time. If communicative memory functions within a social
timeframe, a chronological understanding of time that allows for the recollection
of the past, cultural memory brings about the perception of time in a mythical
manner, as a leap from the remote time that is being remembered (absolute past, illo tempore ) to the present time of remembering. When studying the oral tribes
of Africa, anthropologist Jan Vansina also acknowledged the distinction between m emories that were recent or generational, and those that were distant
or foundational (referring either to the origin of the world or to that of the tribe). The latter were more difficult to preserve and had to be formalized, embedded in
traditional celebr ations and rituals, as well as sustained by specialists who had
undergone initiation. Because of the succession of generations, Jan Vasina
envisaged the distance between the informal and formal types of memory as a
‘floating gap’ (J. Assmann, “ Communicativ e” 112). Similarly, contemporary
Western societies are faced with a gap between the remembering of time as
lodged into two different frameworks: that of communicative and that of
cultural memory. While the former is direct and already embodied, the latter
needs the mediation of institutions that enable the re -embodiment of social
memory that exceeds the lifespan of three generations via repetition and inscription into material, durable carriers.
According to Jan Assmann, there are six main characteristics of cultural
memory: the concretion of identity (a group’s self -awareness), the capacity to
reconstruct (by placing the memory in a contemporary environment), formation (whether narrative or pictorial), organization (by means of specialized practices
and canonization), obligation (educative and normative) and reflexivity (shaping
the self -image of a society) ( “Collective ” 130-132). The connection between
memory and identity is not ignored, as the critic distinguishes between knowledge and memory on an affect ive and identitary basis: “ Memory is
31

knowledge with an identity -index, it is knowledge about oneself, that is, one’s
own diachronic identity, be it as an individual or as a member of a family, a
generation, a community, a nation, or a cultural and religious tradition ” (J.
Assmann, “Communicative ” 114). Similarly, when memory becomes
‘objectivized culture’ and loses its referentiality in relation to the respective
group, it is turned into histoire (J. Assmann, “ Collective ” 129). In addition,
cultural memory is perceived as dynamic and therefore, as having a capacity of “retrospective construction” (Erll, Memory 29). Thus, instead of being fixed in
the past, memory is always perceived in relation to the present context, allowing for a self -reflexive stance, a key element in the formation of identity.
Two significant levels on which Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of
‘cultural memory’ has been criticized are that of national limitation and of
empirical experience. In an interview for the Network in Transnational Memory Studies , Aleida Assmann addresses the first critique according to which cultural
memory is equivalent to national memory and the maintains that this claim can be easily dismissed on the grounds that the term is conceived so as to transcend
the time and space limitations of a nation’s borders. Not only does ‘cultural
memory’ consider ancient cultures and therefore goes further back than the nineteenth century invention of the concept of ‘nation’, but it can be considered
transnational since it is co nstantly being translated, exported and reinterpreted in
different milieux . In terms of the empirical critique, Astrid Erll and Harald
Welzer, among others, maintain that when it comes to the actual (not
theoretical) use of memory, the communicative -cultur al division is not as sharp
as the its theoreticians would present it to be. Although, from an analytical point of view, one is short -term and more flexible and the other is long- term and more
rigid, “observed empirically, the various memory forms flow int o one another ”
(Welzer 286), as one may modify the other, leading to a “ convergence of
cultural components ” (Velicu 1). Among the reasons for this blurring of the line
between the two types of memory may be the advent of mass media or social
media though w hich people transmit memories and communicate daily as well
32

as the ever more popular use of the internet, which has further eroded the
distinction between specialists and non- specialists (Erll, Memory 31). Moreover,
in Jan and Aleida Assmann’s acceptation, “cultural memory begins where
communicative memory ends ” (Bietti, “Cultural ”) and “ ‘everyday memory’ . . .
lacks ‘cultural’ characteristics ” (J. Assmann, “ Collective ” 126), which means
that the adjective ‘cultural’ goes against the modern anthropological trend of
perceiving culture in a broader way which would encompass the communicative aspect of everyday life.
To conclude, this subchapter has provided an overview of the
transformation undergone by memory studies and the ensuing
reconceptualization of t he concept of ‘memory’. If Henri Bergson had focused
on individual consciousness and on memory as the result of a single, subjective mind reflected in the perception of time and if Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung had discussed memory in dream thoughts a nd had developed a theory of
memory inherited by means of genetic material, it was Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg who broadened the understanding of the term. The inheritance
they focused on was not biological, but symbolical. Independently, the two
critics conceived of a type of memory that is social and collective. While
Halbwachs highlighted the necessary cadres sociaux of every memory and
perceived individual recollections as viewpoints on as well as constituents of
collective memory, Warburg’s mnemonic system was based on energetic
formulas embedded in material objects that would exceed the life span of
interacting generations, acquiring an afterlife as continued, yet transformed and
reinterpreted symbols. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the
new wave of memory studies along with Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, a term
enriched with national and ideological connotations, as it was associated with
France’s collective memory shaped by an inventory of s ymbols perceived as
building bricks in the construction of the nation’s image and history. Going beyond the individual, genetic, collective, social and national perspectives on
memory, Jan and Aleida Assmann conceived of a necessary distinction between
33

two modi memorandi that are based on a stricter understanding of the word
‘culture’ and that add specificity to Halbwachs’ ‘collective memory’ ”:
‘communicative memory’, an informal, less structured type of memory based on
everyday interaction and ‘cultural me mory’, an institution -based embodiment of
memory that is formal, structured, mediated and can extend to immemorial times. Although the two terms seem to be in sharp opposition from a theoretical
point of view, the rift between them may not be so deep.

34

I.2. Breaking the History -Memory Polarity: History as Literature

Early memory critics and founding fathers of collective and cultural
memory, Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora, have dedicated a lot of time to
distinguishing memory from history and are among the “few authors [who]
openly claim to be engaged in building a world in which memory can serve as
an alternative to history ” (Lee Klein 128). The objective of this subchapter is to
trace back Halbwachs and Nora’s view of history beyond the 1960s to an eighteenth and nineteenth century positivistic apprehension of thi s discipline
and to provide an alternative for this view in Hayden White’s perspective of history as poesis . The association of history with literature is in tune with the
constructivist turn in social sciences that allows the Assmanns to also argue agains t the polarity between history and memory.
The line separating historical and literary writing has not always been as
well marked as the eighteenth century sought to depict it. For Aristotle, history
and poetry were both rhetorical arts, however, they dif fered in terms of their
balance of probability and possibility (P. Hamilton 8), as the former was
believed to deal with particular instances, while the latter would tackle
universals and generalities. To some extent they were both examples of
imaginative w riting, albeit they dealt with different things: history was rooted in
reality, but further developed using imagination, while literature was immersed in possibility to begin with. However, during the eighteenth century, rationalists
of the Enlightenment s uch as Voltaire clearly set truth against imagination and
history against fiction.

As Voltaire maintained in his Philosophy of History , it appeared to be a simple
matter to distinguish between the true and the false in history. One had only to
use common sense and reason to distinguish between the truthful and the
fabulous, between the products of sensory experience as governed by reason
and such products as they appeared under the sway of the imagination. (H.
White, Metahistory 52-53)

Since art’s ‘irrati onality’ was seen as being opposed to reality’s
‘rationality’ and history dealt with real facts, the only proper history was one
35

that excluded legends, myths and fables and did not give in to superstition or
artistic imagination, but used transparent and l iteral rather than figurative
language to offer a truthful account of the past.
Nineteenth century positivism pushed history even more into proving its
‘realistic’ foundation, as the writing of the past became theorized, objectivized, professionalized and subdued to scientific practices of historical analysis. It was
important to distinguish history “ both from literary fiction and from popular
memory ” (Tamm 463). Yet, the distinction between historic and literary, real
and invented became problematic along with the rise of literary realism used as
stylistic technique in the novels of writers such as Charles Dickens, Honoré de
Balzac or Gustave Flaubert, whose detailed descriptions and alleged objectivity
challenged the boundary between fiction and reality. Even though to them
history was not an enemy, but an ally with a shared object of interest: the real
world, this type of engagement with reality was not recognized by contemporary
historians, who fought to maintain the original opposition by continuing to
associate literature with fiction (invented worlds) and rhetoric (tropes) and
therefore conceive it as history’s ‘other’ in a double sense: “It is often thought
that history’s principal enemy is the lie, but actually it has two enemies . . . rhetoric and f iction . . . it represents imaginary things as if they were real and
substitutes illusion for truth ” (H. White, “ Historical Discourse ” 25).
The claim to authenticity and to a truthful, correct depiction of the past
implies a belief in the objectivity of history. According to Maurice Halbwachs, “the historian certainly means to be objective and impartial ” (The Collective 83) ,
which differentiat es this study from that of memory, which dwells in
subjectivity. Similarly, Pierre Nora drew a clear line between the factuality of
history and the necessarily psychological, idiosyncratic element of
remembering.

The transformation of memory implies a dec isive shift from the historical to the
psychological, from the social to the individual, from the objective message to
its subjective reception, from repetition to rememoration. (Nora, “Between
Memory ” 15)
36

The same charges related t o referentiality that were directed at literature
in the nineteenth century, questioning it on the grounds of the “ fictionizing
effects of narrativization ” (H. White, “ Historical Discourse ” 30), is attributed to
history, since it too is bound to narrativiz e the past and construct it in terms of
possible objects that are no longer perceivable, yet must be divided, hierarchized
and endowed with meaning. The debate between history being more realistic
than fictional, more mimetic than poetic and more scientific than artistic or vice
versa is tackled by Hayden White in his influential work Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (1973) and later in
Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978).
For White, history’s burde n lies in its double allegiance: to science and
to art or more specifically, to positivistic science and romantic art. This
conviction hides behind the historians’ inconsistent defense of their domain. On
the one hand, they invoke the intuitive methods the y use to provide the reason
why history is not recognized as a pure science; on the other hand, they are not willing to employ contemporary modes of literary representation and
consequently “fall[x] back upon the view that history is after all a semi -scien ce,
that historical data do not lend themselves to ‘free’ artistic manipulation ” (H.
White, Tropics 27). Occupying the middle ground between the two supposed
poles, this stance upon history fosters the nineteenth century misunderstanding
based on “ the roma ntic artist’s fear of science and the positivistic scientist’s
ignorance of art ” (H. White, Tropics 28) and its outmoded conception of
objectivity keeps it oblivious to contemporary advancements in both art and
science that dissolve the line between the two by acknowledging the common
constructivist character of both: “ Many historians continue to treat their ‘facts’
as though they were ‘given’ and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much found as constructed ” (H. White, Tropics 43).
Philosophers such as Nietzsche (who according to White hated history
even more than he hated religion, as he instilled a feeling of belatedness)
continued to assert the antagonism between artistic and historical imaginations
37

and maintained that wherever the “ ‘eunuchs’ in the ‘harem of history’
flourished, art must necessarily perish” (H. White, Tr opics 32). For Nietzsche,
“historical writing [did] not function as a window enabling us to perceive
historical reality itself, but rather as a screen obstructing our view of it”
(Ankersmit 189). This intellectual aversion towards history was further
deepened and disseminated by the First World War, when history’s teaching
aspirations proved to be of little use in preparing people for what was to be
expected of the war and in preventing similar catastrophes. Confronted with the
failure of physical apprehens ions of reality, “ contemporary British and
American philosophers have modulated the harsh distinctions originally drawn by positivists between scientific statements and metaphysical statements,
removing the stigma of ‘meaningless’ from the latter ” (H. Whit e, Tropics 46). In
this case, a view of history that is not based on immutable facts is no longer
refuted as being inherently irrelevant or false. This is the reason for which an
apprehension of history from a cultural memory point of view, does not make
history any less real, but it adds value to it.

What counts for cultural memory is not the single, real fact, but the
remembered history. It is through memory that history turns into myth but,
nevertheless, history does not become unreal at all. On the con trary, it gets a
durative and normative strength. (Luiselli 11)

Therefore, during the twentieth century , the fact -based approach of
positivism upon history no longer seemed justified and “ the attempts to drive
back the plurality of viewpoints in history . . . [and] resist variety ” (Herman 41)
could no longer be reconciled with the emphasis on human freedom, diversity,
tolerance and recognition brought about by mid- century civil rights movements.
The multiplicity of voices that constructed their surrounding realities could not
and would not be unified, so the non- dogmatic ideology that prevailed
“avoid[ed] claiming that it ha[d] a monopoly on truth – since it believe[d] that
reality [was] too complex to be fully grasped by one worldview ” (Herman 43)
and embr aced, instead, a pluralist approach.
38

This context allows for Hayden White’s Metahistory to host the
discussion of the historian “ balancing truth to the facts against the need for those
facts to make sense” (P. Hamilton 9) and ultimately about his “ style o f language
constitute[ing] the facts themselves ” (John Nelson 90). This time “ history no
longer looks opposed to fiction, but within history we encounter different genres
of writing, in which it is appropriate to tell different kinds of stories ” (P.
Hamilton 10). For this reason, White warns against the apprehension of history as science.

The historian performs an essentially poetic act , in which he prefigures the
historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the
specific theo ries he will use to explain ‘what was really happening’ in it. (H.
White, Metahistory x)

In general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what
they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much
invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their
counterparts in literature that they have with those in the sciences. (H. White,
Tropics 82)

Although White does not deny the historians’ intention to tell the truth
about the past, he questi ons the possibility of their achieving an objective
account, considering that “ what is invented cannot be easily distinguished from
what is not invented. It is a matter of trope and figuration” (H. White,
“Historical Discourse ” 31). There is no such thing as objective accounts, instead
“historical writings create referents or sign systems that the reader is supposed
to regard as necessary, or objective, or as natural ” (Roth 643). Between the
epistemological relativism embedded in the acceptance of ambiguous
referentiality and the fictionalizing narrativizations of historical accounts, the
necessary criterion for distinguishing adequate from less -adequate
representations becomes either morality or aesthetics.
Starting from the premise that events are not rend ered in the manner in
which they actually occur, but they become a product of the intersection between the chronicle and, most importantly, the reflector’s prefiguration of the
historical field, which is strongly linked to his/ her perspective upon the nat ure
39

of hist ory and historical knowledge, t he presumed correctness and concreteness
of historical works are questioned by White in his essay “The Historical Text as
Literary Artifact ”,13 published in Tropics of Discourse. The historian cannot be
objective si nce he/ she is a practitioner of history and is implicitly biased in his/
her rendition, so the incompleteness of the historical record must be
acknowledged. Furthermore, the historical narrative is not something completely
external to the historian and th us not something the validity of which can be
checked through the senses like a blueprint that can be checked against the original. So a historical work must be seen as a metaphorical statement linking
together past events on the one hand and the plot structures or story types
conventionally used in our culture to give meaning to the unfamiliar.
The scientific or positivistic view upon history built upon the eighteenth
and much of the nineteenth century refusal to accept that the rigorous discipline that d ealt with the ‘actual’ and methodically investigated past occurrences in
order to portray a truthful image of past events might have more things in common with the ‘possible’ of literature than with the concreteness of facts,
with the subjectivity of art than with the objectivity of science. Hayden White’s
Metahistory seeks to underline the symbolic structure of all historical writing s
and to expose their deep tropological fabric in order to prove that historical
elements “are not derived from the data with which the historian works; rather,
they are interpretative strategies ” (Mandelbaum 40) and consequently the
writing of history is at its core a fiction -making operation that is essentially
literary or poetic in nature. At the level of emplotment, the historian identifies the type of story he/ she is dealing with and subscribes it to one of the four
archetypal story forms borrowed by White from Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of
Criticism , and thus envisions the construction of historical narratives as
Romance , Tragedy, Comedy or Satire : “Every story, even the most ‘synchronic’
or ‘structural’ of them will be emplotted in some way ” (H. White, Metahistory
13 This further brings history closer to memory, since the latter can also be interpreted as an
artifact: “memory is an artifact and its purpose (though not always acknowledged) is to
sketch out and confirm the image, entity, identity of a person or, historically speaking, of a
society” (E. Weber 10).
40

8). Hence, whether they are aware of it or not, historians cannot avoid this stage
of writing that unmasks their own input and helps them shape seemingly chaotic
material into stories indicative of their own perspectives. Essentially, “ the order
bestowed b y the historian on his materials represents a poetic act” (Mandelbaum
44) and the sig nificance embodied by the past is given, not found.
When it comes to memory studies, the importance of imagination
overshadows that of authenticity as well because memory “does not represent
but rather constructs reality ” (Schmidt 192). The past is not explored in order to
uncover what actually happened, since it is constructed in a similar vein to that
expressed by White, “ not as fact but as a cultural artifact to serve t he interest of
a particular community ” (Confino 80). This assertion is also valid in the
perspective of Jan Assmann, for whom the historian of memory is not so much
interested in facts, but rather in how what is remembered is relevant for the present. Acco rding to the German critic, there is no such thing as an objective
past that is stored and brought to the surface intact because what is remembered is always subjective since it is mediated by individuals who live in certain
societies and construct memorie s in accordance with a given present ( Moses 14).
Therefore, a memory is not true because it presents an event that actually occurred, but because it envisions an image of the past that is relevant for the
community that builds it.

the ‘truth’ of a given m emory lies not so much in its ‘factuality’ as in its
‘actuality’. Events tend to be forgotten unless they live on in collective
memory. . . . The relevance comes not from their historical past, but from an
ever-changing present in which these events are remembered as facts of
importance ”. (J. Assmann, Moses 9-10)

If history’s claim to objectivity, that situated it at the opposite spectrum
in relation to memory, can be countered and can be proven to bring the two
domains together instead of decidedly sepa rating them, it should be noted that
some critics, among whom Lee Klein and Jan Assmann, focused on one aspect of memory that history seems to lack: a spiritual core. Since the act of
41

remembrance is of great value in the Judeo -Christian tradition – “‘Zakho r’,14
(remember) in the Old Testament, and ‘Do this in remembrance of me’, in the
New ” (Lee Klein 130) – it is on these grounds that Klein talks about the history –
memory opposition: “ If history is objective in the coldest, hardest sense of the
word, memory is subjective in the warmest, most inviting senses of that word ”
(130). The same spiritual layer is acknowledged by Jan Assmann as well:

the eating of bread and the drinking of wine in Jewish families is celebrated on
the eve of Shabbat as a “mnemonic mark, ” or zikkaron, both of the seventh day
of creation and of the exodus from Egypt (yitsi 'at mitsrayim). In Christianity, the eating of bread and the drinking of wine is celebrated with greatest
solemnity as the sacrament of the Eucharist. This rite was explicitly instituted
with the words “ Do this in remembrance of me ” as a zikkaron in order to
commemorate the death of Christ and to provide participation in its redemptory
significance. ( “Form ” 71)

However, Lee Klein also mentions the concept of historical consciousness that
seems to bridge the gap between the two fields: “ the old sense of memory as
material object and divine presence had been taken up in Hegel’s historicism, and so, ‘historical cons ciousness’ married history and memory ” (133). Without
this spiritual dimension to memory, it would not be able to endow the past with presence via an enchanted connection between individuals and the world (145).
Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora also arg ued for the antithesis
between history and memory on the basis of a distinction between universality and essentialism on the one hand and plurality and relativism on the other.

Collective memory differs from history in at least two respects. It is a current of
continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from
the past only what still lives . . . in the consciousness of the groups keeping the
memory alive. . . . In effect, there are several collective memories. This is the
second characteristic distinguishing collective memory from history. History is
14 The Hebrew verb zakhor means ‘to remember’ and it is used in the Bible with regard to
Israel’s imperative not to forget: “ zakhor – we remember the bitterness of slavery in the land
of Egypt. zakhor – we recall the pain and anguish of being second -class citizens in foreign
lands. zakhor – we remember the monstrous evil of the Shoah. zakhor – we recall how
privileged we are to have a strong and vibrant state of Israel (“Zakhor”). These memories
are mandatory because, as Jan Assmann maintains “Egypt must be remembered in order to
know what lies in the past, and what must not be allowed [to] come back” ( Moses 8).
42

unitary and it can be said that there is only one history. (Halbwachs, The
Collective 80-3)
memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet
individual . History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one,
whence its claim to universal authority. (Nora, “Between Memory ” 9)
A
s seen by both critics, history is unitary, fixed and universal, whereas memory
is partial, unstable, relative and frangmentary, since “collective memory is
marked not, as is history, by clearly etched demarcations but only by irregular
and uncertain boundaries ” (Halbwachs, The Collective 82) and cannot therefore
be divided into clear periods of time.
This claim was challenged by Jan Assmann, who maintained that
Halbwachs’ perspective on the history -memory polarity no longer stands in the
midst of contemporary discussions on the nature of history as bound to the
context of its construction.
It is clear that here Halbwachs represents a positivistic concept of history from
which more recent historians have long since distanced themselves. All
historiography is bound to its time and to the interests o f its writers or their
patrons. That is why the distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ . . . no longer stands up to scrutiny. ( Cultural 29)
15
O
ne of the historians that Assmann mentions is definitely Hayden White, who
proved that relativism was not foreign to history, but was actually instilled in it
and was indicative of an inherent aspect of (re)presenting past events. In the
attempt to capture former events, the historian must first prefigure the field, that
is “constitute it as an object of mental perception ” (Metahistory 30) which will
enable him/ her to construct a linguistic protocol cast in a dominant tropological mode. This act is poetic , precognitive and precritical , which means that it exists
before the historian starts writing and is linked to the inescapable bias of all individuals. As Wilhelm D ilthey maintained: “we are historical beings first,
15 Although, Jan Assmann avowedly disagrees with Halbwachs in terms of the presumably
antithetical relationship between history and memory, his sharp distinction between figures of memory but not of history and figures of history but not of memory still determines some critics to (perhaps too hastily) place his perspective in line to that of Halbwachs and Nora:
“Assmann too joins Halbwachs and Nora in supporting a stark opposition between memory
(as referring to the symbolic) and history (as referring to the real)” (Nkulin 16).
43

before we are observers of history, and only because we are the former do we
become the latter ” (qtd. in Tamm 464). Consequently, White insists on the
equality of various historical renditions, which atte sts to the fact that the writing
of history is a non- scientific activity, attracting criticism on the part of
“offended ” historians such as Arthur Marwick, who called White’s system
postmodern, metaphysical and speculative, opposing it to ‘proper’ history and
Carlo Ginzburg, who believed that White entered a dangerous zone of irresponsibility in which morality itself became relativized.
However, White does not hide the element of indeterminacy in his
theory, which is evident in his ambiguous combinations. Not only does he place
on the same level potentially contradictory historical accounts, but he uses both
vertical and horizontal combinatory patterns that seem to undermine his
affinities and the presumed unique connection between tropes and modes of emplo tment. In addition, by uncovering the monopole of a particular trope at the
core of a historical work and not differentiating some tropes and their effects as better than others, the determinacy of history is lost and truth itself becomes
relative.

I will not try to decide whether a given historian's work is a better, or more
correct, account of a specific set of events or segment of the historical
process than some other historian's account of them. (H. White, Metahistory
3-4)

There is no such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but
. . . there are many correct views, each requiring its own style of
representation. (H. White, Tropics 47)

Interpretative and narrative strategies are also indeterminate because oftentimes
limits ar e meant to be crossed and hybrid, manifold compounds emerge: “ the
work of every master historian usually arises from an effort to wed a mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is
inconsonant with it ” (H. White, Metahi story 29). This fragmented approach
implies a fragmented view upon history, in which meaning can only be formed by means of intertextuality, hybridization and pastiche of truths: “ the imperfect
44

and fragmentary truths provided by individual historians can be legitimately
considered as the subject matter of a possible science of history ” (H. White,
Metahistory 103). Hayden White also hybridizes history and historiography by
mixing together science and literature, facts and fiction in stressing the figural
discourse that supports every historical account. The turning of history into
philosophy of history and of historiography into fiction suggests that both historians and philosophers of history “ do not derive meaning from history, but
attribute meaning to history” (Mandelbaum 42). Hence, in this perspective,
history holds no absolutes, but at most a series of fragmented realisms in need of
organization. By the same token, memories are necessarily fragmented and in
need of a narrativizing structure.

One of the most important characteristics of human memory is its
fragmentation. What one preserves as a ‘memory flash’ is without context,
lacking basic information about what came before and after it. It is due to
narration and interpretation that these flashes have subsequently gained shape
and structure, thus becoming stable. (Stanković 89- 90)

Another characteristic that Pierre Nora attributed to history in order to
separate it from memory and turn it into its “ equal though ‘antithetical’ rival”
(Gedi and Elam 33) was its remoteness from the present. The French critic
envisioned memory as a living entity that is authentic and very much embedded
in the present via its ability to evolve and change, whereas history was seen as
an artificial, dead, petrified construct ion of what no longer existed, of a past that
was separated from the present.

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in
fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its
name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering
and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to
manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and
periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the recon struction . . . of
what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us
to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. (Nora, “ Between
Memory ” 8)

45

Yet, as Aleida Assmann maintains, the constructivist turn brought about
a new type of discourse in the humanities that relied heavily on the constructed
nature of (past) reality that is always processed, mediated and reshaped in
accordance with the needs of the present and “ as the present is in no way stable,
reconstruct ing the past is a varying and open -ended project ” (A. Assmann,
“Response ” 34). Moreover, what used to be considered an irreversible series of
events in the past acquires the ability to persistently haunt the present and therefore there is a permanently ong oing process that blurs the line “between
past and present and thereby even questions the existence of these temporal dimensions as separate entities ” (Tamm 465). If, however, past and present are
seen as separate, many contemporary critics, among whom Mieke Bal agree that “the interaction between the present and past . . . is the stuff of cultural memory ”
(vii), which stresses the interdependence and overlapping of the two dimensions
instead of their opposition. In tune with this stance, the apprehension of history
as remote in relation to the present is rejected by Hayden White, who lays
emphasis on the performance and participation of historians when it comes to shaping and enlivening chronicles. There seems to be a gap between the
chronicle and the historical work that must be filled in by the historian, which
underlines the act of molding history in the present.
For White, the historical domain is more akin to literature than to
science, precisely because science is (or used to be) associated with object ivity
and impartiality, whereas literature rejects impersonal detachment in favor of implication, subjectivity, personal input and bias. The field is prefigured in
accordance with the writer’s perspective upon the historical world and
consequently the perf ormance of the historian, as well as his/ her other possible
options of trope -based -construction that influence the resulting narrative (and its
reality) take center stage. It is performance and participation that White’s system
is based on, as he trusts t hat “he historian do[es] not find a type of story into the
past, he form[s] the past into a type of story ” (Roth 640). Therefore it is useless
to seek value and meaning solely into the past instead of analyzing the criteria
46

used by historians on multiple l evels in the present in order to endow history
with authenticity and a sense of realism. However, this does not mean that in
White’s view historiography amounts only to opinion and literary inclination.
The participatory nature of history writing is eviden t in the characterization and
hierarchization of events aimed at gaining explanatory effect.

This transformation of chronicle into story is effected by the characterization of
some events in the chronicle in terms of inaugural motifs, of others in terms of
terminating motifs, and of yet others in terms of transitional motifs. (H. White,
Metahistory 5)

Hence, the hypothesis advanced is that while past events exist, they do not hold
value in themselves and thus they are constructed and narrated differently:
Historical situations are not inherently tragic, comic or romantic . . . Events are
made into a story (H. White, Tropics 84-85). Because in constructivist
perspectives such as this one “ truth is made, not discovered” (Gabardi 13),
historical writings are seen as creating systems of signs that are meant to appear
realistic despite the fact that the sets of relationships that bind their diffe rent
levels of conceptualization are “ not immanent in the events themselves; they
exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them ” (H. White, Tropics
94). The similarity between the above mentioned perspective and that of
reception theory is acknowledged by Jan Assmann and given the name ‘mnemohistory’ in the work Moses, the Egyptian (1997). The past itself can
only be revived by memories carried through by tradition and intertextuality, by “diachronic continuities and discontinuities ” (Tamm 46 4), which entails that
actuality takes precedence over factuality. Yet this is a perspective of memory
that does not oppose it to history, but instead partially overlaps the two fields .
What is more, mnemohistory is just another branch of history: “ Mnemohi story
is not the opposite of history, but rather is one of its branches or subdisciplines,
such as intellectual history, social history, the history of mentalities, or the
history of ideas ” (Moses 9). In this perspective one cannot speak of an
opposition between memory and history, as the two are necessarily related,
47

despite the fact that the former’s institutionalization as a discipline is more
pronounced, since historians exist, but there is no such thing as ‘memorians’
(Moses 21).

Mnemohistory is reception theory applied to history. But ‘reception’ is not to
be understood here merely in the narrow sense of transmitting and receiving.
The past is not simply ‘received’ by the present. The present is ‘haunted’ by the
past and the past is modeled, inve nted, reinvented, and reconstructed by the
present. ( Moses 9)

More precisely, mnemohistory asks questions such as: What is known of the
past in the present? Why is it that some versions of the past triumph, while
others fail? Which events or other phenome na from the past are selected and
how are they represented? How is the past used in order to legitimize or explain the happenings in the present? Why do people prefer one image of the past over
another? (Tamm 464)

Therefore, both metahistory and mnemohist ory dislodge history from the remote
past and bring it into the present, which inescapably shapes it in a manner that
reflects the present context more than the past event because instead of being
perceived as an object that is carried from one time to ano ther, history is seen as
a continuous process of human invention, manipulation and interpretation via narrativization that falls in line with the constructivist, performance -based
nature of cultural memory.
To conclude, this subchapter has brought to the fore a debate over the
relation between memory and history. On the one hand, Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora adamantly pitted memory against history and constructed an image
of memory that was founded on an antithesis between essential characteristics o f
memory such as subjectivity, plurality, relativism, fragmentation and presentism and attributes considered to be quintessential to history, such as objectivity,
unity, universality, essentialism and remoteness from the present. On the other
hand, Hayden White provided a view of history that strengthened its link to
literature (and thus fiction instead of science) and managed to break the
memory -history polarity by acknowledging the impossibility of rendering past
events into an objective and truthful mann er. The strangeness, unfamiliarity and
chaotic nature of the past make it impossible to be (re)presented in a singular,
48

accurate account. Hayden White’s theoretical system of Metahistory proves also
to be founded upon performance and participation, as it i nvites the historian to
fill in the gaps left by the gathering of raw data with his/ her own style and
perspective upon historical knowledge, making use of subjectivity and
displaying personal bias much like an individual who belongs to a certain
community is faced with the task of actively filling the gap between the time of
the event remembered and the time of remembrance. White’s constructivist perspective is embraced by Jan and Aleida Assmann , who also underline the
need to shape the value- neutral past into symbols and reconstruct it in
accordance wi th present needs and intentions, placing this principle at the core
of cultural memory.

49

I.3. M emory, Literature and T heir Performative Nature∗
T
he relationship between cultural memory and literature has so far been
analyzed chiefly with respect to the literary canon and instances of authorial
influence or intertextuality.16 The role of the reader in the construction of
literature as cultural memory seems to have faded into the background. This
subchapter is meant to shed light on the complementary nature of cultural
memory studies and reader -oriented criticism, as phenomena based on the active
construction of meaning, The reader’s agency entails the transformation of texts into literary works (Louise Rosenblatt) and thus the maintenance of the fluid,
dynamic nature of cultural memory (Ann Rigney) that keeps the canon as an
active form of remembering (Aleida Assmann) instead of a passive literary
archive and transforms interpretive communities (Stanley Fish) into special ized
bearers of cultural memory (Jan Assmann), deciding what counts as literature and therefore what is worthy of being remembered.
Scholars such as Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, Renate Lachmann, Birgit
Neumann, Ann Rigney, Max Saunders and Aleida Assmann, among others,
have emphasized the connection between memory and literary studies, showing that “literature, both thematically and formally, is closely interwoven with the
thematic complex of memory and identity ” (Neumann 334). However, if most
of the above mentioned critics have turned their attention towards the canon and
instances of authorial influence or intertextuality, there are almost no references to the reader as instrumental part in the formation of cultural memory by means
of collective (and impl icitly individual) literary memories.
∗ A version of this subchapter has been published as “Literature as Memory and Literary
Memories: From Cultural Memory to Reader -Response Criticism.” (Paris, Brill, 2017).
16 For instance, in Renate Lachmann’s perspective, the intertextual element of a lit erary text is
proof of it being an act of memory that situates itself in relation to its predecessors, while at
the same time, this function is what generates intertextuality: “The mnemonic function of
literature provokes intertextual procedures, or: the o ther way round, intertextuality produces
and sustains literature’s memory” (“Mnemonic and Intertextual” 309).
50

Consequently, this subchapter tackles the affinities between literature as
cultural memory17 and reader -oriented criticism, understood in terms of the
readers’ creation of memories based on their apprehension and appropriation of
literary texts. Firstly, a distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘memories’ is
required. Secondly, it would be fruitful to understand the way in which memory
and literature(s) have been analyzed with respect to the multiple, intricate
connections that unite them. Thirdly, the focus will be on the complementary
nature of cultural memory studies and a few essential premises of reader –
response criticism: the performative function of literature that underlines its constructed nature, the active -passive l iterary distinction, as well as the
necessity for variability and relativism. These characteristics prove he essential role that the reader -rememberer plays in the shaping of the memory -literature
conceptual pair, but also on the value that these features, represented by specific
reader -centered literary theories like that of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional
reader -response theory and Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities
bring to the understanding of literature as cultural memory.
Henri Berg son was the first to differentiate between habit memory
(mémoire -habitude – memory as habit, a memory that repeats and is used in
everyday situations) and pure memory ( mémoire -suouvenir – memory as
distinct recollection, a memory that imagines and is used in particular situations).

The memory of the lesson, which is remembered in the sense of learnt by heart,
has all the marks of a habit. Like a habit, it is acquired by the repetition of the
same effort. . . . [It] is part of my present, exactly like my h abit of walking or of
writing. . . . The memory of each several reading, on the contrary, the second or
the third for instance, has none of the marks of a habit. Its image was
necessarily imprinted at once on the memory, since the other readings form, by
their very definition, other recollections. (Bergson 89- 91)

17 According to Herbert Grabes, for instance, the two terms are inextricably interconnected:
“‘literature’ in its broad sense was and remains of g reat value for cultural memory because
written texts are the most explicit testimonies of past culture” (“The Value” 39) and
“literature in the narrower sense has undoubted value for cultural memory because it
constitutes an important part of it” (“The Val ue” 39 -40).
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In the case of the construction of literary studies, both types of memory are
needed, for readers and scholars have to use both their habit memory in order to
remember how to read, absorb and inte rpret literary works – in which case “ the
past is acted out and incorporated in the present without difference ” (Changeux
and Ricœur 144) – and their pure memory, so as to remember that they have
read certain literary works that influence their current understanding and reaction with respect to other works – in which case “ the anteriority or priorness
of the remembered event stands out ” (Changeux and Ricœur 144). Henri
Bergson’s Matter and Memory was highly influential to other French
philosophers among who m Gilles Deleuze, Jean -Paul Sartre and Paul Ricœur. In
the latter’s book Memory, History, Forgetting, another useful distinction is
made: between mémoire and souvenir .

Memory (la mémoire) as intention and memory (le souvenir) as the thing intended. We
say memory (la mémoire) and memories (les souvenirs). . . . In Husserlian terminology
this is the distinction between the noesis of remembering and the noema of memories. .
. . Memory in the singular is a capacity, an effectuation; memories are in the plural.
(Ricœur 22)

The reason for which the difference between the two terms is relevant is
that the analysis of literature as memory ( mémoire ) entails a highlight on literary
tradition and its persistence in time, its longue durée provided by the literary
cano n, as an institutionalized type of memory that is passed on from generation
to generation. However, the literary memories ( souvenirs ) cannot be discussed
without underlying either individual or specific group instances of literary
remembrance that can invo lve either the author, the reader or metaphorically
speaking, the text itself that collectively and generally speaking form the
memory of literature.
According to Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, there are three main types
of relationship between literatur e and memory: the memory of literature,
memory in literature and memory as medium of collective memory. While the first category deals with ‘inner -literary processes’ (Erll and Nünning), the
second one revolves around a relationship that is extra -literary in nature, for the
52

literary realm becomes a mimesis of the memory discourses of the time and the
third one touches on Aleida Assmann’s distinction between a text’s purposeful
reception18 and interpretation as either literary or cultural. Out of the three
approaches, the memory of literature is given the most space and although the
authors acknowledge literature as being that which is “ ‘remembered’ by authors,
readers and institutions, [with] literature [being] even (metaphorically) ascribed a memory of its o wn” (Erll and Nünning 264), they hardly focus on the role of
the reader in the act of ‘remembering’. Instead, in this type of relationship, the text is attributed memory by means of intertextuality
19, for “ within literary
works there is a memory of previous texts ” (Erll and Nünning 264), while
genres can be considered repositories of memory, for they provide familiar
frames and cues, as well as “ sets of expectations which steer the reading
process ” (Wesseling 18), that are passed on from generation to genera tion,
facilitating the act of remembrance by means of (auto)biographies or historic novels. Authors have memory of the works of other authors, particularly
through what Harold Bloom called ‘the anxiety of influence’. In Bloom’s
perspective, “a poet antithe tically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the
parent -poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though
the precursor had failed to go far enough ” (Bloom, The Anxiety 14). Therefore,
the assumption is that “ poetry is the anxiet y of influence, is misprision, is a
disciplined perverseness. Poetry is misunderstanding, misinterpretation,
misalliance ” (Bloom, The Anxiety 95). But where does that leave the reader? All
individuals who come into contact with literature, be they writers, critics,
researchers, teachers, students or common people, are first of all readers. This
simple, yet mandatory aspect seems to be taken for granted and ignored, as out
of the three main characters of literary studies: author, text and reader , the latter
is the most fickle and difficult to pin down.
18 In this case the word reception is used in a general manner, without making reference to
specific reception theories or to the agents behind literary studies: the readers.
19 According to Erll and Nünning, intertextual mnemonics can be tra ced back to the 1920s and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism.
53

Because ancient mnemonics was based on the juxtaposition of places
and images ( loci et imagines ), the metaphor of loci memoriae proved to be
inspirational for many philosophers and scholars around the world, starting with
Pierre Nora, for whom les “ lieux de mémoire . . . functioned to imprint the key
notions of national history on the outillage mental (‘set of mental tools’) of th e
French citizens ” (Den Boer 21). However, this dominant trope was soon
challenged and seen as too rigid. For this reason, the performative aspect of cultural memory is underlined by Ann Rigney, who stresses the shift from
‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’ and by Astr id Erll, who focuses on the notion of ‘travelling
memories’ and their continuous transformation ( “Travelling ” 11). If the 1980s
revolved around of the concept of sites/places/landscapes/realms of memory that
were not necessarily physical spaces, but mental ones, the present focus of
memory studies appears to have turned towards the dynamics of memory, in order to avoid the possible interpretation of sites as being unchangeable and
fixed.

Although it has proven useful as a conceptual tool, the metaphor of “ memory
site” can become misleading if it is interpreted to mean that collective
remembrance becomes permanent ly tied down to particular figures, icons, or
monuments. As the performative aspect of the term ‘remembrance’ suggests,
collective memory is constantly ‘in the works’. . . . It seems inevitable that
attention should have turned in recent years from memory sties as such to the
cultural dynamics in which they function. (Rigney 345)

According to Ann Rigney, this shift was part of a larger turn in cultural studies
that moved the focus from products to processes and from “ cultural artifacts to .
. . the way those artifacts circulate ” (Rigney 346). But who is responsible for the
performative function of literature as “ the mnemonic art par excellence [if]
literature is culture’s memory ” (Lachmann, “ Cultural Memory ”)?
Since memories are the things intended, accordi ng to Edmund Husserl,
they cannot exist without the person(s) intending them. Phenomenology (which
translates into the study of pure phenomena) challenged the traditional view
upon the external world by rejecting the general idea that objects exist
independently of the human mind: “ Objects can be regarded not as things in
54

themselves but as things posited, or ‘intended’ by consciousness ” (Eagleton 48)
and therefore it is impossible for the perceived to exist without a perceiver:
“Subject and object . . . are really two sides of the same coin ” (Eagleton 50).
And it is exactly this emphasis on the vital role of the subject that opened the gates towards reader -response criticism and seems to be now at the root of the
dynamics of cultural memory. Subsequently, the constructivist or cultural turn of the 1970s which assumed “ the view that almost everything is ‘cosntructed’ or
cultural ” (Grabes, “The Value” 31) allowed for “ Postmodern constructivism and
anti-foundationalism ” (Grabes, “The Value 32) to flourish and en dowed
literature with a necessary cultural dimension, the nature of which is contrived, agent -dependent and, thus, ever -changing.
Just as memory is not considered to be set in stone and objective, a
literary work cannot be viewed a static product, but only as an ongoing process
of interpretation. For this reason, reader -response critic Louise Rosenblatt
makes the distinction between text and literary work, underlying the essential agency of the reader and his or her duty as an interpreter to evoke the liter ary
work from the text by channeling a unique combination of thoughts, past
experiences and literary memories of previous works. Although the text acts on
the reader and vice- versa, they should not and cannot be analyzed
independently. The object of study in Rosenblatt’s theory is the very transaction
between reader and literary work. The two are conjoined and equally important
in the creation of meaning, as they condition each other.

A novel or poem or play remains merely inkspots on paper until a reader
transforms them into a set of meaningful symbols. The literary work exists in
the live circuit set up between reader and text: the reader infuses intellectual
and emotional meanings into the pattern of verbal symbols. (Rosenblatt 25)

The understanding of literature in these reader -oriented terms, which in turn are
founded on the poststructuralist assumption that meaning is not fixed, but fluid
and continuously reshaped, adapted in accordance to its environment and
reception, as well as on the understanding that “the experiencing subject and
experienced object constitute a primal, integral, relational unity ” (Connell 103)
55

seems to be at the root of cultural memory seen as a dynamic system of literary
remembrance.
To further stress the distinction between t he passive text that remains
unread and the active literary work that, through the multiplicity of readers’
literary memories becomes an instrumental part of a culture’s memory, as well
as to emphasize this as an essential part of the dialogue between lite rary studies
and memory studies, it is helpful to turn towards Aleida Assmann’s division of cultural remembering into ‘active’ (the canon) and ‘passive’ (the archive) forms.
For Aleida Assmann, the dynamics of cultural memory is indebted to the
flux betwe en cultural remembering and cultural forgetting, each with their
branches of passive and active forms. Cultural forgetting can be viewed as passive when it is not intentional, but rather information is lost or neglected
accidentally, without a specific pur pose and can be retrieved at a later time,
20
while its active counterpart entails forceful action that through persecution and
censorship, ensures a society’s distortion and strategic forgetfulness of the past.
Yet, for the author the focus remains on remem bering and its two possible
forms.

As forgetting, remembering also has an active and a passive side. The
institutions of active memory preserve the past as present while the institutions
of passive memory preserve the past as past. . . . I will refer to the actively
circulated memory that keeps the past present as the canon and the passively
stored memory that preserves the past as the archive . (A. Assmann, “ Canon and
Archive ” 98)

Consequently, the literary canon is part of the active cultural memory of a
society, as long as it can achieve the function of keeping the past as present by
means of repeated re -readings, ongoing interpretations and analyses, comments
and stagings of lite rary works. In order words, the canonization of a work
implies the acquiring of a status that allows for all of the above -mentioned
procedures to be conducted in a repeated manner, bringing the past into the
20 An example of passive cultural forgetting could be the work of William Blake, which was
mostly “forgotten” or neglected until the Victorian Age, when Alexander Gilchrist’s famous
biography of the poet Life of William Blake: Pictor Ignotus revived it along with the bard’s
image and laid the foundation for its ulterior canonicity.
56

present by reinterpreting according to current values. To Harold Bloom, the
author of The Western Canon (1994) “once we view [the canon] as the
relationship of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written . . . [it] will be seen as identical to the literary Art of
Memory ” (Bloom, The Western Canon 17). The metaphor is explained by the
fact that “ the greatest authors take over the role of ‘places’ in the Canon’s
theatre of memory, and their masterworks occupy the position filled by ‘images’ in the art of memory ” (Bloom, The Western Canon 37). However, the idea of
the place can be too static to satisfy (post)modern needs for fluidity and dynamism and therefore the canon, as Bloom saw it and exemplified it in the
form of a list at the end of his famous work, could only be a target for those who
insisted on the understanding of literature as an open- ended process.
In order for new interpretations of old works as well as the admission of
new ones into the literary the cannon, the latter has to be open. Ever since the 1960s, the canon has faced ceaseless attacks and the idea of canonicity itself has
been often questioned and debated. In its nonreligious sense of “ general law,
rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged” (Kennedy et al.,
“Canon” ), the conc ept undoubtedly stands for authority, domination and fixed
values; yet the demand for relativism, emancipation and rupture has become ever more assertive along with the wave of poststructuralist thinkers. Therefore,
the reasons for the postmodern assault on the literary canon reside in it being
simultaneously the center that poststructuralists so vehemently reject, the
distorted mirror in which women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ communities and
other disadvantage groups see their own images replaced by stereo typical,
oversimplified projections, the universal that the New Historicists discard in favor of cultural specificity, the oppression that Marxists so desperately fight
against, as well as the exercise of power and control that post -colonialists
ardently d ismiss as Western hegemony. The “ anti-canonical attack on tradition
itself and the hierarchical order it implie[d] ” (M. Martin 105) was thus labeled
by Harold Bloom the “ School of Resentment ”. Their fight against homogeneity,
57

discrimination and fixed, cent ral values translated into a denunciation of the
Western literary canon as representing merely a closed system composed of
“Dead White European Males ” (Bloom, The Western Canon 7) whose works
contain “elements of chauvinism, elitism, archaic political view s, anti –
Semitism” (Geddes, “ The Western Canon ”).
The ‘Culture Wars’21 and ‘The Great Canon Controversy’22 proved that
the fixity and legitimacy of the literary canon can be challenged on the grounds
of changes in collective values (Grabes, “Cultural Memory ” 311). If
communities could no longer see themselves represented by the canon, the danger was for it to be no longer widely read and interpreted and thus, to
become archive, the passive form of cultural remembering. The passive -active
polarity seems to be the same as the one at the basis of the text -literary work
distinction. Without active readers, there can be no active literary works and therefore no active cultural memory in the literary sphere. As Herbert Grabes
warned, “to abandon the canon would mea n to jettison cultural memory ”
(“Cultural Memory ” 318) and, thus, despite the attacks it sustained, the canon
will remain, yet it will always be in need of active rewriting.
Moreover, the active “canon and literary histories constitute the
institutionaliz ed memory of literary studies and a society ” (Erll and Nünning
278) and since “ society’s cultural memory is always a reflection of its present
interests, needs and current levels of experience ” (Erll and Nünning 262), it is
only natural that the canon should be molded according to the present interests
and values of the literary communities of a certain time, or more specifically, of
the interpretive communities that establish it. In order to understand the role of
these communities, one needs to look no further than Stanley Fish’s article
“Interpreting the Variorum ” (1976) , where the critic explains the term he
coined: interpretive communities, as a handy tool for the understanding of the variability and relativism behind reader -response criticism. Fish’s p erspective is
21 See Gregory S. Jay’s American Literature & the Culture Wars (1997).
22 See William Casement’s The Great Canon Controver sy: The Battle of the Books in Higher
Education (1997).
58

founded on the conviction that reality and thus literary meaning are socially
constructed: “Fish firmly believes that knowledge is not objective but always
socially conditioned” (Lang, “The Reader -Response ”). Therefore, writers can
only creat e works based on the interpretive strategies advanced by their
communities and readers can only see in literature what the communities they belong to have taught them to accept as correct. The reading strategies
internalized over the years shape whatever t he reader thinks he or she makes of
a text.

It is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or the reader, that
produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of formal features.
Interpretive communities are made up of those who share the same strategies
not for reading but for w riting texts, for constituting their properties. (Fish, Is
There a Text 14)

In addition, similarities and differences between readings is due to
interpreters’ belonging or not to the same community, while distinct
interpretations made by the same person i n various moments in time is the result
of them changing communities or adhering to more than one. There are various memories of the same literary text because there are various communities that decide the shaping of these literary memories according to th eir cultural
interests. Hence, it is interpretive communities that ultimately decide what counts as literature and what does not, or rather, what is worthy of being
actively remembered and what can fade away into either passive remembering
or passive forge tting.
Because of the power that these mnemonic communities have in the
literary sphere, they can take the role of what critic Jan Assmann calls
specialized bearers of memory: “cultural memory . . . always depends on a
specialized practice, a kind of ‘cultivation’. In special cases of written cultures with canonized texts, such cultivation can expand enormously and become
extremely differentiated ” (J. Assmann, “ Collective Memory ” 130). In order for
literature as cultural memory to achieve a time -range th at goes beyond
generational memory and is said to be “ 3,000 years, going back, in the West, to
59

Homer and the Biblical authors and, in the East to Rgveda, the Buddha and
other cultural foundations ” (J. Assmann, “ Globalization ” 122), it needs to be a
highly organized form of remembering. Thus, it is mandatory to have bearers of
memory that can guide readers and cultivate them by choosing “ a corpus of
texts to be remembered from the breadth of available literary texts, and [by] organiz[ing] these texts and ens ur[ing] their being handed down ” (Erll and
Nünning 277), remembered and re -enlivened in future generations.
Furthermore, the distinction between the multiple, equally valid,
(re)constructions of literary traditions exemplifies the requirement in the analy sis of literature as cultural memory for cultural variability and relativism,
core principles of reader -response criticism. If in the case of literature, “ the
rendering of memories potentially tells us more about the rememberer’s present,
his or her desire and denial, than about the actual past events ” (Neumann 333),
then the mnemonic communities that bare the memory of literature are in reality
the interpretive communities that construct it by means of the organization of
literary memories. Hence, it is on ly natural that their different cultural frames of
reference and contemporary situations produce variable understandings of
literature and of the truth: “ The assumption in each community will be that the
other is not correctly perceiving the ‘true text’, b ut the truth will be that each
perceives the text (or texts) its interpretive strategies demand and call into being
(Fish, “Interpreting ” 484). This does not mean that interpretive communities are
fixed or settled. On the contrary, not only do their member s increase or decrease
as they move from one community to another, but “ communities are no more
stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned (Fish, “Interpreting ” 484) and thus socially constructed and prone t o
change, contributing to the “ongoing production and reproduction of cultural
memory, as well as to our reflection on that memory ” (Erll and Rigney 113) and
ensuring that “ the memory of the social system ‘literature’ is thus culturally and
historically va riable ” (Erll and Nünning 278).
60

By way of conclusion, both Henri Bergson’s distinction between
mémoire -habitude and mémoire -suouvenir and Paul Ricœur’s distinction
between mémoire and souvenir offer an understanding of the difference between
memory as habit or faculty and the specific acts of remembering that are
necessarily performed by readers and interpretive communities in order for a
literary tradition to be formed and sustained. As things intended, memories
cannot exist without a rememberer and with respect to literary studies, the multiplicity of memories that establish literature as cultural memory could not
exist without readers, the active role of which is (according to Louise
Rosenbla tt) to transform texts into literary works and thus keep the canon as an
active form of remembering (Aleida Assmann) instead of turning it into a passive literary archive. Along with the stress on the performative function of
literature as a basis for unde rstanding literary memory in terms of dynamic s
rather than stasis, as well as the relevance of the active- passive polarity in the
analysis of the dialogue between literature and cultural memory, the flexibility
of the literary canon and the mechanics of it s variability and relativism become
a main topic of discussion. Since cultural memory necessarily has specialized
bearers that establish what should be remembered and what not, literary studies understood as a mnemonic system must rely on interpretive comm unities
(Stanley Fish), which are made of writers, critics (and thus first of all readers) of literature that can move from one community to another, can belong to multiple
communities and can change their construction of the literary memories that
make up literary tradition along with their present interests, predisposition,
biases, values and social environments, pr oving the fact that literature, viewed
from the perspective of cultural memory, is not a mere object fixed in time, but
a process that always maintains its contemporaneity and open- endedness .

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I.4. From Sites and Images to Figures of Memory

The present subchapter aims at providing a framework for understanding
Jan Assmann’s concept of ‘figures of memory’ by bringing into discussion its
main theoretical predecessors. Starting with the classical tradition of envisioning
memories with the help o f spatial references, I will underline the roots of the art
of memory which, in turn, was the main source of inspiration for Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire and Maurice Halbwachs’ ‘images of memory’. The
conceptualization of these symbolic carriers of memor y will offer valuable
insight into how ‘figures of memory’ distinguishes itself from the other
metaphors.
In his 1966 book The Art of Memory , British historian Frances Yates
discusses the classical tradition of mnemonic techniques and their indebtedness
to loci memoriae (memory places). The author identifies three main Latin
sources for the classical art of memory: Cicero’s De oratore (55 BC), the
anonymous Ad C. Herennium libri IV (approx. 80 BC) and Quintilian’s
Institutio oratorio (95 AD). According to C icero, the ars memorativa was
invented by a Greek poet named Simionides of Ceos who was the first to
understand the importance of associating memories with places. According to
the legend, the poet was attending a dinner at the house of nobleman named
Scop as and recited a poem which referred to Castor and Pollux, but the host
decided he would only pay half of what they agreed on and the other half should be given to Simionides by the two gods he mentioned. Later that evening,
Simionides was told that two me n were waiting for him outside the house with a
message, but when he stepped outside for a few minutes he realized there was no one there. However, during his absence the roof of the house collapsed and
killed everyone inside. Because the bodies of the dec eased were unrecognizable,
the poet realized that the only way he could identify the dinner guests was to remember the places that each of them held at the table before the accident.
Therefore, he conceived of a method of improving one’s memory by storing images of things in mental places and recapturing them at a later time when
62

performing an imaginary visit of those places. ‘Mnemotechniques’, another way
of referring to the art of memory, implied the orator’s reliance on the sense of
sight, which in Cicer o’s perspective is “ the keenest of all our senses ” (qtd. in
Den Boer 19) and therefore one can remember other types of perception more easily by conveying them to the mind as visual images.
Roman rhetoricians made use of this technique based on loci and
imagines (places and images) in order to remember all the elements of a speech
in the order in which they were intended. This aspect was of vital importance for a type of society that “ fashioned and interrogated itself by means of public
oratory, both polit ical and forensic” (Spencer 46). In fact, memory was
considered to be one of the five parts of rhetoric
23 and the author of Ad
Herennium characterized it as the custodian of all the others. Consequently, it
was important to define and to set the rules for t he selection and molding of the
two principles involved.

A locus is a place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, an
intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like. Images are forms, marks or
simulacra ( formae, notae, simulacra ) of what we wish to remember. For
instance if we wish to recall the genus of a horse, of a lion, of an eagle we must place their images on definite loci. (qtd. in Yates 6)

Moreover, Cicero assimilated the places to a wax tablet, the stored images
stored to the letters on the tablet (and therefore they can be replaced while the
tablet remains) and the act of visiting to that of mental reading. A distinction was made between the memory of things and the memory of words. Although
both could be remembered by use of memory loci , the latter would require more
effort and a wider range of places used. For an easier recollection, Cicero, taking after the anonymous author of Ad Herennium , advises that the sites of memory
be chosen as varied as possible, yet well known, spacious a nd well -lit (although
23 In De inventione , Cicero defines the five parts of rhetoric in the following manner:
“Invention is the excogitation of true things (res), or things similar to truth to render one’s
cause plausible; disposition is the arrangement in order of the things thus discovered;
elocution is the accommodation of suitable words to the invented (things); memory is the
firm perception in the soul of things and words; pronunciation is the moderating of the
voice and body to suit the dignity of the things and words” (qtd. in Yates 8- 9).
63

not abundantly so) and the images be active ( imagines agentes ), which means
that they are not ordinary, but novel, odd, sticking or extreme and they usually
represent people in dramatic situations, which allows them to be retained in the
mind for a longer period of time.
Quintilian too attributed the beginning of the art of memory to
Simionides and envisioned a type of mnemonic system that was mostly
architectural in nature and based on the plan of a building in which the orator
woul d take an imaginary walk touching upon all the images he placed in the
rooms while giving his speech. 24 This mnemonic approach became known in
the middle ages as the memory palace technique and highlighted the fact that
“memory [was] spatially constituted ” (Hoelscher and Alderman 349) by
underlining the significant role of localities in the process of remembrance: “ it is
an assistance to the memory if localities are sharply impressed upon the mind ”
(Quintilian qtd. in Den Boer 20). This is due to the fact t hat places are
associated with different people, events, thoughts and activities in accordance with individuals’ biographical memories.
All the classical writers mentioned above distinguished between natural
memory on the one hand, which occurred spontane ously along with the creation
of one’s thoughts and was sustained by discipline and artificial memory on the other hand, which was aided by training and art. It is the latter, that is the
constructed, non- spontaneous type of memory that contemporary Wester n
memory studies are based on and that Pierre Nora brings forth and wishes to dwell on when discussing the lieux de mémoire, albeit in a collective context
and with a nationalist layer attached to the classical concept.
As Nora clearly states in the prefa ce to Realms of Memory: Rethinking
the French Past , the English edition of his famous work, the phrase lieux de
mémoire was directly inspired by Frances Yates: “ Though not really a
neologism, the term did not exist in French when I first used it . . . I took it from
24 In addition, Quintilian mentions the use of signs that can be placed strategically in order to
trigger entire sentences and believes in the method of loci is more useful for the m emory of
things than for the memory of words, in the case of which it becomes too heavy since one has to invent too many images (Yates 25- 26).
64

ancient and medieval rhetoric as described by Frances Yates in her admirable
book, The Art of Memory (1966) ” (Nora, “From Lieux” , xv). Accordingly, the
author offers the following definition of the concept:

A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non -material in
nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic
element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the French
community). (Nora, “From Lieux ”, xvii)

It appears that “ Nora seeks to revive and renew this ‘classic art’, providing in
Realms of Memory an extensive, though far from exhaustive, inventory of loci
memoriae around which French collective memory is constructed ” (Whitehead
125). Moreover, memory sites need not be places per se , but may also be
memorial objects, buildings, monuments, cities, emblems, festivals,
anniversaries or significant personalities that are inextricably bound to French
national identity25 and self-representation. These sites can be concrete or
abstract, public or private, pure or composite, dominant or dominated (Basu 140) and their main purpose is to make time stand still, block the process of
forgetting and create a material shape for what is inherently symbolic and
immaterial. It is also noteworthy that the places of memory described above do not necessarily have referents in reality, which enables them to be interpreted in
various manners and have their meaning recycled multiple times.
Pierr e Nora’s justification for the coming into existence of these artificial
lieux de mémoire is that the natural milieux de mémoire no longer exist in
contemporary society. In other words, memory is no longer part of the experience of everyday life: “ if we we re able to live within memory, we would
not have needed to consecrate lieux de mémoire in its name ” (Nora, “Between
Memory ” 8). The reason for this shift was rooted in the fact that the milieux are
no longer sustained by rituals and rural traditions or customs
26 which have been
eliminated in predominantly urban, fast -paced, mass -culture societies that have
25 The identity traced by Pierre Nora allows memory to become a distinguishing factor
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ (Spencer 45).
26 According to Pierre Nora, the rural culture was “the quintessential repository of collective memory” (“Between Memory and History”).
65

seemingly lost interest in the sacred.27 Consequently, natural, spontaneous
memory has been renounced and what we are left with is its symbolic
substitu tes – or false memory – that have to be deliberately constructed and
preserved: “what we have is second -order memory —we collect, organize,
exhibit, catalogue, but observe the form and not the substance of memory ”
(Winter, “Rev”). This explains the investme nt and constant development of
museums, archives and histories of France (Rechniewski 72) which are aimed at
sustaining a second -degree history of its symbols by “ immobilizing the past in
fixed sequences ” (Meusburger et al. 8).
The encyclopedic endeavor of providing a non- linear, non -chronological
inventory of symbols with the help of which a history of France through
memory28 may be shaped allowed for the depiction of “ memory as a social
activity, as an expression and active binding force of group identity ” (Hoelscher
and Alderman 348), but also as a fragmentary puzzle, the pieces of which “assert themselves over the would -be whole ” (E. Weber 13). In defense of this
topic -based rendition of key symbols of France, Pierre Nora maintains that
although it may n ot be so easily visible, the notions presented are connected by
an invisible thread that binds them together and endows them with solidity, providing “the deep substructure of the collective identity of France (Nora qtd.
in Rechniewski 75).
Furthermore, the collective nature of these mnemonic symbols, as well
as the fact that “ readers are free to group these subjects as they will, as one
might group the cards in a hand of poker ” (Nora, “From Lieux” , xix) implies
that the memory embodied by No ra’s lieux exists in so far as there is a
community that consciously and purposely constructs and puts together the
pieces of the French character and culture, inscribing them in a subjective
pattern that is subject to change. As Michael Rothberg maintains , “sites of
27 Rigney, Erll and the Assmanns, among other cultural memory scholars, no longer perceive
this as a lamentable loss of memory.
28 This led to the attempt to bring forth a history of memory that Nora categorized as
premodern, modern and postmodern. See Wulf Kansteiner’s 2002 article “Finding Meaning
in Memory”.
66

memory do not remember by themselves – they require the active agency of
individuals and publics. Such agency entails recognizing and revealing the
production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and
reinscription ” (Rothberg 8) . However, this raises the question of whose will it is
to remember and on what grounds the selection is made. In this sense, Elizabeth Rechniewski criticizes Nora’s generalization of the agency of memory.

Sometimes Nora seems to attribute agency to memor y itself, referring to the
lieux de mémoire as places “ where memory crystalizes and secretes itself ”, as
though a disembodied national consciousness were dictating the choices of the
editor. Or France itself is personified in phrases such as . . . “ The sit es . . . to
which France has entrusted the care of its own representation ”. (Rechniewski
73)

The highly subjective character of Pierre Nora’s work has been pointed out by
other critics as well. For instance, Tony Judt, noticed that there were no mentions of either Napoleon Bonaparte or bonapartisme in any of the volumes
of Lieux de mémoire (Rotherberg 5), which brings forth the suspicion that only
memories with less controversy attached to them are turned into lieux de
mémoire (Rechniewski 74).
Stripped of national peculiarity, yet still very much imbued with the
social context of a group, Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of place represents an
integral part of his cadres sociaux de la mémoire . Yet instead of dwelling on
spaces that may have no reference in reality, the French theoretician links his concept of collective memory to actual, physical places and their role in the
creation of collective forms of recollection. The fact that these places have a
referent in the external world does not mean that they are perceived only in
terms their physical characteristics. Instead, according to Halbwachs, images of
places always trigger memories of people associated to them, of groups that the
rememberer belongs to or is distanced from. Just as memories cannot be purely individual and socially isolated, they cannot be thought of as existing outside of
a certain space either. In this sense, the collective frameworks of a group are
partly shaped by and engraved in the physical places that are relevant for its
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identity formation. It is easy to grasp how a group can leave its imprint on the
space in which it functions by fashioning it in accordance with its own sense of
self. This leads to a territorialization and transfiguration29 of the landscape that
acquires the p ersonal physiognomy and history of the people connected to it
(Middleton and Brown 36). However the group- place relationship that
Halbwachs calls “implacement” (Halbwachs, The Collective 134) is by no
means a one way process of modification, since spaces also manage to influence
and shape groups.

Thus we understand why spatial images play so important a role in the
collective memory. The place a group occupies is not like a blackboard, where
one may write and erase figures at will. No image of a blackboard can recall
what was once written there. The board could not care less what has been
written on it before, and new figure may be freely added. But place and group
have each received the imprint of the other. (Halbwachs, The Collective 130)

This means that spatial images help construct a group’s image of itself, as the
community is molded to suit the environment that it is linked to it and to
become adapted to its movement and evolution.
Moreover, one of the consequences of associating memory with external,
physical places is that their durability offers the impression of stability: “ it is the
spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed though time and of retrieving the past in the present ”
(Halbwachs, The Collective 156). Nonetheless, the illusion is misleading
because spaces do change and their materiality makes them liable to destruction.
When these physical places no longer exist, wha t happens then to the memories
they are linked to?
In analyzing Halbwachs’ socio -ethnography, Gérôme Truc offers a very
useful distinction in this respect: “ one the one hand we have the ‘memory of
places’, which is faithful but vulnerable, and, on the other, representations that
act as matrices for the designation of ‘places of memory’, which are simplified
29 According to Halbwachs, an ex ample of such transfiguration occurs in the case of
improvised, spontaneous, public memorials where people bring flowers, pictures, candles
and various objects in remembrance of those who have perished in an accident in that place.
See Gérôme Truc’s essay for an analysis of this phenomenon.
68

versions, but more robust ” (149). In other words, Halbwachs offers two types of
frameworks of memory in relation to space: one that is based on physica l
perception and one that is based on symbolic association. In the case of the
former (the memory of places) the destruction or drastic change of the external
space will bring about the active resistance of the group which will resort to
displacement in th e shape of the remolding and reimplacement of novel
surroundings (Middleton and Brown 43). In the case the symbolic framework (places of memory), the disconnection between the group and the place finds its
grounds on a metaphysical level, which maintains i ts image unaltered. An
example offered by Halbwachs is that of the city of Jerusalem which, albeit has changed completely since the times of Jesus Christ, it remains unchanged in
Christian memory and in its symbolism as holy, eternal city because it is
preserved by the Gospels.

For the Christian world, Jerusalem was the holy city par excellence. Even if
they had not seen it in reality, they could see it in their imagination. The image
they fashioned for themselves was surely not without foundation, since i t was
rooted not only in the Gospels, but in the testimony and descriptions of the pilgrims and religious who had visited the city. But this image vastly differed
from the actual city of this epoch, with which the Christians who lived there
were familiar. (Halbwachs, On Collective 230)

Another context in which Halbwachs discusses images, or rather, what
he calls ‘memory images’ is one deprived of the connection with spatial and
social frameworks, yet maintains a very feeble relation with human memory via
dream representations. In the train of an analysis of dreams as the only type of
activity that almost completely30 escapes social interaction, Halbwachs depicts
the memory images of dreams as fragmentary, incomplete, often incoherent and
therefore segments that bear a superficial, illusory connection to authentic
memories: “our dreams evoke images that have the appear ance of memories,
these images are introduced in a fragmented state . . . detached shreds of the scenes we have really experienced. . . . There never appears in dreams an event
30 Because dreams and thoughts develop via the use of language, which is a social construct,
Halbwachs still maintains a thread of social embeddedness in the case of dreams.
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accompanied by all its particularities, without a mixture of alien elements ” (On
Collective 41). Consequently, these dream images can be combined in random
ways and lack the structure given by social frameworks which keeps them from
forming a structure that is solid enough to sustain the act of collective
remembering.
If the present subchapter has dealt so far with the very strong link
between memory, places and images, the rest of the section will be dedicated to
a shift in perspective and the replacement of the aforementioned ways of
referring to the elements that shape memory. Jan Assmann renounces the old
tradition of envisioning memory in terms of spatial imagery in favor of the development of the concept of ‘figure of memory’ ( Erinnerungfiguren).
According to the German critic, the choice of ‘figure’ over ‘image’ was aimed at expanding the medium of representation so as to include not only visual icons
but also narrative texts, alluding to the relation to figures of speech and therefore
to ‘culturally shared narratives’ (Batteau 232): “ the term ‘memory figures’ also
denotes culturally formed, socially binding ‘memory images’, but it seems preferable to use ‘figure’ in this case as it refers not only to iconic but also to
narrative forms ” (J. Assmann, Cultural 24).
The English word ‘figure’ is derived “from Old French figure ‘shape,
body; form of a word; figure of speech; symbol, allegory’ (10c), from Latin figura ‘a shape, form, figure; quality, kind, style; figure of speech’,
corresponding to the Latin verb “figurare ‘to form, shape’ ” (“Figure ”).
Consequently, Jan Assmann discusse s the need for memory to be concretized in
these figures in order to “ have an indissoluble merging of idea and image ”
(Cultural 24). He also discusses “ the will to form” (“Form ” 69), which
underlines the memory function of culture. Coupling the will to for m with the
will to transmit allows cultures to embed figures of memory in their tradition in
order to ensure stability and their survival across generations ( “Form ” 69).
When it comes to language, utterances become mnemonic marks and carriers of
memory thr ough their formalization into written texts, the concretization of
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which ensures that they can be remembered, repeated and transmitted beyond
the moment in which they are pronounced. Thus, according to Jan Assmann,
texts purposefully shift language “ from t he level of communication to the level
of memory ”, by allowing figures of speech and the form given to textualized
utterances to function as “ devices of stabilization meant to render permanent the
volatile words in the flow of time ” (“Form ” 72-3). In this sense, it is narratives,
or rather fictional narratives that provide the main channel of circulation for
figures of memory, becoming “ the most important relay stations given their
wide circulation and their broad appeal ” (Rigney 350).
But before delve any deeper in the analysis of this concept, it would be
useful to have as starting point Jan Assmann’s own overt definitions of the term ‘figure of memory’:

A figure of memory —what does this mean? What I mean by this formula is a
person, hist orical or fictional, who lives in tradition, in myths, legends,
pictures, works of history or fiction, whose sayings are quoted, whose tomb, if
known, is visited, who may even receive a kind of cult. ( From Akhenaten 61)
Cultural memory has its fixed point; its horizon does not change with the
passing of time. These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose
memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and
institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance). W e call these
‘figures of memory’. (“ Collective ” 129)

Thus, we learn that tradition -bound figures of memory are what cultural
memory uses in order to lodge itself in collective remembrance via the use of
fixed, immutable points. They maintain cultural memo ry just as communication
upholds communicative memory (Manier and Hirst 260). These points are symbolic and need not necessarily have a historical correspondent, since what ensures their survival is not extrinsic facts, but rather their concrete, cultural and
institutionalized rendition as material objects, texts, monuments or festivals and
their periodic re -activation though repetition (for instance re -reading, re-
enactment, periodic celebration or other cultural practices). In terms of the literary sphere , it seems evident that texts can become figures of memory though
canonization. But what about their characters, as narrativized elements which
71

may gain symbolic significance outside the original text and find substance in
the memory of a group, the member s of which, in profoundly relating with them
or rejecting them, form their own image? And what about the text’s author who may acquire a symbolic afterlife that can even be detached of the respective
text(s) and live in the memory of a people? If the forme r case seems to be
neglected by contemporary criticism, the latter finds a voice in critics such as Jesseka Batteau: “ an author . . . can function as a figure of memory by
representing a culturally relevant era or a particular social transformation . . . t he
artist can start to stand for more than just him- or herself: his reputation moves
beyond his artistic achievements and he comes to represent an era, ideology, or
even a cultural transition ” (232- 3).
In terms of the features attributed to this concept, Jan Assmann brings
into discussion three main features that figures of memory should display: “ a
concrete relationship to time and place, a concrete relationship to a group, and
an independent capacity for reconstruction” (Cultural 24). To begin with, the
fixed figures are merely forms or shapes and therefore they provide gaps that require to be filled with substance generated by the present timeframe in order
for them to shift from the level of potentiality to the level of actuality. This means that they must not be interpreted in a general, universal, abstract manner,
but in relation to a particular time and a specific setting that can crystalize them
and endow them with significance. However, it is important to note that the
context of these figures is n ot fixed, which is why they can and often do escape
their original cultural background. During the process of travelling through time and space, mnemonic forms are condensed and are liable to (re)interpretation:
“In their displacement, memory figures tend to be stripped of their complexity,
detached from the details and contextual meanings they originally referred to. This can lead to distortion, even perversion, of memories ” (Erll, “ Travelling ”).
In addition, figures of memory are carried by specialized be arers who do
not distribute them at random, but share them in order to bind a group together
in the formation of its identity and in doing so, the bearer reveals his or her own
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membership to the group. The third characteristic of figures of memory and
arguably its most important one – since it incorporates the other two by bringing
the past into the present – is given by what Jan Assmann calls
‘reconstructivism’. In the words of the critic: “ Memory, then, works though
reconstruction. The past itself cannot be preserved by it, and thus it is continually subject to processes of reorganization according to the changes
taking place in the frame of reference of each successive present ” (Cultural 27).
Hence, this element acknowledges the impossibility of maintaining and transmitting the past of such and underlines the fact that societies constantly
reconstruct their memories to suit their own ever -shifting reference points.
The father of ‘memory figures’ offers two main examples of the
concretization of this conc ept: the memory figure of Moses and the memory
figure of the Exodus. In order to clearly reveal the contour of Moses the
Egyptian as a figure of memory that unites Egypt and Israel, and therefore forms
the object of his study, Jan Assmann distinguishes it from Moses the Hebrew as
a figure of history (as defined, for instance by his ethnicity and life span, which
are irrelevant in this context)
31 and from his precursor Akhenaten, who is
depicted as being a figure that belongs entirely to history. In fact, the latter is
regarded as a figure of history without being a figure of memory, while Moses is
a figure of memory without being a figure of history ( From Akhenaten 61). This
is due to the fact that Akhenaten, the little known Egyptian king is historically accounted for and is known for having laid the foundation of a monotheistic
religion around 4 BC, yet his religion did not take the shape of a tradition that
would stand the test of time and was forgotten after the king’s death. In contrast,
Moses did not leave any historical traces behind, yet his legacy helped shape the Jewish, Christian and Islamic collective memory.

31 Jan Assmann underlines the stark contrast b etween two perspectives on Moses, a historical
one and a memorial one: “I shall not even ask the question – let alone, answer it – whether
Moses was an Egyptian, or a Hebrew, or a Midianite. This question concerns the historical
Moses and thus pertains to history. I am concerned with Moses as a figure of memory”
(Assmann Moses 11). A similar example is given in the figure of Paul the Jew.
73

Akhenaten is a figure exclusively of history who was denied any tradition and
memory in ancient Egyptian culture, having been subjected to a complete
damnatio memoriae . Moses, on the other hand, is a figure exclusively of
memory, accruing an immense import ance as the founding father of
monotheism in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, of whose historical existence, however, not the least traces have been found. (J. Assmann, From
Akhenaten 3)

What interests Assmann is not Moses’ past, but “the p erspectives from whose
vantage point later generations have interpreted and incorporated into their own
self-image his history, passed down in writing, and the story of the exodus
associated with his name (Harth 91). Just like Moses, the memory of the Exodus is not based on a historical image of Egypt, but on a figure of memory that was
constructed in opposition to Israel: “ Egypt loses its historical reality and is
turned into an inverted image of Israel. Israel is the negation of Egypt, and Egypt stands fo r all that Israel has overcome. This antagonistic constellation
assumed the form of a Grand Narrative: the myth of the Exodus ” (J. Assmann,
Moses 7). This myth becomes itself a figure of memory that is not linked to a
historical event, but marked as founda tional in the shaping of the identity of the
people of Israel, as well as the nature and identity of the Christian God (J.
Assmann, Cultural 180). Moreover, the fact that Jan Assmann chose to
represent his concept of figure of memory with two spiritually c harged symbols
is not random, since, according to the critic, cultural memory is in strong
connection with the sacred ( Cultural 38).
Because figures of memory oftentimes acquire mythical significance,
they can be perceived as floating signifiers, as ‘isla nds of time’, whose
temporality is suspended and which invite “ retrospective contemplativeness ” (J.
Assmann, “Collective ” 129). The latter term and its association to that of
‘mnemonic energy’ is where Jan Assmann draws from Aby Warburg. Figures of memory emit mnemonic energy that is culturally formed and transferred and
that crystalizes into collective experience, “ whose meaning, when touched upon,
may suddenly become accessible again across millennia” (J. Assmann,
“Collective ” 129). In. follows, that although fixed themselves, figures of
memory have the ability to symbolically float or travel to a different time and a
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different place, which allows them to be transcultural, transnational and
transhistorical. This perspective is also founded on Warburg’s ins istence on the
transcultural facet of memory.

What Warburg focuses on is the movement, the migration or travel, of symbols
across time and space. And this is in fact how I would like to conceive of
transcultural memory: as the incessant wandering of carr iers, media, contents,
forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political
borders. (Erll, “ Travelling ” 11)

The process through which memory figures are re -activated entails two
phases: one of repetition and one of interpretation, both of which ensure cultural
continuity. Jan Assmann maintains that the repetition involved by rituals
provides greater stabilizatio n of memory figures than texts do, since the latter
may be removed from circulation and thus end the cycle of repetition. When it
comes to interpretation, figures of memory are subject to “ interpretive
presentification ” (J. Assmann Cultural Memory 73), a quality that allows
Assmann to stress, once more, the fact that cultural memory “ is guided by
particular motives, expectations, hopes, and aims, each of which takes its form from the referential frame of the present ” (Cultural 72). Under these
circumstances , “institutions of interpretation” (Cultural 79) led by intellectual
elites that become bearers of memory are tasked with managing, and reshaping
the past.
In closing, the classical tradition of ars memorativa laid the foundation
for a twentieth century d epiction of mnemonic devices based on places and
images. Cicero and Quintilian envisioned an artificial practice for the purposeful
training of memory that emphasized the placing of active and striking mental
images in static, imaginary places that endowed them with stability and allowed
for their more effortless ulterior retrieving. The spatial apprehension of memory, as well as its artificiality and constructed character which stands in opposition to
natural, spontaneous memory have been used by Pierre Nora in a collective and
nationalist context. Replacing milieux de mémoire , the l ieux de mémoire had the
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task of symbolically building the image of the French nation and consequently
of French identity. Maurice Halbwachs also discussed the concepts of places
(both concrete and symbolic), images (as incomprehensive fragments and flashes), as well as how memories can be attached to them and how they can, in
turn, leave their imprint on social groups. The above mentioned discussion has
allowed for an understandi ng of the manner in which Jan Assmann’s concept of
‘figures of memory’ both continues and breaks with this tradition. On the one hand, figures retain a concrete connection to space (and time) and they can be
considered mental images that form fixed points to which cultural memory can
attach itself, on the other hand, the word ‘figure’ – and its implicit stress on the
act of molding and on the connection to narrative texts – expands the
significance of the previously mentioned devices of memory. Consequently ,
Assmann’s figures of memory are stable enough to become formative agents of cultural identity, yet their context is flexible enough in order to depict them as
mnemonic forms in need of reference -bound substance. The fact that they emit a
type of mnemonic energy that is not dependent on a historical past, but on the
perspectives of carriers of memory stresses the inherent capacity that figures of
memory have for reconstruction, as well as their ability to transcend cultures by floating (albeit in a condens ed form) from one space/ place another and
undergoing constant transformation in the process.

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II. FROM MOUTH TO MOUTH:
HOW BLAKE’S VISION REACHES GINSBERG

II. 1. Ginsberg’s Communicative and Cultural Recollection of Blake

O Blake, Come help me now
The tears run down the Cheek
That hides my skull. ~ Allen Ginsberg32

The p resent subchapter will use Jan Assmann’s notions of
‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’, intertwining them so as to
attest the mnemonic revival of William Blake in the context of Allen Ginsberg’s
direct, auditory experience of Blake’s voice and a mediated, more structured,
canonical transmission of memory, respectively. The following few pages will
be dedicated to an analysis of the Blake -Ginsberg prophetic connection that
enabled a verbatim transmission of a spiritually charged message as well as an
intuitive recapturing of the original melody of Blake’s Songs though a
communicative -cultural type of memory that is spontaneous, yet dynamically
reconstructed. In addition, since the two poets’ existence was separated by more
than eight thousand kilome ters and one hundred years, Blake’s memory had to
be preserved by an institution (in this case the literary canon) and reach Ginsberg in the textualized form of poems. Although there appears to be a
polarity between Jan Assmann’s two types of modi memorandi , it is possible
that, given the right context, “ the same event can become simultaneously an
object of the Cultural Memory and of the communicative memory ” (Erll,
Memory 31). Indeed, Ginsberg’s relation to his overseas mentor was far too
complex to respect this binary scheme and hence this study captures a partial
overlapping of communicative and cultural memory.
Conservative critics, such as Harold Bloom, dismissed Blake’s
association with Ginsberg on the account that the former was a well -deserving,
32 Allen Ginsberg journal entry cf. Schumacher 332.
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influential canonical poet, while the latter’s lack of imaginative control denied
him a place among noteworthy contemporary American writers in the index of
the Western Canon. Others, such as Tony Trigilio and his 2000 book Strange
Prophecies Anew:33 Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg
conclude that there is much to say about the prophetic, religious and political
authority shared by these poets. Yet the few MA theses34 and journal articles
that tackle the connection between Blake and Ginsberg very rarely refer to them in isolation and detail and never in terms of communicative/ cultural
remembering, which is why this section offers valuable insight into the intricate
personal, prophetic, spiritual and artistic link between the two poets.
Both William Blake and his American disciple considered themselves
sufficiently spiritually inspired in order to take on the role of prophets and gain
access to visions that allowed them to see beyond the natural world. The English word ‘prophet’ which com es from the Greek profetes , is used here to refer to a
person whose words are spiritually inspired and uttered in the name of divinity,
while also interpreting the message for mankind ( “Prophet.” ). Blake had
touched upon this subject in multiple poems, both in his early career – for
instance “In futurity/ I prophetic see/ That the earth from sleep/ (Grave the
sentence deep)/ Shall arise an seek/ For her maker meek ” (Blake, A Critical
“The Little Girl Lost” 239) – and certainly in his prophetic works, in which he
considers himself to be a voice that can disturb the sleep of ignorance of those
who hear it.
35 For Blake, visions were part of everyday life and ever since he
saw the face of God out of the wi ndow when he was a young boy, he continued
to proclaim his visual and auditory connection to angels, prophets – “the
33 This phrase makes reference to the last line of Ginsberg’s poem “ Kaddish”, an elegy for his
mother: “Strange prophecies anew! She wrote – ‘The key is in the window, the key is in the
sunlight at the window – I have the key – Get married Allen don’t take drugs – the key is in
the bars, in the sunlight in the window. Love , your mother’ which is Naomi –” (Collected
252).
34 Two of the most notable theses on the subject are Christopher Pellnat’s 1988 William Blake
and Allen Ginsberg: Poets of a Fallen World, Prophets of the New World and Gregory M.
Daniels’ 2004 The Crazy Du mbsaint of the Mind or Poet -Prophets of the Beat and Beatific .
35 For instance, De Selincourt marks “the complete serenity of his [Blake’s] self -confidence”
(61) when he employs the following line in Milton: “Mark my words, they are for your eternal salvat ion” (qtd. in De Selincourt 61).
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Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me ” (Blake, A Critical “The Marriage”
13) – and famous literary predecessors, among whom Milton, Dante and
Shakespeare. Moreover, he was sure to write upon the command of Heaven: “ I
have written this poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty
or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will” and “I
am under the direc tion of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly ” (Blake, A
Critical “From A Letter to Thomas Butts ” 67-71). In addition, Blake maintained
that the great poem “ Milton ” was written under dictation, with no premeditation
and against his will (Blake, The Compl ete, “To Thomas Butts ” 729). This
perspective implies an apprehension of his role as a vessel that needs to be filled with divine words of wisdom received directly and rendered faithfully, with
elation: “Eternals, I hear your call gladly./ Dictate swift, winged words & fear
not/ To unfold your dark visions of torment ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44).
Also, as a poet -prophet, he realized that “all true art is prophetic, representing
part of the biblical scheme of God and Man and Creation” (Pellnat 37), but a lso
that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God” (Blake, A Critical
“The Marriage ” 13). Consequently that it was the visionary poet’s responsibility
to pass on his knowledge and otherworldly memories by being a social critic and revealing his contemporaries’ erroneous path.
In terms of Allen Ginsberg, there was a specific event in his life that
made him consider himself a visionary, a prophet and a spiritual kin of William
Blake. In July 1948, on the sixth floor of an Eastern Harlem apartment, a
mystical experience illuminated the young American poet’s mind and expanded his consciousness beyond contemporary times, beyond rationalistic and
materialistic America, towards Blake’s prophetic manifold vision, towards
divine imagination and infinity, towards the spiritual origin of the world, but
also its illness and decay. Immersed in loneliness as most of his friends were
either out of town or unreachable,
36 overcome by a feeling of sadness, a twenty
two year old Allen Ginsberg had just masturbated and was gazing at the sky and
36 According to Ginsberg, the state of deep melancholy had also been instilled by a letter from
Neal Cassady in which the American rebel had called off their romantic relationship.
79

at the bricks and cornices of a nearby building, with William Blake’s Songs of
Innocence and of Experience in his lap. Suddenly, he realized that the poem
“Ah! Sunflower ”37 was about him and therefore, for the first time, this al l too
familiar poem acquired a personal, profoundly spiritual significance – a
realization that was accompanied by Ginsberg hearing the voice of Blake himself.

I realized that the poem was talking about me . . . Now, I began understanding
it, the poem whi le looking at it, and suddenly, simultaneously with
understanding it, heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice: it wasn’t any
voice that I knew. . . . Like the voice of the Anci ent of Days. (Ginsberg, “ The
Art of Poetry ” 36-37)

Not only was this experience an auditory one, but it was also conveyed
visually by the apparition of the sky as an ancient portal into the secrets of the
universe, as a giant, intelligent blue hand that had built everything around and
that exuded divinity through every particle of existence: “ I saw the depths of the
universe, by looking simply into the ancient sky . . . that was the moment I was born for ” (Ginsberg, “A Blake Experience ” 122) and “some hand had placed the
whole universe in front of me . . . the sky was the living blue hand itself. . . . God was in front of my eyes – existence itself was God (Ginsberg, “The Art of
Poetry ” 37-38). Thus, Allen Ginsberg understood that what he heard represented
his calling to turn his head like a sunflower towards the sun, towards the
spiritual core of the world, become a visionary poet -prophet and thus impart his
newly gained knowledge of the world though his poetry.

From this, Ginsberg gained a theory of poetry that he continued to develop
throughout his life, namely ‘seeing poetry as the communication of the
particular experience – not just any experience – but this experience’. He may
not have been able to share with the woman next door, but, in various ways,
Ginsberg struggled to communicate these visions th rough his poetry for the rest
of his life. (Pevateaux 42)
37 William Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower”: “Ah! sunflower, weary of time,/ Who countest the steps
of the sun,/ Seeking after that sweet golden clime/ Where the traveller’s journey is done;/
Where the youth pined away with desire,/ And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,/ Arise
from their graves and aspire ;/ Where my sunflower wishes to go” ( A Critical 273)
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In order to ensure the stability of this memory and to be able to follow
his sacred poetic vocation and lead his contemporaries into seeing beyond
materialism, into the infinite, inherent divinity of everything, Ginsberg vowed
never to forget, doubt, deny or turn his back to Blake’s voice in favor of other spiritual visions, of American capitalism and war policy or superficial,
ephemeral earthly life.
38

Anyway, my first thought was this was what I was born for, and second
thought, never forget – never forget, never renege, never deny. Never deny the
voice – no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit
worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or e arth
worlds. (Ginsberg, “ The Art of Poetry ” 37)

I’ll never be able to go back and that’s great, and from now on I’m chosen,
blessed, sacred, poet, and this is my sunflower, or this is my new world, and I’ll
be faithful for the rest of my life, and I’ll ne ver forget it and I’ll never deny it,
and I’ll never renounce it. (Ginsberg qtd. in Portugés, “The Poetics” 131)

Indeed, the English bard’s calling would remain unforgettable throughout
Ginsberg’s life not only because it represented an otherworldly inter vention, but
because turned him into a “poet -prophet . . . touched by a metaphysical vision
that positions [him] in a lineage ‘authenticated by scriptural prophecy’” (Wittreich qtd. in Trigilio, Strange 24). In addition, it was both a God- like and
fatherly voice
39 that delivered a message which activated Ginsberg’s spiritual
side and subsequently turned him into one of the leaders of a new spiritual,
beatific rebirth. In this sense, Blake was definitely a teacher to the American
poet who admitted in a 1976 i nterview with Peter Barry Chowka that he “ had
[had] absolutely no interest in religion, God or spirituality before that vision”
(“Online Interviews with Allen Ginsberg” ). Moreover, he was so touched by the
connection he had established that he admitted he “spent a week after this living
38 Scholars such as C.J. Pevateaux have traced the poetic force of Ginsberg’s poetry to Blake’s
“gnostic dream -insight of the illusory nature of the material world” (38 -39).
39 In the words of Allen Ginsberg: ““it was like God had a human voice . . .a living creator speaking to his son” (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg” 302- 303) or, as the American poet
exclaims in “Psalm IV” in reference to Blake’s voice: “My son! My son! The endless ages
have remembered me! My son! My son!/ Time howled in anguish in my ear! My son! My
son! My father wept and held me in his dead arms” ( Collected 246).
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on the edge of a cliff in eternity ” (The Book 266). However, despite a Blakean
influence that dominated most of Ginsberg’s career, a later conversion to
Buddhism in 1972 presented a challenge in terms of reconciling this
philosophy’s non- dualism with Blake’s dual perspective of the word (Bellarsi
42).
The above -mentioned interaction40 was a private, direct one that was
closer to communicative memory than to cultural memory because the Beat poet
was subject to a prophetic memo ry transmission that was mouth to mouth41
(more than just mouth to ear, since it implied a prophecy spoken through not
just to a person) (Pellnat 6). The initiatory experience was meant to be
communicative and communicated, “ shared . . . through the means of verbal
communication ” (Bietti, “Cultural ”), passed on from generation to generation,
from Blake’s England to Ginsberg’s America, not as historical knowledge, but as “private interpretation of a person’s own past and, therefore, as a sort of
unwarranted everyday memory ” (Bietti, “Cultural ”). While it is true that
“communicative memory comprises memories related to the recent past . . .
[which] the individual shares with his contemporaries ” (J. Assmann, Cultural
36), i n the case of visions, time and space contract and collide with the present,
allowing for an instance of contemporaneous existence of both Ginsberg and
Blake, through what seemed to be the result of a time travel (Ginsberg, “Allen
Ginsberg ” 291) that enabled the sharing of communicative memory as a “quasi –
synchronic process of interpersonal communication” (Velicu 2).

To put it differently: a person’s memory forms itself through his or her
participation in communicative processes. It is a function of their involvement
40 I use the word ‘interaction’ because although the experience may seem one sided, Ginsberg
was convinced of the authenticity of his reaction and of his full- sensorial and psychological
response that was not just passive, but performative and involved an active process of awakening: “my body suddenly felt light and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally
deeper real universe than I’d been existing in” (Ginsberg, “The Art of Poetry” 38).
41 The Lord addressed Aaron and Miriam in reference to Moses: “With him will I speak
mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD
shall he behold” (Numbers 12:8). All Bible quotes in this thesis are taken from King James
Bible Online .
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in a variety of social groups – ranging from family through religion to nation.
Memory lives and survives through communication (J. Assmann, Cultural 23)

I should also be noted that the auditory illumination was a twofold one:
if “Ah! Sunflower ” evoked a feeling of belonging and enlightenment, a few
minutes later Allen Ginsberg heard Blake’s voice recite “ The Sick Rose ”, which
offered him a glimpse of the terrible ‘beauty of doom’ and the actuality of death,
stressing a crucial Blakean understand ing of the world in terms of duality:
“Without contraries is no progression” (A Critical “The Marriage ” 9), which
establishes “an apocalyptic and imaginative coincidentia oppositorum ” (Altizer,
“The Revolutionary ”). This time, however, the memory would be a traumatic
one, as it had to do “ with the knowledge of death – my death and also the death
of being itself, and that was the great pain ” (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg” 305)
and the contemporary perils of rationalism. Initially he interpreted the rose as
the self and the worm as the mind turned sick by reason (in which case, the poet
made a direct reference to Urizen)42 and in another instance the rose was the
body, attacked by the worm of death. While Ginsberg was very keen to discuss
the first vision, often overtly acknowledging its influence on him, he very rarely
spoke of the second one, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to repress and forget
its shuddering impact.
As, Cathy Caruth sustained regarding traumatic experiences, “there is a
response, sometimes de layed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes
the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event” (Caruth 4). At first, Ginsberg did not understand the
extent to which the “ Sick Rose ” vision affected him, as he was subject to what
Dori Laub would call ‘collapse of witnessing’, but this memory would haunt
him by randomly and partially surfacing during his drug induced hallucinatory
experiences, originally meant to recapture the first Bl akean vision not the
second, which was far too scary and painful to intentionally return to. Because
42 As Ginsberg states, “I can interpret it on a verbal level, the sick rose i s my self, or self, or
the living body, sick because [of] the mind, which is the worm ‘That flies in the night, In
the howling storm,’ or Urizen, reason” (“The Art of Poetry” 38).
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the “scene or thought is not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses, at will,
the one it inhabits ” (Caruth 6), flashbacks and further dark visions rel ated to the
“Sick Rose ” would come to life again and again, in what would become a
personal and poetic obsession with death. One of the instances when a fragment
of the vision reappeared was while Ginsberg was walking on the campus of
Colombia University. The poet then felt something of “ the same depth of
consciousness or the same cosmical awareness ” (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg ”
311) as the 1948 vision, but this time it was even more frightening, this time it
was like “death coming down on me – some really s cary presence, it was almost
as if I saw God, except God was the devil . . . I didn’t urge my way there . . . I shut it all off ” (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg ” 311). But shutting it off was not up
to Ginsberg, because he was not in control, but he was being c ontrolled by a
traumatic memory; therefore, years later, in a completely different place, in South America, on ayahuasca
43 (Pevateaux 50), the vision would return against
Ginsberg’s will, possessing him once again and proving that a traumatic “insistent app earance [occurs] outside the boundaries of any single place or
time” (Caruth 9). Even later in Ginsberg’s life, in 1968, the death of his love –
interest, Neal Cassady, triggered another auditory experience of Blake that was
closely connected to the original apprehension of death. This time it was the first
two lines of William Blake’s poem “ The Grey Monk” : “’I die, I die!’ the mother
said,/ ‘My children die for lack of bread” (A Critical 282). These traumatic
encounters are based on mystical communication, y et are transmitted in a non –
institutional environment (J. Assmann, “ Communicative ” 111), in a non-
mediated and spontaneous manner and in a private, domestic, everyday setting, which makes them in instances of communicative memory.
Perhaps the main reason for which Ginsberg’s original 1948 visionary
connection was a cornerstone moment in his life and career was that it
determined the Beat to take after Blake and assume his mission as a prophet,
with the subsequent Blakean auditory ex periences merely strengthening the
43 A shamanic hallucinogenic potion known for altering consciousness. In thi s case it was
recommended to Ginsberg by his friend William Burroughs.
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imperative character of this mission. Ginsberg had no doubt that what he took
part in was a prophetic connection – “a prophecy as if Blake had penetrated the
very secret core of the entire universe and . . . if properly h eard in the inner ear,
would deliver you beyond the universe ” (“The Art of Poetry ” 39) – and some
critics among whom Paul Portugés associated it with a Hebrew prophet being called by his Creator (161). As a result, the young poet assumed his prophetic
voca tion in an attempt replicate his “ illuminative seizure ” (Portugés, “Allen
Ginsberg ” 161) and avowedly composed “ Howl ” by “continuing to prophecy
what [he] really know[s], despite the drear consciousness of the world”
(Ginsberg qtd. in Miles 65). In describing the process of composing “ Howl ”, the
author underlined the importance of preserving Blake’s memory.

my poetry is Angelical Ravings, and has nothing to do with dull materialistic
vagaries about who should shoot who . . . Who denies the music of the sph eres
denies poetry, denies man, and spits on Blake, Shelley and Christ and Buddha. (“Notes on ” 83)

Also, apart from “ Howl ”,44 there are many references to prophecy in
Ginsberg’s early works. In one such case, he addresses Divinity directly and
asks to “ Translate the speechless stanzas of the rose/ Into my poem, and I vow
to copy/ Every petal on a page” (Ginsberg, Collected “Psalm II ” 28). This
prophetic stance is asserted in relation to his readers as well, maintaining: “I am
Thy prophet come home this w orld to scream an unbearable Name thru my 5
senses hideous sixth” (Ginsberg, Collected “Magic Psalm ” 263). Just as Blake
yielded to spontaneity by allowing himself to become the medium for the transmission of heavenly messages, the American poet maintained that one of
the main themes of the Beat Generation was “spontaneous mind and candor ”
(“Online Interviews with Allen Ginsberg” ), an outpouring of feelings without
self-censorship or second guessing, best read out loud (an approach that both
44 See Alicia Ostriker’s article in which she compares “Howl” to the Lamentations of
Jeremiah , as well as the example she gives of Kenneth Rexroth’s trail defense of “Howl” as
propheti c literature: “The simplest term for such writing is prophetic . . . There are the
prophets in the Bible which it greatly resembles in purpose and in language and in subject
matter . . . the theme is the denunciation of evil and a pointing of the way out, so to speak.
That is prophetic literature” (qtd. in Ostriker, “The Poet” 107).
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Jack Kerouac an d William Burroughs proudly supported). As Ginsberg asserted
in his poem “ Who” (1973), and reiterated in a televised interview for the
documentary No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For (1997), his mission was
clear.

From Great Consciousness vision Harlem 1948 buildings standing in Eternity
I realized entire Universe was manifestation of One Mind –
My teacher was William Blake – my life work Poesy,
Transmitting that spontaneous awareness to Mankind.
(Collected , “Who ” 603)

But in order to grasp the target of Blake’s indignation, Ginsberg inevitably
immersed himself in his teacher’s world, as “ the zeitgeist, and the habitus of the
historical actors are also communicated ” (Welzer 288) in the process of
communicative memory transmission. Thus, he learned about the historical
basis of Blake’s dialectics and found a parallel for them in his own reason-
obsessed society.
Another manner in which Blake’s message seems to have been
communicated directly to Ginsberg is still related to the Songs of Innocence
and of Experience, albeit this time it concerns not only the text, but also the
melody, as Allen Ginsberg set the English bard’s volume to music, and released it as an album in the twentieth century in a deliberate attempt to “‘re-
embody’ Blake’s poems ” (K. Stephenson 55). While it is inconceivable to
ignore the multifaceted talent of William Blake as mystical poet -prophet and
painter or inventive engraver and printer, his qualities as a singer or song –
composer seem to have been lost in the mists of time . It is believed that, as the
title suggests, Blake’s famous Songs were indeed put to music by the poet
himself, yet no sheet music was left behind. As critic Martin Nurmi claims,
there is “ reliable contemporary evidence that Blake actually sang the earliest
versions of these poems. . . [although] the melodies have not survived ” (36).
This is a gap that could presumably be filled by Allen Ginsberg’s
communicative memory, since the Beat poet maintained he could reach
Blake’s intention and render the songs in the manner in which they had been
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originally sung by their author.
Consequently, I will refer to William Blake’s lyrical works “ The Sick
Rose ” and “Ah! Sunflower ” (1794) in connection to Ginsberg’s spiritual,
musical renditions “ The Sick Rose ” and “Ah! Su nflower ” (1969) from the
artist’s album “ The Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake,
Tuned by Allen Ginsberg”45 recorded in 1968- 1969 and released in 1970. These
two songs have been chosen primarily because they represent the original two
poems that appeared to Ginsberg in his early auditions of Blake, establishing a
prophetic continuation with the English poet through the mystical understanding of the lines presumably heard in Blake’s voice and also because they are most
helpful in revealing the appropriation of William Blake’s memory through
psychedelic, Indian sacred music in the social context of 1960s America. The
latter process of reshaping is a multilayered one that blends the direct, prophetic, immediate transmission of memory with one that is mediated by the
literary cannon, institutionalized by the music industry and reinterpreted though
the lens of another socio- political context, setting the foundation for an analysis
of mnemonic transfer that is at the juncture between communicative and
cultural memory.
It appears that Ginsberg attempted to mold the vocals and instruments to
match the apparent content of the poems, with the Songs of Innocence being
evidently more cheerful and making use of the flute (representing perhaps the piper’s pipe) and the Songs of Experience introducing the use of the drums,
which gave them a more dramatic effect. Because his was “ a mind prepared to
see what Blake saw ” (Glausser, “Psychiatry ” 171), the Beat musician became
45 “Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg” was
performed by Ginsberg singing and playing the harmonium alongside his partner Peter
Orlovsky (vocals) and various other musicians among whom: Cyril Caster (trumpet, guitar
and horn), Janet Zeitz (flute), Jon Sholle (drums), Bob Dorough (organ, piano, harpsichord)
and Don Cherry (finger cymbals, bass trombone, beaded gourd). This was Ginsberg’s first official musical release that would be followed by other albums in which the Beat poet
sings his own poems, culminating with his 1994 “Holy Soul Jelly Roll”, a four volume best –
of collection that includes some of Blake’s poems as well. For Gins berg, it was the
friendship with Bob Dylan (whom he perceived to be a musical instructor) that had made
him believe that “the line between poetry and music was fading” (K. Stephenson 52) and
that he and Dylan were both poet -musicians.
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convinced of a strong, direct connect ion with his literary and spiritual guru that
presumably allowed him to channel the original melodies of his poems by
carefully studying the purpose he saw in the rhythm, the vowels and individual
intention of each syllable.

Some rhythms mean something . . . and also the vowel sounds . . . as Pound
talks about [them] – and that’s led me onto an examination of Blake, and then
the possibility of putting them to music. . . . I begin to get more sensitive to the
fact that each syllable in a Blake poem is inten tional and therefore has to be
pronounced intentionally, as it was meant. (Ginsberg, “ Improvised Poetics ”
142)

Yet, despite the American artist’s overt intention of putting forth the most
natural rhythm that represented Blake’s own musical rendition based on “being
conscious or aware of the meaning, intention, or the significance of each syllable ” (
Ginsberg, “Improvised Poetics ” 144), he seems to have ‘tinted’ the
original melodies by instilling Eastern influences into them. The year Ginsberg
spent in Indi a, interacting with Buddhist monks taught him how to mantra chant
so that, at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, when disturbed by anti –
Vietnam war protests, he applied this method by first chanting Blake poems and
then chanting Om for seven or eight hours on end in Lincoln Park, accompanied
by hundreds of people with the aim of stopping police violence and calming the
civil unrest: “ I was in a state of shock and began dealing with it by setting
William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ to music ” (“Allen
Ginsberg: Holy ”). There was only one step from sacred mantra to sacred,
psychedelic, Blakean folk music that would allow Ginsberg to re -embody the
poems by melting together his prophetic Blake -connection, his interest in
Eastern spiritualit y and his social activism – for he knew the counterculture
would respond to all three.
The experimentation of sound in “ Ah! Sunflower ” can be said to adhere
to what Michael Hicks considers to be the three core features of psychedelic
music: “In order to understand what makes music stylistically ‘psychedelic’,
one should consider three fundamental effects of LSD: dechronicization,
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depersonalization and dynamization” (Hicks 63). The untrained and
unsynchronized voices of Ginsberg and Orlovsky sound like an incantation and
they purposefully create a time -delay effect similar to an echo that achieves
dechronicization by allowing the listener “ to move outside of conventional
perceptions of time ” (Hicks 63). In addition, the continuous single note of the
harmonium and electric bass, as well as the droning effect produced in the song
offers a hypnotic musical atmosphere – which was exactly how Ginsberg
described this poem when talking about what had caused his Harlem audition of Blake – that creates the effect of dy namization by dissolving experience and
making it seem liquid. This was very popular in psychedelic music for it recreated a hallucinatory state that slowed down experience, introducing a
feeling of peacefulness and relaxation in which body and mind were
depersonalized in an effort to experience a different side of reality. According to Ginsberg, the long breaths taken when reciting Blake’s poem can have a
hallucinogenic effect, “ deliver[ing] a buzz like grass or higher ” (qtd. in
Pevateaux 59). The reaction to the psychedelic beat of the ‘60s was one of acceptance and tolerance that the (sun) flower children of the hippy generation
embraced as being an antidote to the atrocities of warfare. Ginsberg’s transfer of Blakean mnemonic energy to music was based on the American poet being “a
great radiant source of awareness ” (Ginsberg, “February 11” 58) who had the
power of leading the countercultural youth to the realization that they were the
embodiments of sunflowers who soug ht after the Creator’s blessing.
The droning organ effect in “ The Sick Rose ” (a key feature of Eastern
sounds), the dreamy acoustic guitar, Ginsberg’s increasingly vibrating voice and
elongation of the vowels as well as the repetition of the poem three times within
the same song are a reminder in performance and purpose of mantras such as
Om and their high spiritual power. In this sense, the song provided an escape from the sickening, invisible worm of the night (1968 violence in America) into
a holy space of calmness and spiritual healing. The content that is borrowed
from the Eng lish bard by “ setting Blake’s words, syllable by syllable [to music]
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according to vocal tones appropriate to their meaning” (Bamberger, “Allen
Ginsberg’s Music ”) is repurposed and redirected towards America’s
involvement in the Vietnam War. As Allen Ginsbe rg declared in an interview,
the goal was to find “ what we can do to solve the Viet Nam war, to present
different ideas for making the society more sacred ” (Ginsberg, “The Chicago ”
207). The trance and feeling of ecstasy were aided by the use of drugs that
helped prepare the way for an alternation of consciousness meant to be
transferred from prophet to singer and from singer to audience.
Thus, the psychedelic beat offered by Allen Ginsberg’s musical
recreation of Blake’s Songs , particularly “ Ah! Sunflower ” and “The Sick Rose”
kept the poems’ sacred core and retained the original prophetic message received by Ginsberg in 1948, while erasing the singer’s compositional input
and allegedly channeling Blake’s intention and rendering the songs in their original m elody. Although this travelling of memory seems to have occurred
under much of the same circumstances as Ginsberg’s initial, prophetic audition, it appears that the songs’ interpretation is also representative of the cultural
memory mode. In this sense, it embodies an artistic celebratory recollection of
Blake’s poetry and displays a dynamic ability of reconstruction in accordance with the framework of the present, redirecting the songs towards the East by
making use of tonalities similar to Indian mantra c hanting in order to calm the
violent behavior of contemporary Americans through musically induced hypnotic states of illumination.
Since “not every member of the community is endowed with the
legitimacy to influence the content of cultural memory ” (Bietti, “Cultural ”), it
should be noted that neither Blake nor Ginsberg were individuals whose literary work was forgotten, but, on the contrary, they secured themselves a place in the
world literary cannon and therefore we can speak of Ginsberg as a specialized
bearer of cultural memory who manages to both preserve and modify Blake’s
image and visionary message though his own poetry. According to Jan
Assmann: “The cultural memory always has its specialists, both in oral and in
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literate societies. These include sh amans and bards, as well as priests, teachers,
artists, clerks, scholars, mandarins, rabbis, mullahs, and other names for
specialized carriers of memory ( “Communicative ” 114). As cultural memory is
perpetually modified along with context -changes, it is imp ortant to understand
that Blake’s vision cannot be kept as such, but will be molded to suit Ginsberg’s
social environment. Mindful of this aspect, I will analyze the manner in which
Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower ” and “The Sick Rose ” have acquired a cultural after life
in Ginsberg’s “ Sunflower Sutra ” and “Reading William Blake’s ‘The Sick
Rose’ ” and providing what Jan Assmann calls ‘cultural texts’ for Ginsberg and
his literary generation.

Cultural texts’ are a sub -group of texts that are constantly taken up and
reproduced by a whole society. . . . [they] exert a binding energy on the
community in a normative and formative sense. . . . Formative texts formulate
the self -image of the group and range from tribal myths and sagas of origin to
literary works by Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Milton and Goethe. By the transmission of cultural texts, a society or culture reproduces
itself in its ‘cultural identity’ through the generations. ( “Form ” 76)

To begin with, Allen Ginsberg adds the word ‘sutra’ to the t itle of his
poem, which denotes a set of aphorisms of Sanskrit literature ( “Sutra ”) which
are used in Buddhism as teachings conveyed in a simple form and connected by
a thread (O’Brien, “ Definition ”). Hence, from the very title, Ginsberg links
Blake’s sunf lower with Eastern spirituality, but since texts can be considered
memory preservers by excellence, Blake’s poem is not left behind but its
message is, instead, reflected in another context.

All texts participate, repeat, and constitute acts of memory; al l are products of
their distancing and surpassing of precursor texts. . . . As a collection of
intertexts, the text itself is a memory place. (Lachmann, “ Mnemonic and
Intertextual ” 305)

Before introducing the driving image of the poem, the author extends the
sadness implied by Blake’s exclamation “ Ah!” and offers a very grim depiction
of the railroad yard where the lyrical self and his friend, Jack Kerouac, stop to
admire the sunset. The prominent shade cast by the locomotive replaces that of
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natural trees , which have themselves become part of a great, artificial, man –
made machinery; the whole environment that surrounds the protagonists reflects
their bleakness, sadness and tiredness in that it is a desolate wasteland of litter,
discarded consumer products and grime of industrialization that ‘pollutes’ the
beauty of the sunset, the freshness of the nearby water and the vegetation of the
Frisco peaks. In this dreary landscape that seems to be unsuitable for the
development of any life form – “no fish in that stream, no hermit in those
mounts ” (Ginsberg, Collected “Sunflower ” 146) – Kerouac points out a
sunflower resting on a pile of saw dust.
The moment the lyrical self sees the sunflower, memories of the Blake
visions come rushing through and although “ weary of time ”, the beautiful
flower still counts the steps towards the sun (Blake, A Critical 273), which turns
it into a symbol of holiness, spirituality, beauty and endurance in the face of modern, capitalist carelessness and disinterest in the natural and the sacred. As
critic Allan Johnston maintains:
“The sun flower, which exists outside of and in
spite of the economic conditions responsible for its surroundings, becomes a vehicle of escape from those surroundings, allow
ing Ginsberg a visionary
moment ” (116). Therefore, Blake’s memory of “ Ah! Sunflower ” allows for a
commonplace, mundane sight to be perceived as a revelation that is
simultaneously deeply personal and universal.
– I rushed up enchanted – it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake – my
visions – Halem/. . . .
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower, O my soul, I loved you
then!/ . . .
A perfect beauty of a flower! A perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence!
(Ginsberg, Collected “Sunflower ” 146)

This artistic rendition of the sunflower is in line with Ginsberg’s decision “ to
work out a poetics of vision . . . that would allow him to communicate his
visions and his heightened awareness of reality to an audience bent on denying
the mundane as well as the sublime ” (Portugés , “The Poetics ” 131).
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The ‘grave’ that Blake mentions in the poem along with the necessity of
the sunflower to arise and surpass its deadly environment is reflected in
Ginsberg’s cemetery of “ bridges Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages,
black treadles tires forgotten and unretreaded. . . condoms & pots, steel knives,
nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor -sharp artifacts passing into
the past –” (146) that the sunflower manages to grow among an rise like royalty,
albeit its initially “crazy golden crown” is now “ a battered crown ” (146).
Moreover, its roots are personified and attributed the sickly characteristics of dehumanized individuals intrinsically linked with the effects of modern
industrialization. Consequently the flower appears as a skeleton, with arms of
pieces of broken plaster, a toothless mouth and “ a dead fly in its ear ”, railroad
skin, sooty cheeks, hands and phallus, which are nothing but “ artificial worse –
than-dirt–industrial –modern” protuberances (146), while its surroundings are
comprised of abandoned cars, tins, cigars and wheelbarrows, all of which are
described as lonesome, ill, dying people. Just like Blake’s sunflower, which is
bound to earth while dreaming of eternal life, the surroundings Ginsberg’s
sunflower are entangled to its roots, making it sick, convincing it that it is not
holy, almost killing it, yet not managing to take away its hope and perseverance.
Maintaining the Blakean meeting of contraries, in this case between the
youth determined by sexual desire and the cold, holy, virgin, Ginsberg initially
contrasts, then brings together the image of the locomotive with that of the
sunflower. At the beginning of the poem, the antithesis between the artificial
object tainted by its direct connection to in dustrialization and the sunflower that
is alive, natural and still follows the sun in hopes of reaching the sweeter, golden rays of heaven is evident. Yet, by the end of the poem, both the
sunflower and the locomotive seem to have lost their identity as a result of their
restricted freedom. Just like Blake’s youth and virgin who unnaturally suppress their sexuality and end up suffering, the sunflower sees itself as an impotent, old
locomotive and the locomotive has lost its (sexual) drive and power and has
become merely the “ shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive ”
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(147), an aspect which brings the two images together. Consequently, the voice
of the poem overtly reminds them both of their identity in an attempt to free
them from their mental prison and allow them to reach their full potential.
Taking on the role of the savior, the lyrical self of “ Sunflower Sutra ”
establishes himself as king and prophet -priest and, with the sunflower as his
scepter, he delivers a sermon from his soul to the souls of “anyone who’ll
listen ” (148), revealing an optimistic solution to a seemingly inescapable crisis.
This means that he acquires the power to decide which memories can be passed on and which ones can be forgotten: “The power of cultural memory rests in the
conscious decision to choose particular memories and to give those memories
precedence in communal remembrance ” (Rodriguez 12). The message that the
lyrical self of Ginsberg’s poem vows to transmit is in line with both the Blake visions and with Blake’s poe m and aims at reminding people on the one hand of
the superficiality of their earthly state and the ephemeral character of their life’s
“journey ” and on the other hand, of the permanence of the divine, eternal core
which makes up their identity: “ We’re not our skin of grime . . . we’re all
golden sunflowers inside ” (148) and allows them to always aspire towards the
sun. Haunted also by the second Harlem epiphany of 1948, Ginsberg
remained profoundly shaken, and the apocalyptic vision, along with the personal insight gained upon human death when hearing Blake’s voice recite
“The Sick Rose ”, were revisited many times. Therefore, in the same year, he
created his own response to the poem, entitled “On Reading William Blake’s
‘The Sick Rose’ ” that would ensure a cultural continuation of Blake’s work,
while also providing its enrichment with personalized doubts and fears. In other words, “when literature is considered in the light of memory, it appears as the
mnemonic art par excellence. . . . Writing is both an a ct of memory and a new
interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space ”
(Lachmann, “Mnemonic and Intertextual ” 301).

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O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
(Blake, A Critical “ The Sick Rose ” 270)
Rose of spirit, rose of light,
Flower whereof all will tell,
Is this black vision of my sight
The fashion of a prideful spell,
Mystic charm or magic bright,
O Judgment of fire and of fright?

What everlasting force confounded
In its being, like some human
Spirit shrunken in a bounded
Immortality, what Blossom
Gathers us inward, astounded?
Is this the sickness that is Doom?
(Ginsberg, Collected “Reading William
Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ ” )

In terms of formal characteristics, Ginsberg renounces his usual blank
verse in favor of a Blakean rhyme and organizes the poem around a series of
rhetorical questions that allude to Blake’s “ The Tyger ” and, thus, announce a
theme that tackles the nature of the Creator. Addressing the Rose directly in a manner similar to Blake’s source -poem, the lyrical voice acknowledges it as an
illumination of the spirit, as a mystical rose of light, yet also as a dark pessimistic vision, the origins of which are debatable. The question that surfaces
is whether the Blake experience was authentic and miraculous or rather the
result of magic or the perceiver’s own artistic and prophetic arrogance.
Nevertheless, “O Rose ” becomes “O Judgm ent” and the sickness is closely
connected to the feeling of fright, implying that the feelings of doubts and fear have to do with death and the Last Judgment, with the inevitability of the end
and the painful unknowingness that plights the minds of human bein gs. This
falls in line both with Ginsberg’s own interpretation of his feelings when participating at the auditory experience (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg ” 305) and
with a literal interpretation of the destruction of the life of Blake’s rose.
Moreover, the night and secrecy that render Blake’s mysterious
atmosphere are reflected in Ginsberg’s use of the words “ confounded” and
“astounded” , which further underline a state of confusion and uncertainty.
Continuing the series of questions, the voice develops on the nature of the
illness he perceives and wonders who the culprit is, what kind of worm could
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have produced it. Although there are references to the meeting of contraries
(boundedness and immortality, outward blossom and inward withdrawal), the
everlasting force of destruction embodies the human characteristic of oblivion
and imprisonment. Being shrunken in a bounded, physical form entails limitation, restriction and impossibility to gain perspective and acknowledge
one’s immortality – a state that leads ind ividuals to obsessively question, doubt
and be locked in their own minds, enhancing their own sickness and doom. In this case, Ginsberg’s pessimistic perspective can only be mended via a widening
of awareness (Pevateaux 60) that would include his own death, along with the
possibility of communicating this awareness to his readers.
As “mnemic imagination and poetic imagination interact. They seem to
mirror each other and comment upon one another ” (Lachmann, “Mnemonic and
Intertextual” 303), which provided A llen Ginsberg with inspiration for
composing multiple poems that directly or indirectly refer to William Blake and the mnemonic image of him that he envisioned. At least nine poems were
written about what Ginsberg ‘called the Blake visions’: “ Reading William
Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ ”, “Vision 1948” , “The Eye Altering Alters All” , “The
Very Dove ”, “Do We Understand Each Other? ”, “The Voice of Rock ”, “A
Western Ballad ” and the sonnet “ I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this Rhyme ”
(Portugés, “The Poetics ” 135). In addition, there are countless other lyrical
works in which Ginsberg paid homage to Blake and helped shape his cultural memory, among which: “ POEM Rocket ” (1957), “Ignu” (1958), “I Beg You
Come Back & Be Cheerful ” (1959), “Psalm IV ” (1960), “Death News ” (1963),
“Today ” (1964), “Kral Majales ” (1965), “Wichita Vortex Sutra ” (1966), “What
I’d Like to Do” (1973), to name but a few in which Blake’s name is
acknowledged overtly. Of course, this list culminates with “ Howl ” (1955),
which not only refers to the English bard in a direct manner, but also enables a
circulation of his cultural memory via the embodiment of the figure of Urizen in
Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch – a topic discussed at length in the fourth and final
chapter of this thesis.
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In conclusion, A llen Ginsberg’s mnemonic revival of William Blake has
been attested through an analysis of the interpretive development undergone by
the poems “ Ah! Sunflower ” and “The Sick Rose” . First and foremost, I have
discussed the context that allowed for a communic ative recollection of William
Blake: a prophetic message transmitted directly, although not face to face, but
from mouth to mouth, though a mystical convergence of time and space that
resulted in momentous c oexistence of the two poets, making unmediated
communication possible. Secondly, the artistic conversion of Blake’s two
poems from text to song can be interpreted as an overlap between
communicative and cultural memory since, on the one hand, the melody of the
Songs presumably reaches Ginsberg first hand, exactly as Blake intended it and
sung it (although there are no material proof in this respect), and on the other
hand, the textual and musical mediation, as well as the influences that have been added to suit the present framework of the interpreter are in tune with what Jan
Assmann calls cultural memory. Thirdly, the purely cultural transfer of memory from Blake to Ginsberg sees the latter as a specialized bearer of memory, whose
status allows him to preserve and develop Blake’s image via their reinte gration
into the literary cannon as different texts. Therefore, “ Sunflower Sutra ” and
“Reading William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ ” are embodied acts of memory that
strengthen Allen Ginsberg’s connection to William Blake and his desire to acknowledge his poems a s mnemonic markers and actualize them in the context
of 1950s America.

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II. 2. Blakean Madness as Formative Element for Ginsberg’s Beat
Generation

Madman I have been
called; fool they call
thee/ I wonder which
they envy, thee or me?

(Blake, A Critical
“Madman ” 302) I’m with you in
Rockland/ where you’re madder
than I am . . .
(Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 24) The only people for me are
the mad ones , the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk,
mad to be saved . .
(Kerouac, On the Road 5)

In all of the above mentioned quotes, there seems to be a sense of self –
confidence driven by the acknowledgement of being mad and associating with
people who are mad. This subchapter tackles the type of madness that the Beat
Generation, as reflected in All en Ginsberg’s “Howl ”, assumes as one of its main
identity markers. Therefore, in the first section of this subchapter I will tackle
the charges of madness attributed to William Blake that will allow me to define
what I mean by Blakean madness, while in the second section I will analyze the
manner in which this type of madness is reflected in Ginsberg’s manifesto –
poem, as it affects what he calls the members of his generation on multiple
levels, putting them down and making them beat , but also giving them the
strength to persevere by fuelling their visionary beatitude .
The tradition of associating Blake with the concept of madness is so rich
that it can be said that “ the issue of madness runs like a leitmotif through . . .
Blake’s life ” (Youngquist 116). Hen ce, critics have been eager to situate
themselves on one of the two sides of the issue, either gathering proof of the
bard’s eccentric behavior in an attempt to describe them as symptoms of a
mental disorder and provide a diagnosis (be it maniac -depression , schizophrenia
or autism) or they have fiercely defended him on account that his great mythological system is one that is too complex and too coherent to have been
created by an deranged mind. The tendency seems to be towards the latter, with
renowned Bla ke analysts such as David Erdman,
46 S. Foster Damon47, Northrop
46 See David Erdman’s classic study Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1977).
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Frye48 and biographers such as Peter Ackroyd49 uncovering logical systems
behind the poet’s apparent inconsistent material. Further, starting with
biographer Alexander Gilchrist and continuing wit h Morton D. Paley and John
Beer,50 another argument in favor of Blake’s sanity was constituted around him
being endowed with too vivid an imagination51 and too wild an enthusiasm to
convey it, which should be distinguished from claims of insanity.
William Blake’s contemporaries were split as well between sharing
stories of Blake’s outrageous declarations – for example him being God or
Socrates, of hearing harps before the rise of the sun (Jesse 14), of conversing
with the archangel Gabriel and Virgin Mary among others, or of receiving visits
of the dead – and defending him by arguing, as disciple52 John Linnell did, that
Blake would purposefully include these details in conversation, without further
explanation in order to provoke the astonishment of his int erlocutors and get a
reaction out of them. However, a 1809 exhibition of Blake’s paintings which led
to no sales at all prompted a review in The Examiner that characterized the
author as “ a lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from
confineme nt” (qtd. in Bentley 216) and Blake himself admitted that his art was
received as “a Madman’s Scrawls ” (qtd. in Ackroyd 285). What is more, several
fellow artists acknowledged Blake’s madness overtly: William Wordsworth
famously stated in relation to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience “There
is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the Sanity of Lord Byron and Sir Walter
47 See S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary (213) and William Blake: His Philosophy and
Symbols (1958). In the latter, for instance, Foster Damon maintains that asking whether
Blake was mad or not is a senile question (207).
48 See Northrop Frye’s famous archetypal study of William Blake entitled Fearful Symmetry :
A Study of William Blake (1947): “A modern writer on Blake is not required to discuss his
sanity, for which I am grateful” (3 1).
49 See Peter Ackroyd’s Blake: A Biography (1995): “Blake’s prophetic works need be neither
incomprehensible nor (to use Cromek’s word) ‘wild’ or mad” (277).
50 See Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake (1907); see also Morton D. Paley’s
Ener gy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (1970) and
John Beer’s William Blake: A Literary Life (2005).
51 In the words of Alexander Gilchrist: “In Blake, imagination was by nature so strong . . . that
it had grown to a disproportionate height so as to overshadow every other faculty” (340).
52 Towards the end of his life, Blake attracted a small group of disciples around him, who called themselves the Ancients.
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Scott ” (qtd. in Beer 207), Charles Lamb described him as “ a mad Wordsworth”
(qtd. in Beer 207), Henry Fuseli stated that “ Blake has something of madness
about him ” (qtd. in Bentley 52) and Robert Southey affirmed that “ his madness
was too evident. It gave his eyes an expression such as you would expect to see
in one who was possessed” (qtd. in Youngquist 128).
Yet, madness is such a vague notion that its fluid boundaries and
valences can take multiple forms, from lack of reason, incomprehensibility,
inconsistency, instability and meaninglessness to the mark of geni us – “Blake’s
works reveal an artist of enormous genius, and genius often turns out to be the gift of a mind not entirely settled ” (Jesse 17) –, but also originality, inspiration,
vision and prophecy. For instance, although critic Alicia Ostriker acknowledges that in both Blake and Ginsberg, “ the key to healing appears to be madness ”
(“Blake, Ginsberg ” 114), she identifies three possible valances of madness in
Blake’s works and subsequently places the most emphasis on the negative type of madness to which visionaries are usually driven by their uninspired
contemporaries.

The idea of madness takes three different forms in Blake’s writings. At times it
is a purely negative term, but falsely applied by the world to men of vision. At
other times, madness signif ies mental illness in a more or less modern sense,
but everyone is mad. On still other occasions, ambivalently related to the first two, madness may be a necessary route to sanity. (Ostriker, “ Blake, Ginsberg ”
114)

To the world, the inspired man is mad, because he is unworldly. But to him, it
is mad, because it is unpoetic and uninspired; and the symptoms of its madness
are the facts of human suffering. (Ostriker, “ Blake, Ginsberg ” 128)

Yet, the positive and negative aspects of madness can overlap, since
unintelligibility can be seen as “ essential to the poetical and the sublime . . . [as]
a certain divine inconsistency appears in the account of what [the poets] have seen, witnessing to the transcendent nature of the vision” (De Selincourt 66- 8).
In other words in the case of visionary poets, madness may appear as a sign of their calling and genius: “prophecy, poetic genius, and madness are so nearly
allied as to be virtually indistinguishable ” (Barrell 535).
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Conseque ntly, it is no wonder that Blake reacted to the charges laid upon
him in different ways. When he considered himself attacked, the English bard
would strike back at his offenders and point out either the ephemeral character
of their work or the opaque vision they possessed. For instance Blake addresses
fellow English engravers by questioning the quality of their work: “ for these
thirty two Years I am Mad or Else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses. Posterity will judge by our Works ” (qtd. in Ackroyd 292) and in relation
to John Flaxman, he refers to his obtuse character: “ I mock thee not tho I by
thee am Mocked/ Thou callst me Madman but I call thee Blockhead (qtd. in
Ackroyd 270). It is important to note that in neither of these two cases doe s
Blake clearly deny or refute his madness. However, when assuming this state, he finds in it strength, self -confidence and spiritual, divine protection, as well as
a refuge from the rigidity of the world he lives in.

Cowper came to me & said. O that I were insane always I will never rest. Can
you not make me truly insane. I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom
of God I was hid. You retain heath & are as mad as any of us all – over us all –
mad as a refuge from unbelief. (Blake qtd. in Erdman, Blake 663)

In fact, in the Age of Reason “ the madman, like the poor man, divorced himself
from the immanent authority of social order ” (Youngquist 118), which
decisively situated Blake outside the norms of society and led to the
incarceration of fellow visionaries William Cowper, Richard Brothers and
Christopher Smart, among others.
Even the first biography of William Blake, Alexander G ilchrist’s Life of
William Blake, Pictor Ignotus (1863)53 dedicates an entire chapter to addressing
the question “ Mad or Not Mad? ”. In this case, the author attempts to dismiss the
rumors of the poet’s madness by ensuring his readers that all of Blake’s fri ends
and acquaintances, for instance Edward Calvert, John Linnell, Samuel Palmer
53 The work was also published under the title The Life of William Blake (1907). The Latin
phrase ‘pictor ignotus’ signifies ‘unknown painter’ and was taken from Robert Browning’s
1845 poem of the same title, from which Gilchrist emphasized the following two lines:
“The sanctuary’s gloom at least shall ward/ Vain tongues fr om where my pictures stand
apart” (Browning 29). For a more detailed analysis, see Juliette Atkinson’s work Victorian
Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth- Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (2010).
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and Thomas Butts) considered him sane and held him in great respect.
Moreover, his reasoning was not questioned: Francis Oliver Finch deemed his
reasoning correct, although hi s premises false. But what were the charges that
generated the need to defend William Blake’s sanity? The first and perhaps strongest one had to do with the profoundly visionary character of the English
poet’s verses and his conviction of being in direct c ontact with another sphere of
existence that other people did not have access to. Moreover, the things that his inner eye imagined “were as much realities as were gross and tangible facts ”
(Gilchrist 339) and were described alongside ordinary enterprises ( for instance a
mundane activity such as walking into a field was penetrated by the supernatural
vision of a tree filled with angels or the ordinary activity of dining was carried
out in the company of dead poets). To this, Gilchrist responds by affirming t hat,
although both the imaginary and the material were ‘real’ to Blake, he had the
ability of distinguishing them and of placing the former in the context of inner
spirituality and the latter in the context of external, objective physicality. Also,
while insane people try to conceal their madness with no avail, Blake did not
(341). Another characteristic of Blake’s ‘madness’ is that which turns him into a
prophet and a countercultural figure, who resides outside the expectations, understanding and norms of society.

Who, in certain abstruse cases, is to be the judge? Does not prophet or hero
always seem ‘mad’ to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world,
the motives of feeling and action being so alien and incomprehensible?
(Gilchrist 343)

In te rms of the rendition of madness in Blake’s works, particularly in
The Book of Urizen, critics, such as Paul Youngquist54 plead in favor of the
poet’s madness, with arguments based on the presumed centrality of the above
mentioned trope in his myth. For inst ance, the character Urizen is seen as one
54 See Paul Youngquist’s study Madness and Blake’s Myth (1989): “Blake’s visionary
experience falls into a category we today consider at least potentially pathological” (43) and
his article “Vision, Madness, Myth and William Blake” (1994) in which he states that
academic interest with regard to Blake’s madness shoul d be revived, in response to the
prevailing later tendency of dismissing this argument.
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that displays symptoms of madness through his separation from the Eternals – a
form of mental schism, “ a dissociation of a unified psyche ” (Youngquist,
“Vision ” 123) –, his self -withdrawal (seen as autism) as well as his schizoid
tyrannical ruling. All of these are interpreted as the author’s (unconscious)
attempt of dealing with his own mental struggles and finding healing in his
writing: “By making madness into myth, Blake works sickness into health”
(“Vision ” 128) and thus tries to avoid the lethal stigma of insanity. However,
this thesis works to prove the contrary both in respect to Blake’s character and
the visionary -poet’s attitude towards madness. Youngquist fails to convince at
least on two accounts: a) a character that represents the quintessence of reason is depicted as lacking it
55 and b) Urizen is blamed throughout Blake’s myth and
turned into a villain, yet there is no proof of Blake regarding the state of madness as a thoroughly negative characterist ic that needs to be combatted. Still
invoking Blake’s use of madness as a literary trope, yet stripping it of any
biographical references and deeming the author sane is critic Max Byrd
56, who
attributed Blake’s extravagance to his desire of “ break[ing] through cultural
prejudices ” (Jesse 15). An even more intriguing study, Mike Barr’s “ Prophecy,
the Law of Insanity, and The [First] Book of Urizen ” (2006) links insanity with
both author and character, albeit in a completely different light. This time,
Blake’s madness appears as a deliberate ploy in order to escape legal charges57
and defy censorship and the character who is attributed the state of being mad is not Urizen, but Los, the poetic hero of Blake’s myth. According to Barr, the
textual instability of th e eight copies of The Book of Urizen, the author’s
55 The present thesis does not depict Urizen’s act of separation as unreasonable, but rather as
proof of an overabundance of reason, coupled with pride and self -centeredness.
56 See Max Byrd’s work Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century
(1974): “Blake, of course, was not mad in any medical sense” (162); “it is one of the
measures of his real sanity (in the ordinary sense) that he responds to abuse with such wry,
confident irony” (168).
57 There were political implications to prophecies, as “the prophet, by inserting himself in the line of authority between God, and monarch, came to assert his place as supreme fount of
all earthly justice, auth ority, and law in the nation” (Barr 741). This is the reason for which
Richard Brothers, for example was sentenced to prison.
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attributing the authority of the text not to himself but to a divine being58 from
whom he took dictation, as well as the poem’s depiction of the mad prophet
Los59 are all purposeful: “ Madness is a motif Blak e intentionally involves in the
Urizen narrative, becoming a basic thematic and structural principle of his work. In reaction to aggressive censorship, Blake produces an insane text, a text so
divided as to deny its own authority and legal responsibility ” (Barr 747).
Therefore, far from being involuntary and uncontrollable, madness appears as a reasonable decision of using incoherence for legal exemption and audience
selection: those who were uninspired would deem Blake and his work mad,
while the inspired would recognize its authenticity and genius (Barr 757).
It follows that ‘Blakean madness’ manifests itself as vivid visions that
are as real and clear, if not more so, than factual reality and integrated in
everyday existence in a manner that bridges the mundane with the supernatural
by connecting ordinary activities with prophetic illuminations and direct
connections to another realm. The nature of this madness is profoundly spiritual
and invokes a mystical connections that the uninspired cannot understand, as
well as visions that may take the form of divine incomprehensibility. What is
more, it is a state that acquires negative valences only when coupled with meaninglessness and marginalization, but is otherwise perceived as a preferred
state, as the mark of genius confidence and originality, as artistically
empowering and spiritually nourishing. Last but not least, this type of madness can be interpreted as a deliberate, countercultural, literary trope that represents
the struggle of being an outcast, but also the uniqueness, freedom and room for
social criticism that spring from being outside the norm.
Carrying on this legacy and extending it into the context of Cold War
America, Allen Ginsberg set himself as one of the leaders of a youthful, rebellious generation that was mad in a struggle to assert its individuality and
58 By invoking the act of dictation at the beginning of the poem, Blake places The Book of
Urizen “immediately within the propheti c tradition of quotation, described by Shaffer and
more recently invoked by Balfour as the model by which the poet defers authority from the self to an otherworldly source” (Barr 751).
59 Los’ raving, howling and lack of control, but also his separation fr om Urizen (reason) are
invoked as proof of his madness (Barr 747).
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make a change in the “ asphyxiating apathy of the fifties ” (Tytell 10). It all
started with Allen Ginsberg meeting Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs at
Colombia University and together c oming up with “ a manifesto called the ‘New
Vision’,60 a radical statement of artistic intent which praised experiment,
discounted conventional morality and, at heart, responded to the psychic crisis
of a world torn by conflict ” (Warner 24). The three core m embers of the Beat
Generation gradually included more kindred spirits among whom Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, Herbet Hunkie, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder and John Clellon
Holmes, and became a public phenomenon after Ginsberg’s electrifying 1955
Six Gallery reading of “ Howl ”
61 in San Francisco and the poem’s subsequent
publication by City Lights Books the following year. The rise to fame of Beats62
was set in motion by the publicity generated by the obscenity trial involving
“Howl ” – which was won by the publishing house after Judge Clayton Horn
ruled in favor of public speech63 and determined that the work was “not without
socially redeeming importance ” (Peters 207). Public awareness was further
propelled by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and secured by William
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959).
The writers that called themselves The Beat Generation and were what
critic Leerom Medvoi called the “ generation of identity ” (217), as their mission
was to seek an identity that defined them a nd distinguished them from their
predecessors and many of their contemporaries.
60 A title that made reference to W.B. Yeats’ The Vision , which, in turn, found inspiration in
William Blake’s mythology.
61 The other poets who performed that night were Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen, Phillip
Lamantia and Gary Snyder, introduced by Kenneth Rexroth (Warner 26).
62 This thesis distinguishes between the term “Beat” and “Beatnik”, discussing the identity of
the former, which is representative of the Beat Generation, not the latter, coined by
Chronicle journalist Herb Caen and intended as a derogatory term that associated the Beats
with the Russian Satellite Sputnik, and thus with communism and anti -American values
(Peters 210). Allen Ginsberg, for instance, deeply disagreed w ith the way the media
manipulated their image, equating it with that of the beatnik: “The media transformed the
Beats into cartoon characters called beatniks. These beatniks became a commodity and their image was used to promote coffee houses, cellar night clubs and help sell newspapers,
records, clothing and other accessories. . . . The Beats were literary. Beatniks were an adolescent fad” (Huddleston 2, 8).
63 Judge Clayton Horn stated that “An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words” (qtd. in Huddleston 4).
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Yet there is a specifically modern discourse of generations, closely allied to
romanticism, in which a generation is valued, less for preserving a received
tradition than for articulating a historically new outlook. Such a modern
generation takes a name (lost, beat, silent, X) that is meant to distinguish its
cohort’s situation or predicament from those of its predecessors. (Medovoi 215)

Thus, they called themselves ‘beat’ and articulated their identity around this
term. Jack Kerouac came up with the name and traced it back to a conversation
he had had with John Clellon Homes – “I said ‘You know, this is really a beat
generation’ and he leapt up and said ‘That’s it, that’s right!’ ” (“The Origins ” 41)
– and also to a statement made by Herbert Huncke: “ When I first saw the
hipsters creeping around Times Square in 1944 I didn’t like them either. One of them, Huncke . . . came up to me and said ‘Man, I’m beat.’ I knew right away
what he meant somehow ” (“The Origins ” 41-42). Their ‘beatness’ was
identified with “ a combination of both exhaustion and empowerment ” (Russell
11), as they acknowledged their oppression, yet defied it through mad, spiritual
protest. It was also inextricably connected to Blakean madness, since both
entailed being broke and marginalized, exhausted with a disenchanted world,
but also rejoi cing in the freedom, protection and inspiration of beatific madness,
as a spiritual, uplifting state. Consequently, “ Howl ” is analyzed as a poem that
describes and simultaneously creates the Beat identity though literary representation and acknowledgement that “the canon . . . is the principle
underlying the establishment and stabilization of a collective identity ” (J.
Assmann, Cultural 108). In this case, the identity seems to be formed on the
premise of madness: “ The anonymous hero of Howl – the “who” that appears
throughout the first section . . . is an archetypal madman” (Raskin 92). But what
generated their madness and why where the members of the generation eager to embrace it?
Like Blake, Ginsberg was intimately familiar with madness and the
socially alienating effect it produces. As a child and young adult, he witnessed
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his mother’s paranoia,64 suicide attempts and extreme mood swings which led
her to her being in and out of hospitals and eventually to her admission into
Greystone mental institution, w here she underwent a multitude of harsh
treatments including the lobotomy that caused her death two days later, when
her son was only twenty nine years old. Consequently, Ginsberg was very much
affected and traumatized by witnessing his mother’s insanity a nd even fostered a
“fear that the hallucination [of Blake] was symptomatic of an inheritance of her
mental illness ” (K. Stephenson 50). Naomi Ginsberg would become “ the
prototype of the persecuted and martyred visionary ” (G. Stephenson 53) and she
would be mentioned twice in “ Howl ” and later, five years after her death, in
“Kaddish”65 (1961) – a poem in which Ginsberg vividly described her physical
and mental pain, but also included a series of blessings addressed to the Lord,
who guided over madness, death and Naomi Ginsberg among others.

Naomi, Naomi —sweating, bulge -eyed, fat, the dress unbuttoned at one side —
hair over brow, her stocking hanging evilly on her legs —screaming for a blood
transfusion —one righteous hand upraised —a shoe in it —barefoot in the
Pharmacy — . . . In the madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of Death Blessed
is He! . . . Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! ( Collected 223, 233)

In 1949, the American poet had also experienced life as a patient of an
insane asylum, where he had met Carl Solomon, the man “ Howl ” is dedicated
to. However, in the case of Ginsberg his time spent in Rockland was a legal
option taken in order to avoid a prison sentence, as he had helped his friend
64 Naomi Ginsberg believed her mother -in-law was trying to poison her and that President
Roosevelt was monitoring her through wires plated in rooms and in her own body (Tytell
80), but also that doctors, Mussolini, Hitler and the FBI wanted to kill her: “Naomi . . .
defending herself from the enemy . . . ‘Don’t come near me – murderers! Keep away!
Promise not to kill me!” ( Collected , “Kaddish” 223).
65 The original title was “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg”. Honoring his mother’s heritage,
Allen Ginsberg drew inspiration for the title from the Jewish prayer for the dead, “reserved specifically for mourners” (“Mourner’s Kaddish”) and connecting the mother with the son
and the latter with t he synagogue (Trigilio, “Strange Prophecies” 778). After not attending
his mother’s funeral, Ginsberg presumably chose to write this poem when he heard that
there were not enough male attendants in order for the rabbi to read the elegy, the Kaddish
(Russel l 41). Critic Tony Trigilio underlines that “Ginsberg’s poem is . . . an ‘illegitimate’
use of the Kaddish, but Ginsberg nevertheless implores Jehovah to “accept” his mother, thereby affirming the power of orthodox monotheism” (“Strange Prophecies” 778).
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Herbert Hunkie flee the police in a stolen car. He was deemed insane,66
although the doctors would eventually renounce this diagnostic. Moreover, on a
personal level, Ginsberg struggled with charges of madness on account of his
sexuality and was hesitant to publically reveal and accept his homosexuality67
because in the 1950s the latter was still illegal and considered to be a mental
illness that needed to be treated and healed. Realizing he did not fit the rigid
heterosexual grid, Ginsberg started “ thinking and writing about madhouses,
madmen, and madness ” (Raskin 151): “ Madness! Madness! . . . Oh how often I
hear that word in my brain . . . My mind is crazed by homosexuality ” (Ginsberg
qtd. in Raskin 152). Initiall y, he repressed his sexual instincts and underwent
psychoanalytical treatment, but “ Howl ” gave him the impetus to free his mind
from self- imposed shackles and follow Blake’s path in terms of letting go of
shame and guilt: “ the Beats enacted their desires, seeking a restoration of
innocence by purging guilt and shame. The model was Blakean ” (Tytell 10).
All of these accounts of socially constructed mental illness allowed
Ginsberg to see that being ‘different’ and not subscribing to the presumed
homogeneity of American values in an era of conformity oftentimes triggered
charges of deviance and insanity. If “ Trapped in Urizen’s world, Los appears
mad” (Barr 748), trapped in a ‘reasonable’ world in which World War II and the
atomic bomb are marks of sanity, the Beats preferred to deprive themselves of
that reason and embrace madness instead, which made them seem “illogical,
emotional, and irrational ” (Peters 209). In a similar manner to “Blake [who]
often lamented that madness was a label invoked by the uninspi red to
marginalize true inspiration ” (Barr 747), Ginsberg stressed the injustice behind
the attribute ‘mad’ being assigned pejoratively to group who merely sought to
66 Kerouac was also diagnosed with schizophrenia, which rendered him unsuitable to serve in
the army and Burroughs was committed into Bellevue Hospital.
67 In this respect, Ginsberg mentions Whitman as his model of acceptance: “He was the first
great American poet to take action in recognizing his individuality, forgiving and accepting
Him Self, and automatically extending that recognition and acceptance to all – and defining
his Democracy as that” (“A Letter” 217). He also follows the American Transcendenta list
model of individualism, self -reliance and non -conformism promoted by Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, opposing it to the “world of mass production and
standardization” (Gair 19).
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reveal their inherent spiritual capacity for transcendence: “I am saying that what
seems ‘ mad’ in America is our expression of natural ecstasy ” (Ginsberg, “A
Letter ” 209). This is reflected in “ Howl ” in lines such as “ who thought they
were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy ” (12), with the
last word being indicative of both spiritual experience and the drug of the same
name that induces it and modifies consciousness inwards. In other words, the
Beats often induce their madness by means of drugs. If the alternative of pacifist
madness was violent sanity, then the former state was to be preferred: “ I really
will go mad and that’s what I half hope for ” (qtd. in Raskin 83).Admittedly, the
American poet -prophet considers ‘madness’ to be an ambivalent concept.

Madness . . . has al ways had that connotation, among bohemians, of inspiration
or enthusiasm. It also has the connotation of irrationality and ugly physiological
symptoms. I'm steering a middle path here (laughter), but at the same time I am
being sympathetic to the people who are disoriented. The whole point of the
poem is sympathy to the disoriented rather than rejection of them as being
outside of the social pale. (Ginsberg, “ A Collage ” 97)

Ginsberg’s half measure sprang from a personal understanding of the
fact that assum ing madness implied fighting against Moloch’s apparently
“invincible mad houses ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22) and suffering “ the
consequences of the reformatory, the insane asylum, public ridicule, censorship
and even prison (Tytell 10). It also meant that his tr anscendence, like in the case
of Blake, “ legitimize[d] vision but alienate[d] the visionary ” (Youngquist 120).
Therefore, it is no wonder that the first line of “ Howl ” – “I saw the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, nak ed” (9) –
initially defines the Beat Generation in terms of insanity and its negative,
ostracizing facet that leads its subjects to poverty and delirium. However, this
enforced madness is immediately countered by the sacred quality that turns only
the best members into “ angelheaded hipsters ” (9), which alludes to their
inherent spirituality. What follows is a series of long, prose -style free -rhymed
verses that define the members through the lens of the various enactments of
their insanity, with twelve overt references to the notion of madness, which
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prompts critics to declare that “ madness is at the heart of his work, and
especially at the heart of Howl ”(Raskin xxiii). As the author himself maintains,
all three parts of “ Howl ” revolve around establishing how and why he is part of
a “Mad generation ” (“Howl ” 23).

Howl is an ‘affirmation’ of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity
etc. Part I deals sympathetically with individual cases. Part II describes and
rejects t he Moloch of society, which confounds and suppresses individual
experience and forces the individual to consider himself mad if he does not
reject his own deepest senses. Part III is an expression of sympathy and
identification with C.S.. [Carl Solomon] who is in the madhouse – saying that
his madness basically is rebellion against Moloch and I am with him, and extending my hand in union. (Ginsberg, “ A Letter ” 217)

Choosing an alternative lifestyle that did not involve getting married,
securing a stable, well -paying job, wishing to advance in one’s career and
leading average, confortable, yet “unathentic, prepackaged lives ” (Huddleston
1), the Beats refused ‘domestic ation’ and remained wild, untamed, howling
wolves that willingly took a stand against what they perceived to be a deadening
stagnation, normality and lack of individuality on the part of their
contemporaries. Thus, they delighted in ‘exploding’ all of soci ety’s taboos
(Russell 7), from taking drugs, drinking and displaying schizophrenic behavior to getting involved in petty crimes
68 and publically asserting their casual
homosexual, or at least homosocial encounters as preferable to committed, traditional heterosexuality: “who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night afte r night/ with dreams,
with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls ”
(Ginsberg, “Howl ” 10). In should be noted that all of the activities of this
“generation of extremes ” (Clellon Holmes, “ This is ” 226) subscribe to Blake’s
indicat ion that “ the road of excess leads to a place of wisdom ” (A Critical, “The
68 Life Magazine referred to the Beats as “talkers, loafers, passive little con men, lonely
eccentrics” (qtd. in Dandeles 10). However, sometimes, the crimes were more serious. For
instance Lucien Carr killed his former teacher David Kammerer, for the latter was
infatuate d with him and would not accept being rejected. William Burroughs also killed his
wife, Joan Vollmer, in an accident, as they both agreed to take part in a shooting game and
he missed.
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Marriage ” 10) and are also permanently accompanied by a vision of eternity – in
this case the act of taking drugs represents “ the mind’s way of healing the
wounds of alienation” (Wasserman 147) and the body’s way of metaphorically
going through purgatory in order to reach salvation. The conformity aspect of
Moloch, the deity that imposes madness on the hipsters of “ Howl ” will be
specifically discussed in the last subchapter of chapte r four, while the various
ways in which the Beats establish their identity in an antagonistic relation to the
figure of Moloch will be referred to throughout the thesis. In an American
society that was “ split between the normal majority and the deviant min ority ”
(Russell 9), the activities of the Beats were deemed insane, a role that they assumed and turned into an integral part of who they were and sought for all the
advantages it offered.
One of the most valuable advantages of being considered mad was t hat
they freed themselves of the weight of a system they believed to be corrupt and unjust as it perpetually punished them with “ eyeball kicks/ and shocks of
hospitals and jails and wars (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 11). There are three mental
hospitals mentioned in Ginsberg’s poem and in Part I, they all appear in the
same line and refer not to the mind, but to the soul: “ Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s
and Greystone’s foetid/ halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul ” (19). It is
the soul of the generation that these institutions wish to crash, although the spiritual connection of the soul with its Creator should raise above such profane
ambitions: “the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an
armed madhouse ” (Ginsberg, “Howl 25).Viewed from this perspective,
imprisonment by the government cannot be proof of defeat, but rather of
freedom from an already confining society: “they thought inmates embodied the
essence of freedom from the system ” (Huddleston 7). It is this realization that
makes the “ the hospital illuminate[x] itself ” (26) and that drives the ‘mad’ Beats
to “shriek[x] with delight in police cars ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 13). Following
Blake, who was “ always calling for freedom, both at the political and spiritual
level ” (Viscomi qtd. in Galv in, “William Blake ”), Ginsberg insisted on shaping
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the image mad of individuals oppressed by capitalism,69 militarism,
industrialism, materialism and consumerism who were unjustly rejected,70
incarcerated, inflicted unnecessary, harmful treatments and driven to suicide
because the ‘squares’71 surrounding them – a term that would be equivalent to
Blake’s ‘Blockhead’, signifying the faux ‘sane’ – found them mad. “ Howl ”
strengthens the association of Beats with the alienated youth dismissed as crazy:
“In it [‘How l’] I am leaping out of a preconceived notion of social ‘values’ . . .
and exposing my true feelings – of sympathy and identification with the
rejected, mystical, individual even ‘mad’ ” (Ginsberg, “ A Letter ” 209).
It is evident that the figure of the ‘ma dman’ was not only forcibly
attached to the Beats, but was also an image they used in their favor so as to
assert their countercultural rebellion. Therefore, the following lines of “ Howl ”
depict their ironic demand to be hospitalized and given a lobotomy.

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven
heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia.
(Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 18)

Through the above -mentioned protest, the hipsters wished to follow Blake’s
example in “ deliberately challenge[ing] the standards of rationality prevalent in
[their] culture, which entailed redefining the criteria of ‘sanity’ and the nature of
reason ” (Jesse 17), yet they were not understood and instead, they were taken to
be literally mad, which unleashed an endless list of ‘normalizing’ treatments.
69 Being mad meant being the enemy and the latter was associated with communism, a link
that Ginsberg expresses directly in “Howl”: “I'm with you in Rockland where there are
twenty -five-thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the
Internationale” (25).
70 Their refusal to conform led even to a denial of their higher education: “who were expelled
from the academies for crazy” (Ginsberg, “Howl” 9).
71 The term ‘square’ refers to a person who is a conformist, logical and reasonable, yet a
spiritually blind member of society. As early critic Lawson remarked in a 1958 article in the
Encyclopedia Americana , “It is from being square in any way that the Beat, or Hipster,
wants to free himself” (300), since he wished to “deliberately break every rule and ridicule every aspiration of the normal ‘good’ citizen of th eir society” (299).
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Still, they persevered and, in a manner similar to Blake’s, who “ approached
everything with a mind unclouded by curr ent opinions ” (T.S. Eliot qtd. in
Galvin, “ William Blake ”), they made their own sanctity.72
The fact that the lyrical self of the poem profoundly identifies with the
mad generation becomes clear in Part III of “Howl ”. Just as madness is the first
word that describes the hipsters in Part I, the concept surfaces again as part of
the first line of Part III, establishing its priority in the identity formation of the
generation. In addition, a few lines below, the first pronoun “ we” is used in
reference to Carl Solomon, at the Rockland mental institution, uniting the “they”
of the previously described Beats, with the “ you” of Solomon and the “ you” of
the reader, “ implicitly completing the interpellative production of an ‘us’: the
beat generation ” (Medevoi 248, 253). In this manner, cultural identity takes
precedence over individual identity, as “ a social phenomenon, or what we might
term ‘sociogenic’ ” (J. Assmann, Cultural 112).

I'm with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am . . .
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother . .
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter . . .
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets . . .
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes.
(Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 24-26)

All of the three instances are connected with ‘madness’ via the repeated name of
the institution, as well as the early reference to Nao mi Ginsberg and are linked
to the identity of the generation via the pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’73 and ‘we’. While the
last two references carry a message of love, sexual defiance and gnostic,
72 This phrase is taken from Ginsberg’s own description: “I used to think I was mad to want to
be a saint, but now what have I got to fear? People’s opinions? Loss of a teaching job? I am
living outside this context. I make my own sanct ity” (“A Letter” 209).
73 By using the pronoun ‘you’, Ginsberg addresses not only Solomon, but also the reader.
Critic Leerom Medevoi notes that “what the beat texts succeeded in doing was to lay claim
on the identity narrative of fifties youth culture and name its audience the ‘beat generation’”
(Medevoi 217)
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spiritual illumination, the first one is overtly related to madness as a literary
trope that helps express a prophetic dissatisfaction and anger directed at the
world and foreshadows a subsequent spiritual rebellion.
The Beat -generated countercultural protest was a response to the post –
war economic surge caused by what Presi dent Dwight D. Eisenhower called the
“military -industrial complex ” (qtd. in Gair 12), which asserted the industrial and
commercial force of the United States of America as a military superpower
(“Beat Generation Attitudes ”) in the context of the Cold War. Critical of their
country’s aggressive policies, large -scale use of violence, as well as “mass
production and standardization” (Gair 19), and tired of the censorship74 and
(sexual) repression that they witnessed and underwent as consequence of what they per ceived to be an almost totalitarian, one -sided system, the Beats used
“poetry as a weapon of protest ” (“The Beat Generation: the Causes ”) and
created a poetics of resistance. However, their “ howlings of mad prophecy ”
(Barr 748) were not aimed at destruction, and they took “ no particular pleasure
in tearing down a social fabric that they see as already ruined ” (Parkinson 450).
Instead of turning their rebellion into a Marxist revolution, the Beats reached out
“to the e cstatic radicalism of Blake. The issue is never as simple as social
justice; rather, the key words and images are those of time and eternity, madness and vision, heaven and the spirit ” (Roszak 126).
75 In other words, they shaped
their countercultural protes t in a manner that laid emphasis on the
interconnection of literature, madness, justice, freedom and spirituality, reviving
the cultural memory of William Blake. As Jan Assmann states, memory has a
74 The various overtly sexual sections of “Howl” purposefully defy literary censorship. There
is, however, only one word in the poem that remains censored by the author in the line
“with mother finall y ******” (19). It is read as ‘asterisked’ and meant to signify ‘fucked’,
“which is actually printed in certain other editions of the poem” (Verbrugghe 38). It is
intriguing that the word is deleted here, although it appears uncensored earlier in the poem,
in reference to the hipsters being fucked by saintly motorcyclists. Perhaps his mother’s
madness was too painful and intimate to be revealed and was not associated with the avowedly sexual encounters that were meant to be screamed out loud in an effort to counter
homophobia.
75 As the first to have brought the term ‘counterculture’ into public use, Theodore Roszak
considered counterculture to be “fundamentally Blakean . . . [as his book] begins and ends
with Blake” (Kripal 110).
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crucial role in creating a group’s image of the self: “ The constitutive role of
memory in this process of self -image making identity formation was identified
by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and is constantly confirmed
and expanded by modern psychology, psychotherapy, and brain research”
(“Form ” 67). It is in memory of William Blake, that the Ginsberg -led Beat
counterculture acquired a mystical character, teaching people to claim, like his
mentor, that the world can be seen through a different lens than that of scientific
exploration.

The primary project of counter culture . . . [is] to open ourselves to the
visionary imagination . . . to claim like Blake . . . that there are eyes which see
the world not as commonplace sight or scientific scrutiny sees it, but see it
transformed, made lustrous bey ond measure, and in seeing the world so, see it
as it really is. (Roszak 240)

Therefore, the English poet -prophet triggered Ginsberg’s intense awareness of
the inherent holiness of everything. He therefore expressed in his work that
“Heaven . . . exists and is everywhere about us ” (“Howl ” 22), as well as “ I am
living in Eternity./The ways of this world/ are the ways of Heaven” (Ginsberg,
Collected “Metaphysics ” 41), echoing both William Blake’s “Everything that
lives is holy ” (Blake, A Critical “The Marriage ” 20) and Walt Whitman’s “ I
hear and behold God in every object ” (Leaves 101). In “Kaddish” , Ginsberg saw
God in everything, whether it was something that was socially acceptable or not,
reasonable or not: “ Blessed be He in homosexuality! Blessed be He in Paranoia!
Blessed be He in the city! Blessed be He in the Book ” (Collected 233). He
strongly underlined this stance in “ Footnote to Howl ” by the reiteration of the
word ‘holy’ fifteen times, always followed by an exclamation mark, in reference to sexual body parts, friends, cities, virtues, emotions, music, and even
Moloch’s society. Of course, the act of (prophetic) writing and the state of being mad are not omitted and are, as always, linked with transcendence and visions
of eternity: “ The typewri ter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers
are holy the ecstasy is holy! ” (27) and “The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the
madman is holy as you my soul are holy! ” (27), “Holy my mother in the insane
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asylum! ” (27). The literature that resul ts from typewriting is indeed a social
weapon, but it is holy because its message is a mystical one and the
economically poor bum and the confined mother and spiritually rich and free
through their madness.
In his famous 1952 article “ This is the Beat Generation ” that brought the
denomination into the public sphere, John Clellon Holmes insists that, as
opposed to the ‘lost’ generation of the First World War, “ the wild boys of today
are not lost ” (224). Instead, they are a group linked by the need to revive faith:
“it is . . . the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has
been an obsessive problem ” (226). They are always on the move and on the
road, but “ their real journey [is] inward . . . in the hope of finding a belief on the
other side ” (“The Philosophy ” 229). Therefore at the very core of the Beat
Generation, lies an “ identity [that is] spiritually motivated and . . . appear[s] as a
counter -cultural value to Fordist materialism” (Medevoi 222). And if they are
mad, they are “ mad to be saved ” (Kerouac, On the Road 5)76 and mad to be
saviors (Verbrugghe 36), providing an example for the young Americans who
did not see themselves reflected in the post -war culture. Both Blake and
Ginsberg refute the material empires they live in, e mbrace and advocate the
arrival of an empire of the spirit instead (Stroe, “Prophets ” 8) and seem to be
equally committed to becoming spiritual revolutionaries (Portugés, “ The
Poetics ” 134).The predicament that the Beats see in society is essentially a
spiritual one and it very difficult to deny that Allen Ginsberg’s protest77 is the
result of a “ spiritual seeker ” (Raskin), a “ an exercise in pop -cult mysticism”
(Niemi 7) that reveals the ‘beatific’ in the Beat. As the American poet asserts,
“the primary thing was a move towards spiritual liberation . . . [from] the
mechanical assault on human nature and all nature culminating in the bomb”
76 Like Ginsberg, Kerouac d oes not shy away from asserting that the Beat Generation “is
basically a religious generation’” (qtd. in Clellon Holmes “The Philosophy” 229) and that
they are “mystics on a spiritual quest” (qtd. in Huddleston 6).
77 Stephen Prothero’s article on Beat spi rituality “On the Holy Road: The Beat Movement as
Spiritual Protest” asserts that while celebrating nakedness and sexuality, the Beats sought
“mystical awareness through drugs and meditation, acting like ‘Zen lunatics’ or holy fools”
(Prothero 210- 211).
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(“Online Interviews with Allen Ginsberg ”). Therefore, even early critics
realized that “ to the average Beat their work is gospel ” (Lawson 301). In this
sense, “Howl ” can be read as the sermon78 of the soul announced at the end of
“Sunflower Sutra ”.
Moreover, Ginsberg’s mad hipsters are “ crazy shepherds of rebellion”
(Howl “Footnote ” 28) because they “ ate the lamb stew of th e imagination ”
(“Howl 15 ”) and are deemed “ Holy the vast lamb of the middle class! ” (Howl
“Footnote ” 28). The prophetic image created is one that is derived from William
Blake, who in turn drew inspiration from Biblical tradition (Diggory 105). This
symbol , allows Ginsberg to carry Blake’s work in the America of his time, as
well as stress his (and the hipsters’) belonging to the same line of prophecy and
the same cultural identity reflected in the mirror of “Howl ”, which elicits
awareness of a collective ‘ we’.

The notion of symbol forces us to transcend the frames of body and
consciousness and to take into account the whole range of cultural expression,
of texts, images, and actions, as carriers or representations of memory and
identity expressive of time, selfh ood, and belonging. (J. Assmann, “ Form ” 68)
Just as we are unable to see our face except in a mirror, we are unable to see
our inner self other than by reflection, and it is the latter that creates awareness.
(J. Assmann, Cultural 116)

Thus, the Christ -like innocence of the Lamb of The Songs of Innocence is
projected on “ Howl ” and Ginsberg highlights the integral part of this archetypal
figure in his poem, by connecting it to all of the three parts that help establish
what defines his generation, what str uggles it encounters and what measures it
can take to overcome them: the first part is a description of the lamb, the second part represent the lamb’s devourer and the third part depicts the lamb in its glory
(Ginsberg, “ Notes for ” 636).
78 As critic Roy Kozlovsky asserts, the language employed in “Howl”, as well as its
performance can reach a religious and socially -responsible audience: “the auditory
experience of Howl has the quality of a religious sermon, a communal form of speech that was employed by leaders of the Civil Rights Movement” (42).
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Although “Howl ” can be said to borrow mainly Christian imagery, it is
by no means a merely Christian poem. Instead, it affirms the spiritual nature of
all the Beats, independently of their religious conviction.79 In order to stress, as
Blake had, that All Religions are One, Ginsberg makes reference to three different religions in the same line: “ who bared their brains to Heaven under the
El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated ”.
While the word ‘Heaven’ is more closely connected to the New Testament, ‘El’
can refer either to the Hebrew God of the Old Testament, or to the Phoenician
God ‘El’ (Verbrugghe 28) and the Mohammedan angels make clear reference to
Islam. In addition, throughout the poem, Buddhism and Hinduism are also
connected to the generation: “ who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey ” (11),
“who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha ”
(18), “who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vi sionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels ” (12). In fact, the Beats were all angles
80 –
“Everyman’s an angel ” (Ginsberg, Howl “Footnote ” 27) – because they were
inherently divine.
For the hipsters of “ Howl ”, having spiritual visions was not a rare
occurrence and they “ drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a
vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity ” (17). Once
again, the pronouns, ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘he’ mark the ‘we’ of the generation. But if to the uninspired ‘squares’, these visions were a sign of madness, to the Beats, they
were proof of sane illumination and were mingled with everyday activities, just
as they were for William Blake. To emphasize this aspect, Allen Ginsberg chose
to employ “ a language of the everyday and of Judgment Day —a language of the
79 This attitude is shared by fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who stated that he wrote for all
religions “No, I want to speak for things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I
speak out . . . for sweet Mohamed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Loa -tse and
Chuang -tse I speak out, for D.T. Suzuki I speak out . . . This is Beat” (Kerouac, “The
Origins” 41).
80 For the Beats, the word ‘angel’ often acquires sexual connotations and is understood as a
male lover: “a beat boy is a youthful angel who descends on his young male friends and
sweeps them away from the trap of their married homes” (Medevoi 230). This is evident in
“Howl” as well, in sections such as “when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them
with a sword” (14).
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mundane and the apocalyptic ” (Raskin xxi), juxtaposing ordinary experiences
with mystical ones: a regular walk in Kansas would bring about “ the cosmos
instinctively vibrat[ing] at their feet” (12), a game of pingpong would be
perceived as “ the actual pingpong of the abyss ” (25), they would be “ run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality ” (16) and immersed “ in the total
animal soup of time ” (19). In “Howl ” language itself refutes the h egemony of
reason and fids freedom beyond the confines of logic.
To conclude, this subchapter has revealed the various manners in which
to be ‘beat’ meant to be ‘mad’ in a Blakean sense – that is, not clinically ill, but
metaphorically, literary, rebellio usly, spiritually mad. In a society that labels all
nonconformists insane, in a technological era of science, technology,
industrialization and war violence, experiencing visions brought about social
alienation, attempts of institutionalization, normalization and domestication. Despite the difficulties they encountered, Allen Ginsberg presents an image of
relentless Beats who are adamant in defying their contemporaries by taking on
the role of the ‘madman’ and building their identity around it, yet redefini ng it
and endowing it with positive, mystical significance. For them, as for Blake,
whom they saw as a cult figure (Gair 33), to be mad entailed to have visions that
illuminated the soul, yet were as immediate as everyday reality, to be confident
in one’s artistic power and individuality and to assume a divine prophetic
mission of bringing about divine regeneration.

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II. 3. Blake, Ginsberg and Artistic Creation as Sacred Incarnation

The English poet -prophet William Blake arguably centered his
aesthetic on the notion of ‘incarnation’ and envisioned literature as the sign of
the Poetic Genius’ inspiration and imagination, always creating with a vision
towards eternity and with an unders tanding of the words as material
embodiments of another order of existence, which lodged his method in the Biblical tradition. Similarly, the Beat poet of rebellion employed the
theological notion of Incarnation as main analogy for the spiritual embodiment
of his poetic/linguistic creation – that is the poem itself –, which is closely
linked to the physical body of the prophet, allowing for a code of art that is a
cultural reminder of the one used by William Blake. The aim of this
subchapter is to unv eil the relation between various instances of incarnation
expressed in William Blake’s work and their re -employment and cultural
reshaping in Allen Ginsberg’s seminal twentieth century poem “ Howl ”. Firstly,
a brief overview of Incarnation in Christian terms will be given in order to stress the necessary conditions for the coexistence of spirit and matter in the
person of Jesus Christ, emphasizing language as a medium of expression that recalls the Messianic mediation. Subsequently, I will reveal the premise of
William Blake’s creative process and the manner in which it is reflected
Ginsberg's use of imaginative, incarnational language, as an expression of
Poetic Genius, and as a unification of text and visual image, but also of text
and music, as the structural and thematic composition of “ Howl ” – that
embodies the spontaneity of jazz and the sound of the saxophone howling the suffering of Christ – will allow for an elimination of everything that is not
essential, leaving behind only that which is pure and authentic. Furthermore, for Ginsberg incarnation will be linked to the act of physical consumption in
remembrance and celebration of artistic creation, which acquires a similar
function to that of t he Eucharist. Last, but not least, Ginsberg’s expression of
nakedness and sexuality will reveal a similar attitude to Blake’s in relation to
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the Human Form Divine 81and the denial of sexual repression so as to
experience a mystical union with divinity.
In order to convey the different manners in which artistic creation
becomes embodied in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl ”, I will start with a brief
overview of Christian Incarnation in order to stress the necessary conditions for
the coexistence of spirit and matter in the person of Jesus Christ. In the next
section, language will be emphasized as a medium of expression that recalls
Messianic mediation. Subsequently, Ginsberg's use of incarnational language
will be linked to the act of ingestion and physical consumption in remembrance
and celebration of artistic incarnation – an act that acquires a similar function
to that of the Eucharist. Last but not least, I will deal with the manner in which the structural and thematic composition of “ Howl ” embodies the spontaneity of
bebop. The sound of the saxophone that howls the suffering of Christ will
allow for a musical incarnation with the help of jazz.
The association between the Christian God of the New Testament and
speech was established from the very beginning by John: “ In the beginning
was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1);
later, divinity was revealed incarnate, made visible and tangible through Jesus
Christ whose spirit descended to live in the flesh among people: “And the
Word was mad e flesh, and dwelt among us ” (John 1:14). The importance of
the use of the Greek word Logos as vehicle of this metaphor is evident as the
latter “was thought of as a bridge between the transcendent God and the
material universe ” (“The Word is God” ) and sim ilarly, Jesus was considered to
be a messenger, a mediator by means of his condition as both God and Man.
The formation of words – and consequently of language – as example
of incarnation is also discussed by St. Augustine as the co- existence of
presence and absence, of transience and immanence. He maintains that thoughts are inner words of the heart that belong to no language in particular
and that when they employ either a sign (in written language) or a word (in
81 Blake usually depicts the Human Form Divine as young, heroic, “male nude[s] (in the style
of Michelangelo) or as a muscular, bearded Christ” (Mellor, Romanticism 22).
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spoken language), they gain finite express ion and become manifest in order to
reach “men's senses, as the Word of God was made flesh, by assuming that
flesh in which itself also might be manifested to men's senses ” (Augustine,
“On the Trinity ”). What is more, “ transcendence ‘in the flesh’ does not undo its
transcendence . . . but rather points to it ” (J. Smith 127), which means that the
divine spirit in not lost in the process of linguistic incarnation, but rather takes
the form of finite u tterance in order to appear in the material world as sign and
proof of what lies beyond. Similarly, critics such as Hans -Georg Gadamer see
the Incarnation analogy as instrumental in understanding language: “ the inner
mental word is just as cosubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father ” (Gadamer qtd. in O’Sullivan 12) and they are both necessary in the
emergence of the inner word as external entity.
When it comes to William Blake, critic Leslie Tannenbaum is among the
first to note that the aesthetic of the visionary poet is rooted in the conviction
that his work both announces and exemplifies the concept of incarnation, which
ties him to the Biblical tradition (74) and allows him to choose a language that
can “become vision” and a word that can be “ made flesh ” (Freeman 28). This
main metaphor is based on a broad understanding of incarnation that involves
the Poetic Genius being identified with Christ, Divine Humanity and
Imagination. As long as we cultivate this aspect of ourselves, we will realize that “We are We are all coexistent with God: members of the Divine body and
partakers of the Divine nature ” (Blake qtd. in Altizer, The New 58) as well as
the fact that Jesus Christ “ is the only God . . . And so am I and so are you ”
(Blake qtd. in Altizer, The New 58), as Blake told his friend Crabb Robinson.
Thus, the ‘True Man’ both communicating the Word of God and becoming that
Word (Tannenbaum 74), as hi s body and the body of his work are proof of their
participation in eternity by being mediators between a fallen and an eternal reality and belonging to both (Henderson Staudt 15).
The notion of ‘Poetic Genius’ was first used by Blake in his set of
aphoris ms entitled All Religions are One (1788) and announced as the first
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principle: “ That the Poetic Genius is the True Man, and that the body or outward
form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all
things are derived from their genius ” (A Critical 5). Moreover, in There is No
Natural Religion (1788), Blake maintains that “God becomes as we are, that we
may be as he is ” (“There ”). Therefore, through the process of incarnation, the
creative imagination of God becomes manifest in the artist. In turn, the latter gives a body to his prophetic spirit in the shape of his literary works. The
Creator appears as the form of his creation, which means that, just as God is
seen as the total form of the world, the Poetic Genius embodies his cr eation as
his total “ vision of life, and as an individual part of the archetypal vision which
is the Word of God ” (Altizer, The New 59). It is the divine power of poetry that
inspires the True Man to be a prophet and he must be distinguished from those who do not hold this ability (Altizer, The New 59). In Blake’s mythological
system, Los appears as the eternal poet and prophet – as the two spheres are
indistinguishable to the English bard (Foster Damon, A Blake 331) – and has the
mission to redeem mankind. For instance, in Jerusalem (1804- 18), he is seen as
“The Spirit of Prophecy ” (A Critical 426) and “ Imagination (Which is the
Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever) ” (A Critical 384), who can see
beyond the limitation of the material world.
In order to exemplify the above mentioned principles, William Blake
announces in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) that he came up with an
illuminated method of printing that melts together image and text. He calls this
an infernal method
82 although it s aim is a holy one, yet wishing perhaps to
reverse traditional Christian values, he presents “ heaven [as] reason, or passive
and consuming forms, and hell [as] energy, or active and creative forms ”
(Petersen 57). The method was meant to have a catharsis effect, for Blake
associated the apocalyptic vision of the whole world burning down and being
stripped to its essence of infinity and holiness with the method of engraving in
82 Of course that the name of the met hod is ironic; compare with Ginsberg’s direct statement
at the beginning of the volume Howl and Other Poems : “All these books are published in
Heaven” (3).
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which acids etch away the surface of the plate, leaving behind only lines in
relief that are spiritually pure and true.

The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it
now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of
sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his
soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by
corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and m edicinal, melting apparent surfaces
away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. (Blake, A Critical ,
“The Marriage” 14)

Since Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an illuminated work, the
words presented above exemplify the method they evoke, they “physically
demonstrate the purgation they announce ” (Henderson Staudt 14) and appear as
belonging simultaneously to the world of matter and that of spirit. Th ey are
incarnate and language- bound material signs in order to be accessed by the
human beings’ fallen organs of perception, yet “ through their authority and
evocative power, they simultaneously demonstrate what the more liberated
mode of experience will b e like ” (Henderson Staudt 15) and appear as the result
of divine inspiration.
However, acquiring access to this revelation entailed debunking a
common misconception in relation to the human the body. According to the prophet, the body does not stand in opposition to the soul, nor is it equivalent to
it; instead, the human body is a part of the soul: “ that call’d Body is a portion of
the Soul discern’d by the five Senses . . . Energy is the only life, and is from the Body . . . Energy is Eternal Delight ” (A Critical, “The Marriage ” 9). Because
the poet -prophet is born in the world of matter, he is bound to his senses, yet he
must perceive the world not with, but through them in order to access his
Imagination. Moreover, the ‘energy’ he mentions represents sex uality that is
holy because it perpetually enacts incarnation (Raine 37). Sexual love only
appears fallen because in its earthly state because it “ has become enclosed
within itself, no longer passing immediately and spontaneously to the other; it takes nar cissistic delight in its own circular and solitary movement” (Altizer,
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The New 18). This is exemplified in The Book of Urizen, when Enitharmon
refuses Los’ advancements, preferring to suppress her sexuality and replace
divine sensual delight with the fallen, cruel pleasure taken in seeing her partner
suffer as part of a battle of the sexes (Cantor 51): “ But Los saw the Female &
pitied,/He embrac’d her; she wept; she refus’d/ In perverse and cruel delight/ She fled from his arms, yet he follow’d ” (57). Similarly, Blake sees nudity as
nothing to be ashamed of, since “‘The Naked Human form divine’ is ‘Love’s
Temple that God dwelleth in” (Blake qtd. in Foster Damon, A Blake 303) and
the sexual act it performs is that in which “ the Soul Expands its wing ” (Blake,
The Complete “Jerusalem ” 200) in a “ heavenly struggle toward Oneness ”
(Schorer 174). Thus, identification with the body of Christ
83 also implies a
positive perspective upon sexuality as a material manifestation of the union
between Man and God.
Also interested in expressing the principle of incarnation as integral part
of his aesthetic, Allen Ginsberg depicts the creation of “ Howl ” as the result of
the poet being inhibited by the Poetic Genius – which is Divinity itself or Divine
Humanity (Freeman 182) – and becoming the manifestation of its divine quality,
and thus a figure of Christ himself. Ginsberg’s literary take on the theological
notion of Incarnation allows for its association with the spiritual act of the
embodiment of literary creation, and more specifically the materialization of the
poem “ Howl ”.
In the final segment of the first part of “ Howl ”, in which the poetic
voice expresses the suffering and artistic as well as spiritual longing of “ the
best minds of [his] generation” (9), the author establishes a strong connection
between the formation of poetic language and the spiritual understanding of
artistic expression as mediator between thought and sign, as well as between
spiritual Divinity and earthly matter.

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
83 Blake did not believe in the chastity of either Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary.
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imag es and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 20)

The mystical “angelheaded hipsters ” (9), who are the subject of the above –
mentioned fragment, transform gaps in time and space into a language of
incarnation (elemental verbs, nouns and dashes of consciousness). The incarnate gaps are both absence and presence, immaterial and material, they
are the rendering of eternal temporality and spatiality into physical images in
the shape of juxtaposed words on paper akin to Cézanne’s juxtaposed visual
images that create the ‘petite sensation’
84 in the mind. Therefore, t here is a
“gap between the two words —like the space gap in the canvas —there’d be a
gap between the two words that the mind would fill in with the sensation of
existence” (Ginsberg qtd. in Hyde 153). This gap is linked by Ginsberg with
the Buddhist concept denoting emptiness, the Śūnyatā. It stands for
“emptiness, absence of rational, controlled mind . . . an absolute absorption of
the workings of perception . . . a medium for enlightened sensations ” (Hyde
151-152). Similarly, Blake seems to have based his c oncept of incarnation on a
similar principle. Like God, the poet -prophet use of the Word empties him and
allows him to be born anew in his creation.

The biblical source of Blake’s understanding of the Incarnation is in the Greek
word, kenosis, meaning ‘em ptying’; while as a noun this word is not found in
the New Testament, its correlative verb occurs in Philippians 2:7, ‘emptied
himself’, in which Paul says that Christ ‘though he was in the form of God . . .
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, b eing born in the likeness of
men. (Altizer, The New 60)

However, incarnation is not merely marked by the existence of these
‘gaps’, but primarily by the nature of the words employed, for the linguistic
units out of which the poem is composed are the resul t of Imagination and
84 Ginsberg doe s mention Cézanne’s petite sensation as compositional model here.
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therefore work as a bridge between the ghostly archangel of the soul – used by
Ginsberg to emphasize the high rank of the spirit within every person – and the
physicality of its appearance in the world. This is a language that is akin to that
of “religious ecstasy ” (De Selincourt 60) used by Blake, which implies a
meeting point between “bodily and spiritual experience ” (Henderson Staudt
19). The verbs, nouns and punctuation used in the process of literary
creation do not come into existence ex nihilo . They are Imagination, or
Poetic Genius incarnate; they represent the inner words that are translated into human language, as well as the essential, fundamental and primordial Words
that are with God at the beginning of all things and that have the power to
emanate a feeling of omnipotence that turns the creator of literature into
‘Omnipotent Eternal Father God’. Moreover, the reference to the two visual
images that retain the essence of the soul can be interpreted in relation to William Blake’s illuminate d printing and his use of visual imagery to
complement his texts. Although he did not make use of painting, Ginsberg creates textual, metaphoric images that resemble haikus in that they consist of
“2 visual (or otherwise) images
85 stripped down and juxtapos ed” (Ginsberg, “ A
Letter ” 215) that, just like Blake’s work, illuminate the mind through “ the
charge of electricity created by these two poles [that becomes] greater when
there is a greater distance between them ” (Ginsberg, “A Letter ” 215). Thus, the
act o f writing and its result are sacred, allowing for the author to ascend
towards a higher consciousness by “trying to observe the naked activity of the
mind ” (Ginsberg qtd. in Hyde 151) and then descend into material form. For
Ginsberg and his fellow Beats, just as for Blake, nakedness represented the
original, divine, natural state that was wrongly associated with feelings of
shame and inadequacy. In order to expunge this perspective, Ginsberg would
sometimes spontaneously take his clothes off at poetry read ings, always
connecting the nakedness of the body to that of the soul, to sincerity, candor,
85 Ginsberg offers an example of such an image in “Howl” in the phrase ‘Hydrogen Jukebox’
which would not normally make sense, yet used in the context of the atmosphere described
in the poem , it acquires a clear meaning (Ginsberg, “A Letter” 215).
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openness and rebirth.86 It is therefore not at random that the hipsters of “Howl ”
wave “genitals and manuscripts ” (13), since their nakedness is not just literal,
but poetic and prophetic as well.
The attempt to recreate ‘poor’ (fallen) human syntax is an imperative
step in the process of incarnational appearance because just as God “show[s]
up in terms that the finite knower can understand ” (J. Smith 162), the message
of these poet -prophets can only be taught in a medium of expression
understood by the learner. Despite their status as outcasts and their enforced
shame, these mystics’ connection with Divinity is evidenced by the
limitlessness of their inner apprehension of reality and the nakedness of their
thoughts that are unconstrained and open enough to conduct the spiritual
experiences of their souls and convert them into a rhythm of thought that in
turn becomes poetic creation. Although the words used are part of everyday language and although they are transmitted via the senses, they point towards a
spiritual realm: “ incarnational language might be defined as ordinary words
that resonate with the senses as they aim for the stars ” (Norris qtd. in Clark,
“All Flesh ”). In the case of Ginsberg, language is transcendent, yet its aim is
not to escape the material, “ but on the contrary, to incarnate the transcendent in
the materiality of words ” (Gelpi 101).
Prophetic literary creation is also d epicted as being part of these
visionaries’ physical bodies, since “ poetry at the highest spiritual register
[becomes] an expression of the whole body ” (Ginsberg qtd. in Gelpi 101) and
since, in a Blakean perspective, the body is a part of the soul, discer ned by the
senses. This connection to the otherworldly enables the poem’s creator to offer it for consumption as spiritual nourishment. This is indicative of a strong link
with the Christian understanding of Incarnation, for during the Last Supper,
Jesus C hrist encouraged the apostles to eat bread, in commemoration of his
own incarnate presence. Similarly, the lyrical voice of “ Howl ” presents a holy
poem, urging readers to consume it in order to embody the spirit of life.
86 See more on the Beats’ nakedness in John Tytell’s Naked Angels. The Lives & Literature of
the Beat Generation (1976).
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And as they were eating, Jesus too k bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and
gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. (Matthew
26:26)

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own
bodies good to eat a thousand years (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 20)

The foundation and inspiration for this spiritual communion with
divinity was found in the symbol of the Eucharist, in which Christ is both
substantially and eternally present. Considering that “ bread and wine become
the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit and the instrumentality of the priest” (“Presence of Jesus ”), Ginsberg’s analogy
allows for the poem to be understood as bread and for the poet to assume not the role of the priest, but of the Messiah himself, as an equival ent of Christ. In
addition, the multiple repetitions at the beginning of each line of “ Howl ”,
known as anaphora in the field of rhetoric, may symbolize the repetitive lifting
up of the wine and bread during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, known as
anaphora a s well. In Allen Ginsberg’s rendition of the incarnation of spiritual
existence into artistic ingestion that is described as being as physical as the body itself, the poem is not just taken out of the human body, but butchered out
of it, leading to the ima ge of sacrifice and ritualistic offering. This way, the
reader of the poem may metaphorically eat the flesh of these characters. The
flesh becomes holy and immune to putrefaction, as it re -embodies the Divine
spirit.
The “rhythm of thought ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 20) maintained by the
repetitions of the poem is also in close connection to another variation of poetic incarnation that expands the artistic horizon to include not only poetry,
but also music. Before analyzing Allen Ginsberg’s specific connection betw een
spirituality and its jazz incarnation, I would like to mention a few reasons for which the author and his generation were particularly interested in jazz. The
meaning of the Beat Generation can also be understood in terms of musical
beat and hence linked to the growing 1950s American jazz culture. Although the latter was associated primarily with African Americans, it offered “ an anti –
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establishment art form [that was] propelled into America’s consciousness as an
expression of oppressed groups instead of a black art inaccessible to whites ”
(Gibson 56- 57), becoming “ the language of the hipsters ” (Maynard 201) and
“the key soundtrack to their personal and artistic life ” (Warner 8), since it was
the ultimate expression of freedom and difference that resonated with the minds of the marginalized members of the Beat Generation. Furthermore,
bebop was a form of jazz the rhythm variations of which imitated natural
speech and encouraged spontaneity and improvisation which were adopted as
key element of composition in the works of the Beats, as it allowed for an
uncensored, uninterrupted pouring of feelings. In the words of Jack Kerouac,
“[s]ketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret
idea- words, blowing (as per jazz musician) ” (qtd. in Gel pi 99). This is akin to a
purposeful renunciation of artificiality, or of what Blake would call apparent surfaces, which are melted away in order to reveal the raw truth.
Furthermore, Ginsberg famously admitted to having created the lines of
the poem in accordance with the length of his own breath, which gives rise to a
one-speech -breath -thought poetics” (Trigilio, Strange 18). In Ginsberg’s words :
“Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unity. My breath is long – that’s the
measure,
87 one physical -mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of
a breath ” “Notes for ” 635-6). In this respect, he speaks of inspiration both
literally and figuratively, both “the physical act of inhaling air, and the
importance of that act for . . . the presentation of the poem ” (Skalleberg 6) and
its imaginative construction. With respect to hearing the poem recited for the
first time at the Six Gallery, in 1955, Michael McClude asserted that “ a human
voice and body had been hurled against the hars h wall of America ” (qtd. in
Ginsberg, Howl: 50th 168). The mentioning of both ‘voice’ and ‘body’ stresses
the manner in which the poet uses his corporeal presence to give metaphorical weight to the poem, highlighting the value of oral performance in the
87 Critics like Raskin associated the prose- like quality of Ginsberg’s long, free verses, the use
of catalogues, the insistence on America, as well as his personal tone of confession with
Walt Whitman’s poetic style (20).
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transformation of inner thought into outer word. This aspect is also underlined
by Alicia Ostriker who described Ginsberg’s voice as a hypnotic emanation at
the intersection of physicality and spirituality: “That sonorous, sweet, deep,
vibrant, patient bari tone seemed to emerge from some inexhaustible energy
source, manifesting the double sense of breath and spirit ” (“The Poet ” 103). In
fact, Ginsberg himself maintains that both ‘inspiration’ and ‘breath’ are connected to the Latin Spiritus and are turned in to concrete objects of existence
by being drawn into a person’s body. Consequently, in order to be inspired, the poet has to let himself be inhabited by this spirit that is made incarnate through
his body and the use of earthly words, producing “ physical and mental
heightening” (Ginsberg, “Allen Ginsberg: an Interview ”) and exemplifying “ the
inspiration of the Poetic Genius ” (Freeman 183). When the spirit embodied by
physical breath loses its power, the words stop and the line of the poem is
concluded. Ginsberg’s ‘physical -mental’ characterization also leads to the
concept of incarnation, as it involves the paradoxical coexis tence of absence and
presence of transcendence. Similarly, a jazz musician, a saxophone player is
also confined by the breath unit, and has to exercise great breath control in order
to keep a particular rhythm. When running out of breath, “ instead of pausi ng to
inhale, he should start again to the ‘dadada’ riff ” (Gibson 67), which in the case
of “Howl ” is the repetition of the first part of each line. Therefore, ‘who’ in the
first part, ‘Moloch’ in the second part and ‘I’m with you in Rockland’ in the
third part act as the poet’s riff, “ repeating notes, combining and varying to
create something new ” (Gibson 68). The varied rhythm of bebop, the
improvisation that was essential to it, as well as the riffing technique help
Ginsberg adjust his poem in accordance with the rules of jazz, conveying poetic
creation as musical incarnation.
The word ‘jazz’ is mentioned five times throughout the poem and twice
it is linked directly to incarnation.

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s
hotrod -Golgotha jail -solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation (17)

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and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani sax ophone cry that shivered the cities
down to the last radio (20)

In the first instance, the suffering of those described is linked to the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the sake of humanity through the mentioning of
Golgotha, the hill on which the Christian Messiah was crucified. After the
physical death of their bodies, these mystical poets, equivalent to Blake’s Los,
are reincarnated into jazz musicians who blow a saxophone cry expressing the suffering of America that finds its voice in the phrase uttered by Christ before
he died according to Matthew: “ My God, my God, w hy hast thou forsaken
me?” (27:46). The word ‘shivered’ turned into a transitive verb renders the
image of uncontrollable shaking. Just as the earth quacked after the death of Christ, the powerful cry of the saxophone convulses the whole country ‘for
love’ . What is more, the original use of the Hebrew phrase reinforces the link
with the Scripture, and implicitly with the sanctity and the role of salvation of these musical spiritual beings incarnate and reincarnate in an analogy with
Jesus Christ.
The erotic experience of God is also heavily portrayed in “Howl ”, as
the hipsters’ sexual relations transcend the physical sphere. Their partners are
either “saintly motorcyclists ” (13), “human seraphim[s] ” (13) or “ naked
angel[s] (14), in an indication that unrestr icted sexual union is holy and
provides the incarnated mediation between the sacred and the profane,
proving that “ for an incarnationalist, inspiration cannot be divorced from
sexuality ” (Gelpi 102). In this sense, the blowing of the saxophonist into his
instrument, which receives the spiritus and turns it into music is refashioned
in order to acquire sexual connotations: “ who blew and were blown ” (13),
envisioning the hipsters as both creators and creation, musicians and
instruments, breath and its embodiment, the word and the flesh. Replacing
sexual alienation with sexual liberation, the protagonists scatter “their semen
freely ” (13) in extreme a cts of soul and body that defy the preconceived
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notions of their blind, society which sees only the material and not the
spiritual facet of their encounters. The “ ‘liberated’ Beats seek the revelation
of spirit in the body, often in and through sexual expe rience” (Gelpi 101),
rejoicing in the release of sexual energy that turns the material body into a
vehicle of the divine (James Nelson 12) and standing in direct opposition to
their oppressor, Moloch, who violently advocates the suppression of sexuality
with his “ cloud of sexless hydrogen! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22).
The tradition of Christian erotic mysticism88 goes back at least to The
Song of Songs , which is filled with sexual imagery and in which Origen
interpreted God’s Agape as equivalent to Eros , but not a vulgar type of Eros,
but a sacred one (Nygren 389). The same sensual encounter with the Divine,
albeit this time in a personalized form is presented by St. Theresa in an
episode that finds an equivalent in “ Howl ”.

I saw an angel close by me, on my lef t side, in bodily form. . . . I saw in his
hand a long spear of gold, and, at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little
fire. He appeared to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my
very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw t hem out also, and to
leave me all on fire with a great love of God. (St. Theresa qtd. in Runzo 16)
who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a
partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them
with a sword (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 14)

It should be noted that although “ Howl ” makes reference to both
heterosexual and homosexual encounters, it is only the latter that become the
locus of spiritual incarnation. When mentioning Neal Cassady’s “ lays of girls ”
(14), Ginsberg still presents these experiences as unrestrained and free, yet they seem to be merely physical and lack an expression of divine embodiment. In
this sense, Ginsberg turns to St. John of the Cross, a mystic whose name is
mentioned overtly in the poem (12) as one of the scholarly subjects of interest
88 According to Paul Ricoeur, the Western world underwent three different stages in its
interpretation of the r elation between sexuality and religion: in the earliest one the two
spheres were brought together through myth, ritual and symbol, in the stage that followed,
they were separated and sexuality lost its mythological character, and in the third stage, the
two started to be considered as a unitary force once again (Benner 88).
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of the hipsters. Displaying “ erotic love as skillful means toward
enlightenment ” (Runzo 31), St. John of the Cross employs homoerotic imagery
in order to depict this same Union. In his famous poem, “The Dark Night of
the Soul ”, the lyrical -self recounts his nightly meeting with Christ: “ O night
that can unite/ A lover and loved one,/ A lover and loved one moved in unison”
(Cherry, “John” ). Letting himself inspired by these mystics an well as by
Blak e’s conviction of the holy nature of uninhibited, shame -free sexuality,
Ginsberg situates his protagonists in contexts in which amor carnis and amor
spiritus (Nygren 391) meet, expressing the “most fully embodied experience of
the love of God” (Heyward 99) , an incarnate love: “ who copulated ecstatic and
insatiate . . . and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended
fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last
gyzym of consciousness ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 14). This energetic, heightened,
all-consuming experience creates “ a sense of religious fervor ” (Kauxhausen,
“Visions ”) hat accelerates towards an orgasmic peak that generates an
“illuminative seizure ” (Portugés, “Allen Ginsberg” 161) in which God and
Man momentarily co -exist in the same body.
By way of conclusion the experience of God can be felt incarnate in the
poetic language employed in Allen Ginsberg's “Howl ”, since the words used
are portrayed as intermediaries between the finite perception of morta l beings
and an immortal spirit. The latter is very similar to William Blake’s Poetic Genius in that is equated with the divine faculty of Imagination that inhabits
the creator in the same way in which breath enters the body, allowing the
prophet to give a material form to his thoughts and capture the soul between
two visual images. Thus, Ginsberg ‘illuminates’ the reader though juxtaposed mental images, creating with the help of words and of gaps that are the result
of a necessary emptying of oneself, a poem that is simultaneously temporal and
eternal. Moreover, in an analogy with the Last Supper, Ginsberg assumes the
role of the Christian Messiah, continuing Blake’s tradition of identifying the
Poet with Christ. Extending this image, the poem is presented as an artistic
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Eucharist that acts as spiritual nourishment by means of its materialization and
subsequent (meta)physical consumption. The concept of incarnation is then
brought from the realm of poetry to that of music, while retaining the essential
matte r-spirit simultaneity by means of the spontaneous, uninterrupted
construction of the poem as a series of breath- units, turning the poet -performer
into a bebop saxophone player – a Christ -like figure of sacrifice, who inhales
only at the riff, repeating the same notes at the beginning of each line in order
to establish the beat of life and continue with endless improvisation and
variation. The fact that bebop jazz which refutes pre -packaged musical
renditions and artificial, controlled intervention in favor of a free -flowing
stream of natural breath is used as a model method for the composition of the
poem parallels Blake’s insistence on a technique that does away with the
artificial and reveals the hidden core of humanity. Last but not least, Blake’s ‘Naked Human Form Divine’ shines unhindered through “ Howl ” and gives rise
to a type of mystical sexuality, the intense erotic character of which brings about not only sexual liberation, but also God’s Erotic love incarnate in a union
that melts together divine sp irit and mortal flesh.

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III. A STORY OF MEMNO NIC GENESIS:
HOW URIZEN AND MOLOCH ERR
ON THE SAME PATTERN

III. 1. Urizen’s Embodiment and Proliferation of the Primordial Error

At the end of his work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790),
William Blake warned his readers that he would create a Bible of Hell and
reveal it to the world, regardless of whether it would be accepted or not: “I have
also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have, whether they will or no ”
(Blake, A Critical “The Marriage” 19). This promise is often perceived as
having been materialized in Blake’s epic poem The [First] Book of Urizen
(1794). However, far from considering himself to be of the Devil’s party89, the
author wanted to reveal an alternative story to the Biblical view upon the
creation of the world and of the human being, which he knew would most likely
be viewed as heretical, for it did not concur with the traditional reading of the
Christian Churc h Fathers: “ Thy Heaven doors are my Hell gates . . . Both read
the Bible day and night,/ But thou read’st black where I read white ” (Blake, A
Critical “The Everlasting Gospel ” 54). But what was the Error that Blake saw
both in the Christian tradition and i n the world around him and why was he so
adamant in putting it forth? The aim of this subchapter is to reveal the manner in
which through The Book of Urizen, William Blake parodies the Old Testament
version of Genesis, using both Christian- Gnostic and Herm etic elements with
regard to the myth of creation in order to forge a body for the principle of Primordial Error, the root of which can be said to lie in selfishness, in the shape
89 This is the expression used by William Blake in order to characterize Milton, whom he
thought had unintentionally sided with the Devil in Paradise Lost because the “power of
[his] poe try glamorizes the figure of Satan at God's expense” (Read, “Milton and the
Critics”): “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party
without knowing it” ( Blake, A Critical “The Marriage” 10 ). It seems that, to Blake, Milton
made Satan his “most original creation” (Altizer, “The Revolutionary” 34) and took Urizen
to be the real God (Dandeles 28) and eulogized the power of reason.
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of his character Urizen . The subchapter will be divided into two parts. In t he
first part, I will trace the principle of the primordial error, as well as its
consequences to the doctrines of Christianity, Gnosticism and Hermeticism,
while in the second part, the discussion will deal with William Blake’s version
of the origin of the material world, which will be analyzed with respect to the
three sources of inspiration mentioned above and their blending with
personalized Blakean mythology in order to build the foundation for the
embodiment of primordial Error.
The Christian Bible portrays the act of creation as a good work, made by
a benevolent, omniscient and omnipresent deity. The initiation of error had
nothing to do with God, but with the pride of his angel Lucifer and the weakness
of man. In the first chapter of Genesis, the rea der is not given much information
on the nature of the creator, but we know that God is the first entity revealed by
means of voice, not of body, who has been there from the beginning, and whose
first act of creation starts with an utterance90 that divides : “And God said, Let
there be light; and there was light ” (Genesis 1:3). “ God divided the light from
the darkness ” (Genesis 1:4), waters from waters and Heaven from Earth. As it is
often repeated throughout the chapter, “ God saw that it was good” (Genesis
1:10) and during the six days of creation, the planets take shape, after which the
fish, birds and other animals come into existence, and eventually, after a gradual
increase in significance, the Hexaemeron ( “the Greek title . . . for the ‘six days
[of creation]’ ” (Vanhoozer et al. 248) peaks with the creation of man. All beings
are provided with food and shelter and are blessed by God to “ be fruitful and
multiply ” (Genesis 1:28), with man having dominion over all, for he is created
in God’s image.
It is interesting to note the plural used by God in the Old Testament: “ Let
us make man in our own image, after our likeness ” (Genesis 1:26), implying
perhaps that creation was not a solitary activity91 and was maybe the product of
90 The Old Testament God is one whose words have the power to enact that which is spoken.
91 Another possible explanation is that “God is inviting the angels to watch man, the master
stroke of creation, being produced” (Wenham 39).
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the Holy Trinity (Jensen 15). Further evidence of the multiple nature of God is
his being called all throughout Genesis as LORD God (the Hebrew: Yahweh
Elohim), entailing that God is “ both the almighty Creator and mankind’s
covenant partner ” (Wenham 40) and that his nature is plural: Elohim is the
plural for El (God). All “ was very good ” (Genesis 1:31), so God rested on the
seventh day and blessed it, so that man would follow this example as well. The material from which God formed the human body was “ dust of the ground”
(Genesis 2:7) or, as Isaiah states
92, a lump of clay, which alongside the word
bärä (to form, particularly a special creation), reinforces the image of God as
skillful and sovereign potter (Jensen 28) and thus, someone who is personally and physically involved in the act of creation (Mickelsen 317). However, what
makes man special is that after the forging of his body, he is given a spirit: “ God
breathed into his nostrils
93 the breath of life; and man became a living soul ”
(Genesis 2:7).
The creation of the first woman is also relevant, for she is taken from
Adam’s side ( tsela usually translated as ‘rib’) and not from his head or his feet,
implying that the woman “ was not to lord it over him nor to grovel at his feet ”
(Jensen 30), but should be by his side as a helper a nd as an equal. The main
principle here seems to be that “ the sexes complement and support each other ”
(Wenham 40). The fall of human beings into error is presented as a completely
separate event from that of creation. Although God’s creation is good and
perfect, man has free will and the latter is tested by God when, upon the warning
of death, he is ordered not to eat or touch the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil. As will be later seen, Gnostics understood this to be a lie, for
neither Adam nor Eve actually died after committing the original sin and the
devil -snake that tempted them into doing so was telling the truth, for indeed
their eyes were opened and they developed autonomous morality, albeit it was
92 Isaiah asserted “But now, O LORD , thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our
potter; and we all are the work of thy hand” (Isaiah 64:8) – this verse is in reference to God
being the potter of Israel in particular.
93 The nostrils seem to be the only individual part of man’s body that the act of creation makes
reference to, apart from the rib, which could be translated as ‘side’.
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followed by shame and guilt. Yet, it could be said that death did fall upon the
primordial couple first spiritually then physically, for they were cursed and cast
out of Eden94, condemned to suffer the illness and gradual degradation of their
earthly bodies until their death and return to dust .95
If the original sin is said to be man’s disobedience of God, the primordial
error that preceded it can only be Lucifer’s pride, but also his envy and
selfishness. Despite having been gifted with perfect beauty and wisdom,
Lucifer, the son of the morning96, wanted to be better than his creator and his
rebellion resulted in him being cast out of heaven along with his angels: “ Thy
heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, though hast corrupted thy wisdom
because of thy brightness ” (Ezekiel 28:17). The selfi shness and ambition of the
fallen Satan can be perceived in his repetition of the phrase ‘I will’.

I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of god: I will
sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north : I will
ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (Isaiah 14:13- 14)

Consequently, starting with the primordial error of Lucifer, even before its
creation, the world was to further deteriorate by means of man’s first sin and
then proliferate error with Cain’s first murder, proof of the inheritance of man’s
corrupt nature.
With respect to Gnosticism, the roots of which are traced back to Late
Antiquity, an important note to be made is that up until 1945, when the Nag
Hammadi gnostic indexes were found in Egypt, most of what was known about
94 The Bible mentions that the casting out of Adam and Eve was not only an act of
punishment, but also an action meant to ensure that they would not eat f rom the Tree of
Eternal Life as well and therefore live eternally and be truly like God. For this he had a cherub guard the gate of Heaven. This was interpreted by the Christian Gnostics as a
measure driven by jealousy and fear.
95 This is to say that God has the power to take back the breath of life (or soul) that he has
given, in which case, man’s physical body dies (Mickelsen 314): “for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19).
96 It is interesting to note that both Lucifer and Urizen are associated with light. While the
former is called ‘son of the morning’, or ‘son of dawn’, the latter is named ‘Prince of Light’
in Blake’s The Four Zoas and some critics, among whom Harold Bloom, considered this to
be an allusion that the author ma de with respect to the Enlightenment.
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Gnosticism came from the negative value that the Church Fathers attributed to
it. As opposed to the legitimate gnosis (the Greek world for knowledge) of
Christianity, the heterodox gnosis under the umbrella term of ‘Gnosticism’97
was deemed illegitimate, false and dangerously heretical. In short, Gnostics maintained that true knowledge can be achieved by means of revelation only by
a chosen elite the responsibility of whom is to initiate others into the
understanding of the true nature of God and the universe. Occupying a middle
ground between Greek philosophy (especially Platonism) and Christianity,
Christian -Gnosticism embraced the spiritual- corporeal Platonic dualism and
mingled it with the accepta nce of Jesus Christ as the main figure of salvation. If
the dualism of Plato acknowledged “ two levels of existence: the spiritual eternal
ideas and their transitory material (spatial) counterparts ” (Rudolph 60), while
still considering the latter a good pa rt of creation, Gnosticism kept the dualism,
but infused it with anti- cosmic conceptions. For these thinkers, the Error was the
creation of the material world itself, for everything that was visible was “ a
kingdom of evil and darkness ” (Rudolph 60)
98 and co uld only be the work of an
equally evil creator. Early Gnostic Marcion of Sinope “ sought to circumvent the
apparent tension between spirit ( pneuma) and matter ( physis ) by disaggregating
god the creator from god the redeemer ” (Pfau 963) and associating creation with
a god of matter alone and redemption with a god of spiritual transcendence.
Consequently, the Yahweh of the Old Testament came to be seen as a deceitful,
jealous and wrathful demiurge99 (‘demiourgos’ meaning artisan) who only
wanted to enslave mankind and withhold knowledge from man. As a false prophet and a copy of the real, true God that had preceded it and that remains
beyond all that is visible, unknown,
100 “incomprehensible, unbegotten . . .
97 Without an official church and a clearly established canon of scripture, there are many
different versions of Gnosticism.
98 The Bible too makes reference of the Devil being the Prince of this earthy life: “Now is the
judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John 12:31).
99 In Plato’s Timaeus , the demiurge was the creator of the material world, but this was a pro –
cosmic vision and creation was seen as a positive process (Valantasis 16 ), albeit it led to an
imperfect world due to the creator’s flawed nature.
100 The theology by way of negation practiced by the Gnostics was also very common during
the Christian Middle Ages. See the similarity between the following fragment from the
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incorruptible, immesur able, invariable, unnamable, etc.” (Van Meurs 7), the
demiurge could only create a universe as illusory as himself. After creating a
psychic body for man, he created a material body to lock it in out of fear that
Adam’s knowledge would be greater than his. Hence, Adam and Eve’s rebellion
was a good one and Eve acquires a special, positive status in the myth of
creation, for she was the one to convince Adam101 to open his eyes and awake to
knowledge . The only saving grace and promise of redemption of human bei ngs
is a divine spark102 (somewhat corresponding with the divine breath of The Old
Testament) that can be activated through knowledge and set free from the
imprisonment of the body only after hearing the Savior’s call, leaving the mortal
body behind and trav elling in spirit through the eight spheres103 around the earth
in order to reach Heaven and form a perfect union with Jesus Christ. As Kurt
Rudolph, leading scholar in the study of Gnosticism, succinctly puts it: “ the
world is the product of a divine tragedy , a disharmony in the realm of God, a
baleful destiny in which man is entangled and from which he must be set free ”
(Rudolph 66). While death came only as a punishment in The Old Testament,
the Gnostics saw death as an initial transgression, for the demiur ge wanted to
Apocry phon of John: “He also is neither infinite, nor limited . . . He is neither corporeal nor
incorporeal,/ he is neither large nor small/ he has neither quantity nor quality” (qtd. in Van
Meurs 7) and The Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite: “It is neither soul nor
intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, reason or understanding; nor can it be expressed or
conceived, since it is neither number, nor order; nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality
nor inequality” (“Dionysius the Areopagite”). God i s denied attributes that might be applied
to him in order to stress the insufficiency of human language in order to describe his nature.
101 Christian -Gnostics see “Christ as the second Adam, who triumphed where the first Adam
failed” (Vanhoozer 246).
102 Human beings were depicted as being comprised of: body, soul and spirit, and were
therefore divided into three classes: the hylic (matter), the psychic (soul) and the pneumatic
(spirit) (Valantasis 18, 25). Only the latter was considered to be the divine s park that could
lead to salvation. The body was lower than the soul and the soul lower than the spirit,
therefore Christians were considered limited because they only talked of body and soul.
103 The first seven spheres around the earth were represented by the seven planets: Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the eight sphere was seen as either a neutral ground
(similar to a purgatory) or a sphere that exercised an evil influence via the twelve signs of
the zodiac.
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create a deathless world and ironically only managed to create death.104 This
principle is also present in the Gospel of Philip .

The world came into being through transgression. For the agent that made it
wanted to make it incorruptible and immortal. That agent fell, and did not attain
what was expected. For the world's incorruptibility was not; furthermore, the
incorruptibility of the agent that made the world was not. (Turner 229)

Usually Gnostics lay much emphasis on the androgynous natur e of the
creator , who was both male and female. The state of androgyny105 was
considered perfect and the earthly separation into two sexes was among the first
errors in the multiplicity of transgressions that followed the creation of the
material world. In some versions, God and Sophia -Pistis106 (wisdom -faith) are
complementary consorts, but the latter’s demise is brought about by her error of
selfishness (like Lucifer) in the attempt to create a new world by herself without
the knowledge and help of God (Valantasis 21), for she wished to become equal to God. The result, according to Valentinianism, a main type of Gnosticism, was
that Sophia split between a higher and a lower, fallen form and she only formed
an abortive creation that did not become a world, but merely a demiurge (called
Jaldabaoth
107 in many Gnostic texts). Since Jaldabaoth is presented as an
abortive creature, Easson and Easson e xtend the metaphor of gestation with
respect to Urizen by representing the latter’s fall from eternity as a fall from the
ovaries to the womb108 and by perceiving the nine chapters of The Book of
Urizen as nine months of unproductive fetal growth.

Urizen fr ames his womb and from that womb he is never born. At the end of
his book, he is still ‘in darkness clos’d’, still a fetus united by his placental web
to the uterine roof he created in the beginnings. (Easson and Easson 71)

104 Urizen creates death because “bei ng born into a mortal body, . . . is like being born into
death” (Connolly 81).
105 Gnostics believed that when Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children, it
was not because of their innocence, but because of their androgynous state (Walker 188).
106 Sophia -Pistis is also named Babēlo, the gnostic mother.
107 Jaldabaoth often appears as an abortion, a bestial creature of solo creation, an inhuman being or a serpent with the head of a lion (Williams 132).
108 The image of the womb entails an en closing, restrictive, claustrophobic environment that
constrains one to the natural world he is being born into (Connolly 79).
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The demiurge, in turn formed the material109 world and the false -god
established himself as tyrant: “ I have need of no one . . . I am God and there is
no other apart from me ” (Rudolph 75) – paralleling the God of the Old
Testament: “I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me ”
(Isaiah 45:5) – and became an impediment between the world and the true,
unknown God, also described with respect to Pleroma (perfection, fullness). As
an extension of God, Pleroma is described as a multiplicity of gods known as
Eons, who originated in the Father seeing his reflection mirrored in the light-
waters that surrounded him . Thus, Ennoia (Thought) was born and along with
the Father, they brought about myriad other gods in pairs, as male -female, the
last of which was Sophia, who w ould disturb the harmony of the Pleroma with
her disobedience (Van Meurs 8). Upon realizing her error, Sophia manages to
implant a divine spark in man. Sometimes, Sophia and the demiurge are described as weeping and being ashamed of their erroneous creation, realizing at
the same time their ever -permanent duality as both incorruptible and fallen
gods:

I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear./ . . .
I am sinless and [yet] the root of sin comes from me.
(“The Thunder, Perfect Mind” )

Therefore, Yahweh’s plural form is understood as the demiurge and his possible
helpers or even Sophia and as opposed to the Old Testament, where error comes
from free will (that of Lucifer and later that of man), here man “is sinful by
nature ” (Walker 188) and it is not him, but the Demiurge that is responsible for
the primordial error that brings about cosmic tragedy.
109 Matter is sometimes seen as being formed out of the shadow of the curtain that separated
heaven and earth.
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Hermeticism110 has often been associated with Gnosticism, for it
developed during the same period of time and it followed similar patterns,
maintaining the stress on dualism and on the saving power of knowledge, as
well as the position “ between Greek rationality . . . and biblical faith ” (Ralls,
“Hermeticism” ), between paganism and Christianity. However, Hermeticism is
believed to be more optimistic than Gnosticism, for it is procosmic and “ its
dualism is complementary not antagonistic ” (Ebeling 36). Furthermore, the
Hermetica doctrines revolve around the Egyp tian god Thoth111 (representative
of wisdom, inventor of writing and magic, but also guide for the soul in the
underworld, connected with alchemy and occultism). Toth is remembered as
Hermes Trismegistus via an association with the Greek god Hermes and
trismegistus meaning “thrice great ” (Ralls, “Hermetism and Hermeticism” 2).
The negative theology of the Gnostics is weakened in Hermeticism, as it is
believed that a certain comprehension of God can be achieved by means of ‘nous’ (reason) and contemplation of the world, yet redemption could not come
“from philosophical reasoning but [from] divine revelation that leads to the
truth ” (Van Meurs 5). Most importantly, the primordial error could not be
considered to be the creation of the universe, as Hermeticists t rusted that the
creation was good and beautiful. It could not be otherwise because it was a reflection of the order and beauty of Heaven: “ as above, so below ” (Ralls,
“Hermeticism” ), was their famous dictum: “ What is below is like that which is
above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles
of one thing ” (“Tabula Smaragdina” ). Everything was seen as interconnected,
God was in all things and contraries
112 such as matter and spirit only existed in
110 Throughout this subchapter I will refer to Hermeticism instead of Hermetism in order to
designate the movement as a whole and not limit it to the period before the Renaissance:
“the term ‘Hermetism’ usually refers to the practices of the Hermetic path in the ancient
world before the Renaissance, while ‘Hermeticism’ refers to Renaissance and modern
Hermetic work” (“Hermetism and Hermeticism” 2).
111 Toth is usually represented as having the body of a man and the head of a bird (Hoeller, “On the Trail).
112 I use the term ‘con traries’ instead of ‘opposites’, for while the latter entails that the two
sides might annihilate each other, the former allows for an understanding of their
complementary nature. As Jos Van Meurs explains, “these are not viewed as states
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order to form one whole. The a rchetypal figure for the mediation and
reconciliation between two contraries was the Greek Hermes, the messenger
between the two levels of creation , their intermediary and unifying figure,
“prefiguring the role of the alchemical Mercury as the ‘medium of t he
conjunction’113 (Hoeller, “ On the Trail ”).
One of the strongest Hermetic influences for William Blake was the
philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg,114 whose strong Heaven- Earth
correspondence allowed for the perception of God as Man and of Heaven as
being formed in the shape of the human body. In the subsection entitled “God is
very Man ” from his Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Love and Wisdom , the
author maintained: “ In Heaven there is no other Idea of God than that of a Man.
This i s because heaven as a whole and in part is in form like a man ”
(Swedenborg 8). To this Blake added “ Man can have no idea of any thing
greater than Man, as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness. But God
is a man, not because he is so perciev’d by man, but because he is the creator of
man” (qtd. in Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse 68). This is not to be understood as
God having the physical, vegetative body of a man, but perhaps as the creator
contradicting eac h other (‘negations’), but as the antipoles (‘contraries’) that cause the very
energies of life to flow” (286). It is the conviction of the complementarity of contraries that
determined Blake to consider it as the foundation for development and progress: “ Without
contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are
necessary to human existence” ( Blake, A Critical “The Marriage” 9).
113 The term conjunction refers here to the alchemical process of separate elements for the
creation of a new one.
114 The work in which Swedenborg’s influence is most overt is Blake’s The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (entitled in ironical reference to Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell ), in which
Swedenborg’s ‘Memorable Relations’ are turned into B lake’s ‘Memorable Fancies’.
Swedenborg proclaimed that in April 1947 he had had a vision of Jesus asking him to tell the world what is the true meaning of the Scriptures and consequently had allowed him to
witness Heaven and Hell in order to tell their sto ry – a narrative which took the shape of
first person recollections under the name ‘Memorable Relations’ (Glass 104). Blake
considered his books to be “the guidebooks for travelling in eternity” (Foster Damon, A
Blake 393) and praised Swedenborg as “a divi ne teacher . . . [yet one who] was wrong in
endeavouring to explain to the rational faculty what the reason cannot comprehend” (Blake
qtd. in Foster Damon, A Blake 393). Consequently, the English poet -prophet wished to
correct Swedenborg and parodied his s tyle, replacing ‘relations’ with ‘fancies’ – a perhaps
in an attempt to underline Swedenborg’s lower, associative imagination (or fancy) – and
renouncing his long exegesis in favor of short, cryptic morals (Glass 107) such as
‘Opposition is true Friendship ’ (Blake, A Critical “The Marriage” 17). Blake’s aim seems to
have been to offer his (that is the true) version of the Eternal realm.
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having shaped the divine human form of man in his own divine i mage. When
stating that “ Man is All Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in him”
(Blake, The Complete “Annotations to Berkley’s Siris ” 664) or that “ One Man
all the Universal Family; and that One Man/ We call Jesus the Christ: and he in
us, and we in him,/ Live in perfect harmony in Eden the land of life ” (Blake,
The Complete “Jerusalem ” 180), Blake talks about the spiritual, not the natural
body of man, for it is the former that will eventually recreate the primordial
unity. This distinction is worth noting, because the two bodies are sometimes
depicted as standing in contrast to each other: “ The natural body is an
Obstruction to the Soul or Spiritual Body ”115 (Blake, The Complete
“Annotations to Berkley’s Siris ” 664), although in other works, the veget ative
body appears as part of the soul (Blake, A Critical “ The Marriage ” 9).
For Hermeticists, the physical body was no longer the Gnostics’
“garment of ignorance . . . foundation of vice . . . bonds of corruption” (Van
Meurs 12), for it was a miracle of God, yet the soul was superior to it and if the former was asleep and drowned in forgetfulness , the body inevitably became
sinful, turning man into a “ slave of the lower essence” (“The Nature of Hermetic
Wisdom ”). In accordance, “ Blake insists that the body is not error in itself. The
error is within the kind of perception which closes off the body from eternity ”
(Easson and Easson 69).
In addition, an important myth of creation for Hermeticism was that the
Supreme M ind (Nous) created both a second nous (who in turn created the
planets) and a Heavenly Man, who was his beloved child and was equal to him (Ebeling 13). But the latter’s initial error was to see his reflection in the chaos –
waters around him , fall in love w ith it and perform a sexual union with nature
that would render him mortal (Van Meurs 15). In this version too, selfishness,
love of oneself , as well as sexual desire and the subsequent separation into male
115 In stating that “Man has no body distinct from his soul, for what is called body is a portion
of soul discerned by the five senses” ( Blake, A Critical “The Marriage” 9), Blake
acknowledged goodness in the physical body as well, as part of the spiritual body, albeit its
finite perception discerns the soul and only lets a small part of it surface. This partly
positive attitu de is not so evident in The Book of Urizen.
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and female as different, no longer androgynous forms that followed are the main
catalysts for the fall of man. Perhaps in reference to this myth, in the fourth
chapter of the book dedicated to Urizen, the protagonist of the poem is called
“the eternal Mind ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 51).
Now let us turn fully to William Blake and see how he blends elements
of all these three spiritual directions and adds to them his own vision of error.
Just as the title of the Book of Genesis was also translated as The First Book of
Moses , for it was beli eved that Moses had written it, from the beginning, The
[First] Book of Urizen 116implies an association of Urizen with Moses and
draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the work is a parody of the Biblical version of creation. Even the title page of B lake’s book entails a parallel with
the Old Testament, since it presents Blake’s illustration of Urizen as an old man
with a long, white beard – an image that may be a reminder of Moses, but is also
usually associated to the Yahweh of the Old Testament.

Blake’s Urizen resembles the traditional representation not only of Moses, but
also of God, hinting at the truth behind the priestly myth. Since God ‘is’ Moses,
The Book of Urizen parodies the Creation and the Law as one. (Eaves 116)

Blake may have also associated Moses, the “ original retriever of the law . . .
[with] the inventor of the alphabet ” (Barr 749). This is shown by the fact that the
old man appears to be reading with his right big toe117 (Rowland 98) from one
book (perhaps the Book of Judgment as Leslie Tannenbaum maintains) and
translating it with both hands, maybe engraving with one and illustrating with
the other its contents in two other books, which may represent the characters’
116 The title of this work was initially established as The First Book of Urizen , with the author
implying that there would be at least a second book dedicated to Urizen. Although some
critics consider The Book of Los to be a second book of Urizen, William Blake never
established this and for later editions of the book the title was changed into The Book of
Urizen .
117 See the order given by God to Aaron and his sons in relation to sacrificing a ram, where the
right big toe is mentioned: “Then shalt thou kill the ram, and take of his blood, and put it
upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons, and upon
the thumb of their right hand, and upon the great toe of their right foo t, and sprinkle the
blood upon the altar round about” (Exodus 29:20).
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books of iron and brass.118 Behind the protagonist, there are two Mosaic tablets,
insinuating perhaps that Urizen too, just like Moses is a law -giver. However, the
tablets are illegible and have the appearance of two graves which, along with the
barren branches of what is probably the Tree of Mystery, clearly enclose the
main character. In addition, his eyes are closed and he appears to be weeping,
which can be interpreted as cues for understanding the error and limitation
brought forth by Urizen. According to the editors and commentators of the
Thames and Hudson edition of the work, The Book of Urizen is “a history of
error and . . . Urizen [is] the god of that error. Urizen is the god who falls, the god of the fall, and the god who perpetuates the fall ” (Easson and Easson 70).
Moreover, many critics, among whom Christopher Rowland note that “ the
‘scripture -like’ format in which the pages are laid out in double columns
whenever there is writing to be found . . . [represent] a very deliberate attempt to
emulate the Bible ” (5). The argument is strengthene d by the fact that Blake’s
epic poem is carefully divided into chapters and verses, suggesting again a similarity to the way the Biblical text is organized.
William Blake imagined Urizen as part of a fourfold system of primal
human faculties. Along with his fall, which is depicted to be integrated within
the process of his material creation via the work of Urizen (Grimstad 126),
Albion,
119 the primordial man – initially whole and perfect – was divided into
four parts: reason, imagination, love and sensation. Each of these faculties is represented and personified by a biblically inspired Zoa: Urizen (conventional,
restrictive reason, law, limitation), Urthona (mostly known by its fallen name,
Los, representative of imagination and creativity), Luvah (love, pa ssion) and
Tharmas (sensation), gods bound and blinded by their respective feature, permanently at war with one another – at least until the reunification of man at
118 Only the book of brass is mentioned overtly in The Book of Urizen. The book of iron is first
mentioned in The Book of Ahania.
119 For Blake, Albion stands for the primordial , universal man, for England, as well as for all mankind. His Emanation is Jerusalem. As critic Dóra Janzer Csikós puts it, “to read Blake’s
epic as communicating to us an exclusively English legend is to reduce the significance [of]
the poem. . . . Albion . . . is emblematic of the fall of mankind from the Golden world”
(Four Mighty 22).
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the end of times – , seeking dominance over man’s mind. The name ‘Urizen’
can be a play of words for either ‘you reason’ or ‘your reason’ and it is quite
probably related to the Greek root horizō, meaning ‘to set limits’, for the
character ceaselessly seeks to limit and narrow man’s perspective to match his
own. The fact that Urizen is given a certain personality implies, in a Gnostic
perspective, that he is a lower god, for “ the impersonal is the highest principle,
the ‘unoriginate Originator’ [and] is without personality in a human sense of the
word since it is beyond all of our perceptions an d projections ” (Barnstone 8).
With respect to the Greek word zoa, it should be noted that it signifies ‘living one’ or ‘beast’ and is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel in relation to the four
man-like creatures, each of them four -faced and pulling God’s cha riot always
forward, without looking back, in accordance with the command of the spirit.
The Zoas also become the four beasts of Revelation that incessantly guard God’s
throne.
And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud,
and a fire infolding itself . . . out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four
living creatures. . . . they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. . . . they four had the face of a man, and
the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the
left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. . . . And they went every one
straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not
when they. (Ezekiel 1:1- 12)

After this I looked, and, behold . . . a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on
the throne. . . . and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were
four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion,
and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the
fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six
wings about him ; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and
night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is
to come. (Revelations 4:1- 8)

Therefore, the Biblical tradition not only mentions the existence of four Zoas as
carriers and guards of God, but it also depicts them as human- like c reatures that
are each fourfold in their nature, symbolizing a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (cherub images of the four Evangelists and of the four facets of Jesus: king,
servant, man and God). Accordingly, Blake’s Zoas are also vehicles for spiritual
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redemption and are divided into four aspects each, albeit in an idiosyncratic
vision: Specter (negation/male), Emanation (female), Shadow ( “the residue of
one’s suppressed desire ” (Foster Damon, A Blake 368)) and Humanity (the
image of God in Man). Moreover, they only function properly when they are
united; otherwise, when one of them falls, all the others follow because divine
harmony and wholeness are disrupted. The myths of the four Zoas are gathered
together in Blake’s longest, unfinished epic poem Vala, or The Four Zoas.120

Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity
Cannot Exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden
The Universal Man. To Whom be Glory Evermore Amen. (Blake, Vala 114)

Since man was made in the image of God, his Zoas are representative of
divine aspects and, as Blake’s famous critic S. Foster Damon maintains, Urizen
would not have a place within the Holy Trinity, but he would be the
correspondent of Satan,121 whose rebellious nature brings about error.

Tharmas the Shepherd is a mirroring of God the Father, Luvah, in whose robes
of blood Jesus descends, corresponds to the Son; and Urthona -Los, the fount on
inspiration, is the Holy Ghost. Urizen, however, is the aspect of divinity which
falls and becomes the equivalent of the Devil. (Foster Damon, A Blake 459)

According to critics such as John Howard, Urizen can be paralleled to John
Milton’s Satan, Los to Milton’s Adam and Enitharmon (Los’ first female form)
to Milton’s Eve (220) from his epic poem Paradise Lost . Although Milton was
surely inspirational for Blake, the latter’s undeniable originality stems not from Urizen’s egocentric desire for dominion and his material exploration of the
world, but from his relationship with his greatest adversary, Los – the
imaginative power of man, the inspirational capacity, the hero, the savior
120 Vala represents Nature and she is the emanation of Luvah.
121 This assertion is particularly true for the early prophecies. However, as Blake develops his
myth, Urizen co mes to be “portrayed as a polysemous figure. No longer the villain to be
castigated for all life’s evil, Urizen has a central role in ontological awakening” (Csikós, “Urizen” 151).
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(associated with Jesus) of mankind. Urizen and Los are two contraries,122 two
sides of the same coin. Even though the supernatural activities of both of them
are important in the creatio n of the vegetative or natural world, the protagonist
of The Book of Urizen is the title character himself, “ the southern Zoa, the
limiter of Energy, the lawmaker ” (Foster Damon, A Blake 419).
The poem’s prelude reveals the poetical persona as someone who has
access to true knowledge by means of direct contact with the gods. Like a
Christian prophet or like a spiritually initiated Gnostic -Hermeticist, the speaker
confesses the esoteric nature of his beliefs, as well as his responsibility and desire to disse minate true gnosis in an attempt to wake people up from the
deadly sleep of ignorance. The means of achieving this seems to be via direct dictation from above: “ Eternals, I hear your call gladly./ Dictate swift winged
words & fear not/ To unfold your dark visions of torment ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 44).
The Gnostic belief that creation of the material world and the fall into
error are one event, but that there are two creators: one true God, extended by means of a Pleroma of gods who created spirituality and one false, evil god who
created the material si de of the world, with the “debilitating effects of
materiality ” (Valantasis 30) among which the corporeal part of man, can be
interpreted as prevalent in Blake’s The Book of Urizen. From the first words attributed to the protagonist, the idea that he is an evil, devil -like, inept creator is
prefigured:

Of the primeval123 Priest’s assum’d power,
When Eternals spurn’d back his religion
122 When reading Blake, contraries should not to be confused with opposites: while the latter
exclude each other, the former complement each other and create a whole. This has been
proven by the bard in literary creations such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The
Songs of Innocence and Experience . Progress necessitates contr aries: “Without contraries is
no progression” (Blake, A Critical 9). If Urizen is associated with seeing (the eye), Urthona
is linked with hearing (the ear), which means that “for the divination of Man . . . a
synaesthetic union of eye and ear (the cooperation of Urizen and Urthona) is inevitable; we must hear the word and see the light” (Csikás, “Urizen” 150).
123 The word ‘primeval’ may be Blake’s pun for the linking together of ‘prime’ and ‘evil’ (Pfau 967).
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And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary . . .
Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific
Self-clos’d, all repelling. What Demon
Hath form’d this abominable void? (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44)

Rising, that is rebelling, from the group of gods that are called Eternals, Urizen
wants to assume a place that is not his, in the north.124 Just like Lucifer pledged
to sit in the north in order to be like the most High, Urizen too sought to conquer
a place that was not his and that he considered to be more valuable. In the
Blakean myth, Urizen (reason) is given the southern realm, whereas the north is
reserved for Urthona (Los), representative of eternal imagination. Yet,
displaying a similar desire to that of Lucifer and Sophia, Urizen hopes to be one step above his creators and one of his first errors is that of selfishness, out of which pr ide and envy stem. Like Lucifer’s ‘I will’, Urizen’s “I alone, even I . . .
Here alone I ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 46-47) shows his egocentric nature
and his inability to care for anyone else but himself. What results is an “auto-
genesis of rationality o ut of sheer volition and compulsion” (Pfau 967) that does
not lead to the creation of a world out of benevolence, but to forging one out of
the desire to gain advantage and acquire power by the creator establishing
himself as absolute ruler. Urizen’s solip sistic nature is a prime factor that
distinguishes him from the God of the Old Testament: “ if the Biblical creation is
a model of selflessness . . . Urizen’s creativity is rooted in selfishness ” (Cantor
31).
Solitary, and self -closed, all -repelling, desolate, Urizen believes he can
create a world on his own, without help from any of the other gods, but he is unprolific and can initially only form a void and bring about “ abominable
chaos ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44) where there once was unity and
harmony. This is in tune with the Gnostic -Hermetic warning against the
124 In Blake’s representation of Albion’s consci ousness “the cardinal points north, south, east
and west are used by the Zoas and Emanations, who see themselves as autonomous entities”
(Whitmarsh -Knight, “The Four Zoas”). Consequently, Urthona (Los) belongs in the North,
Urizen in the South, Luvah in t he East and Tharmas in the West.
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possibility of a positive creation as the work of only one god. Just like the Bible
presented a creator -god that is Trinitarian in nature, Gnostics trusted that the
Father was surrounded by a Pleroma and therefore was not alone in his creation. It is only the demiurge whose selfishness brings him to the ambition of
attempting a solitary creation that can only result in tragic, universal unbalance.
Moreover, the multiple references to the i mpossibility of knowing this evil god
expressed through the adamant repetition of words such as: shadowy, obscure, unknown, unseen and secret go beyond the theology by way of negation of the
Gnostics, for here it might not be the case of the inability of other entities to
perceive Urizen – because unlike the man -god relationship where the former is
incapacitated by his lack of knowledge, the Eternals cannot be said to be lower and incapable of understanding their fellow God – but rather Urizen’s secrecy is
proof of his unwillingness to show himself. As opposed to Yahweh, who does
all his work in the open (Cantor 30), Urizen desires to keep his work a secret ,
unbeknownst to the Eternals or the Eons of Pleroma, possibly out of shame or out of fear of reprisal: “Brooding secret, the dark power hid ” (Blake, The Book
of Urizen 44). The Demiurge knew that his intention would not be well received
and indeed the Eternals showed indignation, fury and horror upon seeing
Urizen’s actions.
While the God of The Old Testam ent creates utterances that divide the
world without any negative consequences, Urizen’s first articulate words roll
like thunders over the universe and despite their hypocritical expression of good intention, they are meant to divide what was once whole i nto separate parts: “ I
have sought for a joy without pain,/ For a solid without fluctuation” (Blake, The
Book of Urizen 46). In view of Hermeticism, this separation represents a pivotal
error for no things can nor should exist without their contraries. The effects of
this wish for division are felt when Urizen separates himself from the Pleroma
which brings the whole of Eternity to “ roll[x] wide apart ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 48). As Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson maintain in their
commentary t o The Book of Urizen , “It is Urizen’s failure to acknowledge the
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contrary states which causes his fall into the error of dualism. The Book of
Urizen opens when Urizen falls from eternity and separates himself from the
eternal unity of contraries ” (Easson a nd Easson 68). This event creates a
contagious chain of separation where Urizen’s counterpart, Los, divides into a
man and then further divides into a separate, female form, breaking the
perfection implied by the androgynous state and showing the clear impulse
towards nature and simultaneously an alienation from the perfection of divinity,
leading only to disequilibrium.
The fact that Urizen’s actions bring friction and chaos to a once perfectly
ordered cosmos is proven by the description of the state before his rebellion
“Earth was not . . . death was not , but eternal life sprung ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 45). Urizen did not create life. On the contrary, along with Urizen, death
is bestowed upon the universe just like it is proven to happen after Adam and Eve’s disobedience of Yahweh. Death is a consequence of the world of matter
and proof of the demiurge’ s impotence in the act of creation. Nevertheless, the
character’s hypocrisy surfaces again when he is the one to ask: “ Why will you
die, O Eternals? ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 46). The difference is that the
Eternals did not die in the physical sense of t he word, they only changed form,
vanished and reappeared, “ expanded/ Or contracted [their] all flexible senses ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 45). Hence, by creating the body of man, Urizen
hopes to insure stability where there was only fluidity. Yet, ironica lly, the only
certainty that arises is that of death and in a similar manner to the demiurge of the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, Urizen fails in his attempt to create a deathless
world. Thus, it is little wonder that the Eternals characterize him as the
perso nification of death: “ The Eternals said: ‘What is this? Death./ Urizen is a
clod of clay’ (Blake, The Book of Urizen 49). This statement establishes
Urizen’s inferiority with respect to the other Gods; he is their creation, just like
Adam is Yahweh’s; he i s only a clod of clay, a material copy of divinity that
cannot create life, but only bring death into the world. The same idea is also described by Urizen’s description as “ the formless, unmeasurable death ” (Blake,
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The Book of Urizen 50) and the reference towards “the death image of Urizen ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 55). Further evidence of the demiurge’s
responsibility for creating death is the fact that he is depicted as “ A self-
contemplating shadow ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 45), perhaps in reference t o
the Hermetic myth of the creation of the world of matter, rather than the Gnostic
myth of the creation of the Pleroma. This is because it is the former, not the
latter that is immersed in selfishness and love of oneself , leading to the union
with nature and eventually to the mortality of the body.
The abnormality and inverse ratio of Urizen’s work is also evident in his
creation of the shapes “ Of beast, bird, fish, serpent, & element,/ Combustion,
blast, vapour and cloud” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 45), w hich seems to
establish an inverse order in relation to that in which the world is created in The Old Testament: ex -nihilo , with the heavens being created first, followed by fish,
birds, reptiles, animals and eventually man. This order is not random, for
Yahweh’s creation becomes increasingly more significant with each element
and culminates with man, whereas Urizen’s project is described as a regression into nothingness, in which man no longer holds a privileged position, but can
only appear as an element of a deteriorated and deteriorating world. His physical coming into existence shrinks him and, paradoxically, brings him “ a step closer
to nonexistence ” (Connolly 80). Urizen himself can be interpreted as being
subject to this “ regressive growth ” (Easson and Easson 73), like the body of a
fetus who, instead of developing normally, shrinks into an unformed substance.
The Biblical Hexaemeron is paralleled in Blake’s six ages of creation in
which the members of the body are individually formed. But the creation of the first man – which is also “ the creation of the World – the micro – and macro –
cosmos [are] the same” (Tarr, “William Blake ”) – coincides with the
embodiment of Urizen performed by his complementary god Los. Just like Eve
was formed out of Adam’s side, we learn that “ in anguish/ Urizen was rent from
his [Los’] side ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 49), so they are the two Hermetic
contraries that form two sides of the same entity: reason and imagination, ice
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and fire, death and life and when the y are separated, only anguish can follow.
When Urizen transgresses the heavenly order, he falls and Los can only fall
along with him and be part of the same process of decay: “ Los suffer’d his fires
to decay ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 55). This gave rise to another instance of
separation between the incorruptible and the fallen side of the same god that that
is most evident in Blake’s distinction between Urthona and Los (the eternal and the fallen name for the same character). This concept can be recognized in both
Gnostic and Hermetic myths and is disapproved of in both instances. As a
seemingly positive character, Los is forced to create a physical body for Urizen
in order put an end to the fall and to the proliferation of error by limiting it into a
clearly distinguishable form so that it could be more easily recognized,
entrapped and cast off: “ And Los formed nets & gins/ And threw the nets round
about ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 50).
Perhaps Los’ intervention in the creation was meant to heal Urizen’s
wound after being torn from Eternity (Cantor 45), as we are told that “ the
wrenching of Urizen heal’d not ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 50) or perhaps it
was meant to endow the “ Cold, featureless, flesh or clay ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 50) with the breat h of life that the God of The Old Testament breathed
into man, or the divine spark that the Gnostics acknowledged as having been
implanted in the human body. As the representative of Imagination, Los stands for the positive core that can be activated in or der for man to wake up and hear
the call of Eternity again, the only hope for his Salvation and reunification with God. Los can also be interpreted as taking the role of Hermes and being a
mediator between the Eternals and Urizen (Cantor 43, Rowland 99), a
mandatory link between the two worlds.
Before the actual creation of the primordial body, Urizen falls into a
deep sleep: “ But Urizen laid in a stony sleep,/ Unorganiz’d, rent from Eternity ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 49) and he found himself “ In a horrible, dreamful
slumber ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52). This is the Gnostic perception of the
class of people called hylic (from hylē, the Greek word for matter), who were
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“asleep and unaware, completely entrapped in the material world. Hylics existed
as animated corpses ” (Valantasis 26). Moreover, Urizen is disorganized because
in the attempt to create a new order, the demiurge “disturbed the harmony of the
divine realm ” (Valantasis 21) and now he is drowned in chaos. It is noteworthy
that he is merely ‘rent’, not cut off from Eternity and that he is only ‘asleep’ and
not dead, because both of these words used by William Blake imply a provisory
state which can be mended and which in the whole Blakean myth indeed are.
“The truth [is] that each human being , within the fallen human body, is open to
eternity and can recover eternal perspectives at will ” (Easson and Easson 72).
Also, after Urizen’s body is formed, its creator is contaminated and completely
forgets about his eternal nature: “ And now his eternal life/ Like a dream was
obliterated ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 54). As the Gnostics associated sleep
with forgetfulness and ignorance, two instances of deficiency that can be overcome through gnosis, Blake allowed for the possibility of Urizen to be
returned to the Eternity from which he was rent and to awaken from his sleep by
acquiring true knowledge and realizing the divine core of humanity and the necessity for the union with the true God. But the contagious nature of the acts
of separation previousl y mentioned is visible also with respect to Los, when the
character separates the hours of the night, in anticipation of a vast system of
material constraint : “ Pouring sodor of iron, dividing/ The horrible night into
watches ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 51) and then creates precise temporal
measurements: “forging chains new & new,/ Numb’ring with links hours, days
& years ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 51). This process is perceived of in terms
of the formation of chains in order to stress the constraining nat ure of earthly
time with regard to the human body. In the attempt to limit error, the now fallen
Los creates another error
125 in the act of self -limitation that is entailed in the
shaping of the mortal body.
125 Critics such as Matthew Green have put forth the hypothesis that although the making of
Urizen’s body is the work of Los, the changes performed may have been dictated by Urizen
himself (61): “And these were the changes o f Urizen” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 50).
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During the six ages of creation (that are not thematic parallels to the six
days of Genesis), the skeleton, organs and limbs of man are molded. As opposed
to the Biblical satisfaction of Yahweh -Elohim, who repeatedly observes the
goodness of his creation, after each day: “God saw that it was good” (Genesis
1:10), the only repetition that Blake allows after the passing of each age is:
“And a state of dismal woe ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52) and as Los forges
the body of Urizen, he weeps howls in pain and s hrinks from his task (Blake,
The Book of Urizen 54), making it abundantly clear that this is not a positive
creation, nor is there anything to be satisfied about. On the contrary, the physical creation of man is a tragic event. This perspective is rooted i n Gnostic
pessimism and just as “ a gnostic felt . . . imprisoned by his or her body and by
the physical world ” (Valantasis 15), the adversity towards the body, seen as
material entrapment of the spiritual nature of man is expressed by the
multiplicity of words referring to the state of being imprisoned throughout the process of creation: ‘chains’, ‘caverns’, ‘nets’, ‘bounded’, ‘locked’, ‘inclos’d’,
‘closed’ and so forth.
The first age comprises the torturous formation of the spine and bones,
the solidity and inflexibility of which are underlined along with the pain that they bring about: “ A vast Spine writh’d in toment . . . And bones of solidness
froze ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52). A feeling of confinement begins to set in
as the ribs are presented to be “a bending cavern ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen
52). This is a reminder of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which man’s senses can only reach a simulacrum of reality. William Blake proved to have a similar
attitude whe n he maintained in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “Man
has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern ” (Blake, A Critical 14). In The Book of Urizen , the creation of a cavern
of bones is the first step in m an’s entrapment by his body. Next, the heart and
the circulatory system are formed, as a red globe with thousands of branches and
this time the fragility of the trembling heart that is “ sunk with fright ” (Blake,
The Book of Urizen 52) into the abyss of the ribs is emphasized. The third age is
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particularly important in revealing the inadequacy and shortcomings of the
senses,126 specifically of sight in the attempt to ‘see’ the truth: the eyes are “ two
little orbs; And fixed in two little caves ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52), which
stand in opposition to “ the expanding eyes of Immortals ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 55), revealing the limitation of earthly man in relation to divinity.
The ears are created in the fourth age by means of heavy pain and
struggle, and they too are petrified,127 acquiring the rigidity and solidity that
Urizen sought after from the very beginning. The nostrils of the fifth age are
bent down and there is no reference to them being infused with the breath of life
as they were descr ibed in The Old Testament and the stomach, throat, and
tongue of the sixth age are connected to the pain and suffering of hunger and
thirst. Finally, instead of resting on the seventh day, the dissatisfaction of the creator with his work is shown by the fury that caused his newly formed limbs
to stretch over the entire universe in deep anguish and pain: “ Enraged & stifled
with torment,/ He threw his right Arm to the north,/ His left Arm to the south,/ . . . And his Feet stam’d the nether Abyss/ In trembling & howling & dismay ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 53-54). Hence “error (planē ) gained strength ”
(Rudolph 83) along with the creation of the primordial human body, as the
author stressed the limitation, fragility, suffering and alienation from Eternity
that result from it.
The last erroneous “ dark separation ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 55) that
Los u ndergoes is that between male and female, which is triggered by the Pity
he feels upon seeing Urizen’s body. Enitharmon, the first separate female form
126 Not only are the senses separated from their divine counterpart, but they are also separated
from one another, making spiritual experience impossible: “the eyes stationary, the ears
downward, the nostrils outwar d, they can no longer perceive the self, nor work together to
perceive synaesthetically” (Connolly 74).
127 Bryan Aubrey notices that Blake’s account of Genesis mirrors Jacob Boehme’s in multiple
ways. For instance, it depicts a world created with great eff ort, “as the unknown and
unknowing God attempts to set out from the abyss, to move from Unground to Ground” (Aubrey 109). In addition, Urizen draws into himself in order to form matter, and as a result everything around him becomes petrific and solidifies, paralleling Boehme’s First Property,
which is “the cause of all substance, of ‘stones, and bones’” (Aubrey 116), while Los stands
for the Second Property, of division and multiplication, since it divides into the first female
and divides temporal time into hours.
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is not taken from Los’ side, but is formed from a round globe of blood, milk and
tears that appears to b e formed from his head (as Blake’s illustration depicts it).
However, this does not mean that the primordial woman is superior to man nor that she plays a special part in his salvation as some of the Gnostics believed.
On the contrary, the Eternals who are androgynous are so scared and shocked of
this new creature that they call her Pity
128 and flee: “ All Eternity shdder’d at
sight/ Of the first female now separate,/ . . . They called her Pity and fled ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 56). In other words, they could not stand the sight of
this pitiful creation, so they created a curtain between their realm and the world
of matter and called it science (the only reality reachable via the senses) which
would be an impediment for human be ings, keeping them in the dark of
ignorance with respect to fact that “ the world they experience on a day -to-day
basis is illusory and wicked ” (Valantasis 13) when it is not coupled with a vision
towards eternity. Hence, the generations that developed from the primordial
couple and populated the earth inherited this state and Urizen’s infectious error
along with their physical bodies, and the references towards the shrinking of
their senses can be seen as proof of their smallness as well as of the regressio n
of creation by the enclosure of what was previously limitless spiritually. This is
in accordance with the gnostic belief that “ the demiurge locked their true
spiritual selves behind the door of materiality ” (Valantasis 17) and now “ The
Senses inward rush’d, shrinking/ Beneath the dark net of infection./ . . . Brought
together by narrowing perceptions ” and their eyes “ grew small like the eyes of
man,/ And in reptile forms shrinking together ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 62).
To conclude, in The Book of Urize n William Blake used the frame of
Christian Genesis in order to infuse it with Gnostic and Hermetic beliefs about
the creation of the world and of man and to show that the principle of Error
preceded man’s free will and was proliferated like an infectious wound
128 Pity cannot be understood as a virtue because it stems from condescendence. It is “a
patronizing emotion, against love . . . a false love, which produces a whole range of false
reactions in the responsive material universe” (Tarr, “William Bla ke”. Hence, Los pities
Urizen, who in turn pities creation. It is from this place of perceived superiority that the
Urizenic tyrannous rule is born.
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throughout the cosmos starting with Urizen’s rebellion from the other Eternals
and worsening with the creation of the first human body. In a similar manner to
Lucifer and Sophia, Urizen is not self -begotten but is preceded by other divine
entities , which makes him a false god and leads him to follow a similar ambition
to that of the devil or the goddess of wisdom when attempting to establish
himself as the ruler of a new world. Like Sophia’s work, Urizen’s project is
solitary, created in secrecy and s elfish isolation and therefore results in an
abortive creation and like the Hermetic nous, the demiurge’s self -reflection
creates an illusory material world. Furthermore, if Yahweh’s separation of the
world in the beginning of time gives rise to a good cre ation, Urizen’s separation
from Eternity is amplified by a contagious chain of divisions that throws humanity ever deeper into error because it goes against the complementary
dualism of Hermeticism in trying to establish entities that are not perfect in th eir
wholeness, but divided and therefore unbalanced: Urizen is separated from Los,
Los from his Eternal side Urthona, Los from Enitharmon and spiritual man from
God. This leads to Urizen’s and eventually man’s sleep and forgetfulness of true
gnosis. If in the Christian version, the Biblical couple’s disobedience brings
about death, in the Blakean perspective, Urizen himself is death because he is
too self -centred and unprolific to create true life and therefore only manages to
bring about the mortality of man. The latter is not a trumph of a good creation,
and therefore the responsible God is not satisfied but tormented and the
Hexameron is transformed into seven ages of suffering and dismal woe followed
by no rest. The result is an embodiment of error that equates the creation of the human form with the universal fall into error, as the product of a regressive
world that confines man within a physical body, whose finite, shrinking perception diminishes the understanding of the Eternal Truth.

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III. 2. THE ABOMINABLE I: The O.T. Moloch of Sacrificial Filicide and
Ginsberg’s God of Urizenic Error

If Urizen is entirely Blake’s creation, albeit inspired by Ezekiel’s vision
and Milton’s epic poem, Ginsberg’s Moloch’s connection to the Old Testament
is more overt, since the name carries with it a rich biblical significance and
literary legacy. The pres ent subchapter will uncover the implications of
Ginsberg’s invocation of an ancient Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice in “Howl ”, as well as the manner in which this choice provides the
American author with an opportunity to refer to a deity by means of which he can echo the cultural memory of Urizenic error on multiple levels, since it
follows a similar pattern of disobedience, imitation, selfishness, division and death induction. In using the term ‘Moloch’ Ginsberg draws from the Semitic
tradition in order to stress the damaging effects of this god’s reign by means of
his requirement of the highest type of sacrifice.
129 As the author’s Jewish
background surely allowed him to acknowledge, Moloch130 was a heathen god
of fire, worshiped in ancient time s131 by Canaanites132 and Phoenicians,133 who
used to sacrifice their offspring by burning their bodies in order to receive
129 Moloch’s intrinsic association with the idea of sacrifice is further emphasized by the word
being turned into a common English noun denoting extreme sacrifice.
130 Molech is also spelled Moloch, Melech, Molek or Melek, which are used interchangeably throughout the present thesis.
131 The Old Testament attributes the beginning of this cult to King Ahaz of Judah (seventh
century BC), who is said to be the first to have sacrificed his son in worshiping Moloch.
King Manasseh also encouraged the practice and even King Solomon erected a temple for
Moloch ‘against’ the temple of Yahweh, as the O.T. attests and Milton echoes in Paradise
Lost “Solomon he [Moloch] led by fraud to build/ His temple right against the temple of
God” (Milton, Paradise 85). Finally King Josiah abolished the Topheth cult, ensuring that
no children would be sacrificed there in the future (2 Kin gs 23:10).
132 The Canaanites occupied Palestine and Syria from about the 15th century BC and were the
original inhabitants of the Canaan before the Israelites seized it as their promised land by
God (“Canaan.”).
133 Classical sources link the child sacrifices carried out in Carthage, a Phoenician colony in
Northeast Tunisia, with the cult of Moloch (Skolnik and Berenbaum 427). It was there, a
place they called the Tophet, that archeologists Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff
discovered a very large cemet ery with “as many as 20,000 urns [that] may have been
deposited there between 400 and 200 B.C” (qtd. in Levenson 20), containing charred bones
of young children and some of young animals, indicating that these were not sporadic
killings, but cult practice s. Strikingly, the children remains increased not decreased with the
passing of years, implying a tendency of parents to choose their own children over animals as sacrificial victims (“Sacrifices of Children”).
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blessing and prosperity from their god and keep their community in order. Most
scholars agree with Abraham Geiger that the name ‘Moloch’ c omes from an
amalgamation of the Hebrew word mōlēk , meaning ‘king’ and the vowel ‘o’ of
the word bōšet , which stands for ‘shame’, which the Old Testament substituted
for Baal (Day, Yahweh 214), underlining the immoral character of both deities.
In the foll owing lines, I will shape an image of the Old Testament Moloch
(along with its reflection in the works of John Milton) in order to prove how he can act as a link between William Blake’s Urizen and Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch
through the embodiment of error as abomination, the first mnemonic core that is
transferred from the Zoa of reason to the American capitalist deity.
Moloch is mentioned overtly only eight times in the Old Testament, with
five out of the eight occurrences being in Leviticus (18:21, 20:2- 5) and the other
three in Kings (1 Kings 11:7, 2 Kings 23:10) and Jeremiah (23:35). In all of
these instances, God warns the Israelites not to fall prey to the Canaanites’
idolatry which is described as an “ abomination” (1 Kings 11:7)
134 and a “ sin”
(Jeremiah 23 :35) that was already taking the form of an “ established institution
with a fixed location ” (Skolnik and Berenbaum 427), in the Valley of Ben
Hinnom,135 at Topheth136 (2 Kings 23:10), south of Jerusalem, just outside the
city walls. Here and throughout the the sis, the word ‘abomination’ is understood
not only as something repugnant and detestable, as a type of “ irregularity . . .
which offends the accepted order, ritual, or moral ” (Skolnik and Berenbaum
269), but also in Ezekiel’s acceptation of something that runs contrary to God, “a generic term for all aberrations detestable to God ” (Skolnik and Berenbaum
269). According to the Scriptures this practice should be punishable by th e death
134 In one instance, Moloch is described as “Moloch; the abomination of the children of
Ammon” (1 Kings 11:17), which implies an identification of Moloch with the deity
Milkom, the national god of the Ammonites (Stavrakopoulou 150). However, many
contemporary commentators, including John Day distinguish between the two gods, on account that this is the only identitary overlapping between the two deities that occurs in the
Old Testament.
135 The Valley of Ben Hinnom was also known as the Son of Ben Hinnom, The Valley of
Slaughter (Stavrakopoulou 153) or Gehenna, the Jewish hell (Day, Yahweh 215).
136 The word Topheth comes from the Aramic tapyā, meaning “stove, fireplace, pot” (Day, Molech 212), which establishes its role of a place dedicated to burning.
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of the culprit, as well as the expulsion into exile of his family, all of whom will
receive the full consequences of God’s wrath. The following passage presents
the words of the Lord to Moses.

Again, thou shalt say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children
of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed
unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone
him with st ones

And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his
people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary,
and to profane my holy name
And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when
he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not:

Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut
him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with
Molech, from among their people. (Leviti cus 20:2- 5)

The nature of Moloch has been under much debate in the last few
decades and if in the first part of the twentieth century scholars generally agreed
that there was a deity by this name that required child sacrifice, German critic
Otto Eissfeld published a study in 1935 (defended by Paul Mosca in 1975),
which advanced the argument that Moloch should not be understood as the name of a god, but as the denomination for a specific type of sacrifice formed by
the vocalization of the Punic word mlk meaning ‘sacrifice’. Therefore, “ children
were not meant to pass over ‘to Molek’ but were rather made to pass over ‘as a mlk-sacrifice’ ” (Stavrakopoulou 150). This view was challenged by John Day in
1990 and 2002
137, as the critic argued that the vocabulary related to
‘whoredom’138 employed in relation to Moloch was a customary way of
referring to idolatry as a type of spiritual adultery or prostitution; therefore, people could only “play the harlot ” (Day, Yahweh 210) after pagan deities, not
137 See John Day’s Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (1990) and
Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (2002).
138 The language of whoring, coupled with the use of the word ‘seed’ have prompted some
commentators to believe that the sacrificial cults may have also been accompanied by
sexual deviance: “the context of Leviticus 18 is suggestive of a sexual interpretation (giving one’s seed [i.e., semen] to a cultic prostitute” (Heider 2233).
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after types of sac rifices.139 Another Moloch- related topic that spiked the interest
of Bible scholars revolved around whether or not the sacrificing of children was
literal or figurative. In this sense, Moshe Weinfeld associated Moloch “ with
initiation and dedication rather t han with slaying and ‘burning babies’ ” (Noort
118) and hence the passing of children through fire would be seen as an act of
initiation into pagan rituals that involved passing between fires during a
ceremony (Weinfled, “The Moloch” ) without being harmed. Still in a figurative
key, the rabbinic tradition tends to favor a figurative meaning as well, analyzing
the offering of children to Moloch as giving them to a pagan priest or marrying
them to pagan women, which in both cases underlines a wrongful renuncia tion
of the Jewish faith and metaphorical whoredom. However John Day, Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum underline certain passages in the Bible such as
Numbers 31:23 or Isaiah 30:33 that unmistakably refer to literal burning and also mention the independe nt classical sources that confirm the existence of this
tragic cult (Day, Yahweh 211) as well as rabbis’ interest in making the text
relevant for a later audience
140 for whom child sacrifices were already part of
the distant past (Skolnikand Berenbaum 429).
Classical authors141 such as Diodorus Siculus (60- 30 BC) wrote of the
worship of Kronos or Saturn, which were presumably North African equivalents of Moloch. The idol created for worship was represented by a bronze or brass
statue, heated red from within or from below which represented a man with a
bull’s head and with arms outstretched from which children rolled into a fire pit
below (Noort 16) in the presence of their consenting parents. The latter would
be prevented from crying or feeling sorry for the chi ldren by the obstruction of
the youngsters’ crying through the use of loud music (for instance drums and tambourines). Plutarch (110 AD) also mentions that the noise was also intended
139 This is also underlined by Jon D. Levenson (19).
140 See Rabbi Rashi’s interpretation of the Moloch cult in the twelfth century (“Moloch.”).
141 See also the accounts of Cleitarchus (c. 310 -300 BC) who talks about the statue of Kronos
and the grin, or ‘sardonic laughter’ that children would have before dying and Tertullian
(197 AD) who asserts that parents gladly gave away their children, among others
(“Sacrifices of Children”).
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to keep other people from hearing the cries of the children ( “Sacrifices of
Children” ).
The Hebrew Bible is adamant in “ ascrib[ing] child sacrifice to the
barbarian Other, either to Canaanites before the settlement of Israel or to
worshippers of foreign gods ” (Noort 119). There are echoes of Moloch
throughout the Old Testament and although he is not always referred to by
name, at least twelve more instances are generally believed to indicate the
worshiping of the same deity. In Deuteronomy, the abomination of Moloch’s
worship is stressed once again and associated with other typ es of idolatry and
divination that God is said to hate (12:21; 18:10), in 2 Kings, child sacrifice is described as heathen wickedness that goes against the Lord’s teachings and
provokes anger in Him (16:3, 17:17, 17:31, 21:6), in 2 Chronicles the burning of
children is depicted as evil witchcraft that the Lord casts out (28:3, 33:6), in Jeremiah, this abominable type of worship is said to have never entered God’s
mind (7:31, 19:5), in Ezekiel it is described as pollution of the self (20:31) and
in Psalms as pollution of the land that is smeared with innocent blood (106:37-
39) and essentially pollution of God’s sanctuary and desecration of His name
(Berlin 508). Hence, the prevailing view seems to be that the sacrificing of
children was a foreign custom that the Hebrew God abhorred and strictly
forbade, setting himself apart from this false god and stressing his inhumanity in order to justify the extermination of the Canaanite peoples (Versluis 304- 305).
Yet, despite the stern aversion towards child sacrifice , some critics,
among whom Arie Versluis, Ed Noort, Jon Levenson and especially Francesca
Stavrakopoulou underline that Yahweh may not have been so different from
Moloch in terms of requesting children to be sacrificed. It is difficult not to link
Moloch’s child sacrifice with the ram sacrifice made by Abraham as a
replacement for Isaac, “with the sheep that the Israelite father seems to be
instructed to substitute for his firstborn son in Exodus (34:20), and with the
paschal lamb whose death spares the fir st-born son in each Israelite family on
the night of Passover (Exodus 12- 13)” (Levenson 21). Genesis (22:11 -13) tells
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the story of Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his first and only
son, Isaac and then revoking the command at the last minute, g iving Abraham
the option (not the order) to substitute his son for a ram and blessing him for his proven devotion. Subsequently, Abraham shows no signs of relief; on the
contrary, Jewish scholars believe that he would have been “ disappointed at the
revocat ion . . . begging God to see each part of the ram’s anatomy as if it were
the corresponding part of Isaac’s ” (Levenson 21).
Therefore, an important question arises: how can the Hebrew God
condemn child sacrifice in “ a narrative in which a father is richly rewarded for
his willingness to carry out that very practice ” (Stavrakaopoulou 193)?
Although in this case the human sacrifice is not completed, Yahweh did request
it. In fact, there are other passages in the Old Testament that portray the Hebrew
God as a deity requesting child sacrifice. The most overt and controversial of
these have to do with Yahweh’s demand that his worshipers offer Him their
firstborn male child.

Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the
firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me. (Exodus 22:29)

Because all the firstborn are mine; for on the day that I smote all the firstborn
in the land of Egypt I hallowed unto me all the firstbor n in Israel, both man and
beast: mine shall they be: I am the LORD. (Numbers 3:12)

Thus, while firstborn humans and animals are distinguished, they are not
differentiated (Stavrakopoulou 180) and are to be treated in the same manner.
While in other cases (for instance Numbers 18:15) God talks of redemption and
substitution, here the command is clear: the firstborn sons should be sacrificed.
In other texts, however, while still demanding this sacrifice, Yahweh depicts it
as a “ divine shock- tactic, designed to rouse the people into obedience ”
(Stavrakopoulou 185) and horrify or devastate the idolatrous.

Because they had not executed my judgments . . . I gave them also statutes that
were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live;/ And I polluted
them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that
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openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might
know that I am the LORD. (Ez ekiel 20: 24 -26)
A
lthough requested here in order to show people what not to do, child sacrifice
is still overtly imposed by Yahweh. At times presented in a positive light, other
times in a negative perspective, sometimes as a test of faith that is reword ed,
other times as a punishment for disobedience, this type sacrifice is not as foreign to Hebrew practices as the Scriptures depict it to be when rejecting Moloch’s
cult. It is clear that “ if child sacrifice did exist in ancient Israel, they were made
to YHWH as well ” (Noort 124). It is, then, no wonder that “ the Israelites may
have erroneously developed the idea that Yahweh had decreed such sacrifices to
Moloch” (“Moloch”, New World ), although admittedly Moloch did not make
any distinctions of birth order and gender. If the practice was not alien to Yahweh, it means that the repulsiveness directed towards it was not grounded in
moral concerns, but rather in the very act of idolatry, making Moloch worship
synonymous with disobedience, falsehood and imitation. This explains the
emphasis that the Hebrew God lays on clarifying that Moloch burnt offerings
were not requested by Him (Versulius 303) and never entered His mind.
Making use of the Old Testament legacy of Moloch, Allen Ginsberg
manages to paint a p icture of an American society that has gone astray and has
forgotten about authentic spirituality in favor of serving an idolatrous god of
sacrifice. The background of Moloch is said to have spontaneously surfaced into
Ginsberg’s mind after an evening walk in San Francisco. Gazing out of his
apartment window he observed the monstrous figure of the city’s Sir Francis
Drake Hotel and had a peyote induced hallucination of it being “ like a grim
monster staring into the sky . . . the lighted windows below looked, Alan
remarked, like ‘the robot skullface of Moloch . . . glaring into my window’ ”
(qtd. in Schumacher 205 -206). This deadly monster’s eyes were the illuminated
windows that might have reminded Ginsberg of the stories of Moloch’s statue
heated from within as well as of the fire pit below it. This vision – like the Blake
ones in Harlem – was experienced by Ginsberg as being profoundly personal.
Consequently, what seemed to be the eyes of the Modern Moloch targeted his
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own eyes directly, giving the impression that Moloch wanted to eat him
(Schumacher 206), which enhanced the association of himself with an innocent
child thrown into the fires of a society under the control of a pagan dei ty. Still
drawing from the Old Testament, he perceived the surroundings of the hotel to be the equivalent to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, which appeared as the “ red
smoky downtown metropolis ” (Ginsberg, “Notes for ” 636), a place he
confronted personally by wr iting the second part of “ Howl ” “in cafeteria at foot
of Drake Hotel, deep in the hellish vale ” (Ginsberg, “ Notes for ” 636).
It is possible that Ginsberg may have hinted at Moloch in the first part of
“Howl ” as well. The line “ who bared their brains to Hea ven under the El ” (9) is
usually interpreted as referring to the Hebrew God El. However, El was also the
main deity of the Canaanite pantheon who was “later identified with Kronos ”
(Skolnik and Berenbaum 428),
142 who in turn was equated with Moloch. Since
“Phoenician tradition . . . relates that the god Elos (=El) sacrificed his son
following a war which brought disaster upon the state ” (Skolnik and Berenbaum
427), he offered an example for his worshipers to follow. Like Moloch, the Phoenician El demands nothing less than the highest of human sacrifices.
Consequently, Ginsberg’s line may refer to the hipsters having a view of
Heaven, the suitable place for their child -like, innocent souls, albeit they found
themselves constrained by a society ‘under’ the influ ence of a merciless pagan
authority.
The American society of the 1950s appeared, hence, as one which was
willing to sacrifice its younger generation for the wellbeing of the older one. It
was a society comprised of parents who silenced the cries of origin ality of their
children and disregarded the sacred nature of each of their individual lives by embracing confortable conformism and secular capitalism. In its lust for money,
America leaves its ‘children’ in “cold-water flats ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 9), in
“poverty and tatters ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 9), a state that is not to be equaled with
142 The god Baal, whose name appears next to that of Moloch in the Old Testament can also be
considered a “Phoenician equivalent of the patriarch of the Canaanite pantheon, E l”
(“Sacrifices of Children”).
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Moloch’s “poverty [which] is the specter of genius ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22),
since the former is sincere and difficult to endure, while the latter is a
hypocritical and tactica l pretend -poverty that is only expressed as a permanently
unsatisfactory financial situation directed towards accumulating money that would almost be genius had it not been harmful. As Moloch’s children “ pass[ed]
through the fire ” (2 Kings 23:10), Ginsberg ’s hipsters “ passed through
universities ” (9), which regarded originality as irrationality and only formed
“scholars of war ” (9). Moreover, as a free- spirited anti -capitalist, Ginsberg
would only see selfishness in a society based on Adam Smith’s self -interest and
for him, turning primarily towards the self could never lead to mutual advantage and cooperation, but only to (corporate) greed and its “ rapacious pursuit of
profit ” (Milligan 2) that robbed people of their natural inclination towards
kindness and benevolence. Since “under capitalism, profit is the motive and
price the mechanism ” (Milligan 7), people start to worship a god whose blood is
money and whose soul is made of banks (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 21-22), forgetting
that souls are not marketable product s, but inherently spiritual essences which
cannot be translated into materialistic, economic terms and which are not parts
of the “ machinery of capitalism” (“Ginsberg and the Machinery ”). The
emphasis on money reveals the selfish and bloodthirsty character of Moloch
who is solely interested in himself to the detriment of others, generating
inequity, violence and war.
Therefore, ‘solitude’ is the first noun attributed to Moloch in “ Howl ”,
followed by ‘filth’ and ‘ugliness’ (21), forming the picture of a se lf-centered
god whose requirements of “ children screaming ” (21) provokes disgust and
repulsiveness. In cultural remembrance of Urizen’s solitary act of rebellion and
selfish attempt to usurp the place of the true divinity, Ginsberg’s Moloch is also
a self -centered, impious king who takes skyscrapers as scepters and “whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21) in an
attempt to set himself as a ruler, despite the shameful nature that his Hebrew
name implies. Ginsberg depicts a mode rn equivalent to the Old Testament
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Moloch who helps reflect William Blake’s Urizen in that he is as a false god,
inferior to the real one, who attempts to imitate Him, albeit not by creating a
world (as Blake had Urizen do) but by ensuring the obedience of his worshipers
in the request of an extreme sacrifice that stands as proof of the highest loyalty towards him and that seems to have been molded on Yahweh’s own request of
child -sacrifice. A radical, “ loveless ” (21) and authoritarian ruler, Urizenic
Moloch is self -reflected, all -repelling and power hungry and because he does
not have the legitimizing foundation of the real God, he enforces his wishes,
bringing about oppression and cruelty.
Ginsberg and the Beats , the hipsters, the ‘mad’, homosexual visionaries
and pacifist criminals came to be seen as the spiritual lambs engulfed by the
destructive flames of sacrifice. Their metaphorical burning gives out a thick
smoke in the shape of “ smokestacks ” (21) and the pollution generated by
factories ( “Moloch”, New World ): “Moloch whose factories dream and croak in
the fog” (21), suffocating the city. One of the places in which these ‘children’
are sacrificed is Madison Avenue in New York, a boulevard associated with
advertising, which makes Ginsberg’s Moloch a deity of the author’s specific
socio -cultural context. Madison Avenue is depicted with the use of military
terminology and advertising is seen as economic violence inflicted upon
innocent people. If World War II advertising focused on propaganda and on
how to be a good American, post -war advertising serviced capitalism by
persuading people they “needed the new oven, the new microwave, and the new
toaster, because [their] neighbors had these things, and it was [their ] patriotic
duty to continually consume ( “Ginsberg and the Machinery ”) and convincing
them to “ want more things, better things, and newer things ” (McNesse 97).
Thus, the ever more immersed in advertising America forced ‘innocent’ people into the gray flannel suits of corporations that sacrificed their spirituality.
w
ho were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked -up clatter of the iron
regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine [sic] shrieks of the fairies of
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advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were
run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality (16)

The epithet ‘innocent’ reinforces the connection to Moloch’s child victims and
is placed in opposition to the adult -world of violence and war. This recalls
Blake’s association of Moloch with war, through the garments worn by Moloch’s priestesses which were made of “ Pestilence border’d With War ”
(Blake, The Complete “Milton ” 137), as an indication of the fact that “nowhere
else are sons sacrificed more extensively than on the battlefield ” (Foster Damon,
A Blake 284). Similarly, the idol -body of consumerist and bellicose Moloch
takes the form of a regiment and is made of lead and iron, heavy metals which
prevent a m etaphorical ascent to Heaven. Also, the method through which the
sacrifice is enacted involves war weapons such as explosives (nitroglycerin), sulfuric substances (mustard gas) and psychological manipulation though the media
143 (sinister intelligent editors) .
Moreover, the generation described by Ginsberg in the first part of
“Howl ” was representative of the children that tried to redeem society, but broke
their backs in the attempt and, according to Ginsberg – who offers a decisively
biblical and sacrificia l description of the generation – they were the Lambs of
America that Moloch preyed on.

Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable
lamblike youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness [Moloch] that preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affirmation of the
Lamb in its glory. (Ginsberg, “ Notes for ” 636)

A draft of the second part of “ Howl ” included the following line: “ Children!
Children! The very children breaking their backs under the subways. Breaking
their back trying to lift the Whole City on their backs . . . lifting the city on our
back! To Heaven –” (Schumacher 207) which later became “ They broke their
backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22). Therefore, not only is
143 The linguistic manipulation used in order to advance the war agenda is also mentioned by
Ginsberg in “Witchita Vortex Sutra”: “The war is language, language abused for
Advertising” ( Collected 409).
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the city144 a representation of the ancient Canaanite god, but the children, the
sacrificial victims, are the ones who embody the hope for salvation. The contrast
that is created between the child -victim and the child -savior is a reminder of the
context in which John Milton brought the figure of Moloch into his work, creating “an antithesis . . . through child- sacrifice, t o the Christ -child who brings
peace and love instead of death and violence ” (Johnson 218).
Hence, the previous mentions of Moloch in English literature
145 could
not have escaped Ginsberg, whose keen poetic and particularly Blakean interest inevitably lead t o John Milton, a poet whose imagination was occupied by
Moloch arguably more than that of any other canonical writer ( “Moloch” , A
Dictionary 516). In Hymn On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity , Milton
envisages Moloch as a sullen deity who is forced to flee upon Christ’s birth, leaving behind his dark idol surrounded by dancing worshipers who attempt to summon him back through the use of music : “And sullen Moloch fled ,/ Hath
left in shadows dread/ His burning Idol all of blackest hue;/ In vain with
Cymbals' ring/ They call the grisly king ” (55). This scene is visually represented
by William Blake
146 who created a watercolor painting entitled “ The Flight of
Moloch”147 (1809), illustrati ng the above mentioned lines. Moloch appears as a
winged creature flying towards the sky and leaving behind the black statue of a human king surrounded by flames and cheering people. In the furnace at the
bottom of the statute, a child can be seen in a pos ture that recalls the nude in
“Albion’s Dance ” or “Glad Day ”, which, along with the two overwhelmed
144 It is not just San Fr ancesco that Ginsberg associates with Moloch, since “Howl” is usually
said to describe New York (since there are mentions of Madison Avenue and Long Island)
and the author also mentions “fireplace Chicago” (12), indicating that the whole country is
under t he influence of the fire god.
145 Apart from John Milton and William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also warns against Moloch’s prayer of hate and Robert Southey sees Milton’s spirit in the works of Byron and
Shelley (“Moloch”, A Dictionary 516).
146 In a 19 73 poem entitled “What I’d Like to Do” Ginsberg mentions going “to San Marino
[to] see Blake’s vision of Moloch, go to Manchester see Moloch/ Visit Blake’s works all over World West, study prophetic Book interpret Blake unify Vision” ( Collected 610). The
Huntington Library in San Marino holds Blake’s illustrations of Milton’s Moloch discussed
here. Ginsberg clearly expresses his desire to see the work in person and attempt a unification of Blake’s prophetic vision.
147 Blake’s illustration mentioned here is one of the six that he created for Milton’s “On the
Morning of Christ’s Nativity”.
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women148 next to him form the image of a child who is different from the other
child -victims in that he is a savior, a child who is Jesus Christ.
It is true that Ginsberg’s visionary saviors are not children, but they are
Christ -like martyrs, whose sacrifice out of love stands in contrast to an enforced
type of sacrifice that stems out of fear (Johnson 212). In Book III of Paradise
Lost, Christ is imagined to have offered himself for sacrifice during a council in
Heaven: “Father, thy word is past, man shall find grace;/ . . . Behold me then,
me for him, life for life/. . . Well pleased, on me let death wreck all his rage ”
(Milton, Paradise 181). Similarly, in the first part of “ Howl ” the role of
redeemer is assumed by the lyrical self who sees his image reflected in the
visionaries he describes as they write “the poem of life . . . good to eat a
thousand years ” (20), but do so by butchering their own bodies, “ who burned
cigarette holes in their arms ” (13), “who walked all night with their shoes full of
blood” (15), “who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge ” (17). All these instances of
human self -sacrifice are partly caused by pain and the despair of living in a
narrow -minded society, but also by the desire to offer an example of spiritual
resistance through their choice to embrace martyrdom rather than reno unce their
beliefs. As Christ -figures, they are willing “to die a physical death out of love
for others in order to encourage a return to spiritual life ” (Johnson 220). The
triumph of this perspective reaches its pinnacle in the third section of “ Howl ”,
where Carl Solomon becomes Blake’s “ Christ -child [who] stands miraculously,
triumphantly, before the idol ” (“Moloch” , A Milton 151). After describing the
god of human sacrifice, Ginsberg turns to Solomon as a savior and personification of Jesus: “ I'm with yo u in Rockland/ where you will split the
heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb” (25). As representative of the mad, innocent hipsters in the
last part of the poem, Solomon is attributed a regenerative role thr ough sacrifice.
Although the price to be paid is not death, but madness, Solomon willingly
accepts it and lets his soul go on a spiritual pilgrimage to the place of Christ’s
148 These two women can be a reference to the story of 1 Kings 3:16 or, in Blake’s myth, to
Jerusalem and Vala (“Nativity”).
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crucifixion: “I'm with you in Rockland/ where fifty more shocks will never
return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void”
(25). While the body is tortured by hospital treatments, the soul creates “ a
paradise within ” (Johnson 221) through a selfless love that counters society’s
self-love.
Furthermore, in P aradise Lost , Milton introduces Moloch as a merciless
deity who is forever tainted with the innocent blood of his victims and the pain
brought upon their families. Once again, the worship includes making loud
noises to cover the cries of children being sac rificed: “Moloch, horrid King
besmear'd with blood/ Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,/ Though, for the noise of Drums and timbrels loud,/ Their children's cries unheard that passed
through fire/ To his grim Idol ” (Milton, Paradise 84-5). Ginsberg’s hi psters are
also unheard, as “ their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion” (“Howl ”
15). Yet by making them the protagonists of “ Howl ”, the American poet rescues
them from insignificance through remembrance, though saying ‘no’ to
forgetfulness, whic h also means saying no to death (Blustein 270, 272).
Not only is Moloch a horrid and horrifying spirit, but in Milton’s view
he is one of the most important of Satan’s rebellious angels, “ the strongest and
the fiercest spirit/ That fought in heaven ” (122) and the first to speak up in the
famous council of Hell in Book II of Paradise Lost in which Satan discusses
with twelve of his councils who mirror Christ’s disciples, seeking advice from them in relation to dealing with God and none of them wishes to sacr ifice
himself.
149 Militant, thoughtless, radical and vengeful, Moloch advocates for
“open war ” against God (112) because he wishes to either be equal to Him or
“not . . . be at all ” (112). Consequently, he proposes to mobilize all fallen angels
and arm them “ with hell flames and fury all at once/ O’er heaven’s high towers
to force resistless way ” (113).
149 A similar scene is also presented by Blake in Vala, or The Four Zoas and it also includes
the same impatient and self -centered Moloch: “Lucifer refus’d to die for Satan & in pride he
forsook his charge./ Then they sent Molech. Molech was impatient. They sent Molech
impatient. They sent Elohim, who cre ated Adam/ To die for Satan. Adam refus’d, but was
compelled to die” (270).
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Under the influence of Milton, Blake mentions Moloch in Jerusalem ,
where he is described as the Second of the Seven Eyes of God or the “ seven
Angels of prese nce, who watch and guard mankind” (Foster Damon, A Blake
134), indicative of man’s spiritual stages of redemption from the lowest point
(represented by Lucifer’s selfishness), to Moloch’s function of Executioner, to
the most illuminated form of Jesus’ ability to forgive all sins (Foster Damon, A
Blake 134). Blake’s Moloch reflects the mnemonic form of Urizen, since both of
them are primarily negative characters who fulfill a necessary role in order for
the positive figures to become manifest. Thus, the fact that Ginsberg mentions
the holy nature of the angel within Moloch (28) continues the Miltonian-Blakean tradition of regarding the pagan deity as part of Christian system.
Although a Luciferic angel, Moloch is an angel nonetheless just as Urizen is still
an Eternal although he chooses to rebel and turn towards the material realm.
What is more, as angels, Moloch and Urizen are inherently holy despite the fact
that they go against their origins and lend themselves to dreadful abominations.
Another manner in w hich Milton’s Moloch enriches the image of the
Old Testament god, providing Ginsberg with an example of how to further
develop the characteristics of his own Moloch has to do with equating him with
the concept of idolatry itself: “ Moloch was usually thought to subsume all kinds
of idols, since he was the first idol invented by superstition and thus the source of all idolatry ” (“Moloch” , A Milton 150) This recognition caused Milton to
“make[x] Moloch the chief representative of ‘false gods . . . adored as idols’ ”
(“Moloch” , A Milton 150). Therefore, the multiple mentions of the word ‘king’
(‘grisly king’, ‘furious king’, ‘sceptered king’) ironically suggest the lack of legitimacy of his reign. As a personification of the primordial error, Urizen is
also turne d into a vessel for error and falsehood in general. As a Urizenic false
god himself, Ginsberg’s Moloch reveals the wrong path taken by the post -war
American society, which has decided to divide rather than unite its members.
The damaging effects of this id olatrous cult can be perceived in the gap between
what Ginsberg sees as his mad, rebellious generation and the old, conformist
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one. As the Old Testament Moloch separated children from their parents, as
Milton’s Moloch is so keen to separate heaven from hel l and as Urizen
embodies the essence of destructive separation, Ginsberg’s Moloch alienates the ‘children’ of America by heavily judging them, (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 21) labeling
them and sacrificing their youth, spirituality and individuality, so as to favor t he
majority, of patriotic, consumerist, capitalist, rationalist America. Since
“‘memory culture’ is concerned with a social obligation and is firmly linked to
the group. The question here is: ‘what must we not forget?’ ” (J. Assmann,
Cultural 16). If the answer is Urizen, the moral imperative is extended to cover
a specific pattern of error that should be avoided.
Still in tune with the traditional image of Moloch and with that of
Urizen, the Moloch of “ Howl ” does not bring about new life, but merely
death.
150 John Day identified Moloch as an underworld deity, primarily based
on Isaiah 57:9: “And thou wentest to the king with ointment . . . and didst
debase thyself even unto hell ”. But because of the ambiguity of the word mōlēk,
the verse could also be translat ed as “You journeyed to Molech ” (Day, Yahweh
215), which, along with the association of the deity with the Valley of Hinnom (Gehhena or hell), would inevitably link Moloch to “ the cult of the dead ” (Noort
116). Similarly, as discussed in the previous subchapter, in his attempt to create a world, Urizen simultaneously un- creates it and along with physical life,
physical death comes into existence.
151 Also, Ginsberg’s Sir -Francis -Drake –
Hotel -Moloch appears, as the author describes it in his journal as a “ Death Head
– The building an evil monster – A tower in Hell – (‘Those poor souls making it
up in the tower’) –. . . this is deep gong religious. Impassive robot ” (Ginsberg
qtd. in Schumacher 206). In other words, from the very first vision, Moloch was the personification of death, which tortures its captive souls with impious
150 This topic will be further developed in relation to the concepts of ‘shadow’ and ‘sleep’ in
the next chapter.
151 However, Creation can also be considered as an act of mercy (see Blake, The Complete “A
Vision of the Last Judgment” 563), since God stops it (or in The Book of Urizen, the
Eternals’ representative, Los, stops it by giving Urizen a shape) and puts an end to the
reverse direction it took – in moving from infinity to narrowness – just in time to prevent
“Man’s total annihilation” (Pellnat 11).
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disregard and mechanistic detachment. The same impassivity is proven by
Moloch in his personification of “ the vast stone of war ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21),
the system of which does not account f or people’s souls but merely for the
capacity of their bodies to form armies and shape Moloch’s murderous fingers
(21), which are a reminder of Moloch’s “self-begotten armies ” (Blake, The Book
of Urizen 48).
Last but not least, the Old Testament Moloch ins pires Ginsberg to take
the idea of sacrifice one step further and imagine the act of passing though the fire as an act of physical ingestion. According to some classical accounts, the
statue of Kronos or Moloch would have had a mechanism that allowed the
outstretched arms to move upwards towards the mouth, making it seem like the
gruesome god was eating the children that fell into his fire pit below (Ross 107).
This explains why authors such as Diodorus Siculus insisted that “ the myth of
Kronos eating his children arose from the cultic practice rather than vice versa ”
(Boswell 78).
152 Therefore, situating himself on the side of the children to be
sacrificed, Ginsberg associated the image in his vision with a creature which
might devour him: “ And quite vegetable that monster too – it may be coming to
eat me some day ” (Schumacher 206). This fear is reflected into his poem
through the first two verbs attributed to Moloch, ‘bashing’ and ‘eating’: “[he]
bashed open people’s heads and ate up their brains and imagina tion” (21). What
is more, when discussing Moloch’s body, the author asserts that his “ breast is a
cannibal dynamo! ” (21), underlining the deity’s propensity for consuming
human flesh.
Therefore, Moloch can be interpreted in the context of what William
Blake calls ‘the devourer’,153 which stands in contrast to ‘the prolific’.
152 In both Greek mythology and the pagan tradition of child -sacrifice, the act is practiced out
of fear (not love, purification or respect): fear of the child overthrowing the ru ling father in
the first case and fear of divine repercussions in the second.
153 In this context, the devourer should not be confused with the positive acceptation that the
concept acquires in relation to prophets’ connection to divinity. For instance, the call that
Ezekiel heard in order to be a prophet involved a voice ordering him to open his mouth and eat a manuscript: “But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious
like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee. And when I looked,
behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein” (Ezekiel 2:8 -9).
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Thus, one portion of being is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring. To the
devourer it seems as if the producer was in chains, but it not so; he only takes
portions of existence and fancies hem the whole. But the Prolific would cease
to be prolific unless the devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights . . .
These two classes of men are always upon earth, and they should be enemies.
(Blake, A Critical “ The Marriage” 15)

For instance, Urizen is explicitly described as an “unprolific ” (Blake, The Book
of Urizen 44) devourer, who seeks to take the place of the prolific and
consequently finds it difficult to create the world of matter, an enterprise which
seemed “to involve an immense and laborious effort by the creator, and to form
part of his tortuous attempts to bring himself to consciousness ” (Aubrey 109). In
addition, since its creation, Urizen’s stomach is hungry (53), an attribute which
is repeated when Los – in a scene m irroring either Abraham’s willingness to
sacrifice Isaac or the disposition of pagan fathers to offer up their children –
takes his own son, Orc, upon a mountain to be sacrificed out of fear and jealousy “Beneath Urizen’s deathful shadow ” (59), as “ Urizen crav[ed] with
hunger ” (59). This may symbolize “ the way the older generation attempts to
repress the energy of the young. . . . . when he hears the cries of Orc’, almost as
if, like a vampire, [Urizen] wants to drink the blood from the sacrifice of Orc to
restore his own vitality ” (Cantor 53). Another such example of Urizen as child
devourer is given in Vala, or The Four Zoas , where Jerusalem is forced to offer
her children to Urizen: “ Jerusalem/ Captive . . . impell’d/ To worship Urizen’s
Dragon form, to offer her own Children/ Upon the bloody Altar ” (280). In
typically Urizenic fashion, the god of reason does not care about the sacrificed
life, but merely about himself. Although in The Book of Urizen Los appears
fallen as well – “His great hammer fell from his hand” (54) –he is the prolific of
Blake’s myth,
154 the embodiment of Poetic Imagination and creativity (Foster
Damon, A Blake 246-7), the blacksmith who necessarily gives a form to Urizen
This way, reading becomes an act of ingestion, as the “ reader eats up written words with his
or her eyes. The episode suggests becoming one with the text, making it completely part of
oneself” (Connolly 1) in a similar manner in which Ginsberg uses ingestion to show the
young visionaries’ eating of the lab stew of the imagination or the poem of life.
154 S. Foster Damon also notes that Los is t he creator of Golgonooza – the city of art in Vala or
The Four Zoas –, and of Jerusalem, which represents freedom (247).
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in order to limit the expansion of error and also creates the mat erial sun in The
Book of Los , standing in contrast to the destructive force of Urizen.
Falling in line with this tradition, Ginsberg’s Moloch eats the
imagination of the young hipsters who are the epitome of prolific artists,
overflowing with ideas and por trayed as “talk[img] continuously for seventy
two hours from pad to park to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge ” (11), as they “scribble[x] all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations ” (16) and wave their manuscripts along with their genitals in
protest (13). As Tony Trigilio asserts, “Moloch consumes the prophetic
imagination, casting it as unnatural and deviant; like Blake’s Urizenic God, he
reigns over a world cast in the image of his own singularity” ( Strange 145).
Destroying the powerful, youthful and explosively creative abilities of the prolific, the “ anti-creative violence of child -sacrifice to Moloch ” (Johnson 218)
is indicative of the repressing function of the Devourer (Bloom, Blake’s 92).
Hence, the heavy, st atic image of Moloch is contrasted to the fluid, ever shifting
picture of the Beats who display excessive mobility and productivity. Moreover,
the consumption by fire may also be regarded in relation to the destructive post –
war consumption boom and greed of Moloch’s devourer -culture which, in its
purchasing mania, treated their youth as mass -produced goods and bargained
their freedom and idiosyncrasy. Yet Moloch is as indispensible to the hipsters as Urizen is to Los, forming a contrary without which the pr olific could not
function.
To conclude, Ginsberg’s Moloch is overtly rooted in the image of the
Old Testament Moloch, yet through the choice of this particular deity, Ginsberg creates a link in the cultural chain that unites his Moloch with Blake’s Urizen.
The Hebrew Bible offers a rather flat image of a merciless pagan deity that is
wrongfully worshiped by Canaanites, but Ginsberg employs it in order to depict
the devastating sacrificing of his young generation to a monstrous military –
industrial complex that knows no spirituality. I n addition, through Milton’s
work, the picture of Moloch is given color and the grisly god is endowed with a
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radical, impulsive and bellicose character, although he reflects the image of an
angel. Undeniably influenced by both the Old Testament and Milton’ s Paradise
Lost, Ginsberg shapes his own creation and instills in him a pattern of error
which, though the chosen intertextual references, manages to both repeat and
culturally reconstruct the figure of William Blake’s Urizen.
Like his Blakean demiurge pr edecessor, the Moloch of “ Howl ” is
identified not just with a false god, but with the epitome of falsehood and his
self-made kingdom is merely a shameful imitation of reality that reflects his
own self -centered image. The solitary character of Ginsberg’s M oloch repeats
Urizen’s self -love, but reinterprets it in a way that suits 1950s American society
– hence, selfishness becomes a characteristic of rapacious capitalism that insists
on consumerism and warfare, disregarding the spiritual core of its ‘children’,
who are thrown into the fire of self -interest, standardization and violence. As
Urizen is an Eternal, Moloch too is an angel, albeit a degenerated one who has
forgotten his true origin and has been blinded by pride and ambition.
Consequently, instead of uniting, Moloch continues Urizen’s infectious chain of
divisions with his own: the new generation becomes divided from the old one
and man loses touch with God, which brings about suffering and death. In
Moloch’s case death is a by -product of war and of t he rigidity of the molds in
which the young are forced into fitting. However, death and madness are also set in the positive light of martyrdom and of self -sacrifice out of love for
defending the value of leading a spiritual life. As John Milton sets Moloc h, the
child destroyer against Crist- child, the redeemer, Ginsberg also positions the
hipsters and Carl Solomon in positions of child- saviors that defy the flames of
the furnace and stand triumphant in front of Moloch at the end of “ Howl ”. This
contrast can also be explained by means of the two categories of people, or rather parts of the self that William Blake calls the ‘devourer’ and the ‘prolific’.
Once again, Moloch appears as a Urizenic devourer who is destructive,
oppressive, static and impassive, me taphorically consuming the imagination of
the prolific hipsters, who are creators, liberators, constantly on the move and
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overflowing with emotion, but also provides their necessary contrary. Thus,
analyzed more profoundly, in a manner that goes beyond the obvious references
to the Old Testament and to Milton, the abomination of Ginsberg’s Moloch weighs heavily on American society because it is formed of the same iron and
brass as Urizen, ensuring society’s immersion into error and prevent ing its
mystical a scent towards salvation.

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IV. THE NECESSITY TO REMEMBER AND ACTUALIZE:
HOW URIZEN AND MOLOCH RULE

IV. 1. THE MIND. Urizen, Moloch and the Spectral Single Vision
of Hyper- Rationalization

Described as the “ Eternal Mind ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 51),
William Blake’s Urizen is embraced as a figure of memory for Allen Ginsberg’s
Moloch, “whose name is the Mind! ” (“Howl ” 22). Not only are these two gods
both external and internal, functioning on both a cosmic and an individual
level,155 but they are inextricably bound by their blind reliance on reason and
their obsession with the mind, the second mnemonic core that enables the figure
of memory of Urizen to remain fixed, while also leav ing room f or interpretation.
Since Urizen and Moloch have been identified as erroneous deities in the
context of “an excess of reason [that] dominates the episteme of each poet’s
particular era” (Trigilio, Strange 14), the objective of this subchapter is to reveal
the context that enabled two gods associated with the mind and its capacity for reason to be perceived as villains who deny the “ visionary mode ” (Dandeles 3)
of existence and creation. It also seeks to establ ish the role of the Urizenic
Spectre in The Book of Urizen and its reflection in “ Howl ”, as well as to
determine the manner in which the American remembrance of the Blakean Zoa of reason transports the English bard’s denunciation of the reductive logic
behind epistemic and scientific exploration into a Beat warning against mid –
twentieth century hyper -rationalization.
Writing in the so -called Age of Reason, when “Newton’s third law and
Pope’s heroic couplet ensured, in their respective spheres, a well -tempe red and
balanced creation ” (Youngquist 117) and when intuition, imagination and
inspiration were considered to be less valuable than reason, William Blake felt
155 The next subchapter will dwell on this twofold nature of Urizen and Moloch in relation to
Jung’s concept of ‘the shadow’.
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the need to warn his contemporaries against falling prey to an overreliance on
reason and to the egocentric behavior promoted by the supporters of science and
experimentalism.156

The Negation is the Spectre, The Reasoning Power in Man:
This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal
Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway [sic]
. . .
I come in Self -annihilation and the grandeur of Inspiration;
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour,
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory157 by Inspiration,
To cast off Bacon, Locke and Newton from Albion’s covering,
To take off his filthy garments158 and clothe him with Imagination;
. . .
To cast off the idiot Questioner, who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly gin
Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publis hes Doubt and calls it Knowledge; whose Science is Despair.
(Blake, The Complete “Milton ” 142)

To let oneself be dominated by reason meant to negate one’s spirit and lose the
ability to imaginatively perceive one’s own immortality and the divinity of th e
world. The Reasoning Power is a false body because it gives people “ the illusion
of omnipotence and omniscience ” (Roszak 142), as well as the illusion of self –
reliance concerning the knowledge of the universe. The illusory nature of the Spectre
159 is alluded to in its very name. It is “ a ghost, phantom or shadow,
dissolving the determinate powers of the imagination” (Vine xii) and attempting
to defeat visionary perception. Also, because in Blake’s perspective science and
its ever -doubting attitude lead nowhere but to opacity, darkness and narrowness
156 John We sley’s Methodism was also a reaction to this type of rationality, as it “stressed
‘enthusiasm’ and ‘ecstasy’ in religious experience” (Pellnat 7).
157 As opposed to inspiration, memory was seen by Blake as a faculty than can only repeat
what is already kn own instead of creating something new. Reason is associated with
memory on the same grounds.
158 Allen Ginsberg would later use a similar clothing metaphor by implying that his country’s angelic status could be acquired only after undressing: “America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?” (Ginsberg, Howl “America”). Thus, sexual liberation
is intertwined with the process of casting off the restrictive limits of reason.
159 “Raine identifies Plato and Plotinus as the sources for Blake ’s Spectres; they are souls who
have descended through the gate of birth into Generation; they are dead, she explains,
through ‘the loss of vision of eternity’” (Freeman 203).
186

of perception,160 it leaves people with nothing other than perpetually
unanswerable questions and it clothes the world with filthy garments and
despair. The Spectre is associated with the Reasoning faculty of the mind
because the latter indulges the self, giving rise to pride and self -love and
generating a deadly sleep161 that renders men blind to their spiritual nature.
However, since reason should be countered by faith and prophetic imagination, the spectral selfhood should be entirely annihilated, destroyed in order to
“overcome . . . self -centredness ” (Freeman 196) and allow for selfless acts of
love and disinterested compassion. According to Blake’s myth, it is the Spectre that best exemplifies the
principle of negation in human beings. It is very important to note that
‘negation’ and ‘contrary’ are very different in Blakean mythology, as “ Blake’s
contraries bear contradiction within themselves, inhabiting one another
oppositionally or dialectically, whi le Blakean ‘Negation’ aims to abstract itself
from this involvement, positing itself as an absolute ” (Vine 13), when in reality
it is but a part or a ratio.
162 After the fragmentation of Albion, the Primordial
Man into the four Zoas, the latter were further divided into four forms: Spectre,
160 Taking after Plato, Blake renders narrowness of perception though the image o f the cave,
which appears in many of the English prophet’s works, including The Book of Urizen and
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell .
161 In the illustration etched on Plate 41 of Jerusalem, Blake included a small scroll with the
following lines written on it in reverse: “Each Man is in his Spectre’s power/ Untill [sic] the
arrival of that hour/ When his Humanity awake/ And cast his Spectre into the Lake” ( The
Complete 810). The lake may be “the Lake/ Of Los. that ever burneth with fire, ever & ever
Amen!” ( Blake, The Complete “Milton” 140), enabling the annihilation of all errors (Foster
Damon, A Blake 381) The same elimination of the Spectre, albeit this time through the
power of forgiveness is mentioned in one of Blake’s short poems: “My Spectre around me
night & day/ Like a Wild beast guards my way . . . & Throughout all Eternity/ I forgive you
and you forgive me/ As our dear Redeemer said/ This is the Wine & this the Bread” (Blake,
The Complete “My Spectre” 475 -477). One such example of forgiveness of the Spectre is
given by Blake not in the case of Urizen, but in that of Los, who is presented in Night the Seventh of The Four Zoas as embracing his Spectre “first as a brother/ Then as another
Self” ( The Complete 367), which entails that the Spectre is simultaneously a brother, a part
of the Self and an Other. Therefore, the act of forgiveness that brings about the annihilation of selfhood functions on multiple levels: “The Spectre stands for both ‘sinner’ (one’s fellow
sufferer) and ‘sin’ (accusation and jealousy). Paradoxically, Los expunges from his
personality the ‘sin’ of ‘domineering lust’ personified by the Spectre by the very action of embracing the Spectre as a ‘sinner’ and a part of himself” (Moskal 118). Note that in all
cases, the Spectre (Satanic selfishness), not the Zoa (Eternal part of Man) is annihilated.
162 The ‘ratio’ is a Greek term turned into a derogatory concept by Blake, to denote “the
reductiveness of reason” (Freeman 187).
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Emanation, Shadow and Humanity. Consequently, the Spectre is part of every
Zoa and it can be either latent and benign (when united with its Emanation) or
active and malignant (when separated from his counterpart that represented a
source of feminine empathy): “ Being separated from his Emanation, the Spectre
is completely unable to sympathize with any other person ” (Forster Damon, A
Blake 381), and being separated from his (divine) Humanity, it brings man
closest to a Satanic state.163 Therefore, Man encloses himself and takes the
Reasoning Spectre to be a whole, when in reality it is but a self -reflecting Ratio
that contracts imagination (Altizer, The New 24) and reduces it to
demonstration: “In ignorance to view a small porti on & think that all/ And call it
Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life ” (Blake, The Complete
“Jerusalem ” 216) or “ He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who
sees the ratio only sees himself only” (Blake, A Critical “ There is No ” 8).
In the case of The Book of Urizen, I argue that the eponymous character
lets himself be governed by his Spectre, “ the Great Selfhood ” (Blake, The
Complete “Jerusalem ” 255), which provides the main impetus for his rebellion
and iron fist dominion. It also seems clear that the Spectre is linked to fallen
reason – which is detached from imagination and becomes self -absorbed – and
to man’s tendency towards scientific exploration though generalization and
objectification: “it is the Reasoning Power/ An Abstract objecting power, that
Negatives every thing/ This is the Spectre of Man ” (Blake, The Complete
“Jerusalem ” 153). Thus, throughout the book that describes his origin, Urizen is
portrayed as being the negation of everything: he is unprolific, unseen, unknown, unorganized, unmeasurable and unbearable, and the “ serpents of [his]
reason ” (Dandeles 28) – represented in Plate 7 as they entrap the entrapper (the
Spectral state), as well as its disciples – form an inverted scene of Christ’s
crucifixion.
163 While human beings are ephemeral, states are permanent in Blake’s perspective: “So Men
pass on: but States remain permanent for ever” (Blake, The Complete , “Jerusalem” 229) or
“The Spiritual States of/ the Soul are all Eternal/ Distinguish between the/ Man , & his
present State” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem” 200). Consequently, people pass through
various states like travellers in various lands.
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Blake’ s Zoa of reason is arguably most under “his Spectrous Power ”
(Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ” 144) in The Book of Urizen, where the
character is most adamant in building a world in which he places himself as the
central element and the source of all, unquestioning authority. If in Vala or the
Four Zoas , Urizen starts to doubt the rightfulness of his disobedience – as his
peers acknowledge “ Urizen, who was Faith & certainty, is chang’d to Doubt ”
(146) – , which is a first step towards redemption,164 in The Book of Urizen, the
character is determined to build an empire different from that of the Eternals and found it with neatly ordered and well -measured bricks and by establishing static,
mathematical laws of nature that reflect his obsession with reason. In achieving
the materialization of the world, which is synonymous with the fall, Urizen
performs the initial and most destructive act of negation by trading eternal life
and infinity for mortality and limitation, as he shapes a “ lifeless, reversed, and
anti-representational ‘anti -’ world that constitutes the mental abode of Urizenic
programming” (“ The Great Selfhood ”). In addition, the Spectre seems to be the
one fuelling Urizen’s all -devouring ambitions: “ the Spectre is in Every Man
insane, brutish,/ Deform’d, that I am thus a ravening devouring lust continually/ Craving & devouring” (Blake, Vala 228). As it has been discussed in the
previous chapter, Urizen and Moloch take the roles of ‘devourers’ in Blake’s and Ginsberg’s mythological systems, contrasting the ‘prolific’ nature of Los
and the Beat hipsters, respectively. Instead of being aware of his Spectre and
attempting to fight him off, as Los does: “Thou art my Pride & Self –
righteousness: I have found thee out ” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ” 151),
Urizen fully embraces this side of him and is never aware of the fact that he is
being possessed by error.
But the Spectre like a hoar frost & a Mildew rose over Albion
Saying, I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!
Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!
Who teach Doubt & Experiment . . . (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ” 203)
164 As opposed to The Book of Urizen, in Vala, or The Four Zoas , Urizen overtly
acknowledges his mistake: “Urizen said: ‘I have Erred, & my Error remains with me’”
(292).
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Yet why does Blake specifically mention Francis Bacon, John Locke and
Isaac Newton in relation to the Spectre, forming what critics have called a
Blakean “Satanic trinity ” (Foster Damon, A Blake 243) and how are they related
to the Spectral aspect of Urizen? According to Jonathan Israel, in the 1730s English ideas started to heavily influence European Enlightenment, creating a
true “Anglomania ” and bringing about the almost universal eulogization of
Locke and Newton (515). Blake maintained that he had read Locke and Bacon’s most famous works when he was very young and famously stated that he “ felt
the Same Contempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now. They mock Inspiration &
Vision ” (Blake, The Complete “ Annotations to the Works of Sir Joshua
Reynolds ” 660). Despite the stress that the above -mentioned figures of the
Enlightenment laid on the limits of reason and the aspect of “ training the mind
to curb its vanit y” (Corneanu 154), Blake believed that the very nature of their
study could not go beyond “ a half -knowledge born of pride ” (Gilpin 37) and a
hypocritical attitude towards reality. This deceptive behavior, manipulative
abilities and denial of vision are pre sented in an extreme form in the character of
Urizen, as he teaches his subjects (and worshipers) how to ensure that factory
workers are most productive. Since “ dominion, not human betterment is
Urizen’s goal ” (Ackland 183), the ‘secret’ seems to lie in va luing reason over
people divine humanity.

“Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts ”
“Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; & when a man looks pale ”
“With labour & abstinence, say he looks healthy & happy; ”
“And when his children sicken, let them die; they are enough”
“Born, even too many, & our Earth will be overrun ”. (Blake, Vala 220)165

Thus, Urizen’s aim is to destroy Imagination, as he lends himself completely to
the destructive pragmatism of industrializing forces166 and the harmful
165 Thinking in strictly reasonable terms, children become nothing but statistics.
166 Throughout his work, Blake uses the symbol of the ‘mills’ to refer to the process of
industrialization. Y et, in Vala or The Four Zoas , the mills are redeemed when “Dark
Urthona [takes] the Corn out of the Stores of Urizen” and grinds it “in his rumbling Mills”
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inhumanity of over -rationalization and self -interest, in disregard of the hardships
of the individual lives of one’s fellow human beings.
As founder of experimental science and a supporter of empirical
knowledge professed in his The Advancem ent of Learning (1605), Francis
Bacon considered doubt to be the most important starting point of intellectual
inquiry and arguably the greatest virtue: “ If a man will begin in certainties he
shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubt s he shall end in
certainties ” (Bacon 41). However, for Blake doubt was never the answer: “ If the
sun and moon should doubt/ They’d immediately go out ” (Blake, A Critical
“Auguries ” 30) and neither was Bacon’s “ devotion to monarchy,167 money, and
Reason ” (Foster Damon, A Blake 35), which advanced the materialism of the
time and made Bacon “a Contemptible & Abject Slave ” to his king and a
“contemplative atheist” (Blake, The Complete “Annotations to Bacon” 624,
626) in Blake’s perspective. In Novum Organum (1620), Bacon sought to warn
against the idols of the mind and focus on the discovery of general axioms based
on the experience of the senses (Rogers 47) and the interpretation of nature.
Therefore, he relied on experiments and the collection of data that underwent
analysis for the purpose of tracing universal principles though “ inductive
science ” (M. Green 10). Bacon’s theories of error that warned against the
seductive fallacy of the imagination, his “discipline of examination ” (Corneanu
30) and his comm itment “to legitimate inquiry in the sense of a personal trial”
(Corneanu 43) determined Blake to take a defensive stance to what he perceived
to be a direct attack to his innermost principles: “ ‘The ‘great Bacon,’ as he is
called (I call him the little Ba con), says that everything must be done by
experiment. His first principle is un¬belief ” (Blake, “Opinions: Notes on
(318), creating the Bread of Ages and thus “transforming the instrument of limitation (the
mill) into a tool that will permit humanity to ‘behold the Angelic spheres’” (M. Green 12).
167 In Blake: Prophet Against Empire , David Erdman highlighted Blake’s anti -monarchical
views by interpreting his famous picture “Glad Day” as a protest against the English J une
riots in favor of the American Revolution (7 -10). It was a matter of independence over
oppression and passionate rebellion over tyrant reason. Moreover, Blake himself stated that
love had nothing to do with the king: “Go love without the help of any k ing on earth”
(Blake, A Critical “The angel that presided o’er my birth” 302).
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Reynolds.” ) and “ What Bacon calls Lies is Truth itself ” (Blake, The Complete
“Annotations to Bacon” 621). The experimentation that Bacon and his fellow
new ‘scientists’ promoted is alluded to in The Book of Urizen , as the protagonist
“works to dissect, collect, isolate, and preserve in laboratory jars, vampirish
specimens from his deathly world” (Gilpin 52), in futile attempts to gain
knowledge by examining them. In this process, Urizen merely manages to
continue the chain of his divisions168 by turning his (scientific) interest towards
body parts of what used to be whole living creatures.
And his world teem'd vast enormities,
Fright'ning, faithless, fawning,
Portions of life, similitudes
Of a foot, or a hand, or a head,
Or a heart, or an eye, they swam mischievous,
Dread terrors, delighting in blood. (Blake, The Book of Urizen 60)
M
oreover, Bacon’s monarchical devotion triggered Blake to maintain in his
annotations that “ King James was Bacon’s Primum Mobile ” (The Complete
632), which is further satirized in Urizen’s self -proclaimed role of both king and
god.
John Locke, “ the founder of British empiricism” (Tipton 56), his tabula
rasa theory and philosophy of the five senses expressed in his An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690) denied the possibility of innate
knowledge,169 attributing learning solely to passive sensorial perc eption and
active rational reflection (M. Green 27), whereas for Blake “ Innate Ideas are in
Every Man, Born with him; they are truly Himself. The Man who says that we
168 Urizen’s sons also represent a division of the four traditional elements of nature from their
natural function and their debasement into a fallen state: “The sons are describ ed as
suffering from the limitations and deformities that their father’s violent and catastrophic theories of creation have wrought upon them. Named Thiriel, Utha, Grodna, and Fuzon,
these elements have turned fully monstrous in Urizen’s world and wail and lament their
state” (Gilpin 52).
169 According to Locke, because of a lack of reasonable evidence concerning “innatism”
(Tipton 60), human beings cannot be said to carry with them knowledge upon their birth: “If we will attentively consider new -born childr en, we shall have little reason to think that they
bring many ideas into the world with them. For, bating perhaps, some faint ideas of hunger,
and thirst, and warmth, and some pains, which they may have felt in the womb, there is not
the least appearance of any settled ideas at all in them” (Locke 36).
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have No Innate Ideas must be a Fool & a Knave, Having no Con- Science170 or
Innate Science ” (Blake, “ Opinions: Notes on Reynolds.” ). The philosophy of the
five senses constantly re -affirms Man’s Fall (Makdisi 261)171 and is mentioned
overtly as being inspired by Urizen and implemented by Locke and Newton:
“Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete/ Urizen wept & gave it into the
hands of Newton & Locke ” (Blake, The Complete “The Song of Los ” 68). In
addition, rejecting the epistemological basis for knowledge, Blake underlines
the deceptive nature of the senses and the importance of regarding them not as
sources for understanding, but as mere tools that should not be used to perceive
reality with, but through: “ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any
more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it” (qtd. in Van Meurs 276). When a person relies completely on the
senses, then he becomes Urizenic, since “Urizen himself signifies all error
caused when perception occurs only through sensory organs ” (Easson and
Easson 69) or only through the use of reason, without the involvement of
imagination. Furthermore, Locke regards madness not as a loss of reason, but as wrong reasoning (Rovang 38) and warns against enthusiastic
172
“pseudoprophets ” who rely on fancies instead of reason (Glausser, Locke 1), a
perspectiv e antagonistic to that of Blake’s, since the latter’s perception of
madness involved the right vision of true spiritual prophecy, which necessarily
involved Imagination and was worn as a badge of honor, despite its employment
as an insult towards him.
Starting with his unfinished early satire “ An Island in the Moon” (1784),
Blake made sure to express his opinion with respect to the philosophy of John
Lock. In the above -mentioned piece of prose, the character Scopprell
170 The spelling of conscience as con -science may be a pun for the deceptive nature of science
which acts as a con or fraud.
171 As Saree Makdisi maintains in his explanation of Blake’s aversion towards empiricism, “it
is precisely in accepting that what can be perceived defines what is possible, and that what
is possible defines what can be perceived, that the fall takes place, every day” (261).
172 The term ‘Enthusiast’ was used in the eighteenth century to denote radical Dissenters, since
“the term suggests the religious ecstasy of its etymology, ‘filled with God’, anathema to
Deists who claimed the Creator is only knowable through deductive reason. Blake referred
to himself as an ‘Enthusiastic hope -fostered vi sionary’” (Freeman 87).
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mispronounces Locke’s name twice: the f irst time as “Lookye” and the second
time as “ Lock ” (The Complete “An Island ” 456). In both instances, the names
are indicative of features that the English visionary would later assign to Urizen.
Lookye reflects a reliance on senses and particularly on si ght “Look ye ”, which
can be said to be a pun in the name of Urizen as well, pronounced as “ your eyes
in” (Kozlowski 411), which would further strengthen the character’s connection
to the Vegetative eye instead of the Spiritual ear (reserved for Urthona).173 This
is the reason why the call of awakening is meant to be heard – “ Eternals, I hear
your call gladly ” and “The dead heard the voice of the child ” (Blake, The Book
of Urizen 44, 59) –, while the error of reason attaches itself to the sense of sight
– “Lo, a shadow of horror is risen” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44). ‘Lock’
emphasizes the locking of the intellect which has shrunk from eternity and is
reflected in the myriad references to imprisonment in relation to Urizen in The Book of Urizen – where the f allen Eternal is “ In chains of the mind locked up”
(51) – and throughout Blake’s mythological writings, thus implying the error in
Urizen or “ err-reason ” (Kozlowski 411). Continuing this line of thought, The
Book of Urizen describes how the Eternals create a tent around Urizen, Los and
Enitharmon, wrapping them in “ curtains of darkness ” (56),
174 fastened with
golden hooks and woven with a woof called Science (56 -57) so that they “may
no more behold them ” (56). In other words, science appears as an opaque fabr ic
that separates people from divinity, managing to both keep a shameful creation out of the Eternals’ sight and to keep people in a state of darkness and block
their view of spirituality. Hence, science becomes “ a borderline, a limit, [which]
matches well the Blakean thought that empirical knowledge is never able to
‘see’ the true nature of things ” (Csirmaz, “The Second ”). The woof may also
173 Urthona, or prelapsarian Los, placed his Emanations in the ears (called auricular nerves) of
an Edenic -Earth: “Urthona was his name/ In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human Life,/
Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations p ropagated” ( Vala 114).
174 Blake’s curtain of darkness seems to have been directly inspired from the Gnostic
philosophy, which mentions a ‘curtain’ that prevents people from accessing the truth. Its equivalent in Hermetic tradition is “‘the veil’, which blin ds s from seeing the eternal reality
. . . the Kabbalah Ruah ha Kodesh, ‘the shroud of the soul’, the Hindus maya , ‘the veil of
illusion’, and so on” (Tarr, “William Blake”).
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refer to industrialization which was most evident in the textile industry
(Glausser, Locke 5). The fact that this woof is attributed to the Satanic influence
of Locke and Newton becomes clear in Milton , when the prophetic author
addresses Satan with the following rhetorical question: “ Are not thou not
Newton’s Pantocrator,175 weaving the Woof of Locke? ” (Blake, The Complete
“Milton ” 98).
Sir Isaac Newton, who “designed the . . . telescope . . . invented calculus
. . . revolutionized the study of mechanics and physics with three basic laws of
motion [and] . . . discovered the universal law of gravity ” (“Sir Isaac ” 2155)
envisioned the universe as an impersonal machine based on “’laws’ of nature
[that] are continuous mathematical functions which are immutable, static and
unchanging ” (Ault 6), since his system is made of stable, absolute and his atoms
are fixed (Ault 5) . This provides a solid base for universal, abstract inductions,
but for Blake: “ To generalize is to be an idiot . . . general knowledges are those
knowledge that idiots possess ” (Blake, A Critical “From the annotations to
Volume I of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Works ” 75). Moreover, the English scientist’s
focus on explaining the nature of the particles of light and his subsequent
definition of the latter – “rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect
to a difference in their incidence, were, accordi ng to their degrees of
refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall” (Newton qtd. in “ Sir
Isaac ” 2157) – are met with a metaphysical counter -perspective in which the sun
is understood in relation to angels instead of natural laws. When aske d by Crabb
Robinson whether he sees the sun as “ a round disk of fire somewhat ‘like a
Guinea’ ”, Blake replied: “ ‘O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the
Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord Almighty’ ” (qtd. in Van
Meurs 276). The same sharp difference of perspective can be noted in Newton’s
apprehension of the universe “as one vast clock, [and his] claiming that the right
way to understand any part of it was simply to find its ‘mechanism’ ” (Midgley
167), whereas Blake saw the world through the lens of revelation.
175 ‘Pantocrator’ refers to the Greek Orthodox tradition of attributing God and specifically
Jesus the power to rule over all creation.
195

In order to artistically render the Urizenic mentality of Newton, Blake
illustrated the great physicist in a painting by the same name in 1795, depicting
him at the bottom of the ocean, hunchback in order to reach a scroll on which he
traces geometrical figures which determine “ the mechanics of the universe”
(Gilpin 41) with the help of a pair of compasses, which may be the same “golden compasses ” used by Urizen in The Book of Urizen (59) in order to
measure the world he created or the same pair of compasses visually represented in the frontispiece of Europe, A Prophecy , where Urizen, the Zoa of
“mathematical rationality ” (Israel 518) is seen as the Ancient of Days who
similarly attempts to encompass the world with a pair of compasses, embracing
a scientific method for creating and simultaneously limiting the natural world. It
is also noteworthy, that Plate 6 of The Book of Urizen envisions the protagonist
submerged in water, as “All the myriads of Eternity,/ All the wisdom and joy of
life/ Roll like a sea around him” (54) – a condition which is mirrored by
Urizen’s earthly reflection, Newton. The fact that both representatives of reason
are illustrated in this context makes a mockery of their attempts to devise static, immutable, definite laws of single vision in a clearly fluid, indefinite and
impossible to contain, visionary environment.
176
Gathering all the negative attributes discussed above, William Blake
created Urizen, the Zoa of reason and limitation, upon the rebellion of whom the
Veggetative world was created. This demonized figure strives to understand his
new world and establish its boundaries by measuring it: “ Times on times he
devided & measur’d ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44), yet his limiting and
delimiting “betrays the cosmological attribute of infinity itself ” (Pfau 967).
Therefore, Urizen falls into the trap of reason and becomes vain, imagining himself to b e the sole hero, creator and savior: “I alone ” (Blake, The Book of
Urizen 46-47). However, the author depicts Urizen as an “ abstracted . . . self –
clos’d . . . self -contemplating shadow ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 44- 46) and
176 A similar idea is also presented by critic Jason Snart, although in a different context (that of
turning symbolic works into material books). For Blake the book becomes a “material
meton ym for the ten sion between the fixity of a single perspective o n the one hand, an d the
fluidity of imaginative vision on the o ther” (243).
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therefore as an Eternal possessed by his own Spectre, whose self –
aggrandizement and proneness towards abstract negation renders him an enemy
of imagination. Despite the fact that “ no mystic has ever attacked reason with
greater passion than does Blake ” (Altizer, The New 21), there is rec ognition of
the intrinsic value of science, as long as it is stripped of selfishness and is no
longer tyrannical and oppressive, but holy. Thus, Bacon, Locke and Newton are
placed in Heaven at the end of Jerusalem , counterbalancing three great
representati ves of imagination and inspiration: Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Milton; the Spectre is forgiven and Urizen is redeemed at the end of Vala , or
The Four Zoas which also inspires Ginsberg to mention the saving innate
holiness of Moloch in “ Footnote to Howl ” and thus justify “evil . . . as an
important part of ontological development ” (Csikós, “ Urizen ” 131).
As one of the leading voices of counterculture in mid- twentieth century
America, Allen Ginsberg assumed the role of bearer of memory and used his
literar y influence in order to symbolically revive William Blake’s Urizen in the
context of his generation’s particular struggles. Writing in the nuclear age of the Cold War, the American poet -prophet found himself deploring the overuse of
reason and its resulted selfishness almost one hundred and fifty years after Blake
had, but the critique was no longer directed towards empiricism, for
“contemporary context puts the objectivised meaning into its own perspective,
giving it its own relevance ” (J. Assmann, “ Collec tive” 130). However, carrying
on Blake’s cultural legacy of the fight against the perceived supremacy of
reason, Ginsberg attacked its narrowness of vision (which Blake called ‘Ratio’)
and understood that the Enlightenment’s “lure of Reduction” (Midgley xi ii)
according to which the universe was a machine (Voltaire’s watch or Newton’s clock) would only diminish its grandeur through abstraction: “ Hyper -rationalism
reduces natural complexity of nature through narrow thought abstraction”
(Ginsberg, Collected “New Democracy Wish List ” 1063). This type of rationale
paves the way towards dictatorship and war, which prompts critic Reinhart Koselleck to maintain that “ it was in the Enlightenment to which both liberal –
197

democratic America and socialist Russia rightly re traced themselves ” during the
Cold War (1). Reason seemed to justify the existence of war and it seemed to
legitimize its rightfulness on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The two world
super -powers were in a position to make use of strategies based on cold
reasoning, science and mathematical calculations.

So what was Cold War rationality? . . . It frequently took the form of
algorithms – rigid rules that . . . delineate the most efficient means toward
certain given goals . . . episodes were analysed into si mple, sequential steps; the
peculiarities of context, whether historical or cultural, gave way to across- the-
board generalizations . . . And finally, at least ideally, advocates hoped that the
rules could be applied mechanically. (Erickson 3 -4).

Yet, as a seventeen year old Ginsberg writes to his brother Eugene who is in the
army, “there was never any real cause for a war; no war was really every
justified ” (qtd. in “ The Beat Generation at War ”) – a stance he maintained
throughout his adult life, as proven by one of his journal entries nearly twenty
years later (1961), in which he stresses the injustice and selfishness behind
murderous Korean War and warfare in general.

How many millions died? What for? Only ten years ago! All newspapers
portrayed this new war as a Just War. Portugal took part! The last three
American Wars were Just! War I, War II, Korea. I say none of them were just wars. I say whoever preaches War preparedness is a self -interested murderer.
(Ginsberg, Journals 273)

Ginsberg’s Blakean dis trust in blind reasoning and his constant search for
manners of enhancing his imaginative and humane faculties,177 – “I call all
Powers of imagination to my side in this auto to make Prophecy . . . William
Blake the invisible father of English visions ” (Gins berg, Collected “Wichita
Vortex Sutra 413) makes him denounce the war as a means of securing the profit of big governments such as that of the United States and Russia (Ghosal
131), as millions of people lose their lives for the well -being of a few wealth y,
ambitious, hyper -rational leaders. Accordingly, the Moloch of “Howl ” is the
177 As Ginsberg maintains: “It occurred to me early, and is a persistent thought of mine . . .
problem of matter & infinity & origin of Creation to be assessed & thought into without the
aid of reason or science, but with the inner imagination” ( Journals 12).
198

cornerstone of war (21) and is only interested organizing armies and gathering
wealth for “ blind capitals! ” (22), ignoring the sobs of young boys in armies
(21).178
In remembrance of William Blake’s Spectre, Ginsberg makes “ Moloch,
the machine . . . the Demonic Spectre of ‘Howl’ ” (Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg 94). I
have discussed Moloch’s inherent selfishness in the previous chapter, but now,
as it marks the Spectre within, it becomes coupled with negation and reason.
Not only is the American poet’s horrendous god “most intent upon burying alive
. . . the cur ative powers of the visionary imagination” (Roszak 137), but he also
negates empathy, spirituality, love and prophetic revelations, which have not
place in a reason -ruled world: “ Visions! omens! hallucinations! Miracles!
ecstasies! gone down the American r iver” (“Howl ” 22). Moreover, there are two
overt references to the notion of ‘spectre’ in “ Howl ” and both are in relation to
Moloch, as the latter turns poverty into “ the spectre of genius ” (22) and creates
“spectral nations! ” (22). Thus, Moloch either pur posefully impoverishes people
(both economically and spiritually) or deceives them into thinking he is poor,
because although his existence is built on money, he is never satisfied,
descending ever deeper into the error of his selfishness. Also, the idolat rous God
creates false, ghostly images of his own nation and that of the enemy, in order to simplify the situation and create an ‘us vs. them’ mentality that would inevitably
cast the Other nation as being in the wrong. ‘Spectral nations’ can thus be
interpreted as false, reason -bound mental formations of nations that legitimize
the existence of war: “ America it’s them bad Russians . . . The Russia wants to
eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad ” (Ginsberg, Howl “America” 42-43). This
dramatization mocks Amer ican paranoia regarding Russia and exemplifies
though incorrect, child- like grammar, the narrowness of this single vision and
America’s claim to mature reasoning. The association of Moloch’s war –
obsessed and instigative Spectre to that of Urizen is also me ntioned by
178 According to Gary Schmidgall, Ginsberg’s vigorous attack on post -war military and
political systems is endowed to both Willia m Blake’s Jerusalem and Walt Whitman’s
Democratic Visitas (134).
199

Ginsberg, as he refers to Blake’s mythical notion on a sign he composed
specifically for his first participation in an anti- Vietnam War protest.
Man is naked without secrets armed men lack this joy
How many million persons without names?
What do we know of their suffering? . . .
Till his humanity awakes says Blake . . .
End the human war . . .
Enemy – Satan go home!179
I accept America and Red China. (Ginsberg, “October 28, 1963” 11)
T
hus, the remedy to Moloch’s Spectre is Blakean -promoted Divine Humanity,
which rids people of artificiality and selfishness and renders them naked, sincere
and forgiving in front of God.
However, Ginsberg’s generation was in a more immediate life –
threatening situation than that of Blake in relation to the devastating power of
science and its abuse of reason, since the creation and detonation of one of the most lethal weapons of mass destruction, the atomic bomb, opened the way
towards further nuclear experimentation and international competition. The
“science of despair ” that Blake had warned against determined America to make
use of nuclear energy and ultimately take thousands of innocent lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to win World War II. The Soviets followed
with their own atomic bomb explosion in 1949 at a test zone in Kazakhstan.
Despite the immoral consequences, America went ahead with the development
of the hydrogen and the neutron bombs in the early 1950s, as the Cold War
engaged the two nations in a battle of armed forces with m assive investments
180
in nuclear arsenals (Dockrill and Hopkins 54- 55) that although did not include
direct attack between the two superpowers, it claimed the lives of approximately
twenty million people (mainly on Third World soil) between 1945 and 1990
179 By making Satan the enemy, Ginsberg enhances his Blakean attack on selfishness and the
English bard’s proneness towards giving cosmological proportions to earthly events. Thus, Ginsberg ac knowledges the human war as a spiritual war against eternity, a position which
also surfaces in his journal: “They want my body for their war against the Gods” (Ginsberg, Journals 171).
180 For instance, America’s “military defense budget . . . grew from $1 2 billion in 1950 to $44
billion in 1953, Eisenhower’s first year in office” (McNesse 81).
200

(McMahon 57). Tragedy was reduced to numbers and statistics, as the Urizenic
Government was not interested in valuing individual lives and Ginsberg, along
with most of the members of the Beat Generation became obsessed181 with the
“seeds of karmic horror: mass death, mass murder [that] were planted in those
years ” (“Online Interviews with Allen Ginsberg ”) in the name of scientific
progress and victory over the unrighteous: “ The pilots are sweating and nervous
at the controls in the hot cabins./ Over what souls will they loose their loveless
bombs?” (Ginsberg, Collected “Sather Gate Illumination ” 150). The American
prophet needed to let the world know that the faithless “ science of despair ”
would be America’s grave-digger: “I see nothing but bombs . . . War is abstract .
. . These are obvious prophecies/ America will be destroyed ” (Ginsberg,
Collected “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” 176-177). In strongly associating Moloch
with the war and the “monstrous bombs ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22), Ginsberg
endows the Urizenic figure of memory with a specific relationship to his own
space and time (J. Assmann, Cultural 24).
Since both sides were “ Furious in pride of Selfhood” (Blake, The
Complete “Jerusalem ” 208) and unwilling to compromise, 1950s America
started to undergo “ intensiv e mechanization and more application of new
technology182. . . was taken as the supreme ideology ” (“Beat Generation. ”), as
proof of progress and guarantee of luxury. Yet, technological advances based on
“means -ends rationalism ” (Johnston 106) merely intensified man’s destructive
capacities (Erickson 16). Research on nuclear bombs, rockets and satellites was crucial during the Cold War, in order for America to maintain its technological
lead over Russia. Thus, it became “a thorou ghly positivistic culture, dismal and
spiritless in it obsession with technological prowess ” (Roszak 138). As a side –
181 For instance, Ginsberg’s very poem “Hūm Bomb!” contains the word “bomb” in every line
and the last eight lines repetitively affirm “We don’t bomb!” (Ginsberg, Co llected “Hūm
Bomb!” 577).
182 The technological competitiveness between The United States of America and the Soviet Union was extended beyond the limits of the Earth, as the Soviets successfully launched two satellites into space in 1957 called Sputnik and Vanguard. America soon followed with
its own Explorer I in 1958, starting a space race (McNesse 83) and further nourishing the
Spectre with illusions of space dominion.
201

effect, this transformed people into quasi -dehumanized, locomotive -like figures
who have forgotten about their spiritual selves: “ Poor dead flower? when did
you forget you were a flower? ” (Ginsberg, Collected “Sunflower Sutra ” 147)
and have joined the “cult of Reason ” (Bellarsi 42) instead. In addition, America’
excessive machinery and industrialization is seen as a weight on the poet’s
natur al sainthood (Ginsberg, Howl “America ” 39, “Howl ” 22), which stood in
opposition to his secular environment dominated by “ science and hyper –
rationality ” (Bellarsi 42). Taking a stand against the abstraction of war and the
act of bombing, Ginsberg particula rizes this type of violence and imagines, in a
powerful scene of “Wichita Vortex Sutra ”, the effect such a nuclear weapon
would have on an innocent young girl: “ Flesh soft as a Kansas girl’s/ ripped
open by metal explosion . . . on the other side of the pl anet” (Collected 410).
Just as Blake points out the overwhelming, harmful influence of
empiricism and the new science on the mentally locked institutions of education of his time, Ginsberg recognizes the Moloch scholars that the American
education system p roudly forms. As Blake mentions the Locke -Newton
obsessed schools, the connection to Urizen becomes evident: “ I turn my eyes to
the Schools & Universities of Europe/ And there behold the Loom of Locke
whose Woof rages dire/ Washed by the Water -wheels of Newton, black the
cloth ” (Blake, The Complete, “Jerusalem ” 159), black as “Urizen, deadly black ”
(The Book of Urizen 55). In fact, Urizen “ epitomizes the role of abstract
scholasticism in mystifying popular consciousness ” (Brandist 66), which is
acknowledged by the author when he deems the Zoa of Reason “Schoolmaster
of souls, great oppose of change ” (Vala 288). In a similar vein, Ginsberg
distinguishes his hipsters from the ‘scholars of war’: “ who passed through
universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake- light
tragedy among the scholars of war ” (“Howl ” 9).
183 The eyes of the Beats reflect
their illuminated, innocent souls and relaxed attitude, as they are not possessed
183 Ginsberg also writes about the ‘scholars of war’ in his journal in 1959: “America is covered
with Lies. The young thinkers are bad men full of nasty ideas. America created the atom
bomb and dropped it on the world” (Ginsberg, Journals 112).
202

by Moloch’s war -abstractions and find Blake’s spiritually enlightening tragedy
as identitary landmark and source of inspiration. Hence, Blake’s image appears
as a beam of light in a dark world, as a light that “ stream(s) out of the sky! ”
(Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22) when the lyrical self acknowledges and renounces
Moloch.
When asked about American colleges’ anti -intellectual nature, Ginsberg
stressed the contrary: it is the spectral nature of over -intellectuality – that Blake
warned against – which holds students in its power, turning them into
impersonal robots that f unction on algorithms rather than human feeling. A
society who worships Moloch necessarily falls prey to its Spectre, just as those who let themselves dominated by Urizen, embrace his reason and negation.

American colleges are not anti -intellectual, they’ re too intellectual, that
is, the spectre of objective mental intellect and reason has them in its
power. Until the human universe of direct feeling returns the colleges will feel like machines and people in them will be afficted by impersonal, non- persona l, coldwar subjectivity. However, everyone
wants to feel, and wants to feel loved and to love . . . (Ginsberg, “October 28, 1963” 15)

This belief is reflected in Ginsberg’s outrage with contemporary high education
provoked in part by articles written by R obert Brustein, a Colombia University
professor and Norman Podhoretz, a fellow former Colombia University student, who attacked the Beat Generation characterizing them as inarticulate, anti –
intellectual and hostile to the mind writers who worship the “ cult of unthink”
(Brustein 50, 53, 58) and who wish to “ kill the intellectuals who can talk
coherently ” (Podhoretz 493). In response, Ginsberg questioned the notion of
culture and underlined the remoteness between what is taught in universities and
what the co ntemporary artistic scene is offering.

All the universities been fucking dead horse for decades and this is Culture ? . . .
You call this education? I call it absolute brainwashed bullshit. . . . Bustein who
TEACHES at colombia writing in a new money money money magazine
Horizon attacking the Cult of Unthink . . . Podhoretz . . . proceeds to attack it
instead of figurin g out what i [sic] mean. . . . I’ll take a sick junkie any day to
203

this hoarde [sic] of half -educated deathly academicians. (Ginsberg, “It’s a Vast
Trap!” 78-79).

Ginsberg’s preference for the mad -sick, intuitive, visionary outcast over the
‘healthy’ reaso nable intellectual is once again evident and so is his
denouncement of the underlying desire for profit (in the repetition of the word
‘money’) that Moloch- seduced people are able to acquire by selling their own
souls.
Allen Ginsberg’s dedication to studying William Blake is evident not
only in his poetry and political stance, but also in education. In an attempt to further shape the minds of subsequent generations and undo some of the wrongs
of the aforementioned academicians, the American poet works as a teacher
himself at the Naropa Institute,
184 where an entire course is dedicated to Blake’s
cosmology and Urizen in particular, and yet another to The Beat Generation.
Thus, Ginsberg shifts his status of specialized bearer of cultural memory: from
count er-cultural artist and leading voice of his generation to a teacher of Urizen
as a textual figure of memory of contemporary times. The validity of this conceptualization is based on a previous narrativization and canonization of
“Howl ”’s Moloch. As Ginsber g remarked in a lecture he taught on William
Blake in 1978,
185 the hyper -rationalization behind the development of bombs is
of a Urizenic quality.

Destructive intellect,186 or negative intellect, or intellect that’s so solidified and
impacted that it doesn’t allow for any feeling . . . Just like the creators of the
atom bomb, for instance, or the present, say, creators of nuclear energy, who
(consider it as a) purely mental construction, with no regard to the actual waste
that comes through, or the vast stockpiles of unused plutonium. So, actually,
with Urizen, we’re dealing with a contemporary mentality. . . I would say (that)
184 The Naropa I nstitute was the academic name for Ginsberg -founded Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics . Ginsberg “taught there as Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn
College through the end of his life. His classes at Naropa included Blake, the Beat
Generation, Sp iritual Poetics, Meditation and Poetics, and Spontaneous and Improvised
Poetics” (Trigilio, “Ginsberg, Allen” 112). William Burroughs and Gregory Corso would
also be among the professors teaching at Naropa (Warner 28).
185 Ginsberg’s lecture on Blake was tr anscribed and published in 1988 as a very small volume
entitled Your Reason & Blake's System.
186 In the same lecture, Ginsberg also associates this type of destructive Reason to the Buddhist
term vajra , which can also stand for corrupted intellect.
204

the triumph of Urizenic mentality would probably be the neutron bomb.
(Ginsberg, “ William Blake Class ”)

The acknowledgement of the Urizenic mentality of his generation, coupled with
the assumption of his role of Blakean prophecy – “the voice of Blake . . . is the
voice I have now ” (Ginsberg qtd. in Ost riker, “Blake, Ginsberg ” 111).
Consequently, the American poet and teacher created the Urizenic equivalent of
post-war American literature: Moloch who, as a product of the human mind is
able to create “mind -forged manacles ” (Blake, A Critical “London ” 274), by
transforming people into mere soulless robots, entrapped in nightmarish,
demonic industries and prisons of rationalization and mechanization: “ Mental
Moloch! . . . soulless jailhouse . . . Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! . . . Moloch! Robot apart ments! demonic industries! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21-22). He
is the seed of cold reason in the minds of the creators and detonators of the atomic bomb, the H -bomb and the neutron bomb.
187 The will to form and the
will to transmit that Jan Assmann talks about in relation to cultural memory are present in the adamant repetition of the deity’s name – which occurs thirty nine
times in “ Howl ” – as a mnemonic marker and carrier of Urizen’s memor y, yet
modified in order to ensure its survival in a different environment. One of the
fixed points of cultural memory in this case is the hyper -rationalization of both
gods, as well as the process of their defining characteristics shaped as metaphoric emb odiment that allows for the limitation of error. According to
Alicia Ostriker, the American prophet takes after Blake with respect to the
second part of “ Howl ”, where, “ In Blakean terms, Ginsberg is ‘giving a body to
Error’ ” (“Blake, Ginsberg” 121), which cannot be eliminated unless one has
first “defined it and given it material shape ” (Katz 198). This is an aspect
particularly stressed by Ginsberg as well.
187 America successfully tested its first thermonuclear bombs in 1952 and 1954 and Russia
followed with their own successful thermonuclear experiments in 1953 and 1955, both
nations attempting to create every more powerful nuclear devices (McMahon 74 -75). The
neutron bomb was invented a few years later, 1958. The paradox was that although neither
of the two Cold War parties were willing to detonate these bombs on each other’s territory
out of a mutual understanding that this action would trigger a nuclear apoca lypse, they still
continuously sought to gain a decisive superiority in terms of nuclear power (McMahon 77).
205

Urizen is a great error, but you can’t behold the error, you can’t actually
analyze and examine the error, and see where the error doesn’t hang the
universe together, unless you behold him, unless he be revealed in his system ”.
(Ginsberg, “ William Blake Class. ”)

Not only is Urizen a figure of memory for Moloch in terms of the
former’s Error of ‘negati ve intellect’, solidified reason and unscrupulous pursuit
of self -interest, but also with regard to his archetypal dimension. As a mnemonic
form, Urizen “ lives in tradition, in myth ” (J. Assmann, From Akhenaten 61) and
its twentieth century revival attempts a similar mythification of American
Moloch:

Ginsberg acknowledges that he learned from Blake the poetic technique of
mythification, of taking “political details ” and “magnif[ying] roles into cosmo –
demonic figures ”. For Ginsberg, Moloch becomes a literary figuration capable
of carrying a determinate social critique . . . and . . . also of mythologizing that
critique to suggest a more universal and timeless relevance. (Katz 198)

In other words, Ginsberg desires to make his modern Moloch a mythologi zed,
canonized figure of memory as well that may be used for social criticism by
subsequent generations. However, for the purpose of present analysis, this
mirroring of the Blakean character is interpreted as an attempt to minimalize the
unavoidable stripping of complexity (Erll, “ Travelling ”) that occurs in the
process of mnemonic transference of a figure from one context to another and take Urizenic Moloch as a foundational antagonistic figure that helps shape the
Beat identity in “ Howl ”.
As a war machine, Moloch becomes the embodiment of unbalanced
reason turned violent, without caring for the souls
188 and humanity of his
subjects, proving that “ Urizen has taken over ” (Schmidgall 135). With their
imagination limited, people’s inner eyes are closed and they can neither have
visions, nor “ cosmic vibrations ” (Ginsberg, Howl “America ” 40). For Blake too
188 “The Beat Movement can be seen as one segment of society which was struggling
desperately to give America a soul” (Lyon 392). However, albeit Am erica was in focus, the
Beats, and Ginsberg particularly, were worried for the soul of the whole world: “I cried for my soul, I cried for the world’s soul” (Ginsberg, Collected “Tears” 159).
206

“Imagination equals Humanity, the good in man, which in turn is the essence of
God, man’s own divinity ” (Schorer 172). Urizenic Moloch eats imagination and
spreads instead a dark shadow of horror that knows neither love, nor kindness,
but mere blind reason and self -interest. In Ginsberg’s American scenario, the
economic success during the Cold War (albeit a governmental necessity in order
to prove the country’s advantage over Russia) turned Americans towards
egocentrism under the guise of materialism and consumerism. The Economic
boom of the 1950s189 entailed that much attention was directed towards
money190and its illusive power to the detriment of personal salvation and eternal
vision: “ Money! Money! Money! Shrieking mad celestial money of illusion!
Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death!/ Money against Eternity! and eternity’s strong mills grind out vast paper of
Illusion!” (Ginsberg, Collected “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear! ” 178), “Hypnosis
Money/ A billford full of Ah! ” (Ginsberg, Collected “These States ” 593) or
“Money money, reminder, I might as well write poems to you – dear American
money” (Ginsberg, Collected “American Change ” 195). In “ Howl ”, the
contempt towards materialism is expressed in the hipsters’ transcendence of it by burning their money (10) and in its association to “ Moloch . . . unobtainable
dollars” (21) in order to express the surging greed of capitalism.
Both Blake and Ginsberg shared the Neoplatonic and Gnostic principle
according to which earthly life is a mere illusion and a shadow of our eternal selves, but many people are forgetful of their origin and go through their lives
asleep
191 and oblivious of their true holy nature, mistakenly taking vegetative
reality to be the one and only, true reality: “This world of imagination is infinite
and eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and
189 According to Tim McNesse, “between 1945 and 1960, the U.S. gross domestic product
(GDP) . . . grew at the overall rate of 250 percent” (88), which brought about low
unemployment rate and was coupled with the social phenomenon called ‘the Baby Boom’, a period of increased natality in America.
190 To Ginsberg, money had become a destructive force: “Money has reckoned the soul of
America” (Ginsberg, Collected “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” 175).
191 Awakening from the stony sleep of reason is not impossible: “England! awake! awake!
awake!” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem” 233) . See a more lengthy discussion of the
deadly consequences of metaphorical sleep in the following subchapter.
207

temporal ” (Blake, A Critical “ From ‘Vision of the Last Judgment’ ” 37).
Therefore, the philosophy of reason192 and scientific experimentation that
dominated Blake’s time brought about Deist Enlightenment beliefs, which were
considered by the English poet to be superficial because they were reliant upon
something that belonged to this world and therefore was implic itly narrow and
finite: “The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions,/ Are
become weak Visions of Time & Space” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ”
198). Deists193 were also condescending, because they mocked innate,
individual divinity.
Mo
ck on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.194
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Isr ael’s paths they shine.
(Blake, A Critical “Mock on” 284)
You O Deists profess yourselves the Enemies of Christianity: and you are so: you are also the Enemies of the Human Race, & of Universal Nature . . . [for]
Deism, is the Worship the God of this World by the means of what you call
Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy. . . . This was the religion of the
Pharisees who murdered Jesus. Deism is the same & ends in the same. . . .
Voltaire! Rousseau! You cannot escape my charge that you are Pharisees & Hypocrites, for you are constantly talking of the Virtues of the Human Heart,
and particularly of your own, that you may accuse others & especially the Religious . . . (Blake, The Co mplete “Jerusalem ” 201)
192 Philosophers who believed reason to be the supreme faculty of human beings represented
the inspiration of Deists though works such as John Lock e’s The Reasonableness of
Christianity (1695).
193 Interestingly, Blake does not target English Deists such as John Toland and Matthew
Tindal, although their works, Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) and Christianity as Old as
the Creator (1730), respectiv ely, were not negligible during his time. However, Blake
seems to have recognized Voltaire and Rousseau as much stronger voices of Enlightenment Deism and in addressing their beliefs, the English bard stressed the fact that his warnings were not bound sole ly to England, but referred to a much broader context.
194 Similar metaphors are used by Kerouac and Ginsberg: “woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back” (“The Origins” 43) and “When will we discover an America that will not deny its own God? Who takes up arms, money, police, and a million
hands to murder the consciousness of God? Who spits in the face of Poetry which sings the Glory of God and weeps in the dust of the world?” (Ginsberg, “A Letter” 221).
208

Deism, or Natural Religion, attempted to make religion intellectually
respectable by the application of common sense ” (Foster Damon, A Blake 100)
and turned illuminated faith into cold reason. Consequently, all visions, miracles and spiritual revelations were seen as irrelevant superstitions that should be
done away with in order to reveal a reasonable, core religion, common to all and universally embraced. While Blake also believed that All Religions are One
(1788), he stressed throughout all his life that There is No Natural Religion
(1788), since the latter was equivalent to atheism and meant worshiping the God
of this World (Erdman, Blake 416), while “he [Blake] would consider that a
believer only in the historical character of Christ in reality denied Christ”
(Gilchrist 348).
Voltaire and Rousseau are directly nominated by Blake and also turned
by the English visionary into the two wings of Albion’s Spectre (
Blake, The
Complete “Jerusalem ” 203). Be cause of their Deist beliefs and their reliance of
Locke’s Newtonianism, they too are associated with the negative, self -centered
Spectre and the reason -bound Urizen. Voltaire divorced metaphysics from
English Deism and stripped the latter of its Christian roots and proposed a
Christian -free philosophy that involved a Creator who shaped universe without
subsequent intervention, similar to a watchmaker, whose finished work needs no interference and linked to Aristotle’s “ Unmoved Mover ” or “Prima Mobile ”,
who set the universe in motion, while being motionless itself ( “Exploring
Deism ”). Voltaire’s passive, Spectral God of Deism seems to be Urizen, who
stands for the tyrannical movement of Deism (Tarr, “William Blake ”) and
whose creation works only by means of natural laws and has no view of active,
spiritual energy. This type of God is by no means the same as Blake’s Divine
Creator, whose messages can be reached through the creative imagination of
prophets.
Without being so adamant in stressing the power of re ason, Rousseau’s
‘noble savage’ represented a call to go back to nature and understand that
human beings are created innocent and free, yet they are corrupted by
209

civilization and enchained by society’s institutions. Although Blake was also
keen to denounce the injustice of artificially imposed official governments and
religions, he strongly disagreed with Rousseau’s theory, claiming that man is born already in chains: “ Rousseau thought Men good by nature: he found them
evil, and found no friend” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ” 201). Thus,
Blake’s perspective is in tune with the Gnostic under -layers of The Book of
Urizen , in which fall and creation are the same event and in Urizen’s
materialization into a human body already implies his surrender to his evil,
spectral powers.
195
Similarly, Ginsberg’s poems were “the workings of the vision haunted
mind and not that reason which never changes ” (Ginsberg, Collected “Psalm I ”
26). However, instead of directing his attacks towards specific scholars, he
considered the governing of reason to be a collective tendency of his Moloch-led society. Moloch was the reason for which sunflowers saw themselves as
locomotives: because they were all asleep in Moloch, frightened and smothered
by his cloud of hydrogen (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21-22). In Ginsberg’s words,
“Moloch is the vision of the mechanical feelingless inhuman world we live in
and accept – and the key line finally is ‘Moloch whom I abandon’ ” (“A Letter ”
210). Yet, instead of realizing, like Ginsberg and Blake had that the whole world
was holy, society praised earthly reason instead of God, prompting Ginsberg to
feverishly reiterate the holiness of the world.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
. . .
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! every man’s an angel!
(Ginsberg, Howl “Footnote ” 27)

When numbed by the sleep of reason induced by the cruel Urizenic
Spectre, society cannot reach a prophetic level of rebellious dissatisfaction and
195 In Blake’s words: “Man is born a Spectre or Satan & is altogether an Evil, & requires a
New Selfhood continually, and must continually be changed into his direct Contrary”
(Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem” 200).
210

consequently sinks ever deeper into conformism and single vision. This
dangerous attitude was clearly shaped in Blake’s depiction of Urizen’s
limitation and single -mindedness. The primor dial god of reason established his
laws in a Book of Eternal Brass that he created in solitude, without taking council with anybody and placed it on a rock, “ with a strong hand” (Blake, The
Book of Urizen 47), stressing his confidence and unwillingness to compromise
or be open to multiple perspectives.

Here alone I, in books form’d of metals,
Have written the secrets of wisdom . . .
Lo! I unfold my darkness and on
This rock place with strong hand the Book
Of eternal brass, written in my solitude;
One co mmand, one joy, one desire,
One course, one weight, one measure,
One King, one God, one Law. (Blake, The Book of Urizen 47)

The singleness of authority inevitably leads to oppression, tyranny and
censorship, to “ a solid without fluctuation ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 46) that
admits no dynamic contraries or deviations from the norm. The fact that rational thinking and singularity of mind are interconnected surfaces from Blake’s letter
to Thomas Butts, where the author opposes his manifold understanding of the
world with the one track mind of scientists such as Isaac Newton.

Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Sing le vision & Newton’s sleep
(Blake, The Letters “ To Thomas Butts ” 46)

If the fourfold vision was attributed to prophets, men whose mind was open
enough to include messages from Eternals, the threefold vision belonged to
Beulah, “an intermediary between Eternity and Ulro196 (this world of matter) ”
196 For Blake, Ulro is man’s lowest state of existence in which he is bounded by his senses and
bodily instincts.
211

(Foster Damon, A Blake 43), the manifold version197 was characteristic of
people who believed in God and who allowed for more than one way of
accessing knowledge, accepting the relevance and importance of prophecy,
mystical visions and mad illuminations, while the single vision was assigned to
those who made the Urizenic error of falling back solely on the linear thought of
reason198 or on “regarding experience which denies all but the empirical, and all
but what the five senses can deliver ” (Snart 245). In a historical period where
the latter category seemed to be the trend, whoever could not force his
multiplicity of vision into that mold and instead tried to rewrite the brass laws of
reason, was (dis)regarded as bei ng mad.
While not having a book of brass, Ginsberg’s monster -god Moloch is
itself made of cement and aluminum, materials by means of which his hardened
singularity of vision and his unfortunate durability, respectively, are underlined. His is a Urizenic s ociety that is mentally locked because it is ruled by a “ heavy
judger of men ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21) and lives in buildings that are the
embodiment of judgment as well. The judgmental attitude was based on the idea
that America “ should work like a well oile d machine ” (“The Beat Generation:
the Causes ”) and did not afford to have broken pieces. In order for this to
happen, people needed to conform to the majority. In a conservative, straight,
super -capitalist country, Ginsberg found it difficult to fit his homosexuality and
Russian communist descent and fought to give America a polyphonic voice.
As Blake denounced the simplistic one -sided laws of Urizen, Ginsberg
expressed the pain that Moloch brought along with his judgment and similar
reductive and narrowing rationale. Allen Ginsberg and the Beat
197 William Blake acknowledges that his vision is fourfold , as opposed to others who can only
‘see’ in a single, double or triple system, which can be explained as follows: “On the lowest
level is the imagi native perception; then the fool, single vision; then the double vision or
imaginative perception; then the creative imagination; and finally the all -inclusive Body of
the Imagination, the ultimate union of creator and creature” (Gleckner 364).
198 Althoug h neither Bacon, nor Newton, nor Locke were atheists, they vehemently refuted
visions as sources of true knowledge.
212

counterculture199 sought to break free from the same oppressive monotony, so
Blake’s text is assumed as memory instead of mere knowledge.

Cultural memory reaches back into the past only so far as the past can be
proclaimed as ‘ours’. This is why we refer to this form of historical
consciousness as “ memory ” and not just knowledge about the past. (J.
Assmann, “ Communicative ” 113)

The closed mind is the triumph of hegemonic reason that forces the inner eye to
be closed and perceive merely a single vision of darkness that is as static, fixed
and unchanging as a universal law of science. In Ginsberg’s view the solution to
this problem was breaking the Urizenic laws and challenge “ every ban ” (Blake,
A Critical “London” 274) by shocking people out of their “ a stony sleep ”
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 49) that prevailed in “ the sort of hyper -rationalistic,
hyper -scientific, hyper -rationaliz ing of the post -war era” (“Online Interviews ”).
It is very important to note Ginsberg’s stress on the prefix ‘hyper’, which forms
the basis of his attack. Just as, through Urizen Blake does not denounce science,
but its unquestionable reign, through Moloch, Ginsberg does not attack reason
per se , but its overuse and its attempt “ to impose itself repressively over energy ”
(Ostriker, “ Blake, Ginsberg” 116).

I'm not talking about industrialization, but about hyper -industrialization, I'm not
attacking reason b ut hyper -rationality, Blake's Urizenic exaggerated
rationalism, which is not logic or common sense but rationalization for
aggression against nature. (Ginsberg, “ A Collage ” 97)

In sum, the destructive, egocentric, single -minded Spectre of reason
holds Urizen in its power in The Book of Urizen more than in any other Blakean
work and travels from the Southern Zoa to Moloch, negating the belief in the
divine and redemptive powers of visionary imagination. Immersed in
abstractions and unable to sympathize with any one, Urizen embraces his
199 “The Beats began to experiment with everything that 1940s and 1950s America classified as
illegal: drugs, crime, gay sex, racial integration” (Russell 11) and their countercultural fight
against single vision would reach maturity in the 1960’s acid culture and its hippies, anti –
nuclear movements, civil rights movements and later feminist and gay liberation
manifestations.
213

Spectre instead of acknowledging its negative influence that leads to the Zoa’s
single vision and hyper -rationalization. The latter is harmful becau se it is
unbalanced and leads to the belief that what is experienced through the limited
capacities of human beings is the whole, instead of a mere Ratio. Urizen’s
approach to his surroundings is rooted in Bacon’s experimental approach to
knowledge, Locke’ s tabula rasa and philosophy of the five senses (a Science of
sight that forms a woof as black as Urizen) and Newton’s rigid laws of physics. The memory of William Blake’s quest for spirituality in the Age of Reason
through his denouncement of the scientif ic smothering of imaginative
perception is reconstructed at the half of the twentieth century so as to highlight Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual protest against the post -war American hyper –
rationalization that produced a fixation with the development of nuclear energy,
without caring for the lives that may be involved. Thus, the bomb was an invention of pure, Urizenic reason that negated emotion and denied all visions
and miracles. The cultural memory of William Blake’s Zoa determined Allen
Ginsberg to transform Urizen into a figure of memory for egocentrism and
limiting, linear solidity of thought that is reflected in Moloch’s materialism (his
obsession with money) and s elf-interest, as the character is also utterly under the
power of what William Blake would ca ll the Spectre. The censorship -prone
conformist and positivistic Moloch numbs people into a sleep of “ instrumental
reason divorced from human emotion and imagination” (Katz 194), which also
leads, in the case of 1950s America, to a single vision imposed vi a an us vs.
them spectral mentality that justifies the intense mechanization of the country as well as the existence of a righteous war in which leaders find it reasonable to
drop ‘loveless’ and ‘monstrous’ bombs.

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IV. 2. THE ABOMINABLE II. Urizen and Moloch’s Illusion of Order and
Fall into Tyranny*
U
rizen is also a figure of memory of abomination for Moloch, since the
latter is akin to its literary predecessor in his attempt to force the world into
fitting his single -minded vision of order that only turns into destructive rules.
The two deities are abominable because in their falsehood, hypocrisy and tyranny they reign supreme contrary to God’s principles and push people further
away from an understanding of their divine origin and the holiness of a w orld in
which acceptance, forgiveness and freedom are not buried under judgment, selfishness and tyranny. The illusion of order given by the prevailing
mechanical perspective of Blake’s and Ginsberg’s eras, as well as the desire to
mask disorder and difference by means of uniformity is proven to degenerate into tyranny in their dystopian poetical accounts that can potentially have the
effect of awakening readers to the realization that an excess of order can only
infringe people’s innate tendency towards and eternal capacity for imagination
and freedom, which albeit seemingly chaotic, are originally infinite and unbounded. The discussion will revolve around the manner and reasons for
which disorder was particularly feared in Blake and Ginsberg’s societies as
insight into the two authors’ socio- political inspiration for the portrayal of
illusive, exaggerated order via Urizen and Moloch respectively. Viewed from a
different angle, order is no longer beneficial, but it becomes dangerous,
therefore I will also fo cus on the different practical effects of Urizen’s and
Moloch’s tyrannical order in society, which is understood in Hayekean terms as taxis (as opposed to kosmos ), how it creates the illusion of harmonious order and
eventually how it descends into dictatorship.
The hierarchical order implied by a monarchic system is a good example
of how the characteristics of a leader are transferred to the perception of the
*A version of this subchapter has been published as “The Illusion of Order and Its Fall into
Tyranny – William Blake’s Urizen and Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch.” (Paris, University of
Bucharest, 2016).
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society he governs. If the Fisher King is sick, so is the land and so are the people
he governs, if Queen Elizabeth I of England is a virgin, the country she reigns
over is metaphorically impossible to penetrate and dominate. In the same vein, in an era where reason and rational thought have come to be the norm in
England during the eighteenth century, King George III had to provide an
example of reasonableness, self -discipline and temperance. This king in
particular was thought to stand for “ quintessentially English . . . temperate
behavior ” (Rovang 27), since the two previous monarchs before him (Georg e I
and George II) were of Germanic heritage and did not even speak English. Yet, as King George III, “ sovereign -father . . . the embodiment of England” (Rovang
18) became physically and mentally ill in 1788, the idea of “ asylum now
inhabited a microcosm f or society -at-large -, and thus . . . England” (Rovang 26),
as underlined by satirist William Hogarth. Consequently, the king’s “ aids
attempted to hide his illness and he was nursed in isolation ” (“Hidden Stories ”),
for mental disorder and unreason had to be masked by the illusion of order,
sanity and health at the level of society.
One of the reasons for Urizen’s abominable rebellion was his wish to go
against the ordained order of the other Eternals, challenge their hierarchy and
seek to create an alternative order by himself, one that is fixed once and for all.
“Why will you die, O Eternals ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 46) is the question
that the character asks, for he does not agree with the changes that his fellow gods go through as they die and are reborn continually and wishes to have
eternal life for the sake of solidity and constancy. Hence, just like Satan doubts
the legitimacy of God, Urizen seeks to counter the Eternals’ apparent state of
chaos by creating a type of order founded on reason, clearl y defined limits,
inflexibility and obsessive, mathematical precision. Consequently, he measures and divides everything around him: “ Times on times he divided & measur’d/
Space by space in his ninefold darkness ” (44), a scientific endeavor which
futilely a ttempts to bound the unboundable and count the immeasurable
darkness. As a true scientist, the protagonist creates measurement instruments
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with which to explore his new environment. Instead of remembering his origins,
he falls into a Newtonian sleep and st arts to believe that he can acquire valuable
knowledge by means of earthly calculations.

He form'd a line and a plummet
To divide the Abyss beneath;
He form'd a dividing rule;

He formèd scales to weigh,
He formèd massy weights;
He formèd a brazen quadrant;
He formèd golden compasses,
And began to explore the Abyss
(Blake, The Book of Urizen 59- 60)

What is ironic is that, “ where Urizen sees himself as a law giver the Eternals
narrate a process of limitation ” (Snart 241) and despite his organizing efforts,
the other gods perceive Urizen as unorganized “petrific abominable chaos ” (45),
a demon that while measuring everything else, remains himself unmeasured, a
type of “ formless, unmeasurable death ” (50) who offers only the illusion of
order. If in Gr eek mythology, the focus is on (re)installing order over chaos,
Blakean mythology envisions an Eternal world that is initially ordered before
the creation of the Earth and of Man.

Many suppose that before [Adam] <the Creation> All was Solitude & Chaos
This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind as it takes away all
sublimity from the Bible & Limits All Existence to Creation & to Chaos To the
Time & Space fixed by the Corporeal Vegetative Eye (Blake, The Complete “A
Vision of the Last Judgment ” 563)

In other words, human beings perceive real order as chaos because they cannot
understand it and are presumptuous in asserting that the universe they
experience is orderly, since human order is bound to the perceptions of an
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ephemeral body. Thus, Urizen’s chaotic actions turn into a harmful,
hypocritical, imposed type of order200 that is merely a mask for a chaos within.

Blake’s vision of the fall is not, therefore, a creation of order out of chaos.
Instead, he represents man’s fall as a change in consciousness in which aberrant
faculties disturb mental equilibrium seeking autonomy and dominance in the
psyche. (Cramer 523)

Since Ginsberg’s god of reason is influenced by his Old Testament
legacy in terms of his requirement of human sacrifice , it should be noted that the
notion of sacrifice itself entails an attempt to bring about societal order.
According to René Girard, violence, starting with Cain murdering Abel, could
be thought of in terms of a “lack of sacrificial outlet ” (4). Arguing ag ainst the
theological interpretation which presents sacrifice as a mediating act between man and divinity, the author of Violence and the Sacred insists that the
underlying reason behind these violent manifestations is rooted into social reality. Hence, th e victims (in this case society’s most innocent) are not only
meant to calm the anger of Moloch and quench his hunger, but they also act as outlets for built -up collective tension, discord and rivalry. Once the community
focuses its negative energy on them , they become substitutes for each and every
other member and along with their death, cohesion, unity, order and harmony
are restored. At least for a while, the group is protected against its own violence.
This makes sacrifice “ primarily an act of violence without the risk of vengeance
. . . without fear of reprisal ” (Girard 13) that aims at quelling conflict,
controlling violent outbursts and preventing other potential forms of violence
within the community. Thus, in the act of sacrificing its young genera tion,
Ginsberg’s society makes a scapegoat of the Beat Generation, channeling its
symbolic violence towards a specific target which is painted as mad, deviant,
dangerous and delinquent and the sacrifice of which may restore order. Yet, the
200 Urizen’s ‘order’ is not divine, but human, as he has already fallen. He nce, what he wishes to
present as universal order, is merely his order, which becomes oppressive when imposed
upon others.
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order brought by America’s Moloch -led society is one that is imposed by means
of suffering and victimage.
Moreover, the societal conformity and apparent homogeneity of 1950s
America took precedence over diversity and individuality ( “Chapter 27” ),
creating a delusive type of order. As television made it possible for behavioral
rules to be broadcast to a national audience, people were encouraged to observe
the same religious and patriotic rules, maintain gender roles and embrace
suburbanization, a ll of which relied on social uniformity. This eventually led to
the censorship and denouncement of rebellious voices such as that of the Beat Generation that attempted to shatter the perfect image of harmony, equality and
consensus, revealing the racial, s exual and political differences of people who
did not fit into this ideal American mold. When it comes to society, mathematical, logical (and therefore limited) human organization can never be truly orderly in a divine sense, because in praising the Spectr e, human beings
lean too heavily on their presumed powers of knowledge, generating “ hyper –
rationalism, hyper -industrialization & Hyper -technology [which in turn] create
chaos ” (Ginsberg, Collected “New Democracy Wish List ” 1063). Hence,
Ginsberg’s poetry t ends to denounce this apparently optimal societal order as a
façade that merely created a stereotypical prison in which none other than Moloch could govern.
In Friedrich Hayek’s terms, instead of choosing the grown order
(kosmos ) that had seemingly arisen spontaneously, Urizen attempts to force a
consciously made order ( taxis ) that is prone towards authoritarian behavior
(Hayek 221). Both Urizen’s mathematical measuring of the new world and his
coming into material existence with a symbolic human body that generates the
whole of vegetative creation can be interpreted as an illusory attempt to order the universe in accordance with the character’s perspective and replace apparent
chaos with clearly established boundaries. Yet these architectural, material
limitations are represented by the author as merely distractions that deter people
from perceiving their true infinite, eternal nature and hence can only bring about
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chaos, as the other Gods clearly understood it to be. Order falls, along with
Urizen, along wi th humankind.
Not only does order fall into illusion, but it also falls into tyranny. Tired
of what he perceived to be chaotic movement and changes of form, expansion
and contraction of the “flexible changes ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 45) of
other gods, the “self-exhiling Eternal, Urizien ” (Erdman, The Illuminated 185)
met flux with solidity and installed a tyrannous regime that is abominable
because it is based solely on himself, his brassy, opaque Spectre and his self –
reflecting consciousness, losing touch with divinity. The solidity of Urizen’s world is dependent upon him “ keeping at bay the very chaos and destruction
which could liberate him ” (Snart 247). What is more, the first act in which he
engages after his creation is that of writing, performing “a cognitive and
material organization ” (Snart 246). The laws that he forms are “ simultaneously
political, religious, and legal ” (Barr 749) in his Book of Brass. When presenting
this book of rules for an ideal society, Urizen unequivocally stresses his
intentions of achieving both secular and divine dominion. Consequently,
Blake’s engraving depicts him as wearing a “ crown -like (spiky) halo ” (Erdman,
The Illuminated 187), symbolizing perhaps the sovereignty of the Age of
Reason which the poet struggled to de throne, but also the undisputed authority
of King George III, whom Blake could not recognize as a supreme, divine
leader: “Comparisons have been made between representations of Urizen and
George III: both are old, despotic law givers who dampen political a nd religious
revolt ” (Barr 749). Like Urizen, the King of England was sometimes
characterized as a tyrant, particularly because of “ the war with the American
colonies ” (Rovang 27).
Urizen’s book of societal rules is made of brass, which may be a
reminder o f brass idols such as Moloch, while the adjective eternal ensures the
interpretation of the text as a sacred one. As Jesus told Peter “ And I say unto
thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” (Matthew
16:18), Urizen intends to m ark the founding of his religion by decisively placing
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the book upon a rock, marking the coming into being of “ a religion based on . . .
sanctions ” (Rowland 99). The element of dictatorship is given by the character’s
unwillingness to compromise or consult other Eternals, his writing the book in
solitude and his wish to establish himself as the only leader and the only
possible divinity. Since “a tyr ant, as an extreme, is self -control par excellence,
extending his control to every aspect of life ” (Rovang 34), Urizen puts forth
only one measure for command, deciding that any infringement of his law
should be seen as erroneous and sinful and even one me asure for joy, and desire,
reducing the complexity of human emotions and simplifying a polyphony of perspectives by unifying them into a single one.
201 In contrast, Blake cherishes
the holiness and diversity of each individual emotion and human situation, criticizing’s Urizen’s single -mindedness in “Visions of the Daughters of
Albion” as follows:

Ah! Are there other wars, beside the wars of sword and fire!
And are there other sorrows, beside the sorrows of poverty!
And are there other joys, beside the joys o f riches and ease?
And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox? . . .
O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven . . .
How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys
Holy, eternal, i nfinite? And each joy is a Love
(Blake, The Co mplete 48)

As the Greek term tyrannos entails, the tyrant is considered to be “ the
new ruler, the one who has come to power in the city by means other than birth
or established precedent. Therewith his illegitimacy/ but also his freedom ”
(Saxonhouse 1261) . As the illegitimate, self -elected creator of the fallen world,
Urizen is free to transform it as he sees fit, but the danger of such freedom
quickly surfaces, as he coerces people to oblige rules and limitations, while
giving himself none. Thus, despite his tyrannous reign being rooted in freedom and power, its outcome consists of deprivation thereof. As supreme ruler, he
follows the typical rout for tyrants, “ supposing that he can rule not only over
201 As critic Michael Ackland maintains, “Urizen’s idea of unity is not a multiplicity in
harmony, but the authocratic, self -projectin g state of Louis XIV . . . His hierarchy of
compulsion is opposed to change and contrast” (177).
221

human beings, but over gods as well ” (Saxonhouse 1261), establishing himself
as the only deity worth obeying. His illegitimacy comes from the fact that he
“seeks authority to command simply on the basis that he has a book that claims
such authority ” (Barr 750) and therefore attempt to disguise the fact that
“authority must be given and cannot be commanded” (Barr 751). Yet, through
“indiscriminate violence ” (Saxonhouse 1261), Urizen’s “ rage, fury, intense
indignation” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 47), as well as his armies are directed
indiscriminately towards th e universe as a whole and whoever attempts to
challenge his authority. The fact the system envisioned by the god of Reason is
not a feasible, long- term one is proven by the fact that “ the exploited can only
stand for tyranny for so long ” (Marshall 14) and towards the end of The Book of
Urizen , the tyrant realizes that his subjects find it impossible to observe his
laws.

He, in darkness clos’d, view’d all his race,
And his soul sicken’d! He curs’d
Both sons & daughters, for he saw
That no flesh nor spirit c ould keep
His iron laws one moment. (61)

Remembering Urizen and symbolically embodying his abominable taxis
and tyranny, Moloch fills in the gaps within the mnemonic frame with substance
that reflects his own cultural milieu . In narrativizing the Blakean figure of
memory as Moloch, the American Beat teaches his contemporaries what not to
do and how not to become. The docere element of figures of memory is
recognized by Jan Assmann, as he quotes the following passage by Halbwachs (Cultural 25- 6).

Memory figures are also ‘models, examples, and elements of teaching. They express the general attitude of the group; they not only reproduce its history but also define its nature and its qualities and weakenesses. (Halbwachs, On Collective 59)

He still r equires his subjects’ blind obedience and dedication to science
and technology and he also hides behind the illusion of order, turning people
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into machinery pieces and imprisoning their souls under the pretext of saving
them from chaotic, unpredictable and errand lives. However, through Moloch,
Ginsberg reacts to the popular view of his time that America “should work like a well oiled machine ” (“The Beat Generation: the Causes ”) without any broken
pieces. In the American visionary’s perspective, it is exactly the broken pieces (those who do not conform) that are the most valuable. In addition, the short
phrases followed by exclamation marks induce a sense of urgency and, in a
similar manner to Urizen, Moloch deliberately creates his own order in society
that “must rest on a relation of command and obedience, or a hierarchical
structure of the whole society in which the will of superiors and ultimately of [his] single supreme authority, determines what each individual must do”
(Hayek 222).
Moloch makes his subjects mistake taxis for kosmos and understand the
status quo as a universal, “ grown order, meaning originally ‘a right order in a
state or a community’ ” (Hayek 223), instead of seeing it as this particular god’s
personally constructed artificial and imposed order that may be perceived as chaos by somebody else and may become oppressive if pushed to the extreme.
Hence, Moloch creates the illusion of a type of order that has grown internally,
rather than taxis , the authoritarian connotation of which implies exteriority and
in this case the imprisonment of people and transformation into robots that have
no power to decide over their lives. Unable to recognize that “spontaneous order
and organization will always coexist ” (Hayek 233), and unwilling to allow for
an interplay between the two, Ginsberg’s sphinx blindly persists in attempting to
establish the greatest amount of power and control through taxis alone and
therefore conducts a primate manner of ruling, cementing his way to tyranny.
Furthermore, Moloch’s organized corruption proves its tyrannical
character when the absolute ruler exercises his power cruelly and forcibly through physical and psychological violence, bashing open his subjects’ heads
and devouring their imagination, brainwashing and manipulating them into obedience. Although he is not made of brass, nor does he have a book of brass
223

like Urizen, the solidity of thought of Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch is rendered by
means of his fixed, cemented perspective, as well as his selfishness that isolate
him from his worshipers and pushes them apart instead of bringing them
together: “Moloch in whom I sit lonely ” (22). This singularity of vision is also
decisively underlined by the fact that the ruler’s governing system of judgment
is founded upon the necessity to force people into a single mold. Ginsberg
alludes here to the American literary atmosphere of the 1950s, which according
to him was dominated by ce nsorship and was heavily influenced by Cold War
propaganda.

There was censorship, particularly censorship of literature . . . the things that were censored were anti -war, anti -macho, anti -imperial texts . . . so
you had a closed form in poetry and a clos ed form of mind. (Ginsberg,
“Online Interviews ”)

In other words, tyrannical Moloch limits people’s freedom and imposes, just
like Urizen, one law (capitalism), one measure (macho -heterosexuality) and one
command (imperialism) by means of force and censors hip. This conveniently
excludes all possible rebellious, chaotic spontaneity.
Moloch’s oppressive nature is also revealed in his surveillance and
control of people. When Ginsberg describes him as “ Moloch whose eyes are a
thousand blind windows! ” (21), the connection to Jeremy Bentham’s 1791
Panopticon and George Orwell’s Big Brother seems natural.

The Panopticon . . . is a prison consisting of . . . a center tower and an
annular building. Inside the tower, an observer has the ability to see into all of th e cells . . . Each cell has two windows: one window faces the
tower and the opposite window allows light to pass through the prisoner’s cell . . . Since those inside the cells are unable to see into the center tower (its windows are covered), the prisoners can never tell if
(and when) they are being observed. (Marsh, “ Panopticon.” )
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . . you fat to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, a nd, except in darkness,
every movement scrutinized. (Orwell 4- 5)

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Up to this point, Ginsberg has already associated the members of his society
with innocent prisoners of a soulless social penitentiary, isolated from one
another, but now he adds another lay er to his description: that of totalitarian
surveillance. Big Brother’s telescreens could easily have been a source of inspiration for Ginsberg’s Moloch for, Nineteen Eighty -four was written eight
years prior to “ Howl ” and the American poet felt his societ y was getting
dangerously close to the Orwellian dystopia: “ USA was becoming a totalitarian
police state through the military -industrial -nationalist complex ” (Skallenberg 2).
Moloch’s eyes are akin to the many covered windows of the Panopticon central
towe r, the archetype of total surveillance that allows for impersonal control by
means of psychological manipulation: “ The gaze is alert everywhere . . . to
observe all disorder ” (Foucault 195- 196). Discipline is brought about via “ an
omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular,
uninterrupted way ” (Foucault 197) and has two very important qualities: it is
“visible but unverifiable ” (Foucault 201). Out of Moloch’s thousand eyes,
people have no possible way of knowing which eye might be a ble to capture
their wrong doing because they all appear to be blind. Because they are seen but
cannot see, people come to be subject to a type of “ invisibility [that] is a
guarantee of order ” (Foucault 200) and therefore they live in the constant terror
of an “ incomprehensible prison” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21), the rules of which
escape them and the invisible ward of which rules with an iron fist from under the cloak of darkness. As an inner god o f the mind, Moloch thrives in this kind
of psychological control that gives “ power of mind over mind” (Foucault 106)
and is arguably longer lasting and easier to exercise.
To conclude, both William Blake Southern Zoa of Reason and Allen
Ginsberg’s cruel s phinx of the mind offer the illusion of order, as the latter
seems to be one of the prevailing concerns of the authors’ respective societies. However, the two prophets unmask spectral man- made order as oppressive,
tyrannous rule. Blake’s Gnostic demiurge c reates the material realm out of a
desire to end the Eternals’ chaos and ever changing environment, to put an end
225

to fluctuation and bring about solidity, doubting and rebelling in an attempt to
create his own order. Consequently, he keeps dividing and mea suring
everything, even space and darkness, so as to ensure that the universe is in complete scientific, mathematical order. However, the other gods only perceive
this to be a form of abomination, deadly chaos, limitation and narrowness of
perspective because Urizen remains immesurable as death itself and he relies on
what the senses can capture, remaining oblivious of the true, spiritual and
imaginative capacity of man. Moreover, blind Urizen turns into a tyrant when he
imposes the observance of the inflexible rules within his Book of Brass and
attempts to establish himself as the only authoritative entity, both in the secular
and the ethereal realm. As a true tyrannos , he is free, yet his power is
illegitimate and his unrelinquished persistence in being th e sole ruler makes him
treat everyone else with indiscriminate violence.
As a figure of sacrifice, Moloch is intended to bring about order, but in
Ginsberg’s vision the sacrifice required by this god is too great, as he attempts to turn counter -cultural y ouths into dispensable scapegoats and implicitly do
away with society’s imaginative endeavors by way of both physical and
psychological violence. He deceives his subjects into leading organized, robotic
lives that industrializes their soul and that are pre sented to be the natural order
of things, when in reality they represent an artificial order, a type of taxis that is construed and tha t is representative of a single- minded perspective. In addition,
tyrannical Moloch also oppresses people with judgment and censorship, locking them up into their own minds and regulating the idea of normalcy, in order to
avoid the chaos resulting from spontaneity and disobedience. The isolated and
desolated prisoners of Moloch find themselves trapped into a system of
totalitarian surveillance and control in which the thousand blind eyes of their
ruler ensure the imposition of his own order at the cost of freedom.

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IV. 3. THE SHADOW. Urizen, Moloch and the Shadowy Sleep of Death*
W
illiam Blake’s Urizen and Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch are both
characters that seem to be intrinsically connected to the notion of shadow , the
third mnemonic core in the construction of the Urizenic figure of memory that
travels from the English bard’s prophetic work to the American poet’s counter –
cultural poem. More specifically, blinded by darkness, the two deities enter a deep, shadowy sleep that is not depicted as healthy, restful or beneficial, but as
tumultuous, forgetful, harmful and potentially deadly. The aim of this
subchapter is to analyze the various apprehensions of the concept of shadow,
which I perceive to be essential in the construction of the Blakean figure of
memory and its resurfacing in 1950s America in the shape of a modern Moloch.
In addition, the notion of shadow – which necessarily involves both a source of
light and a type of obstruction – will be placed in association with that of sleep,
which naturally implies both the existence of consciousness and the lack of awareness and with the various facets of death. I will start with revealing the
manner in which Urizen is immersed in shadows and entrapped by sleep and I will continue with an interpretation of this state as a critical mnemonic marker
in the formation of a figure of memory for Moloch. The analysis will be carried
in the critical light of Plato’s cave allegory, the Christian apprehension of death
as metaphorical sleep, the Gnostic reconceptualization of the shadowy sleep as
life itself, the Jungian, archetypal and psychoanalytica l interpretation of the
shadow and its characteristics, as well as the Alchemical embracing of the shadow as a necessary step in the process of transformation and self –
improvement.
The Preludium to The Book of Urizen presents the main character as
“Obscure , shadowy, void, solitary ” (44). These are the words that William
Blake uses to introduce Urizen to his readers and many other epithets belonging
to the sphere of darkness are reiterated throughout the poem, so as to establish
*A version of this subchapter will be published in an upcoming 2018 issue of University of
Bucharest Review .
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the terrifying obscurity at the core of this character. From the very first line of
the first chapter, the demonic immortal is described as “ a shadow of horror ”
(44), as a figure whose aim is to spread darkness and who is not only too concealed and cryptic to be comprehended, but also too self -involved to allow
for interaction with anyone else: “ Dark . . . Unseen . . . unknown and horrible, A
self-contemplating shadow ” (45). There are many instances in this poem in
which the division from light is linked to sleep and whether this entai ls the
absence of dreams: “ He [Urizen] lay in a dreamless night ” (50) or the
abundance of nightmares: “ In a horrible, dreamful slumber ” (52), it is certain
that Urizen’s sleep is a deep, heavy state that endures and that his status as both
deity and first created man is reflected upon the whole of the world, imposing a
long lasting, sorrowful condition upon humanity: “ They lived a period of years,/
Then left a noisome body/ To the jaws of devouring darkness ” (Blake, The Book
of Urizen 63). Moreover, the following words are used to characterize Urizen after he creates the earth’s landforms – “ But Urizen laid in a stony sleep ” (51) –
and during the process of the creation of the first human body: “ In stony sleep
ages roll’d over him! ” (51), which lays emphasis the presence of death through
the fact that “ Urizen is falling into time as well as flesh ” (Aubrey 129).
While Ginsberg’s Moloch is not so overtly and avowedly a god of
shadows, he allows for an interpretation and extension of Urizen’s darkness. This is possible because “ interpretation . . . became the central principle of
cultural continuity and identity, and the norms of cultural memory could only be extrapolated from renewed study of their textual sources ” (J. Assmann, Cultural
80). Consequently, although Ginsberg does not mention the word ‘shadow’ in relation to Moloch, the latter is still a character whose darkness and blindness
engulf him in a Urizen’s world where both himself and the people whom he
enthralls are taken over by sleep. The fact that Moloch’s “ eyes are a thousand
blind windows! ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 21) creates an ironical image because the
multiplicity of the sources of light does not enhance this character’s vision but,
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on the contrary, it diminishes it to the point of blindness202 and consequently
binds him to a reality of shadows and darkness. Because “ blind” are also the
capitals he rules over (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22), it is easy to assume that, just as in
the case of Urizen, the shadows extend to the surrounding reality as well and are
not limited to the central figure that produces or advances them. Moreover, the
mention of fog, clouds and incomprehensibility adds to the atmosphere’s
mystery and alludes to uncertainty and difficulty in finding the right path
towards knowledge and light. The second part of “ Howl ”, which is dedicated
entirely to Moloch, is filled with sleep imagery: “ Nightmare of Moloch . . .
Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21),
“Moloch in whom I dream Angels ” (22) and finally “Moloch whom I abandon!
Wake up in Moloch! ” (22). The latter imperative is triggered by the conviction
that the sleep induced by Moloch is one that is destructive and obscures reality.
This lack of access to Truth and the difficulty of finding a type of
Knowledge that is good and authentic are vividly described in Plato’s famous
allegory of the cave, presented in the first part of Book VII of The R epublic . In a
dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, the former discusses human beings’ lack of education and state of imprisonment in a world of illusion by imagining
an underground cave. In this place, detached from sunlight and chained in a
position in which they cannot move, human beings spend the entirety of their
lives facing an empty wall, with their back turned towards another, lower wall above which people carry all sorts of statues and artificial objects. Because the
people carrying these artifact s are hidden by the low wall, “ like the screen which
hides people when they are giving a puppet show ” (Plato, The Republic 220),
the human beings inside the cave are unaware of their existence and because the
objects themselves are illuminated from only on e side by a distant fire, their
shadows are cast on the wall that the prisoners face. In addition, since the people trapped in the cave find it physically impossible to turn around and witness
reality, they take the shadows that they see as real: “ what peo ple in this situation
202 As opposed to Moloch’s blind eyes, the eyes of the hipsters are described as radiant, cool,
brilliant, sexy and wild (Ginsberg, “Howl” 9, 11, 12, 23).
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would take for truth would be nothing more than the shadows of the
manufactured objects ” (Plato, The Republic 221). In Heidegger’s words “ the
prisoners do indeed see the shadows but not a s shadows of something ” (20).
Therefore, they c enter their lives on giving names for them and attempting to
understand and predict their movement. This exercise in imagination is further enriched by the possibility that one of these people may be sent free and may
experience daylight before deciding to return back to the cave and make the
others aware of their condition.
Plato’s “shadow philosophy ” (Andersen i) can prove very useful in
interpreting the shadow nature of Urizen and its memory image in Moloch. It seemingly rests on four pillars of support: the existence of authenticity and the
necessity of its counterpart exemplified by the interdependence of light and darkness, people’s inability to distinguish truth from imitation, the illusory and limited character of sensorial reality and the necessity of receiving help (albeit
unsolicited) in order to transcend this sorrowful condition. Once again, the fact
that the state described by Plato is a more general characteristic of humanity is
stressed by Glaucon’s wonder, who finds this image to be extraordi nary, odd:
“‘A strange picture. And strange prisoners’ (Plato, The Republic 220) and
Socrates response “ ‘No more strange than us’ ” (Plato, The Republic 220).
The dark and enclosed environment provided by the cave conceals the
truth about the world and limits the knowledge of human beings. It is no
surprise that Blake associates the forming of the human spine with a cavern
203
and the materialization of man’s eyes with two, pitifully small orbs which can perceive nothing but the darkness of their own cave: “ Ribs like a bending cavern
. . . From the caverns of his jointed Spine . . . two little orbs; /And fixed in two
203 The cavernous spine is also visually rendered in Blake’s illustration for this passage, which
depicts the first step in the creation of the first h uman body as a human skeleton, bended as
if in a foetal position inside the womb and referred to in terms of the limited senses in Europe as well: “Five windows light the cavern’d Man; thro’ one he breathes the air;/ Thro’
one hears the music of the sphere s; thro’ one, the eternal vine/ Flourishes, that he may
receive the grapes; thro’ one can look. . . Thro’ one, himself pass out what time he please” (The Complete 60).
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little caves204“ (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52). This state extends and infects
the generations to follow.
No more could they rise at will
In the infinite void but, bound down
To earth by their narrowing perceptions . . .
Beneath their brethren shrink together
Beneath the Net of Urizen,
Perswasion [sic] was in vain,
For the ears of the inhabitants were wither’d, & deagen’d, & cold. (Blake, The Bo ok of Urizen 63)
S
imilarly, Moloch forces its prisoners to live “ in the machinery of night ”
(Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 9), a metaphor by means of which night itself is seen as an
artificial, man -made construction aimed at expanding obscurity. Yet, beyond
this darkness, both Blake and Ginsberg show that there is a brighter, truthful,
infinite reality and people seem to be unaware of their having been “ Cut off
from life & light” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 55) and deprived of the “kind,
king205 light of mind ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 10). However, since “appearance is
not identical with reality ” (Andersen 42), their oblivion does not affect the
existence of sunlight outside of the cave and of “ Light streaming out of the
sky!” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22). After all, shadows cannot be delimited in the
absence of light and light cannot shine upon something without producing a
shadow.
The inertia and passivity of Plato’s cave bound human beings can be
paralleled to sleep paralysis and their imprisonment could be understood as their
mental inability to conceive of a wider perspective in which they may realize
that what they experience is not truthful. In other words, while lying
unconsciously, asleep, people experience very limited body movement and are often convinced of the fact that the shadows of their dreams are, indeed,
204 See also Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): “For Man has closed himself up, till
he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern” ( A Critical 14). Also, the same
‘little orbs’ in ‘little caves’ are also used to describe the eyes in the process of Urizen’s
embodiment in Blake’s Milton and in his Vala, or The Four Zoas .
205 The word king could be interpreted as a reference to Plato’s ‘philosopher king’, whose love and thirst for true knowledge would bring about the enlightenment of mind.
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representative of reality. The same physical and psychological restriction can be
considered in the case of Urizen and Moloch. If the former is seen as being
literally bound by chains and nets in terms of both body and mind: “ Restless
turn’d the immortal inchain’d ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 52), Moloch’s
limitation is revealed via reference to prisons. Consequently he is “ Moloch the
incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21). Urizen and Moloch are false gods,
impostors who seek dominion and who seem to thrive in a world blinded by the
reliance on the senses and by the illusory progress of technology, respectively, a
place in which “ the soul . . . limits itself only to organic creation, i.e.
acknowledges only the physical world” (Gallant 7), instead o f reaching beyond
that superficial level. The fact that they are worshiped and obeyed proves how
easily people can be made to believe that what is essentially a “ theatre of
shadows ” (Huard 7) is objective, universal truth.
As political philosopher Roger L. Huard explains, in an analysis of
Plato’s allegory:

We humans are the people who are bound to our chairs in the cave. Our
ordinary knowledge of things is not “ true” knowledge because it is based on the
shadows we see on the wall in front of us. True knowledge requires that we first be freed of our bonds and turned towards things as they really are (the
objects carried along the road and above the wall) as well as the light that
shines upon them. (7)

Therefore, until they are freed “from the chains of ignorance ” (Huard 18), or
from “the chains of familiarity ” (Andersen 42), Urizen, Moloch and their
subjects cannot turn around206, “ascent to the light ” (Huard 18) and per ceive
reality, but, instead, they remain bound and obligated to put their trust in the
authenticity of the only things they know and see: the shades around them.
Because these “ misleading shadows ” (Huard 8) are merely appearances, they
are bound to be simplistic, two -dimensional, colorless copies of reality that, in
206 See Plato’s periagoge or the turning, which does not imply merely the turning of the head,
but a full -body turn, a complete change of perspective.
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the act of replacing authenticity and truth with imitation and falsehood, present
life as a faded, diminished version of what it truly is.
Plato does not provide an explanation for the origin of “the human
condition of being shackled” (Heidegger 22), nor does he hint at who manages
to free the first prisoner who afterwards feels compelled to impart his newly –
found knowledge with the rest of his fellow human beings. However, in Blake’s perspect ive, this psychological condition is imposed by society itself. It is
humanity who itself who “ began to weave curtains of darkness; ” (Blake, The
Book of Urizen 56) and eventually forgot about this action and took the darkness
to be real: “ Till the shrunken eyes, clouded over, / Discern’d not the woven
hipocricy [sic] ” (62). In this case, the inner vision of human beings is
diminished and they are oblivious of the fact that what they witness is actually a lie, a self -made invention, a copy of what things rea lly are. Yet this sleeping
state appears to be part and parcel of humanity: “ being human also means,
among other things: to stand within the hidden, to be surrounded by the hidden”
(Heidegger 21). It is only with the help of a guide, a philosopher (for Pla to’s
intellectual quest) or a prophet (for Blake and Ginsberg’s spiritual quest) that
would untie people and show them the way towards the exit of the cave by
unblocking the doors of their perception. From the perspective of the lyrical
selves of both The Book of Urizen and “Moloch ”, the situation is seen clearly
and lamented. The voices that present the shadowy sleep are themselves awake and can therefore provide that guiding light.
Also, it is important to note that sleeping has long been associated with
death, whether because of the horizontal position of the sleeping body, its lack of movement or the involuntary break from conscious life and shift towards
another realm, the two states have always been in close relation to each other.
For instance, ancient Greek poet Hesiod perceives Death and Sleep as being
siblings and describes them both as children of the Night, as they are both
untouched by the rays of the sun, when referring to Tartarus in his didactic
poem “ Theogony ” (c. 700 BC):
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Night and Day passing near greet one another as they cross the great bronze
threshold. The one is about to go in and the other is going out the door. . . . The
one holds much seeing light for those on the earth, but the other holds Sleep in
her hands, the brother of Dea th-deadly Night, shrouded in murky cloud. That is
where the children of dark Night have their houses, Sleep and Death, terrible gods; never does the bright Sun look upon them with his rays when he goes up
into the sky nor when he comes back down from the s ky. (Hesiod 63- 65)

It is evident that in this case, it is the absence of light that brings sleep and death
together in the house of the Underworld, the realm of shadows. This association
can be traced back to Egyptian literature (the 22 -23 Dynasties, Neol ithic burials,
Pyramid Texts) and Mesopotamian Literature (McAlpine 136- 138).
In addition, the Christian tradition also that makes use of the same sleep-
death or rather death -sleep similarity. In the Old Testament, the two concepts
share much of the same v ocabulary (McAlpine 144) and the expression ‘to sleep
with the fathers’ – in the sense of dying and being reunited with one’s
forefathers – is a common one, used over thirty -five times in the Old Testament
(Elwell, “Sleep ”). From a religious perspective, C hristians are encouraged to
find comfort in the temporality of death, which is not to be perceived as eternal
nothingness, but as a provisional state of interruption from life. Just as one can
awake from sleep, it is possible for the dead to awaken as well : “And many of
those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt ” (Daniel 12:2). The promise of
“the future resurrection of the human body ” (Jackson, “The Biblical ”) that the
figurative meaning of the term ‘sleep’ entails is one that is repeated fifteen times
in the New Testament (Filat, “ Why ”) and mentioned by Jesus Christ for the first
time in reference to his intention of raising Lazarus from the dead, which is perceived as waking h im up from sleep:

Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. Then
said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. Howbeit Jesus spake of his
death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said
Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead ”. (John 2:11- 14)

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Christ’s choice of words proves that “ like Lazarus, everyone enters a figurative
state of sleep at death ” (“Jesus Christ ”). As opposed to human beings who
undergo sleep and death through the fact that they are subject to earthly time,
the God who has the power to wake them up is an immortal being, who “ has no
time in it” (Boehme qtd. in Aubrey 129) and therefore has a beginning without
an end. It follows that He should never succumb to sleep: “ he that keepeth thee
will not slumber. . . . he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep”
(Psalms 121:3- 4).
While the true Christian God never sleeps, false gods Urizen and M oloch
lend themselves to heavy sleep and, while being symbols of death themselves,
they bring about the physical death of those who worship them: “ But Urizen laid
in stony sleep,/ Unorganiz’d, rent from Eternity./ The Eternals said: “ What is
this? Death ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 49). The shadowy sleep of this
character is one that reflects his own image, which is that of death: “ the death
image of Urizen ” (55) or “ Urizen’s deathful shadow ” (59), “The Immortal
endur’d his chains, /Tho’ bound in a deadly sleep ” (54). Furthermore, when
Urizen created mountains and hills to hide from the Eternals after he separated
himself from them, he did so until he aged “ In despair and the shadows of
death ” (48). This means that not only does this imitative god fear the
repercussions of creating an imperfect world and is forced to run away and hide,
but also that his body can be subject to aging and death. Therefore, in Blake’s
perspective, Urizen brings death to mankind by means of his own sleep and the
existence of his own, earthly body.
Establishing Moloch in a position of cultural continuity (J. Assmann,
Cultural 72) to Urizen, Ginsberg stresses the fact that the American capitalist
God is also one whose sleep implies death and whose body parts are themselves conducive to violence, murder and death: “ Moloch whose fingers are ten
armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21). Thus, bringing upon the physical
suffering of death is an action that comes as often and as natural to Moloch as
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using one’s fingers would be to a human being. Moreover, standing in stark
contrast to Yahweh who teaches Moses how to sacrifice animals and bring their
breasts as wave offerings of peace – His own hands shall bring the offerings of
the LORD made by fire, the fat with the breast, it shall he bring, that the breast may be waved for a wave offering before the LORD ” (Leviticus 7:30),
Moloch’s breast requires the sacrifice of another, human, breast, which is not an act of peace, but of war and destruction.
As rulers who are not interested in their subjects’ wellbeing, nor feel the
need to protect or comfort them, Urizen and Moloch lack the Christian God’s
benevolence, knowledge and omnipotence and, therefore, they renounce His
pledge of resurrection. They sl eep and bring sleep upon human beings,
foreshadowing death. Yet the induced state of slumber is not temporal, but eternal and hence anything but comforting. Sleep is neither “ a gift from God . . .
the purpose [of which] is to sustain and heal the body ” (Ancoli-Israel 35 -36),
nor something that people have “no more to fear from . . . than we do from
falling asleep ” (Elwell, “Sleep ”) because instead of union with the Creator,
Urizen and Moloch promise division and instead of eventually waking up from
the sleep of death, their sleep represents a seemingly permanent state of “cold
solitude & dark void” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 54).
A similar, underlying feeling of pessimism can be found in the
philosophy of Gnosticism, where the theme of sleep is widely used a s well.
Albeit the same sleep -death metaphor is maintained, one crucial difference
appears that can be said to topple this long lasting tradition and reconceptualize the notion of death. Consequently, the shadowy sleep of death understood by
Christianity p rimarily as the death of the body is seen by Gnosticism as the
death of the soul. This is expressed overtly by Gnostic scholar Hans Jonas in this work The Gnostic Religion (2001).

While earthly existence is . . . characterized by the feelings of forlornness,
dread, nostalgia, it is on the other hand described also as “numbness,” “sleep, ”
“drunkenness,” and “oblivion ”: that is to say, it has assumed (if we except
drunkenness) all the characteristics which a former time ascribed to the state of
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being dead in the underworld. Indeed, we shall find that in gnostic though the
world takes the place of the traditional underworld and is itself already the
realm of the dead, that is of those w ho have to be raised to life again. (68)

In this sense, Gnosticism challenges the Christian belief207 according to which
the resurrection of Christ prefigures the waking up of the physically dead and
the resuscitation of their bodies on the day of the Last Judgment, when their
immoral spirits re -inhabit their dwelling places. In the perspective of Gnostics,
what is asleep – and therefore dead in the case of most human beings – is not the
body, but the soul. Therefore, figurative sleeping does not imply being
physically dead, while keeping the soul alive, but being physically alive, while
soul is dead. This death- in-life is reinforced by a negative evaluation of
materiality of which human beings are inevitably part and by means of which
they remain in the shad ows or in “ the darkness (the lower, material world) ”
(MacRae 500). In this sense, Jacob Boehme, an influential figure for William Blake stresses the fact that “ the loss of eternity is often signified by sleep ” (qtd.
in Aubrey 128).
It follows that sleep and death become representatives of human beings
being entrapped in their corporeal existence, the shadows of which render them
oblivious to gnosis ,
208 the saving knowledge. The Apocryphon of John, the very
well-known second century Gnostic writing, accounts for the introduction of the
theme of sleep as a fundamental part of the creation myth by invoking the fact
that Adam was put to sleep by Yahweh when the latter created Eve, yet the act
merely deprived Adam of light and threw him into the ignorance of the shadows
of darkness. In this Gnostic version of Genesis, “ ’The Darkness’ (i.e. the
207 The philosophy of Gnosticism was discovered by means of two papyrus texts in Egypt,
close to Nag Hammadi, which “showed a deep split in the early Christian Church. . . .
gnostic Christians d enied that Christ returned in the flesh and appointed Peter his successor
. . . many gnostics challenged priestly authority and believed instead in the presence of the
divine within the human” (A. Casement 49).
208 See “Hymn of the Pearl”, from The Acts of Thomas in which a boy who is sent by his
parents to retrieve a pearl from a serpent forgets about his origins and his mission, but is
reminded of it through a let and eventually accomplishes it, in an allegory of human beings’
lost spirit which has fallen victim to sleep and has forgotten about its divine origins: “I
forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me. Through the heaviness of their
nourishment I sank into deep slumber” (qtd. in Jonas 69).
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Archons) puts Adam to sleep and removes from him, not a rib as Moses said,
but ‘a part of his power,’ which is able to transmit true life ” (MacRae 499) .
The close kinship of sleep and death has been exemplified in the actions
of Urizen and Moloch, but the type of death expressed by Blake and retaken by
Ginsberg is closer to the Gnostic apprehension of the concept rather than the
Christian one, since dea th does not seem to follow life, but actually to equal life.
Paradoxically, when Urizen creates life and the material world, he actually creates death. Along with the creation of his earthly body, man falls into a deep
sleep, since he is no longer conscious of or receptive towards the infinite nature
of the universe and the immortality of his being. “And now his eternal life/ Like
a dream was obliterated ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 54).
209 In addition, when
the first human baby is born (not created), eternity shudders at the realization
that shadows beget shadows and that humanity’s chains of materiality tighten to
the detriment of its spiritual insight: “ A shriek ran thro’ Eternity,/And a
paralytic stroke,/At the birth of the Human shadow ” (Blake, The Book of Urizen
58) and “ Forgetfullness210, dumbness, necessity,/ In chains of the mind locked
up” (51).
Spiritual death also seems to be a main characteristic of Moloch. In his
case, the sleeping soul has lost all contact with divinity and has turned entirely towards man -made, artificial values: “ Moloch whose love is endless oil and
stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22). It is
noteworthy that the two metaphysical aspects of this god, his love and his soul
are rendered are recognized as being infinite, yet are decisively material and
centered around the greed and lust for pow er that economic authority and
dominance of material profit over spiritual wealth bring about. In a Gnostic
209 The same idea of human life being tied to forgetfulness of divinity and its replacement with
a dream can also be encountered in William Wordsworth’s “Ode. Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: “Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting . . . Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison -house begin to
close/ Upon the growing Boy” (Wordsworth, “Ode”).
210 Sleep is not just ignorance, but also deliberate denial and refusal to see the truth is exemplified also in Blake’s The Four Zoas : “The Fallen Man takes his repose, Urizen
sleeps in the porch, . . . Refusing to behold the Divine Image which all behold/ And live thereby he is sunk down into a deadly sleep” (126).
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interpretation, Moloch’s soul is dead, although his body is alive because he has
lost himself in the prison of the physical world of matter and has become
overwhelmed by the illusion of financial power, failing to perceive the spiritual
light.
In a manner analogous to Plato’s cave dwellers who needed to rise and
release their bonds in order to awaken and perceive the true light, Gnostics
dwelled on t he importance of a call of awakening that would have a similar
effect upon those who stood under the shadows of ignorance and unawareness.
One such very explicit and instructive call, written in first person from the
perspective of a voice from beyond that represents light and the source of
knowledge can be found in the passage below:

And I said, 'He who hears, let him get up from the deep sleep.' And he wept
and shed tears. Bitter tears he wiped from himself and he said, 'Who is it that
calls my name, and from where has this hope come to me, while I am in the
chains of the prison?' And I said, 'I am the Pronoia of the pure light; . . . Arise
and remember that it is you who hearkened, and follow your root, which is I,
the merciful one, . . . and beware of the deep sleep and the enclosure of the
inside of Hades. ( “The Apocryphon of John ”)

As it can be observed, the Pronoia211 awakens the previously enchained soul and
insists that it remain watchful and remember the truth so that it doesn’t fall prey
to death again. The call is possible because in every human being there is a
divine spark that is dormant and that can be rekindled along with the resurgence
of consciousness.
In The Book of Urizen , the call of awakening is given by Orc, a character
whom Blake specialist Samuel Foster Damon interprets as “ revolution in the
material world . . . [whose] name is an anagram of cor , because he is born from
Enitharmon’s heart ” (309). He is the child referred to in The Book of Urizen,
who manages to shake the dead from their sleep: “ The dead heard the voice of
211 In the Gnostic system of thought, Pronoia is one of God’s feminine emanations,
personifying “fo rethought”: “ From heaven (called Pleroma, or ‘Fullness’) to earth,
emanations of the feminine energies of God include Protennoia (‘First Thought’), Pronoia
(‘Forethought’), Epinoia (‘Insight’ or ‘Imagination’), Zoe (‘Life’), Eve (‘Living Being’),
and her daughter Norea (‘Fire’ or ‘Light’)” (Chalquist, “A Gnostic”).
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the child,/ And began to awake from sleep./ All things heard the voice of the
child,/ And began to awake to life ” (59). An even more insistent call is given by
Blake in Jerusalem: “ Awake! Awake O sleeper of the land of shadows; wake!
Expand!/ I am in you and you in me, mutual love divine ” (A Critical 381). Orc’s
revolution is necessary for people to renounce conventi on as well as the passive,
careless prolongation of sleep and eventually awaken to the truth of the core, or
“root” of their soul’s divine light and love. However, there is much difficulty in
hearing this call, as “ the unconscious is . . . a veritable infe ction by the poison of
darkness ” (Jonas 69) and hence Urizen spreads it “Like a dark waste stretching ”
(51), in an attempt to impede spiritual revival,212 all the while weeping and
shedding the same bitter tears mentioned in The Apocryphon of John, perhaps
with the same terrifying realization that the world around is not one that reflects
the perfection of divinity.
The “Gnostic image of sleep and awakening ” (MacRae 505) represents
an integral part of “Howl ” as well. There are multiple references to the spiritual
nature of those whom the speaker refers to as the members of his generation. Whether they are angelheaded hipsters or saintly motorcyclists, they “ burn[x]
for the ancient heavenly connection” (Ginsbe rg, “Howl ” 9), a spiritual, inner
consumption that, in a Gnostic interpretation, would be indicative of the “ divine
spark
213 in man, deriving from a divine realm ” (Barnstone and Meyer 10). These
hipsters simultaneously denounce Moloch and fall victims to him , they reject
and rebel against everything this god of materiality and stands for, they are beacons of light
214 in his world of shadows, yet they are inevitably part of the
212 Religion, or rather false religion is another factor that belongs to the world of shadows and
entraps human beings: “A cold shadow follow’d him,/Like a spider’s web, moist, cold, &
dim,/ Draw ing out from his sorrowing soul . . . So twisted the chords, & so knotted. . . And
all call’d it the Net of Religion” (Blake, The Book of Urizen 61-62). This stance can be
explained via the Gnostic mistrust in religious leaders: “ To know oneself truly allowed
gnostic men and women to know god directly, without any need for the mediation of rabbis, priests, bishops, imams, or other religious officials” (Barnstone and Meyer 1).
213 For Urizen, the divine spark could be the very human heart, created immediately after the cavern -like spine and described in terms of a deeply hidden burning globe: “Down sunk
with fright a red/ Round globe, hot burning, deep” (52).
214 The illumination of the mind with divine knowledge of humanity’s spiritual core is overtly expressed in “Footnote to Howl”, where the word “holy” is repeated seventy -seven times in
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same environment and consequently are eligible to fall into the same sleep as he
does. As a result, not only does the lyrical self of “ Howl ” insist on the
importance of waking up in Moloch, or, as the Gnostics would say, “ in the Aeon
of the night ” (Jonas 80) but he also talks about this state of sleep as being a
near-death experience: “ where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our
own souls’ airplanes . . . they’ve come to drop angelic bombs ” (Ginsberg,
“Howl ” 26). The need “to shake out of their sleep and raise up those that
slumber ” (qtd. in Jonas 80) turns into a personal quest bec ause the speaker is
part of the group referred to by the pronoun “we”, the aim of which is spiritual
enlightenment by entering a higher state of awareness. Apart from the sharp
contrast between the brightness implied by electricity and the shadows of a
moribund unconscious that is not yet dead and can therefore still be returned to
life, it is significant to note that the concepts of souls and angels mentioned by Ginsberg are associated with bombs dropped out of airplanes because while the
vocabulary tha t points to the material world is maintained, the driving force
behind this idea of violence contradicts it, allowing for an image of humanity that is at the threshold between confinement and freedom, between sleep and
awakening, between life and death.
Two aspects that cannot be overlooked in the case of Urizen and its
cultural image Moloch are what would make them very suitable for a Jungian archetypal interpretation: their plane of existence in the human mind – since
they not only represent “ the genesis of society. . . [but also] the genesis of
consciousness ” (Cantor 36) – and their simultaneous particularity and
commonality. Instead of them being external to the human being, Urizen and Moloch are depicted as indispensable fractions of a person’s inner re alm, which
falls in line with Jung’s belief that “ all human experience is psychic ” (Gallant
3). In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , Blake makes sure to stress that “ men
forgot that all deities reside in the human breast” (A Critical, 15) and in Visions
reference to all types of people, parts of the body, cities, dreams and even Moloch. This is a
reflection of Blake’s strong conviction that all life is holy and that “E verything is eternal”
(A Critical, “Vision of the Last Judgment” 37).
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of the Last Judgment he sees only mental experiences as authentic: “Mental
things are alone real ” (A Critical, 43). While all of the four Zoas, along with
other mythological projections of Blake are representative of a journey within, it
is Urizen who imposes his extension over the mind (51). Although Albion is not
represented in The Book of Urizen, it appears in The Four Zoas and in
Jerusalem as a sleeping character,215 whose mind is taken over by many
conflicting spiritual entities (among whom Urizen), of whic h he is not aware.
The epithet eternal in reference to man and his mind entails that, albeit
individual and specific to each person in particular, these deities are common to
the primordial human being and, by extension, to all of humanity, just as
archety pes “combine the universal with the individual,216 the general with the
unique, in that they are common to all humanity, yet nevertheless manifest
themselves in every human being in a way peculiar to him or her ” (Stevens,
Jung). Similarly, Ginsberg’s Moloch is a god who has the ability to dwell within
people and affect them from within: “ Moloch who entered my soul early! ” (22).
More particularly, he is undoubtedly a mental deity, whose very name is the mind (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21), which Ginsberg stresses as being particularly the
result of Blakean influence.

The ultimate accusation, really, is ‘Moloch, whose name is the Mind’ It isn’t,
you know, out there, the all -devouring God, the destroyer God, it’s not out
there, it’s our own Imagination, as [William] Blake pointed out. So ‘Moloch, whose name is the Mind’ is hardly angry. That’s a piece of wisdom -teaching
actually, something that I understood from Blake long ago. (Ginsberg,
“BBC ”)

215 See plates 37 and 46 of Jerusalem (Yale Center for British Arts) for Blake’s illustrations of
the Sleeping Albion. The latter is seen as a man who has fallen, unconscious on his back
and is held by a figure of Jesus and then as an aged person with his chin to his chest, in
heavy sleep, riding the chariot of fire along with his emanation (Jerusalem) who sleeps as well. Emphasizing the sleeping state of Albion, Blake structures Vala, or The Four Zoas
into nine nights which form the dream of the Eternal Man.
216 According to Mark Ryan, “Fry also accepts the basic tenet of archetypal criticism, which is a theoretical apparatus for analyzing the role of symbols in literature. He argues that ‘one
essential principal of archetypal criticism is that the individual and the universal forms of an
image are identical’” (176). In terms of a psychoanalytical interpretation of Blake’s system in Vala, or The Four Zoas , Frye asserts that “Jung’s anima an d persona are closely
analogous to Blake’s emanation and spectre and his counsellor and shadow seem to have some relation to Blake’s Los and Spectre of Urthorna” (“ Blake’s Treatment” 67).
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Moloch’s characterization which implies, by means of the definite pronoun
“the” that replaces the more intimate “ my”, that he not just a personal, inner
protuberance of the speaker, but also an archetypal figure, belonging to the limitless shadow reality of the collective unconscious, whose “ identical psychic
structures [are] common to all ” (Jung, Symbols 158).
The concepts of shadow, sleep and the unconscious tackled so far can be
infused with new significance in the light of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalytical understanding of the human mind. If Urizen and Moloch are
understood not just as being asleep, but as being themselves projections of
dreams, they may be associated with unconscious representations that can only
surface in a context that is free from the grip of civilization and the restriction of
morality. According to Jung, there are four main archetypal components of the
human mind that play an important role in the development of the psyche
throughout the years:
217 the self (the unconscious foundation for the ego), the
persona (the social mask), the shadow (the repressed urges and instincts) and the anima/animus (the contr asexual soul -image). To Jung, “ the unconscious
corresponds to the mythical land of the dead, ” (Jung, Memories 191) and,
therefore, the encounter with one’s innermost, hidden thoughts and desires is
described as a descent into the world of darkness, into the underworld where
light is feeble and the shadow is inescapable.

I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at
any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive.
Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I w as conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my
little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. . . . When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was . . . my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the l ittle light I was
217 Jung distinguishes himself from other psychoanalysts of the twe ntieth century in that he
believes that the human psyche is in constant development throughout a person’s entire life.
According to him, there are two main stages of development: one that corresponds to the
first half of one’s existence, in which the perso n is preoccupied with the establishment of
the ego and another stage that surfaces in the second part of life, in which there is a need to
complete one’s personality by means of “recognition of the shadow” (Avens 204).
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carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only
light I have. (Jung, Memories 88)

The fact that the dark, unknown content of the unconscious can be analyzed
only when illuminated by conscious reflection prompts the speaker to carefully
protect the light from going out and from being engulfed into the sea of darkness. At the same time, the gigantic black figure is a constant, terrifying
pursuer, an undefeatable presence that should nonetheless be confronted,
interpreted and made sense of.
This shadow is reflective of instincts towards sexuality and violence that
society would deem blamable and unacceptable and are, thus, hidden away into
the darkest, furthermost corner of the mind, repressed, denied and remote from
everyday reality.

The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no
one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know
oneself in order to know who one is. . . . But if we step through the door of the
shadow we discover with t error that we are the objects of unseen factors. (Jung,
Archetypes 21- 23)

The metaphor of doors is similar to that of Blake’s doors of perception, in that it
presents the shadow as an access point towards a new level of awareness. While
the passage is tig ht and the journey towards the dark bottom of the well is
painful, it is one of self -discovery and of facing the unknown.
Due to the dark nature of the shadow , it is natural its encounter be a
horrifying one and its recognition as a part of the self be challenging and effortful. In other words, “ once we realize we have a shadow, and once we
realize that our enemy is within our own heart, then the conflict begins ” (Bishop
160). Consequently, Urizen speaks of struggles, battles and conflicts that are
monstrous in nature, yet reside in everyone’s mind: “ fightings and conflicts dire/
With terrible monsters Sin -bred,/ Which the bosoms of all inhabit ” (47). The
fact that this conflict is not an external one, but one that tackles the unknown
shadow further underlined in passages such as: “ For he strove in battles dire,/ In
unseen conflictions with shapes ” (45). The world that Urizen creates and
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represents is one bred from “monsters, & worms of the pit ” (61), one filled with
“Dread terrors, delighting in blood” (60) that sickened even its creator and that
take shelter underneath a very deep layer of the human psyche.
This proneness towards cruelty and brutality is also a key component in
the foundation of Moloch, whose acts represent a manifestation of the shadow
“in pathological ways, for example, in the sadism of modern warfare ” (Avens
199). In order to make the shift from potentiality to actuality, Moloch revives Urizen as a figure of memory in the context of the Cold War.

Assmann also makes an important differentiation between potential and actual
cultural memories. He argues that cultural memories occur in the mode of
potentiality when representations of the past are s tored in archives, libraries,
and museums; they occur in the mode of actuality when these representations
are adopted and given new meaning in new social and historical con texts.
(Kansteiner 182)

Consequently, Moloch becomes closely connected to the conce pt of war and
suffering (21), as he makes people sob and fear him so much that they turn
towards suicide: “ they bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! ” (23) and “ who
cut their writes three times successively unsuccessfully ” (16). Yet, if violence
runs ra mpant in the case of both Moloch, the same cannot be said of sexuality.
Urizen avoids it entirely and Moloch represses it deliberately, stressing the sexually intolerant society of Ginsberg’s time: “ Moloch whose fate is a cloud of
sexless hydrogen! ” (22). In this vision, it is the atomic bomb, or rather the
refuted collective shadow of humanity that, in breaking though the wall of
repression, has allowed for such an atrocity to happen, wiping away any traces of sexual diversification and expression.
Howev er dreadful the interaction with the shadow might be, Jung
thought it crucial to accept and integrate it as part of one’s unitary psychic wholeness and called this process individuation. In order for there to be a
“dialectical relationship between consciou sness and the unconscious ” (Avens
197), there has to be a recognition of the necessary complementarity of these
two contrary concepts and implicitly of the dual nature of the shadow, which is
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“on the one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side
healthy instinctivity and the prerequisite for higher consciousness ” (Pennachio
243). Blake’s conviction that without contraries there is no possibility for
progression or that opposition is true friendship is mirrored in Jung’s belief that
there are “ two halves of a single overriding psychic experience which is our
only t rue reality ” (Gallant 6) and “ no growth and development of human
personality is possible without consideration of them ” (Avens 188). The Swiss
psychiatrist thought his perspective valid for the cosmic realm as well: just as man needs his negative side in order to be complete, God’s nature cannot
possibly be all good, without any expression of evil. It follows that he did not
agree with the Christian image of perfect divinity and believed, rather, in the
equal importance of its dark aspect which is the only way via which Yahweh-
Satan or Christ -Antichrist could be reflective of divine wholeness or totality.
218
Jung’s process of individuation seems to observe much of the same main
principles that Gnosticism recognizes as intrinsic to its spiritual beliefs. If for
Gnostics the existence of human beings was rooted in the duality of the deadly
sleep from which people need to awaken by means of inner gnosis on the one
hand and the divine spark within them that would provide spiritual
enlightenment on the other hand, f or Jung, every aspect of reality contained its
opposite form and therefore no conscious human being could lack an unconscious projection, the exploration of which would be similar to a descend
into the underworld and the understanding of which would be pos sible via the
light of self -knowledge that brings into awareness the wholeness of a human
being.
Hence, whether interpreted as archetypal shadows of humanity or of the
cosmic sphere, Urizen and Moloch have to be reconciled with and have to play a
role in the transcendence of the one -sided perspective of evil for the purpose of
reaching the self -fulfillment of the entire being of which they are part and from
which they have been separated. After being fully experienced, the shadow has
218 In the words of Ann Casement, “The highest God is for Jung one that is not wholly good
but evil as well. . . . Wholeness, not perfection is the aim” (52).
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to be integrated. Inst ead of fully blaming Urizen for his violent endeavors and
their horrific outcome, Los takes some of the responsibility upon himself in
admitting that Urizen is an intrinsic component of himself and the demonic deity
also eventually recognizes his erroneous ways. In this manner, the process of
individuation takes it course: “ individuation proposes that good and evil, light
and shadow are fully recognized. To live an integrated life, man must become
conscious of his guilt and his shadow ” (Avens 214). Los’ wee ping is a result of
his waking up to a new dawn of consciousness.219 But despite Urizen’s and Los’
pain and anguish in creation, their redemption and reunion not figured in The
Book of Urizen, but in Vala, or the Four Zoas .

“I cast futurity away, & turn my back upon that void” . . .
So Urizen spoke, he shook his snows from off his shoulders & arose
As on a Pyramid of mist, his white robes scattering
The fleecy white: renew’d, he shook his aged mantels off
Into the fires. Then, glorious bright, Exhulting in his joy,
He sounding rose into the heavens in naked majesty,
In radiant Youth . . . (Blake, Vala 290)

In the case of Moloch, the union and reconciliation with the shadow is
not as complex or clearly put forth, which marks a variation typical for textual
acts of remembrance: “ The main difference between textual and ritual continuity
lies in the fact that th e latter is based on repetition (i.e. variations are not
allowed), whereas the former not only allows but even encourages variation” (J.
Assmann, Cultural 81). Hence, the manner in which salvation reaches the
villainous god is no longer accompanied by apoc alyptic language and mystical
imagery, but merely succinctly expressed via five words that leave room for interpretation and questions with respect to the true identity of the character:
“holy the Angel in Moloch” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 28). However, in identif ying the
angelical chore of Moloch, Ginsberg no longer perceives him as the ultimate,
219 Although no further unification is expressed in The Book of Urizen, in Vala, or The Four
Zoas and in Jerusalem Blake stresses union in the form of resurrection from (spiritual)
death. This union is carried out on multiple levels, to reverse each link in the chain of
division, from spectre and emanation (masculine -feminine), humanity and shadow, to the
fourfold unification of the Zoas ( including Urizen and Urthona/ Los), to Albion and his
emanation and eventually Albion and Jesus.
247

Satanic adversary, that is fully separate from the lyrical self and thus very easy
to blame, but as a god whose divine core brings balance to his being and can
therefore be empathized with by the hipsters who are able to connect him to
their own sacred core. Yet, the element of forgiveness implied by this statement should not be mistaken for submission: “ it must be emphasized again, however,
that this does not imply an irr esponsible surrender to the shadow . . . but a new
freedom to act out of one’s inborn wholeness ” (Avens 204). In other words, by
activating the unconscious and allowing for its fusion with consciousness, the speaker of “ Howl ” gains enough knowledge of hims elf to wake up and embrace
the pain caused by Moloch because it sustains the double nature of both himself and the world around him.
This insistence upon the meeting of contraries, the coming together of
two opposite elements that are melted and incorporat ed for the formation of a
new one is also an indispensable principle of alchemy, the Hermetic art of
transformation. This union is called coniunctio, hierosgamos (chemical
wedding), royal marriage, royal union or unus mundus and finds an equivalent
in the Gnostic dual perception of the world, as well as in Jung’s reconciliation
with the shadow. In fact, it is in alchemy that Jung believed to have found the historical equivalent of his psychological discoveries or, “ in other w ords,
alchemy was a metaphor for individuation” (Stevens, Jung).
A mystical endeavor rooted in the Egyptian civilization and believed to
have been inspired by the god Thoth, later known as Hermes Trismegistus, alchemy was a dual activity: on the one hand it was a pre -scientific attempt
carried out in laboratories with the use of metals and other (mainly secret) ingredients, but on the other hand it was a spiritual process by which the soul
would be awoken to another dimension of existence. In both cases, t he alchemist
would take upon himself a Great Work known as Opus Magnum
220 that
220 The alchemical Opus can be interpreted as an analogy for the creation of the cosmos, as a
human attempt to mirror the generation of perfection, since “man w as seen as a microcosm,
a complete equivalent of the world in miniature” (Levy, “The Sacred”). This view was also
supported by their belief in the parallelism between the two realms, evident in their motto:
as above so below .
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involved melting and coagulating substances via the use of physical fire or
dissolving old selves in favor of new ones via the use of inner fire, hoping to
culminate with the crea tion of the Philosopher’s Stone ( lapis philosophorum ) or
Elixir of Life, an all- powerful substance with the help of which base metals
could be turned into gold (and thus produce infinite wealth) or the self could be
reborn into a higher, perfect form (and thus achieve immortality). For Jung,
extroverted/ scientific/ laboratory alchemy was merely a projection of
introverted/ spiritual/ self -transforming alchemy221 and, hence, the latter should
be understood as the authentic core of this activity.222 Similarly, in what follows
the focus will be on this mystical side of alchemy, taking into consideration that
“mystics of all times have repeated that in the ordinary state we are all asleep or
even ‘dead’ to the true Reality ” (R. and I. Miller, “ The Holistic ”). Hence, the
metalwork of alchemy, its consistency and color -specificity will be perceived in
metaphorical terms, as an inner exploration, the purpose of which is for “ the
soul [to be] free from a ‘dead, leaden state of mind’ ” (N. Hamilton, “ The
Alchemical ”) and become aware of humanity’s mysterious, precious core.
The essence of alchemy lies in a process of transforming something of
little value such as lead or spiritual death into something of utmost value such as
gold or spiritual rebirth. This transm utation was imagined in terms of solve et
coagula, a well -known alchemical motto. After finding the Prima Materia, the
first matter from which the material world originated, alchemists would have to
melt it by fire in order to be able to manipulate its cha racteristics and transform
its initial properties so as to coagulate the unformed mass into a new element that is purer and perfected. Many times throughout The Book of Urizen, the
main character is described in terms of solidity, which makes him a carrier of
221 Speaking about the psychological experience of alchemists, Jung makes the following point:
“Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the
experience had nothing to do with matter itself (that is, with matter as we know it today).
He experienced his projection as a property of matter, but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious” (Jung qtd. in Levy, “The Sacred”).
222 According to Jung specialist Ann Casement, “For him [Jung], the alchemical goal of extracting gold from base metals is mirrored in analytical work in the gradual extraction of
the unconscious gold from the base metal of the consciousness” (53- 54).

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memory for Moloch. For instance, in the first age of creation, in which the
human spine is formed, the hardening of the bones is specifically mentioned
“And bones of solidness froze ” (52) and in the second age, when the nervous
system is alluded to, it has to make its way around the hardness of the bones
once again: “ Shooting out ten thousand branches/ Around his solid bones ” (52).
Moreover, Blake’s multiple references to sulfur in relation to Urizen –
“sulphurous smoke ”, “surging, sulphureous ”, “Sulphureous fluid” , “sulphureous
foam ” (47, 50, 51, 51) – strengthens the alchemical interpretation, since the
substance is known for being “ a primal formative element in alchemical theory ”
(Tarr, “William Blake ”). More specifically, it is the soul trapped in matter, the
divine spark of consciousness that is at the root of Prima Materia .

The alchemists ’ Sulfur became the soul of the material they were working
closely with in their laboratories. This Soul was unde rstood as the
Consciousness of that material, and that consciousness was seen as the source
of that particular material. Not only was consciousness the source of the
material being explored, but that same consciousness was the source of all.
Universal and infinite in its expression this one consciousness gave life to all
forms. (“Alchemical Sulfur ”)

However, Blake’s insistence on Urizen’s unchangeability and stagnation,
emphasized when the character himself overtly confesses that his aim is to
obliterate fluidity in favor of solidity (46), proves that the soul is trapped – the
sulfur thickens continua lly and from smoke it becomes fluid, foam and
eventually turns into a static lake (51). Even before the creation of the human
body, Urizen recounts his creation of the material sphere out of natural
elements, albeit not in harmony with them:

First I foug ht with the fire, consum'd
Inwards, into a deep world within:
A void immense, wild, dark, & deep,
Where nothing was, Nature's wide womb.
And self -balanc'd, stretch'd o'er the void,
I alone, even I! the winds merciless
Bound, but condensing in torrents
They fall & fall; strong I repell'd
The vast waves, & arose on the waters,
A wide World of solid obstruction.
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Here alone I, in books form'd of metals,
Have written the secrets of wisdom. (46 -47)

As Urizen struggles with the elements of nature to create the p hysical world,
what is described is the very Prima Materia that was at the foundation of all
matter. However, instead of it being formed in conformity with nature, it seems
to take shape against it, in an unnatural way, as a rock of obstruction in a sea of
water. Based on the same pattern of solidity and impermeability, Moloch is regarded as a sphinx of cement and aluminum (21), as an immense, heavy
statue, the solidity and potency of which is relentlessly underlined (22).
Moloch’s hard surface is also unna tural and is associated with man -made
machineries and robot apartments which replace the speaker’s inherent mystical proneness: “ who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! ” (22).
Consequently, both Urizen and Moloch are described as very solid
bodies that are created contrary to spiritual principles and that require fluidity in
order to be manipulated and molded into something else. They are reflective of
the “rigid -old-man-negativ e-father [who] is symbolic of a calcification of
consciousness . . . and thus becomes an obstacle to the growth and development of consciousness . . . [and] is in need of being liquefied and desolidified” (Levy,
“The Sacred ”). While Urizen’s frozen bones a nd Moloch’s cement and granite
portray their inflexibility, it is important to notice a gap in this seemingly
unbreakable façade: Urizen’s books of metals and Moloch’s aluminum
component offer the promise of malleability and the possibility of being melted
by fire, an element that is present in both works. As Nelson Hilton asserts, Blake’s hyphening of the word ‘me -tals’ when describing Urizen’s book is not
at random, but may signify that the “ book not only concerns . . . but is made of
himself (Hilton qtd. in Connolly 82). At the same time, the fire of the Eternals is
seen as a burning, yet dark constituent that pours like liquid over his drought –
stricken, solid world: “ And o'er the dark deserts of Urizen/ Fires pour thro' the
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void on all sides . . . But no light from the fires! all was darkness ” (48).223
Although the fire may liquefy Urizen, it denies the world of obstruction any
light, since it is a reflection of the natural sun, instead of the spiritual one
(Stempel 73). For the fellow sufferers of “ Howl ”’s poetic self, fire represents a
powerful element that is repeatedly ingested alongside turpentine, a very flammable substance: “ who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night (10). P erhaps
these were suicidal attempts or perhaps they were desperate alchemical
experiments aimed to provide an antidote for Moloch and to melt and dissolve
the coagulated, Moloch -infested part of themselves in order to purify it.
The shadowy aspect of the t wo characters is represented in the
alchemical process by the stage called nigredo, or blackness because it produces
a substance that is “black blacker than black, [and] is also an internal experience
of melancholia, an encounter with the shadow ” (Grossing er qtd. in R. and I.
Miller, “The Holistic ”). Although the Great Work has been presented in many
ways, many alchemists agree that there are at least three classic stages involved:
nigredo (blackening), albedo (whitening) and rubedo (reddening) (S. Martin
24).
224 It is the first stage that is extensively presented and dwelt upon in terms
of Urizen and Moloch, as the two gods seem to be entrapped in this stage,
blocking any further spiritual development. During the nigredo or the initia l
stage, the now dissolved substance becomes very dark and stands for putrefaction, for “ spiritual or metaphorical death ” (S. Martin 27), as a first
necessary step in cleansing the self and allowing for another beginning. It is often “portrayed as a Death’ s Head ” (S. Martin 33) and symbolized by a raven,
stressing “the stage of discomfort with the status quo [that] is necessary to
initiate the alchemical process ” (I. Miller, “ Introduction” ). Indeed, the
223 The state of utter darkness presented by Blake can be associated to what “the Greeks called
kthonicity – the abs olute darkness of the abyss” (Tarr, “William Blake”) and with the
Gnostic understanding of “the inherent darkness of the physical world” (Pennachio 239) which is based on ignorance: “Gnosticism maintains that most people understand little or nothing of thi s message and live in obscurity, terribly unaware of who they are” (Pennachio
241).
224 Sometimes citrinitas , or yellowing is a phase that preceeds the rubedo.
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difficulties involved in this process have been discus sed and identified as a lot
more than discomfort, as tremendous suffering and death brought about by
Urizen and Moloch. But what is it that dies and therefore undergoes
decomposition? According to the principles of alchemy, “ the Body is to be
decomposed, t hat is one shifts one’s awareness to the inner self ” (Gillabel, “1.3
Nigredo ”).225 The rotting can sometimes be seen as affecting spiritual death, but
since this stage is governed by the element of earth and represents “ a
purification of the earthly nature i n us” (N. Hamilton, “ The Alchemical), it has
to do with the renunciation of human beings’ attachment to earthly, material
existence. Both Urizen and Moloch are deeply rooted in the world of the senses
and of matter and whether they symbolize the limitation of perception to
physicality only or the reliance on money and economic benefits, they represent
shadowy elements of dissolution, of darkness and values that should be reconsidered, as well as attachments to superficial, temporal objects that should
be severed or at least loosened. In addition, the nigredo also incorporates the
water element.

The water element symbolises the emotions that we experience in encountering
and letting go of such attachments – fear, anger, grief, etc. – emotions we need
to encounter and survive, experiencing them in order to become free of them and so move on to the next stage. Thus, it is that when the unconscious earth
nature in us is first awakened we initially experience negative thoughts and
feelings. Once we have overcome the unconscious identifications, the thoughts
and feelings become positive, i.e. the world no longer threatened our real self
because we are free of it. (N. Hamilton, “ The Alchemical ”)

The above mentioned explanation would account for the strongly negative
attitude towards Urizen and Moloch, for the anger directed at them, for the fear,
struggle and sense of injustice that are woven in their descriptions, but also for
the shift in perspe ctive and the realization of their inherent holiness. This latter
attitude is what provides the liberation and activation of perception, the awakening and the end of the nigredo followed by the break of dawn, of albedo,
225 Although the speaker of “Howl” does mention that in Moloch he is a consciousness without
a body, this appears to be seen in negative terms. In this sense, Moloch is depicted as a
suppresser of one’s sexual freedom and sensual enjoyment.
253

or the discovering of the light that brings about the illumination of the soul and
leads to rubedo, the consolidation of the Philosopher’s Stone.
By way of conclusion, through continuation and variation, repetition and
interpretation, Urizen is remembered in a culturally tense America that seems to
have descended into a world of shadows in its many different interpretations. In
order to reach the Platonic sun, Christian immortality, Gnostic spiritual
awareness/ self -knowledge, Jungian individuation or the Alchemical spiritual
gold, the liter ary world envisaged by Blake and remembered by Ginsberg have
to experience darkness and death in the shape of Urizen’s and Moloch’s cave-
bound shadows, physical death, spiritual oblivion, deep, unconscious shadows
of the mind and self -dissolution. All of t hese aspects are perceived as forms of
imprisonment and restriction and are brought to the surface by the abundant imagery related to sleep, as well as chains in The Book of Urizen and prisons in
“Howl ”. An interpretation of Urizen and Moloch as being simu ltaneously asleep
themselves and projections of sleep allows for the two villains to be perceived as shadows that are indicative of the archetypal negative drives, deeply rooted in
the collective unconscious of humanity. Yet, as it has been mentioned, the mere
encounter with this type of darkness is not enough, since what leads to its transcendence is the realization of the necessary role it plays as a contrary figure
to that of illumination in the formation of a perfect union of opposites that
reveals the wholeness of creation. The reconciliation with this indispensable
component of the psyche and the transcendence of spiritual passivity that is akin
to a sleep of death require awakening and resurrection which are possible
because the darkness depicted in b oth The Book of Urizen and in “ Howl ” – and
interpreted through the lenses of Plato’s philosophy of shadows, the Christian and Gnostic different perspectives of death as a shadowy sleep, Jung’s
archetypal construction of the shadow and the alchemical focus on the darkest
stage of creation – shelters a deeply hidden luminous nucleus that holds the key
to inner transformation and metaphysical regeneration.
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IV. 4. THE ABOMINABLE III. Urizen’s Emanation and Moloch’s
Emasculation

A third type of abomination represented by Urizen and remembered in
the shaping of Moloch has to do with gender construction. Both characters display an aggressively masculine behavior that goes against the Eternal
principle of androgyny advanced by the two writers, offering a counte r-example
of unbalanced, single vision of male figures that fully reject their feminine side. Thus, the aim of this subchapter is to analyze the manner in which Blake’s and
Ginsberg’s denunciation of their villainous gods implies a rejection of the all –
masculine male character not by praising a fully effeminate male, but by doing
away with the simplistic masculine -feminine polarity, the static nature of which
Urizen and Moloch are keen to defend. In response, the English bard’s image of
the Eternal Man and the American poet’s construction of the identity of the
hipster bring to the surface a type of masculinity that comprises both of what
was considered to be typically masculine and very feminine characteristics in
the shape of an image that defies polarity in favor of complementarity.
The subchapter will be divided into two parts: the first one will tackle
Blake’s concept of ‘emanation’ as the inner feminine part of each Zoa, its
origins and social implications, the author’s androgynous ideal (which is sharply
differentiated from the figure of the hermaphrodite) and Urizen’s abusive
treatment of his emanation, Ahania, as an example of abominable narrowness of
perspective and machismo which manages to suppress the necessary feminine
nature within the male as w ell as reject healthy sexuality as sin, negating its
liberating energy which brings man closer to God. The second part of this subchapter will deal with Moloch’s masculinity in the context of an American
Government that “ politicized sexuality ” (Moore 5) an d promoted a type of
masculine patriotism that ostracized nonconformist gender roles
226 at the time in
226 John Money was the one who coined the term ‘gender role’: “all those things that a person
says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or
255

which “Howl ” (1956) was written. Taking on the figure of memory provided by
Urizen, and endowing it with contemporary significance, Ginsberg’s American
god embraces a heteronormative type of masculinity which stands in contrast to
a more rebellious and androgynous homosexual or homosocial227 masculinity
represented by the hipster.
To begin with, William Blake’s emanations represent the feminine side
of his Zoas and they are depicted as individual entities detached from the
primordial being along with the Fall. The concept stems from a Neo -Platonic
theory according to which the creation of the universe implied the multiplication of the One into Many by means of various emanations that flow from the
primordial source and create “ a hierarchy of immaterial substances ”
(“Emanation ”) without any diminishing of God’s perfection: “all things are
derived from the One. The infinite goodness and perfection ‘overflows’, and . . .
generates other beings, sending them forth from its own superabundance ”
(Dubray, “Emanationism” ). Thus, the association with water rooted in the Greek
term emanare , which means “ to flow from ” (Dubray, “Emanationism” ) as well
as the secondary nature of the emanation in relation to the One may have been regarded as feminine characteristics by Blake.
Consequently, feminist critics such as Susan Fox
228 and Anne Mellor
have attacked the underlying implications of perceivin g female characters as
emanations who display either passivity and submissiveness or shrew -like
features in Blake’s prophetic writings: “ Blake’s consistently sexist portrayal of
women . . . as either passively dependent on men, or as aggressive and evil ”
woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticis m”
(254).
227 The Beats idealized manly love and camaraderie, often placing their platonic relationship
with other men on a higher level than their marital or familial connection to women. For
instance, Neal Cassady would gladly share his wife Carolyn with Jack Kerouac and even
Allen Ginsberg. They found inspiration in Walt Whitman’s concept of brotherhood: “the
personal and passionate attachment of man to man – which, hard to define, underlines the
lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every land a nd age, and which seems to
promise . . . the most substantial hope and safety of the future of these States” (Whitman, The Complete 250).
228 See Susan Fox’s article “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry” in which the
author underlines the passi vity and dependent nature of Blake’s emanations and heroines in
general.
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(Mellor, “Blake’s ” 148). The passive emanations (such as Ahania and Enion)
wail and lament their condition,229 while doing very little to surpass it and
proving their dependence on their male counterparts, while the aggressive
emanations (for instance Vala an d Enitharmon) are representative of the
‘Female Will’ which brings about an unnatural propensity towards domination,
assertion of independence, egoistic actions, “ entrap[ment] of the naked male
psyche ” (Dent and Whittaker 120) and purposeful denial of sexual satisfaction.
In Jerusalem , Enitharmon rejects Los even more radically than she does in The
Book of Urizen where she refuses his sexual embraces.230 This time she not only
states that she is not his slave, but also that she will not stop weaving his
fiber s231 until God as Male be under the dominance of the Female:

Enitharmon answerd. No! I will seize thy Fibres & weave
Them: not as thou wilt but as I will . . . be thou assured I never will be thy
slave.
Let Mans delight be Love; But Womans delight be Pride
In Eden our loves were the same here they are opposite. . . . I weave . . .
Till God himself become a Male subservient to the Female.
(Blake, The Complete 246-7)

Thus, the Female Will is a repressive agent (Aers 36), indicative of vengeful
female urges to eliminate male dominance, yet the aim is not to gain freedom,
but to establish female dominance instead. In the same work, Blake uses Los’
voice in order to conde mn the Female Will, which is identified as an obstacle in
the way of Man’s salvation and in “ A Vision of the last Judgment ”, Blake
229 See Northrop Frye’s description of emanations in Vala, or The Four Zoas as “shadowy
creatures who do practically nothing but wail about” ( Fearful 277).
230 Los’ sexual embraces may be interpreted as an attempt to regain his integrity. However, his
already fallen nature binds him to a world in which the senses are the highest form of reality
and therefore “Los tries to recapture his wholeness, not by seeking to regain Eternity, but by
seeking to regain Enitharmon. The result of Los’s persistence is the first sexual union”
(Cantor 51).
231 In Blake’s mythology, the Emanations are usually responsible with weaving with the help
of a loom, while their male counterparts plough the fields and prepare the crops. However,
weaving is also used to express the creation of material boundaries and traps. What appears to be an instance of traditional active -male, passive- female distinction that allows for a
gender -based distribution of work gives way to a negative apprehension of women’s work,
which is also later mentioned in Ginsberg’s “Howl” through the figure of the three shrews of fate who snip the creative “golden threads of the craftsman’s loom” (14).
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overtly states that in the perfect world of Eternity, Female Will cannot exist. The
two quotations below are most often the t arget of feminist critics.

There is a Throne in every Man, it is the Throne of God
This Woman has claimed as her own & Man is no more! . . .
O Albion why wilt thou Create a Female Will? (Blake, The Complete
“Jerusalem ” 176)

In Eternity Woman is the Eman ation of Man; she has No Will of her own.
There is no such thing in Eternity as Female Will (Blake, The Complete “A
Vision of the Last Judgment ” 562)

Tristanne Connolly offers two possible interpretations of Blake’s words: either
there is no volition of w omen in Eden since they are subordinate to men, or they
have “no reproductive power . . . [as] the male genitals will be considered the
authentic organ of creative power ” (189).232 I would add another possible
interpretation by the understanding of the word ‘will’ as stubborn ambition, which is admittedly portrayed as a feminine characteristic, but has no place in
Eternity, just as the Spectre, representative of masculine self -aggra ndizement
and self -centered attitude is equally out of place in an environment based on
Universal Love and perfect harmony. In addition, critics such as Judith Lee have
mentioned Blake’s echoes of Mary Woolstonecraft’s feminist work A
Vindication of the Ri ghts of Women (1792), in which case, the Emanations are
evocative of condemnable attitudes in contemporary women: “dependency,
passivity, indolence, sexual immaturity ” (Lee 132). Either way, scholars such as
S. Foster Damon who endeavor to defend Blake from charges of patriarchal sexism usually find it difficult to counter his above -mentioned words and resort
to invoking another one of the poet’s early prophetic writings, namely Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), in which “ Oothoon, the young woman a t the
center of the poem, is both active and heroic . . . struggle[ing] for self –
expression and freedom from repression” (Essick 616), as she contemplates her
violent rape, her lover’s lack of understanding and the latter’s act of chaining
232 The interpretation of the word ‘will’ as ‘phallus’ is inspired from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 136,
in which “the promiscuity of his beloved is expressed through a multiplication of wills, or
penises” (Connolly 189).
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her up “ back to back with her rapist . . . in mocking agreement with the original
hermaphrodites ” (Hayes 145). Although the draws attention to the hypocrisy of
the virgin -cult and the importance of uninhibited, free sexuality, bringing forth
Woolstonecraft’s feminist prin ciples, Leopold Damrosch also notes that in the
end the lead character is a helpless female who wails in vain as the daughters of
Albion echo back her sighs (127).
It is true that Blake’s aversion towards female independence may be
interpreted as misogyni stic, however I believe that such a reading would be
blind to the fact that the Female Will is analogous to the masculine Spectre and in Blake’s mythology, both of these states should be annihilated before entering
Eden, for both encourage a type of self -centered attitude that cannot lead to a
spiritual coming together of the masculine and the feminine aspects of Man. In this context, the aggressiveness of the Female Will cannot be regarded as blamable for “ perverting the proper hegemony of masculine over f eminine
principles ” (Essick 616), but rather for attempting to invert its tyranny rather
than renounce it completely. This is proven by the fact that the same attitude is
condemned in the case of all Zoas (particularly Urizen) as well as their Spectre,
whose struggle for dominion over Albion’s mind offers instances of rejection of
the possibility of progression through the joining together of contraries. Hence,
what Blake presents is a fallen world in which the primordial androgynous being
was divided into two earthly sexes that are equally erroneous when they attempt
to dominate the other and ignore the fact that the battle of the sexes is an earthly,
vegetative creation which transgresses the eternal state of harmonious
androgyny: “He [Blake] is not attack ing women, but rather the oppositions
within all humans between male and female principles that resulted from the fall” (Essick 616).
The figure of the Androgyne has prehistorical roots, but it entered
Western culture through Plato’s The Symposium , in whi ch Aristophanes told the
story of the origin of love in the form of a Greek myth according to which, humanity was initially divided into three sexes (all male -Children of the Sun, all
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female- Children of the Earth and androgynous -Children of the Moon) which
were round, rolling creatures with two sets of arms and legs and two faces each.

Once upon a time our anatomy was quite different from what it is now. In the
first place there were not merely tow sexes as there are now, male and female,
but three, and the third was a combination of the other two. This sex itself has
disappeared but its name, androgynous, survives. At that time the androgynous
sex was distinct in form and name, having physical features from both the male and the female. (Plato, The Symposium 22)

When these creatures became too confident, they attempted to challenge the
gods, and Zeus decided to cut them in half and have Apollo gather their cleft
skin to the fore into the shape of a navel. Ever since then, they have been
condemned to seek their other half and love has acquired the role of “ restor[ing]
us to our ancient state by trying to make unity out of duality and to heal our human condition” (Plato, The Symposium 24). Since the all -male and all -female
human beings were presumably also cut in hal f, they explain homosexual desire,
proving that “ original wholeness may be either homosexual or heterosexual ”
(Stevenson 15), however Blake does not discuss this possibility since
homosexuality could lead to the death penalty in eighteenth century England.
Furthermore, traces of the myth of the Androgyne can also be found in the Christian Bible as the male -female aspects may be a reflection of the
androgynous nature of the Creator who is a sole entity: “ So God created man in
his own image, in the image of G od created he him; male and female created he
them ” (Genesis 1:27). This interpretation advanced by cabalistic mysticism
reached Boehme’s Christian mysticism – as his first principle, Unground was
androgynous – (Stevenson 16) and, along with the Platonic myth, it provided a
solid foundation for William Bla ke’s prophetic vision of androgynous
perfection.
When Blake asserts that “ The Sexual is Threefold ” (The Complete
“Milton ” 97), that “ Humanity knows not of Sex ” (The Complete “Jerusalem ”
193) and that “ Humanity is far above/ Sexual organization ( The Compl ete
“Jerusalem ” 236) he seems to imply that in its original form, humanity is not
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sexually divided, which explains why gender polarity is depicted as a human
condition that needs to be mended or overcome when entering Eternity. Yet, is
should be noted that in Blakean mythology, there is a significant difference
between the Androgyne and the Hermaphrodite. While the former is praised as a paradisiac ideal that eliminates “ the flaws inherent in each sex ” (Hoeveler 29),
the latter symbolizes a fusion between the fallen male and the fallen female and thus “a sterile state of unreconciled and warring opposites ” (Foster Damon, A
Blake 181) that is attributed to domains, states and figures considered by Blake
to be deviant, such as war, rational philosophy and Sata n himself. The
Hermaphrodite represents a vegetative “ grotesque parody ” (Freeman 187) and
monstrous substitute of the Androgyne, a poor material imitation of a spiritual
state that accommodates both sexes instead of transcending them both,
immersing itself in a “ narcissistic fantasy of wholeness ” (Hayes 160) which
ultimately stands in opposition to the original, divine union of the sexes.
The positive example is contrasted to Satan’s hermaphrodite nature and
is represented by the figure of Jesus Christ, whose androgynous form is visually
rendered by Blake both in the illustration “ Christ descending into the Grave ” for
Blair’s The Grave, in which a muscular Jesus Christ has a very feminine visage
and in the illustration for “ A Little Boy Lost” (from Songs of Innocence and of
Experience) in which “ the rescuer has been identified both as Christ and as the
boy’s mother ” (Mellor, “Blake’s ” 152), due to his or her long hair and feminine
garments. Thus, Emanations and Zoas should not wage war against one another and instead embrace their counterpart, or as Blake would say, ‘comingle’ with
the other gender. This is the only manner in which one can es cape the polarity of
earthly division in favor of androgyny, however it is a perfect state that can only be achieved after death or in a post -apocalyptic world: “Sexes must vanish &
cease/ To be, when Albion arises from his dread repose ” (Blake, The Complete
“Jerusalem ” 252). Such a view is overtly expressed in Jerusalem , where Los
acknowledges the androgynous nature of the Human Form Divine as it is found
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in Eternity, formed by means of the coming together of each Zoa with his
Emanation and bridging sexual and gender divisions.

When in Eternity Man converses with Man they enter
Into each others Bosom (which are Universes of delight)
In mututal interchange . and first their Emanations meet
. . . if they embrace and comingle
The Human Four -fold Forms mingle also in thunders of Intellect
But if the Emanations mingle not, with storms & agitations
Of earthquackes & consuming fires they roll apart in fear
For Man cannot unite with Man but by their Emanations
Which stand both Male & Female233 at the Gates of each Humanity (Blake, The
Complete 246)

Despite the fact that the reunion with the Emanation is central for
acquiring redemption and restoring wholeness, Eternity is still about a
connection between Man and Man, a Brotherhood which underl ines the fact that
for Blake “the human form divine ultimately is ‘A Man’ . . . [while] women are
‘emanations’ divided from and intended to be finally reabsorbed into the male ”
(Mellor, “Blake’s ” 150-1). The question of whether Emanations retain any
indivi duality after their unification with the Zoas is not easy to answer since, on
the one hand their will is obliterated, but on the other hand, they are still active components of the Androgynous Man. Not only do Emanations have to actively
seek their counter part, wishing to meet their contrary – for they are not united
by force, but willingly embrace their Zoas – but they are also presented as
“joining ” their partners, not being taken over by them. For example, Ahania,
Urizen’s Emanation is described in Vala, or The Four Zoas as “cast[ing] off her
death clothes; She folded them up in care, in silence” after which “ bright Ahania
took her seat by Urizen in songs & joy ” (296), which means that she is “ not
absorbed into her zoa but joins with him as a self -realized character ” (Lee
140).
234
233 As David Aers notes, “although on a few isolated occasions Blake states that emanat ions
are male and female, the emanations given any extensive life in the poetry are all explicitly
females” (41).
234 As Judith Lee maintains, Emanations have to achieve “[their] own salvation before
rejoining [their] zoa” (148) which makes them “not mere witnesses but active participants”
(150) in Blake’s spiritual revolution.
262

Yet, because it is always the female part of humanity that has to be
integrated by the masculine and never the other way round, the former is still
understood as derivative and secondary, although simultaneously indispensible,
leading to theories according to which Blake’s emphasis on androgyny is
undeniable, yet his focus on equality is questionable. Thus, Mellor maintains
that “Blake was not able to portray such a gender -free androgynous ideal in his
poetry and art ” (“Blake’s ” 155). Based on this assertion and on Blake’s focus on
the male as principle element in the androgynous construction, the Eternal
Man’s double -gender identity may be seen as a result of “ internal movements
within one bi -sexual consciousness ” (Aers 37) of “ a male self with a female
element within it” (Damrosch 182). But forcing Blake’s vision to fit the mold of
either masculinity or femininity is to not realize that the English poet’s androgynous ideal “ no longer conforms to the code of heterosexual masculinity ”
(Hayes 157) and does not aim to counter either gender, but to rise above the
system altogether.
As a reflection of error, The Book of Urizen exhibits such powerful
masculine energy that there is barely room for feminine interventions. The only
Emanation presented in this thoroughly intellectual and tyrannical, macho
display of territorial control is Los’ female form, Enitharmon, whose very
existence generates a feeling of pity in Eternity. If pity was a unifying force in
William Blake’s real- life Othello -inspired love story with his wife, Catherine,
235
in his prophetic works it stands for an abominable division. The feeling is first
mentioned in the prophetic poem as one of the principles of Urizen’s
hypocritical “Laws of peace, of love, of unity,/ Of pity, compassion,
forgiveness ” (47), then as Los’ sentiment when watching Urizen’s dreadful
actions: “He [Los] saw Urizen, deadly, black,/ In his c hains bound; & Pity
began,/ In anguish dividing & dividing,/ For Pity divides the soul ” (55) and
235 Frederick Tatham who was personally acquainted with the Blake family maintained that
when William Blake met his would -be wife, he told her about the fact that he had been
rejected by another woman and asked Catherine whether she pitied him. When she said,
yes, Blake presumably replied that he then loved her and decided to marry her. However,
“The way this tale echoes Othello’s words (‘I loved her [Desdemona] that she did pity’ the
‘dangers I had passed’) makes one suspicious that it is a literary invention” (Essick 618).
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eventually in reference to the first female form who is called ‘Pity’ by the
Eternals prior to their leaving a site in horror (56). In all of these cases, pity is a
divider (ethical, spiritual and gender -based) and in terms of the newly -separated
female, pity underlines woman’s status as Other. Her coming into existence
generates sorrow not necessarily because she is an abomination herself, but
because her formation generates an abominable binary system of gender (in
place of continuity and oneness), which drives Man even further from his
original state of divine androgyny. This is the reason for which the act of
separation is depicted as a negative development t hat makes Eternity shudder.
Throughout The Book of Urizen there is no mention of Ahania, the main
character’s emanation, and it is only in The Book of Ahania (and later in Vala,
or The Four Zoas ) that the absence of Urizen’s feminine element is explained.
An androgynous Urizen casts away his inner femininity through an act that follows physical violence and gives way to symbolic violence. Dealing with the
aftermath of The Book of Urizen , The Book of Ahania tells the story of the
rebellion of Urizen’s son, Fuzion, and Orc -figure who attempts to rise against
his father’s rule, as he considers him to be a “ Demon of smoke . . . this abstract
non-entity . . . King of sorrow ” (The Complete 84), but is ultimately defeated
and crucified by Urizen on the tree of mys tery. During the fight, Fuzion strikes
Urizen’s loins with a fiery beam and Ahania is separated from him.

The cold loins of Urizen dividing . . .
Deep groan’d Urizen! Stretching his awful hand
Ahania (so name his parted soul)
He siez’d on his mountains of Jealousy.
He groand anguished & called her Sin
Kissing her and weeping over her;
Then hid her in darkness in silence;
Jealous tho’ she was invisible ( The Complete 84-5)

Along with the dismissal of Ahania, Urizen casts away h is own soul, his anima,
the “fallen man’s remaining intimation of immortality ” (Cramer 525) and with
it, his own feminine attributes of empathy, affection and flexibility, without
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which he is but a hard, masculine shell that considers his perspective of the
world to be the ultimate truth.
Ahania’s connection to sexuality is clear both from her place in Urizen’s
body (the loins) and from her being rejected as ‘sin’ by her overly intellectual
partner who is ashamed by her and consequently hides her away in a dark corner
of his mind, making her invisible and turning her into “ a faint shadow . . .
Helpless! . . . Unseen, unbodied, unknown” , “on the verge/ Of Non- entity ”
(Blake, The Complete “The Book of Ahania ” 85, 88). S. Foster Damon
underlines the pleasure f unction of Ahania which is spurned because “ the
Abstract philosopher has yet to learn that ‘the Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect’ ” (A Blake 7-8). Consequently, “ reason is destined to negate
every emotional, sexual or mental joy and fulfillment” (Niimi 51) and Urizen
turns pleasure into shame and health into sickness, which distorts the motherly attributes of feminine Ahania who is now “ the mother of Pestilence ” (Blake,
The Complete “The Book of Ahania ” 85), nurturing people to death. Urizen’s
stern decision reveals the fact that he prefers abstinence (‘cold loins’) over
sexual enjoyment and pure masculinity over androgyny, which merely deepens
the sense of human infirmity.
Yet, without realizing, when waging war against Fuzion and Ahania,
“Urizen is [in fact] at war with himself ” (Cramer 528), since the two characters
symbolize his “ repressed energies struggling for expression in order to heal the
imbalance created by the dominance of reason ” (Cramer 526).
236 As an
abominable suppresser , Urizen dismisses the dynamics of creative contraries
within his construction and chooses to do away with sexual freedom (which was
a mystical path towards divinity in Blake’s perspective), as well as the balancing
female aspect of himself. Urizen’s suppr ession is the result of him feeling
threatened on multiple levels: sexual urges might weaken his rigid rational rules and are therefore dangerous to his sovereignty, his feminine side might diminish
236 Ahania may be interpreted as Urizen’s pathos, “his ability to feel pity or sadness” (Niimi
47) and Fuzon may be symbolic of the character’s eros, as well as “his conception of
justice” (Niimi 47).
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his masculinity and therefore make him a weaker ruler (a misogynistic
perspective that the character seems to embrace, since he is in his Spectre’s237
power) and, last but not least, the female self should be hidden away since she might acquire a female will and wish to rule in his place.
Although in Vala, or The Four Zoas , the role of Fuzion is left out,
Urizen still drives Ahania away on account of her attempt to warn him about the
dangers of his path by telling him about her vision of Albion’s Fall. Unable to
acknowledge the possibility that he may be wrong, U rizen’s masculine ego feels
its hegemony being threatened, which fuels the character’s misogynistic drives towards his female counterpart.

“Am I not God? ” said Urizen, “ Who is Equal to me?
“Do I not stretch the heavens abroad, or fold them up like a garment?”
He spoke mustering his heavy clouds around him, black, opake. . . .
His visage chang’d to darkness, & his strong right hand came forth
To cast Ahania to the Earth: he siez’d her by the hair
And threw her from the steps of ice that froze around his throne238 . . .
“Thou little diminutive portion that dar’st be a counterpart,
Thy passivity, thy laws of obedience & insincerity
Are my abhorance. Wherefore hast thou taken that fair from? ” (Vala 168)

In this case, Ahania’s fall is one of the consequences of Urizen’s masculine
spectral “identification of himself as God ” (Altizer, Blake 44) in his ambition to
rule absolutely. The violent and abusive Urizen discards Ahania as if she were an object and speaks condescendingly to her, accusing her of overstepping her
boundaries and of embracing hypocritical subordination. Hence, the god of
reason takes on an over -masculine role as a leader with a ‘strong hand’ who
rejects Ahania for her feminine passivity, obedience and insincerity (or cunningness), while also highlighting her beauty (her ‘fair’) as a possible tool
237 William Blake depicts Spectres in general as being misogynists who think Emanations are
all the same and interchangeable. However Freeman draws attention to the fact that
“Blake’s misogynistic male characters must be seen as objects of his criticism rather than
his mouthpieces” (203).
238 Since throughout Blake’s prophetic writings, Urizen is always shrouded in snow and
everything around him is frozen, it is only natural that “Ahania [be] associated with spring”
(Lee 13 3), marking the end of Eternal Winter and the melting of Urizen’s deadly ice into
life-giving water which turns solidity into liquidity and hard masculinity into a more fluid
gender identity.
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for deceit and overtly putt ing her in her place by reminding her of her
subordinate role as ‘diminutive portion’. Ironically, what Urizen hates in Ahania
is partly applicable to him, since he too is but a ratio who regards himself as a
whole. What Urizen seems to exemplify is stereo typical defensive male anger
and aggression that subscribes to a heteronormative code of masculine behavior that Blake condemns. In this sense, I agree with Walters and Hayes, both of
whom focus on Blake’s attempt to transcend this traditional perspective.

Blake never denies sexual difference, but he sees how the code of heterosexual
masculinity exaggerates that difference and imprisons men and women in mutual and destructive misery. (Walters 241)
When Blake writes that if he ever accepts the conventional attributes of
masculinity he wishes he would suffer a woman’s fate, he is pointing towards how sexual difference produces and is produced by the code of heterosexual
masculinity. (Hayes 156)

While Enitharmon is not given a voice in The Book of Urizen, Ah ania is
the first Emanation to speak for herself in The Book of Ahania and present the
situation from her perspective. Her lament sheds light not only upon the
unfortunate situation of her separation from Urizen, but also upon her Zoa’s
past, as well as hi s forgotten nature. Despite the cruel manner in which she is
rejected, Urizen’s Emanation still regards her male counterpart as a king and god worthy of being worshiped, as a “Flower of morning! ” (88) and the
embodiment of love itself. Blinded by her love and devotion, Ahania refuses to see Urizen as fallen and chooses instead to live in the past, at a time in which
her Zoa’s residence was a “ golden palace ” with an “ ivory bed” and he was not
afraid to welcome her embrace with an “ open bosom ” (89). Throughout her
speech, Ahania shapes the image of a subordinate woman lost without her lover,
whose sole purpose becomes that of gravitating around him as the moon
239
239 Ahania’s description in connection to the moon also underline s her femininity, motus and
malleability, which traditionally stand in opposition to the masculine stasis and solidity.
However, “to live in statis, for Blake is to live Satanically” (Trigilio, Strange 68), which
reinforces his rejection of immutable mascu linity.
267

circles the earth – “In chaos and circling dark Urizen,/ As the moon anguished
circles the earth ” (85) – hoping to reunite with him and regain his eternal love.
This overwhelming display of what Carol Gilligan calls “ ethics of care ”
(xix) places Ahania in a specifically feminine mode of thinking that relies on
attachment, in direct opposition to Urizen, who subscribes to the masculine
model of an “ ethics of justice ” (63) that is based on separation. Since the primal
caretaker in a child’s first three years of life is usually the mother, the child’s gender identity is developed in relation to a female presence. Consequently,
girls identify with their mother by establishing a continuity with her sensitive
and caring nature, while boys seek to separate themselves from their feminine
caretaker and lose the empathetic ties with her through a process of
individuation and separation.

For boys and men, separation and indivi duation are critically tied to gender
identity since separation from the mother is essential for the development of
masculinity. For girls and women, issues of femininity or feminine identity do
not depend on the achievement of separation from the mother or on the
progress of individuation. Since masculinity is defined through separation
while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is
threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by
separation. (Gilligan 8)

As Ur izen is only interested in his moral code of justice, his laws of iron and
brass and his rigid perspective on what is right, his “ failure to care” (Gilligan
51) strengthens his autonomous thinking and all -repelling nature, bringing about
the deep pain and devastating pessimism of Ahania who rhetorically asks at the
end of the poem “ how can delight,/ Renew in these chains of darkness ” (90).240
In turn, her emphasis lies on relationships, caring responsiveness and accommodation of her partner’s wishes and her “ reluctance to judge ” (Gilligan
17) Urizen, her dependence and excessive attachment to him, as well as her insistence on unification seem to be cries voiced in vain for Urizen rejects their
240 With her rhetorical question, Ahania mirrors Earth’s answer to the Father of the ancient
men, expressed in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience : “Can delight/ Chain'd in
night/ The virgins of youth and morning bear? . . . Beak the heavy chain . . . That free love
with bondage bound” (Blake, A Critical “Earth’s Answer” 268).
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validity. It follows that, as separated entities, Urizen and Ahania acquire overtly
masculine and feminine features, respectively, and can no longer come together
in loving agreement. They have become opposite pawns in a game of sexual and
gender dominance, reflecting the dismal state of fallen human beings who find it
impossible to recreate their divine union with each other,241 much less their
original fusion with their Creator.

When the Individual appropriates
Universality / He divides into Male &
Female: & when the Male and Female,
Appropriate Individuality, they become an
Eternal Death.
(Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ” 250)
Two wills they had, two intellects, &
not as in times of old . . . He [Urizen]
drave the Male Spirits all away from
Ahania / And she drave all the
Females from him away.
(Blake, Vala 150)
This means that when human beings universalize “ the subject position of
heterosexual masculinity, he or she sees the world divided into ‘Male and
Female’ ” (Hayes 254) and when this perspective is adopted at an individual
level, both men and women undergo E ternal Death, since they promote
separation instead of unification. Such is the demise embodied by Urizen and
Ahania.
Through Ahania’s recollections of Eden, Blake offers a glimpse of
insight into her and Urizen’s prelapsarian two- in-one gender essence, pr oving
once more that “ the primordial unalienated psyche is androgynous . . . [formed
out of] male Zoas and female emanations ” (Glazer, “Blake ”). When regretfully
describing her previous oneness with Urizen, Ahania mentions their fruitful sexuality in ambiguous terms that allude to both male and female organs:
“When I found babes of bliss on my beds,/ And bosoms of milk in my
chambers/ Fill’d with eternal seed/ O! eternal births sung round Ahania ” (89).
What appears to be a purposeful equivocal image that equates female breasts
filled with milk with male testicles filled with seed alludes to an eternal
environment that is gender -free in which the masculine and the feminine
intermingle and become indistinguishable, making it possible for Urizen’s “ lap
241 In Blake’s vision, this disjunction between “the masculine and the feminine . . . [compels
them] to exist in isolation and secrecy” (Altizer, Blake 19).
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full of seed ” (89) to be “ like a pregnant woman’s ” belly (Hobson 43). Although
this clearly sexual union is depicted through nebulous images that sugg est the
possibility of Urizen being “fertilized by Ahania as much as – or more than –
she by him ” (Hobson 43), it is evident that it has a prolific character, since it
generates “eternal births ” through a process that goes beyond earthly separation.
Howeve r, choosing the material over the Eternal, Urizen disregards or indeed
forgets his past, rejects his healthy sexual urges and turns them into unprolific,
sterile, self -gratifying eroticism. Christopher Hobson points out a possible
interpretation of Urizen’ s actions as masturbatory unprolific sexuality that
creates an unprolific world (39). Thus, in The Book of Urizen, the god of reason
obscures his prolific delight “ In dark secresy, hiding in surging/ Sulphureous
fluid his phantasies ” (51), resulting in a f oam that settles into a white lake. In
this interpretation, “ masturbation is a manifestation of this repression, an
expression of repressed and therefore deformed desire ” (Hobson 41) that has its
roots in Urizen being a self -reflected, narcissistic shadow that has become too
masculine and too self -involved to accommodate any traces of femininity within
himself.
This second part of the subchapter deals with the Moloch of Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl ” and his re -embodiment of the figure of memory of Urizen
through what Jan Assmann calls “three special features ” that turn an ordinary
figure into one of cultural memory, or rather turn potential memory into actual memory (Kansteiner 182): its relation to time and space, its relation to a group
and its reconstructive ch aracter. Hence, a discussion of masculine (and
necessarily feminine) imagery in Ginsberg’s poem will be accompanied by an analysis of 1950s American stereotypical constructions of gender roles, which
offers the figure of memory its distinct spatio -temporal coordinates. This
cultural context enriches the memory of Urizen by placing it within a contemporary framework and making it most relevant for mid -twentieth century
Americans and particularly, the group known under the collective name of ‘hipsters’ or ‘Be ats’. In Jan Assmann’s words, this type of remembrance “ is
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‘cultural’ because it can only be realized institutionally and artificially, and it is
‘memory’ because in relation to social communication it functions in exactly the
same way as individual memory does in relation to consciousness ” (Cultural 9).
As a cultural product and influential canonical work “Howl ” artificially
constructs the image and identity of the hipsters who are endowed with both
masculine and feminine attributes which render them andro gynous (like Blake’s
Eternal Man) in opposition to Moloch, who displays only blind masculine behavior (since it assumes the mnemonic energy of Blake’s Urizen).
The Cold War period is regarded by many critics as “ the most repressive
period in modern U.S. hi story ” (Savran 45) because of its deeply rooted
conformism and advancement of overtly conservative values that devised a normative postwar masculinity. Republican senator Joseph McCarthy
242 was a
key opinion leader in mid twentieth -century America. Through scandalous TV
interviews and purposeful exploitation of domestic fears, he became a national figure (Dockrill and Hopkins 57) who “ stepped into the role of ‘Grand
Inquisitor’ for the House Committee on Un -American Activities ” (Huddleston
1), greatly influencing the manner in which the political body and subsequently
society shaped the image of the American male. Although the Wisconsin senator
never managed to find any communist agents worki ng for the government, he
“tapped into a nerve through his relentless, yet ham -fisted campaign against
domestic Communism” (McNesse 74). McCarthy’s ‘red scare’ spread fear of
communist infiltration across the nation and his attempt to expose spies extended into an investigation of those presumed to be homosexuals as well.
242 The term ‘McCarthianism’ denotes the period of the 1950s in America, when Joseph
McCarthy conducted investigations in order to disclose the identity of Soviet communist
spies who might have infiltrated the U.S. government. However, “the term has since
become a byn ame for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized
indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges”
(“McCarthyism”). McCarthy’s “vicious anti -communist crusade” (Dockrill and Hopkins
57) elicited a po etical response on the part of Ginsberg who considered him to be a secret
homosexual on a mission to destroy the labor movement: “Open all secret files on . . .
McCarthy alcoholic Closet -Queen Conspiracy with Organized Crime to sabotage the U.S.
Labor Move ment” ( Collected “New Democracy Wish List” 1065). In addition, Ginsberg
drew attention to the discrepancy between McCarthy’s public success and the beats’ artistic
dismissal: “McGovern McCarthy ringed with Roses & Laurels,/ ourselves all decked with
Common Grass” ( Collected “These States” 594).
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Just like communism, “ homosexuality was the direct opposite of what it meant
to be an American man ” (Moore 1) because it was perceived as a dangerous
deviance or perversion that would make men more effeminate which in turn
would mean them being more fickle and unstable, resulting in a greater
possibility of them being seduced by communists.243 Consequently this would
weaken and destabilize the country. A famous example of this presumed danger
was given by FBI director Edgar Hoover at the 1960 Republican Convention,
when he overtly associated communists with the Beats in his statement that
“America’s three greatest enemies were Communists, Eggheads244 and
Beatniks245“ (Peters 209).
In order to pre vent a penetration of the government by those who were
perceived to be politically and sexually perverted individuals, there was a need for strong, masculine men that would be hard on communism and intolerant towards anything related to manliness that migh t be seen as soft. Therefore,
there was no room for alternative types of masculinity and if the heteronormative ideal was tainted by effeminacy, it would be stigmatized both
officially by the state and domestically in private, turning men into outcasts and
exiles, decisively proving a “ reliance on masculinity to win the Cold War ”
(Moore 11) and a conviction that anything less than masculine would not do to
defeat the Soviet Union.
243 In the words of Rachel Blau DuPlessis: “words like weakness, subversion, undermining,
deviousness . . . could as easily apply to stereotypes of homosexuals as to ‘reds’”
(“Manhood”).
244 The term ‘egghead’ is part of the 1950s American jargon. It was used by Richard Nixon in
order to characterize the elitism of the Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (Lecklider 203).
245 As it has previously been discussed, ‘Beatniks’ is a pejorative term for the ‘Beat s’ that
entered popular culture as a caricature of rebellion and social misconduct. None of the
members of the Beat Generation identified with the Beatnik image and Kerouac even
warned against the misapprehension of the Beat message, which was turned into a violent one, meant to portray them as dangerous individuals: “woe in fact unto those who make evil
movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks!”
(Kerouac, “The Origins” 43). Kerouac’s warning was not unfounded, since at the time it
became fashionable to brand Beatniks as rapists and even sex slaves: “Mothers were told to
lock up their daughter [sic] in case the evil Beatniks sold them up into drug -addled sex
slavery” (Russell 18).
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The association of communists with homosexuals – based also on the
fact that “ extramarital and premarital sex were seen as communist
characteristics ” (Moore 9) – represented the foundation for an “ anti-homosexual
rhetoric in politics ” (Moore 1) and homophobia among people which were
strengthened by the conviction that both communis ts and gay men were
profoundly un- American. The attack on masculinity was seen as an attack of
America from within, a threat for the national security of the state and for the
American family246 that resulted in the stigmatization and demonization of all
male identities that deviated from the macho, heterosexual standard, as well as
an aggressive push towards strengthening the ‘nuclear family’ that established
traditional gender roles: “ the apparent neux between the communist menace,
disease, and illicit sexu ality was strengthened by the concerted drive after the
second world war to re -establish conventional definitions of masculinity and
femininity especially the dominance of heterosexuality and what was to become
known as the ‘nuclear family’ ” (G. Smith 313) .
This ‘domestic revival’ set out very strict gender roles for males and
females. While the former had to be a heterosexual father who was the head and
breadwinner of the family and was thus connected to the public sphere,
conducting himself in an assertive and responsible manner, the latter had to fit
the mold of the heterosexual mother dedicated to house chores and raising
children, who was a docile and submissive partner strictly tied to the private
sphere. As postwar sociologist Morris Zelditch put it: “ The cult of the warm,
giving ‘Mom’ stands in contrast to the ‘capable’, ‘competent’, ‘go- getting’
male. The more expressive type of male, as a matter of fact, is regarded as
‘effeminate’ and has too much fat on the inner side of his thigh” (qtd. in Savran
47), meaning that he was too akin to a woman.
246 All so called ‘abnormal’ gender identities were considered to be a threat for both the private
and the public space: “under the aegis of McCarthyism and its aftermath, any forms of
gender and sexual expression that did not fit the Cold War ideal of heterosexual nuclear
familial lifestyle we re treated as domestic subversions that threatened the moral fabric and
national security of mid -20th-century America” (Chiang 112).
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However, a few years later, in the 1960s, rebellious younger generations
of men started a ‘male panic’ – which was perceived to be a dangerous crisis of
masculinity by the older generations – by becoming more effeminate (e.g.
wearing their hair long) and not shying away from extra -marital or same sex
encounters. Definitely one of the first and main promoters of a different, softer
masculinity that triggered this so -called crisis, but also shaped the image of
sexual rebels as both victims and heroes (Selby 65)247 was American poet Allen
Ginsberg, who so loudly expressed the “ Howl ” of his generation.
As a representative of hyper -masculinity,248 the fixed, immutable point
or shape that Urizen forms, “ Howl ”’s Moloch condenses the Urizenic single
vision “into [a] symbolic figure[x] to which memory attaches itself ” (J.
Assmann, Cultural 37). Subsequently, this figure is transported into Ginsberg’s
era and the environment it laches on to greatly influences the nature of its
cultural memory, since “ with whom, for what purpose and when we remember .
. . contributes to what we remember ” (Misz tal 12). Therefore, the above
mentioned cultural milieu that stressed so much the importance of a “renewal of
traditional masculine vigor ” (Gilbert 4) and determined males to be always on
guard, always ready to defend themselves against charges of effemina cy (Penner
9) provides a fertile ground for the plowing of Urizen’s rejection of gender complementarily. In order to underline the unapologetic hyper -masculine
portrayal of Moloch, the unilateral view of whom brings about suffering and oppression, I will m ake use of Philip Rahv’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories
of gender.
Firstly, Philip Rahv’s physiological view of literary production is based
on the principle that certain bodies (hard/ soft) translate into certain types of literature (masculine/ feminine), which goes hand in hand with a binary system
embraced by James Penner in his book Pinks, Pansies and Punks (2011): “the
hard masculine body is associated with phallic dominance. . . . the masculine
247 See Selby, but also Stimpson: “The Beats are heroic protagonists in cultural drama about
homosexuality who exemplify how much harder it is to be free and to extend freedom than
to be sexual, and homosexual” (375).
248 See Penner 23.
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body is conceived of as hard, solid, rigid, or that w hich cannot be penetrated. . . .
The hard -shell masculine figure is not entirely comfortable with the . . .
spectacle of the male body being put on display ” (15). Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch
is clearly presented as a hard body, both physically and metaphorical ly: he is
made of cement, associated with endless stone and has granite genitalia, the
phallic potency of which is meant to underline his indisputable masculinity. Not
only is the hard shell of this god certainly portrayed as impenetrable, but it is
him wh o penetrates the minds and souls of people: “ Moloch whose name is the
Mind! . . . Moloch who entered my soul early ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22) and who
is all made up of hard, grey materials (cement, aluminum, granite), which offer
no visual spectacle, allow for no imaginative representations and give the
impression of an ill society.
Moreover, according to Nietzsche’s mythic cultural masculine presented
in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the Apollonian model (of art) was based on
rationality, order, control and res traint (Penner 13): “ critique and reflection take
precedence over impulsivity, inhibition holds sway over exhibitionism ”
(Gatherer, “The Dionysian” ). It is Moloch’s obsession with order, as a tyrannous
god of the mind, that makes boys sob and old men weep because their
masculinity is restrained, because unless they conform to an artificially
constructed norm, they are emasculated and seen as crazy, manless homosexuals
whose true nature is dismissed and oppressed: “ Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! . . . Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22).
In addition, the Apollonian represents “ intellect or reason rather than
nature, rationality rather than emotion, stasis rather than mutability, and, above
all else, a propensity for aggression rather than passivity ”. (Penner 14). There is
nothing natural about Moloch, who is just as artificial as the social constrains he
imposes Everything about this god seems to be man- made: he is a symbol for
jails, as he metaphorically imprisons people’s minds, narrowing their
imaginative abilities and setting limits according to his own one -sided
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reasoning. Skyscrapers, banks and industries also seem to be at the core of his
formation, for he embodies the ruthless logic of capitalism, which is itself
depicted as a monstrous and mind- binding, turning people into corporate slaves.
As an all seeing (yet blind) master over robotized America, Moloch’s mind can
only be “ pure machinery ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21) and his chara cter “devoid of
[any] human sensitivity ” (Penner 143). Therefore, so constant in his attitude and
so defiantly static is he, that any efforts towards moving or changing his
perspective are bound to be in vain: there is a failed attempt to lift him to
Heaven (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22).
Moloch’s associ ation with reason and rationality is overt and
unquestionable, for he is “ Mental Moloch . . . Moloch in whom I am a
consciousness without a body ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 22) and therefore a god that
denies bodily pleasure and enforces masculine judgment upon his subjects much
like Urizen who retreats into an intellectual world devoid of sexual pleasure. A
consequence of this behavior is evident in his violently discarding feminine
sensitivity and rendering it into nothing more than a futile and unimportant
cliché: “Dreams! Adorations! Illuminations! Religions! The whole boatload of
sensitive bullshit . . . gone down the American river ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 22).
The excessive aggression that is associated with hyper -masculinity is
present form the first line that is u sed to describe Moloch, as he violently bashes
open people’s sculls to eat up their brains and imagination. The image of the
god of reason forcibly entering the head and devouring people’s ability to think
on their own and to use their mind for creativity rather than logic represents a
graphic assault and a display of dominant masculinity. Even Moloch’s breast is a “cannibal dynamo ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 21), as he attempts to rob his victims
of their power and individuality. What is more, the emphasis on brute force and
cruelty becomes stronger as Moloch’s name spells nightmarish wars and
hydrogen bombs, while his fingers are representative of ten armies ready to use
force upon those who disagree, be they communists, homosexuals or anything
less than traditiona lly masculine men.
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The association of homosexuality with communism implies an
association of heterosexuality with capitalism, since as previously mentioned,
the two political stances and the two sexual identities were considered to be
polar opposites. Henc e the hyper -masculine Moloch is also a symbol of
capitalist hegemony, as it results from the very construction of his being. The blood of Moloch is made up of what Ginsberg calls “ heterosexual dollars ”
(Ginsberg, “Howl ” 10) in the first part of “ Howl ”. Thi s money is symbolically
burnt in wastebaskets by hipsters who also protest against destructive capitalism
by “distribut[ing] Supercommunist pamphlets ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 13) in an
attempt to escape Moloch and the confinement of capitalism’s rigid masculinit y.
As William Blake presents androgyny as an eternal solution to harmful
and one -sided gender perspectives, Allen Ginsberg endows his hipsters with
both masculine and feminine features, depicting them as ideal figures who are out of place in a corrupted, m aterialist world. In the analysis of ‘the hipster’, I
will start with a discussion of the traditionally feminine characteristics attached
to him that challenge the masculine model so firmly put in place by Moloch. In
this case, they are similar to Blake’s Emanations without taking the form of
separate characters. Because of these strong feminine marks, these hipsters have
been considered by critics to be an inversion of the masculine identity in
homophobic Cold War America (Thompson 3). However, the complex ity of the
construction of the hipster cannot be resumed to a description of a polar opposite gender identity to that of the villain of the poem; therefore I will also
tackle a more subtle manner of protesting against enforced hyper -masculinity by
means of embracing a similar type of identity that is, however, mingled with
feminine traits, in an attempt to dissolve the line between the all- masculine and
the all -feminine constructions of 1950s gender roles.
To begin with, Michael Gold (1930s) sought to establish a type of macho
criticism by looking for effete references in literary texts. Among the ones which are arguably most easily spotted, one could mention (poetic) verbosity,
chatter or emotional excess, as they seem to oppose masculine economy,
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restraint and laconic mode of expression. In “ Howl ” the poetic self identifies
himself with the hipsters, whose excessive verbosity is proven by them being
outspoken and talkative, as they engage in conversations “ continuously for
seventy hours ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 11) and consider themselves “a lost battalion
of platonic conversationalists . . . disgorged in total recall for seven days and
nights ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 11). Not only do these men dedicate so much of their
time to talking and sharing their feelings, as they discuss everything that connects them, from “ memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks [to] shocks of
hospitals and jails and wars ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 11), but they also supplement
that unrestrained creative power with a display of emotional excess when they
“wept at the romance of the streets ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 15). Moreover, the
hipsters’ verbosity seems to be reflected in the upbeat rhythm of “ Howl ”, as
well as the overflowing of emotion expressed by the many repetitions and endless lines with little punctuation and many shifts in topic and perspective that
were meant to be delivered in a single breath, determining M.L. Rosenthal to
describe “Howl ” (and particularly Ginsberg’s performance of it) as “ the single
minded frenzy of a raving madwoman” (qtd. in Penner 144).
In terms of Nietzsche’s mythic cultural feminine model (of art): the
Dionysian, the focus is on ecstasy, on “ the irrational and the cult of the
primitive ” (Penner 13), but also on spontaneity, passion and instinctual drives
which are not restrained by reason. The very first line of “ Howl ”: “I saw the best
minds of my generation, starving, hysterical, naked” links masculinity with what
was traditionally considered to be an exclusively feminine disorder that stemmed from a womb disease: hysteria.
249 The fact that the hipsters are not
merely mentally unstable, but hysterical proves both their connection to womanhood, as they “ exhibit[x] overwhelming or unmanageable . . . emotional
excess ” (“Hysteria ”), and to their increased libido and unapologetic alternative
sexuality, as hysterical women were thought to have “ strayed from the cult of
true womanhood by giving in to seduction and sin” (“The Hysteri cal Female” ).
249 The word ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek word hysterikos , meaning “of the womb”
(Woods, “From Female Sexuality”).
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This type of ‘moral insanity’ manifested by hysterics “ extended the definition of
insanity to include any deviation from accepted social behavior ” (Woods, “ From
Female Sexuality ”),250 including, at the time, homosexuality. As the ‘howl’ goes
on, an endless string of irrational, seemingly insane, desperate and sometimes
inexplicable actions of hipsters come to the fore: “ Who sang out of their
windows in despair, fell out of the subway w indow, jumped in the filthy Passaic,
leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses
barefoot ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 17), “who plunged themselves under meat trucks
looking for an egg ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 16).
In the mid twentieth -centu ry, men who were susceptible to feminine
irrationality and consequently insanity were associated with homosexuality, as the latter was pathologized and diagnosed as a mental illness
251 which required
treatment in mental institutions by means of shock therapies and even lobotomy.
Therefore, these individuals “ demanded sanity trials ” and “ presented
themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy ” (Ginsberg,
“Howl ” 18), only to have their self -parodic protest (Van Engen 9) met with high
dosages of medication, electric shocks and useless recuperation activities that
would presumably make them ‘normal’: “ and who were given instead the
concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 18).
The traditional female gender construction depicts women as embracing
the will of the body, which is seen as open, porous, penetrable, possessable.
However, in the case of “Howl ”’s hipsters, it is “ the male body [that] becomes
porous and capable of being penetrated” (Penner 13) by almost everything,
including cigarettes, needles, swords and even saintly motorcyclists – all of
250 All of these marginaliz ed minority groups found a voice in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:
“Commies, queers, junkies, jews, mystics and madmen . . . erupted into public view from
the pages of Howl ’s slim volume to assert their right to exist” (Van Engen 3).
251 Early twentieth century p sychologists established that homosexuality was “a type of
diseased neurotic degeneracy” (Chiang 114) and American doctors were among the first to attempt a treatment of this ‘mental illness’ by means of psychotherapy and lobotomy.
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which induce masochistic cries of joy and prove once more that the type of
masculinity depicted is one that is very close to the feminine model.
Furthermore, literary critic Leslie Fiedler maintained that even drug use
can be thought of as implying feminization: “ What could be more womanly . . .
than permitting the penetration of the body by a foreign object which not only
stirs delight, but even (possibly) creates new life ” (qtd. in Savran 66). Therefore,
the many references to drugs in “ Howl ” may be interpreted as further
feminization of the hi psters who crave their “ angry fix ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 9)
just as much as they seek sexual gratification. However, in Fiedler’s “ The New
Mutants ” (Partisan Review in 1965), the critic puts forth a defense against this
attack on masculinity on the part of America’s young, who are described as new barbarians influenced by the hipsters, as they “ seek to replace Mom, Pop and the
kids with a neo- Whitmanian gaggle of giggling camerados ” (Fiedler 519). As
Fiedler asserts, “What is at stake . . . [is] a radical metamorphosis of the Western
male . . . all around us young men are beginning to retrieve for themselves the
role . . . [of] women: that of being beautiful and being loved ” (519). The very
hipsters described by Ginsberg are blamed for feminizing American culture,
which was perceived as bringing about impotence and homosexuality. In
“Howl ”, the reader is presented with blonde and naked angels, criminals with
golden hea ds as representatives of beautiful, desirable men that indeed seem to
add a feminine presence and to have the ability to seduce other men, albeit
instead of triggering impotence, it provides an impetus for unconstrained sexual
activity.
What is also a predominantly feminine trait, empathy, clearly takes
center stage in the third part of the poem, along with the repetition of the phrase
“I’m with you
252 in Rockland” , which is stated no less than nineteen times.
Establishing the rhythm of this third part by be ing placed at the beginning of
252 You arguably repres ents all the individuals who were ‘othered’ by 1950s America: “internal
exiles for political reasons (communists, anarchists, anti -Bomb radicals), exiles for
psychological reasons (the dissident/ odd, psychotic, crazy, or driven mad), as well as the
sexual exiles and outcasts (mainly male homosexuals, also the sexually promiscuous, and
others who do not enter the family economy)” (DuPlessis, “Manhood”).
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each line, the phrase denotes intimacy and compassion, warmth and empathy.
The hipsteresque poetic self seems to take a break from the frenetic behavior
previously mentioned in order to acknowledge the suffering of all those who
shared their pain at the beginning of the poem and who might find themselves in
Rockland, a mental institution for individuals who did not fit society’s “ rigid
mold of white, heterosexual dominance ” (Thompson 10). By candidly and
decisively repeating “I’m with you ”, the speaker displays a type of feminine if
not maternal sensitivity and softness, reinforcing the idea of solidarity with other outcasts of society who are considered mentally ill for challenging the unilateral
and hegemonic male gender iden tity.
However, as previously mentioned, as Blake’s post -apocalyptical Man
not only rejects the Urizenic all- masculine rationale, but also the Female Will,
the all -feminine dominance of the human being, the hipster cannot hope to
eliminate Moloch merely thr ough feminine characteristics. Indeed, Ginsberg’s
hipsters are not just effeminate males, but they are also very keen to portray
strong masculine characteristics. For Michael Gold, visibility is a crucial factor
for reaffirming one’s masculinity: “ Males in order to show that they are real
men, must produce rowdy noise and make scenes – the roar of a Harley
Davidson, popping wheelies on a Vespa, a certain tone of voice. Otherwise,
their ‘sex’ remains invisible. . . Machismo, then, is the only way men can be
seen” (Michael Gold qtd. in Penner 4). Consequently, the hipsters scream, howl
and shriek in order to draw attention upon themselves and make sure that they are as visible as possible: “ who howled on their knees in the subway ” (Ginsberg,
“Howl ” 13), “who . . . shrieked with delight ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 13), “who sang
out of their windows in despair ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 17). This attitude may stem
from a refusal to continue to live in silence, with the fear of being (legally) denounced, charged, persecuted or shunned because of their sexual preferences
and behavior. Another way for Ginsberg’s hipsters to prove their masculinity
and defy the limitations of Cold War ideology is by making a spectacle out of
their sexual experiences. As Jarred Thompson asserts, they employ a
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theatricality of sexuality, providing a performance of gender against normative
structures. In other words, their explicit language, graphic imagery and most
notably thee descriptions of their sexual encounters which are purposely
performed in public places such as gardens, parks, alleys, cemeteries or movie
theatres are an attempt to “ push the orgasm out of the dark bedroom and into the
realm of the public space ” (Penner 127) in order to avoid being the “ invisible
homosexual ” who according to McCa rthy sought to “subvert American
institutions from within ” (Thompson 2).
In “Paleface and Redskin ” (1939), American literary critic Philip Rahv
defines two facets of masculinity: strong and weak, as represented by what he perceived to be polar opposite types of writers. Thus, Walt Whitman is
described as the classic ‘redskin’ type in that is linked to lowbrow, hard, strong
masculinity, energy, activity and spontaneity, while Henry James is portrayed as the ‘paleface’ type, for he is connected to the white u pper-class, wealth,
overcilivilization, highbrow effeminacy and absence of vigor.
253 “Howl’s ”
hipsters could be associated with “Whitman’s homosexuality and the erotic
energy in his poetry ”, (Carroll 50) as they make a show of their masculinity and
wave thei r genitals to flaunt their potency, so as to “ replace[x] the effeminate
‘fairy’ masculinity with a virile Whitmanian one ” (Van Engen 4). From this
perspective, there is no reason to stigmatize the homosexual man, for he proves
he himself as being not soft and effeminate, but hard and masculine: “hard-
bodied same -sex passion morphs into gay macho . . . undermining the
stereotypical association of homosexuality and effeminacy ” (Penner 21).
The insistent and frequent display of virility in the hipsters’ both
homosexual and heterosexual encounters, evident in lines such as “ who balled in
the morning, in the evenings . . . scattering their semen freely whomever come who may ” (Ginsberg, “ Howl ” 13) and “who went out whoring through Colorado
. . . N.C. . . . joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls ” (Ginsberg,
“Howl ” 14) allows for a representation of masculinity that is anything but
253 See Rahv’s 1939 essay “Paleface and Redskin”.
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passive. These men “ sweetened the snatches of a million girls . . . [and]
copulated ecstatic and insatiate . . . and continued along the floor and down the
hall and ended fainting on the wall ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 14) because they had
something to prove: their mythic heterosexual potency that demonstrates their masculine manliness.
The rejection of female influences can be seen particularly in the
hipsters’ decision to forgo traditional marital social obligations in favor of
homosocial comradery. Making a statement against conformity, they refused to
have their manhood domesticated and chose instead to be wild, youthful wolves
who remain independent and free of the otherwise too heavy burden of social
obligations and mature responsibility.

For the beats, the homosocially constituted cohort stands in youthful opposition
to the normative authority of ‘maturity’ . . . domesticated manhood is the fate to
be avoided . . . the revolt against domesticity becomes a homosocial project of
boys together.

Hence, like Blake’s ‘Brotherhood’ – “Man subsists by Brotherhood & Universal
Love./ . . . Man liveth not by Self alone, but in his brother’s face” (Vala 310) –,
the hipsters’ homosociality emphasized the connection of Man with Man. In
fact, like Blake’s loom -working Emanations possessed by their Female Will,
Ginsberg’ “the three old shrews of fate” (“Howl ” 14) are representations of
vicious women who impede men’s spiritual progress. In this sense, Ginsberg
makes use of the mythological figures of the “ Greel Moirai, or Fates, [who]
were ugly female deities responsible for the length of lives, with one spinning the thread, another one measuring i t, and the last one cutting it” (Verbugghe 32).
For the American visionary poet, these shrews stand for hetero- conformity
254
and for “society’s perfum’d marriage ” (Ginsberg qtd.in Medevoi 236), as they
make the Beats lose “ their loveboys ” (“Howl ” 14). One shrew is in charge of
“the heterosexual dollar ” (“Howl ” 14) that helps the world spin, one “ winks out
254 According to Stephen Prothero, the Beats’ rebellious statement tackled the whole of
Eisenhower America, as it countered most of its core values, such as “Mom, Dad, Politics,
Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, The Ivy League
Suit and Higher Education” (206).
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of the womb” (“Howl ” 14) entrapping men in traditional families which are
bound with the promise of child conception upon which their lives are
measured and judged and one “ does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the
intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom” (“Howl ” 14), meaning that
she cuts short men’s freedom and creativity, bringing about the metaphorical
end of their lives.
In ad dition, the confrontational style of “ Howl ”, its “ energy and rage ”
(Stimpson 375) are aggressively masculine, assertive and non- apologetic, as
lines succeed one another in building an ever more confident tone that seems to be aimed at bringing about social change, not just pointing out the unfortunate
circumstances in which the characters are trapped. These hipsters are not just victims of their society, but also denouncers of the injustice they are subjected
to: “the hipster is at once a victim of the repr essive and conformist society of
which he is part and a potentially violent . . . opponent of that society ” (Savran
49). Although much of the harm done by the hipsters is directed towards themselves, there are a few mentions of aggressive behavior towards other
people: “who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars ”
(Ginsberg, “Howl ” 13) or “ who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on
Dadaism ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ” 18). Yet, in all cases there is reassurance that the
hipster is innocent and his aggression is only a response to the violence he is
forced to endure.
After considering both the traditionally feminine and the masculine traits
of “Howl ”’s hipsters, what remains is an interpretation of the manner in which
the two can be related to one another. An example in which these two seemingly
mutually exclusive gender roles co -exist within one subject is given by Norman
Miller in his 1957 article e ntitled “The White Negro” , in which he describes the
hipster in analogy to an African American man. The common ground between
the two is that they are feminized – seen as representing “ nature as opposed to
culture and body as opposed to mind” (Savran 50) – yet simultaneously hyper –
masculinized as phallic symbols. It is important to note that the camaraderie
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between hipsters and ‘negroes’ is established from the beginning of “ Howl ”, as
hipsters drag themselves through the “negro streets at dawn ” (Ginsberg, “Howl ”
9). In this manner, Ginsberg “ links concepts of ‘deviancy’ not only to
homosexual individuals but also to black individuals, drawing a connection
between the oppression of both of these subgroups ” (Thompson 3), while the
chosen time of the day may sy mbolize the hope of a brighter future for the two
minority groups, who simultaneously embody masculine and feminine features.
By way of conclusion, it should be noted that Urizen’s portrayal of
destructive masculinity points to a split in gender that is ch aracteristic of the
fallen man who can no longer attain primordial wholeness. Slaves to a binary system of traditional gender -based behavior, Blake’s Zoas are empty Spectres
without their Emanations for Blake constantly reminds his readers that “ Man is
adjoind to Man by his Emanative portion” (Blake, The Complete “Jerusalem ”
187), while fallen emanations, now individualized, turn into either passive,
hypocritical female figures or domineering, aggressive women under the power
of their Female Will. Urizen’s belief that he is self -sufficient generates the
division between himself and his Emanation, Ahania, as the god of reason
despises her presumed feminine audacity to be his equal, revealing a
misogynistic and abusive behavior towards her in the process of ca sting her
away and denying her any visibility. Instead of countering the error of excessive masculinity with excessive femininity, Blake renders them both equally
fallacious and seeks to indicate the earth -bound nature of gender distinction that
condemns people to wage a pitiful and perpetual war of the sexes instead of aiming to recapture the true nature of their Humanity. The latter, depicted in
Ahania’s recollections of Eden is seen as harmonious Eternal Androgyny in the
shape of a bisexual man that comp rises both male and female aspects unified in
a prolific and mutual sexual encounter that refuses to succumb to a single vision of gender.
In terms of Ginsberg’s “Howl ”, critics such as David Savran or James
Penner, who acknowledge the equal importance of both the effeminate and the
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masculine facets of the hipster, portray him as being split and having “ a divided
self” (Savran 41) or as “role-play[ing] and oscilat[ing] between the masculine
and the feminine positions ” (Penner 124). However, in both of thes e
interpretations, Ginsberg’s hipster is found always in a position to choose one
type of masculinity over the other and ends up being stuck in the middle, in-
between the two extremes. As a hybridized subject, he is neither masculine nor
feminine, but fore ver wavering between “ feminized and masculinized
positionalities, between victim and street tough ” (Savran 67). What these
interpretations imply is that the two poles remain utterly incompatible. In my
perspective, however, the rebellion against the heteronormative impositions of
Moloch that Allen Ginsberg’s hipster advances implies a redefinition of t he
concept of masculinity and an understanding that it is neither necessary nor productive to choose between a macho and an effeminate male identity, between being a heterosexual, capitalist, patriotic father or a socially deviant, communist
traitor, but a ctually embrace a more fluid and inclusive image of masculinity
that contains both of these identitary facets.
Embodied by Moloch, Urizen is remembered as an obstacl e in the path
towards salvation, considering his adamant and brutal rejection of his
Emanation, the embodiment of his inner femininity and his subsequent shame in
relation to sexuality, which paint him as an abominable suppresser of energy
that attempts to live only through reason and thus fears the extension of sexual
fluidity into dangerous m oral and behavioral uncertainty and weakness. Thus, he
decides to turn against Ahania, preferring to resort to either abstinence or auto-eroticism instead of embracing his consort in a mystical sexual union that leads
to inner regeneration and eternal recr eation of a prelapsarian androgynous state.
Similarly, Moloch’s masculinity gives way to emasculation and brings forth a restrictive gender identity which all American males are expected to subscribe
to, reinforcing the very binary system that Blake and Gi nsberg seek to
undermine .
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Moloch’s conception which implies an antagonistic relationship between
the two genders and is based on masculine superiority and therefore on on a
suppression of its inner femininity that is a mnemonic reflection of Urizen’s
decis ive separation of the feminine element in the masculine identity, turning
the Blakean god into an abominable figure of memory. This limited vision is
transcended by Blake’s Eternal Man and Ginsberg’s hipsters, who are both
constructed so as to provide an a lternative to the two repressive god, and
therefore choose not to perceive masculine and feminine maleness as polar
opposites and mutually exclusive constructions, but to transcend sexuality itself
and criticize the hegemonic image of the all -powerful, exc essively macho man,
not by inverting it and not by providing an opposite image of hyperfemininity to counter its hypermasculinity, but by “enlarge[ing] the social parameters of
masculinity ” (Penner 147) itself, so as to include femininity as a necessary
complementary image, without erasing typically masculine character. Thus, the
stigma of effeminacy is turned into a tool against the inflexibility of norms,
breaking taboos and paving the way towards sexual revolution and the acknowledgment of gay rights by dislodging the monolithic concept of
masculinity embodied in Urizen and taken up by Moloch and liberating it from
within the grip of normativity and conformism.

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CONCLUSION

Allen Ginsberg’s sphinx of cement, Moloch, enriches the cultural
memory heritage of William Blake’s Urizen by reiterating the core principles
embedded in the construction of the English bard’s Zoa of reason and revealing
them in the peculiar light of the A merican poet’s cultural milieu. In order to
identify the essential characteristics which make memory cultural and allow for the molding of a mere character into a figure of cultural memory, I have delved
into the history and nature of this late twentieth perspective upon memory.
Consequently, the stress on the individual subjective mind laid by Henri
Bergson as well as the shaping of a genetically inherited memory envisioned by
Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung have provided valuable insight into the
devel opment of memory studies by emphasizing the innovative path taken by
Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg who broadened the conceptualization of memory by breaking its individual, biological boundaries and endowing it with
collective, social significance. Thu s, Halbwachs’ necessary cadres sociaux of
memory have shown no memory can escape its social background and
Warburg’s traveling of mnemonic energy has proven that material objects can
acquire an afterlife through memory.
In turn, these approaches have led to the rise of Pierre Nora’s lieux de
mémoire , an inventory of foundational French symbols which collectively make
up the nation’s cultural memory, but also to Jan and Aleida Assmann’s two
modi memorandi : communicative an d cultural memory. Seeking to further
develop Maurice Halbwachs’ ‘collective memory’, the Assmanns created the distinction between an everyday type of memory that is subjective, informal,
disorganized, refers to a mobile, recent past and transmitted directly from one
person to another (collective memory) and an institutionalized memory mode
that is objective, formal, highly organized, points to a distant, fixed past and is
passed on through mediation. Both of these types of memory have been
effective tools in the analysis of the Blake -Ginsberg transfer of mnemonic
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energy, although the focus has been primarily on cultural memory, as it is
through the institution of the literary canon that Blake’s Urizen is assumed as a
figure of cultural memory.
Since the ongoing negotiation between present and past forms the
foundation of cultural memory, a more thorough excursion into the relationship
between history and memory has accounted for the Assmanns’ constructivist
and performance -based mnemonic stance. Countering Maurice Halbwachs’ and
Pierre Nora’s fixed view of memory and history in terms of irreconcilable opposite poles, Hayden White’s apprehension of history which exposes the
artificiality of objectivity, universality and essentialism in the process of
narrativizing past events becomes useful in explaining Jan and Aleida Assmann’s more fluid boundary between history and memory. Although Jan
Assmann clearly distinguished between figures of memory and figures of history, he did not embrace an antitheti cal view of the two fields, but rather
underlined their common necessity for mediation, relativism and actuality over factuality. While both Astrid Erll and Jan Assmann himself overtly embrace
Hayden White’s influence, I have inquired into the specific manner in which
White’s perspective of history may be useful in understanding Assmann’s bringing of the past into the present via cultural memory.
Moreover, the emphasis that cultural memory lays on performativity can
be better explained through the affiniti es that the former shares with reader –
oriented criticism. In order for the canon to circulate and generate figures of memory, it requires the agency of participants who transform it from a passive
archive to an active form of literary remembrance in a similar manner to which,
as Louise Rosenblatt maintains, readers covert ink markings on paper into
literary works. In addition, the specialized bearers of cultural memory may be
regarded as opinion leaders whose shaping of memories is analogous to Stanley
Fish’s interpretive communities. Although the reader -oriented approach to
literary studies is part of the same performative trend exemplified by memory studies, I insisted on such a comparison that has been overlooked by critics in
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order to portray cultural me mory as closely following the example set by reader –
response criticism in constructing memory as (and oftentimes through) literary
texts that are always in motion, since they are based on the relative, biased
perception of remembering groups.
The specific symbolic implications of figures of memory have been
tackled in train of the classical tradition of ars memorativa put forth by Cicero
and Quintilian, but also in relation to Halbwachs’ images and Nora’s lieux .
Viewed from this angle, Jan Assmann’s figures of memory both continue and
break away from the aforementioned imagined mnemonic practices and devices. Hence, figures of memory retain the ancient focus on the artificial, purposeful
construction of memories (as opposed to the spontaneous, natural type of
remembering), they maintain a clear connection to space (and time), yet they go
beyond nationalist contexts and visual iconography. Furthermore, like figures of speech, figures of memory display an inherent connection to texts and are
simultaneously fixe d and flexible – they are stable enough so as to allow for
cultural memory to attach itself to them and solid enough so as to shape cultural identities, yet they are not in the least static, since they undergo constant
transformation in the process of cult ural regeneration. In other words, such
figures are fixed forms that condense a previously context -rich entity or
phenomenon into a floating island, the mnemonic energy of which is dependent upon cultural memory carriers who subsequently place it in line w ith a different
environment and re -embody it accordingly, proving its reconstructive capacity.
Taking on board the Assmanns’ communicative -cultural distinction, yet
challenging the polarity or the two concepts, I have analyzed the complex relationship betw een Allen Ginsberg and his mentor in order to legitimize the
choice of my focus on these two particular authors. The auditory, mystical connection that Ginsberg established with Blake at the beginning of his career,
in the intimacy of his own Harlem apartment is interpreted as an instance of
communicative memory, since its prophetic nature collapses the time and space
gap between the two visionary poets and momentarily allows for Blake’s voice
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to be heard unmediated by Ginsberg alone in a subjective, disorganized and
informal environment. The overlapping of communicative and cultural memory
is presented through the example of the American poet’s setting to music of
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience – although the melodies
of these songs did not survive Blake’s age, Ginsberg was convinced he could access the original manner in which they were sung by their author, displaying
the same prophetic, communicative confidence. However, since the lyrics of
Ginsberg’s songs reached American ears thro ugh the canonical poems of Blake,
this musical remediation is also an instance of cultural memory. This latter approach was also used in the interpretation of Ginsberg’s cultural remembrance
of Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower” and “The Sick Rose” in his “Sunflower Sutra” and
“Reading William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’”, which textualize and
institutionalize the mouth -to-mouth message in a canon -to-canon transfer of
vision.
Opening the discussion on Blake’s impact on the literary formative
elements that define the Beat Generation, I have identified the characteristics of
what I call Blakean madness , which is far from being an attempt at determining
a medical diagnosis for Blake’s proneness towards otherworldly inspiration, but
rather an exploration of the mystical integration of soul-i lluminatin g vision s
into ordinary actions, establish ing an authentic link with a supernatural realm
which is inaccessible to the uninspired masses who perceive it as
prophetic incomprehensibility. It is a literary and spiritual type of madness
that places its subject outside the norm and therefore enables a critical stance
on the part of the outcast who deliberately uses his status in order to take a
countercultural stand against the perceived injustice and blindness of his
world. Hence, instead of focusing on the medical aspect of Blake’s madness,
or on the negative social consequences it gener ated, I depict it as an
artistically empowerin g and spiritually liberating attribute that is
purposefully and confidently assumed in the construction of “Howl”’s
hipsters, whose beat is regarded as Blakean mad beatitude .
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Another instance that determines Allen Ginsberg’s cultural indebtedness
to William Blake revolves around the notion of incarnation and its
implementation in “Howl”. The poem is presented as divine inspiration, as the
metaphoric inhabitation of the spirit of Blake’s Poetic Genius who enlivens the
work through the power of imagination, which in turn is incarnate in the poetic
words that have the ability to capture the essence of the soul. It al so continues
Blake’s identification of the Poet with Christ through the envisioning of Ginsberg’s lyrical self as well as the hipsters’ poetic selves as Christian
Messiahs who sacrifice themselves out of love (as opposed to Moloch who
sacrifices others out of self -gratifying malice) and offer the poem as an artistic
Eucharist that incarnates their spirit and nourishes others through physical consumption (reading). What is more, just as Ginsberg presumably used his own
breath as measure for “Howl”, the Chris t-like figures he depicts empty their
spirit in true martyr fashion and like bebop saxophone players make use of
spontaneity and improvisation in order to discover what Blake believed to be the
hidden truth of humanity. Last, but not least, the act of inca rnation implied in
the English prophet’s mystical sexuality revealed in the shame -free energies of
the ‘Naked Human Form Divine’ is mirrored in the spiritual nature of Ginsberg’s sexual liberation whose heroes indulge in erotic love, which is
perceived as a unification between man and God.
Moving on to a specific interpretation of the origin of the two
antagonists personified by Urizen and Moloch, I have delineated an abominable
pattern of error that lies in the genesis of the Blakean god an resurfaces in the
case of Ginsberg’s Old -Testament inspired god of human sacrifice. The Book of
Urizen parodies Christian Genesis in both form and subject matter, as seven
days of blissful creation become seven ages of “dismal woe” (52) and the first
created being is tu rned into the monstrous figure of Urizen who is also given the
role of creator, since his materialization encompasses the simultaneous coming into existence of the world of matter and of human consciousness. This god’s
eternal rebellion is proven to be inf used with Gnostic and Hermetic significance,
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displaying the originator of the universe as a selfish and false demiurge whose
solitary ambition towards absolute dominion and whose destructive self -love
produce the primordial error, which precedes man’s free will and thus envisions
his Fall along with his Creation. Not only is Urizen’s error based on
self-centeredness and greed, but it is also thrives in division and
proliferates the erroneous rejection of Her metic complementary dualism,
seeing wholeness where there are only unbalanced ratios and perceiving the
creation of life where there is merely a regression into death and the
confined physical and mental abilities of mortal human beings who can no
longer discern the Eternal Truth.
The above-mentioned
Urizenic abomination marks the first of the three
parts that comprise one of the fixed mnemonic cores remembered in Moloch’s
erroneous behavior through the characteristics borrowed from his Old
Testament and Miltonian eponymous predecessors. Enriching the ancient image
of a child-s acrificing impassible pagan deity worshiped by the Canaanites and
the Phoenicians despite the warnings of Yahweh, Ginsberg built on the idea of
Moloch as
the epitome of rebellious abomination and also used the bellicose and
violent temperament of Milton’s literary character of the same name. However,
the elements that
form the essential error of modern Moloch into the shape of a
truly Urizenic pattern are his contrary-t o-God isolation and selfishness
(presented under the guise of Cold War hyper-c apitalism, consumerism and
violent policies)
that may not result in the physical formation of the world, but
certainly generate and promote a false image of what society should be based
on.
To these, I have also added his deceptive and contagious divisions that build
metaphoric walls between the young generation and the old one, as well as
between human beings and God, his forgotten angelic nature and his
deliverance of death instead of life. This pattern is completed by an
interpretation of Urizen and Moloch as unprolific Blakean ‘devourers’,
whose endeavors block the prolific imagination of their counterparts (Los
and the hipsters, respectively) through a violent consumption of their
overflowing creativity.
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As immortals that reside in the human min d, struggle to take ownership
over it and subsequently establish an empire based on the faculty of reason,
Urizen and Moloch have been analyzed as personifications of the unwavering
destructive intellect that has lost itself in generalizations and has beco me too
abstract to account for the concrete, peculiar and immeasurable holiness within each living creature. Coupled with self -isolating single -mindedness, negation of
vision and of imagination, the reason that forms the essence of Urizen (YourReason, ErrReason or YourEyesIn) forms a void around him and
generates his Spectre (the harmful, reasoning power of each Zoa). I have proven
that the Blakean inner deity is most under his spectral power in The Book of
Urizen and it is this spectral and obsessive overreliance on reason to the
detriment of spiritual reality that is passed on from Urizen to Moloch as a main mnemonic core of the Urizenic figure of memory. The fact that Urizen seems to be based on the principles advanced by Deists and Enlightenment icons,
experimental philosophers, empiricists and physicists – such as Sir Francis
Bacon, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton – fades to the background as the figure of memory is reconstructed during the Cold War. Now, in the shape of Moloch,
the unbalanced, one -sided hyper -rationalization is both spiritually and
physically destructive, as it guides the development of science in the direction of profit and power relations that do away with feelings and render miracles
irrelevant. Such is the positivistic and instrumental rationale behind the
fascination of materialism and perhaps most importantly behind the creation of
nuclear bombs and their turning into instruments of manipulation that outline
the simplistic antagonism of an ‘us versus them’ single vision.
The oppressive proneness displayed by both rulers stretches from the
secular sphere to the divine kingdom and, along with the chaotic nature of their
illusive and imposed order, form another aspect of the abomination at the
foundation of the two false deities. Under the pretense of order, Urizen is able to
lay down a set of brass societal rules which are to be followed blindly by his
subjects and which revolve solely around him, his command and his status of
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both king and God. Thus, because he continuously divides and measures the
newly -created universe around him, he offers the impression that scientific,
mathematical order is a reflection of heavenly order, yet through the perspective
of other Eternals, he is revealed as a chaotic tyrant whose illegitimacy, inflexibl e
laws and indiscriminate violence are anything but orderly. The same illusion of order and downfall into tyranny is exemplified by Moloch, who forces or
deludes his worshipers into leading robotic, mechanical lives, the conformist
acceptance of which brin gs about an artificial type of order. Taking after Urizen,
Moloch attempts to present his order as the only order and his taxis is depicted
as kosmos . Consequently, the American god regulates the idea of normalcy and
meets any form of spontaneity, individuality and disobedience with censorship, judgment and ostracization, keeping society under the strict totalitarian control
of his thousand blind eyes.
Moreover, deprived of saving light, Urizen and Moloch find themselves
under the shadowy shelter of the tw o siblings of the night: sleep and death.
Through Platonic, Christian, Gnostic, Psychoanalytical and Alchemical
interpretations of the shadowy sleep of death that unites the two characters, I
have proven that their dark imprisonment in the oblivious sleep of (metaphoric) death can be seen as another bridge that legitimizes the cultural revival of
Urizen and explains the necessity of its Molochian repetition and actualization
in the cultural context of an ideological war. Just as Blake’s villainous Eternal is
engulfed by shadows at every step and is condemned to live in darkness, in a
state of perpetual lethal sleep, Ginsberg’s sphinx of the night is denied any
vision and is blinded by the fog of his own factories, slipping into a slumber of
forgetfulness tha t he also casts over his subjects who no longer remember their
infinite divine nature and have come to worship ephemeral, artificial industries, bombs and economic profit instead. In this sense, the chains of Urizen and the
prisons of Moloch keep them conf ined within deep caves whose “theatre of
shadows” (Huard 7) replaces reality and takes the form of a dark realm that has been interpreted as physical, spiritual and psychological death. Yet, in
296

expressing the two characters’ inner holiness, Blake and Ginsberg offer
a potential way out from beneath the thick shadows that seemed to
have irreversibly taken hold of the two demonic monsters. This ray of hope
has been explained in relation to the Platonic sun , Christian immortality,
Gnostic spiritual awakening and its divine spark, Jungian individuation and
the embrace of the shadow and Alchemical albedo, the phase of inner
transformation that transcends the shadowy nigredo and moves towards
spiritual enlightenment.
Singular and absolute perceptions over gender and sexuality have also
exposed the abominable mnemonic core that defines Urizen and comes to
embody Moloch as well. Sharply contrasting the eternal, harmonious
androgynous ideal envisioned by Blake in the joining of each Zoa with his
Emanation, Urizen’s bruta l repelling of Ahania, h is female aspect depicts a
fallen world in which the two sexes are bound to wage wars against each
other. Neither separated femininity (which is either passive and
incompetent or malicious and vindictive) nor the separated masculini ty of
Urizen (which leads to a misogynistic, aggressive, defensive and domineering
attitude towards his female counterpart) can ever reach div ine salvation and
metaphysical wholen ess if they do not acknowledge the necessary
complementarity that links them. Furthermore, during the process of
condemning Ahania to invisibility, Urizen accuses her of being the
embodiment of sin – since she is violently separated from his cold loins –
and thus banishes sexuality from the mind. Also suppressing his inner
femininity, Moloch displays an ostentatious type of virility that proves his
Urizenic suppositions of masculine superiority and his inability to conceive of
a more fluid and inclusive type of masculinity. However, his attitude stems
from a government-f ueled fear of homosexual allegations which are str ongly
linked with communist infiltrations and deviance. In a similar manner to
his literary predecessor, the American god is incapable of renouncing
traditional gender-r oles and rejects the feminine aspect within himself as well
as its reflection in the androgynous hipsters, whose homosexuality or
rebellious
297

homosociality is viewed as an unmanly threat for the conformist, heterosexual
male figure he standardizes.
William Blake’s prophetic v oice reverberates in the cul tural milieu of
1950’s America through Allen Ginsberg’s purposeful and passionate
resurrection of his mentor’s visionary warnings and spiritual rebellion. The
Beat’s mystical connection to Blake through an intimate and direct
communicative transfer of vision is doubled by a cultural recollection founded
on the circulation of memory enabled by the literary canon. Both the initiatory
Blakean hallucination along with the subsequent artistic endeavors to recapture
the English bard’s metaphoric madness in the por trayal of his generation and the
emphasis on Blake’s aesthetics of incarnation lay a solid foundation for the
interpretation of Ginsberg’s cultural reliance on the mythical figure of Urizen in
the construction of his nightmarish deity, Moloch. The necessi ty of
remembering Urizen and turning him into a figure of memory in the context of
Cold War America is justified through the existence of three mnemonic cores
that make up the fixed form of the figure and ensure its continuity: the
abominable (a characteristic perceived as a rebellious, egocentric form of
idolatry, an oppressive obsession with order and a suppressive rejection of inner
femininity), the shadow and the mind. Simultaneously, the indeterminate gaps
that are formed around these cores exemplify the imperative to actualize and
render Moloch relevant to Ginsberg’s society. In this manner, the cultural
remembrance of Urizen aids in the identification and avoidance of the
psychological , social and spiritual perils embodied by Moloch and facilitates
the poetic distribution of a prophetic message that forges a body for Error and
reveals the abominable, ruinous effects of obscure, tyrannous hyper-
rationalization, the transcendence of which illuminates the cosmic vibrations
of the soul.
298

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326

List of the author’s previously published works that have been used
in the construction of t he present thesis
1.Pa
ris, Andreea. “ Literature as Memory and Literary Memories: From
Cultural Memory to Reader -Response Criticism. ” Literature and Cultural
Memory. Edited by Mihaela Irimia, Dragos Manea, Andreea Paris. Leiden,
Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017. 95- 106. ISSN 0926- 6999; ISBN 978-90- 04-
33886-9 (hardback); ISBN 978-90-04-33887- 6 (e-book).
2.Paris, Andreea. “The Play on Incarnation as Artistic Creation in Allen
Ginsberg’s ‘How’. ” LiBRI: Linguistic and Literary Broad Research and
Innovation 5.2 (June 2016): 54-61 (ISSN 2068-0627).
3.Paris, Andreea -Cristina. “The Illusion of Order and Its Fall into T yranny –
William Blake’s Urizen and Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch. ” Ordine si Chaos .
Edited by Theodor Georgescu and Ioana Munteanu. Bucharest: University ofBucharest, 2016. 223-231. Print. (ISSN 2393 – 185X).
4.Paris, Andreea -Cristina. “Urizen’s Body and the Proliferation of the
Primordial Error: A Biblical, Gnostic, Hermetic and Blakean Perspective. ”
Annals of the University of Craiova. Philology -English. 2 (2015): 118-131
(ISSN 1454-4415).
5.
Paris, Andreea. “ From English Poetry to American Song: Remediating
William Blake into the Psychedelic Musical Beat of the ‘60s .” University of
Bucharest Review Transnational Dimensions of Literature and the Arts 1
(2014): 81-9 7. Print. (ISSN 2069–8658).
6.Par
is, Andreea- Cristina. “Beyond Reason: Allen Ginsberg's Cultural and
Communicative Revival of William Blake. ” University of Bucharest Review
Cultures of Memory, Memories of Culture 1 (2013): 125- 134. Print . (ISSN
2069–8658).
7.Paris, Andreea. “ Dislodging Moloch’s Masculinity in Allen Ginsberg’s
‘Howl’. ” The Gender Construction of Society (Dimitrie Cantemir
Proceedings Volume) 2017 (upcoming)
8.Paris-Popa, Andreea. “William Blake's Urizen, Allen Ginsberg's Moloch
and the Shadowy Sleep of Death.” University of Bucharest Review 2017
(upcoming)
327