We enter William Blake's Jerusalem (1804–c.20) through a distinctly Gothic doorway, yet the word ‘Gothic’ never makes an appearance throughout the 100 plates of Blake's longest work of illuminated printing. To grasp the importance of the Gothic for Blake's late work, we might turn to the 1822 broadsheet entitled On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. This text ends by declaring that ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270).1 Although the ‘Gothic’ is accorded the highest value here, it is not clear what ‘Living Form’ is. The ‘Gothic’, we are told, is opposed to the ‘Grecian’, which ‘is Mathematic Form’ (E 270). Aristotelian unity, moral certainty, and war are the epistemological, spiritual, and political characteristics of Grecian Form: ‘it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars’ (On Homers; E 270). As a polemic against classical thought, and especially its neo-classical revival, On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil finds the stasis and mathematical abstraction of Grecian form inimical to the Gothic as Living Form. At stake in these opposing conceptions of forms are the politics of geopolitical struggle. The path of Grecian form is embodied in the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. By contrast, the Living Form of the Gothic provides an alternative that remains obscure in the broadsheet, for we never receive an example of Living Form or an explicit sense of its potential political efficacy.2 Rather, I argue, we must turn back to Blake's figure of Jerusalem in order to grasp the ontological difference and revolutionary politics implicit in Living Form. In Jerusalem, the production of ontological difference is the necessary condition of revolution.

Admittedly, my claim seems to place a lot of weight on a single term: the ‘Gothic’. It appears in Blake's work only once in the eighteenth century.3 In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Gothic’ makes just ten appearances in Blake's work – only six of which provide any insight into the political and ontological difference expressed as Living Form. Often seen as Blake's major artistic statement in his nineteenth-century career, Jerusalem is conspicuously free of the terms ‘Gothic’, ‘Classic’, or ‘classical’. Nonetheless, Jerusalem is an epic of resistance to classical culture, and its web of associated phenomena include neo-classical art, rational thought, empirical epistemology, corporeal war, and state religion. While the connection between Jerusalem and the Gothic as Living Form in Jerusalem is not immediately evident, the assumption that the Gothic does matter for understanding Blake and his work has a long critical history, one that has done more to distort than to clarify the matter. Under the aegis of the Gothic, Blake has been presented either as a naïve artist whose visual aesthetic is always looking backward and/or as an artist who retreats politically from his late eighteenth-century radicalism to embrace conservative ideology and an apocalyptic Christian mysticism. Recognising the political import in Living Form makes visible Blake's dynamic conception of the Gothic, his most radical conception of being and its attendant potential for unprecedented difference. Turning the frontispiece to enter Blake's Jerusalem signifies a passage through its Gothic doorway. This passage offers nothing less than a sustained engagement with the potentiality of the Gothic as Living Form: a future that is not a repetition of the past. It is this potential that Blake's work attributes to the Gothic as Living Form.4

Malkin's A Father's Memoirs and Blake's Gothicism

Blake's association with the Gothic form finds its critical touchstone in Benjamin Heath Malkin's influential biographical account of the artist in his introduction to A Father's Memoirs of His Child (1806), a text that features a title page that Blake designed and engraved. Malkin's introduction to his A Father's Memoirs of His Child takes the form of a letter to ‘Thomas Johnes, of Hafod, ESQ. M. P.’.5 The letter is not about Blake as such, but a remarkable amount of Malkin's epistle introduces Blake as a designer, engraver, and poet to Johnes. Perhaps it was Malkin's intention to help find a new patron for Blake, but it seems more likely that its purpose is to rehabilitate Blake's faltering career and to soften his reputation as a madman. For our subsequent understanding of Blake, Malkin's account has been widely influential, largely because it is the only biographical portrait that Blake himself influenced. Malkin's brief biography is built on Blake's presentation of himself to Malkin in the early nineteenth century. While less than strictly accurate in some respects, Malkin's account nonetheless provides significant insight into Blake's nineteenth-century period when the term ‘Gothic’ emerges and takes on a particular range of meanings in Blake's lexicon.

In characterising Blake's poetry and visual art, Malkin freely uses the term ‘Gothic’, yet the Gothicism Malkin finds in Blake is significantly different from Blake's sense of the Gothic as Living Form. Malkin's account of Blake's Gothicism has a mixed legacy, for it has significantly confused our present understanding of Blake in two ways. By presenting Blake as an artist whose creative consciousness has always been dominated by the Gothic, Malkin has invited the critics to conclude that Blake's affinity for the Gothic marks a life-long opposition to neo-classical style in art and poetry. As a result, Blake emerges from Malkin's description as an ‘untutored proficient’, an artist out of time, ensconced in a Gothic past that for him is an ever-present reality.6 This treatment omits Blake's own understanding of the Gothic and the range of idiosyncratic associations germane to the complexities of his later work. Malkin describes Blake as Gothic in three distinct ways. He claims that Blake's poetry is Gothic, that the foundational influence on Blake's visual art is Gothic, and that Blake himself has become a Gothic phenomenon.

While Blake's poetry seems almost incidental to his purpose of introducing Blake to Johnes as a commercial designer and engraver, the poetry gets more attention than his visual art does in Malkin's brief biography. The importance of Malkin's interest is not to be underestimated, since it gave Blake's poetry its greatest public exposure to date.7 For Malkin, Gothic poetry is a style, one Blake takes almost unconsciously from a simpler past that communicated its emotions more directly than the discourse offered by ‘the polished phraseology’ and ‘just, but subdued thought of the eighteenth [century]’.8 Blake's poetry is Gothic because it reflects a personal innocence and lack of literary sophistication expressed through its formal simplicity. Blake is a charming amateur who has ‘made several irregular and unfinished attempts at poetry … [that have] dared to venture on the ancient simplicity’.9 For this reason it seems, Malkin refers to Blake as ‘Our Gothic Songster’.10 The implication is that Blake's sensibilities were formed in a past that is no longer accessible to a contemporary writer; it is as if his poetry appears in the present as the ghost of a simpler past.

For Malkin, Blake's poetry is not simply out of fashion; it is from a different era. Of necessity, then, Blake's Gothicism is immune from the influence of the literature generically identified as Gothic in Blake's historical moment.11 Hence, Malkin fails to include any of the instances of Blake's work that might actually qualify as Gothic in the literary sense of the term. Absent is ‘Fair Elenor’ unwrapping her husband's severed head, for example.12 Manifestly absent too is the fiery dragon form of ‘Albion's Angel’ in America a Prophecy, a figure not too far removed from the pyrotechnic horrors of Monk Lewis’ pages. Celebrating Blake's Gothic songs of ‘ancient simplicity’, Malkin condemns Blake's poor prosody and imaginative excesses. Malkin thus chastises the prophecies for ‘so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave unregarded harmony, and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of imagination’.13 In essence, Malkin nonetheless recommends that these poems submit to Alexander Pope's neo-classical advice that a poet must ‘Hear how learned Greece her useful rules indites, / When to repress, and when indulge our flights.’14 Ultimately then, Malkin's idea of Gothic poetry has a great deal of the Grecian in it. For Malkin, the Gothic, in fact, describes a style of neo-classical visual art that looks as much to the Renaissance as it does to the medieval period for its inspiration.

The neo-classical emphasis of Malkin's criteria for Gothic poetry is reflected in his view of Gothic art as favouring clear and distinct outlines, a criterion that lends itself to Blake's view of art as an engraver and painter.15 Emphasising Blake's work as an apprentice, Malkin asserts that Blake's experience drawing the medieval monuments in Westminster Abbey was crucial for the aesthetic development of his visual art. These drawings, Malkin reports, ‘led him to an acquaintance with those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments. There he found a treasure he knew how to value’.16 Blake's apparently precocious valuation of medieval art produced in him what Malkin memorably calls a ‘Gothicised imagination’, a characterisation so provocative as to impress numerous critics to view the Gothic as a guiding force throughout Blake's career.17 These writers include such influential Blake scholars as Alexander Gilchrist, Roger Easson, E. J. Rose, David Bindman, Robert Gleckner, and Northrop Frye.18 Gilchrist quotes Malkin as evidence for Blake's ‘fervent love of the Gothic’ as an expression of his ‘natural affinities for the spiritual in art’.19 By contrast, Frye's Fearful Symmetry cites Malkin's account as the basis for his claims about the consistency of Blake's intellectual and artistic opposition to classicism and neo-classicism. Following Malkin, Frye asserts that after copying the Gothic monuments of Westminster Abbey, Blake, ‘emerged from this training a full-fledged member of the Gothic school; and his pro-Hebraic and anti-Classical bias is equally typical of this period’.20 Frye conflates Malkin's claims for the aesthetic form Blake discovers in Gothic art with the ideational content of Blake's later opposition to classical and neo-classical art and thought expressed in On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. Here, it is instructive to look specifically at what Malkin writes. Malkin states that Blake found in the Gothic monuments he copied ‘the plain and simple road to the style of art at which he aimed, unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’.21 Clearly this description resonates with Blake's assertions in his marginalia to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds of the importance of the bounding outline and resistance to contemporary practices of colouring. Thus, Malkin's account helps to foster a view of Blake as backward looking both in terms of his visual aesthetic and his intellectual predispositions.

Critics more attuned to the historically specific theory and practice of art have recognised in Malkin's description of Blake's affinity for Gothic monuments the neo-classical primitivism whose diverse historical influences and forms were very much a part of the age. According to William Richey ‘what Malkin describes [as Gothic] is a neo-classical aesthetic’, and, likewise, Bindman emphasises that the qualities Malkin lists are ‘characteristic of contemporary neo-classicism’.22 For these critics, Blake's early interest in the uncluttered lines of Gothic monuments does not constitute an intellectual rejection of neo-classical art. At once, Malkin's ‘Gothic’ refers both to art from the medieval period and a distinct, contemporary strain of neo-classical primitivism that embraces a broad range of influences.23 Blake is certainly less singular in his Gothicism than Malkin or Frye seem to think he is. Regardless, Malkin's role in authorising claims for Blake's Gothicism is instrumental in producing some of the most enduring characterisations of Blake as a unique, if reactionary genius too absorbed in his visionary speculations to be seriously engaged with politics.

Even as he identifies Blake's poetry and visual art as Gothic, Malkin presents Blake himself as a Gothic monument. He writes:

What puzzles Malkin is why Blake claims ‘drawing from life … is more like death’, despite the fact that he obviously engages in that practice. By way of explanation, Malkin concludes that Blake's notorious eccentricity has nothing to do with art; rather he has mismanaged ‘his talents’. The implication here is that Blake's contradictory statements on a subject so basic to his professional work bespeaks an unstable mind. Because Blake has not ‘managed his talents’, because he is mentally unstable, he has become a Gothic phenomenon, a ghostly monument to his own incomprehensible opinions.

What Malkin could not be expected to know is that his example of Blake's eccentricity will come to sound like a partial articulation of Blake's own statements that ‘Living Form is Eternal Existence’ and that the ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (On Virgil; E 270). Drawing from life does smack of death and mortality for Blake, but not because it is bad technique. As Blake states in his marginalia to Reynolds’ Works, ‘no one can ever Design till he has learnd the Language of Art by making many Finishd Copies both of Nature & Art’ (E 645). Blake's objection to drawing from life, rather, is part and parcel of the ontology it imposes. If reproducing natural forms and copying the work of previous artists are the ends of art, Blake counters, such art is a lifeless repetition of the possibilities of the past. Conceived of in this way, the artist's images always refer to a particular ideational content in the past. The inescapably political implication here is that meaningful change cannot come from images of, or thoughts from, an actual historical past.

Nevertheless, it is precisely the sort of opinions Malkin sees as eccentricities that suggest the radical transformations that the Gothic as Living Form effects in Blake's work. Malkin certainly had first-hand knowledge of Blake's struggles as a commercial engraver and his biographical account was perhaps some small compensation for the financial disaster that Malkin had seen Blake experience in 1805, when his designs and the promise of engravings for Robert Cromek's deluxe edition of Robert Blair's The Grave fell through. Cromek was evidently displeased with the sample print from the engraving of ‘Death's Door’ that Blake made for display in his shop. Blake was personally and financially devastated to find that Cromek had suddenly given the lucrative contract to engrave his designs to Luigi Schiavonetti.25 In a bitter irony, the Death's Door engraving for The Grave marks Blake's death as a commercial artist. It sealed his reputation as a lost cause with supporters like Cromek and Malkin. Blake would return to the ‘Death's Door’ design, however, and transform it into the Gothic structure that beckons the reader into Jerusalem. If Blake had become a Gothic monument, an artist effectively dead to the commercial engraving market by 1806, the figure entering the Gothic-arched doorway in Jerusalem's frontispiece suggests the transformative potential of the Blakean Gothic as Living Form. To understand this potential and its implications for reading Jerusalem's treatment of the past, I turn now to Blake's treatment of Christianity's arrival in Great Britain in the engraving known as Joseph of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion. In this engraving, Living Form emerges as the means of resisting Enlightenment historiography and biblical eschatology, the very forces that prevent the emergence of a future that does not repeat the past.

Joseph of Arimathea and the Blakean Gothic

Contrary to Malkin, most contemporary critics agree that Blake's turn to what he calls the Gothic takes place after 1800. Specifically, E. J. Rose, William Richey, Roger Easson, and Seymour Howard associate the emergence of the term ‘Gothic’ in Blake's writings with a major shift in the intellectual meaning and political implications of his nineteenth-century work.26 Both Howard and Richey attach the significance of Blake's late embrace of the Gothic and rejection of the classics with a disavowal of the revolutionary politics of the 1790s.27 Here, the Blakean Gothic is essentially a reactionary turn to a conservative political outlook. An apocalyptic Christianity drives Blake's antiquarian nationalism. Through this potent combination, Jerusalem seems to suggest the finality of an eschatological narrative as it enfolds Britain's Gothic origins into the Book of Revelations, making manifest its vision of a transcendent destination: a new Jerusalem descended from the heavens. From the perspective of Blake's understanding of the Gothic as Living Form, however, Jerusalem emerges as a text that resists biblical eschatology and Enlightenment historiography to reveal a continual state of becoming – a Living Form – that never achieves a final state.28 A clear precedent for the ontological transformation that Jerusalem employs appears in the engraving Blake eventually calls Joseph of Arimathea.

In 1773, the early period of his apprenticeship, Blake engraves a detail from Salviati's copy of Michelangelo's The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. The 1773 engraving exercise appears to be little more than an instance of Blake borrowing from his artistic idol, Michelangelo. Blake's alters the original, however, by making Michelangelo's marginal Roman soldier into Joseph of Arimathea, temporally dislocating the figure from its initial setting. As Thora Brylowe observes, ‘[t]his image uses the visual vocabulary of engraving to unite the classical, the biblical, and the English gothic’.29 While there is nothing in the 1773 state of the engraving to suggest that Blake sees his transformation of Michelangelo's figure as a comment on the values he associates with this aesthetic trio, Brylowe notes the meaning of the image will change over the course of Blake's career and hence demonstrate ‘Blake's shift in regard for the classical’.30 Indeed, Blake returns to this image within three years of Malkin's account of his Gothicism, at which time he recasts the scene as the very moment that Gothic architecture comes to England. When Blake revisits his engraving of Joseph, he inscribes the following under it:

What was, in 1773, an apprentice engraving consistent with the tenants of neo-classical primitivism, and thus part of a visual aesthetic that is Gothic in Malkin's sense of the term, becomes Gothic in Blake's sense of the term thirty-seven years later. Yet, rather than a challenge to classical and neo-classical values in art, as Frye would have it, Blake's inscription to Joseph of Arimathea is more a challenge to Enlightenment historiography. It proffers a historically impossible origin to British Gothic architecture. Here, Blake's imagination is not so much ‘Gothicised’ but gothicising. As it gothises Michelangelo's The Crucifixion of Saint Peter into Joseph of Arimathea, it transforms the stasis of both biblical history and Enlightenment historiography into the Living Form of the Gothic. The Gothic's Living Form ruptures both biblical history and historical probability, transforming Joseph of Arimathea through its linking of heterogeneous and temporally disparate elements. In his chapter in this volume, Kiel Shaub is doubtlessly right to caution against finding Blake's Gothic politics in this image altogether transparent. He notes the importance the engraving places on ‘gothic technique’ and ‘a repudiation of rationalism’.31

However, this is hardly the limit of Blake's gothicisation of Joseph and the generative potential of Living Form. Blake's inscription takes considerable historical liberty with the biblical accounts of Joseph of Arimathea as the man who receives and entombs Jesus’ body and the latter, apocryphal accounts of Joseph's presence in England. Blake's inscription prompts the question of what it means to identify Joseph of Arimathea as ‘One of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages’. While contemporary scholarship suggests that Joseph of Arimathea becomes the apocryphal point of origin of British Christianity during the medieval period, Blake – like many in his era – probably accepted the legend as fact. However, Blake's assertion that Joseph was a Gothic artist building cathedrals in England during the medieval period is, I believe, unprecedented.32 One is tempted to dismiss Blake's claim as the sort of religious mania that Malkin felt had blighted Blake's prospects as a commercial engraver. More productively, though, we can view Blake's gothicisation of the Joseph of Arimathea engraving as an indication of the way Blake's approach to both history and the potential for political change functions.

The Joseph engraving reveals Blake's disregard for both biblical narrative and historical teleologies.33 Instead, the engraving imputes to the artist the capacity to produce difference in the process of repetition. Blake repeats his initial repetition of Salviati's repetition of Michelangelo's image to produce a different figure: Joseph. These repetitions are all comprehensible as part of a neo-classical artistic practice. However, Blake's Joseph, builder of Gothic cathedrals, is an ahistorical rupture of the disciplinary regime of Enlightenment historiography. Charges that Blake is thus insane reflect a failure to recognise the counter-eschatological thrust of the Gothic as Living Form. The rupture constituted by the unprecedented emergence of Joseph of Arimathea as a Gothic artist performs the work of repetition in the production of difference. In repeating the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, a narrative that relies on a certain Aristotelian probability and historical possibility as part of the Bible's larger eschatological metanarrative of transcendence, Blake's repetition of the engraving produces the contrary: historical impossibility as the site of an immanent, counter-eschatological potentiality. Blake's Joseph brings to England a Gothic architectural form whose ahistorical emergence supplants the dissemination of Christianity as a particular ideational content or historical destination. As a visual/verbal text that conveys the Blakean Gothic, Joseph of Arimathea derails the linear, eschatological movement to apocalypse and transcendence precisely by denying historical possibility.

The ahistorical emergence that Blake's Joseph of Arimathea performs is hardly accidental. Assigning Joseph a historically impossible role is very much a part of the Blakean Gothic as it appears in a passage on The Ancient Britons in A Descriptive Catalogue (1809). Here, Blake writes about his Gothic era subject: the aftermath of the last battle of King Arthur. Blake claims, ‘the stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion applied to a Prince of the fifth century’ (DC; E 543). Arthur is an historically specific repetition of Albion. However, aware that his claim is contrary to those of ‘[t]he reasoning historian … such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire’ (E 543), Blake cites both historical and poetical precedent for his practice:

This production of a counter-historical model short-circuits Enlightenment historiography's linearity and causal connections. Rather, the artist's expression of elements of myth and legend is a practice of counter-history in which the Gothic as Living Form opens possibilities for future differences that evade historical or transcendent foreclosure. The Catalogue's claim that ‘Mr. B. has in his hands poems of the highest antiquity’ suggests that Blake's counter-historical vision is essential to understanding Jerusalem in particular (E 542). Indeed, the Catalogue's Arthurian version of the Blakean Gothic as a counter-history of ‘improbabilities and impossibilities’ in The Ancient Britons is offered as a placeholder for a ‘Voluminous’ text that ‘contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of Adam’ (E 543). Given its interest in the Arthur/Albion connection and the ‘Voluminous’ size of the manuscript, the description of The Ancient Britons arguably refers to the text we know as Jerusalem. However, there is good reason to suspect that Jerusalem had not reached a state of completion by the time Blake is preparing for his 1809 exhibition. Between Blake's Catalogue in 1809 and Jerusalem's first printings in 1820, there is a significant intensification of the political vision of the Blakean Gothic.

While the description of The Ancient Britons is primarily a nationalist political vision of world domination, wherein the British nation ‘shall arise again with tenfold splendor when Arthur shall awake from sleep, and resume his dominion over earth and ocean’ (E 542), Jerusalem dispenses with the idea that Arthur is a particular historical repetition of Albion. In Jerusalem, Arthur is first identified as ‘the hard cold constrictive Spectre’ (J 54:25; E 204), and later he is included in a satanic genealogy of rulers: ‘Satan Cain Tubal Nimrod Pharoh Priam Bladud Belin / Arthur Alfred the Norman Conqueror Richard John’ (73:35–6; E 228). As the genealogical repetition of Satan, Arthur originates a line of English kings equated with biblical oppressors. Rather than its once and future saviour, Arthur is now a figure symptomatic of Albion's fall. He is an earthly force for the subjection of his people, rather than a figure for the immanent potential of liberty.

One reason for Jerusalem's harsh reevaluation of Arthur has to do with the distinctive political emphasis of the Blakean Gothic in Jerusalem. Judging from his place of prominence in Jerusalem's list of oppressor/kings, Arthur has become less a mythical figure and more an actual ruler for Blake. The Catalogue's passage on The Ancient Britons conveyed Arthur as a mythical figure of nationalist greatness and a guarantor of a British rise to a military dominance in the future. The fact that Arthur's greatness is measured by the geopolitical scope of his martial conquests in the description of The Ancient Britons places him out of step with Jerusalem's political vision. In the prose prefaces to both chapters two and four, Jerusalem states that ‘[t]he Return of Israel is a Return to Mental Sacrifice & War’ (J 27; E 174) and advises ‘every Christian as much as in him lies engage himself openly & before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem’ (J 77; E 232). As ‘the hard cold constrictive Spectre’, Arthur, like Los's Spectre in Jerusalem, is a figure whose actions are inimical to the task of realising Jerusalem as the embodiment of ontological and political difference.

‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY’

As I have shown, in becoming Gothic, Blake's Joseph of Arimathea presents Living Form as the site where ‘Joseph’ constitutes a mode of being contrary to historical possibility and the biblical metanarrative of eschatology. Blake's description of The Ancient Britons likewise links this potential for difference with Jerusalem. In its gothicising repetition of both mythical past and biblical metanarrative, Jerusalem envisions a condition of ontological and political difference that is an apocalypse for the world as we know it. The world remains, but the way we know it is transformed. The frontispiece of Jerusalem repeats as it gothicises the ‘Death's Door’ design, but here the ‘death’ that ultimately takes place is that of the subject and its subjection by the state. The frontispiece of Jerusalem repeats much of the form, arrangement, and engraving technique of ‘Death's Door’, even as it effectively challenges the conception of the subject and the eschatological ends implicit in its earlier iterations. In For The Children as it is in his design for Cromek's edition of The Grave, Death's Door is the end of the biological existence for the old man seemingly blown into his tomb (see Figure 6).

Figure 6 William Blake, Death's Door, For the Children: The Gates of Paradise, plate 17 (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

By contrast, in plate 14 of America a Prophecy, Death's Door receives an overtly political content. Here the old man stepping into his grave may, according to Detlef Dörrbecker, ‘be seen as the representative of the Old Order who has been sent(enced) to death by the revolutionaries’34 (see Figure 7).

Figure 7 William Blake, ‘So Cried He …’, America a Prophecy, copy M, plate 14 (Bentley 12) (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In Jerusalem's frontispiece, the central elements of Death's Door are repeated, but a very different meaning emerges with regard to both death and political revolution.

About two years after The Grave debacle and Malkin's A Father's Memoirs, Blake printed the first proofs of Jerusalem, the frontispiece of which re-envisions the ‘Death's Door’ design as a specifically Gothic archway. Jerusalem's frontispiece presents a young man crossing the threshold of a Gothic structure. According to Morton Paley, this man is Los, Blake's figure for imaginative production, as a watchman.35 Rather than a crutch, Los carries a luminous globe. He is not, like the aged figure in ‘Death's Door’ entering a death which he can only escape through transcendence. Rather, his journey in Jerusalem is a movement to ‘Self Annihilation’, an act that entails the casting off of the autonomous subject of reason (J 98:23; E 257) (see Figure 8).

Figure 8 William Blake, Jerusalem, frontispiece, copy E, plate 1 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In venturing across the threshold, Los is not only entering into a Gothic structure in the course of making his rounds as a watchman, but he is also on the verge of envisioning the Gothic as Living Form, that is, as ontological difference. Los's task within Jerusalem is thus twofold. As a watchman, he watches for the moment when the emergence of difference can radically transform being and through this transformation catalyse political change. In so doing, Los will recover Albion as an instance of Living Form. In this condition, Albion is no longer a conventional subject. On the contrary, his name figures a process of becoming more akin to Gilles Deleuze's notion of multiplicity.36 As multiplicity, Albion becomes a people, a geographical region, a nation, and a mythological giant, without being, in essence, any one of these. However, to transform Albion, Los must envision this radical potential through the figure of Jerusalem. It is in this sense that Jerusalem is, as the title page proclaims, ‘The Emanation of The Giant Albion’ (E 144).

By simply turning the frontispiece, we effectively follow Los through the Gothic doorway only to immediately glimpse a dazzling image of the potential of ontological difference embodied in Living Form (see Figure 9).

Figure 9 William Blake, Jerusalem, title page, copy E, plate 2 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Representing the scholarly consensus, Paley identifies ‘the recumbent figure [at the bottom of the title page] as an analogue of Jerusalem herself’.37 Superficially, her wings signal her role as a figure for difference, but this is hardly the kind of difference that matters for Jerusalem's political vision. The suns, moons, and a field of stars contained in her wings all suggest that difference is immanent. These cosmic figures should not be read as symbolic or fanciful ornamentation. Rather they are intimations of a mode of being that conceives of Living Form as a pervasive process, one that elides distinctions between the natural body and the rest of the universe, between the autonomous subject of reason and object of empirical science, and between the mundane and the divine in conventional Christianity. Nevertheless, it is clear that Jerusalem is altogether unconscious or worse. Hence the concern expressed by the figures on the right and left side of the plate. Why? Because, Albion has decided that Jerusalem does not exist. As the poetic text of Jerusalem begins, Albion claims, ‘Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: / By demonstration, man alone can live’ (J 4:27–8; E 147). Albion's disavowal of Jerusalem's existence marks his allegiance to the epistemological stance of empirical science and, by extension, the neo-classical techniques that make drawing from life, as Blake told Malkin, smell of mortality. Albion's claim that Jerusalem does not exist and that ‘her daughters are indefinite’ is an admission that the nature of their being cannot be reduced to a single or stable existence, moral value, origin, and end.

While the Jerusalem of the title page is a figure for the inert, yet immanent, potential for ontological difference suppressed by Albion, she is nonetheless associated with the Gothic architecture in the visual designs of the text. The text associates Jerusalem with the Gothic form of Westminster Abbey, as opposed to the neo-classical dome of St Paul's Cathedral. ‘Jerusalem is not’, in the terms of Albion's epistemology, but Jerusalem as a figure associated with Gothic form, specifically in opposition to Grecian form, is clearly present on plate 32 of copy E38 (see Figure 10).

Figure 10 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Both Paley and David Erdman see the two full-sized figures as Vala, on the left, and Jerusalem, on the right.39 On the extreme left and right sides of the page are small images that resemble the neo-classical dome of St Paul's and a Gothic structure like Westminster Abbey. The struggle between Vala and Jerusalem is effectively echoed in the polarities represented by St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. Vala is appropriately self-mystifying in the folds of her Grecian/neo-classical veil, while the forms of Jerusalem and her three daughters are naked and clarified by the clouds that would obscure them. Albion's ‘fall’, his declaration that Jerusalem and her daughters ‘are not!’ is, in part, his rejection of the clarity of line (Malkin's notion of Blake's Gothic influence) idealised in the figure of Jerusalem and her daughters. In the following chapter, Shaub is right on the mark in reading this image of Jerusalem and Vala as the ‘pictoral equivalent of Blake's statement’ that the Gothic is Living Form.40 Looking at plate 32, Albion's claim seems absurd, and thus his perspective of reality is brought into question, since Jerusalem and her daughters are visually more distinct than Vala is. Jerusalem is, as the Catalogue says, ‘what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes’ (E 543).

Jerusalem's plate 57 repeats and complicates the visual opposition of the contemporary neo-classical form of St Paul's and the Gothic Form of Westminster Abbey (see Figure 11).

Figure 11 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 57 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Here, Gothic and neo-classical polarities define the top and bottom of a circle, suggesting a naive representation of the world appearing behind, seemingly divided by, the verbal field in the middle of the plate. The top of the circle presents the dome of St Paul's, with the word ‘London’ to the right of it and, at the bottom of the circle, is an image of Westminster Abbey with the word ‘Jerusalem’ to the right. In terms of Blake's mythology, the geographical polarisation of London and Jerusalem itself repeats two of the key ordinal points occupied by the ‘zoas’ after Albion's fall.41 Associated with the rise to historical dominance of reason, empirical epistemology, and state religion, the zoa Urizen is the force that likewise dominates the fallen Albion. Associated with the activities the artist/watchman, the zoa Los embodies the generative impulses that have lost the ability to influence Albion. One way to explain Jerusalem's sleep or unconsciousness on the title page, then, is to view her condition as an expression of Los's suppressed capacities in Albion's fallen state. What is lost in Los's shift to the south is the ability to effectively actualise the Gothic as Living Form.

While the opposition between Gothic and neo-classical architectural forms on plate 32 effectively defines the world as both divided by and a contest between the neo-classical Vala and the Gothic Jerusalem, plate 57 is literally framed within the field of a Gothic architectural form. Erdman identifies the golden, curved lines framing the top of the plate as a ‘gothic window’.42 This situation ideally performs Blake's notion of the Gothic as Living Form, but it is more complex than Erdman suggests. For Erdman, it is clear that the women are ‘weaving a stained glass window’.43 Thus they are both the source of the russet fibres, and they are the active constructors of the Gothic window's internal form. However, it is simultaneously possible that the women are in fact emanations of the divided earth at the centre of the design. Within this larger Gothic frame, their living forms suggest at once the becoming-world of the body and the becoming-body of the world.44 The world of Albion's fallen condition is one that has been occupied; it has been taken over and ideologically remade in the image of contemporary London, the subject of autonomous reason, and the stasis and mathematical abstraction of Grecian form epitomised by St Paul's. At the same time, Jerusalem's Gothic form is not only a geographical and geopolitical potential the occupied condition of the fallen Albion, but it is the immanent condition of the world's existence within the Gothic form of the window. The Living Form of the Gothic is thus ontologically a priori to Albion's fallen world rather than necessarily historically prior to it.

For the visual design of plate 57, Albion's world, a world divided between the polarities of Grecian and Gothic form, is simultaneously framed by and actualised within the Gothic. This reading of the design is confirmed by the accompanying verbal text's critique of division sponsored by the reason, moral judgment, and empirical epistemology of Grecian form. Even as it divides the visual image of Albion's world, the verbal text of plate 57 questions this division through a series of morally charged polarities attributed to the ‘Demonstrations of Reason’ (J 57:11; E 207). Giving utterance to these illusory distinctions, ‘the Great Voice of the Atlantic’ asks: ‘What is a Wife & what is a Harlot? What is a Church? & What / Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate? / Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing?’ (J 57:5, 8–10; E 207). The implication of these rhetorical questions is that the moral distinctions and purposes are constructed by reason and underwritten by phantasmatic truths of religion. The dichotomy of ‘Wife’ and ‘Harlot’ is founded on the state disciplinisation of sex and patriarchal authority. The architectural forms of ‘Church’ and ‘Theatre’ designate worship and literature as equally sites of state-sanctioned performance. From this perspective, St Paul's is the political performance space of London's morality, and Westminster is the political performance space of Jerusalem's suppressed potentiality as Gothic Living Form.

If the divisions sponsored by the unstable mix of empirical reason and morality's transcendent authority are a means to fix identities as forms of subjection to church and state, then, the Voice of the Atlantic's rhetorical questions about ‘Religion & Politics’ affirm that they are ‘the Same Thing’. Of course, religion and politics are intimately related in the history of Britain's church/state relationship, but to say that they are ‘the Same Thing’ does not make the divided elements equivalent or interchangeable. Rather they are the ‘Same’ insofar as the system of meaning which divides them is the common source of their identity. By contrast, the Living Form of the Gothic is the contrary of these moral divisions as such. In this way, Living Form resists the systems that produce both legal and moral identities. It is also a resistance to the notion of a final destination of humanity in the eschatological metanarrative. Living Form is always in process; it has no essential existence as Wife, Harlot, Church or Theatre. Living Form is without a stable structure, codified laws, or political programme or permanent spiritual destination. Yet it is, for that reason, all the more politically revolutionary, precisely because it is the contrary of the subjection that characterises the relationship between the state and the individual. Like its titular character, Jerusalem itself is a process that moves towards the realisation of Living Form.

When the Grecian form of St Paul's and the Gothic form of Westminster appear again on plate 84 in Chapter Four of Jerusalem, they no longer mark the polarities of a divided world (see Figure 12).

Figure 12 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 84 (1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

As the conflict they represent has intensified in the verbal text, plate 84 visually indicates that Gothic form has become a significant presence, one that holds the key to London's, and by extension Albion's, future. Now abutting each other, Westminster towers over St Paul's, an architectural mash-up of London enlarging the importance of Gothic form at this point in the text.45 The visual design is striking, too, for its repetition of elements of the ‘Death's Door’ design brought into the presence of St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. Repeated is the figure of the aged man with crutches heading to his grave that appeared in the various iterations of ‘Death's Door’. So too, the design powerfully evokes the bleak collusion of church and state in ‘London’ in Songs of Experience, where a young child leads an aged figure through the streets. In Blake's ‘London’, the human figures travel towards a brick tomb similar to that in ‘Death's Door’ (see Figure 13).

Figure 13 William Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy F, plate 39 (Bentley 46) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The verbal text of plate 84 describes a scene that belongs to ‘London’ as much as it belongs to Jerusalem: ‘London blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child. his tears run down his beard’ (J 84:11–12; E 243). However, Jerusalem makes a major step beyond the dark, historically accurate view of Blake's 1790s conception of ‘experience’ in ‘London’. For despite its speaker's awareness of the powers to which he is subjected, he cannot envision a political alternative to this situation. By contrast, on plate 84 the child is leading ‘London’ in a direction of travel opposed to that depicted in the Songs and ‘Death's Door’. Here we move past the brickwork of which the tomb consists and past the dome of St Paul's. In Jerusalem the decrepit figure of London is being led to Westminster, to the Gothic seat of Living Form as portrayed on plates 32 and 57 and in Los's transformative artistic vision.

The child's hand indicates the door to Westminster, recalling the scene in the frontispiece. The verbal text of plate 84 confirms the association of the Gothic form of Westminster with Los's entry through the Gothic door on the frontispiece, for in viewing London's condition, the Daughters of Beulah beg Los to ‘Arise upon thy Watches let us see thy Globe of fire / On Albions Rocks’ (J 84:27–8; E 243). The visual design of Jerusalem copy E in particular suggests that Los has heard their call, for the sun is rising over the rocky hill behind Westminster. London may be ‘blind & age-bent’ (J 84:11; E 243) in the moral Babylon of its own making, trapped in ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ (SIE 46:8; E 27), rampant commercialism, abhorrent child labour practices, and the suffering of wounded soldiers, as it is in the Songs. Yet Jerusalem's plate 84 suggests the immanence of unprecedented difference. The rising sun of Los's ‘Globe of fire’ and the child leading ‘London’ to Westminster suggests that the realisation of the Gothic as Living Form holds the promise for the emergence of something new.

Los's watch song on plate 86 further confirms plate 84's presentation of Gothic Living Form as an immanent, counter-eschatological force. If Los's first sight after entering the Gothic structure on the frontispiece is a glimpse of Jerusalem on the title page, then Los's watch song describes Jerusalem as a literally unimaginable expansion of being on plate 86. There is no image capable of mimetically reproducing Jerusalem, and no thought capable of comprehending Jerusalem as a radically heterogeneous multiplicity. Thus, Jerusalem is the paradigmatic example of the Gothic as Living Form. On plate 86, Los, as both watchman and Albion's principle of artistic imagination, sings a song on his rounds that presents Jerusalem as elements that are neither historically possible nor ontologically equivalent. According to Los, Jerusalem is, at once, a woman with a ‘Bosom white’ (J 86:14; E 244), the biblical cities of Shiloh and Jerusalem, a being with six wings, a ‘Pillar of a Cloud’, a ‘Pillar of fire’ (J 86:27; E 245), the possessor of ‘Tents’ wherein one can ‘behold Israel’ (J 86:26; E 245), a being with gold, azure, purple, crimson, and silver feathers (J 86:5–8; E 244), and, as the title page announces, Albion's emanation. Los's watch song at once dissolves Jerusalem as a conventional subject and visual figure, even as it describes her Living Form as a becoming-multiplicity of existence. The path Los repeats on his watch is thus both a repetition of previous watches and a path towards the emergence of ontological difference. In Jerusalem his radical conception of the subject is also a political solution.

Entering the Gothic door of the frontispiece, Los himself performs Jerusalem's alternative to the biological and political deaths expressed by the ‘Death's Door’ design in its various deployments. The verbal text of the trial proof frontispiece describes ‘Los / As he enterd the Door of Death for Albions sake Inspired’ (J 1:8–9; E 144).46 When he enters ‘the Door of Death for Albion's sake’, Los does not commit suicide. Rather he sacrifices his construction of himself as a subject, be it of God or of Albion. Los's inspiration is the sacrifice of his own selfhood to become an expression of the radical ontology of multiplicity. His sacrifice, modelled after Christ's sacrifice in the Bible, is the realisation of the Gothic as Living Form, and it is a radical vision of Albion as multiplicity: both a political state and a state of being. To put it a slightly different way, Albion becomes the ontological difference that Los beholds in Jerusalem and which Los's inspired sacrifice performs for Albion. Albion's repetition of Los's repetition of Christ's self-sacrifice figures the dissolution of the autonomous subject. This dissolution of the subject is indirectly actualised as a political condition the text describes as a ‘fourfold’ collective of ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ ‘Creating Space, Creating Time’ (J 98:28, 31; E 257–8). Albion is thus rendered a multiplicity no longer dependent upon the determinations of time and space necessary for what Kant calls the I of transcendental apperception. Like a Kantian aesthetic judgment of the sublime, this notion of the Last Judgment in Jerusalem is both aesthetically and historically contra-final.47 It is a testament to the Blakean Gothic of Living Form, whose repetitions achieve indirect actualisations of immanent potentiality as revolutionary differences. Historically it is a ‘going forward forward … from Eternity to Eternity’, rather than the achievement of an eschatological finality beyond history (J 98:27; E 257). Likewise, the supposed anthropomorphism of Jerusalem's penultimate plate, where ‘All Human Forms are identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone’, actually suggests an ontology whose radical heterogeneity is the political ideal. This apocalyptic condition is the text's revolutionary step towards the actualisation of a political condition wherein ‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY’ (J 26; E 171). Jerusalem seeks a revolutionary condition that is far removed from the bourgeois human subject's role in the French Revolution. At the end of Jerusalem, ‘Human’ is no longer a substantive entity in the same way that a Deleuzean multiplicity is not simply multiple. There is only a potentially endless flow of intensities, sensations that partake in an unfinalisable becoming at the site of the Blakean Gothic of Living Form.

Jerusalem is a Gothic epic, as long as we understand ‘Gothic’ as the occluded signifier of the becoming that animates the text. In Jerusalem, Living Form entails the dissolution of the subject and the emergence of a politics based on ontological difference. As in On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil, Jerusalem associates Gothic form with a conception of being as a process that neither reaches a final material form nor a transcendent eschatological destination. In the figure of Jerusalem, ‘Living Form is Eternal Existence’, which is to say that Jerusalem has no essential being, no origin, and no end (On Virgil; E 270). Jerusalem is multiplicity. This is why Jerusalem is effectively invisible to Albion throughout most of the poem that bears her name. As Albion becomes ‘Grecian’, he adopts the empirical principles of Enlightenment epistemology bound up in the term ‘Mathematic Form’, and thus the mode of Jerusalem's being is no longer apparent. Jerusalem does not exist in terms of Mathematic Form, for such form is only ‘Eternal in the Reasoning Memory’ (E 270). Rather she/it is a revolutionary break from this past: ‘JERUSALEM IS NAMED LIBERTY’. Jerusalem thus marks the emergence of that which is unprecedented. At the same time, Jerusalem is one figure for a pervasive and a priori process descriptive of all existence. To appreciate the Gothic in Jerusalem, is only to recognise what we have always been, before, as Blake would have it, the disciplinary regimes of classical and neo-classical thought obscured it.

What is revolutionary about the Blakean Gothic's break from the past is also, paradoxically, its return to a pre-modern era that signals Jerusalem's unrecognised affiliation with the genre of Gothic literature. Where the Gothic novel resists the tide of modernity evident in the novel's insistent strides towards literary realism in the eighteenth century, Blake's Jerusalem likewise resists the legacy of realism and its attendant emphasis on the supremacy of reason. The difference is this: Blake's return to the Gothic is the sudden eruption of a future without an image, a form of being that is not a subject, and thus it is a politics without subjection. But despite all of this, Malkin's view of Blake having become a Gothic monument in his nineteenth-century career is half right. Blake may have been increasingly irrational and his engraving technique, emphasising line rather than tonal shifts, out of place in the commercial market, but Jerusalem is truly the Gothic monument to Blake's increasingly invisible and unremunerative nineteenth-century career. Exactly four months before his death, Blake writes to George Cumberland to say that ‘the Last Work I produced is a Poem Entitled Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion … One I have Finishd It contains 100 Plates but it is not likely that I shall get a Customer for it’ (E 784). Even as Blake succeeded in bringing Jerusalem into being, his work was effectively an unknown cenotaph for a tomb that he was soon to enter.