“The Knife of flint passes over the howling Victim”: Rethinking Sacrificial Violence in William Blake’s Jerusalem
Author : Kang-Po Chen
Keywords : William Blake, Jerusalem, human sacrifice, ritualistic violence, Georges Bataille, the sacred
In William Blake’s final epic Jerusalem, human sacrifice plays a significant role. Presented as a distortion of the Passion, its abolition functions pivotally in Blake’s Christian evisionism. Generally, critics interpret human sacrifice as a gruesome reification of religious falsehood, stagnant rationalism, sexual repression, social control and surveillance, and imperialistic trocity. This article reconsiders the established interpretations by examining two specific episodes in Jerusalem: Los’s construction of Golgonooza, the City of Art, in Chapter 1 and Luvah’s torture in Chapter 3. I would argue that Blake’s overtly explicit, excessively detailed depiction of such violence goes beyond the representation of religious oppression and sexual repression as proposed in preceding studies.
Blake's unrestrained visualization of human sacrifice, “[g]lowing with beauty & cruelty,” insinuates a certain fixation on the body that outperforms his rightful assertion of Jesus’s self-annihilation and the spiritual completion it brings forth. In Chapter 1, the sacrifice motif has already permeated Los’s apparently righteous effort of artistic creation, attesting to Blake’s awareness of the intrinsic symbiosis between art and violence. And in Chapter 3, Blake’s versification of Luvah’s sacrifice disturbingly yet mesmerizingly obscures the oundaries between the self and the other and breaches the spirit-body dualism.
Engaging with Georges Bataille’s conception of the sacred, I would propose that ritualistic violence and bodily consumption proffer an alternative route to Romantic artistic magination, challenging the critical consensus that Blake leans towards the spiritual and renounces the corporeal in his late works.