“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 revisionism. Generally, critics
interpret human sacrifice as a gruesome reification of religious falsehood,
stagnant rationalism, sexual repression, social control and surveillance, and
imperialistic atrocity. 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 boundaries 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 imagination, challenging
the critical consensus that Blake leans towards the spiritual and renounces
the corporeal in his late works.