윌리엄 블레이크의 『델서』 : 낭만주의적 생태학을 넘어서

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to read William Blake"s The Book of Thel as an ecocritical text that challenges two major ecological thoughts that emerged in the eighteenth century, an “arcardian” stance of British nature poetry and the idea of “economy of nature” that emphasizes wise human stewardship. Blake"s greatest contribution to the ecological thought is his continual sensitivity to the life of the body, which resists both the subjectless immersion into nature and imperial imposition of human values onto nature. The Poetic Genius is central to this essay"s understanding of Blake"s proto-ecological thought. Even though it differentiates the human from the non-human, its seemimg anthropocentrism is curbed by its promotion of malleability and fluidity, pushing the human subject to move outside the cave of the self and to help encounter other human and non-human life forms. Thel in The Book of Thel is seduced by nature to give up her human identity, including not only her anthropocentric idea of utility but also her life of the body as an embodied form of the Poetic Genius. Thel gives up the former willingly embracing experiential possibilities that her selfhood does not already know. However, she decide not to let the latter go, realizing it reduces her to a vegetable body with its five vitiated senses. Thel"s rejection of the vegetable body is directly related to Blake"s notion of the “spiritual body,” which benefits contemporary environmental thinking. The notion of the “spiritual body” limits the exercise of the human destructive will on nature, while promoting the emergence of new energy and possibilities in nature.