“A Dream of Thiralatha”: Promiscuous Book Gatherings and the Wanderings of Blake’s Separate Plates

Abstract

“A Dream of Thiralatha”: Promiscuous Book Gatherings and the Wanderings of Blake’s Separate Plates Luisa Calè (bio) That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroadTo the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps;To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof. —America a Prophecy, plate 8: 5–91 In europe and america blake denounces the urizenic book as a form of oppression brought about by the ten commandments. The revolution involves, among other things, disbinding the book of the law, so that “none shall gather the leaves.” This iconoclastic act subverts the codex as a medium that can turn poetic fables into instruments of power. By contrast, Blake’s alternative sibylline medium can “renew the fiery joy” and “rouze the faculties to act” (E, 702): if none gathers the leaves, the unbound book allows each copy to become different, a compilation of a varying number of leaves arranged in a different order, revealing “the infinite which was hid” (MHH, 14; E, 39).2 In “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell,” Jerome McGann reconstructs how Blake’s Book of Urizen engages with the hybrid material history of the Bible as a collection of fragments “promiscuously collected and heaped together” as the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued. Working against such a hybrid idea of the book, Blake editors sought to establish “a textual ‘solid without fluctuation,’” witness G. E. Bentley’s editorial decision to produce an “‘eclectic’ text which corresponds [End Page 431] most closely” to one copy, “chiefly based upon narrative consistency, foliation, binding, and the relationship of design and text.”3 That desire for the ideal copy has been displaced by the freedom to choose and compare specimens from an ever expanding corpus of unique variant copies. Yet the philological principles underlying textual bibliography have had wider repercussions on where the boundaries between books, illustrations, and separate plates might be drawn. This essay explores the dynamics of illustration in William Blake’s illuminated printing through an example that questions and disorders the boundaries between books. I will piece together the complex bibliographic history of a “separate plate,” now known under the title “A Dream of Thiralatha,” which exists in two copies, one currently at the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings, the other at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.4 To trace the bibliographic sightings and trajectories of this plate is to rearticulate the dynamic between Blake’s continental prophecies, registering the porous boundaries between book parts and acts of bibliographic purification that separated what counted as books from prints in both British and American collections. The distinction between Blake’s books and “separate plates” dates back to Geoffrey Keynes’s 1921 bibliography.5 This category shaped archival criteria for distributing Blake’s corpus under different divisions of knowledge and institutional repositories. For instance, in 1943 the Lessing Rosenwald bequest to the American nation destined books for the Library of Congress and prints for the National Gallery of Art. This essay reconstructs how “A Dream of Thiralatha” functioned within specific books, when and why it was later disbound or arranged into alternative archival orders, and what its bookish trajectories and archival afterlives tell us about the limits of the book as an object and the dissemination and metamorphoses of illustration under different divisions of knowledge. [End Page 432] I will start with a description of the plate. To the right of the composition we see a half-clad reclined muscular figure, whose curve is echoed and emphasized by the bending shape of a tree trunk above it. The tree redirects the eye from right to left, following the branches bending down and almost touching a naked figure standing to the left and embracing a child that seems to be descending from the sky. The incongruous proportions of the two figures suggest that the standing figure might be a vision. This impression is supported by iconography. Blake’s etching recalls the figure of the dreamer in Henry...