Calling into Existence: The Book of Urizen

Abstract

According to Blake’s Europe, as history moved towards the crisis of the French Revolution, God became a ‘tyrant crown’d’ (Eur. 10.23, E63). One of the ways this paradigm shift — from God to crowned tyrant — manifests itself, both in the history of the late eighteenth century and in Blake’s prophetic books, is through the altering role and power of speech acts. God is presented in the first chapter of the Bible as the ideal user of language that is action, or of what twentieth-century philosophers and linguists have called performative utterance: God spoke and it was so.1 By contrast, the words of the ‘tyrant crown’d’ also issue in immediate action, but it is because he has authority over his subjects, not over the matter of the universe; because he can compel behaviour, not because he can bring about the absolute unity of signifier and signified; because he has assumed or been granted a kind of authority that is only conferred in the first place through political or institutional pronouncements, not because he is the Logos itself. This essay is an attempt to trace the devolution of performative language from the God of Genesis to the tyrant in The Book of Urizen. To put it differently, I would like to consider the way utterances are seen as creating a phenomenal world in the one case, but a world of political relations and social distinctions in the other.