"Once Only Imagined": An Interview with Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi

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The late David Erdman once called attention to S. Foster Damon's eccentric and occasionally oracular style--a statement of more than passing interest from a brilliant critic who in many ways could have been speaking of himself. (1) Blake scholars have long engaged in the sport of calling one another prophet or mystic, imputing the characteristics of their author to those who study him. Taunts of oracle and occulist--alternatingly maddening and clever, petty and spot-on, depending on the circumstances--lurk in Blake articles, monographs, reviews, notes, and conference papers. (2) The prophetic trope is more often than not delivered as a throwaway and read accordingly. Two decades ago, in 1982, Studies in Romanticism published a special issue on Blake that turned the prophetic trope on its head. Conceived as a tribute to David Erdman, the issue included an interview with him and a round-table on the future of Blake studies edited by Morris Eaves. (3) Eaves not only found the soothsayers in his midst, but took things one step further by giving them an assignment. How he persuaded ten esteemed Blake scholars, all of presumably sound mind, to try on for size the mantle of prophecy I can't say, but the results make for startling reading, even--or especially--at this late date. (4) Regardless of whether or not individual predictions have made the transition from counterfactuals to factuals in the twenty years that have lapsed since their publication, the round robin gives a bracing look at how its contributors imagined the future landscape of Blake criticism. The time is ripe to assess their prophetic hits and misses, as well as reach out to the next generation of Blake scholars who will one day stand in the same relation to these pages as I do to their prototype. Because 2002 marks not only the twentieth anniversary of that remarkable issue of SiR, but also the tenth anniversary of the conception of the electronic William Blake Archive, (5) a project that for some has come to iconify the future of Blake studies, I asked its editors--Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi--if they'd be willing to do the mantic honors again, this time around as a threesome. (6) In the text of the interview that follows--conducted via email in January, February, and March of 2002--they've done just that, reprising their prophetic roles, and at my bidding reflecting on their own scholarship--past, present, and future. While topics of conversation run the gamut from the winsome (Blake kitsch) to the peculiar (hypothetical extensions of Blake's canon), such diversity is subordinate to recurrent themes that shape the momentum of the four-way exchange, particularly those of reproduction, materiality, and representation. Perhaps in the hands of this interviewer things couldn't have been otherwise. It is in this context that I have used the interview as an occasion to draw from Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi a view of the Blake Archive as they see it from the scaffolds and a sense of its place in the history of Blake reproduction and editing. Because we live in an age when rapid technological obsolescence is a truism, the more technical questions and answers of the interview are likely to acquire a patina before their time. If today they hold the promise of new knowledge and research tools, tomorrow they will remind us that the future is always refracted through the eye of history, distorted by the force and limitations of a collective imagination. What is now proved was once only imagined, Blake tells us (MHH 8, E 36), (7) on the face of it suggesting perfect agreement between conjectural and empirical truth, the one co-extensive with the other, although temporally disjoint. In this view, history plays the role of generative grammarian, transforming the subjunctive mood in which we cast our speculations about the future into the indicative mood of fact and experience. …