School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemA pompous high priest: Urizen's ancient phallic religion in The four Zoas( 2001)Despite the ubiquity of the word "phallus" and its cognates in feminist, deconstructive and psychoanalytic (particularly Lacanian) criticism of the last three decades, Blake critics have shown little interest in the remarkable array of phalli found in the illustrations to The Four Zoas. Arguably, this neglect extends to the illustrations as a whole. In 1973 Grant noted that "the publication of G. E. Bentley Jr.'s monumental Clarendon edition of Vala or The Four Zoas in 1963" had not inaugurated "a tradition of commentary on the drawings." Twenty-seven years later, the situation is not markedly different.This neglect is in part due to the manifold difficulties of the poem. As Ault writes, "The Four Zoas is the most uncanonical, unmanageable, and recalcitrant text Blake ever wrote. The poem's internal operations exceed the possibility of mastery by virtue of their heterogeneity and complexity." These difficulties are generated in part by two factors: the assumption that after The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Swedenborg exerted no significant influence on Blake's artistic practice or iconography; and the still widespread commitment in Blake studies to an idealizing, logocentric (rather than prophetic imagination. The first discounts the most important context for the poem’s illuminations; the second leads viewers to downplay or ignore the poem’s powerful representations of the tormented, suffering body of humanity.