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.15Erdman s reading of the sixth plate of America as a rewriting of the  Declarationof Independence represents the transformation of a Lockean statement of rights intoa Blakean set of actions as if they were uncomplicatedly parallel to one another.16But Blake has difficulties with this throughout America.Note the passive, rationalvoice of the  Declaration :We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they areendowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,& the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted amongmen, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.17Blake transforms Jefferson s set of rights, with which men  are endowed, intoexhortations.Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field:&Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge (A 6:6 11)13 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and HistoricalRepresentation (Baltimore, 1987), p.13.14 Lincoln,  Blake and the  Reasoning Historian,  pp.78 9.15 Nicholas Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge,1998), p.133.16 Erdman, Prophet Against Empire, p.25.17 Thomas Jefferson, Writings (New York, 1984), p.19.52Americans in British Literature, 1770 1832The aggressiveness of Blake s approach to  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,sharply contrasts with the peaceful exercise of rights guaranteed by the social contractJefferson invokes.18This can be argued away as a difference in tone rather than philosophy, inevitableif one considers the distance between Blake s radical urban situation and Jefferson saristocratic experience.But one can also see Blake s rewriting as a direct, activeinversion of the  Declaration s passive representation of the quarrel as apolitical challenge to Social Contract theory, with its insistence on the necessity ofrelinquishing some rights to ensure others, couched in grammatical opposition.Butthe real failure of the Lockean model the decision of America s Angels to breakfrom England goes beyond tone and grammar.Significantly, Blake s rewriting ofthe  Declaration omits that document s central point:  that whenever any form ofgovernment becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,  it isthe right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it s(sic) foundation on such principles, & organizing it s (sic) powers in such form, as tothem shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. 19 While the  safetyof the colonists may be secured by seceding from the collectivity, this can only comeabout through the rejection of Blake s overarching vision of revolution that ends inunification.The  safety that the colonists were eager to secure is thus incompatiblewith the worldwide revolution Blake considered necessary.Revolutionary approaches based on Enlightenment theories can only endoppression by endorsing disunification, or the bifurcation of corrupted Albion fromthe part of it that stands for the  idea or  ideal of liberty.The facts force Blaketo recognize America s independence, and his republicanism forces him to applaudthis.But his vision can represent the split between Albion and its children only asa further fall.Only through his own imagined system can Blake move towards hisgoal of One Man, and control the process of reforming or eliminating difference tothe point of unification absolute dominion of the subject over itself and whichfor Blake is the same over its physical surroundings, imaginative processes, andtime itself.Blake is moving towards a presentation of revolution as the prelude to an orderingof the world that includes all time simultaneously, and as such eliminates time as weknow it.America, located in a theoretical space for Blake, seems to be the placewhere Albion can become the One Man of Jerusalem, able to repair his bifurcationand present a vision of energetic eternity.Blake s disappointment with America andits  finite revolution rests in its inability to give him the model of this timelessworld he would seek until the final plates of Jerusalem when he exhorts:Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of AlbionAwake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient TimeFor lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal DayAppears upon our Hills & (97:1 4).2018 Jefferson, Writings, p.25.19 Ibid., p.19.20 Jerusalem, Morton D.Paley (ed.), vol.1 in Blake s Illuminated Books (Princeton,1991).53English Reforms in American SettingsThe passing of night and death into eternity, and the emanation of the regeneratedgeography of Jerusalem from Albion, are examples of Blake s desire for a worldwiderevolution, yet his inability to see it taking place outside of England.He longs tosee the fourfold manifestation of the One Man  going forward irresistible fromEternity to Eternity, conversing  in thunderous majesty, and  Creating Time,none of which can be seen in an America that has simply replicated England withouta monarchy (J 98:27, 29, 31).America is in this sense a test of Lockean theory and Painite praxis, both ofwhich it finds faulty.In my reading, Blake is an Englishman prophet or not whoanguishes over the loss of North America as a loss for the English of the  idea ofliberty.While he did not overvalue the American patriots themselves, they werefighting for changes with which he sympathized.America s falling away fromEnglish control is a defeat for his vision as is the loss of England from Americandemocracy.Nonetheless, Blake s point of view and stance remain English and hismove towards a more symbolic representation of history is the move he makes tocontrol these events.It is also his way to remain a revolutionary and republican.Henarrates his way out of the history his fellow radicals envisioned into a new, meta-historical order.Blake begins America: A Prophecy by complicating the challenges his  warlikemen must overcome if they are to move towards his vision [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]