Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!

I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:

1. Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea.  I agree.  I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
2. JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk.  I agree.  But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.  
3. Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post. 

Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794).  It reads:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where to start?  Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza?  Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:

Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line.  Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that.  But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem.  What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS.  So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST. 

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM.  SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!

Is it just me or does the wittle kitty wook hungry?  Is this maybe just what Blake's contemporaries thought tigers looked like?  Not according to Thomas Bewick's General History of Quadrupeds (1794):

"Fierce without provocation" and "cruel without necessity" sounds more like a proper FIRE TYGER! than what Blake burned onto his plates.  What accounts for the difference?  Before I answer that, I want to let those big cats above stare from your screen for a while.  In fact, how about I flip that tiger around so you can do a closer comparison:

 

If the warp and woof of Blake's poem evokes the bottom tiger, why did he etch the top one below the text?  Because, as seemingly everyone since David Erdman (1954) argues, Blake may be borrowing the rhetorical excesses in the poem from the French Revolution-inspired panic that swept across England.  If we buy that reading of the poem, the relation of the hyperbolic text to the hypotropic tiger is evident: Blake was satirizing those who proclaimed The End Is Nigh by showing them what the dread tiger actually looked like.  Not that this is the only legitimate reading of the poem, but the advantage it has over its word-based competitors is that it treats the work in its entirety.

If I seem to be backdooring authorial intent—Blake intended his words to be read on this plate and above this image—let me put your mind at ease: I'm actually doing something far more devious.  I'm claiming that the words absent the picture are meaningless nothings; that they are no more words than Miraculous Wordsworth on a Beach [JSTOR] is words.  They appear meaningful because these words combine into grammatical sentences under the aegis of a rigorous rhyme scheme, but just as a person kicking a ball is not necessarily playing soccer, words that make sense are not necessarily meaningful.  For the actions of the person kicking the ball to be meaningful, they need context: referees, rules, other players, &c.  Similarly, for the words Blake etched onto the plate to be meaningful, they too require the context provided by the image of the FIRE TYGER!  The whole plate constitutes a single and singular text.  To analyze one without the other would be akin to kicking a ball into a tree and insisting you've won the World Cup, because any interpretation of the words absent the image is an analysis of a poem that only exists in your head.

(The soccer analogy would be my nod to textbook language and logic.  It needs work.)

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

I'm reminded of Shel Silverstein, whose pictures often do add significant layers of meaning (sometimes even reversals, if memory serves) to his verses.

I have a question, though: did Blake believe (and would it have affected his presentation) that his poem would always be reproduced with the image?

[SEK]

did Blake believe (and would it have affected his presentation) that his poem would always be reproduced with the image?

That I don't know. I can't assume he did, though, because he insisted he was the only one able to reproduce his technique . . . but since the freshmen anthology wasn't an extant artifact when he wrote the poem, I'm assuming he thought the image would be preserved somehow, or intended it to at least. I don't know. Are there any Blake scholars in the house?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Occam's Razor: perhaps Blake couldn't draw tigers very well.

[SEK]

perhaps Blake couldn't draw tigers very well

He could manage a fair approximation of Michelangelo . . . in relief etching. By which I mean, he could've drawn himself a fine and fulsome tiger had he desired to do so. But he didn't. (I can't link directly to the British Museum because of, well, I don't know why, but it has something to do with JavaScript. Point being, if you google "Blake" and "British Museum," you'll be taken to Blake's very skilled anatomies, which point to Occam slicing unjustly in this instance.)

[Sisyphus]

I never did like that tiger image. I'm probably heretical but I like Tiger Number 2 better.

If you're reading Blake's Tiger, don't you have to read it alongside his lamb poem?

[Vance Maverick]

Is your concern here mainly pedagogy? If not, I wonder (still) how widely you want to cast your net. You're still only scratching the surface of the history of text/image sequences (viz.).

[Vance Maverick]

If the warp and woof of Blake's poem evokes the bottom tiger

Big if, Dr. Rhetoric.

[Kav]

Just because one can draw (or etch) a person it does not follow that one could draw a tiger. Some can, some cannot. I can do portraiture very well, but even then my ability drops away when working from memory or imagination; I work best with a model (be it person or image). Similarly I can reproduce animals relatively well but fail completely if I try to do it from memory.

Thus your assertion that since he was able to etch Michelangelo (which by the way the top half was drawn by Fuseli) he was capable of a tiger does not follow. More evidence please :-)

[P.T. Smith]

Just because one can draw (or etch) a person it does not follow that one could draw a tiger.

But if you're allowing that he does indeed draw people very well, then look at the tiger's face. Forget the rest of the drawing and notice the wide eyes, tiny pupils, the worry lines that extend backwards, and the downturned mouth. They are all typical, simplistic, human facial expressions or worry, sorrow, general whimpering.

I'm still trying to understand the association between the two, as somehow I've always read "The Tyger" as less fierce, and somehow more melancholy but had never seen the drawing before.

[JPool]

Man, I do not like that poem, carzy bow-legged Daniel-Stripped aside.

[JPRS]

Europeans are just nervous nellies--they freaked out over Beethoven and that train movie, too, and those aren't really scary.

[nk]

Was Blake attempting to illustrate a tiger? Or was he, instead, attempting to illustrate the poem's allusion that the act of Creation was an act of corruption?

And when the poet threw down his brush
And went out for an all night bash
Did he get a chance to see
The serving wench's dimpled knee?

[joXn]

Ha. "Likable Wilma" is an even better parody than I had thought! (c.f. http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0006/anagram2/ )

[Annie]

The two books of Songs of Innocence and Experience have to be read consequtively in order to put the Tyger into context. Songs of Experience are contrasting to those of Innocence. Blakes 'Experience' is once the veil of Innocence is corrupted by environment, by carnal knowledge, by cynicism, suspicion and society. The 'innocent' would have depicted the Tyger below, its ideal of what a Tyger looks like. The top Tyger being a metaphor for the ravages of life and effect on a creature normally portrayed as magnificent. As you quite rightly said, his etchings were always intended to be presented with his verse as a signifyer.