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Chapter 1
Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux
Voyez-vous cet œuf? C’est avec cela qu’on renverse toutes les écoles de théologie et tous les temples de la terre.
[Do you see this egg? It is with this that one overturns all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth.]
DENIS DIDEROT, Le rêve de d’Alembert
a. Into the Egg
When William Blake, in Milton and Jerusalem, began to call this world, the world disclosed by our fallen senses, “the Mundane Egg,” he tucked the theater of human history within the most disputed experimental object of Enlightened and Romantic life science. For the longest conceivable eighteenth -century, controversies in the study of animal “Generation”—discipline-forging controversies for what would become experimental physiology, biology, embryology, and comparative anatomy—hinged on events of conception, animation, and organ formation under way within mundane eggs. In this chapter, Blake’s books serve as our surprisingly informative, unsurprisingly polemical guide to the mundane egg’s politically and theologically fraught territory, introducing problems in the early life sciences that will prove central to each subsequent chapter. In this introductory vein, the Blakean poetic lines that aspire to “vary” in “every Word & Every Character / . . . According to the Expansion or Contraction. the Translucence or / Opakeness of Nervous fibres” divulge the special status of the new sciences of life as invitations and incitements to poetic art: the enabling idiom, rather than the target, of Romantics’ critique of previous empiricist and experimentalist knowledge formations (“Bacon & Newton & Locke”) and a license for poetic renovation of what the “senses five” purport to know.1
Before zeroing in on the particularly neo-Lucretian strain of figural materialism followed in detail over the next four chapters, then, this chapter lays out the wider field of interaction and indistinction between biological and poetic approaches to living form in the period, paying special attention to arguments against and beside the organicist ideal that still dominates literary-critical reconstructions of this terrain. Reading scenes of embryogenesis from The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (c. 1804–1811), and Jerusalem (1804–c. 1820) with related poetic and prose accounts from Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, this chapter presents a now unfamiliar premise that, I argue, held contemporary experimental life science open to poetic participation: an understanding of biological life as dependent, for its very development and viability, upon actions and passions of lineation, imitation, and figuration, of which poetry is one. At issue in recent life science was a body tropologically active and reactive even at the level of its basic biological needs and functions, a body whose sensory means of “converting objects” into “symbols,” “signs,” and “images” seemed to furnish the pattern, prehistory, and present condition for more obviously linguistic and social means of production and instruction.2 And given the pre-Darwinian conceptions of biological time that I attempt to restore in this chapter, this logic rendered “forms / Of life” intrinsically historical and poetic in several time signatures at once: not only in the now-familiar, geological “deep time” of species evolution (phylogeny), but also at the quicker tempo of individual development and life course (ontogeny)—not to mention in every apparently immediate event of sensation.
Blake’s books brilliantly illustrate the potential of the experimental philosophy of epigenesis—the science, as we will see, of real-time embryonic embodiment—to represent living bodies as sociohistorically elaborated and collaborative “forms / Of life,” without thereby alleging their unilateral construction or inscription by discursive power.3 In Blake’s and related biologies, I argue in this chapter, beings owe their very life to the social and symbolic processes that give them viable and recognizable form, and they collaborate, down to their nerves and fibers, in the production and perpetuation of signifying systems we now tend to figure as imposed upon bodily life by force of language or law. By virtue of this congruence and complicity with the social forms of art, I argue, the life of the body in Blake and like-minded life sciences cannot fulfill the emancipatory role that Romantic vitalist criticism assigns to it—cannot be trusted, that is, as a source of pure, creative, ontological power to resist, elude, or break through what Blake calls the “mighty Incrustation” of discursive, epistemic, political, and historical forms.4 Instead, as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued in texts that helped coin the term and define the science of biologie, the problem of natural life in fact delivers inquirers directly to the intersection of “the physical and the moral”: biology names the logic by which the “two orders of things” we might now call culture or discourse and nature or the body “have one common source [and] react upon one another, above all when they seem most separated.”5 In Lamarck and Blake’s context, I argue here, “life” frequently names matter’s movement toward, its reception, co-production, and perpetuation of, structures of power and meaning. This also means that bodily “life” cannot be hailed as “totipotent,” discursively innocent, or free.6
There is no denying that Blake’s poetry frequently aspires to absolutely unfettered vitality: a life in which “words of man to man” redound “in fury of Poetic Inspiration / To build the Universe stupendous,” in an activity Denise Gigante has justly termed “ontopoietic,” and Saree Makdisi, “a life of endlessly proliferating creation, a life of ontological power.”7 Yet unlike his more recent, presumptively secular, vitalist advocates, Blake names this mode “Eternal Life” and the “Life of Immortality” (my emphasis), in frankly millenarian invocation of a “Life” available once the pathos and finitude of terrestrial life “Are,” as one Eternal Prophet puts it bluntly, “finishd.”8 That is, Blake’s poetic theology makes clear that “Life” as vital power unbound is not synonymous with actually existing “forms / Of Life,” and may even come at their expense. This chapter proceeds from the observation that exhilarating, vitalist visions of “Eternal Life” in Blake’s oeuvre are frequently shadowed by a different style of demand for life, a demand that voices marked as finite, terrestrial, feminine, and infantile issue against an ideal of Life “too exceeding unbounded.”9 Even Jerusalem’s final, tour-de-force vision of Humanity redeemed is punctured by a “Cry” of protest from “all the Earth from the Living Creatures of the Earth,” a contingent legitimately concerned that Life without limits spells the end of the specific bodies in which their finite lives inhere.10 As if amending the vision of infinite ontopoetic vitality in response to this cry, Blake’s magnum opus ends by picturing participants in the “Life of Immortality” taking restful dips into the transience and finitude of “Planetary lives”—“reposing,” that is, in “lives of Years Months Days & Hours.”11
Heeding such compromised and compromising voices, I want to suggest, is the exact, if somewhat deflationary task of thinking through “biology” with Blake, a logic of life he and his contemporaries called “Generation” and situated within mundane eggs. The very term “Generation” keeps the problems of contemporary experimental life science rigorously coterminous with mundane history in Blake’s lexicon, where “Generation” not only names what we have come to call developmental biology but also, more broadly and basically, creatures’ (ongoing) fall into sexual difference and corollary systems of (re)production and moral and natural law. In the “Looms of Generation” within the Mundane Egg, Blake writes, “Men take their Sexual texture Woven.”12 Sexual “Generation” weaves the span of fallen history for Blake, a “Woof of Six Thousand Years” he expects to be wrapped up and discarded at Jesus’s second coming.13 There is thus an important sense in which the science of “Generation”—a science brandishing, since the seventeenth century, the motto ex ovo omnia (everything from an egg)—is, from a Blakean point of view, curiously preoccupied with the processes by which fallen being replicates itself.14 In what follows, then, I take seriously both Blake’s minute engagement with generation science and his delimitation of any such science to the “Finite & Temporal” set of perspectives confined to “The Mundane Egg.”15 Scenes of generation in Blake pertain precisely and modestly to works of inadvertent repetition and minor transformation within a fallen world, opening a technically mundane dimension in the work of an artist best known for radical, revolutionary, and prophetic aspirations.16 Thus, after examining the rival theories of epigenesis at work in The First Book of Urizen, I turn to a quiet passage in Milton that explores how generated beings might discover their bodies’ negotiable lineaments, were they but to recognize the histories casually “imbodied” there (fig. 1).17
For in fact, if “Generation” in Blake invites us to curb our critical enthusiasm for the ideal of life unbounded, then accepting this curb allows rival Romantic theories of Generation to come into view as rival theories of this-worldly historical process.18 Thanks to the groundbreaking research of numerous scholars over the last two decades, it is no longer news that Blake, with the majority of more and less canonical Romantic poets, intimately engaged the emergent, scientific study of life we now know as biology.19 And yet as literary critics have rediscovered that science’s foundational controversy between “epigenesis” and “preformation” theories of animal generation, we have too quickly seized upon epigenesis—loosely construed as the vital, dynamic refutation of deistic, mechanical predetermination—as Romanticism’s fit, provocative, and progressive life science.20 It is not that preformation, which was anyway on the wane in the late eighteenth century, should be rehabilitated instead. Rather, Blake’s “epigenesist poetics,” in Denise Gigante’s fine phrase, in fact demands a more rigorous grasp of competing variants within that epoch-making idiom, not least because rival theories of generation were then understood to carry competing systems of moral and political order to term.21
I argue in this chapter that Blake’s specific mischief on the mundane egg satirizes one powerful model of epigenesis—incidentally, the one most frequently recovered by Romantic literary historians—and invites us to reconstruct another. Rejecting the rhetoric of autonomous “self-organization” from within a broader epigenesist idiom, Blake’s books undermine the persistent tendency to equate epigenesis with organicism, as well as to frame the question of Romanticism and biology as a question of the fate and merit of a particular, organicist ideal: the Kantian and Coleridgean ideal of living form as autonomous “cause and effect of itself.”22 In Blake, as in the contemporary zoologies of Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, the theory and lexicon of epigenesis casts animal formation as a work of acute circumstantial dependency, rather than of autotelic power. Here living forms are those that tend, for better or worse, to make an organ of experience, their developing bodies presenting a compounding archive of prior interactions with their social and material surrounds. The epigenesist idiom these writers share permits them to depict living forms—even at the level of the bodies they take for natural—as bearers of contemporary circumstance, exquisitely susceptible to incorporating the material relations of their multilevel milieux. By the lights of this lesser-known logic of life, the living bring circumstantial histories to bear on any present interaction and owe their ver...
