Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries

A Mind's Odyssey

Joseph Natoli

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438463506, 9781438463513
• eBook ISBN: 9781438463520
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Uniting personal history with cultural history, Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries tells a story of a mind, a time, and a culture. The vehicle or medium of this excursion is an overview and sampling of the author's work, and what is revealed are cautionary tales of a once-aspiring egalitarian democracy confronted with plutocracy's gentrification; of analog history and off-line life superseded by a rush toward virtualized, robotic, AI transformation of the human life-world; of everything social and public giving way to everything personal and opinionated. The vagaries of a lifetime of paths taken are woven together by a narrative that reveals in every piece a significance that was only partially present at its initial writing. Thus, the reader becomes involved in a developing story of a certain personal psyche working toward understanding its own development within a changing American culture. Sometimes angry, sometimes joyful, but always curious and wry, Joseph Natoli crosses the boundary lines of psychology, politics, literature, philosophy, education, and economics to show how we bring ourselves and our cultural imaginaries simultaneously into being through the processes and pleasures of thinking beyond the confines of the personal.

Chapter One

William Blake

Prophet against Empire

If my reading of thirty-four years of commentary has produced any one single effect, it is this: there is an overall unity of perception of Blake’s work which extends to what it is and what it is worth to us, if not to what it means in purely rational terms.

—Twentieth Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present

I found in the work of William Blake the bottom of my wide-ranging interests over the years; and if there is no unifying vision in those interests, the idea of such vision, or the possibility of such, is what I owe to my lifelong meditation on Blake.

I was an inconvenient Max Stirner-type anarchist to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the sixties and an apostate to the Stirner creed years later when I observed the illusions of individual will and autonomy at work in the new millennium.

I was an absorbed and fascinated Jungian leading to my dissertation on Jung and Blake until I read the work of Jan van den Berg and observed how deftly the pathologies of mind could be revealed without referring to the hidden dimensions of an unconscious mind.

I was very much Heidegger-prone in the eyes of other theorists when ‘theory’ was the rage, attempting to place consciousness and culture as corridors outside the “prison house of language.” Nevertheless, I was a full-blown deconstructionist, according to a British reader of a manuscript submitted to St. Martin’s Press—a manuscript that attempted to show that Dickens experienced a crise de quarante ans in which he deconstructed his earlier Pickwickian conviviality.

With the publication of A Postmodern Reader, edited with Linda Hutcheon, followed by A Primer to Postmodernity for Blackwell and then the long run of the Postmodern Culture series for SUNY Press, I was labeled a “ludic” postmodernist to all, a defender of an -ism that, according to the Right undermined the Western tradition of realism and rationality. The Left did not approve of postmodernity’s dismissive approach to the critical rod of reason by which the Left challenged capitalism. Everyone waited anxiously for the mad fad to disappear.

My turn to online writing, mostly in popular culture and politics, gave me a wider audience but one that placed Obama on the Far Left and Jesus on the Far Right. “Progressive” was meant to be a signifier Liberals could hide under but nevertheless in the American mass psyche the linkage was clear: “progressives = socialists = communists = left-wing radicals = anti-capitalists = un-American.” Within my heartland affiliation, I became the last Marxist standing, a throwback relic in the view of the post-partisan crowd who, at heart, objected to politics simply because it was still going on after the millennium ushered in our new cyber-alternative universe. The presence of something so antediluvian as partisan politics when there are so many colorful apps to engage seems more annoying than comical. The Marxists recognized that I did not quite fit; and so after publishing with Political Affairs, an online publication of the American Communist Party, I was excommunicated, although my work still appears in their archives.

As a member of the editorial collection of Bad Subjects: Politics in Everyday Life, the oldest online political journal, I wrote a series of articles in which Liberals were critiqued as strongly as Neoliberals. And although TruthOut is a progressive online journal, it published an essay—“Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal”—which estimated ideological differences as insignificant compared to the deep affinities of wealth and lifestyle, the bond in which “le luxe est un droit.”

In my early seventies now, I am called a “hippy who is still a hippy,” although I failed to connect in any way with the California flower power/Timothy Leary bullshite nor with a New Left on the East Coast, which was as quickly and as easily absorbed into the capitalist machine as pot, tie-dyed tees, and bell bottoms. The reappearance of my essay on the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski in Oliver Benjamin’s collection Lebowski 101 (Abide University Press, 2014) relocates my mind’s journey with dudeism, which Benjamin calls “a new religion.” However, I do roll more easily into thought than into other people’s lives, and therefore dudeism is not “the rug that ties everything together” for me, and I do not abide there although the Dude’s emergence on the screen in 1998 remains for me a wonderful, timely counterpoint to the Wall Street player heroes that obsessed the American cultural imaginary.

At every staging point of my mind’s odyssey, the substance of how I imagine world and consciousness has remained Blakean.

I select these three excerpts because the first signals my looking at Blake through a phenomenological lens, the second, my use of Blake to pursue my own meditations on disorder in literature, and the third, introduces the politics of a phenomenal divide, a politics Blake well understood and took on with the tools of the imagination.

I humbly pursued that Blakean vision, grounded in the contraries Blake described in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in both my master’s thesis and in my dissertation, originally titled “Blake in the Twentieth Century,” wherein I ranged widely with chapters on depth psychology, existentialism, the myth of the eternal return, the Death of God movement, the Beats, and more. That work was ‘disciplined’ to one chapter on Blake and Jung. Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History had inspired me to go beyond disciplinary borders. The wide-ranging brilliance of that work set me, as well as so many who would move on to the accommodating theory wagon that began with the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism, to jump departmental fences. With only two exceptions—the William Blake essay for the Critical Survey of Poetry series and Twentieth Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present for Garland in 1982—I left off writing in the field of Blake studies as they went from non-existent to grist for the academic mills. However, I never abandoned the idea that “what is now proved was once only imagined” (“Proverbs of Hell,” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790–1793). And regardless of how far I travelled, I took Blake with me.

My interest in the phenomenological psychologists’ notion of Lebenswelt, the human life-world which encompassed an affective and imaginative manner by which we mediate the world, is no more than a Blakean pursuit that goes beyond “weights and measure” and reaches for how and what we envision imaginatively.

Deconstruction for me became an assault on those illusions fashioned in a Blakean fallen world whose formations Blake challenged, his visionary work always seeking to answer our question: “Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?” (Europe, a Prophecy, 1794). The “Orb of Fire,” our imaginations are obscured by minds and hearts bound in “slough” and rock. Reason’s “Heart / In a fleshy slough formed four river / Obscuring the immense Orb of fire / Flowing down into night: till a Form / Was completed, a Human Illusion/In darkness and deep clouds involv’d” (The Book of Los, 1795).

Blake’s vision followed me through my work on literary theory, postmodernity, popular culture, and a cultural critique that ranged widely across education, politics, economics, literature, history, chaos theory, and headline events, both extraordinary and everyday. “I travel’d thro’ a land of men, / A land of men and women too; / And heard and saw such dreadful things / As cold earth-wanderers never knew” (“The Mental Traveller”). I wrote about Rodney King and the Central Los Angeles Riots; the “Little Man” James wilding murder; the O.J. Simpson trial; the psychopath Jeffrey Dahmer; Susan Smith’s murder of her two sons; Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber; the death of Princess Di; the murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst; the siege of David Koresh at Waco; Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing; the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centers; and the Occupy Wall Street protest. Closer to where I lived when I wrote these books were the unsolved murder of Brandon D’Annunzio and the Gunson Street riots in East Lansing, Michigan.

I took the spirit of Blake into a Postmodern Culture book series for SUNY Press that I created with the imaginatively free-spirited Carola Sautter, editor at SUNY Press, and continued under the ever-faithful directorship of James Peltz. We trespassed across the boundaries of high culture into everyday life, left behind foundational footnoting and arguments building to determinate closure, and brought the creative imagination of fiction into the high court of academic discourse. And when Blackwell Publishers asked me to put together an introduction to postmodernity, accessible to an inquiring general public, I employed characters from the TV sci-fi Star Trek to tell that story in a postmodern manner and wrote A Primer to Postmodernity. I began a Europe travel program in 1995 that continued for fifteen summers—“Is this a Postmodern World?—initiated by a theory that explored everyday life as expressions of imaginative phenomenal realities and history itself as the productions of imagination within contexts that might fade but never die.

Through popular culture, I sought to disclose an American cultural imaginary that was both immoveable and transient, and in Speeding to the Millennium, I combined my cultural critique with vignettes in an attempt to imaginatively supplement my critique. Years later, I wrote of a new Gulliver in Travels of a New Gulliver, relying now wholly on fictional satire to reach further than my cultural critique had in my explorations of the American cultural imaginary.

Throughout I attempted to follow Blake’s own counsel: “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Though I have not abstained from reasoning, I have eschewed modernity pretenses and jumped back upon my own reasoning, positioning it and thus tagging a caveat lector to my writing. These are ‘truth stories’ or mediations of world and self at certain times and from within a certain culture. The quest to imagine more expansively is implicit in a postmodern view prompting us to refashion the productions of this time and place when countered by the productions of another time and place.

The infinity that Blake describes thusly: “If the doors of perceptions were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite” has always meant to me endless attempts to imagine the world beyond the limitations of empirical proof and validation. Such reasoning “or the ratio of all we have already known,” is an obstruction, a seeing with and not through the eye.

This life’s dim windows of the soul

Distorts the heavens from pole to pole

And leads you to believe a lie

When you see with, not through, the eye.

Whether, however, we can through the imagination open “the eternal worlds” Blake found, or do no more than see through the presumptions of our truths and certainties is undecidable, as prophecy presumes a truth that theory can question but not assert. I have employed, admittedly, my imagination in interrogating and deconstructing rather than pointing to “the eternal worlds” that Blake was so sure would reveal themselves beyond “our senses five.” But skepticism attends skepticism itself and the question Blake posed can never be answered:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way

Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

At the time I wrote my introduction to Blake criticism, I was a rebel from academe and the institutionalization of intellectual work. I saw classroom and course as disciplinary in a very un-Blakean mode. I conceived this bibliography of Blake criticism as a means of pursuing one’s own understanding of Blake without any classroom mediation. Therefore, the endless amount of Blake commentary I covered were obstacles as well as aids in reaching into Blake. Some forty years later, I see all criticism not as the establishment of a monologue but a continuous battle of stories. A critical commentator of any work must go on in the hope of presenting a strong interpretation that a reader will adopt. It is strong in terms of how well it suits the disposition of both the times and the reader. But the reader is not a free-choosing agent here but already choosing within cultural priorities. In place of the imprisoned reader I imagined forty years ago, I now see a reader living within the illusions of personal freedom to choose, to design a Blake the way one designs one’s own reality in cyberspace. Such liberation is liberation not only from what Blake means despite what you choose him to mean but also from the criticism itself. When I wrote this introduction, I hoped to detach the student of Blake from an academic reading of Blake. I could not imagine a cultural attitude in which reading itself would be superfluous in a world in which personal opinion rules. I could not imagine that criticism would vanish or be reduced to a continuous ‘Like’ feedback from friends or vitriolic comments from those who were not.

Introduction, Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present1

The Pragmatics of Reading Blake

There is a pragmatics of Blake study that involve time invested and profit extracted. In fact, it has been a key concern with a variety of Blake commentators for the entire thirty-four years this bibliography surveys. My own assumption is that students take from Blake according to their own needs, interests, and capacities and that a tabulation of debits and credits is purely an individual enterprise. I hope that a very early reward of Blake study would be a replacement of a cash-nexus mentality with something more humanly oriented.

The Blake that is comprehended by any individual reader is inevitably that individual’s Blake. That comprehension is something very different from the quest made by the total corpus of Blake scholars and critics for a definitive introduction, a definitive biography, a definitive exegesis. The degree to which Blake’s entire work can be reduced to uniform, systematic comprehensibility does not affect the degree to which his work has an effect upon any individual reader. The discursive cannot be substituted for the non-discursive. The quest for a common ground, for an objective Blake, for comprehensible, communicable themes, is the academic quest. It is engaged as enthusiastically with poets as with philosophers, with painters as with physicists. And yet, there is no objectively understood Blake; there is only Blake understood by someone. The work will always have an effect. Effects, which are the results of not striving to locate and define Blake’s work, may be productive by virtue of encountering a greater proportion of one’s own mind than Blake’s work. Since we are all, as individual readers, variously encountering our own minds, the only question pertains to how we make our reading of Blake’s work efficient. Effects, which are the results of staying closely with Blake’s work, reliable text and commentaries, are most efficient if one is indeed reading Blake. When we read Blake, we are committed to that reading. We are committed to reading what others have said, to locating a reliable text. We are committed to locating Blake’s work as it exists outside our own minds. We intend to read Blake—a dialogue of reader and work to be read.

In this dialogue of Blake’s work and the reader of Blake’s work, the exegetist of the work goes on as if the individual reader did not have determining priorities. And it cannot be otherwise. Whether or not the priorities of the reader are acknowledged, the exegesis of the work goes on. It is only when an attempt is made to impose uniformly a supposed definitive, objective exegesis on the individual reader that the inviolability of an equal dialogue must be asserted. Unfortunately, Blake-in-the-classroom is too often a uniformly perceived Blake for the purpose of uniform evaluation of response. One of the purposes of this bibliography is to provide students with a guide to Blake studies so they can select in accordance with their interests. Thus, a bibliography such as this becomes a means by which to break through the circumference of a possibly too Urizenic, institutional presentation. It is hoped that, most often, it will complement Blake-in-the-classroom. Whether or not a student of Blake who comes to this bibliography is enrolled in a course that includes Blake, this bibliography can aid the student in coming to terms with Blake’s work.

Neither the poetry nor the pictorial art is the commentary, and the failure to find a precise equation for the two should not exasperate the student nor lead to the conclusion that Blake’s work is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The reader who intends to read Blake does not read with less of the imagination, emotion, and senses than of reason. There are really two instances when a reader’s comprehension of Blake may go on in the absence of comme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One William Blake: Prophet against Empire
• Chapter Two A Patient Appears at the Psychiatrist’s Office: The Turn to Phenomenological Psychopathology
• Chapter Three The World Is a Book
• Chapter Four Looking for Disorder in Literary Worlds
• Chapter Five Postmodernity Is a Hoot
• Chapter Six At the Theory Carnival
• Chapter Seven Into the American Mass Psyche of the Nineties
• Chapter Eight Railing through Europe: “Is This a Postmodern World?” 1995–2010
• Chapter Nine A Long Journey to Find an Online Political Home
• Chapter Ten Popular Culture: What I Did at the Movies
• Chapter Eleven I Roam into TV: Rebel Sons, Foodies, DBs, TV Pharmacy, and Sports
• Chapter Twelve Dark Affinities
• Chapter Thirteen Dark Imaginaries
• Chapter Fourteen Portrait of Generation Next
• Chapter Fifteen Occupy Wall Street
• Chapter Sixteen Travels of a New Gulliver
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover