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Blake's Laocoon: A Degree Zero of Literary Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David E. James
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Abstract

Blake's late engraving, erroneously known as The Laocoön, presents an unusually direct relation between the content of a literary work and the way the work is produced and consumed as an artifact. By restoring the statue's correct meaning (“Jah & his two Sons Satan & Adam”), Blake arrested its fall into materiality and application to “Natural Fact” and, in doing so, redeemed for spiritual purposes the engraving that he had begun as a commercial undertaking. In his commentary on the plate, he clarified for the first time the mutual exclusivity of art and commerce, not by making a materialist analysis, but by associating art with religion's traditional antipathy to money. He formulated a view of art as devotional practice rather than as the production of commodities, and this logic allowed the plate only the barest form of material existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , March 1983 , pp. 226 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

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