The Torn Book
UnReading William Blake’s Marginalia

by Jason Allen Snart

The Torn Book: UnReading William Blake’s Marginalia argues for the connection between British poet and painter William Blake’s marginalia (the annotations he made in the volumes he owned and borrowed) and the role that often multivalent symbols like pens, writers, readers, and books play throughout his art.

The Torn Book pays particular attention to original Blake items, including the various annotated volumes housed at the Huntington Library, Houghton Library, Cambridge’s University Library and Wren Library, Dr. Williams’s Library, and the British Library, among others. When the annotations are referenced in scholarly studies, they are generally mobilized for their content, and scholars most often turn to the typescript provided in editions such as David Erdman’s Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. However, recourse to typeset provides a limited sense of how the marginalia interact with their original context and how they function spatially on the page. The Torn Book brings to the fore issues of materiality, textuality, and spatiality that are central in Blake studies generally, though which have yet to be discussed relative to Blake as n annotator. The Torn Book reveals the degree to which Blake’s experiments in book-making were connected to his experiences as a reader and annotator of the conventionally printed books of his day.

The idea of the “torn book” recalls one of Blake’s watercolor illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, in which a fiery figure is pictured tearing a book on which is suggested the title, Night Thoughts. The “torn book” image also derives from Blake’s America a Prophecy, in which the pages of the torn book are scattered to the winds and energize the spirit of revolution. The image suggests the physical and symbolic book revealed as a site for contestation, a site from which the voices silenced by presumed authority can reemerge, and a site where multiple, even contradictory experiences of reading can happen.

Blake annotated in such a way as to challenge the formal configuration of the books he was reading, thereby challenging the way in which such configurations controlled the experience of reading itself. For example, Blake annotates some of the numbered aphorisms in Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man by referring the reader to other, sometimes distant, aphorisms. Also, some of the annotations harken to other annotations, creating the sense of the annotations themselves as a textual network that can be navigated in relation to, and in opposition to, the original.

The Torn Book, through its reading of the annotations and their relation to a wide variety of Blake’s works, reveals how Blake creates a new space on the page and a new experience of reading. In this space and through this experience, textual instabilities can function positively to produce new relationships between readers, writers, and books. The marginalia are ultimately a crucial part of Blake’s working through the possibilities for just what books could be and for what they could do.

ISBN 1-57591-109-4

Printed in the U.S.A.