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Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' - William Blake - Rhetoric and Poetics

Style, Summer, 1996 by Michael Simpson

There is some critical consensus that Blake's "The Fly" has an ironic sting in its tail. A rough sampling of the criticism indicates a large range of such irony: Pagliaro's reading finds a merely conditional "visionary defeat" for the poem's narrator; Bloom reads a more destructive critique of the pious consolations of an orthodox Christianity; and Wagenknecht proposes a nihilistic final stanza that critically parodies syllogistic reasoning by demonstrating its effects as a heap of bodies at the end of the poem.(1) But I shall argue instead that it is we who are in danger in any encounter with the poem and that this danger originates not in the poem but in ourselves. I shall also propose, however, that the grammar of the poem, along with its formal identity as part of a chapbook, can enable us to recognize our destructive and ultimately self-destructive complicity in the text. It is in my emphasis on the agency of a reader, invoked by the poem, that the difference between my argument and the previous criticism consists.

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There is, perhaps expectedly, more critical agreement about the poem's plot than there is about the consequences and significance of its "events": the fly always gets to die, and in the rest of the poem it is understood that the narrator's attempt to identify with his victim is variously complicated according to the degree of irony thus read into it. It is, however, this very stability, constituted by a critical consensus about the plot, that I shall challenge by the version of reader-response criticism that follows. While virtually all critics of the poem have stabilized its plot by declining to consider their own agency in this project, I shall develop the notion of "affective stylistics," formulated by Stanley Fish, to reflect on both my own reading agency and on that of a critical consensus concerned to deny, or at least to ignore, its own complicity in the drama of this poem. My working notion of an affective stylistics will, however, differ from Fish's version by sidestepping the fairly received objection that Fish's reader never learns from his or her own experience. Jolted into self-recrimination by a disruption of its syntactic expectations, Fish's reader then approaches the next sentence, and then the next, and so on, without any suspicion that the moral lesson of the preceding sentence is about to be taught again. Since I focus here on a single lyric rather than the large narratives that Fish analyzes, I do not face the problem of an incredibly sustained credulity. But even if my reading practice were applied to the whole corpus of Blake's Songs, the problem would still not occur, both because this collection is considerably shorter than, say, Paradise Lost and because each lyric, unlike each sentence in Milton's epic, presents a different dramatic situation. Differently situated in each poem, my reader is taught a lesson that is contextually distinct. Since this lesson, staged chiefly by the genre of the chapbook, entails an exercise in reading just as much as it enjoins the exertion of moral discrimination, Blake's Songs seems proleptically to invite a version of such criticism.

Despite the supposed stability of this poem's plot, the death of the fly and hence the narrator's culpability for it are highly contingent upon how we read the first stanza. What the narrator admits is that he has "brushed away" the fly's "summer's play."(2) Either this admission is a soothing circumlocution for an act of destruction or it is an innocent account of how the narrator merely repelled, accidentally or otherwise, the fly's activity. To convict the narrator on the basis of his self-incrimination, we must first undergo a little jury selection. Virtually all the critics of this poem have established the murder by supplying the body themselves. But did they really get it from the text when the text itself does not definitively state that a death in fact occurred? In order to answer this question about whether the narrator or the reader is the dominant agent in this first stanza, we must, since the extent of the narrator's malefaction is suddenly at issue here, decide how much agency the narrator and the fly possess relative to one another.

However implausible the following scenario within a code of realism, the syntax of the first stanza allows "Thy summer's play" to be either object or subject of the verb "has brushed," and "My thoughtless hand" to be subject or object respectively. Depending on how we resolve the syntax, the narrator kills or repels the fly, or, inversely, the fly's impulsive activity successfully resists the encroaching hand. Whether the narrator or the fly is read as the subject of the verb, the sequence of the sentence, in both its variants, involves an inversion of the conventional word order of prose, so that no objection to the fly as subject can rest on an assumption about word order. Given that there is here no "normal" word order, because the poem is signaling its identity as poetry through the trope of syntactic inversion, we have no way to determine which of the two readings is more or less probable. Even if we suppose that the sequence "Little dog, your ready tooth the mailman's boot has damaged" would tend to be conventionally resolved so that the mailman's boot would be the subject of the sentence, and if we further suppose that this convention of prose syntax might govern the construing of Blake's stanza, installing the "mailman's boot" and the "thoughtless hand" as subject would nonetheless be only the most probable syntax in a range of plausible resolutions we might entertain until the sentence was read to its conclusion. That all critics who have written on the poem seem to understand the "thoughtless hand" as subject does not necessarily deny that there are no other possibilities that might finally be over-ridden at the end of the stanza.(3)

Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' - William Blake - Rhetoric and Poetics

Style, Summer, 1996 by Michael Simpson

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