THE REAL IN THE BOOK OF THEL

by

PHAMJune
Xuandung
PHAM(June)

Thesis
Presented to the Department of Anglophone Studies of

University Paris Diderot – Paris 7

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Research Master in Literature

Under the supervision of

Professor Fournier Jean-Marie

University Paris Diderot – Paris 7

June 2014
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Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................. 1

Literature Review .......................................................................................... 4

Some words about the Lacanian Real ........................................................... 7

I. Thel as Subject of the Unconscious ......................................................... 8

II. The Object of Desire ........................................................................... 24

III. The Real in The Book of Thel .............................................................. 35

Conclusion ................................................................................................... 46

Works Cited ................................................................................................. 48

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Introduction
As William Blake’s first illuminated book, The Book of Thel (1789) occupies a
special place in the artist’s career. It marks the moment of surging creativity as Blake
starts to experiment with the new art of illuminated printing. Nevertheless, there have
not been many researches dealing exclusively with the book1, which probably results from
a deeply rooted belief that its content and design are simple and do not require much
explanation. While it is true that compared to the task of analysing much more complex
books, such as Jerusalem, Thel does not seem to pose any challenge; however, the book’s
significance as a landmark of what is to become Blake’s most remarkable heritage, the
illuminated books, is what prompted me to choose to work on it instead of any other iconic
work.

Secondly, even among a number of researches done exclusively on Thel, as far as I

am aware of, none has been done using the Lacanian psychoanalysis approach which I
intend to employ in this thesis. Besides literary and feminist criticism, an analysis of Thel
from the psychoanalytic perspective can be found in a section of Diana Hume George’s
book, Blake and Freud. However, George’s reading is subjected to traditional
psychoanalytic criticism, in which psychoanalysis claims the position of the master
discourse and literature is assigned the subordinate position of a set of texts in need of
interpretation. In Lacanian psychoanalytic reading, literature provides the language
through which psychoanalysis can speak its concepts and its truth; thus, the relationship
is implication rather than application. If traditional psychoanalytic criticism is sometimes
subjected to anachronistic flaws, due to forcefully applying concepts which did not exist
at the time the literary work was created; Lacanian psychoanalytic reading, thanks to its
democratic relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, makes it possible to avoid
such trap. This is the reason why I decide to choose this specific approach for my analysis
of Thel.

To start with, I will provide a brief literature review in which different perspectives
in the reading of Thel are introduced. While these accounts may seem irrelevant to the

1 In many of the anthologies of Blake’s works on various topics, Thel occupies several lines at most,
and in some cases, is not mentioned at all.
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themes I would like to pursue - none of them has anything to do with psychoanalysis -
they provide valuable insights on the importance of originality in research methodology.

The literature review will be followed up by a brief introduction on the main focus
of my thesis: the Lacanian Real in Thel. The Real is one of the most revolutionary and
significant concepts that Lacan has contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. However,
it is also one of the most challenging and difficult topics to approach. In this part, I will
attempt to recount the definition of the Real, as has been formulated by Lacanian scholars.
This will provide the basis for my analysis of Thel.

The first part of my thesis will focus on the analysis of Thel as a subject, not in the
sense of a literary character, or an individual human being, but as a subject of the
unconscious. The idea of self and subjectivity occupies a central place in Blake’s artistic
career, as pointed out by Grimes:

The self is a category which sometimes appears in philosophy, psychology,

and religion. Strictly speaking, the poet as poet is not concerned with the
nature of the self. Nevertheless, character is to Blake’s vision what self is to
philosophy, psychology, and religion. So even if self and character are not
identical categories, they are analogous, and in Blake’s writings it is evident
that his poetic organization of characters and his philosophical
understanding of the self are mutually dependent. Characters are virtual
selves. Like the “self” in some forms of religion, the “character” of Blake’s
prophecies represents the naming of a center of cohesion and unity among
what would otherwise be a mere disconnected succession of events (1-2).

It is plausible to consider Thel as Blake’s early attempt to handle the problem of

character and self, which will become a constant theme in his later works. Therefore, my
analysis focused on the subject will shed some light on not only the character Thel but
also on Blake’s perception of human existence in general. The analysis of Thel as subject
of the unconscious will reveal and reaffirm the fact that among all that belong to the
subject, only her anxiety is real.

The second part will be concentrated on my attempt to define the object of Thel’s
desire. I will first analyse two possible objects, knowledge in the meaning of life, and
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love/sexuality. These two items are present throughout the poem, from Thel’s motto, to
the conversations between Thel and other creatures in the Vales of Har. However, just as
there are two levels of subjectivity in my analysis of Thel in the first part, here, there also
exist two levels of objects of desire. On the first level, it is the goals that can be known by
the conscious subject and can be expressed in language. Knowledge and love/sexuality
belong to this. On the second level, there is the aim, the real object of desire that cannot
be named2. I will use a variety of Lacanian concepts to elaborate on the theme of the
subject of the unconscious’ real object of desire.

In the third and last part, after analysing the elements of the Real in the poem, I
would like to extend my investigation to the Real that goes along with the experience of
reading Thel. Several concepts related to reading theory will be explored, such as
“logomimesis” (Clayton Koelb), “the text of pleasure” and “the text of bliss” (Roland
Barthes). This will also be the only part in which I attempt to work with the visual aspect
of the book – the illustrations. I will try to prove my hypothesis that the combination of
texts and images in Thel particularly and in Blake’s illuminated books in general produces
a kind of “surplus creativity” that can be identified as jouissance of the reading experience.

Finally, in the conclusion, I will confirm once again the impossibility of

encountering the Real through my analysis of the subject, the object of desire, and the
reading experience of Thel. Simultaneously, I will also highlight the pervasive existence
of the effect of the Real in the book. This opens up to further research on other illuminated
books by Blake, which promises to be an interesting and fruitful direction to pursue if I
am to continue working on the same subject.

2 The difference between the goal and the aim will be discussed in greater details in the section.
For the sake of clarification here, I will briefly make a distinction between the two concepts: the
goal is something specific that can be attained, while the aim is impossible to be defined or
satisfied.
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Literature Review
In “The Book of Thel by William Blake: A Critical Reading,” Marjorie Levinson
proposes an alternative approach to deliver a formal analysis of Thel which focuses on the
sequence of speeches offered to Thel en route as the primary factor that constitutes the
intention of the work rather than being the means through which Thel’s psychosexual
development is explained. Levinson discovers that these dialogues, while progressing on
the principle of verbal repetition and association, create a process in which Thel-Desire
emerges and gains self-consciousness. As she converses with the Lily, the Cloud, the
Worm and the Clod of Clay, Thel discovers that it is her own voice that made up the
content of their speeches. Consequently, the poem consists of Thel’s ventriloquism.
Levinson makes another significant remark on the parallel between Thel personifying
other creatures in the Vales of Har and Blake personifying Desire through Thel. The
motivation behind both personifications is to stimulate a necessary transition. For Thel-
Desire, it is through the dialectical process of internalising a listener who would reveal the
limits of her knowledge regarding her origin, effect and end, she would become self-
conscious, and eventually acquire Wisdom and Love. For Blake, it is to produce his own
proper speech to move on to The Songs of Experience after he has already finished The
Songs of Innocence3. Thel, therefore, also reflects Blake’s artistic orientation: the need for
a poet to construct an internalised listener in order to develop a poetic voice.

Levinson opens up the possibility of reading the work as it is, with the preference
of linguistic analysis over symbolic deciphering. In addition, by focusing on analysing the
speech-act, she draws attention toward the parallel between Thel’s experience and that of
the poet; thus, gives us a glimpse of Blake’s artistic practices and ideology. Nevertheless,
as pointed out by James E. Swearingen, such analysis, being formulated on the
representational thinking of Thel as Desire personified, is still subjected to traditional
psychological reading. Strongly indebted to Levinson’s approach, Swearingen, in his
article titled “Will and Desire in Blake’s Thel,” goes one step further in identifying Thel

3 According to Levinson, “the poet, having located the cause, effect and function of his own Desire
and of Desire in general, can proceed to sing of Experience. He has performed the act of knowing,
or self-consciousness, required to free himself from Innocence” (300).
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exclusively in the dialogues without any preconceived assumption. In other words, he

attempts to “trust the poem to ground the concepts [desire and will] rather than the
concepts to explain the poem” (125).

Swearingen points out that at the beginning of the poem, consciousness does not
exist but lies ahead as a task Thel must complete. Moreover, this task is not initiated by
Thel herself but is rather evoked from the spontaneous images around her; therefore, “she
comes to herself within the play of analogy” (Swearingen 129). If Levinson is convinced
that the voice of the Lily was Thel’s voice, Swearingen suggests that the voice belongs to
neither of them but is “an exchange between a quasi-externality and a quasi-internality
which let both emerge from the undifferentiated background” (130). It is the openness to
knowledge implanted in the conversation that matters, not the distinction between
subject and object. This remains true in the encounter of Thel and the Cloud. However,
as she meets the Worm and the Clod of Clay, the initially pure, general “will” is
transformed into the “I will” - determined and limited by the selfhood. Thel’s reluctance
to hear the Worm and her mishearing of the Clod reduce will to “a mere function of a
reified being - her will” (Swearingen, 135). Her retreat to the Vales of Har at the end of
the poem is indeed the manifestation of her sexuality denial, but more importantly, it is
her refusal to take the leap from being to becoming. Interestingly, as Levinson calls for
attention toward the parallel between Thel’s and Blake’s experiences, Swearingen
underlines the parallel between Thel’s final retreat and what happens to the reader while
re-enacting the text: “If we do not repeat her defection, conceptual understanding grows,
new possibilities open for our own becoming, and in some measure the world is refigured”
(139).

Unlike Levinson and Swearingen, Malgorzata Luczynska Holdys approaches Thel

from a very different perspective. In ““Life exhal’d in milky fondness” - Becoming a
Mother in William Blake’s The Book of Thel,” she examines how the interaction between
text and design reinforces a feminist reading of Blake’s poem. Similar to Swearingen,
Holdys views Thel’s decision to flee back to the Vales of Har as an act of self-assertion;
nevertheless, her personal interpretation suggests that it is a conscious decision of a
matured woman who rejects the perspective of sexual relationship and motherhood - an
act against the expectation of others. By analysing the illustration, Holdys comes to the
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conclusion that Thel is not afraid of the idea of partnership and sexual union as often
believed. On the contrary, she is attracted to it. What drives her away is the desire for
fulfilment beyond a woman’s prescribed social role; in other words, what the Clod sees as
the ultimate sign of use and significance in maternal sacrifice, Thel consideres as
meaningless and insignificant. The last design, which is non-correspondent to the text in
any aspect, clearly indicates Thel’s inner transformation: “instead of female malleability
and perfect compliance with the roles that have been written for her, she takes the rein of
control into her own hands and writes her role herself” (Holdys 21). Holdys’ reading of
Thel from the feminist view point is refreshing, since it not only puts other female
characters in Blake’s poetry into a new perspective but also shows the acute sensitivity
and awareness of Blake on women’s issues.
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Some words about the Lacanian Real

The Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic, constitutes three orders
that contain all human experience. The Real differs from reality; in fact, in Lacan’s view,
our social reality is a product of the process of signification involving symbols and as such,
belongs to the Symbolic order. The Real remains the most evasive concept ever created.
Defining the Real is a challenging task, first of all, due to the fact that its conception
changed radically throughout Lacan’s career. In the 1930s, the Real was conceptualised
as “being-in-itself” that lies beyond the realm of appearance and images (Homer 82). In
the 1950s, the Real was opposed to both the imaginary and the symbolic. It is “that which
resists symbolization absolutely.” From 1964 onward, the Real is associated with the
concept of trauma, the death drive and jouissance (Homer 83-84). Nevertheless, there is
one element that persists throughout the development of the concept of the Real: its
existence is necessarily linked with lack and void. And here comes the second reason why
it is impossible to define the Real.

Many books have been dedicated to explaining the Real. In the limited scope of my
research, I am not as ambitious as to attempt to perform this task in several pages. To
serve the purpose of introduction, I will state my understanding of the Real in a few lines.
As far as I understand, while the possibility of encountering with the Real is out of the
question, the effect of the Real, however, is tangible, in the sense that it can be seen or felt
in the imaginary and the symbolic. This results from the fact that the three orders do not
function separately; they are linked together as a Borromean knot4. Thus, the Real always
leaves some residue in the symbolic or the imaginary. In psychoanalytic term, it is called
symptom. In my attempt to approach the Real in Thel, the only method available to me
is, therefore, to analyse these symptoms to bring out the lack that is associated with the
Real.

4 The Borromean knot, according to Soler, is “a formation of three linked rings in which each ring
prevents the other two from drifting apart, was evoked for the first time by Lacan in his Ou pire…
seminar” (2003, 93).
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I. Thel as Subject of the Unconscious

As the title of the work is The Book of Thel, it is natural that all accounts dealing
with it have attempted to identify Thel in one way or another. Generally speaking, these
identifications can be divided into three groups: first, Thel as a “pure spiritual essence”
refusing to enter the material world5; second, Thel as an allegory of will and/or desire 6;
and last, Thel as a real adolescent girl struggling against the prospect of motherhood and
womanhood 7 . While equally plausible, these interpretations are limited within the
traditional framework of literary criticism. That is to say, they remain focused on
deciphering a certain symbol. Such approach is quite reasonable, considering the fact that
the poem appears to be straight-forward and easy to understand. This aspect has been
pointed out by Swinburne in Critical Essay, “The Book of Thel, first in date and simplest
in tone of the prophecies, requires less comment than the others. This poem is as the one
sister, feeblest if also fairest, among that Titanic brotherhood of books” (200). What we
get from Swinburne’s statement is that, compared to other “Titanic” books, Thel is a
rather insignificant and immature work with no mystery to unveil, like a fair and feeble
sister - nice but overly simple.

It is true that at the time of Thel’s creation, Blake was in the initial stage of
experimenting with the new method of illuminated printing; thus he might have been
greatly concerned with the form of the book. Nevertheless, to say that it was not invested

5 According to Nancy Bogen, this reading was first proposed by Edwin J. Ellis and William Butler
Yeats in The Works of William Blake in 1893 - a monumental, three-volume facsimile edition with
a long section devoted to explication. This reading of the poem was adopted by a considerable
number of twentieth-century scholars, including S. Foster Damon and Northrop Frye (Bogen 16).
6 Marjorie Levinson, in his article titled “The Book of Thel by William Blake: A Critical Reading,”
provides an analysis formulated on the representational thinking of Thel as Desire personified.
His account, while remarkable for its approach, which opens up the possibility of reading the work
as it is, and with the preference of linguistic analysis over symbolic deciphering, is still largely
subjected to traditional psychological reading.
7 This feminist identification of Thel can be found in the writings of Malgorzata Luczynska Holdys,
“”Life exhal’d in milky fondness” - Becoming a Mother in William Blake's The Book of Thel”; or K.
D. Everest, “Thel’s Dilemma.”
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with profound content and ideas is to be misguided. As Roland Barthes has remarked,
“The more a story is told in a proper, well-spoken, straightforward way, in an even tone,
the easier it is to reverse it, to blacken it, to read it inside out” (26). Thel’s motto at the
beginning (or in the end in some copies) and the curious design in the last plate allude to
something more than just a simple coming of age tale. Similarly, Thel’s identity is much
more complex than it may appear to be. In this thesis, I would argue that rather than
being constrained by any fixed identity, Thel should be viewed as a subject of the
unconscious 8 who is constituted through two movements: alienation and separation
through language. Such subject, according to Lacan, “has no permanent or persistent
existence, since it alternately appears and disappears through a continuous process of
subjectification” (Homer 74). Thel as a Lacanian subject will definitely not be anywhere
in the text or images9; yet, she is always there. Seen in this light, it becomes clear why it
is crucial for the poem to take up the form of dialogues 10 . It is through the various
conversations between Thel and the creatures of the Vales of Har that Blake is able to
provide the context for the interplay between the development of Thel’s ego and the
construction of her subjectivity11. It is also through discourse that we come to realize that
the known part of the subject is merely the representation of an unidentifiable subject of

8 A detailed explanation of “the subject of the unconscious” will be provided in the following
paragraph.
9 The Lacanian subject is everywhere, and yet, nowhere. As soon as language is involved, the
subject of the unconscious ceases to exist, giving up its place to the subject of the conscious, or
ego. For Lacan and Žižek, “every word is a gravestone, marking the absence or corpse of the thing
it represents and standing in for it” (Myers 84).
10 Moreover, as Thel’s quest for the meaning of life is a question of significant philosophical
concern, nothing but the dialogue format can be used better for the purpose of communicating.
According to Karl Jaspers, “communication is the aim of philosophy, and in communication all
its other aims are ultimately rooted: awareness of being, illumination through love, attainment of
peace” (27).
11 Lacan’s examination of subjectivity can be divided into three consecutive stages: imaginary
subjectivity in the 1930s and 40s, symbolic subjectivity in the 1950s, real subjectivity in the 1960s
and 70s (Lorenzo 5). The ego can be defined as an imaginary function; while the real subjectivity
is associated with the concept of the subject of the unconscious and the Real.
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the unconscious. In short, Thel addresses two levels of subjectivity: the first being the ego
(the subject of the enunciated or the subject of the statement), which can easily be found
in the text; the second being the subject of the enunciation (the subject of the
unconscious)12, which is always escaping our attempt to give it substance; and yet, always
making its absence felt within language.

Before going into details in Thel, I would like to provide more explanation on the
account of the Lacanian subject, or the subject of the unconscious. As Lewis summarises,

The entire infinite system of language cannot be comprehended in finite

consciousness, and cannot even be traversed sequentially, by apprehension.
Therefore, it is not possible to be conscious of the entire system of references
which determine the value and hence the meaning of the signifiers with
which one speaks. The infinity of the system of language must remain
unconscious: ‘the unconscious is language [l’inconscient est langage]’ (E:
736) (E stands for Écrit, my explanation). The subject which speaks, insofar
as it is always fundamentally repressed by this system of language, through
being objectified, deprived of its subjecthood, is the subject of the
unconscious” (23).

Lewis’ statement elucidates the link between Lacan’s most famous claim, “the
unconscious is structured like language” and how the subject born into language is the
subject of the unconscious. In another relevant remark, Lewis writes, “The real subject
twinkles a moment before being snuffed out, in the coruscation of the symptom, the
presence of that which is absent and cannot be made properly present, which is the
unconscious subject itself” (35). Thus, I am convinced that the subject of the unconscious,

12 According to Myers, the subject of the enunciation is the “I” who speaks, the individual doing
the speaking; the subject of the enunciated is the “I” of the sentence, the grammatical designation
or pronoun used by all individuals. As such, the “I” is split between the individual “I” (subject of
the enunciation) and the grammatical “I” (subject of the enunciated), and the unified sense we
feel is just an Imaginary illusion (Myers 84).
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not the subject of the statement or the individual human being, is the pivotal element in
my analysis of the Real.

It may also be necessary to briefly address the reason why I specifically chose a
Lacanian approach for the analysis of Thel as a subject. When Blake created Thel in 1789,
the Enlightenment and empiricism had already brought dominance to the concept of self
over soul. The importance of subjectivity and the subject was affirmed; nevertheless, this
subject of Anglo-American philosophy remained limited in the sense that it was perceived
as the individual, the conscious subject, or the subject of the statement. Together with the
advent of structuralism in the mid-twentieth century, however, the subject lost its
prominence. The assertion of subjectivity seemed to undermine the emphasis on
interrelations; thus, has been considered incompatible with the notion of structure from
a structuralist perspective 13 . Lacan’s concept of the subject and subjectivity is
revolutionary, not only because it maintains and defends both structure and subject, but
also because it opens up a whole new horizon of possibilities. It is true that structure plays
a very important role in Lacan’s work (by structure, I refer to the Symbolic order or
language); nevertheless, he certainly never reduces the subject “to a simple position
characterized by a simple aim. And he parts away with structuralism, as the later implies
an attempt to explain everything in terms of a more or less mathematically determinate
combinatory which plays itself without any reference whatsoever to subjects or objects”
(Fink 1995, 64). Lacan proposes that the subject/discourse pair should not be viewed as
a hierarchical relationship, in which discourse or language is contained by the subject, as
advocated by Freudian psychoanalysis; or in which the subject is totally submitted to
language, as argued by structuralists. A Lacanian approach, thus, reveals a subject as
excess of the Other-language, one that is neither domineering nor submissive to the
Symbolic order. A subject is born into language and has to learn to adapt throughout
his/her life despite the fact that he/she will never be able to fully integrate into this

13 As summarized by Simon Blackburn, structuralism is “the belief that phenomena of human life
are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and
behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture”
(365).
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symbolic order. Consequently, the subject is split or alienated from the Other and also
from itself. However, this split, rather than being the end of subjectivity, is “the condition
of the possibility of the existence of a subject, the pulsation-like shift seeming to be its
realization” (Fink 1997, 48). In other words, it reveals a subject that goes beyond or
overcomes the division caused by language – a subject that is related to the Real14. This is
what I meant by “a subject as excess of the Other-language.” And this is the angle that I
would like to explore in my analysis of Thel.

Critics of Thel are not the only ones who disagree on Thel’s identity. The
beginning of the poem gives the idea that Thel herself is indecisive about who she is. She
has to rely on nine similes to introduce herself. The juxtaposition of nine images, all of
which suggesting transience and fragility, works to reinforce the ephemeral, fragile and
transient nature of Thel’s life. Alternately, it can also be interpreted as her uncertain sense
of self.

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud,

Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,

Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face,

Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air.

(3:11-14)15

Only when one is greatly unsure about something, does one have to fuddle with
words to find a way to define it. This is exactly what happens to Thel. Unsure of who she
is, she goes through all the images and sounds in her mind, trying to get as close as

14 It is true that Lacan has never mentioned about the relationship between subject and the Real.
Here, I would like to hypothesise that as anxiety is the only real thing that the subject of the
unconscious possesses, and this anxiety belongs to the Real; thus, the part of the subject that is
identified by anxiety also belongs to the Real.
15 All line numbering here is based on textual transcription on the website The William Blake
Archive, of copy B of Thel, printed in late 1789 or early 1790. This copy is currently housed at the
Yale Center for British Art.
 13

possible to the Thel that she wants to present. What can be detected from these four lines
is a remarkable sense of depersonalisation, the nostalgic wish for a natural tie, and the
radical alienation that occurs when the chain of signification failed to reveal the subject
of the signified16. It is noteworthy that Blake uses a series of similes rather than metaphors.
There is one clear distinction between simile and metaphor: simile acknowledges the
limitation and imperfection of the comparative relationship to a greater extent than
metaphor. While metaphor conflates the two factors of the equation into one, simile
maintains a certain distance in that one factor resembles another, not one being another.
The recurrence of the word “like” underlies the fact that all those descriptions, whether
viewed individually or collectively, will never account for the subject Thel; that there is
always a gap between what is said and who Thel really is.

Nonetheless, Thel’s uncertainty about self should not be mistaken as manifestation

of a weak ego. In fact, her insistence in identifying herself is close to the level of obsession,
which in turn, signals toward narcissism and a strong ego perception.

Narcissism is a recurring theme in analysing Thel as a character. Robert Gleckner

makes a distinction between Thel and the other daughters of Mne Seraphim, whose
company she left from the beginning of the poem in search of her life’s meaning. While
her sisters are the symbol of higher innocence, who have undergone a mortal life of self-
sacrifice in exchange for “eternal delight,” Thel is seen as uncooperative, vain and self-
deceiving. Thel is viewed as an anti-heroine. Her final act of fleeing back to the Vales of
Har indicates her obstinacy to remain as she is, brushing off the lesson of self-sacrificing
the other creatures have been trying to teach her (Bogen 16). In a similar note, Diana
Hume George interprets Thel’s reluctance to accept her mortality as a product of the
narcissistic phase; while her refusal to enter the world of experience and generation
functions as the proof of Thel being a narcissistic woman, in the sense of Freud, “who
wants to be loved but cannot love in return.” (98) Not only do these analysis simply put
Thel in the position of a human being and the poem in that of a tale dealing with innocence
and experience as human values, but it also misinterprets Blake’s attitude toward Thel.

16 In this case, Thel as a subject is the signified and the similes used to describe her act as the
signifiers.
 14

There are many proofs showing Blake’s positive view on his character, such as the words
he uses to describe her (“sweet maid,” “beauty of the vales of Har”); however, the most
important indication of Thel’s positive personality is the fact that like Blake himself, she
can go back and forth between imaginative and objective vision (Bogen 18). This
possession of double vision is acquired under the condition that there exists a splitting of
the self. In fact, there are several Thels in the poem: the Thel who is the nine similes, the
Thel who is the subject of the statement - the “I” (“Ah! Gentle may I lay me down, and
gentle rest my head” (3:15)), and the Thel that is the subject of the enunciation (or the
subject of the unconscious).

Once again, we must highlight the importance of the dialogue form of the poem.
The dialogue form of Thel acts as the basis where communication takes place. This
communication is essential for the development of Thel’s ego. The ego has many guises:
it can appear as the individual, the conscious subject, the mirror image, or the subject of
statement. It is constituted by the Other (other people, as well as the Other as language).
As Lacan writes in Écrits, “the presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of
the Other, can be found in every discourse, in its enunciation” (Écrit 834)17. It is through
the many forms of Thel’s imaginary and symbolic subjectivity that we get a glimpse of her
as a Lacanian subject – the subject of the unconscious (the real subjectivity).

First, let us look at how communication affects the development of Thel’s ego and
the construction of her subjectivity. Before going into details in Thel, I would like to make
clear distinction between two types of ego, the ideal-ego and the Ego-Ideal. As Lacan has
pointed out, “the ideal-ego stands for the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I
would like to be, I would like others to see me); the Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I
try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and propels me to
give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualize” (Žižek 2007, 80). Thus, even though
both are the product of constructed subjectivity, each type of ego has its separate source:
one in the Imaginary order, the other in the Symbolic order. Thel’s ego at the beginning
of the poem belongs to the ideal-ego constructed in the imaginary domain. Moving on, we

17 English translation by Bruce Fink 2006, 707

 15

soon encounter the second type, the Ego-Ideal, starting with Thel’s encounter with the
Lilly.

But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:

I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?

(4:12-13)

What is fascinating in these two lines is the “pearly throne” that suddenly breaks
the chain of images originated from Thel. Previously, she has associated herself with a
wide range of images and sounds, all of which have nothing to do with power. The throne
is the first symbol that refers to Thel’s high status. However, she probably would not come
up with the image herself if it was not for the hint offered by the Lilly in the preceding line,
“the mistress of the vales of Har” (4:2). Following immediately, as if to confirm once again
Thel’s authority, the Lilly answers by addressing her as “Queen of the vales” (4:14).
Another example for this process of projection and internalisation of self-image can be
found in Thel’s conversation with the Cloud as he recounts his sexual adventure with the
“fair eyed dew.” As the Cloud refers to both Thel and the dew as “virgin,” the Ego-Ideal is
already at work when he describes the dew’s habitation as “her shining tent” (5:15).
Unconsciously, Thel internalises this idea and after several lines, she presents herself as
“this shining woman” (5:24). Initiated by a suggestion, Thel embraces the idea and comes
to view herself in the same way that she is viewed.

Clearly, there is an interplay between how Thel is perceived by others and the way
she perceives herself - a process going back and forth in shaping both her ideal-ego
(imaginary) and her Ego-Ideal (symbolic). It would be reasonable to claim that while
being distinctive, the two types of ego strongly rely upon each other in the construction
process of subjectivity. Indeed, as Fink points out, “it is the symbolic order that brings
about the internalization of mirror and other images, for it is primarily due to the parents’
reaction to such images that they become charged, in the child’s eye, with libidinal interest
or value” (1997, 36). In this case, the Lily and the Cloud play the role of the parents,
charging images such as “queen of the vales,” “virgin” with libidinal interest and value,
which results in Thel taking up those very references and producing them again in her
own words (“the pearly throne,” “this shining woman”). Viewed differently, in employing
 16

the instrument of suggestion, Thel’s interlocutors perform the role of the traditional
psychoanalyst, whose aim is to help Thel restore access to reality. This approach is very
different from Lacanian psychoanalysis, since for Lacanians, analysis “is a matter of
enabling the subject to catch a glimpse of the real” (Gueguen 90). In a sense, this is what
the Clod of Clay has managed to do by inviting Thel to enter the pit and see for herself.
This view is shared by Diana Hume George, who comments on the symbolic psychic
topography of Thel: “aboveground are consciousness and manifest content, and beneath
the earth are unconsciousness and latent content. When the clay invites Thel to enter she
is inviting Thel to explore her own internal recesses without the protective veil that blocks
direct perception in normal states of mind” (93). The possibility of an interpretation that
involves Thel as an analysand and the other creatures as analysts is the reason why I
would claim that the issue of transference is clearly present in Thel.

Many would say that to talk about transference in Thel, a literary work, is to
perform a rather far-fetching act of analysis, since it is often thought that the application
of the concept of transference is limited within the context of psychotherapeutic
treatment between an analyst and his patient. Nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss the
unconscious without mentioning transference. In Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan gives the exact definition of transference: it is “the
enactment of the reality of the unconscious” (149). This shows the significance of
transference as the path from which we can gain access to the unconscious. And since my
topic here is the subject of the unconscious, it would be inevitable to include transference.

There are two main axes in transference: “the axis of knowledge, linked to signifiers
and repetition, and … the axis of love, linked to being” (Brousse 103). The fact that both
knowledge and love appear in Thel’s motto reaffirms the importance and relevance of the
concept of transference in the analysis of Thel. Let’s hypothesise that Thel asking for help
from the Lily, the Cloud, and the Clod of Clay is equivalent to a patient going to see a
psychoanalyst for help. Thel is suffering and this suffering is transformed into
 17

symptoms18 which manifest through her lamentation. She thinks that because the Lily,
the Cloud and the Clod are happy despite the transient nature of their life, they must know
the meaning of her symptoms, and how to treat them. This is the orientation of
transference that is linked to knowledge – unconscious knowledge. As the “treatment”
progresses (in this case, the conversations Thel has with different creatures), Thel comes
to realise certain limitations, because, “In the same movement in which you present your
suffering as a symptom, you present it as something with which you live and which you
do not know” (Brousse 104). Consequently, she becomes an alienated subject, or, in
Lacan’s term, experiences manque-à-être – lack of being. This lack of being explains why
the other side of transference is love: love gives being. Thel may have redirected her love
for her mother to the Clod, as the Clod appears to possess many maternal attributes. That
is the reason why, unconvinced by the speech of the Lily and the Cloud, when it comes to
the Clod, Thel finally “wip’d her pitying tears with her white veils” and accepted the
knowledge that she was given.

The daughter of beauty wip'd her pitying tears with her white veil,

And said: “Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.

That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot

That, wilful, bruis'd its helpless form; but that he cherish'd it

With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep,

And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away,

And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.”

(7:8-14)

As Thel is alienated in discourse and language, another process takes place

simultaneously: separation. When theorising about discourse, Lacan has suggested that

18 According to Lewis, “The symptom is a trace, it is the presence of the absence of the unconscious,
the mark left in presence of something which simply cannot be present” (22). In other words, it is
the real (Thel’s suffering) manifested in the Symbolic order of language.
 18

“individual subjects are produced by discourse and yet manage to retain some capacity
for resistance” (Bracher 1). In Thel, this resistance occurs when the alienated Thel moves
on to confront the Other, this time not through language, but as separation through desire.
As Homer summarises, “Separation is linked to desire and designates the process through
which the child differentiates itself from the (m)Other and is not simply a subject of
language… Separation takes place in the domain of desire and requires from the subject
a certain ‘want to be’; a ‘want to be’ separate from the signifying chain19. It also involves a
‘want to know’ of that which is outside structure, and beyond language and the Other”
(72). Thel’s insistence on figuring out the meaning of her existence is the cause that leads
to separation.

The first indication of a break between Thel and her surroundings occurs in the
conversation with the Cloud:

"Dost thou O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee;

For I walk through the vales of Har and smell the sweetest flowers,

But I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds,

But I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food;

(5:19-22)

Thel feels detached from other creatures in the Vales of Har not only because she
is physically separated from them but also because they mean nothing to each other: the
flowers and the birds will continue to exist as they are with or without Thel, since her
existence does not make any difference or impact on their living. The two first sections of
the poem give us an impression that Thel, despite the uncertainty of herself, is clearly a
figure of authority who is in control of her surrounding environment. Nothing can be

19 In Thel’s case, this “want to be” means “want to be different.” While the other creatures of the
Vales of Har are satisfied with their prescribed role, Thel aims for something that transgresses the
convention of the Symbolic order. She desires for the real meaning of life, which is the signified,
not the signifiers that others take up and limit themselves within (for instance, procreation and
maternal role, in the case of the Clod).
 19

more misleading. In fact, not only is Thel influenced by the environment every step she
goes, but she is also a total outsider in the Vales of Har. While the Lilly, the Cloud, the
Worm and the Clod of Clay form a group within which the identity of each individual is
formulated by an internally integrated set of rules (of which “we live not for ourselves”20
echoes as a collective motto), Thel’s pursuit is both selfish and destructive to this carefully
constructed social balance. She is not willing to accept what she has been told, that the
ultimate meaning of life is the eternal generation in which one life is given for another. In
fact, such answer is no answer at all, since her interlocutors, wise as they are, do not
possess the answer themselves. The Clod gives us a clear proof on this, “I know not, and I
cannot know;/ I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.” It is equally possible
that there is no answer to begin with; however, such concern is beyond the scope of this
research. Here, I simply wish to highlight the fact that through conversations, Thel
becomes aware of her deviation from group consciousness21.

The Clod’s remark on knowledge and love is extremely fascinating, since it leads
us straight back to Thel’s motto.

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?

Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?

Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?

Or Love in a golden bowl?

(1:2-5)

As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, originally motto is “a word, sentence,

or phrase attached to an impresa or emblematical design to explain or emphasize its

20 This idea of self-sacrifice, of one living for the better cause of the many, is pervasive throughout
the text. Before the Clay, the Cloud voiced something similar, “Everything that lives/ Lives not
alone, nor for itself.”
21 As mentioned in note 19, this group consciousness can be defined as the belief that the meaning
of life lies in living not for one’s self, but for other people. Thel realised through her persisting
symptoms of existential anxiety that she cannot be convinced to believe in the same doctrine.
 20

significance” (meaning 1). Later on, it is understood as a short sentence or phrase chosen
as encapsulating the beliefs or ideals of an individual, family or institution. Thel’s motto
would not qualify under this definition. As a personal motto, instead of showing Thel’s
attempt to shape how she is viewed by the society, or to project an image she would like
to be identified with, it poses a set of riddles. However, if we take meaning 2b in the OED,
motto as “a short quotation or epigram placed at the beginning of a book,” it becomes
clear that the motto here does not belong to the character Thel, but to The Book of Thel,
and is intended to suggest the book’s themes. These themes are: knowledge, wisdom, and
love.

The first two lines clearly refer to the issue of how to obtain knowledge. The
double vision of the Eagle and the Mole regarding the content of the pit can be classified
as knowledge-that and knowledge-how respectively. In epistemology, it is common to
distinguish among three types of knowledge: knowledge as in knowing a person,
knowledge-how (how to ride a bike), and knowledge-that or propositional knowledge
(when we know some fact is true; for instance, two plus two equals four)22. Here, I am
only interested in the last two types, which can be rephrased as practical knowledge and
theoretical knowledge. To distinguish between these two types of knowledge, we need to
rely on the object of what is known. In the case of Thel’s motto, it is the content of the pit.
Even though the Eagle goes ask the Mole, the information he acquires is not the same as
the knowledge of the Mole, since he will never be able to become the Mole and see the pit
from the Mole’s perspective. On the other hand, the Mole, despite his first-hand
knowledge of the pit, is incapable of viewing it as part of a larger structure: for him, the
pit is everything, because he lacks the theoretical knowledge which the Eagle possesses.
Nonetheless, these two types of knowledge still belong to the realm of “objective”
knowledge, whose limitation can be surpassed and whose completeness is theoretically
achievable. It is yet another type of knowledge - wisdom, which is metaphysical and can
never be mastered completely.

This is when we get to the third line, “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?” In The
Care of the Self, the third volume in The History of Sexuality, Foucault "goes back to

22 Please refer to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more detailed information.

 21

ancient philosophy to uncover a distinction between two models of knowledge: an older

ethic in which the search for truth necessitates a transformation of the seeking subject,
and the modern scientific approach to “objective” knowledge, which leaves the subject
untouched” (Quinney 23). While the first two lines of the motto make reference to the
scientific knowledge that leaves the subject untouched, the third line about wisdom
touches upon the search for truth, for knowledge of the in-itself, that transforms the
seeking subject. Clearly, this alludes to Thel and the quest for meaning of her life. Some
other parallels can also be drawn here between the motto and the rest of Thel, for instance,
the impossibility of knowing things-in-themselves and the non-representability of Thel as
a subject of the unconscious; the splitting visions of the Eagle and the Mole as comparable
to the splitting self of Thel mentioned previously. All of these demonstrate how the
seemingly irrelevant motto is all the more relevant to the whole poem.

It is no coincidence that Thel first and foremost presented herself by her own name.
Bruce Fink suggests that the subject’s name, being chosen long before the child’s birth,
inscribes him or her in the symbolic order. Even though this name has absolutely nothing
to do with the subject, with time, this signifier “will go to the root of his or her being and
become inextricably tied to his or her subjectivity” (Fink 1997, 53). By identifying herself
not with the usual “I” but with her name, Thel demonstrates the inherent bond between
the subject and the symbolic order. The subject is born into the pre-existent language and
he/she has no other choice but to submit to it in order to have an identity or to articulate
his/her desires. It is true that the subject is submerged in language and because of its
alienation within language, it is split between two forms of otherness - the ego as other
and the unconscious as the Other's discourse. Nonetheless, this split “stands in excess of
the Other” and consequently, “the advent of the split subject signals a corresponding
division or breakdown of the Other” (Fink 1997, 46). What this means is that, instead of
an alienated subject as the finality of subjectivity, there is a possibility of the existence of
a subject (a Lacanian subject) who overcomes language and goes beyond the Symbolic
order. Speaking differently, the real speaking subject inhabits the gaps between signifiers.
A subject of the unconscious that is real, not the imaginary or symbolic subjectivity. In
Thel, we see a perfect example of such subject, who is neither the "individual" or conscious
 22

subject of Anglo-American philosophy nor the subject of the Statement; who appears
nowhere in what is said; and who is best characterized by her fleetingness (Fink 1997, 36).

In fact, identity as a fixed attribution does not exist in Thel, neither does
consistency in personality. In all of Blake’s works, characters are not totally static but
change, either by their conscious effort or being transformed by circumstances, or both.
In Thel, Thel is not the only character without any fixed identity. Surprising as it may
sound, the Clod of Clay resembles Thel in this matter. Her personality and speech are
open to opposing interpretations. She is supposed to be the maternal figure of the poem:
she pities the weeping infant Worm (“The Clod of Clay heard the Worm's voice, & raisd
her pitying head;/ She bow'd over the weeping infant, and her life exhal'd/ In milky
fondness” (6:9-11)) and kindly gives Thel advice for her problem. Yet, her house – the pit,
resembles nothing less than Dante’s inferno, the habitation of demonic creatures. The
Clod seems to be deeply indoctrinated by the ideology of male dominance, and yet, she is
the hostess of the horrible underworld. It is impossible to make sure whether she is weak
or strong, evil or helpless. But that is exactly where the Clod’s similarity to Thel ends.

As a Lacanian subject, Thel is not a subject of certainty. On the contrary, she is

always in doubt; she suffers without knowing the cause of her suffering even though she
is not indifferent to truth and very insistent in finding out this truth. On the other hand,
the Clod functions as a Cartesian subject who is completely independent of truth, whose
only concern is the certainty in existence as presence, which is acquired by thinking
(Cogito ergo sum).

I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.

(7:7)

As soon as she gives up on thinking, on pondering, the Clod of Clay becomes a

perfect example of a petrified subject, who has no questions about herself; who lives and
acts, but doesn't think about herself. She even refuses to think about what she is (Soler
1995, 48). Thel is the total opposite: she has chosen meaning and fights for the cause of
her own symptoms. In the first three parts, Thel functions as a neurotic subject, both
 23

obsessional and hysterical 23 . As Ragland points out, “Neurotics - hysterics and

obsessionals - suffering from a frozen narcissism, a denial of castration, a refusal to accept
that anything was lacking in the family novel, fail to repress childhood. This keeps them
from entering the social order of debt and exchange as easily as does the "master" who
seems happy and in control of his or her destiny” (45). The “childhood” in the above quote
is equal to the Vales of Har – the world of innocence, while the “social order of debt and
exchange” can be understood as the pit – the world of experience. A simple way for the
hysterical subject to get a sense of being is to be loved, or to be more precise, to be desired.
Following this line of reasoning, Thel remains a hysterical subject only if she embraces
sexuality and accepts “a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy.” However, as soon
as she enters the pit, Thel abandons being a hysterical subject and remains solely as an
obsessive one, who “is afraid and flees the Other's desire because the Other's lack makes
him or her anxious” (Soler 1995, 51). It is understandable why among the two, the
obsessional aspect persists, since “Obsessional neurosis doesn’t simply consist of
symptoms but is also a structure” (Lacan Seminar III, 129). To such a subject, the only
constant form of emotion that exists is anxiety, or trauma. In the end, only anxiety is real:
from the earlier anxiety that initiates Thel to question the meaning of her existence, to the
latter anxiety that causes her to flee when faced with the prospect of sexual maturity.

23 As Lacan writes in Seminar III, “Hysteria is a question centered on a signifier that remains
enigmatic as to its meaning. The question of death and the question of birth are as it happens the
two ultimate questions that have precisely no solution in the signifier. This is what gives neurotics
their existential value” (176). In other words, procreation and sexual position lie at the centre of
the hysterical’s question, whereas the obsessional neurotic is concerned with the question of the
subject’s existence.
 24

II. The Object of Desire

The first section of this thesis ends with my claim that only anxiety is real in Thel.
I would like to use it as the starting point for my second part, beginning with the enquiry
on the source(s) of Thel’s anxiety. Generally speaking, there are two possible answers: the
first being human’s mortality (associated with the obsessional neurotic’s question of the
subject’s existence), and the second one being the prospect of sexual maturity, of
womanhood and motherhood (associated with the hysteric’s question of the subject’s
sexual position) 24 . Consequently, the remedy for these anxieties is the knowledge of
meaning of life and sexuality/love respectively.

Many critics have pointed out that Thel’s existential crisis (which is the result of
the brevity of human life) is just the false cause of her anxiety, that her repressed sexual
desire is the true underlying force that sets Thel off on her journey. According to George,
what sends Thel screaming back to the Vales of Har is the prospect of the “youthful
burning boy” bursting the “little curtain of flesh” (8:22-23), in other words, of sexual
intercourse (95). She uses Freud’s On Narcissism as the basis for her interpretation,
claiming that “the pressure toward mortality has its source in external pressure exerted
on the ego by nature and in internal pressure exerted on the ego by the unwitting
cooperation of the sexual instincts” (George 95). Thel’s failure to embrace experience is
also a proof of her functioning as a narcissistic woman in Freud’s term, who wants to be
loved but cannot love in return. For the purpose of research, I would like to analyse both
causes, existential crisis and repressed sexuality, before arriving at any conclusion.

It is clear from the beginning that Thel behaves like an individual who suffers from
severe existential crisis. Thel’s lamentation echoes the “ineradicable insecurity” or
“groundlessness” of human existence that Heidegger has written about and hereby
summarised by Krell:

This insecurity is due to the fact that our existential trajectories— our life
projects, roles, and identities have “always already” been shaped by a past

24 See note 23 for an explanation of the difference between the hysteric and the obsessional
neurotic.
 25

that we can never get behind and they head off into a future in which they
will always be incomplete, cut short by a death we can neither avoid nor
control. We exist as a “thrown project.” We have no choice but to project our
life projects toward the impenetrable horizon of our impending deaths. This
gives rise to the “uncanny” feeling that we are not at home in our lives. (235)

This aspect of being “not at home in our lives” has been investigated thoroughly in
the first section as the alienation of the subject in the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders.
In Thel, the Worm is the most prominent example of a “thrown project.” Among the four
natural phenomena in conversation with Thel, the Worm is the only one who does not
utter a word. He plays the role of an infant, who is born into the Symbolic order and “even
before acquiring the function of speech, is already submerged in a world of language in
which the Other gives a name, signs of identity, a place in the division between masculine
and feminine” (Braunstein 109). In this state of helplessness, the Worm as a proto-subject
can only rely on the maternal Other (in this case, the Clod of Clay) for nourishment and
protection.

It is natural that Thel sympathises greatly with the Worm, since they are similar in
the most basic ground of existence: both of them are living things subjected to death and
decay. However, Thel is a little different. She laments the transient nature of human
existence and simultaneously desires to know her place, her use in life. Her two questions,
“Why do I have to die?” and “What do I live for?” are essentially inseparable. Thel cannot
embrace the Clod’s attitude, “I know not, and I cannot know;/ I ponder, and I cannot
ponder; yet I live and love” (7:6-7). It is crucial to understand Thel’s questions and why I
would say that her insistence on knowing marks the subject’s attempt to encounter the
Real.

For the Lily, life is meaningful because her breath nourishes the innocent lamb,
her wine purifies the golden honey, her perfume tames the cow and revives the steed. The
Cloud finds meaning in his existence in bringing beauty to the sky and the air; while the
Clod of Clay believes that regeneration is the whole purpose of life. They are satisfied with
these simple answers when being asked about what they live for. In other words, they
totally choose to ignore the fact that these answers are not the signified “what” in the
 26

question, but simply a variation of signifiers stemmed from the imaginary. Their decision
is understandable; in fact, it is the attitude most people tend to adopt when being asked
such question. By settling on one or several specific meanings of life, they are able to
identify themselves as somebody. Just as Ragland has pointed out, “People settle for any
known set of identifications, however painful, lest they fall out of the familiar symbolic
order into the real of anxiety which opens onto a void of actual emptiness at the center of
being” (95). By refusing to settle on any one identity, by continuously pursue the
knowledge of life, Thel is actually approaching this “real of anxiety.” And as I previously
concluded, that only anxiety is real, Thel’s behaviour can be understood as the Lacanian
subject’s attempt to approach the Real. On the other hand, the attitude of the Lily, the
Cloud, and the Clod of Clay toward the question of meaning of life is not only logical but
also desirable. Without meaning, life would be unbearable; therefore, human beings are
forced to choose a meaning to cling to in order to go on living. In the face of the one truly
serious philosophical problem, man has three options, as proposed by Camus in The Myth
of Sisyphus: to take a leap of faith by placing our hope in a God beyond this world, to
commit suicide, or to accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose.

We can safely eliminate the possibility of suicide in Thel, since for a religious and
spiritual man like Blake, such option is, without doubt, out of the question. Thel’s
interlocutors appear to have taken up the first choice, that of religious conviction. One
solid proof for this claim is the “he” figure about whom the Lily and the Clod mention with
great reverence.

Yet I am visited from heaven, and he that smiles on all

Walks in the valley and each morn over me spreads his hand

(3:22-23)

But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head,

And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,

And says: “Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee

And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.”
 27

(7:2-5)

It turns out that this male figure is no other than God 25. Consequently, it can be
said that the Lily and the Clod derive their purpose of life from their religious belief. They
have taken the leap of faith that is indispensable in dealing with the existential problem
raised by Thel. Not Thel herself, though. By the end of her journey, Thel remains resistant
to the other creatures’ advice. She did cry when she listened to the Clod’s story; however,
her tears are not equal to Thel being convinced that her life’s meaning is given by God.
She simply states the fact that she did not know about God’s love for weak and helpless
creatures such as the Worm, and because of that, she did weep. In other words, this is
Thel acknowledging her ignorance in the existence and generosity of God, of the power of
love; whereas the real meaning of life which Thel desires remains unanswered.

Once again, I am brought back to the two themes which previously appeared in
Thel’s motto: love and knowledge.

Knowledge is motivated by dissatisfaction, by the insufficiency of pleasure. We

believe that there is something better that we have not known about, and because of this,
we always desire to know more. This other knowledge exists, because its possibility can
be felt and conceived, and yet, it is always a missed encounter since we have no ideas what
exactly this something is. The reason why Thel is unsatisfied with regeneration as the
answer for the purpose of life is because she believes that there must be a better answer,
one that is capable of satiating her desire to know. Her search for meaning is destined to
fail, since meaning is necessarily linked to signification. That is to say, the real meaning
cannot be known through language. What human beings, within our restriction of the
Symbolic order, can comprehend, are only the various meanings in the form of signifiers.
This is probably the reason why in the end, Blake provides no specific answer for Thel’s
search for meaning of life. Moreover, at first sight, it seems as if Thel has the active role

25 Thel is the one who identifies this male figure as God. After listening to the Clod, Thel says:
That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot
That, wilful, bruis’d its helpless form; but that he cherish’d it
With milk and oil I never knew; …
(7:10-12 )
 28

in initiating her quest for meaning, for knowledge; nevertheless, some careful
consideration would reveal that in fact, she is driven toward it.

As for love/sexuality, it seems to me that even if it is the object of Thel’s desire, the
type of love she is after would be a non-sexual love. Not because she fears sexual instinct,
as presumed by critics like George, but simply because the existing model of love available
to Thel in the Vales of Har is non-sexual. It is either religious, paternal, or maternal love
that has left its impression on Thel26 in the first three parts of the poem.

The point when Thel enters the pit can be considered to be of great importance,
since it acts as the moment of revelation and enlightenment for Thel. It is the moment
when it becomes clear that neither love nor knowledge is the real object of Thel’s desire,
or of the other creatures’ desire for that matter. What they all desire is something that is
capable of filling their void of being 27 . Since this object of desire exists beyond the
Symbolic order, they have no other option but to substitute it with other things that can
be named by language: in Thel’s case, it is knowledge/ meaning of life; for the others, it is
love (the Lily, the Clod) and sexual relationship (the Cloud).

As mentioned briefly in the introduction, there have been conflicting ways of

interpreting Thel’s fleeing act. According to George, at the moment of entering the grave,
Thel is “at the very point of embracing mortality through sexuality, poised on the brink of
transferring libido from self to object” (95). And being unable to face her sexual desire,
Thel “chooses instead to withdraw libido into herself, in order to protect those ego
boundaries” (George 97). George’s opinion clearly suggests that Thel’s act of fleeing is
originated from both fear and narcissism. Malgorzata Luczynska Holdys holds a
completely opposite opinion on this point. It is not fear or self-love that drives Thel away,
it is not even true that Thel is uninterested in the idea of sexual relationship. What stands
behind her withdrawal is her desire to go beyond the social role prescribed for women, of

26 There is sexual connotation in the Cloud’s narrative of his affair with the dew; nevertheless,
Thel does not seem to pay attention to his details.
27 The concept of objet petit a will be discussed in more details later on.
 29

motherhood as the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. While George’s Thel is cowardly and
narcissistic, Holdys’ Thel is original and revolutionary.

In my point of view, Thel’s decision not to enter the world of experience should not
be viewed either as a manifestation of her weakness, her inability to grow up, or as the
proof of her proto-feminist mind set. It simply shows how Thel has matured significantly
in her understanding of life. She has realised that the answer to her existential question
belongs to the Real, which forever resists conceptualisation and symbolisation. Speaking
differently, it functions as the signified that perpetually slides under and is separated from
the signifiers - the attempts to disclose the meaning of life through discourse and language.
In addition, Thel has become consciously aware of her desire (which also belongs to the
Real) and its “repetitive compulsive movement” (Homer 76). If we take the Vales of Har
as the world of innocence and the underground as that of experience, it becomes clear
that despite their inherently different nature, they are fundamentally similar in one aspect,
that of constituting reality. And reality, for Lacan, “is generated across the registers of the
Imaginary and the Symbolic” (Eyers 4). Thus, leaving the Vales of Har for the other side
would not yield any significant result in Thel’s search for meaning of life. The point when
Thel turns back to the Vales of Har marks what Foucault calls the rebound effect (effet de
retour) or “effects of the truth on the subject”, in which “subjectivity is illuminated; the
subject begins to experience his or her own subjectivity differently, sees the possibility of
a new way of existing as a subject, and strives for it” (Quinney 24). Speaking differently,
by the end of her journey, Thel becomes a mature soul and achieves the visionary power
that traverses the rift between subject and object.

It is also in Thel’s final act that we find a major parallel between Thel and The Myth
of Sisyphus. The central issue in The Myth of Sisyphus is the “absurd.” In Camus’ words,
it is “that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my
nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them
together” (50). The absurd man “catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and
limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which
all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw
from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without
consolation” (Camus 60). In this respect, Thel’s final act of fleeing can also be identified
 30

as what an absurd man would do in the same situation. She decides to stay in the Vales
of Har, not to become similar to the Lily, the Cloud, the Worm, or the Clod, but to live her
life as it is, to accept the world as such, because, “The real effort is to stay there, rather, in
so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant region.
Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity,
hope and death carry on their dialogue” (Camus 10).

Thel is not afraid of sexual instinct. This much is clear from the illustration in the
last plate, in which the serpent – sexuality symbolised, is depicted as under control of the
little girl. It can also be seen from Thel’s reaction to the Cloud’s account of his sexual
adventure with the dew: she does not utter a word of objection or express any sign of
discomfort. On the contrary, her refusal to enter the world of experience, which is
equivalent to the world of sexuality in Blake’s view, can be seen as manifestation of her
advanced comprehension toward love and sexual relationship. If the pleasure of other
animals is limited to being fed, stroked, being safe, etc., most human animals look up to
love as their higher satisfaction. In loving and being loved, they will be able to shut out
loss and satiate the lack in desire. Or so they hope. The Lily, the Cloud and the Clod seem
to share this common attitude. They choose to live not for themselves but for others, and
in doing so, their lack of being is temporarily eradicated 28 . Unfortunately, there is no
permanent remedy for the lack of being: it is an incurable illness, a malaise. As Ragland
puts it, “The malaise is an indestructible inertia in unconscious desire that organizes all
normative life around the fault or flaw of a sexual unrelation between men and women.
Two cannot be one. Love does not stop the malaise. A certain unhappiness is the human
norm” (103).

28 It is obvious that the Lily, the Cloud and the Clod also share a common religious belief:
Christianity. According Žižek, “the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a loving
(imperfect) Being to the place of God, that is, the place of ultimate perfection” (2005, 372-73). In
admitting that they themselves are incomplete and vulnerable, and therefore capable of love,
these creature elevate the importance of love over knowledge, “only an imperfect, lacking being
loves: we love because we do not know everything… even if we were to know everything, love
would inexplicably still be higher than complete knowledge” (Žižek 2005, 372).
 31

In refusing to enter the underground world, Thel refuses to embrace love and
sexuality. Consequently, her insistence on a real meaning of life that is beyond love and
sexual relationship is essentially the representation of the death drive. My reason for
making such statement will be explained hereafter in relation to the concept of the lamella.
In Lacan’s words, “It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or
irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is
precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to
the cycle of sexed reproduction” (Seminar XI 198). Lacan’s myth of the lamella, of
immortal life, aims to correct the love myth of Aristophanes29 in Plato’s Symposium. As a
consequence of the Aristophanes myth, “For nearly two thousand years we have used sex
and love to hide the ever present death drive that the lamella, the greater libido, sustains
and includes” (Jaanus 131). Lacan’s myth of the lamella reverses normal ideas about life
and death, since it “shows sexed life up as a loss of immortal life so that sex becomes,
paradoxically, the death of immortality, while death, on the other hand, becomes a desire
for immortal life” (Jaanus 131) (my emphasis). One’s birth is one’s loss of immortality.
Merely by being born, living beings are subjected to death. The subsequent desire for love
and sexual cycle is the substitution for the irretrievable loss of immortality.

Since love, sexuality and sublimation are the only things we have, we are subjected
to a process of transference, translation and sublimation; in other words, we have to rely
on transference to sustain our existence, regardless it is transference onto others,
language, or objects. The Lily, the Cloud, the Worm and the Clod behave in the way
singular, mortal beings generally do according to the Aristophanes myth. They sublimate
sexuality into the means through which civilisation is preserved and sustained, into love.
Their self-sacrifice doctrine is nothing more than a mode of transference. On the other
hand, Thel, by refusing sublimation, love and sexuality, exposes herself to the seductions

29 Aristophanes’ speech comes in the form of a myth recorded in Plato’s Symposium. He explains
that when human was first created, there were three genders: male, female, and androgynous,
and each person was twice what they are now. Zeus envied them and decided to cut each person
in two. Thus, longing to their original state, human beings keep trying to find their other half and
reunite with it. Aristophanes uses this myth to explain the reason why we have desire for other
people.
 32

of an immortality that is simultaneously death (the lamella). And yet, she does not fall
into the choice of committing suicide. Thel’s act of fleeing does not originate from denial
but from acceptance. She finally accepts the fact that love is impossible, that “there is no
such thing as a sexual relationship.” Thel demonstrates once again the characteristic of
Camus’ absurd man, who, instead of committing suicide or choosing a transcendental
approach to deal with the absurdity of life, simply keeps on living after acknowledging the
existence of an unknowable void in his being.

Thel’s failure in figuring out the meaning of her life is closely related to what Lacan
terms jouissance 30 . While being the central concept of Lancan teaching, the term
jouissance is generally left untranslated and without commentary. Jouissance, as Ragland
understands, is “a sign of the unconscious screening itself off from conscious life by means
of fixations that give rise to repetitions” (10). In other words, it is caused by an insatiable
desire for constant satisfaction, constant happiness, but itself cannot be identified by any
specific satisfaction. The impossibility of a fit between what is said and the thing in itself
is an undeniable fact; yet, human is incessantly driven by a desire to eradicate, or at least,
to narrow down the gap between the signified and the signifier. This, in turns, creates “a
push to repeat, a repetition which is founded on a return of jouissance and which always
produces a failure, a loss” (Glowinski, Marks and Murphy 101).

Taking it one step further, it can be assumed that whatever happens in Thel is
neither the first nor the only time that Thel laments her mortality, questions the meaning
of her life, and consequently, sets off on a journey to find an answer. This makes it all the
more logical that Thel returns to the Vales of Har: she is destined to repeat the process
over and over again. Just like Sisyphus, Thel is condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the
top of a mountain, only for it to fall back of its own weight. Her labour is futile and
hopeless; yet, it does not mean that it is nonsense. As Blake later writes in The Marriage

30 I would like to simply give a real life example of jouissance, which would make it much easier
to understand the concept. Let’s look at anorexia. The oral drive has its goal in food, however, its
aim is not food but jouissance. The anorexic eats nothing, its goal is clearly not obtained, but it is
this lack of food that produces oral jouissance, the satisfaction which goes beyond the pleasure
principle.
 33

of Heaven and Hell, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,”
repetition is the means to wisdom. Commenting on repetition, Fink writes, “It is the non-
representational nature of the real that brings on repetition, requiring the subject to
return to that place of the lost object, the lost satisfaction. Every other satisfaction pales
in comparison with the one that was lost, and the subject repetitively returns to the site
of that absence in the hope of obtaining the real Thing, and yet forever missing it” (1995,
228) (my emphasis). What is paradoxical is that this supposed initial, complete
satisfaction never exists in the first place. Speaking differently, the true aim of repetition
is not to retrieve the lost satisfaction, but to reveal the unconscious truths: it is the
manifestation of the desire to maintain jouissance as a constant (Ragland 68).

No matter what it was in the beginning that sent Thel off to her adventure, Thel’s
failure to reach the goal she initially set up is the jouissance that transgresses the pleasure
principle. In the words of Lacan, “The subject will realize that his desire is merely a vain
detour with the aim of catching the jouissance of the other – in so far as the other
intervenes, he will realize that there is a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle”
(Seminar VII 183–4). Thus, as contradictory as it may sound, Thel missed her goal, but
her true aim was achieved31.

It is essential here to make a distinction between goal and aim. The aim is the true
object of the drive, of gratification; while the goal is no more than a signifier. In Seminar
XI, Lacan explains:

When you entrust someone with a mission, the aim is not what he brings
back, but the itinerary he must take. The aim is the way taken. The French
word but may be translated by another word in English, goal. In archery,
the goal is not the but either, it is not the bird you shoot, it is having scored
a hit and thereby attained your but. (179)

The other term for this aim is objet petit a, the real object of desire. Previously, I
have hypothesised knowledge and love as the two possible objects of Thel’s desire and

31 Lacan took up this differentiation from Freud. Freud is the first one who draws a distinction
between the goal and the aim of the drive.
 34

subsequently proved how they are not the real object of desire. They can be the goals the
conscious subject Thel pursues; nevertheless, they are not the objects which the subject
of the unconscious desires. Unconscious desire has no specific object, “Desire is not for
objects in and of themselves… but for the fulfilment one equates with constancy,
consistency, oneness, unity, and stability—a guarantee or grounding to one's life”
(Ragland 43). The object of desire is objet petit a, which is neither imaginary nor symbolic,
but real.

Here, things get confusing since all the concepts start to reveal themselves as
intertwining and overlapping. Lacan found a paradox that led him to call all drives death
drives. What we desire is something new, something we do not already possess (nobody
desires what he has already) but we are always driven to seek satisfaction via the familiar,
by repeating the known. This is the death that drives us in all our acts (Ragland 90). The
drives aim for something more than pleasure and inevitably lead to missed encounter,
since closure never comes. In this sense, the drive is jouissance. But as commented by
Ragland, “jouissance names that which makes human beings vacillate between the
sublime and the ridiculous, pleasure and pain, being and nothingness: the value one
assigns to one’s being at the level of worth. Jouissance is the essence or quality that gives
one's life its value” (87). As such, jouissance is also objet a. No matter what, all these
concepts revolve around the issue of the Real. Consequently, the whole theme of Thel is
about the impossible encounter with the Real and its effect on the subject of the
unconscious. There is no way to know what Thel unconsciously desires, not only because
as soon as she start expressing her desire through language, Thel ceases to be the subject
of the unconscious, but also because of the fact that desire is real. Speaking differently,
just like the Real, one cannot know the object of desire; one can only feel its existence
through its absence.
 35

III. The Real in The Book of Thel

What I am interested in in this final section is to analyse how Thel is able to
sustain conflicting interpretations throughout the years, even in the most basic elements
such as the identity of its main character or the supposed attitude toward Thel’s act of
fleeing. As can be seen above, each and every interpretation of the book seems plausible
and persuasive in its own right, yet, they virtually share no common ground and can
hardly be less compatible. Before returning to Lacan and the concept of the Real, I would
like to explore the issue from another angle, that of the theory of reading. As of today, the
only known study that pursues this direction has been conducted by Janice Hewlett Koelb,
in which she used Thel as an example to illustrate the theories devised by Clayton Koelb
on “the invention of reading” and “logomimesis.” According to Clayton Koelb, one
characteristic of logomimetic fiction is that it “makes the structure of its fictional reality
conform to patterns provided by everyday language. Instead of attempting to make the
work of literature “hold the mirror up to nature” and imitate in a convincing way the world
as it is, the logomimetic artist chooses to imitate structures that are already purely verbal”
(C. Koelb 44). Viewed under this light, Thel presents itself undoubtedly as a work of
logomimesis, in which language imitates itself.

There is much evidence to support this claim, one of which is the origin of Thel’s
name. There have been all sorts of speculation revolving around this subject: the Greek
word for will, wish, or desire; an echo of Thomas Vaughan’s Thalia (from Greek thellein,
“blossoming” or “blossoming one”); or a near anagram of lethe - a play on Greek for
“female” or Hebrew for “dew” (J. Koelb 153). If we accept the speculation that one piece
of Thel’s mother’s name, the salutation “Mne”, to be the first syllables of Mnemosyne –
the personification of memory in Greek mythology, we would come up with the muse
Thalia 32 as another possible source for Thel’s name. In 1955 George Mills Harper

32 Thalia is one of the nine muses and daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. This is my personal
conjecture, and is quite improbable, since Thalia is the eighth-born of the nine Muses, not the
youngest one like Thel. Also, Thalia is the muse who presided over comedy and idyllic poetry,
which have no relevance to Thel on the level of content. My intention here is simply to
demonstrate the fact that all kinds of explanation would emerge if we open up to all possibilities.
 36

announced that he had discovered some connections between Thel’s experience in part
four and Persephone’s descent to the underworld as explained by Thomas Taylor (Bogen
17). As such, Thel can also be identified as Persephone. In all possibilities, Blake might
have invented the name by himself. My concern here is not to dwell on which explanation
is the most correct, but to emphasise the logomimetic aspect of the name. As Janice Koelb
puts it, “Like all Blake’s onomastic figures, thel is a powerfully condensed focus of
narrative actualization, a seminal invention of reading. How enthusiastically the reader
contributes to the actualization demanded by logomimesis depends on the reader’s
linguistic experience, competence, and openness (in Blake’s terms) to at least double
vision” (155). Understood this way, a reader who has no knowledge of Greek can still enjoy
the poem as much as someone who knows Greek and can make the connection between
Thel’s name and its Greek root. The only difference is that the more one knows, the more
one will be drawn to the act of deciphering the poem, to the game of language. Here is
the point where we are reminded that the meaning of any given text does not lie within
the text itself but is a reconstruction between reader and text (Homer 123).

The second proof showing that Thel is a logomimetic text lies in the structure of
the poem itself. If we take on Levinson’s view that the poem consists of Thel’s
ventriloquism, that the voice of the Lily, the Cloud, the Worm and the Clod of Clay is no
other than Thel’s own voice, we arrive at a splitting that is particularly characteristic of
logomimetic rhetoric that Clayton Koelb calls “dialepsis.” “Dialepsis” can be defined as “a
figure in which a single “thing” can divide into multiple entities at the behest of language”
(J. Koelb 151). All the creatures with whom Thel converses do not appear out of nowhere;
there is always a sign, the “behest of language,” that introduces them naturally into the
story. Most of the signs can be found in Thel’s lamentation in the beginning:

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud,

Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,

Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face,

Like the dove's voice, like transient day, like music in the air.

(3:11-14)
 37

The “watry bow” is the Lily, the “parting cloud” is obviously the Cloud, and the
“infant” becomes the Worm. As for the Clod, she comes into the picture as a matron figure
when Thel mentions about “mothers smiles” (6:8) to cherish the Worm. Once again, we
are reminded of the fact that that language lies at the centre of our reading attempt and
how Thel is a work of logomimesis, in which language imitates itself.

Another example of Thel’s logomimetic aspect is the double vision evoked from
Thel’s motto which appears once again in the title page design. Depending on the reader’s
point of view, it can be seen as a landscape “with an over-arching willow and a life-sized
pastoral heroine” or a small tombstone graven with the work’s name and an
accompanying fairy-sized shepherdess (Hilton 196). There is no one correct way to
approach Thel, both texts and illustrations. As Janice Koelb has concluded, “What is at
stake... is the possibility of changing both the character’s and the reader’s mental state,
and therefore the surroundings, through the agency of art. In Thel, the psychotherapeutic
technique is a rigorous logomimesis that requires creating a world in many more ways
than one at a time, and out of the most basic mental material: language” (159).

All of the above examples lead me to one conclusion. The Book of Thel can be read
both ways: as a simple text with a simple story, and as a complex text that contains more
than meets the eye. As such, it functions as both the text of pleasure and the text of bliss,
the two concepts developed by Roland Barthes33. This “bliss” here is generally identified
as the equivalence of the Lacanian jouissance. As Barthes remarks, “With the writer of
bliss (and his reader) begins the untenable text, the impossible text. This text is outside
pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you cannot
speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, in its fashion, enter into a desperate
plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively repeat the letter

33 Barthes makes clear distinction, “Text of pleasure: the text that contains, fills, grants euphoria;
the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of
reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to
the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation to
language” (14).
 38

of pleasure)” (22). My attempt to analyse the Real in Thel is a perfect example for the
hysterical affirmation of the void of bliss, as opposed to other “pleasure” readings whose
main focus is on interpretation. Since the Real is non-representable, beyond language, it
is guaranteed from the beginning that my analysis will not come to any specific conclusion,
just as Thel’s failure to reach her goal in the end of her journey.

Interestingly, there is another way to look at the situation. The Real is non-
representable, that much is clear. However, the effect of the Real is everywhere in the
Imaginary and the Symbolic orders, which means that while it is impossible to define the
Real, it is possible to talk about the impossible encounter with the Real. Here, I would like
to embark on tracking down this effect of the Real in Thel specifically and in Blake’s works
in general. My main hypothesis is that the “surplus creativity” created by the combination
of texts and illustrations is where the effect of the Real is felt. This idea is inspired by my
reading of Eaves’ foreword to Samuel Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary, where he
writes, “As long as Blake’s visual art did not have to be coordinated systematically with
the verbal in the process of interpretation, the visual art could signal his surplus
creativity—his difference from the norm and even from the five Romantic poets to whom
his future was beginning to be tied.”

It is necessary to recall the different types of criticism Blake tends to attract. Even
though William Blake is a relatively well-known name, what should be known about him
varies from person to person. Some think about him as an eccentric artist with
questionable talent in visual representation but whose ideas are worth examining; others
admire him for his unprecedented boldness in rendering visual images while dismissing
his ideas as overly religious or simply incomprehensible. He is valued as a painter by some,
a poet by others, a skilful engraver by a few, and maybe a little of everything by most. No
matter what, he is definitely remembered for his attempt to create a total work of art in
his illuminated books. The relationship between texts and illustrations in these books is
one of unique characteristic. The combination of visual and literary aspects is far from
accommodating the viewer’s and reader’s understanding. In fact, in a large part, the
illustrations have nothing to do with the texts. In other words, Blake’s art is in no way
illustrative. Even in those images that are illustrative, there is always something more.
 39

As pointed out by Trodd, “Even those most sympathetic to his art, including
Gilchrist, the Rossetti brothers, Swinburne and Symons, tended to trace in his works the
uneasy relationship between aesthetic exuberance and compositional coherence” (21).
For instance, by viewing his unfinished drafts for Dante’s illustrations, it becomes clear
that Blake’s design is disordered and unpleasant for the eyes. In addition to
unconventional graphic expressions, the anxiety of scale and size in representation adds
up to this negative effect. Blake often squeezes things in enormous scale into a very
confined and limited space, which creates a type of illusion the mind is not used to. It is
understandable for a normal audience to look at Newton in display and have a sense of
inexplicable uneasiness: a seemingly enormous giant occupies a mere 40×60 cm surface
definitely invokes an asynchronous effect in visual perception.

In fact, the art of William Blake is challenging both in terms of form and ideas.
Swinburne has to confess that, “So far one may at least see what he meant; although at
sight of it many would cover their eyes and turn away. But the main part of him was, and
is yet, simply inexplicable; much like some among his own designs, a maze of cloudy
colour and perverse form, without a clue for the hand or a feature for the eye to lay hold
on. What he meant, what he wanted, why he did this thing or not that other, no man then
alive could make out” (4). This shows us how even Blake’s admirers are uneasy with the
incomprehensibility of his art and ideas. This unpleasantness produced by the difficulty
of the texts, by the chaos of the images, and most important, by the obscure relationship
between literary and visual elements, can be best defined as the jouissance of Blake’s
works.

To put this back into perspective of the task I am currently engaged, Thel is one
early example of such works. It is true that in this illuminated book, the text is not too
complex to comprehend, the images are not too chaotic or disturbing. Nonetheless, the
irrelevance of the illustration to the content acts as the major element that discomforts
and unsettles the reader. I would like to remark that not all of the images in the book are
unrelated to the text. In fact, if that was the case, the reader may have been less confused.
Except for the last plate, the rest of the images make good sense when put in the context
of the poem. Thus, what Blake does in Thel is to create a sense of inconsistency between
 40

words, images, and meaning, by juxtaposing an image that has nothing to do with the text
beside those that are meant to be illustrations.

First, let us look at the images that serve perfectly well for the purpose of
illustrating. In plate 2, the title page, we can see Thel, in a long gown and holding a
shepherd’s crook, stands at the lower left corner and gazes at a couple of miniature man
and woman in the act of embracing. Even though the plate does not directly illustrate any
scene in the text, the two embracing figures can very well be identified as the Cloud and
the “fair eyed dew” (5:15) in the moment of “raptures” (5:13) during their courtship. In
plate 4, Thel and the personified Lily are depicted; thus, the design clearly illustrates the
conversation between these two characters. The moment pictured here may be their
parting, when “the Lily bowd her modest head” (8:14). Plate 6 has Thel standing at the
centre with arms wide open, accompanied by the personified Cloud and Worm. The
design seems to illustrate the last two lines of the previous plate and the first line of verse
on this plate:

The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lilly’s leaf,

And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale.

(5:32-33)

Then Thel astonish’d view’d the Worm upon its dewy bed.

(6:3)

In plate 7, Thel squats on the ground and looks at the personified Worm and Clod
of Clay. This design may illustrate some lines from the previous plate, such as:

The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;

She bow’d over the weeing infant. and her life exhal’d

In milky fondness…

(6:9-11)

Finally, we arrive at the last plate, whose design bears no direct relationship to
images or events mentioned in the text. There are three children riding on the back of a
 41

snake. The front-most little girl holds a rein in her hand that extends to the snake’s open
mouth, while the boy in the middle seems to be holding on to the second, smallest boy at
the back. If one is to make sense of this curious design, one will have to go back to the text
and try to find any possible thread which can link the visual representation to the content.
Sure enough, there is always an explanation if we consciously look for one. According to
Janice Koelb, the word seraphim, the name of Thel’s mother, “was traditionally thought
cognate to the Hebrew word for “serpent,” an etymology that secured Satan's genealogy
as the fallen seraph appearing as the serpent of Eden” (155). The presence of the snake is
thus explained. But this is by no means the only explanation. The serpentine tailpiece
was a cliché in book decorating motif in the end of the eighteenth century: “Snakes were
favored by French rococo colophon designers; snakes were still in vogue when Blake, as
James Basire’s apprentice, engraved the elaborate tailpiece to the first volume of Bryant’s
Mythology, a pair of snakes curling above a pair of Medusa-headed coins” (J. Koelb 161).
In another reading, Holdys suggests that this design indicates Thel’s inner
transformation: “instead of female malleability and perfect compliance with the roles that
have been written for her, she takes the rein of control into her own hands and writes her
role herself” (21).

After all, it does not really matter what the design means or refers to. What is of
significance here is the thoughts and emotion invoked in viewing it. This maybe differs
from person to person; therefore, I would not attempt to make any generalisation, but
rest the argument on my personal opinion. Up until this tailpiece, what I get from the
poem is a pervasive sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and of struggling. And yet, the tailpiece
comes as an absolute surprise, with its indisputable impression of control and its powerful
exuberance. No matter what the serpent stands for, the little girl is clearly in control of it.
If we think about the Thel who has been desperately wandering around in the break of
her existential anxiety, nothing can be more contradictory than the thoughts evoked from
the tailpiece. In the end, this is exactly what Blake wants to communicate to the reader:
despite struggling, anxiety and uncertainty, the subject finally will take the rein into her
own hand.

As mentioned in the introduction, William Blake is greatly concerned about the

subject. He perceives that “the science and philosophy of his own day had become
 42

increasingly committed to discounting the value of perception and introspection, and that
they were thereby simply abandoning the subject to its vexed experience of itself”
(Quinney 11). As a consequence, the alienated subject is left with no choice but to seek
consolation in False Religion. Blake endeavours to address this issue in his works, taking
on character as representation of the subject. As such, the last thing Blake wants for his
characters is for them to be passive and helpless. He terms the New Science of his days “a
Science [of] Despair” and strongly objects how it encourages the centre of consciousness,
the self, to regard itself as invisible and intangible as compared to the solid and real world
into which it has been thrust. It is fascinating how modern Blake’s attitude is in terms of
the relationship between subject and structure. According to Quinney, “Blake is clearly
one of the therapeutic number, persuaded that the subject does not have to dwell at odds
with its own subjectivity (and appalled by materialism because it abandons one to
existential anxiety without redress)” (Quinney 19). Blake is bent on a radical solution,
which is an impersonal transcendence - something that is left after the selfhood is
annihilated. Blake’s ideas coincide with Neoplatonism until he makes a difficult, original
turn: he redefines impersonal transcendence as intellectual creativity (Quinney 20). His
task is:

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination

(Jerusalem 5:19-21)34

The source of this impersonal transcendence, this intellectual creativity, is no other

than Imagination. For several reasons, imagination holds an especially important place
in Blake’s artistic vocabulary. Here, I would inspect one that is related to the social and
cultural context of Blake’s time.

34 The numbering here is based on textual transcription on the website The William Blake Archive,
of copy E of Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, printed in 1821. This copy is currently
housed at the Yale Center for British Art.
 43

As Trodd puts it, “For his contemporaries, such as Hunt35 and Joseph Farinton, as
well as Victorians such as Crawfurd, Hewlett and Atkinson, Blake is known through his
opposition to the foundation and reproduction of rules of aesthetic composition; his
questioning of sense-based knowledge is an attack on the accumulated wisdom embodied
in the learnable processes of authentic art theory” (24). The system Blake tries to devise
is simply impossible to replicate, unlike that of the conventional teaching practiced by art
institutions, among which the Royal Academy is the most prominent. This ideological
opposition can be seen through Blake’s fervent criticism against the doctrines of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the RA.

A man of the Enlightenment, Reynolds strongly believes in the concept of

“acquired genius,” expressed thoroughly in his Discourses36. He chooses to value formal
education and tradition over inspiration and individual expression. In Discourse 1, he
writes, “The principle advantage of an Academy is, that, besides furnishing able men to
direct the Student, it will be a repository for the great examples of the Art. These are the
materials on which Genius is to work, and without which the strongest intellect may be
fruitlessly or deviously employed” (Reynolds 8). Blake views this insistence on aesthetic
education and the distrust on uneducated imagination as nothing more than an act of
defending the authority, a kind of propaganda written to serve political purposes. In his
Annotations, Blake clearly states, “Reynolds’ Opinion was that Genius May be Taught and
that all Pretence to Inspiration is a Lie and a Deceit… The Enquiry in England is not
whether a Man has Talents and Genius, But whether he is Passive and Polite and A
virtuous Ass and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and Science” (452-53).

35 Robert Hunt was an art critic in Blake’s time. Commenting on Blake’s one-man exhibition in
1809, he wrote, “If beside the stupid and mad-brained political project of their rulers, the sane
part of the people of England required fresh proof of the alarming increase of the effects of insanity,
they will be too well convinced from its having lately spread into the hitherto sober region of Art”
(605). That shows how hostile he was to Blake’s art.
36 Discourses on Art is a series of lectures delivered by Sir Joshua Reynolds between 1769 and
1790. William Blake, in response to this artistic doctrines, published the vitriolic Annotations to
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses in 1808.
 44

In a context where the Enlightenment ideology is the dominant intellectual force,

Blake’s emphasis on imagination is his way of revolting against what he thinks of as a
restriction to artistic creation and life fulfilment. Through the illuminated books, Blake
demonstrates how it is possible to reconcile the two aspects that at first appear
irreconcilable, mass production and the uniqueness of a work of art. Blake’s books all have
a manual origin even though they are mechanically printed. Bigwood provides some
insights to the creating process of these books: “Blake wrote backwards on the copper
plate with an ink that would resist the corrosives later poured on the plate. When the
paper was printed, the lines on the plate would reverse, making them legible. He then
hand-painted each copy of the work, drawing out different aspects of their potentially
infinite depths and thereby producing a new book each time” (315).

Blake is by nature intolerant of restraint. He does not only care about his own
freedom of imagination; he is also greatly concerned with liberating his reader’s
imagination. Blake’s illuminated books “not only slightly disengage us from the epochal
perspective, but alert us to the restrictive character of our thinking, intimating a more
flexible thinking that is at once more insightful and more open to the pre-linguistic
movements of perception” (Bigwood 307). They pinpoint the power of the Symbolic
order/language over the subject and simultaneously open up the possibility of going
beyond this limitation. In his eagerness to conceptually take up meaning, the conscious
subject forgets “the actual bodily origins of the cogito itself” (Bigwood 314). His
occupation lies at the superficial level of the work of art as long as he is fully conscious. In
creating a world of ambiguity in his books, Blake “transforms our reading into an
unexpectedly sensuous experience and encourages us to rediscover a creative, active
pursuit which tries to get beneath ready-made concepts to the existential experience to
which these signs originally gave form” (Bigwood 309).

Blake’s fundamental belief in the supremacy of imagination and his intolerance to

any form of restraint give rise to the notion of energy as the quality that characterises his
art. As affirmed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “The
delight of energy is the delight of the freed imagination, of unsuppressed instincts, of
release from stultifying moral laws” (Bowman 60). The energy emitting from Blake’s
design is what captures the viewer most. It is sometimes said that this energy is “a
 45

reflection of his own dynamic personality - impulsive, highly combustible, even arrogant,
yet at times gentle, kindly, and tolerant: a paradoxical temperament that was responsible
for the creation of poems not only about tigers, but about lambs as well” (Bowman 60).
In reading Thel and other illuminated books, one may find it difficult to master the
language of the text or to decipher the images in the design. Nevertheless, one will always
be attracted by the powerful and mysterious energy merely from being in contact with the
work.

The combination of text, colour and form creates an effect that integrates the
reading eye and the seeing eye37; and “Through this simultaneous seeing and reading, we
contact the page in a full way and the page blossoms with new meaning” (Bigwood 309).
It is a crucial rewarding experience, but it may not be a pleasant one. Blake’s illuminated
books can be said to be the epitome of literature as the jouissance of language. That
“something” that one feels but cannot be put into words when one encounters his works
is the Real that resists all attempts of symbolisation and explanation.

37 According to Bigwood, the reading eye “apprehends predominately conceptual meanings,”

while the seeing eye apprehends meanings (“sens”) that are pre-conceptual (309).
 46

Conclusion
My main objective in analysing the Real in The Book of Thel is to highlight the fact
that as Blake’s first illuminated book, the poem contains much more than meets the eyes.
It is not simply an allegory of will/desire, or a coming of age tale, but a total work of art
which contains a wide range of elements highly effective in providing the language
through which psychoanalysis can speak its concepts. At the very least, this thesis is the
proof that, besides existing methods, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacanian
psychoanalytic reading are potential tools for further understanding the work of William
Blake.

The Real as it is always escapes language, but its effect permeates the whole book,
in texts and designs. It is the presence of absence found in the analysis of Thel as the
subject of the unconscious. The analysis of Thel in the first section reveals two levels of
subjectivity: the first one being the ego, with its various disguises lying on the surface; and
the second one being the subject of the unconscious, characterised by anxiety and its
fleetingness. Thel as a Lacanian subject exists, not in the text, but in her absence felt
through the analysis of the text. This effect of the Real is what makes the existence of a
real subject, which transgresses the limitation of the Symbolic order, possible.

Similarly, the effect of the Real emerges from my failed attempt to give a name to
the real object of Thel’s desire. Neither love nor knowledge is what Thel truly desires, as
presumed initially in the second section. It is the death drive which keeps Thel in the
constant search for the unknown objet petit a, whose real aim is jouissance – the
satisfaction (or lack of satisfaction) that goes beyond the pleasure principle. Once again,
the impossibility of identifying the real object of desire points toward a void, which is
made perceptible by its absence.

Thel also demonstrates how Blake’s illuminated books are capable of illuminating
its reader, both through content and form. Just like the subject Thel experiencing her
subjectivity in her journey, in reading Thel, the reader will go through a reading
experience that transforms him/her profoundly. It is the early example of Blake’s work
functioning as the jouissance of language.
 47

This last remark leads me to proposing another approach to reading Blake’s works,
in which Thel in particular and Blake’s illuminated books can be considered to be what
Eyers calls “the Real writing.” In Seminar XXII, Lacan comments, “not only can the Real
be supported by a writing but that there is no other tangible idea of the Real” (qtd in Eyers
145). Lacan perceives the three orders, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real as being
linked together like the Borromean knot. In Seminar XXIII, he writes, “the nœud bo
[Borromean knot] in question completely changes the meaning of writing. It gives to the
aforementioned writing an autonomy, which is all the more remarkable in that there is
another writing [une autre écriture], which results from that which one could call a
precipitation of the signifier” (144). The Real writing is possible, in so far as it models and
remodels the subject within the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, using language as the
signifiers, but simultaneous draw attention to the material unmeaning of these signifiers.
Lacan’s own writing is an exemplary example of this style of writing in which the Real is
made tangible. In the end, this thesis opens up the possibility of exploring the Real in
Blake’s other illuminated books. As the complexity of these other books is of a higher level
compared to Thel, it is foreseen that they will require more profound knowledge (of
Lacanian psychoanalysis and literary criticism) and much more effort. This complexity
equally means that there will be more material to work on, which paradoxically makes the
task easier and more challenging at the same time. Nevertheless, it is very promising that
this effort will yield significant result in our advanced understanding of Blake and his
visionary world, which is all the more valuable and rewarding.
 48

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