Ambiguity is arguably the most important idea in Beauvoir's philosophy. This chapter argues that Beauvoir's idea of ambiguity has much more in common with Merleau-Ponty's idea of ambiguity than with Sartre's. Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity complement each other.

Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were friends and knew each other’s work. In a 1945 commentary on Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), Merleau-Ponty says this novel portrays a genuine morality that does not seek to dispel our fundamental ambiguity. In a later prospectus of his own work, Merleau-Ponty declares that establishing a “good ambiguity” “would . . . give us the principle of an ethics,” but he never developed that ethics. Shortly after his review of L’Invitée, Beauvoir wrote a review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (Phenomenology of Perception) in Les Temps modernes, a journal that both had helped to found and on whose editorial board both served. There Beauvoir praises phenomenology for “abolishing the subject-object opposition” that education erects in wrenching the living, meaningful world away from children and substituting a universe of frozen, independent objects. Ethics teaches children to renounce their subjectivity in favor of universal laws, yet they retain a sense of personal uniqueness and intimacy with the world in the spontaneous movement of their life. Beauvoir says phenomenology addresses and abolishes this split.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

THE MAKING OF A LIFE-STORY

In the Interlude that comes between parts I and IIof Force of Circumstance, Simone de Beauvoir's third autobiographical volume, she reflects on what a peculiar object a life is. The peculiarity accrues when it is viewed not so much as a thing lived, but rather as an object of ongoing written representation – an object amenable to that double publicity entailed by the telling of one's own life-story in a published memoir. For the author, some of this peculiarity must inevitably be reflected back onto the life lived, because as the project of writing a memoir gets under way and life infuses the page, so will the prospect of the written record begin to infuse the experience of living. Certain experiences will take on the aspect of a theme, certain events the significance of an aberration, a confirmation of a pattern, a turning point, a nemesis, and so on, even while they are being spontaneously lived. We know that even as a little girl, if out of sheer romanticism, Beauvoir thought of her life as a “lovely story” in the making.

The best way into the time-twisting, identity-scrambling otherworld of Blake's Milton: A Poem (c. 1804-18) is to set aside guidebooks, including this one, take a deep breath, and follow the hero as he breaks through the surface of the title page - alone, without a “companion” - parting the syllables of his own name (and the poem's title) with one hand, sweeping back publishing details with the other, to brave the swirling abyss of the unknown (Fig. 31). The reader-resistant text billowing around Milton's nude figure scans vertically, bottom to top on the left, top to bottom on the right - a hint of the head-spinning reorientations to come. At the foot of the page, in much smaller lettering, a single upright line appears reassuringly straightforward: “To Justify the Ways of God to Men” (Paradise Lost 1:26). But is Blake reaffirming - or co-opting - Milton's magisterial summation of epic purpose? Or is Milton, in flexing his left foot to take a second step into Blake's poem, leaving the secure foundation of his theodicy behind him? Should both poets - and their audiences - be interrogating, not justifying, God's ways? As the poem proceeds, readers find themselves clueless in medias res, thrown back on their own resources, as if subjected to a wilderness-survival test. But the neural overload helps cleanse the doors of perception, and the solo ordeal can be character-building. This chapter is meant to be put aside now and taken up again on the far side of “Finis” (Milton 43 [50]:2, E 144), after pulse and respiration have returned to normal.

From Unnam’d forms to the forms of books

Is “Blake's language” and “poetic form” an un-Blakean conjunction? In the wake of eighteenth-century political revolutions, Blake broadcast a revolutionary poetics, seemingly anti-formalist in its determination:

As these inspired lines from Milton (pl. 41 [48], E 142) demonstrate, the sneer at poetic finishing includes not just rhymes but even blank-verse harmonies, the measure Milton advertised in his note on “The Verse”to Paradise Lost as “ancient liberty” recovered from the “modern bondage” of having to rhyme heroic verse. But if Milton tropes blank verse as political liberation, Blake saw him still constrained by the “uniform systems of execution owned by the culture, or by poetic tradition.”

For a number of years in the long middle of the twentieth century the term Romanticism conjured up for students of English literature two dates and half a dozen names. The dates became so self-evident that no one remarked on their oddness. Neither 1789 nor 1832, the standard limits of the period, were chosen for literary-historical reasons. The first commemorates the French Revolution, the second the Great Reform Bill that extended the vote to many affluent males who had not had it before. George Crabbe, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott all died in 1832, but their passing has not been used as the measure of the end of an era. 1789 happened to be the year of William Blake's Songs of Innocence, but its appearance has not usually been regarded as foundational for Romanticism: that honor has much more commonly been bestowed upon Wordsworth and Coleridge's jointly authored first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). This has had the effect of distancing the literary from the political revolution, leading to lively arguments about what the politics of Lyrical Ballads (and Romanticism generally) might be given its appearance during the British counter-revolution, after the widespread loss of faith in French republicanism and following the government's repressive measures against British radicals. Blake has nonetheless mostly counted as one of the names that the mention of Romanticism has been supposed to invoke, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. All poets, all men. Jane Austen was usually left out of any efforts at categorizing Romanticism, along with all the other novelists of the period: she has tended to appear in literary history as an isolated genius in the story of the nineteenth-century novel. The drama was even further distanced: the common consensus was that there was not much of it and that what was there was not very interesting.

In the originality, comprehensiveness, and sheer energy of his analysis of the religious dimension of human experience, William Blake's artistic achievement is matched in Western literature only by that of Dante and Milton. Religion was, arguably, the primary theme and motive of all his art, poetic and pictorial. But to compare Blake's art with the work of other poets and painters soon makes clear that his own artistic program and vision differed strikingly from what is commonly understood to be the purpose of religious art. His poetry, and the illuminations that enrich it, only rarely are expressions of devotion. Although one catches glimpses of personal piety in his letters, and senses it in his more conventional pictorial art, Blake's illuminated verse is primarily social in its concerns, focusing on the historic and psychic origins of religious faith and on religion's influence on human behavior. Blake was convinced that religion profoundly affects every aspect of human life - political, economic, psychological, and cultural - and that its influence has generally not been a positive one. He detected flawed religious thinking at the root of most of the social disorders afflicting England in his time, and found that even the highest virtues associated with religion - “Mercy Pity Peace and Love” (E 12) - were routinely misconceived or manipulated for destructive ends.

I recently heard one poet praise another for achieving “balance between restraint and revelation.” Few would think to offer that praise to Blake. James Joyce's characterization would be more applicable: “Armed with this two-edged sword, the art of Michelangelo and the revelations of Swedenborg, Blake killed the dragon of experience and natural wisdom, and, by minimizing space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he tried to paint his works on the void of the divine bosom.”Though wrong in some details, Joyce's characterization conveys well the extravagance, even the impossibility, of Blake's ambitions, which has played a major part in the attraction-repulsion response that has always dogged him. His poetry risks every kind of excess to achieve revelation. It brushes aside elements that might restrain it, including formal poetic conventions that help to shape and contain the drive to revelation. Enveloping the stressful, straining poems are the handsome, odd, bizarre, grotesque, weird, lovely images, which supply no balancing force.

The life of William Blake became a legend even before he died, and in discussing his life the two must be disentangled as far as possible. This presents several problems. First of all, the essential materials for his biography - letters, journals, memoirs, official records, comments of friends and others - are meager, while the uncertain dates of many of his works complicate the task of a chronology. Only ninety-two of his letters survive, the first a short note from 1791, when he was thirty-four, and most of the others are concentrated in a single decade, 1799-1808, like the few remaining letters written to him. For the most part his letters are concerned either with prosaic business matters or with what Keats called “the life of allegory,” only remotely connected to outward events and relationships. There was little external incident in Blake's life, and he lived in obscurity for most of it; except by a small group of admirers his name was largely forgotten within a decade of his death in 1827, as the subtitle of the first full-length biography, Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus,” suggests.So sparse a record as this is a temptation to biographers to fill out with more or less fictional detail.

On 12 April 1827, shortly before he died, Blake wrote to George Cumberland thanking him for trying to sell copies of Blake's illuminated books and his recently published engraved illustrations to the Book of Job. Blake had first executed the Job illustrations as watercolor drawings for Thomas Butts around 1805, followed by a duplicate set for John Linnell, who commissioned him to engrave the series in 1823.

Three years later, Blake had twenty-two line engravings that looked very different from the tonal prints then popular. Indeed, they even looked different from engravings, his own included, for they were not executed in the standard “mixed method” technique, in which designs were first etched and then finished as engravings. In this technique, which Blake mastered as an apprentice, the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acidresistant “ground” covering the copper plate and then etched with acid. The engraver went over these slightly incised lines with burins (metal tools with square or lozenge-shaped tips used to cut lines into the plate) and engraved the plate’s entire surface, uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines.

“If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward,” especially when the resulting productions are “of equal magnitude and consequence” with those “of any age or country” (E 692). So maintained thirty-five-year-old William Blake in an etched prospectus addressed “To the Public” and dated 10 October 1793, two weeks before the execution of Marie Antoinette would dominate the London news. “Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth” comprised two “Historical Engraving[s]” - Job and Edward and Elinor - two “small book[s] of engraving” - The Gates of Paradise and The History of England (now lost or never actually published) - and, extending this range of concern with matters national, spiritual, and educational in diverse media: America, a Prophecy; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In his only recorded use of the phrase now synonymous with his greatest achievement, Blake described these latter six books as “in Illuminated Printing.” The prices ranged from three to twelve shillings (almost a laborer's weekly wage). Not advertised were the author's two conventionally type-set volumes, Poetical Sketches of ten years before and The French Revolution of 1791; missing also from the prospectus were Blake's five-year-old first experiments in illuminated printing, All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion and, understandably, two manuscripts: a burlesque set in an island in the moon and a verse narrative about a mythic patriarch, Tiriel. None of the works he then advertised, which include those best known today, were to find a large market, but Blake later commented that sales were “sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended” (letter of 9 June 1818, E 771).

Blake has been called Britain's greatest revolutionary artist. He is also routinely described as a visionary or mystic, a man more concerned with spiritual than political matters. Many critics subscribe to the intermediate position that Blake's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative power of the imagination or a version of John Milton's “paradise within thee, happier far.” This chapter suggests, on the contrary, that Blake was always a deeply political writer, even if he was one who viewed the distinction between spiritual and political matters as the product of a fallen human consciousness, but whether he is understood as a political radical, a mystical genius, or a disillusioned fellow traveler, the judgment is complicated by a paucity of biographical information. Unlike the annotations he made on various books he owned, which regularly refer to political matters, the few Blake letters that survive rarely mention politics.

Like some other radicals in the 1790s, Blake saw the American revolution as igniting a process of liberation that would sweep around the globe, exploding repressive superstitions and causing despotic governments to crumble. Some envisaged this process as a fulfillment of the enlightenment that would establish universally acceptable principles of justice based on reason rather than on corrupt tradition. But Blake's antinomianism led him to see the enlightenment as an extension of the errors it aimed to dispel. He imagined global revolution not as universalizing the rule of reason, but as liberating desire and spreading “thought-creating fires” (SL 6:6, E 68).

The vision was certainly rebellious, but Blake himself cut an odd figure as a revolutionary. The links between his prophetic art and contemporary radicalism have been widely explored, but identifying a contemporary fit audience has proved difficult. When he composed America (1793), the first of his “continental prophecies,” he may have thought of it as an intervention in the political debate stimulated by the French revolution. But the advertised price of 10s. 6d. (E 693) put it well out of reach of a popular audience. It was his most ambitious illuminated book to date, with plates more than four times bigger than the Innocence plates.

Blake and history painting

Recent commentary on Blake has tended to find the core of his achievement in the prophetic books of the 1790s and in the later prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem. These books speak now to a world that relishes their complexity, unresolved nature, and play between image and text. Yet they represent only a part of his achievement, and were the focus of his attention, as far as we know, only between 1788 and 1796, and again between 1804 and c. 1820.He was more continuously preoccupied with his work as a painter in tempera and watercolor of biblical and literary subjects, usually in series. Blake's “illustrations”are not a secondary activity but are quite as personal and imaginative as his prophetic work. It is true that there were artists like Blake's friend Thomas Stothard who made a living from designing illustrations to novels and other works, and Blake often engraved from the drawings. But such illustrations were clearly subordinate to the text. Blake's designs, on the other hand, constitute an active engagement with each text by an artist who never doubted that he was the peer of any author. Furthermore, his designs are informed by assumptions and traditions that belong to discourses of art rather than literature. They look back to the Italian Renaissance and to ancient Greece, and in later years to Gothic and even Hindu traditions. The fact that the starting point for almost all of Blake's temperas, watercolors, and some separate prints was a text written by another author no more diminishes them than Michelangelo's use of the Bible diminishes the Sistine Chapel. Blake argued that each of his tempera or watercolor designs had the potential to be hugely enlarged, and that his method of “portable Fresco” (E 527) would enable him to produce public paintings on a monumental scale.