Kang-Po Chen
ABSTRACT
William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job is widely recognized as the magnum opus of his final years. Generally, the preceding studies see the Illustrations as either an inner mental drama or a coherent part of Blake’s theological framework of a more enlightened form of Christian belief. But I argue that certain plates of the Illustrations foreground radical materiality as a disruptive force that ceaselessly resists spiritual elevation. By engaging with Georges Bataille’s conception of “base materialism,” I propose that Blake’s fusion of imagery and text is artistically heterogeneous, intensifying the presence of the material to disclose the fact that theodicean idealization is dependent on and even outperformed by the “base matter.” With radical materiality, Blake’s Job designs convey that human beings can will their moral actions based on the intrinsic qualities of such actions—“the use-value of uselessness”—rather than dictated by the exchange value that points to external ends. Also, religious experience consists of materialistic exploration, manipulation, and consumption of the body, challenging the conventional understanding of religion as inherently spiritual and idealistic.
KEYWORDS: William Blake, The Book of Job, materialism, Georges Bataille
Kang-Po Chen, Associate Professor, Department of English, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan (kpchen@ntut.edu.tw).
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202606_19(2).0005
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