Life’s "Lines Of Flight"

In spite of the fact that William Blake lived in an age and country different from that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s methodology of schizoanalysis can still be an efficacious approach to the postmodern features of Blake’s thoughts on desire, becoming, and his inclination to lines of flight.Although Blake is conventionally renowned as a romantic poet, his thoughts do not only exhibit the features of his time, but also implicate the properties of the postmodern, which renders him an important literary figure bridging romanticism and postmodernism. Academic researches on him have amassed for no less than two centuries, initiated with combing through his works and biographies, recommenced when modernist theories excavated significances from his works, revitalized with postmodern perspectives taking over the momentum. Standing on the shoulders of the giants in the field, the new generation Blakean scholars are gradually turning to the "differance" and "differentiation" features in his works, modifying and subverting the extant research conclusions, even raising brand-new, more time-fitting interpretations and conclusions, so to fuel the already prosperous vitality of Blakean research.Among the applied postmodern perspectives, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis is currently a most activated theoretical instrument, whose frequency is rising, and range ever expanding. This dissertation is to set schizoanalysis’s three core concepts——desire, becoming, and lines of flight——as the theoretical base for an extended interpretation and analysis of Blake’s Tiriel, The Four Zoas, Milton:A Poem and Jerusalem, along with related shorter poems and engraving works. Based on the extant researches, this dissertation is an attempt to concentrate on the other dimensions from a contemporary critical perspective, discovering the open features of "becoming-other" and cooperation with the other in Blake’s thoughts, aiming at enriching and deepening understanding of Blake’s philosophical system. It is an effort to negotiate with the international Blakean research.The three chapters of this dissertation follow the sequential issues on desire, becoming and lines of flight. The first chapter is an extended discussion of Blake’s view on desire, the impacts of such a view on his composition and its representation in particular works. Deleuze and Guatarri’s pivotal concept desire is applied as instrument to disclose Blake’s multi-faceted desire and its formative process. It is to be concluded that Blake holds a positive view on desire as an immanent energy, the non-diminishing drive for innovation and production; that Blake confirms to wield desire as an instrument and weapon to bring forth a set of politics of desire with overwhelmingly subversive power, all to the purpose of "breaking down" and "breaking through" the psychological entrapments of the capitalist oedipalisation, so as to release desire’s true creativity and revolutionary power by justifying its nature.Chapter two focuses on how Blake, under the catalyzing effect of desire, displays the potential becoming ideas in his poetry and artistic works. Following the lead of Deleuze’s becoming theory with typical features of postmodern philosophy, this chapter develops from becoming-woman, to becoming-child and becoming-animal, exposing their traces in Blake’s poetic art. It is concluded that Blake does use the discourse and technique of becoming in his works to form a series of unidentifiable fields, obliterating the distinction between Man, woman, child and animal so to weaponize it for resisting the violence of marginalization and otherization, envisioning the possibilities of new life and even new people.The last chapter shifts on to Blake’s lines of flight activities on scales of nation, religion and culture, which could be deemed as the expanded scope of his becoming thoughts. This chapter critically rediscovers the situations of communication between the west and the east, finding that the east had been orientalized as the other to the west in Blake’s time, but Blake does not regard the orient as such. He does not only know the east, China in particular, but also borrows a typical oriental symbol "mandala" as the key to unlock his systematic thoughts, the fact of which corroborates that Blake follows his mind’s lines of flight to deterritorialize the already oedipalized western culture. What Blake holds close to his heart is an ever opening and tolerating stance for different cultures, together with a healthy mind to embrace the idea of "becoming-other", move toward the other, and join force with the other.As a conclusion, this dissertation argues that Blake is among the few geniuses whom Deleuze appreciates as keeping "between" and "nomadic"; that he sings of the positive effects of desire, employs becoming and lines of flight to break through the limits of "Man", nation, society and civilization by casting off the "either...or" logic; and that with the assistance of the three core concepts of schizoanalysis, Blake’s thoughts are invigorated with the dynamism of the new age.