| William Blake (1757-1827) is referred as the most extraordinary artist of Britain. He is well known of multiple identities:Poet, Artist and Philosopher. During his life, he has created an artistic world, which integrates religion, mythology, philosophy, poetry and painting together, and his oeuvre crosses those discipline boundaries.Jerusalem:The Emanation of Giant Albion embodies the highly artistic achievement of William Blake. In this long prophet poem, he has used multiple meaning symbols to represent the history and development of Human Being, as well as the psychology of the individual in a panoramic way. He has used his unique creative method—"illuminated book" which has interwoven poems and paintings together. In this work, poetry and painting are in complete harmony, while they break through its own boundaries—the text becomes the visual-text, and the image becomes the narrative-vision. The bridge between them is the open symbolic system behind Blake’s artistic creation, which is also the key to understand his work.This essay is an attempt at a method. It tries to analyze this trans-boundary work with inter-disciplinary approach. Firstly, it uses the analysis tools of narratology to comb the characters and the events, to reveal the multiple meaning underlying the symbols of text and image, anatomizing the visual sources, traditional prototypes, and myths etc. By doing this, it offers a panoramic view of William Blake’s symbolic system. On this basis, it approaches Jerusalem itself, tracing back to the historical tradition of this special expression, then moves on to conclude the three function of the text and their impact to the meaning. Finally, it comes back to the specific pages, tentatively explores the framework and the strategies of narration. |
