The Blake Archive

As far as the attack on the Blake Archive, I will refrain from delving too deeply into it. It seems like the Archive's editors have thoroughly rebutted Cooper and Simpson's insinuations with a grace and a tactfultness that might have eluded some of my fellow bloggers. I shall just say that certainly the same "tyrannical" or "Urizenic" quality, which C & S detect in the WBA, can be easily ascribed, by the authors' same parameters, to the institutions cutting their checks or publishing their essays. I too cannot help but find Simpson and Cooper's claims grounded in a counter-productive utopia, and to be misguidedly nebulous and unjustifyably mean-spirited.

For my part, after spending a few hours exploring the Archive, I am positively blown away by its depth, thoroughness, and manageability. I found no problem in locating anything Blakeian I could think of, and was impressed in a very positive way by finally experiencing in practice that comunion of documentary and critical editions we've discussed so much in theory. I also thought that the search engine for the images was extraordinary--again, I am no authority, and Google might be working on something even more intuitive/sophisticated, but I personally had never seen anything like it, and found Cooper and Simpson's complaints incomprehensible if not downright ridiculous (I believe they revealed not only, as Will noted, a complete extraneity to the nuances of the digital medium, but a poor grasp of Kant as well) . On the negative side, I was a bit disappointed by finding that the image search does not cover the Divine Comedy illustrations. Regarding these, I enjoyed viewing them in the dazzlingly high definition advertised in class, but am having problems visualizing the reproduction to scale. On my laptop, when the image is allegedly at 100% scale, it in fact measures (on my screen) no more than 7 x 5 inches (whereas the originals are about 52 x 37 cm). Aside from the Archive's general introduction to the whole series, I also could not find any external scholarly commentary to the Comedy illustrations (either in its entirety or focusing on single pieces), but this seems to reflect the overall paucity of existing material to this effect (and that's where I come in, right? ).

In sum --although, would I really say anything different within this particular seminar?-- I found the Blake Archive far superior to its Rossettian "cousin", both in terms of its scholarly thoroughness and of its organization/user-friendliness. The only area where perhaps the Rossetti Archive has an edge, from what I could assess, is its exterior graphic/visual layout (its bigger fonts are a little easier to read, and the overall appearance of the page, including that mysterious window/fresco, is a little easier on the eye). I understand that this is a completely secondary concern; in fact, a more "hip" appearance might even be viewed as undermining the project's serious, academia-driven ambitions. However, I agree with Kroeber when he argues that tools like the WBA can play a significant role in fostering a fascination (naive, perhaps) with a particular artist or subject in highschool students, for whom a crisper, more appealing layout might be a stimulus to read on rather than a turn-off. Some of these teenagers may become Blake scholars, and may even one day contribute to the Archive's improvement/survival. Again, I am echoing Kroeber when I say that the success of similar projects is largely contingent upon 1) the "saintly" nature of a few good men and 2) the availability of necessary funds. I cannot imagine a more soothing appearance to be anything but beneficial in creating both of these required pre-conditions. And I seriously doubt that a touch of glamour-factor could really scare away the boring, bearded academics; afterall, if the British Encyclopedia came in a fluorescent tie-die box, it would still be the British Encyclopaedia (and would it sell more copies or less?). Besides, wasn't visual presentation such a key element in Blake's poetics, to the point that it ceased to be "presentation"?