Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 21:10:46 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re:  Dumain, Blake, Marx


I can't find the time to thank all those who have posted me
privately and publicly and provided references for future reading
as well as supportive remarks.  This will have to serve as one
collective thank you.

I am just about out of time for lengthy posts for awhile, though I
would like to write more about Blake and science, issues of
systematic interpretation, as well as follow up on unfinished
business from previous arguments.

I split my sides over Hugh Walthall's phone calls from Blake, so I
thought out a few and sat down and wrote out one of my own, which
is hysterically funny but might be too sexually explicit for this
list.

Some follow-up to Vic Paananen.  I need to correspond with you
personally about Jack Lindsay, but I just wanted to point out a
few things for a public audience.  I did indeed read that article
you cite.  I was surprised to find an article on Lindsay in
NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT just after I complained on another
list that Jack Lindsay seemed to be completely unknown in the USA.
(I have only three of his hundreds of books and I can't find his
stuff in used book stores.)  However, I did some reading up on him
at the Library of Congress a few months ago, particularly a
festschrift I think was called CULTURE AND HISTORY.  If memory
serves, Lindsay got all of his dialectical thinking from Blake and
possibly one or two other poets, and he worked out his methods
long before he studied Hegel and Marx.  He was already a public
literary figure in the 1920s, and his first book on Blake is cited
in Wicksteed's introduction.  With the crisis of the 1930s he
turned to Marxism.  His own stubbornly idiosyncratic and
independent brand of Marxism seems to be common (am I wrong?)
among people in the Commonwealth anglophone countries raised on
literature, such as the Australian Lindsay, the Englishmen E.P.
Thompson and Christopher Caudwell, and the Trinidadian C.L.R.
James.  Frankly, I prefer this heritage, if it can be called that,
to the loathsome stuff that has come out of France in the past
half-century.

This is not the appropriate occasion to discuss Marx's
"post-theism" in detail.  Though indeed Marx was an atheist, he
declines to adhere to that label in the 1844 manuscripts, since he
thinks he has gone beyond the concerns of "Atheism".  To
understand this, however, one has to know some of the history of
the Young Hegelians, especially Bruno Bauer.  There is something
in Marx's method of this time period which is very fruitful for
the kind of studies I have been outlining in my posts, though in
fact the development of my approach antedated a serious study of
the young Marx and was more motivated by my study of James.

What an exhilarating and exhausting week this has been!


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