G. E. Gallas’ graphic novel, The Poet and the Flea, premiered on WordPress on 28 November this year, in honour of William Blake’s 255th birthday. At first an influx of pages were self-published: Cover, Title Page, Letter to Blake, and Pages 1-5. Then the graphic novel turned periodical. A hundred pages are planned with the first thirty dated up until 26 June 2013.[1] Each new page appears on Wednesdays (except in the holidays) on Gallas’ WordPress site. A project of longevity, Gallas has currently published up to page 9. The instalments are easily accessed by following the WordPress site and signing up to email updates. This method reminds the reader of the novel and counteracts the threat that it may be too fragmented to prolong interest. The email encourages the reader to revisit the story each week, and provides a type of delayed gratification not familiarly associated with internet publications. This is interactive reading injected with time, and the reader has to re-evaluate the parts as more are added to the whole. Admittedly then, this medium and method of publishing feels like a wonderful mishmash of past with present; the nineteenth-century periodical adapted and revived through the web. However, one downside is the discontinuity of scrolling on the website. The reader has to reposition the next page after it updates to view it. One is only able to see the full page by clicking on it to open in another browser; the process is not hugely intuitive or fluid.
Gallas introduces her insect theme in pages 1 and 2, by recounting and illustrating the last two stanzas of Blake’s poem, ‘The Fly’, from the Songs of Experience. The poem introduces the idea that ‘thought is life | And strength and breath’, and that the ‘want | Of thought is death’.[2] The novel’s images also echo the contrast between creation and destruction; Biblical illustrations with a gothic edge. Blake draws an angel on page 4, with a likeness to his wife Catherine (Kate), who passes by the door with a basket of apples; forbidden fruit of Eden. Skulls, serpents, and orbs decorate the pages in stark black and white designs. All oppositions are mediated only by grey tones. There is no text on page 6, rather images of workmanship. In one of the sections on this page, Blake and Kate sit companionably with eyes downcast, he in dark contemplations, her in empathy, lush eyelashes resting on her elfin cheek. Here, Blake and Kate are portrayed more attractively than previous likenesses and descriptions suggest. Kate has tousled locks covered in very prettily positioned grime. Gallas’ style, pen and ink with a discernible influence of Manga, sets Blake, to no detriment, as a young Johnny Depp in a romantic and gothic Tim Burton scene.
The novel draws on Blake’s famed visionary incidents. Pages 7 to 9 tell of his first vision when a young boy. The older poet describes to his wife the angels he ‘saw as a boy. A tree filled with angels. Their light, blinding. Their wings bespangling every bough like stars.’[3] Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, appears to be the indirect source here, deducible from Gallas’ ‘Research’ links in her ‘Behind the Scenes’ section. The wording of the incident is near perfect to Gilchrist’s description. As he records, when Blake was ‘eight or ten’, walking along, he ‘looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.’[4] Gallas splits the incident into three pages, and shortens and emphasises the language with added full stops to suit the brevity of, and illustrations on her pages. The light is intensified from ‘bright’ to ‘blinding’, adding illumination to the black and white pages. Gallas also adds colour with words on the next page, as after Blake told his father of his vision, only his ‘mother’s intervention’ stopped him being ‘beaten black and blue.’[5] As Gilchrist first regaled the public: ‘Returned home [Blake] relates the incident, and only through his mother’s intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie.’[6]
Blake’s vision of the Flea is the overarching narrative frame. Only two hints towards the Flea exist so far, as the story builds. On the ‘Cover’ are opposed miniature heads of Blake and the Flea, and secondly, on page 5, the Flea hovers outside a house, number ‘23’, a dark figure in profile. In both instances the Flea is recognisable by the protruding tongue and backward pointing ears of Blake’s ‘Visionary Head’ painting, now in the Tate: ‘The Ghost of a Flea’.[7] Set in 1790 after the death of Blake’s brother Robert, the blurb promises that the Flea will visit the poet, as an ‘ominous creature’ who ‘reveals an invested interest in William’s spiritual well-being’. An ‘unorthodox wager’ will occur between the two and Blake may or may not ‘triumph’ over the insect’s ‘sinister meddling’ and threat of ‘corruption’.[8] Here, there is a more substantial, spiritual and sinister impact on Blake than the original anecdote holds. The original report regaled by Gilchrist stems from John Varley’s A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), which is quoted by Southey. Blake had a vision of the Flea, who visited him ‘in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect.’ At Varley’s request the poet drew the insect, and as he did so the Flea told him that ‘all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess’. They were ‘confined to the size and form of insects’ as if any larger, their appetites would ‘depopulate a great portion of the country.’[9] On page 5 of the novel the profile of the Flea is followed, in a centre section, by a pair of detached, veined eyes, peering out of the dark insomuch as if they are on stalks. In the next caption an unknown figure either lies or walks on a cobbled street, next to a torn flyer warning of the ‘London Monster’, the flyer repeated larger in the foreground of the page. So far, and judging by her Wikipedia sources on the website, the images suggest that Gallas has drawn on the Flea’s mix of human soul and animalistic blood-thirsty appetites to associate it with a famed ‘Monster’ of 1788-1790, who attacked women with ‘a signature behaviour of Piquerism, the pricking and/or stabbing of his victims with a knife, pin or needle.’[10] As the story is developing it promises an interesting elaboration of the actual incident.
Gallas presents the novel as ‘a reimagining of the life of the poet-painter William Blake’.[11] Her interest and motivation is explained in a prefatory letter addressed to Blake: the novel will recreate the poet’s life graphically, as ‘a fantastical reimagining of sorts’. Rather than holding any strict basis in ‘solid fact’, Gallas draws inspiration from Blake’s ‘thoughts’ and ‘essence’ as the anchors of her work.[12] This approach therefore enforces Blake’s belief in the importance of the ‘Imagination’ as ‘Spiritual Sensation’.[13] Problems do arise here though. Page 3 sets the scene in London; a bricked in city with smoke-filled skies ‘at the onset of The Industrial Revolution’.[14] The location is illustrated as 23 Hercules Road, Lambeth, and the repeated number on page 5 suggests that the Flea lurks outside Blake’s address. Yet from 1790 to 1800 Blake lived at 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth.[15] Gallas does locate Blake in London and the switch of ‘Buildings’ to ‘Road’ may suggest deliberate reinvention. Alternatively, the number 23 may be amalgamated from 23 Green Street, where Blake lived from 1782 to 1784.[16] Similarly, Blake’s painting of the Flea is dated c. 1819-20 whilst Gallas’ story is set in 1790; a discrepancy possibly explained by the re-imaginary nature of fiction. Granted, to a degree Gallas has repudiated her work and creative process from any historical responsibility, yet the inaccuracies suggest either an accidental or intentional misreading which could misinform the reader. The informal websites used for research, factual slips, partial texts, and rearranged narrative invalidate the resource for educational and academic use, as they may complicate more than aid a student. Introduced with a degree of separation from academia, as an example of Blake’s continuing influence, and on its own terms as a self-published work of fiction, the art, narrative and periodical publication proves compelling.
Gallas does recognize and draw on Blake’s contemporary relevance; he is an innovator, ‘a man before his time’, his work ‘the junction between Dante Alighieri and Allen Ginsberg – a sort of dazzling crossroads between history and modernity’.[17] Here Gallas is well-informed by her sources. Blake illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy, as Denise Vultee et al note, in ‘1824, he commenced a series of 102 watercolor illustrations of Dante, a project cut short by his death in 1827.’[18] The reference to Ginsberg also holds weight, as Joseph P. Natoli records, ‘a relatively short time after Blake became top-grade grist for the scholarly mills, he became also an influential force outside of academe, within a subculture that was finding spokesmen in Allen Ginsberg […].’[19] Odes like Gallas’ prove that Blake’s work is still alive outside the academy, and her provision of links to both informal Wiki sites and academic websites (‘The Blake Society’ and ‘The William Blake Archive’) encourages further exploration of Blake’s work for those with a sparked interest.
Notes
[1] G. E. Gallas, The Poet and the Flea,
[2] Gallas,
[3] Gallas,
[4] Alexander Gilchrist, Gilchrist on Blake: Life of William Blake Pictor Ignotus, ed. and intro. by Richard Holmes (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p. 9.
[5] Gallas,
[6] Gilchrist, p. 9.
[7] Tate Website,
[8] Gallas,
[9] Gilchrist, pp. 273-74.
[10] ‘The London Monster’,
[11] Gallas,
[12] Ibid.,
[13] The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, p. 703.
[14] Gallas, http://thepoetandtheflea.wordpress.com/about/ [accessed 12/01/2013]
[15] G. E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records, 2nd edn. (London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. xiv.
[16] Bentley, p. xii.
[17] Gallas,
[18] Denise Vultee and the Archive Editors, ‘Biography’, in The Blake Archive
[19] Joseph P. Natoli, Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism: Northrop Frye to the Present (London: Garland Publishing, 1982), p. 123.