Transformation:
What Immortal
Hand or Eye?
Engraving in the eighteenth century was the handmaid of oil painting.
Engravers were commissioned to transpose the oil paintings of masters into
engravings to be printed in books. Since engravings can be pressed out one
after the other with minimal discrepancies between each printing,
engraving became a sign of the mass production of images. Blake breaks with
the use of engravings as merely mass production of a transposed oil
painting. He uses
engraving as an art form in and of itself, rather than have it at the service of
oil painting and book printing. What Immortal Hand or Eye?
Additionally, rather than use engraving for standardized, mass produced images, Blake's method of printing caused "imperfections" or variations in each impression of a plate. These imperfections serve as part of the uniquness of each plate. In "The Tyger" the striping of the tyger changes from plate to plate. One can read this striping as a marking of sin or imperfection. "Stripping" is found throughout the Songs of Innocence and Experience, from "And I made a rural pen/ And I stain'd the water clear" to "And mark in every face I meet,/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe" ("Introduction to Songs of Innocence" and "London"). There is a felix culpa claim made here in that imperfection, and even sin, produces a creative individuality.
The marks or stripes of the tyger in the plate can also be found on the tree next to the tyger. In almost every plate of "The Tyger" Blake renders the stripes at the base of the tree the same color and shape as the stripes of the tyger. The stripes move from the tyger to the tree. Furthermore, the branches at the top of the plate stripe the verbal text of the poem. And finally, the cryptic "y" of "tyger" marks or stripes the word differently from the standardized spelling, "tiger." The "y" of "tyger" serves as a mark of difference. (The use of "y" also highlights other key words with "y": thy, eye, and symmetry.) By deviating from standardization, the textual figure (word and image) is marked as different from a habitual rendering of the figure. This difference is the place of fragmentation and transformation.
In our transformation, the viewer's eyes see the visual difference made by Blake's hands, as well as the variant verbal texts in a state of becoming . The verbal portion of the transformation mutates between Erdman's edition, the Norton Anthology's standardized version, and early drafts of the poem from Blake's notebook. The visual portion reflects Blake's aversion to stablizing meaning (notice, for instance, the changing expressions and coloring of the tyger). The mass of verbal and visual differences and transformations at work in any series of Blake's plates provokes the question:
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
