Blake's work is, in W.J.T. Mitchell's designation, a "composite art:" it fuses text and image. Since Jean Hagstrum's William Blake: Poet and Painter (1964), the distinctive textuality of Blake's work has received substantial critical attention, best exampled by Mitchell's own Blake's Composite Art (1978), Nelson Hilton's Literal Imagination (1983), and more recently, John B. Pierce's The Wond'rous Art: William Blake and Writing (2003). These studies examine Blake's treatment of text as a visual medium in relation to more generally imagistic forms of visuality, such as illustration. The fusion of text and image in Blake's work occurs through a number of techniques and takes several different affective forms, including the appearance of “pictorial signifiers in the midst of alphabetic ones, with the inevitable effect of inducing the eye to pictorialize the rest of a plate@De Luca 231-2.

De Luca, V.A. “A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text.” Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986. 218-241..” The pictorialized text is not reducible to a separable allographic module that could be extracted through transcription. In addition, much of the text itself cannot be represented through conventional typography, particularly when the lexical string of Blake's writing intertwines with its surrounding illustrations.

The presence of illustration, however, does not necessarily imply that the visual elements of the work uniformly support or enhance the meaning of the linguistic elements. If this were the case, a transcription might differ from a facsimile only in its medium of signification, while maintaining the same general meaning. Instead, the Blakean text-image is far more problematic. Harold Bloom, as part of his justification for entirely ignoring the illustrations in Blake's Apocalypse, notes that in his experience, “the poems are usually quite independent of their illustrations@Bloom 9.

Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1963..” This is, of course, true – the text does not depend on the illustrations in order to achieve meaning, because the illustrations in fact, as Nicholas M. Williams suggests, “frequently serve as counterpoint to the verbal text, or set out in directions unanticipated by the words on the page@Williams 3.

Williams, Nicholas M. “Introduction: Understanding Blake.” Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Ed. Nicholas M. Williams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006..” The illustrations, then, do not uniformly assist interpretation, but rather they work to complicate and challenge the meaning of the text. Additionally, we initially encounter each plate as a unified gestalt, such that “the attention of the reader is diverted from a sequential pursuit of words and lines to a visual contemplation of the whole block of text as a single unit, a panel@De Luca 232.

De Luca, V.A. “A Wall of Words: The Sublime as Text.” Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986. 218-241.."

The text of Blake's late work tends toward visual density, and at times becomes barely legible, requiring active perceptual effort to make the material inscription into signifying units of language@De Luca points out some notoriously dense plates from Jerusalem, but as Erdman notes, Milton “contains nearly as many words per page,” even though it was composed on plates half the size (Erdman 806).. In some of these instances, the eye more easily navigates the text from top to bottom rather than left to right, as in the lower half of the figure at right, beginning at the second word of each line and moving down, we can make out the string “of a Globe / Microscope / ratio of the / every Space / visionary and / every Space / Eternity of / red Globule / measure Time...@Milton 29:16-24, E12.

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1982..” This sequence, produced by the particular materiality of the text, provides a thematic background for the conventional left-to-right reading. And in my view, illuminated printing authorizes this possibility even if its relationship to Blake's specific intentions cannot be estalbished.

Johanna Drucker describes “a visuality of language which is not imagistic, but specific to the quality of written language itself@Drucker 109.

Drucker, Johanna. Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New York, NY: Granary Press, 1998.;” I take this visuality to be intimately bound to the signifying properties of text. At times, text can become perceptually transparent or peripheral to the linguistic sense it carries, particularly in standardized typography. For Drucker, the texture of text is somewhat ineffable: it is “[n]ot an inherency, but an actuality, tangible, perceptible, specific, and untranslatable, understood and grasped as effect@Drucker 109.

Drucker, Johanna. Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics. New York, NY: Granary Press, 1998.”. Blake’s art plays on this quality of visual text by displacing the temporal, perceptual, and aesthetic primacy of lexical signification. In the process, the text of the illuminated books works more like visual imagery, presenting language in a form that must be experienced first in material and sensual terms before it can become the referential language of reading. This deferral of linguistic meaning participates in the fundamental argument of Blake’s art, which as Pierce suggests, grounds truth not in “the signified content of the media but the manner of interpretation and the ‘raising’ or enlarging of perception;" it follows that, for Blake, "graphic representation thus partakes of truth in as much as it is a conduit of truth@Pierce 64.

Pierce, John B. The Wond'rous Art: William Blake and Writing. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003.”.

While many scholars maintain that context and presentation heavily inform, constrain, or determine the interpretive possibilities of text, the conceptual distinction between text and material form applies differently to Blake's art, because there is no text to speak of (or read) outside of its presentation in the illuminated books. The notion of a material context - a form of presentation external to the work itself that influences its meaning - fundamentally assumes that the text is directly influenced by non-authorial agents. Context is by definition marginal to text, and we might risk elaboration: context is sometimes considered non-authoritative, inessential, peripheral to meaning.

In Blake's work, however, the book is the context, and the book is all his, which is to say that none of it is peripheral and all of it is authoritative. The material book, then, cannot be interpreted as a context for his work, because it is his work. A conventional text contains elements incidental to meaning, residing in its material periphery. In Blake's art there is no material periphery, as the literal margins of the book are often central to its signification. However, we can, and we inevitably do, make distinctions between elements we assume Blake intended to be relatively codified and determinate in meaning (his words, and in a different mode, illustrations), and elements he intended to produce a more general affect (layout, certain marginal designs, color). Such distinctions are essential to analysis, and they structure this very argument. The important point is that in Blake's art, we experience these elements in unity, and our understanding requires us to forcibly separate this unity. Terms like text and image give us ways to talk about Blake's books, but the books themselves challenge conceptual differentiation.