Global Blake: In Conversation with Wiliam Rubel - 'A Fly like Thee'
Blake’s “The Fly” presents us with the absurd implications of the optics of finitude. Cut off from infinite sympathies by his epistemic stance, “The Fly’s” empiricist speaker cannot help but reduce himself to the humming chaos of non-life or of inert matter. For him, human life and insect life become equivalent, a mindless buzz. Akin to the other voices of the Songs of Experience, his is the voice of a circumscribed modern agent who, having negligently killed a fly, is thinking through its moral and existential implications. “The Fly” can be read as a more concise and sophisticated version of There Is No Natural Religion, offering the same parody of the violent absurdity of Lockean epistemology but in ways that dramatise rather than criticise the spectral and discursive “I.”
Among the Songs of Experience, “The Fly” has generated a variety of critical readings relevant to current debates about Blake in relation to ecophilosophy. In his recent reading, for instance, Timothy Morton notes how “The Fly” enacts the “blind laundry-folding hands of logic, reducing personhood to mechanism” (Hell, 205). Morton explicitly relates the poem to the logic of colonialism and violence of modern reductionism. “The Fly” has also struck a nerve among musicians, inspiring many classical settings, but none so apt or so marvellous as Esperanza Spalding’s jazz rendition, “Little Fly” (2010). Jazz strikes me as the perfect medium to question the notion of an “I” (endowed with properties and limited to an identity) and to play with the poem’s subversion of the darkness (isolated location) it enacts. To further unpack why this apparently minor poem speaks to us so strongly, I will contrast it with Emily Dickinson’s equally jazzy “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - ”, which uses a similar kind of counter-epistemological humour to poke fun at the “I” and affirm nonlocal intelligence.