Another textual instability within The Book of Thel is the marginal yet prescient figure of
the mole that appears only in the text’s margin, namely, in the Motto, which shifts locations within various copies (copies N and O end with the motto). By rearing its head at various points in the copies, it functions like a mole creating furrows within the text, creating hermeneutic upheaval. 111 The Motto’s mole-like movement not only flags the poem’s incompletion, but heightens its effect of being haunted by a spectral inhuman presence that we never formally encounter within the poem’s internal pantheon of players. Structurally, the Motto consists of two couplets that perplexingly ask after two different epistemologies:
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? (i: 2-5, E3)
111 The Motto has been taken up by critics who place varying degrees of importance on the dis-locations of
the motto. Tilottama Rajan, in The Supplement of Reading, reads the Motto as internally ambiguous, so that its location at either the beginning or end of the text doesn’t settle anything. Richard Sha, in Perverse Romanticism, suggests that the effect of the motto appearing at the onset is nothing short of the silencing of Thel, whereas the existence of the motto at the outset allows for Thel to have the last word; the motto, at the end, is understood as an extension of Thel’s ventriloquist voice. While Sha puts this observation into service of the discourse of sexuality, the two positions of the motto reflecting the positions of innocence and experience, respectively (her ignorance vs knowledge of sexuality and sexual pleasure), we can extend his observations to see them speaking, more generally, to the ungrounded or dislocated quality of the text. See esp. Chapter 5 in Sha’s Perverse Romanticism (2009).
The Motto is internally ambiguous, a feature that further compounds the poem’s
unsettledness; it is, as Tilottama Rajan notes, “the site of a resistance to any attempt to fit it into the system” (Supplement 243). While the riddle-like Motto does not resolve any of the poem’s internal tensions, it does introduce the spectral presence of the mole and with it the figure of a liminal life – an idea that haunts the poem. For Thel’s “strange kinship” with the mole intensifies the extent to which her place in the natural order of things cannot be represented. The mole operates as a distinctive site of knowledge: unlike the eagle who can only know the pit from a distance, the mole has the specificity and particularity of perception.
Blake’s mole also creates intertextual furrows, recalling the vengeful “old mole” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the term Hamlet uses to describe the ghostly voice of Hamlet’s
father coming from the grave: “Well said, old mole. Canst work i’th’earth so fast? / A worthy pioneer!” (I.V.170-1). The restless, hectoring voice of his father’s ghost drives Hamlet’s pursuit of revenge, like the goading voice from the ground in the final lines of
TheBook of Thel.112 For just as Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy insists
on the need to listen to the mole, “to give ear to its urgency – when the mole that is within forces its way on” (553, my emphasis), Blake’s mole calls us to attend to the ways in
112 The provocative voice of Shakespeare’s “old mole” is later taken up in a positive light by Hegel in the
section on “Recent German Philosophy” of Lectures on the History of Philosophy to describe the progress of Spirit: “Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! Canst work i’th’earth so fast? / A worthy pioner!”) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of the earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away” (546-7).
which the inhuman, like Kant’s “differently organized creatures” or Shelley’s Demogorgon, scratches at the root of this text, spurring on intellectual activity. 113
The mole is important for its unique activity of creating underground tunnels, which we might read as an apt metaphor for the deconstructive work of critique – despite the fact that Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason seemingly imagines his critical
philosophy as repairing the damaging mole-like work of metaphysics:
we must occupy ourselves now with a less resplendent yet still meritorious task, namely, we must level the ground and make it firm enough for those majestic edifices of ethicality. For in this ground we find all kinds of mole tunnels which reason has dug in its confident but futile search for treasure and which make such construction precarious. (qtd. in Krell 171)
Yet as we saw in chapter 1 with the disconnect between the intention of Kant’s pragmatic anthropology and its actual tendency towards a general anthropology, there is a gap between the “levelling” that Kant imagines his critical work to be doing and the mole tunnels it (as a critique) actually digs. Similarly for Blake, The Book of Thel not only
contains mole tunnels but creates them within his corpus, since the poem cannot be harmoniously integrated within his larger cosmos. Here, the text’s structural unsettledness, in conjunction with its reference to the mole, contributes to our
understanding of the poem as staging the idea of a life that has no “me” at the center of it.
113 Marx uses the mole as a figure for the Revolution: “In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the
aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognize our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer – the Revolution” (Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper, 1856). For an excellent examination of the mole in the history of philosophy see David Farrell Krell’s essay “The Mole: Philosophic Burrowings in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.”