Blake and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Blake and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a paired study of the poetry of William Blake (1757 to 1827) and Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 novel, which takes its title from Blake and quotes him throughout. The pairing is set for HSC English Advanced Module A: Textual Conversations.

William Blake (1757-1827) wrote and engraved his poetry in London through the revolutionary decades at the end of the eighteenth century. Songs of Innocence and of Experience sets a world of pastoral wonder against a world scarred by poverty, church and law; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its Proverbs of Hell, is a deliberately diabolical scripture that inverts orthodox morality to argue that repression, not desire, is the true evil; and The [First] Book of Urizen mythologises that repression as Urizen, a god of reason, measurement and law who freezes the living world.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018) is a novel by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, narrated by Janina Duszejko, an ageing woman living in a remote village on the Polish-Czech border. Framed as a murder mystery, it is really a philosophical and ecological lament: as local hunters begin to die, Janina insists the animals themselves are taking revenge, and rages against a rural order of hunters, police, priest and officials - until the novel reveals her as the killer.

The pairing is inheritance under pressure. Tokarczuk builds Blake into the bones of her novel - the title is a line from the Proverbs of Hell, his poems head every chapter, and Janina spends the book translating him into Polish - and then tests whether his visionary radicalism can actually be lived by a person in the world.

Tokarczuk inherits Blake's great contrary of Innocence and Experience and makes it ecological. Blake's unanswered question in "The Tyger" - "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" - forces meekness and predatory energy into one creation, and the novel holds the same doubleness in one narrator: Janina's tenderness toward her "Creatures" coexists with lethal wrath.

The beating heart of the pairing is Energy against Reason. Blake crowns the predator as sublime rather than evil - "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night" - and his proverbs rank "The tigers of wrath" above "the horses of instruction", damning repression in the deliberately shocking "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires". Against energy stands Urizen, "A self-contemplating shadow" who "divided, & measur'd / Space by space". Tokarczuk's decisive move is to fuse both sides inside one guilty person: Janina is at once the prophet of Blake's energy and the agent of its wrath, and her calm account of the killings asks whether unbound wrath stays wise once it kills.

Blake's institutional critique is rebuilt in post-communist, Catholic Poland. His epigram "Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion" welds law and religion into one indictment, and the novel compresses the same fusion into a single object: the hunting towers the novel calls pulpits. Father Rustle supplies the theological cover, preaching that animals were placed in man's service - the modern voice of Blake's cursing cleric.

Blake's climactic gospel, "For every thing that lives is Holy", becomes a contemporary ethics of animal rights. Janina treats her animals as family, and her conviction that a country's attitude toward animals reveals its truth sharpens Blake's reverence into a diagnostic test of a whole society - even her capitalised idiolect grants animals the grammatical dignity of proper nouns.

Finally, the novel puts the Blakean prophet on trial. Janina is dismissed as a harmless old woman and a madwoman, yet claims the seer's paradox that her ailments sharpen rather than cloud her sight. The murder-mystery structure withholds its solution until the prophet is revealed as the criminal, so every conviction voiced as prophecy must be re-weighed as self-justification. The title itself - Blake's proverb "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead" - converts exhilarating renewal into the logic of an avenger, and the reader must decide whether that is prophecy fulfilled or prophecy betrayed.