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William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science. - Review - book reviews
Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Grant Scott
William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science by Stuart Peterfreund. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 255; 8 illus. $34.95.
Until quite recently, it was a truth universally acknowledged that Blake--as poet, artist, thinker, and publisher--was a historical anomaly, a visionary whose work transcended the beliefs of his time. Although he is classified as a Romantic poet, his work is notoriously difficult to assimilate with his contemporaries'. And though he lived most of his life in the eighteenth century, his radical poetics could not be more alien to that period's dominant concerns or its prevailing style. Beyond traditional disciplines as well as periods, Blake consciously defied the conventions of his culture, nowhere more so than in the production of his books, which he meticulously engineered one at a time.
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Both works under review set out to challenge this portrait and to situate Blake within the cultural and political context of what Glausser calls "the long eighteenth century" (1660-1830), More importantly, they seek to engage Blake in a series of fruitful conversations with the pressing topics of his day, from slavery to Gnosticism. Even as they differ markedly in style and method of argument, both books attempt to overturn Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence, his emphasis on the charged agon of the Freudian psychodrama. Rather than defeat his interlocutors, as both critics show, Blake means to persuade and ultimately redeem them. As they appear in his work, figures like Locke, Bacon, Milton, and Newton are less bogies to be resisted and vanquished than specters ready for "rehabilitation." Glausser's book is more emphatic in this regard, working against the grain not only by setting Blake and Locke in direct dialogue, but also by searching out points of agreement rather than contention. Glausser endeavors "to discover more complicated patterns of comparison" (ix), a task that leads him to experiment with a new hermeneutic model, what he calls "a composite critical biography" (ix). Although he deploys the more orthodox form of the critical essay, Peterfreund similarly works to implicate Blake in the scientific, religious, and cultural debates of his time. His study examines the extent to which Blake's reaction to his predecessors is "based on an informed understanding of Enlightenment premises in general and Newtonian thought in particular" (xii).
Peterfreund begins his book by defining "situated knowledge"--knowledge that is cognizant of its own ontology, its existence as part of an ongoing historical narrative--which he sets in opposition to a universalizing epistemology he calls "scientific" (4) that insists on "dissituation" (9). Among those rationalists who embrace an ahistorical "knowledge `in itself'" (15) are Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon and, of course, Newton. Included in those thinkers who espouse what Clifford Geertz calls "local knowledge" are Leibniz, Vico, Herder, and Blake, whose "locolalia" (16) or obsession with lists of the actual reveals his belief in the primacy of situated knowledge. Peterfreund argues that above all "what situated knowledge foregrounds and celebrates ... is the deployment of metaphor in the act of invention" (17), a characteristic Blake borrows from the prophetic discourses of Jesus in the Gospels.
The first two chapters examine Blake's response to Newton's Principia, especially in the later prophetic works, where characters like Urizen, Los, and Enitharmon variously adopt and struggle with Newtonian roles. In skillful close readings of passages from Jerusalem and Milton, Peterfreund shows how Blake corrects Newton's model of the universe, replacing the "outward" with the "inward" gaze. The middle chapters analyze Blake's complicated negotiations with the Freemason and Gnostic movements and explore Blake's treatment of charters, weights, and measures as forms of social control. In chapter 3, "Blake, Freemasonry, and the Builder's Task," we learn that "Blake's animosity to some practitioners of Freemasonry does not necessarily imply his rejection of Freemasonry itself" (60), a point driven home in Peterfreund's useful analysis of a number of Blake engravings which borrow visual motifs from Masonic aprons and ornaments. The fourth chapter, "Blake, Priestley, and the `Gnostic Moment'" traces the revival of gnosticism in eighteenth-century England and the importance of this dissenting movement in shaping Priestley's scientific theories as well as Blake's "immanentist metaphysics" (94). Chapter 5, "Blake on Charters, Weights, and Measures," is the most New Historicist of the essays, focusing on the increasing authority of measurement and standardization in the 1790s and the effect of this new dispensation on the language of "London."
The final three chapters outline Blake's critique of Newtonian metonymic logic, Natural Theology, and the ideology of Nature respectively and chart what happens to Blake's language in the new urban landscape ("The Din of the City"). These chapters include a persuasive and original reading of the questions in "The Tyger" as metonymic rather than metaphorical (or rhetorical), as attempts "to mobilize the logic of effectus pro causa to reason back from the tiger as created effect to an understanding of his creative first cause" (127); a discussion of Blake's spiritual ideology, which "ordains a transferential and metaphorical relationship between causal subject and caused object ... maintaining both in a state of(re)constitutive play" (141); and a thoughtful analysis of cacophony in Blake's prophetic books.
