William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science. - Review - book reviews

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.

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.

Peterfreund's essays offer a wide-ranging and learned discussion of important topics, but they never cohere as a book, as a sustained, capably developed meditation on Blake's relationship to eighteenth-century science and culture. The author has added a preface and introduction, but all of the major chapters have been reprinted, two from as long ago as the early 1980s. No effort, as far as I can tell, has been made to refashion the essays into a more cohesive sequence or provide clarifying transitions between chapters. On the contrary, each essay begins anew, with the result that there is overlap and repetition, but no development. It is the patient reader indeed who will leave this work without feeling that the author has neglected "the builder's task" of supplying a sturdy framework for his ambitious design. A myriad proofreading errors (at least two dozen), the absence of a bibliography, and the fact that key terms like "transferential," "immanentist," and "ideology" are not fully defined until the later chapters only increases the reader's burden.

Of greater concern, perhaps, is the explicit identification with and endorsement of Blake's perspective, especially in a collection that is so careful to warn against the totalizing claims of scientific rhetoric. Rather than enacting a genuine conversation--as Glausser attempts to do--Peterfreund establishes a binary that privileges the "intuitive rightness" (48) of Blake's philosophy over the benighted materialist project of Newton. Again and again, the "immanent, immaterial principle" (56) of Blake's writings triumphs over the deluded materialism of Newton, whose world is a "heavy" mess of matter, motion, and force and whose theories and language are never adequately examined or complicated. The prevalence of references to the Bible--from Genesis, the Gospels, and Paul especially--far outweighs the discussions of science (which, in any case, is figured only in terms of its rhetorical dimension) and indicates the author's own spiritualist proclivities.

In Locke and Blake, Glausser tries to be more fair-minded, examining his subjects "with equal attention and critical distance" (x). To do so he dispenses with the standard critical essay format and creates an eclectic critical biography organized by specific cultural topics. A series of "correspondences" or "convergences" in the lives of his subjects allows Glausser to bring the two together in unexpected ways. For example, both men had run-ins with bishops and with the law (Blake was brought to trial for sedition; Locke's name was included on a 1685 list of seditious radicals); both sought alternatives to ordinary marriage; both had complex and ambivalent responses to the slave trade; both quarreled over "stolen" pictures; and both composed epitaphs that lamented the meaninglessness of earthly life. The biographical parallels are sometimes thin, however, and Glausser is on safer ground when he widens the discussion to include overlapping topics, such as medicine, property, and printing.

Chapters 4 and 7, on slavery and printing, are the strongest and most compellingly argued of the book. Chapter 4 examines both men's ambivalence toward slavery. Locke is clearly the more complex and difficult case, and Glausser sets forth the circumstances surrounding his involvement in the slave trade with admirable clarity. After summarizing scholarly interpretations of Locke's personal and theoretical associations with slavery, Glausser concludes that "Locke the opponent of slavery cannot entirely suppress Locke the Landgrave" and that because of the "many confusions of theory and practice" (70) Locke cannot avoid writing "himself into the histories of both slavery and abolition" (75).

Blake was more demonstrably abolitionist, but Glausser nonetheless describes "some fault lines" (76) running through his antislavery texts and images. The first appears in his collaboration with John Stedman in engraving designs for Stedman's Narrative of an Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. On the surface an antislavery text, Stedman's narrative in fact ends up defending an "enlightened" type of slavery practiced by humane owners (77) and "implies a theory of white skin as primary" (79). Although, as Glausser admits, "it is difficult to distinguish [the engraver's] authorship within a collaborative text" (81), Blake is all but convicted of guilt by association. In his own work, Blake's imagery is seen to participate in his culture's "pejorative figuration of black" (83), most notoriously in a troubling parenthetical reference that appears in "Song of Liberty": "O African! Black African! (go winged thought widen his forehead)". In "The Little Black Boy" as well, Glausser finds that the poem's narrator "is actually enslaved by the universalist transcendence designed to liberate him" (91). If there is a tendency here to regret the fact that Blake was not as modern or liberal-minded "as one might have hoped" (91), in other words not as sensitive to these issues as we are, there is also a welcome attention to the nuances of Blake's specific language and the iconography of his images.

In Chapter 7, "Printing," Glausser explores the substantive ways in which "print consciousness", (141) influenced his subjects' dominant ideas. While Locke immerses himself in print culture--and becomes so affected by it that he uses print as a constitutive metaphor in defining the operations of the mind--Blake revolts against it, both in explicit thematic arguments and in his use of expressive media (illuminated printing). In itself this is not a startlingly new idea, but Glausser goes on to uncover "shadowy subplots" (156) within both authors' thinking about print which work against their surface claims. For the rationalist Locke this involves a suspicion in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that imprinted images are "idols, somehow deficient in spiritual content" and a nostalgic desire "for inspiration" (153). More interesting still are a number of biblical echoes in the Essay's argument, echoes that show that "Locke's printed ideas occasionally fall into association with shadows, eidola, idols and may call up just the faintest shudder of spiritual death" (156). For the visionary Blake, the counterplot turns on "the danger of excessive spirituality" (157), a claim that is teased out in a tantalizingly brief close reading of "The Crystal Cabinet." Here Glausser uncovers Blake's reservations about imagination and enthusiasm, his need to limit or restrain the voice of private inspiration.

A note at the end of Locke and Blake informs us that the author has received several awards for teaching and was chosen "Indiana Professor of the Year" in 1990. This no doubt accounts for the book's lucid exposition, its clear presentation and summary of arguments, and its jargon-free prose. If its claims are not always earth-shatteringly original, they have the virtue of being presented concisely and accessibly Any reasonably intelligent undergraduate would have little trouble negotiating the pages of this book, some of which are also highly entertaining (see, for example, Locke's forays into medicine, his interest in Lycanthropy, and his fortuitous operation on Lord Ashley Cooper [43-53]). In my mind this clarity enhances rather than diminishes the value of Glausser's achievement, though it cannot compensate for the book's lack of illustrations, a sin in any study of Blake and a serious shortcoming in the slavery chapter, where several designs are searchingly analyzed but remain unavailable for our immediate inspection.

Other weaknesses include a tendency to mix the personal with the published views of the authors (overstressed in Glausser's speculations about Blake's credibility in the Scofield affair) and the book's somewhat outdated bibliography A reckoning with two important new studies of Locke, Barbara Arneil's John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996) and Nicholas Wolterstorff's John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge, 1996) might have strengthened the book's assertions. Chapter 4 especially would have benefited from New Historicist work on the slave trade and recent essays by critics like Alan Richardson and Anthony Harding on "The Little Black Boy" In the main, though, Glausser's study offers a useful corrective to the rote polarizing of Locke and Blake to which we have become accustomed, placing the authors in fruitful dialogue, and staking a convincing claim that they belong together in the long eighteenth century. Although at times uneven in presentation, both books will be welcomed by Blake scholars looking to situate the poet more firmly in his own time.

Grant Scott

Muhlenberg College

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