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

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Grant Scott

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.