Nelson Hilton reviews Reading William Blake

Saree Makdisi. Reading William Blake. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 137 pp.

25 May 2016

“Neither a guide nor a companion,” Reading William Blake shrinks insights of the author’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s to a “set of discussions” for beginning students that might better be considered as a prolegomenon to its designated concern (pp. 2, 5).

Seven single-word nodes organize for the student variously- and multiply-characterized “most important concepts,” “most important principles driving Blake’s work,” “themes,” “notions,” or objects of “the question of”: “Image,” “Text,” “Desire,” “Joy” “Power,” “Time,” and “Making” (pp. 5, 3, 95, 112, 95, 112, 77, 82, 95). Like its characterization of William Blake’s illuminated books, these brief chapters themselves present “a network of shared, reiterated elements (including recycled images, concepts, even whole lines of text)” (pp. 69–70) that resists review in “smooth linear time” (p. 27).

Reflecting “the increasing availability of high-quality facsimiles and reproductions of the illuminated books—especially the online Blake Archive—which has completely transformed the way Blake is now read, studied, and taught” (p. 17), this current pedagogy highlights the “material nature of Blake’s books and the printing method he used to produce them” (p. 8). Its approach to “the meaning and significance of his work” (p. 123) emphasizes “the centrality of his critique of industrial and commercial logic to his work” given “the important fact that Blake’s profession—copperplate engraving and printing—was taken to be the very model of the modern industrial assembly line” (p. 99). That logic Blake turned “on its head” (pp. 3, 4, 26, 124) as part of his thoroughgoing “critiques” and “resistances” seen as reviving antinomian “notions of textuality, authority, and the politics of reading . . . central to the theological and political controversies of the seventeenth century from which Blake derived many of his ideas” (p. 29).

“Our restriction into limited units of being . . . is made possible by—it is inseparable from—the process that limits and restricts how we read” (p. 90). Fortunately, readers of Blake benefit from “the particular nature of reading that his books enables and sustains,” and “reading in this method pushes—and indeed enables—us to go beyond the limits of conventional thought” (p. 75). Unfortunately, information regarding “this method” remains tantalizingly vague, save that “the fullest experience of reading Blake comes from reading multiple different copies of the ‘same’ book simultaneously” (p. 21) and that “the text of Blake’s illuminated books can be said to exist . . . in the gap between the verbal and visual components of which the book is immanently constituted” (p. 100).

Each chapter is focused on a reading of one of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (“the ‘gateway drug’ to the world of Blake’s illuminated books” [p. 5]), but extensive instruction in how to read isn’t a goal for a work that hopes “you will quickly develop your own way to read in the spirit of Blake” (p. 6). That said, one pauses over the absence from Reading William Blake of concerns like allusion, polysemic ambiguity, dramatic monologue, bi-stable imagery, ideology, “minute particulars,” or “fourfold vision” that might practically assist such development.