The Wondrous Art: William Blake and Writing by John B. Pierce (review)

Abstract

488 Reviews The book is very handsomely produced and well illustrated (Hogarth's series 'In? dustry and Idleness' is reproduced) but the copy-editing could have been tighter. Several points are repeated in virtually identical terms: we are twice told, within nine pages, that British characterizations of Dutch indolence intensified during Britain's struggle for dominance in South Africa (pp. 138, 146). The writing is marred by several annoying habits, such as the repeated quotation in the text of full titles and subtitles of secondary books that should be in footnotes, and the irritatinglypersis? tent use of the phrase 'I would argue' to introduce not very controversial aspects of argument. The book makes some subtle uses of its assemblage of material, but a less tentative approach might have done more. The dust jacket promises a 'new and lucid theorization of the professionalization of writing' but the book does not really make great strides in this important area. There is an account of Thomson's career and his projection of the cultures of idleness and industry (in The Castle of Indolence), but writers who have much to say about these matters, such as Defoe and Pope, scarcely feature. Women's connections with publishing, recently brought to the fore by Paula McDowell, are totally ignored and women's writing, whether professional or not, only features as a store of images and ideas to be mined and quoted, not as an activity to be studied. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom one might have expected to be discussed in such an account, is not mentioned in the book. The chapter on Johnson has an oddly sentimental, inward-looking focus, considering that he was the great champion of professional writing. Johnson's roots in the book trade and his intense knowledge of its workings do not appear at all; neither does his commentary on in? dustry and idleness in the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which might have afforded material to compare with earlier points about labour and colonization. This remains, however, a wide-ranging and industrious book, a meticulously disciplined storehouse of ideas, images, and arguments about idleness and industry at the historical moment when these concepts became crucial levers of power. University of Liverpool Paul Baines The Wondrous Art: William Blake and Writing. By John B. Pierce. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 188 pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8386-3938-0. John B. Pierce is already the author of a useful study on Blake: Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake's fVala or The Four Zoas* (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1998). This new study, in the shadow of the recent editions of the Illuminated Books under the general editorship of David Bindman (Princeton Uni? versity Press and the William Blake Trust), does more and less. More because it attempts to theorize Blake in relation to Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault, less in being shorter on sustained analysis of the texts (despite its diagrams): even the chapter on The Four Zoas is inconclusive. Pierce is right to stress writing in Blake's text, and to indicate that one target of a deconstructive reading of Blake may be to work on his reception by Frye and scholars working post-Frye; he quotes, aptly, Frye's Fear fui Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 5, that 'all of Blake's poetry, from the shortest lyric to the longest prophecy, must be taken as a unit' (p. 170)?as though it were a single work, comprising a single book. Pierce, of course, in contrast to Frye, works from 'work to text' like Barthes, and anticipates, like Derrida, the end ofthe book. His preface is a handy guide to deconstructive readings of Blake, and he is struck by W. J.T. Mitchell's argument for Blake's 'graphocentrism'?a 'tendency to treat writing and printing as media capable of full speech, not as mere supplements of MLR, 100.2, 2005 489 speech' (p. 28, quoting from'Visible Language: Blake's Wond'rous art of Writing', in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. by Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1986), pp...