Joyce and Blake

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 JOYCE AND BLAKE Murray McArthur. Stolen Writings: Blake's 'Milton,' Joyce's 'Ulysses,' and the Nature of Influence. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. $44.95 AS THE TITLE of Murray McArthur's rich and thought-provoking new study makes explicit, his work is as centrally concerned with the problematics of influence studies as it is with the parallels between Blake's Milton and Joyce's Ulysses. Influence studies are typically grounded in direct expressions of indebtedness. And Joyce's critical writings have provided McArthur with two lengthy statements on Blake: Joyce's 1902 essay on the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and his 1912 Trieste lecture. These documents reveal how Joyce chose to emphasize those features of Blake's poetic and personality which directly contradicted the mystical dimension that Yeats had earlier reified. Joyce's Blake is saved from the incoherence of the Western mysticists because he "unites keenness of intellect with mystical feeling." For Blake, the fallen "vegetable world" is not left behind in man's flight towards the timeless, but provides the pavement upon which the artist walks through eternity; in Milton, the great bard must throw away Eternal Life and claim the Hell of fallen reality as the furnace of his prophetic art. Blake's "infernal method" of textual production, his obsession with the material appearance of his texts, and his thematic concern with the sign and the written artifact were all meant to correct the false dualism of body and soul. The body can no more be separated from the soul than the written body of language can be separated from speech or the soul of the text. And while the artist may nurture a mystical longing to abolish history 's nightmare of slaughter, every writer eventually has to accept the boundaries of the body, the confines of the physical world; Joyce's reading of Blake rests on the premise that all attempts to soar past these material nets on wings of excess lead inevitably to a "thud against the horizon of body and page" (36). McArthur suggests that Joyce was attracted to Blake's insistence upon the material nature of the text and to Blake's conception of the artist's relationship to the material forces of world history. Joyce refigured Blake in order to define for himself the place of the writer within society and distance himself from the "narrow and hysterical nationality" Joyce saw in Yeats's active political involvement. In Milton, Blake attacks his precursor for the same error of violent political activism; by defending regicide, Müton mistakenly attempts to contest the exclusionary powers of priest and king through a futile 384 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 counter-violence, and so entangles himself in a hopeless cycle of slaughter and martyrdom. McArthur argues that Joyce turned to Blake as a model of the artist who saw the nightmare of history but refused to meet violence with violence; according to Joyce, Blake's strength (and interest) lay in his awareness that "the poet who hurls his anger against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny." In his "spiritual rebellion against the powers of this world," Blake's writing took the place of gunpowder. The social protest of Blake and Joyce, according to McArthur, lies in the self-conscious intertextuality found in the writings. For this argument, McArthur relies on Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque: the carnivalesque discourse, by opening itself up to other competing voices, ridicules and challenges the voice of priest and king, of authority and exclusion, and so becomes a form of social and political protest. McArthur has set himself a task that is crucial for any critic working at the present moment, yet fraught with difficulty—the discovery of a structure that would enable the critic to discuss works in terms of self-reflexivity and intertextuality without rejecting notions of history and referentiality. McArthur finds himself working with texts that lend themselves to Derridean analysis, yet poststructural formalism demands a rejection of history—or, at least, of history as teleological and rationally progressive. As a solution, McArthur turns to Foucault. If the self-reflexive...