Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake by Angela Esterhammer (review)

HUMANITIES 335 some detail in relation to all six plays, and it is also profitably measured against Jonson's somewhat contradictory desire to claim an elite, recondite status for his own drama. William Slights's study of the six middle plays of BenJonson is informed by a brilliant central idea - that 'the form, ideology, and interpretation of these plays are interdependent within the discourse of secrecy.' While I would have liked to see a fuller historical contextualization of Jonson's drama - a more detailed picture of the early modem'discourse of secrecy' - I nevertheless welcome this book. Without ever becoming a single-note thesis, Ben Jonson and the Art ofSecrecy elaborates a valuable insight into the relationship between the formal characteristics and the social conditions of production of jonson's most important plays. Beyond that, it provides a series of mature, sophisticated analyses which consider Jonsonian drama as both cultural artifact and literary art, and which explore as well the linkages between artifact and art 'within the discourse of secrecy.' (PAUL YACHNIN) Angela Esterhammer. Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language ofJohn Milton and William Blake University of Toronto Press 1994. xviii, 246. $45.00 Creating States is not simply an application of speech-act theory to the works of Milton and Blake. Instead, Angela Esterhammer tries to establish a reciprocal relation between theoretical and/visionary' discourses, and in the process she brings us to new perspectives on both. She argues that the visionary quality of Milton's and Blake's writings consists in the vehement performativity of their language: Milton portrays with firm conviction the speech acts of God creating the lUliverse, and Blake aspires to create a new world in the act of writing. Language is considered here as an instrument of creation rather than a vehicle of representation, and the creativity of visionary language is placed in an explicitly Christian context. It would be interesting to consider whether this kind of pefformativity could be found in the visiona~y writings of other traditions which do not make such a close connection between the origins of word and world. As it is, Esterhammer finds ample evidence in the Genesis 'P' text and the gospels ofJolm to posit the existence of a sub-genre of Christian literature that is more actively creative than it is mimetic. Esterhammer argues that these writings contain a particular kind of performative that has not received sufficient attention from speech-act theorists. Writers such as Austin and Searle have focused on the context of the speech act as a way of defining its performative force, but Esterhammer 336 LETTERS IN CANADA 1995 suggests that the authority of the visionary text is not derived from the social position of the writer but instead from an Wlsubstantiable claim of transcendental or mystical certainty. She makes a distinction between two kinds of performative language: the sociological, which derives its legitimacy from social conventions; and the phenomenological, which claims authority on the basis of the writer's inner experience. The phenomenological performative in a sense gives birth to itself - it cites its own inviolable origin as a guarantee of its illocutionary value. It is also, therefore, blatantly logocentric, hut this is not necessarily a drawback. In fact it allows Esterhammer to point out the imbalancein speech-acttheories which have oftenbeenso concerned with contextualization that they ignore the intentional nature of the act itself. The distinction between sociological and phenomenological performatives is useful at a general level, but it begins to disintegrate almost immediately as Esterhammer proceeds to demonstrate how the two are interrelated. By showing the ways in which Milton and Blake cite biblical texts to generate the phenomenological authority of their assertions, she admits that there are many traces of the sociological within them. Citation is an appeal to literary conventions, not an assertion of autonomous creativity. None of the visionary creation in Milton and Blake is strictly speaking ex nihilo,because the social arrangement oflanguage precedes the act of writing. Of course, Esterhammer is well aware of this. Though her initial categorizationis somewhat misleading, her subsequent investigation shows that she does not shrink from the complexities that her theory raises. It would perhaps have been more...