Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic by Lorraine Clark (review)

156 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 cultural niche that these writers filled. Nonetheless, Ty's turning to Lacan/Kristeva is suggestive in other ways. For these theorists enable Ty to identify the authority of a mode of intellection and communication which is not abstract reason, a mode of intellection which is just as sophisticated as words/abstractions, but one that is based on image and emotion: forms of consciousness that enable people to think and to communicate in ways that the formal logic of abstraction cannot touch. I am not convinced that Lacan/Kristeva constitute the best means to get at this reality, but they are perhaps the only theoretical resource available at the present thne. Perhaps Ty herself has the power to provide new theoretical resources .in her further work, resources better suited to displaying the riches of the writers she works with so thoughtfully in the present study. (MERVYN NICHOLSON) Lorraine Clark. Blake, Kierkeganrd, and the Spectre of Dialectic Cambridge University Press 1991. 238, $49.95 Lorraine Clark's book on Blake and Kierkegaard is a pleasant surprise. As she herself notes at the outset, it joins a recent wave of 'analogues,' or books on 'Blake-and-a-suprisingly-similar-continental-writer': Blake and Goethe, Blake and Navalis, Blake and Heget Blake and Marx, Blake and Nietzsche, Blake and Freud. But one does not need to read far into Clark's lucid introduction to feel that she has indeed brought forward a compelling parallel that yields far more than a collection of intriguing echoes; the result is, in fact, a fresh perspective on both nineteenthcentury philosophy and postmodern theory. Clark locates her argument not simply between the two poles of Blake and Kierkegaard, but within the entire problematic of post-structuralist criticism and its construction of - and by - Romanticism. 'What Blake and Kierkegaard fundamentally share,' she argues, 'is an eccentric idea of dialectic: Kierkegaard's famous Jleither/or," which stands in fierce opposition to the ''both-and'' logic not only of Hegelian mediation, but of Schlegelian romantic irony and in turn of deconstruction.' Both Blake and Kierkegaard undergo a traumatic personal conversion from systematic 'both-and' dialectic to unsystematic 'either/ or' dialectic. However, this movement is complicated by the fact that 'either/or' represents both a repudiation and an embrace; in other words, it also incorporates 'hothand ' in a 'difficult paradox which constitutes the heart of our difficulties with Blake and Kierkegaard.' In Blake's work, this paradoxical dialectic finds expression in the struggle of Los with the Spectre of Urthona, a struggle that Clark sees as 'the central dynamic' of Blake's major prophecies and the culmination of his various reworkings of the relationship between contraries in earlier texts. HUMANITIES 157 This is a fundamentally sound thesis which accounts satisfyingly for some of the most striking characteristics of Blake's work: his logic of exclusion, his extreme distinctions of truth from error, his insistence on the firm bounding line. It is also fair to Kierkegaard, about whom this book has valuable points to make, despite Clark's own assertion that it 'is written not for Kierkegaardians but for Blake scholars and romanticists.' Certainly Kierkegaard is much more than a point of reference or a source of quotations. One of the strongest aspects of this study is Clark's sensitive reading of both Blake's and Kierkegaard's texts. This sensitivity emerges above all in the attention to detail, the respect for necessary distinctions even within analogies, the ability to grasp subtleties of meaning, and the intelligent incorporation of biographical material such as Bla~e's crisis with William Hayley at Felpham and Kierkegaard's broken engagement with Regina Olsen. In her acknowledgments Clark thanks a person who, like Blake and Kierkegaard, 'often speaks in paradoxes but can always explain them when he pleases.' The same might be said for the author herself. Her formulations of the relationship of Blake to Kierkegaard and of both of them to Hegel, Schlegel, and poststructuralists are often complex to the point of paradox, and in other hands the proliferation of analogues, contraries, parallels, and distinctions traced in this book might become dizzying (e.g., 'this latter move is in fact from a...