I’m pleased to announce that Kathryn Freeman’s review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety has just appeared in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. I would like to thank both BIQ for sending my book out for review and Kathryn Freeman for taking time to review it. Freeman’s highly professional review accurately identifies both my book’s strengths and weaknesses and suggests revisions that I wish I had considered prior to publication (such as relegating my occasional references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to footnotes or developing them further). I would like to address a few of her specific criticisms here, but more for the purposes of clarification than rebuttal.

Freeman’s most significant criticisms are that my study is broad so at times shallow, spends too much time on background information, and is more effective in its treatment of Kierkegaard than of Blake. She understands the book’s central methodological purpose, which she summarizes in this way:

Just as this synthesis of history and subjectivity offers a rethinking of Blake and of Kierkegaard, Rovira’s revision of Derridean deconstruction from the hindsight of new historicism challenges the assumption of mutual exclusion between the two theoretical positions. More relevant for the study itself, this strategy has the potential to prevent the argument from being limited to mere synchronicity.

My study is certainly broad, and I was indeed deliberately attempting to avoid what Freeman calls “mere synchronicity” (I like her phrase). I attempted instead to identify a motivated synchronicity between Blake and Kierkegaard, describing the motivations for this synchronicity in terms of Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s shared cultural, political, and intellectual histories. So my first chapter compares the social and political milieu of Blake’s England to Kierkegaard’s Denmark, while my second and third chapters appeal to the Socratic tradition as shared intellectual context. Chapter two compares each author’s relationship to Plato’s works, and chapter three explains each author’s use of a model of personality arising out of Plato’s dialogs as it was developed throughout the medieval period. My fourth and fifth chapters argue my thesis about Creation Anxiety, which proceeds from a critique of generation present in both authors (chapter four) and then culminates in Blake’s creation myths (chapter five). My historicizing in chapter one reappears in chapter five while the intellectual history provided by chapters two and three lead into chapter four.

I would like to address the first two of Freeman’s three criticisms in terms of my desire to establish a motivated synchronicity between Blake and Kierkegaard and in terms of audience. Literary criticism in general tends to be divided between conceptual and historical approaches; Blake criticism perhaps even more so. My study is one of several recent works about Blake that consciously attempt to bridge this divide. But in order to demonstrate a motivated synchronicity, I had to consider two very different audiences: readers of Blake with perhaps marginal knowledge of Kierkegaard, and readers of Kierkegaard with perhaps no knowledge of Blake.

Problems involved in writing to such a diverse readership are compounded by the inclusion of historical material, as not all those interested in either literature or philosophy are concerned with history, and not all those interested in history are particularly interested in philosophy. My wife, for example, is very interested in British history but very annoyed with philosophy. Michael Phillips, who read and responded to my book shortly before a first draft was sent to the publisher, would probably agree with several of Freeman’s criticisms and generally shares my wife’s disposition toward philosophy. He wanted me to completely separate my material on Blake from my material on Kierkegaard, but I didn’t have the time to engage in that extensive a revision that late in the publication process. On the other hand, my colleague and editor, Sherry Truffin, initially considered majoring in philosophy but was put off by the male-dominated environment predominant in most philosophy departments, was drawn by Blake into the study of literature, and then by Flannery O’Connor into a study of Gothic literature. She has had relatively little interest in history but found my philosophical and literary material engaging.

To cover my possible audience bases, then, I had to review both British and Danish history and Socratic philosophy in ways that both brought my two authors together and then advanced my thesis. The result, I think, is that my book treats some subjects broadly and others in more depth (but which book does not?), and that those most interested in history will find the least original material in my discussions about that subject. My thesis is not about British and Danish history, but about Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s imaginative responses to their respective intellectual, cultural, and social contexts, so historical material is primarily background to my study.

The three historical tensions that serve as the focus of chapter one, tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice, reappear in my final chapter’s review of The [First] Book of Urizen, the only chapter that Freeman did not quote or even reference in her review. So when she describes an “unassimilated quarry of historical material,” I am unsure if she read the whole book carefully. She should have observed that I attempted to assimilate this material in my fifth chapter and then evaluated how well I did so.

However, I remain dissatisfied with my combination of historical and conceptual approaches to literature, so like Freeman I am somewhat unhappy with my own work on that point. At the time, I wanted a synthesis. The result of this dissatisfaction is my next book project, Interpretation: Theory: History, which takes historical approaches to figures important to the development of textual interpretation and to the rise of literary theory. I describe how this project arose out of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety in a December 29th, 2011 blog post entitled “Theorizing History: Historicizing Theory.” In this blog post I explain that I have abandoned any desire for a synthesis between historical and conceptual approaches in favor of maintaining them as Blakean contraries, each in dialog with the other with neither achieving dominance.

I plan to address Freeman’s criticism about the effectiveness of my treatment of Blake in a separate blog post. However, I am not saying at present that her criticism of my book on that point is unfair. I need to review her points and then my book in a bit more depth before I respond to that claim, a response which may take the form of corrections to my book rather than a defense of it. I would like to take the rest of my time here, instead, to respond to a few criticisms tangential to my thesis, responses that are again in the interests of clarification, not necessarily rebuttal.

Freeman takes issue with my claim that Blake’s description of A Vision of the Last Judgment presents “an explicit condemnation of nature” (p. 48 in my text). My claim is embedded within language characterized by qualifications and hesitations, however. I say immediately before making this claim that Blake “at times” “seems to validate Platonic idealism” (p. 48, emphasis added here). I then say it is “very easy” to read Platonic idealism into Blake, which in the context of my earlier qualifications was meant to be read as a warning against simply reading Blake as a Platonic idealist. I then repeat the phrase “seems to” at the beginning of the next paragraph.

So while I did claim that Blake issued an explicit condemnation of nature, I meant to set that claim up for rebuttal later in the chapter by using highly qualified language early on, a rebuttal which Freeman does register. My intent for this section was to acknowledge that Blake’s language does at times entail an explicit rejection of material nature. For example, later in A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake claims, “We are in a World of Generation & death & this world we must cast off if we would be Painters” (Erdman p. 562). Claims such as these are difficult to assimilate to a positive view of nature: my argument is not that Blake completely rejects nature, which he certainly does not elsewhere, but that he rejects a specific phenomenology of nature inspired by Bacon, Newton, and Locke (p. 109).

However, I do not want to deny Blake’s very explicit language of rejection. This topic perhaps needed more discussion in my book and has been in the back of my mind since I first started writing. The question nags, but my ideas remain undeveloped. Blake’s language about nature moves back and forth between the positions of outright rejection and praise. For example, in Jerusalem:

A murderous Providence! A Creation that groans, living on Death.
Where Fish & Bird & Beast & Man & Tree & Metal & Stone
Live by Devouring, going into Eternal Death continually (Erdman p. 199)

which we might compare to:

Where we live, forgetting error, not pondering on evil:
Among my lambs & brooks of water, among my warbling birds:
Where we delight in innocence before the face of the Lamb (Erdman p. 165)

Or we might simply compare “The Lamb” to “The Tyger.” I explain this dichotomy in my book in terms of a dialectic between different phenomenologies, but Blake’s own language of rejection sounds at times intense and personal, raising suspicions about attitudes toward nature perhaps driven by his own grief over his brother Robert’s death — and what do we make of William and Catherine’s childlessness (addressed by others, I know)? I still need to think through this topic. Though I believe that the discussion of this topic in my book was adequate for my immediate purposes, I too am unsatisfied with where I left it.

Freeman’s most personally mortifying criticism is that I “collapsed forty years of feminist criticism on Blake to a single 1977 study.” Within the context of my discussion Freeman’s claim is a little exaggerated, as I claim Susan Fox’s 1977 study is an example only of “some feminist criticism of Blake” (p. 77, my emphasis), not all of it. I do review criticism of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Book of Thel and cite books and articles appearing in 1977, 1980, 1989, 1990, 2002, and 2006. My focus was on criticism that compared the two works, some of which was feminist in orientation and some of which was not.

My problem is that I criticized one work of feminist criticism on Blake without drawing on later feminist criticism, but I never intended to survey all feminist criticism on these works. What I observed in scholarship on both authors as I was reading for this book was a deep division among feminist scholars about their subject’s possible misogyny. Feminist scholars have viewed both Blake and Kierkegaard (separately) as intensely misogynist or radical and liberatory. Because both sides have good points to make, I think the division itself is interesting, and I attempted to account for it in terms of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on historical contingency in his discussions of women and childbirth in The Concept of Anxiety, a discussion that appears on pages 98-100 of my book. I did observe what I believed were similar patterns in Blake criticism but did not draw that discussion forward into my section on Blake’s critique of Generation, however, so have no one but myself to blame for that.

At any rate, despite evident flaws, I am grateful that Freeman ends her review on a positive note:

With a shift away from the stark contrasts that form its skeleton, Rovira’s book offers a fresh possibility of viewing each writer through the lens of the other in a number of tantalizing suggestions, such as through the relationship between generation and creation. Rovira’s observation that the creator figure in Blake’s The Four Zoas is Enion rather than Urizen, for instance, has intriguing implications for the earlier section on Thel and Oothoon (113). In this regard, the book contributes to a rethinking of the boundaries of theory, particularly as they need to be addressed vis-à-vis the field of European and British romanticism.

What I attempted was very difficult and somewhat unusual in its approach, so I expected some flaws. I had predecessors and fellow travelers but no real models to follow. Freeman’s review provides good direction for my own future work.