Sarah Haggarty’s new study of Blake reflects her self-described interest in the intersections of literary studies with anthropology, philosophy, and theology. Her book focuses on social constructions of gifts or gift-giving as an index to the nature of a society and its human, and human-divine, relationships. Haggarty puts Blake’s poetry, letters, annotations and some designs into a rich textual conversation that ranges from ancient cultures to modern thinkers, such as the sociologist Marcel Mauss and the poststructuralists Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, who built on and debated Mauss’s work, as Haggarty herself builds on and argues with these writers. At the same time, Haggarty also sets Blake’s ideas and practice of gift-giving in his own cultural context, using records of those who knew Blake as well as writings by fellow artists and poets and writers on politics, philosophy, art, and religion.
The book’s main argument is that giving gifts and the relationships that this activity fosters are crucial to Blake’s production and dissemination of art, to his conceptions of divinity, and to the ways in which he urged his readers to act. The aim of Blake’s art, Haggarty posits, is “to create enduring bonds between people,” whether by treating sales like presents, turning readers into “members of a religious republic” or “crafting divinity into humanity” (1). Haggarty thus takes issue with some recent critics such as Saree Makdisi, who describe Blake’s gifts as incompatible with the quantified world of exchange. Preferring the term “gift relationships,” Haggarty understands gift-giving in such relationships—whether among people or between human and divine—as a “co-operative antagonism” that links Blake’s divine humanity in “mutual obligation.” The separation of gift and exchange shifts to “a reciprocity that is hoped for but cannot be counted on” (3).
Two particularly interesting chapters on economy and patronage demonstrate many kinds of reciprocity, including Blake’s variable prices for his works for different recipients or the networks of sharing manuscripts or finished works that were read aloud, given, lent, bequeathed, or copied as well as being sold. Blake’s Illuminated books are also gifts because of how they are made to work on us and how they are made to work by us: in short, they hope to instigate reciprocal gift relationships with readers. Even patronage could be a malleable system. Blake’s letters and even his poetry show that he tried with some success to shape his various patronage relationships into mutual independence and generosity among friends. In his relationship with William Hayley, however, the language of friendship barely masks Blake’s sense of a power struggle, evincing the violence of the gift theorized by Bourdieu.
A third, transitional, chapter on charity effectively links these economic constructions of gift relationships to debates about whether the moral duty of charity entailed a freely given gift (often argued by religious writers as well as politicians) or was a matter of justice (argued by writers like Paine). This issue is crucial to Blake’s ideas of “salvation” because the question of whether human beings could and should mirror God’s generous gifts is at the heart of ideas about human nature and dignity. Hence, Blake mocked and rejected ideas of “salvation” as an atonement that pays a debt since, as Haggarty rightly argues, whether you are interpreting salvation as a debt that humans cannot pay or theorizing a free gift that allows of no exchange, you have just denied the possibility of a relationship “between donee and donor” or indeed between any “buyer and seller, economy and politics” (105).
Chapters 4 and 5 on inspiration and salvation explore two of the gift relationships of “divine” and human. The former focuses on the actual labor of the “inspired” artist as a reciprocal gift given to others within the community of human and divine, an action that the artist hopes will be imitated and reciprocated in some way. For Blake, Haggarty contends, inspiration meant empowerment but also the active struggle between the artist’s or any person’s capacity to act divinely and our corporeal aspects. Second, “Salvation” pursues the question of what independent human beings can return to the divine giver and other members of the human form divine. Haggarty provides an original and effective use of the design on Jerusalem, plate 76, where a standing Albion steps toward a crucified Christ and echoes his form, to demonstrate the difference between imitation and being inspired by an example of Albion’s dynamic and voluntary stance as though interrupted in a dance; his own creative act, she argues, shows not just freely given gifts but gift exchange between divine and human.
As Haggarty postulated in her introduction, reciprocity cannot be counted on or demanded; her conclusion returns to the fact that any gift can be refused, as Blake periodically seemed to reject inspiration and his audience. Still, she maintains, echoing Mauss, we should “emerge from self, to give” however we can. If Blake presents his works to us to use or refuse, “It is up to us to credit his example, and continually to give ourselves to improvised reciprocity” (192) whatever the context. Throughout the book, Haggarty also discusses those moments when Blake seemed to shrink from the gifts of patronage and inspiration or, in moments of anger or resentment, canceled gestures of love and intimacy for his audience. Still, Blake offered his works. “It is up to us,” Haggarty concludes, “to credit [Blake’s] example, and continually to give ourselves to improvised reciprocity” (192).
In the end, Haggarty’s methodology here is richly productive, although it is challenging to those unfamiliar with the theorists she uses. Since the book ranges over such a wide variety of Blake documents, though, even newcomers to Blake’s work will find much to help them grasp central issues in his work and life, and anyone interested in the period will find much to provoke further thought and study.
