GALLANT, CHRISTINE. Blake and the assimilation of chaos.  Princeton University Press, 1978. Pp.  198. £7.90.

This Jungian-orientated study by an American professor of English explores with great patience and expertise the archetypal symbolism of Blake's Prophetic Books, thereby demonstrating the formidable courage and insight that any confrontation with chaos requires. For inevitably long stretches these bizarre works evoke neurotic reactions in the timid reader, an enormous sense of tedium, frustration or bewilderment; much of the content may seem baffling and repetitive, the verse curiously lumpish or over-insistent, falling unmusically like lead upon the starved ear. It is hard to grope through all this to interludes of lyrical relief.

Professor Gallant, undaunted, is able to sustain ‘the soul-shuddering vacuum’, helped by a clear understanding of Jungian psychology and impressive literary and critical skills. This is very much a work of scholarship and includes a valuable, wide-ranging bibliography. In her view, systematically but not rigidly outlined, the more mature books, particularly The four zoas, reveal ‘a new and richer reaction to the void’, a progressive humanisation and move towards a more dynamic myth, bringing about an artistic release rather than a relentless binding of energy. As the doors of perception become cleansed by the action of contemplative thought, man's existence is seen in terms of enantiodromia, no longer irretrievably divided but informed by the constant interplay of inseparable polar opposites, extremities of a single whole. In this harmonious awareness of process chaos becomes both inevitable and acceptable, an essential and permanent element of Eternity. Ultimately Blake's poetic imagination, resolving paradox, transcends limited and traditional concepts of the millennium as a final point in a linear and irreversible Time. This new beatific vision is exemplified by the regenerated Albion in his rôle of husbandman:

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