Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake's Designs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1995]. ISBN: 0521473810 (hb 1995) 0521555620 (pb 1998). Price: £45/$74.95 (hb) £15/$24.95 (pb).

This is a lucid and intelligent book. It is full of thoughtful readings of Blake's designs, and Christopher Heppner has a number of interesting propositions to make about interpretative principles—ones which he is not afraid to make clearly and to defend with spirit. I wish, though, he had chosen a different title. At one level, Reading Blake's Designs balances cleverly between 'engaging in the process of' and 'successfully undertaking' exegesis, but, given the state of art criticism (and the same is true for studies of Blake's poetry and a fortiori for all investigations into 'Blake's composite art', no one is currently in a position to do more than offer a prolegomena to reading Blake, notes towards the satisfactory hermeneutics which may perhaps one day emerge. The book has two major themes. In the early sections, Heppner argues that to Blake the body is the unit of meaning in history painting, and he pursues an investigation of 'Blake's quest for an expanded and more powerful vocabulary of expressive bodies'. He suggests that Blake moved (although not in a simple chronological progression) from a stereotyped mode of conveying emotion physically, one strongly influenced by the codification of gestural representation created by Le Brun, to a way of expressing emotion that involved the whole body, one which, although strongly influenced by 'schema' learnt from Michelangelo, left him enough room to develop 'his own style of expression' (54). Heppner convincingly analyses the early Robinson Crusoe Discovers the Footprint in the Sand as a figure drawn in close conformity to Le Brun's formula for 'admiration' (11), and he gives careful attention to the questions around the nature of Blake's knowledge of Michelangelo's work. The book moves on to develop a thesis that will be more controversial: we must, Heppner argues, 'learn how to reconstruct the texts and names that underlie Blake's designs, and to understand better the ways in which he incorporated his meanings within them' (99). Heppner is well aware that what he calls the 'intellectual' aspect of Blake's art has to coexist with the artist's sense of 'visual balance' (xvl), but he is confident in his belief that Blake typically bases his work on texts, and the 'reader' can only proceed successfully if they find the right one. The title of the book takes on an added significance in what some will feel is a theory that places unwarranted emphasis on language and meaning at the expense of visual qualities, that promotes art's legibility rather than its resistance to hermeneutics, and Heppner's concessions are unlikely to mollify them. This is a huge debate, but the least I would claim for Heppner's position is that it makes for lively and illuminating commentaries. In the course of developing his two main arguments, Heppner attacks a number of existing ideas about Blake's visual work, for example, that he is usually illustrating his own myth even when ostensibly dealing with unconnected subjects, that he typically subverts the meanings of the texts he illustrates and that it is possible to usefully label most of Blake's characters good or bad (82; 152; 175). Any reader will find some of these propositions more convincing than others, but Heppner always makes cases that need to be taken seriously. I cannot help feeling, though, that he underestimates what a problem it would have been for Blake to stick as closely as he suggests to the meaning of a Christian poet like Young! But then few critics have had a problem calling Blake himself a Christian, even though by the early 1790s he had rejected every important Christian doctrine and adopted a set …