Kathleen Lundeen, Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. ISBN: 1575910411. Price: US$37.50.

Kathleen Lundeen's Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology is a remarkable addition to the formidable and ever-growing body of criticism surrounding William Blake. What is most striking about Lundeen's study is its commitment from the outset to an uncompromising and open-minded investigation of the way that Blake's visual/verbal texts both disrupt and reorganize the way readers can conceive of the relationship between the material and the spiritual. The question for this study is not so much one of the meaning of Blake's text, but the way Blake's textual semiotics identify a concept of being. To this end, Knight of the Living Dead focuses on Blake's texts as sites that dramatize the constitutive role of perception: "By peering through the seams in Blake's text—the verbal and visual borders—we may discover, as Blake evidently did, that ontological boundaries are actually perceptual boundaries, which dissolve with improved vision" (162). The perceptual boundary that Blakean vision potentially dissolves is the body/spirit distinction that marks Blake's contrary stance towards the mainstrean currents of his Enlightenment milieu. Despite the philosophical complexity of its subject, Lundeen's book is couched in a delightfully playful tone, as is evident in its title. This sense of humor is a considerable accomplishment in an age where theoretical sophistication often seems to be marked by a grim adherence to a specialized vocabulary. Asserting that the inseparability of word and image is analogous to the unity of body and spirit in Blake's text, the first chapter of Knight of the Living Dead defines Blake's visual/verbal interplay in terms of "three distinct modes, each of which elucidates the nature of empirically based language" (23). Thus Blake's text functions "[b]y deconstructing the binary of natural and arbitrary signs" so that "what we recognize as word or graphic image depends on our epistemological orientation, just as what we term 'matter' and 'spirit' is determined by our state of perception" (58). The first of these "modes" is that which is most familiar to Blake's illuminated books in their exploration of "the range of discursive possibilities in a text/design dialogue" (23). By interacting in this way, rather than as a distinct set of signifying practices, word and image suggest a dialog where the messages of the media evince an interchangeability. While much of what Lundeen discusses as the first mode of Blake's visual/verbal art is an extention of W. J. T. Mitchell's pioneering Blake's Composite Art, the other two modes strike off into new territory. The second mode of verbal/visual relationship Knight of the Living Dead identifies is that characteristic of Blake's illustrations for the work of other writers. Here, the center of the page is taken up by a white block, wherein typeset poetry is printed. In this mode of word image relationship it is as if the words of Thomas Gray or Edward Young stand "between" the viewer/reader and Blake's design. Lundeen claims that Blake forces the "written word . . . into the three dimensional realm of plastic art" (31). The third mode is a reversal of the second. Here "the design is perfectly outlined, central on the plate, and the text never invades the domain of the picture" (35). The preeminent examples here are Blake's magnificent Laocoön engraving and his illustrations to the Book of Job. The common point Knight of the Living Dead draws from all three modes is that the "dual medium of poetry-painting" allows Blake to articulate "his conception of a text in which the boundary between being and supra-being, the visioned and the envisioned, is dissolved . . . in anticipation of a …