PRELIMINARY REMARKS


 Narrative Unbound and the Textuality of The Four Zoas

 Narrative Unbound is the first minutely detailed interpretation of the verbal text of "THE
 FOUR ZOAS / The torments of Love &Jealousy in / The Death and Judgement / of Albion the
Ancient Man / by William Blake 1797," which was originally titled "VALA / OR / The Death
andJudgement of the (Eternal) [Ancient] Man / a DREAM / of Nine Nights / by William Blake
1797."3 The complexity of the poem's textual state has encouraged critics to resort to ex-
ternal, intertextual sources, either in Blake's other works or in texts not written by Blake, for
resolution of the poem's difficulties. My assumption, however, has been that it is both possible
and fruitful not to appeal to such intertextual lures but to keep a kind of tunnel vision focused on
The Four Zoas itself, without restricting analysis exclusively, or even predominantly, to
textual problems as such. The extent of the revisions and rearrangements of The Four Zoas text
indicates that its narrative difficulties are part and parcel of Blake's compositional/philosophical
situation, not an obfuscation of it. Thus, in Narrative Unbound, the manuscript status of The Four
Zoas serves as an index of Blake's compositional strategies rather than of his compositional
failures. When taken to be strategic, Blake's revisions begin to make uncanny sense as gestures
that address issues of psychic/ontological revision extending far beyond the boundaries of The
Four Zoas.
 The manuscript status of The Four Zoas,4 like that of the poems in his Notebook reveals Blake's
elaborate, even obsessive, processes of composition and revision. Blake worked on The Four Zoas
over an undetermined period of time, usually taken to be approximately 1796-1807. During this
time influences seem to have passed back and forth between the Zoas and Milton and erusalem,
Blake's two later finished prophecies, in ways that render it impossible to determine exactly when
Blake decided to revise the Zoas no further,6 diminishing the possibility that the poem is no more
than a chronological bridge between Blake's earlier and later completed works. Even a superficial
glance at the manuscript, especially its most heavily over-written pages-with passages crossed
out, inserted, and sometimes drastically rearranged-reveals a veritable textual labyrinth. These
textual tangles have naturally generated a range of speculation from conflicting critical perspec-
tives concerning why the poem exists only in manuscript form, but virtually all of it comes to the
same conclusion: Blake's abandonment of the poem left it in a flawed, unfinished state of incom-
pleteness, even though recent criticism has come to recognize that "unfinishedness" may have a
formal poetic value.7
 Years ago Northrop Frye, whose authority has sustained the paradigmatic approach to Blake,
proposed that Blake abandoned the poem due to a shift in the priorities of his evolving mythol-
ogy, calling The Four Zoas "The greatest abortive masterpiece in English literature" and its
"unfinished state a major cultural disaster."8 Another tradition of criticism, exemplified perhaps
most persuasively by Morton Paley, has held that Blake tried unsuccessfully to graft a Christian
framework onto the poem and so turned his attention to Milton and especially toJerusalem where,
from the outset, it is assumed, Blake is deeply committed to his own special brand of Christian-
ity.9 David Erdman and G.E. Bentley, Jr., the two most relentlessly vigilant editors of The Four
Zoas, have engaged in interpretive battles over the poem's textual details, but they agree that the
poem is flawed because it is unfinished. Based on his close examination of the text, Erdman
suggested some years ago that Blake may have intended The Four Zoas to be a unique illuminated
manuscript which he eventually abandoned when the revising process (for whatever reasons) got
out of hand.10 Bentley has argued that Blake's haphazard habits of revising were themselves
primarily responsible for Blake's failure to complete the poem." Though Erdman is much more