PRELIMINARY REMARKS


reluctant to fault Blake for carelessness, references to Blake's "giving up" on the poem are
essential to Erdman's editorial logic and rhetoric.
 Though broad agreement has been reached about many features of The Four Zoas text, it suffers
from what might be called intra-textual excessivity: its sheer physical status is sufficiently inde-
terminate (or over determined) to render any final judgements about it merely conjectural.'2
Controversies concerning, for example, the precise period and sequences of composition and
revision, the dating of states of certain revisions with respect to one another, and the
inclusion, exclusion, and ordering of specific textual blocks are often undecidable. Other prob-
lems, notably the existence of two textual segments named "Night the Seventh,"' the multiple
endings to the First Night,14 or the absence of an unequivocal beginning to "Night the [Sec-
ond],"'5 pose threats to any critic attempting to extract Blake's "final intention" from such
particular textual situations. At times Blake leaves open or indeterminate the rules for interpret-
ing what and how segments of the text should be included or excluded, while at other times he is
meticulously clear about these matters.'6
 While these facts about The Four Zoas have in one sense been a nightmare for textual critics,
they have simultaneously constituted a treasure trove, an extraordinary field of play for exploring
the limits and rules of textual editing. Similarly, the manuscript status of the poem, which has
allowed (indeed driven) critics to retreat from the poem's uncompromising complexities by
appealing to its incompleteness (or, in some cases, ignoring or selectively acknowledging the
interpretive problems the manuscript presents),' actually provides a unique opportunity to
explore the ways that the textuality of The Four Zoas challenges cherished assumptions concern-
ing what in fact a text is. In its naked preservation of the traces of its struggle to be (re)composed,
The Four Zoas pushes to the foreground the productive labor of writing: it is a text that insists on
its own radical heterogeneity, on its own struggle to be different from itself, indeed, ultimately on
its process of eradicating a potentially unitary textual "self" from which "it" could "differ."
 One mark of the poem's heterogeneity lies in the fact that Blake never stitched it together as a
 whole but only in parts, while he never bound many of the leaves at all.18 Perhaps the most
 immediately visible mark of this self-differing of the text, however, is in Blake's revision of the
 poem's title: Blake deleted both the name "VALA" and the reference to the poem as "a DREAM /
 of Nine Nights"; yet he left the name "VALA" and the label of "Night" suspended over the
 beginning of each division of the poem. One response to this incongruity is to assume that, since
 this title change was evidently one of the last revisions made to the manuscript, Blake simply did
 not care enough to go back and change the titles of each of the poem's divisions in the manuscript
 to make them consistent with the title of the poem as a whole but would have done so had he ever
 finished the poem. An alternative assumption, however, more congruent with the argument of
 Narrative Unbound, is that, as it stands, the text announces, through a disparity in names, a radical,
 unresolvable disjunction between its totality and its divisions-that its parts do not add up to a
 whole; or that its parts exceed the whole; or, perhaps, that the very possibility of the poem's
 existing as a coherent, closed totality is a fundamental problem that the poem is addressing.
 Seen in this light, The Four Zoas enacts in the field of an ostensibly single text the process of
 self-differing that occurs in the multiple copies of finished poems that Blake printed. In other
 poems, as is well known, Blake changed illuminations from copy to copy, rendering no two texts
 precisely alike and thereby undermining efforts to make the texts completely consistent with one
 another or even "variations" on a privileged, primordial text." Some of the variations in different
 copies of Blake's printed poems may issue, of course, from what Robert Essick calls "medium
 reflexive" effects, that is, variations that are the result of the medium of reproduction rather than