PRELIMINARY REMARKS


could be written. I did not question the fall/redemption/apocalypse model; I traced the evolution
of Blake's characters and images as allegories of scientific principles; I extracted doctrinal state-
ments from their narrative contexts; and I persistently sought sources, parallels, or structural
homologies that would make troublesome details in Blake's poetry coherent by reference to
mathematical and philosophical texts not written by Blake. Indeed, it was because its achieve-
ment could be situated in and measured against these strategies of prior Blake criticism that
Visionary Physics could be recognized as a "breakthrough" at all.
 As my work on The Four Zoas progressed, Visionary Physics seemed more and more to have
involved a fundamental transgression of Blake's own project, due, at least in part, to the residual
influence of the "Chicago" Neo-Aristotelian emphasis on "adequacy" of explanation as a func-
tion of the kinds of details that have to be left out of an analytical account ofa text.29 Because I had
gone through the processes of historical decoding and intertextualizing that were central to
Visionary Physics, I was able to come to grips with the conditions under which such work could be
done and to understand what such a project had forced me to ignore or unconsciously assume.
 Some variation of the fall/redemption/apocalypse model is what holds together the
methodological assumptions of traditional Blake criticism. It is in relation to this model that
critics have often proceeded as if it were not possible to talk about Blake's long works without
extensive cross-referencing to Blake's other works, a tendency which Blake encourages by using
the same names over and over from one work to another. Critics have tended to see those
cross-references functioning in two ways: as pointing toward Blake's poetry as ultimately a
coherent, systematic canon, or as pointing toward radical shifts in Blake's beliefs which can be
mapped by reference to the same character names as they come to express his altered or contradic-
tory systematic drives.
 The assumption that certain doctrinal statements, which occur with extreme infrequency, can
be read unequivocally across the body of Blake's poetry often prevents critics from seeing how
these propositional eruptions are themselves contextualized by their surrounding networks of
details and how conflicting statements may function to open up a play of differences rather than to
indicate Blake's confusion or unsystematic, carelessly fabricated philosophy. The lure of such
extractable doctrines is perhaps unavoidable: it even persists into Narrative Unbound itself, which
begins by invoking Blake's dictum, "the Eye altering alters all," as if it were a universal principle
independent of its particular poetic context. One such "doctrine" of special interest to this study
is the identification of the characters Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas, and Urthona as "the Four Zoas."
Although the four names appear together at one point in a deleted line following 104:37 they are
never called "the Four Zoas" in the poem bearing "their" label, though they are so identified in
Milton and Jerusalem.
 Resorting to materials external to Blake's own poetry to overcome its intransigencies follows a
double path similar to that followed in the analysis ofBlake's characters and system: it allows one
to see (as in Leopold Damrosch's eclectic Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth)30 how Blakefails or
(as in Jacki DiSalvo's Marxist/feminist War of Titans)3' how Blake succeeds in incorporating/
transforming external materials into a totalized (utopian) vision. The power of such external
intertextualizing, whether or not it involves Blake's other writings, is that it allows the critic to
explicate and pass judgment on Blake's project by reference to a system/analogue which is itself
presumed to be masterable and at the same time provides a means of escape from some of the most
problematic dimensions of Blake's poetry.
 These critical assumptions most relevantly dominate the first book-length reading of The Four