PRELIMINARY REMARKS


Zoas, Brian Wilkie and Mary LynnJohnson's Blake's "Four Zoas": The Design of a Dream .32 In their
own words: "we expect [our book] fundamentally to reinforce the consensus of Blakeans; if we
were to arrive at an interpretation that radically contradicted those ofJohn Middleton Murry or
Northrop Frye or the early Harold Bloom, we would belie our basic premise about the poem's
firmness of meaning and its subtle but demonstrable coherence."33 In the self-consciousness of its
stance as a confirmation of the dominant paradigm of Blake's myth-a filling in of details in
relationship to it-Wilkie andJohnson's book stands at the end or culmination, the most extreme
fulfillment, of the presuppositions that have until quite recently informed the Blake critical
community.
 Wilkie andJohnson, often elegantly, invoke the assumption that there is a central coordinating
paradigm for Blake's poetry, especially The Four Zoas, that is so embedded in Blake criticism as to
be beyond question: that there is (or was) a prior unified world from which the "fall" took place;
that much of The Four Zoas consists in the different ways characters incompletely, inac-
curately, and contradictorily "remember" the "fall"; that there exists a partially inexplicable
swerve toward a "redemptive" vision toward the end of Night VIIa in which the character Los
undergoes a kind of conversion experience; and that the poem strives toward a renovation,
depicted in the unfolding events of Night IX, that reinstates or improves on the original state of
unity.
 Throughout their argument, Wilkie and Johnson's assumption of a movement in the narrative
world from fall to apocalypse prevents them from taking seriously either the radical instabilities
and resistances to the emergence of a unified world represented in the text or the extent to which a
goal-oriented interpretation of the events presented in the poem may conceal or divert attention
away from disturbing challenges with which The Four Zoas constantly assaults the reader. They
consider characters to be fundamentally interchangeable from one Blake poem to another, usu-
ally assuming that the "final" formulation of Blake's myth justifies their tendency to read retroac-
tively from clues embedded in Milton andjerusalem in order to stabilize narrative relations in The
Four Zoas between, for example, Los and Urthona or Orc and Luvah. When anomalies crop up,
as they do all the time, Wilkie and Johnson characteristically turn away from the immediate
webbing of the textual event to external sources or analogues.
 Although it is misleading to assume that Narrative Unbound simply offers a counter-paradigm,
rather than an account incommensurable with the traditional paradigm, it is nevertheless true that
in this study the "fall" is considered provisionally, as a narrative pretext for enacting a "fall" in the
reader; "memories" are treated as ways of fictionalizing the present which contribute to the
possibility of the myth of the "fall"; Los's actions late in Night VIIa are microscopically inter-
rogated to reveal the dilemma of considering these events as unequivocally "redemptive"; and
Night IX is read subversively in order to resist the pull of its apocalyptic teleology by focusing on
the presence of structural interference that undermine the closure of the narrative. Furthermore,
Narrative Unbound entertains the possibility that, although characters with identical names appear
in other Blake poems, their modes of entry and their actions in The Four Zoas are unique to this
poem and may be illuminatingly considered as signifying new, unfamiliar characters. Finally,
Narrative Unbound attempts to resist the temptation to escape anomalies by recourse to exterior
sources. Rather discrepancies are taken to be significant as such.
 Since The Design of a Dream did not appear until 1978, bringing with it the full persuasiveness
of the Blake critical community, it is not surprising that when I began working on this Four Zoas
project in 1971, there was little Blake criticism that turned away from or openly questioned the


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