PRELIMINARY REMARKS


 In terms of differences, this study de-emphasizes both the disappearance of the text in those
pragmatic theories in which meaning is solely the product of the hegemony of interpretive
communities43 and the denial of the text's ratifying authority in some Marxist theories of the
"scientific" severing of the reader's ideological relation to the text.44 My methodological
emphasis on the authority of the text does not, however, imply a de-radicalizing of Blake but
rather quite the opposite: returning to the text as arbiter of explanation is no reactionary move in
the study ofBlake, for there is nothing I (or anyone else) can say about Blake's text that is as radical
as Blake's text itself.
 In terms of similarities, my bracketing off or forgetting certain critical presuppositions, includ-
ing those of contemporary theory itself, suggests a form of phenomenological reduction, while
the chronological stages of development of Narrative Unbound's relation to the dominant Blake
paradigm (first inverting priorities and then redistributing them) roughly parallel Jacques Der-
rida's double gesture of "overturning" and "positive displacement."45 By aligning itself with a
break from academic hegemony by being a materially different kind of book published at a press
dedicated to experimental poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose-that is, by emphasizing the
materiality and the heterogeneous ideological scars of both its own text and the Blake text it
addresses-Narrative Unbound pushes into the foreground issues of textual production central to
much Marxist criticism.46
 This account given thus far of the parallels between Narrative Unbound's methodology and
competing methods of contemporary schools of criticism is both incomplete and misleading,
however. For example, in the "Preludium" and in the opening sections of "Region A" and
"Region D," I frame my account of The Four Zoas in terms of the binary fiction of "Newtonian"
versus "anti-Newtonian" reader, text, and narrative.47 This conceptual framework grew out of
my research into British empiricism for Visionary Physics as well as from my training in method
at the University of Chicago. It also conveniently provided a rhetorical strategy that allowed me
to steer clear of the powerful and currently more fashionable terminology derived from Conti-
nental philosophy to which my methods have seemed to bear increasing resemblance. The
conceptions of narrative and text that emerge from this "Newtonian"strategy tend to invert those
that are central to much (especially American) "narratology," which is generally characterized by
some kind of division between story and discourse,48 a distinction already developed rigorously
in R.S. Crane's theory of "plot."49 This "Newtonian" twist to my argument also allows Narrative
Unbound to intersect Visionary Physics at the primary lacuna between the two works-the signifi-
cance of sequence and context to the ontology of reading Blake.
 In the process of designing a methodology to confront the specific difficulties of The Four Zoas
text, I found it necessary to develop an ontological theory of reading and to test relentlessly how
this theory holds at (and between) two interpretive limits-the level of minutely particular
textual details and the level of conceptual models of the poem's textual and narrative patterns. A
small group of narratological functions that address these limits are explicitly set forth in the
"Preludium" and used implicitly throughout the body of my analysis. It may be useful to
consider briefly how other (mutually competing) critical orientations enter into or parallel the
narrative and textual categories I developed for Narrative Unbound from the demands of Blake's
Four Zoas text itself.

 Narrative. I use the familiar term narrative for an unfamiliar process in Blake. It is an ontological
category that includes "perspective transformation" (including retroactive transformation,