PRELIMINARY REMARKS


perspective analysis, and narrative branching) and "aspectual interconnection" (which governs,
for example, the way details migrate from speeches into the landscape and back again). In its
emphasis on the temporality and linearity of the reading process and in its invocation of a special
kind of "reader" as an essential participant (but not the primary agent) in constituting the
possibility of narrative, perspective transformation parallels similar impulses in Neo-
Aristotelian, phenomenological, and reader-response methods. In its emphasis on the primary
role of relationships and the subordinate role of elements, aspectual interconnection bears
resemblance to strategies of structuralism. Both of these dimensions of narrative are topological
properties of reading The Four Zoas, and both contain "dialogical" features. (My use of the term
"dialogical" comes more directly from George Quasha's account of the dialogical practice of
contemporary poetry and poetics than from Mikhail Bakhtin's work.)s5

 Text. "Text as flight" consists of local discontinuities, while "text as pattern" makes visible
otherwise inaccessible systematic relations within the textual field. In its emphasis on extremely
close reading and its assertion of the text as the primary authority and ratifier of interpretive
statements, text as flight reactivates features of the old "New Criticism." In its emphasis on
disunity, disruption, intrusion, the materiality and spatiality of the text/signifier, the subversion
of linguistic categories as they bear on the problem of being, and the way that perceptual or
interpretive repression of details peripheral to the dominant paradigm parallels the political
repression of marginal groups in society, text as flight resembles psychoanalytic, feminist,
Derridean, and Marxist critique. In its emphasis on the possibility of extracting spatial models
(present in the graphics for each Night) which visualize and exteriorize textual interrelatednesses,
text as pattern invokes the simultaneous unities and pseudo-mathematical synchronicities of
archetypal and structuralist methodologies (though these are undermined by the action of the
narrative and by the text in its role as perpetrator of disruption).
 Like the theoretical/methodological programs they reflect, these dimensions of Narrative
Unbound's analytical project are sufficiently heterogeneous to interfere with one another, mirror-
ing the radical heterogeneity of the Four Zoas text by refusing to be a totality unto itself, despite
the constant temptation to try to make it so. All of these competitive analytical operators are
pragmatically gathered together and put into play in order to respond more adequately to the
internal self-interferences of The Four Zoas.


 Special Textual Devices ofNarrative Unbound
 Because of the self-interfering properties of Narrative Unbound and the volume of detail it
explores, special editorial devices have been incorporated to surround and enclose its text in order
to provide the reader with relatively stable points of reference and orientation.

 The Marginalia/Marginal Glosses
 These devices function in several different ways in relation to the text proper of Narrative
Unbound: to highlight or rephrase central points; to juxtapose segments of Blake's text not
otherwise noted; to provide additional information or interpretation; and to revise, even subvert,
the argument by providing alternative or contrary perspectives. Reading the marginalia apart
from the text proper will produce an independent sense of what the book is doing.