Introduction: Altering Single Vision


 Without giving full weight to the narratological implications of Blake's
well-known visionary dictum that "the Eye altering alters all,"1 it is
difficult, if not impossible, to realize how the disruptive complexities that
beset Blake's composition and revision of the verbal text of The Four Zoas
constitute not a confusion of purpose or lack of fit between philosophy and
poetic method but the emergence of a radical poetic ontology which
fundamentally revises the meaning of "narrative," of "text," and of
"reader." Taking Blake's "Eye altering" dictum seriously, however, puts us
immediately at odds with a powerful assumption without which most
scientific and technological progress prior to the twentieth century would
not have been possible: that behind the complex world of external appear-
ances lies one single unified world toward which all true explanation must
point.2 This world view presupposes that subjective experience partially
grasps and partially distorts features of the hidden unified field that allows
"external objects" to appear; in this metaphysics, such external objects
acquire the authority to passjudgment on the validity and completeness of
subjective experience. In this world view it seems inconceivable that the
way something is perceived constitutes its being or reality; indeed, such
constituting would seem to imply an idealism profoundly more prob-
lematic than Bishop Berkeley's "esse is percipi." Blake, however, labeled
this pervasive world view "Single vision & Newtons sleep" (E693, 722),'
insisting that the surface dualism in, for example, such guises as Locke's
primary and secondary qualities and powers betrays a yearning to pene-
trate and merge with the mysterious underlying unified world, a nostalgic
desire for final rest and complete certainty in a state of metaphysical
incest.5
 Throughout his career Blake waged uncompromising war against
"Single vision," which he perceived infiltrating the most crucial fields of
existence, binding down and artificially limiting social organization, indi-
vidual fulfillment, narrative possibility, and language itself. Especially in
his extended struggle to compose and revise The Four Zoas Blake
experimented with developing narrative structures that could function
therapeutically to rehabilitate imaginations damaged by "Single vision."
This experiment is by no means restricted to The Four Zoas, although the
manuscript state of the text of the Zoas affords peculiar insight into Blake's
process of narrative composition.6 Milton and erusalem are permeated with
the strategies he developed in the Zoas to combat and subvert the form of
explanatory storytelling that can be labeled generically as "Newtonian
narrative."7
 "Newtonian narrative" presupposes that behind the text lies a single
unified field (ur-narrative, privileged originating event, state of conscious-
ness, and so on) whose essential features do not irreconcilably and incom-
mensurably conflict with one another but can (in theory at least) be fully
captured through systematic analytic explanation. In such a view, dis-


See note 1 for contextual
variations on Blake's
doctrines of perceptual
variability as an ontolog-
ical principle.






The attraction of the
"one true world" of
prisca sapientia: see note 2.








"incomprehensible / To
the Vegetated Mortal
Eye's perverted & Single
Vision" (Jerusalem
53:10-11).




The "reader" of The Four
Zoas is created through
the resistances of its nar-
rative processes.


Blake prepares the
reader to battle the per-
ceptual delusion of the
"Single Vision" world
by exercising dimen-
sions of the reader's
being that are vulnerable
to Newtonian assault.