INTERFERENCE, INTENTIONALITY, INCOMMENSURABILITY


For Blake, the stray data
that escape the repressive
certainty of "Single Vi-
 sion" are keys to reno-
 vating the individual's
 perceptual structures.










Revision as an ontologi-
cally destabilizing action
rather than a movement
 toward closure















 The presence of an
 implied world behind
 the text is progressively
 obliterated by The Four
 Zoas.


crepancies between textual details merely reflect errors of perception or
memory in characters or in the narrator. Both "Single vision" and "New-
tonian narrative" aim toward realizing the coherence and completeness of
a narrative world or text (which, in this view, contains a narrative world in
potential form) and toward realizing a preordained "end" or closure that
resolves conflicts into a unified whole.8 The implicit goal of Newtonian
narrative is imaginative death through positive affirmation; the explicit
goal of Blake's narrative is an intense awakening, through negative dialec-
tic,9 to hitherto buried possibilities of the human imagination.
 The conflict between, on the one hand, Blake's desire to renovate his
reader's perception by relentlessly subverting "Single vision," and, on the
other, the powerful temptations of Newtonian narrative itself is played out
in the radical process of revising that The Four Zoas underwent. At times,
Blake's disruptive revisions seem almost an overreaction against his own
Newtonian impulses, resulting in alien poetic strategies and narrative
complexities that easily could be (and have been) taken as demonstrating
incoherence or a loss of control and purpose.10 How the poem was trans-
formed from its Vala state into The Four Zoas suggests that revision takes
on a double significance: it is both something that Blake did to the text and
something that the text does, through the agency of narrative, not only to
the reader, but to itself. Indeed, Blake's whole enterprise constitutes the
irreducible presence of multiple interfering and incommensurable struc-
tures that operate 1) to rule out a pre-existent underlying world which
surface events (i.e., those narrated by the linear text) partially rearrange
and partially distort, and 2) to generate a narrative field in which the past is
not finished and closed but incomplete and open-alterable and revisable.
 That is, instead of a prefabricated underlying single world or
ur-narrative (whether it be an ideal substratum of the text or Vala itself)
that supports the details of the surface narrative-is signified and re-
arranged by them-Blake substitutes a transformational process at the
service of (and brought into existence by) the temporally unfolding sur-
face narrative itself. This continuously originary process retroactively
resembles a deep structure in that, although characters and events come
into existence the moment they are narrated (that is, they are not presup-
posed or contained in any fashion, potential or otherwise, until they
explicitly enter the poem), once characters and events come into existence
they behave as if they belonged to an underlying world, one that is never
articulated except through self-cancellation, but to which characters
attempt to refer. In this sense, the surface narrative is primary, and what-
ever deep structure there is emerges as an evolving secondary by-product
of the operations of the poem's narrative surface." By incorporating into
The Four Zoas subversive narrative processes (perspective transformation
and aspectual interconnection) and textual features (text as flight and text
as woven pattern), Blake achieves what otherwise might seem virtually
impossible-a narrative field with an open past such that past narrative
facts can be altered and revised by present ones, thereby allowing present