RETROACTIVE TRANSFORMATION


by The Four Zoas. In the poem Blake experiments with creating a text that
cannot sustain its authentic existence independent of and prior to the
narrative world in the process of being constituted through sequential acts
of reading, thereby creating a reader whose perception is able to alter the
very being of the text's supposedly fixed facts and devising a narrative
world that, although it comes into existence temporally through the
mutual interconstitution of reader and text, functions as the primary agent
by which the reader and text are able to transform one another mutually. 14


Narrative Processes and Textual Features of Blake's Four Zoas


 It is clear, even from this preliminary sketch, that narrative, text, and
 reader come into existence simultaneously to constitute and alter one
 another at each point in the poem. Because of this subversive poetic pro-
 Conflict in The Four gram, The Four Zoas resists penetration by traditional critical tools. It is
 Zoas is less between therefore necessary to make a sudden break into the explanatory circle of
 "characters" than be-
 tween competing text, narrative, and reader, much like the rupture near the poem's opening
dimensions of the narra- where Blake interrupts'5 the unfolding pseudo-invocation with the man-
 tive. ifesto, "Begin with Tharmas Parent power" (4:6). One episode that can be
 isolated from its context with little damage to the poem's complex dialec-
 tics and which, at the same time, clearly exhibits the narrative and textual
 features that are the building blocks of The Four Zoas occurs in the cryptic
 events surrounding the appearance of the "Circle of Destiny" (whose
 minute details are understandably often disregarded), near the beginning
 of Night I. In this episode, following an elliptical conversation with his
 female counterpart Enion, "Tharmas Parent power," the ostensible narra-
 tive nucleus out of which the poem generates, turns "round" the "Circle of
 Destiny" and then sinks into the sea. As he descends, however, Tharmas
 exudes bodily fibres that Enion weaves into a "perverse" form with "a will /
 (5:20-21) Of its own" that then becomes (or brings into existence) the Circle of
 Destiny itself. 16


 Narrative Implications of the Circle of Destiny Episode
 Perspective Transformation. This sequence exemplifies perspective
transformation (specifically retroactive transformation) under the guise of
a causal loop or circle on the surface of the text: if the Circle existed before
Tharmas sank down into the sea, how can it come into existence as a result
of his sinking down? By means of this causal paradox in the narrative
surface, Blake invites the reader to undergo a retroactive perspective trans-
formation, a process that always requires a conflict (or discrepancy) be-
tween two very different but closely related reader events. In this case the
Circle first appears as if it does not need explanation, as if it were a given,
pre-existent feature of the poem's underlying or presupposed world. But
the Circle's second appearance retroactively corrects the reader's natural