THE MIRRORING OF NARRATIVE AND TEXT


Perspective transforma-
tion is circular and self-
 interfering.





The manuscript status of
 The Four Zoas exposes
 the textuality of surface
 revision -foreground-
 ing text as flight and
 concealing text as pat-
tern, thus facilitating the
misleading assumption
that the poem is flawed
 because incomplete.


conceals, represses, and evades in flight, withdrawal, and hiding; this flight
manifests itself as discrepancies, inconsistencies, gaps, and discontinuities
in the text. Text as flight makes mandatory the reader's microscopic
scrutiny of syntax and diction, an anatomizing attention that constitutes
the discrete acts of perception through which the continuously unfolding
and originating narrative field is shattered and reconstituted; text as inter-
woven pattern is the ground for extrapolating visual graphic schemas that
express (through arbitrary signifiers) those (signified) structural
strategies, narrative switchpoints, and so on, that are inherently inaccessi-
ble to direct temporal experience of the poem but that in part govern the
organization of narrative details and discrepancies (see the graphics located
throughout this book for examples of this potentiality of the text). Taken
by itself, text as flight gives rise to the impression of arbitrariness and
incompleteness; text as interwoven pattern, taken by itself, divides the
narrative into finite, reified, closed structures. These schematic patterns
are second-order phenomena, generated by the primary surface narrative,
which acts inexhaustibly to revise, subvert, and desubstantialize the very
perceptual structures that allow the temporal narrative to exist.
 The narrative aspects of Blake's Four Zoas (perspective transformation
and the aspectual interconnections between the narrator's voice and other
narrative voices) and the dialectical conflict between flight and weaving of
the text itself produce the tight, dense network of transformations that is
the primary reality of the poem, apart from which there are no events in
The Four Zoas. These narrative and textual aspects, taken together, guaran-
tee that there is no pre-existing substructure, constituted by a specifiable
sequence of events, that is partially distorted or partially interpreted by
surface perspectives. The narrative principles reflect or mirror the work-
ings of the text itself, because each of these features is an aspect of the
others: they invade and interconstitute one another in an incestuous or
narcissistic way, so that any language that attempts to describe them must
fold back on itself, and so that any attempt to isolate them analytically
from one another must rupture their field of mutual interrelations.
Nevertheless, because Blake was unwilling to compromise the difficulty
of realizing his goal-a fundamental restructuring of his reader's con-
sciousness-it is necessary not to recoil from Blake's challenge but to
respond to it directly, no matter to what alien territory such an investiga-
tion may lead. Thus, in order to move forward, it is necessary to back up
and examine these narrative and textual features in more detail.


 The Four Zoas Narrative and Text Reconsidered


 The Narrative Field

 Perspective Transformation. An implication of the apparent causal loop
at the center of the Circle of Destiny episode is that the very possibility of