DISSOLUTION OF THE NARRATIVE WORLD


The possibility that The
Four Zoas narrative will
 be denied existence by
 the resistive reader















"Deep structure": a con-
 venient misnomer for
 the unstable structures
 generated by The Four
 Zoas narrative






 Perspective transforma-
 tion operates on itself.













 Self-reflexivity of
perspective transforma-
tion produces narrative
 branchings.


ceive the discrepancy between the two textual facts and interpret it as a
subjective error on the part of the reader or the narrator. In this latter case,
the radical Four Zoas narrative fails to come into existence at all, and the
text exists as an inert nest of paradoxes, mistakes, and non sequiturs. Any
reader who is able to perceive the text as though it were itself undergoing
transformations, dissolving fixed facts in the receding narrative and allow-
ing the past to be re-enacted and revised, has already been initiated into
Blake's perspective drama. The reader who resists Blake's text and anx-
iously clings to the security of one of the fundamental elements of a pre-
existent underlying world-a privileged originating event, a primal rup-
ture, or "fall"-refuses to acknowledge that the "fall" or rupture actually
comes into existence through the reader's failed imaginative judgment in
the face of radical discrepancies and does not lie before or beneath the text
(see below).
 Because it rules out the existence of a prefabricated world that acts as a
mysterious substratum of the text (akin to the "I know not what" ofLocke
and Berkeley), perspective transformation argues that whatever underly-
ing world or deep structure the poem could possibly exhibit must come
into existence in the process of being narrated. The operation of this
generative process imposes on Blake's narrative field a severe restriction -
the primacy of narrative sequential order-that dictates that the order in
which characters appear and events occur is a primary feature of their
reality. This narrative requirement in part accounts for the intensity of
Blake's obsession with rearranging, inserting, and deleting segments of
The Four Zoas. 20
 Finally, retroactive and projective perspective transformations are
structurally self-reflexive: they operate not only on narrative details but
also on themselves. By their very nature, perspective transformations have
the power to modify the rules of the game at those junctures where the
content of the narrative reaches a state of crisis. One such point occurs in
Night Vila in the context of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Mystery,
where characters begin to become consciously aware that they are in a
narrative world where it is possible to revise the past by re-enacting it-a
process which had previously operated as unconscious "perspective
analyses" of events by the narrative (see below). Characters thus attempt
consciously to undo prior events in Night VIIa under the guise of repen-
tance and contrition. As if to subvert this emergence into consciousness
of its own unconscious processes, the narrative begins generating branch-
ing, alternative routes through which conflicting narrative possibilities of
prior events are realized. Perspective transformation itself undergoes
transformation by not only analyzing prior events but also simultaneously
generating different and irreducibly incommensurable ways the same
event actually happens (enters into the narrative).

 Aspectual Interconnection: The "Fall" as Privileged Event and Pretext.
Throughout the poem Blake distinguishes between two sources of infor-
mation: the constantly modulating voice of the narrator and the spoken