DISSOLUTION OF VOCAL DIFFERENCE


words-questions, interpolated visions, remembrances, and so on-of
characters who appear in the narrative proper. Initially it seems as if there
are two distinct and contrapuntal streams of information alternating with
each other: spoken visions, memories, and so on, that seem to refer com-
pulsively to a privileged originating event (the primal "fall" of "Man") and
the narrative proper, whose events seem to be happening after the events in
the spoken accounts.21 Since the characters (and even the narrator) rarely
talk about, remember, or directly refer to what has been happening in the
unfolding narrative proper, its events seem to be constantly disappearing.
Characters' speech gestures often act as decoys to draw attention away
from the actions they are engaged in and which are disguised (though
sometimes obliquely enacted) by their speech gestures. Despite the fact
that in these interpolated visions the characters claim to be referring to
another state of being altogether, the poem invites the reader to interpret
these visions as the characters' own fictional transformations of relation-
ships between already present characters and events.
 Though nothing less than a vast accumulation of instances could be
fully persuasive here, perhaps a simple example will suffice. In Night IV,
the "Spectre of Urthona" enters the narrative proper at the moment Thar-
mas separates Los from Enitharmon; but the Spectre retells this event as if
it had notjust occurred but had happened in the distant past, at the original
"fall," associated with an utterly different causal background. Signifi-
cantly, he has no memory of, or makes no reference to, his immediate
separation in the narrative proper. In general, the characters behave as if
they were referring to (rather than fantasizing or fictionalizing) a world
other than temporallyy prior to, spatially beyond) the world of the narra-
tive proper. In fact, the near absence of references (by characters) to events
in the narrative proper cumulatively creates the possibility that the
retroactively dissolving events in the narrative proper are themselves the
fantasy and not the common world that the characters mutually inhabit.
 Within this framework of a fundamental, though undermined, distinc-
tion in the The Four Zoas between narrated events and visions, songs,
soliloquies, and so on, the reader is constantly caught between the narra-
tor's version and various characters' versions of "events": it is in this
moment of suspension that the reader's (Newtonian) reflex yearning to
grasp the primordial event (the "fall") itself enacts in the reader the breach
that the reader is attempting to locate before or beneath the text. In terms
of Blake's anti-Newtonian strategy, narrative events do not occur after a
primal "fall" beyond the text, nor do interpolated visions refer to a primal
"fall" in the dim past. The "fall" is a narrative pretext, occasioning a
breach in the reader who refuses to recognize that the opposition between
narrative and interpolated information is only apparent, and who thereby
re-enacts the speakers' evasive directing of their speech gestures away
from the present narrative context, fictionalizing that context in parables
involving other names, times, and places in order to deny the living reality
of their present situation.
 Blake's narrative thus intermittently tempts the reader into believing


The mechanism ofinter-
polated visions works as
a character and event
generator.



See Note 21 for a
catalogue of discourse
types in The Four Zoas.











The central event of the
"fall" has no structure or
context other than serv-
ing as a pretext for set-
ting incommensurable
perspectives in motion.














The way the reader of
The Four Zoas functions
as a character in the pre-
text of the "fall"