CLOSURE AND OPENING


The text lures the reader
into experiencing a delu-
sion, into believing in a
 false apocalypse.


that the poem's events are linearly unfolding re-enactments of a single
unapproachable, pre-existent moment, all the while undermining the
possibility of such a privileged primordial event. In addition, begin-
ning especially in Night VIIa, the narrative begins to open up the desire
(even hold out the hope) that the knotted complexities and paradoxes of
that precipitating event, which always seems outside the text, will be
revealed, reversed, and resolved within the text itself in Night IX. The
asymmetry is obvious: in this reading, the precipitating event cannot be
directly dramatized but the resolving event can be. There is, however,
strong evidence that one dimension of the ostensible precipitating event
(the "fall") finally materializes in the text itself at the moment the
apocalyptic reunion of Tharmas and Enion takes place -in which case it is
the most radical case of retroactive constitution/canceling out in the
poem.


The Dialectic of the Text


 The emergence of the
 dialogically constituted
"narrator" from the gaps
 in the text


 Text as Flight. The subversive microscopic surface of The Four Zoas
narrative is the aspect we have identified with Tharmas' withdrawal
beneath the oceanic surface in the Circle of Destiny episode. Indeed, this is
no unique act by Tharmas: he is constantly perceived as fleeing from
confrontations, leaving in his wake perceptual vortexes and voids. Thar-
mas' compulsive fleeing reappears as an aspect of the text under the guise
of discrepancies, gaps, and discontinuities. Perhaps the most problematic
point at which to enter the text under the aspect of flight is one of the
points that caused Blake the greatest difficulty (as evidenced by massive
deletions and revisions) -the opening lines of the poem itself. In the first
eight lines of the poem proper, the narrative voice divides into a sequential
dialogue or dialectic whose physical, spatial layout on the page possesses
significance in itself. The first three lines focus on the "Song of the Aged
Mother"; the next three lines emphasize the "Universal Brotherhood";
and from the last two lines of this sequence the "Heavenly Father"
emerges. (This family constellation is further completed when the
"Daughter ofBeulah" appears six lines later.) The physical relationship of
these three segments to one another on the space of the page sandwiches
the Brotherhood between the Mother (on top) and the Father (below). In
so doing these lines embody a fundamental discrepancy ideographically:
is it significant that the Brotherhood has come spatially between the Aged
Mother and the Heavenly Father? And why does the physical arrangement
of the lines of the text seem to invert the traditional spatial arrangement
(by analogy with nature) in which the "Heavenly Father" is a sky god
above and the "Aged Mother" is the earth below? If we read this spatial
descent down the page as signifying a temporal order, it is possible that the
sequence of the lines embodies a narrative sequence in which the Aged
Mother's matriarchy precedes the seizure of power by the sons, and the