THE FOUR ZOAS PERCEPTUAL GRAMMAR


Perhaps only those "in
all Eternity" are barred
from knowledge of the
 "Four."


 The poem begins with
 an enumeration of the
unknowable "Four" not
 at the first, but at the
 "fourth.. one."































 The subordinate status
 of textual patterns


Eternity" from knowing the "Natures" of (supposedly) the "Four." In the
first three lines of the poem Blake deleted reference to the reader's com-
prehension; here we have an implicit reintroduction of the reader as an
individual spectator to a drama that the reader, as an individual, will be
unable to comprehend. Since the poem immediately continues with the
line "Los was the fourth immortal starry one," and seemingly proceeds to
delineate his nature, either the previous statement is irrelevant to the
individual reader of the poem, or the narrative voice has, once again,
undergone an internal transformation.
 In these opening lines Blake calls direct attention to the act of reading,
and the revisions compress or suppress information that subsequently
(inadvertently or intentionally) turns up in disguised form, as happened in
the case of the initially deleted reader. Another feature of these opening
lines is the submergence of causal connections under incomplete syntax
(as in the exclusion of subject-predicate forms as if under grammatical
transformation), and the structural overlapping of discrete pieces of infor-
mation (as in the case of the emerging family constellation in which the
Mother and Father are spatially separated by the "Brotherhood").

 Text as Woven Pattern or Schema. The aspect of the text that weaves
minute details into large, abstract tapestries or schematic patterns lies at
the opposite extreme from the frustrating gaps in the text that enact
Tharmas' flight. Moreover, Enion's weaving of the Circle of Destiny,
which serves as a model for this most complex sense of Blake's text,
connects the process of perspective transformation to the sequential dis-
crepancies of the text as flight. As Enion weaves the Circle out of elements
of the conversation she just had with Tharmas, her weaving takes on a will
of its own, "perverse & wayward." Similarly, the schematic patterns of
The Four Zoas mutually interfere with, as well as mutually constitute, each
other.
 The narrative of each Night of The Four Zoas has its own perspective or
perceptual grammar whose features are marked by minute details of the
text. These patterns are no more primordial than the temporal surface
details: in a sense they have less claim to textual reality because they can be
experienced by the reader only indirectly. These textual structures work
to subvert normal patterns of processing and grouping perceptual and
conceptual information and to open up new ways of structuring con-
sciousness. Among the comprehensive textual models or patterns for
perspective transformation which Blake invokes throughout the poem,
the following are most prevalent: 1) perspective analysis and linearly
embedded structures; 2) hierarchical displacement; 3) fictions of causal
sequence; 4) overlapping of "events" by repetition; 5) involution of events
by causal circularity and information loops; 6) disjunctive jumps (within a
nexus of events) between discrete information bits; and 7) continuous
re-orientation of perspective. There are many others, but these are the
primary organizing/disorganizing textual patterns.