Introduction: Subverting Origin and Identity


 Because, as we have just seen, Blake's war against "Single vision &
Newtons sleep" demands the perpetual subversion of a single, stable,
unified world underlying the text, the greatest enemy of Blake's narrative
is also its precondition: the Newtonian reader's inertial resistance to the
transformational narrative processes of The Four Zoas dictates the minute
organization and deployment of textual details that make possible the
initiation of the Newtonian reader into the poem's perspective ontology.
This conflict, comprising the "Intellectual Battle" announced at the open-
ing of the poem (3.3), lies at the heart of the circular interconstitution of
reader, narrative, and text that is fundamental to the poem. Because ref-
erentiality and linear processing of language are two primary perceptual
categories through which the Newtonian reader constitutes the underly-
ing world which The Four Zoas is designed to undermine, Blake is con-
strained to work through those categories in order to subvert them. This
constraint guarantees that The Four Zoas narrative is not solipsistically
self-enclosed and merely self-referential, even though it exists to deny a
fixed underlying narrative "world" to which its events "refer." The poem's
most fundamental reference is, instead, to the forces against which it is
constantly struggling, "Single vision & Newtons sleep"--a strategic ref-
erentiality that enacts the spiritual struggle announced in the epigraph to
the poem.' This constraint also guarantees that the sequence of narrative
events is not at all arbitrary or indifferent to rearrangement: it is precisely
through the narrative's linear sequence that processes such as retroactive
transformation become possible and the apparent unrevisability of the past
can be challenged.
 Blake's combat with "Single vision" thus raises subversive questions
about its own integrity: To what degree are Newtonian vestiges necessar-
ily present in Blake's text? To what extent is there a residual underlying
world in The Four Zoas, even if it exists primarily to be undermined? To
what extent does Blake's text participate in the world it is subverting? All
of these questions focus on the boundary between the inertial conscious-
ness of the reader and the transformational fluidity of Blake's narrative
field as it battles to break down that Newtonian resistance. Because this
boundary is also the point of intersection between language as prohibition
or limit and language as locus ofvisionary possibility, it poses a fundamen-
tal continuing challenge to Blake's verbal imagination and composition.
 The difficulty of this challenge is perhaps most graphically
 demonstrated in the opening pages of the poem's manuscript, where
 Blake's revision upon revision produced what can only be called a textual
 disaster area. Within that verbal tangle, however, lie with astounding
 clarity the rudiments of text as flight and text as pattern or woven structure,
 two interacting textual dimensions of the narrative which Blake continu-
 ally exploits to counteract the natural pull of consciousness toward "Single
 vision." In the opening lines of the poem, Blake deleted explicit reference


The minute particulars
of The Four Zoas













The referentiality of The
Four Zoas








Newtonian residues in
The Four Zoas













Reconsidering text as
flight and text as pattern