ENGENDERING NARRATIVE VOICES


multiple possibilities is the single, true, correct reading? That is, Blake has
made the text ask if it has an identity in the Newtonian sense under the
guise of asking a Newtonian question concerning ostensible external
independent beings, Emanations and Enion. In the process, the Newto-
nian reader is drawn into this set of conflicts-identity/origin, declaration/
interrogation, subject/object, primordial/immanent origin-in such a
way that as the text surreptitiously loses its identity in the face of Blake's
astonishingly efficient verbal/visual strategies in this line, this reader is
initiated into a state of anxiety that disintegrates the very identity that is
supposedly processing the information in the line.
 Each of these variant readings enacts an aspect of the speaker's (presum-
ably Tharmas') attempt to come to grips with the centripetal dispersion of
his words that constitutes his loss of identity or self-coincidence. Under
this pretext, Blake has demonstrated that a character is not a character, a
text is not a text, and the reader is not a self-identical reader. In attempting
to retain control over the act of reading, the Newtonian reader tries to
isolate the variant readings as though they were separable, distinct mean-
ings; if this reader can sustain such an assumption, then the reader can
retain his/her identity; but if this reader is able to acknowledge that the
text is losing its identity in the process of being read, then the reader is
experiencing the need to affirm his/her own identity. At this point, the
reader may realize that in trying to affirm his/her identity through the act
of reading, he/she is searching for his/her own "Emanation" in the text,
which isjust what both the speaker and the reader have lost. For the reader,
however, this loss occurs in the act of reading the line itself, while the
speaker acts as if the loss had already occurred prior to his utterance. It is
precisely this decoy presumption of prior loss that lowers the reader's
defenses and makes it possible for the reader to acknowledge his/her own
lost identity/Emanation in the text. This desubstantializing process that
undermines the fixed identities of the reader and the text while subverting
a privileged primal origin is the Four Zoas narrative itself, emerging into
existence as an agent of ontological revision.
 Like these two lines, which open the narrative proper and divide the
speech of characters from that of the narrator, the structure of Night I as a
whole seems at first glance to affirm Newtonian ontology. Underlying the
reader's direct experience of the narrative in Night I is a complex network
of embedded structures that seem to contain the nucleus of the entire
poem. Taken in themselves, these structures are fixed and unrevisable by
the agency of the narrative: indeed, in themselves, they are the supervening
framework that constrains or bounds the narrative. As with the two open-
ing lines of the poem proper, however, where Blake invokes Newtonian
impulses only to subvert them, the embedded structures of Night I are
designed specifically to rule out the possibility of 1) a privileged origin,
beyond the text, of the poem's narrative world, and 2) consistent fixed
identities of characters and events. With respect to origin, the two "pri-
mary" structures of Night I, the "Tharmas/Enion" plot and the "Eternity"


The text interrogates its
own identity by having
the voice question the
name ofthe Emanations.








Though initially ungen-
dered, "Tharmas" will
henceforth be consi-
dered male, in anticipa-
tion of his sexually
divided state which
comes into being
through his speaking.


Assignment of male
gender to the speaker
circumvents the
androgynous being of
this act of speaking.

The text calls into ques-
tion the reader's fixed
gender as an aspect of
identity and otherness
(Emanation).




Dismantling origin and
identity




Night l's embedded
structures re-enact the
dispersion of origin and
identity.