THE READER'S REPRESSION


The inadequacy of the
return of the repressed









Textual gaps open up
narrative possibilities.


psychological repression model of the narrative and text could adequately
account for the minute particulars ofEnion's weaving and sexual ravishing
that subsequently enter the narrative proper: these events cannot, however,
be fully explained as sequential revelations or manifestations of informa-
tion previously hidden or repressed by the Tharmas/Enion dialogue. If
such a repression model were fully sufficient to account for the minute
particulars of these subsequent narrative events, the conversation between
Tharmas and Enion would substantially affirm the existence of a world/
situation (independent of or prior to the text) from whose features Thar-
mas and Enion select, through a process of psychological exclusion or
repression, rather than (as is the case for The Four Zoas) a world/situation
in the state of coming-into-existence by virtue of-in the region of-
precisely those textual gaps that take on significance in the poem as dis-
crepancies within the narrative field. That is, rather than signifying the
closing off of awareness (repression), these textual gaps serve to open up
regions of possibility in which subsequent perspective analyses can find
room to engage in (often perverse) free-play.
 Once Newtonian repression has explicitly entered the narrative proper
by the agency of the Tharmas/Enion dialogue, however, it becomes a
primary and necessary feature of the Four Zoas narrative field, taking on
ontological significance as Blake uses it to draw the reader into perform-
ing the same processes that the characters are enacting, to tempt the reader
to repress not only numerous local details but even the Tharmas/Enion
conversation itself.
 The second complication of this process of perspective analysis by re-
enactment forces into the open the incompleteness and erroneousness of
the initial impression that a psychological repression model is adequate to
Blake's text: the alternate re-presentations of the originating conversation
introduce elements into the narrative proper that conflict with and even
contradict the prior verbal interchange between Tharmas and Enion. Per-
vasive textual lures tempt the reader to assume that the details that follow
the conversation between Tharmas and Enion are narratively related to
one another as a simple causal sequence: the conversation causes the weav-
ing which causes the ravishing. Sustaining a causal reading of this linear
textual sequence, however, demands the repression, by the reader, of
significant local details that persistently interfere with, but do not obliter-
ate, the possibility of causal dependence between the emerging sequential
narrative events. Interpreting these discrepant details as signs of prior
repression by Tharmas and Enion leads to the partially misleading conclu-
sion that Enion's weaving and sexual ravishing were somehowgoing on at
the same time as the conversation, that these subsequent events were the
bodily gestures Tharmas and Enion were repressing in their evasive
dialogue. This reading is certainly more accurate than the causal interpre-
tation, but nevertheless still clings to the supposition of a pre-existent
narrative world.
 Only the consistent details support a reading of the text as a causal