FOUR ZOAS I / 4:6-5:6


 Speech and writing at
 the boundary of the nar-
 rative proper










 Tharmas' speech as a
 catalogue of grammati-
 cal types










 How the fiction of
 separate characters
becomes possible in The
Four Zoas narrative field




Revisions and deletions
to these lines call atten-
tion to the difficulty of
 the narratological/
 ontological problem
 being confronted.


saying" (5:6). The suddenness of Tharmas' opening cry of anguish (4:7)
and the initial indeterminateness of the speaker's identity are crucial to its
significance: this cry enacts in its temporal unfolding the process of
"darkning" announced immediately preceding it. By beginning his text
with an act of speech, Blake calls attention to this cry as lying on the
boundary between speech and writing: because Tharmas' speech is spa-
tially encoded in a text and not literally vocalized, Blake is able to organize
the syntax of this speech (through spatial layout, punctuation, etc.) with
an almost maddening openness to competing constructions by the reader
which allows Blake to challenge the identity of both the reader and the
text.
 Through this textual cry, Blake invokes already existent grammatical
categories (subjects, verbs, modifiers, etc.) in order to bring those
categories into narrative existence as ontological strategies in the poem at
precisely the moment he undermines them. The opening words of each
line of Tharmas' first speech, for example, constitute a catalogue of utter-
ance types, of tense and mood shifts: "are my... We are become... I have
hidden ... I will build... Why hast thou ... Let her Lay... It is not... She hath
taken ... The Men have recieved" (4:7-15). The organization of Tharmas'
syntax itself mirrors his sexually dividing being: an element that functions
as a subject in one reading becomes an object in another; some readings are
more obvious and less anxiety-inducing than others, but Blake makes it
impossible to accept any single syntactic construction as authoritative and
final. The layers of overlapping syntax which the reader struggles to
isolate from one another (or repress) are analogous to the overlapping yet
differentiating and repressing being ofTharmas' "darkning" sexual divi-
sion.
 The precise syntactic structure of the hiding/searching dialectic which
informs the Tharmas/Enion conversation not only allows the two charac-
ters to alternate between and participate in each other's roles but also
makes it possible for these characters to exist as separate beings in a
potentially fully interconnected narrative field. The hiding/searching
structure of the conversation is thus Blake's solution to the poetic and
ontological problem he is facing here-how to embody a character who is
in the process of dividing by means of the fiction that the character is already
divided. The speech gestures of the two fictionally already separate (though
ontologically dividing) characters overlap and disjoin in such a way that
each character can presume the separateness of the other character while
enacting the other's role and even accusing the other of the action he
himself (or she herself) is performing. The speech acts which Tharmas and
Enion-and indeed, the reader-initially experience as diametrically
opposed utterances by discrete characters progressively interconstitute
one another to such an extent that they become the same action: it is thus at
the moment they physically separate (5:5) that they are most fully revealed
to be the same character.
 Since this conversation enacts through language the dissolution of