Introduction: Mapping Nights H-VI


 As we have seen, in Night the First Blake experimented and struggled
with complex narrative rules and perspective techniques-in some ways
the most original and difficult in the poem for both the reader and for
Blake himself-which subvert the possibility of reconstructing from
Night I's textual surface an underlying narrative world whose events obey
the laws of linear causality. It must seem, therefore, somewhat of a retreat
when, in Nights the [Second]' through the Sixth, Blake tempts the reader
with pervasive clues which suggest that the narrative events are now
unfolding according to the already discredited conventional principle of
linear causal dependence. As might be expected, however, Blake under-
mines this apparent causal movement with local disruptive details which
he, at times almost perversely, challenges the reader to overlook or disre-
gard.
 Blake facilitates this fiction of causal sequence by using a primary plot
division-which exists invariably one-half to two-thirds of the way
through each Night of The Four Zoas -to connect and overlap Nights
II-VI, rather than to separate them, as he does in all the other Nights. For
example, the final segment of Night II connects more closely to the open-
ing segment of Night III than to the opening segment of Night II: this
process holds for the entire sequence of Nights II-VI. In these Nights, the
plot divisions nearly override the physical breaks between Nights, almost
as if Blake purposely sought to misplace those breaks. While the end of VI
and the beginning of VIIa constitute a common plot, Night VIIa deci-
sively swerves away from this narrative strategy in its final third and
(through heavy revision) breaks the chain of causal overlapping in a way
that prevents it from being resurrected in the later Nights. In some cases,
as with the revisions and rearrangements of Nights VIIb and VIII, Blake
seems to have made narrative decisions, at least in part, with an eye to
frustrating the reader's desire to be handed such neat plot overlapping
between consecutive Nights. Blake initiates a seductive dialectic between
the forward thrust of the dominant narrative features and the persistent
reminders that subsequent events intersect with and are aspects or versions
of prior events. The characters and the narrator seem determined to cling
to fictions that make sense of things causally, but the details of their
actions and utterances work constantly to undermine these metaphysical
fantasies.
 Each of these five Nights seizes as its dominant narrative fiction one or
 more of the techniques of Night I. Night II emphasizes discontinuous
 jumps between discrete levels of a four-tiered perspective hierarchy: these
 levels are modes of Urizen's creation of the Mundane Shell and its transfor-
 mation into his golden heavens. Although this technique resembles Night
 I's sudden leaps to glimpses of the "Divine Vision" or "Beulah," its opera-
 tion in the perspective hierarchy in Night II virtually generates a new
 narrative technique. Each of these four levels of perspective is assigned its


The apparent narrative
retreat to the principles
of linear causality in
Nights II-VI

There is no Night Blake
unequivocally named
"the Second."






The invariable internal
plot division of each
Night of The Four Zoas


The use of this pattern in
Nights II-VI




The transformation of
this pattern in Nights
Vila, Vllb, and VIII.













The narrative strategies
of Nights II-VI incor-
porate and revise the
structural techniques
developed in Night I.