FRUSTRATION OF DESIRE FOR REPRESENTED REDEMPTION


whirl), Los seems to lose his name and collapse into "the nameless
shadow" as he begins to re-enact his binding in Nights IV and V: suddenly
at this point where the narrative proper bottoms out, the narrator again
drags out a narratively discredited doctrine concerning the Lamb
(107:36-38). The sudden resurgence of the doctrinal Lamb resists and
defends against the narrator's fear that the poem will drearily recycle itself.
The poem does not recycle, however, in spite of, not because of, the
narrator's desperate gesture.
 Thus Blake disturbingly acknowledges our need for a relief from the
 nearly unbearable tension of increasing complexity in the poem by incor-
 porating into the narrator's intrusive judgments a version of our yearning
 to behold a redemption in a fiction external to ourselves (and to the text)
 and by projecting in the characters a need for and belief in a form of salvation
 that displaces responsibility away from themselves. In these three Nights
 the characters begin to believe (or hope) that redemption is coming in the
future, a corollary of their sustained belief (in Nights I-VI) in a fall in the
past. Even if we have awakened to the fact that for Blake the "fall" in The
Four Zoas is a narrative fiction, a pretext important primarily in its power
to manipulate perceptual judgments, it is much more difficult to resist the
hope of external redemption and confront the welter of complexity in
Nights VIIa-VIII without succumbing to an overwhelming need to seize
upon plot elements such as "The Lamb of God" or doctrines such as that of
"States" (which is suddenly elaborated in Night VIII), as if they were
unproblematic indices of forthcoming resolution. Unless in Nights VIIa,
VIIb, and VIII Blake abandons his program of perceptually re-educating
his readers, such "redemptive" images and doctrines must function
analogously to the "fall" and be determined contextually by the perceptual
presuppositions and organizations of the narrative field.
 By incorporating "redemptive" references into the poem in the way he
 did, Blake either failed to graft an authentic external redemptive scheme
 onto the fluid perceptual narrative field of The Four Zoas, or succeeded in
 exposing the falsity of and the imaginative danger inherent in presenting a
 true redemption in completed narrative form on the surface of the text. In
 either case, the external redemptive scheme is found wanting, and Blake
 plays off this profound frustration against our desire to see the enormous
 complexity and confusion of Night VIII resolved in the narrative events of
 Night IX. Whatever Blake's intentions were in grafting references to
 "redemptive" forces onto earlier Nights, the cumulative effect of such
 revisions is to undermine the unambiguous authority of such forces to act
 as powers that can redeem or save the characters, the narrative world, or
 the reader.
 In attempting to unravel some crucial problems of these especially diffi-
 cult Nights it is valuable to examine: 1) how elements which seem to
 originate in these three Nights (such as the Tree of Mystery, the weaving
 of the spectres of the dead, and the massive war) are actually transforma-
 tions of previously existing narrative elements; 2) how the mechanisms of


"Redemption" in the
futureversus the "fall" in
the past as a narrative
strategy