FOUR ZOAS/END OF THE DREAM


The inertial state of con-
sciousness is perpetuated
by the hallucination of a
 narrator who has the
 authority to close the
 poem, by speaking its
 "End."


ports to coincide with its fictional origin and is judged by the narrative
field through which that voice comes into being. A primary meaning of
perspective ontology thus involves the process by which the ontological
status of a character or event-in this case Urthona's ontological priority
to Los-can be revised and even inverted by the linear narrative. As such,
the dream's "End" takes on the meaning of the poem's most extreme
possibility: to oppose the reader/narrator's desire to renounce the nar-
rative's power to revise the ontological conditions of its possibility.
 The "Dream" in this sense is that lethargic, closed state of consciousness
from which Blake has been relentlessly challenging the reader to awaken.
It is indeterminable whether the pastoral dawn of the poem's conclusion is
yet another, perhaps the most delusive of all, "false morning," the illusory
core event, introduced in Night I, that lies behind yet narratively infil-
trates the actions of the entire poem. By this strategy, Blake provides no
final answers, no precise path to take. Rather, he challenges the reader not
to succumb to the narrator's dream of resolution, not to ignore the power-
ful anti-apocalyptic resistances in Night IX, and, consequently, not to take
the risk of remaining tenuously suspended in the repressively benign,
pastoral Beulah. Through the radical optionality of The Four Zoas text,
which calls for continual vigilance, altertness, and openness, Blake has
provided a transformational ground for the reader's awakening to the
hypnotic attractiveness of this mild, harmonious vision, whose appeal to
the reader up to (and even through) the very "End" is an index of the
reader's refusal to cast off perceptual habits, the inertial state of conscious-
ness that has perpetually resisted the poem's revisionary power.


U.




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