POSTSCRIPT


small to support either the fantasized "body behind the text" or the literal textual body itself,
unsettling this massive, spooky figure.
 The designs used to open regions A, B, and C above similarly arouse the anxiety that accom-
panies viewing such cut-away bodily images. Imagining the drawings complete behind the text
by connecting the lines that have been cut off by the sharp borders of the word-spaces requires a
surrealistic bodily dis-memberment and re-memberment. In ruthlessly cutting off the drive
toward closure and completeness that informs the ordinary, ego-affirming visual imagination,
this incisive, dis-membering tabula rasa literally opens up a space to be filled in by language. By
denying access to the (imaginary) unified visual body of another, this interposition of the (sym-
bolic) cutting edge that opens up a space for words threatens the unity of the viewer's own
ego-body-an enactment of the textual castration explored by Jacques Lacan and others. But
Blake undoes this primary cut by making the visible words of his text resist absorption into
phallocentric grammar.
 The spectator's desire to complete the drawing behind the text in these examples parallels the
reader's urge to find an ur-narrative behind the poem. On the physical page, of course, there is
literally nothing behind the verbal text, for the rectangular space and the inscribed words con-
stitute their own complete visual field. Likewise there is literally no primordial story behind the
surface details of the poem's narrative. The presumption of such a story dissolves under close
scrutiny of particulars.
 At the one point in the manuscript where Blake sketched in the completion of a Night Thoughts
design, the sketch disrupts the lines of poetry. Thus on page 137 of The Four Zoas (page 348
above), where Blake curved the left margin of the verbal text around the sketched-in completed
wrestling figures, the lines of poetry are compressed (show ideological and aesthetic stress)
precisely where the poem's syntax unequivocally asserts Los's identity with Urthona. Central to
the argument of Narrative Unbound is the possibility that this syntactic reduction of Los to
Urthona threatens the revisionary ontology of the poem. Thus, the two figures wrestling do not
simply allegorize the reader's resistive struggle with this apocalyptic text (though this is certainly
a dimension of the design's subversive referentiality) but also the struggle between Los and
Urthona for ontological priority over one another at the close of the poem-figures frozen in a
twisting identity-in-difference. Significantly, this point of stress is the only instance in The Four
Zoas manuscript where Blake displaces the verbal text in favor of an intruding "completed"
drawing, as if such completion itself ontologically displaces the status of the literal words on the
page.
 On page 126, the verso side of one of the Night Thoughts designs, Blake invokes an opposite
strategy. Instead of hiding the figure behind the text, he draws a weird creature whose eyes peer
out through the word "reorganize," a visual pun requiring an act of double reading that "reor-
ganizes" the organs of our eyes: it "re-organs-(our)-eyes."
 Since in many of Blake's finished "illuminated"works there is little direct correspondence in
content between design and accompanying verbal text, it is hardly surprising that drawings made
to illustrate another poem, serving later as worksheets, should bear approximate and, at best,
problematic relation to the content of the inscribed text. Yet, remarkably, the examples incor-
porated in Narrative Unbound selected primarily on the basis of their structural or thematic
relevance to the argument of the sections of this book also seem to suggest complex interconnec-
tions between the visual and verbal dimensions of The Four Zoas. It remains a choice to see this
connectedness either as a matter of coincidence or a sign offundamental interrelatedness, open to
ongoing definition.
 Blake's words on the opening and closing illustrations for Narrative Unbound, for example,