NOTES


tion, syntax, and narrative processes suggest a verbal parallel to the kind of work
Gombrich has characterized as a "lethal" constant frustration of our expectations.
Gombrich's analysis of the Cubists leads him to a conclusion concerning their art
which is close to Blake's verbal (and more indirectly his visual) techniques.
According to Gombrich, the manifest spatial contradictions of the Cubists' art
were intended to force our attention to the flat plane itself by introducing "con-
trary clues which will resist all attempts to apply the test of consistency," p. 282.
Blake's verbal/spatial techniques give the impression of those of Braque, the ele-
ments of whose work Gombrich says will work not in harmony "but... clash in
virtual deadlock," p. 281.
 5 For an extended discussion of these matters see my Visionary Physics: Blake's Note 5: page 3
Response to Newton (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
 6 Many of the manuscript pages of The Four Zoas are so over-written with Note6: page 3
revisions that even a superficial glance, especially at the beginning of Night I, gives
the visual effect of scribbled confusion. Blake's concern with the way he would
initiate the reader into the poem's strange world seems crucial, though thus far
there have been no methods which can respond to the richness of Blake's narrative
techniques, in part because of the difficulties that the revisions raise.
 7 In its generic sense, "Newtonian Narrative" underlies most conventional Note 7: page 3
narrative forms; in its specific sense-narratives produced by the "historical"
Newton-"Newtonian narrative" is an extreme case of the generic drive toward
unity, repression, closure, and so on. See note 8 below.
 s What I am calling generic "Newtonian narrative" fulfills almost exactly the Note 8: page 4
 conditions Peter Brooks sets forth for all narrative in general in his excellent
 psychoanalytic essay, "Freud's Masterplot," in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The
 Problem of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
 University Press, 1982), which I encountered only after I had completed this
 present account. In discussing the drive toward narrative closure as the death
 impulse, for example, Brooks says: "The very possibility of meaning plotted
 through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the
 interminable would be the meaningless" (p. 283). Again:

 Textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a
 text... can become usable by plot only when it has been bound or
 formalized.... To speak of "binding" in a literary text is thus to speak
 of any of the formalizations (which, like binding, may be painful,
 retarding) that force us to recognize sameness within difference.
 (p. 290)

 Blake's Four Zoas narrative subverts these conditions systematically, even in its
 persistent emphasis on difference within sameness. In terms ofspecific "Newtonian
 narrative," these concerns are part and parcel of the mathematical and
 experimental-scientific texts Newton composed; these issues are perhaps even
 clearer, however, in his non-scientific work-especially in his published Chronol-
 ogy of Ancient Kingdoms Ammended (which, in part, lays the foundation for tracing a
 single, linear course of events from creation to apocalypse), and in his unpublished
 commentaries on "The Book of Revelation," in which the symbols of the
 apocalypse, as the closing event of our world, can be interpreted only by means of
 Newton's own exegetical algebra. See Ault, "Incommensurability," 294-96, and