NOTES


Note 9: page 4












Note 10: page 4





Note 11: page 4








Note 12: page 5


Frank Manuel, The Religion of Sir Isaac Newton: The Fremantle Lectures 1973
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
 I invoke the term "negative dialectic" with some reservation because of its
 close association with the Frankfurt School of (para)Marxist criticism: it seems,
 however, to be a term adequate for the present purposes to contrast with the
 affirmative monolithic vision of Newtonian narrative. By the time we reach the
 end of Night IX, the limited appropriateness of this term will be more evident. See
 Region D, note 6. For two divergent accounts of the dialectics of negation in
 Marxist criticism see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the
 Frankfurt School in the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto:
 Little, Brown & Co., 1973) and Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-
 Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
 1971).
 o0 G. E. Bentley, Jr., for example, claims that "as time went on Blake tended
 more and more to let the thought determine the form of his poetry, and the
 thought was becoming more amorphous.... [H]is absorbing interest in the grow-
 ing myth obscured or somehow denied his sense of poetic form." William Blake:
 "Vala," p. 186.
 In an earlier (unpublished) formulation of this textual situation, I conceived of
 The Four Zoas text as stratified into two different dimensions: 1) the text as an
 unfinished visual surface that subverts conventional visual/syntactic "reader"
 response; and 2) the text as a convergence ofdisunified interconnections at various
 levels, many of which interfere with one another. Any "deep structure" that could
 be generated from such a stratified, heterogeneous text would bear little
 resemblance to a unified world even in the process of dissolving at the moment of
 its coming-into-being.
 12 In his edition of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible (itself an uncom-
pleted work), Claude Lefort calls attention to: "our confusion before the uncom-
pleted work; it brutally confronts us with an essential ambiguity from which more
often than not we prefer to turn away"; The Visible and the Invisible Followed by
Working Notes, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968), xvii. Blake's text of The Four Zoas, as is commonly known, remains in
manuscript form, "unfinished." Because the text is unfinished it provides us with a
number of opportunities for interpretation which tend to remain closed in criti-
cism based on the myth of the "completed" or "finished" text. The fact that Blake
never "finished" the text opens up the temptation to critics to treat discrepancies
simply as anomalies of an incomplete manuscript. Not only does the manuscript
form increase our chance of seeing how self-consciously Blake built discrepancies
into his art, but it also gives the critic an extraordinary opportunity to observe the
constructive aspect of the text which is there in all of Blake's texts, whether he
"finished" them or not. Blake is notorious for changing details in various copies of
the "same" work-as with Milton where no single copy Blake made is "complete."
Perhaps more obvious and dramatic is Blake's deletion of key words in the only
complete colored copy of Jerusalem. Especially in his address "To the Public" in
Chapter 1, Blake deleted specific references to the reader but draws attention to the
fact that something has been deleted which would complete the statements that
now appear incomplete Blake effects incompleteness precisely because these
words are "finished," colored over. The visual "finish" is precisely what deletes
the verbal "completeness": for example, "...the highest reward possible: the