NOTES


perspectives. Primary perspectives resemble Paul Feyerabend's subversive incom-
mensurable frameworks in Against Method: Outline of An Anarchist Theory of Knowl-
edge (London: NLB; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975). Feyerabend
argues that even systems that have been traditionally construed to be structurally
analogous explanations of the same phenomena really share no "facts,"statements,
or theories. The world that implicitly lies behind (though the metaphor is
inappropriate) Feyerabend's attack on conventional ideas of the way science pro-
gresses," it seems to me, is a complex multiverse, not unlike Blake's in which
elements of crucial importance always escape explanation by any unified system,
though they may be explained by another system, which, by the same token,
allows other elements to escape. Further, such elements change their inner con-
stitution when they are taken account of by different systems. The (potentially
infinite) family of perspectives (kinds of possible organizations) constitutes its
elements with no obligation to take into account distinctions such as "fiction" and
"reality" that may be occurring in impinging, neighboring perspectives. In this
sense, no elements can exist "out of frame." See Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis:
An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1974), especially pp. 201-246 for a treatment of this issue in terms of the
sociology of knowledge. While primary perspective can be totally atomistic with
regard to other primary perspectives, "Blake" takes other perspectives (such as an
underlying world, consistent characters, causal sequence) into account to the min-
imal extent necessary to bring the energetic reader to a sufficiently imaginative
state to pass judgment on the text as a network of delusional pretexts (and glorious
subversive co-options) by constantly luring the reader toward, and then short-
circuiting, deeply rooted perceptual habits.
 Secondary perspective presupposes the primacy of narrative sequential order (see
note 20 above). In this perspective, events and characters come into existence the
moment they are narrated and not before (that is, they are not presupposed or
contained in any fashion until they explicitly enter the poem), but once they come
into narrative existence, they behave as if they belonged to an underlying world,
one never articulated but to which characters attempt to refer. Once in the narra-
tive, all details are present at all times but their presence is differentiated by degrees
and kinds of inclusion. Secondary perspective is thus a function that guides the
selection of surface residues of partially excluded events (i.e., decides how events
that have entered the narrative and are then partially suppressed are taken into
account in the present event). This sense of perspective re-enacts on a continuous
sliding scale of degrees and kinds of inclusions and exclusions the radical admis-
sion or rejection of alternative perspectives on the most comprehensive (primary)
level. Secondary perspective operates within a primary perspective field to main-
tain its characteristics at a working level. Because in secondary perspective all
event-features must come in layers of inclusion/exclusion, the most hidden or least
acknowledged details exhibit very few criteria (such as phrase repetition or context
analogy) for revealing that the present narrative event is an aspect (or transforma-
tion) of a preceding (nearly excluded) event. In secondary perspective no events
can ever totally vanish or be eradicated from the narrative field once they have
entered it. Every surface detail has the potential of being traced by tree (and other
web-like) diagrams to every other detail. Details thus range from being maximally
included by their immediate presence in the surface narrative to being minimally
included as a residue of partially, though never totally, excluded events. In most
cases the minimally included event-the event most impossible to locate in the