Becoming-zoa

Abstract

The political, economic and print machinery of the 1790s brings Blake to a moment of crisis and visionary insight made evident in The Four Zoas. This essay questions the notion that The Four Zoas is simply a manuscript. A look at the complex politics of printing in the 1790s suggests that the Zoas is part of Blake’s working through the problems of publication during the reign of a conservative, nationalistic government at war with France. To begin with, The Four Zoas is written on proof sheets of Blake’s illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts. This detail leads to an examination of two types of literature in the mid-1790s, state approved literature and state censored literature. Blake’s work is at a crossroads between the two since he wants to produce a lavish illuminated folio like the Blake-Edwards edition of Night Thoughts, but also include radical material that would be censored. Standing between printable national literature and banned anti-government works, Blake’s Zoas is a highly unstable text which, because of its instability, defies and critiques the political, economic and industrial machinery of publication during the turn of the century. Blake’s construction of the Zoas makes the act of reading both traitorous and insightful. Editorial marks, multiple ways of arranging pages, and lined and etched drawings become part of the system of signification for the verbal text. Words, phrases and images in the Zoas are so deeply overdetermined that the reader struggles to produce meaning via ordered patterns of relations without shutting down or shutting out the surplus of possible readings. In order to keep a maximum of possibilities open, I devise a method of reading involving "vector" relationships. I use pages 99 and 100 of The Four Zoas as an example of the complex nexus of lines, marks, drawings, words and spacings made visible by a vector reading. Ultimately, Blake envisions that the dizzying experience of reading will open the readers’ " doors of perception," challenging the way readers think about texts and the interface between text and world.