Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas by John B. Pierce

ESC 26, 2000 is true for radicals or reformists like Phebe Gibbes, John Trusler (now, there is a new discovery for most of London’s readers!), and Robert Bage. In its exhilaratingly intelligent close readings of texts, and in its command of a broad sweep of argument, this book rearranges familiar landmarks in a manner that will be felt for some time to come. ISOBEL GRUNDY / University o f Alberta John B. Pierce. Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas. Montreal, Kingston, London, Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. xxvii, 206. 9 plates. John Pierce’s analysis of Blake’s most difficult poem is a worthy contribution about a much-studied work.1 The title derives from his argument that in Vala, Blake’s shifting of narrative strategies gives the poem a flexible de­ sign, one whose [... ] outline gains its flexibility through con­ scious adaptations of sequential disruptions as a fundamental element in narrative experiment. [... ] the poem is revised to enact its own meaning through emergent forms. [... ] Essen­ tially, however, I am interested in the fluidity and occasional uncertainties evidenced in revision, leaving the poem as a monument to process rather than product, (xxii, xxvi, xxi) His “critical approach here is driven primarily by the physi­ cal state of the manuscript” (xv), and he deals with its extraor­ dinary intricacy in exemplary though not very novel fashion. The problems are primarily to establish what the words of the poem axe (many of them are erased or deleted), where they be­ long (there are two sections called “Night the First” and none called “Night the Second” and two called “Night the Seventh”), and how the scores of illustrations are related to the poem (the proof-engravings for Young’s Night Thoughts and several of the drawings are probably not related to the poem at all2). Its meaning exists in the stages of development of the poem, not in its organic unity. This supposition has been too little registered in the field of Blake criticism, and it is this suppo­ sition the book attempts to explore, (xxvi) 502 REVIEWS Of course the pattern he traces was not the one Blake orig­ inally intended. Blake gradually altered the shape of the poem and its es­ sential narrative poetics to highlight the discontinuous, the indeterminate, and the synchronic. [... ] the synoptic and synchronic tendencies of Blake’s poetics are the result of con­ scious revision and correction of an essentially diachronic nar­ rative. (xvii-xviii) Pierce therefore claims that the discontinuities in the text are deliberate, that they indicate a change in Blake’s plan, or rather a growing insistence that the idea of natural cause-andeffect is a Newtonian delusion. As Blake wrote in Milton, “every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems: it is a Delusion.”3 And in his notes to Bacon’s Essays he exclaimed: “There is no Such Things as [... ] a Natural Cause for any Thing in any Way” (Marginalium [71798] to Bacon’s Essays [1798], 75). Of course such a belief makes a narrative poem impossible, for its events do not produce one another in a natural way. Pierce argues plausibly that Blake began writing a narrative poem, and then, when he came to believe that its method, its narrative character, belied its purpose, or what had become its purpose, he disrupted it with interpolations that fundamentally altered its narrative character. There may once have been a “story” in Vala, but, by the time it had become The Four Zoas, the story was in tatters, and the disruptions to the continuity were often more conspicuous than the “narrative.” This is an argument of very considerable significance and one that is very illuminating not only of The Four Zoas (179671807 ?) but also of Milton (1804[— 1811?]) and Jerusalem (1804[1820 ?]), which overlapped with and succeeded The Four Zoas. Blake’s earlier long poems, from Tiriel (71789) to Europe (1794) and The Book of Urizen (1794), are manifestly narrative po­ ems, although the worlds they deal with are only occasionally the natural world and although the spiritual histories they de­ pict are occasionally disconcerting. But events...

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