Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake's «Vala» or «The Four Zoas»

Kathleen James-Cavan is an assistant professor of English and the
University of Saskatachewan.

The vexed history of the composition and publication of William
Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas is a rich mine of textual cruxes and
theoretical concerns. In an important and groundbreaking work of
scholarship, John Pierce departs from the practice of most Blake
scholars commenting on this text in the past 20 years by yoking a
detailed discussion of the layers of manuscript revision with a
sustained close reading of the poem. His thesis is that through its
various revisions, Blake’s poem goes from a sequential and diachronic
structure to one that is synchronic and synoptic, bringing it “into
alignment with Milton and Jerusalem.” Pierce refers throughout his
book to his concept of Blake’s “flexible design, one whose outline
... gains its flexibility through conscious adaptations of sequential
disruptions as a fundamental element in narrative experiment.” What
appears as indeterminate, Pierce sees as part of a narrative design
through which “the poem is revised to enact its own meaning through
emergent forms while it resists critical struggles to extract a
comprehensive or satisfactory statement of its thematic relevance.”

In contrast to the complexity of its vision and the material upon which
it comments, Pierce’s argument is clearly set out in the book’s two
parts. In the first part, he describes the manuscript and elaborates on
his notions about Blake’s revision of his narrative strategies; in the
second part, he focuses on Blake’s poetics of character. He concludes
the book by suggesting a “poetics of revision” that might allow the
reader to “entertain the juxtaposition of ... two possibilities [of
textual emendations] instead of suppressing one.” What emerges is a
picture of a poem continually under revision that also requires the
reader to be part of that revisionary process. Also included in the book
are eight plates reproduced from the manuscript and two appendixes (a
transcription of the earliest version of Vala or The Four Zoas and an
outline of the stages of development of Nights VII through IX).