William Blake's 'The Four Zoas' : a reassessment of its implied metaphysics

• Main Author: Mounsey, Chris
• Published: University of Warwick 1992
• Subjects: 800; PR English literature
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.332054

This thesis considers the attempts of various critics to read the work of William Blake as either part of the traditional canon or as excluded from it, because of suppositions made about Blake’s view of metaphysics. By means of careful analysis of these opposing views of Blake's poetry, this work finds that neither of these statements can be said to be entirely true because each group of critics, in reading Blake’s work, impose their own metaphysics of reading upon it. Therefore, it is shown that rather than discovering the metaphysics inherent in Blake's idiosyncratic writing, most readers of Blake have done no more than find their own metaphysical position reflected back at them by Blake's Contrary. In order to give some idea of the formulation of the Contrary, Blake’s poem Vala, with its additions which created The Four Zoas, is considered in detail. This section relies heavily upon the layering of new writing upon older work which remains legible beneath, and uses this systematic pattern of changes to explore Blake’s changing relationship with Platonic metaphysics. The taking up and then dropping of Platonism by Blake is seen alongside the development of his own metaphysical system of the Contrary, and this non-systematic system is in turn documented in a brief final section which considers the ambiguities on the poem Milton. The complexity and subtlety of the Contrary will thus be displayed as both fitting into the canonical framework of traditional metaphysics, in that it posits a type of return in the fullness of meaning. But it will also be shown to be outside the aegis of traditional metaphysics, in that the return functions in a temporality that is eternally present, rather than one which looks forwards and backwards. Thus Contrary metaphysics will be seen to be closed, and furnishing fullness of meaning, but also changeable, thus not fixing meaning.