9

Grimes, like Beer, clearly rejects a methodology such as that followed by Percival, Raines and Frye:

Blake's vision has nothing whatever to do with archaic myths of cosmogony and theogony, which are based on circular views of time and which seek renewal by a ritualistic return to the time between chaos and history, namely, to the time of "the" creation. -- Blake's interest is not creation but creativity.

It can be seen from these views that the poem is thought either to have no formal literary structure, or to be plotless within a traditional mythic frame. An alternative was therefore sought, and Helen T. McNeil provided such an alternative. Her central thesis is:

The Four Zoas' independence of form amounts to

the creation of an internally consistent but externally unexplained world. A creation of this sort, even if Blake did not carry it beyond manuscript stage, has tremendous formal implications. It bluntly abandons the associative obligations of major poetry, and by doing so threatens the mimetic mode itself. Such a threat, if* carried through, could return major poetry to a pre-Homeric primitivism, or, more hopefully, it could give a literary form to any phenomenology which, like Blake's, sees the perceiver and the perceived as one.30

This radical hypothesis advances a lack of formal literary structure as a positive device of "tremendous formal implications" which threatens "the mimetic mode itself." McNeil's insights should be taken most seriously, for, if correct, it follows that the work could transform traditional literary activity on keenly argued methodological grounds. Literary criticism, for example, which seeks to relate the parts to the whole, cannot come to terms with an "externally unexplained world."

29 Ibid., p. 80.

30

McNeil, "The Formal Art of The Four Zoas." Blake's Visionary

Forms Dramatic, p. 379. '"