10

To support her criticisms (and there can be few more searching criticisms than those she has advanced) McNeil presents the following justifications:

The Zoas themselves posit radically different pasts according to the emotions of the present. Indeed, time recalled from the perspective of a distant present, and temporal movement toward a future which constantly realizes itself in the present can hardly be said to exist in The Four Zoas. The past seems rhetoric; there is no linear time-line . . . until Night the Eighth. . . . The Zoas' acts are of a continuing nature without the continuation affording the richness of an interlocking plot. After the reader has followed the Zoas, through their maze of false choices and dead ends, he begins to realize that there will not be any reward of a moral at the end of the poem.31

To my mind, McNeil makes four fundamental points: that The Four Zoas has an "externally unexplained world" because there is no systematic cosmology;

that there is no linear timeline" and so no chronology;

that there is no "interlocking plot" and so no sense of coherent action;

and that, in consequence, there is no "moral at the end of the poem." Her position is developed well by Grimes, who argues that "Blake emphasizes the problem of transition in its literary, psychological, and social manifestations precisely by muting or omitting connective 32 devices." Blake's style, to Grimes, emphasises the intuitive and the visionary and means "that vision is none other than the breaking down 33 of strict chronological and causal sequences."

McNeil, "The Formal Art of The Four Zoas," Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, p. 380.

32

Grimes, "Time and Space in Blake's Major Prophecies," Blake's

Sublime Allegory, p. 80. Ibid., p. 80.