BLAKE'S NOSTOS
Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas
Kathryn S. Freeman
Establishes Blake's controversial, unfinished epic, The
Four Zoas, as the culmination of his mythos.
Blake's Nostos establishes The Four Zoas, Blake's
controversial, unfinished epic, as the culmination of the poet's
mythos. Kathryn S. Freeman shows that, in its freedom to
experiment with non traditional narrative, this prophetic book is
Blake's fullest representation of nondual vision as it coexists
with the material world. Blake' s scheme of consciousness
eliminates the Enlightenment hierarchy of faculties in a
structure centered around a nondual vision operating through and
subsuming the fragmented world. The author draws on the analogue
of Eastern philosophy to describe Blake 's nondualism. According
to this interpretation of Blake's epic, consciousness itself is
the hero whose nostos is the apocalyptic return to
wholeness from the multiple ruptures that comprise the
fragmenting journey of Albion' s dualistic dream. Blake's
Nostos demonstrates that for each of the central elements of
myth--causality, narratology, figuration, and teleology--Blake
superimposes such dual and nondual perspectives as time and
eternity as well as bounded space and infinity.
"While many of Blake's critics resort to a vocabulary or a
methodology that compounds the difficulties of understanding
Blake's prophetic poetry, Freeman writes with clarity and
precision. The topic, how Blake in The Four Zoas has
challenged the fundamental dualism of Western thought with a
nondualistic poetics of 'Contraries,' may seem often on the verge
of losing its own philosophical ground and lapsing into paradox,
but Freeman is able to build her case persuasively as she guides
her reader through Blake' s myth of the Fall into the constrained
realm of temporal/spatial constructs. Without lapsing into the
language of epiphany, she explains Blake's celebration of a
liberating vortex. His vision, she convincingly argues, is not
the rhapsodist' s furor divinus, but is mediated in and
through physical and mental awareness." -- Frederick
Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles
Kathryn S. Freeman is Assistant Professor of English at
the University of Miami.
A volume in the SUNY series,
Western Esoteric Traditions
David Appelbaum, editor
192 pages March 1997
paperback ISBN 0-7914-3298-X
hardcover ISBN 0-7914-3297-1
State University of New York Press
State University Plaza
Albany, NY 12246-0001