In considering these questions, it is important to remember, as Gregory Ulmer suggests, that "the scholarly practices of our discipline evolved as part of an apparatus consisting of a language technology (alphabet and print), institutionalization (school), and subject formation (selfhood)." In this light, we can understand that "the shift in our language technology from the page to the screen is part of the emergence of a new apparatus that includes not only a new technology but also new institutional practices and new personal behaviors (subjectivation)." [3] The continued predominance of print metaphors (as in "homepage") in the discourse of the Web indicates that these practices, and the modes of subject formation they might entail, have not yet been invented in any kind of systematic way. As scholars of English language and literature, with a range of theories describing both textuality and the production of subjectivity at our disposal, we can be an extraordinary resource in inventing these new practices.
In this paper, I will suggest a provisional theory of hypertext design based on William Blake's The Four Zoas and offer an experimental hypertext adducing this theory, using the poem as my object of study. I will argue that Blake's text manifests a material and narrative excess that undermines the concepts of rational reference and embodied meaning upon which traditional forms of academic discourse are based. The process of revision to which Blake subjects the poem functions to continually realign the various levels of narrative in relation to synchronic, associative properties, creating the potential for various spaces to exist simultaneously. These are surface effects, sometimes achieved through "microscopic" manipulations of syntax, that confound any attempt to construct a coherent underlying narrative. At the same time, the poem calls into question modes of subjectivity founded in the traditional discursive forms of the print medium, attempting to construct in their place a radical subjectivity capable of negotiating the intransigencies of a critically destabilized narrative space. The excess of reference exhibited in the text, I will argue, is produced by a process best understood as a kind of fetish logic, and therefore demands a discourse unfixed on embodiment, one that allows an unrestricted engenderment of associated meanings, contradictory or otherwise. The multimedia possibilities of the World Wide Web and the associative structure of the hypertext link seem uniquely suited to creating such a fetishistic discourse, suggesting that we might find in Blake's poem a model for designing academic discourse for the screen.
In The Four Zoas, Blake seems already well on his way to exploding the paradigm of the page. The poem exists as a single, heavily revised, complexly visual manuscript never bound by Blake in any final order. Many of the pages contain sketches in the margins, or are written on the proof sheets for the illustrations Blake did for Young's Night Thoughts. While this material excess has made life difficult for its editors, the poem provides us, should we choose to embrace its difficulties, with an extraordinary re-visioning of the very idea of the book. As Ault argues, "In its naked preservation of the traces of its struggle to be (re)composed, The Four Zoas pushes to the foreground the productive labor of writing: it is a text that insists on its own radical heterogeneity, on its own struggle to be different from itself, indeed, ultimately on its process of eradicating a potentially unitary textual 'self' from which 'it' could 'differ'" (xiii).
Ault's linking of textuality and subjectivation here is astute. By continually breaking the chain of causality required by narrative, fracturing and reconstituting space/time, Blake calls for the reexamination of the discursive space in which subjectivity comes into being. It is not surprising then that a preoccupation with origin attends almost all of the narrative activities of the characters in The Four Zoas. In Night Five, for instance, when Urizen is awakened by Orc's howling in the Dens of Urthona, he immediately attempts to make sense of his situation by remembering his fall from Eternity, his origin in the fallen world. The narrative that Urizen tells is one of a series of versions told by characters in the poem, each profoundly different from the previous, of what ostensibly are the same events. In this version, Urizen takes the blame for "the fall," which occurs after he becomes drunk with the "wine of the almighty" given to him by Luvah in exchange for the "steeds of light." Based on this story, he concludes that Luvah, a character who disappeared from the narrative in Night Two, has returned in the figure of Orc.
In Night Six, driven by this memory, Urizen throws himself "into the Eastern vacuity the empty world of Luvah," beginning the spatial translation of an interpretive void, populating space with the physical manifestations of the various narratives generated by his activities. It is no accident that this takes place in the world of Luvah. The propagation of signs that evoke Luvah, but are evacuated of meaning by his non-existence, forms the basis for a series of narratives seeking to fill the interpretive breach created by his absence. With the addition of the spatial metaphor for what, until this point, had been "only" an exegetical problem for the various narrators of the poem, the narrative itself moves into a space that defies stable representation.
In Night VII, the crisis that this precipitates becomes apparent. The horses of Urizen are bound within Orc's cavern, the bulls of Luvah surround Orc--and because of these signs, Urizen reads Orc as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Luvah's return announced in Night V. This reading is "confirmed" by Orc, who appears to acknowledge this identity: "I well remember how I stole thy light & it became fire / Consuming. Thou Knowst me now O Urizen Prince of Light / . . . Terrified Urizen heard Orc now certain that he was Luvah" (80: 39-43). But if Orc is "really" Luvah, he offers a memory of the narrative of Luvah and Urizen opposed to the version Urizen relates in Night V. Urizen does not "well remember" Luvah stealing his light--he remembers giving Luvah the steeds of light in exchange for the wine of the Almighty. The reading of Orc as Luvah is further destabilized by the ambiguity of the pronoun reference in the passage quoted above: is Urizen now certain that Orc is Luvah or that Urizen is Luvah, or is Orc certain that Urizen is Luvah? All of these possibilities emerge in one line, all equally tenable, for Urizen has rebuilt and repopulated Luvah's empty world, and is thus, like Orc, implicated in his traces.
As we can see, the continual revisioning of past events in the narrative present causes the various characters to behave very much like fetishists. Rather than confronting the experience of radical otherness, the alterity of a fractured subjectivity, the fetishist retreats behind a screen, turns to an object that can be controlled. This object is used as an ordering principle, a means of bringing heterogenous material into a systematic organization (Brown 38). The fetish's status as an originating event allows the narrativization of experience, the displacement of desire onto drive. The characters seek endlessly to remember a shared, but irrecoverable, origin that would make sense of their present situations, and when they fail, erect a screen in its place. In the narrative present, like victims of amnesia, they remember only the last memory before the traumatic one and retain it as a fetish (cf. Bergen 137). Urizen, motivated by the lack both hidden and revealed by the screen memory of his origin, deploys Luvah's signs as fetish objects to systematically map the interpretive abyss in which he finds himself. "The word fetish is a part of mapping," Mark Wigely argues. "It is used at the borders to outline the unmappable, the strangest, least comprehensible symptoms of the other, that which makes the other truly other, bracketing it in order that the rest of the map can be completed" (89). Reading The Four Zoas in this light, one begins to realize that the operation of this fetish logic is not limited solely to the level of the narrative activities of various characters. Representation itself gradually becomes implicated in the magic of the fetish, causing the reader dependent on traditional modes of signification to be implicated, like Urizen, in the very signs he or she seeks to read.
In Night Eight, the "Sons of Eden" sing a song in which they catalogue from their position in Eternity the ontological processes occurring in a range of narrative spaces, positing a connection between them in terms of a narrative teleology of sin and redemption. They behold the daughters of Enitharmon weaving clothing for the dead on their looms, and Satan's "Mills of resistless wheels," standing "round the roots of Urizens tree," where this clothing is unwoven and then woven "anew in the forms of dark death & despair" (113 (first portion): 1-37). The song ends with a description of the disruptive agency of the Lamb of God in this process, who they say "redeems the spectres from their bonds," and in a seeming contradiction, plead for the Lamb to come and initiate this "Redemption / Begun Already in Eternity" (104 (second portion): 11- 17). From the perspective of Eternity, the Lamb of God is the key to the resolution of a profound ontological crisis that has developed in the poem's narrative through the conflicting agencies of characters in other spatial contexts, and furthermore, Eternity is the privileged interpretive space from which this resolution must come.
The process the song describes allegorizes a potential relationship of the reader to the text at this point in the poem, a poem in which various incommensurable narrative strands have been woven together, unwoven, and woven anew, like the clothing for the spectres of the dead described in the song. The narrative built around the Lamb of God is repeatedly fragmented in Night Eight by the transfer of Luvah's signs from Orc to the Lamb, who appears wearing Luvah's robes of blood. The narrative excess unleashed through this identity crisis undermines rational reference, trapping the reader dependent on this mode of reading, like the spectres of the dead, in "forms of dark death & despair." The hope held out in the song is that the Lamb will rescue the narrative from the interpretive abyss, retroactively instituting the strictures of narrative teleology and reaffirming structures of rational reference by bringing closure to the poem.
It should not seem strange then that the narrative perspective of Eternity has been adopted by so many readers of The Four Zoas and dominates much of Blake criticism. Eternity, by the logic of this account, is privileged above all other interpretative spaces in the poem, and in return for the critic's investment in it, guarantees the functioning of a critical economy that produces the possibility of identifying embodied meaning. Thus, when Harold Bloom encounters the passage at the end of Night Seven that marks the initial emergence of the "spectrous dead" and the constellation of associated weaving images into the narrative, he reproduces on a meta-level the structural conditions of this allegory of reading. "Los," he argues, "feels the imaginative desire to 'fabricate embodied semblances,' artifices of eternity in which the dead can live again . . . . The desire of Los is the desire of Blake, and The Four Zoas is such a world" (255). Bloom sees these "embodied semblances" as allegories for Blake's redemptive theme in the poem, and the status of these "semblances" as "artifices of eternity" is meant to establish the "truth" value of his claims. But in embracing this system of reference, Bloom has radically closed off the conflicting associations generated by the narrative. In this sense, he is practicing a fetishistic discourse, valuing one part of the text in a way that is unwarranted by the narrative, using the "artifices of eternity" to screen anything disruptive to his interpretation.
A similar process occurs in explications of the visual text of the poem, where the simultaneity of image and text offers the potential for a non-linear, synchronic experience of "reading." The opening lines of page nine, which describe Enion's search for her children, are, as Erdman explains, "inked over erasures, but first written in pencil in top margin, then replaced by a drawing of Christ in an orb" (note 824). The text and drawing in the margin become physically enclosed in a space in which associations are reconfigured non-linearly and rebirthed in synchronicity with the act of reading. Magno and Erdman's interpretation of the image in their facsimile edition is as follows: "to show us what lives within the symbolic circumference of infinitude, Blake has drawn a globe at the top of the page. In its center, contradicting Old Testament fatalism, Jesus is shown sitting on a curve of this earth, with his legs drawn up and his arms outstretched in a gesture that . . . offers the radiant immortality of the creative imagination to all earthly creatures . . . " (30).
In this reading of the "Christ in the Orb," one can see the image's extraordinary power to link disparate textual spaces together and reconfigure their significances, as well as the critical resistance to admitting the ultimate consequences of this process to interpretation in the poem. When we return to the text of the poem from Magno and Erdman's account of the drawing, it is easy to see that the image is functioning as a fetish for them, that their reading is a screen memory keeping them from making certain associations that might call into question their systematic interpretation of the text. The iconographic identification of the image in the Orb as Christ, required by the dominant fall-redemption paradigm of Blake studies, closes off all associations alien to the discourse on "creative imagination" it produces. But we have access to what is screened because what has been repressed still haunts the screen. Restoring these associations, some of which are more obvious than the linkage with Christ, however, destroys Erdman's interpretive mapping of the text.
One such association is the emergence of Luvah and Vala from Enitharmon's "Song of Death" into the narrative "proper" on page twelve: " Night darkend as she spoke! a shuddring ran from East to West / A Groan was heard on high. The warlike clarions ceast. the Spirits / Of Luvah & Vala shudderd in their Orb: an orb of Blood!" (12.1-3). The appearance of Luvah and Vala within an orb here clearly resonates with the image of the figure in the orb, but suggests an ontology of that image fundamentally incommensurable with the agency ascribed to it by Erdman and Magno. Luvah and Vala, enclosed in the orb, are radically cut off from the world: "They stood above the heavans forsaken desolate suspended in blood / Descend they could not. nor from Each other avert their eyes / Eternity appeard above them as One Man infolded / In Luvah[s] robes of blood & bearing all his afflictions" (13.6-9). Eternity, represented in this description as a man infolded in robes of blood above Luvah and Vala, strengthens the correspondence of this narrative space to the image space of "Christ in the Orb."
But if Eternity is marked by a deletion of knowledge, a forgetting of the non-knowing of origins in the attempt to establish a unified perceptual field, Blake attempts to shatter this illusory field through the convolution of narrative space/time in the opening of incommensurable synchronic spaces. In the image of "Christ in the Orb," the accretion of these synchronic associations is translated into a spatial metaphor for the dangers of Newtonian subjectivity: the savior, if that is who is represented in the drawing, like Luvah and Vala, is inscribed in a circle of `single vision,' severed from congress with the world.
What is at stake in the question of reading the text of The Four Zoas is the very construction of subjectivity in language, with all the metaphysical and ideological consequences that attend it. Eternity, for critics like Erdman and Bloom, is what Luvah's signs are for Urizen, a fetish object used in mapping a system of unproblematic interpretation into a rupture that would otherwise expose a lack. This fetish object is called into "being" in order to interpret, but it is also always a screen that contains the traces of prior and future projections operating phantasmically to avowal and disavowal one another This process occurs en abyme in The Four Zoas, telescoping the magic of the fetish into every level of interpretation in the poem, implicating every character, as well as the reader, in its traces. In the process, the poem itself becomes such a trace revealing on a meta-level these fetishes to be nothing more than ironic simulacra of each other: the process of rational reference itself is shown to be structured by a fetish logic. The secret of the poem is not hidden by the screen, but rather is the screen.
The pun on screen here is hardly accidental. In my hypertext design, I have attempted to use the associative power of the fetish to create discursive spaces that operate in ways similar to the textual spaces of The Four Zoas. In so doing, I have tried to position myself at the boundary between the libidinal and rational economies I take part in as a graduate student to create a criticism that both reveals and revels in my fetishes and the fetishes of others. The basic principle of my "Blakean" hypertext design is to disrupt and alter processes of linear reading in an effort to create an awareness of how our discourse, our very subjectivity, is structured by denials and repressions--and the ideological consequences of these disavowals. This is appropriate not only because Blake seems to have anticipated multimedia, but because of my own libidinal investment in the text, my academic fetish.
Taussig argues that as academicians, our identities are "implicated and imperilled in the object of study, in its power to change reality, no less" (253). That this fact is so often elided, Taussig says, is an indication of "massive cultural repression" at work. We have to remember that our own desires and identities are bound up with our objects of study, that our efforts to place these objects into an interpretive system are ideologically structured. In my project, I have tried to foreground this relationship, not by explicating the relation of my identity to Blake's poetry, as to do so would suggest that I can somehow step outside the system of reference in which I am implicated, but rather, by attempting to "react" with the poem, by unleashing what Adorno calls the "mimetic shudder" (qtd. in Taussig 253-4), proliferating associations in which "I" consume the poem and it consumes me. I have fetishized the poem, as we all do with our objects of study, but I have tried to display my fetish openly, critically.
In The Four Zoas, we have seen how characters can create the spaces (both literally and figuratively) through which they journey . The narrative switches between these spaces in ways that corrupt their coherency--creating ruptures by giving voice to synchronous and mutually exclusive narrative fields. In my project, I have attempted to construct an analog of this process for the Web by providing parallel, but conflicting discursive avenues of flight for the reader, using links to interpolate the discourses so that the reader must move through them non-linearly. One of these avenues is a fragmentary personal narrative of a journey on Interstate 95 through a landscape of billboards advertising South of the Border (e.g., "You never sausage a place"). These billboards, which extend for hundreds of miles in both directions from the South Carolina / North Carolina line, feature a "Mexican" mascot named Pedro, who in a fake vernacular advertises fireworks and peach wine. By linking these narrative fragments to passages in The Four Zoas that describe Urizen's journey through the empty world of Luvah, I attempt to associate this weird tourist trap space, this mecca of bad advertising, to the kind of "erroneous" spaces characters in The Four Zoas fall into and perpetuate. I am trying to suggest that Luvah's signs function like "billboards" for Urizen, that in reading these signs and interpreting them, he is drawn into a fetishistic economy, not unlike the economy touted on Pedro's signs.
I have "written" this narrative on pages of the poem taken from the proof sheets for the illustrations Blake did for Young's Night Thoughts. Upon these illustrations, Blake superimposed blank rectangular spaces that literally function as screens, both in the sense that they cover important parts of the illustration and because text (whether Young's, Blake's or mine) can be projected on them. These pages seem to be literal realizations of the metaphor of the fetishistic screen memory, and indeed they function as screen memories in Blake's poem, haunted by the ghosts of erasures, additional drawings, and Young's text, as well as the illustrations they cover. I have tried to capture this idea of the screen as a place of flow, litter, and libidinal accretion in my project.
The other discursive centers of the project consist of a series of quotations taken from theoretical discourse on the fetish, a series of quotations from The Four Zoas, fragments of an essay I wrote on the narrative function of Luvah in the poem (some of the arguments of which are reproduced above), and a series of quotations from "outdated" criticism by Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. The fragments from my essay are written in the style of advertisements for my particular take on the poem, and each is placed underneath a picture of a South of the Border billboard advertising the process of fetishization to which I have subjected the poem. Each billboard is also a hypertext link that jumps to a quotation by Frye or Bloom chosen for being blatantly ideologically suspect. I did this both because the fetishes of the New Critics are rather obvious and easily revealed, and to suggest that my essay, dependent as it is on the same structures of rational reference practiced in Frye and Bloom's work, is similarly suspect. The quotations from Bloom and Frye are superimposed over erotic sketches from the poem to suggest that their discourse is structured by repressed libidinal investments in Blake's text.
I hope that moving between these discursive centers functions to create an associative montage that, like a lane change in the tenth hour of driving, is both revelatory and anxiety producing. Hypertext links, like the fetish object, become locations where different discourses and ideologies are set in motion. Mine is an attempt then to organize the hybrid medium of the Web, not as a synthesis, but as "shuttling" (a metaphor implying a woven text) between multiple discursive positions and modes of subjectivation. To design for the Web, we need to open our discourse (the form our work is in now) to the excess reference not explicitly acknowledged by whatever argument we happen to be making. Thus, in my project I have tried to construct an associative link between the production of traditional academic discourse, the narrative processes of Blake's poetry, and the stereotypes deployed by the fetishistic practices of advertising to suggest that they are similar in some important ways (the stereotype, like the fetish, is a short cut directly embodying an entire constellation of discourse). But in giving up the structures of argumentation, I have given myself over to a different mode of signification. The argumentative method would allow me to "prove" that these ideas reside in the text, but using the structure of the fetish forces me to open this assemblage of texts without stabilizing one particular meaning. The model of The Four Zoas shows us that in designing for the screen, we should take advantage of the associative logic of the link to unbind our discourse, to produce a subjectivity that recognizes itself as an emanation, a specter of the ideological forces acting on it, a self-reflexive identity constructed in the discursive interstices of the Web.
Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1987.
Bergren, Ann. "Mouseion." Fetish(The Princeton Architectural Journal, Volume 4). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. pp. 130-157.
Blake, William. The Four Zoas. The Complete Works of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Magno, Cettina Tramontano and Erdman, David. The Four Zoas by William Blake: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript with Commentary on the Illuminations. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1987.
McGann, Jerome. "The Rational of HyperText." URL: http://jefferson.village.virgi nia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html, 1995.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity, A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Ulmer, Gregory. "Pedagogy." URL: http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/pedagogy.html, 1995.
Wigley, Mark. "Theoretical Slippage: The Architecture of the Fetish." Fetish (The Princeton Architectural Journal, Volume 4). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. pp. 88-129.