Peter Otto. Blake's Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 019818719X. Price: $74.00.

Beginning with the publication of Brian Wilkie's and Mary Lynn Johnson's 1978 Blake's Four Zoas, there have been several book-length studies devoted to Blake's longest poem, Vala or The Four Zoas. The work was never engraved and exists in a single manuscript that Blake reworked over a ten-year period from roughly, 1797 to 1807. This period coincides with major changes in Blake's symbolism, mythography, and, at least according to the school that espouses what it has termed "the thesis of fracture," his religious and political beliefs. These changes are visible in the poem's numerous revisions, and many critics have attempted to use The Four Zoas to trace the development of Blake's thought between the more politically explicit Lambeth prophecies and the later, more obscure, and Christian Milton and Jerusalem. As Jonathan Wordsworth has noted, the relation between the revisions and the development of Blake's mind suggests strong parallels with Wordsworth's Prelude (35). But in The Four Zoas the additions, emendations, drawings, and erasures occur atop the older material and each other, meaning that Blake's intentions are veiled by a complex palimpsest. At least since the mid-1980s, when similar questions regarding materiality were being put to Blake's illuminated books, critics have wrestled with how to incorporate the physical state of The Four Zoas manuscript into readings of the poem. For most critics, this question has meant either demonstrating how the poem evolved to its present state or examining the poem as it presently exists. Concerned with historical conditions or acts of individual production, the former method draws on historical influences and biography, as seen, for example, in Andrew Lincoln's Spiritual History or George Anthony Rosso's Prophetic Workshop. The latter approach is often more concerned with the act of writing. As expressed by V. A. De Luca, this school suggests that Blake's "revisions introduce real, not metaphoric, openings into the text at the same time they introduce disruptive content": "the fact of interpolation is itself as significant as the content that is interpolated" (113). The telos of the text from this perspective is the text itself and the ways readers are implicated by its dramatic as well as physical features. Like a good Blakean, Peter Otto attempts to marry these contrary approaches in his latest book, Blake's Critique of Transcendence. The book's introduction provides a sketch of approaches to the poem similar to the one above, and Otto criticizes what he sees in both approaches as a fundamentally "romantic response to disorder," where one attempts to cure chaos through either "transcendent powers or immanent faculties," such as God or the Romantic imagination (6). In contrast, Otto wishes to embrace the chaotic space between transcendence and immanence, which he aligns with the chaotic textual body of The Four Zoas's manuscript, reading what he calls "The sublime 'surface' of the poem" (8). Otto's attempt to integrate previous approaches to the poem plays down the history of his own partisanship, which has immense bearing on the argument found in Critique. This history began in a 1987 essay, in which Otto responded to Paul Mann's and Robert N. Essick's 1985 explanations of Blake's possible publishing intentions for The Four Zoas. As early proponents of what Mann called Blake's "production-aesthetic" ("Apocalypse" 13), Mann and Essick theorized that The Four Zoas was one of Blake's attempts at formats "more accessible" and "reproducible" than illuminated printing ("Final State" 204). On the basis of the manuscript's multiple scripts and the change from blank paper to Blake's Night Thoughts proofs shortly before the end of Night III, they put forth the idea that …