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. The poem provides us, however, should we choose to embrace its difficulties, with an extraordinary re-visioning of the very idea of the book. As Donald Ault argues in Narrative Unbound, "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).

What is at stake in 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. When confronted with the poem's narrative intransigencies, critics of the poem tend to turn to look for a way to stabilize and bring order to the text. But recognizing that Blake's text manifests a material and narrative excess that undermine any attempts at imposing the linear structures of rational reference on the poem, we find instead associative structures and sets of uncanny correspondences produced by what may best be understood as "fetish logic". The fetish object (the narrative perspective privileged by the critic, for instance) is 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 reveals 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.