Transformation:
Becoming-Animal

Sameness and imitation serve as traps for the engraver of the late 18th century. It is the artist working with oils who creates, while the engraver is hired to reproduce the works of the oil painter. The divide is between artist and craftsman. Furthermore, printmakers are concerned that each print of an illustration come out as similar as possible to the one before it, thus ensuring a standardized product for the market. Blake is capable of making commercial prints when necessary, but of interest here is his move toward blurring the line between artist and craftsman and his move away from standardization as a means of commercial mass production. Buy using proof sheets from Night Thoughts, Blake deterritorializes the commercial venture. He interrupts the flow from engraving to print to bound book by taking mis-drawn engravings as the starting point for an-other unbound text. One of the means by which Blake escapes the constraints of nationalized literature and the constraints of commercial production is by transforming the nationalized work for profit, the folio edition of Night Thoughts.

Consider that the first leaf of Night Eight of The Four Zoas is written on a proof sheet of Blake's illustration for the Edwards edition of Young's Night Thoughts. Illustrating Night Thoughts entails mis-illustrating. The "bad" copies are used by Blake for his own work. This upsets the value system which selects the printer's copy as valuable and considers the rejected copies a valueless. The illustration on page 99 of The Four Zoas is flawed. The left foot is awkwardly drawn and the toes are elongated. Additionally, the winged man is off balance, in an impossible stance. His shoulders and torso point in one direction his legs point in another. Where the torso would meet legs, the hip is covered by a blank space for the text.

Why privilege the good copy, the printed copy, the "correctly" drawn copy? The Four Zoas undoes this privileging. The Night Thoughts illustration is but one moment in a series of sketches and reworkings of an image. There is no stability to the image, it is always becoming something else. A foot is redrawn on page 99. It is not the long toed, awkward left foot which is redone, but the firm footed, stable right foot. Without firm footing, the territory of the body begins to deterritorialize.

Before we look at what the figure is changing into, let us inquire into what he is changing from. What is this character with scythe and wings? In brief, he is an analogy. Dress up a man, put wings on his back and a scythe in his hand, now he is Father Time. According to the Night Thoughts text the line illustrated is "Time, in advance, behind him hides his wings". To see this figure as Father Time is to read analogically. Transformation is not analogy. Analogy is based on similarity while transformation is based on difference. A variety of different forces fragment the analogical figure and re-arrange the scattered fragments.

Some points of transformation in the text

FROM THE FIGURE OF FATHER TIME TO:
  • Human-Lions-Tygers-Wolves

    "They humanized into the fierce battle where in direful pain
    Troop by troop the bestial droves rend one another . . .
    Return in pangs & horrible convulsions to their bestial state
    For the monsters of the Elements Lions or Tygers or Wolves
    Sound loud the howling music"     page 101 of the Zoas

  • Phallus, erect in war then limp. The Phallus is bat-winged as on pages 42, 143.

    What guides transformation in becoming is not similarity but rather a constellation of forces applied to an object. The Human-Lion-Tyger-Wolves-bat winged Phallus is a combination of several major forces in the text: sexual division, troops of war, occasional appearance of animals.

    "Relapsing in dire torment they return to forms of woe
    To moping visages returning inanimate tho furious
    No more erect tho strong drawn out in length they ravin"     page 102 of the Zoas

  • Nebuchadnezzar: The position of the hand, the look on the face, the knees bending, the overly long toes of the left foot bring to mind the image of Nebuchadnezzar, the man becoming-animal, the oppressive king who crawls among his caves. Beneath one illustration of Nebuchadnezzar is written,

    "One Law for the Lion & the Ox is Oppression"

  • Deleted/Highlighted Text in the margins of page 99:

    While the text in the wing of the page is crossed through for deletion, the marking only highlights the text. Notice the repeated use of wings and even the use of feet.

    ". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but other wings
    They had which clothd their bodies like a garment of soft down
    Silvery white shining upon the dark blu sky in silence
    Their wings touchd the heavens their fair feet hoverd above"     page 99 of the Zoas

What Blake achieves in becoming-other is no particular animal, several animals at once, a snake-Orc-phallus, a feather-winged bird/bat . . .. The becoming does not stop. There is no final goal. Rather there is a rhythm of figure, fragmentation, transformation, and re-organization and back to fragmentation. The term "manuscript" is used to denote a text which is in route toward publication--even if it never makes this destination. But The Four Zoas as manuscript has no such destination. The imperfections, Blake's editorial marks, lines of revision, stray lines and blots, etc. of the text are so much a part of the text that it defies the State and commercial appropriation and labeling of a text a National literature and publishable--or treasonable literature that must be censored.


Perform the Transformation


Designed and Performed by
F. William Ruegg & Ronald S. Broglio
English Department, University of Florida.