Blake's Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas

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 nontraditional 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.