Graphing VALA, or The Four Zoas: Toward a Dynamic Edition

From its title, Blake’s VALA, or The Four Zoas manuscript challenges editors with its complex revisions, its mix of textual and graphical materials, and its direct relations to other works—not to mention its more abstract, non-documentary fields, like its linguistic and semiotic fields. Indeed, editors in the past have grappled with these features of it but because they’ve worked with inadequate technologies have either come up short in fully representing them or abstracted them away. I offer here a new approach that uses graph technology. A graph data structure, or network of relations, can completely model the multidimensionality of the work’s documentary and non-documentary fields at their atomic level for sophisticated digital analysis. And the model can subsume all past editions of the work and provide a base upon which to build future editions. The result would be a dynamic edition, in which past, present, and future editions all lie in recognition of each other, though without completely understanding one another. Like Urizen’s “hard subdued”, or well-defined, web of a world that is nonetheless shapeless because it can take on any shape, a dynamic edition is a logical universe that still permits ambiguity. And ambiguity is the quality that pervades all literary works. The rationale for the editorial approach laid out here, therefore, would be of interest to any scholarly editor, not only editors of Blake’s most recondite prophetic work. But given its boundless complexity, the work is an ideal specimen on which to demonstrate some of the power and benefits of this approach.