Catastrophe, Sublimity, and Digital Thinking in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas

Amongst the verbal/visual cruxes encountered in Vala or The Four Zoas none has provoked more debate than the presence, in this work, of two seventh Nights. Rather than asking whether the two were intended to become one or whether one was written to replace the other, this chapter recounts the history of transcendence narrated by the poem, in order to ask what work interruption (of numerical sequence and narrative continuity) is doing at this point in the manuscript? The answer takes shape through discussion of the traumatic sublime, the analog and the digital in the long digital age, the incarnational art and politics sketched in the late additions to Night VIIa, and what is gained and what lost when digital technologies are used to remediate the poem.