PERSPECTIVE ANALYSIS: EMBEDDED STRUCTURES


 The embedded struc-
 tures of Night the First




The transition of charac-
 ters into the narrative
 proper from inter-
 polated visions


formations of the prior conversations. As discussed earlier under the
category of narrative, these successive analyses further make the initial
event possible by establishing in the subsequent event the conditions for the
narratively prior event, often at the same instant that they cancel out the
possibility of the earlier event.
 The most complex mode of perspective analysis "embeds" subsequent
events in prior plots. In an embedded plot previous narrative events are
re-enacted within a new fictional framework; new characters re-enact
prior events under a transformed perspective, thereby revealing (bringing
into explicit narrative existence) information that retroactively seems to
have been repressed within the previous fictional framework. This narra-
tive process of embedding can be visualized by bracketing textual details
into groups within which sub-groups of details are embedded. The Thar-
mas/Enion plot constitutes the first primary bracket of Night I, and the Los/
Enitharmon plot functions as the first embedded structure of the Tharmas/
Enion plot: as narratively derivative characters, Los and Enitharmon act
out in great detail the actions of the Tharmas/Enion plot and generate
other characters (Urizen, the Fallen/Wandering Man, Luvah, and Vala)
through interpolated visions. The most deeply embedded structure of the
Tharmas/Enion bracket is the "Song" at the Feast of Los/Enitharmon: in
it the maximum information surfaces, and the prior narrative elements are
most radically revised and redistributed. The second primary bracket of
Night I, which competes ontologically with the Tharmas/Enion plot, is
constituted by the "Eternity" plot, which generates characters in the
opposite order from that of the first primary bracket. The massive "war"
that surfaces in the "Song" at the Feast is narratively generated out of the
primary Tharmas/Enion sexual division; in the "Eternity" plot, however,
war is the generative nucleus that forces to the surface the sexual division of
Tharmas and Enion as a secondary by-product of the war.


 The interesting discontinuities and repetitions on the level of syntax and
 diction (text as flight) mark boundaries and reveal organizing principles of
 the perspectives constituted through them, along with the elements that
 enter into and are constituted by the perspective. When seen from a New-
 tonian perspective, the sequence of events of Night I appears to be ran-
 dom; when taken as a narrative process of perspective and embedded
 analysis, this sequence can be mapped as a complex symmetrical pattern
 (Fig. l.l:p.20) (Fig. 1.1).
 Night IX exhibits an even more narcissistically nested set of bracketed
 structures. The complex embedded structures of Night IX strongly
 suggest that the "Last Judgment" is an act of consciousness Blake chal-
 lenges the reader to make in relation to the unsatisfactory "End" of Night
 The embedded struc- IX. The text of Night IX inverts and superimposes the two competing
tures of Night the Ninth perspective structures of Night I. In Night IX the Tharmas/Enion bracket
 is the innermost narrative structure, being enclosed within the Urizen/
 Eternal Man plot, which is itself contained by a fusion of the Los/Enithar-
 mon sexual plot with the imagery of war. Tharmas and Enion assume the
 role of children as Los and Enitharmon did in Night I, and the "Eternals"