CONTEXTUAL STRUCTURES


Inclusion or omission of
 Vala and ofLuvah's
robes of blood marks the
 causal inversion of the
 two primary brackets.


















"Eternity" as a narrative
fiction susceptible to the
 laws of perspective
 transformation


 Within the second primary bracket (Eternity) further embedded struc-
tures occur, but these structures are not marked by repeated lines. The
Eternity bracket divides into two sub-phases-a long speech delivered by
"messengers from Beulah" and an account by the narrator proper of the
actions of the Daughters of Beulah. The messengers' account reverses the
order in which information was generated in the Tharmas/Enion bracket:
in the messengers' account, the primary conflict occurs between Urizen
and Luvah (who functioned as derivative characters in the Tharmas/Enion
plot); in the messengers' account the conference and combat between
Urizen and Luvah is ontologically and narratively primary and generates
the sexual division of Tharmas and Enion; at the same time, however, the
messengers' report inadvertently presupposes that division. In addition,
the absence from the messengers' account of the character Vala and the key
image of"Luvahs robes of blood," whether through ignorance or suppres-
sion, accompanies an inversion of the narrative/ontological field. At least
at one stage of the text's evolution, Blake specifically revised the first part
of Night I by deleting an extended conversation between Enion and the
Spectre regarding Enion's slaying of Emanations.6 Therefore, at the one
point where the two primary brackets of Night I could intersect or overlap
(at Enitharmon's causal relationship to Tharmas and Enion [22:22-23]),
the reader is confronted with an inversion of narrative "facts." The narra-
tor's account in the first bracket of Night I is incommensurate with the
messengers' narration in the second bracket because the elements of expla-
nation are no longer ontologically the same, even though they bear the
same names. The second sub-phase of the "Eternity" bracket features the re-
turn of the characters named the "Daughters of Beulah" and thus reintro-
duces as the primary generative force the sexual plot which the messengers
have just treated as secondary; like the messengers' account, however,
the Daughters' segment also omits reference to Vala or Luvah's robes.
 The information generated from the perspective of Eternity and the
information located textually prior to it and generated directly from the
narrator in the Tharmas/Enion bracket invert one another. Because both
phases of the Eternity bracket repress Vala and the key image of"Luvahs
robes," however, this second primary bracket cannot be a source of
unequivocally true or context-free information, obeying Blake's narrative
ontology that dialectically conditions information so that it is primarily
constituted by context. The gap between the Tharmas/Enion and Eternity
perspectives derives from a radical ontological shift that totally reor-
ganizes the narrative field and alters the meaning of characters and events.
The disjunctive narrative fields of the first and second primary brackets of
Night I thus subvert (by their mutual inversion) the possibility of an
underlying stable world that is being distorted and rearranged by the
surface text.
 Had Blake reversed the narrative order of the two primary brackets and
given "Eternity" linear priority, it would have drastically altered the expe-
riential (and thus ontological) status of these two segments. By directly