DIALOGICAL HIDING/SEARCHING


 The irreducibility of
 Night I to competing
versions of the war plot


"Spectre," a term from the first primary bracket, with "Urthona," an
alternate name for Los in the pseudo-invocation (3:11-4:1). The final
interpolated vision of Night I, the account of the messengers from Beulah,
appears within the Eternity bracket and contains references to all the
characters in both the narrative proper and the interpolated visions of the
Tharmas/Enion bracket, with the key exception of Vala: this omission
accompanies an inversion of the narrative/ontological field that con-
stituted the first primary bracket. The more complex structure of Night I,
then, takes on a form like that of Fig. A.3.
 Night I concludes with an ironic coda that reductively recapitulates the
two competing and incommensurable primary structures of Night I. This
coda reverses the linear order of narration: the "Wars of Eternal life"
(apparently referring to the Eternity bracket) and "wars of Eternal Death"
(referring to the Tharmas/Enion bracket). This coda is ironic in that it is
only from the perspective of Eternity, mediated by the messengers from
Beulah, that the events of the Tharmas/Enion bracket are called "Wars of
Death Eternal" (21:15); in the Tharmas/Enion plot itself, "Eternal Death"
is primarily a condition of sexual division. There is, furthermore, no
narrative basis in either bracket for "Wars of Eternal life"; for upon learn-
ing of the wars of Eternal Death the "Family Divine" (one projected form
of "those in Great Eternity") summarily encloses the Messengers (and
syntactically itself) and withdraws from warfare.


The First Primary Bracket: Tharmas/Enion


Hiding/searching as the
narrative origin of divi-
sion as well as of inter-
 constitution


 The Tharmas/Enion conversation, out of which the embedded and
sub-embedded structures of the First Primary Bracket will generate,
employs confession, accusation, and interrogation to enact through
speech the dialectical division between, and the interconstitution of, hid-
ing and the search for that which is hidden. Blake uses this hiding/search-
ing dialectic as the narrative origin of division because hiding creates the
presupposition of another separate being (or mode of consciousness) from
whom one can hide,just as searching creates a presupposed separate other
who can be examined. The hiding/searching dialectic is also an ingenious
narrative origin of interconstitution because hiding exists only by virtue of
the fear of being examined, and examination exists only by virtue of the
suspicion that something has been hidden. Secrecy, or the fiction of
separate, opaque identities whose interiors are hidden from external gaze,
therefore becomes possible only within this circular interplay between
concealment and scrutinizing. What Tharmas and Enion are evading by
consciously focusing each other's attention on the problems of conceal-
ment and exposure, however, is that they are treating what is happening in
the narrative present of their dialogue as if it had already happened before
the poem began.
 What is actually being hidden by their conversation, then, is how their