FOUR ZOAS I / 11:12-24


 "This bright world" is
 situated in the text spa-
 tially above "this cold
 expanse.







The differential entrance
into the narrative proper
 of the four characters
 generated in the inter-
 polated visions


The retroactive dissolu-
 tion of the Tharmas/
Enion narrative nucleus


Los's smiting of Enitharmon in the narrative proper is re-enacted in his
parable: Luvah descends "invisible" because he had vanished out of Eni-
tharmon's vision by her refusal to acknowledge him further; he descends
into the "Gardens of Vala," which Vala has just entered and in which
Enitharmon had staged her own confrontation with the Fallen One.
 The new imagery and events emerging in Los's vision simultaneously
explain and revise prior narrative actions. The Fallen Man's sick head and
faint heart can be traced not only to Luvah and Vala's flight from the Heart
to the Brain but also to Enitharmon's deluding the Fallen One with a "false
morning," which initiates his feelings of jealousy and thus engenders a
false sexual awakening. At the end of his vision, Los persists in identifying
himself covertly with Luvah and in identifying Enitharmon with Vala,
though in a more explicit and restricted manner. According to Enithar-
mon's vision, Luvah and Vala flew up into the Brain, and that is exactly
where Los places himself and Enitharmon. Los, however, identifies the
Brain as the realm where "Urizen," the elliptical sleeper of Enitharmon's
vision, resides. This world of "Hosts" who hang "immortal lamps"
immediately recalls the starry sky of the "bright Universe" in the poem's
invocation. Los's gesture is strategically ambiguous, however, because his
two references to "this bright world" and "this cold expanse" require a
spatial, physical act of pointing and differentiation by Los that cannot be
seen by the reader. The ambiguity of this gesture both separates and
identifies these two worlds and brings back into narrative focus the point
with which Los began his complaint -Tharmas' mourning.
 At the conclusion of his speech, Los suddenly reaffirms that the conten-
tion between himself and Enitharmon has all along been over their rela-
tionship to their "Parents" from whom they draw the spectrous power
that they experience as "bliss." In the process of their conversation, the
new names they invoke to engage the argument-like the narrative
metaphors and similes used earlier-acquire the potential to enter into and
constitute the narrative itself. These characters, first introduced as
argumentative fictions of Los and Enitharmon's slumberouss bliss," are
about to enter the narrative proper and assume independent existence.


 Los/Enitharmon: Third Phase: Urizen/Los/Enitharmon
 The interpolated visions within the Los/Enitharmon confrontation
 introduce four new characters into the poem who assume functions previ-
 ously or concurrently being enacted in the narrative proper. At the same
 time, these characters bring new layers of information into existence
 which, once they appear, behave as if they had been present but suppressed
 all along. The narrative keeps fanning out from the Tharmas/Enion center
 that created the Los/Enitharmon structure by the fiction of sexual parent-
 age. In turn, the Los/Enitharmon bracket has generated the Fallen Man/
 Urizen/Luvah/Vala cluster, not as an offspring of sexual division and
 union, but as a structural network of interpolated visions, whose elements