CALLING URIZEN INTO THE NARRATIVE PROPER


substitute for aspects of Los and Enitharmon's relationship to each other
and to their parents. Nevertheless, these elements, like those in Enion's
weaving, begin to take on a perverse narrative independence. In this sense
Enion's weaving the Circle of Destiny is a paradigm for the way new and
unpredictable forces are simultaneously re-enactments and revisions of
prior elements.
 After Los's speech, Enitharmon, who was smitten by and within the
speech, has no problem interpreting the parable Los has just told of their
existence, just as Los had no difficulty understanding the significance of
Enitharmon's Song. As Los ceases speaking, Enitharmon musters her
previous "scorn" and fuses it with Los's "indignation." "Reddning"
(11:20) like the "bloody...false morning" (11:9) or "crimson light" of
dawn (10:2), Enitharmon signals the next phase ofher contention with Los
by calling upon Urizen, the most elliptical character in her vision. Her
battle tactic is to surprise Los by placing in Urizen's hands the horses[s"
and "chariots" Luvah had supposedly "siez'd." In so doing she seizes
Urizen, the only character not claimed by either Los or Enitharmon in
their verbal combat, and makes him the instrument of punishing Los. She
specifically commands Urizen to "descend" out of her vision (as Los had
visioned Luvah descending to punish):

 Descend O Urizen descend with horse & chariots
 Threaten not me O visionary thine the punishment
 The Human Nature shall no more remain nor Human acts
 Form the rebellious Spirits of Heaven. but War & Princedom &
 Victory & Blood
 (11:21-24)

In calling a character out of her parable, Enitharmon enacts an irreversible
moment in the growing network of narrative relations. The interpolated
parables originally emerged as fictional arrangements of possible struc-
tural interactions and relations between characters and events already pre-
sent in the narrative proper, but at this point they begin acting as if they
refer beyond themselves, as if they have had that potential all along.
 At the point of rupture, where characters emerge out of interpolated
visions, Los and Enitharmon are suddenly revealed to have been laboring
under a severe narrative restriction: if their parables are to obey the rules of
perspective transformation that preside over the previous narrative field,
Los and Enitharmon are constrained to fictionalize in clusters or constella-
tions of characters. As soon as the four interpolated characters become
fictional narrative possibilities and one (Urizen) is invoked--wrenched
out of his interpolated status -the other three characters (Luvah, Vala, and
the Man) are forced into the narrative proper as preconditions of Urizen's
entry. The unfolding narrative thus begins to make explicit a fantasized
system of characters and events which are mutually interdependent yet
perversely in conflict with one another. Blake's character names initially
seem arbitrary (like terms in a mathematical argument), but once certain


Enitharmon calls Urizen
into the narrative proper
out of his function as a
dialogical operator in
her interpolated vision.


The narrative rupture at
the entrance of four new
characters participates in
the process of narrative
embedding.