FOUR ZOAS III / 41:13-42:17


How syntactic indeter-
 minacy enacts the
struggle being narrated











Intrusion of an essential
yet incommensurable
 perspective: Vala
 enclosed in the Body


 Although the events that Ahania next recounts do not seem to involve
 Urizen directly, they reinforce her vision as an attempt to make Urizen
 confront his own sexual impotence and division:

 And Luvah strove to gain dominion over the mighty Albion
 They strove together above the Body where Vala was inclos'd
 And the dark Body of Albion left prostrate upon the crystal pavement
 Coverd with boils from head to foot. the terrible smitings of Luvah
 (41:13-16)

Just as the watery Shadow's mysterious separation and ascent above the
Man caused the Man and Vala to fall prostrate, in this passage an overt
physical struggle over/above the "Body" causes the "Body where Vala was
inclos'd" to fall prostrate. This re-enactment pushes into the foreground
the relation between the political and sexual dimensions of the power
struggle that were confounded in the delusive vision itself. At the same
time, the syntax of lines 41:13-16 enacts the Shadow's perceptual delusive-
ness. Line 41:13 is syntactically secure, even though "over" could imply a
spatial as well as a power relation. In the next line, however, one of the
referents of "they" (41:14) is indeterminate: one must be Luvah, but the
other could be "the mighty Albion" or the "Awful Man" who was "indig-
nant" at Luvah's descent. Though from one perspective these two names
function as aspects of the Man, they are by no means identical. Blake leaves
this indeterminacy unresolved by specifying the location of struggle to be
"above the Body where Vala was inclos'd[.]" If this Body is Albion's (as
the next line at least suggests), then either Albion is striving above his own
Body or the Awful Man is a name for Albion separated from his Body.
Once the name "Albion" has become attached to the Body, Blake does not
use the term "Albion" again in Night III after the Body has been smitten.
That Vala is "inclos'd" in this Body must come as a shock, for she has
recently appeared as if a separate character, first walking with the Dark-
ning Man and then trembling prostrate on the pavement (39:15- 40:9). It is
as though the intervention of the Shadow, now manifested as a strife
above the Body, has enclosed her in a manner similar to Urizen's and
Luvah's prior enclosures in clouds.
 Line 41:15 is organized so that two opposed readings of it are frustrated.
The most obvious reading constrains the reader to reverse the verb and
object, exposing an absent subject that thrusts the reader back to the
ambiguous "they" of 41:14: they left the dark Body of Albion prostrate. If
the order of words in the text is taken as the syntactic order, with "Body"
as the subject, then the reader must acknowledge a lost direct object: the
dark Body of Albion left [a lost object] prostrate. The indeterminate
subject and the lost object that emerge from these readings accurately
project in the syntax of this line the perceptual and sexual depletion being
enacted in the events.
 The "smitings of Luvah" (41:16) refer simultaneously to the smiting
Luvah performed as well as the form in which Luvah was smitten.