GOLGONOOZA AND THE SPECTRE


though Los consciously intended it as a stay against his own extinction. A
surprisingly condensed image of the Oedipal family constellation occurs
in the context of Golgonooza's creation:
 Los beheld the ruddy boy
 Embracing his bright mother & beheld malignant fires
 In his young eyes discerning plain that Ore plotted his death
 Grief rose upon his ruddy brows.
 (60:7-10)
As Los looks at Orc and projects his own jealousy into Orc's motives, he
begins to look like Orc-"ruddy." Since Orc is an aspect of Los's own
being, the "fierce prophetic boy" of Night I (9:35), Los really fears that his
own repressed sexuality, embodied in Orc, will rise up and overwhelm
Los's conscious control. This Oedipal constellation appears, however,
only after Los's labors are made public. The spaces he has created operate
therapeutically, and dangerously so: they bring Los's psychosis, his
"uncouth plague" (60:24) into the open in the form of the bloody chain of
jealousy.
 Blake has repeatedly used explicit verbal signals to identify superficially
divergent events, and at the same time, to differentiate between events that
seem virtually identical. The similarities between the bindings of Urizen
and Orc superficially identify them as two accounts of the same event; yet
the role of the Spectre in each binding is radically different, and in this way
Blake reveals that the difference between the two events is more significant
than the similarity. The chain that binds Orc is iron (as is Urizen's); it is a
chain of "nights & days" (like Urizen's); and Enitharmon howls and cries
(as she did at Urizen's binding and Orc's birth). But the Spectre appears in
Nights IV and V only in the context of jealousy: once the binding of
Urizen officially began in Night IV (53:20), the Spectre dropped out and
did not return until the narrative circled around and returned to a
second binding, that of Orc. The Spectre of Urthona first appeared in the
narrative proper in Night IV and "writhd / His cloudy form in jealous
fear" (49:24-25) when Los and Enitharmon were sexually divided by
Tharmas. Thus the Demons'song, which substitutes Vala for Tharmas as
the source of the division of Urthona, transforms the context of Night V.
The syntax at this point connects the Spectre with the chain that binds Orc
itself:
 Enitharmon beheld the bloody chain of nights & days
 Depending from the bosom of Los & how with griding pain
 He went each morning to his labours with the spectre dark
 Calld it the chain ofJealousy.
 (60:19-22)
This is the first appearance of the Spectre in Night V. The syntax in the
first three lines associates Enitharmon's ability to behold the chain with
her ability to behold Los going to his labors with "the spectre dark." These
lines almost identify the chain with the Spectre; and Blake's omission of a


The different roles of the
Spectre in the bindings
of Urizen and Orc