URIZEN'S MONOLOGUE REPRESSES AND INVERTS


Several contexts already exist in which a character has been asked (or
commanded) to "Go forth," especially Albion passing the sceptre to Uri-
zen in Night II and Tharmas bullying Los and the Spectre in Night IV.
Thus, this moment in Urizen's memory acknowledges as well as trans-
forms those attempts to transfer power. Urizen identifies himself as the
"light" and thus covertly as the "face," the source of the "light" in the
preceding lines: the "voice" here literally addresses Urizen as the "light."
Urizen's memory of being given the sceptre should refer directly to Al-
bion giving him the sceptre in Night II: "take this Scepter! go forth in my
might" (23:5), even though the two contexts are not identical. Urizen's
reference to "my Son who wanders on the ocean," implies Urizen's (partial
and ambiguous) awareness that the event he is recounting here is an aspect
of the attempt by Tharmas (who wanders on the ocean) to order Los to "go
forth" in Night IV. In that context in Night IV Tharmas referred to Los as
"My Son," thus rendering Urizen's reference to "my Son who wanders on
the ocean" even more ambiguous. This intersection and superimposition
of two disparate narrative moments forces Urizen to enact simultaneously
his relation to Albion and Los's relation to Tharmas. Yet neither context
fits exactly. This confused overlapping and transformation successfully
shifts Urizen's attention away from Ahania-whom he was just about to
remember through his imagery of enclosure. Ironically, what Urizen
"well remembers" in lines 64:21-24 allows him to deny building the Mun-
dane Shell at Albion's behest:
 I went not forth. I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath
 I called the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark
 The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away
 We fell.
 (64:25-28)

In thus refusing to go forth with the sceptre, Urizen inverts his power
fantasy of Night II in which he assumed legitimate control over the uni-
verse, and thus acts as if Los's initial refusal to obey Tharmas in Night IV
and Luvah's refusal to accept Urizen's horses in the Messengers' report in
Night I were his own denial of the sceptre. The result, however, is the
same: he now hides in clouds (as he did in Nights II and III) just as he had
hidden his treasuries in stony roofs. This structural parallel between his
enclosure of treasuries in roofs and his self-enclosure in clouds also
identifies his refusal to obey the order to "go forth" with the refusal of the
horses of the "prince" to his "Lord."
 The ambiguities and discontinuities in his tale reveal their significance
to Urizen as an evasive gesture. In inverting his fantasy of legitimate
power transfer in Night II, Urizen conjures up a vision of a plot, appar-
ently one of usurpation (which should thus bear kinship to that in the
Messengers' account in Night I), but certainly one which presents itself as
incomplete and unclear within this context and represses the central fea-
ture of that plot, the conspiracy between Urizen and Luvah which has
been repeatedly (and contradictorily) associated with control over the


The indeterminacy of
the "face" and the
"voice





Recurrent commands to
"Go forth"










A function of Urizen's
soliloquy is to avoid
awareness of Ahania.


Urizen's denial of going
forth with the authority
of the sceptre retroac-
tively undermines the
narrative proper at the
outset of Night II.