THE STRATEGIC IRONY OF URIZEN'S QUEST


Every gerund in the first line above is central to the actions of Los in
Nights IV and V in binding Urizen, Enitharmon, and Orc. Now, rather
than being unambiguous products of Los's "labours," these sounds them-
selves create a "world" for the passive Los who broods in cruel delight.
Just as Los cannot see Urizen in his quest, Urizen cannot grasp the sexual
implications of these sounds. Blake carefully places "shudderings" be-
tween "groanings shriekings" and "sobbings burstings": the former two
terms are associated with Orc's birth and Urizen's binding; the latter
two are associated with the emergence of the Chain of Jealousy.
Blake sandwiches Urizen's own trembling "shudderings"--which at
first seemed only implicitly and distantly related to the sexual activity of
Night V--between the sounds of the birth and the sounds of the emergent
Chain. Technically, then, Urizen's quest for the shudderings must lead
him to the sexual consequences of his creation, for they are spatially
embedded within the birth and the chaining of Orc. Guiding Urizen to
the threshold of that inevitable realization is the task of Night VI.


 Retrogressive Re-Enactment in Night the Sixth

 Because Urizen skillfully represses the fact that it is his own shuddering
(as much as the unknown force of Orc's rending) that he sets out to find in
Night V, his quest in Night VI involves a very precise search within
himself for the fearful shuddering that rends the caves. As such, his spatial
journey in Night VI becomes a re-enactment of previously repressed
actions, a mode of repetition-compulsion in which his concentration on
accepting the physical and social implications of the world he created in
Night II precisely excludes his knowledge of its sexual consequences. This
movement, then, is Urizen's attempt to assuage his guilt by confronting it
only partially, and his quest is a complex avoidance of the sexual implica-
tions of his creation. The journey must allow Urizen to acknowledge and
re-experience his "fall" (which occurred officially in Night III, but which
was an alternative perspective on the world he created in Night II
[25:1-20]) in a way that disguises the forms it had assumed in its prior
narrative incarnations. To be successful this strategy must allow him to
forget the central act of his fall-the casting out of his female sexual
counterpart, Ahania (an event re-enacted in Night VI in his casting out of
his daughters whose "scream" summons Tharmas).
 The wealth of landscape detail in Night VI is a function of the intensity
of Urizen's compulsive focus. This saturation of detail as decoy charac-
terizes thejourney and lures the reader into forgetting the structural mean-
ing of the quest itself and thereby into the same kind of self-deceptive
forgetfulness that Urizen experiences. Thus, while it is necessary to call
attention to the submerged avoidance structure of this Night, the reader's
experience is closer to that of Urizen's, one of being swept into a world of
overwhelming complexity. In analyzing this Night it will be useful to


Fig. B.5 (pp. 237-38)
maps the textual pattern
of Night VI.













"Officially": the narra-
tive of Night III per-
suades the reader that
Urizen's fall was a
unique event, while
Tharmas saw it as a
moment in an "endless"
cycle (97:14-15).


The textual surface
absorbs the reader into
the quest.