THE WEB'S PERSPECTIVE MAPPINGS


for restrictive explanatory structures. The eyelids and the ears locate their
"outward forms" in "the Abyss," in what can only be (once again) the
primal turning downward and outward of the senses which now "began
shrinking" (74:6). Although this shrinking of the senses seems to be occur-
ring in Urizen's journey for the first time at this point, the senses had
already shrunk when Urizen was unable to communicate with his
children in the South (70:39-40). At the same time that Urizen's Web
causes the primal shrinking of the senses it takes on Urizen's function of
vocalizing, "uttering...woes" (73:36), and causes the "wing like tent of
the Universe" to "Vibrate" (74:3-5), much as Urizen's golden heavens
vibrated in Night II, anticipating the vibrating Web as a battle weapon
later in Night VI. The Web's destructiveness finally calls forth a "universal
shriek" (like Enitharmon's in Night I [22:21], Night IV [48:27], and
Night V [57:20]) that rends "the web torment on torment" (74:7-8), ironi-
cally returning to the action of Orc's "rending his way" in birth (58:17)
and "the rendings of fierce howling Orc" (63:16) at the moment Urizen
re-entered the narrative in Night V, bringing Urizen back to his starting
point.
 As soon as the web is rent it disappears from the surface of the plot and
becomes the narrative perspective until the battle at the end of Night VI.
As soon as the web disappears, Urizen begins warring with "monsters of
the Deeps" (74:10), a resurgence ofTharmas' vision of the Body he sought
to destroy at the beginning of Night VI (69:12). At this point the narrative
draws back from Urizen (inhabiting the web's perspective, which makes
the web vanish) and lapses into a spatial overview of Urizen'sjourney. This
information emerges from an alternative perspective because Urizen's
journey, which proceeded in a counter-clockwise fashion from West to
South to East to North, is now described by the narrator in a clockwise
direction: South to West to North to East. At the point at which the
narrator finishes reciting this reverse cycle Tharmas immediately reap-
pears identified as rolling through all four caverns. The transformation of
perspective exposes the motive Tharmas suppressed in his speech to Uri-
zen: "Seeking / For Enions limbs" (74:21-22), yet still "Flying away from
Urizen that he might not give him food...Making between horrible
chasms into the vast unknown" (74:23-26). These two aspects of the chase
are now simultaneous. Thus one thing the chase has been disguising is
Tharmas' sexual longing (and thus Urizen's repression of sexual desire, a
longing which, because thwarted, has given birth to the monsters Urizen
must subdue in order to regain control). The fiction of Tharmas being
chased by Urizen-completely unacknowledged for many pages -returns
at the moment Urizen has developed a new fiction of absolute control as
an expression of the fall itself and appears only after Urizen has passed
through the other worlds and is about to enter Urthona's, heavily armed
with the invisible web. The narrator has apparently known the directions
all along, but his impulse to consolidate them is a consequence of the web's
becoming the narrative point of view. Thus the narrator's description of


The shrinking of the
senses creates the need
for the map-like order-
ing of narrative details.















Like the books and the
globe, the web tem-
porarily disappears and
becomes the narrative
perspective.








(74:14-19)