Introduction: Anatomizing the Narrative Field


 Taken as an aggregate, Nights Vila, VIIb, and VIII constitute an
asymptotic approach to total confusion: at the same time that more and
more characters with seemingly distinct identities crowd into an ever-
condensing web of events, all of these characters and events more
explicitly than before become aspects of one another, with key features
interfusing and crossing over from each character and event to all the
others. Unlike Nights II-VI there is no single plot thread but a single,
dense nexus of narrative events out of which individual moments or
scenarios crystallize, only to be immediately reabsorbed, juggled, trans-
formed, discarded. Each event bears multiple relations to every other
event: while this interconnectedness makes it more evident than ever that
all characters and events are aspects of one another, the overloaded narra-
tive surface challenges us to keep straight the senses in which one element
(x) is identical to (constitutes, is an aspect of, etc.) any other element (y)
and the senses in which x differs from y. For example, how are the war and
weaving plots precisely related to Orc's serpent form or to the Spectre's
attempt to convert Los?
 Our first task in pulling the details of these three Nights into a more
comprehensible arrangement will be to analyze this extremely complex
community of interlocking events into artificial narrative sub-divisions;
then we will analyze the perspective structures Blake devised to act as
subliminal underpinnings for the reader's experience but which are
nevertheless generated by the complex surface perspective interactions of
these three Nights. To accomplish the former task we must look at the
same events, characters, and perceptual structures over and over again,
each time dialectically integrating a particular narrative feature (event,
character, structure) into a new relational context. This technique requires
repeated references to the same events or image structures (technically, the
same lines of poetry) in constantly changing contexts to see how other
events feed into and constitute them and how they constitute the events
that feed into them-an elaborate system of repetitive cross-references.
This process of analytical re-enactment and repetition reveals Blake's
astonishing, if forbidding, accomplishment in these three Nights. Indeed,
it often seems as though there could be no way to constitute in language
the kinds of relational imaginings Blake brings into narrative existence.
 Because the sheer volume of narrative information in these three Nights
accumulates so rapidly and with such complexity, the narrator begins
occasionally, but at key points, especially late in Night VIIa and through-
out Night VIII, to insert value judgments, insights, or doctrines that are
not fully warranted by the overlapping density of the narrative itself. Some
of these judgments appear to be dictated or constituted by the pressure of
self-proclaimed redemptive or morally superior forces. For example, the
"Council of God" at the opening of Night VIII enters into the narrator's
perspective and dictates that "the saviours arms" in which "Man" reposes


The crisis of relational
versus individual iden-
tity in Nights VIIa,
VIIb, and VIII





















Of analytic repetition











The emergence of
"redemptive" versus
"Satanic" valuejudg-
ments as a response to
the density of narrative
information