ORC: DIVISIONS


 The Re-surfacing of Suppressed Narrative Elements

 The Tree of Mystery, weaving, and war-the central actions and images
 of Nights VIIa, VIIb, and VIII-are, as we have seen, transformations of
 images and events from prior Nights. The particular shape these images
 assume when transformed simultaneously makes possible the re-surfacing
 into the narrative proper of several characters and one image whose names
 have languished in the background since early in the poem. In Night VIII,
 especially, the structural complex of Jerusalem, the Lamb of God, and
 Satan emerges as a system of interconnections that had been almost com-
 pletely suppressed by the actions of previous Nights. In addition, the
 Spectre of Urthona in VIIa, and Vala and Orc in all three Nights assume an
 importance they have not explicitly known before. In Night VIII the name
 "Vala" narratively overlaps both "the Shadowy Female" and "Rahab &
 Tirzah" (though these characters retain distinct functions), while one
 aspect or role of the Spectre of Urthona, who mysteriously disappears
 from Night VIII after becoming central to Night VIIa, is structurally
 replaced by the "Synagogue of Satan." These characters, then, express
 both a re-surfacing of previously elliptical and enigmatic elements and the
 emergence of genuinely "new" characters in the plot of Night VIII.
 Though the Spectre of Urthona and Vala are clearly residues of prior
Nights, we will defer separate consideration of the Spectre and Vala in
order to focus on their relations to the "new" elements in these three
Nights-especially the Shadow of Enitharmon, "Rahab & Tirzah," and
the "Synagogue of Satan." Blake's narrative techniques in Night VIII make
it impossible to separate the Lamb of God ontologically from Jerusalem,
Satan, and the hermaphrodite, and so, for the present, we will consciously
violate Blake's tightly woven narrative structures in order to see how this
image-complex is actually constituted: we will treat these images/charac-
ters separately in order to see how they relate to one another.

 Orc
 By carefully overlapping prior structures with transformed and new
narrative elements, Blake makes it dialectically impossible to deal with
any of the characters separately, especially in the cases of Orc and Vala,
who function in Nights VIIa and VIIb as characters who re-surface into
the narrative after having made only enigmatic prior appearances, but
who, by Night VIII, are functioning in highly derivative and transformed
ways. Although the "Shadowy Female" of VIIb and VIII is progressively
identified with Vala, that "Shadowy Female" ambiguously overlaps the
"Shadow of Enitharmon" at the moment of the birth of the "wonder
horrible" in VIIa (85:7). While Vala syntactically and semantically over-
laps Enitharmon's shadow, she is also structurally divided from it. Orc, on
the other hand, splits into two very different forms. Explicitly he becomes
the "serpent" around the Tree of Mystery, and implicitly, in an extremely


Differences between,
and intersections of, the
Shadow of Enitharmon,
the Shadowy Female,
and Vala