JERUSALEM: INVERSION IN LOS'S SPEECH


years ago," so that it occurs in the text prior to Urizen's descent into his
dragon form and prior to the narrator's statement that "Jerusalem wept
over the Sepulcher two thousand Years" (110:33). Since the narrator has
already predicted "six thousand Years" as the length of time it takes Los
and Enitharmon to effect their "Union" (87:27-29), exactly the time Lu-
vah is bound in the sepulcher in the demons' song (92:14-15), Los's speech
should immediately precede the union of Los and Enitharmon and the
rebirth and release of Luvah. But neither of these events happens: instead
Urizen becomes a dragon as a consequence of the power Rahab draws
from Los's speech; and Urizen's descent into dragon form in "numming
stupor" actually establishes the preconditions for several of the poem's key
prior events. Tharmas, Urthona, Los, and Enitharmon become stricken
with Urizen's stupor: Urthona shoots out a fibrous form and Los's blood
vessels writhe in the abyss creating Enitharmon as a vegetative form, thus
enacting for the first time in the narrative proper events "remembered" in
Night IV and VIIa as aspects of the original "fall" or the initial division of
Enitharmon; and Tharmas begins his whirlwind flight that, as in Night
VI, creates "abstract false Expanses" (108:3). Thus the speech of Los,
which internally claims to give a privileged perspective on the confusions
of Night VIII, not only complicates the action by inverting causal
priorities, but sets up false expectations that his "six thousand years"
speech to Rahab will immediately issue in an explicit renovation of The
Four Zoas narrative universe.
 Blake's strategic rearrangement of pages causes Los's speech to establish
the conditions for the fall-pretext (which always seems to lie prior to the
events of the poem). Despite the responses of Ahania and Enion near the
end of Night VIII, Los's speech results in a return to the image and rhetoric
of the Body on the Cross, sealed in despair in the Sepulcher while Babylon
triumphs over Jerusalem-an event that was already occurring simultane-
ously with Urizen's creation of the Mundane Shell in Night II (25:31).
This development is thus an analysis of the framework of Urizen's cosmol-
ogy in Night II. Urizen's sexual dragon form is exactly what he creates by
suppressing his sexual relation to Ahania. Finally, Blake utilizes both
Jerusalem and the Lamb to frustrate the expectation that Luvah will be
reborn and Los and Enitharmon reunited by having Jerusalem "worship
Urizens Dragon form" (111:3), while earlier she worshipped Death which
she identified as the "Body dead upon the Cross" (106:7). ThusJerusalem's
perceptual transformation of the Tree into the Cross, and of the Lamb into
the Body, transforms the Body in the Sepulcher into Urizen's dragon form
as well.


 New Narrative Elements

 In the network of overlapping interconnections and radical discon-
tinuities that arises from Blake's perspective strategies in The Four Zoas it


Narrative consequences
ofBlake's rearrangement
of pages in Night VIII









At the spreading of Uri-
zen's "stony stupor," Ur-
thona first comes into
existence in the narrative
proper as a character dis-
tinct from "the Spectre"
or "the Shadow."





















Urizen's dragon form is
narratively identified
with the crucified Lamb
by means ofJerusalem's
worship.