THE SHADOW: NARRATIVE DISLOCATIONS AT HER ENTRY


 The structural significance of the role of the Shadow of Enitharmon in
Blake's overall narrative scheme in The Four Zoas relates to the way the
reader responds to the events that issue out of her presence. Having learned
the perspective techniques of Nights I-VI, the reader must be on guard
when terms as unusual as "Golgonooza," "the Limit of Translucence," and
the "Limit Twofold named Satan & Adam" suddenly reappear in the text.
All of these terms first entered the poem in association with either Los's
building of the body in Night IV or the emergence of the Chain ofJealousy
in Night V. The events that surround the reappearance of these terms in
Nights VIIa, VIIb, and VIII constitute re-enactments or perspective
analyses of those earlier events. But Blake alters the language and context
in which these terms recur -all the while supplying contradictory signals
-so that the reader must experience these narrative happenings as com-
pletely new events, and even as responses to the previous forms of these
events which are now analyzed in the narrative present of Nights VIIa,
VIIb, and VIII. As they coalesce in the context of the Shadow of Enithar-
mon, the events of Night VIIa reveal themselves to be an explicit radically
alternate version of the unfolding route of the event-strands that issue from
events in IV and V. This transformation is inseparable from the phe-
nomenological organization of the Shadow herself.
 The events of VIIa all occur within the context of the Tree of Mystery
itself: the Spectre/Shadow confrontation actually happens beneath the
Tree; while, prior to the Shadow's birth, the Los/Enitharmon confronta-
tion is located spatially "above" the Tree; immediately following this birth
"Then took the tree of Mystery root in the World of Los / Its topmost
boughs shooting a fibre beneath Enitharmons couch / The double rooted
Labyrinth soon wavd around their heads" (85:23-25). All the action that
follows-the confrontation between the Spectre and Los, and between Los
and Enitharmon, as well as the fabrication of embodied forms-occurs in
the context of the Tree and its fruit. Even the reappearance of "Gol-
gonooza," built with "Wonders of labour" (87:5-7), is located among the
Tree's branches: "Los sat in Golgonooza in the Gate of Luban where / He
had erected many porches where branch the Mysterious Tree / Where the
Spectrous dead wail" (90:2-4). These multiple repetitions of "where" con-
stitute a spatial infolding of otherwise distinct places within one another,
an infolding which, by connecting the Tree, the spectres, and Golgonooza,
pervasively conditions Los and Enitharmon's decision to "fabricate
embodied semblances" or "forms sublime" for the spectres (90:9, 22).
 The events in the final two-thirds of VIIa issue from the sexual confer-
ence between the Spectre and the Shadow, a conference which is itself
made possible by the fruit of Mystery, a "poisonous" and intoxicating
food. The food of the Feast in I, the food prepared for Orc, the food
Urizen sought in chasing Tharmas, and in Urizen's perspective, the food
of Los's "strong devouring appetite," all coalesce in this explicitly danger-
ous "fruit" that hides "Plagues" within its "shining globes" (82:20-22) and
thereby is a repetition of the dialectic of concealing and seeking while it
reconstitutes Urizen's "globes." Further, this fruit appears in the form of a


The emergence of narra-
tive branching in Night
VIla


















Note: line numbering
on page 87 is keyed to
the pre-1982 Erdman
text (which combines
lines 5 and 6 into one
line).