CONVERGENCE OF NARRATIVE BRANCHINGS


way key events of Night VIIa happen-Orc becoming a serpent, the
Shadow assuming power, and the dead bursting forth (See Fig. C.2).
 Nights VIIa and VIIb function as alternative routes of realization of the
same events. VIIa itself proceeds by narrative branching, while VIIb
employs mediating transitions to connect narratively dispersed events.
Night VIII exteriorizes the branchings of Nights VIIa and VIIb dialecti-
cally by means of radically abrupt shifts with no mediating transitions,
similar to Night II's hierarchical ordering. But since, by this time, the
narrator's implication in the action and delusion is irrevocable, there are
no unambiguous signals by which to judge among the ironic/redemptive/
fallen/sexual perspectives.


 Night VIII
 Night VIII's extreme perceptual confusion and narrative density emerge
from two competing ways the dead (spectrous males) have burst into the
narrative proper: VIIa's transformational embedded accounts drive toward
a redemptive perspective (which is significantly undermined by the eating
of the fruit of the Tree of Mystery); VIIb's discontinuous yet mediated
structures drive toward an ironic (and unequivocal) perspective. Though
Blake is constantly subverting the possibility of making unequivocal deci-
sions between polarized structures (such as redemptive and ironic), these
dual aspects of the action of Night VIII impel the emerging narrative
world (and the reader) toward a desperate need for a final or "last" judg-
ment in Night IX.
 The schizophrenic state of the narrative, as it emanates from its radically
alternative branches in VIIa and VIIb, dictates that Night VIII begin as no
other Night has begun, with the "Council of God" purporting to act in a
decisively providential way to rectify the crisis. This sudden intrusion of a
structure of authority that has made only two prior (elliptical and
equivocal) appearances by name functions primarily as a temporary diver-
sion or deflection from the unfolding narrative scheme, flooding the first
two pages of Night VIII with heavily positive imagery that is progres-
sively swallowed up by the expanding narrative crisis. In its previous two
appearances (in Nights I and IV) the Council seems, as we have seen, to
become what it beholds or creates, to enact the events it is attempting to
redeem.
 A similar process occurs at the beginning of Night VIII: the Man is
stretched on the "oozy Rock"; yet after he "sneeze[s]...again he reposd /
in the saviours arms," implying that the rock and the arms are the same
place. This possibility further suggests a covert connection between the
Council of God and its supposed polar opposite, the Synagogue (or coun-
cil) of Satan, which appears as "Twelve rocky unshapd forms" (105:9) from
which the narrator recoils. Further, in Night VIII the Council (as "Jesus")
meets "Upon the Limit of Contraction to create the fallen Man" (99:3),
thereby taking responsibility for the "fall" itself. Because the Man (in


The horizontal deploy-
ment of events in Night
VIIb (Fig. C.2, pp.
334-35)