Preludium: Reading Night the Ninth Subversively

 Whereas in Night I of The Four Zoas Blake posed for himself the nar-
ratological problem of using the "beginning" of the text to undermine the
ontology of (Newtonian) origin, in Night IX Blake accepts the equally
difficult challenge of invoking massive textual signs of "ending" (of the
poem itself and of the continuously originating "world" of the poem) in
order to subvert radically the (Newtonian) meaning of"ending" as a final
closing off of possibilities, a meaning that threatens to unhinge Blake's
entire poetic project. One danger in reading Night IX is thus Blake's
genius for realizing powerful apocalyptic imagery which, at more than
one level of reading, could well be taken for an "end" in itself.
 Perhaps the greatest challenge, then, in reading Night IX is resisting the
temptation to accept the textual lures that make it possible to experience
Night IX as closing off, once and for all, multiple options of reading it, of
believing the "Last Judgment" is an event represented in the text and acted
out by characters in a distant narrative world- an event, in short, to which
the reader is a relatively passive spectator. It is necessary, therefore, self-
consciously to read Night IX as subversively as possible, as a therapeutic
antidote to the sleep-inducing inertial (conventionally apocalyptic)
aspects which Blake has woven into Night IX's text.
 Reading Night IX subversively pushes to the foreground those ele-
 ments that resist a straight apocalyptic reading: it emphasizes the dis-
 crepancies, the detours, and the intrusions which, in a non-subversive
 (Newtonian) reading, appear (if observed at all) as distractions or uncom-
 fortable anomalies. Reading Night IX subversively also means exposing,
 even more extremely than before (since more is at stake), the narrative's
 hidden relational possibilities in all their legitimate perversity. Finally,
 reading Night IX subversively means treating these disturbances and per-
 verse relatednesses (especially at the heart of the apocalyptic imagery
 itself) as indices of Blake's power to keep open radically conflicting
 options in the very Night that pretends to close offoptions with absolute
 finality. In other words, the reading that follows is an attempt to resist the
 reader's resistance to the counter-apocalyptic resistances in the text of
 Night IX. One risk of such a subversive reading is that it, too, will take
 itself to be final-a threat against which we must be constantly on guard
 but which may prove to be inescapable.



 Introduction: The Crisis of Entry into Night the Ninth

 While thrusting forward as if aiming toward an unseen goal, the linear
 movement of the plot in Night IX is subverted by multiple interference
 patterns, the chief of which is an intricate network of embedded structures.
 This interference between linear and embedded structures is one aspect of


The threat of "ending"
versus the threat of
"beginning"