FOUR ZOAS 1-IX / 5:42-126:16


 The interference be-
 tween linear and
 embedded dimensions
 of the plot in Night IX
 responds to the unre-
 solved conflict between
the narrator and the nar-
 rative in Night VIII.




Consequences ofnarra-
tive branching in Night
 Vila






 The dangers of a desire
 for a "future" that
 reinstates the remem-
 bered "past"


Blake's response to the crisis at the end of Night VIII which arose out of the
unresolved conflict between 1) the narrator's attempt to separate those
characters and events that are ostensibly "redemptive" from those that are
"Satanic" and 2) the narrative's persistent interconstitution and intertwin-
ing of the "redemptive" and the "Satanic." This crisis is an extension of the
branching of the events (in the context of the branching of the Tree of
Mystery and the eating of its fruit in Night VIIa) through transforma-
tional detours that opened up just as Los, Enitharmon, and the Spectre
began to become aware that they exist in a world in which the past can be
altered (undone) by re-enacting it. As a self-reflexive response to the
characters' dawning awareness of the narrative's powers of perspective
analysis and retroactive transformation, the narrative began to shift its
rules and generate branchings of events, a situation that made it possible
for a single event to be actualized (in addition to being analyzed) through
alternative routes of narrative possibility. In functioning to frustrate the
characters' desires to achieve "repentance" through re-enactment, these
branchings created the need for external redemption and produced Night
VIII's complicated network of conflicting perspective transformations
into whose midst the Lamb of God descended as (at best) problematic
redeemer.
 This narrative shift manifested itself in three ways: 1) in a swerving
away from the characters' obsession with "remembering" and re-telling
the "past" (without recognizing the "past" as a fictional transformation
and repression of the present); 2) in a shift of characters' attention toward
anticipating or predicting the future (often self-consciously as a re-
enacting, re-visioning, or re-instatement of the past as they "remember"
it to have been); 3) in a sudden awareness in characters (especially Los and
Enitharmon and the Sons of Eden) and in the narrator of a need for
redemption originating in some providential being or force external to the
characters and not subject to the narrator's control.
 Blake's challenge, then, is-under the guise of resolving the poem's
narrative tensions-to take advantage of these crises in order to maximize
the reader's primary role of opening up alternative possibilities of reading
while actively constituting the hidden relatedness of narrative events and
structures. The problems facing us in constructing a subversive reading of
Night IX thus rapidly become as complicated as the poem itself. It will
therefore be useful to consider some of the legitimate ways bequeathed
from previous Nights that Blake could have chosen to resolve the poem's
narrative crises in Night IX through the actions of agent-contexts or the
occurrence of events. Some of the more distracting aspects of these pos-
sibilities appear in footnotes.
 Of all the agent-contexts, or narrative beings who lie between characters
and landscapes, which precede Night IX only a handful hold any real
possibility of enacting a renovation of the poem's narrative universe.
Among those we might expect to return in Night IX but do not are: "the
Council of God" (not just in its unified form as "Jesus," which appeared