STRUCTURAL INTERFERENCE


The openness of Blake's
text to alternative struc-
 tural divisions


 A range of narrative
characteristics that inter-
 fere with linear and/or
 embedded structures


 6) and finally, the structure constituted by the story of Tharmas and
 Enion as children (130:2-131:19), existing within all of the above
 structures as the most deeply embedded structure of Night IX.
 In a two-dimensional map these bracketed structures enclose one
another in symmetrical fashion (see Fig. D.1), although they could be
visualized as a series of receding plane surfaces, with the movement from
one bracket into the next involving a movement into a different reading
surface constituted by its perspective. By incorporating into the poem
details geared to a linear reading that directly conflicts with Night IX's
embedded structures, Blake resists the temptation to render these elegant
structures rigid, thereby retaining an extraordinary degree of narrative
freedom in the context of precise structural constriction. These conflict-
ing modes of organization strategically interfere with the reader's attempt
to grasp Night IX even in the unconventional terms of the previous
Nights.
 The particular dimensions of this internal narrative conflict radically
keep open legitimate alternative ways of dividing or bracketing the text of
Night IX. Any such alternative structuring of Night IX would, of neces-
sity, rearrange the ontological/perspectival constitution of narrative
events. For the purposes of our subversive reading, however, it is more
useful to entertain the fiction that the symmetrical bracketed structures
outlined above are stable divisions of the text against which contrary clues
-for example, the feast as an aspect of the feast bracket as opposed to the
feast as an aspect of the Eternal Man bracket-function as strategies of
interference which force the reader's imagination to an unrelieved crisis.


 Preliminary Analysis of the Structural Interferences
 in Night IX

 Some of the features of Night IX that tend to obscure the embedded
structures include:
 1) the structurally eccentric placement of events such as the union ofTharmas
 and Enion, which has the potential to be Night IX's central resolving
 narrative event;
 2) linear override plots which seem to proceed with relative indifference
 to embedded structures; examples include: the unfolding fate of the
 trumpet sound which eventually constitutes a circularity; the linear
 reappearances of the images of flames/fire (and their relation to
 consummation/consuming) and the harvest (in relation to the
 agricultural override plot); and the operation of the feast and Luvah/
 Vala as linear plots as distinguished from their function as embedded
 structures;
 3) pseudo-symmetrical structures, such as the parallel between Luvah and
 Vala in the garden and in the wine presses or between Tharmas and
 Enion in the garden and in their embrace;