OVERRIDES: THE LUVAH/VALA PLOT


and prevent the further separation of the female from the male, this
embrace suddenly-and precisely in the context of the feast-creates the
preconditions for sexual separation as such. The narrator's emphasis on
the Eternal Men's perception of the separated female draws attention away
from the fact that the "Eternal Men" embody or enact an implicit division
of the Eternal Man himself (that is, the narrator's perceptual bias obscures
the fact that seeing the female separate equals the Eternal Man's own
division).
 Since the multiple Eternal Men meet as if in order "to see / The female
form now separate," the division of the Eternal Man becomes an aspect of
the separation of the female, and vice versa. The embrace of Tharmas and
Enion thus occasions, through the mediation of the feast, what appears to
be an originary or primal separation of male from female. It is crucial that
this female is not named but treated as if generic, for the convoluted
context opens up the possibility that this female is Jerusalem. In their
division in Night I, Tharmas hid Jerusalem (4:9) and Enion wove a taber-
nacle for Jerusalem (5:6-7); thus the union of Tharmas and Enion could
disclose or unconceal Jerusalem as an aspect of the poem's sexual jealousy
plot. Since the Eternal Man's female Emanation Jerusalem (19:1) has been
claimed as "bride & wife" of the Lamb of God, according to the Eternal
Man's lecture to Urizen (122:16-17), the Eternal Men's revulsion from
their sudden consciousness of the "female separate" could be the way the
Eternal Man perceives the intersection of his own speech to Urizen with
the Tharmas/Enion union. In this reading the feast celebrates the hidden
wedding ofJerusalem and the Lamb which separates Jerusalem from the
Eternal Man.

 The Luvah/Vala Plot. Luvah and Vala function,just as the feast does, in a
 double role-as a linear override plot and as an embedded structure. The
 Luvah/Vala embedded structure is bounded by their descent into and their
 actions within their radically isolated world, but the linear plot featuring
 these characters extends almost to the end of the poem -specifically to the
 point at which the Eternal Man casts out Luvah and Vala, at the boundary
 between the Eternal Man bracket and the final Los/Urthona embedded
 structure (137:30-31). Unlike the linear trumpet sound, whose hidden
 features discontinuously surface and climax at the feast by creating the
 trumpet sound's own preconditions and then disappear, and unlike the
 feast plot that crops up at various discontinuous moments in the narrative
 as a stationary landscape to which the action keeps returning, the Luvah/
 Vala linear plot is evasive, covert, and difficult to sight, though it displays a
 movement and direction that the characters and the narrator often fail to
 perceive.
 Because Luvah's ambivalent actions systematically mystify other
 characters as well as the narrator, the movement of the Luvah/Vala plot
 remains fundamentally invisible (the guise under which Luvah often
 explicitly appears) and therefore requires further analysis, even at this


The separation of the
female from the Eternal
Men at the feast as a sub-
versive enactment of the
Lamb's appropriation of
Jerusalem as his "bride &
wife"

















The nearly invisible
movement toward
power of the Luvah/Vala
plot