REPETITIONS / DISCONTINUOUS BREAKTHROUGHS


 Apocalyptic break-
 throughs considered as
aspects of the process of
 narrative branching


 Repetitions
 Since in the past Blake has marked boundaries of embedded structures
by repetition of phrases and lines, it is not surprising that with its multiple
nested structures Night IX exhibits an unusual number of repeated
phrases. What is surprising is that not one of these repetitions signals the
boundary of a major bracketed structure. While this mode of interference
is important, it can best be described in a note.'

 Discontinuous Breakthroughs of Apocalyptic Imagery
 Blake also subverts the reader's direct perception of the nested structures
of Night IX by employing discontinuous breakthroughs of apocalyptic
imagery, i.e., those narrative interruptions or intrusions in which re-
demption, release, freedom, and so on, come into existence only at the
expense of massive suffering, torture, and horror. Although such imagery
is associated with each central male character at least once, it is not dis-
tributed symmetrically: Blake thus frustrates the reader's desire to derive
transformational rules for Night IX's organization from these appearances
of apocalyptic imagery alone.
 The first apocalyptic imagery in Night IX occurs as Los tears down the
Sun and Moon, an act which issues in the vast consuming of the universe
in flames and bloody gore (117:10-119:23). Apocalyptic imagery literally
"explodes" from "the bursting Universe" in the first section of the Urizen
bracket (122:26-124:5), and a third outburst occurs within the Urizen
bracket as a consequence of his plowing and sowing (124:25-125:14),
during which Tharmas is first identified as the trumpeter. Apocalyptic
imagery is interwoven with the mystifying event in which Urizen pours
his light to exhale Luvah and Vala (131:22-132:1). Blake gives Tharmas an
independent if ambiguous apocalyptic moment in his speech condemning
"Mystery" (134:5-29). Apocalyptic imagery pervades the sequence at the
wine presses of Luvah (135:34-137:31), and Urthona/Dark Urthona
attempts renovation through his Mills and in the process conjures up some
dismal apocalyptic imagery (138:1-19).
 Although each of these breakthroughs of apocalyptic imagery involves
a massive upheaval, a near total destruction of the narrative universe and/
or its inhabitants, the narrative world always soon settles back into a
relatively normal state, almost as if the disintegration had not occurred.
These apocalyptic intrusions thus give the impression that they are func-
tioning as successive appearances in the poem of the "same"
disintegrating/finalizing event as it is actualized through alternative
routes of narrative possibility. This branching of events through transfor-
mational detours opened up in Night VIIa as if it were a conscious
response by the narrative to the emerging awareness of Los, Enitharmon,
and the Spectre that they exist in a world in which the past can be altered
(undone) by re-enacting it. These narrative branchings functioned to
frustrate the characters' desires to achieve short-cut repentance through