DOCTRINAL INTRUSIONS


re-enactment. These branchings created in the characters a need for exter-
nal redemption and generated the massive network of conflicting perspec-
tive transformations in Night VIII. The prior operation of this process of
narrative branching creates the possibility that these apocalyptic break-
throughs may in fact constitute the primary event of Night IX, while the
repeated servings away from it are evasions and repressions of it-
including the final segment of the Los/Urthona bracket, which most
persuasively erases the expense of apocalyptic upheaval from the poem and
from the reader's consciousness.

 Doctrinal Intrusions
 In contrast to these violent apocalyptic interruptions, doctrinal intru-
sions recur throughout Night IX. These often extended speeches are usu-
ally uttered by "Eternal" characters-the "Eternal Man" (119:32-120:12;
120:14-25; 120:28-51; 122:1-20; 135:5-20), the "Immortal" (126:6-17),
"One of the Eternals" (133:11-26)-but also are spoken by Urizen
(121:3-26; 122:21-25; 131:31), Tharmas (134:5-29), and Luvah (135:21).2
These didactic intrusions are not doctrinally consistent with one another:
for example, one of the Eternal Man's speeches (122:1-20) extols sexual
division as the basis of regeneration, while the speech at the feast by "One
of the Eternals" (133:11-26) is a doctrinaire response which serves to
repress the immediate sexual division that has just occurred in the narra-
tive proper ("The female form now separate"). All of these speeches seem
to have one characteristic in common, however: they presuppose the
desirability ofa return to a prior state of existence without that state having been
changed in any way by the events of (reading) the poem.
 The Eternal Man summarizes this tendency when, in his opening so-
 liloquy, he asks:"When shall the Man of future times become as in days of
 old" (120:5). (Although Blake is playing with the verb "become," opening
 up the possibility that "in days of old" Man existed as a process of becom-
 ing in contrast to his present inert immobility, the Eternal Man seems
 unaware of this implication.) The Eternal Man's primary focus is his desire
 to find a means by which he can regress from his present condition of
 internal warfare to a state he recalls/fantasizes as prior, peaceful, and thus
 more desirable. When the Eternal Man calls on the Prince of Light for
 help, it is as much because he sees Urizen as the great conservative force,
 the "great opposer of change," as in spite of it. This desire to return
 cyclically to a primordial state uncontaminated by the poem's dislocating
 energy is most specifically the desire to escape the process of retroactive trans-
formation that has been constantly revising the past in such a way that there
is no prior state to which one can simply return.
 Blake invokes these techniques, and many others (especially strategies
 of detour), negatively to obstruct the reader's direct perception of hidden
 embedded structures. But these techniques also function positively in
 allowing the reader to become aware of the incompleteness of linear pro-
 cess and thereby to experience the perceptual interference between linear


Doctrinal intrusions
tempt the reader to
acquiesce in the desire to
escape the poem's
retroactive transforma-
tions by returning to a
state of being unaffected
by the events of The Four
Zoas.