PRIMARY CRISIS OF NEAR-REPETITION


in Night I. This redistribution of narrative relations underscores the dif-
ferences between the contexts that govern these nearly repeated utterances
in Nights I and IX.
 This shift in context is accompanied by a crucial structural shift. The
near-repetition of line 10:25, which originally participated in establishing
the difference between the narrative proper and the first interpolated vision
in the poem, now marks an undermining of the distinction between these two
primary sources of information. In Night I the information in these lines
occurred in an interpolated vision; now it occurs in the narrator's own
voice. Perhaps the only other time in the poem such a near-duplication
occurs between these two information sources is the narrator's reference to
the political plot involving Urizen, Luvah, and the horses of light at the
beginning of the Eternal Man bracket (119:27)-an event similarly
brought into existence by Enitharmon's vision in Night I (10:10-13).
Furthermore, the Fallen One's utterance in Night I was couched in tem-
poral terms (Once...now), while the narrator's account in Night IX is
atemporal and logical (Not...but). These differences conspire to bring
into the narrative proper itself the event of the ostensibly primal separation
of the female and the consequent fall of Man into a state of victimization
and multiplicity, rather than treating it as something that happened in a
temporal gap between a prior state and the narrative present. As the sep-
aration takes place in the narrative proper, the narrator takes on the aspects
(and the voice) of the Eternal Men.
 This moment decidedly engenders a crisis in the text unlike any we have
encountered before, and yet, in this near-quoting of one of the earliest
passages in the poem, Blake unearths once again the role of the "false
morning" (10:21) that provided the context for the Fallen One's narratively
original statement concerning female power in Night I. Blake now, how-
ever, carefully suppresses direct reference to the image of dawn until he
has detoured the reader through a speech designed to submerge awareness
of the sinister operation of the lingering false morning. The narrator both
describes and quotes the Eternal Men: "They wept to see their shadows
they said to one another this is Sin / This is the Generative world they
remember the Days of old" (133:8-9). The Eternal Men's reflex of nam-
ing the separation "Sin" ominously purports to be primordial, perhaps a
precondition to Enion's finding "Sin" in Tharmas in Night I (4:27); this
naming simultaneously mocks the repeated references to Vala as sinlesss"
in the recent garden phase of Night IX. Similarly, the Eternal Men's
sudden reflex of remembering inadvertently converts the immediate nar-
rative event of female separation into the ontological precondition of
memory throughout the poem. These two reflexes constitute one another:
in naming the female separation (which the Eternal Men desire to forget)
the Eternal Men bring memory into existence to fill the void created by the
desired forgetfulness, thereby allowing "Sin" to appear under the guise of
temporal distance ("the Days of old").
 At this crux Blake opens up two divergent readings of "they remem-


Nearly repeated lines
10:25 and 133:7 are both
relatively late editions to
the manuscript, but the
order of their inscription
with respect to one
another is indeterminable.


















The complexity of the
Eternal Men's utterance







The referents of the two
occurrences of "this" are
indeterminate.