FOUR ZOAS IX / 133:9-30 (23:17-133:30)


The dialectical irony of
 "the Days of old"







The Eternal Man's inter-
polated speech attempts
to assert the division of
 "Man" from "Eternal"
just enacted in the narra-
 tive proper.





 The metaphysical joke
 of "One" and "All"












 The Eternal's speech:
 cyclic/patriarchal


berd the Days of old": either, 1) they perceive the present event of female
separation as a re-enactment or return of the past, as if "Sin" existed before
and is now recurring; or, 2) suddenly a past ("the Days of old") radically
comes into existence as a defense mechanism of the Eternal Men and
acts to contrast with the present, thereby drawing attention away from the
immediacy of the Men's separation from one another in the narrative
present. In the former case "the Days of old" are virtually indistinguisha-
ble from the present, for it is on the basis of the resemblance that the
Eternal Men are able suddenly to "remember"; in the latter, "the Days of
old" are really only a few moments in the narrative past, just before the
female separation became conscious to the Eternal Men-in this case
memory functions to push that narratively close moment fictionally into
the distant past.
 After this complicated dialectical revelation, where can Blake go next?
First of all, he almost imperceptibly, but nonetheless definitively, divides
the term "Eternal" from the term "Man" by suddenly referring to the
"Eternal Men" as "Eternals" (133:10) and then having One of these Eter-
nals give a speech in which he attempts (ultimately unsuccessfully) to
separate himself (as Eternal) from the being he calls "Man" (133:11ff).
Blake introduces this further crisis with a metaphysical joke which can
easily be overlooked in a commonsense reading: "One of the Eternals
spoke All was silent at the feast." For the narrator, One opposes All, and
speech opposes silence, as if "All" could include "All" except "One," as if
"All" could be "silent" even though "One" "spoke." In order to sustain
this fiction, the narrator must remain unaware that, as we have seen above,
his own voice is now more deeply than ever implicated in the speech acts of
the characters he narrates; he thus tries to keep All and One opposed,
revealing his blindness to the ontological option that One and All are
interlocked in such a way that speech constitutes silence. This latter possi-
bility can be realized directly to the extent that the Eternal's speech cancels
itself out: it concludes by emphasizing the likeness of Man to the Eternals
rather than his difference from them, which is the premise with which the
Eternal opens his speech.
 On its surface, the speech reiterates for at least the third time in Night
IX the inevitability (if not the virtues) of the cycle of the seed; it also enacts
a gesture of turning away from the divided female and toward the male
"Brotherhood" (133:22), a term which dimly though abruptly recalls both
line five of the poem's opening as well as the "Eternal Brotherhood" that
functioned parallel to the delusive Shadowy reflection of Man in Ahania's
vision in Night II (40:14; 41:9). Toward the end of his speech the Eternal
proclaims the desirability and the necessity of an "embrace" that turns the
males toward one another, parodying the heterosexual embrace of Thar-
mas and Enion; and the Eternal's doctrine is fulfilled in the narrative
proper when "they embraced the New born Man" (133:27). This is one of
only two times Blake uses the term "New born Man" in the poem, and it is
clearly ironic that the Eternal's speech-which desperately tries to retain