FOUR ZOAS IX / 137:4 (3:11-139:7)


 The conflict between
 closure and optionality
 that attends the ending
 of Night IX



















Following Urthona's en-
trance into the narrative
proper as a consequence
 of Urizen's sexual
stupor (107:21), the syn-
 tax suggests that Ur-
thona is as separate from
Los as Tharmas is, even
though Urthona's name
stands spatially next to
Los's: "Tharmas gave his
 Power to Los Urthona
 gave his strength / Into
 the youthful prophet"
 (107:31).


the poem univocally -either as an event that is going to wrap the poem up
neatly and resolve the inner conflicts that press against (the possibility of)
resolution in the text or, on the contrary, as an event which is purely
delusive or ironic. Since, at this point in the poem, the reader knows there
is little more than a page and a half of text left, it is very likely that the
anxiety of teleological wind-up (or wind-down) dictates that each detail
should be increasingly significant, heavily laden with overlapping net-
works of meaning, intersections of discontinuous contexts, and so on.
The reader's resistance to the accumulating power of The Four Zoas narra-
tive processes generates both conscious and unconscious anxieties -hopes
of not missing, fears of overlooking or misjudging, the crucial details
(images, transformations, discontinuities, and so forth) that will make
possible the full experience of the poem's resolution.
 Blake seems willing to manipulate the reader's residual teleological urge
to the very end of the poem. That is, Blake makes it possible for the reader
to emerge from the "End" of the poem: 1) thinking that he/she got it,
grasped the poem's goal in an event-complex represented as happening to
characters in the narrative; 2) feeling empty, depressed, or embarrassed
because somehow he/she missed the climactic revelation; or 3) recogniz-
ing that the Four Zoas text, in sustaining radically optional readings right
to the very end, keeps the possibility of explicit resolution in the text open
only insofar as it is a lure to engender perceptual lethargy in the inertial
reader (sitting, repose, sleep), and that, therefore, to have got it would
have been to have missed it.5 A central question in this third experience is:
how far do you have to read before you begin to dread rather than hope for
a non-optional explicit resolution that co-opts the reader's judgment by
occurring in the text itself? It should not take all the way to the end of the
poem-and perhaps beyond-but Blake knew it probably would. Blake's
challenge, then, in this final phase of the poem is to hold open the possibil-
ity of reading the events as constituting a final resolution on the page. Our
task is to try to resist that reading, to expose the subversive options to
definitive closure the text keeps open.
 Los has been noticeably absent from Night IX: he reappears here only to
be absorbed by Urthona, "his name / In Eden" (3:11-4:1). Throughout
The Four Zoas, however, the reader's primary concern has been with Los,
the first character to be named in the poem. At the beginning, Los was
presented as the focus of interest, while his "name / In Eden" seemed
almost to be an aside, being divided between two different pages of text:
Urthona seemed merely to be another name for Los in the context of
Eden. Here, late in Night IX, though Los's name is mentioned first,
Urthona is not another name for Los: rather Los is Urthona, and this
equation is asserted in an unbroken line of complete and unambiguous
syntax: "Then Los who is Urthona rose in all his regenerate power"
(137:34). Since Los is the actual subject of this sentence, with Urthona
appearing in a subordinate clause, it should be Los who rose, but this
phrasing serves instead to replace Los with Urthona. That this phrasing in