REFUSING CONVENTIONAL POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE CLOSURE


rebirth like spring or morning that will be fundamentally different from
all the previously enacted rebirths, this "repose" in itselfoffers the narrator
few legitimate options for halting the narrative's seemingly infinite capa-
city for repetition/transformation of events under ever new and inter-
twined delusive guises.
 The most obvious option would be to invoke the conventional
religious/sacramental associations with the bread and wine and have a
redemptive figure such as Jesus or the Lamb of God appear to wake
everyone up and set the world right. Since there have been sufficient
references to such figures throughout the poem, their materialization at
this point could be a great relief, especially to a reader still searching for a
textual closure that eliminates options of reading from the poem's ending.
The Lamb of God would seem especially appropriate because of his con-
nections with the crucifixion in Night VIII and with the Regenerate/
Immortal seasonal sexual cycle in Night IX. Blake's Lamb of God has been
sufficiently contaminated, however, through the Lamb's intertwining
with Satan in Night VIII and through the Lamb's connection with the
separation ofJerusalem from the Eternal Man, that invoking him at this
point would reintroduce precisely the kinds of narrative overlapping and
discontinuity that facilitate the endless repetition/transformations the
narrative has been perpetually enacting.
 The other most obvious option would be simply to end the text at this
point, an attempt to short-circuit the narrative's capacity for transforma-
tion by ending the poem at a point where its content seems to leave open
no future options. Closing the poem at this point would, however, open
up an abyss of negativity, affirming the inevitable triumph of the powers
of "Winter," "night," and "Time," utterly frustrating the reader's desire
for resolution on the page. Such an ending, thus, would enact a negative
dialectic on the surface of the text by insisting that the poem cannot be
authentically resolved within the parameters of the narrative itself.6 This
solution would be tantamount to an admission by the narrator that his
immense task of narrating has come to this negative impasse. Neither of
these options is chosen: rather Blake focuses on the narrator's struggle to
create a satisfactory positive closure to an unclosable poem without
recourse to redemptive figures, as though the logic of the narrative itself
authentically led to a resolution through which the narrator could extin-
guish his existence without the guilt or anxiety of knowing he is subtly
re-enacting, through his language, the narrative processes at whose serv-
ice he has been working all along.
 The narrator has been forced to this crisis by the internal dialectic of the
tale he is telling, a process which parallels Enion's weaving a garment not
subservient to her hands but having "a will / Of its own perverse &
wayward" (5:21-22). This dialectic drives the narrator to attempt the most
total and radical repression in the poem. In order to get from "repose in
Winter in the night of Time" to "The Sun has left his blackness..."
(138:19-20) the narrator must divest himself (by suppression, evasion,


The insufficiency of
Blake's Lamb of God to
perform a narratively
resolving action
















The possibility of end-
ing the poem at the nadir
of "Winter in the night
of Time"








Foregrounding the nar-
rator's attempt to bring
about positive closure
and escape the perspec-
tive transformations that
drive the narrative
forward