FOUR ZOAS IX / 139:4-7 (3:9-139:7)


 Los is Urthona.








Urthona is no longer Los


 The Spectre Los






 IfLos's memory (on
 which this interpreta-
tion is based) is accurate,
then why does Urthona
 not resume his role as
 gatekeeper?


unquestionably depends on the vital syntactic connectives (which would
have closed off alternatives) having "departed" from the visual surface of
the text.
 The positive process ofUrthona's rising unification is initially couched
in negatives (139:4-5), which could promise a negative resolution in the
text that would undermine the reader's options less completely than would
positive statements such as "Urthona is now united with Enitharmon,"
since in The Four Zoas narrative world such positive statements have had a
high probability of issuing in frustration. At the same time, the doubt that
had nearly been excluded in 138:20-40 begins to rush back in through the
visual appearance and content of these lines.
 The Los/Urthona bracket began, "Then Los who is Urthona rose"
(137:34). If that statement had been what it seemed to be-the declaration
of an ontological identification ofLos with Urthona-then the subsequent
focus on Urthona to the exclusion of Los could have meant that Urthona is
completely constitutive of Los and that to mention Los would be redun-
dant. Now, however, Urthona's being "arisen" depends on his being "no
longer the Spectre Los[.]" Once Urthona "is arisen" Los no longer is
Urthona but is a "Spectre" who can be separated from Urthona. Reduced
to schematic terms, the division between 137:34 and 139:5 divides the
narrator: "Los...is Urthona" opposes "Urthona [is]...no longer...
Los."
 The sudden identification of Los as "the Spectre" (139:5) opens up
several possibilities. It could imply a radical perspective transformation
that retroactively revises the body of narrative events in the poem since
Los's entrance in 3:9. From this revised perspective, "the Spectre Los" has
unequivocally usurped the ontologically primary being, Urthona, as Los
himself bragged in his bombastic confrontation with Tharmas in Night
IV ("I know I was Urthona keeper of the gates of heaven / But now I am all
powerful Los & Urthona is but my shadow" [48:19-20]), even though
Tharmas "Doubt[ed]" Los's words. It is as if this scene late in Night IX
privileges Los's account in Night IV over substantial counter-evidence,
including the Spectre ofUrthona's own account that Los "didst subdue me
in old times by thy Immortal Strength / When I was a ravning hungring &
thirsting cruel lust & murder" (85:39-40). There have been almost as many
accounts of the relation between Los and Urthona as there have been
accounts of the Luvah/Urizen horses of light plot, all of which are in
significant ways incommensurate with all the others.7 Even if we tem-
porarily grant a prior plot in which Los did previously assume Urthona's
identity, it is by no means clear that such a takeover was anything but
beneficial. Now Los's presumed (and in the poem's ontology, fictional)
takeover has somehow been reversed and is being asserted as an
unequivocal precondition to a final resolution of the poem's narrative
world. It is also possible, however, that whoever is speaking in 139:5 (the
narrator, the Man) perceives line 137:34 itself ("Los who is Urthona rose")
as the textual locus of the takeover of Urthona by Los, with the events in