OPENING FROM THE TEXT


up in the plains of Beulah Many Sons / And daughters flourished round
the holy tent of Man / Till he forgot Eternity delighted in his joy / Among
his family his flocks & herds & tents & pastures / But Luvah close conferrd
with Urizen in darksom night / To bind the father & enslave the brethren"
(83:19-24). Urizen and Luvah-the characters onto whom the narrator,
like Tharmas in Night IV, projected all guilt for the fall (119:27)-are
excluded from the final segment of the poem, as if the conditions for the
fall could be present while the agents are nowhere to be found. More
significantly, the imagery here in Night IX calls attention to an act of
forgetting (83:21), which is precisely what the narrator is doing with regard
to Urizen and Luvah at the poem's close. The narrator is also forgetting the
way the events at the poem's close are invoking the confusion between
"Eternity" and "Beulah" voiced by the Spectre of Urthona in Night VIla
(84:4-9) in his response to the Shadow's account of the fall. The Spectre
called for the "morn of ages" to "renew upon us / To reunite in those
happy fields of Eternity." The lacunae between the Spectre's and the
Shadow's accounts in Night VIIa12 render both stories problematic; but the
subliminal return of this delusive context introduces a distant shadow into
the sunny vision of the renewal and reunion of Urthona and Enitharmon
in the poem's closing lines.
 This shadowy intrusion further alerts us to a central problem of the
 poem. The unfolding narrative of The Four Zoas has exercised its power to
 revise even the ontological priority of Urthona to Los (as affirmed on
 pages 3-4 of the manuscript and in numerous interpolated visions
 throughout the poem), in part by not allowing Urthona to enter the
 narrative proper as a character (disconnected from the term "Spectre" or
 "Shadow") except as a consequence of Urizen's "stony stupor" (107:21).
 To the extent this has occurred, these thirty-one lines enact the reader's and
 the narrator's wish-fulfillment dream of Urthona's restoration to his
 "ancient strength." This restoration of Urthona -which denies the poem's
 own revisionary power-is aligned with a desire to return to a state unaf-
 fected by the events of (reading/telling) The Four Zoas. The narrative
 exposes the cost of this desire for representational closure (through the
 figure of Urthona) by allowing the forgetting of Urizen and Luvah, by
 short-circuiting the redemptive scheme of the Lamb of God/Jesus
 (thereby repressing the Lamb as a fictionalized sexual competitor for
 Jerusalem who wants to keep Man in a state that can desire no further than
 Beulah, the realm the Lamb creates), by pressuring the syntax of the last
 lines to resist the information they attempt to impart, and by privileging a
 radically restricted vision of Urthona.
 Considered in this light, the reader and narrator want the poem to
 consume itself-like the "evil" of 138:22. But poem is not a self-
 consuming artifact in this sense. Instead, the narrative reveals the narrator
 to be, at the poem's close-in order for there to be a close-the hidden ally
 of the Newtonian reader: the narrative voice takes on the characteristics of
 a subjective consciousness seeking its own identity in a closure that pur-


The reader's dream













The reader constructs a
narrator whose wish-
fulfillment enacts the
reader's own desire for
closure.