NOTES



transformation, however, reintroduces a more subversive "simultaneity" by
allowing a prior event to come back to life, literally to be resurrected, as it is
gathered into (constituted/canceled out by) the present event that reincarnates it.
 21 The primary types of spoken discourse inserted into the narrative proper
include: 1) interpolated visions and dreams which always involve characters using
other character names, as if referring to some distant event, often as though it is
ambiguous whether it occurred in the past or will occur in the future, in order to
fictionalize the present situation, manipulate another character, to repress their
own guilt, and so on; 2) remembrances always involve some acknowledgment on the
part of the speaker that he or she is a party to the events being remembered, but
invariably events "remembered" in the distant past either just happened in the
narrative (as in the Spectre's tale in Night IV) or completely contradict earlier
narrative information (as in Urizen's soliloquy in Night V); remembrances use
(some of) the same characters to disguise the present under the fiction of temporal
distance; 3) songs may incorporate dreams and memories, separately or interwo-
ven; they often involve complex shifts in the character being addressed or have
other internal contradictory aspects; unlike memories or visions, songs need not
be restricted by the fiction of canonical reference to external situations but can
quite legitimately function primarily to produce effects in a listener; it is thus
significant that Enitharmon's opening speech, which introduces the Fallen Man,
Urizen, Luvah, and Vala into the poem is a dream within a song, distancing it from
referential correspondence to anything beyond manipulation of the immediate
context (Los, Enion, and Tharmas); song is the most legitimately and self-
consciously fictional of these forms of discourse; lamentations are songs which
(almost always) retell negative narrative elements without making reference to
character names and only oblique reference to dominant images (Ahania's lamen-
tation in Night VIII and Urizen's in Night VI are among the exceptions to this
general rule); 4) interrogation or questioning, the mode of discourse which first
opens up the character voices of Tharmas and Enion, the mode in the form of
"Sin" which Paul Ricoeur has called the most astonishing form of primordial
self-alienation (The Symbolism of Evil [Boston: Beacon Press, 1967], p. 8); 5)
dead-end addresses often include commands, promises, threats, and temptations and
constitute situations in which one character speaks what we read as words but
which the character addressed experiences as landscapes, images, and so on, and
thus does not respond in words but in bodily movements (examples are Tharmas'
second address to Los in Night IV and to Urizen in Night VI); 6) mutual conversa-
tions are rare and even then fraught with problems of radical gaps between state-
ment and response (examples include conversations between Urizen and Los and
between Urizen and Luvah in Night I).

 22 Erdman cautions against taking "periods" too seriously in his introduction to
 "The Punctuation" in his "Textual Notes" in both editions: "In Blake the practical
 difference between comma and period [,however,] is almost unappreciable" (E, p.
 710, 787). Erdman's caution does not detract from the argument at hand, for the
 melting of commas into periods and vice versa is as subversive as using them in
 consistently perverse ways.
 23 Because "unity" is as close to the forces of analytical reduction as it is to the
 forces of imaginative integration, Blake's use of the term in any particular situation
 must be carefully considered in its narratological context: any kind of "unity" that
 moves toward closure must, in general, be suspect. For example, unity or oneness


Note 21: page 11








































Note 22: page 14






Note 23: page 15