Transformation:
"Christ in the Orb"
In Night Eight, the "Sons of Eden" sing a song in which they catalogue from their
position in Eternity the ontological processes occurring in a range of narrative spaces, positing a
connection between them in terms of a narrative teleology of sin and redemption. They behold
the daughters of Enitharmon weaving clothing for the dead on their looms, and Satan's "Mills of
resistless wheels," standing "round the roots of Urizens tree," where this clothing is unwoven and
then woven "anew in the forms of dark death & despair" (113 (first portion): 1-37). The song
ends with a description of the disruptive agency of the Lamb of God in this process, who they
say "redeems the spectres from their bonds," and in a seeming contradiction, plead for the Lamb
to come and initiate this "Redemption / Begun Already in Eternity" (104 (second portion): 11-
17). From the perspective of Eternity, the Lamb of God is the key to the resolution of a
profound ontological crisis that has developed in the poem's narrative through the conflicting
agencies of characters in other spatial contexts, and furthermore, Eternity is the privileged
interpretive space from which this resolution must come. "Christ in the Orb"
The process the song describes allegorizes a potential relationship of the reader to the text at this point in the poem, a poem in which various incommensurable narrative strands have been woven together, unwoven, and woven anew, like the clothing for the spectres of the dead described in the song. The narrative built around the Lamb of God is repeatedly fragmented in Night Eight by the transfer of Luvah's signs from Orc to the Lamb, who appears wearing Luvah's robes of blood. The narrative excess unleashed through this identity crisis undermines rational reference, trapping the reader dependent on this mode of reading, like the spectres of the dead, in "forms of dark death & despair." The hope held out in the song is that the Lamb will rescue the narrative from the interpretive abyss, retroactively instituting the strictures of narrative teleology and reaffirming structures of rational reference by bringing closure to the poem.
It should not seem strange then that the narrative perspective of Eternity has been adopted by so many readers of The Four Zoas and dominates much of Blake criticism. Eternity, by the logic of this account, is privileged above all other interpretative spaces in the poem, and in return for the critic's investment in it, guarantees the functioning of a critical economy that produces the possibility of identifying embodied meaning. Thus, when Harold Bloom encounters the passage at the end of Night Seven that marks the initial emergence of the "spectrous dead" and the constellation of associated weaving images into the narrative, he reproduces on a meta-level the structural conditions of this allegory of reading. "Los," he argues, "feels the imaginative desire to 'fabricate embodied semblances,' artifices of eternity in which the dead can live again . . . . The desire of Los is the desire of Blake, and The Four Zoas is such a world" (255). Bloom sees these "embodied semblances" as allegories for Blake's redemptive theme in the poem, and the status of these "semblances" as "artifices of eternity" is meant to establish the "truth" value of his claims. But in embracing this system of reference, Bloom has radically closed off the conflicting associations generated by the narrative. In this sense, he is practicing a fetishistic discourse, valuing one part of the text in a way that is unwarranted by the narrative, using the "artifices of eternity" to screen anything disruptive to his interpretation.
A similar process occurs in explications of the visual text of the poem, where the simultaneity of image and text offers the potential for a non-linear, synchronic experience of "reading." The opening lines of page nine, which describe Enion's search for her children, are, as Erdman explains, "inked over erasures, but first written in pencil in top margin, then replaced by a drawing of Christ in an orb" (note 824). The text and drawing in the margin become physically enclosed in a space in which associations are reconfigured non-linearly and rebirthed in synchronicity with the act of reading. Magno and Erdman's interpretation of the image in their facsimile edition is as follows: "to show us what lives within the symbolic circumference of infinitude, Blake has drawn a globe at the top of the page. In its center, contradicting Old Testament fatalism, Jesus is shown sitting on a curve of this earth, with his legs drawn up and his arms outstretched in a gesture that . . . offers the radiant immortality of the creative imagination to all earthly creatures . . . " (30).
In this reading of the "Christ in the Orb," one can see the image's extraordinary power to link disparate textual spaces together and reconfigure their significances, as well as the critical resistance to admitting the ultimate consequences of this process to interpretation in the poem. When we return to the text of the poem from Magno and Erdman's account of the drawing, it is easy to see that the image is functioning as a fetish for them, that their reading is a screen memory keeping them from making certain associations that might call into question their systematic interpretation of the text. The iconographic identification of the image in the Orb as Christ, required by the dominant fall-redemption paradigm of Blake studies, closes off all associations alien to the discourse on "creative imagination" it produces. But we have access to what is screened because what has been repressed still haunts the screen. Restoring these associations, some of which are more obvious than the linkage with Christ, however, destroys Erdman's interpretive mapping of the text.
One such association is the emergence of Luvah and Vala from Enitharmon's "Song of Death" into the narrative "proper" on page twelve: " Night darkend as she spoke! a shuddring ran from East to West / A Groan was heard on high. The warlike clarions ceast. the Spirits / Of Luvah & Vala shudderd in their Orb: an orb of Blood!" (12.1-3). The appearance of Luvah and Vala within an orb here clearly resonates with the image of the figure in the orb, but suggests an ontology of that image fundamentally incommensurable with the agency ascribed to it by Erdman and Magno. Luvah and Vala, enclosed in the orb, are radically cut off from the world: "They stood above the heavans forsaken desolate suspended in blood / Descend they could not. nor from Each other avert their eyes / Eternity appeard above them as One Man infolded / In Luvah[s] robes of blood & bearing all his afflictions" (13.6-9). Eternity, represented in this description as a man infolded in robes of blood above Luvah and Vala, strengthens the correspondence of this narrative space to the image space of "Christ in the Orb."
But if Eternity is marked by a deletion of knowledge, a forgetting of the non-knowing of origins in the attempt to establish a unified perceptual field, Blake attempts to shatter this illusory field through the convolution of narrative space/time in the opening of incommensurable synchronic spaces. In the image of "Christ in the Orb," the accretion of these synchronic associations is translated into a spatial metaphor for the dangers of Newtonian subjectivity: the savior, if that is who is represented in the drawing, like Luvah and Vala, is inscribed in a circle of `single vision,' severed from congress with the world.
Perform the Transformation