This study intends to explore the significance and dynamics of the mythology of "Giant forms" as they emerge in The Book of Urizen. It argues that Blake's myth-making is his way of articulating a fundamental human problem: that of the gap 'within the self,' between language and the reality of desire that cannot be symbolised. Blake, as a matter of fact, addresses the problem as early as the Songs by bringing into play the vicissitudes of his mythic Child: from the In fans of Innocence whose naked, non-signifying voice declines what we may call, in Lacanian terms, the Name-of-the-Father, to the new-born Child of Experience able to inscribe the fulfilment of his desire in the very language that speaks of his "Sorrow." The problem is further explored in the myth of Urizen, the subject alienated in the "place in the north"-the symbolic site, the order of language-, repressing unnameable desire that returns in uncanny "voices of terror"; until those voices are finally recognized and perceived as the "voice of the Child," a flamboyant "it speaks" interfering within the Urizenic "I speak" in a creative transgression which is none other than the poetic. The Blakean myth thus constructs in the very "place in the north" that paradoxical locus-exemplified by the "Book" itself-where signifying forms can turn into inscriptions of unsignifiable desire.
