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Fred Dortort. The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem. Barry town, NY: Station Hill Arts (imprint of Barry town, LTD), 1998. Pp. xxviii+468. $24.95 paper.
In The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem, Fred Dortort offers a close reading of Blake's last major epic. This sort of close reading of Jerusalem is something we have long needed to complement Morton Paley's The Continuing City which provides extensive background and structural analysis of the poem, but which also explicitly discounts the importance of a sequence of events in the poem. Dortort's determination to confront the poem in all its difficulty is also a welcome change from critical work which often avoids such confrontation either by taking refuge in the history of the poem's composition or by invoking, for example, a principle of sublime impenetrability. Dortort engages the often confusing syntax of the poem, as well as the poem's other well known problems, and he arrives at a reading of Jerusalem that turns the moral valences of the poem inside out. His thesis is clearly controversial, though somewhat less than convincing.
Dortort's book basically follows the pattern of Blake's poem. After Dortort's Preface, and the Foreword by Donald AuIt, the book comprises four lengthy chapters: "Entry into Jerusalem" (on Chapter 1 of the poem), "Perspective Suppression" (on Chapter 2), "Narrational Uncertainty" (on Chapter 3) and "Vision and Dream, Resolution and Delusion" (on Chapter 4). Each chapter contains an introductory discussion followed by a close rending, virtually line-by-line in many cases, of the chapter. Each chapter is then followed by an "Event Catalog," essentially a line-by-line paraphrase/ quotation of the chapter just discussed, the "major value" of which, Dortort says, "lies in their unavoidable emphasis of Jerusalem's essential strangeness, exposing beyond any possible dispute the extremes of dis junctiveness and bizarre repetition that comprise much of the poem's text" (85). If one really wants to experience the "essential strangeness" of the poem, I would recommend that the reader just stick with Blake's own text, but Dortort's strategy of offering an interpretive close reading, followed by a sort of re-reading of the poem does emphasize that his is an argument that requires its reader to know Blake's poem very well. Dortort's...