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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Fred Dortort. The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Arts (imprint of Barrytown, 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 Auk, the book comprises four lengthy chapters: "Entry into Jerusalem" (on Chapter I 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 reading, 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 disjunctiveness 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 Appendix A presents an overview of criticism of Jerusalem, and his Appendix B presents the poems from Blake's Prefaces to Chapters 2 and 3 in the double-columned format in which they appear in the illuminated text.
It is a difficult book about a difficult poem. Donald Ault's Foreword is not exactly inviting, practically daring the reader not to like the book. According to Ault, Dortort's book is apt to be marginalized for three reasons: 1) Dortort himself "lacks official status in the Blake industry: he is an independent scholar, neither affiliated with a university nor supplied with the proper credentials to speak with authority" (xxvi); 2) Dortort's "running interpretations and conclusions so diverge from the authoritative consensus of the Blake critical community that taking them into account could 'jam the theoretical machinery' of annotated editions and facsimile commentaries" (xxvii); or 3) Dortort "emphasizes how Blake's verbal text works in...
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