Fred Dortort. The Dialectic of Vision: A Contrary Reading of William Blake's Jerusalem.

Yoder, R. Paul

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 its perceptual intricacies, a project which is somewhat out of synchronization with other tendencies of recent Blake scholarship," especially the emphasis on the visual text made possible by the recent facsimile editions, and the historicizing of Blake in order to "re-stabilize [him] as a (perhaps) not-so-extraordinary figure of his time" (xxvii-xxviii). This sort of preemptive defense is hardly encouraging, and indeed, is hardly necessary. Dortort makes some excellent points and provides a very thought-provoking discussion of one of English literature's most difficult and ambitious poems.

Dortort draws heavily from Ault's own Narrative Unbound : Re-Visioning William Blake's The Four Zoas and other essays by Ault for his approach to Jerusalem. He adapts the hermeneutic constructs designed by Auk (aspectual interconnections, perspective transformation, modal interference and perspective analysis) to his own analysis of Jerusalem, reading the poem in terms of "perspective warfare," "perspective frames," "modal interference" and "perspective analysis." Perspective warfare occurs between or among the perspective frames, the three central groupings of characters/names around which the core events of the poem converge: Los, Albion, and the Luvah/ Saviour complex (more on this last frame below) (19). Modal interference occurs primarily in the tension between the minutely detailed descriptions of setting, for example, and the larger events of the narratives; the long lists that recur in the poem and the detailed description of Golgonooza are intended, says Dortort, to obscure from the reader the events of the narrative as well as the larger implications of those events. Perspective analysis occurs when events recounted in one textual block "migrate" into another textual block, so that an event is presented from two or more incompatible perspectives, forcing the reader to recognize possible alternative interpretations, and thereby denying the reader any sense of a stable text or narrative.

Dortort's approach leads to some important insights. Like many readers of the poem, Dortort suggests that much of Blake's goal in the poem is to extend the conflict and its implications beyond the bounds of the printed page to the reader, so that the possibility of redemption, whatever its status in the poem, is ultimately directed toward the reader. Unlike many readers of the poem, Dortort contends that Jerusalem does have something of a narrative as well as a "narrational" (a sort of meta-narrative) structure, and he is right on target in asserting that "Much of what passes for action in Jerusalem, then, is better understood as the attempts of characters to impose their perceptual modes on other characters" (24). Dortort correctly sees that the conflict of the poem centers around contending viewpoints about the nature of divinity and Albion's relation to it, and he emphasizes the necessity of retroactively rereading and reinterpreting the poem as one progresses through it. He also recognizes an important distinction between Blake the narrator as depicted in the poem and Blake the author who created that depiction. Such a distinction is routine in reading most authors, but its implications have rarely been explored regarding Jerusalem. I disagree with Dortort's assertion that the narrator is duplicitous in his desperate efforts to control the poem--those modal interferences, says Dortort, are part of that duplicity--but nonetheless, the distinction enables the reader to examine the narrator as a character within the poem, rather than an intrusion from without.

Within this framework, then, Dortort sees Jerusalem as a poem with a narrative, but a narrative that is submerged, rarely visible to the uninitiated reader. This narrative records a battle of perspectives among the three perspective frames already mentioned, those perspectives associated with Albion, Los and the Saviour/Luvah complex. In Dortort's reading, however, the Saviour is the villain of the poem, allied with Luvah and Vala against Albion; Los, despite his devotion to Albion is little more than a dupe. Albion himself is the Saviour's opponent, as he attempts to resist the Saviour's efforts to incorporate him into the Divine Family. Much of what is at issue is how Albion is to be perceived. Separated from the Divine Family, Albion is dehumanized into geography, a rocky island--at least from the Saviour's perspective. Against this perspective, Albion struggles to maintain his human identity, and he is, in Dortort's view, right to refuse the Saviour's efforts to bring him into the Divine Family. The narrator is himself susceptible to these various perspective frames, and he becomes, for Dortort, progressively more complicit with the Saviour/Luvah complex, attempting to impose order on his poem much as the Saviour attempts to impose membership in the Divine Family on Albion. The narrator wants his story to tell of Albion's fall and eventual redemption, but the terms of that redemption reveal the oppressiveness of the Saviour's system, a fact which the narrator struggles to keep the reader from recognizing. Ideally, once the reader learns to see through the modal interferences created by the narrator, and to use perspective analysis in order to understand the implications of the different perspective frames, he or she will find the path to redemption if not in the poem, then at least in his or her own life. As Dortort puts it, This book, therefore, seeks not only to resolve the riddle of the meaning of the poem, Jerusalem, but to aid as well in the identification of those textual elements that can broaden the ability of its readers to define and act upon the redemptive effort, not merely within the text but within their lives. Jerusalem, if read in this way, in fact is a poem about redemption, but instead of being poetically depicted on the printed page, the redemption under discussion can only take place within its readers. (10-11).

There is much that is good here, but I also think there are some serious problems with Dortort's reading. Primarily, I have doubts about Dortort's assertion that the Saviour is actually complicit, and indeed identifiable, with those characters who contribute to Albion's fall--Luvah, the Spectre and Satan. As he puts it, "Instead of belonging to Albion, culpability for the diverse misadventures described in the text must lie with the aggregate character individuated at points along a continuum to include Jesus, the Divine Vision and Voice, and Luvah" (273). In other works, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and America, Blake has indeed blurred the distinction between the Redemptive and the Satanic; particularly in the character of Orc, these contraries create an image of a fiery revolutionary rebirth after the cold darkness and death under a Urizenic tyrant. However, in Jerusalem the dynamics are different. Most readings of Jerusalem (including my own) see the poem as concerning the choice Albion must make between the Saviour's doctrine of forgiveness and mercy and Satan's doctrine of judgment. The Saviour, Luvah, Satan and the Spectre do not lie on a continuum that makes them identifiable with each other. Rather they are opposed forces, and they hold opposed perspectives on the nature of the divine and of Albion's relation to it, the Saviour seeing the human as divine and the Spectre seeing the human as a "Worm seventy inches long" (29[33]:6). Both the Saviour and Satan/the Spectre claim divine authority and identify themselves as God; Albion must choose which God he will follow and which view of the human he will accept. In Dortort's reading there is no such choice because the Saviour, Luvah, Satan, the Spectre and finally the narrator are all part of a great conspiracy to undermine Albion's sense of himself as an independent entity.

Dortort collapses the distinction between the Saviour and the enemies of Albion largely by ironizing the Saviour's words, especially the word "mild." According to Dortort "mild" always signals some kind of deception and attempt at oppression, and he cites several instances from Milton as support. In 3 of the 4 instances he cites from Milton, however, it is explicitly Satan who is manipulating his supposed mildness. Dortort is, of course, correct that these instances of Satan's mildness are deceptive, but that hardly demonstrates that the mildness of the Saviour in Jerusalem is similarly deceptive. In Dortort's fourth example from Milton, the mildness is attributed to Los by his sons Rintrah and Palamabron who call him "O mild Parent! / Cruel in thy mildness, pitying and permitting evil" (Milton 23:1819). Dortort calls this a situation of "unmistakable deception" (59), but his reference to Milton cuts short the passage, omitting that what Rintrah and Palamabron really want is to "descend & bring [Milton] chained / To Bowlahoola," and they complain because Los refuses to do this even though he is "strong and mighty to destroy" (Milton 23:13-20). Images of chains and destruction are rarely positive in Blake's work, and Los resists such action by explaining his seemingly "cruel ... mildness": O noble Sons, be patient yet a little I have embraced the falling Death, he is become One with me O sons we live not by wrath, by mercy alone we live! I recollect an old Prophecy in Eden recorded in gold; and oft Sung to the harp: That Milton of the land of Albion. Should ascend forward from Felphams Vale & break the Chain Of Jealousy from all its roots. (23:34)

Los's sons do not understand his mildness because they do not see the larger redemptive plan of which it is a part. Los is not being deceptive. Instead, the problem is that his sons do not see that the status of the "mild" depends on its context.

Dortort does see that mildness depends on context, but since he identifies the Saviour with Luvah and all the others who mean Albion harm, it is all the same context, and he repeatedly turns to an ironic reading of "mild" in order to deconstruct the Saviour's attempts to redeem Albion. For example, in the first use of the word in Jerusalem, the narrator says that the Saviour awakens him every morning "Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song" (4:5). To this Dortort says, As related by the narrator, the next line, in which the song commences, does seem rather mild ... but the tenor of the ensuing passage rapidly changes to an interrogative mode incompatible with this 'mild' tone. (59)

There are a number of problems here. First, Dortort seems to assume that the "mild song" is limited to the speech which the Saviour delivers to Albion in lines 4:6--21. It is much more likely, however, that the "mild song" to which the narrator refers is the whole poem, the entire "Song of Jerusalem" (99:6-7), and not just the Saviour's opening speech to Albion--does the Saviour awaken the narrator "ev'ry morn" (4:3-4) to dictate the same 16 lines over and over? The poem, taken as a whole, might be mild, even if parts of it do not seem so when taken out of context. But even if we grant that the mild song is only that one speech, there are other problems. Despite Dortort's claim of "an interrogative mode incompatible with this 'mild' tone," the 16 lines in fact contain only one question, "Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem / From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?" (4:16-17). Dortort is correct that the question had originally begun with a reiterated "Where!! / Where hast thou hidden," but that first "Where!!" including its double exclamation points, was gouged out of the plate before printing. Moreover, the bulk of the passage emphasizes the Saviour's love for Albion, and his pleas for Albion to return to the divine family in which "we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!" (4:20). But these pleas Dortort simply dismisses as "attendant syntax dominated by terms of weeping and singing" (59).

Dortort's mistrust of the Saviour's motives colors his reading of the Saviour's actions toward other characters as well. For example, in Chapter 3 of Jerusalem, the Divine Voice sends to the miserable Jerusalem a vision of Jesus' mother, Mary, in which an angel defends Mary against Joseph's plans to put her aside for supposed harlotry. The events of the vision clearly mirror Jerusalem's own situation in which she has been banished as a harlot. The vision is a comforting one, and Mary "burst[s] forth into a Song!" following the angel's defense. Jerusalem (like Thel) has difficulty accepting the comforting lesson, and so Jesus explains to her about his own vision of "Forgiveness & Pity & Compassion," a vision so radical that even "Luvah must be Created / And Vala; for I cannot leave them in the gnawing Grave" (62:20-21). However, the time of Jesus' victory has not yet come; Albion has not yet accepted forgiveness, and so even as Jesus speaks, "Luvah's Cloud reddening above / Burst forth in streams of blood upon the heavens & dark night / Involved Jerusalem." Nevertheless, we are told, "Los beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the Furnaces / Therefore he lived & breathed in hope" (62:35-36). Dortort's own vision of the delusive villainous Saviour does not allow him to recognize the vision of Mary as an attempt at comfort; he rather sees it as an attempt to "delude" or "subvert" Jerusalem, and Luvah's bloody cloud is a manifestation of the Saviour's true motives (216-18). In Dortort's reading Jesus' doctrine of radical forgiveness is nothing more than aiding and abetting the enemies of Albion and Jerusalem.

Dortort's indictment of the Saviour is at the core of his reading of the poem, and that indictment itself derives from Dortort's assertion that Blake rejected Christianity in his later life. This assertion must be part of what Auk means by those "interpretations and conclusions [that] so diverge from the authoritative consensus of the Blake critical community." As such, and given that Dortort's reading of the Saviour's motives and actions is at the core of his "contrary" reading, one might expect him to offer some detailed discussion of the issues involved. But Blake's relationship with Christianity is dealt with only minimally. Dortort offers very little discussion of Blake's biography, beliefs, or religious context. In the index only eleven isolated pages spread over the entire book are listed for either Blake "and Christianity" or "Christianity, Blake's presumed." Indeed, most of what he has to say in terms of dismissing "Blake's final reconciliation with Christianity" (37) could be contained on a couple pages.

Part of the problem is that Dortort operates with an unexamined concept of Christianity in Blake's day, so it is almost impossible to know just what Dortort thinks that Blake rejects. For Dortort Christianity is set against the individual identity and against any questioning of the divine--hence his championing of Albion's efforts to resist joining the Divine Family. This notion of Christianity would come as something of a surprise to many theologians, including John Milton, for example, whose work Blake treasured. No doubt there were some branches of Christianity in Blake's time that advocated a "sheeplike response" (as Dortort puts it [9])--witness Mr. Collins in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice--but Christianity was not the monolith that Dortort seems to think--witness Austen's attitude toward Mr. Collins. With such a monolithic view of Christianity, Dortort does not see just how radical Blake's Christianity could be. Take for example that vision of Mary given to Jerusalem. Part of the Saviour's message is that he must also redeem even Luvah and Vala. Dortort can only see this as evidence of the Saviour's complicity with these characters who seek Albion's downfall and Jerusalem's imprisonment. He overlooks not only the doctrine of radical forgiveness implied in the Saviour's redemption of even these sinners, but also what Jeanne Moskal calls "the obvious attack on the orthodox doctrine of the virginal conception of Jesus" (Blake, Ethics and Forgiveness [U of Alabama P, 1994] 35). Blake in fairly obvious ways rejected many of the teachings of orthodox Christianity, but that is not the same as rejecting Christianity and the Saviour outright as Dortort asserts.

There are other serious but less central problems. There is virtually no discussion of how historically-based characters like Scholfield fit with the Biblical contexts Blake invokes, or how either of these might fit into the Saviour's supposed attacks on Albion. Nor is there much discussion of the key issue of true versus false friendship. In the readings of particular passages, Dortort will offer the "standard" or "obvious" interpretation, followed by a contrary interpretation that "may be" valid, but too often that "may be" becomes "is" without any clear explanation of why the new reading should be privileged over the more obvious one. Despite these problems, Dortort manages to do what deconstruction should do, and that is to make us take a closer look at what we think we know about Blake's poem. He is correct that often the Saviour and the Luvah/Satan/Spectre complex make much the same claims of authority; but is that because they are complicit, or because Luvah/Satan/Spectre have appropriated divine rhetoric for themselves in order to seduce Albion? We should be grateful that Dortort forces us to confront this and other questions, but we might also wish that he had interrogated his own argument with the same rigor he attempts to bring to Jerusalem.

R. Paul Yoder University of Arkansas at Little Rock

PAUL YODER is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He specializes in literary history from Milton to Keats, especially Blake and the romantics. He has published articles on Milton, Samuel Richardson, Thomas Gray, Wordsworth, and Blake, and has co-edited with Wallace Jackson two collections of essays on Alexander Pope. He is currently working on an essay on Blake and the biblical book of Numbers, and a book on the implications of narrative for reading Blake's Jerusalem.