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

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I have read many so-called "authoritative" works about Blake, but this one knocked my socks off! I can't wait until the word gets out on what Dortort is proposing here. It's definitely worth the time investment to get to what Dortort is proposing here. Any serious Blake lovers should check it out.

Some time ago I reread Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I came across this and a few other books with a different view.

This masterful book about Blake's last major poem Jerusalem deserves a more in-depth review than can be provided here. Jerusalem has long been considered almost intractably difficult to understand. At the time Dortort wrote this book in the late 90s, interpretation fell mainly into two positions; the poem was narratively incoherent (e.g. Morton Paley) or contrarily it reflected the grudging acceptance by Blake of a conventionally pious way of interpreting political and personal conflicts (e.g. Northop Frye and adherents). The author should be commended for doing what generations of Blake critics were unwilling to do, namely, analyze each line and try to assign it to a given event or speaker in the narrative and relate it to prior corresponding material before trying to figure out what Jerusalem meant. Dortort relies entirely on the text as presented and does not resort to using external events or concepts to provide a meta-explanation or hidden key. Instead he identifies three "perspective frameworks" present in the work which he names Albion , Los, and the Saviour respectively. These three frameworks have a variety of subsidiary names or "characters". In addition there is an implicit narrator who advances the point of view of the Saviour either covertly or explicitly and sometimes clumsily. In contrast to a typical narrator in a work of fiction, this narrator (perhaps intentionally on the part of Blake) seems to be unable to maintain consistent control over the text material and its presentation. Periodically, discordant information comes to the surface that undermines the narrator's version of events and which the narrator tries to suppress or reinterpret.

Rather than restate what was stated in the book, this is what I came away with. There are very few unique events, physical actions or discrete characters in the poem. The conflicts expressed by the main charaxters are really different ways of interpreting or characterizing the same events with the point of dominating the other perspectives not of enlightening them. The two events that seem primary are first, the conflict over the female emanation "Jerusalem" between the "characters" or states called Albion (loosely speaking Humanity/England) and Luvah (loosely speaking Physical and Sexual Energy/France) and second, the jealousy of Los (artistic creation/ possibly Blake as writer) over Enitharmon (the world of space and time/possibly Blake's wife or women in general) and her detachment and liaisons with other "characters". Strangely enough these two events are usually discussed in veiled or cryptic allusions in the poem and only rarely come to the fore. The bulk of Jerusalem is composed of what I would (anachronistically) term psychological or propaganda warfare between the perspectives but mainly by the Saviour (and Luvah) group against Albion. The Saviour group acts as a sort of frontman for the aggressive but mostly ineffectual Luvah lurking in the background. Thus Albion is forced to contend with the verbal admonishments and attacks of the more positive and noble Saviour and the "Lamb of God" even though these serve mainly the cause of his opponent Luvah. The description of this psychological warfare is actually chilling since it so closely approximates the techniques and procedures of propaganda warfare developed and used by governments, media and advocacy groups in the 20th century up to the present. The conclusion of the poem is magnificent but also quite ambiguous in its meaning and affiliation to a given perspective when read carefully.

I'll make this short and sweet: this book is the most important contribution to Blake Studies since Donald Ault's monumental "Narrative Unbound" was published in 1987. Dortort is so good it defies belief.