Conducted 25 August 1971?
From the transcription by Robert D. Denham, in WGS, 109–18, of CBC audio-tape no. 578, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies in 1975. Dating is somewhat speculative. Jane Widdicombe’s list gives “August 22–30: London, CBC Blake Interview, Alasdair Clayre.” Frye’s daybook has a note for Wednesday 25 August to meet Alasdair Clayre (a brilliant English producer) at the BBC’s Broadcasting House. However, here the actual interviewer is not Clayre but Melvyn Hill, at that time the chair of the Division of Social Sciences at York University in Toronto, later a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. The interview was heard on a program produced by Catherine Gallant as part of the series On Man and Cosmos on CBC Radio’s Ideas in 1971.
HILL: Dr. Frye, we’re going to be talking about William Blake this evening. He’s a poet who has been described as being radically original in respect to his cosmology. I wonder if we could start with the question, What is a cosmos? What is a cosmology in the traditional sense of the word?
FRYE: Traditionally a cosmology has been an ordering of the objective picture of nature that man sees around him. That is, traditionally heaven has always been “up there.” When Jesus left the world he ascended into the sky, and his disciples gazed upward until a cloud received him out of their sight. The emphasis on his going back up into the sky is very much insisted on. Similarly, with his going down, he goes into hell between the death on the cross and the Resurrection. For Blake, this spatial cosmology is just a tissue of metaphors. What Blake lives in is a universe which is the same but can be perceived in different ways, so that heaven is the world perceived to the maximum of human imagination, and hell is the same world when the human imagination gives up.
HILL: Are you suggesting that in Blake the cosmos is no longer presented as an objective order of the universe but as a creation of the imagination?
FRYE: That’s right. You start a mythology usually with a creation myth, but that is usually followed by some myth about the fall of man or the limitation of human power. It becomes obvious that the creation myth is projected from man’s sense of his own alienation. If you think of man as making his myths, you can see that the sense of alienation comes first and the creation myth follows it. That is also true of Blake. For Blake there is no creator in the picture except man himself. The creation is what man still has to accomplish: it’s not something that’s there.
HILL: Does he retell the myth of creation in his poetry?
FRYE: He retells the myth of creation, but he retells it without putting it back to the beginning of time. For him the opening verse of the Bible reads something like “To start with, God makes the heavens and the earth,” but Blake, of course, is identifying God and man.
HILL: I see. Is it possible to give a brief telling of the myth at this stage? The essentials of it as we find it in Blake?
FRYE: The essentials of the myth, I suppose, are that there is in eternity, that is, outside the continuum of time, an identity of God and man. Blake is a Christian because for him Christianity is a religion that identifies God and man. But in the particular human orbit we’re living in, there is a sense of having forfeited the eternal heritage and having broken away from that unity of God and man, so that the program of life is to reconquer it.
HILL: And how does one do that?
FRYE: According to Blake, the state of eternity is followed by the fall—when the human mind gets lazy, when instead of creating it thinks of the thing outside itself as independent of itself and falls into an objective world. The true creation is the overcoming of the sense of the objective and the restoring to man of his creative heritage.
HILL: So that it depends upon the exercise of one’s mental powers?
HILL: And which mental powers in particular? Is there any indication in Blake?
FRYE: Well, Blake always associates three words: mental, intellectual, and imaginative. And the word which he opposes to all three of those is the word “reason.” By reason, he means the opposite of what he would consider mental or intellectual activity. That is, reason in the bad sense is simply accepting the objectivity of the world as a final datum. In other words, reason for him is essentially rationalizing the status quo, the world in which man finds himself.
HILL: And the imagination enables man to transcend that state?
FRYE: Yes. Blake has a picture of the three ancient Britons, of which one, he says, is the ugliest man, and he represents two things, the human reason and the incapability of intellect.1
HILL: Does this enable us to understand the distinction of the four levels of existence in Blake?
FRYE: Blake says that there are four levels, and that the fourfold vision, which he calls Eden, is the highest. This is the perception of the world in which perception and creation have become the same thing.
HILL: And what comes in between the level of alienation and the level of Eden?
FRYE: There are two stages in between—the threefold vision is the stage of Beulah, where the thing created is beloved and consequently is in a sexual or feminine relationship to the creator. For Blake, this sexual relationship is the relaxed form of creativity. As the relaxation of creativity, it is fine. But there is also a great danger in it, because the loved object may become autonomous and separate from the creator.
HILL: And the twofold?
FRYE: The twofold in this context means simply man struggling with his environment. It’s not man fallen under complete tyranny, which is his hell, or what he calls single vision, but it’s man being continually thwarted, baffled, and frustrated by the objectivity of the world but still putting up a fight.
HILL: So far we’ve been speaking about Blake’s cosmology in relation to the traditional Christian cosmology. I don’t know if the word applies to the scientific tradition, but where does Blake stand in relation to the view of nature and the universe that emerged with the scientific revolution?
FRYE: Well, his great bogeys are Bacon and Newton and Locke. The reason why he makes them demonic figures in his symbolism is that he thinks that the scientific attitude of his day tends to encourage an attitude of passivity on the part of man. That is, you accept the world as it is given to you first of all, and because you accept it you get into a habit of thinking that what exists must necessarily exist, and that extends to the feeling that evil and injustice and cruelty and slavery and misery must exist simply because they do exist.
HILL: From the trend of your discussion it seems that Blake’s opposition to the scientific thinkers is ultimately a social and political one. Is that true?
FRYE: Yes, that’s quite true. There’s an interesting analogy in a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost [bk. 8, ll. 175–8] that I think has often been misunderstood. Adam in paradise asks Raphael whether the other planets are inhabited or not. Raphael says, “Don’t bother about that,” and it looks as though Milton was being an obscurantist and being anti-scientific. But actually all that Raphael is saying is that the question of human freedom is more important than the question of whether there are other worlds and other kinds of life. This is Blake’s attitude to the science of his own day. He pictures the traditional, orthodox creative God as an old man with a white beard holding a compass in his left hand and setting a horizon (that’s where he gets his word “Urizen”) on the face of the deep. And then he has a picture of Newton in which Newton is doing exactly the same thing, that is, tracing a compass circle on a piece of paper. But he’s looking down; he’s not looking at the stars. The inference is always, in the old Marxist cliché, that it’s more important to change the world than to study it.
HILL: He’s suggesting that the scientific view of the world reduces man’s capacity to do so?
FRYE: It does, if it is taken as an end in itself. In the Introduction to the Songs of Experience the bard says to earth, “The starry floor / The watry shore / Is giv’n thee till the break of day.” The point is that the scientific universe of Newton and Locke is the floor; it’s the place to start from. It’s not the ceiling; it’s not the place to end with.
HILL: Now what does this say about the project of science which was held up from the earliest time in the scientific revolution? Descartes, for example, foresees the development of science as leading to the happiness of mankind because of the progress that the scientific control of nature will give man.
FRYE: For Blake, that is again associating, or rather confusing, the creative imagination of man with the objective world. The notion that man can be satisfied by something brought to him from the objective world is for Blake one of the great fallacies about human life. He says, “More, more, is the cry of a mistaken soul / Less than all cannot satisfy man.”2He means that man should recover his creative abilities.
HILL: When we started off talking about cosmology, you said that it referred to the objective order in the world—in the traditional view of cosmology. Did Blake also find an order in his subjective treatment of cosmology?
FRYE: He certainly found an order. He said in A Descriptive Catalogue that the artist’s job is to find form and to keep it.3 But of course form for him is always living form. He says, “Fire delights in its form.”4 There is no dead or static or monumental form for him. His conception of form is not subjective either because that’s the other side of the objective fallacy. The real form is the identification of the subject and the object, where one becomes the creator and the other the creature. If you think of the implications of the word “subject,” you see that it’s ultimately a political word. It means somebody kept down by his environment.
HILL: Is he using the model of the artist’s creativity?
FRYE: That’s why he says that a person who is not an artist is not a Christian.5 By that he means a man who is not using his creative capacities, whatever they may be, is not fully human.
HILL: Does this mean that all good citizens should be artists?
FRYE: Not in the narrow sense, because art for him includes a great deal that we don’t think of as art, and it excludes a great deal of what we do think of as art. That is, he attacked people like Joshua Reynolds very violently. His conception of art was simply that the work of art is the model of man’s creative effort. But while it is man’s duty to be creative so far as he can be, the work of art is merely the model of what creativity is. It’s not the form it always has to take.
HILL: Now the creation of a republic, for example, would be the political form of creativity?
FRYE: It would be, yes.
HILL: Does Blake give any indication of the nature of the republic in which the citizens would be artists in the more extended sense of the word?
FRYE: Well, his republic is what he calls the New Jerusalem, where everybody, insofar as in him lies, works to build up the eternal human community. He says, in contradicting Bacon on the matter about control over nature as leading to the satisfaction of man’s wants, that the increase of a state, as of a man, is in intellectual acquirements.6
HILL: So what would be the ultimate goal of a republic of men?
FRYE: The ultimate goal would be a community in which all men were creative and therefore—this may sound like quite a jump, but it’s a very short jump for Blake—all men finally realize that they are the same man.
HILL: Is this the ultimate form of the imagination then—the realization of unity?
FRYE: The ultimate use of the imagination is the realization by men that they are all the same man and that that man is God. That is a conception of unity that Blake says is to be attained by what he calls “mental fight.” But it’s the opposite of uniformity. It has nothing to do with people thinking alike.
HILL: What is the distinction between uniformity and unity?
FRYE: Well, unity is something that the poet gives you in the metaphor, where he says A is B: “The hero is a lion,” something of that kind. These two things are said to be the same thing and yet they remain different things. Similarly, Blake’s doctrine that God is man is a metaphor. It says that there are two things which are the same thing. But once you say that A is like B, then you are abstracting something which the two hold in common, and abstraction for Blake is going in the wrong direction. It’s going in the direction of monotony, a world in which everybody acts and thinks alike, a world of immutable law.
HILL: So what would be the bond that unites men in the New Jerusalem? I assume that it would not be a law.
FRYE: It would not be a law because, as Blake says, “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”7 That is, the only law is the law of one’s being. For that reason, everybody who is alive has his own law. But at the same time, the creative life is the constructive and forming life. It’s not a destructive life. So his New Jerusalem would be a world in which all things were the same and therefore individual.
HILL: We’ve followed Blake’s thought through from his opposition to both the objective concept of cosmology and science and the traditional Christian cosmology. What would you say is the ultimate content of his cosmology?
FRYE: Well, most cosmologies exist in time and in space. That is, they start where time begins—with the creation—and end where time ends—with the last judgment, and they extend from the heaven, which is way up there, to the hell, which is way down there. For Blake, time and space are not to be objectified in that way. Time as we ordinarily experience it consists of three unrealities: a past which doesn’t exist any more and a future that doesn’t exist yet and a present that never quite comes into existence. Similarly, with space, which consists entirely of “there,” that is, the conception of space as pure alienation. The centre of time is now, but in ordinary experience, we never experience now. And the centre of space is here, but in ordinary experience we never know that here is here, unless we draw a circle around ourselves and say that here is inside it. In Blake, the traditional religious words “infinite” and “eternal” mean the real here and the real now. That’s why he says, “To see a world in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”8 That is, normally we think of the infinite and the eternal as time and space going on and on and never stopping. But Blake calls that the “indefinite,” and for him it’s the opposite of the infinite and the eternal.
HILL: So once more you’re suggesting that in his cosmology things are brought together and transcend the distinction between subject and object, between here and there, or between now and then?
FRYE: Yes, things are brought together but they’re also transformed by the intensity of perception. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”9 The thing is not to look for other worlds in other places, but to expand one’s powers of perception where they are.
HILL: Does Blake anywhere indicate the way in which he arrived at this expanded perception himself?
FRYE: He doesn’t so far as I know. He seems to have thought of it as something he had always had. In fact, his main trouble in communication was that this was so obviously true to him that he couldn’t understand why other people had difficulty in grasping it. But there never seems to have been a time when he didn’t hold it. Even the anecdotes we have about his early childhood indicate that he had it then.
HILL: Sometimes one hears that Blake was considered mad in his own time. Does this account for that?
FRYE: Oh, yes. Madness is a social judgment. The person who is mad is the person who is out of line with what society regards as normal behaviour. But of course all prophets are mad in that sense.
HILL: And Blake was a prophet?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
HILL: What do you mean by a prophet in this context?
FRYE: Originally the Biblical prophets were the people who had an unusual power of perception. At first this threw them into trancelike states. But the prophets that we know and remember in the Bible, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were simply people who had an unusual capacity for seeing what was there at the present moment. That is how Blake defines the prophet, too. He says quite explicitly that the prophet is not the man who can foretell the inevitable future because there isn’t any inevitable future. But he’s the person who can see the results of a present line of policy.10
HILL: Now is the capacity to see what is going on in the present related to the capacity to imagine the cosmos in the way that Blake does?
FRYE: Yes, because imagination is simply seeing at its most concentrated. Seeing at its least concentrated is simply seeing what is there, what is presented, what is the datum. But seeing at its greatest power of concentration is also creating what you see.
HILL: I’m thinking here of Plato’s myth of the cave. The philosopher who goes off to discover the forms finds great difficulty when he comes back into the world because other people do not share his ability to see the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of things. At the same time, he rejects their cave, the world in which they’re living. Is there the same indication in Blake of a rejection of the world and a turning away from things?
FRYE: You see, there aren’t two worlds in Blake. There’s only that cave. There isn’t any world of the sun outside. The only sun is in the brain that sees these shadows flickering on the cave walls. The conflict is between the people who study the flickering shadows on the walls and the people who realize it is their eyesight that is producing those shadows.
HILL: So Blake as a radical is not someone who would, say, turn away from civilization back to nature?
FRYE: He wouldn’t turn back to nature. He wouldn’t go to heaven. He wouldn’t go any other place. There isn’t any other place.
HILL: How then does he work in a world that is caught in the realm of experience—in the twofold vision?
FRYE: Well, he works as best he can as an artist. He warns his readers of terrible disasters in the future, when man’s power of self-destruction will be very much greater than it was even in his own day. In the meantime, he attempts to get along as well as he can in his own trade.
HILL: Was he successful?
FRYE: Well, he kept alive for seventy years and he kept his wife alive. She outlived him by a few years. He was never wealthy or successful in the worldly sense, but he seems to have managed to keep going. He made a good deal of sense to about half a dozen people, and in the eighteenth century that was all you needed to stay alive.
HILL: Besides these few people he was in contact with, would you call him a full member of the society? Or had he withdrawn from society?
FRYE: It depends on what one means by withdrawal. Blake certainly had nothing of the noble savage in him. He had nothing of the desire to live in solitude. He lived in London all his life, and he was very much a city man and loved the feeling of a society around him and the sense of crowds and of movement. He was obviously a person very easy to make friends with. He was often regarded as queer, but he was never regarded as unlikeable.
HILL: You said recently in an article on Blake that he realized that introversion was not profundity.11 Frequently today Blake is identified with the new cult of introversion, I suppose associated with the use of hallucinogenic drugs and so on. I wonder if you could explain your comment?
FRYE: Well, I said that he makes bogeys, more or less, of Bacon and Newton and Locke, particularly Locke, whose Essay on Human Understanding he seems to have read with a great deal of dislike. We haven’t turned up his copy, but I think we know what his attitude would have been. According to Locke, you perceive the outer world with your senses, and then you retire into your own mind and reflect on what you perceived. For Blake, that is the philosophy of introversion, the philosophy of subjectivity, of withdrawing and retiring into yourself, and it’s the exact opposite of what he meant by vision, which was the outward-directed creative force that built up the New Jerusalem.