Conducted 21 January 1987
From the copy of the CBC transcript of the program with this title in NFF, 1991, box 41, file 1. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was a three-part series on Blake by David Cayley which aired on Ideas on 12, 19, and 26 March 1987. It featured readings from Blake, biography, music, and comments by Blake’s contemporaries and modern critics, including Kathleen Raine and Gerald Bentley. Frye was not present in a studio discussion, but was interviewed separately by Cayley, who then inserted his remarks at suitable points in parts 1 and 2 (part 3 dealt with Blake’s painting). Frye’s words are used to lead into the first part.
CAYLEY: Why read Blake today?
FRYE: Why read Blake today?
CAYLEY: Yes.
FRYE: Well, because he’s one of the half-dozen people in the world it makes sense to read.
LISTER SINCLAIR: That was Northrop Frye. I’m Lister Sinclair and this is Ideas on the poetry, the painting, and the prophecy of William Blake.
FRYE: Blake was the first poet of English literature, and as far as I know, the first person of the modern world who not only had revolutionary ideas but realized that the whole mythical structure of the universe that man had been using for a couple of thousand years had had it, and we needed another one.
[After a discussion of Blake’s scorn for the scientists’ conception of an “objective” nature governed by uniform laws and set apart from the human observer, Frye’s voice is heard.]
FRYE: The “real” conventionally means what is “out there” and therefore can’t be changed.
CAYLEY: University of Toronto professor Northrop Frye, whose book Fearful Symmetry set the standard in Blake criticism.
FRYE: But ninety per cent of our encounter with reality is an encounter with human rubbish, with what man has already made and has no longer much use for. And Blake, like Vico in Italy before him, is saying, “Reality is what you make and you can’t understand what you haven’t made.”1
[The discussion turns to intellectual influences on Blake and begins to follow the growth of his oeuvre. After a reading of There Is No Natural Religion (b), Frye remarks:]
FRYE: By natural religion, he means the religion that we derive from the sense of design in nature. A sense of design in nature is something we’ve already put there as a mental construct, so we’re really staring in a mirror, like Narcissus. In other words, we get nothing from nature, the passive contemplation of the world. All real knowledge and understanding is created, that is, it’s something that’s an activity in man himself. So all religion is revealed by the imagination.
[Three poems are read from Songs of Innocence and Experience.]
FRYE: Innocence is associated with childhood, not because the child is morally good but because the child is civilized; that is, he believes that the world makes sense and it was created very largely for his benefit and his happiness. Experience comes when you’re older and you realize that isn’t true. So what happens to the child’s innocent vision is that it gets driven underground into what we now call the subconscious, and there it becomes the bound Orc, the sexual energy that’s repressed, and keeps thrashing around trying to get free. Freud discovered that two hundred [sic] years after Blake discovered it.
[The theme of revolution introduces the figure of Orc as described in a reading from Blake’s America.]
FRYE: Orc is the youthful, rebellious energy which can be made constructive instead of destructive, because it’s a sexual energy, and there are ways of channelling it so that it isn’t stifled or suppressed. When it’s stifled or suppressed, it gets very dangerous. And Urizen is the capacity for wisdom and experience which can get perverted into authoritarianism.
CAYLEY: And is there an interrelation between Orc and Urizen?
FRYE: Well, really, all young people are Orcs and all old people are Urizens. These characters are “states,” as he calls them, states of the human mind, and we spend all our time being in one state or another. * * *
CAYLEY: What did Blake see in the revolutions in America and France?
FRYE: He saw two things in the revolutionary activities of his time. One is the sudden awakening to the fact that man has been playing a damn silly game over the centuries and that he doesn’t have to go on playing it. He can kick over the table and spread the pieces on the floor and go on with something else. On the other hand, he also saw cyclical movement, where a revolution consolidates power by going back to what it was in the first place, and that was what he saw in France when it went from the destroying of the Bastille to Napoleon, and what he saw in the United States when it kept on owning slaves and maintaining an oligarchic economy. * * *
[Part 2 covers the middle years of Blake’s life, up to and including the composition of Jerusalem. Urizen is introduced.]
CAYLEY: Urizen is God as a caricature of human reason. He is humanity’s creative power, alienated and imprisoned within an abstract divinity. And inevitably, says Blake, he is a tyrannical God, an allegory of kings and priests, his heavens “Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole” [E521]. Against this God Blake pits what he calls the divine humanity and he takes his stand, according to Northrop Frye, on the Bible, the book which Frye follows Blake in calling “the Great Code of Art.”
FRYE: The Bible to Blake was really the Magna Carta of the human imagination. It was a book that told man that he was free to create and imagine, that the power to create and imagine was ultimately the divine in man, and that Christianity, and of course it’s the Christian Bible Blake is talking about, was preeminently the religion which united the divine and the human and consequently opened a path of freedom to man which was infinite. The Gospels represent Jesus as saying that nobody can understand God except through him, that is, except through the God-man. So you have God, and you have God-man, and you have man. And if you try to approach God without the idea of the humanity of God, then you get what he calls Nobodaddy, that is, the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views, who enjoys sending people to hell.
[Blake’s Let the Brothels of Paris Be Opened, ll. 5–12, is read.]
Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted & belched & coughed
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering.
Then he swore a great & solemn oath
To kill the people I am loth,
But If they rebel they must go to hell
They shall have a Priest and a passing bell. [E499]
FRYE: If you turn to man, simply man, then of course you’re involved in all the evil that makes man a psychotic ape, and that’s the tendency he calls Deism; that is, the tendency to substitute the totalitarian for the social. If you insist on separating God from man, you have merely God, who is a scarecrow in the sky, and merely man, who is a psychotic ape. You have to approach through your own humanity. The human cannot really comprehend the nonhuman or what transcends the human. * * *
CAYLEY: Blake began writing his poem Milton while he was at Felpham, and he engraved the first two copies of it in 1808. It was his reckoning with the figure of John Milton, a poet with whom Blake wrestled all his life, loving him as another inspired man, but passionately disagreeing with many of his views.
FRYE: I suppose this is an example of what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. That is, Milton and Blake were so close together in their points of view, and yet there were things about Milton which confined him to the seventeenth century, his very literal view of the Bible. He thought of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden as literally and historically true. His instincts as a poet drove him in another direction, but still, that was there. And Blake felt that a poem in which Milton was more or less transcended by entering Blake would also be, for Blake himself, a kind of emancipating process.