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William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and the New Art: Blake Helps the Toronto School Unlock the Seals to the Great Code; Or Reconnecting R

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William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and the New Art: Blake Helps the Toronto School Unlock the Seals to the Great Code; Or Reconnecting R Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art: Blake Helps the Toronto School Unlock the Seals to the Great Code; or Reconnecting R. Bruce Elder—Professor Emeritus Ryerson University—[email protected] In his last public lecture on Blake, presented in 1987 in London, England, Northrop Frye situated the poet’s formidable achievement in the context of Western mythology: To have turned a metaphorical cosmos eighteen centuries old upside down in a few poems, and provided the basis for a structure that practically every major thinker for the next century would build on, was one of the most colossal imaginative feats in the history of human culture. The only drawback, of course, was that no one knew Blake had done it: in fact Blake hardly realized he had done it either. For some fifty years, Frye devoted significant efforts to discerning the deep structure of Blake’s universe and the underlying forces that give rise to it. In Anatomy of Criticism, he generalized the approach he developed while studying Blake: he decided to investigate literature as an “order of words” with an assumed coherence and set out to crack the great code the gives rise to its recurrent patterns. The investigation of patterns in literature (or in art history) is what Frye believes the critical method to be: one identifies basic elements and notes patterns in their reoccurrence, reorganization, transformation, and interaction. Marshall McLuhan, Frye’s colleague in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, also believed that the study of media is a search of patterns. In remarks on Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent in Maelstrom,” he noted, pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion or consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival. Like Frye, McLuhan believed artists are most able to tell us what world is like. The artist, alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. Only 1 R. Bruce Elder the artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity [technical inventiveness]. Artists are not entertainers. They have a much more serious role to play in society: “The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival.” Following up on Renato Barilli’s writings on McLuhan, I suggest in this essay that a key force that gives structure to recent art and thought is the development of the science of electromagnetism and, consequent upon that, the invention of electrotechnical devices. A foundational notion of the science of electromagnetism—a pattern that I suggest Blake was the first to recognize—is the idea of interpenetration. Alfred North Whitehead provided the classic statement of the idea: “My theory,” Whitehead says, involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world. Frye told David Cayley, The concept of interpenetration . I found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. Other people have found it Mahayana Buddhism and the Avatamsaka Sutra. The opposite of interpenetration, where everything exists everywhere at once, is an objective centrality, which it seems to me, is a most tyrannical conception. The Lankatara and Avatamsaka Sutras became for Frye, despite their daunting challenge, “vade mecums [handbooks] of practical meditation.” Blake’s intermedial, verbi-voco-visual works I show embody a conception of interpenetration that turns out to be close to Avatamsaka Sutra’s. In this paper I lay out some of the features of the Avatamsaka Sutra’s idea of interpenetration, show how that idea became the basis for exchanges between McLuhan and Frye and to constitute one of the hallmarks of the Toronto School, and demonstrate that a similar idea of interpenetration gave rise to the revolutionary intermedial forms Blake created and later became a defining feature of electromorphic art. 2 William Blake, Electric Thinking, Holism, and The New Art In his last public lecture on Blake, presented in 1987 in London, England, Frye situated the poet’s formidable achievement in the context of Western mythology: To have turned a metaphorical cosmos eighteen centuries old upside down in a few poems, and provided the basis for a structure that practically every major thinker for the next century would build on, was one of the most colossal imaginative feats in the history of human culture. The only drawback, of course, was that no one knew Blake had done it: in fact Blake hardly realized he had done it either.1 One idea that Blake’s mythology rejected was that of the chain of being that had dominated cosmology from the Classical era to his own time (the beginning of the Romantic era): the great chain of being was the ladder through different orders of reality, according to the ratio of matter to form in them: reality was thought to be “formed out of the two principles of form and matter and stretched from God, who was pure form, through spiritual and human existence into the subhuman world until it reached chaos, which is as close as we can come to pure matter without form.”2 The second idea Blake’s mythology dispatched was that of differentiated levels of reality in the Ptolemaic universe. According to that model, there was the extra-universal realm of Heaven, out there somewhere. Below this, and revolving in circles of diminishing circumference, are a series of spheres, from the primum mobile down through the planets to the moon, and from the moon to the “sublunar” world where things are composed of the material elements, earth, air, fire, and water—since the fall, this realm has been subject to decay. Newton’s discovery that the planets in the superlunary realm move according to the same laws that govern the movement of things 1. Northrop Frye, “Blake’s Bible,” 419–35 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, ed. Angela Esterhammer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), Collected Works of Northrop Frye (hereafter CW) 16: 427. From a typescript with handwritten changes and strike-overs. 2. Ibid, CW 16.425. At the time he wrote Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), Frye still harboured divided feelings about how to classify Blake’s poetry. He knew that Blake was resolutely, implacably, militantly anti-Enlightenment. That was a given—for all Frye tries to separate the study of poetry and literature from personal bias, there is nothing in Frye’s writings (even in the notebooks or articles or fragments thereof that went unpublished in Frye’s lifetime) that suggests anything but a complete lack of sympathy with the abstract, geometric, and atomizing language of the Enlightenment. But in regard to the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against it, Frye’s earlier writings show him to be in a position like that of Petrarch vis-à-vis Classical Antiquity and the renaissance. He half- adopted the views that dominated Blake scholarship in the decades between 1910 and 1930, that Blake was not a full-blown Romantic, though aspects of his work anticipated features of Romanticism. However, from the 1960s, and onwards, Frye seemed content to call Blake a Romantic. For example, in “The Road of Excess,” Frye writes, “Blake was the first and the most radical of the Romantics who identified the creative imagination of the poet with the creative power of God,” and his lyrics “can be used as a key to Romanticism” (Northrop Frye” The Road to Excess,” in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963], 3–20; reprinted 316–329 in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, CW 16:327, 334). I declare at the outset my belief that William Blake is at once the first English Romantic poet and the greatest. That periodization is important to me, for it gives me grounds for identifying Romanticism with electromagnetic theory and the reaction against Newtonian-Enlightenment thought. It also allows me to stake the unpopular claim that we still are living in the Romantic—or as I describe it, the electrologic—era. 3 R. Bruce Elder here on earth brought that conception into question. Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion suggested the universe is a gigantic machine, devoid of intelligence and personality; and, however much that fact dismayed him, that is the image of the Newtonian universe that entered history. Blake could not abide the universe-as-a-giant machine metaphor and strived—and, according to Frye succeeded—to create a new metaphoric cosmos. A few years earlier, in a lecture at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Frye made similar claims for the revolutionary character of Blake’s vision. He presents Blake as a discovering, through an act almost akin to a Nietzschean transvaluation, a great code of Western myth and symbolism: his art discloses this great code in the act of revitalizing it and returning it to its primal truth.
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