ABSTRACT
In ‘General Note: Blake’s Mysticism’ near the end of Fearful Symmetry (1947), Northrop Frye clarifies the relation between vision and mysticism as it pertains to William Blake, the inspiration for so much of Frye’s work. Frye characterizes Blake’s art as a spiritual discipline and says that for visionaries like Blake the true God is not the orthodox Creator but an unattached creative Word who is free from an eternal substance and an eternal nothingness. Only an effort of vision that rejects the duality of subject and object and attacks the antithesis of being and non-being can attain unity with God. The effort of vision is the realization in complete experience of the identity of God and the human in which both disappear. Frye says that ‘Blake’s conception of art as creation designed to destroy the Creation is the most readily comprehensible expression of this effort of vision I know’ (1947a: 431). This effort of vision is, according to Frye, at the foundation of Zen Buddhism and of the great speculative Western school that forms a well-integrated tradition-the mystical. Blake is not a mystic if mysticism means a contemplative quietism or a spiritual illumination expressed in a practical and unspeculative piety, but, Frye asserts, ‘if mysticism means primarily the vision of the
prodigious and unthinkable metamorphosis of the human mind [Frye’s description of which I have outlined above]…lake is one of the mystics’ (432). It is in this last sense that I call Frye a mystic: he is one of the visionary company (for reviews of Frye’s work that include comments on vision, see, for instance, Becker 1982, Bloom 1957, Breslin 1982, Cahill 1983, Dudek 1982, Duffy 1968, Gillespie 1986, Globe 1983, Kenner 1982, Kermode 1982, Keynes 1947, Kirss 1983, Mandel 1982, Poland 1984, Schwab 1983, Speirs 1983, Wellek 1949 and Wheeler 1984).
