As we all know, unless we have been living on an island in the moon, Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers for the serious crime of three bolshy X posts. There was widespread condemnation of this as both a waste of police time and resources, and a massive overreach of state power. This was edifying to hear and read, and goes some way towards rebalancing the shameful cancelling that the comedy scriptwriting genius has suffered over the past decade.
Nevertheless, many critics of the arrest added caveats about Linehan’s tone and manner. Even commentators who shared his position on the trans issue couldn’t resist qualifying their support. It’s almost as if we were seeing a perversion of the traditional summary of Voltaire’s position into: “I approve of what you say, but I will disavow to the death the way in which you say it.”
What prevents some commentators from giving Linehan their unqualified support? The Canadian critic Northrop Frye declared in a 1935 letter: “Read Blake or go to hell, that’s my message to the modern world.” It is to William Blake, then, that I turn to explain why Linehan’s punchy style is not only permissible but vital — and why it provokes such visceral objection.
William Blake gives one of literature’s most incisive accounts of a conflict between unvarnished expression and society’s demand for propriety in his portrait of the Reprobate and the Redeemed. As Frye explains in his seminal study of Blake, Fearful Symmetry, the Reprobate prophets are always outcasts, while the timid Redeemed find their better qualities only after being jolted awake by the prophet’s blows. In Linehan’s case, as in many others, it is precisely the abrasive quality that marks him as Reprobate. And it is precisely this which unsettles a society that insists on politeness before truth.
Blake’s vision of the Reprobate and the Redeemed — along with a third figure, the Elect — appears in his epic Milton: A Poem. He identifies three classes of person, employing his idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation:
The first, The Elect from before the foundation of the World:
The second, The Redeem’d. The Third, The Reprobate & form’d
To destruction from the mothers womb: follow with me my plow
These three “classes” of human beings — the Elect, the Redeemed, and the Reprobate — represent distinct archetypes (or “spiritual states,” to use a more Blakean idiom) within his mythological framework. They are worth understanding because, as Frye boldly states, Blake supplies us with a unique map with which we can navigate our contemporary world. His paradigms sharpen our vision of life and its processes.
The Elect, essentially the villains of Blake’s world, embody rigid, self-righteous clinging to conventional morality, law, or institutionalised religion — we might say, to ideology. Blake condemns them as spiritually stagnant: hypocrites and defenders of a corrupt, sterile society. Their minds are as stultifyingly solid as a dead skull.
The Redeemed, by contrast, are those capable of transformation and awakening. They can move between error and truth, are open to imagination, creativity, and evolution. Most of us would like to think we belong here — reasonably thoughtful, sometimes imaginative, and capable of growth.
Then there are the Reprobates. These rugged folk are “marked for destruction” from the off, yet paradoxically they represent for Blake the best. They embrace the role of prophet, challenging the status quo and embodying creative rebellion. Within Blake’s vision, it is the Reprobates who prove most dynamic — for without their wild, irredeemable energy, the Redeemed would have nothing to awaken from.
Polite society loathes the Reprobates. They often express themselves in ways that would ruin an afternoon’s high tea at the Lady Jane Tearoom. The Old Testament prophets are their prototypes. Possessed by a divinely inspired vision of how society had gone astray, they were not afraid of making an unseemly fuss.
Isaiah paraded naked and barefoot for three years as a sign of the coming humiliation of Egypt and Cush by the Assyrians. Ezekiel lay on his side for 390 days, cooked food over dung, and ate it publicly to symbolise Israel’s punishment. Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke around his neck to illustrate Judah’s submission to Babylon. Hosea married Gomer, a “woman of whoredom”, as an enactment of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. Amos, a lowly shepherd, confronted religious and political leaders in no uncertain terms, denouncing their corruption and predicting exile.
All of these actions were profoundly shocking to the religious and political establishments of their time; far more so than Linehan’s X posts. From the Biblical context it is clear that such acts led to the prophets being marginalised, mocked, and isolated. Jeremiah was beaten, put in stocks, imprisoned, and at one point the religious establishment sought his death. The priest Amaziah accused Amos of conspiracy against King Jeroboam II and ordered him to leave Bethel — effectively cancelling him.
Blake’s Reprobates, like their prototypes the Old Testament prophets, act in ways that are socially unacceptable because their task is to break through the skin of convention. They must scandalise the norms that keep society comfortable but stagnant. They must make an almighty fuss when society is heading down the wrong path. Their wildness is not gratuitous: it is the necessary shock that unsettles well-mannered complacency. It is also an enormous source of publicity — Isaiah’s nakedness ensured that both he and his message were noticed.
For Blake’s less courageous subset, the Redeemed, this disruption is essential. Without the provocation of the Reprobates, the Redeemed would never be jolted out of timidity. They might not even notice something wicked occurring in front of their blinded eyes. Frye put it bluntly: the good qualities of the Redeemed emerge only after the prophet’s example has hammered their timidity to pieces and opened up their vision to outrage. In Blake’s scheme, the Reprobates are society’s furnace — the heating system without which change cannot occur.
His expression and imagery are often unacceptable in the eyes of what another Irish Reprobate, G. Bernard Shaw, painted as “middle-class morality”
Linehan is quite the Reprobate. His expression and imagery are often unacceptable in the eyes of what another Irish Reprobate, G. Bernard Shaw, painted as “middle-class morality”. After his arrest, the ever-generous Owen Jones, while decrying the arrest, described him as “beyond awful.” James Butler, co-founder of Novara Media, called Linehan “an unpleasant character,” adding spicily: “His online presence is a sordid gutter of monomania.” The former UK ambassador Craig Murray ranted that Linehan is “an unpleasant, hate-filled person.” Each post is a Rowlandson satire of a social gatekeeper holding his nose.
None of these figures is a friend to the sex realist side of the trans debate, so such virulent dismissals might be expected. Yet Janice Turner, herself on the realist side, also felt that it behoved her to describe Linehan’s posts as “obnoxious” and the man himself as “an obsessive, narcissistic, often cruel social media presence.” Jean Hatchet — often a mighty Reprobate herself — protested that “he can’t regulate himself.” With friends like this…
Yet those of us who wish to be Redeemed need friends like Linehan. His forthright statements catch our attention and vividly paint the horrors many of us might miss or in cowardice ignore. Linehan — on Newsnight — compared what is politely called gender-reassignment surgery to Nazi atrocities. He has incessantly, and with graphic coarseness, drawn attention to the scandal of what he’d dare to call “men in dresses” entering women’s spaces. The authorities’ overreaction to his X posts has exposed state overreach around free speech. It has also revealed the scandal of our police force acting as lapdogs to a handful of extremely vexatious trans activists. Having the loud and unruly voice of this prophet, with his “obnoxious” humour and “unregulated” utterances, has multiplied a hundredfold the airtime that corrupt practices have received.
Without the shock of prophetic disturbance, we neither see nor resist corruption
According to Blake, if the Reprobate does not roar, we Redeemed remain timorous, numbed by conventional respectability. Without the shock of prophetic disturbance, we neither see nor resist corruption. And in that silence the Elect — those Blakean villains who enforce ideological conformity through institutional power — reign unchallenged. The Redeemed, who might have grown via the example of Reprobate vision to challenge authority, become instead its docile accomplices. The absence of the Reprobate’s cry is not peace but the slow petrifaction of society into the skull-like fixity of the Elect.
Once the Reprobate has done his work — smashing the walls of social convention to expose the disease and corruption within — the Redeemed can begin the slower task of undoing the damage and conscientiously building Blake’s Jerusalem. In that Jerusalem, children’s bodies are not violated by drugs and surgery, women’s spaces and sports stand inviolate, and speech is free to name the damage done by corrupt ideologies policed by the Elect.
To paraphrase Frye on Blake: celebrate Linehan the Reprobate — or go to hell.
