Review: WILLIAM BLAKE’S VISIONS: ART, HALLUCINATIONS, SYNAESTHESIA by David Worrall

This book examines whether Blake's 'visions'—visual, auditory, and visual hallucinations—actually derive from several types of synaesthesia. Blake is a celebrated 'visionary,' and yet his ‘visions’ have not been discussed. Worrall draws on neuroscience to examine both Blake’s visual art and writings to question the rumours about Blake's insanity.

Reading this book three years after encountering David Worrall’s work in his conference paper ‘Neural Blake’ (January 2022, the first Global Blake conference) resolved most of the questions I had then on the research’s wider ramifications for Blake scholarship. Whilst the 2022 paper represented a fresh take on the origins of Blake’s visions, Worrall’s talk emphasised the neuroscience behind Blake’s work rather than explicitly demonstrating the research’s potential impact. The critical significance of presenting Blake in this new way was perhaps considered as a given by an audience of supportive Blake scholars. Worrall’s 2024 monograph presents, in great detail, his unique research alongside a comprehensive argument for its impact within and beyond Literary Studies.

Scope and Critical Context

Blake’s Visions has nine chapters (including an introduction and conclusion), each differing slightly in format. The introduction details at length the neuroscientific basis for the research and introduces readers to key concepts like Klüver form-constants and synaesthesia. This is a key intervention for readers with a literary-art history scholarly background, and I’m grateful Worrall went into such depth here. The figures included in the book—reproductions of the Blake art Worrall references—are a key reference point and important inclusion, particularly when discussing lesser-known Blake works.

Following chapters each argue for the presence of a different neurological phenomenon in Blake’s works and biography. Some chapters, like ‘2. The Physiology of Blake’s Hallucinations’, cover several types of visions: this includes discussion of Scheerer’s Phenomenon and post-bereavement hallucinations. Other chapters focus on either one type of vision (‘4. Klüver Form-constants’), or one of Blake’s creative outputs (‘7. Blake’s Synaesthesia, The Visionary Heads’). Worrall presents convincing explanations for each of Blake’s visions, with reference to multiple phenomena as documented by neuroscience. On a practical level, the ratio of neuroscientific context to analysis of Blake’s works is well-balanced, although Worrall covers some conditions in far greater detail. The second half of the book focuses almost entirely on synaesthesia, but this works given the sheer amount of compelling material and reminds me of Elizabeth Foley O’Connor’s Pamela Colman Smith: Artist, Feminist and Mystic (2021), which defines Smith’s visions as synaesthetic inspiration (Foley O'Connor, 102–103).

Blake's Vision fits neatly into Worrall’s own oeuvre, referencing his past work on Dorothy Gott and Romantic prophetic and visionary communities, both alone and with co-author, Nancy Jiwon Cho. With my own research on and interest in Blake as an otherworldly, ‘visionary’ or ‘mystic’, figure I was delighted to find this return to Gott. Within the wider field, Blake’s Visions complements work on Romantic literature and science, including Stephanie O’Rourke’s Art, Science, and the Body in Romanticism (2021), Sharon Ruston’s, The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2021), and Ruston’s Creating Romanticism (2013). Richard C. Sha’s chapter ‘William Blake and the Neurological Imagination’ in Imagination and Science in RomanticismÂ(2018) also provides a useful comparison considered alongside Worrall’s discussion of Scheerer’s phenomenon. Worrall’s book is thus supported by new waves of science and literature research within current Romantic Studies.

'Madness'

Blake’s Visions concludes with finality, ‘He had no dysfunction, no disorder’ (249). This line best represents the impetus for Worrall’s research: to trace Blake’s visions to real neurological phenomena, and discredit once and for all Blake’s ‘mad’ reputation. Worrall’s insistence that Blake’s visions can be explained entirely by common neurological conditions presents various questions and concerns. On the one hand, Worrall’s connection of Blake’s visions to hallucinations helps destigmatise the phenomenon which, as Worrall notes in his conclusion, is common and can prevent people seeking medical help (238). On the other hand, he expends much critical energy attempting to prove that Blake, one of the most notable authors and artists in cultural history, was not mad. The defensiveness of his argument has the unintended implication that ‘madness’, psychological disorder and disability, is incompatible with being ‘visionary’ like with Blake. Whilst implications of Blake’s madness have impacted and continue to impact his critical reputation, his cultural legacy ultimately survived.

The same could not be said for his prophetic contemporaries. Joanna Southcott, for example, remains largely ridiculed in contemporary Blake scholarship. Richard Brothers was denounced and imprisoned for subversiveness, and discussion of his prophecies is largely limited to works by eighteenth-century religious scholars. Neither of these figures have achieved the longstanding cultural impact of Blake. His canonical status enables scholars to recast Blake’s madness allegations with relative ease. Brothers and Southcott, due to their class, gender, and position on the borders of Romantic studies, have sadly not yet received this kind of critical attention. Although it is far safer, and of greater public interest, to apply Worrall's methods to a towering figure like Blake.

Visions and Revelations

Worrall is at his most persuasive in his longer, detailed analyses of specific conditions of Klüver form-constants and synaesthesia, where multiple works by Blake can attest to strong patterns of neurological influence. Perhaps the most critically game-changing analyses are those which link the visual language of Blake’s raw visions with his metaphors of religious philosophy, as found in the section on The First Book of Urizen and ‘nets of religion’ (139). Here, Worrall argues that Blake’s hallucinations of web-like structures inspire him to move towards innovative thinking: the visual form of the hallucinations alters Blake’s philosophy, poetry and art. Blake’s Visions is not a book that considers Blake a mystic, yet there is something to be said here about the connection between visions and revelation in a non-spiritual context. Some of the most interesting passages in Blake’s Visions are Worrall’s application of his neurological analyses to Blake’s female contemporary in Dorothy Gott. As with Blake, Worrall identifies her visions as hallucinations, thus opening a potentially rich analysis of her visions along the lines of his Blake arguments (70, 72, 117–19). I am unaware if Worrall has plans to publish further on this line of argument, but I look forward to and earnestly encourage such work.

Worrall’s study presents many firsts for Blake and Romantic Studies, and the wider field of Health Humanities. The book is attuned to Blake’s popular status as well as in academia since Worrall’s book provides the academic evidence for mainstream Blake biographer John Higgs’ speculations about Blake’s visions (18). Whilst Blake’s Visions comes from an academic publisher, I believe it has broader public appeal beyond an academic readership. Overall, Blake’s Visions is a much-needed intervention in ongoing attempts to define Blake’s visions. The book also demonstrates the potential application of Worrall’s methodology towards further understanding ‘visionary’ writers in Romantic studies beyond Blake.

David Worrall, William Blake's Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 262pp. RRP. €162.49 (hardback); €39.99 (e-Book).