Blake’s Synaesthesia

There is another significant hallucinatory type which can be associated with Blake: synaesthesia, the subject of intense research development over the last 10 or 20 years. The word derives from the Greek roots syn, meaning together, and aisthesis, meaning perception. As one foundational introduction remarks, there is no one-size-fits-all type of synaesthesia. The first medically recognized description of synaesthesia appeared in a doctoral thesis written in Latin in 1812 by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs (1786–1814). Blake is extremely unlikely to have been aware of it. Synaesthesia is a condition, not a disorder. As a review of the scientific literature puts it, ‘it is not associated with obvious brain pathology or with general cognitive dysfunction.’ Synaesthesia does, however, involve anomalous perceptual experiences. One study, putting forward ‘a provocative evolutionary hypothesis for synaesthesia,’ suggests that ‘synaesthetic experiences may serve as cognitive and perceptual anchors to aid in the detection, processing, and retention of critical stimuli in the world,’ that is, it may have been retained in H. sapiens as an evolutionary benefit. As the implications of Blake’s several modalities of synaesthesia have a significant influence on what follows in this chapter, it should be remembered that the current consensus is that ‘synaesthesia is neither imagination nor is it metaphorical thinking, instead it has a neural basis.’ This has a huge bearing on literary critical practice. Although beyond the scope of this book, in any writer, but perhaps particularly poets, what looks like a striking metaphor or vivid turn of phrase may have originated in synaesthesia. As with all of Blake’s hallucinatory types, it has a neural and not a psychological basis.