Burning Power: William Blake and the Politics of Spectrality
Thesis Proposal
Travis Duncan
McMaster University
My doctoral dissertation interrogates the fraught and over-determined figure of the spectre, and the connected and similarly gothicised themes of haunting and mourning, in the work of the great Romantic visual artist and poet, William Blake. After 1794, Blake increasingly employs spectres in his illuminated texts as figures of an irreducible otherness. These spectres haunt the margins of Blakean subjectivity, terrorizing, fragmenting, and thereby thwarting the
(supposed) ideal guiding Blake’s system: the realization of the “real and immortal Self.”
Visually, these spectres are depicted as bat-like creatures that hover predatorily over living things; to all below, their outstretched wings block the visions of Eternity that Blake portrays above —an especially problematic act considering that for Blake the ability to perceive Eternity is the very same thing as existing in Eternity. But despite their obstreperous characterizations,
Blake’s spectres are also somehow indispensable to the creative process. Los, Blake’s alter ego in his later prophetic texts, at one point in The Four Zoas (1795-1803) embraces his spectre
“first as a brother/Then as another self”—one of the most bizarre and troubling moments in all of
Blake’s writings. Throughout Blake’s art and poetry, and even in several of his personal letters, spectres threaten the artist’s creative vision, not as something opposed to creativity, but as a destructive presence that lurks within creativity itself.
In Jacques Derrida’s now infamous terms it could be said that Blake’s art is driven by the need to “live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, the com merce without commerce of ghosts” (1994, Derrida’s italics). But while for Derrida spectres are figures that both inhabit and unsettle the in-between spaces of classical metaphysics, calling attention to the “radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inhe ritance”
(1994, Derrida’s italics), Blake’s spectres are most interesting for the ways in which they are caught up in particular cultural contexts , forming a means by which the artist at once reproduces

T. Duncan 2 and critiques those contexts. By the time that spectres become the central antagonism guiding
Blake’s art, European culture had witnessed a proliferation of gothic and supernatural motifs across a wide variety of genres —including not only those genres within fiction and poetry, but also across fields as diverse as scientific writings, journalism, travel writing, and moral and political philosophy. As great deal of recent scholarship has shown, this proliferation of spectral figures in part signalled an encompassing anxiety over, and even a site of conflict within, a socio-political spectrum that had been thrown into turmoil through such unparalleled happenings as the French Revolution and the emergence of a nascent capitalist marketplace. A central working assumption in my project is that Blake formulates his discourse of spectrality not exactly as a part of this wider proliferation, but more specifically as a response to it. I contend that
Blake inherits and adapts contemporaneous discourses of ghosts, spectres, and phantoms, and engages with larger questions of how we are to think of and relate to the dead and death more generally, in order to radically deconstruct those historical processes which were supposedly advancing notions of individual sovereignty and the “rights of man.” As is revealed through my study of his spectres, Blake believe that far from advancing individual freedoms, emerging discourses of rights and independence were actually threatening the individual’s imaginative capabilities, standardizing notions of selfhood and limiting conceptions of what community is and can be.
In this regard, my work follows from recent studies like David Simpson’s Wordsworth,
Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (2009), Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosphy of History (2005), Deidre Lynch’s
The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (1998),
Esther Schor’s Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to
Victoria (1994), Terr y Castle’s The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the
Invention of the Uncanny (1995), E. J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800
(1995), as well as from Jerrold E. Hogle’s thesis on what he has called in a number of texts “the

T. Duncan 3 gho st of the counterfeit” (1998 & 2002). In their own unique ways, each of these studies attend to the limits and/or “others” of eighteenth century empiricism and rationalism, and show how
“the very psychic and cultural transformations that led to the subsequent glorification of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment —the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch —also produced, like a kind of side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse” (Castle, 1995). Most curiously for my own project, the Blakeian spectre emerges precisely as an uncanny and gothicised figure that is, at the same time, associated most explicitly by the time of Blake’s final illuminated prophecies, Milton (1804-
1809) and Jerusalem (180420), with “the Reasoning Power in Man” ( Milton , 40:34, E 142).
Following, then, from these contemporary studies that uncover uncanny doubleness at the very origins of modern subjectivity, I suggest Blake incisively perceived the dualism of these origins first hand and, in response, formulated a theory of spectrality that is simultaneously both a symptom and a potential cure to this historical impasse. My dissertation proposes to work through these seemingly contradictory poles in Blake’s representations in an attempt to uncover a more radical political orientation in the nascent stages of modern subjectivity itself.
The opening chapter of my thesis historicizes the term “spectre” and attempts to situate
Blake’s use of this word and figure within the larger proliferation of discourses on spectrality that we referred to above. I draw from a range of ghostly representations, including those from the
Gothic fictions of Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, as well as from the poetry of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, and from such philosophical texts as John Locke’s An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759) —two figures that Blake will antagonistically associate with his spectres at various points. This opening chapter attempts to situate these spectres at the nexus —or perhaps more accurately, as the nexus —of two particular cultural contexts. One the one hand, I am interested in how spectres proliferate at this time in response to issues of terror —and here I am especially interested in how this concept of terror comes to be theorized by such diverse

T. Duncan 4 thinkers as Kant, Hegel and Burke in their responses to the French Revolution and its fallout. In addition to its associations wit h terror, I am also interested in this chapter with the spectre’s connection to questions of commerce and commodification. Here I address not only the issues of the marketability the Gothic spectre at the time, but also issues concerning the rise of a nascent visual or virtual culture time, as well as the development of new forms of paper money and credit which were radically reorienting and destabilizing understandings of self and individual identity. Together, these issues of terror and commerce form th e backdrop to Blake’s own spectral anxieties. I argue that it is precisely the emerging sense of self-alienation advanced by the revolutionary terror and by developments in commerce and trade that inform the scenes of self-division and tortured alienation in Blake’s own spectral representations.
After developing this framework for discussion, the remaining three chapters of my dissertation explore the different ways in which in Blake’s later prophecies the figure of the spectre develops along this axis of concerns. In my second chapter, “Rewriting the Gothic
Spectre: The Appearance of the Spectre in The Four Zoas ,” I argue Blake first takes up the gothic spectre in his unfinished epic, The Four Zoas (1797-1803), in a rather mechanical way, generically reproducing the terrifying spectres of gothic fiction in a way that suggests they are a symptom of the commercial and the political anxieties that I sketch in my Introduction. In my third chapter, “Spectral Debts: Milton and the Commerce of Ghosts,” I look at Blake’s penultimate illuminated prophecy, Milton (1804-1809), in connection with the evolution of commercial society. In particular, I am intrigued by the relationship between the rise of the capitalist marketplace and Blake's representation of the artist figure in the poem, Los, as being haunted by spectral figures that threaten artistic production even as they seem to, in some ways, enable this production. While Blake explicitly disavows commercial concerns from his poem in the Preface, I argue that in the narrative of Milton itself Blake begins to theorize a ground —or more specifically, an ungrounded ground—for agency with his spectres by showing the ways in which the commercial sphere has “spectralized” the subject, i.e., made individual

T. Duncan 5 genius slave t o a “general equivalent.” Finally, my forth chapter, “Blake’s Spectrous F[r]iend:
The Politics of Spectral Friendship in Jerusalem, ” establishes a Derridean framework of the politics of friendship to expand upon this ungrounded agency in Blake’s art. I argue that Blake’s final illuminated poem is not simply anxious about the influence of the public sphere in fragmenting or alienating the subject from itself, but it is also strangely hopeful about this as well. Resisting a “Burkeian” reversion to tradition or custom in the face of this sphere in ways that, I argue, Milton does not, in Jerusalem the spectre becomes associated with the politics of friendship, and of the nation more generally, playing the role of the friendlyenemy to the poem’s artist-protag onist. I argue that this final poem is perhaps Blake’s most “modern,” in that it theorizes the political sphere in a way that doesn’t simply seek to exorcise those virtual others that Blake is so anxious about in the previous two poems. Instead, Jerusalem opens Blake’s conception of a visionary community up to those nonhuman “others” that both threaten and yet in turn give name to his ideals of justice, community and imagination.
In the end, Blake’s theorization of spectres is very much enlivened by the fact that it is always already haunted by the others that it claims to exorcise. My dissertation argues that
Blake’s spectres receive their compellingly haunting power specifically from the fact that Blake
“failed” in his lifelong struggle to overcome them. For my project, though, this “failure” is an extraordinarily productive problem —it is very much what helps to give Blake’s work what
Leopold Damrosch refers to as its “peculiar energy and value.” (1980)

T. Duncan 6
Abstract Bibliography
Blake, William. “The Four Zoas.” Blake: The Complete Poems. Ed. W.H. Stevenson. New York:
Norton, 1971; 287-467.
-------. “Milton.” Blake: The Complete Poems. Ed. W.H. Stevenson. New York: Norton, 1971;
484-576.
-------. “Jerusalem.” Blake: The Complete Poems. Ed. W.H. Stevenson. New York: Norton,
1971; 622-841.
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Culture Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Morning, and the
New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Hogel, Jerrold E. “The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux’s Fantome and the Cultural Work of the
Gothic.” The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in
Leroux’s Novel and its Progeny. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 103-131.
-------. “The Ghost of the Counterfeit and its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of ‘Frost at
Midnight’.” European Romantic Review. 9 (Spring 1998): 283-292.