Synaesthetics

Art as Synaesthesia

Paul Gordon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501356803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Paul Gordon proposes a new theory of art as synaesthetic and applies this idea to various media, including works--such as movies, illustrated books, and song lyrics--that explicitly cross over into media involving the different senses. The idea of art as synaesthetic is not, however, limited to those "cross-over" works, because even an individual poem or novel or painting calls upon different senses in creating its syn-aesthetic "meaning." Although previous studies have often devolved into those who see an obvious connection between art and synaesthesia and those who adamantly reject such a notion, Synaesthetics furthers our understanding of synaesthesia as an important, if not essential, component of artistic expression.

1

Introduction:
Art as Synaesthesia

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this idea [of a synaesthetic relationship between music and poetry] will stir the dreams of future generations.

(Debussy¹ )

Art is everywhere, and has been so for a very long time. And yet, no one has satisfactorily explained the particular pleasure that is beauty, or the particular kind of meaning—truth, if you will—that is to be derived from that beauty except, of course, to famously refer them back to each other. Witness, for example, this statement by Hegel, which begins with the promise of explaining what beauty is only to end up acknowledging the impossibility of the same:

If we are to display the necessity of our object, the beautiful in art, we should have to prove that art or beauty was a result of antecedents such as, when considered in their true conception, to lead us on with scientific necessity to the idea of fine art. But in as far as we begin with art, and propose to treat of the essence of its idea and of the realization of that idea, not of antecedents which go before it as demanded by its idea, so far art, as a peculiar scientific object, has, a presupposition which lies beyond our consideration. . . . Therefore it is not our present aim to demonstrate the idea of beauty from which we set out, that is, to derive it according to its necessity from the presupposition which are its antecedents in science. . . . For us, the idea of beauty and of art is a presupposition given in the system of philosophy.²

Following on the heels of a recent book that examined the attempts by Kant, Hegel, and other Idealists to define art in terms of the philosophical absolute or “thing-in-itself,”³ the present work proposes a related theory of art as synaesthetic and, then, applies this idea to various works from various media, including works—such as movies, illustrated books, and song lyrics—that explicitly cross over into media involving the different senses. The idea of art as synaesthetic is not, however, limited to those “cross-over” works because, if my thesis is correct, even an individual poem or novel or painting calls upon different senses in creating its synaesthetic “meaning.” This idea of replacing “aesthetic” with “synaesthetic” is a new argument that will, I hope, be made more convincing as one delves deeper into the synaesthetic unities discussed here as well as into the many more points of synaesthetic contact not discussed in this work; for example, that of dance as visual music; tactile, “textile art” such as that featured on the cover; architecture as having “a special role to play in the advancement of multi-sensory perception,”⁴ and acting as the synaesthetic union between self and other.⁵

Although this is a new way of defining art, it has been anticipated by such things as Horace’s famous ut pictura poesis dictum, discussions of the “sister arts” or paragone in the Renaissance, Baudelaire’s (and the later Symbolists’) occasional statements about poetry as synaesthesia and, more recently, by the field of “word/image studies” and its parent discipline of “comparative literature.” However, such arguments have always been marginalized, often by the very artists and theoreticians who proffered them. With regard to Horace’s notion, the idea of poetry as “like” painting (or vice versa) is not the same as saying that poetry is painting, and vice versa. Similarly, if the relatively new field of “word/image studies” has reached an impasse, it is because, I would argue, it is similarly deficient in not bringing together its two components where, in artworks, the word is image, and the image is word—et verbum caro factum est.

It is also important to distinguish “synaesthetics” from other ways the relation between art and synaesthesia has been defined in the past. As many have noted, interest in synaesthesia itself, as well as in its relation to the arts, has waxed and waned over time. A second renaissance, as it were, occurred in the nineteenth century, when the earlier obsession by da Vinci and others in the relation of the “sister arts,” or paragone,⁶ led some to argue even more strongly for the underlying unity of the arts: “the painter who is musical, the composer who paints, these are the true, genuine artists.”⁷ Curiously, the early nineteenth century was also the period when the idea of “absolute music” freed the medium from any ancillary relation to dance, theater, and so on.

It is precisely this “paradox”⁸ of the simultaneous rise of “absolute music” with growing interest in synaesthetic forms like “program music,” the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, Baudelairean correspondances, etc. that the “synaesthetic” model proposed here hopes to clarify, for the artistic “purity” advocated not only by advocates of “absolute music” but, with regard to the visual arts, by the likes of Lessing and, more recently, Clement Greenberg,⁹ is based on a profound (albeit inevitable) misunderstanding of the very artworks that their conceptual categories seek to explain. As Schelling argued, all art is “absolute” (indeed, he even went so far as to claim that there is only One artwork!¹⁰ ), and the result of this ontology is that the very “purity” of art sought by those who seek to define or sequester it is inherently syn-aesthetic, not aesthetic.

As Marsha Morton has noted in her excellent essay for The Arts Entwined,¹¹ two of the leading practitioners of the Gesamtkunswerk and “program” (versus “absolute”) music, Wagner and Berlioz respectively, largely ignored painters and rarely visited museums, and while some might see this as contrary to their many examples of “visual music,” I would strongly disagree, for it is based, again, on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of their art. If, as Morton also notes, other romantics such as Ca rlyle and Mme de Stael considered music, which had become the dominant art form of the nineteenth century, as “leading us to the edge of infinity,”¹² this “edge” combines the arts in a unified whole, whether or not the other arts are explicitly involved, as in opera, dance, program music, etc. or not. Indeed, it is more likely the case, for many of those (including Wagner¹³ ) who wrote against “program music,” that the literal, as opposed to metaphorical, reference to this sort of sensory crossover actually undermines the very unity it purports to reclaim. There is nothing literally “pastoral” in Beethoven’s 6th symphony, nor is the Symphony Fantastique literally about its hero’s opium-induced fantasies; analogically speaking, such “tone poems” are to artistic synaesthesia as artistic synaesthesia is to synaesthesia proper.

So let the incessant arguing about visual/pictorial music versus nonvisual/pictorial music cease, arguing that has led some, for example, to claim that Corot’s landscapes are more musical than, say, those of Monet.¹⁴ The pseudoscientific claim to define art—“aesthetics”—as separate from its synaesthetic essence takes us further from our understanding of art because of the very act of understanding it this way. Every artwork is a Gesamtkunstwerk, for, as Edouard Schuré observed at the end of the nineteenth century, “Divine Art has been cut into pieces. . . . The arts constitute a united whole. They are truly fertile only when they act together in harmony and support each other.”¹⁵

That said, to claim that art is inherently synaesthetic—that the aesthetic is really the “syn-aesthetic,” beginning with the empathic unity between the spectator and the work—requires that one clarify at the outset the relation of literal synaesthesia, a widely recognized if still controversial neurological phenomenon in which one hears colors, sees sounds, tastes smells, etc. (“To persons endowed with coloured hearing, for example, speech and music are not only heard but are also a visual mélange of coloured shapes, movement and scintillation.”¹⁶ ), to art as synaesthetic—what one writer refers to as the difference between “actual” and “artistic” synaesthesia,¹⁷ and another as “psychological” and “cultural” synaesthesia,¹⁸ and yet another as “developmental” versus “pseudosynaesthesia.”¹⁹ Although synaesthesia is often discussed in terms of the relatively few artists who explicitly define themselves as synaesthetes (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nabokov,²⁰ Messiaen, Hockney, and others) or the artworks that explicitly define themselves as synaesthetic (this list is much longer, including works by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whistler, Klee, and others), no one has gone so far as to claim that all art is synaesthetic. With regard to this essential question regarding literal versus figurative synaesthesia, I will maintain that while there is clearly a difference between the neurological condition and its aesthetic counterpart, the difference is one of degree rather than one of kind, and art owes its very existence to those neurological underpinnings.²¹ Although they seemingly reject the notion of art’s relation to synaesthesia “proper,” two leading experts in the scientific study of synaesthesia nonetheless pose the question:

Given the varieties and degrees of synaesthesia that appear to exist, as well as the evidence for cross-modal transfer in normal people, an important question to address is: are people with synaesthesia qualitatively or simply quantitatively different?²²

As the common metaphorical reference would suggest, “taste” (goût, Geschmack, etc.) is related to art, but it is not the same as eating it.

Resistance to this idea is bound to come from both sides, from writers on art as well as from synaesthetes themselves, and those interested in “real,” “developmental” synaesthesia. The former would reject the idea as, at best, analogically true; that is, art might be like synaesthesia in providing many sensory crossovers, such as the all-important, ubiquitous presence of metaphor (“My luve is like a red, red rose”), but such a relation to synaesthesia, however important, must remain just that, a purely analogical relation. Synaesthetes proper, and those studying the neurological phenomenon, would similarly reject the idea because the experience is real and involuntary; the relation between a “trigger” (say, a number) and its “concurrent” (say, a color) is literal, not figurative. In a word: the thesis that art is synaesthetic must answer to the objection that art is, at best, like synaesthesia. As representative of both camps Dani Cavallaro mentions Jamie Ward (The Frog Who Croaked Blue), who insists that “most types of synaesthesia have little or no bearing on art.”²³

There are at least three preliminary answers to these important objections to the idea of art as synaesthetic, although these objections can only really be answered by the numerous concrete examples that make up the present work. The first, which is largely speculative but, according to Daria Martin’s recent work on mirror-touch synaesthesia, has significant “scientific support,”²⁴ was first suggested to me by a scientist who has spent many years studying actual synaesthetes in his native country of Switzerland.²⁵ He believes that as infants everyone is originally synaesthetic, and that as we mature most of us progressively lose this inherent capacity. This would explain why art is synaesthetic while not synaesthesia as such—it is a “disinhibitor,”²⁶ a “remembrance of things past,” a r eturn to our earlier synaesthetic “consciousness” about which Proust would doubtless have had much to say. (This answer also fits well with Freud’s theory of art as a window into our infantile Unconscious²⁷ and, especially, his notion of dreams as synaesthetic word/ images.²⁸ ) It is also worth noting that if this relatively widespread notion of an original stage of synaesthetic “consciousness” is correct,²⁹ it is highly likely that it can, under certain circumstances and/or with a certain degree of practice, be regained in whole or in part. Of course, one would have to begin such “exercises” by acknowledging that our usual, abstract thinking about synaesthesia is, itself, hopelessly un-synaesthetic!

A second, related answer would argue that while there is clearly a difference between the neurological condition and its aesthetic counterpart, the difference is one of degree rather than one of kind, and that, as mentioned, art owes its very existence to those neurological underpinnings. This answer is supported by a recent and groundbreaking, albeit contested, discovery in neuroscience, that of mirror neuron systems:

Mirror neurons are a special class of cells first discovered in the brains of macaque monkeys in 1992 by a group of neuroscientists in Parma, Italy (including Vittorio Gallese, contributor to this volume). The scientists found that single neurons in the monkey fired both when the animal performed an action (lifting a cup, tearing a piece of paper) and, equally, when it merely watched another monkey or person performing that same action.³⁰

A third related answer would argue for a middle ground in which art is synaesthetic because it is like synaesthesia. That is to say, because no one has yet been able to define what art is (as noted at the outset, even Hegel, who wrote on art at great length, was forced to admit as much³¹ ), and because one has therefore only ever been able to say what art is like, then the fact that art is like synaesthesia means that, lacking any more literal definition, it is synaesthesia. The definition of art as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Art as Synaesthesia
• 2 “Deep Down”: Metaphor as Synaesthetic
• 3 The Synaesthetic Origin of the Work of Art
• 4 Baudelaire’s Poetry of Synaesthetic Correspondences
• 5 Plastic Fantastic: Paul Klee’s Synaesthetic Word-Images
• 6 Rouault’s “True Icons”: A Synaesthetic Unveiling of the Miserere’s Veronicas
• 7 Feeling/Hearing Picasso: The Synaesthetics of Cubism and the Vollard Suite
• 8 Georgia O’Keeffe and the Music of Flowers
• 9 Joan Mitchell and the Power of Blue
• 10 Rock and Roll as Synaesthesia: Why Rock Lyrics (Don’t) Matter
• 11 Hearing Images: Movie Music
• Epilogue: Tasting Art: Art as Synaesthetic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright