Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses

Shane Butler, Alex Purves, Shane Butler, Alex Purves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317547136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Like us, the ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand the world through their senses. Yet sensory experience has rarely been considered in the study of antiquity and, when the senses are examined, sight is regularly privileged. 'Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses' presents a radical reappraisal of antiquity's textures, flavours, and aromas, sounds and sights. It offers both a fresh look at society in the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature. The book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy and cultural history. All Greek and Latin is translated and technical matters are explained for the non-specialist. The introduction sets the ancient senses within the history of aesthetics and the subsequent essays explores the senses throughout the classical period and on to the modern reception of classical literature.

1

WHY ARE THERE NINE MUSES?

James I. Porter

If you want to know why there are nine Muses, you just have to ask Homer. Homer knows either one or several nameless Muses of some indefinite number, as at Iliad 1.604 (“the antiphonal sweet sound of the Muses singing”) or Iliad 2.484 (“Tell me now, you Muses, who have your homes on Olympus”), Iliad 2.761 (“Tell me, then, Muse, …”), or Odyssey 1.1 (“Sing to me, Muse”). They remain in this indefinite state until the last book of the Odyssey, where the Muses are said by Agamemnon’s psychē in the Underworld to appear finally on Earth – already a peculiar topographical and narrative inversion in itself – in order to lead a thrēnos at the funeral of Achilles. Only, they do so both as a chorus of nine and in the seemingly abstract and faceless singular:

And all the nine Muses in sweet antiphonal singing
mourned you, nor would you then have seen anyone of the Argives
not in tears, so much did the singing Muse stir them.

(Odyssey 24.60–3; trans. Lattimore 1965)

Hesiod follows suit in the Theogony, either conferring or transmitting the nine distinct names of nine Muses, otherwise not functionally distinct, in a gesture that was destined to become canonical.¹

Elsewhere, their number varies wildly. Ephorus knows three Muses, others give four, five, seven or eight. And the iconography is in agreement. Sappho sometimes makes a tenth, but that is as far as it goes. The disparity in number is telling, but of what? Jean-Luc Nancy, in his brief collection of essays, The Muses, is likewise interested in the question, which he poses in this way: “Why are there several arts and not just one?”² He might have framed the problem in terms of the contrast between one Muse and many Muses and thereby arrived at his signature concept of “the singular plural of … art”, a concept that for him is informed by a notion of synaesthesia, and behind which lies a view of reality (an ontology, in fact) that is based on the principle of the singular plurality of being or beings.³ But Nancy doesn’t quite make this connection. Instead, he insists, against the facts, that the Muses were plural “from the first”: “There are Muses, not the Muse”⁴ – probably because he is so keen to conflate each of the Muses with the individual arts individually, whereas in antiquity, at least, the Muses were jointly associated with song, music and dance from early on, tasks they took on in joyous simultaneity, not under separate rubrics. And that is how they continued to be known into later antiquity, despite their changing names and numbers, though gradually and only much later they came to be associated with individual genres of creativity (history, tragedy, music and so on).⁵ Whether these associations hampered the joint functioning of the Muses or not remains to be seen. I doubt they did, at least not until post-classical times, and even then not universally or as a rule.

This underlying lack of any functional distinction among the Muses is, I believe, what defines their creative core. It also brings us back to the problem of their number – not their numerical count, but their lack of fixed number and their capacity to oscillate between singular and plural without loss of substance or function. This uncanny ability is dramatically on display in the passage from Odyssey 24, where Homer shifts from “Muses, nine in all” (Μοῦσαι δ’ ἐννέα πᾶσαι) to “the Muse” (Μοῦσα) in the space of three short verses, without so much as batting an eyelash. Are these two expressions equivalent for Homer? Is “the Muse” a shorthand for what the Muses collectively do? Perhaps the Muses were indeed something of a singular plurality, though perhaps not quite the way Nancy had in mind. Nancy’s insistence on the plurality of art is aimed against what he considers to be “the modern regime of art [which] gets established in the singular”, and “tendentiously” so.⁶ I find this claim itself tendentious, for more than nine reasons, but I don’t want to enter into a detour to prove this point here.⁷ Instead, I want to fasten onto the synthetic, or rather synaesthetic, plurality that I believe is entirely symptomatic of Greek views of art and aesthetics, but also of modern art and aesthetics (despite the claims of some to the contrary), though it is the ancient half which will be my main concern in the present context.

One of the advantages of a synaesthetic approach to art is that it allows us to follow the ways in which the materials of art are transformed in their very apprehension, first when they are apprehended as (bare) matter or material, and then again when they are apprehended as capable of containing, releasing, or just triggering aesthetic properties, perceptions or experiences. Aesthetic phenomena cannot help but be experienced synaesthetically by their very nature: they are taken in by the eye and the ear simultaneously, but also by other senses, for instance taste, smell or touch, whether it is by feeling objects with our bodies or through the physical impress that non-tactile senses leave on our sensorium. Consider how a piano is both a stringed and a percussive instrument, and hence its sounds create vibrations that touch the ears and other parts of our bodies. The same is true of the Greek lyre, but also of phenomena generally, which rarely appear in one sensory mode alone.⁸ This being so, synaesthesia is an ideal way of widening our outlook on the experience of art and the theories of art that attempt to encompass this experience. The Muses work in concert as well as apart.

My comments in what follows will fall into three, related sections:

1. First, I want to indicate how synaesthesia raises a basic issue about aesthetic inquiry, ancient or modern, but with special implications for antiquity. This pertains to the syn- half of the term, which points to the complexive nature of aesthetic thought, reflection and practice.

2. Next, I want to suggest that any moment of aesthetic sensation is founded on, or contains, a synaesthetic element. This pertains to the aesthetic element of the term synaesthesia. Here, aesthetics inevitably becomes a kind of syn-aesthetics. If I do nothing else with this paper, I want to explore a few of the reasons why aesthetics in any era are naturally promiscuous in a synaesthetic way, and why Greek antiquity can help illuminate the problem from a particular angle.⁹

3. Finally, I will turn to two final case studies from Greek antiquity, all I will have space for, in order to illustrate these points in greater detail.

SYN-

Synaesthesia is of critical importance to understanding aesthetics of any era – not in the clinical sense of the term, if by this we understand involuntary sympathetic feeling, whereby stimulation of one sense faculty causes a corresponding sensation in another (say, you hear a sound and it conjures up for you the colour blue or a round shape).¹⁰ As fascinating as this phenomenon is, and it is undeniably an element of aesthetics, it is not a core element of aesthetic experience (for starters, it is experienced by a limited population). But something like it is, and I suspect that this is what most of us have in mind when we talk, in aesthetic contexts, about the way language from one sensory sphere is borrowed to describe another. The Greek lyric poets afford plenty of examples of this second phenomenon, as when Pindar uses an architectural metaphor to describe the “golden columns” of the song he has his chorus sing at the start of Olympian 6: “Let us set golden columns beneath the well-walled porch of our sanctuary like a much gazed upon palace. For when a work is begun, it is necessary to make its front far-shining” (Olympian 6.1–3).¹¹

We might be tempted to label descriptions like these grandiose breaches of literal fact. In a strict sense, they are. But in another way they are not. Pindar’s odes were sung before sun-drenched columns. They also had an architectural quality of their own in their verbal structure. How could they fail to take on some of the gleam and sturdiness of their surroundings? Similarly, the term rhuthmos can be used to capture architectural characteristics, whether designating arrangement, pattern, shape, symmetry, perspectival effects, or simply the movement of a building’s appearances in a beholder’s eye.¹² Rhuthmos is attested in at least one of these senses as early as Pindar’s eighth Paean, long before it came to be so used in technical handbooks on architecture: “What rhuthmos”, he asks, “was shown (τίς ὁ ῥυθμὸς ἐφαίνετο) by the all-capable skills of Hephaestus and Athena” on the third temple of Apollo at Pythia?¹³ Finally, Pindar’s odes were not simply sung: they were danced to the very same rhuthmos to which they were sung.

So, when Pindar’s choruses sing about the architectural dimensions of their own song, what they are in fact doing is describing in spatial terms what their audience is taking in not just aurally but also visually, at the very moment the song is being put into rhythmic motion in three or more ways and senses before them: as music, motion, song and language. A sound is being seen. Pindar may well be alluding to the architectonics of his own song structure, and not merely to the artisanal, craftsmanlike features of his art (its facture), with the dimensional metaphors that characterize so much of his poetry. These building metaphors (which we use today: stanza originally means a room where you stop and stand, and before that, a stay or support, like a kiōn, or column of song, in Pindar¹⁴) are too often construed in recent scholarship as marking a rivalry with the plastic arts, whether sculptural or architectural, and indeed as a vaunting on Pindar’s part that declares the superiority of the transportable, mobile word over the materially fixed, immobile works of three-dimensional art, as in the following two representative examples:

A golden foundation has been wrought for holy songs. Come, let us now build an intricate vocal adornment ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: synaesthesia and the ancient senses
• 1. Why are there nine Muses?
• 2. Haptic Herodotus
• 3. The understanding ear: synaesthesia, paraesthesia and talking animals
• 4. Aristophanes, Cratinus and the smell of comedy
• 5. "Looking mustard": Greek popular epistemology and the meaning of δριμύς
• 6. Plato, beauty and "philosophical synaesthesia"
• 7. Manilius' cosmos of the senses
• 8. Reading death and the senses in Lucan and Lucretius
• 9. Colour as synaesthetic experience in antiquity
• 10. Blinded by the light: oratorical clarity and poetic obscurity in Quintilian
• 11. The sense of a poem: Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595)
• 12. Saussure's anaphonie: sounds asunder
• 13. Beyond Narcissus
• Bibliography
• Index