Oltre i sensi. Forme e stili della sinestesia moderna

Abstract

Synesthesia, both as a literary figure and as a perceptual experience, is the main focus of this work which aims at identifying and analyzing the fascination for the synesthetic phenomenon across several disciplines in the last three centuries. I try to pursue an interdisciplinary approach considering the evolution of the term as a literary metaphor (popular during the Romantic and Symbolist periods) and as a medical/psychological condition (starting with the definition of the disease known as audition coloree in the 1870s) and observe how the two perspectives have been a source of mutual influence and stimulated a desire for the synesthetic experience which took various shapes in the English and French culture from the XVIIIth century up until today’s neuroscientific investigations. Achieving great popularity with Isaac Newton’s theory of the analogy between the light spectrum and the proportions of musical octaves, synesthesia became a key feature of Romanticism. In the light of the complex relationship of Romantic writers with the new scientific methods, I suggest that the synesthetic metaphor could be seen as a strategic literary device allowing them to reconfigure the scientific discoveries about perception within a traditional, religious framework. While in the second half of the XIXth century, the discovery of audition coloree generated a new (medical) interest in the synesthetic experience, the popularity of the sonnet “Voyelles” by Arthur Rimbaud pioneered a new form of literary synesthesia expressed through the symbolic qualities of the poetic language. If the Romantic metaphor is, by then, considered obsolete, the attribution of colors to vowels created an awareness of language as intrinsically synesthetic which inspired the new generations of Symbolist and Modernist writers. Sound symbolism is at the forefront of the XXth century avant-garde experimentation with writers such as Gertrude Stein or the Dadaist group openly pursuing synesthetic purposes in their poems. Their achievements in highlighting the synesthetic qualities of the signifier anticipate, as I will argue, much of the modern neuroscientific claims about the relationship between language and the synesthetic experience.