RENÉ GHIL AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF SYNESTHESIA

NO ONE BUT A SPECIALIST in French Symbolism is likely to know much about René Ghil nowadays. His poetry is no longer read, and the correspondences among vowels, colors, and musical timbres spelled out in his Traité du verbe do not have the objective necessity he claimed for them. Critical studies of his work tend to begin ad hominem with a reference to his "megalomania" and proceed to draw an instructive, but by now surely unnecessary, contrast between his poetic mediocrity and the excellence of his master, Mallarmé. Yet if Ghil's value for us is chiefly that of an instructive failure, it must be said that he failed more strikingly and memorably as a theorist than as a poet. The problems he encountered are permanent and basic ones, involving the role of language in aesthetic experience and the relationship of poetry to music and the visual arts. As a result, a detailed examination of his synesthetic system should have a more than esoteric interest . . .

I would have made no difference to René Ghil to be told that strong synesthetic associations occur in only 12 to 13% of the...population, since he himself, the true voyant, was one in a million. He did not recognize that the complexities and irregularities described by [Hermann von] Helmholtz, whose [1863] treatise he read in translation around 1887, gave no reason to suppose that an objectively valid, universally acceptable system of correspondences could ever be worked out. He understood only that scientists were on the job and took heart from the meticulousness of their procedures. They could be relied upon to bring up the rear, while he himself dealt with loftier matters, such as the relationship of Pythagorean intonation (a description of which was appended to the 1868 edition of Helmholtz's treatise) to the harmony of the spheres . . .

A clear discussion of modest scope will resist the very nature of synesthesia, which fosters a confusion of categories. It will exclude all information pertaining to senses other than those of sight and hearing--the "sweet and sour borscht" taste of "a tone pitched at 50 cycles per second" reported by the Russian mnemonist, for example, or the "musique des liqueurs" composed by des Esseintes on his "orgue à bouche" ("mouth organ"). Reports of impressions which obliterate all reasonable distinctions must also be ruled out: if the whole French language is "dark brown . . . German, green . . . Ancient Greek, yellow," as one man claimed, or if all of Gounoud's music is "violet," while all of Beethoven's is "black," there is nothing more to be said. Once the field has been weeded and circumscribed in this way, the difficulty of telling what, in synesthesia, corresponds to what, can be presented in the form that occupied René Ghil, for whom the color of sound was not a function of pitch, but of timbre.