digital emunction

From “The Poet Who Could Smell Vowels,” an article by John E. Joseph in the current TLS that quotes Ferdinand de Saussure’s record of his synesthesia (first included anonymously in a study by William James’s friend Théodore Flournoy):

In French we write the same vowel four different ways in terrain, plein, matin, chien. Now when this vowel is written ain, I see it in pale yellow like an incompletely baked brick; when it is written ein, it strikes me as a network of purplish veins; when it is written in, I no longer know at all what colour sensation it evokes in my mind, and am inclined to believe that it evokes none….

So it does not seem to be the vowel as such—as it exists for the ear, that is—that calls forth a certain corresponding visual sensation. On the other hand, neither is it seeing a certain letter or group of letters that calls forth this sensation. Rather it is the vowel as it is contained in this written expression, it is the imaginary being formed by this first association of ideas which, through another association, appears to me as endowed with a certain consistency and a certain colour, sometimes also a certain shape and a certain smell.

Joseph also quotes Saussure’s experience of the French letter-sound a:

[It is] off-white, approaching yellow; in its consistency, it is something solid, but thin, that cracks easily if struck, for example a sheet of paper (yellowed with age) drawn tight in a frame, a flimsy door (in unvarnished wood left white) that you feel would shatter at the slightest blow, an already broken eggshell that you can keep cracking by pressing on it with your fingers. Better still: the shell of a raw egg is a (whether in colour or in the consistency of the object), but the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not a, because of the feeling you have that the object is compact and resistant. A yellowed pane of glass is a; a pane of ordinary colour, offering blueish reflections, is the very opposite of a, because of its colour, and despite its consistency being just right.

Garry Wills reviews Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism in this week’s New York Review of Books. A preview of the review is available here.

Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism won a 2007 Bancroft Prize. Also well worth your time are Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.

Pamela Lu’s “Ambient Parking Lot,” which was first published in Chicago Review 51:4/52:1, appears in this month’s Harper’s magazine. So does a review of Bob Richardson’s William James biography. You should buy them both.