Creative Synaesthesia in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck

Abstract

240Val Scullion and Marion Treby human beings had been interconnected with nature in their primeval state and now yearned to return to that lost harmony of spirit and matter. Schubert's work not only suggested to Hoffmann that poets, visionaries and madmen were highly sensitive to this universal magnetism, 18 opening up possibilities of synaesthetic experiences, but this work is explicitly cited by Hoffmann in descriptions of the underlying sound of nature in his novellas Die Automate (The Automata, 1819, 4: 421) and Der Unheimliche Gast (The Uncanny Guest, 1820, 4: 725). 19 Along with many other European intellectuals of the late-18th century, Johann Ritter influenced Hoffmann's understanding of the inseparable sensations of hearing and sight. Hoffmann often alludes to Ritter and specifically quotes him in a densely synaesthetic passage in Johannes Kreislers Lehrbrief (Johannes Kreisler's Indenture, 1815). 20 According to Ritter's cosmology, sound and light vibrate as one throughout the whole universe. His theory that '[n]o apprehension of the universe is of such complete and absolute value as the acoustic one (als die akustische)' 21 has an important bearing on the epistemology of musical performance and speech, which are dominant preoccupations in Ritter Gluck. (Johann) Ritter characterised music and language as stemming from the same primeval source, which, he maintained, caused language to operate through associated or internally imagined sounds, rather than by means of conceptual nomenclature. 22 Furthermore, universal vibration, otherwise referred to as the music of nature, emits tone or nature tone. This enabled human beings, like sounding boards, to respond to nature through a 'thousand chemical, electrical and magnetic processes (tausend chemische, elektrische, magnetische Prozesse)'. 23 In short therefore, he privileged the sensory response of hearing over vision, maintaining that 'hearing is seeing from within (das Hören ist ein Sehen von innen) the innermost consciousness'. 23 These brief allusions to the contemporary theories of the natural philosophers Schubert and Ritter, both acknowledged by Hoffmann, illuminate his work. Their research enriches his understanding of the overpowering effect of music and the cosmic sounds of nature on the Romantic sensibilities of the artist.A further example of received scientific wisdom was the sensorium commune. According to late 18th-and early 19th-century natural philosophy, namely science, it was taken to be the percipient centre to which sense-impressions were transmitted by the nerves. 1 It was believed to operate through one unified sense, which fused differentiated stimuli. The driving forces were feeling and emotion, rather than reason and abstract thought. The foregoing outline of contemporary German Romantic Science reveals the origins of present-day research into synaesthesia, kinaesthesia and synkinesia. 25 Technological developments in neuroscience have irrefutably shown, through CAT (computed axial tomography), PET (positron emission tomography) an...