Progrès ou décadence, art ou fumisterie? La critique fin-de-siècle des synesthésies

Abstract

Defined as the individual and recurrent association of the mental image of a color with the perception of a sound, colored hearing—including the sensory perceptions named synesthesia from the 1890s onwards—had a substantial impact on both the arts and sciences during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. During this media age, chronicles, popular essays, fiction, works by art, literary, and theatrical critics, and caricatures dealing with this modality of sensory perception multiplied in the newspaper and specialized press, in fashion newspapers, and in the satirical press. Often in dialogue with each other, these articles and drawings constitute a corpus testifying of the international reception of the arts and sciences of synesthesia. Above all, the press articles reflect a keen interest in synesthesia, which emerged as a social topic that, at times, aroused exasperation or enthusiasm but most often curiosity and perplexity. Three main postures stand out in the critical reception of synesthetic or polysensorial works of art: doubts about the reality of these perceptions, which were expressed in spite of the scientific endorsement from which the synesthesia benefited; the enthusiasm stemming from the emergence of novel perceptions likely to transform one's relationship to art and the world; and, finally, the belief that these perceptions testified to a degeneration of art and humanity. The aim of this article is to observe how these questions, fundamental to the history of aesthetic appreciation, were presented to the large and diverse reading public of the fin-de-siècle press in order to highlight the conceptions and judgments associated with synesthesia as well as the endogenous links forged among sensory perception, progress, and decadence. This approach allows us to better grasp the enthusiasm and resistance generated by questioning the hierarchies that have governed the history of the senses and the arts.