Former posting by JM: While I was watching Fellini’s masterpiece “E La Nave Va” … imagine if Fellini was aware of V.Nabokov’s synesthesia and introduced it as an homage to him? No, no way [ ]Google search informed me that not only Fellini was a synaesthete, but Pina Baush too. So… no direct links to Nabokov, but lots of interesting clues about Synesthesia that are worth sharing here.
Jansy Mello: In one of the links embedded inside the main references, I reached a scientific paper about synesthesia. Synaesthesia, creativity and art: What is the link? Jamie Ward, Daisy Thompson-Lake, Roxanne Ely and Flora Kaminski Department of Psychology, University College London, British Journal of Psychology (2008), 99, 127– The British Psychological Society www.bpsjournals.co.uk .* According to the authors, Nabokov’s synesthesia remains unproven for his experience belongs among the “self-reported” number of synaesthetes. Yes, not even Van Veen was able to ascertain that…
What about V.Nabokov’s indications that also Tolstoy and Proust had been synaesthetes? (although I think that VN was more in awe of the extension of sensations and memories combined in their sentences and how it created a new kind of “synesthetic effect”). To evaluate the effect of Proust’s “fairy-tale” on VN (and the knowledge about their shared experience of reading Henri Bergson, his ideas on duration and Time) it is necessary to reread the entire Proust lecture. Here are some very few samples, though:
“And these flowers [now the combination of all the senses] had chosen precisely the colour of some edible and delicious things, or of some exquisite addition to one’s costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason of their superiority, are those whose beauty is more evident to the eyes of children…” (p. 233)
“an image which was not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others that allowed themselves to be suffused by the orange tint of a sonorous syllable [Marcel saw sounds in color]” (p.235).
“This band of light was of a mauve color, the violet tint that runs through the whole book, the very color of time.” (p.241)
“The narrator is able to identify the sensation rising from the past as what he had once felt when he stood on two uneven stones …and with that sensation came all the others connected with that day…It was in the same way that the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray to my mind.” (p.246) …“a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, that is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again” p.249.
And: “In Proust’s case the peculiar point is that he drifts from the idea of pale light to that of remote music – the sense of vision grades into the sense of hearing.// But Proust had a precursor. In part six, chapter 2, of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1864-1869) Prince Andrey stays at the country manor…”the sounds became still like the moon and the shadows.”[…] “the close association of the visible and the heard, of shadow light and shadow sound, of ear and eye.”(p.220)
Perhaps this is why, in PF, when Kinbote mentions Proust, he refers to Tolstoy two times (but the name of Dostoevsky in the first instance apparently denies this linkage): **
Cf. CK,s note to line 181 (importantly marked from Shade’s word “today”):
“Speaking of novels," I said, "you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described — by Cocteau, I think — as ‘a mirage of suspended gardens,’ and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski’s (and Lyovin’s) thick neck, and a cupid’s buttocks for cheeks; but — and now let me finish sweetly — we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking ‘human interest’: it is there, it is there — maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing."//I am a very sly Zemblan. Just in case, I had brought with me in my pocket the third and last volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, Paris, 1954, of Proust’s work, wherein I had marked certain passages on pages 269-271. Mme. de Mortemart, having decided that Mme. de Valcourt would not be among the "elected" at her soirée, intended to send her a note on the next day saying "Dear Edith, I miss you, last night I did not expect you too much (Edith would wonder: how could she at all, since she did not invite me?) because I know you are not overfond of this sort of ‘parties which, if anything, bore you."…So much for John Shade’s last birthday.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
*What evidence, if any, points to a link between synaesthesia and creativity? First, some researchers have noted that synaesthesia is found in a number of famous creative individuals (Mulvenna & Walsh, 2005). A common list of gifted synaesthetes includes the composers Messian (Bernard, 1986) and Scriabin (Peacock, 1985), the painters Kandinsky (Ione & Tyler, 2003) and Hockney (Cytowic, 2002), the physicist Feynman (1988) and the author Nabokov (1967). However, without a comparison of the prevalence of synaesthesia in such gifted individuals relative to the general population these claims are not convincing. It has also been claimed that synaesthesia is more common in creative artists – poets, musicians, visual artists, etc. However, the evidence is equivocal. Domino (1989) assessed subjective reports of synaesthesia in 358 fine arts students and reported a prevalence of 23%. Domino found a difference between the selfreported synaesthetes and matched controls on four measures of creativity. However, there was no objective measure of synaesthesia employed. Contemporary researchers use a wide variety of objective tests that discriminate between synaesthetes and other individuals such as measures of consistency (Baron-Cohen et al., 1993), Stroop-like interference in colour naming (e.g. Mattingley et al., 2001; Mills et al., 1999), functional imaging (Nunn et al., 2002) and psychophysical measures (e.g. Hubbard, Manohar, & Ramachandran, 2006; Palmeri, Blake, Marois, Flanery, & Whetsell, 2002). Other prevalence studies that have relied on subjective reports alone have found similar levels of self-report even though they did not restrict the sample to fine arts (e.g. Calkins, 1895; Karwoski & Odbert, 1938; Rose, 1909). A recent prevalence study that did use an objective measure found a prevalence of 4.4%, although around 25% of participants initially reported synaesthesia-like experiences (Simner et al., 2006).
**Here is what connects these lines in PF to the lecture on Proust: “In his youth Proust had studied the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Proust’s fundamental ideas regarding the flow of time concern the constant evolution of personality in terms of duration, the unsuspected riches of our subliminal minds which we can retrieve only by an act of intuition, of memory, of involuntary associations; also the subordination of mere reason to the genius of inner inspiration and the consideration of art as the only reality in the world; these Proustian ideas are colored editions of the Bergsonian thought. Jean Cocteau has called the work “A giant miniature, full of mirages, of superimposed gardens, of games conducted between space and time.” (LL, Fred Bowers, 1980,p.208)