Synaesthesia in Cixous and Barthes

7/30/2019 Synaesthesia in Cixous and Barthes

1/17

Synaesthesia in Cixous and BarthesClaire Oboussier

Ne vous opposez pas au monde sensoriel.1The term synaesthesia where a stimulus applied to one sense involuntarilyelicits a response from one or more others describes both a neurologicalsyndrome and a literary device and the two cannot be conflated unproblemati-cally. The former pertains to concrete physical sensation and the latter, moreoften, to poetic notions of transfemng one sense into another. Notw ithstand-ing this distinction, the latter was elaborated from the former: as a literarydevice, synaesthesia describes and inscribes bodily sensation, and sensationprecedes ideation. Synaesthesia is present in the writings of both Cixous andBarthes. It occurs most notably in Barthess writing on painting and music,for example Cy Twombly ou non multa sed multum, Sagesse de lart,Rquichot et son corps, and Ecoute. It is inscribed throughout Cixousswriting and most actively in LApproche de C larice Lispector, La Venue lcriture, Le dernier tableau ou le portrait de dieu and LA. Synaesthesia isaxial in the intersecting projects of Cixous and Barthes to rehabilitate sensoryperception (it can be read as a production of this project) which , in turn, isintegral to a w ider concern to redefine knowledge. Thus he synaesthesia inoperation here is more than poetic effect. It has wider epistemologicalimplications which are both extensive and open-ended. In thispaper some o fthese implications will be examined through the writing o f l ix o u s and Barthes.Therefore synaesthesia will not always be addressed directly; where it leadsto and proceeds fiom w ill be of equal significance in the broader agenda ofredefrning knowledge and the position o f sensory perception with regard toknowledge.

The synaesthetic writing of Cixous and Barthes is radically open and thisopenness necessarily informs the structurai pattern of this essay. Moreover, itprecludes arrival at any peremptory conclusions. The first section therefore1 Tao to Kingquoted by Barthes inAlors, la Chine?,Paris, 1975, 14.


2/17

116 Claire Oboussier

traces briefly the m arginalisation of sensory perception as t took effect in thePlatonic tradition. Following his, Richard Cytowics recently published bookThe Man Who Tasted Shapes is considered as an example of how within thescientific register o f neurology synaesthesia has had profound epistemologicalimplications. Cytowic explores how synaesthesia has presented g rounds fora re-conceptualisation of sense perception and how this is linked to new insightinto the organisation of the brain and the formulation of knowledge. Fromhere I proceed to an exam inationof the synaesthesia mobilised in the writingsof Cixous and Barthes. First, Cixouss expanded use of metaphor is consid-ered; how this kind of relation to metaphor is bound up with the body andsensory perception. This leads into an examination of her writing fmm andthrough the writings of C larice Lispector wherein sense perception is re-mo-bilised and sense modalities are reinscribed. There followsa section on rhy thmand a discussion of how this inherently transgressive category (in terms of thecompartmentalisation of the senses) is linked to notions of the body in bothwriters and carries all the senses concurrently. The paper conc ludes with aconsideration of music as a privileged idiom of signification for both Cixousand Barthes.The marginaiisation of sensorial perceptionCixous and Barthes both claim that sensorial perception has been repudiatedand marginalised. This repudiation can be traced back to Platonic thoughtwherein all physical objects in the world were consideredas basically unreai.Plato therefore situated reality in ideal forms because it would be impossibleto say, for example, of the form of roundness that it is not round. A form canbe named without risk o f error or exception and thus it can be considered asreal: it is its conceptual nature that qualifies it for reality. Sensory experienceof the world in the Platonic matrix is regarded as unreal and is mediated andcategorised through a reasoned form of thought. This epistemological fiame-work is quite opposed to the ancient materialist theories wh ich based knowingon the senses. Barthess methodological alliances with t h i s latter paradigm o fknowledge are bom out by his use of certain elem ents of its terminology inorder both to ground and to describe his own writing: words such as schmaand, notably, esthtique. Returning o the latters etymological oot the Greek


3/17

Synaesthesia in Cixous and Barthes 117

term aisthesis refers to sensation and perception. Perception was initiallyintroduced into Greek philosophy as a way of defining the physical processesinvolved in contact with objects. F. E. Peters notes how various explanationswere proposed , mainly concerning the contact, mixture or penetration of thebodies involved and that despite certain discrepancies the first major crisis inthese theories only came about when:

grades of knowledge were distinguished and sense perception wasseparated from other more reliable types of perception that had littleor nothing to d o w ith sensible realitiesor sensible processes. Aisthesisfound itself involved in the epistemological doubts raised by Heracli-tus and Pannenides and debarred from any genuine access to truth?

This change also coincided with the increasingly widespread belief in theimmaterial, ideal quality of the soul, situated as he centre of life in the subjectand the source of sensuous activity. Thus a new relationship between incor-poreal soul and material body emerged, as Peters describes:

#at had once been a simple contact between bodies was nowextended to a chain of causality that began with a perceived body andits qualities, and passed, v ia a medium (...) a sense organ, and a sensefaculty to the soul, becoming , at least for those who held the immate-r i a i i s of the SOUI, noncorpoGeaI at some point in the process. (GPT,8-9)

Aisthesis came under increasing attack and episterne took precedence.Thought was exalted as a superior kind of perception and speculation wasdeemed to be dem onstrated by experiential perception in that order. This isan order which Cixous and Barthes are engaged in strategies to invert.Moreover, their common sanctioning of the poetic over the theoretical is inline with this inversion. The poetic, in Jakobsons formulation (which wasdoubtless influential on both Cixous and Barthes), is constituted by theaesthetic signifier and art affects the subject: it touches hi m he r throughthe senses. The mobilisation of synaesthetic paradigms in the writing of bothis one o f the m ost affective and thus significant of these strategies workingas it does to inscribe heterogeneous sensation in language.

2 E . Peters, GreekPhilosophicalTenns: A HistoricalLexicon.New York,1967,8, hereaftercited in the text asGPT.


4/17


The Man Who Tasted Shapes: synaesthesiaand neurologyAs a lived condition synaesthesia has had profound implications for theneuro-scientific apparatus of analysis. Richard Cytow ics The Man WhoTasted Shapes may serve as a productive intertext for the reading whichfollows since the difficulties and conundrum s synaesthesia posed for neuro-science correlate at many levels with the kind of theoretical and poeticmutations encountered in the writing of Cixous and Barthes. The neuro-sci-entific framework evoked here cannot serve to explain the synaesthetic pro-ductions of their writing, nor am setting out to make some pseudo-scientificdiagnosis o f them as synaesthetes. These considerations of syaesthesia as aneurological condition occupy the position of a brief excursus, serving, toshow some of the w ider implications of synaesthetic paradigms of significa-tion and of the revindication of a sensorial relation to the w orld.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes relates the authors (a neuro-scientist)exploration of synaesthesia through the experience of synaesthetes and theprofoundly disturbing implications the phenom enon had for many of the mostbasic tenets of neuro-science. Historically, synaesthesia had been deemedunworthy of scientific attention due to its ideopathic nature. An experiencethat is subjective and different in each manifestation, he only means o f gainingknowledge of it was through the reports of those who claimed to experienceit. Its lack of external manifestations made it almost impossible to generaliseabout and thereby construct any coherent scientific explanation. Due to itslack of shared reference, Cytow ic contends, synaesthesia has been marginai-ised linguistically and culturally and denied legitimacy and expression. Heinsists, however, that subjective experiences such as synaesthesia are, in fact,the bread an d b ~ t t e r ~f clinical neurology and, moreover, the only m eans togauge any sensory perception. The quality of synaesthesia, according toCytow ic, is that it is a direct sensory experience. It has no meaning, thesensation being mem orable rather than its name: The experience of synaes-thesia is concrete (...) it is more like a sensation than an abstract idea (MTS,106).3 Richard Cytowic, The Mon Who TastedShupes,London, 1994,73, hereafter cited in the textas MTS.


5/17


Furthermore, in certain cases where the synaesthetic perceptions areoverwhelmingly strong the subject can have difficulty in discerning thesemantic function of language. He quotes Lurias patient S: What strikes mefirst is the colour of someones voice (...)He has a crumbly, yellow voice, likea flame with protruding fibers. Som etimes I get so interested in the voice, Icant understand whats being said (32). Here sensation takes precedenceover semantics, doubtless causing considerable difficulties for the subject.This is an inversion also noted by B arthes in his essay Ecoute where heobserves: Parfois, la voix dun interlocuteur nous frappe plus que le contenude son discours et nous nous surprenons couter les modulations et lesharmoniques de cette voix sans entendre ce quelle nous dit? in the case Sit proved hopeless asking him to convert specific experiences into generalinstances, a basic p rocedure in inductive reasoning, since the particularities ofeach synaesthetic experience are unique and form a singular event in the lifeof the subject. Cytowic and his most important case study Michael Watsonhad em barked upon their research into synaesthesia with both the intentionand expectation of finding an identifiable physiological explanation in thegeography of the brain, in Cytowics words, possibly a tangle of neurons, ashort circuit that we could point to and say, Ah ha, heres the culprit (7).The assumption at the outset was that something was not functioning as itshould, that a technical fault was interfering with the mechanics of the sensesas discrete, separate modalities.

Cytowic points to many recent innovations in neurology including therelinquishment of the pivotal standard view which rested on three essentialconcepts: first, that flow of information is linear, second, that physical andmental functions can be localised to separate parts o fthe cortex, different lobesbeing concerned with different senses, and third, that there exists a hierarchyin which the cortex dominated all that is beneath it. The cortex is the greyouter bark of the brain, only one millimetre thick, far more developed inhum ans than in other animals. A n important corollary of this third assumptionis that the suprem e cortical function is language and that language containsthe contents of our brains (which in tumrests on a notion of language as a4 Roiand Barthes,Ecoute(1976). inlobvie et lobtus,Paris, 1982.225.


6/17


recipient rather than an active producer and, further, on the assumption thatany sensation not contained in language is in some way impossible andillegitimate). The three assum ptions together yielded another fundam entallyimportant concept: the cortex was held to be the site of reason and the m ind,in Cytowics words those things that m ake us human (23).

Through his study of the aphasia in Maurice Ravel which had produceda tragic situation where the composer could still conceive musically and hearmusic in his head but was unable to express it through writing, playing orsinging, Cytowic was led to the split-brain research of the 1970s in whichconnections between the two hemispheres of the brain were entirely severed(as n surgery for extreme cases ofepilepsy). Subsequent tests on the recipientsof this somewhat draconian surgical intervention revealed what Cytowic callsa wonderfulparadox: the person who speaks is not the person who perceives(17). In these tests, input was limited to one hem isphere at a time and itemerged that each hemisphere reacted differently: the right hand literallydoes not know what the left one is doing. One hem isphere can solve a problemfor which it is well suited, while the other one responds with surprise, ignorantof what is going on (MTS, 17). In this way, Cytow ic deduces that there ismore than one personality in each subject but that the nerve fibres connectingthe two hemispheres produce the seamless illusion of a single, integratedself-namely, the person who speaks (17). The radical implication of this isthat language is only one intellectual function, in Cytowics words: Noteverything we are capable of know ing and doing is accessible to o r expressiblein language. This means that some of our personal knowledge is ofl imitseven to our own inner thoughts 17). Moreover, he goes on to contend that:We actually have severai streams-of-consciousness running every moment.That not all of them are accessible to language has important implications forwhat we can know in the conventional sense (24).

With the unseating of the cortex from the position o f control, monisticassumptions about rationality have also begun to be questioned and forms ofknow ledge derived fiom previously discredited categories such as emotion,intuition and other forms of mentation which are not normally accessible toself-awareness, are being re-evaluated. These form s of mentation are notlocated in the cortex but in the limbic system which is to be found much deeper


7/17


in the tissue of the brain. The new view of how the brain works is an almosttotal inversion of its antecedent. First, the flow of information is not linearbut parallel, multiplex and non-hierarchical and includes mobilisation ofinformation that does not travel along nerves. Second, functions are no longerconsidered to be localised in certain sections of the brain but distributedthroughout. Thus a given part of the brain serves many different senses andfunctions, jus t as a given function does not reside in one particular part of thebrain but is diffused over more than one area. Third, whilst our model of realityand analysis of the world outside is still a function of the cortex, it is the limbicsystem that makes decisions about the salience of these data. Thus our actsare u ltimately determined by an emotional choice rather than a rational one.What emerges is that we know (in the broadest sense of the word) more thanthat which we learn through rational thought and its language. Tlie epistemo-logical implications ofthis new view are patent enough in regard to the alreadyover-cited Cartesian Cogito.

Before proceeding to the synaesthetic mobilisations in the writing ofCixous and Barthes, some further germane observations Cytow ic makes aboutthe phenom enon of synaesthesia towards the end of his book merit note. Hecontends that synaesthesia is in fact an ordinary working process of the brainwhich normally remains beyond the reaches of awareness. In synaesthetes,the experience peeps through to consciousness (apparently due to a sh ift incerebral metabolism) so that synaesthetes know they are synaesthetic whilethe rest of us do not (MTS, 166). Synaesthesia is a multisensory evaluationof the w orld, not something that has been added, but has always existed, amultisensory awareness is something that has been lost from consciousawareness in the majority of people (MTS, 167). Furthermore, he proposesthat synaesthesia is not an isolated, esoteric quirk (...) [but that] some aspectof it points to a notic understanding of which everyone is capable (166).Notic comes from the Greek nous meaning intellect, understanding. It is atthe etym ological root of the word knowledge but refers to a knowledge that isexperienced directly and which imparts a sense of truth: truth unplumbed bythe discursive intellect. It thus provides an understanding of something


8/17


without a knowledge of the m eans of understanding it.5 Perhaps the m ostimportant characteristic of synaesthesia is this d irectness accompanied by anunshakeable certitude that the perception is real, a thats it! response with asense of insight and enlightenment.

This brief, laical foray into neurology in no way maps neatly onto thesynaesthesia now to be considered in the writing of Cixous and Barthes.However, it may stand as a fertile intertext. Beyond this it demonstrates thefundam ental epistemological questions implied by synaesthetic sensory per-ception.Metaphorical effects and corporealityCixouss texts are constructed around a rich fabric of metaphor. Within thehistory of European writing metaphor was marginalised and denigrated in theRationalism of the seventeenth century. Franoise Defiom mont remarks thatanalogies were excluded as if they interfered with and de-routed the purevision of abstractions6 Metaphorical thinking, she goes on , was feminised,inferior thought. Defiom mont also makes the pertinent distinction betweenmetaphor as Ornamentation and metaphor as an embodiment of writing. Thefirst functions to embellish an idea, in an analogous way to a photograph usedto illustrate or legitimate a journalists report. The second operates in a quiteantithetical way, giving thought a corporeal base. This kind of metaphor, againin Defrommonts words anchor[s] thought into matter, embodying ideas,giving them som ething of a body-instead of just being ideas they becom ethinkable (Defiomm ont, 117). This engenders a different dynamic in theprocess of thought: not to withdraw fiom, to abstract, but to remain in theflux. Thought becomes a mobile process requiring continuity not separation.It is no longer constituted of preordained ideas; words m eet and infiltrate eachother, exceeding the fixed repertoireof language. Cixouss expansive use of5

6This notic understanding characterises Barthess relation to photography in Lo Chambreclaire.Franoise Defiommont, MetaphoricalThinkingand Poetic Writing in Virginia Woolf andHlne Cixous in The Body and rhe Text: Hlne Cixous,Reading and Teaching,edited byHelen W ilcox, Keith McW atters,Ann Thompson and Linda R.Williams,London, 1990,116,hereafte r cited in the text as Defrommont.


9/17


metaphor is very much in the sp irit of this second, material kind; in her ownwords: Langue de ma mre, moins langue que musique, moins syntaxe quechant de mots (...) ne scrit pas: me traverse, me fait lamour, aimer, parler,rire de sentir son air me caresser la g ~ r g e . ~ere metaphor does not serve todecorate. Rather, it is the substance of the work itself, the nearest it comes tohaving a structure. Furthermore, and vital to the approach of this paper, it isthe body that gives meaning to the metaphorical effects she inscribes; theseeffects are grounded in bodily sensation. Any m etaphor is possible within theterms of the body since the body is not only written but writing, not only aproduction of language but also a producer of it. Thus the synaesthesiaencountered in Cixouss writing is the body signing itself and its metaphoricityis precisely that which gives it its materiality.Clarice Lispector: Sensing the worldThrough the w ork o f the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector Cixous writestowards a direct, multisensory apprehensionof the world. In LApproche deClarice Lispector she claims that Lispectors writing teaches an approach; itis always in the present, within it chaque instant est . It lets lappel deschoses be heard,8 capturing the call which is in the thing itself, no longerseparating the m ateriality, the physical presence o f the thing, from the wordsused to denote it. In Lispectors writing les mots dans cette voix son desfruits (LApproche, 118, my emphasis). For Cixous, this is a writing, arelation to language, which manages to transgress pervasive patterns ofpreconceived thought which leave no space for thinking of the sm allest thingselon son mode vivant (LApproche, 119). This living space which Cixouscalls Zenfrenous, s, she argues, that which escapes the mechanismsof thoughtwe are taught to employ. Here, Cixous is rearticulating the Heideggerianconcept of Being and joining the phenom enological call for the investigationof the things themselves in the realm of philosophy. As Morag Shiach notes,Cixouss reference to Heidegger is important in that it links her deconstructive7 Hlne Cixous, La Venue B lcriture in Entre lcriture, Paris, 1986,31, hereafter cited inthe text as LaVenue.8 Hlne Cixous, LApproche de Clarice Lispector (1979) in Entre lcriture, 117-18,hereafter cited in the text as LApproche.


10/17


project to eradicate binary thought patterns with the positive commitment toconstruct different paradigms of signification based on the art of keepinga l i ~ e . ~eideggers critique of m etaphysical thought and self-consciousnessclaimed that these m echanisms of thought were ways of avoiding the questionof Being and, furthermore, that they posited a subject separated from othersand from the world. For Heidegger subjectivity is always intersubjective andhe conceives of it as a relational element of Being (Sh iach, 60). Cixoussentrenous,crucially, holds the possibility for expanded intersubjective econo-mies. in LApproche de Clarice Lispector she stresses that nous devonssauver lapproche qui ouvre et laisse la place de I autre 1 19) and, still writingof Lispector, a few lines later she em ploys a synaesthetic paradigm to showthis entrenous: Les phrases dans sa voix sont des jardins o je cros. Sontdes forts. Des panthres passent. Ses phrases pas de panthre douce. Savoix peuple, sauvage, coute (1 19). The word approaches the thing and thething is allowed to approach the word in a perpetual reciprocal movement ofgivingheceiving wherein the relation to the o ther is not one of separation butrather a kind of mobile crossing.

What Cixous discovers through Lispector (i.e. through this intersubjectivespace created in her writing) is an access to knowledge through the senses.The lesson of lenteur must be learnt, she says, the art of receiving:

Savoir recevoir est le meilleur des dons (...) il sagit de recevoir la leondes choses. Si nous savons penser, en direction de la chose, nouslaisser appeler elle, la chose nous mne un espace compos de lachose et de nous. (LApproche, 1 19)For this receptive approach the senses must be reclaimed differently: Savoirvoir avant la vue, savoir entendre, avant la comprhension (1 19). Cixous isalluding to a vision pared of its history as an apparatus of power and itsfundamental implication in the history of representation as a privilegedparadigm of signification in the West. By the same token the hearing she callsfor attends to the sonorous substance of words as much as the m eaning theyare supposed to hold. Lispector has a different way of naming: les nom s sont9 Morag Shiach,Hlne Cixous: A Politics of Writing, ondon, 1991,60, hereafter cited inthe textas Shiach.


11/17


des mains quelle pose sur espace, avec une tendresse si intense (122). HereCixous produces an image in which the naming process of language is madetactile, conferred the quality of a bodily gesture: the proximity and directnessof touch. This is the kind of relationship to language she solicits. We live inviolent and lazy times, she says o nous ne vivons pas ce que nous vivons(122); we are not receptive to the presence, the materiality of things as theypresent themselves to us because we experience the world by means of analienated language. W ords as hey are most often used are dried up, embalmedand reduced, to the extent that, paradoxically, they finish by obstructing theroute to their referent, or as Cixous puts it il ne reste plus rien de la mer quunnot exist; the word sea should feel wet, taste sa i ty and smell of seaweed. Sheappeals to a previous edenic state where words existed in a direct physicalrelation to their referents:

Ils surgissaient des ch oses autrefois comme lclat de leur r i re essen-tiel, quand, de joies, elles sappelaient, elles exultaient leur nom-par-fum, et mer, mer sentait algues, bruissait sel, et nous gotionslaime infinie, nous lch ions ltrangre, le sel de sa parole sur noslvres. (123)

mot sans eau (123). For her, this hiatus between signifier and signified should

Within the K antian taxonomy o f the senses the mechanical senses ofhearing, sight and touch are differentiated from the chemical senses of tasteand smell. The mechanical senses pertain to perception and the chemicalsenses to pleasure. Kant also postulated qualitative differences between thetwo groups: smell and taste were considered superior to sight and touch dueto the latters exteriority. He did not, however, associate pleasure and knowl-edge but acknowledgednevertheless that in former times pleasure commandedknowledge as experience before the fracturing ofj ou ir (to have pleasure) andknowledge. For Cixous, links wth that kind of knowledge must be retainedand recreated; a knowledge not based upon separation, exteriority and con-trolling sight but rather the continuity and closeness of the chem ical senses ofsmell and taste. Within the m etaphorical substance of her writing she re-em-bodies the mechanical senses of hearing, touch and sight, assigning qualitiesascribed to one sense to others, perpetually transfusing their imputed charac-teristics so that they expatiate with the language inscribing hem. For example,in LApproche de Clarice Lispector Cixous w rites of disencumbering vision

l

I


12/17


from all an tecedent visions, in order to see, not through the memory of havingseen before, but only in the instant of seeing. For Lispector, in her own words,mes prvisions fermaient le m ondey10 nd therefore she transforms her wayof see ing; for Cixous, she teaches le survoir and that pour voir (...) il fautdvoir (127). In order to laisser entrer une chose avec son tranget ratherthan to appropriate and hom ogenise it il faut mettre de la lum ire dme danschaque regard, et mlanger la lumire extrieure et la lumire intrieure(123).That is to unbind sight, to use sight in an unaccustomed way: voir avant lavision (...) avant le rcit des yeux (123) so that the eyes function not just asan exterior sense but are also m obilised by the pleasure and the interiority ofthe o ther senses. In Cixouss LA this kind of vision is also impelled, througha different kind of language: Avec el le jouvre la bouche des yeux, Alors toutce qui voit parle et chaque parole allume un autre noeud de sens. l1 Here visionand language are conflated in a circularity of m ovement; it is language thatemancipates vision and vision can then speak and each new w ord creates newmeaning.

For Cixous, therefore, knowledge is never abstracted but always linkeddirectly to the body. Moreover, the partitioning of the senses is both artificialand constraining and should be challenged through different paradigms inwriting. In Illa ways in which this kind of knowledge should be acquiredaredeveloped; a rose should be felt in a rose way; things must be allowed o happenin their own modality instead ofbeing appropriated and abstracted. She recallshow as a child, in North Africa, she wandered towards the market, beforeknowing the names of the streets, before proper nouns and com mon nouns,how the senses knew their ownway along the perfumes (Cixouss syntax),in sandalled feet within the movement of the market place. Again, in vivrelorange,as the title shows, she is writing towards a direct sensory contactwith the world; to live the h i t , to live the colour, beyond the separation ofwords, calling for acontinuity rather than a compartmentalisationofthe senses.In Conleys w ords the wor(1)d is fruit, felt and tasted7 .12 The Enit is never10 Clarice Lispector,LaPassion selon G. H., Paris,1985,25.11 Hlne Cixous,LA Paris,1976,112.12 Verena Andematt Conley,Hlne Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Lincoln and London, 1984,104, hereafter cited in the text as Conley.


13/17


which she approaches the other). Preferably, her attentions move comme despoissons dans la lenteur, bui, on occasions, they are audacious [ils] vont auxrecontres comme des fauves douces (...) et se tiennent en tremblant dans letrs-prs tremblant de lautre(l30). This intersubjective space is, for Cixous,a feminine space: Alors la femme est: la femme-et-lautre. Ensem ble vivant,impersonnel, qui ne peut se rsumer. Ni faire histoire. Mais vit. Se passe(130). Cixouss w ri ting fim (rather than on) Lispectors texts begins toinscribethiskind of intersubjectiveeconomy. Reading LispectorsL Imitationde la rose she tells of being sent flowers, flowers hat she couid never have13 Charles Baudelaire, CorrespondancesinBaudelaire: TheCompIete Erse,vol.., editedbyFrancis Scarfe, London, 1986.61.


14/17


sent herself. They are revitalised by L ispectors way of showing them, stillcarrying the humectant contact of Lispectors eyes upon them: Ainsiauroles, elles me montaient aux yeux, et me venaient tout humides encoresde regard, elles slevaient regardes, m ieux visibles(131).tion, achieves a kind of atopia (u topos-without place) of language. Eachnaming is an event, each event is unique and thereby language is divested ofits fixing effect. in Cixouss words il y a une attention pour chaque naissance(129): to impart its life each object needs a specific approach. This joinsBarthess proposition at the beginning of Lu Chambre claire: Pourquoi nyaurait-il pas, en quelque sorte, une science nouvelle par ob jet? Une Mathesissingularis (et non plus u n i ~ e r s a l i s ? ) ~ ~nd his utopian call further on for unescience impossible de ltre unique (1 1O). Indeed Cixous herself speaks ofla science de lautre (LApproche, 123) where language is not attenuatedto the extent of being nothing but a carrier of ready-m ade meaning, but ex istsin a sensuous relation with its referent, letting it ca ll the senses in its own way:Les musiques des choses rsonnent toujours, attendant que nous les en-tendions fidlement, avec les o reilles, avec la peau, avec les narines, avec larespiration, surtout avec la poitrine (130).

Synaesthetic paradigms in language are a way of approaching, in writing,this kind of sensorial perception of things. Lispectors written flowers were:

un bouquet de fleurs sues, qui rayonnait, sur ma table, sur mes livres,sur les feuilles de papier et soudain je compris queje lisais la lumiredes fleurs, jappris que les fleurs-vues donnent pendant quelquesheures un clat de lait transparent.(13 1-2)

and Cixouss descriptionsof how we might come to this kind of perception inlanguage are, almost without exception, synaesthetic in their internal work-ings:

Pour arriver au coeur de la rose, nous navons qu prendre le cheminde la rose, allerelle selon sa voie. Sapprocher avec une telle absencede soi,avec une telle lgret(...) entrer pas de parfum dans leau deson parfum sans la troubler. (134)

Lispectors way of accessing the object itself in writing, without separa-

14 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, 1980,21.


15/17


RhythmCixous privileges the ear in writing; for her, the musicality of a text isparamount and the origins of writing are to be found in the aural not the visualfield: 1 always privilege the ear over the eye she remarks in an interview Iam always trying to write with my eyes closed (Conley, 146). However, acloser reading reveals that aural category to be inextricable from the othersenses. For both Barthes and Cixous, writing is closely allied to what bothhave referred to as une langue matem elle, a language which comes fiom andapproaches the d o th e r. Barthes writes of un amour: celui de la languematernelle (la langue des femmes) on one of the rare occasions when he refersexplicitly to the feminine,15 and there are numerous references to a maternaltongue throughout Cixouss work: dans la langue que je parle, vibre la languematernelle, langue de ma m re, moins langue que musique, moins syntaxe quechant de mots (La Venue, 31). Illa is searching for the voice of the mother:

Appele? Entend des v o ix - se s voix. Sa voix. Toutes les voix quisoufflent entre les langues, les mmoires. Prentend. Ne voit pas deux pas devant son corps. Des yeux faibles. Pour entendre. Leregard coute.6

Here, corporeal sensations are canied over into voice and script and heardwith a different ear: an ear which, like the eyes of Cixouss and Barthessdifferent vision, is linked to a kind o f pre-hearing which is not separate fromthe other senses, not a solely exterior sense. The eye listens as it apprehendsthe letter on the page, a kind of b lind reading: Ce que ma m ain fait couler surle papier cest ce que je vois-entends, mes yeux coutent, ma chair scrute(LaVenue, 64), whilst for Barthes: Tous les sens peuvent donc regarder, etinversement, le regard peut sentir, couter, tter.

in his essay Ecoute Barthes refers to the rhythmic traces that wereanterior to writing; a corporeal activity that cannot be isolated to one sensemodality. Rhythm, e stresses, is the grounding principle of language: sansle rhythme, aucun langage nest possible (220). Furthermore, in the sam e

15 Roland Barthes, RolandBarthespar RolandBarthes,Paris,1975,119, hereaftercited in thetextasRB.16 Hlne Cixous,Illa, Paris,1980.9.17 Roland Barthes, Droitdanslesyeux(1977) inLobvieetIobtw,280.

17


16/17


essay he proposes that 1coute(listening), from its rhythmic origins, is whatputs two subjects into relation with each other:Linjonction dcouter est linterpellation totale dun sujet un autre:elle place au-dessus de tout le contact quasi physique de ces deux sujets(par la voix et loreille): elle cre le transfert: c o u t a - m o i vent dire:to uc he z-m oi, s a c h a q u e a i s t e . (2 2 3 )

He continues, employing the terminology of Jakobson, coutez-moiest unphatique: the language used to comm unicate feelings rather than ideas, unoprateur de comm unication individuel (223). In the act of listening: Lin-terpellation conduit une interlocution, dans laquelle le silence de lcouteursera aussi actif que la parole du locuteur (223). For both Barthes and Cixousin their recognition of rhythm as the synaesthetic source of writing, it is amusical econom y that is most favoured. Cixous, writing with eyes closed,listens to that which vibrates in almost musical fashion in me and from thereannotates h i s rhythm in a manner homologousto that of a musician (Conley,146). For Barthes , n his essay La musique, la voix, la langue, music is themedium that rescues us from cette indiffrence des valeurs, the tendency,that is, to disguise and deny a grounding of any discourse of interpretation invalue either by idealism or by scientism: Nous nageons dans llmentindiffrent (=sans diffrence) de ce qui vaut en soi, ou de c e qui vaut pourtous (Nietzsche, Deleuze).18 But m usic demands a language of evaluation,of difference. Any other kind of comm entary means that nous sentons unesorte de chape idologique tomber sur la matire la plus prcieuse de lvalu-ation, la musique (La musique, 246). in La musique Barthes promotes thevoice as le lieu privilgi (iditique) de la diffrence (247). Moreover toutrapport une voix est forcment amoureux (247). Writing of his ownamorous relation to the voice of his preferred singer Panzra he explains how,through an attention to pronunciation (as distinct from articulation) Panzraproduces a kind of intersemiotic translation (here between language andmusic). Articulation functions to:

donner chaque consonne la mme intensit sonore, alors que dansun texte musical, une consonne nest jam ais la mme: il faut que~~~~ ~~~~

18 Roland Barthes, La musique,la voix, la langue(1977) inLobvie et lobtus,246, hereaftercited in the text as La musique.


17/17


chaque syllabe, loin d& e issue dun code olympien des phonmes,donn en soi et une fokpour toutes, soit sertie dans le sens gnral dela phrase. (250)Articulation, advances Barthes, encum bers meaning with a parasitic claritywhich itself is no t innocent but ideologically loaded; an art of expressivit ormore precisely of dram atisation (250). Pronunciation, by contrast, maintientla coalescence parfaite de la ligne du sens (la phrase) et de la ligne de lamusique (le phras) (250). This coalescence can occur since, unlike articu-lation where language invades music, disrupts it in an inappropriate way andpushes itself to the fore, in the case of pronunciation: cest la musique quivient dans la langue et retrouve ce quil y a en elle de musical, damoureux(250). This process of intersemiotic translation depends, for Barthes, on acertain physique de la voix (ientends parphysique la faon dont la voix setient dans le c o r p s - o u dont le corps se tient dans la voix) (25 I). This voice,for both Barthes and Cixous, should not be situated in the vocal apparatusalone; it is the body showing its difference and thereby a production from allthe senses.Synaesthetic paradigms therefore not only open ou t perception and createthe possibility for ostensibly different sign systems to enter into a process oftranslation, in doing so, they open the way for new intersubjective econom iesand different ways of approaching the other.

Synaesthesia in Cixous and Barthes

Documents

Transcript of Synaesthesia in Cixous and Barthes