Strauss on Yamaguchi (2024)

This dense, serious, and probing book examines various attempts to connect vowel sounds to colors during a period—from 1812 up through the present—when the possibility of such correlations became an explicit subject of study. Given its meticulous attention to nuance and detail, its range across disciplines and languages, and some startling discoveries and conclusions—such as a neglected passage from Georg Sachs’s Latin medical thesis in the final chapter—this book will undoubtedly become a crucial reference point for subsequent works on synesthesia in language and a resource for scholars seeking to better understand the ways that nineteenth-century poets used non-semantic qualities of language to structure their writings and convey sense. This with a caveat, however. Yamaguchi bookends her study with references to the effects that such vowel-color relations might have on signification—and, in her introduction, offers tantalizing promises of discoveries about the way that color and synesthesia shape the meaning of linguistic communications (9, 15–17). But ultimately that does not really seem to be the intention of this book. It provides instead a rigorous, detailed, and often fascinating historical study of successive theories of synesthetic relations between colors and vowel sounds by a series of writers from different disciplines, including linguists, both famous and largely forgotten, musicians, such as Richard Wagner, and poets, most notably the French symbolist writer, Stéphane Mallarmé.

Her first chapter centers on Hermann von Helmholz’s 1863 Sensations of Tone, which introduced the term Klangfarbe or “sound colors” to describe certain qualities that distinguish vowels from each other. This term formalized a connection between the visual and auditory and, because it was the unique resource for describing this particular linguistic aspect, made that connection almost inevitable in subsequent discussions of vowel sounds. Helmholz’s attempts to identify objective, physical links between the stimuli received by the two senses—including studies of wave patterns—ultimately failed, according to Yamaguchi, in part because they treated only individual vowels in isolation from other linguistic sounds. The second chapter thus turns to later studies, and critiques of Helmholz, that treated color not as the fixed properties of isolated vowels but as the product of dynamic interactions among them and with consonants. French poets of the nineteenth century, Yamaguchi argues, expressed interest in the prismatic effects of letter combinations and increasingly emphasized color effects—the timbres or tones of their words—over other organizational and expressive aspects of language, most notably meter. For this reason, at least in part, they could not abandon rhyme, which consequently became, for the poet Paul Verlaine at least, definitive of verse (62–4). Since French words bear no inherent lexical stress markers, Yamaguchi argues, the perceptibility of a line of poetry depends on its rhyme, and for that reason the language resisted the advent of verse that was both free and blank. Here, the “crise de vers” or crisis of verse that Mallarmé identified in his 1897 essay of the same title emerges from a desire to expand poetic expression beyond the limits of meter and rhyme and to comprehend the paradoxical possibility of a poetic prose, which had profoundly troubled Mallarmé. Although Yamaguchi does not mention it, this same moment became the focal point for Julia Kristeva’s 1974 Révolution du langage poétique, which saw the resolution of this poetic crisis in the way individual language sounds correlate to universal somatic effects, their related unconscious drives (anal, oral, etc.), and the symbolic meanings that derive from them. Yamaguchi sees things differently. Through a detailed reading of several theoretical texts by Mallarmé, especially Crise de vers, she argues that he believed modern poetry should free itself from verse forms and structure itself instead according to its relation to something else—the coloris or palette of vowel sounds (83). As she writes, “From March 1, 1894, onward, however, ‘verse’ admits of two definitions” for Mallarmé. “It may be language ordered by meter into a line, or it may be language that engages the tension of timbre” (78) Here, Yamaguchi is excitingly precise in her formulation of a historic, literary moment. Still, this precision comes at a cost. Her formulation would eliminate not only the importance of meter and verse, but also of rhythm, despite the fact that Mallarmé insists heavily and repeatedly on its crucial role in modern and prose poetry, even in the same texts that Yamaguchi cites. 

The fourth chapter recounts a surprisingly consistent history of triangular charts intended to illustrate the supposed analogies between vowel sounds and colors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yamaguchi points to a remarkable coincidence, for example, between, R.K. Lepsius’s 1861 diagram and a similar drawing created by Roman Jakobson in 1939. The fifth chapter turns to some little-read texts by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, who identified a quality of vowels that distinguished them from each other and which he opposed to quantitative aspects of vowels, or their length of duration in time. This quality he described as color, and Yamaguchi convincingly argues that they allowed him to make discoveries about the historical development of Indo-European languages. These discoveries began as deductions from the patterns of vowel sounds in existing European languages that were subsequently confirmed by the discovery of ancient Hittite language, which in fact included characters for those very sounds. Speculative deduction, in short, became fact. Now, in a little-known and previously anonymous response to a colleague’s inquiry, Saussure also described how different vowels evoked for him specific colors. Yamaguchi is brilliantly positioned to seize on this tidbit, which allows her to make the case that Saussure’s personal ability to visualize vowel qualities as colors was directly related to his unique ability to understand the historical development of language. With this remarkable piece of analysis and sleuthing, Yamaguchi pulls a provocative and convincing discovery out of her painstaking attention to details and clues hidden over Saussure’s decades of research, publications, and personal notes and letters. She does not, however, specify the nature of the relation between color and vowel quality for Saussure or what it means. Was it, for instance, causal? Could Saussure not have made this particular discovery if he had not personally visualized certain vowels as evoking specific colors? 

Yamaguchi offers no synthetic conclusion, but her final chapter brings the issues she raises up into the twenty-first century by setting them into dialogue with contemporary scientific studies on synesthesia, which tend to treat the links between perceptions originating in different senses as objective fact, but which also raise the question of why accounts of such correlations seem to date back no further than 1812. Yamaguchi proposes several astute answers to that question before turning back to the nineteenth century to examine contemporary reactions to the German composer Richard Wagner’s attempt to create a Gesamtkunstwork or totalizing work of art, whose “point of departure,” she argues, “is to be found, quite literally, in the colors of vowels” (137). Given the far-reaching implications that Wagner imagined for his aesthetic project, synesthesia would, consequently, have been the basis for an instrument to shape human society, religion, and politics. The final two pages return to Mallarmé and his study of English words, the source for so much of Kristeva’s analysis of the organic relations between sound and meaning, but here Yamaguchi seems to reduce that connection to onomatopoeia and an elusive and mysterious quality in language.

In the final chapter, Yamaguchi suggests that we should understand the relations between visual colors and vowel sounds to be objectively, and indeed scientifically, attested, although the particular combinations vary from individual to individual. But does this mean that they are properties of the physical world or of human perception? And if they exist objectively, how do they affect the perception of meaning? Although Yamaguchi does not make the call on these questions, her book is compelling and important. At the end of her study, in the face of her remarkable restraint on these questions, the reader is left with a deeply nuanced awareness of a crucial, fascinating, and elusive aspect of language, an aspect which Mallarmé, as Yamaguchi points out (139), seems to have called the mystery among letters.