Synaesthesia

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

   - The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

Synaethesia is either a mental condition whereby colours are perceived as smells, smells as sounds, sounds as tastes etc, or it is a rhetorical device whereby one sense is described in terms of another. If colours are harmonious, or a voice is silky, that is synaesthesia (or some other spelling).

It is a common enough device, except that there seem to be rules, or norms governing which senses can be coupled. Sight and sound are interchangeable. Quite aside from John Lennon's request to George Martin that the orchestration of Strawberry Fields should be "orange", colours can be loud or discordant while melodies can be bright and rumblings dark. Tone is even an ambiguous word that can be applied to either sense, and I thoroughly recommend Ernest Bloch's Sketches in Sepia. (I omit colours that are purely symbolic: blues music is no more blue than blue movies are).

Touch can be applied to sound - a gravelly voice - and to the warm colours of a painting. But rarely is the favour returned, indeed I can't think of a single example.

Taste gives you a couple of terms of approbation - delicious and tasty - and of deprecation - bland or disgusting. But again it receives no thanks from its fellow senses.

And smell. Smell sits apart on his own, blowing his nose. Odious, before you ask, means hateful and has nothing to do with odour. Rank and pungent have, over the centuries, been sent as emissaries to the other senses, but that is all and it is possible to forget that words were ever native to a nostril. And smells are never described as being like anything else at all.

And that is why the Raymond Chandler line is so striking. Though the sense is quite discernible, the expression of it pulls you up short. The phrase is memorable in a way that it would never have been were it "she sounded the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight."

Synaesthesias of smell are jarring and effective. It is probably an easy shortcut to a memorable line. However, caution, dear reader, should be observed. You may not want your line to be remembered. Many critics have been wrong, some amazingly so, but few will be remembered verbatim as Eduard Hanslick was when he wrote of Tchaikovsky's First Violin Concerto that it showed there could be "music that stinks to the ear."

I shall leave you with an extract from A Rebours, in which our hero has constructed an organ that when the stops are touched gives out drinks. The idea was stolen and perhaps improved upon by Boris Vian in the wonderful L'Ecume des Jours.

Moreover, each liquor corresponded, according to his thinking, to the sound of some instrument. Dry curacoa, for example, to the clarinet whose tone is sourish and velvety; kummel to the oboe whose sonorous notes snuffle; mint and anisette to the flute, at once sugary and peppery, puling and sweet; while, to complete the orchestra, kirschwasser has the furious ring of the trumpet; gin and whiskey burn the palate with their strident crashings of trombones and cornets; brandy storms with the deafening hubbub of tubas; while the thunder-claps of the cymbals and the furiously beaten drum roll in the mouth by means of the rakis de Chio.


The whole can be read here. I may be wrong in all these observations and expect a cataract of counter-examples.

That's how she smelled

P.S. If you're reading this and you've got my copy of A Rebours, give it back before I track you down and hang you. Mrs Malaprop, same goes for you and my copy Ecume Des Jours, they don't publish that translation anymore.