SYNAESTHESIA

Symbolist Drama ( 1 963) ; A. Bertocci, From Symbol

ism to Baudelaire ( 1 964) ; P. Ricoeur, "Le Sym
bolisme et I'explication structurale," Cahiers Inter
nationaux du Symbolisme 4 ( 1 964) ; B. Weinberg,
The Limits of Symbolisme ( 1 966) ; A. Balakian, The
Symbolist Movement: a Crit. Appraisal ( 1 967) ; ]. R.
Lawler, The Lang. ofFr. S. ( 1 969) ; R. Wellek, "The
Term and Concept of S. in Lit. Hist.," Discrimina
tions ( 1 970) ;]. West, Rus. S. ( 1 970) ; C. Chadwick,
S. ( 1 971 ) ; ]. H. Boon, From S. to Structuralism
( 1 972) ; H. Peyre, Qu 'est-ce que Ie symbolisme?
( 1 974) ; D. O 'Connell, The Opposition Critics
( 1 974) ; T. Todorov, Theories du symbole ( 1 977) ;
Waiting for Pegasus, ed. W. Risley ( 1979 ) ; ]. P.
Houston, Fr. S. and the Modernist Movement ( 1 980) ;
An Anthol. of Fr. Symbolist Poetry, ed. ]. P. Houston
and M. T. Houston ( 1 980) ; The Symbolist Movement
in the Lit. of European Langs., ed. A. Balakian
( 1 982) ; B. Stimpson, Paul Valery and Music ( 1 984) ;
Terras; P. Florence, Mallarme, Manet and Rodin:
Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Mean
ing ( 1986 ) ; Andrey Bely: Spirit ofS., ed. ]. E. Malm
stad ( 1987) ; D. M. Hertz, The Tuning of the Word
( 1 987) ; Hollier.
A.B.

SYMPATHY. See EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY.

SYMPLOCE. See ANAPHORA.
SYNAERESIS (Gr. "drawing together" ) . The coa
lescing of two contiguous vowels within a word,
usually for metrical purposes, e.g. theoi for th'ifol
( Iliad 1 . 1 8 ) or Theudoslus for TheodoslUs. Strictly
speaking, s. in Gr. denotes coalescing, where the
second vowel is iota or upsilon, in order to form a
diphthong. This is indicated in Gr. by the cornois
mark (equivalent to smooth breathing ) . The term
is often confused with or synonymous with
synizesis, syncope, and synaloepha (qq.v. ) . An
Eng. example would be "seest" for "seest." In the
opening line of Paradise Lost, "Of Man's First Dis
obedience, and the Fruit," the "ie" in "Disobedi
ence" changes to what is called a "y-glide," reduc
ing the word from five syllables to four. But to some
degree s. is simply a normal linguistic process
carried on in ordinary speech all the time, of
which the poet simply takes advantage for writing
verse with regulated syllable count: a number of
words have syllabically alternative forms, e.g.
"heaven" as both disyllable and monosyllable. Coa
lescing of vowels across a word boundary (end of
one word, beginning of next) is synaloepha (q.v. ) .
See ELISION; METRICAL TREATMENT OF SYLLA
BLES.-W. S. Allen, Accent and Rhythm ( 1 973) ;
Morier; West.
T.Y.F.B.; R.A.H.; ].W.H.
SYNAESTHESIA. The phenomenon wherein one
sense modality is felt, perceived, or described in
terms of another, e.g. describing a voice as velvety,
warm, heavy, or sweet, or a trumpet-blast as scarlet
("To the bugle," says Emily Dickinson, "every color
is red") . Evidence for s. in lit. is ancient and cross-

cultural, but critical conceptualization of it in the

West dates only from the 18th c., and a specific
term for it only appeared in 1 89 1 ( Century Diet.) ;
i n the literary sense i t seems to have been first
employed by Jules Millet in 1 892. S. was popular
ized by two sonnets, Baudelaire's "Correspon
dances" ( 1 857) and Rimbaud's "Voyelles" ( 1871 ) ,
and by Huysmans' novel A rebours ( 1 884) , and
from these sources became one of the central
tenets of symbolism (q.v. ) ; but the device had
been widely employed earlier in Ger. and Eng.
romantic poetry, and it also can be found in some
of the earliest lit. of the West (in Iliad 3 . 1 52, the
voices of the old Trojans are likened to the "Iily
like" voices of cicalas; in Iliad 3.222, Odysseus'
words fall like winter snowflakes; and in Odyssey
1 2 .1 87, in the "honey-voice" of the Sirens) . In
Aeschylus' Persians (395 ) , "the trumpet set all the
shores ablaze with its sound." In the Bible, He
brews 6.5 and Revelations 1 . 1 2 refer to "tasting"
the word of God and "seeing" a voice. Dante refers
to a place "where the sun is silent" (Inferno 1 .60) .
Donne mentions a "loud perfume," Crashaw a
"sparkling noyse." Shelley refers to the fragrance
of the hyacinth as "music," Heine to words "sweet
as moonlight and delicate as the scent of the rose."
S. as the expression of intersense analogues has
been exploited in lit. for a variety of effects, par
ticularly increase of textural richness, complica
tion, and unification. It is evident that metaphor
(q.v. ) , esp. in the tenor and vehicle (q.v.) model,
and simile (q.v.) too can approximate the same
kinds of suggestion, albeit in looser and more
taxonomic forms. Shelley, apparently the first
Eng. poet to use s. extensively, uses it particularly
in connection with visionary and mystical states of
transcendental union ("Alastor," "Epipsychidion,"
"The Triumph of Ufe") ; here s. suggests not only
a greater "refinement and complexity of sensuous
experience" but also a "harmony or synthesis of all
sensations" and kind of "supersensuous unity"
(O'Malley) . Cf. Baudelaire's "metamorphose mys
tique / De tous mes sens fondus en un" ("Toute
Entiere") .
One important species of s . is audition coloree, in
which sound (or even silence) is described in
terms of colors. Silence is "perfumed" (Rim
baud) , "black" (Pindar) , "dark" (Macpherson, Os
sian) , "green" (Carducci) , "silver" (Wilde) , "blue"
(D 'Annunzio) , "chill" (Edith Sitwell ) , "green
water" (Louis Aragon) . This phenomenon is com
mon in lit., the most famous example being Rim
baud's sonnet "Voyelles" (Vowels) beginning: "A
noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, 0 bleu, voyelles."
Such terms as "golden voice," coloratura soprano,
"chromatic scale," Ger. Klangfarbe ("sound-color";
see TIMBRE ) show the assimilation of audition col
oree into both common and scholarly usage. More
important still is the "light-dark" opposition in
vowels first demonstrated by Wolfgang Kohler in
1910 and subsequently shown to exist in many of
the world's langs.: Kohler argued that this oppo-

- [ 1 259 ] -

SYNALOEPHA
sItton is not merely metaphorical but in fact a
feature of all the senses resulting from some "cen
tral physiological perceptual correlate."
The related term synaesthesis appears in the late
1 9th c. in the course of evolving psychological
theories of beauty to mean a wholeness in percep
tion, or anti-atomism in epistemology. 1. A.
Richards takes this term into his psychological
theory of crit. as part of his neurologically derived
account of literary value (Principles) : he too uses
it in the sense of "wholeness" to refer to the syner
gistic nature of sense-experience, wherein wholes,
"sensation-complexes," are greater than the sum
of their parts. Cf. UNITY.
J. Millet, Audition colorie ( 1 89 2 ) ; Y. Segalen,
"Les synesthesies et l'ecole symboliste," MdF 42
( 1 90 2 ) ; I. Babbitt, The New Laokoon ( 1 9 1 0) , ch.
6-attacks s. as decadent; W. Kohler, "Akustische
Untersuchungen," Zeitschrift filr Psychologie 54-7 2
( 1 91 0-15) ; E. von Erhardt-Siebold, "Synasthesien
in der englischen Dichtung des 19.Jahrhunderts,"
Englische Studien 53 ( 1 9 19-20) , "Harmony of the
Senses in Eng., Ger., and Fr. Romanticism," PMLA
4 7 ( 1 932) ; A. Wellek, "Das Doppelempfinden im
abendlandischen Altertum und Mittelalter," "Zur
Gesch. und Kritik des Synasthesie-Forschung," Ar
chiv filr die gesamte Psychologie 7 9-80 ( 1 93 1 ) ; W. D .
Stanford, Gr. Metaphor ( 1 936) ; S. d e Ullmann,
"Romanticism and S.," PMLA 60 ( 1945 ) ; A. G.
Engstrom, "In Defense ofS. in Lit.," PQ25 ( 1 946) ;
E. Noulet, Le premier visage de Rimbaud ( 1953 ) ; M.
Chastaing, "Audition coloree," Vie et langage 105,
1 12 ( 1 960, 1961 ) ; G. O'Malley, Shelley and S.
( 1 964 ) ; R. E tiemble, Le Sonnet des voyelles ( 1 968) ;
L . Schrader, Sinne und Sinnesverknilpfungen
( 1 969)-s. in It., Sp., and Fr., inc!. bib!.; G. Cam
bon, "S. in the Divine Comedy," DSARDS 88 ( 1 9 7 0) ;
P. Ostwald, The Semiotics of Human Sound ( 1 97 3 ) ;
L . Vinge, The Five Senses ( 1 9 7 5) ; L . E. Marks, The
Unity of the Senses: Interrelatins among the Modalities
( 1 9 7 8) ; Morier, S.V. "Correspondances"; D. John
son, "The Role of S. in Jakobson's Theory of
Lang.," I]SLP 25-26 ( 1 982) ; N. Ruddick, "S. in
Emily Dickinson's Poetry," PoT 5 ( 1 984) ; J. H.
Ryalls, "S.," Semiotica 58 ( 1 986) ; J. P. Russo, I. A.
T.V.F.B.; A.G.E.
Richards ( 1 989).
SYNALOEPHA, synalepha, synalephe (Gr. "coa
lescing") . In C!. prosody (q.v. ) , S. is the term for
all forms of elision (q.v.) in which two syllables are
reduced to one. In modern usage it tends to be
restricted to the coalescing of a vowel at the end
of one word with one which begins the next word.
Crasis (Gr. "mixture," "combination") is a synony
mous term sometimes used for the fusion of a
vowel or diphthong with another which follows,
e.g. haner for ho aner, kago for kai ego, onax for 0
anax, and mentan for mentoi an. S. in not allowed
in Fr. prosody-a final mute e followed by a vowel
is simply elided-but is used liberally in It., at
times almost to excess. In Sp. it is used moderately
and generally unobtrusively. In Eng., it is a con-

spicuous feature of 1 7th- and 18th-c. prosody, e.g.

Milton and Pope, where it is used to maintain the
syllabic conformity of lines. In metrical theory,
therefore, S . is the important mechanism affecting
situations where the relation of metrical position
to syllable is one to many, acting to reduce excess
number of syllables. By contrast, diaeresis (q.v.)
affects the situation position : syllable many :
one. Coalescing of contiguous vowels within a
word is synaeresis (q.v. ) ; see also ELISION; METRI
CAL TREATMENT OF SYLLABLES.-Koster; W. S. Al
len Accent and Rhythm ( 1 9 73 ) ; West.
T.Y.F.B.; RJ.G.
=

SYNAPHEIA (Gr. "fastening together") . In C!.

prosody (q.v. ) , (metrical) continuity between any
two syllables or syllable sequences that follow each
other in delivery without interruption, as part of
the same flow of sound. As a general rule, S . was
felt to exist between all contiguous syllables which
did not belong to two separate, independent rhyth
mical units such as line or stanza. Even sequences
in contrasting rhythms-the components of most
asynartete verses (see ASYNARTETON ) , for exam
ple-could be "in s.," provided it was felt that
neither one, taken by itself, constituted an autono
mous rhythmical whole. Break in S. involved some
sort of pause in delivery-a pause long enough to
allow contiguous vowels to stand in apparent "hia
tus" (q.v.) with each other, and to lengthen a
preceding syllable, even if it would have been
short under other circumstances ( brevis in longo;
see ANCEPS ) . The occurrence of either hiatus or
brevis in longo in a poetic text is thus an indication
that S. has been broken. Their absence, however,
need not indicate that S. has been maintained:
break may simply have occurred at a point where
there are no short syllables or contiguous vowels
to reveal its presence. Hence some of the uncer
tainties which plague modern editors of Gr. lyric
texts: in the absence of identifiable breaks in S . , it
can be difficult to know where one major rhythmi
cal unit ends and another begins. See also PE
RIOD.-Hardie, 266; Dale; L.E. Rossi, "La sinafia,"
Studi in onore di Anthos Ardizzoni ( 1 9 7 8) ; West.
A.T.C.
SYNCHRONY. See STRUCTURALISM.
SYNCOPATION. In modern discussions of C!.
prosody, S. is a common way of referring to what
musicians would call a "hold" or "rest" (see
PAUSE ) , namely the suppression (syncope) of one
syllable in a metrical pattern and the filling of its
time value either by a rest (usually notated by a
dot or caret) or by the protraction of an adjoining
long syllable so that it becomes equivalent in
length to three or four shorts rather than two.
These two phenomena are, respectively, the
"empty time length" ( kenos chronos) and
"trisemic" /"tetrasemic" longs of ancient metrical
theory. Both have been regarded on occasion as

- [ 1 260 ] -