Paris, Now Also City of Nightmares

Perfume: The Story of a Murder; Patrick Suskind; Mystery/Thirller/Horror; +10; Stephen Silver at sfsite.com

I've always been fond of identifying obscure literary devices at work, so on that count this is my all-time favorite book. The entire book (the whole fucking thing) is synesthetic. Absolutely everything that can be, is described in terms of scent. Viewed strictly from a lit-crit perspective, it's a stunning achievement. I keep rereading this book, trying to deconstruct his use of that device. It's so smoothly done, so closely and carefully and consistently (just a little polysyndeton there) woven into the story that it's... It just blows my mind.

It's also a fun excuse to talk about the Synesthetic Metaphor, my absolute all-time ultimate favorite literary device. This device seems uniquely suited to the English language, which is possessed of one of the broadest vocabularies on the planet. While not as well-suited to the creation of new words as, say, German, English almost madeningly adept at appropriating foreign words. (Ex: schadefrude, chef. Interestingly enough, both these words have strictly English equivalents, which are far less popular: epicaricacy and cook ((the noun)), respectively.) In 1920, W. P. Reeves wrote that English was "overlaid with more foreign words than any [other] living tongue..."

The synesthetic metaphor, often as simple as the phrase "sweet sounds," is terribly common. It's also incredibly effecient. By modifying "sounds" with "sweet" the writer is able not only to imply a technically harmonious composition, but an emotionally gentle and pleasing one as well. In the case of third-person limited narrative, it is especially useful.

Compare: "James played the harmonious melody, enjoying the soothing effect it had on his troubled soul, small though that should be."/"James removed himself to practice, the sweet sounds providing small consolation." The synesthetic metaphor implies all of the same technical and emotional content as the more prosaic version, while allowing for greater amounts of information to be added in a smaller amount of space. It allows the prose to be evocative rather than descriptive; it goes to the heart of the "show, don't tell" dictum.

Synesthesia itself is also a wonderful component of most "purple prose." That's a style with a really bad rap, I know, but it can be well-done and when it is, it's truly wonderful. There is a certain richness to synesthetic description which cannot be equaled with regular prose. Dark sounds, golden sounds, drab sounds and other variations on "visual hearing," just like "auditory gustation" ("bombastic spices"), or "oflactory sight" ("rancid scene," "balmy tableau") come closer to describing the intangibles of an experience than even a good string of abstract nouns. In the case of "gustatory olfaction" or "olfactory gustation," one can attribute the effectiveness of the description to the fact that taste and smell are fairly unified biological processes, broken apart rather cruelly by language; the synesthetic metaphor that reunites then doesn't so much blend two different senses as it does reunite the two parts of a single sense.

So why is snyesthesia so very evocative? Probably because it comes closer to a right-brained perception of the world than most other linguistic devices. Language is, after all, a child of the left brain. The left brain thinks in terms of order and classification. The right brain, on the other hand, thinks in terms of undefined sensations. Simply by using words, one moves a perceived thing (be it a sight, sound, smell, taste or even an emotion) from the right to the left brain. By using a descriptive method that defies the logic of the left brain, one forces the right brain to take part in understanding that perception. It creates a more complete and sense-oriented understanding of the thing described, one that touches not only the analytical mind, but the emotional, instinctual one.

Rock on, synesthetic literature!