Con The immortal flame From Stephen Crane, the writer gave the printing press his most bulky work; About one thousand pages in its Bags Edition published in Spanish by Booket. It is a biography drawn with thorough where we find a note that is curious due to its relationship with scientific knowledge.
According to Auster, on one occasion and a friend were walking through Brooklyn, when a boat was about to collide with the dock and one of the sailors “released a warning cry.” It was then that Crane identified the scream of the sailor with the green color: “What a green voice!” He exclaimed. And his friend, amazed, asked Crane if “he intended to be poetic,” to which he replied: “Of course not.”
If we transfer it to the scientific dimension, we are facing a case of “synesthesia” or, what is the same, a neurological phenomenon where several sensory modalities are manifested at the same time. It happens when two or more senses interrelate with each other, so that a person can see sounds or perceive smells with his eyes, in the same way that he can smell colors. This sensory variation causes people with “synesthetic capacities” to perceive the world as a reality of infinite nuances where each nuance is related to others until a fabric of great sensitive wealth is achieved. It is known that this phenomenon was an attribute of the personality of, also of the musician Duke Ellington or the physicist Richard Feynman with the equations, perceiving colors in them.
When synesthesia reaches literature it becomes an expressive resource; A literary figure that the symbolist poets will use. We have the example in the young Rimbaud, a pioneer of symbolism that, as Auster points out, “articulates the essential characteristics of synesthesia in his poem entitled Vocal”; Verses where Rimbaud gives each of the vowels a color, being black the A, the e, red the i, green the U and blue the O. With this, Rimbaud revealed the sense of Baudelaire in that other poem entitled correspondences, where – in its final thirds – Baudelaire tells us of bright connections or correspondence:
There are perfumes as fresh as children’s meats,
sweets like oboe, green as meadows,
And there are other corrupted, rich and triumphant
Correspondences is part of his famous poems The flowers of evil, which was published in 1857, when the word “synesthesia” was still born. However, the first case that is known as “Synesthesia” took place years before Baudelaire published his poems and dates from 1812 when Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, a medical student, about his confusing sensory perceptions that led him to relate colors with letters, as well as numbers and days of the week.
It was the American psychologist Mary W. Calkins who published the first scientific article where she coined the word “synesthesia”, giving him the meaning he currently has. Synesthesia comes from the Greek (Σ & Upsi; n -[syn]which becomes “together”, and A I S I SIA [aistesía] which becomes “sensation”). This article came out in 1895, the same year that Stephen Crane Publica The Red Badge of Value (Austral), his best known novel and one of the highest peaks of American literature; A story where the American author uses war to show us what the psychology of fear consists of, a phenomenon that we will talk about at another time.
