Farbensprachen: Chromatik und Synästhesie bei Hugo von Hofmannsthal by Linda Puccioni (review)

This study seeks to fill a gap in the scholarship on Hugo von Hofmannsthals prose in the form of an analysis of how Hofmannsthal used color as a means to create a new synesthetic language that sought to overcome the limits of language. Puccioni s study places primarily the early work of Hofmannsthal in its historical and cultural context, seeing in Hofmannsthals engagement with color, in his programmatic writing, and in his creative works a linkage to contemporaneous discourses about language, art, music, and to some extent dance. The author also analyzes Hofmannsthals wide-ranging interest in numerous historical studies on color, art, and language, for example Goethe's Farbenlehre and the writings of da Vinci, drawing on Hofmannsthals own library and marginalia to understand his interest in or rejection of color theories and philosophical tracts on synesthesia and sensory perception.

Puccioni charts Hofmannsthals development from some of his earliest writing until his death in 1929. The author makes the case that Hofmannsthal, in search of a new synesthetic language that could unite the self to the world, used color in his writing to overcome the well-known language crisis as expressed in Ein Brief (1902). Before turning to an analysis oiEin Brief to explicate a pivotal time in Hofmannsthals development as a writer, Farbensprachen begins with an analysis of two early prose texts, Der Geiger von Traunsee (1889) and Das Glück am Weg (1893), in which color is primarily used as a descriptor to create a painterly effect: "[D] ie Sprache dieser frühen Texte zeigt eine bildmächtige, fantasiereiche und malerische Ausdrucksweise, in der eine synästhetische Verbindung zwischen Ich und Welt zu spüren ist" (97). Pointing to essays that are characteristic of the middle phase of Hofmannsthals development, Puccioni explicates how colors become objects themselves, rather than being simply descriptors of things (138). In Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten (1907), for example, colors have an ontological, mystical power. As Puccioni argues: "Die Sprache wird stumm und das stumme Bild dagegen fängt an, zu sprechen. Durch die Farben setzt sich ein neues Primat der Bilder im literarischen Text durch" (163). This developmental use of color eventually culminates for Hofmannsthal in his late work in a primary focus on the power of light to unite opposites and create a harmonic "Gesamtbild" (229). In his travel writing about Italy and Greece, Hofmannsthal acknowledges the critical combination of light, place, and time as facilitators of the conditions for creative production. In her analysis of these late works, Puccioni argues that Hofmannsthal employs a poetological approach to light that allows a melding of past and present. This unity of experience, combining the synchronic with the anachronistic, allows Hofmannsthal to find "einen Ausweg aus dem zersplitterten und intellektuell gespaltenen 'Zuhause', wo das Vergehen der Zeit zwar seine Spuren hinterlassen, aber nicht zu einer Harmonie, sondern zu einer Trennung geführt hat" (208).

This study has multiple strengths; most importantly, the author's thesis is clearly articulated and supported with strong textual analysis of Hofmannsthal's prose texts. The overview in the first two chapters on color theory, synesthesia, and atmosphere and Hofmannsthal's reception of these theories is interesting to read, especially the way that Puccioni is able to pull together strands from a variety of sources to serve her primary thesis effectively. Furthermore, the analysis of color and synesthesia functions as a focused lens through which to understand Hofmannsthal's entire body of work, allowing the reader to gain a relatively neat and compact overview of nearly all of Hofmannsthal's years as a writer. The beginning of the study provides a useful overview of theoretical texts relating to color and synesthesia, including sources that provide contextualization of Hofmannsthal's work in its contemporary context. Puccioni provides evidence for Hofmannsthal's interest in the theoretical writing of Ernst Mach (Die Analyse der Empfindungen, 1900), for example, and delves into other theoretical discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in...