Can you smell colors and see flavors?

With Stephen Crane's The Immortal Flame , writer Paul Auster published his most extensive work, nearly a thousand pages in its paperback edition published in Spanish by Booket. It is a meticulously written biography, featuring a note that is striking due to its connection to scientific knowledge.

According to Auster, Stephen Crane and a friend were once strolling through Brooklyn when a boat nearly collided with the pier, and one of the sailors “let out a warning shout.” It was then that Crane identified the sailor's cry with the color green: “What a green voice!” he exclaimed. His friend, astonished, asked Crane if he “meant to be poetic,” to which he replied, “Of course not.”

If we translate this fact into a scientific dimension, we are faced with a case of "synesthesia," or, in other words, a neurological phenomenon where several sensory modalities manifest simultaneously. It occurs when two or more senses interrelate with each other, such that a person can see sounds or perceive smells with sight, just as they can smell colors. This sensory variation causes people with "synesthetic abilities" to perceive the world as a reality of infinite nuances, where each nuance interacts with the others to create a highly sensitive fabric. This phenomenon is known to have been a personality attribute of Vladimir Nabokov , also of the musician Duke Ellington, and of the physicist Richard Feynman, who experienced synesthesia with equations, perceiving colors in them.

When synesthesia reaches literature, it becomes an expressive resource; a literary figure that symbolist poets would later use. We have an example in the young Rimbaud, a pioneer of symbolism who, as Auster points out, "articulates the essential characteristics of synesthesia in his poem entitled Vowels"; verses in which Rimbaud gives each of the vowels a color, with A being black, E white, I red, U green, and O blue. With this, Rimbaud revealed Baudelaire's meaning in that other poem entitled Correspondences, where—in its final tercets—Baudelaire speaks to us of luminous connections or correspondences:

There are perfumes as fresh as children's flesh,

sweet as the oboe, green as meadows,

and there are other corrupt, rich and triumphant ones

Correspondences is part of his famous collection of poems , Les Fleurs du Mal, which was published in 1857, when the word "synesthesia" had not yet been coined. However, the first known case of "synesthesia" occurred years before Baudelaire published his collection of poems and dates back to 1812, when Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, a medical student, wrote a scientific article about his confused sensory perceptions, which led him to associate colors with letters, as well as with numbers and days of the week.

It was the American psychologist Mary W. Calkins who published the first scientific article in which she coined the word “synesthesia”, giving it the meaning it has today. Synesthesia comes from the Greek ( σ &upsi ; ν -[ syn ], which means “together”, and α ι σ Θ η σ ι α [aistesía] , which means “sensation”). This article came out in 1895, the same year that Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage (Austral), his best-known novel and one of the highest peaks of North American literature; a story where the North American author uses war to show us the psychology of fear, a phenomenon we will discuss another time.