Synaesthesia

The word ‘synaesthesia’ has been derived from a Greek word meaning ‘perceiving together’. It means concurrent appeal to more than one senses. J.A. Cuddon defines it as the “response through several senses to the stimulation of one”. It is also sometimes called ‘sense transfer’ or ‘sense analogy’ – as M.H. Abrams too has termed it as description of one sense through another; for instance, colour is attributed to sound, sound to odour, odour to colour.
Synaesthetic imagery was first used by Jules Millet in 1892 in his thesis on Auditon Coloree. Baudelaire made us of this imagery in his sonnet ‘Correspondances’ and ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’. Rimbaud in his poem ‘Voyelles’ assigned a colour to each vowel sound. This imagery was especially used by the Romantic poets and later by French symbolists.
Keats in his odes makes full use of this type of imagery. For instance, in his Ode ‘To Nightingale’ he writes:

“Tasting of Flora and the country green
Provencal song, dance and mirth”

Keats here refers to the tasting of sight, colour, sound, motion and heat. About these lines, Fogle is of the view: ‘Synaesthetic imagery is at its highest’.

Shelley too, using synaesthetic imagery in his poem ‘The Sensitive Plant’ writes:

“Of music so delicate, soft and intense
It was felt like an odour within the sense.”

This imagery was also used by poets like Aeschylus, Donne, Crashaw and Horace.

'Stream of Consciousness' and 'Mrs.Dalloway'

I have always been fascinated by the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’. It sounds so poetic, may be because it compares the thinking process or our consciousness to a stream. The psychologist and the writer of ‘Principles of Psychology’, James Joyce, coined the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ in 1890, although the technique had already been used by Edouard Dujardin (French novelist) in a short novel. By this term James Joyce meant that human consciousness is something fluid. With this technique what we have before us is the outer observations as they
impinge on the flow of thoughts, memory and feelings.
A novel written in this technique, that stands out in my memory is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, which has been called “the first wholly successful novel that Virginia Woolf produced” by. The action or description of events in the novel has not been narrated in the chronological order – a typical characteristic of stream of consciousness. All the characters have been portrayed by the ‘flow of the stream of consciousness’. The action is confined to just a single day. The novel begins with Clarissa going out of her house for buying flowers in the morning and ends with Clarissa’s party in the evening. But although the clock time is restricted, yet the psychological time is of much longer duration.Virgina Woolf herself says: "In a novel of subjectivity there is no plot, no character, no tragedy, no comedy and no love-interest as in
traditional novel."