Ocular harpsichord: colour-sound analogy at large in The Enlightenment
<p>The ocular harpsichord was a notable cultural phenomenon of the European Enlightenment, but its precise chronology and contemporary reception have since become obscure. Proposed in 1725 by Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757, a Jesuit scientist and writer at the <em>Journal de Trévoux<...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English French |
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2018
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| Summary: | <p>The ocular harpsichord was a notable cultural phenomenon of the European Enlightenment, but its precise chronology and contemporary reception have since become obscure. Proposed in 1725 by Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757, a Jesuit scientist and writer at the <em>Journal de Trévoux</em>), it was meant to play ‘colour music’. However, the exact sensory and aesthetic effect that it was meant to have upon an audience is difficult to gauge, because it inspired such extensive controversy and excitement—evidenced in books, academic lectures, reviews, journal articles, libertine satires, personal anecdotes, and private correspondence. Was it inspired by Newton, and what assumptions did it imply about the senses? While the ocular harpsichord is sometimes mentioned in connection to synaesthesia, there was no eighteenth-century equivalent for this late nineteenth-century term derived from the emerging discourse of psychology, which indicates that contemporary responses to Castel’s clavecin oculaire had other pre-occupations, motivations and goals. Complicating matters is the fact that Castel was a polarizing and polemical figure in the lives of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Rameau, Fontenelle and Montesquieu. While some philosophes who had quarrels with Castel described him as crazy, or ‘fou’, they also made perplexing remarks about his contraption that typically resist straightforward interpretation. The ocular harpsichord’s mechanics as a concept and as a machine have been further obscured by Castel’s elaborate style of writing, whose organizing principles and institutional and cultural contexts are alien to modern readers. Yet Castel wrote many works about his device, using it to construct his persona and generate publicity for his œuvre and universal system. This thesis combines close reading of primary sources, intellectual history, and literary analysis using the tradition of classical rhetoric to explain what the ocular harpsichord was, how its history as a material instrument unfolded, and what it meant to Castel and his readers.</p> |
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