Beckett and Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia, the cross-connection of the different senses like colour hearing, was an important element in Western art and literature around the beginning of the twentieth century. The delirium of the senses that Rimbaud's sonnet "Vowels" explored appealed to many innovative artists of the day. And it was inseparable from the tendency in symbolism and modernism to blur genre distinctions. Beckett was one of the many modernists in whose work synaesthetic sensibility is inscribed. This paper first outlines synaesthesia in symbolism and modernism, referring to new media and technology. It then considers how Beckett (especially in his early writings) can be situated in the trend.