[D66] Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

[René Oudeweg]

h-net.org <https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30256>


  Review of Hamilton, John T., Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Ian Miller
7–8 minutes
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*John T. Hamilton.* /Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language./ 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/023114220X?tag=hnetreviews-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1> 
Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts Series. 
New York: Columbia University Press 
<http://cup.columbia.edu/%20%20%20email%20for%20Meredith%20Howard%20:%20mh2306@columbia.edu>, 
2008. xviii + 252 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14220-5.

*Reviewed by* Ian Miller (University of Manchester)
*Published on* H-Disability (August, 2010)
*Commissioned by* Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)

*Music, Madness, and Language*

In his latest book, /Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language/, 
John T. Hamilton astutely observes that the last few decades have 
witnessed a burgeoning scholarship on the isolated topics of music or 
madness in relation to language. However, sparse attention has been paid 
to the specific association of music and madness in romantic literature, 
and its ramifications for theories of aesthetics, representation, and 
linguistics.  Hamilton gracefully succeeds in providing such an 
analysis, systematically uncovering the underlying motivations for their 
persistent historical coupling.  He convincingly demonstrates that 
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there existed an 
autobiographical impulse that influenced the direction of literary, 
philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness.

Although the subject’s loss of rational control during the experience of 
music and the rise of unexpected passions is presented by Hamilton as a 
transcultural, transhistorical phenomenon, the setting within which the 
author pursues his interest is Germany during the romantic period.  Even 
today, scientists remain intrigued by the intricacies of the apparent 
relationships between creativity and mental illness, yet it is in the 
romantic period, so the author maintains, that the deepest and most 
prolonged reflection on the coupling of music and madness occurred.  In 
Germany, inclinations to associate mental disturbance with sound, and a 
trend toward intermingling literary and clinical discourses, assisted in 
shaping the direction of the German cultural and literary imagination.  
Music was presented sometimes as essentially beneficial and therapeutic 
in nature, but also as a detrimental and pathogenic force.  Yet both of 
these standpoints pointed toward a recognition of the emotional force 
and influence of music that nurtured and stimulated an ongoing debate 
within music, literature, medicine, and philosophy.

Language is presented in /Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language 
/as an intrinsic and central component of this historical debate.  
Hamilton argues that both music and madness marked out a conceptual 
border where language could not reach. Romantically, they were conceived 
as abstract spheres that challenged the norms of denotation and 
signification, defining the upper and lower limits of language.  The 
rational working of language was thought to be a mechanism that 
distinguished mankind from beast.  Hence, speechlessness became 
conceptualized as a symptom of imminent insanity and a signifier of a 
psychically disturbed state that threatened individual identity.  
Madness dissolved the boundaries between man and the savage, while music 
might override the division separating humanity from the divine.

One of the most profound and practical manifestations of this was the 
contemporary acknowledgement that music might be essentially violent in 
nature, a concern that pressed upon eighteenth-century aestheticians.  
Verbal language was commonly deemed necessary to maintain art’s mimetic 
principle and acted as a safeguard against its potential to evoke 
irrational emotionalism.  Hamilton describes polyphony, as represented 
by the burgeoning popularity of instrumental forms including the sonata 
and the symphony, as becoming perceived in some intellectual circles as 
a threat to the individual.  Without words, music might be free to exert 
its violence upon the listener.  Yet to its advocates, instrumental 
power had the potential to present human truths that evaded the rigid 
concepts of syntax.

These debates are skillfully interwoven by Hamilton into debates 
surrounding the historiography of psychiatry.  The author engages with 
Foucauldian theory by aligning his discussion of musicology with the 
emergence of madness from invisibility and silence throughout the period 
in question.  Music became perceived as having immediate access to the 
volatile life of the emotions which rendered it morally problematic.  
The listener became viewed as having little choice but to submit to 
music’s intoxicating power, which caused music to be regarded as an 
exemplary case of the sublime, as something that eluded definition, 
comprehension, or representation.

Hamilton begins in the 1750s with Denis Diderot’s /Neveu de Rameau/, 
situating the text in relation to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s reflections on 
the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics.  
Diderot’s employment of the literary figure of the mad musician in this 
work is presented as providing a literary place for a group banished in 
a period that arguably witnessed a great confinement of the mad.  
Linkage between music and madness is further explored through analysis 
of the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 
Hegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Heinrich von Kleist.  The 
latter’s haunting tale of music and madness, /St Cecelia, or the Power 
of Music /(1810) is presented as deftly rehearsing the major motifs of 
the sublime.  Hamilton then turns his attention toward E. T. A. 
Hoffmann, whose early nineteenth-century writings accelerated the 
preceding tradition. Hoffman explicitly theorized music to exist before 
and after the abstract forms established by language.  Hegel’s, Immanuel 
Kant’s, and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche’s renderings of the topic in 
question are then fully analyzed throughout the concluding sections.  
Hegel, for instance, was led to recognize that the musician’s 
derangement was a sign of modern man’s necessary self-alienation, 
acknowledging music’s inherent inwardness.

Overall, /Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language /is an extremely 
accomplished work that provides a powerful insight into a potentially 
important historical topic.  It is imaginative and lucid, impeccably 
well written, and positively interdisciplinary in nature, being of 
interest not only to historians of music, but also to those interested 
in the history of psychiatry, language, culture, aesthetics, philosophy, 
and romantic culture.  Despite the complex nature of the narrative 
provided by Hamilton, it is highly accessible to both specialists and 
nonspecialists.
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