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<h1 class="reader-title">Review of Hamilton, John T., Music,
Madness, and the Unworking of Language</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Ian Miller</div>
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<p>
<strong>John T. Hamilton.</strong> <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/023114220X?tag=hnetreviews-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1"><em>Music,
Madness, and the Unworking of Language.</em></a> Columbia
Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts Series. New
York: <a
href="http://cup.columbia.edu/%20%20%20email%20for%20Meredith%20Howard%20:%20mh2306@columbia.edu">Columbia
University Press</a>, 2008. xviii + 252 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-231-14220-5.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Reviewed by</strong> Ian Miller (University of Manchester)<br>
<strong>Published on</strong> H-Disability (August, 2010)<br>
<strong>Commissioned by</strong> Iain C. Hutchison (University of
Glasgow)<br>
</p>
<p><span>
<strong>Music, Madness, and Language</strong>
</span></p>
<p>In his latest book, <em>Music, Madness, and the Unworking of
Language</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Language is presented in <em>Music, Madness, and the Unworking
of Language </em>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Hamilton begins in the 1750s with Denis Diderot’s <em>Neveu de
Rameau</em>, 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, <em>St Cecelia, or
the Power of Music </em>(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.</p>
<p>Overall, <em>Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language </em>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.</p>
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