John T. Hamilton. Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language. Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 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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Citation: Ian Miller. Review of Hamilton, John T., Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30256

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