In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with
madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist,
Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches
back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern
imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way
literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and
madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a
crisis of language. Special focus is given to the decidedly
autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the
expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects
of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system.
The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, and
situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice
and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Upon tracing the
linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder,
Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A.
Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century
accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton
considers the particular representations that link music and madness,
investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological
premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The
gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially
problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of
selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced
problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that
the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the
generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to
linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music,
madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they
also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance.
