Mallarme and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (review)

The compatibility of poetry and music seems obvious, not only because they both exploit sound – music's production of tones, poetry's privileging of verbal sonorities – but also because both have the uncanny power to provoke intense, immediate experiences of the sublime. Noting, however, "the natural asymmetry" between them that "makes the act of comparison difficult" (XIII-XIV), Elizabeth McCombie proposes "to reconstruct the particular force of the intermediate ground and its underlying dialogue of slippages and collusions" (XVI), in order to get beyond the "naïve mimetic model of the inter-art relationship" (XIII) that has traditionally predominated and prevented any really profound engaging of the two fields. In her introduction, "Searching for the Intermediary," she adroitly addresses fundamental differences between literature and music that impede finding a common language. Matching "the structural features of a poem and a piece" (6), as a strategy, is dismissed – unconvincingly I feel – because it purportedly considers only symmetrical elements, even though such a comparison could also point up formal asymmetries and distortions. A more promising approach, she implies, would focus on rhythm, since "the distinctive joint feature of music and poetry is that the formal apparatus of each is based on the rhythmic apprehension of time" (7).

Chapter 1, "Music in Mallarmé: A Musico-Poetic Aesthetic," concentrates on selections from Mallarmé's theoretical works written ostensibly in prose, but Mallarmé's prose style is idiosyncratic and poses interpretive problems no less challenging than many of his poems. McCombie notes that, for him, "there is no difference between prose and verse, just tighter and looser rhythms" (32), and her trenchant analysis of these difficult texts is, for me, a highlight of the book. She very effectively teases out the musical vocabulary that the poet weaves into his discussions, demonstrating not only how his views on music differed from other important nineteenth-century figures, but also the extent to which allusions to music infuse so much of his prose, and not only "La Musique et les lettres," where it is obviously a central issue. Reading this particular work "in a musical way" (31), she shows how "it is a prose that illustrates his theory in practice to the most extreme degree, an ultimately self-enacting aesthetic manifesto written into the manner in which it says rather than into what it says" (31-32). Her claim, though, that the arabesque asserts "the rhythmicity of the musico-poetic overlap" (41) would profit from a close analysis of such a figure – no illustration is provided – that demonstrates how specifically it incorporates rhythm and the other attributes she ascribes to it, including "mise en abyme" and abstract concepts like "undecidability."

The title of Chapter 2, "The Poetics of Discontinuity," signals, perhaps unintentionally, the author's loosely organized and at times disjointed alignments of poetry and music, Mallarmé and Debussy. The pairing of the octosyllabic sonnet "Billet" with the three-movement La Mer, is disproportionate, and the analysis of "Petit Air I," juxtaposed abruptly with Debussy's Études, is not particularly musical but a rather traditional close reading. The relating of the Möbius strip to this poem, moreover, is basically impressionistic, and the claim that its "twist" is what "Mallarmé identifies as the linguistic equivalent of the phenomenon of the 'idée'" (91) is thought-provoking but only speculatively linked to his notion of "enroulements." Concerning Mallarmé's "Billet," McCombie states in a note that "much has been written on this poem" (47), but aside from a recommendation to "see" two critics' readings, there is no engagement with the discourse surrounding the poem. This echoes an earlier note concerning "an explosion of renewed critical interest in Mallarmé" that the author claims is not "within [the book's] scope to absorb" (XVIII). The very limited recourse to other critical studies of the works examined and the reliance on a selected few, such as Richard's important but dated L'Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé, give the impression that McCombie is working in somewhat of...