Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (review)

In this monograph, Eric Prieto analyzes the functions of music in the work of three second-generation modernists, Robert Pinget, Michel Leiris, and Samuel Beckett, who illustrate a version of a crisis in mimesis that questions the possibility of representation itself. If the starting point of the crisis is Flaubert's "livre sur rien," the supposed remedy for the crisis had already appeared in Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, with the battle cry for heterogenous recuperation of the whole launched with the first chord of Tristan und Isolde.

High modernism tried to use technique, structure, and polyphony to give meaning and mimesis back to narrative, or at least to respond to the crisis. Yet in the second phase of modernism, the narrative crisis still looms large. Prieto admirably demonstrates how the authors use music as a response to the crisis in representation. With detailed studies that show the functions of musical form in these authors' works, Prieto illustrates the "musicalization of fiction" (59). Prieto problematizes the interrelations of the two arts in ingenious ways, as he eschews easy approaches that would thematize music or represent it in some sort of realist or mimetic fashion.

In the chapter on Pinget, he demonstrates the structural relation between Passacaille and the polysemy / polyphony of the form referenced by the title. Prieto is aptly ludic, going masterfully between polysemy and polyphony, with grounded bass, theme, and variation artfully illustrated. In the forceful chapter on Leiris, Prieto successfully argues that Leiris's late work "Musique en texte et musique anti-texte" needs to be considered in relation to the early Glossaire : J'y serre mes gloses (109-10). In so doing, he allows his readers the insights necessary for considering the musicality in Leiris's autobiographical works. Prieto explores music as it "links the humanity of the spoken word with rhythms […] that transcend the human" (128). Explaining leitmotifs and metaphors, themes and variations, Prieto provides a convincing reading of these often hermetic works.

Starting with Beckett's "explicitly Schopenhauerian analysis of Proust's poetics" (167), and working through what he calls the "loss of meaning" in Watt (184), Prieto shows how Beckett uses music not as the solution to the crisis of mimesis and representation, but simply as the evocation of a once-having-been : "The piano, the piano-tuner, and the pianist are all doomed. All that has permanence is the fact of their passing" (189). This then is Beckett's crisis: unlike Sartre's Roquentin listening to jazz, Beckett finds no solace, either here or in later works like Cascando in which music plays a key role but offers no solutions.

The author's final chapter, entitled "Music, Metaphysics, and Moral Purpose in Literature", is both an effective summary of the key points and a set of consequences resulting from these analyses. Here, the critic offers useful insights into the roles of transcendence and immanence in the arts, as he questions received ontologies and epistemologies about literature, music, and critical inquiry. This book is to be recommended to readers interested in the interplay of music and literature, as well as to those interested in the three authors studied.