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  • French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music
  • Heath Lees
Acquisto, Joseph . French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 202. ISBN 0-7546-5641-1.

Nowadays, no reader approaching this book through its title will be naive enough to expect one single "idea of music" to emerge by its end, far less one that sounds out all the overtones that characterize the symbolists. If there is any finite search running through Acquisto's book, it is as much a search for the symbolists' idea of poetry as it is for their idea of music – or for their idea of the idea of music.

This is not mere word-play. The symbolists' territorial jousting with music could never amount to more than a second- or third-order activity, since they were poets by vocation, not musicians by profession. Acquisto's opening picture of the unplayed harmonium in the meeting-room of René Ghil's circle captures their musically outcast state through its paradoxically eloquent dumb show. Never, he says, was a literary movement so fascinated by music, yet none of its members was a musician. Their engagement with music was ncecessarily theoretical rather than practical, but it was their very theorising about music that led them from their idealistic pretensions toward a more musically performative type of writing that was to become central to their poetics. In the end, says Acquisto, with music's considerable help, the symbolists eventually outgrew music itself.

Acquisto's method is to present a wide-ranging textual symposium from four symbolist figures, the first two definitely central (Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and the latter two definitely fringe. (René Ghil, and Jean Royère). Wagner appears as a fifth author, fortissimo at the start through his much-neglected text the Lettre sur la musique, but as Acquisto's four-movement sinfonietta progresses, Wagner undergoes a strangely gratifying diminuendo al niente. As the symbolists outgrow music, so too does the reader outgrow Wagner.

Using well-chosen, music-dominated works for his podium, Acquisto conducts a verbal fantasia of texts and intertexts, where music and poetic language often emerge as each other's "other." Their relative claims to superiority, once a hot topic, becomes a calmer, more fruitful discussion about means and ends. Instead of poetic language being challenged by music – Mallarmés "singulier défi" – music transforms itself into a lens through which the idea of poetry is itself re-envisioned. Acquisto sees music as poetry's agent for self-discovery and thence for change; a change in favour of music's instant but unverbalised effet, its wide, performative sway over its audiences, and its (Wagnerian) ability to integrate with other arts. The symbolists, in grappling with these enormously current ideas about music, were not so much propelled towards an expanded domain for poetry, but, in Acquisto's admirable phrase, "towards other semantic spaces that interact with the discourse of poetry."

In pursuit of his elegant and original hypothesis Acquisto takes his reader through his own choice of spaces, including Baudelaire's lyrical forest, now [End Page 152] as much displaced by Wagner's "mélodie de la forêt" as it is uprooted by the modern urban environment. Mallarmé's space is one of text and blanks, or notes and silences, through which one arrives at the performative goal of "radical undecideability" (70) in the sonnet Hommage (à Wagner) and then into a refreshing clearing where La Musique et les lettres gets a new and very convincing treatment. Ghil's space is that of the pseudo-scientist, some might say the charlatan, while Reyer's self-cancelling domain is just an interesting coda, vainly theorising on works of "catachresis in repetition" (156).

Like the symbolists of whom he writes, Acquisto is sympathetic and revealing of his authors and texts, but musically speaking, he hits a few bum notes. A town named Beyreuth appears, with its Wagner festival in 1869 (half a dozen years before the Bayreuth theatre was actually built), and there is a non-existent composer, Anton Weber, whose music, we are told, Baudelaire listened to. Still in historicizing mode, one might challenge the author's own "idea of music" at...

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