Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (review)

The decades before and after 1800 saw the emergence of a pure instrumental music that distinguished itself from its lighter predecessors by transcendental aspirations. The new sonatas, symphonies, and other new musical forms demanded that the psychological, social, philosophical, and religious functions of music be reconsidered, and the resultant reflections on these works represented a major revolution in aesthetics that opened the door for new, semantically undefined, "abstract" art forms in general. The new music that "rid" or "emancipated" itself from language came to question not only the function of text in music but in a broader sense also the capabilities of language, and, ultimately, the whole "logocentric" philosophical tradition.

John T. Hamilton's excellent study follows a series of studies in recent decades that explore this aesthetic-philosophical changeover by examining a number of canonized literary texts, ranging from Diderot's Le neveu der Rameau to E. T. A. Hoffmann's works as well as the relevant writings of Kant (in chap. 4), Hegel (in chap. 3), and Herder (in chap. 4). The terrain and the topic are not new, but Hamilton's sensitive and highly intelligent interpretations are. Innovative also is that Hamilton finds, time and again, failures, limitations, ambiguities, and psychological crises where others might and have seen merely new aesthetic and expressive opportunities. As Hamilton writes programmatically in his introductory "hors d'oeuvre" in connection with the deranged Hölderlin (who does not figure in the rest of the book), his book deals "with writers who attempt to appropriate the unworking effects of music and madness as a technique for retrieving—orphically, one could say—that which is already gone. Through metaphors of music and madness, they attempt to bring to the light of day this Eurydicean point of selfhood that, according to the very law of metaphor, must return to the dark" (xvii).

The just-quoted sentence does attribute to music/madness a certain recuperative, though ultimately failed, attempt at meaning making. Diderot's fictional Jean-François Rameau, who is Hamilton's first literary figure, has no such constructive role: his incoherent singing and failure as a composer merely undermine the rational conventions of his counterpart in the dialogue, Diderot's "moi."

As to be expected, writings of the German romantics are at the heart of Hamilton's study, though it is somewhat surprising that, with the exception of Tieck, the Jenaer romantics are mentioned only in passing. The absence of Novalis is particularly curious since at the beginning Hamilton quotes Blanchot's remark about a désoeuvrement in Novalis (15), a concept that becomes important in Hamilton's own argument.

Hamilton's key authors are then Wackenroder, Kleist, and, above all, E. T. A. Hoffmann. In his discussion of Wackenroder's composer Joseph Berglinger (121–33) Hamilton explores the tension between the autobiographical references of the novella (he speaks of an "eradication of the line that generally divides life from work" [123]) and the emerging aesthetics of "a utopian nonverbal language" (128), even nonmimeticism in music. As Hamilton notes, this aesthetics foregrounded harmonic and other musical structures in opposition to Rousseau's championing of melody and his postulate that music and language were united in some mythical originary culture.

Hamilton's probing analysis of Kleist's novella "Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik" (134–58) also links fiction to autobiography by formulating the novella's problematic in terms of Kleist's letters, especially the one that he wrote to his fiancée on 19 September 1800. As in the case of Wackenroder, Hamilton shows that Kleist decisively departs from the word-centered monodic tradition: "Kleist aligns himself with the prima prattica of polyphony, where words are subordinate to the music, where the individual voice melts into the voice of God" (144). Here, as in the case of Wackenroder and Hoffmann, Hamilton links the erasure of the individual subject to a romantic admiration, initiated by Herder, for Catholic Church music. Herder also functions as...