Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (review)

Anyone who followed the polemics surrounding the building and inauguration of the Opéra Bastille and its bicentenary musical programme will not be surprised to learn that the French had repeatedly gone to war over music in the past. The argument of this book situates itself in the eighteenth-century debates over the suitability of the French language for musical expression, and the moral implications of music for women. Is French opera, and therefore the French language, and therefore the French nation, going to be forever incapable of surpassing the Italians? Is a woman playing or listening to music automatically apt to be seductive or seduced? Rousseau, it will be seen, is dead centre in both of these problematics, and the responses to his claims about music and language in the Lettre sur la musique française and about the education of Sophie in the Émile, structure the book's six chapters. It will not be news to scholars that those authors taken up in the book's first half, Diderot, Beaumarchais and Cazotte, produced pointed observations on Rousseau's ideas about music and the nation. Nor is it a new thought that those read in the second half, Charrière, Cottin, Krüdener and Staël, wrote about the cultural association of women, music and immorality. This book, however, settles on a particular textual device, the musical tableau, as a tell-tale moment in all of the texts under consideration, and neatly shows how it overpowers or undermines surface meaning. The musical tableau is a musical performance staged for a beholder inscribed within the text. Theoretically, it operates in the vicinity of Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality, that is, of the double absorption of the actor, be s/he playing a game of knucklebones or playing a harpsichord, and the absorption of the spectator in the actor's absorption. However, the almost complete ahistoricity of Fried's path-breaking identification of this structure created an opportunity to test its connections, whether to the rhetoric of the hypotyposis, or to the history of the play-within-a-play. The finesse of the present study lies in its mobilization of this opportunity. Through an impressive series of close readings of such scenes, for example the harpsichord recital in Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux during which Alvare peeps through a keyhole to watch and listen to Biondetta playing purportedly Italian music, and which is beautifully reproduced on the dust jacket for the Peeping Tom reader, Boon Cuillé shows that music's indeterminacy troubles any easy reading of these texts. Missing here is any real reflection on what it means to write an account such as this. There may be too many things that lead on 'inexorably' to the next, a few too many movements 'feeding into' later ones, and too many forerunners and things on the verge of this or that. However, the energy saved by not interrogating its own writing of history is profitably expended on opening up a whole world of the troubled reception of Rousseau's musical aesthetics, and on an indefatigable practice of close reading.