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

For Mallarmé, 'the Book', le Livre, was a lifelong obsession. At times, he presents this figure as a metaphor for the whole of his (completed and projected) literary output. Elsewhere, his invocations take a more concrete inflection, seeming to indicate an actual book he has yet to write, or a quasi-material allegory of the acts of reading and writing. In envisaging Mallarmé's 'Book' as an ideal behind the book under review, it might be best to select from all his invocations the least metaphysical and the most structurally explicit. 'Le Livre', he once wrote, 'is to be architectural and premeditated, and not a haphazard collection of inspirations' (Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris, 1959-85), ii. 301, my trans.).

In her book Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text, Elizabeth McCombie offers a 'haphazard collection of inspirations' that falls far short of any ideal of premeditated structure. While one cannot tell from the names given here for the editors of the Oxford Modern Language and Literature Monographs whether any individual had charge of this manuscript, it is clear that no senior scholar or professional editor can have read it closely. Thankfully, the kind of factual error that gives Debussy's dates in the first sentence as '1862-1916' recurs only rarely. But the writing style throughout is atrociously unrefined.

I must first exemplify the problems if I am to find my way to more fruitful considerations. At the most basic level, some might forgive the drum-beating about the 'extraordinary substance' in Mallarmé's claim to 'musical' prose and, a page later, the 'extraordinary subtlety' in his interdisciplinary thinking (pp. 23, 24). But the red pencil should have come out countless times for 'very exacting', 'very specific', 'very static', 'very futile', etc. More substantively, the banal claim that 'listening to Debussy and reading Mallarmé can be very different experiences' (p. 1) might pass once at the start, and perhaps a single varied reiteration ('The fundamental experiences of reading Mallarmé and reading Mallarmé as stage-managed by Debussy differ widely', p. 177) seems a near-acceptable resumption of an argument. But a second one, again with lazy emphasis—'Hearing the song Éventail is a very different experience from reading Mallarmé's poem' (p.188)—smacks of critical impotence.

A similar impotence characterizes McCombie's vocabulary. She is overfond of pseudo-profundities like 'telos' (or 'telic') and 'proleptic' (both passim), but content to enlist the blandest of verbal nouns for all imaginable purposes: 'One problem in the language of musicology is the pull between purely formal elements of analysis, and the use of "extra-musical" language for descriptive purposes' (p. 98); 'for every pull up in the poem there is a pull down' (p. 178); 'the 'pli' itself holds opposing pushes and pulls in their simultaneous relation' (p. 186). As the last example may suggest, McCombie likes to sprinkle her readings with Mallarmé's words. This is common practice, to be sure, but the way she drops the bits of French into her sentences often betrays her ear: 'the figure of the pli contains the nexus of movements that occur in the weave of ('subtil') the charged, hesitating surface' (loc. cit.).

Ill-heard sentences are, indeed, prevalent. 'When a piece of music and poem are placed side by side', we read early on, 'there is overlap between the dynamic energy and patterns of reading and listening of each' (p. xiv). And later: 'making music a proper consideration, that is to say, has a certain part in and effect on the text, opens up ways of reading his late prose not available before' (p. 31). Occasionally the overwriting shades into incomprehensibility. A section starts with one clunky sentence—'Eclat and Explosante fixe are the titles given to two of Boulez's works the compositional principles of which are fascinating and revealing' (p. 63)—and closes with this...