Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (review)

Peter Dayan explores through extracts from the writings of eight subjects—Sand, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Debussy, Berlioz, Barthes and Derrida—the nature of the relationship between music and literature. He focuses on the crucial question of whether the signifying direction of words can ever fully evoke what music actually is, demonstrating that all attempts to capture music within language are at once impossible and essential to forms of literary writing. The syntactic ambiguity of the title is thus deliberate: can music compose a definition of literature, or literature of music? Can any form of words encapsulate either of these arts with any adequacy? Or does music write literature to the extent that its very lack of specificity infuses a generality of purpose into the treacherous referentiality of the signifier? Dayan charts the way that certain writers foster an initial illusion of referential musical meaning through metaphorical association (e.g. George Sand’s attribution of raindrops to one of Chopin’s Preludes, the alleged birdsong of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the link in Swann’s mind between Odette and Vinteuil’s music); and then, how the writers come to disabuse themselves and the reader of such illusions. Other writers—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Barthes, Derrida—recognize from the outset the impossibility of embodying music in words: they seek to free such writing from directly signifying representation by acknowledging the instability of metaphor and developing new forms of expression that take account of everything that cannot be fixed in language. Music thus makes writing possible, not by analysis or imitation, but ‘as it is translated, in the process of its own transformation into something else’ (p. 10). The faithful representation of a singular human subject may be impossible, but music and poetry can at least offer ‘a faithful reflection of the process of that impossibility’ (p. 123). Key themes run through the chapters: the notion that any imposition of meaning on the autonomous art of music is, by definition, extra-musical; recognition that the nature and identification of the state engendered by music is located within the listener’s sensibility (what Valéry calls ‘l’effet sans cause’); discussion of the intersection between the singularity of the experience of an individual work and the universality of its general import; allusion to a music of silence, of absence (as in Mallarmé); the primacy of ‘le chant’ as the very condition of poetry (as in Derrida). A surprising omission from this bevy of writers and musicians is Valéry, who had extensive contact with the musical world and addressed succinctly all of these issues. He adds a further dimension, distinct from Dayan’s deconstruc-tive play of opposites, namely the sense in which music is a form of experience deep within the self, an expression of the entire living being, of which the musical art of sounds is only one possible manifestation. Poetic writing is, for Valéry, not a translation, but the expression of the desire to capture, however imperfectly, that inner voice, the ‘musique qui est en moi’.