Searching for Lost Time: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic

SEARCHING FOR LOST TIME: PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON GAVIN BRYARS’S THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC SAM CLEEVE INTRODUCTION WANT TO BEGIN BY VENTURING that Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic (1969–) might plausibly be phenomenologically experienced as a manipulation of one’s sense of the present, but one that is contingent upon an ubiquitous sense of the past. Certainly that is a statement that requires unpacking: ostensibly at least, Bryars’s work is characterized by unvarying repetition—indeed, its acute sense of stasis is such that it might feasibly qualify as a piece of minimalist music.1 By extension , the work has the potential to elicit the altered modes of temporal experience—that is, manipulations of one’s sense of the present—that have long been associated with music of the kind.2 Simultaneously, The Sinking of the Titanic was conceived entirely as a result of rigorous historical research. When reading around the work, one quickly finds that all of its various musical components are associated with, or I 146 Perspectives of New Music derived from, research and evidentiary material concerning the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. The work is contingent, that is, upon an inescapable preoccupation with the past. A similar duality—of a present altered through a sense of retrospect —is at the root of what Sigmund Freud addresses in the opening chapter of Civilization and its Discontents (1929) as the “oceanic feeling”—essentially an ecstatic, limitless sensation sometimes associated with religious experience. But this transcendental phenomenon, experienced in the present, is in fact attributed to a regression, a latent “memory” of the past. This memory is of the limitless narcissism of pre-Oedipal experience, of an infant experience in which stimuli are indistinguishable from their worldly sources, in which the child is unable, even, to differentiate between his or her own ego and the external world. It is the task of this article to explore and explicate the various similarities between Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic and Freud’s oceanic feeling. Such a comparison almost suggests itself: both turn to the ocean as a conceptual signifier, after all. But the relationship survives beyond this rather superficial level of scrutiny: The Sinking of the Titanic, as we will see, is characterized by an indeterminate yet repetitive structural design that constitutes a remarkably precise musical representation of pre-Oedipal experience. Furthermore, there are aspects of the work that arguably represent the oceanic feeling’s intrinsic recollective processes—if we are to accept Freud’s analysis, there is no oceanic feeling without any memory function. As such, this article will also consider the ways in which Bryars handles historical materials, incorporating them as programmatic allusions throughout The Sinking of the Titanic, and imbuing the music with an inherent sense of retrospect. The identification of such interdisciplinary connections serves primarily to prompt inventive ways of contemplating temporality, and, by extension, emotion (namely nostalgia) in Bryars’s work. But, as has already been touched upon, one might also argue that The Sinking of the Titanic possesses a real potential for the phenomenological induction of various emotions, sentiments, and—like other minimalist works—unusual temporal experiences. In this instance, the elicitation of the same “memory” at the root of the oceanic feeling serves as a kind of psychoanalytic explanation for the elicitation of such responses. Thus, once the similarities and parallels between musical work and psychoanalytic theory have been fully pursued, the potential and limits of resultant psychological induction will be addressed. Searching for Lost Time 147 BRYARS’S NAUTICAL MAUSOLEUM The earliest version of The Sinking of the Titanic existed as little more than a descriptive sketch, conceived as a work of conceptual art (perhaps in the vein of John Cage or the artists associated with the Fluxus movement3) for an exhibition at the Portsmouth College of Art, where Bryars held a teaching post. Bryars would later describe this early iteration of the work as “a single page of typed A4 paper, a kind of conceptual artwork describing the possibility of a piece.”4 It was only in December 1972, when promoter and critic Victor Schonfield programmed The Sinking of the Titanic as part of one of...