"What Is This Thing Called Love?": Cole Porter and the Rhythms of Desire - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Ronald Schleifer

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Notes

(1.) See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 16. Levi Strauss's extended description of the power of music is relevant to my discussion of syncopation as well as Lacan's use of metonymy as a figure for desire (which I discuss later). "The musical emotion," Levi-Strauss argues, "springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining because of his subjection to a dual periodicity: that of his respiratory system, which is determined by his individual nature, and that of the scale, which is determined by his training. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void, but only because the support that is waiting for us was not in the expected place. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own. Sometimes he moves us, sometimes he forces us to make the movement ourselves, but it always exceeds what we would have thought ourselves capable of achieving alone" (17). In this passage, Levi-Strauss is describing the power of music precisely in terms of syncopations. Such syncopations are not altogether arbitrary: rather, they are the juncture of sensation and semiotics.

In other words, in his juxtaposition of culture and nature Levi-Strauss is describing what I am calling the relationship between discourse and things, and what Lacan calls the "metonymic" nature of desire. Levi-Strauss argues for the special status of music in creating such a relationship by comparing music to painting. "Painting," he writes, "through the instrumentality of culture, gives intellectual organization to a form of nature which it was already aware of as a sense pattern. Music follows exactly the opposite course: culture is already present in it, but in the form of sense experience, even before it organizes it intellectually by means of nature. It is because the field of operation of music is cultural that music comes into being, free from those representational links that keep painting in a state of subjection to the world of sense experience and its organization in the form of objects" (22). Within this passage, as I hope to show, the term "desire" could be fruitfully substituted for music. Culture is already present in desire in the form of sense experience, and because the field of operation of desire is cultural, it is not organized in the form of objects (of desire), even as it is represented that way. The syncopated opposition between phenomenological "organization" and semiotic "representation" is clear in the lyrics, music, and structures of Porter's songs.

(2.) See Cole Porter, Cole (New York: Delta, 1971) 235. Further references will be identified by page numbers in the text.