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

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Ronald Schleifer

Thus, in "You Do Something to Me" the seeming contingency of a face occasioning the absolute and noncontingent opening of heaven gives rise to the "little meaning" of Lacan's metonymic desire so that the haunting of its homelessness can be discemed. Emmanuel Levinas traces in such a face a meaning that

   means from the very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms
   which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence to
   perception. But always the face shows through these forms. Prior to any
   particular expression and beneath all particular expressions, which cover
   over and protect with an immediately adopted face or countenance, there is
   the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such.... From the
   beginning there is a face to face steadfast in its exposure to invisible
   death, to a mysterious forsakenness.(30)

The face to be faced is exposed to the mysterious forsakenness of a world in which things by themselves do not signify, but stand naked and destitute. Yet such exposure--like the confrontations of needs and demands of recognition and surprise--also provokes a "little meaning"; it provokes desire. That is, the rhythm of desire, as "I Get a Kick out of You" suggests, is closely tied to the immanence and contingency of the beloved's face and apprehended patterns of sound and beat and meanings that play in the difference between boredom and inebriation and danger. Such rhythm presents endless metonymic displacement: proper names such as Lindbergh can be endlessly attached to the play of desire, just as changing tempos and changing places can. That is, it presents the displacement of a sudden recognition of a "fabulous face" in the face of the "old ennui" or heaven opening with strange feelings occasioned by a gaze. And when face signifies itself, in the supernaturalism of the rime riche of signification folded back upon itself, repetition seems a new beginning. Such folding back is the syncopation of desire--the syncopation of signification--in which meaning seems to inhabit a worldly "thing" so absolutely that it becomes the touchstone of value, an object of desire.

Porter explores the "mysterious forsakenness" of such a face in a song like "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (1929) and even, perhaps with less overt "mystery," in "Just One of Those Things" (1930/1935). "What Is This Thing Called Love?" is one of Porter's most mysterious and haunting songs. It is based on the rhythms of a chant Porter claims to have heard in Marrakesh and is dominated by the implicit mode of C minor, but it repeatedly resolves itself into C major, displacing its implicit C7-Fm, G7-Cm repetitions with C7-Fm, G7-G augmented-C major.

This resolution is most pronounced at the end of the song, with the octave C and the question "I ask the Lord in Heaven above, / What is this thing called love?" (Cole 93). The displacement of minor by major is especially emphasized m the 1955 arrangement by Nelson Riddle, sung by Frank Sinatra.(31) In this arrangement the repeated motif of the clarinet makes the resolution of each verse seem minor rather than major, until the displacement of C minor by C major takes place after Sinatra finishes the ballad, as if the resolution in C major were beyond the question of the song, repressed, so to speak, in the subject's experience. The displacement of minor by major--Porter uses this in "It Was Just One of Those Things" (Dm/F), "I Get a Kick out of You" (Gm/[E.sub.b]), and more starkly and ironically in "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" (1938; Cm/C)--effects a sense of desire as that "something" Lacan talks about just beyond the reach of apprehension, desire, like Porter himself, almost graspable but inhabiting homelessness.