LISTENING IN: MUSIC, MIND, AND THE MODERNIST NARRATIVE

Comparative Literature, Fall 2004 by Pautrot, Jean-Louis

LISTENING IN: MUSIC, MIND, AND THE MODERNIST NARRATIVE. By Eric Prieto. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xiii + 322 p.

The interrelations of music and literature is an expansive field, and so is the subfield of musical influences on literature. However, relatively few such studies have appeared on prose narratives of the twentieth century, with the pre-WWII period receiving more attention than postwar literature. Françoise Escal's respected work, for example, does not venture much past André Gide. Even works seeking to cover the entire span of the twentieth century, such as Werner Wolf's, seem to be more comfortable with authors who could be called early modernists, such as Joyce, Woolf, and Huxley.

Along with Frédérique Arroyas, Eric Prieto is one of only a few critics to examine analytically works by avant-garde, late modernists Robert Finget, Michel Leiris, and Samuel Beckett in terms of musical influence. Prieto's study places these works, which span the 1940s to the 1960s, against the evolution of a musical model in literature and proposes a coherent thesis for the use of music as a central, if not always obvious, reference in late modernist narratives.

In the Introduction, Prieto reminds us that the possibility of using music as a model for narratives is a recurrent preoccupation of twentieth-century writers and an unprecedented phenomenon (p. ix). Recalling that this interest in music is a consequence of the crisis of mimesis in the late nineteenth century, Prieto formulates his thesis: the musical model "always serves to further [an] inwardly directed mode of mimesis," which Prieto names "listening in," where the object of representation is not the outside world, but "the subtly modulating interactions between consciousness and the world" (p. x). Music, with its emphasis on process, formal relations, and semiotics over semantics, becomes an appealing alternative "guide for reconfiguring the narrative text" (p. x), and serves as a "formal, expressive, or essentialist model of non-conceptual communication" (p. xii).

In chapter 1, "Music, Mimesis, and Metaphor," a first part is devoted to tracing the "historical explanation of the modernist interest in music" (p. xi), going back to the Greek notion of Mousike in order to show that the modernist use of musical models was made possible by the erosion of the traditional relationship between the two arts in which voice was central. Something happens with the "Symbolist Moment": by the end of the nineteenth century, "voice is no longer a necessary element of the relationship," and the new link is thought (p. 10). This postsymbolist connotation of music turns it into a model for literature, in conjunction with the influence of Wagner. The birth of the modernist narrative, brought about by the search for alternatives to logical discourse and realism, is directly related to music: inspired by Wagnerian leitmotifs, Dujardin invents the streamof-consciousness technique. Prieto grounds his subsequent analyses of works by Finget, Leiris, and Beckett directly in the postsymbolist link between music and thought.

Prieto then presents his theoretical tools. He is critical of the current field in which "a viable methodology has not yet emerged" (p. 18). Confronted with the inevitable problem of the metaphoricity of the musical reference in literature, the founding works of Calvin Brown, and those of his followers (Steven Paul Scher, Werner Wolf), share a shortcoming: attempting to "legislate, to decide once and for all what does constitute an appropriate musical metaphor" (p. 21). But the critic should not take the place of the writer: if an author uses a musical metaphor, incongruous or musically misinformed as it may seem to knowledgeable readers, it is to be studied carefully: "The question is not whether a metaphor is appropriate or not but where it can take us, how much it can teach us" (p. 23). Prieto then presents his approach to the problem of musical reference and musical meaning.

After discussing aesthetic theorists such as Leonard B. Meyer, Monroe Beardsley, and Susan Langer, he focuses on Nelson Goodman's Language of Arts, which he finds useful for the notion of exemplification: a work of music "does not denote, resemble, or cause the things it is said to mean" (p. 32); rather, it exemplifies, i.e., it refers to previous pieces, genres, or styles, it "defines form itself as a mode of reference with a semantic dimension" (p. 33). Prieto's extensive use of Goodman's idea of musical exemplification in subsequent chapters is what gives this book its most original dimension.

Prieto then explores the "semantic dimension of the relationship" between music and narrative, since "the shift in emphasis from denotation to exemplification implied by the use of musical models requires a rethinking of the relationship between narrative syntax and semantics" (p. 42). Building on Pavel's analysis of narrative semantics as possessing a cognitive purpose and on Ricoeur's studies of metaphor and narrative time, he demonstrates their compatibility with Goodman's theory through the capacity of indirect reference. Arguing against Pierce and musicologist Nattiez, Prieto stresses the importance of "those kinds of secondary meanings that depend on the indirect reference characteristic of metaphor and fiction" (p. 47). Drawing from Swayne, he argues that "music is a semantic horizon of literature, that point at which literary statement, having traded directness and literality for an ever increasing semantic range, gains access to meanings completely inaccessible to direct verbal predication" (p. 48).