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Des Pas Sur La Neige 19TH CENTURY MUSIC Mystères limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige Debussy est mystérieux, mais il est clair. —Vladimir Jankélévitch STEVEN RINGS Introduction: Secrets and Mysteries sive religious orders). Mysteries, by contrast, are fundamentally unknowable: they are mys- Vladimir Jankélévitch begins his 1949 mono- teries for all, and for all time. Death is the graph Debussy et le mystère by drawing a dis- ultimate mystery, its essence inaccessible to tinction between the secret and the mystery. the living. Jankélévitch proposes other myster- Secrets, per Jankélévitch, are knowable, but ies as well, some of them idiosyncratic: the they are known only to some. For those not “in mysteries of destiny, anguish, pleasure, God, on the secret,” the barrier to knowledge can love, space, innocence, and—in various forms— take many forms: a secret might be enclosed in time. (The latter will be of particular interest a riddle or a puzzle; it might be hidden by acts in this article.) Unlike the exclusionary secret, of dissembling; or it may be accessible only to the mystery, shared and experienced by all of privileged initiates (Jankélévitch cites exclu- humanity, is an agent of “sympathie fraternelle et . commune humilité.”1 An abbreviated version of this article was presented as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison music collo- 1Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Neuchâtel: quium series in November 2007. I am grateful for the Baconnière, 1949), pp. 9–12 (quote, p. 10). See also his later comments I received on that occasion from students and revision and expansion of the book, Debussy et le mystère faculty. I am also indebted to Michael Puri, Alex Rehding, de l’instant (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1976), pp. 15–19. Re- Anne Robertson, and the reviewers for this journal for maining citations in the present article refer to the origi- their trenchant reactions to earlier written drafts of the nal 1949 edition, unless the later edition is explicitly speci- paper. fied. Translations from either edition are mine. 178 19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 178–208. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.32.2.178. Debussy’s music, Jankélévitch famously pro- in all problems the secret of technical con- STEVEN RINGS nounced, is a music of the mystery, not of the struction,” considering the latent “scientism” Debussy’s secret. It does not hide its truths behind her- of this approach a “philosophical indiscretion, Des pas sur metic codes or arcane formalisms, but instead mistaking for a secret the constitutional and la neige lays bare essential mysteries of existence, mak- nuclear mystery of existence.”5 Jankélévitch’s ing them palpably present to experience: “no exclusive religious societies, quintessential cul- musician has gone as far as Claude-Achille in tures of the secret, are all too easily compared the suggestion and transcription of the myste- to communities of musical analysts trained in rious. The inexpressible that Debussy expresses highly specialized approaches—methods acces- resembles an enigma that, we might say, is sible only to the initiate. (It is hard to imagine meant to be loved, but not solved.”2 that he did not intend the comparison.) The “But not solved. ” The implication is analyst not only does violence to music’s mys- clear: we are not to treat mysteries as secrets. tery, but exhibits something approaching a pa- That is, we are not to approach them as puzzles thology—a “maniac antihedonism,” manifested to be solved, ciphers to be cracked, doors to be in a desire to flee from music’s most potent unlocked. In short, we are not to analyze mys- effects: “Technical analysis is a means of refus- tery. Jankélévitch easily could have quoted ing to abandon oneself spontaneously to grace, Debussy himself on the matter: “Grownups which is the request the musical Charm is tend to forget that as children they were forbid- making.”6 Analysis, in short, is in league with den to open the insides of their dolls—a crime the ideology of the secret and is anathema to of high treason against the cause of mystery. mystery. And yet they still insist on poking their aes- The scholarly literature of course abounds thetic noses into things that don’t concern in analytical and theoretical studies of them! Without their dolls to break open, they Debussy’s music. Jankélévitch’s view, if ac- still try to explain things, dismantle them and cepted, would force us to regard all this work quite heartlessly kill all their mystery.”3 There as, at best, orthogonal to what is most impor- is much to relish here, most notably the mas- tant in the composer’s music, or, at worst, terful twist that allows Debussy to patronize deeply damaging to it. Some analysts may be adults by comparing them to children, who untroubled by this indictment, finding Jan- know better than to analyze their pleasures. kélévitch’s notion of mystery too woolly to Citations of these (or similar) words from the support rational academic discourse in the first composer have become a familiar ritual in place. Others may wish to dismiss Jankélévitch Debussy criticism, offered as an admonition by on more philosophical grounds, holding his those not inclined to analysis, and as an expres- sion of anxiety by those who are.4 With Jankélévitch, the admonition against analysis rises to the level of an ethical indict- 5Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 10. 6Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. ment. He condemns the tendency to “seek out Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 102. Charme is a special term of art for Jankélévitch, denoting a sort of unanalyzable poetic grace; Arnold I. Davidson discusses the concept in his introduc- 2Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, p. 11. tion to Abbate’s translation (pp. vii–xii). Abbate has ex- 3Debussy on Music, ed. and trans. François Lesure and tended and elaborated on Jankélévitch’s arguments in her Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 13. much-discussed article “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Criti- The quote comes from Debussy’s first published essay for cal Inquiry 30 (2004), 505–36, in which she stresses the La revue blanche, dated 1 April 1901. importance that Jankélévitch places on the antimeta- 4Roy Howat, for example, begins his monumental analyti- physical materiality of music as experienced in perfor- cal study of Debussyan form and proportion with this very mance. Echoing the passage quoted above, she states that citation. See his Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analy- “dissecting the work’s technical features or saying what it sis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. ix. represents reflects the wish not to be transported by the Edward Lockspeiser offers a characteristic admonition state that the performance has engendered in us” (pp. 505– against analysis in Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. II 06). These ideas of course have a history: most obviously, (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 234. Though Lockspeiser the notion that analysis is a form of “dissection,” which does not quote Debussy in this particular passage, he does turns a living body into a corpse, is a familiar trope in approvingly cite Jankélévitch. Romantic criticism. 179 19TH claims of musical ineffability suspect.7 Some range his presentation in a way that will stimu- CENTURY MUSIC readers, however, may find this division of la- late the musical imagination of his audience. bor more or less satisfactory, falling, as it does, . Analysis simply says: listen to this . now along familiar and well-fortified disciplinary remember how that sounded . hear the rela- battle lines. In this view we are left with two tion . etc.”9 From this perspective—analysis nonintersecting, irreconcilable discourses on as an invitation to listen, to experience in- Debussy’s music, one of them immersed in the tently—Jankélévitch’s charge of “maniac fascinations of form, the other immersed in the antihedonism” rings especially false. The charge fascinations of meaning (meanings worldly or will surely come as a surprise to those who find mysterious, legible or ineffable). This split, fa- analysis and all of its attendant activities— miliar and comfortable for some, will never- listening, playing, singing, reflecting, recom- theless feel intellectually crippling for others. posing—a means of experiencing music’s physi- Not only does it divide the scholarly commu- cality and immediacy, its presence effects and nity into two populations who do not commu- meaning effects, as acutely as possible.10 The nicate with one another, it also closes off a experiences so constructed are of course not wealth of insight into the ways in which the extra-discursive; they are constructed by the sounding details of Debussy’s music (variously analytical act itself. I do not mean to naturalize refracted or constructed through different ana- analysis; it is a very special kind of activity, lytical discourses) might give rise to meanings with an admittedly charged ideological and in- (variously refracted or constructed through dif- stitutional history. The analytical encounter ferent interpretive discourses). with music should not be facilely equated with Perhaps the most effective end run around our countless other encounters with music, all Jankélévitch’s binary is to demonstrate that richly interwoven in the fabric of our everyday analysis need not always work in the way he lives, and all saturated with meaning.11 I sim- says it does. Analysis, at its best, need not be a ply wish to stress that, rather than reflecting a means of “solving” a piece—of decoding it like desire to flee music’s effects, the act of analysis a secret—but instead a process of making us is often undertaken in an effort to intensify more alive to it as a material, sonic phenom- those very effects.
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