Modernist Subject in Time: Fugue and the Fourth Dimension

The (Proto-)Modernist Subject in Time: Fugue and the

Fourth Dimension

Antonio Gordon Viselli

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

The (Proto-)Modernist Subject in Time: Fugue and the Fourth

Dimension

Antonio Gordon Viselli

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

2014

Abstract In such curiously compelling historical proximity, French symbolist poets and European modernist writers experimented with a particular musical form in literature: fugue, a musical style that reaches its height in the Baroque period, with the composition of Bach’s unfinished work, Die Kunst der Fuge. This dissertation analyzes the peculiar melopoetics of fugal writing in fin-de-siècle poets as well as in their modernist counterparts, who write in French, English and Italian. On a formal level, this project demonstrates how – within an intermedial methodological framework – fugue functions as a hybrid, experimental narrative, in its representation of polyphony and counterpoint, as well as both a horizontal and – a nearly impossible feat within linear narrative – vertical simultaneity in literature. Above and beyond the manner in which a fugal poetics manifests itself in the works of Verlaine, Mallarmé, Joyce, Pound, Gide and Vittorini, the fugue – defined, in part, as the variations of a single subject in time and space – becomes a vessel for authors to represent a fragmented modern subjectivity, and a crisis of language and communication, at a specific historical juncture, and within diverse aesthetic and political contexts. The enigmatic and resistant fugal form not only subverts language in these authors’ works – by colliding two distinct semiotic media, in which only one is mimetic –, thus creating a reading experience of “hostipitality” (Derrida), but it also performs the desire for wholeness, by deconstructing the ‘subject’ – with all of its polysemic ambiguity – in relation to the self, to objects, and to alterity. Finally, fugue’s interdisciplinarity goes beyond breaching the gap between music and literature, and comes into dialogue with the distinct notions of four- dimensionality, from relativity theory to non-Euclidean geometry.

Acknowledgements

The fugue always exceeds itself in some way, shape or form; it wanders, diverts and fragments itself. In a project that seeks to contain the uncontained, I have had tremendous support from numerous individuals, whose guidance has facilitated the interweaving of a fugal poetics’ many braids, in an attempt to reach coherence and harmony. I would like to sincerely thank the Centre for Comparative Literature for its support, and most importantly, my supervisors and committee: Professors Roland Le Huenen, Ming Xie, and Luca Somigli, for their encouragement, pertinent observations and intriguing questions, as well as their availability at some of the busiest times in the academic year. This dissertation would not have come to term in a timely manner without their dedication and disposal. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Professors Frédérique Arroyas, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, and Julie LeBlanc for their excellent comments, questions and suggestions during the doctoral defense. Among the many friends, colleagues and professors who have helped shape this project in some shape or form, I would like to recognize the late Professor Françoise Haffner for the enthusiastic dedication to French poetry that she inspired within me. My gratitude extends to Dr. Brendon Wocke as well, not only for the proofreading and comments he provided, but also for the fruitful discussions we shared: productive exchanges and collaborations that, I have come to believe, are the basis of our teaching and research in the Humanities. I am extremely grateful to my family for their unwavering support and inspiration: to my parents, Sante and Patricia Viselli, for having instilled within me a passion for languages, literature, art, and travelling; to my grandmother, Jean Hally, for her constant encouragement; to my wife, Maria, my metronome, mantra, and muse; and to my daughter, Valentina, the counterpoint to a fleeting poetics, who inspired the completion of a project that resists finitude.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... iii List of Figures ...... vii Prologue as Prelude: Fugue is in the Air ...... viii

Chapter 1 The Melopoetics of Fugue ...... 1

1 On Musico-Literary Poetics ...... 1 1.1 Fugue: History, Form and Variation ...... 6 2 Towards a Definition of Fugue in Literature ...... 12 2.1 Polyphony and Counterpoint ...... 14 3 Why Orchestrate a Literary Fugue? ...... 26 3.1 The Fleeting Subject ...... 27 3.2 The Subject in Time and Space ...... 30 3.3 The Fourth Dimension ...... 34 4 Enigmatic Fugues and their Readership ...... 42

Chapter 2 Symbolism and the Fugal Poetics of Verlaine and Mallarmé ...... 50 1 “Vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible”: Defining Suggestiveness and the Contours of the Symbol ...... 50 1.1 The History of Symbolism and of the Symbol ...... 56 1.2 A Symbolist Movement A Posteriori: from Music to Language ...... 60 1.3 Towards a Definition of the Symbol ...... 63 2 The Vacuity of Language, Subjectivity and the Problem of Communication ...... 66 2.1 Symbolist Subjectivity ...... 68 2.2 Schopenhauer ...... 70 2.3 Bergson ...... 72 2.4 Music and the Symbolist Movement ...... 75 3 Verlaine and the Fugal Poetics of Romances sans paroles ...... 79 3.1 Language amidst Fugues and Arias ...... 83 3.2 The Linguistic Fugal Breakdown: “Ariette III” ...... 88 3.3 Subjectivity and Alterity: the Question of the Receiver ...... 93 3.4 “Ariette III,” Fugue and the Destruction of Language ...... 95 3.5 Four-dimensionality ...... 99 4 Mallarmé ...... 101 iv

4.1 Mallarmé and le Néant ...... 103 4.2 A Summary of “L’Après-midi d’un faune” ...... 107 4.3 The Fugal Poetics of “L’Après-midi d’un faune” ...... 109 4.4 Variations on the Subject of Absence ...... 112 5.0. From Symbolist to Modernist Fugal Poetics ...... 117

Chapter 3 The Anglo-Modernist Novel and Long Poem: Fugue in James Joyce's Ulysses and Ezra Pound's The Cantos ...... 121 1 A Hermeneutics of Hospitality ...... 121 1.1 Joyce and Music, Music and Ulysses ...... 125 1.2 (Un)Weaving Counterpoint: Penelope and (In)Fidelity ...... 128 1.3 Joyce’s Fuga per canonem vs. The Critics ...... 132 1.4 Re-re-opening the Mystery of Fugue in “Sirens” ...... 135 2 From Hypertextual Prelude to Fugue ...... 137 2.1 Why is “Sirens” a fugue? ...... 146 2.2 Paradigmatic Counterpoint or A Metempsychotic Subjectivity ...... 147 2.3 The Semiotics of Fugue ...... 151 2.4 A New Perspective on Spatio-temporality ...... 154 2.5 Epiphany, Quiddity and Four-Dimensionality ...... 160 3 The Spatialization of Time: Fugue and the “Great Bass” in Pound’s The Cantos ...... 168 3.1 The “melopoeia” of Poundian Poetics ...... 169 3.2 Pound’s Music of the Mind: Vorticism and Imagism ...... 173 3.3 Both “like and unlike” a Fugue ...... 179 4 Fugal Metonymy ...... 183 4.1 The Annihilation of Time or Cascading Birds from a Wire ...... 190 4.2 The Great Bass and Four Dimensionality ...... 194 4.3 Pedale: Joyce and Pound ...... 199

Chapter 4 Detaching Oneself from the Real: Fugue Within Fugues, in Gide's Les Faux- monnayeurs and Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia ...... 203 1 Gide: A Modernism Between Symbolism and the Nouveau-Roman ...... 204 1.1 From Pianist to Novelist and In Between ...... 205 1.2 The Linearity of Les Faux-monnayeurs ...... 209 1.3 Memorable Fugues ...... 213 2 Variations on the Figure of the Writer: Writing a Counterfeit Novel ...... 217

2.1 Epistolary Counterpoint ...... 219 2.2 Vertical Counterpoint I: Free Indirect Speech ...... 224 2.3 Uniting the Horizontal and the Vertical ...... 228 2.4 Vertical Counterpoint II: Édouard’s Metanarrative ...... 232 2.5 Between the Particular and the General ...... 239 3 The F(r)ugal Poetics of Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia ...... 240 3.1 Dressing Fugue Up in a “Fancy Package” ...... 242 3.2 A Recipe for Culinary Fugue: Variations on the Theme of Truth ...... 244 3.3 Prelude and Fugue ...... 246 4 Awakening From the Nightmare of History ...... 255 4.1 Travelling in the Fourth Dimension ...... 259 4.2 A Linguistic Coda ...... 263 4.3 Fugues Within Fugues: Dismantling the Modern Novel From the Inside Out ...... 265

Stretto and Coda ...... 268 Bibliography ...... 283

List of Figures

1. Kandinsky’s “Fugue”……………………………………………………………………. ix

2. Composing a Fugue, by Justin Henry Rubin…………………………………………… 10

3. The Splicing Method…………………………………………………………………… 37

4. Jouffret’s Polyhedron…………………………………………………………………... 39

5. Picasso’s “Portrait of Kahnweiler”…………………………………………………….. 40

6. Ezra Pound’s “Canto 75”……………………………………………………………… 192

7. The Tetraktys and the Ouroboros……………………………………………………… 197

8. The Möbius Strip……………………………………………………………………… 238

9. Lacan’s Borromean Knot……………………………………………………………… 281

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Prologue as Prelude: Fugue is in the Air

In 1914, Wassily Kandinsky paints the relationship between the visual arts and the abstraction of music in his ekphrastic rendering of fugal form in painting, entitled “Fugue.” In transposing one artistic medium into another, the artist brings two semiotically distinct artistic forms into collision, showing a preference for the suggestive power of abstraction which excites emotion and sentiment, invoking the essence of things and of the soul, over the direct representation of reality. By means of geometric motifs, diverse colours, and layers that regroup within the confines of a bordered, closed-off spatio-temporal frame, Kandinsky creates an interactive polyphony that negotiates between the solidity and concreteness of reality and its transcendentally malleable, hybridized, intermediary forms: an anti-mimetic conception not unlike the dynamics of Baudelaire’s dialectical, or even contrapuntal description of modernity, so valuable to this project, in which the transitory and the immutable unite. Above and beyond the nascent form of intermediality that Kandinsky experiments with, ‘fugue’ also takes on a more pressing socio-political connotation, bleeding from the aesthetic into the autobiographical: in

1914, on the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky flees Germany to return to his native Russia.

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Shifting from the visual arts to literature and music, one could ask: is it by chance that half of a group that Wyndham Lewis named ‘The men of 1914’ – that is, James Joyce, Ezra

Pound, T.S. Eliot and Lewis himself – were also experimenting intermedially with the musical form of fugue in literature? Is fugue simply “in the air” in 1914, and if so, how far back can one trace a modernist poetics of fugue? Some writers whose literature was arguably nurtured in one shape or form by fugue include: Thomas De Quincey, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, André

1 Kandinsky, “Fugue,” 1914. Web. September 10, 2013. ix

Gide, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Aldous Huxley, Elio Vittorini,

Umberto Saba, Paul Celan, Francis Ponge, Robert Laporte, among others. I therefore argue that the beginning of a fugal melopoetics finds its bourgeoning forms in symbolist verse, stretching beyond modernism into postmodernism.

Two Anglo-modernist authors, whose works and correspondence in relation to fugue and literature, planted the seeds of this dissertation’s design, namely Joyce and Pound. The first author to introduce me to fugue in literature was Joyce, who attempted to write, as he explicitly stated both in print and in conversation, a fuga per canonem in his “Sirens” episode within

Ulysses. Pound, with whom he corresponded – and to whom he owed the serial publication of his modernist novel –, was also explicitly working on fugue and counterpoint in his modernist long- poem, The Cantos. Although no historical proof remains as to a conversation or epistolary correspondence on the explicit use of fugue in their works, an indirect commentary on fugue, as well as the problematics of reading a musical form in literature transpire in the letters between

Pound and Joyce on the latter’s “Sirens” episode. Pound’s feedback on Joyce’s draft begins as follows:

Caro mio: Are you sending this chapter because you feel bound to send copy on time? Let the regularity of appearance be damned. If you want more time take it. I shall send off mss. to Egoist & L.R. tomorrow. But you will have plenty of time to hold up publication if you want to, and to revise if you want to.

1. you have got some new effects. 2. It is too long 3. One can fahrt with less pomp & circumstance [3a. gallic preference for Phallus – purely personal – know mittel europa humour runs to other orifice. – But don’t think you will strengthen your impact by that particular.

Mass effect of any work depends on conviction of author’s sanity = Abnormal keenness of insight O.K. But obsessions arseore-ial, cloacal, deist, aesthetic as opposed to arsethetic, any obsession or tic shd. be very carefully considered before being turned loose. = [sic] (158)

Pound’s feedback represents the beginning of a dispute between the two authors. The American author, by focusing on the abject aspect of the closing scene of Joyce’s episode – a flatulent

‘pedale,’ as I explain in Chapter 3 – and on Joyce’s “obsessions” and “sanity,” neglects the “new effects” of the episode he mentions in failing to comment on the fugal properties. Subsequently, by ironically performing a form of fugal writing in which variations of a word spawn new, hybridized words, Pound strongly voices his confusion for the plot and character development in

“Sirens”:

The peri-o-perip-o-periodico-parapatetico-periodopathetico-I dont-off-the-markgetical structure of yr. first or peremier para-petitec graph-will cause all but your most pig-o- peripatec-headed readers to think you have gone marteau-dingo-maboule – / Even I cd. do with indication of whose jag–possibly Blooms (?) it is. [sic] (1967: 157)

Pound’s confusion is surprising given he is working on a similar poetics, and that he, much like

Joyce, believed in an ‘ideal reader.’ Could a fugal poetics simply be too enigmatic in prose and poetry, or, on the contrary, should fugal writing eclipse itself altogether in order to function ideally? This dissertation not only addresses the historical breadth of a specific intermedial poetics – and the reasons behind employing fugue in a linguistic form –, but also the enigmatic and even hostile readability of musico-literary works: counterpoint, as I will explain, is an inherently violent form, and the collision of diverse media, although it creates a heightened artistic arrangement, is also a very destructive force. The poetics and politics of intermedial reading are fundamental to the construction and understanding of fugal writing.

A Potentially Endless Fugue: to What End?

Essential to this dissertation are not only the narrative, poetic, and organizational aspects of fugue in literature, but also the larger thematic and philosophical understanding of fugal writing. Why revert to fugue in an artistic medium outside of music? Why not rather employ something akin to sonata, to a symphony, to a rondo, for example? What fugue encapsulates, I

xi will demonstrate, is not only structural: unlike the other forms mentioned here, counterpoint is the leading polyphonic organization of fugal variations, which tightly interweave subject, answer and countersubject. Fugue also encapsulates polysemy and a larger narrative import, weaving the constituent elements of ‘subject’ and ‘theme,’ among others, together with the concept of departure, flight, and the occasional return from (or to) a more simple, linear, plot perspective.

Fugue, unlike other musical styles, also acts as a vehicle for the representation of deconstruction in literary form, wherein, from two often diametrically opposed binaries, a third element is brought into the foreground. Whereas in literature, similarity is primordial to counterpoint, in music, the subject, answer, and countersubject have the same melodic shape which is set together on a different tone, as I will discuss in Chapter 1. Nevertheless, the literary countersubject, in an attempt to represent overlapping polyphony and vertical simultaneity, remains one of the most intriguing goals which the symbolist and modernist writers in this corpus seek to epitomize.

This project, beginning from a philological standpoint, opens towards a larger comparative and interdisciplinary approach in analyzing the literary attempt to re-create fugue in poetry and prose in French, English and Italian language literature. It furthermore interrogates the larger intermedial and trans-disciplinary ramifications of breaking artistic boundaries, an example being the association of fugue with geometry and with notions of four-dimensionality.

Such a project is intrinsically comparative, uniting philology and multiple literatures in their original language with poetic and narrative experimentations that move beyond literature and into music or the life sciences. Fugue, I will demonstrate, offers symbolist and modernist authors a manner in which to question and represent space-time relations, to perform theoretical open- endedness, multiple variations, and interpretations, as Douglas Hofstadter’s description of fugue

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as an endless braid suggests.2 Its inherently subjective nature – the fugue being, by definition, the variation of one subject through time and space; note the polysemy of ‘subject’ – makes it propitious to the study of an ideal united whole. By seeking to reunite the fragmentary and the incomplete, fugue is an overarching metaphor for modern subjectivity, and of a constant struggle within modernist aesthetics. Finally, fugue addresses the larger crisis of semiosis and communication so present in modernist and symbolist preoccupations by uniting two distinct semiotic systems, and by chiasmatically rendering music less abstract and language even more intangible.

In true fugal nature, the form of this dissertation will echo its content: following an introduction to, and history of, fugue in music and its potential literary equivalences or adaptations – the melopoetics of fugal writing – (Chapter 1), I will portray the embryonic form of fugal poetics in symbolist verse (Chapter 2), which lays the groundwork, I argue, for Anglo- modernist fugal experiments (Chapter 3), later echoed by French and Italian modernist prose

(Chapter 4). Only then, similar to the theoretically interminable style of fugue, will I recapitulate

– as a stretto – the overarching problematics of fugue in literature, and spin off, as the endless golden braid itself, into novel areas of inquiry for fugue, literature and subjectivity.

2 In Gödel, Escher, Bach. New York: Basic Books, 1999. xiii 1

Chapter 1

The Melopoetics of Fugue

1 On Musico-Literary Poetics

Despite its defining characteristic as a primarily written form of art, literature has, since its inception, benefited from a close kinship with music. Such affinities can be traced through the oral nature of storytelling and of texts, as well as in the very form that these stories take in both prose and verse: from their rhythms and rhymes to their alliterations, among other rhetorical figures. However, it is only much more recently that critical interest within the niche of interarts studies has focused on research in “intermediality,” a term which “came into the scene in the

1990s with such striking success” (Rajewsky 43). It is evident that interest in the interrelationship of varying media soared with the technological advances of the late-20th century; therefore, the nomenclature “intermedial” and its subsequent theorizing has opened up new critical grounds on which interdisciplinarity can foster new dialogues. This project will address one facet of intermedial studies, namely that of “melopoetics,” to adopt the “mellifluous coinage” (Scher 471) of Lawrence Kramer, which designates the affiliation between literature or the written word, and what e.e. cummings labels “the other time-art,” music (Antretter 185).3

More specifically, the scope of this dissertation lies within the affinities and differences between 19th-century French symbolist poets, as well as American and European modernist writers, who share, not only a melopoetic conception of literature, but also an aesthetic shift from a focus on the epistemological to the ontological. Fugue and the nature of being, as this

3 It is important to note that the term “melopoeia” was first defined by Pound in “How to Read” (1928), and therefore precedes Scher’s definition. According to Pound, the term designates a moment “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning” (Bucknell 61).

2 dissertation will demonstrate, are inextricably linked. Demarcating the limits of literary modernism remains a polemical topic of inquiry, either within the niche of Anglo-American studies – that regroup such authors as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, or Proust, Pirandello and Baudelaire – or within a larger multilingual context, where many French and Italian literature critics alike reject the nomenclature of modernism altogether.4 Likewise, there has been much ink shed over the relationship between modernist authors and their 19th-century poetic French forefathers. I seek to revisit this relationship and the aesthetic similarities between these two literary periods which both deal with the crushing weight of modernity that so characterizes modernism: from the mimetic crisis of representation and predominantly the crisis of language, to the manifestation of a fragmented subjectivity. In order to represent, question and maybe even regain the erosion of the self and of language – or suggest a pre-linguistic state of communication –, these authors revert to another artistic medium in order to make literature “new,” to borrow

Pound’s oft-quoted tenet. The chosen medium is one unhindered by the semiotic enchainment of referentiality: music, and the preferred compositional style is fugue.

Late 19th-century French poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine were particularly invested in a musical poetics of redaction.5 In this dissertation, I trace a modernist fugal poetics back to Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles (1874), in which the musicality of interweaving consonance and assonance creates a poetic fugue in which sound and literary

4 However, in recent debate, many critics have worked to include the fields of French and Italian literature in a larger international dialogue on modernism, visiting, for example, the historical and aesthetic contexts of symbolism, decadentism, and more generally the avant-garde, among others. See Peter Nicholls’ Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995), and Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni’s Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (2004). 5 I employ the term “redaction” for its polysemy. Although it signifies the process of writing, such as a draft or version of a text for publication, it also implies an element of editing and even censorship that will become important later in this project, particularly in regards to Elio Vittorini’s novel.

3 meaning cohere harmoniously.6 Mallarmé, on the other hand, disgusted by the corrosion of contemporary language – an “overworked tool” as he called it – sought pure musicality in the form of poetry, an example already present in L’après-midi d’un faune (1876), but which reaches its peak in Un coup de dés (1897) (McParland 6). Mallarmé’s musico-poetic goal was to strip signifier from signified in language. These poets, along with their modernist, symbolist and decadent contemporaries and predecessors, such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Tristan

Corbière and Jules Laforgue, left an indelible influence on both French and foreign writers to follow. Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, for example, were among the first

Anglophone poets to champion these writers, in both critical essays and reviews, and in pastiches of their writings.

Symbolism and other 19th-century literary fashions such as parnassianism and decadence left their mark on André Gide and Marcel Proust, among other French novelists. These writers, however differently from their symbolist forerunners, also adopted a fugal form, one in prose and in direct relation with the genre of Künstlerroman, both in Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925) and À la recherche du temps perdu7 (1913-1927) respectively. English language authors who self- admittedly employ fugue in literature include Thomas De Quincey in The English Mail-coach

(1849), Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1928), James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Ezra

Pound in The Cantos (1925-1968). Fugue is also apparent in Italian writers of the same period and later, such as novelist Elio Vittorini, whose arguably counter-amnesiac narrative in

6 Arguably, the earliest account of fugue in literary form appears in De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue,” in The English Mail Coach. For a discussion on De Quincey and music, see Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction (pp. 111- 125). This dissertation, for a question of concision, focuses not on this sole example of romantic prose and fugue in 19th-century literature, but more so on the symbolist poetics of fugue. Further analyses, however, would be fruitful on the potential influence De Quincey’s fugal writing had on Mallarmé’s verse. 7 Proust has left no trace of having attempted a fugal poetics in his novel, and for the sake of space will not be addressed at length in this dissertation. However, as suggested in Chapter 4, the very title of Proust’s novel could indicate melopoetic experiments in his representing aesthetic subjectivity.

Conversazione in Sicilia (1941) depends on musical form as a means to avoid censorship, and poet Umberto Saba, whose polyphonic verse in Preludio e fughe (1928) represents a personal battle with depression.

Although the abovementioned authors and works do not exhaustively define either symbolism or modernism, nor catalogue their use of the fugue in literature, these works nevertheless offer a socio-historical time frame in which one may ask: why adopt the fugue in literature at a specific historical juncture? One may furthermore use this as a position from which to ask how a fugal poetics functions within literary texts more generally. These questions are the foundation upon which problems of language, subjectivity and temporality will be treated in the following works, in the following order: Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, Mallarmé’s

“L’après-midi d’un faune,” Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s The Cantos, Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, and Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia. Fugue, as a new narrative form in lieu of language for some –as I will demonstrate –, or as a supplement of language for others, allows for these authors to indirectly comment upon socio-historical, aesthetic, subjective and temporal issues through a hybridized, intermedial art form.

Given the fundamental role language plays within the conception of a fugal poetics, these works were chosen in order for commentary to be pursued in the original language of these poems and novels. These authors, despite occasionally sharing similarities in their use of fugue in literature, remain quite diverse in their conception of a fugal poetics. Consequently, the corpus will be divided in the least arbitrary manner possible. Firstly, I will trace each author’s use of fugue in accordance with his literary and linguistic tradition, in order to, secondly, draw comparative conclusions that unite a variety of symbolist and modernist fugal poetics. I acknowledge that although other languages and literary traditions may espouse a musico-literary

5 poetics – namely German literature, however, the list is inexhaustible –, the primary scope of this project will be to unite fin-de-siècle and modernist literatures in English, French and Italian.

Comparatively speaking, although these authors all adapt fugue to literature – some acknowledging its presence, others preferring to remain silent on the subject –, they also employ a fugal poetics to varying aesthetic and political ends: from the suggestiveness of symbolism to its antithesis in Pound’s direct imagism, or from Pound’s fascist ideals to Vittorini’s subliminal anti-fascist narrative. What, in a certain sense unifies this temporal period, that is the years between 1874 (the first publication of Romances sans paroles) and the 1960s (the final serial publication of The Cantos), is a fragmented notion of what it means to be a subject within modernity, during periods of war, of ever increasing urbanization, of amassing publicity, and the elaboration of psychoanalytic theories. If modernity is, as Baudelaire defines it, “le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable,” then both art and the modern subject inherently depend upon the dialectical dynamics of the fugacious and the permanent, as well as on the destruction of this binary (“Le Peintre de la vie moderne” 11).

Baudelaire’s use of the term “fugitif,” whose etymology recalls fugue (fuga) – further uniting the words “refuge,” “refugee,” and “fugitive” within the same lexical field – also evokes the notion of selfhood vis-à-vis space, thus encapsulating within the musical sense of fugue notions of identity, alterity, belonging and home. The writings of Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, Mikhail

Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, will offer a theoretical framework to question the philosophical, political, aesthetic, and identity-related repercussions of fugal writing, inherent both in these authors’ attempts to recreate fugal form in language as well as in the musical form itself.

1.1 Fugue: History, Form and Variation

The relationship between fugue and literature, Ezra Pound warns, should not be understood as a “strict, one-to-one analogy,” nor, I would add, as strictly metaphorical (Davis

76). Within the scholarly divide over whether a literary mode can espouse a musical form at all, one element of confusion overlooked by many literary scholars is the attempt to pin down a proper, all-encompassing definition of fugue, without taking into consideration both its metamorphic nature and its historical breadth. A fugue, musicologists agree, is “not a form at all, but rather a procedure,” it is a stylistic composition that has unceasingly evolved from its birth in the canonic form (canon or canonem) up until the height of fugue in the Baroque period, namely in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge (Bucknell 105). Although in music, fugue is a style of composition, in intermedial transposition and for the purpose of literary analysis, the terms “form” and “structure” need be employed in order to comprehend the application of a musical composition to this corpus of study, given the static, unperformed nature of these texts.

Nonetheless, the use of nomenclatures such as “style” and “structure” further open the interdisciplinary field of inquiry between musical style and the process of writing, suggesting that genetic criticism could also shed light on the kinship between the aesthetic process of creation in both literature and music. Due to the extensiveness of such a study, this dissertation will not focus on the process of creation as fugal.

Synchrony, in fugue as in literature, is interdependent upon diachrony. The melody, phrase or sentence does not exist in a vacuum; it participates, both horizontally and vertically, in a progression, in which the present is both a continuation from and reaction to the past.

Therefore, a crucial understanding of the evolution of fugal form is essential to the comprehension of its musical existence at specific junctures in history. The term fugue, originally spawning from the Latin fuga for “flight,” “flee” and “chase” instantly evokes literary

7 resonances: in terms of plot sequences, protagonists flee their home, their city, or crime scenes; mythically, one calls to mind Daphne, Icarus, or the inevitable departure in the Odyssean paradigm for a nostos to exist; historically, authors flee cities and persecution from political regimes. In music, notes also take flight and seem to follow, or chase, one another in an orderly manner through musical phrases. The particularity of the fugue as a compositional form is precisely this intricate construction and development of melodies, more specifically denoted as

“subjects” or “themes,” as well as “answers” and “countersubjects” throughout a song.

Imogene Horsley, in her in-depth historical study of the fugue, explains that the latin term fuga “originally stood for what we call canon” (6): canon meaning “a short motto or sentence that indicated in the manner of a riddle, the way in which a single part was to be performed or another part derived from it” (6). I will return to the importance of the riddle in regards to fugal writing and reader response (see section 4 in this chapter). It is only in the eighteenth century that the term canon takes on the strict definition by which we know it today: the “continuous imitation of a leading part by one or more following parts, musically at fixed intervals of time and pitch” (6). Furthermore, not only does the canon imply a repetition of voices – most often three – but inversion often follows the initial entrance of voices as well: this will evolve to become “invertible counterpoint” in the fugue (7). The term “counterpoint,” due to its interdisciplinary polysemy, lends itself to confusion both in literature and music. From a musical stance, it denotes two melodies that occur simultaneously – and therefore, at least in part, overlapping each other – or successively, one melody following another, either in harmony or in contrast to the previous melody.

One of the first examples of canon with lyrics is by Guillaume de Machaut (1304-1377), in which the chiasmic verse sings: “ma fin est mon commencement, mon commencement ma fin” (7). Beyond the syntactic mirror that creates invertible counterpoint and a cyclical image,

8 these verses underline a fundamental religious connotation implied in the canon: that the writing of such works is considered a sacred “cantus firmus”8 that the devoted sing to God (22). It also alludes to a ludic understanding of time, which I will address below (see 3.2.). Canon, however, loses its prominence in the mid-eighteenth century when homophony takes the upper hand on contrapuntal compositions, the clarity of one melody becoming preferred to intertwined melodies. A literary analogy could be traced between the ornate nature of symbolist verse, in comparison to the direct, clear-cut nature of imagist and vorticist poetry, if it were not for the strict rules that accompanied canon, rules against which the symbolist and decadent writers were working. Nonetheless, the fact that both symbolist and modernist writers employ fugue in literature demonstrates the impossibility of employing a clear style, and the necessity of making sense of confusion: particularly of multiple selves in time and space.

Much of the ambiguity in understanding fugue in a historical context depends on the nomenclature attributed to distinct musical forms throughout history. Several musical genres coexisted throughout time, as Horsley explains, particularly in the mid-sixteenth century, where fuga and canon were often indistinguishable. Such terms as “fuga legata” and “fuga sciolta” also begin to develop around this time, where the former defines a strict and continuous imitation of the “subject” throughout the song, the latter signifying imitation followed by “free melodic continuation” (50). Throughout the seventeenth century, the term fuga designated both kinds of compositional imitation. Horsley elucidates the difficulty in offering a general definition of fugue: “[a] great deal of effort has been expended in the attempt to define fugue exactly, but the fact remains that the meaning of fugue has changed a number of times so that it cannot be properly defined outside of the historical context” (55). She does, however, explain one

8 “Cantus firmus” is a strict contrapuntal style, at the basis of Gregorian chant. The two ideas that are put in opposition (in counterpoint) are the sacred and the mundane (Horsley 22).

9 particular characteristic akin to all fugues, their beginning, defined as the “exposition”: “The parts enter one at a time,” Horsley writes, “the first to enter stating a short melodic subject9 and the others restating that subject on another pitch,10 rhythmically and melodically as exact as possible. These later entries nearly always come at some perfect interval” (55).11 Unfortunately, due to its “inherent flexibility” – which puts it in contrast to the strict rigidity of the canon – it is nearly impossible to fix a specific fugal form as its ideal or archetype, and it must be understood as “the goal of a process of musical evolution” (55). If the “process of musical evolution” is both the historical reason that made the fugue what it is today, as well as its fundamental nature, then the fugue must be understood as a development and one that evolves, unveils itself, its subject or object of fascination, and its sensations, piece by piece, melody by transformed melody.

Despite their singularity, there exist many overarching defining characteristics that several fugues share. Nadya Zimmerman offers the clearest definition of fugue I have encountered to date, one which expounds the notions of answer, subject and countersubject, the very elements of counterpoint:

Like the canon, fugue incorporates the method of imitation. In a fugue, the first voice enters playing the main theme, which again is called the subject. The second voice enters, perhaps a few measures afterwards, and takes that same subject, but modifies it by starting on a different note. The modification in the second voice […] is called the answer. As in the canon, the answer retains the same intervallic shape and melodic structure as the subject, yet it is said to be in a different key. When the second voice enters with the

9 The subject in question consists of a short or long melody: a phrase in music, for example, such as la petite phrase in Vinteuil’s Sonata (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu). 10 By “restating […] on another pitch” we mean that the exact same melody and rhythm are played, however beginning and continuing on different notes. In literature, point of view and characters’ perspectives stand in for pitch, as I will demonstrate in regards to Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs. 11 An interval designates a specific space between notes played simultaneously. A “perfect” interval is the distance between the first note (known as the “tonic”) and its fifth, or five notes above that (known as its “dominant”). Such an interval forms a harmonious sound between subject and countersubject, as opposed to other potential intervals which would create cacophony or discordance. This is less important for the theoretical understanding of fugue; however, it can become problematic with the transposition of notions such as “interval,” “tonic” and “dominant” into literature.

answer, the notes occurring simultaneously in the first voice are no longer considered part of the subject: they are referred to as the countersubject. Naturally, a fugue is composed with the intention of making this countersubject fit harmonically with the answer, because the two are sounded simultaneously. When the fugue reaches a more complicated stage of development with more than two voices, the first voice does not always carry the subject. (Zimmerman 110)

Therefore, it is appropriate to divide the sections of a fugue as follows: first of all, the exposition, as defined above, where the theme or subject enters. The answer ensues in a second voice, and the third (optional) voice, reiterating the original subject in the same key is either a new subject, or, if occurring simultaneously to the answer, a countersubject.12 The following image depicts these sections musically in three voices, the alto, soprano and bass:

The alto, soprano and bass all maintain the intervallic shape of the phrase, despite beginning on a new note or octave.

Following the exposition are “episodes,” which can either introduce new melodies into the piece or which take up certain parts of the subject and create new material from them, in

12 This process is theoretically infinite, new voices potentially entering endlessly. 13 Rubin, Justin Henry, Composing a Fugue. Web. August 15, 2012.

11 order to direct the piece elsewhere. These were understood by many Baroque composers to be distractions from the ludic intricacies of multiple entrances, and were not used at all. In literature, episodes are inevitable components to plot progression, particularly in regards to the novel.

Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, for example, could not take the shape of a novel if it were not for the episodes that unite over fifty different characters. After the episodes in fugue, “modulations” follow, where the initial subject is taken up once again, this time in a different key, interwoven throughout the piece. At this point, other interspersed episodes are optional. The musical climax arrives in the form of a “stretto,” which reunites the subject, answer and countersubject, as well as their modulations in a short sequence, offering the sense of a rushed finish. It essentially hastily narrows down the time between melodies, as its Italian definition suggests. Finally, a

“cadenza” – a literal virtuosic cascading of notes announcing the end of the piece – or “coda” – the tail end of a piece – may close the fugue. Occasionally, as is the case with Joyce, a “pedal” will dampen the fugue into a subdued finale. At times, however, the fugal style remains open and seemingly endless, with no recapitulation or final stage of development, spiralling into infinitude.

Evident from Zimmerman’s definition above is that fugal form can essentially be either quite simple, or fundamentally complex, depending on the quantity of voices that interweave and dialogue. One of Zimmerman’s statements that merits some clarification, however, is related to a notion of harmony between voices. Although much like counterpoint, harmony can have a number of definitions depending on the context, in a strictly musical setting, harmony works to support the melody, to work with it. However, in fugue, each subject or countersubject is in fact its own autonomous melody that does not clash with the other. This may create a sense of opposition, yet without discordance. Therefore, once combined, while these melodies sound harmoniously, they are not necessarily constructed as harmonies; in other words, one is not

12 subordinate to the other. Such an understanding of singular and autonomous voices, when transposed into literature, offers a peculiar comprehension of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism, and a compelling medium through which to orchestrate both the multiple selves of one character and the numerous characters on which the plot depends.

To my knowledge, although many critics have studied musical aesthetics in regards to most of the authors in this corpus – from Brad Bucknell and McParland in modernism to Michel

Malherbe in symbolism –, no one has yet compared the various fugal poetics within modernism and symbolism. Furthermore, a lack of compelling reasons from critics for these authors’ reasons for bringing musical fugue into the literary realm nurtures this comparative study which constitutes the fundamental search for a definition of fugal poetics in the literature which spans the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. 2 Towards a Definition of Fugue in Literature

Despite many 20th-century authors’ explicit acknowledgement of their use of fugue in literature, there remains a great deal of skepticism within critical circles as to whether it is legitimate or even possible to espouse a musical form, that is, another medium’s compositional style, in literature.14 The seemingly insurmountable difficulty raised by scholars, particularly regarding the works of Joyce and Pound – two authors whose paratextual use of the term fugue has caused an influx of controversial formal analyses – is literature’s ineffectiveness to represent a layering of voices, given the linearity of language in the written form. One crux of defining a fugal poetics therefore lies in the understanding of simultaneity, and the various ways authors have sought to represent it. Fugue, however, despite its definition as a polyphonic musical style,

14 Such an assertion is exemplified by Brad Bucknell, in Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein, (2001: 99), as well as Robert McParland, in Music and Literary Modernism: Critical Essays and Comparative Studies (2006).

13 makes the use of countersubject facultative; interweaving subjects and answers can, in fact, constitute a purely linear fugue, without taking into consideration other harmonic occurrences.15

Although such a composition is rare, it remains theoretically possible, which both complicates and reconciles the musical to literary transition of terms such as counterpoint, theme/subject, pitch, melody, tone and mode, among others. Defining fugue in literature therefore depends on the multi-faceted nature of the musical style and its multiple defining characteristics, as well as the specific fugal elements these authors – whose aesthetic goals often differ – seek to employ.

As an interdisciplinary project, this dissertation seeks to reconcile two distinct – even dialectical according to Paul Scher – art forms by combining theories of subjectivity and temporality from Paul Ricoeur alongside semiotic, sociolinguistic and structuralist terms from

Mikhail Bakhtin, via a comparative, musico-literary methodology. Essentially, it also questions the very foundation of interdisciplinarity, positing as two diametrically opposed possibilities to its inquiry the “strict one-to-one analogy” of which Pound warns his readers, and the pitfalls of juxtaposition or metaphorical echoes between music and literature (Davis 76). Roger Fowler describes this tendency as follows: “[i]nterdisciplinarity in practice often founders on the fact that two disciplines are merely juxtaposed; work at their interface, which should be most exciting, can become embarrassingly vague” (Scher 12-13). By straddling the fine line between juxtaposition and complete assimilation of the two arts – which otherwise stated are music as metaphor and fugue as structure, or a static in opposition to a dynamic intermediality – this dissertation acknowledges the hazards of both extremes. Although the authors in this corpus arguably create a heightened form of art by uniting music and literature, this new hybridized melopoetic form has incontrovertible shortcomings in that there may always be something

15 Other harmonic occurrences could include coinciding chords, melodies or harmonies that neither interfere with the theme or subject and answer of the fugue, nor with its progression.

14 missing when studied in accordance with one artistic paradigm alone, either musically or from a literary standpoint. It is therefore particularly through close-readings of these authors, by scrutinizing their structural and metaphoric use of fugue, that I will trace a fugal poetics in literature, as well as its aesthetic and philosophical ramifications. In order to do so, a few categories of musical equivalences in literature need be made, some adopted to greater or lesser degrees by the authors of this corpus. To my knowledge, such a list of literary equivalents to, or effects of, musical fugue have neither been regrouped nor theorized together.16 They, however, remain paramount to an understanding of fugal writing in poetry and prose. The sections that constitute a breakdown of fugal poetics include three possible narratological, structural and poetic representations of literary polyphony and counterpoint.

2.1 Polyphony and Counterpoint

Polyphony, as its etymology suggests, signifies many voices or sounds. In music, these voices are simultaneous or separate, either independent or interdependent. In other words, the texture of these multiple sounds and voices are either harmonious, discordant or they simply stand-alone. It is interesting to note the shared use of the terms “text” and “texture” (from the

Latin texere, meaning to weave) in both literature and music, where in the latter, it denotes the combination of melodies, harmonies and rhythm in a given piece. Music and literary narrative can thus be seen as intrinsically interwoven arts; consequently, part of this study is to untangle the single strands that, seemingly useless on their own, once combined create a strong and often cohesive formal whole. Polyphony is this defining texture of fugal orchestration. In fugue, however, a particular form of polyphony organizes the manner in which these many voices

16 The works of Brad Bucknell (Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein. 2001) and Werner Wolf (The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, 1999) offer the most expansive comparative studies on fugue and literature, including De Quincey and Gide, beyond the authors quoted in Bucknell’s title.

15 interact: this form is counterpoint, a strictly interdependent form of polyphony. Particular to literature, the term polyphony has stretched beyond its musical connotations to include questions of narratology, socio-linguistics, philosophy and politics.

This interdisciplinary topic is the fruit of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, who coined such theoretical terms as polyphony, dialogism, heteroglossia, carnivalesque and chronotope with regards to his analyses of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Rabelais’ works. In order to properly comprehend Bakhtin’s use of polyphony, the governing logic of heteroglossia and dialogism need be understood first. Michael Holquist, in the introduction to Bakhtin’s work, The Dialogic

Imagination: Four Essays, defines the context of heteroglossia – literally “different languages” – as:

the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide. (428)

Heteroglossia therefore represents the coexistence of a linguistic universe constructed by a stratification of multiple linguistic registers and dialects, all within one language: the context of the text. The interrelation between these varying registers, dialects and sociolects is governed by what Bakhtin calls dialogism. Holquist defines the latter as the “characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means or is understood as one part of a greater whole – there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (426). In Bakhtin’s heteroglossic literary world, the narrator or author’s voice is but one of many within the novel, and does not subordinate the voice of any other character. This, according to Bakhtin, offers the multiple viewpoints inherent to the polyphonic

16 novel, in which perspective is of great import. I will argue that in regards to poetry, multiple viewpoints and a parallactic narrative construction are also essential to poetic polyphonic writing. Polyphony is essentially the final result of the commingling of these dialogic interactions, the text or texture of the context. However, despite their interdependence, polyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogism function differently. Sue Vice differentiates polyphony from Bakhtin’s two other theoretical terms as follows: “[a]lthough polyphony has often been taken to be synonymous with either dialogism or heteroglossia, it refers precisely to the construction of the voices of characters and narrator in the novel, as its etymology – the Greek for ‘many voices’ – suggests” (Vice 112). This construction and the interweaving of voices of power and subjugation represent one aspect of fugal writing. Finally, as polyphony “refers to the arrangement of heteroglot variety into an aesthetic pattern,” I will demonstrate how fugue operates as one pattern of textual creation that allows the reader and critic to identify the power relations implied in voice (Vice 113).

Despite the seemingly autonomous agency of a character’s voice, Vice warns the Bakhtin scholar that heteroglossia is “a double-voiced discourse, as it ‘serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author’” (Vice 19). She goes on to add that

“dialogism refers to the presence of two distinct voices in one utterance” (45). These are fundamental elements of polyphony and counterpoint. I seek to expand Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic within literature, to further stress the “double-voiced” nature of the narrative voice, and arguably of the authorial voice as one stratum within a character’s speech. Such a narratological orchestration is of particular interest to works whose authors portray an alter ego of themselves within the narrative, and even more specifically in the genre of the Künstlerroman, such as Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs.

The first of three fugal elements in literature – and the only one, to my knowledge, that has not been theorized at length in regards to music – is the use of free indirect discourse as a polyphonic layering of voices and authority.17 M.H Abrams, explaining its equivalence to the

French “style indirect libre,” and likening it to “represented speech and thought,” defines free indirect speech as “the way, in many narratives, that the reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move – or sometimes hover – between the direct narrated representation of these events as they occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator of the story.” (180). An example in

Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs describes the character of Albéric Profitendieu and his ailments: “il ressentait un petit pincement au côté droit, là, sous les côtes; il n’y couperait pas: c’était la crise de foie.” (Gide 945, Keypour 131). It is through the use of the deictic “là” that one realizes the interference of the narrator’s perspective. An overlapping of perspectives is created through narration: the use of the adverb “là” has shifted the narration into the visual realm, as David

Keypour suggests. Furthermore, the whole description is in the past, yet the use of “là, sous les côtes” seems to violently bring the narrative into the present (131). This is the power of free indirect speech that I argue creates a polyphony more akin to its musical counterpart than to

Bakhtin’s socio-linguistic usage of the term, given the overlapping perspectives and voices in a single utterance. Therefore, although Bakhtin’s precise use of “polyphony” will aid this dissertation theoretically – for example, with reference to the use of dialect in Elio Vittorini’s novel –, it is a slightly varied and more malleable definition of polyphony that I wish to employ.

17 David Keypour in André Gide: écriture et réversibilité dans Les Faux-monnayeurs does acknowledge the use of style indirect libre on many occasions as to comment upon the misleading role of the narrator. However, he does not liken the process to any form of musicality.

The use of free indirect speech creates polyphony, and more specifically, a particular organization of polyphony fundamental to fugue: counterpoint. As I have argued, whereas polyphony, by definition, is founded upon multiple voices or sounds that are either independent or interdependent, counterpoint exists solely in relation to its melodic counterpart. The melodies or voices here are strictly interdependent. Therefore, the examples of free indirect speech in

Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (Chapter 4) create an intriguing contrapuntal arrangement at the very centre of an ironic Künstlerroman. The overlapping of varying aesthetic perspectives, from the character-authors to the narrator imbued with an authorial voice, allows for a mise en abyme within the novel, which creates a sense of verticality. This verticality creates an ironic distancing between Gide’s voice – which one can arguably extrapolate through the narrator’s speech, and in addition to Gide’s paratextual account of his process of creating such a novel in Le Journal des

Faux-Monnayeurs – and the numerous writers in his work. Northrop Frye, in his notes and in

Anatomy of Criticism, associates modal counterpoint with irony. It is the distance between the mythic, romantic, high-mimetic, low-mimetic and ironic (or even abject) characters in comic fictional and tragic fictional modes that creates the basis for such irony. The larger the distance in this vertical construction, the more ironic the tone becomes. The examples of Cervantes’ Don

Quixote and Joyce’s Ulysses belong to this tradition, where the abject anti-hero is constantly pitted against – or at least necessarily echoes – his mythic or fictional counterpart, in these cases, the archetypal hero of chivalric romance or Odysseus.

Following free indirect speech, the second literary fugal device is the paradigmatic axis which creates counterpoint. The term “counterpoint,” due to its polysemy, lends itself to confusion, as it straddles the border between literature and music. From a musical stance, it denotes two melodies that occur simultaneously – and therefore overlap with each other – or successively, one melody following another. It must be recalled that two simultaneous melodies,

19 although they do not clash dissonantly with one another – in this sense, they are in harmony – are not written as harmonies, that is to say, one melody or phrase does not subvert the other.

Nonetheless, a certain violence is implied in counterpoint, where, etymologically, the term recalls “notes, ‘pricks’, or ‘points’, set against (over or under) the notes or points of the original melody,” perhaps divulging its inherently ironic nature and its appropriate use in creating a sense of distance between author or narrator and other characters.18 In literature, the term almost always represents diametrically opposed ideas, figures or characters, functioning as antithetical contrasts within a text. I will argue through the examples within this corpus that counterpoint, particularly in reference to a fugal poetics within literature, although at times also metaphoric, differs from metaphor due to its structural importance: counterpoint is a formal guiding force within these works. Not only does it create momentary metaphorical oppositions, calling to mind an absent object, feeling or idea through a present one, counterpoint operates as a fundamental basis, a dynamics of fugal construction.

The linguistic paradigmatic axis, according to Roman Jakobson is the axis of “selection,” which works in synchrony with the syntagmatic axis, the axis of “combination” (220). The relationship between words chosen in the paradigmatic axis is one based on similarities, synonyms and antonyms, the same rules that govern counterpoint; therefore, a simple sentence such as “The dog chased the bone,” has unlimited possibilities of substitution within the semiotic system of language (Jakobson 218). The subject “dog” could be replaced by any other noun; a synonym for it could be “canine,” an antonym, “cat,” etc. The same goes for the direct object

“bone,” or even for the substitution of the action by any other verb. In a literary work, it is the

18 OED. “Counterpoint.” Web. September 14, 2012.

20 context that demonstrates the relationship between a chosen word and the virtual plethora of potential other words associated with that one word. It is therefore a “present absence,” the eikôn of which Ricoeur speaks, the “représentation présente d’une chose absente” which governs the paradigmatic axis (8). This absent presence is always lurking within the object. For example, symbolist poet Tristan Corbière reverts to the pansemiotic nature of opera to create his theatre of masks and travestissement. He refers to himself as Sir Bob – “chien de Femme légère, braque anglais pure sang” – in his poem “Sonnet à Sir Bob,” while a few pages later in “Bonne fortune

& fortune,” the epigraph reads “Odor della feminità,” intertextually recalling the hypotext Don

Giovanni by DaPonte (719, 727).19 By understanding that these words or identities work in conjunction with each other – parodically playing on the olfactory prowess of the dog and of

Don Giovanni –, the reader comprehends that modernist reading is both horizontal and vertical.

The ironic distance between representing a poet suffering from tuberculosis as both Don

Giovanni who chases women and as a dog – the only manner, according to the poet, in which to receive a caress – is precisely the mythic method to which T.S. Eliot referred in regards to

Joyce’s Ulysses, a mode in which the abject – lower than the low-mimetic – character of Leopold

Bloom always recalls his paradigmatic counterpart, Odysseus. This relationship, I suggested earlier, is, according to Northrop Frye, one that defines the ironic mode, a mode that he associated with counterpoint: “[i]f inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode” (Frye 34). The sheer distance between the lower than low-mimetic and the mythic mode is precisely what creates irony. Therefore, in the example of Corbière considered as

19 Corbière transforms the exact operatic quotation of “Sento odor di femmina.” The term “hypotext” is adopted from Gérard Genette’s work on transtextuality, in Palimpsestes: le degré zéro de la littérature. It refers to the source text in intertextuality.

21 both dog and as Don Giovanni, such a representation could be said to be both metaphorical and contrapuntal. However, once the metaphor becomes a pervading presence and a structural necessity for the story’s logic and signification, it is counterpoint that reveals its force beyond rhetoric.

According to a contrapuntal, paradigmatic reading, it seems adequate to conclude that one aspect of modernism is the verticality of its text. Reading and writing, for these authors, no longer means to linearly trace a narrative; the new form of narrative is to read in conjunction with something else, a spectral presence and an inherent alterity within the subject, character, theme or motif of a text. Verticality manifests itself through the layering of voices and through the paradigmatic axis of writing. Another intertextual or paratextual reverberation of this paradigmatic verticality transpires through the French notion of construction en abyme, or the

“heightened level of structural likeness between the framing text and the text it incorporates,” a term first coined by André Gide in his analysis of painting (Iampolski 36). The ludic and structural congruent aspect of the “text within a text” or literally “construction in the form of an abyss” offers another element of fugal poetics – even a potentially destructive one – peculiar to

Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, and one that operates much in the same manner as the paradigmatic axis (36).

Along with free indirect speech and the paradigmatic, the third and final literary method of portraying counterpoint is the more linear aesthetic process of theme and motif. In an attempt to define Ezra Pound’s contrapuntal arrangements, Hugh Kenner explains that his polyphony is

“not of simultaneous elements which are impossible in poetry, but of something chiming from something we remember from earlier” (Bucknell 60). The terms Kenner and Bucknell use not only suggest musicality, as in the chiming echo of something previously stated and reiterated, but it underlines the importance of an active reader whose memory is essential in order to connect

22 the sound and its echoes, a pervading theme and its constituent motifs. On this topic, the subject of defining a musico-literary readership will be addressed in more depth below (see section 4).

Motifs, images, themes and sounds may all have a chiming effect when they recur. What differentiates echo from a fugal poetics for these authors, however, is precisely the arrangement and complexity of the echoes, the repeated and yet varying representations of the evolving original sound or motif – whether elongated, expanding or truncated in some manner. At times such echoes are linguistic, as simple as the analogous musicality of consonants, vowels and musical sounds. In fact, Paul Scher calls the “extraordinary poetological echo” the word-tone dichotomy found in romantic aesthetics, but one could stretch that to modernist goals, particularly with Pound, for example (330). The first example of a fugal poetics in this dissertation explores the word-tone relationship in Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, in which the poet works with minute recurrences of assonance and consonance. Vittorini, in

Conversazione in Sicilia also operates according to a similar instrumentation in his critique of language and communication under fascist regime.

Beyond the reverberations of phonemes, it is the rhythmic recurrence of an image, motif or symbol throughout a literary work (or a section of a work) that is equivalent to what Eugene

H. Falk denotes as theme and motif. In his Types of Thematic Structure, Falk traces the difference between these two terms, defining motif as “textual elements as actions, statements revealing states of mind or feelings, gestures, or meaningful environmental settings” (Ciholas

38). He compares such motifs to Wagnerian musical labels, where they “accumulate significance as they recur in new contexts,” recalling a specific object or idea even when it is not present (38).

Such rhythmic recurrence obeys the same principles as the paradigmatic axis, and the eikôn of which Ricoeur speaks. Karin Ciholas, in her study of Gide’s novel goes on to add, with reference to Gide and Wagner that “motifs may be contrapuntally combined; and, finally, repetition of

23 motifs is an effective means of musical unity” (42). Although Wagner was not known for his fugues, his understanding of motifs as musical images and feelings, that pick up and expand while they accumulate meaning, is perfectly transposable into literature, and is somewhat similar to a fugal poetics in this regard. However, the development and interweaving of the motifs’ theme – “the idea or ideas which can be derived” from these motifs – is what constitutes more of a fugal poetics than those of a sonata, or operatic aria, for example (38). Given that counterpoint is not at all a static form, the subject in counterpoint picks up meaning as it goes along, leaving traces of its presence as remnants of a united whole. These traces are the numerous motifs that, once combined, represent the subject or theme of the fugue.

One example of a fugal creation through the use of theme and motif, to employ the aforementioned example of Albéric Profitendieu, is Gide’s character portrayal. For Gide, a specific motif such as counterfeiting coins enters the novel as the main fugal “subject” or initial melody, only to be answered by the same motif taken up in a different key. In literature, a different voice or character may act as such an equivalence to “key” or “pitch,” such as Bernard learning that Profitendieu is not his father: Bernard, as a different character from Georges the counterfeiter embodies a different “pitch” or perspective, exposing to the reader yet another motif of forgery or imitation: his father’s fraudulent identity. Many other similar motifs recur and intermingle with themselves and with contrapuntal motifs, often their direct opposite. The motifs find their similarities only once the paradigm to which they belong is understood: in this case, the paradigm and subject is that of the ‘real.’ From this perspective, what corresponds to

“subject” in music (the initial melody) translates into “motif” in literary analysis. Therefore, what is of interest in a fugal poetics is an understanding of the minute construction undertaken in such motif and thematic orchestrations. A fugal poetics seeks to underline the manner in which particular themes are posited against each other, and the way in which characters interact, which

24 creates the notion of a complete universe: a Gesamtkuntswerk20 inherent to modernist aesthetics.

The first example of such a structure begins with character development.

On the microstructural level, Gide uses carefully deployed motifs in order to create his characters and to underscore their development, at once engendering, as regards his characters, our (that is the reader’s) trust in them or lack thereof. We can continue with the example of

Albéric Profitendieu, Bernard’s adoptive father. He is described in terms that accentuate his dishonesty and concealment, as well as his weakness. For example, he has hidden the fact that he is not Bernard’s biological father from the child; his true identity revealed in a love letter that another man has written to Bernard’s mother. Over several pages, Gide paints an ailing picture of

Profitendieu: “il s’inquiétait de sentir, une certaine pesanteur au côté droit; la fatigue, chez lui, portrait sur le foie” (Gide 15). Later on, we read the passage (previously quoted) which betrays both the narrative’s perception and the narrative temporality within the text via free indirect discourse: “il ressentait un petit pincement au côté droit, là, sous les côtes; il n’y couperait pas: c’était la crise de foie” (24-25). The pain finally worsens and Profitendieu cries for help, “d’une voix plaintive, quasi suppliante, car la colique hépatique commençait à le faire cruellement souffrir” (25). His pain mutates from the physical to the moral realm due to Bernard’s escape from home: “Sa douleur au côté se confond avec sa tristesse, la prouve et la localise. Il lui semble qu’il a du chagrin au foie” (25). However, in so far as exerting his power within the household as regards his legitimate children and wife, the thought of Bernard and the physical, and moral, pain he felt miraculously disappear: “[i]l ne songe plus à son mal,” writes Gide, only a few pages later (29). Finally, “[i]l s’est levé, par instinctif besoin de dominer; il se tient à

20 Although the notion of a Gesamtkuntswerk is most often associated with Richard Wagner, who however did not coin the term, what is of interest to this dissertation through the use of such a term is to identify both an attempt on behalf of authors to unite diverting arts through literary fugue, and to incorporate the attempt to represent totality in modernism.

25 présent tout dressé, oublieux et insoucieux de sa douleur physique et pose […] la main sur l’épaule de Marguerite” (30). Profitendieu will disappear for a few hundred pages, only to return with the exact same liver ailment when in the presence of Bernard. While the description above is only of Profitendieu, it can be extended to the character development of almost any character in Les Faux-monnayeurs, where Gide sets up a contrapuntal distinction between the authentic characters and the counterfeiters, between veracity and falseness, between authenticity and counterfeit. Such a dichotomy, however, as I will explain, quickly unravels in Gide’s anti-novel.

Similar to the construction en abyme, the microcosm is metonymically symptomatic of the macrocosm in Gide’s work, where unnoticeable character traits lay the groundwork for motifs and themes that reappear later on, only to be explored at the most unlikely moments within the novel. Gide, in his Journal, exposes this orchestration: “[c]elles [les idées], principalement, exprimées dans le journal d’Édouard;21 il serait bon de les faire reparaître dans la seconde partie. Il serait dès lors d’autant plus étonnant de les revoir après les avoir perdues de vue quelque temps, comme un premier motif, dans certaines fugues de Bach” (Keypour 177).

The opposing traits of honesty and dishonesty are therefore spread linearly throughout the novel

– in terms of character traits and the plot as a whole – describing events chronologically. Gide, however, reverts to counterpoint in order to describe simultaneous events as well: primarily through the epistolary genre, among other forms. What Gide demonstrates here is the logic or rhythm of reappearing motifs which have long since been forgotten by the reader, a form which

Joyce, Vittorini, Mallarmé and Pound all make use of. The following statement by Karin Ciholas can therefore be expanded to include these authors: “[w]hat counterpoint is to music, the generic

21 There exists a layering of journals in and around Les Faux-monnayeurs. Gide kept a journal entitled Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs while writing the novel; Édouard, his character, also keeps a journal. However, the journal quoted by Keypour above is an ongoing journal Gide wrote, between 1887-1925.

26 coherence of themes is to literature” (48). This is somewhat of a grand statement and should be tempered, since I am not arguing that thematic coherence is always contrapuntal. Nonetheless, this understanding of a structural and semiotic chain of thematic signification does indeed suggest a fugal poetics, especially as concerns writers such as Gide, Mallarmé, Vittorini, Pound and Joyce.

It is therefore via free indirect speech, the paradigmatic axis and the use of theme and motif that, according to Falk, a fugal narrative begins to emerge in symbolist and modernist literature. Although these examples resonate with musical fugue, it must be understood that they are not to be applied indiscriminately, since each author represents fugue in his own way, according to his own logic, aesthetics and politics. 3 Why Orchestrate a Literary Fugue?

Having elucidated how the fugue becomes manifest in literature, the question remains: why attempt to recreate the equivalent to fugue or an effect of fugue in the literary realm?

Relatively few critics have either posed or attempted to answer this question, rather preferring to focus on the formal and stylistic equivalences to the musical form. Nevertheless, among these endeavors, the following conclusions merit substantial further analysis: for Pound, fugue was an aural equivalent to his visual aesthetics of imagism (Bucknell). Such an ascertainment, as will become evident in Chapter 3, neglects Pound’s wish to reach a sort of pure silence, which he describes as a perfect musical space in poetry. For Joyce, the use of music exemplifies the shortcomings of language and the impossibility of rendering the linguistic code purely abstract

(Zimmerman).22 For Mallarmé, critics are divided as to whether the aim of the symbolist poet

22 In comparison to all authors within this corpus, Joyce’s “Sirens” episode has received the most critical attention, mostly due to Joyce’s own commentary on the episode, defining it as a fuga per canonem.

27 was to regain the musical qualities of poetry and therefore subjugate poetry to music, or whether the presence of music in poetry offers a vehicle for the effects of poetic language (Heath Lees).

As for Gide, critics such as Françoise Escal, Frédérique Arroyas and David Keypour echo Gide’s own use of fugue within his novel in many different studies. The copresence of Bach’s fugues in

Gide’s novel has also led to potentially exciting analyses, such as Karin Ciholas’ work, Gide’s

Art of the Fugue: A Thematic Study of Les Faux-monnayeurs. Despite the alluring title of her study, Ciholas only mentions counterpoint once in her book, employing fugue in a more impressionistic manner, as a metaphorical title to her thematic study, without any lengthy comments on the subject. As for Vittorini, the term fuga, according to critics, has most often designated the fugue-state (or psychogenic fugue) that the protagonist Silvestro enters, prior to his Odyssean-like nostos to his hometown. The only critic to employ the nomenclature fuga in regards to Vittorini’s work is Bianconi-Bernardi who defines the dialogue between the participants of a “lirico-polemica sul tema sociale” as a fugue (Potter 51). Regarding Verlaine,

Michel Malherbe has expertly assembled the minute phonemic fugues in Romances sans paroles, yet this is presented with nearly no commentary as concerns Verlaine’s reasoning behind his fugal poetics. These critical conclusions and, in some cases, complete omissions, are simply insufficient from a scholarly perspective, and do not offer proper insight into the use of this specific musical form in literature: a form which is remarkable in so far as it formed a touchstone for so many authors who, in such curiously compelling historical proximity, experimented with the fugue.

3.1 The Fleeting Subject

This project suggests that one answer as to why employ or create a fugal poetics depends heavily on a modernist understanding of subjectivity and temporality. Tamar Katz explains the intermingling of modernist narratives and subjectivity: “[m]odernist experiments in narrative

28 form often take as their goal the reshaping of narrative to a newly-envisioned subjectivity” (232).

Modernist experiments in such narrative subjectivity include stream-of-consciousness, oneiric- like, impressionistic or even cubist narratives, as well as the multiple points-of-view offered by characters and objects. Parallax, for example, the “[d]ifference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points” is a significant tool for Joyce in

Ulysses, not only to create a multiplicity of perspectives throughout the narrative, but also as a temporal reference point: many characters pass by specific objects at different points during the twenty-four hour odyssey, thus offering a point which enables the reader to orientate him or herself.23 Commenting on these forms, Katz adds that “modernist narrative appears to shift away from linearity and discursiveness to an aesthetic of the non-discursive image or the non-narrative pattern of spatial form” (233). While analyzing the specific context of each author in this corpus, it will become evident that fugue is capable of functioning both as a linear and non-linear narrative, suggesting, evoking and representing sensations and actions from multiple points of view. At the heart of its essence, a fugal poetics exposes the multi-faceted nature of subjectivity in modern times: from the role of the poet or aesthete in society for Mallarmé and Gide, to the politically fractioned self in Vittorini and Pound’s works, to the schizophrenic self in Joyce, to the dissolution of the family and questions of the sexual self in Verlaine’s poetry. For these authors, fugue is a means to represent and to make sense of the impossible totality evoked in modernity, particularly in terms of the impossible representation of a complete subject.

Although I will argue that not all modernist and symbolist writers’ interest in fugue spawns from Johann Sebastian Bach’s unfinished oeuvre Die Kunst der Fuge, Bach’s work remains an incontestable archetype for fugal composition, and may also ultimately reveal

23 OED. “Parallax.” Web. September 14, 2012.

29 something intrinsic to this compositional technique. Nevertheless, several authors in this corpus do indeed reference Bach, either as a static intermedial or ekphrastic mentioning within their work, or paratextually – namely Gide, Pound and Joyce –, which may underline an implicit subjectivity at the heart of Bach’s work that permeates into literature. Inherent to Bach’s aesthetic conception is the notion of subjectivity, both in musical terms and in terms of selfhood.

In his masterpiece, Bach wrote fourteen fugues and two canons as “an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject” (Wolff 433). As will become evident, when transposed into the literary realm, the polysemic “subject” in question flirts both with the notions of “topic” and “selfhood.” Bach’s fifth son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, famously noted that Bach had transcribed himself as one of the subjects within his oeuvre, codifying his own name into the score via musical annotation, the following letters appearing in contrapunctus:

B, A, C and B♮ (which corresponds to “H” in the German notation). Bach is essentially in line historically with both the religious and subjective import of the fugue, as Zimmerman writes:

“[i]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fugal forms served as musical analogues to the notion of the centered Self: fugue narrated a quality of “subjective becoming” in which heterogeneous elements of self come together as an autonomous whole” (109). It is thus clear that at the very centre of fugue lie subjectivity and the desired notion of totality.

The term “subject” lends itself to much polysemy in the context of literature. From a grammatical stance, the subject holds the agency in a sentence or utterance; the verb is conjugated according to the subject. The subject, however, may also be the topic or theme of that which is being discussed: in this sense, grammatically, it is also the object, and aesthetically, the point of interest or of desire. Finally, it refers to selfhood, the thinking subject or id, and the construction of an individual’s identity in a given story, poem or narrative. In the field of music, however, and particularly in relation to the fugue, the term “subject” is the guiding force to

30 musical composition. Another name for “subject” in fugal composition is “theme,” as explained above (see section 1.1.), which when transferred into literature, has more substantial repercussions than in music. Whereas in music, it is the evolution of the subject/theme and its recurrent metamorphoses that create it, in literature, the subject/theme is the sum of its motifs, or the relationship between the two once combined (Falk). In other words, as Arroyas echoes

Françoise Escal’s differentiation between theme in music and literature, one must comprehend the “thème musical comme énoncé” and the “thème littéraire comme unité de sens” (127). In other words, subject as theme or topic in literature, or subject as selfhood, both follow a similar structural logic in these works: it is the combination of motifs or the elements of a fragmented self that drive the search for a coherent subject, a subject that represents either self, topic or idea.

3.2 The Subject in Time and Space

If representing subjectivity is arguably the primary function of the literary fugue in modernism, the secondary function is to exemplify temporality, particularly the individual in time and space. One of polyphony’s definitions is a layering of notes occurring simultaneously; it therefore innately combines time and space in searching to create a harmonious whole, a structure analogous to the subject in time. Hence, it is imperative to unite these two correlations.

Peter Nicholls explains that if modern time “is now felt to be oppressive it is partly because time is experienced as endless repetition […] when subjective time becomes mechanical, the passing moments palpable” (7). Nicholls’ affirmation suggests a cyclical chronology and a sense of endlessness; however, the sense of a fragmented subjectivity for the modern individual occurs both diachronically and synchronically. This is at least what Ricoeur’s conception of subjectivity, defined below, suggests. In modernity, not only is the notion of time rapidly changing, but the notion of space is as well: fleeting, with new technologies, new constructions and new forms of transportation. These are the very conditions of Paris in Baudelaire’s poem “Le

31 cygne,” which comments both on the role of the artist within society and on society’s rapid changes. The muddled crowd becomes synonymous with anonymity. It moves, as a mass, in diverging directions, an immeasurable space of constant shifting: reflected in Baudelaire’s “À une passante,” whose “jambe de statue” represents the remnants of the past and the impressions left upon the soul of a dandy-poet, a modern Pygmalion capable of capturing both the transitory nature and the dialectics of a past and a present that these crowds evoke within him (145). This is the powerful confrontation between the past – whether the subject’s remembered or the mythical past – and the present, a constant and violent counterpoint which is at the basis of modernity exemplified by Baudelaire, as well as by other symbolist and modernist writers.

Logically, the evolution of a person over time occurs somewhat linearly, and is traceable throughout time and space. However, an omnipresent sense of a fragmented self is repeated throughout this corpus of study: it is the nearly simultaneous experience of being different people

– or different facets of one persona – that creates a synchronic, seemingly schizophrenic self.

Paul Ricoeur’s conception of ipse and idem-identity, as well as the relationship of the self to alterity more generally, offers a method in which we can understand the evolution of the self – its internal and external formation – through time. A further understanding is developed both of the sporadic confrontation of a past self with the present, and the fragmented representation of a multiplicity of selves. The binary of similarity and difference, as well as its breakdown, will influence our understanding of a fugal poetics. Ricoeur asks:

Que signifie en effet rester le même à travers le temps ? Je me suis mesuré autrefois à cette énigme, pour laquelle j’ai proposé de distinguer deux sens de l’identique: le même comme idem, same, gleich – le même comme ipse, self, Selbst. Il m’a paru que le maintien de soi dans le temps repose sur un jeu complexe entre mêmeté et ipséité, si l’on ose ces barbarismes; de ce jeu équivoque, les aspects pratiques et pathiques sont plus redoutables que les aspects conceptuels, épistémiques….. [sic] la « déraison identitaire », comme dit Jacques Le Goff, consiste dans le repli de l’identité ipse sur l’identité idem, ou, si vous préférez, dans le glissement, dans la dérive, conduisant de la souplesse, propre au maintien

de soi dans la promesse, à la rigidité inflexible d’un caractère, au sens quasi typographique du terme (98-99)

A dynamics of the ipse – of change or difference, the inner ‘who’ of the self – and the idem – the same or the constant in time and space, the constitutive and more external ‘what’ of the self – allows for the reader to make sense of the narrative of subjectivity that Ricoeur outlines. The substance of being in one’s idem-identity and the ipseity of one’s relation to the Other exemplify a possible breach in the constancy of ‘what’ the I is made of: “Deuxième cause de fragilité, la confrontation avec autrui, ressentie comme une menace. C’est un fait que l’autre, parce que autre, vient à être perçu comme un danger pour l’identité propre, celle du nous comme celle du moi” (99). Ipseity, the internal substance of the self, is punctuated in narrative form by difference, by encounters with otherness that leave an indelible mark on the ‘I,’ and these fragmented moments are arguably that which the authors in this corpus, at least in part, seek to retrieve and unite. Fugue allows these authors to recreate and re-member the multiple selves of their creations (or alter egos) – the substantial and more superficial aspects of the self – both synchronically and diachronically. It also allows for an aesthetic commentary on the representation of time, from subjective time to an omniscient God-like temporality.

Among other grand narratives, one problem within modernism for several authors and artists alike is the crisis of religion. From the outset, the fugue is deeply enmeshed with faith; representing a chant offered to God, originally an offering via cantus firmus (via canon). T.S.

Eliot, who underwent an explicit crisis of faith, plays a pivotal role in bridging aesthetic and linguistic experiments from the symbolists to the modernists. Along with Pound, he championed such authors as Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière,24 otherwise unknown to the English public.

24 Eliot, in fact, writes his first verses in French as pastiches of Tristan Corbière’s poems from the latter’s Les Amours jaunes.

In his Four Quartets, Eliot seems to offer a literary equivalent to canon and counterpoint or cantus firmus – the father of fugue per se – and in doing so, foreshadows the crisis of subjectivity and faith within modernity, in regards to temporality:

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation (7)

Although not constructed in mirror opposition such as de Machaut’s verses (see section 1.1),

Eliot’s stanza elegantly employs counterpoint, creating a dichotomy between “present” and

“past” within the first verse, only to add a third element of opposition (or better, countersubject),

“future,” thus laying the ground work for a potentially canonic or fugal poetics. By intermingling past, present and future, Eliot underlines the eternal within the intangible instant – to recall

Baudelaire’s definition of modernity – reducing time to “abstraction” and “speculation,” since, as he writes, “[o]nly through time time is conquered” (10). Given that Eliot only offers the reader the ensemble and not the musical form – four quartets being four songs, each with either four voices or four instruments – the argument could be made that the four interweaving voices are: the present, the past, the future, and the abolition of time, in a proto-deconstructionist aesthetics.

The canonic “riddle” present – since riddle is a fundamental element of canon – or the problem to be cogitated herein lies within the role of consciousness vis-à-vis time, a topic that Eliot subsequently develops in Four Quartets, where the end of our adventure “[w]ill be to arrive where we have started / And to know the place for the first time” (43). Eliot, by confusing the individual’s sense of time and a notion of deistic, all encompassing time, seems to suggest both an abolition of time, similar to Pound’s poetico-temporal objectives, and the understanding that

34 these temporalities, once combined, create a more heightened awareness within the individual, in light of the present. This example could suggest a modernist paradox: the subversion of an essentially religious medium (fugue or canon) as well as a way in which to reinvigorate a hitherto spiritually devoid genre. Although Eliot’s poem is not as fugal as his symbolist forefathers’ or modernist contemporaries’ writing, he nevertheless creates unison between time and space through counterpoint that other writers in this corpus endeavor to take even further.

3.3 The Fourth Dimension

By furthering their experiments in time and space, these authors begin a dialogue with other arts and disciplines: from Cubist paintings to Geometry, among others. More precisely, music offers an indirect channel to painting and geometry, and it is the fugue, I argue, that offers a particular dynamics of time and space that most resembles various notions of four- dimensionality. The fourth dimension is a means through which authors can represent a subject or object through time – the coexistence, for example, of his or her selves throughout time, as though layered – and a manner in which authors may demonstrate the simultaneity of coexisting selves and objects at any one given time. Three distinct definitions of the fourth dimension exist.

The first conception of four-dimensionality is related to Einstein’s theory of relativity, in which time and space are coexistent and interdependent. While this theory is predated, according to Tony Robbin, by Joseph-Louis Lagrange in his Théories des fonctions analytiques (1797); it remains most commonly linked to Einstein’s research. Experiments in the visual arts undertaken by cubist painters – such as Picasso, exemplified below in this section –, as well as by the surrealists and Dadaists, namely Marcel Duchamp, sought to include motion and time into the static medium of painting. Although literature offers a sense of motion through narrative, poets and novelists alike sought new ways in which to represent time and space relations. In literature, authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Proust and Vittorini make explicit use of the fourth

35 dimension in their works, however to different ends. The only explicit correlation, however, between music and four-dimensionality within this corpus of study arises in Vittorini’s

Conversazione in Sicilia.

In order to approach these texts, one theoretical apparatus of use in this study is Bakhtin’s understanding of the chronotope. The Russian literary critic chose to employ his own understanding of the dynamics of time and space as a metaphor for literary criticism rather than a strict analogy to Einstein’s theories, nevertheless acknowledging his debt to the German-born scientist’s theory of relativity. Bakhtin explains the chronotope – literally defined as “time- space” – as follows: “[i]n the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84). As such, the chronotope belongs to both the cognitive or linguistic realm and to the narrative world of a given literary text.

Vittorini in Conversazione in Sicilia makes his protagonist utter the words “fourth dimension” in order to explain the heightened experience of traveling home, and reimagining a past – albeit a past he has erroneously taken for reality – vis-à-vis the present Sicily in which his mother lives. Silvestro is suffering from what Paul Ricoeur describes as “le piège de l’imaginaire” in which the subject confuses two paradigms, that of the imaginary with that of remembrance (64). Nonetheless, the fourth dimension fuses past and present, despite the reality of the past, and Vittorini meticulously plays with these shifting paradigms to create his notion of four-dimensionality:

il freddo, il braciere di rame in mezzo alla cucina, e l’acquisito nella mia coscienza di quel punto del mondo dove mi trovavo; ogni cosa era questo, reale due volte; e forse era per questo che non mi era indifferente sentirmi là, viaggiare, per questo che era due volte vero, anche il viaggio da Messina in giù, e le arance sul battello-traghetto, e il Gran Lombardo in treno, e Coi Baffi e Senza Baffi, e la verde malaria, e Siracusa, la Sicilia stessa insomma, tutto reale due volte, e in viaggio, quarta dimensione. (183-4)25

The abounding need to better the present reality and to heighten it emanates from this passage, with the use of expressions such as “l’in più d’ora” and “due volte reale” – twice real or twice as real – to “quarta dimensione.” They all underline the stark realization that the present no longer offers the pleasures, satisfactions, and justice that the (idealized) past seemingly did. The account of a fourth-dimension therefore expounds the crux of reality and its opposition to abstraction and imagination. This is a conflicting paradigm, primarily in Gide’s novel, as well as in Vittorini’s.

Despite the fact that only Vittorini makes explicit reference to the fourth dimension, the correlation between multiple spaces and plural time extends to the other authors within this corpus via the presence of a fugal poetics. This understanding of four-dimensionality therefore remains one of the most crucial reasons for the intermedial adoption of fugue in literature within this dissertation.

Nevertheless, a second significant understanding of four-dimensionality shapes the narratives within this corpus of study as well. The second notion of the fourth dimension is not dependent upon time at all, but instead presupposes a spatial plane in and outside of the three- dimensional world we live in. It seems incontrovertible, according to scholars that a fourth-

25 “This was my mother: the memory of her fifteen years earlier, twenty years earlier, […] as she waited for us to jump off the freight train; that memory, plus all the time that had passed since then, the something-more of the present. In short, she was twice real. She examined the herring on one side then the other, holding it up, and even the herring was both a memory and the something-more of the present – the sun, the cold, the copper brazier in the middle of the kitchen, the existence in my mind of that place in the world where I found myself, everything had this quality of being twice real; and maybe this was why it made a difference to me to be there, to be on a journey, because of everything that was twice real, even the journey down from Messina, the oranges on the ferry, and the Big Lombard on the train, and Whiskers and Without Whiskers, and the malarial green, and Siracusa – in all, Sicily itself, everything twice real, and on a journey in the fourth dimension” (Vittorini 43-44, Trans. Alane Salierno Mason).

37 dimension does indeed exist; however, mathematicians from Möbius to Henderson and Klein acknowledge that it is not visible to human beings living in a three-dimensional world.26 Within this understanding of four-dimensionality, there are two ways according to two distinct principles of geometry in which a fourth-dimension can be conceptualized: the first being the

“slicing method” and the second being ‘the shadow method” (or the “method of projection”).

The first conceptualization of the fourth dimension can be illustrated by the following image:

According to Tony Robbins, “[t]o the Flatlander on the plane, a point or particle appears to be moving in a circle, but to the higher-dimensional viewer, a spiral is being pulled straight through a plane” (26). Such a conclusion can only be drawn via the slicing method, which demonstrates a contrasting ambivalence also at the heart of this dissertation: the relationship between the static – the world of two-dimensionality or of one medium alone – and the dynamic, or the invisible force, movement and vigor behind objects and the self. The projection method – which is of the greatest interest to this dissertation – suggests an invisible, external, and internal dimension of a given object or thing: philosophical or aesthetic counterparts to these dimensions include the

26 For a novel on this topic, see Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott Abbott. 27 Image taken from “Inward Quest.” Web. June 10, 2013.

38 essence, or perhaps even mystery of the subject/object and its aura. This understanding of four- dimensionality acknowledges the existence of a dimension that enables one to see not only through objects, but also enables one to see other dimensions outside of objects. Such a geometrical understanding had a significant influence on a number of artists, including Pablo

Picasso, who studied Jouffret’s Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The hypercube and fourth-dimensional octahedron in Jouffret’s work notably influenced that of

Picasso engendering novel applications in his art. The example below is Jouffret’s demonstration of sixteen deconstructed perspectives of the four-dimensional octahedron (usually made up of eight equilateral triangles in three-dimensionality). In dividing the possible angles and faces of this polyhedron, Jouffret theorizes the potentiality of space in and outside visible objects.

Robbins (31)

Without delving into the theoretical underpinnings of Jouffret’s geometrical forms, it is evident from this image that the mathematician was experimenting with the existence of an invisible dimension, both surrounding and within objects, which essentially lay the groundwork for paintings such as Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler exemplified below.

(Robbins 30)

Jouffret’s studies heavily influenced “[t]he odd way in which spaces are both inside and outside a four-dimensional figure” for Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler (Robbins 33). According to

Robbins, such a “projection model freed Picasso of the tyranny of the surface,” and “in 1910,

Picasso became the champion of a new culture that was told by science that the essence of things lay in structures that skin hid” (33, 47). The essence, for Picasso and for symbolist and modernist writers, would prove to be both on the surface and further below: essence is at once the surface of the skin and the structures hidden beneath it.

This second definition of four-dimensional space, distinct from time as the fourth- dimension of space, implies an invisible internal core and/or external layer within objects: an understanding akin to modernist and even metaphysical aesthetics. This is not wholly unlike

Joyce’s epiphany – described according to Thomas Aquinas’ theories of quidditas –, Pound’s theory of the Great Bass or “luminous detail” – in which he seeks the abolition of time through space, or the “timelessness of time” –, and it can even be seen to recall Rimbaud’s illuminations

(Frye 61). The authors in this corpus of study all seek, in their own way, to represent the invisible essence or aura of an object, person or utterance, the realization of its hidden truth, the

Kantian notion of the “thing-in-itself,” for example, seeking perhaps to exemplify or otherwise maintain its mystery. This invisible, ineffable or ephemeral thing is fleeting, much like the fugue, and it is in conjunction with the polymorphous and parallactic nature of a fugal poetics that these authors create new experiences of discovering the whatness (to use another Joycean term) imbued within the object, self or experience. The variations of a single subject or the multiple perspectives the fugue offers create the necessary context to analyse such revelations; fugue becomes, for these authors, the vessel of quidditas, of a hidden truth or of enigma.

The third and final definition of the fourth dimension employed in this dissertation, more metaphorical than the previous two, is that attributed to M.H. Abrams. In his recently published collection of essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (2012), the author writes about the pleasure of reading poetry aloud, and the critical and physical implications of doing so, in which he defines four dimensions of a poem. The first dimension is the printed text and its visual aspect, such as “cues as to the pace, pauses, stops, and intonation of your reading” (2). Sounds read aloud or imagined constitute the second dimension (2). The third dimension is the meaning of the poem. And finally, the fourth dimension, according to Abrams is the oral activity of enunciating the speech sounds, “the act of its utterance” (2). In other words, reading the poem

42 aloud, the pleasure of uttering and lulling – a primitive pleasure according to Abrams – embodies the text, literally re-creating the body of the work: “a material body, which conveys its nonmaterial meanings” (2). The physical and pleasurably sonorous engagement between text and reader is precisely what creates this understanding of the fourth dimension. Although this final definition will not play an overtly significant role in this dissertation, it nevertheless proves relevant in reference to Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, by complementing the more cerebral tour de force of representing subjectivity both intermedially and interdisciplinarily, within the exemplification and sensorial performance of the body.

The answer to the question regarding the identification of a fourth-dimension in modernist literature is therefore three-fold: 1) Time represents either a united or a fragmented subjectivity within specific spaces, diachronically and synchronically. 2) A fourth dimension of space implies an invisible essence that may emanate in one form or another. 3) The reception and engagement of the reader is essential to the re-creation of the body of a text through the body of the reader/speaker. All of these four-dimensional elements exist on their own; however, once combined with fugue, or read alongside a fugal poetics, these notions of the fourth dimension represent the drive and the dynamics of subjectivity and temporality through a literary melopoetics. To my knowledge, no studies have yet to combine intermedial fugal writing with notions of four-dimensionality. 4 Enigmatic Fugues and their Readership

The final definition of four-dimensionality suggests a peculiar responsibility which weighs upon the reader of a literary fugue. The question regarding the constitution of a fugal poetics elucidated above begs us to ask if there is an intended or ideal readership for a work of literature that espouses a fugal form. While the formulation of an adequate answer relevant to all

43 authors within this corpus is next to impossible, it is only through a detailed analysis of each work in question that the dynamics of reader-response and reader responsibility will become evident, answering the question as to whether the author believes in an ideal reader or not.28 This study approaches a fugal poetics from a more literary angle than from that of a musicologist, and therefore suggests that no previous knowledge of music is necessary in order to experience the poetics of fugue in literature; in fact, if fugal writing achieves its objectives, the process arguably becomes self-effacing – only its effect endures. According to this statement, a fugal poetics may seem, for many writers, inherently symbolist, in that it is the sense of suggestion and evocation, as well as the effect that matter more to the reader than a detailed deconstruction of fugal elements in order to appreciate the signification of the text.

Despite the specificity of each author’s work, identifying the intended reader of a literary fugue may depend, in part, upon an understanding of the relationship between fugue and enigma, elucidated in Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. The fugue, although not a Baroque creation, reaches its apex in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach during the early eighteenth-century. The reason for its resurgence and peak at this time is due to the malleable nature of the fugue, and its inherent similarities to the characteristics of the baroque: exuberance, grandeur, movement, and tension are characteristics shared between both the artistic medium and the historical and artistic context.

Contemporaneous artistic interrelation suggests a kinship between painting, music, and architecture, wherein the sublime and chiaroscuro in painting harmoniously unite with “the multiplication of surfaces, contours, and folds – both to allude to a greater portion of space than

28 Despite addressing a fugal poetics as a deconstructive form, this dissertation does not proclaim the death of the author, given authorial intent plays a significant role in the experimental writings of each author, and their conception of the reader’s experience – whether they believe in an ‘ideal’ reader, for example – or the autobiographic aspect related to fugue.

44 what is visible, and to produce movement” in architecture (Roraback).29 Such a remark is not unlike the second definition of four-dimensionality defined above, nor is it unlike one’s conception of a dynamic modernist literature. Although not all writers in this corpus are necessarily directly influenced by Bach, a brief consideration of the German composer’s magnum opus may reveal something inherent to fugue, and which may offer an understanding of how a spectator or reader should experience both fugue in music and a fugal poetics in literature.

In his detailed study of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, Hans-Eberhard Dentler explains one of the most contested musical creations of all time. The question of whether Bach’s oeuvre was ever intended for a specific musical instrument, or whether it was simply meant as a theoretical opus – a sort of music of the mind – is addressed by Dentler via historical as well as biographical analyses. Dentler argues that Bach’s The Art of the Fugue was created as a Pythagorean enigma, and he justifies such a statement by demonstrating precise mathematical sequences the followers of Pythagoras venerated as symbols of a higher understanding of the harmonious relationship between the senses, knowledge and the soul, all of which are present in Bach’s work. One fundamental example of a Pythagorean recurrence is the importance of the tetraktys, a mystical geometrical triangular shape made of one, two, three and four rows of points: the tetraktys signifies “sacred four” and adds up to the divine number ten (1+2+3+4=10) (Dentler 57).

Without reiterating the complexities of the presence of tetraktys and other mathematically

Pythagorean elements – from the importance of four voices, or the mathematically harmonious

29 Roraback, Erik S. “Gregg Lambert. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture.” Web. September 3, 2012. E- rea 3.2. 2005.

45 intervals between notes – it is the fundamental use of enigma that plays a pivotal role in the creation and understanding of Bach’s work.30

Enigma, for the Pythagoreans, was first of all a didactic method, along with the necessity of repeating that which was learnt during the day, just before bedtime.31 Enigma underlines the desire to expose information only to whomever is capable of decoding its riddle, form or equation; hence, the Pythagoreans’ creation of a new language based on symbols as a secretive form of communication for the initiated. The tetraktys represents one semiotic element of this language, and Dentler traces a similarity between it and the enigma of the Sphinx solved by

Oedipus in which subjectivity and the temporality of humanity is at the forefront: man being the answer to the enigma: "[w]hat animal in the morning walks on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening on three ?" (54).32 One of the subjective riddles in Bach’s work was the inclusion of his name and the desire to insert the names of his family members in his work. In literature, the wish to immortalize oneself within one’s work is a constant tension amongst narrative voices in fugal writing. Therefore, the question remains whether there is something inherently enigmatic – in the Pythagorean sense of the term – in the fugue.

Understanding the implementation of fugue through the frame of enigma offers interesting reader-text tensions. Dentler, describing the unveiling of the subject behind the creation ascertains that “[s]olo colui che riuscirà a sciogliere l’enigma vedrà il maestro nella sua interezza; il complemento mancante si riferisce dunque alla risposta esatta, lasciata allo

30 Other similarities between fugue and Pythagorean enigma include the use of musical terminology to designate both mundane and spiritual realms of existence. Just like fugue is a chant to God in music, the Pythagorean society is founded “per onorare Iddio,” to quote Dentler’s echoing Lorenz Christoph Mizler (29). The Pythagoreans also employed musical terminology to describe their quotidian lives and their faith: their souls were “harmony” and the copresence of binaries – a form of counterpoint – was one of their philosophical principles (29). 31 Although such a practice is often attributed to Aristotle, the act of repeating what is learnt prior to falling asleep is fundamentally Pythagorean (Dentler 18). 32 My translation.

46 spettatore” (17).33 The use of the term enigma, and more specifically Pythagorean enigma, emphasizes the fact that one correct answer exists to a problem, that there is only one manner in which to arrive to the signification of a text. According to this statement, the ideal reader capable of decoding the enigmatic fugues would be an intermedial reader, knowledgeable in literature, music and math, an initiated reader in the Pythagorean sense of the term. Most authors in this corpus would most likely disagree with the unequivocal meaning of a literary work, to the exclusion of Joyce, perhaps, who famously quipped it would take critics at least one hundred years to decipher Ulysses. Nonetheless, enigma and riddle – we can recall as the original form of musical canon – offer a form of ludic interplay between reader and text, in which difficulty, and even resistance, reign. The manner in which literary fugues are enigmatic in a Bachian and

Pythagorean sense, I argue, is the central role of subjectivity in these works of literature, for which fugue represents the shell of its being or the vessel for the rhythm and dynamics of its proliferation.

The relationship between the act of reading and enigma may, however, go much further in regards to subjectivity. Approaching fugal literature as enigma forces the reader to question, seek to comprehend, or at least synthesize his or her own self vis-à-vis the object of creation and the individual or multiple individuals present in the work. In this sense, the reader specularly analyzes his or her self alongside art, and therefore creates a work of art alongside the artist, in the Barthesian sense of a ‘writerly’ text; this, in part, is what Wolfgang Iser suggests in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. For Iser, the classical notion of “meaning” or deciphering the significance of a text is no longer relevant: “[m]eaning,” he explains, “is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced” (10). The dynamics of

33 “Only he who solves the enigma will witness the master in his entirety; the missing piece therefore lies in the spectator’s exact response” (My translation).

47 readership work in correlation to the work of literature, which is not a fixed or finished work, which is, on the contrary, virtual, realizing its potential through a given development, that of reading. Meaning depends both on the reader and the text, for Iser, it is the notion of an “implied reader” that governs the laws of creative meaning: the given reader, not to be confused with the actual reader of a work of literature, is defined as the “textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient” (34). Such a reader is in the text. Reading therefore becomes a performative act, since the reader is involved in “both the production and the comprehension of the work’s intention” (35). The manner in which a reader performs his or her role is through the notions of textual “blanks” that need be filled with meaning, and through the multiple perspectives offered by characters, which Iser characterizes as “wandering viewpoints,” not unlike parallax in modernist literature, as I will discuss (111). The German literary critic writes: “[t]he reader should see himself reflected in the characters, and so should come to a better understanding of himself” (123). By echoing the theoretical understanding of “theme-and-horizon” posited by

Alfred Schütz, Iser explains the wandering (even parallactic) viewpoints that animate such an understanding or quidditas within the reader: “[a]s perspectives are continually interweaving and interacting, it is not possible for the reader to embrace all perspectives at once, and so the view he is involved with at any one particular moment is what constitutes for him the ‘theme.’ This, however, always stands before the ‘horizon’ of the other perspective segments in which he had previously been situated” (97). Reaching significance or meaning therefore depends on the synthesis of these viewpoints, much like theme in fugal writing depends on the synthesis of its motifs.

The definitions Iser postulates above as regards the aesthetic response of a reader share many elements integral to fugue. The fact that meaning is replaced by suggestion and effect, for example, is one of the guiding forces of fugue in all works within this study. The interweaving of

48 characters and points of view is also fundamentally fugal, and perhaps even polyphonic, once the reader is added to the equation. In other words, the interaction between reader and text constitutes a form of counterpoint as well, in that the reader, according to Iser, is forced to position him or herself against the author or other characters within the novel or poem. The notions of an enigmatic readership and the performative readership to which Iser alludes may therefore be reconciled. The etymology (and therefore intrinsic nature) of enigma signifies to

“speak allusively”.34 In this sense, for all authors, from Verlaine and Mallarmé, to Joyce, Pound,

Gide and Vittorini, a form of modernist readership is invented, one with musico-poetic reverberations. An implicit or explicit fugal poetics suggests and evokes a fugal dynamics of reading.

A literary fugue in the Pythagorean sense offers a new language or system of communication, in which one reads literature intermedially. Nonetheless, even if the reader does not approach the text with enough interdisciplinary baggage to pinpoint the musical elements in literature, I echo Iser to conclude that this reader will not have missed out on the experience of a fugal poetics. It is, above all, the suggestion and experience that such a poetics creates that matters to the reader, one who participates in the fugal process via the dynamics of reading. This project, however, approaches the existence of literary fugues through a discourse on melopoetics and will therefore scrutinize the concrete fugal elements present in these works, in order to comprehend the inner-workings of the suggestions and evocations transmitted from text to reader. Among other analyses, it will juxtapose and compare the melopoetics of the works within the corpus, comparing, for example Mallarmé’s symbolist conception of fugal creation to

Pound’s more imagist, anti-suggestive poetry. By reverting to fugue, it will become evident that

34 OED. “Enigma.” Web. September 14, 2012.

49 these poets, as well as the novelists within this corpus, have much more in common than meets the eye. It must also be remembered that within all the works in this dissertation, fugue is often but a part of a whole, and therefore only represents one of the many diverse elements of structure, poetics and signification at play within each of the works studied. Therefore, although often fundamental, a fugal poetics is evidently not the sole conveyer of meaning in these poems and novels. Nevertheless, it is, as I will demonstrate, a fundamental receptacle, which brings a particular dynamic to the signifying process and to the creation of meaning, as well as to the interrogation of modern subjectivity in time and space.

Chapter 2

Symbolism and the Fugal Poetics of Verlaine and Mallarmé

Prior to defining the fugal poetics of Verlaine and Mallarmé, respectively, this chapter

proposes to define the nascent context of symbolism, what constitutes symbolist verse, as well as

the particular roles language, music, and subjectivity play in this literary movement. I will

demonstrate in this section that the fugue operates both in harmony with, and in contradistinction

to language, as a means to formally represent the consciousness of style, and a new form in

which the representation of subjectivity is central. 1 “Vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible”: Defining Suggestiveness and the Contours of the Symbol On September 18, 1886 in Le Figaro, Jean Moréas publishes “Le Manifeste du

Symbolisme,” in which he describes the dynamism of a new literary movement – or ‘school’

according to Illouz (9) – which breaks with the binding and superficial shackles of the parnasse,

moving away from enthusiasts of the motto “Art for Art’s sake.” Moréas is essentially the first to

coin the term ‘symbolist’ in order to define poets who share their mistrust of language, and who

search for a new poetics; seeking a new suggestive metaphysics in which form is as, if not more,

important than content. Although he does not offer a direct definition of symbolism – which is

perhaps the very symptom or performance of symbolism’s manner of signifying –, he

nevertheless enumerates several of the most cohesive characteristics of a poetic lineage that he

traces back to Baudelaire. Diachronically, he explains the evolution and lineage of symbolism as

follows: “Charles Baudelaire doit être considéré comme le véritable précurseur du mouvement

actuel; M. Stéphane Mallarmé le lotit du sens du mystère et de l'ineffable; M. Paul Verlaine brisa

en son honneur les cruelles entraves du vers que les doigts prestigieux de M. Théodore de

Banville avaient assoupli auparavant” (1). The archetypal and foundational symbolist poem is arguably Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” in which the primary trope is synaesthesia, the aesthetic and harmonious confusing of the senses that many critics, such as Illouz and Jenny, consider to be the primary defining element of symbolism. According to Sven Johansen, in his study Le Symbolisme: Étude sur le style des symbolistes français, the fundamental dynamism of the symbol and of synaesthesia are essentially the same: the “fusion d’impressions provenant de différentes sphères” (32). The primary difference between the two, as will become evident through examples in Mallarmé and Verlaine, is that although the symbol is the “transcendance de l’image,” synaesthesia goes beyond the aesthetic and enters the realm of the psychological as well (Johansen 74). Before questioning the psychological ramifications of the image and its acutely hyper-sensorial context, what remains to be understood is how such an image is born within symbolist poetry.

To return to Moréas’ brief statement above, the terms to which he most frequently refers are ‘mystery,’ ‘ineffable’ and the question of versification. Moréas, in elucidating the essentially rhythmical ‘rules’ of symbolist verse – “un désordre savamment ordonné” – recalls the use of the vers impair, which Verlaine somewhat ironically venerates in his “Art poétique”: “l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – résolus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes” (Moréas 1). A call for the use of syllables and metre bordering on the vers faux, combined with the polysemic nature of the term “impair” – which denotes not only odd numbers, but the sense of erroneous, equivocal and tactless actions – unites with Moréas’ other defining concepts (“mystery” and the “ineffable”) in order to offer an interdisciplinary glimpse of symbolist interpretation.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, in his genealogy of the movement, Moréas offers a key to deciphering symbolist poetry, which consists of the link between the cumulative

52 qualities passed down since Baudelaire: the common ground between “mystery,” the breakdown of verse and the “ineffable.” That which “cannot be expressed or described in language,” is “too great for words,” “unspeakable,” “transcending expression.” All of these definitions describe that which is “ineffable”.35 Moréas’ comment therefore begs the question: what is poetry without words? If the ineffable cannot be “described in language,” then the understanding of the subject needs to be transmitted through a different medium, or in the breakdown of language, narrative, and even discourse. Such a definition points to the paralinguistic, the perilinguistic, and the metalinguistic elements of poetry. Beyond words, poetry is verse, rhyme, rhythm, sound. It is the visual combinations of letters, both capitals and lower-cased, not to mention various font sizes, especially for Mallarmé; it is the recurrence and combination of sounds, as well as the emotive, affective and visual resonances they evoke on the reader; it is the mathematical and therefore musical combination of a new language which subverts the communicative power (or impotence) of language. There seems to be a deeper, hidden truth in the numbers, in the form and shape that the verse and poem take, the mathematical and musical underpinnings of the poetic creation. The crisis of language, I argue, coupled with the crisis of subjectivity, offer a clear reason underpinning our consideration that the birth of fugal poetics occurs primarily in the 19th century, reaching its paroxysm in modernist art.

At the core of this linguistic crisis and the creation of meaning lies a constant friction between structuralist and post-structuralist thought and their relationship to fugue. The latter’s similarity to the linguistic – as a dialogic, linear form – would suggest that it is, in Lyotardian terms, solely of discursive nature; however, fugue is also a fragmented, yet (re-)arranged aesthetic method that acts what, following Lyotard, we could define as the “figure,” given that it

35 OED. “Ineffable.” Web. November 13, 2012.

53 has “le pouvoir de figurer et pas seulement de signifier” (62).36 In a sense, fugue can therefore both ‘show’ (suggest or evoke) and ‘tell,’ in both discursive and figural terms, and according to its two distinct semiotic systems (music and literature). It literally portrays, beyond a linear narrative, the dissolution of the subject or object, its disintegrated or broken essence. In a deconstructive manner, “la figure est une déformation qui impose à la disposition des unités linguistiques une autre forme. Celle-ci n’est pas réductible aux contraintes de structure” (61).

The arrangement and disposition of a style fugué embodies this ambivalence of structure and figure. Similar to that of the linguistic, when arranged linearly, the fugue tells a story in accordance with a set structure, but the fugal poetics of disjointed and tangled motifs also exist autonomously, offering elements that the reader needs to visualize and comprehend in their own right. Therefore fugue, in symbolism and in modernism, is at once a narrative form that creates and performs the process of aesthetic creation (or of subjective becoming) and meaning, as well as a figural conception – or in the case of Verlaine, an embodied physical figuration – that can suggest an image or thing’s essence, or maintain it shrouded in mystery. Verlaine, I will suggest, exercises this representation on a more linguistic level, whereas Mallarmé operates on a more thematic, aesthetic one. Nonetheless, this dichotomy of fugal discursivity already present in symbolist verse, lays the groundwork for experimental modernist narratives to come, as a formulation and interrogation of a crisis of language.

Music in general, and fugue more specifically, may also resonate with the highly dynamic nature of symbolism, in its desire to evoke and to suggest, rather than define the poetic image, sensation or idea. Fugue can convey fleeting sensations and images in an indirect manner, slowly unveiling the contours of the melody or subject. A closer look at Moréas’ definition of

36 Lyotard’s example for such an explanation is Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés”: pp. 62-72.

54 symbolism brings one somewhat common goal and theme to the forefront which the first wave of symbolist poets, from Mallarmé and Verlaine, to Laforgue, Corbière, and Rimbaud share. The author of the manifesto writes:

Ennemie de l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective, la poésie symbolique cherche à vêtir l’Idée d'une forme sensible qui, néanmoins, ne serait pas son but à elle-même, mais qui, tout en servant à exprimer l'Idée, demeurerait sujette. L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures; car le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la concentration de l'Idée en soi. Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux- mêmes; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales. (2)

According to the description above, the universe of symbolist poetry is unequivocally one of initiates, of readers patiently capable of untangling the multiple difficult strands weaved around the transcendental image or ‘Idée.’ Such an observation further accentuates the politics of reading, and the enigma of reading fugue in literature, as described in Chapter 1. “Vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible” underlines the paramount importance of form in the symbolist quest for the reinvigoration of poetry, emphasizing a form that is “sensible,” in other words, one that touches upon the senses, capable of exciting a sensorial response within the reader. This synaesthetic experience is one way to come to terms with the ‘Idea’ – sensually comprehending it. If the notion of form is of utmost importance in order to avoid the concentration or even saturation of the Idea – which should never fully and objectively be (re-)presented –, nor should this same form overpower the Idea. While it will inevitably become subjectified, as Moréas explains; one nevertheless needs to discern between the distraction of the flashy exterior or pomp

– the simarre – and the form, shape and contour which harmoniously helps to manifest the Idea, metaphorically, allegorically and metonymically.

Mallarmé, in his attack on the parnassians, echoes Moréas’ affirmation that symbolist writing is the enemy of didactic and objective literature; in fact, in the following description,

55 where the pleasure of the text – a Barthesian and Lacanian jouissance, which takes into account the reader’s active and subjective role in creating textual meaning, and a pleasure of text on the threshold of transgression37– is described as an entrance into the dream world, the poet demonstrates the two angles through which symbolist verse may approach its stylistic dismantling: “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le symbole: évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme, ou, inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par une série de déchiffrements”

(Johansen 80). The dynamics of, little by little, evoking a frame of mind is heavily dependent upon the stylistic and formal aspect of the poem. Perhaps more so than Moréas, Johansen unites the transcendental Idea with the form through which it is conveyed, as, after all, “un symboliste est un idéaliste métaphysique, qui veut aussi idéaliser son instrument pratique d’investigation”

(18). This chapter investigates how the symbolist turn, moving towards a different medium, offers poets new tools to create the “forme sensible” and through which one may reach towards an expression of the Idea or symbol. I will demonstrate that fugal poetics, in becoming the subject matter of the poem, does not in any way take away from the Idea; on the contrary – to use Rimbaldian terminology – fugue complements and illuminates the Idea in a new fashion.

Before discussing how fugue revolves around, and is suggestive of the Idea in Verlaine’s

Romances sans paroles and Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” it is necessary to understand the history of the symbolist movement, a term which criticism has too liberally employed as a label for many a 19th- and 20th-century poet. As many of these poets, between the latter half of

37 In Chapter 4, Barthes’ notion of the scriptible, of a ‘writerly’ text in which the reader participates in the process of aesthetic creation, will push reader-response to its paroxysm, with specific attention given to metatextuality in Gide’s novel. The initiation of the reader, in symbolist aesthetics, already participates in this form of texte scriptible.

56 the 19th, and the first half of the 20th centuries, “étaient en désaccord sur presque tout excepté sur le fait qu’il existe un idéal de la poésie,” it is necessary to comprehend various definitions of the symbol, that which – if it even exists – would constitute the central interest of symbolism. It is furthermore of fundamental importance that we understand the manners in which several poets of this period dealt with the crisis of language, questions of subjectivity and the idea of interdisciplinary dialogue between the arts (Johansen 18).

1.1 The History of Symbolism and of the Symbol

Beyond Moréas’ Manifesto, symbolism has manifested itself in various, even contradictory ways in history. It is therefore important to here elucidate what precisely constitutes a symbol, together with the history and evolution of an avant-garde literary movement that is often, arguably erroneously, situated solely beneath the umbrella of modernism, since as Laurence Porter writes in The Crisis of French Symbolism, “literary historians have not agreed on who the Symbolists were” (6). Porter goes on to suggest four scholarly tendencies pertaining to the definition of symbolism:

The first claims that Baudelaire was a precursor and that after him Symbolism divided into two "branches," the musical and the metaphoric, dominated respectively by Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. A second view discerns two different branches: the free-form, alogical creations of Rimbaud and the intellectual, stringently formalistic verse of Mallarmé, an opposition echoed in the 20th century by Paul Verlaine ("a poem should be a festival of the intellect") and André Breton ("a collapse of the intellect"). A third view would also include Corbière and Laforgue as Symbolists, presumably in order to give two fine neglected poets their due by sheltering them under the umbrella of an overarching movement in literary history. A fourth perspective extends the Symbolist period to the mid-1920s and embraces such twentieth-century figures as Paul Claudel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Valéry. Only Mallarmé appears on everyone's list. (Porter 6-7)

Such definitions are not only historically expansive, but also somewhat contradictory. They divide the musical and the metaphoric, the formalistic and the intellectual, whereas all of these elements can, nevertheless, be seen to play a crucial role in the poetics of many symbolist poets at various times throughout their careers. It is evident by this definition, and will become more so

57 in this project, that it is not possible to speak of one symbolism proper, but that we should rather speak of many, and, more specifically, of two larger diachronic differentiations.

That Baudelaire is the (grand-)father of symbolism seems indisputable. That Verlaine is more musical than Mallarmé, I will argue is inaccurate, but that some symbolist verse is much more intellectual than aesthetic and playful is apropos. For example, Tristan Corbière and Jules

Laforgue may offer glimpses of a symbolist poetics in line with Baudelaire’s depiction of modernity; however, these two poets represent the quintessential difficulty in generically labelling and classifying authors within a movement or school of thought: their poetry is not congruent with their historical milieu, and it will take many decades after their death – one died at age twenty-seven, the other at twenty-nine – for their poetry to be sold and read. If anything, the omnipresent irony, and auto-derision, together with the celebration of discordance and the cacophony of verse is more akin to the study of postmodernism than that of symbolism or modernism. Finally, a new symbolism or a retrieval of the symbol by early 20th-century authors resurrects an obscure movement, coalesced into a second wave of symbolism that Valéry,

Claudel, Apollinaire and arguably Gide and Proust, among others, all championed.

When precisely did symbolism begin, and when did it finish? According to some, it “is ordinarily defined either too narrowly or too broadly: as a general tendency of La Belle Epoque

(1880-1914),” or as a gradual progression from decadence and the parnasse (Porter 6). Others date its beginning as far back as Baudelaire – and therefore 1857, with the publication of Les

Fleurs du mal, or 1841 when he began writing – and would extend it as far as Apollinaire’s publication of Alcools (1913) or even Valéry’s Charmes (1926) (Porter 15). Porter underlines the ambiguity of generic nomenclatures and classifications in the 19th century, which accounts for the misrecognition of symbolism vis-à-vis decadence or the parnasse: "The prevailing scheme for structuring the history of 19th-century French poetry divides the century into three periods:

Romanticism, an undifferentiated transitional phase, and Symbolism. Lacking the conceptual

"home" of an identified literary movement, some major mid-century poets are neglected, while others are reft from their historical context so that they may be presented as precursors to

Modernism rather than as representatives of their own times" (1).

Jean-Nicolas Illouz, in his study of symbolism, explains that as a general rule, “on dit du symbolisme qu’il réagit contre le parnasse et qu’il revient au romantisme,” and goes on to discuss the generalization this causes in regards to questions of poetic inspiration (18). Although

Guy Michaud states that “Décadence et Symbolisme sont, non pas deux écoles, […] mais deux phases successives d’un même mouvement, - l’une négative, et l’autre positive,” Illouz clarifies the large difference between symbolists and decadents as follows: “Les « doctrines », au départ confondues, se séparent bientôt plus nettement: alors que les « décadents » s’en tiennent à un pessimisme négateur, les « symbolistes » vont affirmer leur foi en un idéal ou en une réalité supérieure; le sentimentalisme vague de ceux-là va être remplacé par l’ambition théorique de ceux-ci” (39). Indeed, the symbolists, by playing with form, invent the vers libre and interior monologue (Édouard Dujardin), which revolutionizes contemporary versification, as well as narrative focalisation in prose, together with the question of representing interiority or subjectivity. To the symbolists, the symbol, image, and Idea, encapsulated within the “sorcellerie

évocatoire,” is both sensual and metaphysical, something decadent writers interpreted as pure obscurity, or what Paul Valéry will define as a “mythe,” questioning the very existence of the movement that scrutinizes the “gouffre sans fond” of any word (Lemaître 676; Illouz 10: echoing

Paul Valéry).

Yet symbolism did indeed exist, and Valéry was arguably an integral contributor to its second wave. The first wave, which officially begins in 1886, owes its birth to four pillars or four

‘beacons,’ to use baudelairean imagery: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé (Illouz

22). These poets, who begin writing at least one or two generations before 1886, receive a posteriori, for the most part, the symbolist label, in an attempt to differentiate between them, the decadents, and the parnassians, such as Huysmans, Cazalis or Mendès. Verlaine, for example, breaks with the parnasse in his publication of the Poèmes saturniens (1866).

The symbolist period is also deeply inscribed in a salon tradition. Mallarmé, for example, held his “mardis” in the “rue de Rome” starting in 1880, in which the insomniac poet was reputed to give tireless talks to a large number of authors and poets. In the 1890s, many of these artists included Gide, Valéry, Jarry, Claudel, and later Dujardin, Wyzewa, Fénéon, Ghil,

Régnier, Mauclair, Gustave Kahn, among many others (Illouz 37). Although much quarrelling ensued between symbolists and those that still espoused the motto “Art for Art’s sake,” it is only in 1895 that an attempt was made to dismantle the symbolist movement. Moréas, who only a few years earlier had baptised the new aesthetic school, decides at this moment to create what would be but a new interregnum, the “École Romane,” to take symbolism’s place. Many writers therefore defect from symbolism at this point, in a return to Classicism, a Neo-Classical aesthetics that criticizes the obscure nature of symbolism.

Proust articulates the death of symbolism as follows: “Partout, contre le culte des paradis artificiels du premier Symbolisme, on retrouve le contact avec le monde sensible, et l’on réinvente un lyrisme qui puise aux parties plus humaines du moi” (Illouz 77). A second, more approachably allegorical wave of symbolism revives what these authors consider an obscure and obsolete understanding of poetry. Valéry and his followers, for example, in lieu of poetry taxed as “cymbalistes” by no other than Verlaine – in reference to its complex cacophony – or of

“allemandisme,” for its seemingly foreign nature, return to a more accessible and direct symbol reminiscent of a pre-symbolist era. This wave of symbolism, however, inscribes itself less in line

60 with a musical aesthetics than did the former wave. This dissertation therefore studies symbolist fugal poetics as a precursor to, and as an essential component of the first wave of symbolism.

1.2 A Symbolist Movement A Posteriori: from Music to Language

Above and beyond the publication of Moréas’ manifeste, Illouz offers another potential publication that announces the birth of the symbolist movement: in 1886, “L’année s’ouvre sur la publication, dans le numéro de janvier de la Revue wagnérienne, d’un hommage à Wagner qui comporte huit sonnets: de Mallarmé et de Verlaine,” amongst others. “L’ensemble peut apparaître comme la première manifestation collective d’une « École symboliste », qui ne dispose pas encore d’une doctrine formulée, mais qui se reconnaît déjà dans une commune religion de la Musique et de la Légende, l’une et l’autre confondues dans l’œuvre de Wagner”

(Illouz 42-43). It is both myth and music that represent the fundamentally fruitful contexts, forms and themes of symbolist writing, taking as a starting point Wagner and his interdisciplinary theories, to which I will return. Despite the publication of the first Revue wagnérienne and the

Manifeste du symbolisme in the same year, there is no precise historical explanation left by scholars for the birth and death of symbolism during this period. Perhaps eclipsing the importance of the communards in Paris, the revolts of 1871 and the rise of the Franco-Prussian war – which could offer one reason behind symbolism’s emerging poetics –, Porter writes: “No clear-cut historical events delineate a Symbolist period as the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the promulgation of the Second Empire in 1851 may be said to have defined Romanticism in

France” (Porter 13). The rise of symbolism at the fin-de-siècle therefore points more to an aesthetic necessity than to a socio-political influence, without completely ignoring the political context. To a certain extent, the modernity of symbolism therefore lies within its ahistorical nature, in focusing more on the aesthetic and the subjective than the socio-political.

Baudelaire is considered by many as the poet of modernity, the pillar of a new aesthetic turn. In returning to Baudelaire in order to lay the foundations of symbolist writing, a certain ambiguity can, however, be seen to exist, as Illouz explains: “d’un côté en effet, l’œuvre de

Baudelaire semble récapituler l’héritage romantique dont se chargent les doctrines du symbole, - de l’autre, sa « modernité » tient dans la façon dont elle ressent l’effondrement de l’ancien univers analogique, et inaugure une nouvelle pensée du signe” (Illouz 154). Evident from this quote is a pervasive tension identified by critics – and obscurely implicit in Illouz’s writing – between the romantic symbol and the symbolist symbol with which Baudelaire dealt. By romantic symbol, I understand a more static, classical creation of symbolization that operates via paradigmatic substitution, analogy or metaphor, in which a thing is charged with a signification that lies above and beyond its meaning, evoking another thing, sensation, idea or context. The symbolist symbol, I will demonstrate – and this is its quintessential link to fugue – is deeply dependent upon its dynamism, its movement and process. From both a writer and reader’s perspective, the goal of symbolist symbols is “not to describe objects of perception but to condition the perception of objects” (Halmi 1). While the manner in which one reads or engages with the text obeys a specific process of symbolization that can take into account various

(Romantic) symbols, this new symbol is, however, its own poetic development.

Returning to Baudelaire, the new semiotic understanding of the world – a new manner in which to conceive of the sign – is the “réseau des correspondances” (Baudelaire 154). As Illouz suggests, the aura of “la forêt de symboles” in Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances” is the most likely source of the term (38). Illouz goes on to explain the evolution of the nature of the symbol, from Romanticism to symbolism in his own terms: “En définitive, dans ce tournant du

Romantisme à la modernité qu’opère l’œuvre de Baudelaire, le symbole a été progressivement remplacé par l’allégorie” (158). Whereas Romanticism championed the symbol over allegory,

62 according to Illouz, symbolist poets, starting with Baudelaire, chose allegory in order to better represent modernity. Such a grand statement, however, deserves to be revisited, since Illouz’s understanding of symbolism, and more precisely of Baudelaire, seems heavily influenced by

Walter Benjamin’s theories of allegory.38 Baudelaire is, after all, the very centre of both

Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and his understanding of allegory, which I would argue is much more in line with a German rather than a French tradition. What I would liken to allegory, however, is the process of symbolization that the symbolist symbol demands: a pervading metaphor, image, sensation or idea that the reader slowly unveils or the effect of which s/he gradually senses, and not a single, isolated and static symbol.

Therefore, to recapitulate, the symbolist symbol breaks with Romantic symbolism, and seems more allegorical than symbolic, given that it is the basis of the entire poem’s signification.

Nonetheless, this notion of symbol must not be understood as simply allegorical either, in that interpretation works backwards from a pre-conceived allegory. On the other hand, the symbol, via suggestion, is a progressive process: “La notion de « suggestion » invite tout d’abord à considérer que le symbole, dans le poème, n’est pas une figure isolée et isolable, mais qu’il procède de l’œuvre tout entière. Contrairement à l’allégorie qui part d’une symbolique préétablie, le symbole, s’il est authentique, résulte du seul travail du texte, qu’il mobilise tout entier” (Illouz 171). This is all evidence of a dynamics of creation and interpretation, a new stylistics based on the totality of the text, which is slowly divulged by the reader. I argue that fugue not only functions in a similar manner to this, but it also offers a model for such a symbolic understanding of the Idea.

38 Illouz’s conception of allegory, its dynamics and all-encompassing qualities, are much more fitting for Mallarmé’s verse than for Baudelaire’s, and deserve further consideration.

1.3 Towards a Definition of the Symbol

The history and evolution of the symbolist movement thus elucidated, it is necessary to theorise what exactly constitutes the symbol, the elusive Idée suggested by Moréas. According to the prominent symbolist critic Guy Michaud, the symbol is at the very heart of one’s understanding of poetry and art: "le symbolisme a toujours existé. Le symbole est le fondement même de l'art, puisque l'art est la reconstruction du réel selon les correspondances secrètes et l'harmonie souveraine de la création. La véritable poésie a toujours été symboliste, puisqu'elle ne pouvait suggérer la Beauté que par le truchement des symboles" (418). Michaud offers a definition of the symbol that spans historically, from the very dawn of poetry right up to

Romanticism. The attempt to reconstruct the “réel,” however, is not a symbolist objective. The symbolist symbol is obscure and demands interpretative perseverance, requiring an initiated reader; the symbol is often an abstract, metaphysical idea or image, which one may only attain by threading together multiple strands in the text, as I have suggested above in relation to allegory. According to this dynamics of interpretation, Mallarmé understands symbol and

“synthesis” to be synonymous (Porter 255). Beginning with Mallarmé, Illouz summarizes the many viewpoints that various authors held in regards to the symbol:

Pour Mallarmé, le symbole est l’instrument privilégié de la « suggestion ». Pour Charles Morice, « c’est le mélange des objets qui ont éveillé nos sentiments et de notre âme, en une fiction ». Henri de Régnier, pour sa part, affirme que si l’école nouvelle n’invente pas le symbole, du moins est-elle la première à en faire « la condition essentielle de l’art ». Quant à Maeterlinck, il est, avec Mallarmé, celui qui va le plus loin dans la compréhension de l’opération symbolique, en distinguant le symbole « de propos délibéré », qui part d’abstractions et touche de près à l’allégorie, d’un « symbolisme inconscient », qui puise aux tréfonds de l’âme et du Mystère, et par lequel l’œuvre participe silencieusement aux forces mêmes de l’univers. (Illouz 58)

Interestingly, as we here read, Verlaine never offers a clear-cut definition of the symbol or of symbolism, except perhaps in his poem “Art poétique,” most likely due to his dislike of labels. In line with the mysterious and the idea of reaching into the abyss of one’s soul or mind, symbolism

64 is definitely one of the first movements to theorize the unconscious and dream-states. One idealist interpretation of symbolism is therefore the “besoin de trouver un refuge dans le rêve”

(Illouz 88). Whereas the Romantics adopted the dream as a thematic underpinning to their creations, the symbolists took dreams a step further and analyzed their anti-naturalist potential as subjects in which to understand (un)consciousness. This new portrayal of the oneiric offers the

“supra-sensible” individual a peek into an invisible world (88). Invisible world, representing the oneiric, tapping into the unconscious, all of these sensations and representations find a shocking similarity to symbolist suggestiveness and its poetics of indirectness or diversion. Without necessarily addressing the dream state critically, symbolist writing portrays a veiled world that the reader is required to decode, slowly unraveling fragments and reconstituting events, one example being Mallarmé’s sonnet “Une dentelle s’abolit”:

Une dentelle s’abolit Dans le doute du Jeu suprême A n’entr’ouvrir comme un blasphème Qu’absence éternelle de lit.

Cet unanime blanc conflit D’une guirlande avec la même, Enfui contre la vitre blême Flotte plus qu’il n’ensevelit.

Mais, chez qui du rêve se dore Tristement dort une mandore Au creux néant musicien

Telle que vers quelque fenêtre Selon nul ventre que le sien, Filial on aurait pu naître. (74)

Mallarmé gradually unfolds the pleating lace of emptiness by confusing both the perspective of the viewer – from the window pane to the empty bed inside the room – and the object itself: emptiness, which seems to engender more emptiness. As we will later see, his representation of

65 language is hauntingly similar to this example. The lace from the bed and from the window mesh, which confusingly floats in front of the viewer – or reader – who is hypnotically, and musically cradled to sleep. Indirection, diversion and suggestion all create a context of perplexity and mystification. It is most likely one of Mallarmé’s poems that best exemplifies his fascination with emptiness, absence and dream states, which reaches its pinnacle in “L’Après-midi d’un faune.”

What is and is not visible, and how to reveal what is hidden or elusive is often the topic of symbolist art. The symbol itself embodies such a dynamics. Ferdinand Brunetière evokes the epiphanic and four-dimensional qualities intrinsic to the symbol in his definition of symbolism:

“Dans un temps où, sous prétexte de naturalisme, on avait réduit l’art à n’être plus qu’une imitation du contour extérieur des choses, les Symbolistes, rien qu’en se nommant de leur nom, ou en l’acceptant, ont paru réapprendre aux jeunes gens que les choses ont une âme aussi, dont les yeux du corps ne saisissent que l’enveloppe, ou le voile, ou le masque” (Illouz 54).

Brunetière continues, explaining the metaphysical and mystical side of the school of thought:

Entre la nature et nous il y a des « correspondances », des « affinités » latentes, des « identités » mystérieuses et ce n’est qu’autant que nous les saisissons que, pénétrant à l’intérieur des choses, nous en pouvons approcher l’âme. Voilà le principe du Symbolisme, voilà le point de départ ou l’élément commun de tous les mysticismes, et voilà ce qu’il était bon que l’on essayât d’introduire, comme un ferment nouveau, pour le faire lever, si je puis dire, dans la lourde masse du naturalisme. (Illouz 54)

It is through the substantial use of imprecision and indetermination, the infinite and the unfinished that symbolism achieves such a feat (173). In René Ghil’s publication Traité du verbe, Mallarmé offers an intriguing foreword which points at a constant duality within symbolist writing, between the metaphysical and the material: “il s’agit […] d’associer une physique du langage qui prend en compte la matérialité sonore des mots dans le procès de la signification, à une métaphysique de la poésie qui confère au poème la tâche de reproduire

66 symboliquement l’ordre de l’univers” (Illouz 43). Such a statement is not unlike M. H. Abrams’ definition of four-dimensionality in which the physicality of language and the body of the speaker are conflated with a metaphysical experience of the words uttered, something I argue is more relevant in Verlaine than Mallarmé’s verse. Jenny otherwise states this duality as follows:

“Le symbolisme hésite entre un idéalisme d’inspiration néo-platonicienne, qui fait culminer quasi mystique, et un matérialisme absolu qui met en question jusqu’à la notion même de

« symbole » ou de langage, en réduisant l’expression poétique à une réaction réflexe » (31).

Despite what the demarcations of the symbolist movement are and what the multiple understandings of the symbol may be, the question that remains is: why symbolism? Why such an obscure, unapproachable form to create poetry? The answer, I argue, lies within the underlying notions of language or communication in general, and of subjectivity in particular, to which music, and more specifically fugue provide an answer. 2 The Vacuity of Language, Subjectivity and the Problem of Communication

According to Porter, Illouz, and Jenny, the symbolist poets experienced l’incommunicabilité: “a crisis or loss of faith in the communicative process” (Porter 11). Illouz goes as far as characterizing this crisis of communication as the very nature of modernity: “il [le symbole] passe par les relais de Baudelaire, de Rimbaud ou de Mallarmé, où la pensée du

« symbole », si elle est maintenue, est cependant inséparable d’une crise majeure dans la confiance accordée au verbe poétique, qui caractérise la « modernité »” (Illouz 153-4).

“Symbolist poetry” is therefore essentially “a poetry of failure,” failure in the linguistic sense, along the axis between sender and receiver (Porter 12). It could therefore be said that symbolist writers were working on language through language; they were pointing at something lost within language, and trying to both regain it, and create a new path for it. There was no way to do so

67 other than through language itself. Inevitably bound by failure, these poets were made to rethink the very medium of linguistic communication, perhaps influenced by conviction that society was struck with its very annulment. Ironically, working through this annulment offered these writers the hope of reaching a metaphysical awareness and a sublime understanding of aesthetic transcendence. Mallarmé and Verlaine, for example, had specific doubts in the ability of language to signify in general, let alone represent transcendence. Mallarmé “subverted the idea of inspiration,” not only creative inspiration, but more specifically the relationship between sender and message, and “Verlaine vehemently mistrusted language itself" (Porter x).

In light of such a pessimistic view of language and communication – which includes the linguistic basis of both every-day communication and any aesthetic message – how could symbolist poets deal with this insurmountable medium, in order to instill readers with the Idée?

"If a direct attack on the transcendent by means of words seemed bound to fail,” Porter explains,

“there remained the hope that the beyond could be intuited, suggested, indirectly evoked" (11).

The hallmarks of symbolist poetry are, of course, suggestion, and evocation, together with indirect and diverting representation. Mallarmé and Verlaine, more so than others perhaps, sought to go beyond the signified and signifier that make up the sign, and sought a new semiotics of suggestion. Through the morphemes and phonemes, the minutiae of language, which – similar to music – do not have a strict one-to-one analogy or referent, these poets offered a new manner in which to suggest transcendence. It is in a turn to Cratylism, a philosophical theory which counters the argument that arbitrariness governs the relationship between sign and referent, that

Mallarmé, and arguably Verlaine, seek the underlying transcendental nature of words, their sounds and origins. Porter writes that Mallarmé in particular “resorts to Cratylism, finding in the shape of letters and in the sound and etymology of words innate meanings deeper than the

68 conventional signifieds” (12). For Verlaine too, the uniting of particular phonemes recreates the body of his text, and more specifically, creates the image of the man behind the plume.

A Cratylistic understanding of language in the world, however, leaves little place for the individual in society; the subjective turn becomes an inward movement, and the “failure of metaphysical values destroys the hope that a coincidence between self and world might be achieved through sociality and a shared language” (Nicholls 24). The goal these symbolists had set was to create a new language “which would make stronger claims to transcendence,” and the novel poetic form arguably found its answer in music (Nicholls 25). Before analyzing the relationship between symbolism and music, however, it is necessary to comprehend a second crisis in symbolism as well as in modernism, which, alongside the crisis of language, participates in these poets’ struggle to appropriate a new medium within poetry: the problem of subjectivity.

2.1 Symbolist Subjectivity

If the modern subject is fleeting and hypersensitive in a world of constant flux – as depicted in Baudelaire’s “À une passante” –, then the poetic reverts to a subjectivity which has a deeper relation to interiority than to the external world. Nicholls writes: “in so far as the abrupt movements of the city were incorporated into the artist’s internal life, so the self began to lose its boundaries, becoming instead a flux of sensation and contradictory states of mind” (17). He goes on to echo Baudelaire’s conception of alterity and subjectivity, omnipresent themes in his poetry, particularly in Le Spleen de Paris, among elsewhere. One can think of “La vie antérieure,” for example: “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being, at will, both himself and other people. Like a wandering soul seeking a body, he can enter, whenever he wishes, into anybody’s personality” (Nicholls 17). This conception of poetic omniscience, imagination and metempsychosis slowly points towards literary investigations into the unconscious, predating symbolist inwardness (“Je est un autre”?), Surrealist experiments and psychoanalytic theories.

Metempsychosis, for example, becomes a literary trope in proto-modernist verse, such as in

Tristan Corbière’s poetry, and most notably in modernist novels, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, which employs the technique and philosophy as a paradigmatic orchestration, and Proust’s Recherche, in which the term métempsycose appears in the opening pages, in reference to inanimate objects in Marcel’s waking moments.

Whereas for the Romantics the representation of nature, an idealized Nature, signified a symbiosis between subject and surroundings, or a pathetic fallacy of emotions and energy, for the symbolists, the external world portrayed in poetry is secondary to the interiority of the subject. In lieu of a mimetic, realistic representation of reality, priority is given to the projection of an interiority. Many of these poets, in fact, advocate a “rejet du monde extérieur,” as Illouz explains (Illouz 122). Similar to the critique of language, which inevitably makes use of language itself, the symbolists, I argue, create a new understanding of the world in order to fulfill novel representations of the self. Therefore, I agree that if “le monde extérieur existe pour les

écrivains symbolistes, c’est seulement dans la mesure où il peut servir de support à une projection des sentiments, de manière à objectiver en quelque sorte une subjectivité trop

« volatile » en elle-même, - de manière aussi à rendre sensibles les « analogies » secrètes qui relient l’âme et le monde” (Illouz 124). Subjectivity being volatile and fleeting as it is, this inward turn creates “un paysage intérieur, un paysage d’âme,” because the imagined and often mythical landscapes or settings point indefinitely towards the profundity and infinite mystery of the self, and this, Illouz explains, is the only and unique object(ive) of symbolist art (122, 135).

The duality between exteriority and interiority, and the notions of a symbolist and modernist subjectivity owe much to two philosophers, although the latter is in somewhat of an anachronistic dialogue with symbolist aesthetics and metaphysics: Arthur Schopenhauer and

Henri Bergson.

2.2 Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical writings were of great influence upon many prominent thinkers and artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Nietzsche to Wagner and the later symbolist poets, given that his work in France is only made available in the 1870s. This is despite the fact that his most prominent work, The World as Will and Representation was published in 1818. Nonetheless, French writers contemporary to Schopenhauer were, albeit indirectly, aware of his theories. His oft-quoted tenet, “The world is my will” – or occasionally translated as “idea” in lieu of “will” – for example, echoes the idealist rejection of the world the symbolists believed in, not simply an external world governed by a specific Zeitgeist, but one which one’s own mind creates and represents (24). Influenced by Kant’s notion of the unknowable “thing-in-itself,” Schopenhauer formulated an understanding of the world through the concept of Will. For Schopenhauer, Will is the driving force of effort and desire in individuals and animals, a force that governs fulfillment or lack thereof in individuals, and the very inner reality of one’s being. It also presupposes an ontological interconnectedness; all individuals and even animals are what he describes as ‘phenomena’ of the will-to-live, the external shell of that which is not visible. Illouz, in a discourse on alterity, thus writes: “la pensée de Schopenhauer sert alors de caution philosophique à une forme particulière d’idéalisme qui est en réalité un subjectivisme absolu” (Illouz 137). If all living beings are the phenomena or fragments of a unified Will, then individuality does not exist, and to paraphrase Rimbaud, the

Other truly is also the self. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s concept of the ‘Idea’ is in fact the coexisting relationship between the object in time and space, and the reflecting subject: these two components, which are mutual halves of one whole, create ‘perception.’

The symbolists, through dream narratives and mythic settings were on their way to representing the dynamics of Will’s desire, as well as the self as something both internal and

71 external, not to say representing a split within the self or even multiple selves. Schopenhauer described the ‘immediate object’ as the self one could perceive outside of oneself, a form of heightened consciousness. Porter recognizes the following Schopenhauerian passage as the clearest expression of symbolist reasoning:

Time, space, and causality are that arrangement of our intellect by virtue of which the one being of each kind which alone really is, manifests itself to us as a multiplicity of similar beings, constantly appearing and disappearing in endless succession. The apprehension of things by means of and in accordance with this arrangement is immanent knowledge; that, on the other hand, which is conscious of the true state of the case, is transcendental knowledge. The latter is obtained in abstracto through the criticism of pure reason, but in exceptional cases it may also appear intuitively. (Porter 8)

Nothing visible exists outside of time and space, thus complicating the epistemological and ontological ramifications of existence and aesthetic creation. What Schopenhauer states, however, is that what is not perceivable exists outside of causality, temporality, and space. There is a hidden essence, a sort of four-dimensionality (as in space’s invisible fourth dimension) essential to the object or individual’s being and Will. One may apprehend the physical realm, but to consciously know and understand the metaphysical nature of the object, this can only be suggested. Here, Schopenhauerian metaphysics are completely akin to the symbolist motto of suggestion and evocation, and to the dynamics of fugal creation. An inner truth, “transcendental knowledge” cannot be directly perceived, but only hinted towards indirectly, not unlike fugal orchestration (Jacquette 173).

Music is one form of indirect evocation that symbolist writers either explicitly or implicitly made use of, as a way to suggest tone, mood or an idea (or the ‘Idea’). According to

Jenny, the non-mimetic power of music for Schopenhauer was the ideal form for the representation of Will: “c’est l’art qui a la plus grande valeur ontologique puisqu’il exprime non pas les Idées de la Volonté mais la Volonté elle-même; mais c’est aussi, en conséquence, le seul art non mimétique: il ne représente pas des Idées, et à vrai dire on ne peut guère concevoir qu’il

72 soit le résultat d’un « faire » ou d’une création quelconque, puisqu’il exprime sans médiation la force aveugle de la Volonté” (Jenny 31). This particular role of music is similar to the symbolists’ deployment of musical techniques and poetics. It is, for Schopenhauer, the art that most directly represents the Will, and therefore the constant becoming of the subject in question.

Following a brief understanding of the relationship between symbolism and Bergsonian subjectivity, I will expose the fundamental importance of music in this period, and the particular role of fugue in relation to a subject’s identity and desire.

2.3 Bergson

Although Henri Bergson’s theories are not contemporary to the symbolists, most critics agree that Bergson philosophically theorizes what many symbolist poets sought to represent aesthetically.39 While Bergson’s writings will have a tremendous influence on Proust and Pound among other modernists; it is nevertheless interesting to consider some Bergsonian terms in light of symbolist poetry, as a means to comprehend the undercurrents of subjectivity and form within their verse. In 1904, Tancrède de Visan publishes L’Essai sur le Symbolisme, and thus is one of the first writers to unite this aesthetic movement with the philosophy of Bergson. According to

Visan, “La poésie est définie comme « l’extériorisation d’une conscience spontanée »; et le

Symbolisme apparaît comme une tentative pour capter les manifestations du « moi profond »” (Illouz 147). This quotation suggests a certain degree of subjectivity, and the possible multiplicity of selves to which the symbolists already hint, and which, moving beyond Proust, is also exploited in the work of Pound and Vittorini in particular.

39 For a detailed debate on the topic, see: Maurice Blanchot, “Bergson and Symbolism.” Yale French Studies. No. 4 (1949): 63-66.

Illouz explains the distinction between a more profound self and a superficial one:

“Bergson distingue deux aspects du moi: un moi superficiel, qui « se prête […] aux exigences de la vie sociale en général et du langage en particulier », et un moi profond, fait d’un flux ininterrompu de perceptions, de sensations et d’émotions que le langage ne peut traduire parce qu’elles ont une existence purement qualitative” (Illouz 147). Once again, the distinguishably precise and impersonal opposes itself to the inexpressible, the confused, fleeting and mobile, in a similar manner to the duality of external and internal states of mind that we read in

Schopenhauer (Jenny 23). Jenny offers an analogy to scrutinize the profound, internal self:

C’est au second moi, beaucoup plus intérieur et inexprimable, que se sont attaqués les symbolistes. Celui-ci, infiniment mobile et confus, ne se solidifie qu’avec peine. Ce serait comme un visage derrière une vitre: si nous passons rapides il échappe, mais dès que l’attention fixe notre regard sur les ténèbres, la figure bientôt sort de l’ombre et nous parle. (Jenny 25)

The moi profond is not conceivable linguistically; not only is such a self veiled, as Jenny would suggest, but it is an elusive subjectivity lacking form itself. I will argue that the melopoetics of fugue is precisely one such suggestive literary form that stages multiple polyphonic levels of subjectivity, present in Verlaine and Mallarmé’s verse.

Another central theoretical component to Bergsonian thought is his understanding of temporality. Bergson differentiated between scientific time and the notion of duration (durée), in which, he argues, free will exists. This conception of time, unlike scientific time, can be stretched, expanded, and can even become subjective, qualitative. This notion of temporality offers a fruitful context for the understanding of Proust’s life-long narrative, and more specifically, I will demonstratein Vittorini’s parody of it (Chapter 4), but it also finds its place in shorter, poetic narratives. Bergson explains the dynamics of durée and the interweaving nature of a subjective temporality as follows: “la pure durée pourrait bien n’être qu’une succession de changements qualitatifs qui se fondent, qui se pénètrent, sans contours précis, sans aucune

74 tendance à s’extérioriser les uns par rapport aux autres, sans aucune parenté avec le nombre: ce serait l’hétérogénéité pure” (Jenny 23). Duration is not dependent upon causality, in this sense; it is not linear. It is also governed by the nature of intuition – another term at the basis of

Bergsonian subjectivity, defined as “le fond-même de nous,” which takes over the notion of intelligence – and is therefore similar to the symbolist aesthetics of imprecision, evocation and suggestion (26). In order to exist or represent itself, this notion of subjective time needs to pass through something else: whether that be an image, sound or other sense, all remnants of a profound self. Unfortunately for Bergson and the symbolists, “le caractère insaisissable de l’intuition du « moi profond »” renders the symbolist crisis even more pessimistic (26). Despite this impossibility and the ultimate failure of symbolism, it is in an attempt to allude to a greater self and world that the symbolists revolutionized poetry, both formally and philosophically.

Jenny summarizes this objective and the influence – at times anachronistic – of Schopenhauer and Bergson upon their creations: “Il y a donc une poétique du travail philosophique, qui évoque de fort près la pratique des poètes symbolistes: dans les deux cas il s’agit de recourir à des moyens d’expression indirects, d’agencer une multiplication d’images imprécises et indécises qui, en se superposant et en s’excluant mutuellement, font allusion à un irreprésentable (la

« durée » a pris la place de l’ « Idée » ou de la Volonté schopenhauerienne)” (Jenny 24).

Although Jenny suggests that duration, and therefore a novel sense of temporality takes the upper hand on the ‘Idea,’ the ‘thing-in-itself,’ or Schopenhauerian Will, I would err on the side of caution, and not completely dissociate any of these ideas from one another. Arguably, they all unite in a symbolist Zeitgeist, a spirit of an age where new aesthetic, linguistic and philosophical forms of space and time appear, of which fugue is both a valuable component and emblematic: from its polyphony, and suggestiveness, to the representations it offers of the many faceted subject in both time and space.

Despite the innate contradictions that underlie the symbolist movement – from idealism and positivism, to subjectivism and the unconscious (Illouz 136) – the very manifestation and questioning of a moi profond, but also of the profound essence of things and ideas, represents the mobility of a psychic life that language can no longer trace or represent. The value given to music at this specific moment in history will prove to be beneficial, offering a source of influence and of experimentation for poets who, at that time, were in search of a strategy for the representation of that which lacks form.

2.4 Music and the Symbolist Movement

In symbolist poetry, we see a switch, which occurs between a more visual poetic representation and an aural and musical conception of the poetic experience. The main influence on 19th-century poets, as early as Baudelaire, is Richard Wagner and his interdisciplinary understanding of art and performance. His theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total or ideal work of art – aimed at the union of stage, classical music and poetry (Nicholls 49). Illouz explains, “Wagner y défend une conception mystique de l’art, radicalement opposée au matérialisme ambiant: la musique parle directement le langage de l’âme, et apparaît « comme la révélation d’un autre monde »” (Illouz 18). Such sensorial harmony and the fusion of music and poetry in order to reach a metaphysical other world was of tremendous interest to poets of the time. Baudelaire, for example, writes to Wagner stating that he experienced “la plus grande jouissance musicale qu’il ait jamais éprouvée” while listening to his music, and that he recognized within those pieces his own theory of correspondances (Illouz 19). Let us recall that in 1885, Édouard Dujardin begins work on the Revue wagnérienne, which is arguably the birth of the French symbolist movement along with the publication of the Manifeste, thus underlining the omnipresent sympathy for his music and ideology. Nonetheless, a sense of ambivalence to

Wagnerian theories arises among the symbolists, led by Mallarmé, whose conception of music differed dramatically to Wagner’s.

Despite Wagner’s union of music and poetry, for the German composer, the latter would forever remain subordinate to the former (Nicholls 50). In contrast, Mallarmé’s conception of

“Music” was an idealized and novel form that would have nothing to envy from music. In fact, it would be the vehicle with which to reach a form of pure poetry, and an idealized representation of the self in the world. Jenny explains that it is the combination of Wagnerian thought and

Schopenhauer’s philosophy that offers the ‘perfect storm’ for symbolist poetics: “Cette idée

« musicale » de la poésie n’était pas seulement une concession à la mode du wagnérisme, elle tenait aussi lieu de « théorie » de l’expression. Depuis la diffusion de la philosophie de

Schopenhauer en France, dans les années 1880, la musique était solidaire d’une conception expressive de l’art selon laquelle la poésie doit se comprendre comme l’Extériorisation d’une intériorité” (Jenny 13). In order to represent interiority and to suggest a greater metaphysical essence to things and beings, Mallarmé sought to “Reprendre à la musique son bien” (Touya de

Marenne 91). In this sense, Mallarmé highlights the superiority of poetry as both linguistic and non-mimetic. Eric Touya de Marenne explains that according to Mallarmé,

la consécration de la « Musique », en tant que « rythme entre les rapports » (la mousikè), n’entraînait pas une rupture avec l’intelligible. […] La « Musique », telle que celui-ci l’envisageait, appréhendait autrement le mystère. C’est sur ce point que Mallarmé relevait le défi wagnérien, sur la question de la représentation artistique. (Touya de Marenne 118)

Using Mallarmé’s musical theories and aesthetics, it becomes evident that the symbolists work backwards, privileging poetry as a rhythmical and harmonious form in which the sensorial, metaphysical, and intellectual fuse. Many symbolist experiments, although not essential to this study, begin with the revolutionary “vers polymorphe,” also known as free-verse or vers libre, which arguably also valorised popular song, alliteration and assonance (Touya de Marenne 16).

Such versification has much in common with symbolist and modernist narratives: for example, the much celebrated modernist stream-of-consciousness began with Édouard Dujardin’s novel

Les Lauriers sont coupés.

Why privilege music and the auditory prowess of language and poetry as opposed to the visual? As Gauguin once wrote:

Ne peignez pas trop d’après nature. L’art est une abstraction. Tirez-le de la nature en rêvant devant… Cherchez la suggestion plus que la description comme le fait d’ailleurs la musique. (Touya de Marenne 62)

To use Touya de Marenne’s terminology, abstraction is preferred over the illusion of referentiality, and the non-mimetic characteristics of music are better able to insinuate indirectly rather than to depict the reality of something. One underlying question symbolists implicitly ponder is whether reality exists, whether it is external to the mind or internal, as well as the path to reaching metaphysical revelation.

Mallarmé and Verlaine, more than most symbolist writers, seek the use of music in poetry – albeit differently – to form their poetic universe. They are closest in applying

Schopenhauer’s understanding that music is superior to all other arts “parce qu’elle donne l’Idée de l’Univers sans l’intermédiaire d’aucun concept” (Touya de Marenne 104). However, a slight paradox of the intermediary remains here at work. Symbolist poetry reverts to music, or at least to a new understanding of music – as harmony, rhythm and unity, to be understood formally and spiritually for Mallarmé – in order to annul the referential bonds of semiosis inherent to language. However, completely destroying referentiality would annul poetic significance, and therefore, the goal of symbolist poetry is no longer so much concerned with the breakdown of the sign, but rather with a new and more complex relationship between the signifier and the signified. In order to reach this enhanced and more complicated relationship requires the poets to unite the varying strands of words, their sounds, their etymologies, and the suggestive

78 entanglement they share with other images, sounds and ideas within the same work. Mallarmé writes of this vigour and rhythm as follows: “Exprimer l’idée à l’aide de mots, suggérer l’émotion par la musique de ces mots, tel est, je pense, l’alpha et l’oméga de notre doctrine”

(Illouz 171). Arthur Symons perspicaciously hints towards the extremes of symbolism and the dangers of reaching pure musicality: “There is such thing as perfecting form that form may be annihilated. All the art of Verlaine is in bringing verse to a bird’s song, the art of Mallarmé in bringing verse to the song of an orchestra” (Symons 5). Symons’ commentary could also suggest the self-effacing or elusive nature of fugal form in literature, in which its effect persists, but traces of its presence nearly vanish.

Music, for the symbolists, beyond the glorification of Wagner during this period, brings the crisis of language to the forefront, underlining the semiotic and communicative power language contains, or has lost. The dismantling of the ties between words and things, or more specifically between words and their transcendental signifiers, needs to be recuperated. While musical poetics offers a means to this goal, it furthermore manifests a dynamism and idealism in which Schopenhauerian Will and Bergsonian duration may exist. In light of such idealism and congruent with music, more specifically with the fugue, Symons writes:

Symbolist, Decadent, or Mystic, the schools thus called by themselves, or thus hastily labeled by our information-press, adopt, for meeting-place, the point of an Idealism which (similarly as in fugues, in sonatas) rejects the ‘natural’ materials, and, as brutal, a direct thought ordering them; to retain no more than suggestion. To be instituted, a relation between images, exact; and that therefrom should detach itself a third aspect, fusible and clear, offered to the divination. (Symons 72)

Music, as I will demonstrate, is both part of the material world and the ethereal or metaphysical realm. It not only is a vehicle for idealism, as Symons suggests (or as criticism has demonstrated by linking it to the two philosophers above), but it is also the foundation of a synesthetic relationship with the physical realm. Fugue, as Symons explicitly states, is a particular form of

79 music with formal, thematic, intellectual and philosophical ramifications; I argue that they are essential to Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles and to Mallarmé’s “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” 3 Verlaine and the Fugal Poetics of Romances sans paroles

The period during which Paul Verlaine wrote and published Romances sans paroles is arguably the most tumultuous of his life. It is a time of personal turmoil, of familial dispute, of sexual ambiguity, of fugue from home and family, of quarrels, imprisonment and artistic reconsideration (1871-1874). Critics have spent much time depicting Rimbaud as being at the origin of Verlaine’s personal and aesthetic downfall; however, tension among other intellectuals, artists and family members was already very high, even prior to his travels with Rimbaud. Steve

Murphy, in his all-encompassing, contextual, and genetic study of Romances sans paroles, explains: “les difficultés de Verlaine sont déjà considérables avant même le début de ses relations avec Rimbaud, auquel il a été trop commode d’assigner la responsabilité de l’exclusion de Verlaine des milieux poétiques” (22-23). His disputes with the parnassians, and particularly with Leconte de Lisle and Lemerre regarding the Paris Commune (Spring 1871) offer a socio- political background to the ongoing quarrels within aesthetic circles. This also marks the end of his relations with many members of the Cercle zutique, a group of poets whose primary goal was to create parodies of parnassian poetry; one of the reasons for their disintegration, according to

Murphy, was Verlaine’s desire to outdo François Coppée (15).

In 1870, Verlaine marries Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, joining the Garde nationale that same year, only to turn Communard a year later in March, 1871. He does not partake in the semaine sanglante, and returns to Paris only later in the summer of 1871; shortly after this, he receives his first letter from Rimbaud, and his relationship with Mathilde slowly begins to unwind. Once Rimbaud makes his entrance into Verlaine’s life, despite the sporadic nature of

80 their encounters, he leaves an indelible mark on both the personal and the professional lives of

Verlaine. Borel and Le Dantec explain:

Le paysage de Rimbaud fulgure en traits de feu dans la vie et dans l’œuvre de Verlaine. Par ce feu solaire, illuminant, corrosif, Verlaine est un instant arraché à lui-même, écorché, mis à nu, et, en même temps, confronté violemment à sa face la plus profonde. S’il se rebelle, s’il s’effraie, s’il se dérobe enfin, c’est parce que ce poing plus fort que lui qui l’a saisi veut le contraindre à aller jusqu’au bout de lui-même. (172)

Such an observation suggests a need to encounter alterity in order to know one’s own boundaries, limits and capabilities. Although Rimbaud has a mostly negative influence upon his counterpart, it is true that his poetic vision is also crucial to a new aesthetic awakening for

Verlaine, as will become evident shortly.

A year later, in 1872, Verlaine leaves his wife and son, and flees with Rimbaud, first to

London, and then elsewhere in Europe. The following year, the pinnacle of a tumultuous relationship is brought to an abrupt end when Verlaine shoots Rimbaud, slightly wounding him, leading to his imprisonment. While in prison, he converts to Catholicism, a personal and spiritual conversion that would greatly influence his later poetry. Given his incarceration, the publication of Romances sans paroles is halted: the book of poems he began around 1872 would only be printed in 1874, outside of the larger European cities, and importantly, away from the publishers in Brussels and Paris. Murphy explains, “Bruxelles, Paris : des lieux d’édition espérés, vainement. L’incarcération de Verlaine et sa conversion signeront l’arrêt de mort du projet bruxellois : les Romances seront imprimées en province” (30). The fact that Verlaine publishes his book outside of the larger European cities, despite the potential loss of readership, underlines how important this short book of poems is to him personally and aesthetically. It can therefore be said that Romances sans paroles acts as a stepping-stone to a new Verlainian poetics.

Verlaine’s poetry neither easily fits into preconceived generic labels nor does it correspond to standard aesthetic movements. Parnassian and decadent at times, often symbolist

81 and impressionistic at others, Verlaine’s verse is constantly on the cusp of the avant-garde, experimenting with new forms. Language, for example, remains the most problematic medium of communication and transmission for him; having sought many ways in which he could subvert and transform language, together with its expressive nature. The more symbolist and impressionistic Verlaine, in breaking with the school of “Art for Art’s sake,” employs music and the underlying musical qualities of words to a new end, something that distinguishes him from his parnassian counterparts. Illouz unites Verlaine’s new poetic vision with the appearance of

Rimbaud, an influence he describes as more impressionistic, given the symbiosis between nature and self that arises in Verlaine’s verse:

La rencontre avec Rimbaud précipite la rupture de Verlaine avec l’école de « l’art pour l’art ». Les Romances sans paroles paraissent en 1874 et témoignent d’une nouvelle manière qui allie la fluidité du vers à l’évocation de « paysages d’âme » : c’est un « impressionnisme » littéraire qui est en train de naître, avant que Sagesse, en 1881, y ajoute une thématique chrétienne, qui rendra possible une réception « décadente » et « symboliste » de l’œuvre. Mais à la vérité, jusqu’à la parution de Sagesse, Verlaine est presque oublié de la scène littéraire. La reconnaissance de ce futur « maître » de la génération symboliste n’aura lieu qu’au début des années 1880. (Illouz 25)

While Rimbaud certainly contributes to the creation of soul-landscapes, impressionistic manifestations of the self in natural settings, he may have enjoyed even more influence on

Romances sans paroles than what was previously believed, both in terms of its content and in terms of its genetic evolution.

The birth of this book of poems is fascinating in its ambiguity. Although many critics such as Jean Cassou and Françoise d’Eaubonne have spoken of the direct formal and personal influence Rimbaud has on Verlaine, it is only after the publication of Steve Murphy’s edition of

Romances sans paroles that a more exact reason behind the musicality of Romances sans paroles arises. For the longest time, the use of the term “Ariette” has been questioned, and Murphy traces the origin to Charles Simon Favart: “dans une lettre qui daterait de novembre 1872, Verlaine

82 demande à Lepelletier de lui retrouver « Un recueil de pièces, (XVIIIe siècle), entr’autres:

Ninette à la Cour, par Favart, avec une eau-forte initiale” (46). Favart’s Ninette à la Cour is indeed quoted in epigraph to the first Ariette, and other critics believe that a potential text entitled “Ariette oubliée” may exist in Favart’s repertoire that has hitherto been lost. Murphy goes one step further in discovering one possible origin of the section “Ariette,” originally entitled “Romances sans paroles” (Murphy 49). He suggests that although the quotation from

Favart is cause for belief that an original mysterious and missing “Ariette oubliée” exists, a possible letter from Rimbaud may point in another direction: “il n’est pas impossible que l’expression « l’Ariette oubliée » s’explique par un énoncé rimbaldien perdu, du genre: « je t’envoie une ariette de Favart ; tout le monde l’a oubliée mais je suis sûr qu’elle te plaira” (48).

Whatever the origin of the Ariette may be, it is crucial to remember that it is, above all, a musical form that Verlaine employs in poetry, and one that may divulge important information in regards to Verlaine’s representation of subjectivity in his book of poems.

Following the opening section of “Ariettes oubliées,” which consists of nine poems, is

“Paysages belges,” which comprises five poems. The following section is made up of a single poem entitled “Birds in the night,” which is followed by the fourth and final section

“Aquarelles,” made up of six poems, which are primarily of English content. Romances sans paroles, in a possible echo of Mendelssohn (Murphy 335), is therefore a book of poems as much about the self and one’s loves, as it is about travelling, adventures and fugues – in every sense of the word. The erasure of words in song and verse, suggested by the title and the omnipresence of birds, underlines the central role of the ineffable and of silence in this work, something that unites Mallarmé and Verlaine in their fugal poetics, to which I shall return. Music has taken the place of words. On October 5, 1872, Verlaine divulges the title of his new book of poems:

Mon petit volume est intitulé : Romances sans paroles ; une dizaine de petits poèmes pourraient en effet se dénommer : Mauvaise Chanson. Mais l’ensemble est une série d’impressions vagues, tristes et gaies, avec un peu de pittoresque presque naïf : ainsi les Paysages belges. Je ne crois pas qu’il y ait rien d’anglais… (Murphy 53)

He sets it up thematically as though it were in counterpoint to his previous publication La Bonne chanson, a book of love poetry dedicated to the young Mathilde. In another letter to Blémon in

1872, Verlaine further exposes this antithetical structure, and comments on the content of

Romances sans paroles: “Je fais imprimer ici un petit volume: Romances sans paroles, - il y aura dedans une partie quelque peu élégiaque, mais, je crois, pas glaireuse: quelque chose comme la

Bonne Chanson retournée, mais combien tendrement ! tout caresses et doux reproches. – en dépit des choses, qui sont, je le répète, littéralement hideuses, sauf erreur (que j’implore !)” (Murphy

55). Finally, Verlaine exposes some of the most characteristic components of his book: he chooses the title "ROMANCES SANS PAROLES, ainsi dénommées pour mieux exprimer le vrai vague et le manque de sens précis projeté," an indistinguishably symbolist definition (Borel

8). Romances sans paroles, however, deals much more explicitly with the components of music, and not simply with the elegiac nature of a “chanson.” This book of poems, that Murphy suggests may have also been called, at one time, “De Charleroi à Londres,” employs music and the thematics of adventure in a substantially different manner to that which is found in his previous works (50). Given the fugal elements which are most evidently within “Ariettes oubliées,” the analyses in the following sections will focus mainly on this section of Verlaine’s

Romances sans paroles.

3.1 Language amidst Fugues and Arias

The following analyses of poems III and V within the section “Ariettes oubliées” owe much to the linguistic analysis of Michel Malherbe, in his meticulous study L’Euphonie des

Romances sans paroles de Paul Verlaine (1994), in which he enumerates every single phoneme

84 within Verlaine’s lyrical book. Malherbe considers this book, more than any other of Verlaine’s, as a “terrain privilégié” for musical studies, in which he attempts to make sense of the often convoluted, yet sometime straight-forward, phonemic combinations between words, anaphoric verses, and phrases (7). Although Malherbe offers an enlightening conclusion regarding the overabundant use and constant recurrence of certain sounds – which I will comment in relation to subjectivity –, his work remains almost uniquely linguistic, and does not take much of

Verlaine’s personal life into account – an aspect more important in Romances sans paroles than in other of his works. Nor does Malherbe consider the aesthetics and poetics of the symbolist movement. Such oversights need to be addressed, and we should fill the relevant lacunae in order to better understand how fugue functions in relation to the ambiguity of the linguistic axis of sender-receiver in the poetry, and in the larger context of the function of melopoetics in

Verlaine’s oeuvre.

Does Verlaine, as Porter argues, escape “the impasse of the meaninglessness of language through the relatively simple solution of invoking musicality,” which creates “the impression of replacing words without actually, of course, doing so,” or does Verlaine essentially revert to an impressionistic abstraction of language in order to create a new referential system (24)? One school of thought believes the author of Romances sans paroles has overcome his long crisis of language, and that he renders language abstract in Romances sans paroles; another, however, believes that his disgust with language persists. Malherbe’s uncontestable work will act as a springboard for my analyses that seek to respond to this debate, offering a particular consideration of the fugal arrangement in two pieces of the “Ariettes oubliées.”

The study of euphony – literally that which sounds well – takes the notion of harmony as a starting point. Echoing Le Petit Robert, Malherbe defines the eponymous character of

Verlaine’s work as "l'harmonie des sons qui se succèdent dans le mot ou la phrase" (6). He goes

85 on to expand this understanding of euphony, in order to create a science of the rules and patterns of sounds in verse: "l'étude des phonèmes d'un poème, considérés en dehors des valeurs sémantiques qu'ils supportent, par ailleurs, dans leur organisation et arrangement mutuel, et en liaison avec les cadres traditionnels de la prosodie, de la métrique et de la versification" (20). By completely dissociating sound and semantics in Verlaine’s work, Malherbe, unfortunately, does not even question an association that is the very heart of Verlaine’s poetry: the ambiguous relationship between sound and meaning, whether sound can evade meaning altogether, or whether it can suggest something in harmony or in contrast to the linguistic sign.

In his conclusions to many of the patterns and recurrences that he considers, Malherbe thus defines the “Canon”: “un même thème est sans cesse répété selon des variations multiples”

(196); in addition, he defines the fugal form as: “Exposition d’un thème, suivie d’imitations successives formant plusieurs parties” (102). Both of these definitions despite being somewhat vague, are nevertheless in line with their musical counterparts. Fugue is indeed the exposition of a theme, successive imitations creating the necessary dynamics of this form. Although Malherbe fails to comment on them, these imitations take place in different voices or on different pitches, equivalently represented within the poetry in varying consonants and vowels.

Poem “III” is one of Verlaine’s most famous verses, which represents the lyrical subject distraught over his relationship with either Rimbaud or Mathilde. It is also Verlaine’s most explicit example of a fugal poetics.

IL pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville; Quelle est cette langueur Qui pénètre mon coeur? (192)

The opening stanza intratextually links poem III with the very first poem in “Ariettes oubliées,” in which a morphological derivation of “langueur” is in the very first verse, following the epigraph to Favart:

C’EST l’extase langoureuse C’est la fatigue amoureuse, C’est tous les frissons des bois Parmi l’étreinte des brises, C’est, vers les ramures grises, Le choeur des petites voix.

This seemingly simple link between the poems attests to Verlaine’s comprehensive detailing, in uniting common threads throughout this entire section. In particular, we find that the subject and his relationship with others, or the Other, is foregrounded here: a contrapuntal arrangement of post-coital languor, mixed with neurotic unsettlement, pain and the oneiric. The final stanza in poem “I” reads:

Cette âme qui se lamente En cette plainte dormante C’est la nôtre, n’est-ce pas? La mienne, dis, et la tienne, Dont s’exhale l’humble antienne Par ce tiède soir, tout bas?

The synesthetic languor that permeates the pathetic fallacy of nature and narration reaches its apex in this final section. The warm and loving lament specularly manifested in nature’s wind – a witness to the susurration and murmurs or the complaints of the two lovers – demonstrates a perverted conception of the self vis-à-vis nature, one’s surroundings and the other, who is in fact a part of the self, as we shall see. The epigraph quoted by Favart – “Le vent dont la plaine/Suspend son haleine” – leaves the wind mute and breathless, only to be taken up once again here by the subject. It is the speaker who has now invoked a whirlwind of breath that has transubstantiated into the soul, a soul that is shared: both “mienne” and “tienne.” In Ricoeur’s terms, the speaker’s self, his ipseity, depends on the interaction with the other, one with whom he

87 has yet to come into confrontation, but whose identity – as fugacious as the wind – is slowly becoming threatened (Ricoeur 99). Looking through a biographical lens, the violent end to

Verlaine and Rimbaud’s relationship is the cataclysmic culmination not only of an affair, but of a balanced subjectivity based on these power relations that rattle the speaker’s ipse-identity.

Verlaine is tracing a certain unity in “Ariettes oubliées” and he begins doing so in the very first poem, creating a sense of counterpoint by evoking a duality between speaker and recipient who fuse into one, as well as underlining the role of music. The term “antienne,” for example, denotes a chant executed by two choirs (choeurs) who alternatingly respond to each other.40 Music, in lieu of language, has here taken over – in fact breath has been transformed into the soul, not speech – in order to create duality, and perhaps even a sense of triplicity within the unity Verlaine seeks. In fact, the cohesion or oneness prepares the fugal variations on one subject that echo throughout this unit of Romances sans paroles.

Nonetheless, language is not completely subverted or abolished in this section. Verlaine may in fact be negotiating between an impressionistic and a symbolist aesthetics, by creating a form of acoustic metonymy. It is particularly through the use of polysemy and homonymy that he manages to suggest and unite different terms, and ignite varying acoustic images. For example, the sound of the musical genre “antienne” can also call to mind temporalities, such as

“voix anciennes,” perhaps in reference to a past love, given that Mathilde is no longer a physical presence and that Rimbaud’s love is quickly waning (191). More importantly however, is the use of the term “choeur” in the first stanza of poem “I,” which not only combines with the contrapuntal musical genre of the “antienne,” but also calls to mind the heart, coeur. In poem

“II,” for example, fusion of “mon âme et mon coeur en délires” underlines the omnipresence of

40 Lexilogos French Dictionary. “Antienne.” Web. November 29, 2012.

88 the heart and its musical resonances, only to peek in poem “III,” in which the heart remains in harmony with its external context, even as a projection of nature (193). It is evident through this quick, linear reading of the Ariettes section that an inherent ambiguity reigns, uniting self and music, as well as self and other, whether that other is Mathilde, Rimbaud or the poet himself. By turning to a more formal analysis of “Ariette III,” I will demonstrate that the elements of fugal writing shed more light on the perplexing representation of subjectivity, musical aesthetics and language, all elements which evidently bleed out, embracing many sections of Romances sans paroles.

3.2 The Linguistic Fugal Breakdown: “Ariette III”

“Ariette III” is arguably the most concrete example of Verlaine’s use of musical form, other than canon, in his poetry. Malherbe’s analyses, although extremely thorough, are not always as precise as they could be. Furthermore, it seems as though his conclusions are occasionally stretched, made to fit his thesis. Therefore, in lieu of repeating his work at length, I will demonstrate the fugal euphonics of the first stanza, before attempting to answer the fundamental question of this study, which Malherbe has neglected to ask, that is: why use fugue in this poem at all?

Malherbe identifies two recurring consonantal series, which I read as subject and countersubject due to the manner in which they constantly overlap each other throughout the poem.41 He also argues that two accompanying and interwoven vocalic series exist. I however, disagree with the vocalic phonetic transcriptions Malherbe employs, and will therefore focus

41 In such a conception, the ‘answer’ is inexistent due to the overlapping nature of each melody; whereas the countersubject overlaps the subject, the ‘answer’ follows it in fugal form. Since they occur within the same verse, I would argue that they are an attempted representation of simultaneous polyphony.

89 solely on the consonantal examples, which I will transcribe phonetically:42 the first is /l…p…R/, and the second /m…k…R…s/. The first verse reads as follows:

Il pleure dans mon coeur

/l/ /pl/ /R/ /R/ (102).

Malherbe justifies the repetition of the /l/ as a fugal développement, and that the final /R/ is a reminder (rappel). In other circumstances within his analyses, he employs the musical terms diminution and alteration – in which a note is either raised or lowered with the use of accidentals, such as # or ♭ in order for these notes to be accepted within a key that is not their own – to justify the inclusion or lack of a specific phoneme. Although this may appear exaggerated, it would be next to impossible for a poet to avoid absolutely all consonants or vowels in words that do not fit his subject, answer or countersubject in a hypothetically perfect literary fugue. Such is the case, in the examples below, with the consonantal combination of /tR/ which appears in the word “pénètre,” an example Malherbe entirely glosses over. One reason for which he does not comment on the presence of the /t/ sound, as well as the /S/ on occasion is because it does not fit his recurring, fugal paradigm. Nevertheless, the /t/ sound merits some inclusion in Verlaine’s conspicuous arrangement of consonants, since this semi-repetitive intrusion performs its own definition, as a penetrating sound, that is, a sound that does not quite fit, yet forces its way in.

Given that it does occasionally recur, I suggest that this sonorous presence can be understood as either a note in harmony, or a variation of the phrase or melody. Furthermore, although this is entirely speculative, the combination of the sounds /tR/ could recall the musical function of ‘trill’

42 I disagree with Malherbe’s vocalic analyses on page 107 of his work, in which he unites the nasal and non-nasal vowel sounds as one, in order to argue the fugal creation of Verlaine’s verse. He also occasionally inverts the [e] sound with the [o] sound to skew his results. His consonantal analyses, on the other hand, are particularly convincing and thorough. In a larger study, I would therefore demonstrate how the consonantal fugue and the vocalic fugue interweave, as to demonstrate the literary equivalent to pitch. In this equation, the consonantal fugue is the subject, and the vocalic, the answer.

(trille in French), in which the note in question vibrates, quavers or warbles. Interestingly, in an intermedial setting, the term ‘trill’ pertains to both the musical and the linguistic realm, given it also defines the manner in which a particular consonant is pronounced, one of the most prominent examples being the /R/ sound in the French language, the very consonant the /t/ sound precedes in the word “pénètre.” Verlaine’s musico-literary verse evokes a musical form, and also plays on its very performance, through annotations and a phenomenological conception of words

(and language more generally) enacting their meaning in a musical setting. Given the impossibility of pinpointing a perfect recreation of sound in verse that mimics a musical subject,

I wish to stress the fact that both the creation of fugal poetics and their analysis need to be judged with some leeway. These are, after all, experiments in often incompatible media.

As of the second verse – the answer to the subject above – there is a variation, with a double development of the /l/ sound, followed by a reminder /l/ that can be found at the end of the verse (102):

Comme il pleut sur la ville; /l/ /pl/ /Rl/ /l/ (102).

The third verse consists uniquely of /l/ and /R/ sounds:

Quelle est cette langueur /l/ /l/ /R/ (103).

Finally, the last verse of the first stanza is solely made up of the remaining consonant /p/ together with a recurring /R/ sound, which announces its beginning the following stanza:

Qui pénètre mon coeur? /p/ /R/ /R/ (103).

In total, Malherbe identifies nine variations of the theme /p…l…R/, which arguably have much to do with the use of anaphora in this poem, although anaphoric constructs are even more abundant in Ariette I and V.

The countersubject /m…k…R…s/ is made up of fifteen developments, of which, once again, only the first stanza will be commented. Again, the countersubject is the overlapping theme or melody, which one hears alongside the initial subject, as opposed to the “answer,” which in this example is the vocalic fugue.

Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme... /m/ /k/ /R/ /k/ /m/ (104).

The first appearance of these consonants, in order to fulfill their contrapuntal duties, proves, indeed, that they occur simultaneously, with a diminished /s/, and a recurring /k/ together with the /m/ as a development. This euphonic creation subverts prosody. The countersubject even works against the enjambment, thus annulling the laws of versification which enables a newer technique to spawn, and which is evidently extremely labor intensive on Verlaine, erasing any doubt regarding the intentionality of his fugal writing. The rest of the verse finishes as follows:

…il pleut sur la ville /s/ /R/ (105).

The third verse also spills into the fourth in the manner of enjambment, with the presence of /k/ and /s/, and the later diminution of /s/ and /m/ respectively, followed by a development by alteration with /k/ and /g/ (105):

Quelle est cette langueur / Qui… /k/ /s/ /g/ /R/ /k/ (105).

The fourth, and final, verse of the stanza proceeds by altering the sounds /m/ and /n/, and diminishing the /s/, and developing /R/ (105):

...pénètre mon coeur? /n/ /R/ /m/ /k/ /R/ (105).

This sequence, together with the first sequence, oscillates throughout the poem, expressing a pervasive presence. Although Verlaine never acknowledged working directly with fugue, it seems incontestable, through such an abundance of minute examples that he was indeed

92 experimenting with musical form, that is, experimenting with the form opened up by a consideration of that which lies beyond the musicality of sounds in words. Nonetheless, there are obvious shortcomings to a fugal analysis in poetry; the equivalence is by no means perfect.

However, the variations in pitch or voice that arise in the use of diminution or augmentation are all symptomatic of musical techniques that manifest themselves in poetry, much more so than in prose.

Another critique of Malherbe’s work is that he does not take into account similar intratextual recurrences – within different poems in one section – and only focuses on the phonemic presences within one poem at a time. Both linguistically and thematically, in “Ariettes oubliées,” Verlaine prepares his readers for an abstraction that slowly takes place before one’s eyes, through music. This, I argue, is a build-up to, and potential fragmentation of, the ongoing fugal duality within “Ariette III.” This occurs through the two phonemic series discovered by

Malherbe that create a sense of fugue in poetry: the use of the recurring phonemes /pl/ on the one hand, and /k/ and /R/ on the other. In poem “I,” central to the significance of the poem are the words “choeur” and “plainte,” which later unite with “antienne,” as suggested above (191). I argue that these terms and the thematic and phonemic resonances that their lexical field emanates, create a duality which constitutes the interweaving subject and countersubject in

“Ariette III.” The term “plainte,” for example, foregrounds the sound /pl/, already present in the epigraphic quotation by Favart: in this case, “plaine” is the context of the amorous tryst described in the poem. Components of the countersubject /k/ and /R/ appear in the word

“choeur,” as well as in the term “cri doux,” the resonating sound of pleasure between the two lovers, “cri” also contrapuntally echoing the emanating “plainte,” “Dont s’exhale l’humble antienne/Par ce tiède soir, tout bas” (191). These fugal constructions evidently spread beyond the

93 confines of one single poem, and therefore deserve, in a future study, further intratextual attention.

3.3 Subjectivity and Alterity: the Question of the Receiver

One potential answer as to why Verlaine uses a literary equivalent to fugue in his poetry is that this serves to create a greater sense of ambiguity on the receiver-sender axis of communication, better representing the poet’s subjectivity vis-à-vis others in his life. Beginning with “Ariette I,” Verlaine is arguably enacting the fugal definition of variations on a subject.

Beyond the possibility of the addressee being either Mathilde or Rimbaud, the fugal construction can also offer a different reading into the question of the receiver in “Ariettes oubliées.”

Verlaine, by offering the semblance of a dialogue between two people, is in fact representing two facets of the self that, although united in music, are contrasted as one’s physical and one’s spiritual self (or more superficial self vs. the profound self, in Bergsonian terms) – this is read through the plurality of the heart, or c(h)oeur. In the first stanza of “Ariette I,” the final verse is a form of summary of the languor and amorous drowsiness: “Le choeur des petites voix” (191).

Once again, to the ear, the term “choeur” is identical to the word “heart,” thus superimposing upon the image of little birds – most likely the physical embodiment of these voices – that of the heart. A juxtaposition is then created which fuses the notions of flight with that of love. Such an analysis, which echoes Symons’ statement that Verlaine’s goal is to reduce poetry to the music of birds, is fitting for a poet who has indeed left his wife to travel with his lover; similarly, the relationship with the lover now waning, nostalgia for what is lost can be seen as a result of this image. Poetry therefore becomes a sort of music of the heart, not in a Romantic sense, but in a symbolist one, in which the suggestive nature of verse recreates the multiple viewpoints of this adulterous affair, and the constant struggle between the physical and the metaphysical self. The

“plainte dormante” is in fact the cries of “Cette âme qui se lamente” (191). The soul’s lament,

94 harmoniously muddled with both the positive and negative connotations of the complaint or moaning, unite the metaphysical realm with the physical erotics of an amorous liaison on the synesthetic susurrus grass. The terms plainte (/pl/) and c(h)oeur (/k/ and /R/) thus united in the contrapuntal genre of “antienne,” fuse to offer a sense of fugue that reaches its pinnacle in

“Ariette III”: the height of uncertainty in which the speaker questions the very nature of his languor and pain.

“Ariette II” operates as an intermediary poem, which further represents the bifurcation between soul and heart or body, and their relationship to music.

Je devine, à travers un murmure, Le contour subtil des voix anciennes Et dans les lueurs musiciennes, Amour pâle, une aurore future! (191)

This opening stanza amplifies the suggestive powers of symbolist poetry, in which murmurs may offer a glimpse of ancient voices’ subtle contours. The suggestiveness is inherently fugal, constantly fleeting, pushing the reader to slowly unveil the image at hand. Verlaine effectively fuses the voices from “Le choeur des petites voix” in “Ariette I” with the notion of temporality:

“ancienne” (191). Similar to choeur/coeur, the homonym “ancienne” also recalls the contrapuntal musical structure of the “antienne” (191). Through music, once again, Verlaine, having just portrayed an ambiguous relationship between the speaker and the receiver – interpreted either as two lovers, or, as I suggest, as a split in subjectivity – here offers a different sense of temporality in the present.

By evoking, in the final verse of this stanza, “Amour pâle, une aurore future!” the poet exemplifies the antithetical loves through colour imagery: the pale, death-like love is a fading one, whereas the potential pink and golden hues of a coming sunrise offer hope for the future.

This future may represent either his new relationship with Rimbaud, or a new beginning with

Mathilde. Porter argues that another person may also be added to the equation: Verlaine’s mother. She writes: “The dreamy swoon so characteristic of the “Ariettes oubliées,” where the poet’s feelings are in harmony with his surroundings, recalls the infantile bliss of being fed and cradled. These poems are indeed deeply regressive” (Porter 108). She goes on to argue that the swinging and cradling of “voix anciennes” and the balancing between “jeunes et vieilles heures” connotes the relationship between the speaker and his mother or his wife, more than an eroticized homosexual one (108). The relationship with the other – whether Rimbaud, Mathilde or the mother – creates a palimpsest-like effect in the poem and in the entire section, in which a specular relationship between self and another facet of self, as well as self and other become interdependent. The following stanza returns to the most important problem in Romances sans paroles: the subject’s inner quarrel, in which the physical and metaphysical selves are at war:

Et mon âme et mon coeur en délires Ne sont plus qu’une espèce d’oeil double Où tremblote à travers un jour trouble L’ariette, hélas! de toutes lyres! (192)

The duality of heart and soul, explicitly at odds earlier, here unite through the sense of vision, a double, even palimpsest-like vision. The batting of the eyes – an embodiment of the lament and pain – in turn creates an “ariette,” the very musical form evoked by the title of this section.

Verlaine, through this vertical mise en abyme creation, points to the externalization of love and one’s relationship to others, while also pointing towards the self, inwardly. After all, an arietta is, by definition, a small aria: a song, most often from an opera, sung by one voice. The “ariette” is therefore inherently a solo, and in this case, a song for the self, by the self, as well.

3.4 “Ariette III,” Fugue and the Destruction of Language

The inward turn Verlaine strategically employs subverts the question of the receiver, giving less importance to Rimbaud and Mathilde, and more importance to the poet’s self, his

96 inner self. Not only does the structural component of the arietta within the ‘ariette’ suggest such introspection, but the very language and grammar Verlaine uses also hints towards a turn to the ego. In the final stanza of “Ariette II,” Verlaine writes: “O mourir de cette mort seulette,” not only underlining the agony of the subject in his solitude, but also the peculiar relationship he shares with language (192). To die one’s death is a linguistic example of a cognate accusative, in which the object of the verb is of the same etymological root, or of a similar lexical field to the verb. Only a few verses later in “Ariette III” – the pinnacle of interiority –, Verlaine writes:

“Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure” (192). Adding to critics’ praise of the musicality of Verlaine’s verses in this section, I would add that the use of the cognate accusative – the complément d’objet direct interne – offers a particular musicality to Verlaine’s verse, through seeming repetition. I would argue that Verlaine is not only representing an inward turn of the subject upon himself, but also of the inward turn language has taken. Verlaine, in an attempt to subvert language in praise of music has offered a way to fold language in on itself, ambiguously annulling language from the inside. The cognate accusative (or cognate object) embodies such a reversal. The fugal poetics Verlaine creates is therefore a way to undermine the communicative powers of speech and language, and he does so by using rather simple, banal words and phonemic recurrences. In so doing, the poet creates linguistic patterns that offer more value to the sound that emanates than to the semantics of the verse. Fugue is, as its etymology would suggest, a way to escape and flee; here, music escapes linguistic constrains. Although not due to the necessity to return to the mother’s unconditional love and sustenance, or a desire to simply regain what was lost in a “blissful past,” I agree with Porter who writes that “the “Ariettes oubliées” attempt to create the semblance of a regression to a preverbal state, an impression that contrasts sharply with the ostensible modernity of the short, unusual line lengths and the synesthetic network of associations with the other arts” (109). This semblance, however, must

97 remain only a semblance. Verlaine’s pre-verbal state is to foreground a new form of language.

Therefore, the interrogation of the self and the dynamics of fugue both unite to heighten a sense of symbolist subjectivity, and to offer symbolism a new medium of communication sans paroles.

“Ariette III” acts as the apex of lamentation in “Ariettes oubliées” and of Romances sans paroles as a whole. It is the climax in which the dueling subjects of body and soul unite into a single cry, the reasons for which are unknown, writes the poet:

Quoi! nulle trahison?... Ce deuil est sans raison.

[…]

Sans amour et sans haine Mon coeur a tant de peine! (192).

Interestingly, the use of fugue is not simply contained within this poem, in order to understand the manner in which the subject and countersubject stretch to include, among others, the duality between the body and soul – and therefore the crisis of the poet’s subjectivity more precisely –, it is necessary to expand one’s scope. Consider how the phonemes discovered by Malherbe may point to further poetic counterparts and fragments which exist in relation to what we can consider as the desired notion of wholeness. Beyond formal, linguistic and philosophical experimentations, the fugal poetics of Verlaine, may also serve an apologetic purpose.

One of the most explicitly musical pieces in this section, “Ariette V,” – which also contains a vocalic fugal arrangement, according to Malherbe – places the piano front and centre.

In an almost anthropomorphic reversal, the piano and the hand that plays it are portrayed in a loving manner:

Le piano que baise une main frêle Luit dans le soir rose et gris vaguement Tandis qu’avec un très léger bruit d’aile Un air bien vieux, bien faible et bien charmant Rôde discret, épeuré quasiment,

Par le boudoir longtemps parfumé d’Elle. (193)

Temporality is once again foregrounded in this poem, where the “air bien vieux” unsettles the present. The suggestive and even impressionistic hues of an evening painted as “rose et gris vaguement,” not only underline the hazy vagueness in the atmosphere, but it also juxtaposes harmoniously with the first example of conflicting temporalities in “Ariettes oubliées”: “Amour pâle, une aurore future!” (191). The colorless pale grey of the sky and the hopeful pink light of a new beginning seem to overlap. The vagueness and the music also unite to create an oneiric context, in which the speaker is transported in time:

Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce berceau soudain Qui lentement dorlote mon pauvre être? Que voudrais-tu de moi, doux Chant badin? (193).

Unlike Porter who believes that the “berceau” and the verb “dorlote” suggest the poet’s regressive desire to return to the happiness of infancy,43 I tend to side with Jacques Robichez and

Jacques Borel who place at the piano, not Verlaine’s mother, but his mother-in-law. “Cette main au piano,” they explain, “est celle de la belle-mère du poète. Mme Mauté de Fleurville, excellente musicienne, élève de Chopin, et qui donnera un jour des leçons de piano à Claude

Debussy enfant. C’est elle qui, en 1873, fera se présenter Debussy au concours d’entrée au

Conservatoire” (Murphy 351). Steve Murphy recognizes that it could, however, be Mathilde herself, given her musical expertise, and that “la mère de Mathilde était au coeur de la “cabale” contre lui” (Murphy 351).

Nonetheless, without denying the claim that it could be Mathilde, the mother of his child, playing the piano – which would also support an apologetic argument –, I believe that given the mother-in-law’s hatred towards him, fugue operates as a way to make sense of the conflicting

43 I would however argue that the regressive linguistic state the poet represents is indeed also a way to look forward. By tapping into a pre-verbal state, Verlaine is hinting towards new possibilities for language.

99 elements in his life, and may, in a sense, enact an homage to the women he has betrayed. In the final verse quoted above, the speaker directly interrogates the light-hearted and mocking music,

‘Chant’ with a capital ‘C,’ asking: “What do you want from me?” In addressing the song and the piano, the poet is in fact addressing a metonymic stand-in for either the mother-in-law, his wife, or even for himself. Similar to the vertical creation of the ariettes in “Ariette II,” in which the musical form encapsulates as a double vision the contemporaneity of the body and soul in one being, here, the interrogation of the ‘Chant’ is also an interrogation and redefining of the self.

Such an argument would explain why, following the publication of Romances sans paroles,

Verlaine undergoes a religious conversion while in prison.

3.5 Four-dimensionality

As fugue represents the variations on a single subject, the ambiguity of subjectivity – what constitutes a subject, and the self’s relationship with others – is paramount to Verlaine’s poetics. The Schopenhauerian notion of Will is parallel to Verlaine’s uncertain representation of subjects: they all are, arguably, interchangeable phenomena. At times, they seem to layer as a palimpsest, or unite in an “espèce d’oeil double,” to employ Verlaine’s own verse (192).

Schopenhauer’s theories suggest an ontological interconnectedness, in which individuals are all fragments of a unified Will. This, however, complicates Verlaine’s conception of alterity and subjectivity. The attempt to tap into the whatness or essence of the metaphysical nature of the

Will is in part, I argue, what Verlaine represents through fugue, a metaphysical self always at odds with the body and the external world. Such an attempt to reach the hidden, metaphysical essence of the ‘thing-in-itself’ or the self at hand is similar to the notion of four-dimensionality defined in Chapter 1 (the existence of a four-dimensional spatial plane). Although Verlaine muddles temporalities and confuses the loved-ones in his life into, at times, one unique Other or addressee – thus uniting diverse temporalities and spaces –, the concept of four-dimensionality

100 most apropos for Verlaine’s work is M. H. Abrams’ poetic and performative understanding of the term.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the four dimensions of a poem, according to Abrams, include:

1) the printed, visual text 2) The sounds of the text read aloud or imagined 3) The meaning of the text. The fourth dimension is the oral act of enunciating the sounds of speech, and more specifically, the pleasure such enunciation creates. Reading the poem aloud, literally uttering it, according to Abrams, recreates the body of the text, shaping it anew and giving it form. On a second-dimensional level, to take “Ariette III” as an example, the interweaving fugal sounds of

/pl/, /k/ and /R/, among others, create the context of the poem. The sudden, brusque and abrupt sounds of the rain falling harshly become manifest through /k/ and /R/ repeatedly, whereas the recurrence of the /pl/ sound combination offers a more subdued rain. This duality, four- dimensionally, creates a mood of ambivalence, in which the uttered speech recreates both the rigidity of uvular /R/ and the velar /k/ phonemes, as well as the elongated lulling of the labial /l/ sound. The latter, near the beginning of the poem, is almost always accompanied by the initial strong palatal consonant ‘p,’ underlining a balance between the patter or drop of rain and its subsequent lull. Such examples include the repetition of: “pleure,” “pleut,” “pluie” (192). In the final stanza, however, the /l/ sound no longer accompanies the initial abrupt sound of /p/: “pire peine,” “pourquoi,” and “peine” all appear in the final section. The act of giving shape and body to this poem creates a sense of ambivalence in the reader who, able to lull and stretch certain phonemes and phrases near the beginning of the poem, is no longer able to near the end. A final sense of pain and desperation is therefore recreated through these phonemes. The fourth dimension to the poem therefore offers the reader the occasion to experience the shifting dynamics that are working within Verlaine’s poetry fugally. We must therefore add the reader to

Verlaine’s list of paradigmatic substitutions for the self and other – adding the reader to a list

101 which includes Mathilde, Rimbaud and the mother (-in law) – since the reader too experiences the tension created by the elements of fugue within the poem.

One final observation in regards to Abrams’ four-dimensional poetic experience depends upon the embodiment of the self. If recreating the poem orally indeed gives body to a purely linguistic text, then it is possible that both through fugue and other phonemic occurrences,

Verlaine was inscribing himself into his poetry, on a much more literal level than I had previously implied. Malherbe explains:

chaque fois que Paul Verlaine parle de lui, exprime son JE dans un poème, on rencontre des associations phonémiques préférentielles: /v R/ /l R/ et /ø E/. C'est-à-dire cinq des six phonèmes du nom de l'auteur […] Il semblerait donc qu'au niveau subliminal, Verlaine appose, d'une certaine façon, à son texte sa signature. Et si on met en rapport la fréquence de cette signature et l'intimisme des poèmes concernés, un outil de mesure de l'auto- implication de Verlaine dans son poème voit le jour. (172)

Such an observation, although not limited to the fugal poetics or subjects of Verlaine, are very convincing. To extend this analysis to “Ariette III,” it could be argued that beyond the presence of /l R/, and other consonantal and vocalic sounds explicated above, the recurrence of the sounds

/pl/ are the only consonants necessary to write Verlaine’s first name: Paul. Similar to J.S. Bach who also musically wrote his name into his fugue, Verlaine inscribes the phonetic fragments of his self. This should not be surprising for a poet who anagrammatically added his own name to his list of poètes maudits, rearranging the letters in his name in order to remain anonymous:

Pauvre Lelian. In Romances sans paroles, it is up to the reader to recreate both his body and the body of the text, which holds the enigmatic key to its essence, an essence unveiled through the literary experiments of fugue. 4 Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé is perhaps the most quintessentially symbolist poet of all. Although his verse has been taxed as obscure, incomprehensive and discouraging to readers and poets

102 alike, his understanding of versification and his will to create what D.J. Mossop calls “pure poetry” are meritorious feats that leave an indelible mark on poets and authors to come.

Mallarmé’s conception of music – defined above as more of a music of Poetry – evolves throughout his career; and “L’Après-midi d’un faune” plays a pivotal role in the musicality of his writing. With reference to Mallarmé and music, Touya de Marenne writes: “Pour le maître de la rue de Rome, la « Musique », qui selon une perspective abstraite et idéale n’est pas celle des sons et des instruments, touchait au fondement de la Littérature” (89). For the symbolist poet, literature and, more specifically, ‘Poetry,’ constantly regain the upper hand over music.

Elsewhere, Touya de Marenne adds: “Mallarmé voyait dans la musique la célébration de l’insu, toute la magnificence et la prétention à l’absolu qui appelait un sacré à venir, celui de la Poésie.

Or, relevant de l’occulte et de l’impénétrable, la musique usurpait le devoir du poète, et dévoilait avec éclat l’irrévérence faite à son art, qui était le « plus grand »” (Touya de Marenne 91).

“L’Après-midi d’un faune” embodies the dynamic relationship between literature and music; this poem arguably acts as an allegory of Poetry itself, and embodies the tensions that arise regarding

Mallarmé’s understanding of inspiration, the unconscious, language and his new ideal: nothingness.

Much of Mallarmé’s poetry, described as very Baudelairean in its initial stages, is published in the Parnasse contemporain. However, its third issue in 1876, edited by Théodore de

Banville, François Coppée and Anatole France would not contain “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” since the editors refused it, underlining an already present aesthetic divide between the parnasse and the symbolist poetics to come (Illouz 27).44

44 Henri Mondor suggests that the poem was first destined for the stage as a theatrical performance (Touya de Marenne 107).

103

What exactly constitutes, as Moréas described it, Mallarmé’s break with his predecessors? And why choose this path of poetic representation, one of obscurity, negation, and nihilism? The mythological context of the faun’s sensual reverie offers a fertile atmosphere in which Mallarmé can experiment with the musicality of his poetry, his seemingly nihilistic tendencies, all in breaking with the parnasse. Illouz traces a distinct difference between the parnassians’ and the symbolists’ way of conceiving mythology: whereas “la différence des mythologies parnassiennes qui tentent seulement de restaurer, sur un plan purement plastique, les

Panthéons antiques, les mythologies symbolistes reprennent les mythes constitués sur lesquels elles s’appuient dans un processus – proprement maniériste – de déformation et de transformation qui les plie aux jeux de l’imaginaire et les fait servir de support aux projections fantasmatiques” (Illouz 101). Symbolism and more acutely “L’Après-midi d’un faune” represent a process of signification, and fugue is one structure and dynamism within this process.

4.1 Mallarmé and le Néant

Mallarmé is experiencing personal turmoil, metaphysical angst and aesthetic questioning around the time he writes “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” He also admits to close friends that he was an insomniac for the better part of twelve years. His depression in the 1860s grows tremendously, and his religious beliefs or lack thereof mix with his preoccupations over the notion of nothingness. He famously writes, “Après avoir trouvé le Néant, j’ai trouvé le Beau”

(Touya de Marenne 101). Such an affirmation suggests the mythical necessity of passing through the depths of (one’s) hell in order for rebirth to exist, for a new beginning to take effect.

However, Mallarmé’s poetics are subtle; in writing the abovementioned statement, he draws a parallel between the allegorical entities of Nothingness and Beauty, suggesting that the Beautiful within poetry may manifest itself in a minimalist fashion, perhaps even through negation.

Abnegation, in fact, will prove to be one way for Mallarmé to think through both his

104 metaphysical and his poetic questions. Negation and erasure become a novel conception in his writing: from a subjective stance, annulling the self and erasing language – as well as its referentiality – prove essential to this new form of writing.

“La découverte du « Néant », au cours de la crise métaphysique des années 1864-1867,”

Illouz explains, “fait s’effondrer les anciennes doctrines du symbole qui reposaient toutes sur une croyance, diversement formulée, en une transcendance du sens.” (Illouz 162). Transcendence, it would seem, is no longer Mallarmé’s symbolic goal; signification, in a sense, implodes. Words now contain the seeds of their own destruction, and reading a poem linearly, for its meaning, is replaced with a sense of the interconnectedness of words and the suggestions they evoke, once their sounds and acoustic images combine. Illouz explains this process of signification as follows:

Pour Mallarmé, l’écriture poétique est conçue de telle façon que les mots, traités comme les éléments d’une gamme sonore, tirent leurs sens, non de leur emploi dans le langage ordinaire, mais du « reflet » qu’ils reçoivent des autres mots auxquels ils sont liés dans la structure interne du vers et du poème: l’écriture mallarméenne travaille ainsi à saturer le sens jusqu’à rêver de faire du sonnet une sorte de « carré magique » où les mots s’engendreraient les uns les autres en faisant jaillir, de leurs multiples combinaisons, des émissions de sens inédites. (Illouz 173)

Not only is such saturation of sense apt for the sonnet in Mallarmé’s writing, but for verse in general. From a musical stance, the definition above could just as easily be describing fugal composition, in which sounds exist and spawn from one another contrapuntally. They also, however, transform each other; therefore, counterpoint acts as a musical mirror per se, distortions and all. Just as words reflect specularly upon themselves, mixing metonymically, and procreating almost palimpsestuously45 – both in engendering terms from others that share an etymological root, and layering meaning within these words – they also work to destroy each other. In

45 Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation, employs the neologism “palimpsestuous” to imply the hybrid vision of incestuous adaptation and the notion of layering at once.

105 breaking down the communicatory relevance they once had, the combination of words takes precedence over the metaphysical or other signification of one word alone. Illouz explains that nullity and nothingness have now set into words for Mallarmé, and that such a linguistic and sensorial concept may become “le principe d’un déploiement nouveau de l’opération symbolique, fondée cette fois, non plus sur une ontologie idéaliste, mais sur une philosophie matérialiste du langage. Pour Mallarmé en effet […] il n’y a pas d’au-delà du langage: toute transcendance supposée est rapportée à la « fiction » qui en fait un pur effet de discours” (Illouz

162-3). The plasticity of language, the contours of words, even the size of the font – notably in

“Un Coup de dés” – and particularly the sounds evoked, take the meaning of the poem itself hostage. What becomes necessary to Mallarmé is a manner in which to suggest feelings, ideas and particularly images. Therefore, in a sense, the metaphysics of his poetry are not completely out of the poetic picture; it is the way in which to reach these images and meanings that

Mallarmé seeks to revolutionize. Once again, this new form – the very essence of symbolism – is through suggestion and evocation, something also fundamentally fugal.

Negation in Mallarmé’s poetry also heavily relies upon subjectivity, not only regarding the role of the poet in general, but more specifically as concerns Mallarmé’s personal self. In a letter to Henri Cazalis, Porter explains that Mallarmé divulges a crisis he is experiencing, which resembles Hegelian thought, particularly the unrest within the subject defined as “pure negation”: “Je viens de passer une année effrayante: ma Pensée s’est pensée, et est arrivée à une conception pure [var. divine]… je suis maintenant impersonnel et non plus Stéphane que tu as connu – mais une aptitude qu’a l’Univers spirituel à se voir et à se développer, à travers ce qui fut moi” (Porter 29). Similar to Verlaine who employed the cognate accusative in his poetry as a scheme to annul language through language, or as Symons explains, as a “chimerical search after the virginity of language,” Mallarmé seems to suggest an erasure of subjectivity necessary for

106 the writing of poetry (71): “ma Pensée s’est pensée” implying, through the accusative object, that a shift from the epistemological to the ontological occurs. From ‘thought,’ he has now become pure action and being, the term “aptitude” underlining his ontological nature. “C’est dans un rapport personnel à l’impersonnel,” writes Touya de Marenne, that “le poète est celui qui fait l’expérience du sacrifice de son moi personnel pour laisser place à la voix poétique” (100-1).

Despite Mallarmé’s erasure, a poetic voice still resonates; it is therefore still possible for subjectivity to influence the poem, to shape it, even though, for Mallarmé, the notion of subjectivity has now shifted.

On the one hand, the subjectivity of the poet that can emanate within the poem exists, and on the other hand, the very sense of subjectivity that poetry creates, objectively can be found. In regards to the latter, Porter writes: “Certainly the whole trend of the poetic theory he developed between 1862 and 1865 was toward a greater degree of subjectivity, not in the sense that he advocates the expression of feelings peculiar to himself but in the sense that he aims at expressing feeling in abstraction from the objective situations that cause it” (113). One question remains, however: what is the source of this “voix poétique” to which Touya de Marenne refers?

Although Mallarmé may wish to delete any image of the man behind the pen, the poet’s own subjectivity inherently transpires in his meta-poetic writing – the more objective suggestion of subjectivity that Porter alludes to – in which inspiration and the (re-)creation of an event or thing are often at the centre of the poem. Porter explains the ambivalent sense of inspiration grounded in Mallarmé’s work as calling “into question not inspiration per se but the irrepressible, instinctive tendency to hypostatize inspiration, to conceive it as coming from a supernatural

Beyond rather than from within ourselves” (Porter 36). The “voix poétique” therefore necessarily points inwardly; its source of being and creating exists within itself. The importance of hypostatizing inspiration, as Porter suggests through the use of the term “hypostatize,” unites the

107 realm of the concrete with that of the abstract. Illouz explains the balance in allegory according to similar terms:

[…] oscillation entre le concret et l’abstrait […] C’est bien de « créations » mythologiques qu’il s’agit, car à la différence des mythologies parnassiennes qui tentent seulement de restaurer, sur un plan purement plastique, les Panthéons antiques, les mythologies symbolistes reprennent les mythes constitués sur lesquels elles s’appuient dans un processus – proprement maniériste – de déformation et de transformation qui les plie aux jeux de l’imaginaire et les fait servir de support aux projections fantasmatiques. (Illouz 101)

For the faun in “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” the tension between subjectivity and reality calls into question the process and experience of creation, while also projecting the subject’s desires and troubles, in a poem that is unequivocally anti-parnassian and essentially symbolist. Adding the suggestive fugal poetics of Mallarmé to the process of poetic interpretation and creation demonstrates how a musical form – the discourse and language of fugue – may work to represent something music cannot.

4.2 A Summary of “L’Après-midi d’un faune”

“L’Après-midi d’un faune,” written between 1865 and 1867, but only published in 1876, is a poem formed of one hundred and ten alexandrines. It narrates the hazy awakening of a lustful faun – part man, part goat – and the ambiguous divisions between his reality and the imaginary. These two realms fuse into symbols; Mallarmé’s symbolist creation offers an aesthetic context that encompasses these distinct worlds. Subsequently, this poem is a way in which to perceive the oneiric, as well as question subjectivity, and the notions of perception and sensation.

The faun awakens from his mid-day sleep, “l’heure fauve” in which two nymphs have appeared to him, leaving him on the threshold of fulfilling his pleasure, thus perpetuating his desire for them (51). He feels the urge to re-create them, bring their image back to the surface of his consciousness: “Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer” (50). The poem – as an églogue usually

108 is (Églogue being the subtitle of the poem) – is a dialogue masked as a monologue – similar to

Verlaine’s arias –, in which the faun interrogates himself, amassing the information needed to understand whether he was dreaming or not, and how to bring forth that which is now absent and forever lost: “Aimai-je un rêve?” (50). In order to answer this question, as Porter suggests, he goes through two phases (63): he tries to summon the nymphs through the use of music, which, however, only turns into an “instrument des fuites” (51). I shall return to this key verse in relation to fugue. Another manner to awaken the fleeting nymphs is through narration, and in harmoniously fusing the contextual landscape with the physical traits of the nymphs:

Réfléchissons… ou si les femmes dont tu gloses Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux! Faune, l’illusion s’échappe des yeux bleus Et froids, comme une source en pleurs, de la plus chaste: Mais, l’autre tout soupirs, dis-tu qu’elle contraste Comme brise du jour chaude dans ta toison? (50)

Porter explains that the destruction of the Real in favor of the oneiric happens, not only through music’s fleeting qualities, but also through narration: “the possibility that the nymphs might have been real is erased by an ellipsis: “Réfléchissons…/ou si les femmes dont tu gloses / Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux!” […]. “Gloser” means to explain an obscure text by paraphrasing it with more intelligible words: to apply the term to the nymphs covertly transforms them into a text already produced by the faun” (63). The faun therefore becomes the author of his own text, the creator incapable of retrieving his work, his creation, his inspiration: that which is needed to fulfill his pleasure, an ‘objet petit a’ in Lacan’s theory of jouissance per se. “L’Après-midi d’un faune” becomes a meta-poetic commentary on creation – not unlike Gide’s novel – and arguably, as Porter underlines, on the reversal of the process of inspiration: “Instead of the Muse summoning art, art here attempts to summon the woman. She appears as the goal of art rather than as the mediatrix whose presence engenders art” (63). Beyond inspiration, it also contrasts

109 language (speech, narration and the power of words to signify) and music: they are the faun’s two recourses to action, two media that embody the role of pitch in Mallarmé’s fugal instrumentation.

Both music and language, in the poem, are devoid of any inspirational value, of any representational power. Mallarmé recognizes that he is dealing with the absence of meaning, and he wishes to underline this. That which is absent, whether mnemonically absent or physically void, takes on particular significance in this poem. Porter writes of Mallarmé, echoing Hans-Jost

Frey:

When his faun tries to determine the ontological status of his nymphs, […] “meaning introduces an absence into their presence, because through it they now refer to what they are not. Meaning undermines the presence of things . . . . Language [here] means the wish to overcome language.” So we must recognize, for example, that in part the faun is the naïve butt of a joke, the figuration of our unwitting lust for the void. (Porter 35)

Not only does the faun represent “the figuration of our” desire for the void, but more specifically

Mallarmé’s interest in representing nothingness, and in turning his poetry into an art that passes through a new communicative system of suggestion and evocation, a new symbolist language that must begin with the removal of meaning by the “creux néant musicien,” as the poet defines himself in his poem “Une dentelle s’abolit,” quoted earlier. Similar to Mallarmé, the faun, laughingly and dionysiacally raises

[…] la grappe vide Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide D’ivresse […] (51) contemplates the nothingness on which his creation is based.

4.3 The Fugal Poetics of “L’Après-midi d’un faune”

The impotence of music may seem surprising for a poet whose goal is to “reprendre à la musique son bien.” Music, particularly in mythology, holds enchanting powers. It can charm and animate, especially with regard to the figure of Orpheus and his lyre. He was reputed to charm

110 animals, inanimate objects and even soften the heart of Hades. This, albeit momentarily, allowed him to retrieve his love Eurydice, before disobeying the gods by succumbing to his own desire: he turned to look at Eurydice before she too had crossed out of the underworld. It is interesting to note that a satyr was chasing Eurydice when snakes bit her, essentially causing her death. And while satyrs and fauns are not quite the same mythological beings, they were interchangeable at one point in history, namely in Aesop’s fable “The Satyr and the Traveller.” Mallarmé’s faun, however, is even less fortunate with regards to his use of music as a means to retrieve the object of his lust. In the “bosquet arrosé d’accords” within the poem, the faun plays his pipes, only to trigger a “vol de cygnes” (50, 51).

Unable to reconcile “ce doux rien,” the missing proof and an imagined “baiser” on his chest, the “morsure/Mystérieuse, due à quelque auguste dent,” the faun’s relationship to music shifts slightly. Previously unable to retrieve the nymphs through the playing of his pipes, he now disdainfully questions the representational value of music:

Mais bast! arcane tel élut pour confident Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous l’azur on joue: Qui, détournant à soi le trouble de la joue, Rêve, dans un solo long, que nous amusions La beauté d’alentour par des confusions Fausses entre elle-même et notre chant crédule; Et de faire aussi haut que l’amour se module Évanouir du songe ordinaire de dos Ou de flanc pur suivis avec mes regards clos, Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne. (51)

The “jonc vaste et jumeau” represents the reeds of the musical instruments, portrayed through the natural surrounding context of greenery and plants, under the sky. The faun believes that they

– “arcane” – withhold the secret to his vision, and he proceeds to describe the nymphs in musical terms, as modulations, their bodies, their backs and thighs transforming into a single sonorous, monotonous line, which culminates in the faun’s inability to perceive: his eventual blindness, his

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“regards clos.” Mossop describes the narration as follows: “On a plane of sublimity (‘aussi haut que l’amour se module’) the richly sensuous plastic beauty of the nymphs’ forms is dissolved into the melodic line of successive notes, whose tenuous abstract purity does indeed appear to the faun in his more sensual mood as ‘vaine’ and ‘monotone’” (122). Mossop stresses the importance of monotony – thus uniting the two nymphs into one harmonious whole – and the notion of “vaine,” which emphasizes emptiness and parallels the inflated “grappe vide” of the faun’s lust.

The faun’s accusations turn towards the object of music itself, bringing to light the mythological underpinnings that influence the text: “Tâche donc, instrument des fuites, ô maligne / Syrinx, de refleurir aux lacs où tu m’attends!” (51). The pipes the faun plays, as

Mossop explains, are “personified as the nymph Syrinx who escaped from Pan and was turned into the reeds from which Pan cut his first pipe: it is only to be expected that her spirit should serve, like music itself, as an ‘instrument des fuites’ (suggesting musical ‘fugues’ as well as

‘flight’) by helping her sister nymphs to escape the faun’s desire through the very inability of music to represent” (123). Music may not have the power to represent, but neither music nor language is privileged for Mallarmé. Language no longer represents anything accurately; similarly, music is incapable of semiosis, as we have seen with Verlaine’s fugal poetics.

Therefore, although Mossop states that Mallarmé’s goal and the essence of his “pure poetry” is

“the musical purity that he strives to imitate in words that do represent and are not as self- sufficient as the notes of music,” there is more to music than the attempt to reach or represent purity (122). Fugue, as evoked by Mossop, is not only thematically motivated throughout the poem, but it also operates as an enactment of Mallarmé’s famous anti-Wagnerian quote of

“reprendre à la musique son bien,” explicated above. Mallarmé substitutes music for the language of music, even a discourse of music, to evoke a term with a similar fleeting

112 etymology.46 I argue, therefore, that Mallarmé is not only stripping language away from language, as Verlaine also intended, but also music away from music. In his suggestion of musical fugue – a hybrid of both arts – the symbolist poet orchestrates a poetics of erasure, contrapuntally interweaving the nymphs in his poem with its décor, and poetically portraying what neither language nor music can achieve alone.

4.4 Variations on the Subject of Absence

“L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Paul Valéry writes, “est devenu une sorte de fugue littéraire, où des thèmes s’entrecroisent avec un art prodigieux” (Valéry 670). He goes on to elsewhere explain that the poem is constructed “selon une rigoureuse architectonique,” defining it as the only poem in France to ever reach such an ideal aesthetic (1722). Apart from Valéry’s claim and

Mossop’s comparison of the poem’s likeness to fugue, I have not encountered any other use of the term “fugue” in order to define Mallarmé’s work. There is no written proof that the poet himself ever spoke of the topic, although one can imagine it may have arisen during his Tuesday evening salons on rue de Rome with the mardistes. To echo Valéry’s claim, how precisely then can one consider “L’Après-midi d’un faune” as an effort to evoke fugue in literature? And subsequently, how does it contribute to Mallarmé’s vision of a poetics of nothingness?

If Mallarmé’s poem is a fugue, its variations are on the theme of absence, and more specifically the questioning of reality, similar to Gide and Vittorini. The nymphs represent the two contrapuntal voices, two facets of reality that appear in a dynamics of subject and response.

A third voice interweaves the theme as a countersubject, and this voice is that of the hybrid par excellence, the faun, who, acting as the counterpart to the nymphs, also fuses their

46 The etymology of “discourse” recalls the notion of running away (OED. Web. December 10, 2012.

113 representations with his own biased sense of reality. Most peculiar in Mallarmé’s poem, I will demonstrate, is his representation of voice and pitch. Since a change in pitch – literally the transposing of notes or a melody into a different key – is not readily attainable in literature,

Mallarmé plays with the very foundation and form of communication: namely the narrative of language and that of music, commented above, these codes created to communicate both eventually fail in the recreation of the faun’s vision. Fugue in verse takes the place of linguistic and musical codes, which, as Mallarmé demonstrates, are no longer useful.

The recreation of the dream begins with the faun’s awakening, “[a]ssoupi de sommeils touffus,” and his perception of the natural surroundings. At this point, believing an ethereal remnant of the nymph’s presence in the air – “Leur incarnat […] voltige dans l’air” – he turns to the flowers, and visualizes their fleshy, incarnate presence in the roses: “[…] hélas! que bien seul je m’offrais / Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses” (50). This verse is followed directly by the reflective state, the narrativising of a past event through the present surroundings. The first pitch or key on which Mallarmé creates his subject is on the power of language to represent via narrative:

Réfléchissons… ou si les femmes dont tu gloses Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux! (50)

The faun offers himself a lens through which to hermeneutically comprehend the vision: sensuously, through his “sens fabuleux.” In a sense, he is performing his own creative ability. By addressing himself through the plural vocative “Réfléchissons,” he summons himself and begins the process of re-creating his fantasy through story’s narrative. Although the plural form of the verb is arguably a pluralis maiestatis, it is inclusive by nature, uniting the faun with a potential external listener or reader. A meta-poetic layering therefore coats the poem, in which the faun’s performativity is in direct relation to the poet’s process of inspiration and writing. A verticality,

114 almost a mise en abyme, exists between the poet’s desire to create from nothingness, and the faun’s recreation of a dream that did not exist.47 The self-induced sensuousness triggers the faun’s transformation of the rose figures – with all of their intended symbolic sexuality, beauty and lust which this evokes – into natural, yet sensual elements. Beginning with roses, the faun proceeds to layer the identities of his objects of desire with increasingly natural elements.

The first, chaster nymph appears metonymically through her “yeux bleus/Et froids, comme une source en pleurs” (50). The second nymph is, however, “tout soupirs, dis-tu qu’elle contraste/Comme brise du jour chaude dans ta toison?” (50). These two nymphs depict contrapuntal realities related to the faun’s desire: one is cold, which Mossop aligns with sublimated passion, the other hot, sensually stimulating (119). Mossop summarizes the contrapuntal elements as follows: “Having been introduced as roses, the two nymphs are now associated, one with (absent) springs of cool blue water, the other with (non-existent) hot, sighing breezes” (119). Although both representations of the nymphs, roses and natural elements

(the primary, secondary and tertiary motif modulations) create counterpoint, it must be remembered that a fugue is also the exposition of one major theme evoked by the motifs, whose varying fragments unite despite their diverting nature (at least in literature). Here, it is the sense of absence that purveys through counterpoint: the nymphs and their metonymic and metaphoric extensions cannot be dissociated from a sense of absence. So pervasive is this absence, that regardless of which nymph the faun were to pursue – the lustful heat of desirous satisfaction or the cold shower of the cool springs – both routes would ultimately lead to the same conclusion: nothingness.

47 Furthermore, one representation of the nymphs is in the form of swanns, which in symbolist verse in general, and in Mallarmé’s (and Baudelaire’s) more precisely, is an allegorical stand-in for the figure of the poet.

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Mossop explains: “So well are these […] harmonizing and contrasting moods and themes modulated and combined in the faun, the nymphs and the décor, that the poem deserves to be called a kind of fugue” (119). In fact, the secondary and tertiary decors superimposed upon the nymphs also create various moods, as Mossop suggests. What Mossop does not demonstrate, however, is that a more radical counterpoint exists between language and music throughout the poem. While the palimpsest of images associated with the nymphs continues to appear and interweave throughout the poem, a shift takes place in the countersubject. Whereas the faun – the thematic catalyst in a sense – is initially interested in recreating via language, he quickly realizes the shortcomings of this form, and secondly reverts to music. In fact, a musical presence already appears near the beginning of the poem, demonstrating the commingling of all motifs with music as well:

Suffoquant de chaleurs le matin frais s’il lutte, Ne murmure point d’eau que ne verse ma flûte Au bosquet arrosé d’accords; et le seul vent Hors des deux tuyaux prompt à s’exhaler avant… (50)

Similar to the re-membering through language, the faun tries to summon the nymphs through music, and the same interweaving contrapuntal subjects and answers exist: from the lexicon related to temperatures, “chaleurs” and “frais,” to the elements such as the synesthetic fluidity of the notes that seem to pour out of a flute (“verse” and “arrosé”) and the warm breeze in the

“vent.” Throughout “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Mallarmé meticulously places the recurrent fugal motifs, both in relation to narration and to music (as varying pitches), at the very end of the poem, in which the faun’s desire expands like the “grappe vide” which he attempts to fill with the (graphically) overly inflated “SOUVENIRS divers” (51). Music ultimately fails too, calling to mind the myth of Syrinx. He ultimately remains with “l’âme/De paroles vacante,” and being the dionysiac figure he is, turns to wine in order to sleep, in hope of seeing “l’ombre que tu

116 devins” (53). In Schopenhauer’s terms, the faun is a direct representation of the Will, which is essentially insatiable and in constant search of fulfillment.

Although it is textually and formally relevant to decipher the presence of fugue in the poem, what remains to be fully comprehended is why Mallarmé may have employed fugue in

“L’Après-midi d’un faune,” an acknowledgement Mallarmé himself never makes. I suggest that

Valéry and Mossop’s commentary on fugue lack one fundamental analysis. Although the thematic interconnections that these authors articulate are relevant for the most part, it must not be forgotten that a fugue is the evolution of a subject, whether that subject be a person, thing or idea. Mallarmé, whose goal at a very difficult time in his life is to write a poem about nothingness, decides to employ fugue to do so. For a poem that is “an insubstantial reverie which begins and ends in the nothingness of sleep,” the fugal subject is absence itself, articulated through the three voices – in which unite the contrapuntal motifs – of the two nymphs and the faun (126). Fugue also offers an affirmative attempt to create absence, a poetics of erasure for the poet, in which the shortcomings of language/narrative and music to represent a given reality, offer a novel intermedial manner to write, and finally, to “reprendre à la musique son bien.”

“Après avoir trouvé le Néant, j’ai trouvé le beau.” Repeating this quotation offers insight into Mallarmé’s infatuation with nothingness. It also puts on a similar playing field the subject of

Mallarmé himself alongside the notion of absence or nothingness. Mossop writes, explaining the first stage of Mallarmé’s life to be over following the statement above: “This ‘homme nouveau’ was to be […] the finite and infinite reconciled, their unity, the one who was to be the many in one (‘l’humanité depuis son enfance’)” (137). He goes on to write, once again echoing Hegel:

The pure self, the essence of a man, is not merely the negation of an individual but the affirmation of man in general. The pure poet must make himself as representative as possible of the sum of human intelligences and sensibilities throughout the ages. The ‘one’ must transcend his ‘one-ness, by transcending it and becoming the ‘many-in-one.’ (143)

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These philosophical reverberations offer a key reason for both Verlaine and Mallarmé’s use of fugue in their poetry, and for their use of a new idea of music in general, the pinnacle of which will be Mallarmé’s “Coup de dés.” Fugue in “L’Après-midi d’un faune” represents the multifaceted nature of the subject. It enables a layering of occasionally dissonant, at times quite similar, characteristics within one individual, or one idea. The cool and warm nymphs offer a

Manichean scheme to the faun’s desire; yet they also fuse, breaking the boundaries between their seemingly hermetic dualism. The modulation – both musical and thematic – of the nymphs and their surroundings is also a more general commentary on subjectivity. Fugal writing therefore permits the author to demonstrate the variations of a subject; the faun, his nymphs and the oneiric and sensuous context in which they exist are all interdependent. The Hegelian “many-in- one” which fascinated Mallarmé is the plurality of subjectivity within the faun, and by extension the poet, but one, which in Schopenhauerian terms, is in constant flux. Fugue is therefore both a philosophical form and a new poetic code, a hybrid one which takes at once from language and its non-mimetic counterpart music, in order to create a new intermedial poetics. In creating a form of fugal writing, Mallarmé partially realizes his goal of stripping language from language as well as music from music, but only in so far as he fuses two forms into a heightened poetic arrangement, which evokes the transcendence of the “finite personality” of the poet in the context of nothingness (Mossop 142). 5.0. From Symbolist to Modernist Fugal Poetics

Fugue in poetry is both analogous to symbolism and a component of it, in that it both represents and participates in its dynamics of suggestion and its often vague or veiled treatment of the subject. Through a history of symbolism – an interarts movement which refuses a clear definition – and in close readings of Verlaine and Mallarmé’s poetry, a formal and metaphoric

118 understanding of fugue reveals a contrapuntal and dialectical discourse on the static and fleeting characteristics of modernity, and the subject’s role within it. A symbolist fugal poetics is therefore one that engages formally with the text, in creating a new medium, which breaks down semiosis (particularly logocentric meaning), by introducing musical form into literature. This, in turn, creates a new code of poetic value, while also engaging psychologically and aesthetically with ways in which to represent the process of identity construction at a moment in history where language and its communicative powers become suspicious to many artists.

Although the modernists will expand the depiction of the self as fragmented, and in a constant flux of re-definition, the symbolists, by breaking with a Romantic sensibility of selfhood, offer a starting point to modernist subjectivity that is not monochromatic. In such a conception of subjectivity, never is it a question of bettering oneself; for the symbolists, it is the representation of a heterogeneous and heterological conception of the subject in modernity that comes to the forefront. For example, making sense of oneself vis-à-vis the other – and the other is often within the self – is staged as a manner to question its very nature. Symbolist subjectivity is therefore not progressive. It does not gradually evolve toward a foreseen end, one of amelioration.

Symbolist fugal writing portrays several forms of subjectivity. There is, first of all, the self described in the poem, which in the case of Verlaine is implicitly biographical, in the case of

Mallarmé, more nuanced. For Verlaine, identity and alterity intertwine delicately, in which the specular relationship between the poet and his loves operates according to the undercurrents of

Schopenhauerian Will. The second symbolist self is highly meta-poetic: the figure within the poem links contrapuntally and paradigmatically with the poet. Such is the case for Mallarmé’s confused faun, whose struggles metaphorically stand in for those of the poet’s, being representative of the latter’s process of both inspiration and creation. A further subjective

119 subdivision can be considered in terms of the Bergsonian notion of self, a division between the superficial and the profound self, that is here reflected poetically. Thirdly, a subjectivity which arises through objectivity is one of Mallarmé’s symbolist goals: to reach subjectivity through objective suggestion. The example of the contrapuntal nymphs, and the sensual and natural contexts which layer their identity, and the manner in which the faun mnemonically interacts with them, creates an indirect sense of selfhood and of one’s perception of reality. The primary, secondary and tertiary stages of his fugue suggest this form of subjectivity. In this sense, fugue, in playing with the oneiric haziness of the faun’s recollections, portrays overlapping contexts and settings, blending spatial and temporal boundaries. On this note, four-dimensionally, a final subjectivity exists which engages the reader and the author. The act of enunciating and uttering phonemes in Verlaine’s poetry, for example, almost spawn the poet himself, through the repetition of the sounds that make up his name, or his guiding notes on pronunciation: for example, the potential ‘trill’ in the intruding word “pénètre.” The fugal orchestrations in his poetry literally bring his name to life, underlining an encounter between reader and author, and therefore further complicating the paradigm of readership, one of initiation, subliminal messages and alterity.

Beyond representing subjectivity and temporality, fugue in the poetry of Verlaine and

Mallarmé addresses the very medium employed to communicate their poetic message. By reverting to a musical form in poetry, they both create what I understand as an acutely symbolist endeavor: a poetics of erasure. Although modernist writers, particularly Joyce, will continue this linguistic project, its nascent form appears in symbolism. Language is in crisis, as Porter suggests; Verlaine does not trust the linguistic medium whatsoever, and Mallarmé seeks, through a more subjective Cratylism, to understand language by offering more power to the shapes and sounds of the words – and to the harmony created by their coexistence – than to their signifieds.

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At the same time, in anti-Wagnerian fashion, he attempts to redeem poetry through music, by taking back from music that which has been lost, that which poetry can do better. Both Verlaine and Mallarmé therefore take on the impossible task of annulling language, in order to re-create it, or at least subvert it, as to replace it with a new form. This literary fugal form essentially suggests, and therefore represents, not only the modern subject, but also transcendence. In so doing, fugue participates in a psychological, melopoetic and semiotic realization of the subject in time and space, whether that subject is the archetypal figure of the poet, the real man behind the pen, or a mythical stand-in for the subject in general.

The symbolists and modernists alike suggest and demonstrate something peculiar within language and music, an often ambivalent intermediatic relationship. At times concordant, at times discordant – from the cogito subject who thinks through language in a Cartesian model, to a Cratylist understanding of sounds in speech and on the page –, these two artistic forms offer a novel referential and semiotic system, as well as a new poetics. However, where does symbolism end and modernism begin? What I have outlined in this chapter are the symbolist fugal poetics of

Verlaine and Mallarmé, poetic, philosophical and aesthetic elements that bleed into the authors and poets who studied their works. Despite such a strong influence, however, particularly with regards to English and French modernism, modernist fugal poetics nevertheless share many similarities with its symbolist forefathers, and yet dramatically differ from them, whether formally, aesthetically or politically. In the following chapters, the manner in which a poetics spawned from the self-same interdisciplinary notion may encompass such divergent understandings of art within such a short historical timeframe will become more evident. Having considered the need, in the enigmatic melopoetics of fugue in symbolist verse, for an initiated reader, it is now necessary for us to dive into the difficult, or better yet, resistant, and even hostile fugal poetics of modernist writers.

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Chapter 3

The Anglo-Modernist Novel and Long Poem: Fugue in James

Joyce’s Ulysses and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos

As outlined in the Prologue to this dissertation, the correspondence between Joyce and

Pound surrounding the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses became a point of contention between the

two writers. Over and above our initial surprise that Pound did not recognize the fugal elements

in Joyce’s writing, despite experimenting with fugue himself, this chapter will consider both

authors’ explicit attempt to employ fugue in literary form. We will furthermore compare –

moving beyond the few close-readings that are under specific examination – the similarities and

differences in their melopoetic creations and meta-critical testimonials of Joyce and Pound. For

both Anglo-modernist writers, fugue offers a commentary not only on the figure and place of the

poet in society – and throughout history –, but also on the semiotic and synesthetic dynamics of

sound and language, subjectivity, and the spatio-temporal dimensions of narration. 1 A Hermeneutics of Hospitality

As we have demonstrated in the previous chapter, the symbolist poetics of suggestion and

evocation are inherently fugal, in that they foreground a hermeneutics that resonate with the

fleeting, indirect and imprecise subjects they portray. Fugue in symbolist verse therefore acts

both as the veil of elusion or illusion, and the motor with which we comprehend the image, thing

or self caught in the ‘fugitif’ and the ‘transitoire.’ This dynamic that the modernists share with

their forefathers creates a hospitality of readership per se, in which the author and the reader are

participants in a host/guest relation – to this end, the French ambiguity of the term hôte that

Derrida and Lévinas theorize can be seen to designate both guest and host –, thus offering new

122 forms of intersubjectivity through reading. Adding this to what both Joyce and Pound believe in terms of an ideal reader places further emphasis on the ambiguity and enigma of readership. As

Jean-Michel Rabaté points out, in reference to Pound and Joyce: “they show how Modernism has forced critics to take the reading act into account.”48 The modernist reader is at once an observer, a writer – as we shall see in chapter 4 – and an initiate; despite his or her role, the reader’s function is reciprocal with that of the text or author, in that the reader must assist in the creation of meaning and in the portrayal or attempted discovery of the elusive and the inaccessible through fugue.

Not only does the reader take on the burden of recreating the body of the text and therefore of the subject behind it – essentially embodying the virtuality of that subject that is neither captured nor fixed – as in M. H. Abram’s terms (fourth dimension), but he or she also becomes part of the ‘happy few:’ initiated readers capable of deciphering the difficult symbolist or modernist verse or sentence, as Mallarmé explains: “La jouissance goûtée par l’admis s’avivait de l’incompréhension de tous” (Chapoutot 22). It is clear that difficulty remains one of the most fundamental characteristics shared by both symbolism and modernism. In this case, the untangling of the enigmatic form, in other words reading fugue in literature, is similar to the act of tapping into the elusive, of accessing the inaccessible: the very correlation between the thing observed and the observer or reader’s knowledge or understanding of it. Similar to the question of difficulty, the question of resistance as an intermedial characteristic – also constituent of

48 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Pound, Joyce and Eco: modernism and the “ideal genetic reader.” The Romantic Review. 86.3 (May 1995), 485. Web. June 10, 2013:

123 modernism more generally – sheds light on the symbolist and modernist struggle of manipulating language, and of apprehending reality or the Other.

Whereas one of the symbolist’s responses to “modernity” is the modernity of the 1830s and the advent of what Mallarmé called, in Crise de vers, ‘l’universel reportage’ – the menacing standardization of language and journalistic discourse – the Anglo-modernist’s modernity is both the continuation of a re-questioning of language’s effect to communicate (Jakobson’s distinction between the referent of language and its poetic function), and a new, distanced, often ironic perception of the present vis-à-vis the past. The modern is always, as Henri Meshonnic explains, a time of “transition,” and furthermore, a time based on the subject (Mallarmé 368, Meshonnic

36):

moderne suppose la subjectivité d’un énonciateur, il ne peut pas se confondre complètement avec la notation temporelle que désigne le contemporain. Moderne ne se borne pas à qualifier une époque. La nôtre. Si étendue que soit la continuité supposée du je. Si le moderne a pu signifier le nouveau au point d’y être identifié, c’est qu’il désigne le présent indéfini de l’apparition : ce qui transforme le temps pour que ce temps demeure le temps du sujet. (34)

While symbolism can be considered modernist to a certain degree – both nomenclatures having been espoused by critics a posteriori – through the crisis of language, the struggle to comprehend representation (mimesis), as well as time, and technology, together with the understanding of subjectivity, and the view taken of art as a method with which transcendence (in high- modernism, at least) can be gained, the two movements are nevertheless distanced by the question of irony and suggestion. That is to say that symbolism detaches itself from irony and the poetics of suggestion do not always find itself transposed into modernist literature, at least not to the same degree. A modernist ironic tone can be seen to now cover narratives where remnants of

Romantic angst, depression and nihilism were abounded.

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The sheer difficulty of reading as a fundamental component of textual interpretation continues as we move into modernism, arguably becoming a dogma of the high-modernist literary tradition. The initiated reader, capable of breaking the enigma or code that binds the text in some fashion, has breached the threshold of interpreting a difficult, even hostile text through unconventional methods of reading. In the context of this dissertation, such a method is an intermedial one, which also takes into account modernist formal experimentations as a whole.

Consequently, the symbolist and modernist texts are arguably resistant and even hostile, in that they reject a classical hermeneutics, pushing away even the most trained readers. Derrida’s neologism – albeit somewhat contextually hijacked – is appropriate here: the text becomes a space of “hostipitality,” uniting the etymological understanding that hostis encapsulates both

“host” and “enemy” (Dufourmantelle 12). Transposing the political context of Derrida’s lecture and a discourse on alterity into an aesthetic and textual sphere, a similar pact – a Xenia – may exist between reader and author. In meta-discursive terms, it also cautions against over-reading or excessive interpretation, given that this comes at a time when the “death of the author” has been declared. We could, in this context, go so far as to say that the reader, in a sense, may also be guilty of creating a sense and context of ‘hostipitality.’

In meta-critical terms, this chapter, which focuses on the Anglo-modernist writing of

Joyce and Pound, will expound the presence of fugue in the prose and verse of these two writers, while, at the same time addressing certain elements the current critical debate as regards musical aesthetics in the corpus of these writers. After all, Pound and Joyce, in explicitly announcing their use of fugue, opened the floodgates of critical inquiry, which can essentially be divided into two categories: those who acknowledge the fugal form in Joyce and Pound, and those who do not. Critics who support the latter position, despite not recognizing the fugal form in Joyce and

Pound, nevertheless, for the most part, recognize a singular and intriguing use of intermediality

125 in their works. These camps, often hostile towards one another, represent two disputable classifications, whose borders, as I will demonstrate, are less hermetically sealed than they may seem. Although I am interested in ‘how’ fugue functions in Joyce’s “Sirens” episode within

Ulysses and in Pound’s Cantos, I am however more concerned in this chapter with the following question: why is fugue employed? And, what are the benefits and outcome of such experimentations? The fugal repercussions that echo in these authors’ works include a novel conception of time and space, and to use Meshonnic’s term quoted above, of “apparition” – a word which is particularly significant for Joyce in this chapter –, together with the subject-as- observer’s role within these works.

Following a brief history of the debate, one which is however more robust in Joycean circles than Pound’s, I will position myself within the critical literature, and offer reasons for the employment – or attempted employment – of fugue in Joyce’s prose and in Pound’s verse, anchoring this in the larger context of modernism and experimental modernist narrative, and within the question of hostility, which comes in being a lector ludens, or more precisely an initiated reader, one that understands or breaks down the structural enigma within the text.

1.1 Joyce and Music, Music and Ulysses

Music was much a part of James Joyce’s personal life as it was an integral part of his literary career. As a trained pianist and vocal performer (a tenor) much like his father, John

Stanislaus Joyce, the author performed publicly, even alongside reputable opera singer John

McCormack in 1904. Should his literary career not have taken off, it is very probable that in place of his book of poems entitled Chamber music, Joyce would have indeed been working on chamber music, either from the ivories or as a singer. His theoretical knowledge of music was expansive and he was interested in what seems like an endless list of composers, from Bach and

Mozart to Wagner, but “detested most modern music,” claiming for example that “not even a

126 canary could sing” Stravinsky’s pieces (Ellmann 669). Similar to the symbolists, Joyce had a love-hate relationship with Wagner, described by William Blissett as in accordance with the

“Parisian curve,” in other words, “favorable before the War, disrespectful after” (MacNicholas

29). Nonetheless, traces of the structural theme/leitmotif combination that Wagner championed – and which I exposed as fugal, in line with Faulk’s literary theories in chapter 1 – have their place in Ulysses, not to mention in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. If “Wagner,” as Joyce writes to Oscar Schwarz, “stinks of sex,” then this statement may be symptomatic of the lascivious and sensuous relationship that music has vis-à-vis the plot sequence in Ulysses, and its recurrence from episode to episode (MacNicholas 29). Form or technique, intertext and content would therefore unite within “Sirens,” an episode with one hundred and fifty-eight references to forty-seven different works of music (Bowen 64).

Although music for Joyce both disrupts and aids the linearity of reading, its presence forces the reader to question his/her own perception of words, sounds and literature as a whole before one can even attempt to connect the multiple plot strands – not to mention the metaphorical or mythical correspondences – that unite the interconnected and parallel narratives.

Therefore, before we begin to consider the structural and thematic organization of music in

Ulysses and more specifically in “Sirens,” it is pertinent for us to visualize and “hear” the minute musical elements that Joyce creates through language, offering himself greater poetic justice in prose than many of his symbolist and modernist counterparts do in verse. Joyce creates melopoetic neologisms and experimentations, of which the greatest concentration is to be found in “Sirens.” James Ordway, in his article “A Dominant Boylan: Music, Meaning and Sonata

Form in the “Sirens,” singles out a few of these musical correspondences. For example, the description of Molly’s “wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair” represents, according to Ordway, a trill: that is, a vibrating, pulsating or warbling sound in music (93). I would add that these sounds

127 also work synesthetically, instantly triggering an acoustic image; in this case, the abundance of the waviness of the hair accentuates its length through the stretching of the word. Therefore, although I will argue that while Joyce is breaking down the semiotic chains of language, he is still, in some way, “reinforcing [the] relationship between semantic and phonetic elements of the word,” to echo Derek Attridge’s analyses of onomatopoeia (Bucknell 134). In Lyotardian terms, the discursive nature of music’s characteristics in language triggers a dynamic figure, a visual correspondent to the narrative, inclusive of background music.

To accentuate a pause on a note, a lengthening of it beyond its specified temporal value, the use of a musical fermata is used, not unlike the musical prolonging known as sostenuto: two examples of these terms include “endlessnessnessness,” (Joyce 355) which performs the very temporality it signifies, and “lugugugubrious,” which sustains the dismalness of the term – encoding semantic value it otherwise would not have (365). In music, a modulation is the change of key of a certain melody. In fugue, for example, the subject and answer (or even countersubject) are occurrences of the same melody at different intervallic pitches, at times in different keys. Ordway demonstrates that an equivalence to modulation occurs in the following:

“waiter, waited, waiting” (352). The paradigm of verbal conjugations or other morphological transpositions of a similar root-word or etymological similarity constitutes this modulation. An example of appoggiatura, in which a “grace note” – an embellishing, but not necessary to the pre-existing melody – leans against another note is “luring. Ah, alluring” (355): it acts as the introductory note before the melody. Finally, Ordway explains that Joyce “explores […] rhythmic punctuation and transformation,” such as in:

Bravo! Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said, cried, clapped all. (93-94).

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Other examples include the linguistic equivalences of accelerando, staccato or even musical annotations. Interestingly, all of these examples are from the “Sirens” episode, examples which stretch our understanding of language and the concrete imagery of words through the melopoetic neologisms, the elongating and warping of words; supplementing language, pointing out something that it lacks. Modernist writers, in a catachrestic and distortive fashion – whether warping words intermedially or misusing them altogether –, suggest an access either to the pre- linguistic or to an ‘urlanguage.’ They find a way to hint at a core – of language, objects or subjects – furthermore commenting on the very process of the construction of meaning. Similar to the relationship between discourse and its visual patterning, the figure, modernist intermediality reverts to the fundamentals of distortion, alteration and variation in order to represent reality, alterity and language’s relationship to them. “Sirens,” specifically, is an episode that pushes the relationship between phoneme and semantics, syntax, sound and the vertical relationship of words – their paradigm and modulations –, an episode in which music is occasionally the narrator and in which “the collapse of words back toward sound” acknowledges a novel understanding of the relationship between music, language and linear narrative (Bucknell

133).

1.2 (Un)Weaving Counterpoint: Penelope and (In)Fidelity

One of the founding modernist novels, Ulysses, depends much on music for its plot progression, in a book where very little actually occurs. The linear storyline primarily revolves around Bloom’s arranging of his wife Molly’s adulterous affair with her voice-coach Blazes

Boylan. Molly, the vocal performer, as well as the operatic or other musical intertexts with which the reader comes to associate her, not only move the story forward, but also link to the paradigmatic webbing that connects the numerous characters and their – more often than not – lascivious, bawdy or seedy hidden lives. For example, the reason for which Molly and Boylan

129 are rehearsing is for Molly to perform two pieces at an upcoming show, the first being “La ci darem,” alongside J. C. Doyle, from Don Giovanni, and the second, an Irish folk song entitled

“Love’s Old Sweet Song,” which arguably acts as the soundtrack to the couple’s reunion in the

“Ithaca” episode. In a conversation between Bloom and Molly in the “Calypso” episode of

Ulysses – a sea nymph whose name is synonymous with concealment – on the topic of metempsychosis, Bloom begins daydreaming about the lyrics of Don Giovanni’s opera: “He felt here and there. Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio” (77). In this same passage, the logic of metempsychosis is exposed, when Molly, reading from a book by

Paul de Kock, whose name she finds particularly pleasing, asks her husband:

“ –Met him what? he asked. –Here, she said. What does that mean? He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail. -Metempsychosis? -Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home? -Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls. (77)

Joyce illuminates one aspect of Ulysses’ readability, in which the logic of substitution or transference promotes the replacement of Molly with her operatic counterpart, since metempsychosis differs from reincarnation due to its synchronicity and lack of circularity: one does not necessarily need to die for the soul to migrate. Bloom states that “He felt here and there,” the dream-state echoing a metempsychotic meandering, in which the present reality and the imagined literary world fuse (77). In this case, intertextually, Bloom invokes Da Ponte’s libretto as hypotext, distorting the verb conjugation’s paradigm: he shifts the original conditional

“vorrei e non vorrei,” to the present indicative – and therefore much more affirmative – voglio, underlining his fantasies of Molly’s adulterous affair, and the pleasure she will take in it. To the definition of metempsychosis above, Molly disappointingly responds, while perusing the text,

“There’s nothing smutty in it,” further fueling Bloom’s fantasy (78). Bloom’s orchestration

130 ironically aligns him at the same time with Don Giovanni and the cuckold in this example of paradigmatic counterpoint, a literary copresence that recurs throughout the novel.

“Sirens” is an episode about music, written in musical form, in which many parallel narratives interweave. The current time in this twenty-four hour odyssey is four o’clock in the afternoon, and the many spaces include the Ormond hotel and bar, the streets of Dublin and the

Bloom residence. If Odysseus made his men tie him to the mast in order to avoid succumbing to the sirens’ enchanting song, music for Bloom first becomes a necessary distraction – a true divertissement – to calm his nerves over the approaching affair of his wife with Boylan. While

Bloom is walking past shops on the streets of Dublin, the Ormond hotel barmaids – Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy – laugh at him from the window, while they gossip. Simon Dedalus, Bob

Cowley and Ben Dollard entertain guests with Irish folk songs and operatic arias, as well as ballads, while Bloom has dinner with Goulding in the Ormond’s restaurant in the next room, in order not only to observe the men singing, but Boylan as well, in so far as he enters the bar for a drink, before going to meet Molly for their rehearsal and eventual tryst. The barmaids – capable of hiding their fishtails behind the bar as Joyce notes in a conversation transcribed below – represent the sirens in this episode, but so do the men who sing songs that provoke Bloom’s oneiric visions: from Bloom’s realization that his familial lineage is stunted (due in part to the lack of his masculinity, according to Molly and in line with Weiningerian gender theory), to the voice of Dedalus, Stephen’s father, ruined by liquor. Most importantly, however, music acts as a distraction for the impending climactic cuckoldry.

While Molly begins her carnal affair with Blazes, Bloom participates in an epistolary romance with a woman named Martha Clifford; he writes under the penname Henry Flower.

Coincidentally, one of the songs that Dedalus sings is “M’appari,” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, or The Market at Richmond. At this point in the novel, Bloom ultimately becomes

131 bored with the correspondence and decides to stop it, and music both accompanies and influences Bloom’s mindset throughout “Sirens.” In fact, in this episode, every character is associated with a sound or song: Bloom’s is “Bloom is on the Rye,” which unites the idea of courtship in a love song – whether that be Boylan and Molly, or Bloom and Martha –, along with the image of the flower in Henry’s name, which he translates from his Hungarian grandfather’s name, Virag. Furthermore, the song “Love and War,” as I will explain, places the countersubjects Bloom and Boylan in juxtaposition. The episode ends in a form of subjective and even digested musicality, with Bloom’s exiting the Ormond restaurant in a hurry, culminating in the sound of his flatulence layered under the sounds of a passing tram:

Seabloom, greasebloom viewed last words. Softly. When my country takes her place among. Prrprr. Must be the bur. Fff. Oo. Rrpr. Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgundy. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppfff. Done. (375-6)

Bloom’s closing sonorous statement is in juxtaposition with a speech by the infamous Irish nationalist, Robert Emmet, fragments of which appear in italics. The contrapuntal arrangement excludes any hope for an Irish nationalist revival, equating it abjectly, in a subject and answer form, to the passing of gas.

Although music is arguably one of the main subjects in this episode, it is also the narrator of an episode written as a fuga per canonem. “Sirens” is a fugue that encapsulates the heterogeneous musical forms of Irish nationalist music to arias of famous operas, to the clinging of cutlery and the piano tuner’s tuning stick. It is a fugue that allows for Joyce to not only

132 embellish the importance of the Odyssean paradigm in Molly’s climactic affair, but also to question the limits of language and its representation of spatio-temporality, by fusing simultaneous narrative threads and viewpoints into one enthralling episode.

1.3 Joyce’s Fuga per canonem vs. The Critics

In 1921, Joyce creates a schema for his friend Stuart Gilbert, similar to the one he wrote a year earlier for Carlo Linati, in order for him to better follow the novel and its overall conception. This grid-like map of Ulysses has both aided and hindered the understanding of the novel for students and scholars of Joyce’s work, a map which outlines eight columns and elucidates each episode, including: title, scene, hour of the day, organ, art, colour, symbol and technic, since each episode adheres to specific aesthetic, scientific and spatio-temporal dimensions. According to the Gilbert scheme for “Sirens,” the scene is the “Concert Room,” the hour “4 p.m.,” the omnipresent organ in the episode is the “Ear,” and the fundamental art,

“Music” (Joyce xxiii). Under “Symbol,” Joyce has penned “Barmaids,” and most importantly, the episode’s “technic” is “Fuga per canonem” (38).

Apart from these notes left by Joyce, the author of Ulysses also left metatextual proof of his desire to write “Sirens” as a fugue in his epistolary correspondence, in conversation with friends, and in the recent discovery of his manuscript of the “Sirens” episode. Georges Borach transcribes a conversation he had with Joyce in Zurich, on June 18, 1918, in which the author explains his fugue and the “technical resources of music” in his episode:

I finished the Sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallentendo, and so on. A quintet occurs in it, too, as in the Meistersinger, my favorite Wagner opera. The barmaids have the upper parts of women and the lower of fish. From in front you see bosom and head. But if you stand behind the bar, you see filth, the empty bottles on the floor, the ugly shoes of the women, and so on – only disgusting things. Since exploring them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music any more. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more. (Borach 72)

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This is the only point at which Joyce ever (supposedly) uses the term “fugue” to describe

“Sirens,” and not fuga per canonem. Given that this is a written transcription of a conversation, there can be some doubt as to the exact nomenclature used. Nonetheless, Borach’s statement makes note of fascinating musical notations, the very effects and dynamics of music, of which

“Sirens” is laden (ie. “Softly” quoted above is often associated with Bloom, a benevolent and unassuming character; “soft Bloom” (370)). The antithetical remarks concerning the barmaids – their visual upper beauty and lower hidden filth – suggests a certain dichotomy that spreads throughout the episode: the dynamics of attraction-repulsion dominate this chapter. The chapter is equally dominated by the similar juxtaposition of relationships, whether Bloom and Molly,

Boylan and Molly, or Bloom and Martha, among other characters and politicians present in the

Ormond Bar or evoked through song.

On August 6, 1919, in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who, thanks to Ezra Pound, was one of Joyce’s patrons, he writes:

Dear Miss Weaver: … Perhaps I ought not to say any more on the subject of the Sirens but the passages you allude to were not intended by me as recitative. There is in the episode only one example of recitative on page 12 in preface to the song. They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels. (Joyce: Letters, 129)

This letter represents the first scholarly trace that Joyce envisaged eight parts to his fugue, or fuga per canonem. Until recently, it was believed that the eight parts of the fugue were in reference to Gédalge’s Traité de la fugue, in which the “fugue d’école” was made up of: subject, answer, one or more countersubjects, exposition, counterexposition, development or diversions

(acting as transitions to different tonalities), stretto and pedal.49 However, in 2002, the

49 Witen, Michelle. “The Mystery of the Fuga per canonem Re-opened.” Web. June 10, 2013.

134 acquisition of the “Sirens” manuscript demonstrated that Joyce had penned in Italian in the backside of the cover page, a list of eight sections, not wholly unlike Gédalge’s divisions:

1. Soggetto 2. contrasoggetto (reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento) 3. soggetto + contrasoggetto in contrapunto 4. esposizione (proposto – codetta) 5. contraesposizione (nuovi rapporti fra detti: parecchio) (divertimenti) 6. tela contrappuntistica (episodi) 7. stretto maestrale (blocchi d’armonia) (mystery word) 8. Pedale (Brown)50

These documents and this conversation constitute the only traces left by Joyce on fugue, in his most musical episode.

The first polemical point regarding “Sirens” – at least until the last decade – was the notion of “eight regular parts” of a fugue. Zimmerman suggests, as do other critics, that these parts could have represented voices. Although I believe the chapter could be divided according to eight major voices, these do not represent sections, but they do represent viewpoints, which serve as the exposition and digression in “Sirens,” which bracket off the two contrapuntal characters of Bloom and his wife’s suitor, Boylan. Since the appearance of the manuscript, however, little doubt is left as to what the “eight parts” constitute, except the doubt that Joyce is playing a trick on his reader by offering false leads, as he often does. The results of the particular

(fugal) form that Joyce’s writing takes is that critics have been busy decoding his novel for even

50 Brown, Susan. “The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved.” Web. June 10, 2013.

135 longer than Joyce himself had assumed; reinforcing the hostility that exists in deciphering

Ulysses.

1.4 Re-re-opening the Mystery of Fugue in “Sirens”

Michelle Witen, in her article, “The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Re-opened,” aptly writes,

critics have been both baffled and baffling in their attempts to apply fugal elements to the “Sirens” episode. The divide between scholars is almost Manichean, where on the one side, critics believe in the application of fugue or fuga per canonem to the episode, and others do not. In the latter category, we find scholars who do not deny the inherent musicality of “Sirens;” for example, “Jack Weaver, Don Noel Smith and Scott J. Ordway,” but who believe the episode is a sonata. “Tim Martin, A. Walton Litz, Stanley Sultan, and Alan Shockley,” however, investigate the episode “through leitmotif and operatic components,” whereas Zack Bowen defines it as a musical within the novel.51

Other critics amidst the “hydra-headed discussions” of fugue in “Sirens,” take specific fugal aspects for their own arguments, from Andreas Fischer – who studies counterpoint, polyphony and onomatopoeia as structure – or Anthony Burgess – who analyzes the “sound of words,” among many others, who have sought to decipher the enigma of such an inter- and intratextually parasitic episode.52

Although Ordway has the strongest arguments for “Sirens” as a sonata, he explains that

“Sonata form […] is not defined by polyphonic processes at all but rather by a sense of musical narrative and development” (87). Unfortunately, with such a claim, he eclipses all aspects of polyphony and counterpoint from the episode, an arrangement in which too many characters, passersby, noises from the streets and songs from the bar partake in one piece, paradigmatically united with a specific theme/subject. On the contrary, the subject – whether it be the thematic

51 Michelle Witen, Ibid. 52 Witen, Ibid.

136 notion of fidelity, love, relationships, or the individual self – is not linear, but is scattered, contradictory, and constantly redefining itself (and fleeting or evading definition). Due to the incontestable conception of Joyce’s work as polyphonic, the idea that “Sirens” is written in sonata form is false.

In the camp of those who believe that “Sirens” is indeed a fugue, varying ideas of regarding how Joyce conceived of this project exist. Bucknell, at least in part, sums up this group:

Ann Hardy, for instance believes in the fugal structure of the chapter and claims that the first subject is Man-Woman relationships; the first counter subject is music; the second subject is Bloom himself (note the shift from thematic concerns to those of character) and so on. Hardy’s fugue varies from Gilbert’s canon. He maintains that the subject is the Siren’s song, the answer (an element missing from Hardy’s analysis) is “Bloom’s entry and monologue; Boylan is Counter-Subject.” Other commentators (Lawrence Levin and David Cole) come up with still different variations…” (Bucknell 124)

I will demonstrate shortly how recent scholarship, along with the application of the evidence of

Joyce’s “Sirens” manuscript, sheds new light on this heterogeneous breakdown.

Beyond whether or not “Sirens” is a fugue, however, lies the question: why use the term fuga per canonem to define it? Bucknell writes: “The trouble is […] that the fugue and the fuga per canonem are not the same form. Fuga per canonem refers to an early sixteenth-century form for a “fugue according to rule,” or essentially what we would call today a canon” (Bucknell 122).

This observation is correct, according to Imogene Horsley, and to the Grove’s Dictionary of

Music, which scholars believe Joyce was using at the time of writing. Since a canon can have

“multiple subjects,” it may seem conducive to fugal writing; however, as Shockley explains – and Horsley elsewhere – “a canon is simply perpetual imitative polyphony,” something that leaves no room for expositions, countersubjects and counter-expositions or variations (65).

Bucknell also breaks down the generic dichotomy, by explaining the ambiguity between “two musical forms involving flight (fugue) and rule (canon)” (122). I therefore align myself with

137 those scholars who do believe “Sirens” to be a fugue, and neither a sonata, nor a canon.

However, I would add that Joyce most likely extracted the ludic elements of puzzle (enigma) intrinsic to canon and employed them in fugue, much like Bach. 2 From Hypertextual Prelude to Fugue

On the incipit of “Sirens,” Ordway writes: “Zack Bowen rightly points out that were the episode truly a fugue, it would not begin with such a clear overture as it does” (85).

Unfortunately, neither Ordway nor Bowen explain this “overture” in a convincing manner, and I believe they have misread the prelude as an overture. It is customary for a band to practice sections, warm-up and more specifically tune before a concert, already exposing, before the piece begins, where it may go, melodies that will sound. One argument could be that the first two pages of “Sirens” are in fact a warm-up, in which we find, albeit cacophonic, musical correspondences to dialogues and speeches. I will go one step further and suggest that it is actually a prelude to the fugue,53 an opening piece that introduces the main subjects and themes of the piece to follow: one, in this case, that metonymically exposes to the reader the role of

“soggetto” and “contrasoggetto” in the rest of the episode, of which it is a microstructure. It lays out what in the rest of the episode becomes “a reverberating polyphony of suggestions with a series of connections among characters and sketches […] inserted by means of musical devices”.54 For the sake of space and concision, I will describe the fugal eight-part breakdown of the episode from the point of view of the prelude, which I consider a condensed version of the

53 Werner Wolf, in The Musicalization of Fiction, addresses the problem of employing the term “prelude” to describe the opening pages of Joyce’s “Sirens” episode, however concluding that “it is not easy to find a fitter musical equivalent to the passage in question” (137). 54 Guillermo Sanz Gallego, “Boylan’s Fugue in ‘Sirens.’ Web. May 25, 2013.

138 fugue to follow, not to say a nascent form of hypertextuality, in which each word in the prelude essentially links the reader to a section, motif and theme in the episode.

The prelude, a nearly incomprehensible, non-linear mix of quotations, abbreviated and truncated words, confuses every possible point of view of characters present in the episode.

Nonetheless, it follows the logic of Joyce’s notes scribbled in the “Sirens” manuscript of his eight-part breakdown. It opens with: “BRONZE by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining/Imperthnthn thnthnthn” (328). The subject of the fugue is Molly’s soon-to-be lover,

Blazes Boylan, a character associated metonymically55 – as are most in this episode – with the sound of his jingling car, keys and jaunty confidence (“jingle jingle jaunted jingling,” 329), but more specifically here with the colour of his shoes, quoted later in the episode: “Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar” (332). The “hoofirons, steelyringing” are an answer, a contrapuntal background to Boylan’s passing by, quoted in the fugue (and not the prelude) as Miss Douce, one of the barmaids, hearing “the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel,” the cavalcade of a horse and carriage procession crossing in front of the bar (331). This initial example of counterpoint, as dismal as it may seem, is telling, because the viceregal cavalcade crosses through the city and it allows Joyce to organize the spatio-temporality of “Sirens,” where the reader gets a sense of parallax, the multiple viewpoints of the same object. This object in motion, fleeting, represents one rhythmic recurrence in the episode, but also a motif that ties characters together in time and space.

The unintelligible murmur of “Imperthnthn thnthnthn,” the reader finds out, is a sound emitted by Boylan, who is metonymically described as “bootsnout” due to his sniffling: a

55 The use of metonymy in lieu of characters’ names – such metonymy can be the colour of hair, shoes, or simply surrounding sounds with which the reader may associate characters – underlines the syntagmatic axis of Joyce’s writing. This is the linearity of music that is neither metaphorical nor referential, unlike language.

139 combination of his gold/bronze boots and sniffling. This is a direct, albeit almost inaudible, echo of what Miss Douce says later in the episode:

-I’ll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your impertinent insolence. -Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootsnout sniffled rudely, as he retreated as she threatened as he had come. Bloom. (332)

Bucknell describes the imitation of Miss Douce as “unpronounceable syllables […] a parody of another’s speech (perhaps even a kind of parody of unpronounceability)” (140). I would add to this meta-polyphonic remark that Joyce is staging the performance of language itself, stripping it down to a mocking sensation or evocation (quite similar to the symbolists in this case) of what the terms truly mean: acting disrespectfully transpires through the mocking sound of the words which in fact signify ‘acting disrespectfully.’ Once again, as a sort of catachrestic alteration of words, Joyce collapses meaning into sound, to suggest either a pre-linguistic form, or, in anti-

Saussurean terms, to demonstrate the inherent relationship between signifier and signified. Not only do characters and plot cohesively intertwine in Joyce’s fugue, but language is also evidently front and centre. Bucknell echoes Harry Levin’s observation, stating that the reader is unable to understand “whether it is the language or the situation […] that is being treated fugally. Should we accept each syllable as an interval in a melodic phrase? Or should we assume that the characters work out their own counterpoint, with Bloom as subject and Boylan as countersubject?” (Bucknell 125). I would not go as far as stating each syllable as independent within this web of counterpoint; however, it is clear from this observation that fugue occurs on many levels: from that of the linear syntagmatic narrative, to the vertical, paradigmatic language.

Levin’s remarks also expose the erroneous belief that Bloom is the subject of the fugue, when he is in fact the countersubject.

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According to Susan Brown, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, Bloom was not initially written into the episode. However, it is clear that when Joyce decided to employ fugue in

“Sirens,” he needed to call on Odysseus’ counterpart, the maestro/arranger of the adultery quest, to act as countersubject to the suitor. Bloom enters the prelude as follows:

A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the Gold pinnacled hair. A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille. (329)

The first appearance of Bloom’s name, here in its common noun form, spawns from an aural confusion of terms, or as Bucknell describes other similar linguistic constructions in the episode,

“a joke out of aural consistency, one which is played against lexical meaning” (136): from the blowing of a note, to the blue, glum emotion of the anti-hero – also a colour in counterpoint with

Boylan’s gold and bronze – to the bloom of a flower. The elliptical reference to “bloom is on the” is one in line with the song “The Bloom is on the Rye,” verses of which are sprinkled throughout “Sirens;” however this verse ends in enjambment, in relation to the golden hair of the barmaid with whom Boylan was just speaking. The reason behind this is due to Bloom’s whereabouts, while the barmaids gossip at the window; they are watching and mocking Bloom walking along the street: “Bloowho went by by Moulang’s pipes, bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul” (331). Bloom has just purchased a licentious book to feed Molly’s fantasies, and muffles its narrative strands and characters, another mise en abyme of his own fantasies:

Molly and Boylan’s affair.

The “husky fifenote” is in fact ringing from the Moulang pipes, an element that brings simultaneity to the text, since Bloom’s walking, the barmaids gossiping, and Boylan’s appearance, all happen at once. The pipes echo the sirens’ call to enter the bar – not unlike the

141 presence of the pied piper in Vittorini, as I will discuss in chapter 4 – and to succumb to the enchanting and subjugating effects of music. In Joyce’s manuscript, under “contrasoggetto,” he brackets off “(reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento),” as quoted above. Zimmerman explains that “Joyceʼs “eight regular parts” correspond to the eight main characters in the chapter, with thematic repetition in the text serving as an analogue to fugal repetition and counterpoint”

(Zimmerman 110). Although I disagree with the characters representing the eight parts outlined by Joyce, her understanding of characters as carrying voices – and therefore the repetition of the subject in a different tone – is appropriate. So too are her observations on thematic and motif-like repetitions, similar to Mallarmé, and all other writers to follow within this corpus. Since the countersubject is most often in what Horsley calls the ‘dominant key’ – in other words five notes above the original melody (or the original key) –, I would conclude that the reference to

“fifenote,” beyond the evocation of the musical instrument of the fife/pipe that Simon Dedalus is playing in this episode, by uniting the terms “fife” and “note,” allows the reader to hear and see something akin to ‘five note’ or ‘fifth note.’ Bloom’s entrance as on the fifth note of the subject

– in other words, in the dominant key – would make him the exact musical countersubject.

Furthermore, Joyce added the words “in raccorciamento,” translated, in musical terms as

‘in diminution,” or simply as ‘shortening,’ ‘truncating.’ As stated earlier, Joyce reverts to the use of abbreviations to adopt musical writing and annotations in this episode. Beyond seemingly unimportant abbreviations, there is the more important factor of Bloom’s name rarely appearing whole after the prelude: from “Bloowhoo” – in which we hear the sobbing ‘boohoo’ of Bloom’s blue morale – to “Bloo,” and finally and most importantly, “Poldy” (333, 329). This last name is a diminutive and nearly emasculating shortening of Leopold, in which the fierce vigour of the

‘Leo’ or lion are eclipsed, and only Poldy remains. The countersubject is therefore entirely “in raccorciamento,” standing no chance up against the hyper-masculine, excessively hairy Boylan.

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Paradigmatically, Bloom is once again the anti-Odysseus, the lower than low-mimetic of heroes in Frye’s archetypes.

The third section of the fugue, summarized in the prelude, is the contrapuntal arrangement of subject and countersubject, which begins: “Jingle. Bloo./Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum” (329). The climax of this section is when the performers sing “Love and War,” essentially equating both subject and countersubject

– two sides of the same equation – to each other, and to one song. Ordway explains:

The songs in the background also shift to reflect the complexities of this section. Bloom’s calm ballad is no longer so easy to distinguish from Boylan’s triumphant oratorio. The singers begin “Love and War” (U 11.459), a duet highlighting the unity of these two opposing ideas […]

The songs are no longer explicitly associated with either Bloom or Boylan, but rather both are addressed simultaneously. Bloom’s love for Molly is complicated by the “war” between the two of them. This bifurcation then manifests itself in the struggle between tonic and dominant that drives the episode. (Ordway 92)

The tonic – or initial subject – is Boylan, and the fifth note above him is the (in musical terms only) dominant Bloom.

While the counterpoint between Bloom and Boylan throughout the episode is endless, the

“exposition” that Joyce makes note of and defines as “proposto – codetta,” is arguably Boylan’s departure from the bar to meet Molly, summarized through the background songs and conversations, which have an amorous parallel:

Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye! (329)

Although these lines come mostly from dialogues between the barmaids and other men, or from

Simon Dedalus and his songs, they intratextually recreate Boylan’s arrival, an affair, and departure. The counter-exposition, denoted in Joyce’s manuscript as “nuovi rapporti fra detti: parecchio,” could imply Bloom’s virtual relationship with his pen-pal, articulated in the prelude

143 as “Martha! Come!” (329). Since Joyce added “nuovi rapporti fra detti,” some ambiguity exists as to the relationship in question: it could explain Bloom’s departure from Martha, having become bored with their correspondence, or it could mean that a new rapport exists between

Bloom and Boylan. After all, this is the third time that Bloom is near Boylan in Ulysses, and it is the first time he does not run away. Bloom, at one point in “Sirens,” even leaves his car and hails down a cab in order to follow Boylan. This would in fact constitute a large shift in his behaviour, one that would give novel understanding to the thematic importance of the “fugue” in this episode, where notions of fidelity and ‘dominance’ are flipped on their head. It is the first time

Bloom does not entirely flee or avoid the inevitable.

As per Joyce’s use of “tela contrappuntistica,” this web he speaks of has no specific musical equivalences according to Brown and Sanz Gallego. I believe that this is simply the abundance of convoluted motif/theme intertwining, of song, conversation, reverie and lament: particularly Bloom’s preoccupation with familial lineage, his daughter Milly’s dislike for music, and more importantly the notion of concealment, treachery and betrayal. These last elements appear not only through Emmet’s speech quoted above, but also through the intertextual song,

“The Croppy Boy,” which narrates a young man’s confession prior to battle. Upon having confessed to a cloaked individual, who, it turns out was a British soldier in disguise, the young man is arrested and is later executed. The topic of familial betrayal, here takes on larger political dimensions.

The “stretto maestrale” is essentially the summing up of important images, motifs and themes in literature, whereas in music, it is the recurrence of major melodies and harmonies that gather speed and strength while nearing the end of the fugue. In the prelude, these motifs include the maidens’ golden locks, the metonymic motifs of Bloom and Boylan, the piano tuner and his phallic tuning stick, and the notion of prayer (or confession in “The Croppy Boy”):

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Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair. Amen! He gnashed in fury. Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding. Bronzelydia by Minagold. By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom. One rapped, one tapped with a carra, with a cock. Pray for him! Pray, good people! His gouty fingers nakkering. Big Benaben. Big Benben. Last rose of Castille of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone. (330)

The final line in the stretto reiterates the very opening contrapuntal arrangement between Boylan

(subject) and the background noise, and the answer to understanding this circularity – one that ties it to the canon as much as to the fugue – lies in one of Joyce’s textual enigmas. In “Aeolus,” the episode on rhetoric, Lenehan:

extended his hands in protest. - But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line? -Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled. Lenehan announced gladly: -The Rose of Castille. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee! (170)

These “Rows of cast steel” recall the viceregal cavalcade of “hoofirons, steelyringing,” and which echo throughout the episode, all the way to the end of “Sirens.”

Finally, in the ultimate section of the fugue, written as “pedale” by Joyce, we hear or read something that is not found in every fugue. In his Anatomy of a Fugue, Timothy A. Smith explains that pedal point – the suspension of a pitch, normally in the bass line, in order to clear the confused polyphony of a stretto or other counterpoint – is one way to conclude a fugue.56

This has a dampening, lulling and even staggering effect. Sanz Gallego equates the pedal with the knocking of Boylan on the Bloom residence door; however, given that section of the episode does not appear in the prelude, I would argue that Joyce ends his already enigmatic and ludic episode on an ironic and flatulent note, in which he reiterates, in a condensed manner, the

56 Timothy A. Smith, Anatomy of Fugue. Web. June 9, 2013.

145 previously explicated passing of gas over the noise of a train passing, all the while interspersed with Emmet’s speech on Irish nationalism:

Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl. Then, not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt. Done. Begin! (330).

In this pedal, the dampening that should clear the muffled and confused melodies has in fact overlapped and jumbled them even more. This is because, as the conductor states in the last line, the song is only about to begin, and the pedal will only truly exist in the final passage of the fugue and not in the prelude.

The overarching theme or subject of the fugue, which one can extrapolate from the prelude, is that of infidelity, or more broadly of betrayal and deceit, to unite it with the implicit and explicit political contexts quoted in the episode. Joyce creates this fugal writing, as do

Mallarmé, Pound, Gide and Vittorini, by inverting the way in which fugue signifies in music, and the equivalent effect it may have in literature: “whereas simultaneous lines in music will not have the same notes [which would make it homophonic], in literature, Joyce needs to add some thematic similarities in order to bring the phrases closer together” (Zimmerman 111). These phrases or motifs, which spread across paragraphs and pages, unite (thematically) in order to expose the variations of one single and unifying subject. I argue that over and above the experimental narrative form, and Joyce’s pleasure in misleading his readers, he resorts to this melopoetic conception, in order to question subjectivity and spatio-temporality by means of intermediality.

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2.1 Why is “Sirens” a fugue?

Thanks to the acquisition of the “Sirens” manuscript, much of the enigma surrounding

Joyce’s fuga per canonem has been answered.57 Genetic studies in Joyce circles have dominated recent scholarship, particularly since much of Joyce’s work is now public domain. Although these textual studies are paramount to the understanding of Joyce’s works, his thought process and the evolution of his novels, I believe too much emphasis has been placed on whether

“Sirens” is a fugue. A better question, or a question which allows us to better understand the fugal nature of “Sirens,” would perhaps ask why Joyce employed fugue in order to write an entire episode of Ulysses?

One obvious observation is that Joyce, much to Pound’s dismay, decided to write each episode in a different style, after having become bored with the interior monologue. Writing a literary fugue, much like writing an episode entirely of puns, or one that offers the reader a history of the English language, or an example of Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine, represented a modernist feat, exercises in style – to employ Queneau’s terms – and one that would break with the stagnation of a single style. In fact, Joyce found that at a time of war, the interior monologue quickly became synonymous with stagnation. To this regard, Pound writes in a letter to the Irish novelist:

Also even the assing girouette of a postfuturo Gertrudo Steino protetopublic dont [sic.] demand a new style per chapter. If a classic author “shows steady & uniform progress” from one oeuvre to ensanguined next, may be considered ample proof of non-stagnation of cerebral Rodano–flaming Farinatas included– (157)

57 Nonetheless, many critics, including Sanz Gallego and Brown, have offered diverse breakdowns for Joyce’s fugue – on top of the many interpretations acknowledged above –, the most surprising for me being that Bloom is the subject of the fugue. To my knowledge, none have offered the exact breakdown I have elucidated above of Joyce’s fugal writing, nor has anyone analyzed the prelude as a hypertextual version of the episode to follow.

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Another reason behind Joyce’s fugal writing was the pleasure he felt from the creation of extremely difficult texts. Writing and reading, for Joyce, were part of an enigma, a game, and part of his search for the “ideal reader” (Kearney 192). As exposed in the Prologue to this dissertation, even Pound, who decidedly employed fugue in The Cantos, was evidently not able to decipher certain fugal elements in the manuscript which Joyce sent him, despite describing the work elsewhere using lengthy, musical analogies:

In this section, beyond the sheer difficulty and resistance of this modernist text, I offer four reasons for Joyce’s fugal narrative in “Sirens”: the paradigmatic axis and a questioning of subjectivity, a commentary on language, the representation of spatio-temporality, and fugue’s ties to Joyce’s notion of epiphany, an aesthetic form of four-dimensionality.

2.2 Paradigmatic Counterpoint or A Metempsychotic Subjectivity

In the first chapter, I explained that the “mythic method” to which Eliot refers, the paradigmatic aligning of, for example Odysseus and Bloom or Molly and Penelope, constitutes a form of counterpoint. For example, Pound defines Bloom as “l’homme moyen sensuel; he is also

Shakespeare, Ulysses, the Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, Everyman, and ‘the goat’…” (403). Such counterpoint, according to Frye’s theories, paints the text with an ironic hue, given the enormous gap between the mythical, epic and the nearly abject representation of the hero or anti-hero. Whereas in The Odyssey, the protagonist’s men succumb to the sirens’ song, leaving Odysseus on his own, Bloom’s compatriots drink themselves into submission, drowning their sorrows and lingering in the nostalgia for a desired better nation, an Irish revival and most importantly, the hopeful wish of

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Home Rule that seemed almost inevitable under the auspices of Charles Stewart Parnell. The latter’s downfall, unfortunately, was a woman, Katherine O’Shea: a scandalous affair he had with the wife of one of his colleagues. Infidelity is indubitably omnipresent in “Sirens,” a trap that the protagonist debatably avoids in this episode, by quitting his epistolary romance with

Martha. In terms of music, Bloom, similar to Odysseus, listens to the call of the sirens and does not flee or avoid it. Instead, he sits in the restaurant – his safety mast – from which he can observe and hear what is happening in the bar, without fatally drawing himself into it.

In this daylong odyssey, Joyce flips Penelope’s fidelity and Odysseus’ quest for nostos on their heads, a contrapuntal parallel to Homer’s epic that the reader must make on every page.

Beyond this contrapuntal ‘mythic method,’ fugue also operates according to a continual dynamics of linearity and verticality, of plot progression and character substitution. Joyce demonstrates this through his constant differentiation between metonymy and metaphor.

Metonymy, for example, occurs on a syntagmatic, linear level, whereas metaphor exists via various contextual and character substitutions, on the paradigmatic axis. Metonymy, for Joyce, is a blending of characters with their surroundings, but it can also combine characters with other characters: the barmaids and Boylan get intertwined when “gold” is used interchangeably as a motif that denotes both Boylan’s boots and the barmaids’ wavy locks. This small example of character intermingling and confusion obeys Joyce’s laws of a literary metempsychosis, discussed above in operatic contexts. The ‘transmigration of souls’ is linear, as opposed to its circular variant of reincarnation (more similar to the ‘mythic method’). I maintain that metempsychosis, as metaphor and as narrative technique, allows Joyce to represent a fleeting, modern subjectivity that unites the notion of self with others, as well as the self with its physical surroundings. One could make the same argument regarding the incipit of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the protagonist describes inanimate objects and his waking

149 perception of them in relation to metempsychosis. Such an idea sheds new light on the authorial perspective, wherein the writer is able to scrutinize the inner-psychological workings of each of his characters, not to mention potential ontological characteristics for things as well. For example, Nicholls writes the following: “in so far as the abrupt movements of the city were incorporated into the artist’s internal life, so the self began to lose its boundaries, becoming instead a flux of sensation and contradictory states of mind,” an observation which he equates with one of Baudelaire’s observations. Baudelaire explains: “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being, at will, both himself and other people. Like a wandering soul seeking a body, he can enter, whenever he wishes, into anybody’s personality” (Nicholls 17). Metempsychosis as artistic power is a way of understanding the creative genius behind the pen, but it also becomes a way to understand the often perplexing relationship between characters and their metonymic or metaphorical counterparts.

It is pertinent to recall a quote from Zimmerman: “[i]n the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fugal forms served as musical analogues to the notion of the centred Self: fugue narrated a quality of “subjective becoming” in which heterogeneous elements of self come together as an autonomous whole” (109). Zimmerman goes on to explain: “Joyce, however, employs a fugal structure to question autonomy and simulates simultaneity in order to reveal a multi-vocal interiority” (109). While I agree with Zimmerman, I would however add that this interior polyphony is not hermetic; it seeps out into the exterior physical world with which it is deeply entrenched, an alterity against which it rubs and defines itself. This understanding is in line with Nicholls’ remarks on “The Men of 1914,” Eliot, Pound and Joyce: for these men,

One of the first moves of this modernism had been to reconstitute the self as closed, autonomous and antagonistic. At the same time, though, this construction of the self eschewed any form of romantic individualism: notions of authenticity and spontaneity were discarded as so many trappings of the democratic age, and the ‘Men of 1914’ stressed

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instead the self’s unoriginality, its embeddedness in a complex cultural tradition. (Nicholls 251).

Metempsychosis explodes this notion of a centred self, by providing the soul – or literary id, self or being – with a novel character alignment, a new contextual space or narrative in which to exist.

Metempsychosis, from a literary perspective, allows the reader to project the identity of one character onto another, or onto intertextual or mythical others, symptoms of nascent psychoanalysis at the time of Joyce’s writing. Molly, for example, fits into the narrative of

Sweets of Sin, the book Bloom is holding while walking down the Dublin streets near the

Moulang pipes. I would recall that the first appearance of the term “metempsychosis” appears when Molly interrogates Bloom on its definition, interested in whether or not it was a naughty word, and ultimately disappointed to find nothing smutty in it at all, especially in a novel by such a peculiarly named author, Paul de Kock. The mise en abyme substitution extends to various levels of “Sirens,” in which the motif of sex, betrayal and more specifically adultery pervade the text, from “The Croppy Boy,” to Parnell’s love affair, and finally to Boylan and Molly. The paradigmatic axis, metempsychosis and a narrative ‘en abyme’ participate in a particular conception of counterpoint in Joyce’s novel.

Since the fugue is originally the contrapuntal portrayal of a single subject, I would insist that the subject and countersubject interweaving unite two sides of the same coin: Bloom and

Boylan. This would also explain the confusion as to which character in fact constitutes the

“soggetto” of the fugue. The split between Bloom and Boylan explores two narrative possibilities that the reader senses as occurring simultaneously, due to the constant juxtaposition of incomprehensible syntax and varying motifs that recall, in turn, both Bloom and Boylan. The fugue blends the temporalities, overlapping Bloom and Martha’s pseudo affair with Boylan and

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Molly’s true tryst, a de-centred self at odds with itself, further embellished by the soundtrack to their events, “Love and War,” which occurs in the background. Both Bloom and Boylan operate essentially as dialectical opposites of a de-centred, destabilized modern self, surrounded by familial and political betrayal: the true overlaying subject to Joyce’s fugue. Therefore, we can see how the fugue arranges the various distinct voices and motifs within this episode, only to show how the notion of a centred self is flawed, and yet, contrary to this notion, it demonstrates that the self is nevertheless entirely enmeshed within a context of people, city, politics and history. A new understanding of the self can no longer remain internal; it becomes interdependent upon the world in which it exists. As Bucknell argues, Joyce […] seems to cast doubt upon the whole issue of expression and self-expression by highlighting a technical linguistic practice which links the representation of inside and outside” (Bucknell 7).

2.3 The Semiotics of Fugue

Paronomasia, puns, jokes, enigmas, riddles, a lack of punctuation or quotation marks and neologisms are nothing new to the avid Joyce reader. His use of over twenty different languages in Ulysses doesn’t eclipse his goal of creating a national Irish literature in the English language, and he does so, writing in Geneva, Paris and Trieste. Language is occasionally the target of

Joyce’s attacks, such as “Eumaeus,” an episode he writes as a continuous run of clichés, proverbs and archaisms. The idea of a clichéd language as the basis of communication stands in stark contrast to language for artistic purposes – something Joyce shares with the symbolists – and

Leopold Bloom embodies a liminal space between these two notions. By profession, he is an advertising canvasser, and therefore employs a specific linguistic register pertaining to sales, ready-made phrases and persuasive jargon devoid of true meaning. Porter describes the relationship between symbolists and modernists vis-à-vis language as a means to reaching transcendence:

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Symbolists tried to detach language from material reality so that they could use it as an instrument of transcendence. When they failed to achieve transcendence, they lost faith in language. At the same time, they paradoxically used language to evoke transcendence by lamenting the inaccessibility of the transcendent. Modernists, in contrast, rejected the hope that language could serve to effect transcendence. But in the process of renouncing such hope, the Modernists once again grounded language solidly in reality. (Porter 259-60)

Joyce’s language is indeed solidly grounded in reality. Moreover, one of Joyce’s reasons for writing a fugue into his novel is precisely because he could, a sort of parnassian idea of ‘fugue for fugue’s sake,’ or, in a Flaubertian sense, to demonstrate that style can speak for itself. After all, as Nicholls echoes Flaubert’s aesthetics, the fugue could also act as “an absolute manner of seeing things,” not quite writing “a book about nothing,” but at least an episode that is

“dependent on nothing external” (20).

Nonetheless, Joyce works with the concreteness of language, as well as its signifying nature: from the point of view of both langue and parole. Bucknell explains that “[i]n Pound, as in Joyce, there is always this tension between language as a kind of material entity and as a tool of expression” (Bucknell 64). The most important reason for Joyce’s use of fugue or music in general to narrate “Sirens” is to strip language of its binding shackles of signification, its inherent semiotics. Music in literature, for the Irish novelist, helps exceed “the mere rationality of language” given its non-mimetic essence (Bucknell 2).

Joyce, in a sense inverts the ordinary roles of music and language through fugue, by taking the semiotic readiness – or easily accessible interpretation – away from the word, and attributing it to the music, making music, to a certain degree, subjective. This stands in contrast to the objectification (or tool-like qualities) associated with language. Although Bucknell describes language as a “sign,” whereas for music, “sound is an object” appearing “as an end in itself,” Joyce has rendered sound ambiguous, and the relationship between sounds and words complicated (17). Through Bloom, he breaks down the clichés of advertising discourse, the bulk

153 of communicative language, and has reversed it by mirroring it to music. Thus, he creates a true understanding of intermediality that becomes “an examination of the conflicting spaces of

“reality,” of the clash between the “inside” of the characters and their external, social worlds”

(121-2). Once again, the internal reality of characters and their surroundings fuse, and even more confusion arises when the reader attempts to comprehend the linguistic axis of speaker-receiver, since it is often difficult to understand who is in fact speaking to whom. Joyce regularly makes one character ask a question, but the answer is taken up by a different character in another space, thus amalgamating and superimposing diverse contexts upon each other. For example, the dialogue between Boylan and the barmaid, Miss Douce, explores this tendency:

Who? Where? gold asked eagerly. - In the second carriage, miss Douce’s wet lips said, laughing in the sun. He’s looking. Mind till I see. (331)

Bucknell explains that the “certainty is slight, but it does seem unclear whether it is miss

Douce’s “wet lips” that are “laughing in the sun” or the man in the “tall silk” (Bucknell 143).

Elsewhere, in the examples of “rose of Castille,” the repetition of “rose” and the polysemic use of “blue,” “blew” and “bloo” demonstrate Joyce’s breaking down of language, working from its aurality to its written form, confusing the ear and disorienting the reader, who hears the recurring sonorous motifs and their often inevitable homophony. Ordway writes that

“[t]he interdependence of form and meaning is missing from the fugue, when applied to literature;” I would however argue that this is precisely the point that Joyce seeks to make: form in literature has lost its power to embody and represent its very substance (86). Therefore, in swapping the semiotic roles of language and music, Joyce creates a novel reading experience for the reader who must now associate motifs and images to sounds and to characters, experiencing the sensorial interweaving of these elements which spawn from contiguity and parataxis

(metonymy), as well as from a confusion of polyphony and counterpoint. He arguably dissolves

154 the form of fugue into a narrative, coating, or veiling linguistic meaning with the naturally unreferential semiosis of music.

The form of the fugue is therefore also its meaning, and this points to the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between the creation and transmission of meaning, and language. I argue that Joyce suggests the possibility of a pre-linguistic state or an urlanguage, and the problem of creating meaning linguistically is the philosophical reasoning behind this goal. In an apophatic manner, Joyce demonstrates the negation of linguistic meaning, reverting to music in order to demonstrate what language is not, or what meaning is no longer. Such a negation of meaning, more than evoking the ineffable, suggests the inaccessible and the mystery, which lies not only behind fugue (which is inherently enigmatic according to Dentler), but also behind language, objects, moments and even the self. Fugal writing, considered as an intermedial and intersemiotic method, is a process that, for Joyce, fluctuates between deciphering the meaning or desire for the perception of the essence of things, and the aesthetic attempt to keep that which is hidden concealed, and to perpetuate the mystery. An answer to the question of Joyce’s fugal poetics therefore links his linguistic experiments to his aesthetic, spiritual and philosophical thought regarding the apprehension of the essence of things.

2.4 A New Perspective on Spatio-temporality

Fugue, by reiterating the subject on a different pitch – and by overlapping the subject and countersubject or interweaving the subject and answer –, distributes musical notes over time and space. The spatio-temporal effects of fugue are definitely one of Joyce’s reasons for employing the musical narrative he creates in “Sirens,” one that heavily relies upon stream of conscious narration. Precisely who (or what) is the narrator in this ever-changing episode? I agree with

Zimmerman who suggests that music is in fact the narrator, and I would add, fugue is its dynamism, one that works harmoniously with Joyce’s narrative techniques. Stream of

155 consciousness or the interior monologue, a fundamentally symbolist narrative experiment by

Édouard Dujardin, is propitious to musical writing quite generally, and more specifically to fugal writing. Its lack of punctuation and linearity, its fleeting ideas and running, sporadic thoughts and external disturbances not only offer the reader an introspection and voyeuristic peeking into the psychological depth of the character – a concretization of thought process – whose narrative voice we, as readers, hear, but it also connects us to the physical external world with which that voice/character comes in contact. The interior monologue is dualistically as external as it is internal.

“Sirens” differs significantly from the rest of the first half of Ulysses, in which stream of consciousness narrative depicts Dublin from both Stephen Dedalus (in the “Telemachiad,” what

Joyce named the first three episodes of his novel) and Leopold Bloom’s perspectives. Stream of consciousness may in fact be more musical than Joycean critics ever thought, since as Susan

Brown suggests,58 the interior monologue may have only begun in “Sirens” – according to

Joyce’s manuscript –, and Daniel Ferrer writes of this episode and the musical proof in the manuscript: “The presence of these notes on the threshold of the second draft and the juxtaposition with the earlier version […] gives us the impression of observing at close range a crucial turning point in the history of Ulysses – one could say in the history of literature” (63).

The manner in which “Sirens” differs from Ulysses’ previous episodes is that the narrator is no longer a live character, but an abstract entity, a different artistic medium parasitically eating away at literature’s representation of spatio-temporality, linearity, and plot progression. We have seen how fugue can hijack language and invert its referential significance, but it is now also evident that fugal writing can overturn both one’s notion of subjectivity, and the subject in the

58 “The Mystery of the Fuga per canonem Solved.” Web. May 15, 2013.

156 world. If the fugue is an exploration of the depths of a single subject, then Joyce has taken the term ‘subject’ as loosely as possible. It is at once the musical definition of subject that stands – the subject made up of the numerous motifs combined, the equivalence to “theme” in literature – and also the literary or philosophical understanding of subjectivity and individuality. Whereas traditionally, the narrative voice pertained to one individual, here the reader witnesses the text unravel before his/her own eyes, following a literal score of polyphonic voices that blur context and time into a seemingly omniscient, God-like time, or what Benjamin calls “messianic time”

(Kearney 192). The reader, or guest – to employ the metaphor of hospitality – bares witness to the very fugal performance that is “Sirens.”

By shifting an ordinarily internal mode of narration to an abstract, external narration that blends surrounding sounds, while confusing characters’ whereabouts, thoughts, and the colours with which they are associated – from boots to hair –, Joyce displaces the sense of an internalized, centripetal subjectivity and specularly or centrifugally scatters it onto the panorama of Dublin’s streets, bars and homes. The narrative flow, which is unequivocally tied to a rhythm of introspection, becomes spatialized, harmonizing with an external subjectivity that subverts a once whole, internal conception of the subject. The subject is no longer a whole self, but now exists solely in relation to others. In this sense, music, thanks to fugue and to the interior monologue, operates in a metempsychotic manner, by entering diverse characters’ consciousness, offering different perspectives to the reader, and by distorting the singularity of an individual’s viewpoint: distorting it almost like a prism, refracting elements of itself onto others. If metempsychosis is ‘the transmigration of souls,’ then music acts as a wandering intruder that scatters the individual’s perspective, and reorganizes it into a cacophonic, hazy and hypnotizing space. Once this external world is fixated, the reader realizes s/he is in music’s consciousness – however fleeting or ambulant it may be – and this mind, an abstract cognizance,

157 has arranged the episode in accordance to the refracted and fragmented projection of the relationships that other characters have towards music: from operatic aria in Molly and Boylan, to Irish folk song for Dedalus. The reader experiences a jumbled piecing together of characters’ perception of music, and the mythological as well as socio-political import of such a medium.

According to this logic, music and particularly fugue adhere to ‘parallax,’ a term very dear to Joyce, one that recurs at four separate occasions in Ulysses. The definition of parallax, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions.”59 Sanz Gallego is the only critic, to my knowledge, that unites fugue and parallax in the following observation: “Joyce’s fuga per canonem in ‘Sirens’ is a way to emphasize the parallax effect in this musical episode. Such a composition with multiple viewpoints provides the narration with the significant amount of objectivity, allowing readers to come up with their own understanding depending on the perspective they focus on60.” I concur with the question of objectivity as an outcome to parallax; nevertheless, I feel that these viewpoints are always conditioned by music as narrator: the characters’ perspectives, thoughts, words and songs cannot escape the encapsulating prison of fugal writing. Sanz Gallego argues that the logic of the countersubject – the notes or melody occurring at the same time as the subject – offer a sense of parallax: “[…] one can expect that every one of the characters that appear in the countersubject is going to assist in Boylan’s description. This kind of portrayal, in which several views of the same object are inserted, bears fundamental analogies with parallax, one of Joyce’s most recurrent devices in Ulysses” (Ibid.).

Although he is right to point out that the events which occur at the same time as Boylan’s actions

59 OED, “parallax.” Web. (Ibid). 60 Gallego, Sanz. “Boylan’s Fugue in Sirens.” (Ibid).

158 amount to a countersubject, given that Boylan is indeed the subject of the fugue, what the author fails to realize is that this argument could be extended to every character: for example, the manner in which one views Bloom can be seen as an example of parallax, taken from the barmaids’ perspective to that of other men in the bar. What Sanz Gallego fails to see, therefore, is the true object of parallax.

Ironically, this failure can be seen in relation to the etymology of the word “parallax,” whose original sixteenth-century definition is given as the “fact of seeing wrongly.”61 Thus, in order to see correctly, one would assume that it is necessary for the various viewpoints to be united in order to create a complete picture or object. Such dynamism is akin to the structure and logic of fugue, or to employ Joyce’s term – also from the Sixteenth-Century – fuga per canonem.

Therefore, I would argue that the object of parallax is music itself. And the various viewpoints are each character’s understanding and perception of music, its evocations, sensations and acoustic images; which, as an object, is treated fugally. The fact that characters view this object incorrectly via parallax is due to each character’s lack of autonomy in relation to the enchanting, mesmerizing and eventually paralyzing effects of music: fugue organizes their actions, and represents not only their fragmented or distorted perceptions, but ultimately, their subjectivity.

The exploration of one subject – once again, the definition of fugue – here, is a refracted, misleading, parallactic conception of fleeting subjectivity, through a fugacious and chameleon- like medium. Parallax and its inherent relation to misperception therefore also stands as a pillar for perplexity, adjacent to linguistic misreading, thus uniting with the fugue’s theme of betrayal – the betrayal of language, of a loved one, of a countryman –, which becomes manifest from varying perspectives and different spatio-temporal contexts.

61 OED, “parallax” (Ibid.).

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In summary, parallax designates at once the act of perceiving an object differently depending on the position of the observer or one’s line of sight, as well as the act of seeing wrongly. If a parallactic visualization is innately ‘wrong,’ then this subjective experience depends upon an understanding of what seeing properly actually entails; the answer to this question thus varies depending on the context. Firstly, comprehending parallax as a reader – either the ‘ideal’ Joycean or symbolist/modernist initiated reader – means untangling the narrative implications of parallax, which I have demonstrated are close to fugue in kind and fashion. They create the discursiveness necessary for the figure of fugue to emanate. In this context, the reader creates meaning and is the authority. Deciphering exactly what the object at hand is, and what it signifies, depends upon a particular process of reading, one which for Joyce conflates fugal poetics with parallactic perception.

The second context for deciding what seeing properly means is the interpretation of a specific character’s relation to the object in question: his or her perception of the thing, in this framework, depends both on potential authorial intent and the reader’s interpretation. Finally, outside of the narrative, philosophical and aesthetic implications of parallax remain. For Joyce, as well as for Pound, Gide and Vittorini, parallax is symptomatic of a modernist mindset that privileges the plurality of perception to its singularity. Parallax represents the multiple manners in which objects can be conceived in time and space – as well as the subject’s relation to them –, and it may serve as a method to comprehend the existence and essence of such objects. The belief that no unique interpretation stands alone, is in harmony with contemporary artistic movements, such as cubism – where “no one perspective offers itself as definitive” (Nicholls

207) –, and is furthermore reflected in literary theory, especially within post-structuralist thought, to which we might add the more generally enigmatic nature of fugue and reading.

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In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek comments upon the philosophical implications of subject and object dynamics within parallax, explaining that the “‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself” (Žižek 17). Such reciprocity between object and observer, between thing and subject, complicates the apprehension of the thing perceived, and comprehending its ontological characteristics, both the external qualities as well as the essence or whatness of the object at hand.

2.5 Epiphany, Quiddity and Four-Dimensionality

In an episode so clearly focused on hearing, Joyce seems to concurrently underline the importance of perception. The reader is forced to recreate the situation and physical whereabouts or interactions of characters, to visualize their being through the obscure and disorienting sounds.

What, then, are the implications of perceiving or seeing “wrongly,” either from the point of view of the reader or the characters? Jean-Michel Rabaté scrutinizes the “chiasmatic moment” that occurs in “Sirens,” whereby the barmaids put a sea shell up against their ear, explaining that “the role of the echo is to redouble both song and look. The space of the shell is necessary for the reciprocal transformation of song into image (an imaginary song) and of vision into music

(hallucination)” (Bucknell 146). Bucknell goes on to describe this “chiasmatic moment” as an epistemological uncovering:

This supplementarity is recapitulated in “Sirens” by virtue of the visual transcription of seeing listening occur in the chiasmatic moment where Bloom watches Douce and Lidwell exchange the shell. […] Bloom sees the two hearing nothing. […] Still Bloom knows what this nothing sounds like. The very possibility of knowledge, and indeed, in the song – those well-internalized pieces of occupied subjectivity – is here emblazoned by the visuality of substantial non-presence. Bloom sees them hearing the nothing that is not there, and hears the nothing that is. (Bucknell 147)

The experience of the “non-presence” and the ontological ambiguity of silence as both something and nothing, not only point to a parallactic play of perception, but also to notions of virtuality. The object perceived holds within it an essence, a whatness that is not tangible, nor

161 fully perceptible. The difference in this context between the “nothing that is” and the “nothing that is not” is simply subjective. At this point in the episode, everybody is passing the shell around, holding it up against their ear, as one of the barmaids passes it to one new customer after another. Bloom avoids the shell as Odysseus avoids succumbing to the call of the sirens.

Everyone assumes that the shell has kept an echo of the sea, as the reader finds out through

Bloom’s voice: “The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar” (363). Bloom explains his view, however, in pseudo-scientific terms, stating it is one’s blood flowing or heart beating that one hears in the shell: “The blood is it” (363). This also turns out to be empirically false, and could be one of the examples of true parallax – of “wrongly” seeing – in the episode, since as Valérie

Bénéjam suggests,

this acoustical phenomenon is that in our surroundings, there always exists a certain level of noise. The shell acts as a resonator amplifying the sound at specific frequencies, which are given by the shell’s dimension and shape […] And this mixture of overtones, together with the appearance of rather broad resonances, gives rise to the impression of a nontechnical, natural sound, as from the sea. (63)

Joyce, according to Bénéjam, would have been aware of this scientific information, having read

The Theory of Sound by John William Strutt 3rd Baron Rayleigh, published in 1878. Therefore, it is possible to say that Bloom also hears the nothing that is not there. Yet, he and all characters in fact hear both the ‘nothing that is’ and the ‘nothing that is not,’ in that the seashell becomes a metonymic stand-in for the sounds that surround them, albeit occurring at a different frequency.

Fugue, as the organizational technique of “Sirens” is also in a sense happening at a different frequency,62 and after all, the barmaids are in part right to claim that the sea, with its hypnotic sirens, is present in the Ormond bar.

62 This is extremely similar to Pound’s theory of the Great Bass.

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Joyce was often interested in transcribing dialogues he had, conversations he heard, anecdotes of what he perceived in the quotidian, in order to capture an essence within the moment, to allow an object, person or context’s ‘whatness,’ as he called it, to emanate. The seashell scene suggests this desire to acquire meaning from a perceived object, and perhaps even the authorial pleasure taken in creating false meaning. In this context, there is an invisible space, a part of the object that neither the reader nor the observer – whether Bloom, the barmaids or

Boylan – can properly perceive or decipher in the physical realm: this fourth-dimensional space exists either within or outside the object. Attempting to tap into this dimension – whether it be a hidden truth within the object or its external aura – represents one of Joyce’s earliest aesthetic goals: his secular conception of the epiphany. If parallax signifies both viewing from diverse angles and not properly seeing, then I would argue that fugue, in “Sirens,” acts as a catalyst and dynamism to the manifest epiphanic realization of an object’s clarity, despite that object’s ultimate intangibility. It is the ambiguity of the object perceived that draws attention to its virtuality, its multiple possibilities and perpetual probability.

Joyce kept a booklet of epiphanies that he sought to publish; unfortunately, to this day, only a few examples of these aesthetic manifestations exist, most incorporated either into

Stephen Hero, Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. For example, Joyce found that, beyond aesthetic and philosophical illuminations or moments of inspiration, epiphanies could also add to plot, in that they create either a role-reversal, or momentary illumination for a character to change his or her ways and actions, particularly in Dubliners. In “Sirens,” the specific song “M’appari,” taken from the opera Martha functions in this exact manner. By hearing the song – a literal apparition of Martha through music, opening another possibility of four-dimensionality –, Bloom resolutely decides to sever his literary romantic ties to his pen pal of the same name. That the song’s title is “M’appari” is probably not chance, since Joyce could

163 have chosen any other song from the same opera; the secular apparition, her transmediatic incarnation from paper to song aligns with epiphany, and acts as a commentary between the written word for Joyce – and the linguistic more generally – and the spoken or sung words and notes.

In her essay, “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” Irene Hendry reminds the reader of Joyce’s definition in Stephen Hero of his eventual aesthetic goal: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (449). This definition recalls, to a certain degree, one half of Baudelaire’s modernity, the fugacious and fleeting half, thus innately aligning it with the fugue and its often-inaccessible nature. If Bloom’s perception of the shell verges on the epiphanic, it is only the reader who can truly discard

Bloom’s pseudo-scientific definition as a parallactic, false epiphany.

Since Stephen Hero is arguably a draft of A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, it is not surprising that Joyce would expand upon Stephen Dedalus’ tripartite notion of epiphany here in relation to St. Aquinas’ philosophies. The young aesthete, in this scene, explains the

“necessary phases of artistic apprehension” to his colleague Lynch, via the following quote:

ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? […]

-Look at that basket, he said.

-I see it, said Lynch.

-In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separate the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as

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selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.

[…]

-Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against balanced part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.

-Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.

-The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but a shadow, the reality of which it is but a symbol. I thought he might mean the claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. […] The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure […] (212-214)

Epiphany, in Portrait, is engrained within the context of aesthetic imagination, in which Stephen equates “beauty” with artistic “apprehension.” Fundamental to the comprehension of Portrait is reading the novel not as a Künstlerroman, but as an ironic Künstlerroman, in which the older experienced writer looks back on his previous self with a certain sardonic distance; after all, as

Joyce pleaded with his publishers, the novel is entitled A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, suggesting the division between the artist he will become and the young man that he is at the time of diegesis. On this note, I would argue that contrary to much criticism, the most famous of

165 the epiphanies in Portrait, described in Joycean circles as the “bird girl” scene,63 is a false epiphany, or to employ Kevin Dettmar’s neologism, “epiphony,” an aesthetic and narrative tour de force that Joyce will continue throughout his literary career (90).64

I believe Joyce becomes as interested in epiphonies as he was in epiphanies, and the definition offered by Stephen above can be taken out of the aesthetic context of creation, and into the more appropriate context of interpretation, hermeneutics or deconstruction, since it is the notion of “apprehension” that the young aesthete is scrutinizing. I argue that when transposed into the literary realm, and more specifically in regards to the relationship between author and reader – and Joyce was always writing for an “ideal reader” – the deciphering of integritas, consonantia and claritas becomes representative of a veritable discourse on the impossibility of apprehension.

Readers of “Sirens” are confronted with the tripartite division Aquinas lays out in order to reach quidditas, a manifest understanding of music in this episode, and the hidden meaning or revelatory essence music holds in this narrative. Reading is therefore synonymous with enigma or puzzles, a performative game for which Joyce leaves the instructions in Portrait. Reading

“Sirens” in accordance with Stephen’s (ironic) epiphanic structure will unveil the function of music, fugue, subjectivity and the apprehension of quidditas in this episode. It is therefore

63 The iconic scene creates the ironic distance between the artist writing in hindsight and the young man who believes he has been struck with aesthetic prowess: “A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face” (171). 64 There is very little scholarship that discusses Joyce’s false epiphanies, except for Zack Bowen and Kevin Dettmar, who question the validity of certain epiphanies; however, to my knowledge, there is no scholarship that discusses Joyce’s deliberate use of false epiphanies as narrative strategies, placing wrongful (parallactic) information as a counter-narrative (Dettmar 90).

166 necessary to turn Stephen’s commentary on its head, and approach it not from the point of view of the creation, but from that of the observer, the interpreter.

The first step of integritas is to extrapolate the “thing” from all other things. In as disorienting an episode as “Sirens,” it is difficult to understand who is speaking or who the narrator is describing, without having to pinpoint one specific “thing” in the episode. On a microstructural level, we can apply this logic to most objects, individuals or situations in this episode, most notably in the sea-shell excerpt, in which the quidditas of the shell is arguably the same as that of the entire episode, or more specifically, of music. I understand music to be the

“thing;” however, it is difficult for a line to be “drawn about the object” of music, as it is not initially divisible from its “immeasurable background,” and is not firstly “selfcontained,” due to its disrespect of the laws elucidated by Stephen: as a melopoetic narrative that fuses music and language, acting as both temporal and spatial, visible and audible. Contrary to the centripetal nature of a “selfcontained” object, music acts centrifugally and cannot be extracted from time and space; on the contrary, in the episode it creates both time and space. Furthermore, there is a commingling of the thing – music – with other things in its surroundings, and this constitutes one of the difficulties for the reader: pinpointing the thing and its essence, the fugue and its subject, where the thing (music) creates “its own specific kind of space even as it moves through time”

(Bucknell 138).

Difficult as it may be, the musical style of fugue englobes the “wholeness” characteristic of integritas, since it differs from all other objects – and all other musical forms – in that it organizes and encompasses the rest; its style of composition is also unique. Consonantia, the quintessential make-up of the thing, its harmony, division and structure, are the “complex, multiple, divisible” components of fugal counterpoint that make up its claritas, its uniqueness.

The quidditas or luminous manifestation of the thing, music, is the fugal subject, exposed above

167 as the exploration of betrayal, which is in fact the analysis of the individual’s true, hidden or false relationship to others, whether amorous or political. The understanding of a potential essence of the fugue, the ‘stress’ that ties subject and quiddity once again come down to subjectivity, and the impossibility of apprehending the once internal and now external self – a four-dimensionality of subjectivity in modernism, given it is not only singular but in relation to others –, a commentary which expands to include the impossibility of apprehending language, music, the self, the Other, and the epiphany. An inherent tension or ‘stress,’ to employ Gerard

Manley Hopkins’ terminology, exists between the observing subject and the object. For Joyce, fugue is the vessel that conveys the breakdown of a subject/theme in a given narrative. It is the dynamic force that pushes narrative forward, that tangles and untangles the elements of the subject/theme in question. It is the dynamic instress, as Hopkins conceives of it, which consists of not only recognizing the individual identity (or inscape) of the object or thing perceived, the wholeness of that thing, but also of containing and binding it (Greenblatt 1514).65 Wholeness, epiphany, instress and elusive essence, along with their corollaries, are similar in their comprehension of aesthetic apprehension to Pound’s understanding of virtù in terms of subjectivity, and the ‘luminous detail’ in terms of epiphanic moments, as I will soon discuss them. More importantly and peculiarly, however, are not only how the viewer apprehends the objects, but how the dynamic intermedial force of fugal writing offers authors a way to suggest these aesthetic experiences. What a deconstruction of “Sirens” elucidates, and what an analysis of fugue in The Cantos will suggest, is that all of these notions – in relation to subjectivity,

65 Hopkins’ understanding of “instress” and “inscape” are in dialogue with the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, who contrary to Aquinas, believed in “univocity” and subsequently did not believe in the distinction between existence and essence. Despite their differences, I believe the conflation of Hopkins’ and Aquinas’ aesthetic understandings offer a fruitful debate, particularly in relation to fugue’s dynamic nature, and its ability to represent both discursively (through narration) and figurally, arguably becoming the object of apprehension itself.

168 temporality and quiddity – are fleeting, resistant and ephemeral, and the effect of the fugue, at least for Joyce, underlines the false epiphanic or parallactic hope of having apprehended its significance. Fugue then, is a form that both conveys epiphanic energy – the form, vessel or container of whatness – as well as the object of apprehension itself, which can also hostilely resist complete appropriation. 3 The Spatialization of Time: Fugue and the “Great Bass” in Pound’s The Cantos

Joyce and Pound, despite not having left any explicit written trace of a discussion on fugue, nevertheless both employ fugue in what is at times a similar manner, at times quite differently within two quintessentially modernist texts. Whereas Joyce writes about Dublin in a sort of self-imposed European exile (writing from Paris, Geneva, and Trieste), the Poundian excerpt I will analyze is written while the poet is in Italy, later even incarcerated. Fugue, in this context and in its most general understanding, remains an underlying theme for both authors’ writing, especially given the constant departures which punctuate their lives (and their writing); in the case of Pound, writing is his only escape. In order to expound the American author’s fugal poetics, I will first define certain key musico-literary terms that Pound employs, followed by the consideration of a brief “state of affairs” with regards to scholarly criticism on fugue in his work, as well as Pound’s own description of fugue in The Cantos. Finally, by means of the incipit of

Canto 72, I will analyze a minute form of fugal writing – that can arguably extend to the overall conception of the entire work –, followed by a spatio-temporal reasoning behind Pound’s use of this particular melopoetic device, which embodies his textual experiments that, similar to

Verlaine, Mallarmé and Joyce thus far, make literature and especially narrative, ‘new.’

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3.1 The “melopoeia” of Poundian Poetics

Ezra Pound’s literary, philosophical and political conceptions evolve throughout his profuse writing career, in which The Cantos are a testimony of an unfinished intellectual, historical and artistic development. This expansive book that unites Pound’s notions of vorticism, imagism and the ideogram with a deep understanding of music – and the relationship to literature – is in constant flux, a project born of modernist poetry that unites disparate moments of history, languages, traditions, politics, economies and arts, arguably becoming a commentary on the very process of history and art, its appropriation, reception and transformation through time and space. Despite the chaotic nature of many cantos, where the reader is confronted with many paradigms – namely overlapping Dantescan, Odyssean and

Ovidean paradigms –, the American wordsmith reverts to many methods, both structural and stylistic in his converging, palimpsest-like creation, in which he inscribes even himself into the spiral of history. Music more generally and fugue more specifically, in this infernal descent and paradisiac return, act in part as an organizational technique, a dynamic force of arrangement, a philosophical and abstract way of comprehending literature, and as a practical, formal tool to represent poiesis. Music therefore holds a privileged place in Pound’s writing and in respect to his poetics, a music that is both formal, experimental and a music, similar to Bach’s fugues, of the mind: there is a constant duality and often ambiguity between an intellectual, abstract music, and the concreteness of sound and words, which share many particularities with Poundian tenets that deserve further explanation.

In “How to Read,” Pound defines the term “melopoeia” as “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning” (53). This conception of a melopoetics suggests that music offers a supplement to meaning, and the manner in which Pound’s musical conceptions are

170 intertwined with his understanding of literature quickly becomes apparent, particularly in terms of vorticism and imagism: music, sound, language, images and themes all converge in a hybridized heightened poetic form. For example, in his literary essays, Pound explains his conception of rhythm by writing:

I do not believe that Chopin wrote to a metronome. There is undoubtedly a sense of music that takes count of the ‘shape’ of the rhythm in a melody rather than of bar divisions, which came rather late in the history of written music and were certainly not the first or most important thing that musicians attempted to record. The creation of such shapes is part of thematic invention. Some musicians have the faculty of invention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets. (Pound 421)

Although Pound was commenting particularly on T. S. Eliot’s writing, one could transpose the same observations onto a consideration of his own text. For example, the term ‘rhythm’ – which has both temporal and spatial repercussions for the poet – is a recurring problem for Pound in his criticism and throughout The Cantos, a question that I will address in more detail in the last section of this chapter on Pound’s theory of the “Great bass.” Nonetheless, the importance that

Pound places on the abstract understanding of the shape of rhythm as “theme” borders on his conceptions of “harmony” and “pitch.” In his introduction to the translation of Cavalcanti, Pound explains that the strongest ties between poetry and music heavily rely on rhythm. He essentially believes in

an ultimate and absolute rhythm as I believe in an absolute symbol or metaphor. The perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. It is only then, in perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word that the two-fold vision can be recorded. (Bucknell 63)

The binary that is here placed under consideration underlines the manner in which the word reflects the intellect and the sound of emotion, in a dichotomy of visual and aural representation.

However, Pound’s notion of “absolute” – whether related to metaphor or rhythm – remains quite vague. It would seem, nonetheless, that the union of intellect and emotion, instead of harmony, creates a sensorial interdependent rhythm. The union of the word’s image and sound depends on

171 the rhythmic utterance, the oral and physical manifestation of the thing evoked, not unlike the example of embodiment in Verlaine’s poetry, and Abrams’ understanding of the fourth dimension.

Although it may seem more logical to employ the term “harmony” to describe the codependent signifying logic behind Pound’s understanding of emotion and intellect or word and cadence, the poet has a different, albeit also synesthetic understanding of harmony. Pound blurs the lines between “‘harmony in the sentience’ or harmony of the sentient, where the thought has its demarcation, the substance its virtù, where stupid men have not reduced all ‘energy’ to unbounded undistinguished abstraction” (Pound 154). The distinction between the two harmonies are amongst the physicality of feeling, of sensations and the harmony of the senses or things themselves, a distinction that demonstrates Pound’s interest in the intermediary dynamics between object and subject. His criticism of an unbounded abstraction foreshadows his poetics of imagism, which I will discuss shortly; however, what is most important in this statement are the terms “unbounded and undistinguished,” as they represent the antithesis of a united whole.

Unbound, the perceived thing or self is disjointed and fragmented. Subjectivity is also implicit in

Pound’s description, since it is the poetic self that he describes in musical terms, the otherwise unconnected selves need to unite in harmony for the modernist poet. Harmony, whose etymology means to “join,” is at the heart of a writer or artist’s virtù,66 which is described as the substance of a poet’s harmonious ability to feel and perceive. Pound’s interest in harmony not only suggests that he views aesthetic subjectivity in musical terms, but also that harmony is an organizing tool to represent a multitude of subjects. Beyond the subject, counterpoint as an

66 Pound describes the term virtù as follows: “The soul of each man is compounded of all the elements of the cosmos of souls, but in each soul there is some one element which predominates, which is in some particular and intense way the quality of virtù of the individual; in no two souls is this the same. It is by reason of this virtù that a given work persists. It is by reason of this virtù that we have one Catullus, one Villon” (Wolfe 72).

172 element of harmony, as we have seen with Joyce, Mallarmé and Verlaine, acts as a fugal organizational element necessary for plot progression and overall signification.

Virtù, a term Pound employs in regards to Cavalcanti and to Homer specifically, ascribes its origins more accurately as coming from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance – which he in turn had adopted from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a further meta-commentary on the translation and re-appropriation of history and art in Pound’s philosophy – which he defines as:

the property each [thing] has of affecting one with a special, a unique impression of pleasure … And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse and separate its adjuncts…. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue. (Wolfe 71)

This observation recalls, to some respect, both the drive of fugue and Joyce’s notion of epiphany, and in fact, Cary Wolfe in her book The Limits of American Ideology in Pound and Emerson describes the dynamics of aesthetic subjectivity with the object perceived: “Pound’s extension of

Paterian virtù,” she explains, “underscores the active, transformative power of the poetic self required to bring out the quidditas of things in themselves. Poundian virtù is, in James

Longenbach’s words, a name for ‘the essence of individuality’” (71). She goes on to write that

“Virtù is rather that more elusive thing: a principle of differentiation by which selves may be kept separate – the difference, we might say, of difference” (71). And finally, she concludes:

“What Pound wants, it seems, is nothing short of a paradox: a principle of identity on behalf of difference, one that might keep these particular individualities apart and delineated, unconfused with one another” (72). Difference in harmony is precisely what Pound seeks to expose in his conception of virtù. Counterpoint – two concurrent melodies occurring in a form of harmony – or contrasting harmonies represent the unity of the subject, whether that subject is the thing perceived or the individual observer.

One final relevant musical element in Pound’s poetics is pitch. In an essay entitled

“Pitch,” Pound questions the possibility of having “in speech, as there is in music, ‘tone-

173 leading’” (Bucknell 59). He adds: “What I want to get at is this: in the interpreting of the hidden melody of poetry into the more manifest melody of music, are there in the words themselves

‘tone-leadings?” (59). In other words, what he would ideally like to extract from language is a logical and natural progression between words from the notes, sounds and more specifically the tones they emit. Unfortunately, as Bucknell explains, “there are no standardized pitches in the

English language as there are in music” (59). Nonetheless, Pound explains he would like to create “a system of overtones, cadences […] in the sense of a sequence of vowels and consonants with rising and falling inflections” (60). Although Pound knows of the impossibility to translate pitch to writing and to language in general, the recurrence of the importance of the cadence to him is particularly telling. It participates in the rhythm and harmony of poetry, its meaning and the dynamics of deciphering its significance; it also thematically recalls, through its etymology, the ideas of falling and descending, either into the abyss of one’s own inferno – in search of his virtù –, or of humanity’s decadence. These terms partake in a poetic endeavour for Pound, who incorporates their concrete and abstract connotations, as a formal and philosophical conception of organization in his poetry, alongside his notions of vorticism and imagism.

3.2 Pound’s Music of the Mind: Vorticism and Imagism

Bucknell is right to point out that “Pound’s poetics and his theorizing about music and literature participate in the confusions and complexities of his larger project. For what Pound seeks from his musical poetics, and indeed, from his sense of music, has much in common with what he seeks socially and poetically elsewhere: and that is a kind of essential hierarchical structure, a truth beyond the merely material or materialistic, yet a truth which is always manifest through concrete action or style: image, vortex, or ideogram” (Bucknell 52). Together with fugue, these last three terms are fundamental to the conception of The Cantos, and it is necessary

174 to elucidate these concepts in order to comprehend their relationship to music and more specifically to fugue.

Hugh Kenner explains: “a Vortex is a circulation with a still center: a system of energies drawing in whatever comes near” (239). The “image” for Pound is actually a vortex, and it participates in the energy and logic of vorticism, in that the “image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; … a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (Nicholls 174). The rushing ideas that both enter and exit the spiraling vortex underline its centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. This is an underscoring momentum and rhythm that punctuate The Cantos, where form and rhetorical techniques have their own power to signify above and beyond the content of the poems. Pound first coined the term vorticism, a movement whose origin is largely attributed to Wyndham Lewis. The first example of vorticist poetry appeared in a 1914 issue of BLAST magazine, in which a section of the manifesto reads:

BLAST First (from politness) ENGLAND [sic.] CURSE ITS CLIMATE FOR ITS SINS AND INFECTIONS DISMAL SYMBOL, SET round our bodies, of effeminate lout within…” “OH BLAST FRANCE pig plagiaris BELLY SLIPPERS POODLE TEMPER BAD MUSIC (Lewis 11-13)

Several pages later, the manifesto contrapuntally offers a reversal to the blasting, by praising

England, and further detaching itself from the French, effeminate “DISMAL SYMBOL,” a section that could represent a direct jab at Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés,” in which the rocky seas engulf the protagonist who cannot escape chance or fate:

BLESS ENGLAND FOR ITS SHIPS which switchback on Blue, Green and

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Red SEAS all around the PINK

EARTH-BALL,

BIG BETS ON EACH.

BLESS ALL SEAFARERS. THEY exchange not one LAND for another, but one ELEMENT For ANOTHER. The MORE against the LESS ABSTRACT. (Lewis 22)

The poetic vortex engulfs and spits out images, distorting them in the same manner that a twister does its surroundings: the object of contention here is indubitably symbolist verse, and French culture more largely, its “BAD MUSIC,” its abstraction and its policies. Nonetheless, despite

Pound’s best efforts, abstraction plays an important role in his poetic creation, and his use of fugue may not differ much from his symbolist forefathers.

Inextricably tied to vorticism is imagism, where the central importance of the poem lies in the image, which in Pound’s words is “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Nicholls 169). Three rules are extractable from imagism:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. (Nicholls 170).

This tripartite definition grounds itself in an anti-symbolist poetics, where the adverb “direct” stands in stark contrast to the symbolist indirectness of suggestion. The lack of superfluity in language also adds to Pound’s desire for the image’s immediate accessibility, a seemingly mimetic correspondence between image and idea that will prove furthermore ambiguous in conjunction with Pound’s ideogrammic method. Finally, in returning to the concept of rhythm within imagism, Pound rejects the rigidity of traditional metres, and prefers an accentuation within the verse or verses – which create the “phrase” –, returning to his conception of tone- leading, in which words and sounds naturally connect to the following word, in the manner of pitch and chord progressions. Bucknell finds a contradiction between the attempt to render an

176 accurate image and the musical form espoused (65); however, I would argue that it is the use of the term “phrase” that is primordial to Pound’s understanding of rhythm in this context. A phrase is a specific unit in music within the larger piece, either a harmony or melody; it is therefore a whole unit, its own totality within a piece – the subject within a fugue, for example, or the recurring phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata for Proust. In other words, it is not divided, fragmented or bound to a rigid structure, within the confines of the musical bars, the measures that make up a temporal division within music: for example, the musical “tempo” of 4/4 means that the entire piece is broken up into four beats per measure, in order to keep time. Pound, who would like to obliterate traditional notions of time, works against this form of tempo, moving towards the melopoetic dynamism of the phrase.

Imagist writing operates through juxtaposition and super-position, “one idea set on top of another,” in which Pound suggests a “formal hiatus or pause – a gap between two parts of the poem – a space in which the reader might construe relationship,” an utterly anti-impressionistic aesthetics, against the passivity of “receiving impressions” (Nicholls 171). One of the most quintessential imagist poems remains “In a Station of the Metro,” published in the magazine

Poetry in 1913, which embodies the hiatus and juxtapositional equivalence or equation Pound sought to represent:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Axelrod 663)

The poet exemplifies the transitory, the ephemeral and the fleeting nature of life, by equating travelers’ faces with soon-to-be dead, heavy petals. J.T. Barbarese sees in this poem, a “break from the pentameter,” and Nicholls reads it as “an attempt to recover a stylistic purity, a ‘welding of word and thing’” (Barbarese 308, Nicholls 170). This welding, interestingly, once again occurs via juxtaposition or “equation,” as Nicholls suggests, since Pound understands “image as

177 an ‘equation’ for a particular mood […] there is a subtle shift of attention away from the object itself towards something else which allows desire to be mediated by a tradition or a set of conventions” (Nicholls 170). Welding is purely figural, and despite the contiguous nature of words, sounds and images, they can only truly connect, physically and concretely, in the reader’s mind. This aesthetic logic was indubitably inspired by Pound’s interest in Chinese characters – which appear sporadically throughout The Cantos – whose origins and direct relationship to acoustic images stimulated him. This non-linear narrative relates to Pound’s ideogrammic method, a poetic subdivision of imagism, and of extreme importance to The Cantos.

Bucknell states that Pound wrote The Cantos in the ideogrammic method, as exemplified in Pound’s The ABC of Reading, in which concrete symbols and characters represent abstract ideas. The “Petals on a wet, black bough,” for example, creates a set of emotions only through a process of connecting the first verse to the second, a juxtaposition or amalgamation of the concrete and the abstract. This process is akin to Pound’s ideogrammic method, and not wholly unlike many symbolist poems, most notably Rimbaud’s vowels. Beyond juxtaposition, it is the proximity, the closeness of the two seemingly unharmonious concrete images that Bucknell explains is of utmost importance to the ideogrammic method. “Contiguity,” he writes, “is, then, not only the underpinning of Pound’s “music” of writing, it is also the crucial element of the ideogrammic method which is Pound’s technique for the presentation of the real and the true”

(Bucknell 108). The dynamics of vorticism in relation to music are apparent, and now the link between imagism – and its ideogrammic method – also comes to light. Contiguity as a musical underpinning may suggest a way for Pound to perform or represent the tone-leading in literature, as explained above. However, the ideogrammic method, with the image as its central component, operates according to, what I argue, is a fugal logic. Bucknell writes:

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For Pound, the image, not the word, […] is the poem’s minimal unit of meaning. So, in his theory of an “active, not static” harmony, where the need is for a sound to “last long enough […] for the succeeding sound or sounds to catch up, traverse, intersect it,” the meaning, as John Tucker explains, “resides precisely in the catching up, traversing and intersecting.” […] The belief that such minimal units of juxtaposition can generate meanings is the basis of the ideogrammic method. (Bucknell 99)

The process and temporal dynamics of “catching up, traversing and intersection” perfectly parallel the variations between subject, answer and countersubject in fugue. Contiguously pitting against each other varying spatio-temporal images, personae and ideas creates a meddling of subjects, which takes into account Pound’s vorticist poetics, the rhythm of correspondence between juxtaposed, super-imposed or contiguous, paratactic images, all in a fugal form, particularly counterpoint. Since, in Davis’ and Pound’s words, the

basic principle of counterpoint, as distinct from any set of niggling ‘rules,’ is that a number of melodic lines carry on and, by carrying on, interact […] “You can cover it up more or less in symphonic or “harmonic” writing, you may even be able to camouflage it a little, a very much lesser little in counterpoint by patience and application of process. But you can’t damn well learn even that process without learning a great deal by the way. / A fugue a week for a year wd. teach even a bullhead something. (Davis 75)

Fugue, therefore works in harmony with vorticism and imagism in The Cantos, and I agree with

Bucknell who explains that “[w]riting or graphing, then has a great deal riding on it, and the fugal design of multiple and (to a degree) independent voices in time and space renders the

“fugue” as a kind of aural model of absolute space-time relations. What I suspect both Pound and his commentators want from the fugue is an aural complement to the predominantly visual poetics of the ideogram” (Bucknell 106). I would further argue that fugue functions both within the visual and the aural realms of poetry. Particularly through repetition – from echo to thematic recurrence – and juxtaposition, Pound demonstrates the repetitive nature of history through an ideogrammic method, which finds a counterpart in the combination of motifs (tied to a theme) in fugue. Pound navigates through these recurring images and incremental echoes, via a self-elusive framework that is the fugue: it becomes the binding force of juxtaposition, echo, repetition and

179 recurrence, which, once united, also acts as the visual and figural (in a Lyotardian sense) space of poetry Pound seeks to create. Similar to his melopoetic definitions of rhythm, pitch and harmony, Pound’s understanding of fugue is not free of ambiguity. Prior to offering a close reading of a section of Pound’s The Cantos as fugal writing, it is essential to extrapolate Pound’s conception of fugue in poetry, and how his life-long project is and is not a literary fugue.

3.3 Both “like and unlike” a Fugue

The meta-narrative surrounding Pound’s use of the term “fugue” as a defining structural characteristic of The Cantos stirred up a substantial amount of commentary, from Yeats and

Pound himself, to more recent critics and scholars. As with Joyce’s Ulysses or Mallarmé’s ideal

Le Livre, it is nearly impossible to offer a singular definition of The Cantos. This is in part precisely the point in a literary work that portrays the fragments of history and the individual’s experience of and within it, a fundamentally modernist preoccupation. For example, Joyce’s

Ulysses and Eliot’s “The Wasteland” contemporaneous to The Cantos both question the subject’s place throughout history and in the present, as well as the specular relation between these two temporal spheres. Similar to Baudelaire’s rag-picker in “Le vin du chiffonier,” Pound’s goal, I would argue, is to question the re-writing of history, of super- or juxtaposing artists, leaders, soldiers and bankers, what has (been) appreciated through time, what has been venerated and what has been ruined: from the detritus of the modern city to the true and false transcriptions and translations of history books. After all, according to the poet, “[…] the modern world/Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in” (Engler 98).67 Although this modernist image is fitting to describe the intermingling of incongruous and miscellaneous elements, it would also suggest a

67 This verse appears in “Ur-Canto I” which was not published in the final version of the poem. It was published in Poetry in June, 1917 (Engler 98).

180 certain unity and bounded or finished nature. The pieces that make up The Cantos, an unfinished and effectively interminable oeuvre, can be considered to have been assembled in Pound’s rag- bag and subsequently scattered on the floor. Such an image privileges continuity over unity, since it is essentially up to the reader to create the logic of contiguity – Poundian rhythm – between the various fragments. One remnant of hermeneutic hints on Pound’s behalf that The

Cantos will resemble a fugue in its final form; therefore, the re-writing of history, the various subjects reiterated and contradicted – the subject taken up on a different pitch or in various spatio-temporal contexts – create a sense of cyclical or spiral-like time, which, as I will explain,

Pound slowly unweaves thanks to the fugue.

Pound first mentions the fugal form in a letter to his father, describing the work as

“rather obscure, especially in fragments” and here, he offers an “outline of main scheme,” which he defines as “[r]ather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue”

(Bucknell 102). The subject, answer and countersubject appear in the following layout:

A. A. Live man goes down into world of Dead C. B. The “repeat in history” B. C. The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidian into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc. (Bucknell 102)

Bucknell argues that “Pound’s self-negating statement that the Cantos is both “like” and “unlike” a fugue suggests a certain hesitancy about any absolute correlation between the fugue form and the poem” (Bucknell 102). I agree that Pound implies a degree of hesitancy, and that his musical vocabulary, as stated above, is ambiguous at best, despite his substantial knowledge of music.

Furthermore, the statement “both like and unlike” already performs a particular counterpoint; it complements Pound’s interest in the dialectical or binaries, and the intermediary space between them, a space of silence in which the reader is given agency. Let us recall that Pound’s polyphony, as Kenner describes it, is “not of simultaneous elements […] but of something

181 chiming from something we remember from earlier” (Bucknell 60). This logic connects not only one canto to the next, but one set of decads (or section in The Cantos) to the next, and arguably, the entirety of The Cantos.

The letters – A. A.; C. B.; B. C. – are to be understood in accordance with Pound’s statement above, alongside his conception of counterpoint, where symmetry is at the forefront.

Pound, similar to Joyce’s ‘mythic method,’ portrays a live man descending into hell – either literal or metaphorical – whose counterpart is many a man. As Fussell explains in paradigmatic terms, “Pound is Aeneas, St. Paul, Christ, descending into Hell (history) to perform good

(literary) works, and this motive is increasingly evident as the Cantos round, or hump themselves, toward a possible close” (85). The “repeat in history” are specific events of war, political, financial and social change, and its contrary is a world of possibilities, the ‘what could have happened.’ Finally, the “magic moment” is arguably the mythical moment traditionally recounted in stories, and its counterpart is a variation or adaptation of it. In all cases, Pound privileges a coexistence of the present and the past, of history and its re-writings.

Fugue occurs a second time in meta-critical writing, notably in the writings of William

Butler Yeats, who details a conversation he had with Pound regarding the structure of The

Cantos:

He explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical characters… He has scribbled on the back of an envelope certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events – I cannot find any adequate definition – ABCD and then JKLM, and then each set of letters repeated, and then A B C D inverted and this repeated, and then a new element XYZ, then certain letters that never recur and then all sorts of combinations of XYZ and JKLM and ABCD and DCBA, and all set whirling together. (Fussell 76)

Upon the publication of this, Pound writes in a personal letter:

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God damn Yeats’ bloody paragraph […] If Yeats knew a fugue from a frog, he might have transmitted what I told him in some way that would have helped rather than obfuscated his readers. Mah!!! (Fussell 76)

While Yeats’ letter is confusing, it does, nonetheless, offer some insight into the abundance of letters Pound uses as either “emotions” – a form of synaesthesia in fact – or “archetypal events,” according to Yeats. This statement as well as the “Descent into Hades” and the “Metamorphosis” are congruent with Pound’s statements a year earlier to his father, and represent the larger plot narrative and his logic of inversion or counterpoint. Furthermore, Pound’s obfuscation of Yeats’ incomprehension and lack of clear explanation suggests that Pound had a much clearer understanding of fugue than some critics (namely Stephen Adams, among others) believed.

The final piece of evidence linking Pound’s poetic practice to fugue is a conversation he had with his daughter, transcribed by Davis:

You know how a fugue of Bach is composed, one instrument comes in and the others repeat the theme. The Cantos start with Homer, the descent into hell. Then a theme of Ovid – Dafne, my own myth, not changed into a laurel but into coral. And then Dante – Dante has said everything there is to be said, so I start with Malatesta. (Davis 80)

Once again, there is harmony between Pound’s multiple accounts of fugue in The Cantos. In this last example, he demonstrates how the “Descent into Hades” is a potential subject or theme throughout history and mythology, where it is necessary to enter a figurative hell in order to reach redemption, salvation or forgiveness. What fugue truly offers in this reasoning, however, is organization. Fugue offers a musical dynamics that unites motifs and themes, while pitting them against their counterparts: for example, the author’s presence – often transcribed as “EP” – takes the place of Homer, Dante, Sigismondo Malatesta or Charles Francis Adams, a clashing of the modern and the mythic that creates a new intermediary space. Nicholls explains that “[f]or the

‘Men of 1914’, and especially for Pound and Lewis, what really counted was the ‘organisation of forms,’ the power of design as the ‘composition and symmetry and balance’ of structures which

183 might function to order the flux and chaos of modern phenomenal life” (Nicholls 196). Fugue acts as this specific organizational discourse and figure, based on “symmetry and balance” and it represents modernity’s chaotic and fleeting nature, as well as its predisposition to formlessness.

Without realizing how similar to fugal notions his description is, Nicholls adds: “Form and

‘pattern’ yield a ‘motif’, and that ‘motif’, as Pound discovers it operating in Lewis’s art, is characteristically that of ‘the fury of intelligence’ working against the ‘circumjacent stupidity’ of a formless modernity (196). Writing in fugue gives form to this modernity, and works “not to hollow out the present, but to excavate its foundations,” to make sense of history, individuals’ memory of it and the manner in which it has been written and re-written (Nicholls 260). Also, beyond its discursive and organizational features, fugue also emanates as a sort of ideal poetic space, both a linear, narrative patterning and a visual one. 4 Fugal Metonymy

Pound’s cantos were published serially, the first, “A Draft of XXX Cantos” (1930) prepares the modernist long poem’s sense of fragmentation, incompleteness, by opening in media res in Canto I: “And then went down to the ship,” (3) and ending with “So that:” – linking it chronologically to other poems that can offer a result to such a conjunctive construction. It also places front and centre the spectral nature of language and history, as well as translation’s role within its representation and mediation: he echoes, for example, Andreas Divus’ translation of

Homer to recount Odysseus’ meeting Tiresias, a parallel to Pound’s own search for knowledge and symptomatic of the (seemingly musical) repetitions and variations of history. “Eleven New

Cantos XXXI-XLI,” published the same year, ensue, followed by “The Fifth Decad of Cantos

XLII-LI,” otherwise known as Leopoldine Cantos (1937). The China Cantos and Adams Cantos,

“Cantos LII-LXXI” and “Cantos LXXII-LXXIII” appear in 1940. “The Pisan Cantos LXXIV-

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LXXXIV” written while Pound was incarcerated near Pisa appear in 1948, followed by “Section:

Rock-Drill De Los Cantares LXXXV-XCV” in 1955. Finally, the last ten years of publications focus on “Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX” (1959) and “Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-

CXVII” (1969). “Fragment,” published in 1966, appears as a final section in the oeuvre. A claim could be made that each decad – Pound’s regroupings of ten cantos at a time – tie to the next and to its predecessor in a fugal manner, reiterating similar themes, either in relation to Tiresias,

Homer, Aeneas, or Charles Francis Adams, Benjamin Franklin, or even Mussolini, among many others. However, such a claim remains quite vague, even though the larger all-encompassing metaphor of fugue is evidently something Pound sought assertively. I would underline that it is the effect of fugue – and this is similar to symbolism –, its power to connect and to overlap opposing notions and spatio-temporal distances, regrouping the present and past’s power relations or histories, that the reader needs to perceive and feel, all the while questioning the rhythm or harmony of blurred temporal boundaries. Regardless of whether Pound’s fugal writing is a success or a failure, what is more important than formally analyzing each poem, decad or section according to an applied scheme, is to question why precisely Pound would choose to insert fugue into his modernist poem, or employ it as a larger metaphor or scheme for the entire work. Prior to answering this question, it is important to understand how fugue functions on a smaller scale, metonymically. If the entirety of The Cantos can be considered fugal, it is because fugue exists both on a macro- and microstructural level.

The “Pisan Cantos” are arguably the most musical of all sections in The Cantos, those

Pound first wrote on toilet paper while incarcerated in the American Disciplinary Training

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Center, outside Pisa. I choose to offer a close reading of the final poem of Purgatory,68 Canto 72, one of two Cantos written almost entirely in Italian, and which prepare the reader for the Pisan cantos to follow: following cantos 72 and 73, “Pound went on to make extensive drafts for further Italian cantos in early 1945 but abandoned them and reworked their essential episodes in

The Pisan Cantos” (Adams 40). Although this poem has received much attention from scholars of Italian – from literary scholars to linguists –, to my knowledge no study of the fugal form in this passage has been made.69

Pound’s fugal poetics obey the theme and motif orchestration Faulk outlined, and which I discussed in chapter 1 and 2. Accordingly, the subject of Canto 72 is ‘creation,’ its answer or contrapuntal antithesis is ‘destruction,’ and I will demonstrate that the interweaving of these two themes – represented by the recurrence of particular motifs that recall the theme –, that the play between creation and destruction is the countersubject, a liminal space, much like purgatory itself, which demands representation. By both antagonistically pitting these two concepts against each other and intermingling them, Pound creates a new space in which the boarders between the two binaries collapse, and the relationship between destruction and creation blur into a third, open space, which breaks down the hermetic Manichean distancing of contraries.

Although I will offer a commentary on the incipit of this canto, the logic of various motifs, contexts and personae that regroup to recall the fugal theme/subject of creation is applicable to the entire canto. The opening verses of Canto 72 juxtapose poetic inspiration or aspiration and the mnemonic potential to harness writing, with the Book of Genesis, thus equating aesthetic creation – and the “Horatian theme of the immortalizing power of poetry”

68 Pound divided his cantos according to the Dantescan paradigm of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, the corresponding breakdown being: Hell, cantos 1-30; Purgatory, cantos 31-72; Paradise, 73 to the end. 69 For an intricate fugal breakdown of Canto 62, see Davis, pages 82 to 94.

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(Casella 202) – with the God-like act of creation. Casella calls it a “para-epic invocation to the

Muses as in classical poems” (199). The seemingly destructive power of war offers an answer to these acts:

Purché si cominci a ricordare la guerra di merda Certi fatti risorgeranno. Nel principio, Dio Il grande esteta, dopo aver creato cielo e mondo, Dopo il tramonto vulcanico, dopo aver dipinto La roccia con licheni a modo nipponico, Cacò il gran’ usuario Satana-Gerione, prototipo Dei padroni di Churchill […] (425)70

The evocation ritual begins with the poet re-iterating Genesis, adding that he literally shat out

Satan, thus confusing, and very early in the poem, the act of creation and destruction via the scatological, which embodies waste, the abject and death. Such a motif echoes the “guerra di merda” in the first verse, something otherwise glorified by Futurism, and the answer to the fugal subject. According to mythological inspiration, the invocation follows the evocation, and the poet begins to sing:

[…] E mi viene ora a cantar’ In gergo rozzo (non a (h)antar ‘oscano) ché Dopo la sua morte mi venne Filippo Tomaso dicendo: “Be’, sono morto, Ma non voglio andar in Paradiso, voglio combatter’ ancora. Voglio il tuo corpo, con cui potrei ancora combattere.” (425)71

70 Pound published his own translation of Canto 72: If one begins to remember the dung of war certain facts will well up again. In the beginning God the greatest aesthete having created heaven and earth & after the volcanic sunset, had painted the rocks with lichen in Japanese manner Exuded the great usurer Geryon, prototype Of Churchill’s backers […] (Pound 432).

71 […] And there came singing Filippo Tomaso in rough dialect, with h for c All right, I am dead, but do not want to go to heaven, I want to go on fighting & I want your body to go on with the struggle. (432)

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The ambiguity of the term cantar’ recalls the tangibility of the canto and of language: it is a song, a poem, even an epic that will sing the glories of war and adventure. As a canto, it is both sung (or spoken) and written down, a dichotomy that prepares for Pound’s commentary on embodiment and voice in literature, and the power of poetry to immortalize. Casella once again recalls a Biblical allusion, this time that of John I, 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the

Word was with God, and the Word was God” (199). Language, its multiple dialects and registers, are the poet’s tool to create, but also a physical extension of his being, since he embodies the “grande esteta” in this paradigm. However, in lieu of the poet singing, it is Filippo

Tomaso Marinetti who speaks, the founder of Futurism, who had died recently before Pound’s writing of this poem.

The dialectal and phonetic representation of Tuscan via the aspirated – and the polysemy of this term is thematically important – intervocalic letter ‘c’ represents an “exposition” within the fugue, that will return throughout the canto, uniting with the Emiliano dialect, in counterpoint with Pound’s voice. The exposition, which melodically plays with musical motifs in the subject, answer and countsubject truly ties into all sections of the fugue: language is, once again, the means to reaching poetry. However, a distinction is soon made between the written and the oral form of such language: here, the oral aspirations, whether it be the aspiration of letters in Tuscan, the poetic aspiration to create “a meeting with spirits,” as Pound defined this canto, or

Marinetti’s bellicosity (Casella 203). The contradiction between the positive cantare and the traditionally negative combattere become dialectics no longer at a standstill, to employ

Benjamin’s terms. They come together in a sense and blur the borders that divide them, especially in a Futurist discourse. Combattere, for Marinetti and for Pound, no longer have a destructive connotation, but a creative one, much like cantare. Finally, following a contrapuntal

188 arrangement of poetic, Biblical and war-related notions of creation and destruction, the subject and answer overlap, creating the sense of a countersubject, in which this already blurred distinction between subject and answer, offer a third option to the equation: transformation.

To Marinetti’s desire to take Pound’s body to continue his fight, Pound writes:

Ed io risposi: “Già vecchio il mio corpo, Tomaso E poi, dove Andrei? Ne ho bisogno io del corpo. Ma ti darò posto nel Canto, ti darò la parola, a te; Ma se vuoi ancora combattere, va; piglia qualche giovanotto; Pigiate hualche ziovanozz’ imbelle ed imbecille Per fargli un po’ di coraggio, per dargli un po’ di cervello, Par dare all’Italia ancor’ un eroe fra tanti; Così puoi rinascere, così diventare pantera, Così puoi conoscere la bi-nascita, e morir una seconda volta, Non morir viejo a letto, anzi morir a suon di battaglia Per aver Paradiso. (425)72

Once again, the linguistic exposition continues, here with the “softer and more melodic” dialect of Emilia – also that of Mussolini –, according to Casella, in contrast to the “nervous and harmonic Tuscan,” an observation that suggests counterpoint between the two dialects (202).73

Similar to Joyce, Pound here employs the concept of metempsychosis, in which the transmigration of Marinetti’s soul into Pound’s body represents the Italian poet’s goals. Between creation and destruction comes the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot

72 And I answered: “my body is already old, I need it, where wd. I go? But I will give you a place in a Canto giving you voice. But if you want to go on fighting go take some young chap, flaccid & a half-wit to give him a bit of courage and some brains to give Italy another hero among so many Thus to be reborn & thus become a panther & so know the second birth, & die a second time Not old in bed, But die to sound of trumpets & come to Paradise. (432) 73 Unfortunatley, Casella does not explain such a grand claim, in linking two diverse dialects to music, in terms of melody and harmony. I have included his commentary here, since it sheds light on the contrapuntal arrangement of the linguistic fugal exposition.

189 be created or destroyed, but only transformed. Metempsychosis (or reincarnation in this case) would allow Marinetti to physically fight, and – aligning him with Christ and Promethean archetypes –, to be reborn and experience a “bi-nascita,” as well as a second death. Pound, however, transforms him into a persona within his poem, giving him a voice – a permanent one within The Cantos – and therefore assures his immortality, his Paradiso, ironically locked within purgatory. It seems fitting that Pound would so distinctly employ fugue throughout The Cantos and even more notably within the final section of Purgatory, since despite enacting a constant desire to flee, the fugue (or Pound, or Marinetti) is forever trapped within its own endless torment without any sign of catharsis. “The text cannot […] exceed itself,” Bucknell explains,

“but only produce more and more of itself in a procedure of continual assertion and association.

The result is a process of constant supplementarity that “music,” in any of its various appearances, cannot stop, but of which it can only become a part” (120).

The subject of creation (with its answer and countersubject) persists throughout the poem, largely in regards to translation – a text by Albertino Mussato (Ecerinis) translated by

Manlio Torquato Dazzi, among others – and the creative dynamics of creating or re-creating, and the violence or infidelity implied within it – the oft-quoted tenet of “traduttore traditore” comes to mind – and the philosophical and theoretical understanding of what it means to translate and transcribe history, and one individual’s, often biased, point of view. On top of this individual subjectivity, it is important to remember a communal notion of identity amidst the treachery of war. Reconciling the singular and the plural, near the end of the canto, the diffuse voices unite contrapuntally, in the form of birds:

E come onde che vengon da più d’un transmittente Senti allora Le voci fuse, e con frasi rotte, E molti uccelli fecer’ contrappunto Nel mattino estivo,

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fra il cui cigolar (430)74

Although Pound unites his dispersed voices and characters, similar to the opening poem in his work, the motifs are almost always taken up once again, acting neither as a beginning (creation), nor as an end (destruction), but as a constant present occurring in media res, a time and space of constant transformation. This transformation underlines the power of the ‘countersubject’ more generally for Pound, in a deconstructive aesthetics, which makes of two opposing binaries a third, new element that bridges the insurmountable gap between subject and answer, and perhaps even of past and present or self and other.

4.1 The Annihilation of Time or Cascading Birds from a Wire

Although a claim could be made that each decad or section ties into the next in a fugal orchestration – as Pound’s metacritical writing indicates was his goal –, it is clearer on a smaller scale how Pound intertwines themes that unite over time and space, essentially dissolving spatio- temporal boundaries into an anti-narrative. Partly similar to Joyce’s goals, the dissolution of time, I argue, is for Pound, the main reason for employing a fugal form in his poetry, alongside the structural and intermedial properties described above, in which counterpoint is reached by the chiming echo of previous sounds, motifs and images.

A tension exists in the palimpsest-like overlapping of characters such as Odysseus,

Dante, Dazzi, Cavalcanti, Marinetti and Pound himself, and music, especially in the “Pisan

Cantos.” This section offers a tangible, imagistic counterpart to the mobile and uncontrollable nature of time. In Canto 75, for example, a musical transcription defined by Bucknell as a “map

74 Confusion of voices as from several transmitters, broken phrases, And many bids singing in counterpoint/In the summer morning and through their twitterings a suave tone […] (Pound 436).

191 of musical time, an ideogram, perhaps, of musical temporality with the transcription of

Jacequin’s motet, ‘Chansons des Oiseaux’” demonstrates this inscription of temporality on the page (96). The correct title of the poem is actually “Le chant des oiseaux” (1529; Bucknell 111), meant to imitate birds singing – while also reiterating the theme of treachery, deceit and infidelity between the nightingale and the cuckoo – which Pound, in return, transposes into a music of both the ear and the eye:

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(470)

I will return to the importance of birds and fugue shortly, but what is of import here is that Pound demonstrates a polyphony of birds, “–not of one bird but of many,” beyond their sonorous qualities. He creates a visual equivalence to polyphony, a polyvisual, in which space can represent temporal simultaneity: in this example, the birds on the staves correspond to the birds on the fence that Pound watched while in the detention facility outside Pisa. The following page within The Cantos further demonstrates the overlapping of harmonies. Musical transcription,

193 therefore, gives the reader a proper sense of a textual palimpsest, in which notes are superimposed upon each other, “in which, ideally, one text might overlay another without effacing it”

(Nicholls 179).

The effect of simultaneity in The Cantos – the coexistence of present and past – is ultimately the creation of an atemporal space. Bucknell explains: “At the Disciplinary Training

Centre just outside Pisa, Pound is without most of his books and all of his friends and therefore is forced to re-compose himself in a sense as yet a new “noman,” an Odysseus figure at the blind end of time. For time itself has stopped, according to Pound, here “in the 23rd year of the effort”-

Mussolini’s fascist effort, that is, with its new calendar and its concomitant attempt to make history coterminous with itself” (97). The coterminous nature of his poetry – which, I would argue, was already one of Pound’s objectives before the “Pisan Cantos” – reflects the blurred lines of beginning and end, past and present, self and other(s). Nicholls comments upon these relationships in light of imagism, stating: “In the first phase of The Cantos, Pound develops the implications of imagism, using allusion and citation to create a collision of time-schemes which yields (to borrow Derrida’s formulation) ‘a series of temporal differences without any central present, without a present of which the past and the future would be but modifications’” (261). I would go as far as to extend this observation to fugue as well.

Fugue, more so than imagism perhaps – because it interweaves the visually tangible objects or characters and the more abstract ideas – makes temporal schemes collide, effacing any hierarchy between the binaries or contrapuntal themes: for example, in Canto 72, with the notions of creation and destruction uniting in a deconstructive sense, wherein destruction can also become a creative force, and takes on similar connotations to its counterpart. This reciprocity yields a temporal space inconsistent with any traditional understanding of the present, past or future. Nicholls explains, echoing Komparu, that “‘dramatic time is split and revolves

194 around two axes.’ This ‘splitting’ involves more than a simple juxtaposition of past and present, for the reversal of chronology produces a sort of compound tense in which the past may seem open to change or revision” (177). An underlying question of the importance of translation is implicit in Nicholls’ comment; however, what is more significant is that the temporal splitting for the reader evokes a sense of contemporaneity and simultaneity that Pound sought in his poetry. The poet, EP, Ezra Pound, ‘£,’ or any other paradigmatic characteristic or persona he takes on, is capable of pushing this simultaneity to the creation of a new, modernist, coterminous space made from time, a time inextricably linked to melopoeia. “The guiding principle for this horizontal continuity,” Bucknell writes, “is melody now conceived of as time, and it is time which also binds the larger construction of the overall piece, as is suggested in Pound’s theory of

Great Bass” (78).

4.2 The Great Bass and Four Dimensionality

Whereas early in the “Pisan Cantos” Pound creates a spatial/visual representation of time through the transcription of a piece of music, near the end of this section, the poet’s image of music – and ‘image’ is the key word – seems to subvert the semiotically abstract referent of music, in favour of a certain physicality. A concrete example of this is Canto 82, where Pound inverts the notion of musical notes and written language, placing written letter notes in place of musical annotations on a stave; these notes eventually take the form of birds, birds that he watched on a wire – the metal fence on which they were perched representing his stave – while he was imprisoned and experienced a mental breakdown. Bucknell writes: “Pound sets about his own writing of music, though his is not a music strictly of sound but rather of writing, and, more importantly, not a writing which is imitative or even descriptive of sound, but, instead, one which requires the “real” birds of the camp to be transformed into the image of written music”

(118):

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f f d g write the birds in the treble scale (Bucknell 118; Pound 545)

In the final verses of this poem, we can read:

three solemn half notes their white downy chests black-rimmed on the middle wire periplum (Bucknell 118; 560)

The birds, according to Pound’s representation are in fact outside time – both fixed and mobile in writing – and dynamism moves through them as was Pound’s idea of vorticist poetry. These birds also intratextually recall the first poem of the “Pisan Cantos,”

with two larks in contrappunto at sunset ch’intenerisce a sinistra la Torre seen thru a pair of breeches. Che sublia es laissa cader (Pound 451)

The final verse, a physical fall – or cadenza – is a quotation from Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Quan vei la lauzeta mover,” a Provençal medieval song that describes the spiralling descent of a bird singing while falling. This cadenza – a virtuosic musical passage – recalls the birds from the purgatory canto, “E molti uccelli fecer’ contrappunto” (430), not to mention the incipit to Canto

82, where the song to follow depicts the music “– not of one bird but of many” (470). The chiming effect of the recurring birds not only evokes a fugal creation in which motifs return at unexpected moments – also tying specific themes together – but it also creates momentum, by slowly preparing the reader for the final cadenza, the fall of the birds, the cascading letters they have come to embody.

It is only in the final appearance of these birds on wires that Pound reaches the paroxysm of his writing and image of music, and arguably even that of the spatialization of time. Through

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Pound’s portrayal of the birds as notes, he is tracing a novel conception of space within poetry and beyond imagery, believing that “in time we will discover an absolute space structured on temporality itself; its audible manifestations will rest not in liminality and the passing of tones but in the aural shape of the space such tones both create and point toward: an immanent space of necessary time” (Bucknell 71). According to this, it would seem as though Pound’s spatio- temporal understanding echoes Bergsonian durée, which Wyndham Lewis describes, contextually convenient for the discussion of this poem, in regards to the world of birds and insects:

Their world is not a world of distinct objects. It is an interpenetrating world of direct sensation. It is, in short, Mr. Bergson’s world. It is a mental, as it were an interior world, of palpitating movement visually indistinct, electrical; not all arranged on the principles of surfaces and lines; and it is without a ‘void’ at all. (Lewis 435)

In a sense, Pound’s whole conception of the The Cantos adheres to a vorticist manipulation of duration, in which “[t]he present pervades the past, and so the past is renewed: since, for some reason, the present, concentrated in this way, and swelled out to bursting with all the past, is both

‘free’ and ‘new’” (Lewis 437-8). In the example of the birds on a wire, Pound is reconciling the external space of lines quoted above, and his internal perception of space, based on temporality.

Interestingly, the reference to the “middle wire” in the poem exposes Pound’s knowledge of music on a seemingly simple level: the middle wire on the treble clef corresponds to the letter

“b” in music, which would create a perfect chord (with a diminished 7th) once all the notes are united: G-B-D-F. The missing note that links the others together in harmony (true musical harmony, not only thematic harmony) is ironically a “dead” note, the dead birds no longer able to emit music. These four notes could also correspond to a Pythagorean ideal, symbolized in their mystical geometric figure of the tetraktys, which embodies harmony in all its forms: harmony of the spheres and of the elements, not to mention its direct correspondence to divine creation, since

197 the sum of the triangle’s points, as depicted below, is the mystic Dekad, which symbolizes oneness (accentuated by the image of the Ouroboros). Pound, after all, divided many of his cantos in decad form, and the tetraktys represents a manner in which to conceive of harmony, intervals, and therefore the spatial features of music.

75 Tetraktys and Ouroboros. Web. September 10, 2013.

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Pound is therefore successful in making the spatialization of music prevail via the contrapuntal birds, and the dead, silent note of the image. The note exists as an image, and I believe it corresponds, at least in part, to Pound’s notion of the “Great Bass,” his understanding of ideal time inherent in all music despite one’s incapability of hearing it. After all, Pound’s metempsychotic portrayal of death – where it is but a transformation of energy, a transposed or translated state: a cyclicality portrayed above in the Ouroboros – would suggest that, although something is invisible or inaudible, does not mean it is not there.

This driving force of time is defined as a “quasi-scientific reconciliation between the audible and the absolute underlying unity of silence,” a still harmony, as though it were “the basis for a kind of Pythagorean music of spheres” (Bucknell 119, 79). Interestingly enough, in

Pythagorean terms, the overlapping of the harmonious notes on the stave – represented as birds –

, ‘g’ and ‘d’ correspond to a ‘perfect fifth’ in intervallic tuning frequencies, attributed to

Pythagoras. The lonely ‘f’ notes, once united with the missing ‘b’ on the middle wire, also creates a ‘perfect fifth,’ another element of Pythagorean, Poundian, musical and mathematical harmony of time and space, of the visible and invisible, audible and inaudible. In a sense, an overarching harmony between subject and object exist, in which the object is imbued with agency; the birds on the wire can, after all, compose and recompose themselves, in a natural harmony, without any intervention on behalf of the author. Beyond passivity or impressionism, however, it is up to the observer to construe meaning from the object perceived, or the position and repositioning of the birds.

Returning to Pound’s notion of “Great Bass,” the author, in Guide to Kulchur (1938) explains his theory as:

Down below the lowest note synthesized by the ear and “heard” there are slower vibrations. The ratio between these frequencies and those written to be executed by

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instruments is OBVIOUS in mathematics. The whole question of tempo, and of a main base in all musical structure resides in use of these frequencies. (Pound 73).

Pound’s understanding of harmony in his theory of the Great Bass, an absolute silence that creates space – a space made from time – offers a unique perspective of a hidden four- dimensionality that is the basis of a poetics, a rhythmic force of power in line with vorticism, imagism and fugue. Such a notion, beyond his interest in abolishing time – by uniting on the same plane synchrony and diachrony – or in creating the “timelessness of time,” suggests that a music of writing constitutes, to a certain extent, a vorticist epiphanic moment for Pound, the

‘luminous detail’, a raw, or “first reality” of aesthetic reception (Frye 61; Bucknell 56). This constitutes a true understanding of the image in time and space, despite the reader or listener’s inability to see or hear it, much like the organizational feature of fugue. The apt, capable reader must tap into the “invisible level” in which “the sensorily perceptible has its foundation buried,” in order to capture a glimpse of the luminous detail that is the combination of the image of birds, in this case, with the spatialized time of music, a temporality indebted to the contrapuntal arrangements of Pound’s fugal writing (Bucknell 116).

4.3 Pedale: Joyce and Pound

Fugue acts in a similar manner to Pound’s conception of Great Bass, as an integral backdrop to his understanding of harmony, rhythm, echo, as well as space-time relations.

Analogous to the Great Bass, fugue eclipses itself in a sense, and what remains is its overarching power to evoke, since it becomes its own silence, an organizing technique, a suggestive guiding sensation the reader feels, rather than analyzes or deconstructs. This understanding of a present absence – or Ricoeur’s eikôn – unites fugue’s relationship to Joycean epiphany and to Pound’s luminous detail, as well as both authors’ portrayal of language vis-à-vis music. To revisit

Pound’s contrapuntal breakdown, fugue is both the “repeat in history” on a discursive, formal

200 and self-elusive narrative level – uniting juxtaposed elements and echoes –, as well as the “magic moment,” the visual figure of epiphanic discovery or the perception of the luminous detail. The

“Great Bass,” in a sense, is but part of a whole, a metonymic stand in, characteristic or effect of the larger, all-encompassing fugue.

Both Joyce and Pound invert the relationship between music and language, albeit differently. For Joyce, language – as for the symbolists – needs to be rebuilt somehow, since it has lost its semiotic strength, and no longer signifies poetically, in Jakobsonian terms. Joyce breaks down the referential qualities of language by making music narrator, and fugue both its syntagmatic and paradigmatic forces. For Pound, what matters most is the spatialization of language, making it concrete, while harnessing the imagistic qualities latent in the visual nature of music in poetry. Alongside these inversions, Pound and Joyce employ a melopoetics in order to portray an absent interior or exterior, primarily of the self, but also of the object observed. For both authors, fugue takes into account the stress of the subject in relation to the thing observed, in an attempt to reach its whatness. In terms of aesthetic subjectivity, fugue more specifically and music more generally for Pound, “show that he is straining to bridge the space between inside and outside, between the poetic object and the artist’s interior through the idea of music”

(Bucknell 4). This conception of the self is in line with the search for the luminous detail for

Pound, and a poet’s virtù, an intriguing parallel to Gide’s use of fugue in his portrayal of literary inspiration in the following chapter. What remain similar to both Anglo-modernists is the manner in which fugue functions on a melopoetic, as well as theme/motif basis: whereas simultaneous or contrapuntal phrases or melodies in music rely on difference – since they cannot be made up of the same notes on the same pitch in order to create harmony –, in literature, Joyce and Pound need to add thematic similarities through recurring motifs in order to bring phrases closer together, especially when they are spread throughout several pages. Despite the opposite

201 occurring in musical fugue and literary fugue, these authors realize a similar effect to musical fugue in literary form.

Both authors also employ fugue in order to portray and to question notions of subjectivity, temporality, metempsychosis, points of view (parallax), and the individual’s place within history. Their most telling similarity is that fugue, for both Pound and Joyce, via its fleeting, almost capricious nature, acts as a means to evoke infidelity. Joyce, for example, employs fugue as a technique in “Sirens” to depict the adulterous affair between Molly and

Boylan – without forgetting the many layers of political and personal disloyalty in the episode –, and to pit characters against each other. Pound employs fugue in order to show how “the writer

[i]s a re-reader and misquoter of a vast array of texts,” his manner of interweaving diachrony and synchrony, and questioning an intermediary area, a hiatus in which the reader or observer is forced to make sense of this new, revisionary space.76 Even this intermediate spatial sphere supports a fugal and vorticist rhythm, in which a slight change in translation can unravel, an example of one person changing the way history is viewed. Rabaté evokes this dynamics while he explains the opening poem of The Cantos, and the use of the term “bi-nascita,” which Pound employs while speaking to Marinetti in Canto 72, explained above:

“bi-nascita” in a sense (it is Calypso's phrase in Od. V, 203) happens to be used twice (Od. XI, 60 and 92) in the Nekuia episode which Pound translates in what becomes his first Canto--not translating directly from the Greek original, but using a Latin translation from the 16th Century, in a Latinized Odyssey he found by chance in a bouquiniste off the Paris quays. The repetition is often thought to be an interpolation, and does not appear in Berard's translation for instance. However, Andreas Divus keeps it, perhaps because the Greek text he had to work from said: "digonos" (twice-born, double) instead of "diogenes" (issuing from Zeus, therefore noble). (Ibid.)

Translation from one language to another and from one medium to another implies a particular violence, both a destructive and creative element, essentially a deconstructive transformation.

76 Rabaté, Jean-Michel: “Pound, Joyce and Eco: modernism and the "ideal genetic reader," (Ibid.).

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The intermediary dismantles the binary for both authors, an inhospitable dismantling also of linearity, and arguably of teleology as well: between the old and the new, heaven and hell, body and mind, subject and object, the modern and the mythological. This dynamism is the crux of modernism. Fugue, which seems to endlessly vary one subject throughout time and space, while also uniting diametrically opposed images and ideas into a new concept, also adheres to this energy, and it is not surprising that both Pound and Joyce would employ this musical technique to evoke and portray the dizzying, enchanting and incarcerating feeling experienced in “Sirens” and Purgatory, or the Pisan Detention Centre.

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Chapter 4

Distancing Oneself from the Real: Fugue within Fugues, in Gide’s

Les Faux-monnayeurs and Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia

The modernist interest in music, and particularly in fugue, stretches beyond the confines of Anglo-modernism or French symbolist verse, finding a home in both the meta-poetic and political writings of French and Italian modernism. The focus of this chapter is to explore Gide and Vittorini’s portrayal of the ‘real,’ in which fugue plays a crucial role in the aesthetic representation of reality – and the novelist’s departure from Realism in search of a varied novelistic form – as well as the socio-political and psychological repercussions of being a subject in fascist Europe. For these two authors, the power of fugue lies in its capacity to subvert the real, acting, in Conversazione in Sicilia, as a mnemonic device that, contrary to its thematic polysemy that evokes departure and flight, recalls intersubjective relations, described in a state of confused narration. In Gide’s novel, fugue represents the genetics of poiesis – the essence of the genre of Künstlerroman –, which layers the eventual figures of the artist, and his variants, ultimately acting as a commentary on the modern novel. It should be reminded that Les Faux- monnayeurs’ subtitle is the generic definition of “novel,” a novel written in mise en abyme: a novel within a novel. Interestingly, Vittorini’s work follows a similar logic, in which the protagonist Silvestro’s departure from Milan to return to Sicily is inscribed within the psychoanalytic case of a fugue state – or psychogenic fugue – occurring within the melopoetic fugue of, as the title would suggest, a long contrapuntal conversation.77 This chapter will unpack

77 Given the scope of this dissertation, I will not address the psychoanalytic repercussions associated with the ‘fugue state’ in great detail. However, I do interpret Silvestro’s original departure from Sicily – an extra-diegetic assumption – as a psychogenic fugue, and his return home, is thus an attempt to re-member his past.

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the place of intermediality in Gide and Vittorini’s novels, while paying close attention to a fugal

poetics and a writing en abyme. 1 Gide: A Modernism Between Symbolism and the Nouveau-Roman

Placing Gide within the French literary tradition and larger European canon has proved

somewhat difficult given his own literary commentary, and the evolution of his works and

aesthetics. Nonetheless, as this dissertation seeks to unite symbolism and modernism in retracing

a fugal poetics, Gide represents a pertinent link between symbolism and the nouveau roman.

Alain Goulet explains that Gide first aligns himself with the symbolists, defining himself as “le

romancier qui manque au Symbolisme,” in speaking to his new friend, Paul Valéry: “Mallarmé

pour la poésie, Maeterlinck pour le drame – […] j’ajoute Moi pour le roman” (46). These words

pronounced in 1891 would slowly become an after-thought, however, and in the 1927 preface to

Les Nourritures terrestres, he writes of the necessity to transform literature by returning to a

more concrete or humble form, “à un moment […] où la littérature sentait furieusement le factice

et le renfermé; où il me paraissait urgent de la faire à nouveau toucher terre et poser simplement

sur le sol un pied nu” (Illouz 75-6). He further breaks with the symbolist school, several years

later, when he defines this movement in his Journal des faux-monnayeurs:

L’École symboliste. Le grand grief contre elle, c’est le peu de curiosité qu’elle marqua devant la vie. A la seule exception de Vielé-Griffin, peut-être […] tous furent des pessimistes, des renonçants [sic.], des résignés, las du triste hôpital qu’était pour eux notre patrie (j’entends : la terre) « monotone et imméritée », comme disait Laforgue. La poésie devint pour eux un refuge; la seule échappatoire aux hideuses réalités; on s’y précipitait avec une ferveur désespérée. (Illouz 76)

In Les Faux-monnayeurs, Gide undertakes a shift in dynamics, choosing to push forward rather

than ‘flee backward’ or regress, as the term “refuge” in this excerpt would suggest. Such goals

echo the larger modernist endeavour of creating something new from a harmonious

205 interrelationship between distant past and present. In lieu of escaping the “hideuses réalités,” he addresses them directly, in answering Realist, Naturalist and symbolist conventions of representation head on, and by revolutionizing the form of the novel as a whole.

If the young Gide sought to write a symbolist novel “qui rejette les solutions du Réalisme et du Naturalisme: l’histoire « tranche de vie », les personnages qui font « concurrence à l’état civil », les descriptions conçues comme fac-similés de la réalité,” then the author of Les Faux- monnayeurs was equally reacting to the lack of concreteness of the symbolists (Goulet 47). In creating this novel as a literary fugue, Gide is able to transpose and transform some of the linguistic preoccupations of his symbolist contemporaries into the realm of narration, from verse to prose. In so doing, he places the artist’s relationship to, and struggles with, reality, perspective and (mostly aesthetic) subjectivity. The variations and permutations of plot scenarios – and the contrapuntal arrangement of characters and their potential substitution (paradigmatic) – would deeply influence the artists of the nascent nouveau roman: from Georges Perec and Robbe-

Grillet, to Raymond Queneau (particularly his Exercices de style), and other avant-gardist literary movements or schools, such as the Oulipo, with their particular focus on mathematics and literature. This, I argue, is echoed in so far as, fugue, with its inherently infinite possibilities is similar to mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, as most notably suggested in

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, where the author compares it to “a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”

(Arroyas 53).

1.1 From Pianist to Novelist and In Between

Although Gide’s biography greatly influences his novels, I will limit my discussion of

Gide’s upbringing and personal life to that which specifically illuminates his knowledge of music, and will only briefly draw upon it in relation to the figure of the author, which is arguably

206 the crux of Gide’s fugal narrative. Gide begins to play the piano at age seven, at which point he develops an acute pleasure for Bach and Chopin, among others, but a strong dislike for Wagner.

Similar to Mallarmé and Joyce, Gide’s concerns with Wagner speak to a larger modernist preoccupation with the German composer, whose aesthetic and musical views envisioned a synthesized understanding of drama and opera in his ideal totalizing art form of the

Gesamtkunstwerk. For modernist writers, and Gide is a leading voice on the issue, the synthetic use of intermediality, of an intruding ‘other’ art form in literature, specifically addresses a question of lack, of absence, and therefore, specifically acknowledges the place of the fragment and the impossibility of a united whole or any conception of totality. Les Faux-monnayeurs, in presenting the reader with the figure of a multi faceted writer, for example, and in divulging numerous plot sequences that turn on a common theme, engages with the role of literature within the larger narrative of a fragmented art form – the new novel – as well as within a modern conception of subjectivity and temporality, at a time of aesthetic and political change. Although we are between Wars at the time of publication, the absence of war in Les Faux-monnayeurs is nevertheless telling and therefore participates in a larger discussion on the impossibility of aesthetic forms to achieve totality at a time of such socio-political instability. Wagner’s music was furthermore fraught with political appropriation and ambiguity, adding connotations of ideological identification to the larger narrative of artistic taste.

Some contradiction arises, however, between Gide’s aesthetics and those of Wagner, which muddle the former’s dislike for the latter. Despite criticizing the German composer, Gide, by creating intermedially, is doing something not wholly unlike Wagner, uniting various arts. His criticism seems therefore somewhat out of place, and deserves further interrogation. If

Mallarmé’s disgust for Wagner spawns from the latter’s vision of poetry as subservient to music, this may reflect Gide’s position as a writer as well. Gide could argue for the Poetry of language

207 as inherently musical – more of a philosophical music –, much like Mallarmé did. I would however stress that Gide’s criticism of Wagner is more symptomatic of a larger modernist preoccupation with the question of ‘totality,’ and less one of power relations between diverse artistic forms: for the modernists, the Gesamtkunstwerk is a utopian creation. The destructive aspect of intermediality therefore presents itself here: fugue becomes, in part, parasitic, echoing what we could read in a Derridean discourse on hospitality. It eats away at linear narrative, at the novel’s core fundamentals. It points particularly toward the fragmented, the discontinuous; its narrative features perform an unravelling of events, a crisis of individuality, and even the impossibility of creation. The melopoetics of fugue and its content, in a sense, can be contradictory by nature – in that the fugal form, in music, eventually unites the many facets of the subject, while also naturally demonstrating their scattered division. Gide applies these problematics to the linguistic and literary realm: in its goal of uniting artistic forms, fugal writing addresses what is particularly lacking in at least one of the arts, in this case, literature and, more particularly for Gide, the modern novel.

Gide was a very humble musician, both in his youth and adult years, never accepting to play for others. O’Brien, who supplements the lacunae in Jean-Aubry’s study Gide et la musique, explains that “the young Gide knew several Bach fugues by heart without ever having opened the music. Suddenly, he says, he felt as if he had become able to speak a divine language whose sounds he had previously repeated without understanding” (O’Brien 51). Not only is it a testament of genius that at such a young age, he could play the intricate Bach fugues from memory, but the ability to comprehend the “divine language” of music through the physical engagement with it is also semiotically significant. This transcendent experience – rich in symbolist synaesthesia – suggests the possibility of tapping into an epiphanic or luminous

208 moment, in which the literacy of music transforms the young man into a ‘happy few’ of fugal decipherers, one of few to both intellectually and physically engage with this form.

That Gide would explain the musical experience in linguistic terms is, however, not surprising; if anything, it foreshadows his inclusion of music in his literary works, and even the correlation between a divine and a mundane language, not to mention a potentially anti-

Gesamtkuntswerk notion of privileging the literary realm over the musical, and not the contrary.

Like Joyce, under different circumstances, however, he might have become a musical prodigy.

O’Brien explains that his piano teacher, Marc de La Nux, a friend of Chopin and a pupil of Liszt, wanted to take Gide under his tutelage, against his mother’s will: “Fortunately Mme. Gide,”

O’Brien explains, “decided that her son could do better in life than to interpret the work of others” (51).78 Yet, Gide continues to interpret the work of others, and this interpretation in turn fuels his own creation via intermedial conceptions, in which the sacred or divine nature of music mixes with language’s significative power.

Gide’s musical expertise can therefore be seen to pass into the literary realm, fuelling novel narrative forms and poetics. Six years prior to the publication of Les Faux-monnayeurs,

Gide wrote La Symphonie pastorale, in which Beethoven’s symphony lays the groundwork for a poly-sensorial education that a pastor gives to a blind girl. Through the piano and through

Biblical stories, the young heroine receives the necessary tools to imagine and create her own sense of the visual world that surrounds her. Following an operation that gives the young

Gertrude her sight back, her utopic world violently collides with the reality of the sadness that surrounds her, its incongruities with her Biblical education, and the illusion of the one she loves being thrown into sharp relief. Although music lingers in the background of much of his work,

78 Marc de La Nux represents the “half-pathetic, half-ridiculous character in Les Faux-monnayeurs” (O’Brien 51).

209 the question of music in literature arguably reaches its apex for Gide in and around Les Faux- monnayeurs. By ‘in,’ I understand the melopoetic form of the novel, and by ‘around,’ I suggest

Gide’s own meta-critical thought process that accompanies his work, published as Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs, which Gide wrote and published in order to appease the critics who much too simply reduced his novel to a glorified autofiction.

Following a brief summary of the multiple plot strands in Les Faux-monnayeurs, I will demonstrate that this work performs the potentially infinite variations of one subject – in this case, the perception of the real –, and in so doing, despite the subtitle of Gide’s work as “roman,” untangles traditional understandings of the novel. Fugue manifests itself not only within the contrapuntal arrangement and simultaneous organization of the multiple storylines, but also performs a sense of polyphony through the use of free indirect speech and mise en abyme.

Although Gide’s fugal writing does not evoke four-dimensionality, it does nevertheless relate to other mathematical notions, notably Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and one of the only representational non-Euclidean shapes in space, the Möbius strip.

1.2 The Linearity of Les Faux-monnayeurs

André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs offers an account of multiple adventures and perambulations, its incipit opening the novel with a physical fugue, an escape from home.

Bernard, an aspiring writer, learning that he is his mother’s illegitimate child leaves home and departs on a subsequent adventure with his friend, Olivier, also a young aesthete. Bernard despises his stepfather, Albéric Profitendieu, for his cowardice, and scorns him for never having loved him, despite this man’s relentless love and even preference for the adolescent over his own children. The real (and its corollaries, truth and authenticity) forms, from the opening pages of the novel, a thematic backdrop that unceasingly nurtures the progression of the entire novel, becoming both a refuge – something to fall back on – and a point of departure and flight.

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Escapes, travels and occasional returns confuse a linear plot line in which at least forty characters in many different cities and countries participate. As Fowlie explains, “the scheme of such a novel is almost impossible to outline,” and this, I suggest, accounts for the richness of polyphony in Gide’s work (Ciholas 28).

The central narrative revolves around young high-school students, literary aficionados preparing to pass their baccalaureate, and the eventual contrapuntal paths they take in their aesthetic aspirations. Olivier’s uncle Édouard, is the archetypal novelist in the story that both boys aspire to become. He eventually invites Bernard – despite Olivier’s penchant for his uncle, fraught with ambiguous desire – to travel with him as his secretary and protégé to Switzerland to visit his friend Laura a woman who Vincent (Olivier’s brother) has abandoned, despite the fact that she is preganant with his child. In contrast to this enthusiastic adventure, Olivier is left inconsolably jealous, and ultimately falls prey to the advances of Passavant, a rich dandy – also a writer – with a proclivity for young men. He manipulates Olivier, who eventually realizes his nefarious transformation and contemplates suicide. The greatest contrapuntal arrangement, that I will comment shortly, exists between these two aesthetes. However, many other narrative threads fill Les Faux-monnayeurs: from the piano teacher La Pérouse’s orphaned grandson, Boris, in

Switzerland – and his eventual public suicide –, to Georges (Olivier’s little brother) and his friends’ counterfeit coin creation, and to Bernard’s father, the judge in the case. Indubitably, despite the relative confusion of the narrative plane, Gide sought a certain symmetry to his novel that adheres to a contrapuntal arrangement in three voices – or three interactive themes –, and underlines the distinctions between the real and its illusion.

Generically speaking, the novel – and it is the first of Gides’ works for which he chose the nomenclature ‘novel’ – is an ironic Künstlerroman, a novel which recounts the becoming of young artists and one writer’s inability to write: Édouard represents the impossibility of stylizing

211 reality, since he has not written a single word of his novel, a work entitled Les Faux-monnayeurs and based on a writer’s representation of reality. Although critics, especially early critics who rejected any value in the novel whatsoever, associated Édouard directly with Gide, this association of Gidean alter egos deserves further attention than previously believed, for the

(often ironic) distantiation of the author vis-à-vis his characters is but one layer of Gide’s orchestration that I argue adds polyphony (and verticality) to an already linearly complex novel.

Édouard is attempting to write a novel which, similarly, mirrors events that go on around him, many of which he is not aware of, adding the impression – at times at least – that Édouard is in fact the author of the novel one is reading. This is particularly evident given that as he explains, the title of his novel is Les Faux-monnayeurs and the theme is the representation of reality. Gide echoes this desire when he writes in his journal: “Ce que je veux, c’est présenter d’une partie la réalité, présenter d’autre part cet effort pour la styliser” (Ciholas 88). In the true novel, Les

Faux-monnayeurs, Édouard explains: “J’invente un personnage de romancier, que je pose en figure centrale; et le sujet du livre, si vous voulez, c’est précisément la lutte entre ce que lui offre la réalité et ce que, lui, prétend en faire […] À vrai dire, ce sera là le sujet: la lutte entre les faits proposés par la réalité, et la réalité idéale” (Ciholas 233-4).

What exactly constitutes the ‘real’ for Gide? While his aesthetic goals include working against the tranche de vie, as quoted earlier; the dichotomy between a sense of the real, and a stylized version of it remains ambiguous. I argue that this tension is at the heart of the fugal subject of Les Faux-monnayeurs, a novel that performs the struggle of “modernism’s rejection of the mimetic” (Nicholls 191). Given that at the point of writing this novel, Gide has somewhat detached himself from the symbolist movement, the author’s desire to return to a more concrete form of literature demonstrates his intent to address the question of the representation of reality head on. The real, for Gide, is not any different from the real for the Naturalists and the Realists

212 of the 19th century that he may criticize; however, his struggle – and this differs from Édouard’s, a symptom of the impossibility of representing an ‘ideal reality’ – is that he seeks to erase from the real its plain reality, in favor of the subjective and, in large part, thanks to the ironic mode.

For Gide, the crux of representing the real therefore lies in this ‘ideal’ form or ‘stylized’ reality that is none other than the subjective, transformed and distorted perception of things and self, which I argue fugue performs throughout this entire corpus. Gide’s portrayal of a stylized reality works particularly against notions of the copy and the counterfeit, omnipresent themes in Les

Faux-monnayeurs. For example, his use of fugue, its seemingly infinite viewpoints and ways to perceive reality, its endless combinations and limitless ways to signify, performs an act of endless semiosis (in both Gödel’s – as we shall soon see – and Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms) while conflicting with the “‘great copying’ which has defined the mimetic (or ‘plagiaristic’)” in literature (Nicholls 215). The subjective, stylized or idealized depiction of the real – the latter being an arguably impossible feat – annuls the copy and the counterfeit, making these representations autonomous entities in their own right. Through fugal writing, and in deconstructive fashion, much like Joyce and Pound, Gide breaks down the binary of an external reality – which one attempts to comprehend and apprehend – and the artist’s perception and transformation of it, whether it be through ironic authorial and narrative distantiation or other intermedial aesthetics.

Les Faux-monnayeurs is evidently highly metatextual, to employ Gérard Genette’s nomenclature, the mise en abyme79 accentuating the depth of the narrative, whether metatext be considered the critical response to the novel, or the presence of a novel written within the novel –

79 Gide is reputed to have invented the term mise en abyme in relation to painting. The first account of Gide describing this technique appears in his Journal of 1893, as “une « mise en abîme » ou mise en place au centre d’une œuvre d’une autre version du sujet « à l’échelle des personnages »” (Morrissette 117).

213 a novel pointing to its own fictionality. Another generic element in line with a modernist aesthetic is the omniscient narrator who often breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, or speaks through other characters, parallactically confusing the reader’s multiple viewpoints of characters and events, as well as the reader’s understanding of the voice behind the narration. The narrator acts at times as a character, at times as the guiding voice of the narrative thread and, I would insist, at times as Gide’s own voice overlapping other characters’ voices, particularly in the use of free indirect speech. The final layering of Les Faux-monnayeurs is

Gide’s own commentary on the novel. Whereas Édouard’s aesthetic thoughts – I dare not say writings, since he does not in fact write a single word of his novel – remain internal, within the novel, Gide’s metatextual commentary is a response to harsh critical reviews and to the outright rejection of his narrative, serving to distance himself from his characters: he did so through the publication of the journals that he kept while working towards his novel, Le Journal des faux- monnayeurs. And, if in the novel itself, Édouard also keeps a journal, Gide manages to outperform the novel’s own élan, by stretching it beyond the confines of the single book, thereby perpetuating questions that surround authorial intent and the power of authorship.

1.3 Memorable Fugues

Fugue was undeniably on Gide’s mind while writing Les Faux-monnayeurs, and he transposes his literary goals into his novel through Édouard’s voice: “Ce que je voudrais faire,”

Édouard explains, “comprenez-moi, c’est quelque chose qui serait comme L’Art de la Fugue. Et je ne vois pas pourquoi ce qui fut possible en musique, serait impossible en littérature” (237).

Although I would be wary of the dangers in conflating the ‘real’ author of Les Faux-monnayeurs with the ‘fake’ one, here the character’s ekphrastic aesthetic goals are in harmony with Gide’s own, and there is evidence of this in his journals, as I will demonstrate shortly. Also, having examined Gide’s notes for Les Faux-monnayeurs at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in

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Paris, I can attest to the existence of fascinating passages surrounding ‘fugue’ and music more generally in his work. Despite the abundance of notes in margins, words or complete paragraphs crossed out, Gide leaves almost every single passage in relation to fugue entirely unchanged from the manuscript form to the final publication, thus demonstrating a deliberate interest in fugue, one that needed no editing or revision.

A discussion surrounding fugue also offers a glimpse into Gide’s process of creation and his understanding of characters vis-à-vis himself, while also painting fugue’s relation to memory, whether singular or communal. For example, beyond Édouard’s grand intermedial claim quoted above, a conversation between Bernard and his former piano teacher, La Pérouse – based on

Marc de La Nux – explicitly refers to fugue, and more specifically one’s memory and ability to play them by heart. He asks his former pupil, "Vous me trouvez changé, n'est-ce pas?" to which

Bernard responds:

"J'aurais voulu protester, mais ne trouvais rien à lui dire, péniblement affecté par l'expression harassée de ce visage que j'avais connu si beau. Il continua: "Oui, j'ai beaucoup vieilli ces derniers temps. Je commence à perdre un peu la mémoire. Quand je repasse une fugue de Bach, il me faut recourir au cahier... (129)

A peculiar intersubjective transposition occurs from a biographical point of view, because it is

Gide, we understand, who had learnt the fugues by heart, something that astonished his piano teacher. Although one cannot assume that the piano teacher in question, either de La Nux or La

Pérouse could not also play them by memory, we could speculate from this comment that Gide wrote fragments of himself even into the characters that would not necessarily represent his alter ego. Also, to push the fugue’s association with memory further, it could be that Gide saw mnemonic qualities in fugal style – as does Vittorini –, and that he saw in his new conception of the novel, a form that the reader would engage with differently, an active reader capable of stringing together the varying paradigms, the variations of a theme that unite in one subject. Like

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Joyce, Pound and Mallarmé, Gide sought an ideal, or at least active, reader, as he writes in his

Journal des Faux-monnayeurs:

Je […] laisse au lecteur le soin de l’opération; addition, soustraction, peu importe: j’estime que ce n’est pas à moi de le faire. Tant pis pour le lecteur paresseux: j’en veux d’autres. (85)

For Gide, reading is in part decoding and deciphering, working through a problem even in mathematical terms, a question we will return to later in this chapter. What is most striking here is that fugue aligns itself once again with an author’s understanding of an active or ideal reader, one who can take into account the musicological dimension of modernist narrative forms and of language. Gide’s modernist novel therefore shares a ludic and enigmatic feature of reading both with his modernist contemporaries and his symbolist counterparts who he both embraced and repudiated.

Before understanding why Gide placed fugue within a counterfeit novel, it is important to recognize that Les Faux-monnayeurs’ musico-literariness has received some scholarly attention, most notably by Karin Ciholas, David Keypour, Françoise Escal and Frédérique Arroyas.

Ciholas, whose captivatingly relevant title is Gide’s Art of the Fugue: A Thematic Study of “Les

Faux-monnayeurs,” unfortunately falls quite short of any intermedial commentary, employing the term ‘fugue’ much more metaphorically than any of the authors in this corpus. Her analyses of a thematic unity in Les Faux-monnayeurs based on the notion of ‘authenticity’ is, however, peculiarly telling. I echo Ciholas’ work on numerous occasions due to the detail in her thematic analyses that echo fugue, at times, unbeknownst to her. I also believe she has only acknowledged one half of the thematic and fugal subject – although she only recognizes it truly as thematic –, that authenticity is a subdivision to the larger question of depicting reality. Her occasionally impressionistic likening of theme to fugue – she employs the term counterpoint once in the entire work – deserves to be pushed further, with a particular focus on the dynamics of fugal writing,

216 and the multiple manners in which Gide portrays polyphony and counterpoint. One of the few occurrences of ‘fugue’ in her work – and an extremely relevant one – appears in her comparative linkage of “theme” in literature and in music:

The fascinating quality of the fugue is its capacity to relate themes in a contrapuntal arrangement. It is one of the most rigorous musical forms, because it demands a simultaneous exposition of multiple themes along with purity and an almost mathematical precision. Transposed to literature we might say that Gide accomplishes for the novel what Bach achieved for the fugue. (49)

Keypour, who publishes his work André Gide: écriture et réversibilité dans Les Faux- monnayeurs six years after Ciholas’ study, immediately surpasses the thematic, in order to underline the question of voice and the polyphonic:

La composition du roman se définit avant tout par l’ordonnance des voix qui s’entrecroisent pour proférer les mots que nous lisons. Et si l’on a maintes fois relevé la structure fuguée du roman, on s’est contenté de vérifier dans l’entrelacement visible des thèmes et des récits, ce que Gide lui-même avait clairement annoncé dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs. Or, il y a une fugue plus subtile, une véritable polyphonie des voix qui les énoncent. (17)

Keypour’s remarks justify the study of the oeuvre from a narratological perspective. Françoise

Escal, in her analysis of Gide’s novel in Contrepoints, underlines the effect and importance of linear counterpoint in the novel – and outlines a temporal scheme of the entire novel (175) –, however stating that any contrapuntal verticality is sacrificed: “La littérature,” she explains,

“condamnée à la seule linéarité, ne peut offrir qu’un effet de contrepoint, pas le contrepoint lui- même comme technique de composition qui consiste à superposer des lignes mélodiques” (170).

While at times echoing and at others negating what Keypour and Ciholas have written, as well as adding to the condemned possibility of creating vertical counterpoint (Escal), I wish to demonstrate that fugal writing – both thematically and polyphonically – creates an anti-novel, an unraveling of novelistic forms, and a dynamism for Gide’s irony, all revolving around the portrayal of the real. Also, I wish to determine that on an even larger, interdisciplinary plane,

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Gide’s use of fugue – and particularly of mise en abyme, which many critics have not likened to any fugal poetics – engages with the hard sciences on both a concrete and abstract level. Finally and most importantly, critics have failed to acknowledge that fugue becomes the novel’s quintessential undoing, a necessary breakdown, for only then can it be ‘made new’ – in abiding to Pound’s tenet – or at least rebuilt. 2 Variations on the Figure of the Writer: Writing a Counterfeit Novel

If the above-mentioned critics have questioned the thematic linkage of fugue to the plot in Les Faux-monnayeurs, their choice of pervading subject/theme merits further analysis. For example, for Keypour, ‘illusion’ is the main subject, whereas for Ciholas, it is ‘authenticity’ that connects the fugal web of Gide’s work. Looking at these two options juxtaposed, it is evident that they are both, to a certain degree, right and wrong. I would argue that the crux of distinguishing the subject lies in the fact that fugue is a dialogic form of subject and answer, of opposites – in literature at least – and both Ciholas and Kepour have failed to comprehend that fugue performs a dismantling of binaries by juxtaposing them and contiguously grinding them into a new form, similar to the poetics of Pound. The fugal subject, in a deconstructive sense, holds the power to its own dismantling and destruction. Therefore, ‘authenticity’ exists in perfect contradistinction to the false or the counterfeit; ‘illusion,’ in antithesis to fact, reality, truth. The implication of ‘illusion,’ however, is slippery in terms of its binaries, given its proximity to the imaginary. Nonetheless, I would argue that these terms represent two sides of the same

(counterfeited) coin, and that they all essentially act as secondary themes – picking up and linking motifs as they gain strength and size throughout the novel – to the fundamental subject that is the ‘real,’ a subject inevitably linked with its counterparts – of illusion, the imaginary, the false and the copy –, with which it disputably becomes one.

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I’ve already demonstrated in chapter 1, with the example of Albéric Profitendieu’s ailments (see Chapter 1; 2.1) how a motif enters, even with something as small as character development, only to be taken up on a different pitch – in this case, in a different character or context –, creating a connection between various motifs and one theme or subject. This creates a sense of counterpoint that unites linearly throughout the novel, while also creating a sense of simultaneity: for example, the untrustworthy nature of Profitendieu and his phantom pains are transposed into the realm of the inauthentic coins, and spread into the illusory, adulterous, often concurrent, and false relationships among characters.80 In literature, a different voice can therefore act as such an equivalence in transposing a melody onto a different pitch, such as

Bernard learning that Profitendieu is not his father: Bernard, as a different character from

Georges the counterfeiter embodies a different “pitch,” when he learns of another motif of forgery or imitation, his father’s identity. Many other similar motifs recur and intermingle with themselves and with contrapuntal motifs, often their direct opposite. This fugal orchestration not only abides by what Édouard writes in Les Faux-monnayeurs – his desire to write a literary fugue –, but it also echoes the notes that Gide jotted down in his journal, which stand in specular relation, meta-textually, to Édouard’s own journal: “Celles [les idées], principalement, exprimées dans le journal d’Édouard; il serait bon de les faire reparaître dans la seconde partie. Il serait dès lors d’autant plus étonnant de les revoir après les avoir perdues de vue quelque temps, comme un premier motif, dans certaines fugues de Bach” (Keypour 177). The motifs find their similarities only once the reader comprehends the paradigm to which they belong: in this case, that of the real and its aesthetic portrayal. In lieu of echoing critics’ discussion on counterpoint and polyphony in Les Faux-monnayeurs, I wish to depict the specific fugal representation of the

80 For a temporal breakdown of each character’s whereabouts at specific moments in time, see Escal: 175.

219 writer, and the various pitches such a figure can embody – from Bernard and Olivier, to Édouard and Passavant. After all, the writer needs to be the most prominent figure in an ironic

Künstlerroman, and Gide’s misleading narrative is what binds these personae, this plurivocity, into one.

2.1 Epistolary Counterpoint

Similar to the symbolists’ preoccupations with a subjectivity that is both internal and external, Gide’s depiction of aesthetic subjectivity encapsulates notions of the real, of truth and sincerity. I will demonstrate that Olivier and Bernard together create a total aesthete, and that their evolution throughout the novel – both a Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman in this case – is an interdependent one. Olivier, consumed by his jealousy, becomes an untrustworthy character, particularly in his epistolary exchange with Bernard. It should be remembered, however, that

Bernard is not any more trustworthy than his high-school counterpart, since early in the novel, he steals uncle Édouard’s suitcase, and reads his journal, an act that, ironically, leads Édouard to invite him on his trip as his secretary. This also paints a negative portrait of Édouard’s judgment, both from a practical standpoint and an aesthetically creative one. Although it may seem that

Bernard and Olivier are in harmony due to their inauthenticity and cunning actions, in musical and literary terms, there are significant differences.

While in music a subject and countersubject – the melody which is simultaneous to the subject – must occur on a different pitch, here the understanding of pitch as character in literature also depends on harmony. Similar to the observations we have made regarding Pound and Joyce

(in chapter 3), where difference in literature creates the same effect as similarity in music,81 here

81 I explained, in both chapters 1 and 3 that in music, the melody occurring on different pitches are similar; it is the repetition of a similar phrase – despite being on different notes – that the listener recognizes as recurring. In

220 the two characters can only be trustworthy and untrustworthy at different times in order to create harmony and counterpoint. Otherwise, in lieu of polyphony, we would experience a sense of monophony, where the complementary characters of Bernard and Olivier fuse into one. They can therefore never coincide in their similarities, in order to uphold a certain synchronized harmony

(or different pitches), diametrically opposed and balancing entities. This dynamics also echoes the capricious nature of the characters within the novel, as well as the larger modernist understanding of subjectivity as in constant flux. Olivier writes:

Que cette question de la sincérité est irritante! Sincérité! Quand j’en parle, je ne songe qu’à sa sincérité à elle [Laura]. Si je me retourne vers moi, je cesse de comprendre ce que ce mot veut dire. Je ne suis jamais que ce que je crois que je suis – et cela varie sans cesse, de sorte que souvent, si je n’étais là pour les accointer, mon être du matin ne reconnaîtrait pas celui du soir. (Gide 89)

Beyond the evolution of modern subjectivity that shifts even within the quotidian, Olivier’s statement is rich in terms of a hermeneutics of alterity, as well as a meta-critical commentary on one’s own fictionality. Olivier is conscious of his own agency in acquainting – of coming ‘to know’ and gain knowledge of, as the term’s etymology suggests – his own seemingly schizophrenic self. He, as the authority on his own self, puts his multiple selves into order

(acquaints them), and yet can only truly comprehend sincerity in specular relation to Laura, a refracted sincerity that he does not accept within himself. Therefore, he performs his own fictionality as a character, and yet seems to also hold the strings as the puppeteer; however, as we will soon discuss the vertical polyphony of authorial voice, one could ask: is the “je” in “si je n’étais là pour les accointer” in fact Olivier, or is this a paradigmatic intrusion of the narrative

literature, however, in order to create a sense of counterpoint, it is often an antithetical binary that creates a sense of polyphonic opposition. Even the distribution of various motifs – often of different nature – united in one theme operates according to a similar logic.

221 and/or author’s voice? What is undeniable is that it is not the same ‘je’ as the morning or evening

‘je.’ This division between the “cogito” self and the “fictional” self, between the real and the stylized, underlines Olivier’s lack of sincerity and his contrapuntal evolution throughout the novel.

Nowhere is the contrapuntal relationship between Bernard and Olivier – a fusion of two corresponding figures – more explicit than in their epistolary correspondence which takes place during their travels. I will comment on the contrapuntal arrangement of these letters as a narrative in their own sense, one that, once combined, creates a dialogue between the two characters, which, in a Poundian sense, ‘chime’ and ‘echo,’ recalling the other despite the numerous pages that separate them in the plot sequence. Keypour, in a larger metaphorical description of the novel as orchestra or symphony, explains: “La polyphonie du roman est assurée non seulement par le concours des personnages à la narration comme dans un roman par lettres, mais aussi par l’orchestration d’instruments divers. Sur ce fond harmonique, ces deux lettres se détachent comme deux soli, comme un dialogue à distance” (59). Keypour’s description of the backdrop of the novel as a “fond harmonique” is an adequate metaphor; however, I would argue that the epistolary breakdown that I will comment shortly can be read in two ways: the first is in a fugal subject/response, in which each of Olivier and Bernard’s sentences within their letters are both melodies on different pitches. This would correspond to

Keypour’s description of both letters as “soli,” given they do occur on their own. The second reading, however, I would dispute, despite the linear break and shift in temporality, is to examine the letters less as subject and response, and more as subject and countersubject, as though the letters were occurring simultaneously, in palimpsest form. In the latter case, the two phrases would occur harmoniously and not autonomously, but interdependently. This tension of harmony and disjointedness, beyond the epistolary and fugal form, exists within the content of the letter

222 too. For example, some information is identical in Olivier and Bernard’s letters; yet, sometimes, the information is antithetically opposed. I have chosen to transcribe, echoing Keypour, the fragmented breakdown of several sentences in each letter, in lieu of rewriting each letter in its entirety:

Bernard : Cher vieux, Que je te dise d’abord que j’ai séché le bachot.

Olivier : Cher vieux, Que je te dise d’abord que j’ai bien passé mon bachot.

Bernard : Une occasion unique s’est offerte à moi de partir en voyage.

Olivier : Une occasion unique s’offrait à moi de partir en voyage.

Bernard : J’ai sauté dessus ; et je ne m’en repens pas.

Olivier : Je balançais encore ; mais après lecture de ta lettre, j’ai sauté dessus.

Bernard : Je suis chargé de t’exprimer tous les regrets de mon compagnon de voyage d’être parti sans te revoir.

Olivier. P.-S. (sous une épaisse rature) Dis à l’oncle E … que je pense à lui constamment ; que je ne puis pas lui pardonner de m’avoir plaqué et que j’en garde au cœur une blessure mortelle.

Bernard : Certains jours je te souhaite éperdument.

Olivier : Je serais désolé que ton nom ne brillât pas à côté du mien, dans le premier sommaire. (Kepour 60-62)

The reciprocity and similarities in this distant epistolary dialogue are undeniable. The rhythm between the two is mostly of cause and effect, evidently more subject-response than subject- countersubject. However, the notion of countersubject manifests itself in the fact that both characters are travelling at the exact same time and their actions are occurring simultaneously, which creates a particular spatial plane, in which the reader can superimpose both experiences.

Both Olivier and Bernard are offered chances to travel: this is possibly happening at the same time, yet there is no negation between the two phrases. For the two actions to occur simultaneously, harmony would need to prevail, and the thematic antithetical relevancies are

223 necessary in literature to evoke this kind of harmony. The choice to depart here is, for Olivier, dependent upon Bernard’s acceptance. This overlapping of the young aesthetes depicts the eventual paths an artist can take, one, unfortunately that will not lead to the desired end result of being an artist; after all, one is following an author who has yet to write a single word in his Les

Faux-monnayeurs, and the other is under the tutelage of a pederast, who publishes literary journals and lures young boys more for his own pleasure and less for the didactic apprenticeship he can offer them.

Keypour suggests that the characters develop throughout the letter, much to their ignorance, portraying unconscious elements of themselves to the reader: “En même temps, l’auteur de la lettre concourt inconsciemment à dévoiler le portrait d’un autre personnage que le lecteur connaît par ailleurs. D’où un jeu complexe de simulation et de dissimulation, un quiproquo incessant entre le réel et l’illusoire où l’auteur, bien qu’absent en principe, se masque et se démasque pourtant, dans l’ironie secrète ou évidente qui imprègne l’écriture des personnages à leur insu” (64). For example, Olivier’s response is a dissimulation of his jealousy.

However, what Keypour demonstrates is that someone else is always controlling the narrative voice, despite the characters’ attempt to break free from the chains of their narrator or author.

Counterpoint, through the example of this letter, but also through the abundance of motif/theme development in the novel, is crucial to character development, and character development, in turn, is crucial to a fugal plot development; fugue essentially occurs at every level of narrative for Gide, from a micro- to a more macrostructure. Following this linear example of counterpoint, it is necessary to address Keypour’s suggestion above, that a polyphonic layering which manifests itself through the voice of the characters is fundamental to Gide’s fugal dismantling of the novel. Through the use of free indirect speech and the internal refraction of mise en abyme,

224 we will shift from a horizontal contrapuntal representation of writers – the two young boys – to the creative authority that the reader witnesses in real time, unravelling as it occurs.

2.2 Vertical Counterpoint I: Free Indirect Speech

Free indirect speech, as outlined in chapter 1, is another method in which Gide constructs the semblance of a fugal form in literature, more specifically its fundamental component of polyphony. Such a form of narration or of transvocalisation as Genette coins the term – which also calls to mind the potential ventriloquism of any author – combines third person narrative – the narrative, extradiegetic voice – with occasional first person narrative. In

Gide’s case, its use underlines the notion that one’s voice is never fully one’s own, given that language is never truly singular, a very Bakhtinian notion against which Mallarmé was working.

Such a form allows for another person’s voice to overlap with and even infiltrate another character’s parasitically, whether the overlapping voice is that of the narrator or even that of the author. Keypour, on this topic, explains: “le style indirect libre laisse transparaître à la fois le point de vue du personnage et celui du narrateur sur le personnage; d’où le plus souvent la présence d’un ton ironique” (249). The ironic tone abides by the same rules as the paradigmatic contrapuntal irony present in Joyce and in Frye’s writing, not only furthering the distance between the speaker and the author or narrator, but exaggerating furthermore the dichotomy between fiction and reality, as well as the characters’ ineffectiveness to escape their (often tragic) universe. Free indirect speech therefore creates a sense of hypermediacy, in which the famous

Coleridgean tenet of a reader’s suspension of disbelief is overturned, and in its place, the reader becomes conscious of the synthesized reality at hand. I would argue that in fugal poetics, polyphony and parallactic points of view – diverting as they may be – occurring simultaneously through the layering of voices, are offered by free indirect speech. The narrative form, along with metalepsis – which, according to Pierre Fontanier allows “l’auteur de s’immiscer dans l’univers

225 de sa fiction”82 and which Genette defines as “le passage [transgressif| d’un niveau narratif à un autre” (243) – also creates a sense of counterpoint between framed worlds, in which the diegetic, extradiegetic and metadiegetic all bleed into each other.

This process, similar to the ambiguous “je” in the passage quoted above on Olivier’s schizophrenic personality, inevitably points towards the fictionality of the novel. The characters become pawns, attempting to enact a certain agency, but are condemned to echo someone else’s thoughts and ideas along with their own. Free indirect speech points therefore towards its own medium, making the reader ever more conscious of the relationship between characters in a novel – that we almost believe are conscious that they are in a novel – and the narrator or author guiding them or pulling their strings. A work that self-admittedly acknowledges its own artifice, and furthermore includes the reader in the process of creation corresponds to Barthes’ notion of the “texte scriptible” (“writerly text”). Such a text works against the “texte lisible” (“readerly text”), in which the reader is a receiver of information, taking the text as a representation of reality, which is opposed to a meta-fictional illusion of reality, or a glimpse into the genetics of the text. In portraying the novel’s inner workings, and in destroying the notion of authority behind it, Gide’s writerly text opens to infinite possibilities as a ‘plural text,’ whose meaning is never fixed, a text capable of spiralling into infinite semiosis, since “Interpréter un texte, ce n’est pas lui donner un sens (plus ou moins fondé, plus ou moins libre), c’est au contraire apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait” (Barthes 11). For Barthes, the goal of this particular form is the following:

“l’enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c’est de faire du lecteur, non plus un consommateur, mais un producteur du texte” (10). The reader is truly an active reader, on a similar playing field with the author:

82 Louis-Paul Willis, “Vers un ‘Nouveau Hollywood’? Considérations sur la métalepse dans le cinema populaire contemporain.” Web. July 9, 2013.

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De plus, son modèle étant productif (et non plus représentatif), il abolit toute critique, qui, produite, se confondrait avec lui […] Le texte scriptible est un présent perpétuel, sur lequel ne peut se poser aucune parole conséquente (qui le transformerait, fatalement, en passé) ; le texte scriptible, c’est nous en train d’écrire, avant que le jeu infini du monde (le monde comme jeu) ne soit traversé, coupé, arrêté. (11)

If we, as readers, experience the text as being written while we are reading – as suggested in the interpretation that Édouard is the author of the text we are reading, his blank pages actually reflecting the process of a text’s ‘writability’ – then Gide’s ironic Künstlerroman pushes the boundaries of aesthetic creation and a subjective portrayal or stylized representation of reality even further than once believed.

Through a peculiar verticality that links author, narrator and characters, Gide stages a dismantling of the novel, conceiving, in Barthesian terms, new ways of “writing” and “reading” text, and particularly the novel. Although free indirect speech, a narratological vertical device, is not purely fugal, it evidently creates literature’s most specific example of vertical polyphony and, more importantly, vertical counterpoint between authors within a novel and the author, and reader, outside of it. It is even more fascinating that Gide manages, through the use of a musical medium inserted into literature, to further expose the inner-workings of the novel, its genetics, its fragments and eventual deconstruction.

If Gide’s characters already speak on their own, creating new stories and paths for themselves without the need for a narrative voice, creating an “allure discursive du récit,” it was not without any doubt on behalf of the author (Ciholas 23). In his Journal des Faux-monnayeurs,

Gide states: “Peut-être est-ce folie de vouloir éviter à tout prix le simple récit impersonnel” (22).

In order to bridge the gap between personal and impersonal, the author reverts in part to what criticism has described as his “lamp effect,” whereby the narrator spreads light on particular characters that surround him, each becoming the protagonist of a particular microcosm in Les

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Faux-monnayeurs. In a conversation with Martin du Gard, to whom Gide dedicates the novel, he explains his own method of parallax and viewpoints:

Pour mieux se faire comprendre, il a pris une feuille blanche, y a tracé une ligne horizontale, toute droite. Puis, saisissant ma lampe de poche, il a promené lentement le point lumineux d’un bout à l’autre de la ligne : « Voilà votre Barois, voilà votre Thibault… Vous imaginez la biographie d’un personnage, ou l’historique d’une famille, et vous projetez là-dessus votre lumière, honnêtement, année par année … Moi, voilà comment je veux composer mes Faux-Monnayeurs… » Il retourne la feuille, y dessine un grand demi- cercle, pose la lampe au milieu et, la faisant virer sur place, il promène le rayon tout au long de la courbe, en maintenant la lampe au point central : « Comprenez-vous, cher ? Ce sont deux esthétiques. Vous, vous exposez les faits en historiographe, dans leur succession chronologique. C’est comme un panorama, qui se déroule devant le lecteur. Vous ne racontez jamais un événement passé à travers un événement présent. (Ciholas 22)

This conversation is rich on numerous levels, the most appropriate to our discussion here being the narratological aspects and the importance of avoiding linearly chronological accounts of characters’ actions. Gide’s half-circle creates a spatio-temporal panorama – the character’s reality and life hitherto experienced – with which s/he can relate via flash-backs, in which the true light of the author’s lamp flashes and homes in on specific moments in time, all in relation to the present. Even more interesting is Gide’s choice of the half-circle, instead of the whole circle, as a periphery created by the lamp’s shadow. One could ask: why not draw the entire circle? Could it be that the other side of the geometrical figure is reserved to the character’s counterpart? Or, more importantly, could it be that the geometrical shape in Gide’s mind is not in fact the circle, but, as we will unveil shortly, the three-dimensional shape of the Möbius strip?

What is certain in Gide’s commentary above is that he was intentionally subverting the linearity of narrative, and the most precise way of uniting various spatial contexts in time is through the vertical and polyphonic use of free indirect speech, which forces a literal and virtual palimpsest of voices. Although Bakhtin argues that polyphony exists thanks to the multiple autonomous voices within a narrative and without the intervention of the narrator, I am considering a slightly varied definition from Bakhtin’s, given that he only explains the

228 interaction of linear, horizontal voices. By taking into account the narrative voice’s incursion within other characters’, Gide creates a vertical layering of voices as well as a horizontal one.

2.3 Uniting the Horizontal and the Vertical

Before looking at the polyphonic function of the narrator, it is important to understand his role in exposing simultaneous narrative threads and the reader’s trust or lack thereof in him. His ambiguous, omniscient and pervading qualities are fundamental to his contextual and mental intrusion in the scenes he describes, and into characters’ minds. The invasion of the narrator’s voice acts as a go-between, often interacting with the reader in the manner of a theatrical choir: offering a description of a given character’s point of view with the ironic distance of the authorial voice. This reciprocity between narrator and active reader, together with the aforementioned metafictional qualities of Les Faux-monnayeurs accounts for the palpitating thickness of the text, which expands, weaves and unravels beneath the reader’s eyes, a text in perpetual semiosis and renewal. Such a thickness – both progressively horizontal and vertical – is reminiscent of Barthes’ conception of the “braid” in S/Z. He writes:

Le texte, pendant qu’il se fait, est semblable à une dentelle de Valenciennes qui naîtrait devant nous sous les doigts de la dentellière : chaque séquence engagée pend comme le fuseau provisoirement inactif qui attend pendant que son voisin travaille ; puis, quand son tour vient, la main reprend le fil, le ramène sur le tambour ; et au fur et à mesure que le dessin se remplit, chaque fil marque son avance par une épingle qui le retient et que l’on déplace peu à peu : occupés puis dépassés en vue d’un investissement progressif du sens. Ce procès est valable pour tout le texte. L’ensemble des codes, dès lors qu’ils sont pris dans le travail, dans la marche de la lecture, constitue une tresse (texte, tissu et tresse, c’est la même chose) ; chaque fil, chaque code est une voix ; ces voix tressées – la voix ne travaille pas, ne transforme rien : elle exprime ; mais dès que la main intervient pour rassembler et entremêler les fils inertes, il y a travail, il y a transformation. (Barthes 165-6)

The active reader of Les Faux-monnayeurs participates in the dynamism of the active and

“inactive bobbin,” the process of assembling the very codes that, in the breadth of this novel, unite an abounding and inexhaustible plethora of meaning. Such is the nature of the “writerly text.” The narrator, whose voice “works” and “transforms” the text by actively engaging with the

229 inert strands of the braid, speaks both within the diegetic and directly to the extra-literary realm, and is thus capable of interlacing the simultaneous threads of narrative that the reader witnesses.

Keypour interprets a passage from Les Faux-monnayeurs, which demonstrates this impetus, as follows:

Tout se passe comme si le narrateur, après avoir introduit le récit, se retirait pour laisser la parole aux agents mêmes de l’intrigue, et n’intervenait que pour enchaîner, pour lier les scènes qui se déroulent parfois même parallèlement. Or, pour nous faire assister à ces scènes parallèles, le narrateur ne manque pas de se doter du don d’ubiquité :

C’est l’heure où, dans une triste chambre d’hôtel, Laura, sa maîtresse d’hier, après avoir longtemps pleuré, longtemps gémi, va s’endormir. Sur le pont du navire qui le ramène en France, Edouard, à la première clarté de l’aube, relit la lettre qu’il a reçue d’elle, lettre plaintive et où elle appelle au secours. Déjà, la douce rive de son pays natal est en vue, mais, à travers la brume, il faut un œil exercé pour la voir. Pas un nuage au ciel où le regard de Dieu va sourire. La paupière de l’horizon rougissant déjà se soulève. Comme il va faire chaud dans Paris ! Il est temps de retrouver Bernard. Voici que dans le lit d’Olivier il s’éveille. (129)

Although I disagree with Keypour’s statement that the narrator leaves the characters alone to develop the plot – a very Bakhtinian sense of polyphony –, the narrator’s role in actively representing simultaneity is unquestionable. What Keypour does not acknowledge, and this has repercussions when we speak of a fugal poetics, is the way in which simultaneity is created; the narrator does not simply jump from one scene to another abruptly, as it may seem at a first glance. It is once again through the use of thematic and poetic language that the narrator unites different temporal spheres, creating a thematic linkage, as well as one that unites a multitude of characters scattered along hundreds of pages. With such an interweaving and unraveling of narrative threads, it is not surprising that Hofstadter, in his interdisciplinary study, Gödel,

Escher, Bach, would liken the fugue to a braid. This particular example plays with the notion of awakening, juxtaposing the horizon’s red eyelids (“paupière de l’horizon rougissant”) with

Bernard’s red eyes while he awakens in Olivier’s bed. Juxtaposition slowly fuses into contiguity

230 within the two spatial frames, and Gide eloquently links, in a similar fashion to his fugal writing, one character and his or her actions with another’s.

Once again, the idea that the narrator leaves the scene and that characters autonomously speak and act on their own is questionable. Criticism has not been kind to the protagonist

Édouard and consequently to Gide, as exemplified below, believing he simply represents the author’s alter ego and incarnates Gide’s own theoretical beliefs. I believe that more than

Édouard, it is the narrator who carries Gide’s voice throughout, a voice that stands in contradistinction to his novelist-protagonist’s, since the latter is incapable of creating the novel

Gide has written. In his Journal, Gide exposes the harsh reaction from criticism and brings to light the effect of trying to reconcile the real and the ideal for Édouard: nothingness. “Je n’ai jamais rien pu inventer,” writes Gide. “C’est par une telle phrase du Journal d’Édouard que je pensais le mieux me séparer d’Édouard, le distinguer… Et c’est de cette phrase au contraire que l’on se sert pour prouver que, “incapable d’invention,” c’est moi que j’ai peint dans Édouard et que je ne suis pas romancier” (31). I will return to the specularity between Gide and his novelist struck with writer’s block; however, it is first essential to understand the narrator’s wandering eyes and voice that, not unlike metempsychosis, seem to possess many a character within the novel.

For an example of free indirect speech where the third person narrative is overtaken by the often devious intervention of a first person narrative, I will quickly return to the description of Profitendieu and his ailments described in chapter 1:

Monsieur Profitendieu gagna, en chancelant, un fauteuil. Il eût voulu réfléchir, mais les idées tourbillonnaient dans sa tête. De plus, il ressentait un petit pincement au côté droit, là, sous les côtes ; il n’y couperait pas : c’était la crise de foie. (25)

Although the narration is in the past tense within this passage, a mixing of temporalities prompts multiple viewpoints. According to Keypour, the adverb “là” (there) belongs to the present tense.

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He writes, “[l]a scène même n’est plus narrée, elle vient de basculer dans le visuel” (131). The indication “there, under his ribs” is a sentence that could technically belong either to Profitendieu or the narrator; this “suspension of words” between different temporalities, as Keypour explains them, is fundamental to the notion of free indirect speech (131). Later in the same paragraph, this narrative technique exposes its ability to enter the consciousness of an individual, almost in the manner of stream of consciousness. The linear progression of Profitendieu’s thoughts are governed by metonymy: “Y avait-il seulement de l’eau de Vichy à la maison? Si au moins son

épouse était rentrée! Comment allait-il l’avertir de la fuite de Bernard?” (25). One must remember that the reader has just learned that Profitendieu, having just finished reading

Bernard’s letter which acknowledges the recent discovery of his true father, is described as having “les idées [qui] tourbillonnaient confusément dans sa tête” (24). The idea of confusion is transcribed through the rhetorical use of metonymy (and in vorticist language:

“tourbillonnaient”), linearly relating thoughts that seem irreconcilable at first: Vichy water; if only his wife were home; Bernard’s escape (and how to tell his wife about it). The indirect speech makes these words as belonging ambiguously to both the narrator and the character at the same time, additionally providing the reader with a glimpse of Profitendieu’s inner psychology.

The only logical link between these thoughts, I believe, lies in the polysemy of the word “fuite,” which means both a “leak” (in regards to water) and an escape or fugue, in regards to Bernard, and more generally to the fugal form of this literary work. The paranomastic use of “fuite” lends irony to the situation, from the author’s perspective and allows the reader to get a glimpse of his psyche. Bakhtin explains: “all transcription systems – including the speaking voice in a living utterance – are inadequate to the multiplicity of the meanings they seeks to convey. My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plenitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am unaware” (Bakhtin XX). This is a problem of

232 polyphony, according to Bakhtin, and even dialogism – the presence of two voices in one utterance –, to which we need not forget to add authorial intent. The characters in the novel do not realize the irony of the situation in which they find themselves; however, the narrator greatly emphasizes this, by shifting the temporality to the present – in the example of Profitendieu’s ailments – and pointing right at it, as well as connecting the interior monologue’s seemingly disjointed thoughts into a comprehensive whole.

The use of free indirect speech is a polyphonic orchestration, one which heavily relies on music, a medium that Bakhtin believed could shift the novel – “the encyclopedia of the life of the era” as he defined it – from seeing, to hearing, since “the novel is the maximally complete register of all social voices of the era,” and one where the authorial voice does not subvert the voices of his characters (Bakhtin 431). That this notion need be re-examined is evident especially in light of Gide’s narratological experiments in so far as the authorial voice – manifested here through the narrator – actively participates in the novel as polyphonic scaffolding.

2.4 Vertical Counterpoint II: Édouard’s Metanarrative

Well beyond character development, the notion of authenticity and the struggle between the real and ideal, or the copy and the original reaches its apex in the metanarrative of Édouard’s desire to write Les Faux-monnayeurs and the aesthetic ideals that he iterates. This frame or box narrative creates an authorial nexus within the novel, both among characters and between Gide and Édouard as authors. Moreover, it is fundamental to the reader’s interpretation of the subtitle to Les Faux-monnayeurs: “roman.” As stated above, Édouard’s claim to aesthesis is to discover what is at stake between one’s perception of reality and an ideal, stylized reality: “la lutte entre les faits proposés par la réalité, et la réalité idéale” (234). How does one represent reality?

Although for Gide, the answer is arguably infinite – fugue representing the variations possible on that one subject –, for Édouard, this is at the heart of his incapability of writing. This fact alone

233 separates him completely from his author, something early critics failed to understand. In his

Journal, Gide writes: “Le roman doit prouver à présent qu’il peut être autre chose qu’un miroir promené le long du chemin – qu’il peut être supérieur et à priori – c’est-à-dire déduit, c’est-à- dire composé, c’est-à-dire oeuvre d’art” (Ciholas 32). Édouard in the novel antithetically remarks: “C’est le miroir qu’avec moi je promène. Rien de ce qui m’advient ne prend pour moi d’existence réelle, tant que je ne l’y vois pas reflété” (32). Gide, in his Journal, traces the indecisive contours of his character, forcing him to constantly wrestle with the blank page, which, similar to Mallarmé’s blank pages, is rich with a potential he can, unfortunately, never fully grasp: “Chaque fois qu’Édouard est appelé à exposer le plan de son roman, il en parle d’une manière différente. Somme toute, il bluffe; il craint, au fond, de ne pouvoir jamais en sortir”

(Gide 54). Édouard’s goals and aspirations follow a fugal dynamic of endless possibilities.

However, for the first time in this corpus perhaps, fugue takes on a negative and even detrimental role in relation to aesthetic creation: fleeting and capricious, the words are never written down, the idea is always – similar to water for Tantalus – just out of reach, inspiration too far away.

The terms Gide uses in his journal to describe Édouard – “de ne pouvoir jamais en sortir” – are reminiscent of imprisonment; he is trapped in a world of endless possibilities for which he has no control, a larger existential commentary on the individual’s agency in the world.

In accordance with these observations, Édouard – not to mention Vittorini’s protagonist as well – fits the quixotic role necessary for the “antiroman,” according to Genette: “La folie, ou plus précisément le délire, est évidemment le principal opérateur du type d’hypertextualité propre à l’antiroman: un héros à l’esprit fragile et incapable de percevoir la différence entre fiction et réalité prend pour réel (et actuel) l’univers de la fiction, se prend pour l’un de ses personnages, et « interprète » en ce sens le monde qui l’entoure” (206). In an elaborate reversal of this equation, the hypertextuality – with Gide’s journals, for example – depends upon the

234 reader’s understanding of Édouard (and his goals) alongside Gide. Édouard does not believe he is a character in a book he is reading; he is, however, the protagonist of the unwritten book he keeps attempting to write: his life constitutes the backdrop for the ideal reality he wishes to convey. He does, however, interpret the world that surrounds him, in an attempt to stylize what for the reader is fiction, but what for him is reality. He therefore tries to stylize fiction, almost decadently, to make it more real than his reality, ignorant to the fact that the dynamics of the novel he is writing and the one he is in are incompatible: Gide’s novel is centripetal, whereas

Édouard’s is centrifugal. The mirrored relationship – so important to Édouard’s aesthetic conception – is between Édouard and his creator, not between himself and his creation.

Unfortunately for him, his lack of artistic and existential agency not only underline the pre- destined failure of his Les Faux-monnayeurs, but also the unraveling of Les Faux-monnayeurs of which he is a fundamental part.

These endless possibilities, in which the subject becomes more of a controlled object, recalls a sense of parallax – as seen in Joyce – as well as Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.

The fugue as a formal technique for Gide operates in accordance with an impossible desire to represent totality – a complete picture of the real more specifically – and this, from various points of view, exposing every angle or focal point of an object by first introducing it and then offering its variation, for example, from another angle, moment in time, or from another set of eyes. Ciholas writes of the interrelationship of characters as follows: “First, they express the existential tenet that we are the sum total of our acts and that even the most innocent incident of our lives contributes to the total picture. Hence, all our acts are interrelated, not only on an individual basis, but also collectively as each affects the entire human race” (235). Édouard’s aesthetics navigate around this concept, that of a totality and the world he seeks to represent aesthetically: “et toute oeuvre d’art n’est que la somme ou le produit des solutions d’une quantité

235 de menues difficultés successives (235). Since he is an elementary part of the novel he is writing

– one trapped within a possible world of the novel Gide is writing and of which he is a leading character – Édouard represents the great artificer also endowed with mathematical prowess, one in need of finding the proper solutions, equations and sums that make up the whole of his work of art, of his conception of reality, even though Gide is in fact demonstrating the impossibility of such a totality or reality.

Although Gide’s engagement with fugue unites spatio-temporal boundaries and breaks down internal and framed narratives, it does not represent a formal fourth-dimension as other authors in this corpus do. Nonetheless, it seems to engage, as the quotation above suggests, with mathematics, both arithmetic and geometry. Gödel’s incompleteness theory evokes, on its most simple level, the potential infinity of the fugal form in both music and literature: Édouard is stuck in the impossibility of creation, the perpetual blank page that never reflects his ideals, or the ideas he shares with others in conversation. On the contrary, Gide’s fugal counterfeited novel offers many diverse perspectives regarding the treatment of the ‘real’ and of subjectivity throughout Les Faux-monnayeurs. Gide and Édouard as authors of the ‘same’ novel are therefore also two sides of the same coin, as they essentially signify the same thing: the breakdown of traditional meaning through language and words. Form, for the time being, takes on the rhythmic significance that words lose, offering a guiding frame for the comprehension of the creation of meaning.

Matthew Frank elucidates, in linguistic parallels, Gödel’s rather obscure axiomatic mathematical theory as follows:

The implications of the theorem, mathematically, are that no set or subset of numerical formulas can consistently be used in order to prove the validity of an “answer,” and its relationship to other “answers.” Linguistically, this means that no set of words, no matter how logically applied, will survive the ages with meaning intact. Dog will eventually fail to refer to that sharp-toothed beast with the sweeping tail. Bloat, the canine’s second

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leading killer, will no longer refer to the excruciating twist of the dog’s stomach, trapping air and food and water, the beast finally giving in to the shock. Severe nasal congestion will no longer refer to my body’s response to the dander of the dying dog. All language, if not flexible and twisting and willing to evolve, will break down. All stages and planes of said evolution will eventually be rendered meaningless. Philosophically, this means that no truth is provable, and is therefore not true. True is already a meaningless word, even within the current evolutionary plane. It has already broken down. There’s no air trapped within it.83

It is not surprising that some critics compare Gödel’s theorem to the ‘liar’s paradox,’ another enigma or riddle, in which a liar, stating he is a liar, is incapable of lying. In this sense, Les

Faux-monnayeurs operates according to a dynamic of an unraveling novel, a novel, which, by self-labeling itself as a ‘novel,’ is no less counterfeit in this Darwinistic conception of language and truth, in which adaptability is placed at the forefront. If Gide’s goal was to create numerous possibilities and paths with which to represent the real, and if Édouard’s aesthetic aspiration was to do the same, unfortunately, the novel demonstrates that the content of the form – that which the vehicle contains, whether that container be language or musical form – will eventually tend towards meaningless, improvable truths. Defining and portraying the ‘real’ is therefore also in harmony with this infinity, and the degradation of the object described: the real is in constant flux, and in constant de- and re-composition.

Gide’s statements in his published journal that exclude Édouard as one of his alter-egos could also participate in this ‘liar’s paradox,’ constituting a game with his readers. After all, in a statement quoted above, he explicitly portrays Édouard’s deceitfulness, stating that he bluffs every time he speaks about his potential novel. Despite underlining the gap between the two, which I have commented above as an example of ironic distantiation, Gide nonetheless

83 Matthew Gavin Frank, “Silk, Allergies, Sisters, and Incompleteness”. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Vol. 14.2. (Fall 2012). Web. June 10, 2013.

237 participates in a specular exchange with regards to his creation, in which the borders between the internal and external, once again, collapse. In his Journal, Gide writes:

Le livre sitôt conçu, dispose de moi tout entier, et … pour lui, tout en moi, jusqu’au plus profond de moi s’instrumente. Je n’ai plus d’autre personnalité que celle qui convient à cette œuvre – objective ? subjective ? Ces mots perdent ici tout leur sens ; car s’il m’arrive de peindre d’après moi (et parfois il me paraît qu’il ne se peut d’autre exacte peinture), c’est que d’abord j’ai commencé par devenir celui-là même que je voulais portraiturer. (15)

In a peculiar inversion of aesthesis, Gide begins by first embodying the character he is creating, in a similar way to Édouard’s performance that the reader witnesses throughout Les Faux- monnayeurs. An intersubjective creation is what comes of this relationship, in which remnants of the poetic self infuse within the characters, and this further underlines the contamination of narrative frames, between narrator and characters, or arguably between Gide and his counterpart(s). Although verticality and polyphony occur within free indirect speech, they attain their height in the metaleptic construction of mise en abyme.

Thus far, I have argued in this dissertation that the notion of non-Euclidean geometry can constitute a literary representation of four-dimensionality. Gödel, Peter Wilsher explains, “is fascinated by the phenomena of isomorphism, where one set of ideas is mapped on to another, apparently completely different, and by self-reference, where thoughts and concepts appear to loop back on themselves, like nested flashbacks or plays-within-a-play” (558). I would conclude this intermedial portrayal of literature, music and mathematics, by uniting Gödel’s notions with the only four-dimensional theoretical shape that is conceivable on a three-dimensional plane, and which illustrates Gödel’s interest in self-referential looping or flash-backs – as represented through the lamp metaphor –, and which constitutes one reason for Gide’s employment of mise en abyme within fugue. Although the vertical structure of a ‘text within a text’ creates polyphony and counterpoint, on a spatial plane it also, in the case of Les Faux-monnayeurs, depicts the geometrical shape of the Möbius strip, drawn below.

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The fundamental characteristic of this figure – which will later come to fascinate the experimental writers of the Oulipo – is that it is a one sided, three-dimensional shape. In other words, its internal plane and external plane are the same, depending on perspective: the inside and the outside loop into or onto each other, creating the illusory sense of two distinct sides. This recalls many of M.C. Escher’s impossible angles and spatial illusions. The Möbius strip represents a deconstructive understanding of binaries that Les Faux-monnayeurs illustrates, furthermore coming to represent, more importantly, the correlation between the ‘true’ author of

Les Faux-monnayeurs and Édouard, a relationship based upon ekphrasis, metalepsis, metadiegesis and mise en abyme. In this fugal loop in which subject and answer (or countersubject) unite, seemingly distinct conceptions such as subjectivity and alterity break down. Gide in his Journal, explains: “Cet effort de projeter au-dehors une creation intérieure, d’objectiver le sujet (avant d’avoir à assujettir l’objet) est proprement exténuant” (25). On a very literal level, the extenuation of the subject and object are made thinner, as the etymology of

‘extenuate’ suggests. Here, the subject – whether it is the individual, a topic, theme or idea – is

84 Image captured from the title of Mathias B. Freese’s This Möbius Strip of Ifs: Essays. Red Willow Books.

239 made so thin that its boundary with its counterpart is no longer visible. So too are the boundaries between the real – and one’s ideal or stylized understanding of it – and its representation: Les

Faux-monnayeurs performs its desire to depict reality, by demonstrating the numerous permutations of subjects through time and space, only to fail at any coherent conception of the real or of truth.

2.5 Between the Particular and the General

By including fugue as a melopoetic means to question the manner in which a novel signifies and represents reality, Gide incorporates many particular narrative techniques that fall under the umbrella of a fugal poetics while also working against “la paresse du lecteur” in a

“writerly text” and arguably even against mimesis (Gide 29, Nicholls): from free indirect speech to metalepsis, and mise en abyme, to geometrical shapes. Fugue’s dynamics, its capabilities of uniting spatial and temporal dimensions into one common context, and its ability to connect antithetical binaries by breaking them down into new shapes, ideas or subjects, makes it a propitious musico-literary counterpart to the Möbius strip and to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The latter and its less official label as the ‘liar’s paradox’ adds another dimension of veracity and deceit in a novel entitled The Counterfeiters, where things are rarely what they seem, relationships are frauds and reality is but a subjective illusion; the largest illusion being the impossibility of ideally stylizing it. In Les Faux-monnayeurs, where the internal and external worlds are in specular relation to one another, fugue allows the author to navigate between and even overlap the singular and the plural, the extradiegetic and the diegetic, form and its content, the individual subject and his or her corresponding (musical or literary) theme(s), as well as the general and the particular. This last binary, in fact, constitutes one of Édouard’s considerations of art:

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En localisant et en spécifiant, l’on restreint. Il n’y a de vérité psychologique que particulière, il est vrai; mais il n’y a d’art que général. Tout le problème est là, précisément; exprimer le général par le particulier; faire exprimer le particulier par le général. (205)

The musical form of fugue in the novel performs this exact (at times chiasmatic) relationship between the macro and the micro, in which the potentially linear indefiniteness of fugue not only demonstrates the evolution of counterpoint, but it eventually loops back on itself, where motifs, phrases, notes and images all combine under one common denominator, in which the particular inevitably, allegorically and symbolically, recalls the general, even if that general is the ineffability of the real. Fugal writing places counterpoint at the micro level of character development specifically – for example, Profitendieu’s authenticity –, and more generally on the larger theme of truth and the real interspersed throughout the novel, and acting as a critique of the novel. For Vittorini, fugue extends, attempting not only a representation of the real, but of the ineffable as well, of an entangled reality so chaotically interwoven with illusion and the imaginary that the modern subject is caught in a seemingly hopeless limbo. 3 The F(r)ugal Poetics of Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia

Elio Vittorini’s novel is the only work within this corpus not in direct dialogue, in some specific way, shape or form with French symbolism. Nonetheless, it inscribes itself within the larger context of European modernism, plagued with a crisis of identity, religion, politics and language, further complicated by the rise of fascism. These elements permeate the pages of

Conversazione in Sicilia, creating narrative and poetic parallels with the likes of Verlaine,

Mallarmé, Joyce, Pound and Gide, a few of which he acknowledges having read by 1929, since as Vittorini explains in his article “Maestro cercando” (Solaria), the crisis of narrative literature in Italy explains a turn toward foreign literature for inspiration and an answer to its problems

(Bosetti 384): “Ayant appris le français, j'avais déjà lu Proust et Gide, je lisais la «N.R.F.» et je

241 lisais Joyce en traduction française, je lisais Kafka en traduction française” (Bosetti 385).

Furthermore, Vittorini’s work is indisputably in dialogue with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – a lingering spectre in this dissertation on the topics of time and subjectivity, as well as music and Künstlerroman –, particularly regarding the mnemonic associations between the quotidian and aesthetic creation, between present and past, memory and the imaginary. Where

Vittorini differs from his modernist and symbolist counterparts, and particularly from his

“nouveau maître,” Proust, is in the political engagement underlying the fugal narrative in his novel (Bosetti 384). If fugue is enigmatic in symbolist verse and in Anglo-American writing, it is because it also manifests itself in a particular relationship with its readership: not only does fugue seem to call upon the ideal and active reader (while also pushing the reader away), but in the context of Vittorini’s work, it calls on one who is also reading according to a certain ideology under the restriction of censorship and potential persecution. Although Vittorini never employed the term ‘fugue’ to discuss his novel, some critics such as Potter and Borrelli nevertheless refer to Conversazione in Sicilia in musical, most notably in orchestral or symphonic, terms. It comes as a surprise to me that beyond the occasional online literary review that uses the term ‘fugue’ in relation to Conversazione in Sicilia,85 no scholarly attention has focused on its fugal narrative, in a novel that makes a more explicit performance of fugue than any other text within this corpus; nowhere is fugue’s relationship to a notion of four-dimensionality so pronounced.

If André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs presents the reader with a commentary on the real and its aesthetics through fugal narrative techniques – creating syntagmatic and paradigmatic fugal orchestrations –, including metalepsis and mise en abyme, Elio Vittorini also blurs the boundaries between the real and its counterparts, the imaginary and the illusion, and he does so

85 Book review on “Goodreads.” Web. June 10, 2013.

242 with a fugue within a fugue. Arguably, Conversazione in Sicilia is a long dialogue with others that the protagonist undertakes, a dialogic portrayal of an individual coming to terms with the past and his (mis)understanding of it, at a time of political turmoil. I will demonstrate how

Vittorini’s fugal narrative is similar to all of the other authors within this corpus in his employment of theme and motif as fugal, as well as in his attempt to both encrypt and re-create language.

3.1 Dressing Fugue Up in a “Fancy Package”

Defined by Italo Calvino as the “libro-Guernica,” Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in

Sicilia indirectly represents the atrocities of war by focusing on the traces imprinted by dictatorial abuse on an individual whose fragmented memory and identity embody the larger societal dysfunction (Ricci 204). Vittorini himself describes his novel as a philosophical and aesthetic voyage, one “alle origini, un ritorno alle cose essenziali, un lungo discorso intorno ai problemi elementari dell’uomo: la ragione prima del suo essere sulla terra, l’amore e la morte, la giustizia e l’ingiustizia, l’offesa e la speranza” (Potter 50).86

Apart from the ideological dimension to the novel, it is the crisis of communication in general that becomes central to Vittorini’s aesthetics and poetics: monologues, dialogues and conversations – which unite in the singular, all-encompassing conversation that entitles the work

– allow memory and history to be narratively traced. In fact, the eponymous setting in

Conversazione in Sicilia is arguably not Sicily at all,87 which one can paradigmatically substitute

86 “[…] one which returns to the origins, to what is essential, a long discussion around the elementary problems of mankind: the primal reason for his being on earth, love and death, justice and injustice, offenses and hope” (My translation). 87 In an interview, Elio Vittorini stated that the context for his novel was not necessarily Sicily. Given the importance of censorship during the time of writing, the reader must not take this claim as completely accurate. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this project, I will discuss the notion of ‘conversation’ as fundamental to Vittorini’s fugal poetics, while maintaining that Sicily is the true context of the novel.

243 with Spain or any other war- and poverty-stricken land, but the notion of “Conversation”88 itself, a shared exchange of ideas through language, which etymologically recalls a notion of community, of togetherness: “having dealings with others” and later “living together” are the roots from which “conversation” spawns, one which Vittorini attempts to recreate through music, language and food.89 The form Vittorini’s novel adopts is crucial to his goal of promoting dialogue and creating a new language; however, it also cryptically encodes meaning into a work of literature which was scrutinized under the Fascist regime. Ernest Hemingway in his foreword to the English translation, in reference to the off-putting, convoluted “rhetoric or fancy writing” of the novel, warns the reader: “Remember he wrote the book in 1937 under fascism and he had to wrap it in a fancy package. It is necessarily wrapped in cellophane to pass the censor. But there is excellent food once you unwrap it” (Vittorini vi). Part and parcel of understanding the poetics of Vittorini’s work lies in the act of unwrapping the layers of melopoetics that constitute it, an intermedial form that acts, in part, as its content, especially at a time of nascent fascism and impending dictatorial rule.

Joy Potter states that in Conversazione in Sicilia, “[t]he call for revolution is obvious, but what is not obvious is how that call for revolution functions, the way in which the author seeks

“un’utilizzazione della realtà”90 that may provide a weapon or instrument for what he calls “le forze storiche,”91 and what these forces are” (51). Without over-emphasizing the socio-political aspects of the novel and the existential call to arms in this chapter, I will argue that the answer to

88 The novel’s title is translated as Conversations in Sicily, “Conversazione” thus translated into the plural when in Italian, it remains singular, a topic of discussion in the last section of this chapter. 89 “conversation, n.” OED Online, March 10, 2012: http://www.oed.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/40748#contentWrapper 90 “[…] a use of reality” (My translation). 91 “historical forces” (My translation).

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“how that call for revolution functions” and the manner in which reality manifests itself to the reader, in lieu of a distorted dialogue or conversation, is via the musical structure of fugue in literature: the cellophane in which the narrative of Conversazione in Sicilia is wrapped. Form becomes the vehicle for the author to represent and work against the historical forces of recurrence, of a circularity – which contrary to its etymology – signifies a failed ‘revolution,’ one incapable of resolving the misfortunes, violence and brutalities of the past, one which constantly loops on itself like the circular food motifs that I will discuss shortly in Vittorini’s novel. The fugue, a polyphonic, contrapuntal musical style which interweaves several voices at varying pitches, is also a leading mnemonic dynamic which here interestingly employs food – often acting as the basis for understanding the fugal subject – and its symbolism in an attempt to achieve wholeness and totality within the subject, represented here through the protagonist

Silvestro.

By slowly working towards a new linguistic form, Vittorini skillfully employs non- and pre-linguistic contexts in order to depict his subject’s struggles. Following a close reading of a

‘culinary fugue,’ I will expose Vittorini’s notion of four-dimensionality and the parodic function of food as a mnemonic device within such a spatio-temporal framework and in light of Paul

Ricoeur’s theories. I will conclude with the depiction of a “vocalic fugue” formed by linguistic phonemes, Vittorini’s foundation for a new form of communication, something that aligns the

Italian modernist writer with Joyce and his symbolist forefathers.

3.2 A Recipe for Culinary Fugue: Variations on the Theme of Truth For both the novels of both Gide and Vittorini, the epistolary form marries well with fugue, as though a sense of travel (fugue as departure) imbued in the letter were to infect its reader, not to mention the dynamics of counterpoint of sending and receiving news. For example, upon

245 receiving a letter from his father stating he has left Silvestro’s mother for another woman with whom he is moving to Venice, Silvestro embarks on a train and later a ferry, bound for Syracuse to visit his mother. The letter triggers agency and awakening, a fugue or departure, which pulls him out of the paralytic, dream-like state he is in, described as being “in preda ad astratti furori

[…] Credere il genere umano perduto e non aver febbre di fare qualcosa in contrario” (131).92

The abstract fury, frenzy or fever which numbs Silvestro is a paralytic, even anesthetized condition which allegorically plagues all of society, of which the individual subject is a minute and metonymic constituent. Conversazione in Sicilia therefore narrates Silvestro’s slow awakening from his dormant state – a state of psychogenic fugue, which would annul or veil any memory of his past – during his journey home, a journey back to childhood memories, punctuated by the shock of the discovery of the great distance between his pleasant perception of the past and the bitter reality of the social and familial situation of which he was a part: two temporalities which violently clash, symptomatic of the fragmented self within modernity. A fugal narrative, for Vittorini, therefore works against Silvestro’s (psychological) fugue state, and departure becomes synonymous with return in a plot sequence that constantly confronts attempted retrieval with truth and imagination.

Following multiple train rides, connecting in Florence, Rome, Naples, until finally reaching Calabria, Silvestro embarks on a “battello-traghetto” for Sicily (138). The spatial and temporal connotations of the ferry travelling on the “mare [..,] nero, invernale” represents a chronotopic motif, which lulls the protagonist as though he were cradled into a subdued and yet

92 “Believing humanity to be doomed and not burning with a fever to do anything about it” (Vittorini Trans. 3). It could be argued either way whether Silvestro’s fugue state is his travel to Sicily, or whether his return home is in fact an awakening from the fugue state that defined his initial departure to Milan. I understand his fugue state to be the latter, his return home is an attempt to come to terms with a traumatic past.

246 paradoxically awakened state, recalling many of his childhood memories (138).93 “In the literary artistic chronotope,” Bakhtin explains, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84). Such is the case for a vessel that is subject to the rhythm of the waves upon which it travels, far from the monotonous and cacophonic train rails. Its movement mimics that of a cradle, of a soothing rhythm on top of the sea, whose allegorical qualities may evoke a plethora of symbolic or psychoanalytic elements: from the potential presence of sirens and therefore impending danger, to the depth of the womb – and of consciousness –, without forgetting its maternal qualities. Ironically, once again Vittorini inserts an element of paradox into his description, taxing the sea as “black,” therefore associating it with the Black Sea, an essentially tideless sea. Movement and stasis are therefore two constantly juxtaposed dynamics in Vittorini’s oeuvre, emblematic of the Kantian and Aristotelian struggle of what Ricoeur labels the “invariant relationnel” in which an individual’s ipseity (selfhood) evolves in relation to the

Other, in opposition with one’s idem-identity which represents one’s constancy through time

(1990: 143). The depth of the maternal water also symbolizes the unconscious, a womb-like locus – also a pre- or non-linguistic space – which, as Bakhtin’s definition above suggests, also recalls moments in history and mythology: for example, travelling home by sea echoes the

Odyssean nostos, the king’s return to Ithaca after twenty years of errancy.

3.3 Prelude and Fugue

It is on the ferry that Vittorini stages the first passage of his literary fugue in two voices, a fugue based on the repetitive motifs of food, which, through their interaction, point to an

93 “The sea was black and wintry” (Vittorini 9).

247 overarching theme. As I have argued elsewhere in this dissertation, including in regards to André

Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, it is through the interweaving of various motifs that point to a unifying theme, that many modernist authors have accomplished a fugal narrative in literature.

The musical and literary theme developed here is nearly identical to Gide’s, that of ‘truth,’ in which the “real” and the “abstract” or “imagined” confront each other contrapuntally throughout this section, via the recurrence of several culinary motifs.

As we have seen in regards to Joyce, a Prelude may introduce a fugue, and Vittorini makes no exception to this possibility in literature, by composing a Prelude which introduces the main voices, motifs and themes of chapter III, in Conversazione in Sicilia. The “subject” or first melody to enter is Silvestro who recounts having just purchased bread and cheese, and the sensorial evocations that ensue: “Avevo comprato a Villa San Giovanni qualcosa da mangiare, pane e formaggio, e mangiavo sul ponte, pane, aria cruda, formaggio, con gusto e appetito perché riconoscevo antichi sapori delle mie montagne, e persino odori, mandrie di capre, fumo di assenzio, in quel formaggio” (139).94 This passage is one of the first examples of Silvestro’s false memories, which inscribes itself into a parodic aestheticizing of Proust’s mémoire involontaire, which I will address shortly. By ‘false memories,’ I understand Silvestro’s distorted view of his past, of his land and family; superimposing inaccurate events and characteristics onto memories is a coping mechanism for the protagonist, much like his initial fugue state – the initial fugue or departure from his reality. This false or distorted recounting of the past is emblematic of a larger political discussion on the act of forgetting and ‘covering up’ at a time of war, and fugue

94 “I had bought something to eat, bread and cheese, and I was eating it on the deck (bread, raw air, cheese) with gusto and appetite because in that cheese I recognized the ancient flavors of my mountains, and even their smells, their herds of goats, and their wormwood smoke” (Vittorini 9).

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– as wrapper or cover to its content – acts as an indirect form for Vittorini to address these problems.

The “answer,”95 harmony or contrasting melody to this passage is an account by the narrative voice which portrays those Silvestro perceives: “I piccoli siciliani, curvi con le spalle nel vento e le mani in tasca, mi guardavano mangiare, erano scuri in faccia, ma soave con barba da quattro giorni, operai, braccianti dei giardini di aranci, ferrovieri con i cappelli grigi a filetto rosso della squadra lavori” (139).96 The contrapuntal arrangement of Silvestro eating bread and cheese, and the poor Sicilians who grow and pick oranges, but do not eat, demonstrates the gap between Silvestro and a people he erroneously identifies with, setting the stage for subsequent misrecognition on behalf of Silvestro when faced with questions of alterity, but also between himself and his imagined past. The Prelude ends, as do most fugues in fact, on a “stretto,” a musical section that quickly reiterates or summarizes, in a virtuosic manner, themes and notes developed throughout the piece of music.

The stretto which concludes the Prelude and introduces the literary fugue appears in inverted counterpoint and sets up an opposition between Silvestro and the other Sicilians on the train: “E io, mangiando, sorridevo loro e loro mi guardavano senza sorridere” (139).97 A near chiasmus, or syntactic mirror, occurs as a literary equivalent to inverted counterpoint, specularly uniting the Sicilians and Silvestro. Working centrifugally from the conjunction “e,” the term

“loro” is in opposition with “loro,” “sorridevo” in opposition with “guardavano,” and

95 Although the term “answer” is the correct nomenclature for the second melody to enter in the fugue, the Prelude does not have a strict structure; I therefore employ the term “answer” in regards to the Prelude as well as the fugue, given this particular Prelude mimics a fugal composition, much like in the example of “Sirens” for Joyce. 96 “The little Sicilians, their shoulders bent into the wind and hands in their pockets, looked at me as I ate, their faces dark, but gentle, with four days’ growth of beard. They were workers, day laborers in the orange orchards, and railway men wearing the red-striped grey hats of the work teams” (Vittorini 9). 97 “I smiled at them as I ate and they looked at me without smiling” (Vittorini 9).

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“mangiando” in opposition with “senza sorridere.” Beyond the entanglement between an active and positive ‘smiling’ on behalf of Silvestro and a neutral ‘looking’ on behalf of the Sicilians, the subject “io” is in opposition with a misplaced “mi” (direct object pronoun) in the chiasmus, since Silvestro (and his subjectivity most precisely) is out of place. He is literally, according to him, and as I will demonstrate shortly, in a different place and time, another dimension. The most important aspect of this refracted and distorted mirror lies within the difference between

Silvestro and the little Sicilians he observes: he is eating and they are not.

The following f(r)ugal development offers Silvestro a lens through which to work out notions of identity, poverty and hunger, in both the present and the past. The first voice of the fugue, Silvestro’s, recites: “Non c’è formaggio come il nostro” (139)98 to which no one responds. Instead, “tutti mi guardavano, le donne dalla femminilità voluminosa sedute su grandi sacchi di roba, gli uomini in piedi, piccoli e come bruciacchiati dal vento, le mani in tasca”

(139).99 The “answer” to the “subject” is voiceless and visual; Silvestro’s ‘conversation’ is but a monologue for now. Silvestro directly inscribing himself within the Sicilian community of fellow travellers – describing the evocative sensations the cheese activates, as well as the geographical imagery – uses the first person plural possessive adjective “nostro,” only to receive no acknowledgement. The physical description of the Sicilians as “bruciacchiati” intratextually recalls the leitmotif of the mother’s herring, described below in Silvestro’s definition of travel in the fourth dimension – another Proustian echo – as paradoxically both burnt and not burnt.

Vittorini reintroduces the burnt motif on several occasions to portray the faces and skin of those who work outdoors, burnt by the wind and the sun. Similar to the burnt herring which Silvestro

98 “There’s no cheese like ours” (Vittorini 9). 99 “[…] everyone looked at me, the women of voluminous femininity seated on large sacks of goods, the small men standing as if scorched by the wind, hands in their pockets” (Vittorini 9).

250 recalls always being perfectly cooked, the burnt, poor Sicilians represent a reality Silvestro is still incapable of recognising. His nostos is hitherto missing a scene of anagnorisis.

Following a first ‘subject’ and ‘answer,’ Silvestro immediately takes up the initial subject once again by Silvestro: “E di nuovo io dissi: / -Non c’è formaggio come il nostro,” after which he describes his emotional state as “entusiasta” after having “il pane e l’aria forte, il sapore bianco eppur aspro, e antico, coi grani di pepe come improvvisi grani di fuoco nel boccone. /-

Non c’è formaggio come il nostro, - dissi per la terza volta” (139).100 This description acts as

“countersubject” in accordance with Nadya Zimmerman’s definition of the fugue, since “[w]hen the second voice enters with the answer, the notes occurring simultaneously in the first voice are no longer considered part of the subject: they are referred to as the countersubject” (10). Here, the first voice is taken up once again following the “answer,” reiterating almost verbatim the first

“subject.” This passage or melody constitutes Silvestro’s first explicit awakening from his sense of indifference, an enthusiasm unleashed by the flavours which recall an “antique” past, pepper corns bursting like seeds or “grains of fire” in the bite he has taken. This image of pleasure-filled fire stands in contradiction to the wind-burnt Sicilians; Silvestro, it seems, unconsciously tries to find similarities between himself and the others – further represented here through free indirect speech – but fails to fit in, as the second voice, the small Sicilian “il più bruciato dal vento”101 demonstrates by asking: “-Ma siete siciliano, voi?” (139).102

100 “this cheese, tasting it in my mouth along with the bread and the strong sea air, the taste bland but sour, and ancient, with grains of pepper like sudden grains of fire in the mouth” (Vittorini 9-10). 101 “the most windburned, the one with the darkest face” (10). 102 “Are you Sicilian?” (Vittorini 10).

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This interrogation constitutes the second “subject” and a new melody, to which Silvestro offers the “answer” “-Perché no?” (140).103 The small Sicilian then turns around and “non disse altro,” rendering louder the silence following every question Silvestro asks (140). On top of the contrapuntal writing and narration, an element of polyphony and dialogism in a Bakhtinian sense emanates through the dialectal syntax of the little Sicilian, through the use of the second personal pronoun in the plural “voi,” both common in the south of Italy and among the working class, especially when employed at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning. Furthermore, under the Fascist regime, the use of “Lei” was supposedly deemed as feminine, and therefore forbidden. Consequently, Silvestro would appear as even more “other” due to the national standardized Italian he speaks. As a countersubject, in lieu of dialogue and of a response from the Sicilian, whistling operates as a fugal voice: “i fischi dei battelli risuonavano bagnati, e come fischi d’acqua giungevano da terra quelli delle locomotive” (140).104 Synaesthesia is, as will become further evident in the following section, the predominant literary trope in Conversazione in Sicilia; the whistling of the boats and of the locomotives on a land which is now near blends harmoniously into a wet whistling, despite the fact that “Il mattino era di pioggia ma non pioveva” (140).105

The third interweaving of “subject” and “answer” begins once again with Silvestro’s anaphoric melody “-Non c’è formaggio come il nostro,” to which no one responds (140).

Instead, everybody rises to see they are approaching land. One fifth and final time, Silvestro states the phrase “-Non c’è formaggio come il nostro” (140). Although silence supervenes one

103 “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?” (10). 104 “the wind blew wetly and the boats whistled wetly, and on land the locomotives whistled as if echoing the other side of the smokestack” (10). 105 “It was a rainy morning, but the rain had stopped” (10).

252 final time, literature unlike music offers the possibility of narrating a context. The reader learns that the small Sicilian man bends over, looks into a basket he is carrying and takes out an orange, which he offers to his wife – whom Silvestro had initially mistaken for his child – who refuses it.

Unlike the joyful experience Silvestro has in eating his bread and cheese, the small burnt Sicilian with “l’arancia in mano, bruciato dal freddo”106 goes on to desperately peel the orange, “e disperatamente mangiarla, con rabbia e frenesia, senza affatto voglia, e senza masticare, ingoiando e come maledicendo” (142).107 Food and eating have literally replaced the linguistic here: the small man eats the orange, “swallowing as if cursing” (Vittorini 11). To the more expensive commodities of cheese and bread – which presuppose an entire chain of preparation, from harvesting wheat, to owning cattle – oranges represent a quintessential staple of Sicilian food. They grow effortlessly under the Sicilian sun, are nutritious and need simply be picked.

Following the description above, a voice which acts as the “countersubject” to this section takes up the description of the silent desperation of the man eating the orange: “-Messina, - disse con lamento una donna; e fu una parola detta senza ragione; solo una specie di lagnanza” (142).108

Messina is announced as a lament, scornfully, as though it were the soundtrack to the small

Sicilian’s misfortunes, the sonorous echo of his thoughts and lamentations.

The fifth and final development begins with the subject iterated by the second voice, the small Sicilian: “-Un siciliano non mangia mai la mattina, - egli disse d’un tratto. / Soggiunse: –

Siete americano, voi?” (142).109 The manner in which the man utters these last three words is described as “in tono di stridula tensione come se gli fosse in qualche modo necessario, per la

106 “[…] the orange in his hand, a little person without an overcoat, scorched by the cold” (11). 107 “[…] peel the orange, and eat it desperately, angrily, in a frenzy, without even wanting it and without chewing, swallowing as if cursing, his fingers wet with the juice of the orange in the cold” (11). 108 “Messina,” a woman said dolefully, and it was a word said without reason, only as a kind of complaint” (11). 109 “A Sicilian never eats in the morning,” he said suddenly./He added, “Are you American?” (11).

253 pace dell’anima, sapermi Americano” (142).110 Silvestro’s “answer” is “-Si, - dissi io, vedendo questo. – Americano sono. Da quindici anni” (142).111 Silvestro is once again marginalized; he can afford to eat cheese and bread in the morning, and is therefore not Sicilian according to his peers. However, ironically, it is only once he begins to think altruistically – answering what the

Sicilian wants to hear instead of the truth – that Silvestro starts to identify with the Sicilians, even answering in Sicilian syntax instead of the standard Italian: “Americano sono” and not

“Sono americano,” (142). A peculiar inversion occurs here with the conscious lie or performance of being American. The protagonist’s ‘lie’ offers the reader a glimpse into a world where things are not always what they seem. Silvestro, by breaking down his truths – or what he imagines are truths – will begin to properly awaken to a present through a past he has repressed. He is, in fact, more American than Sicilian in this context, since the American is a paradigmatic stand-in for any foreigner in this case. By eventually acknowledging that he does not fit in, in lieu of forcefully imposing his presence and identity on the people with whom he dialogues, Silvestro begins to altruistically converse, to listen to the reality of a world he had painted brighter and happier than it ever truly was.

To reiterate Hemingway’s cellophane metaphor, both the wrapper – the fugal form – and its contents – food and dialogue – are codependent in Vittorini’s musico-literary orchestration.

The function of fugue in Conversazione in Sicilia is to demonstrate Silvestro’s inability to communicate or build an identity vis-à-vis his peers, and to place particular attention on the form of dialogues and communication in general, in a mediated manner. The question remains, however: why is food so dominant in the fugue, and what is food’s relationship to music? In

110 “[…] in a tone of strident tension as if it were somehow essential to him, for his peace of mind, to know that I was American” (12). 111 “Yes,” I said. “I’m American. I’ve been an American for the last fifteen years” (12).

254 order to subvert a linguistic narrative, Vittorini reverts to a non-linguistic medium, music without lyrics. Both food and music, as well as taste and scent pertain to the non-linguistic realm.

Following this culinary fugue, which exposes the difficulties Silvestro encounters with his present self and the present Sicilian reality, the protagonist begins to ponder the heightened experience of remembered time: perceiving a present overlapped with the past, what he defines as the fourth dimension. At this point, food becomes imbued with a deceptively mnemonic purpose, recalling fabricated memories which enchain Silvestro to ceaseless repetitions: the omnipresence of such circularity is evident in the culinary images of the oranges, the cheese (a piece from a wheel), melons, and in the Christian omega-like symbol of the fish, here as the herring.

I believe Vittorini enigmatically encodes meaning and symbolism into images, in a similar manner to the early Christians, who would sketch the image of a fish – written in Koine

Greek as Ichtys – in order to represent the congregation or secret meetings of Christians under persecution in anagrammatic form: the letters in Ichtys spell ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.’

Under a different contextual censorship, Vittorini is encrypting a logocentric message into the image, therefore semiotically privileging the visual over the linguistic, only to allow the linguistic to parasitically infiltrate the more literal meaning of the image, since a totalitarian authority is monitoring language. Similar to fugue in literature, the vessel of the message becomes part of its signification intermedially, and here, Vittorini makes the reader conscious of the way one reads. If censorship is almost robotic in its decryption of language – scrutinizing the literal sense of words –, then a politically and formally engaged literary form needs to expand the poetic function of language (in Jakobson’s terms). This problem ultimately leads the author to a reconfiguration of language through intermediality, regaining its authority, and a communal understanding that conversation and dialogue through the means of a new language will

255 eventually overcome both the political abuse and the more spiritual crisis of il mondo offeso, as he describes the current state of affairs.

Only after failing to reconcile these two temporalities – that of remembered time and imagined time – is Silvestro capable, in the very last chapter, of breaking with circularity and deconstructing language from the ground up, where he participates in a linguistic vocalic fugue.

Vittorini therefore expertly shifts his reader from an interrogation of the present via the fugue and the non-linguistic, to the coexistence of various diachronies, and finally to the pre-linguistic

(and therefore pre-lapsarian) stage which allows the author to reconstruct the language he has subverted, and to do so, once again, through a fugal composition. 4 Awakening From the Nightmare of History

The power of music is the instigating factor, the subliminal catalyst in the beginning of

Silvestro’s epiphanic actions – to illustrate them in Joycean terms –, described intertextually with reference to the legend of the pied piper:

Non avevo più voglia di guardare la mia ragazza in faccia, sfogliavo il dizionario mio unico libro che ormai fossi capace di leggere, e cominciai a sentire in me un lamento come un piffero che suonasse lamentoso. Andavo al lavoro […] e un piffero suonava in me e smuoveva in me topi e topi che non erano precisamente ricordi. Non erano che topi, scuri, informi, trecentosessantacinque e trecentosessantacinque, topi scuri dei miei anni, ma solo dei miei anni in Sicilia, nelle montagne e li sentivo smuoversi in me, topi e topi fino a quindici volte trecentosessantacinque, e il piffero suonava in me, e così mi venne una scura nostalgia come di riavere in me la mia infanzia (136).112

Silvestro’s intimate relationships have waned; he is no longer capable of reading anything except

112 “I no longer wanted to look my girlfriend in the eye. I flipped through the pages of the dictionary, which was the only book I was still able to read, and inside I began to feel a moan as if a doleful fife were playing. I went to work every morning […] and a fife played in me and stirred mice in me, mice that were not memories, exactly. They were only mice, dark, formless, three hundred and sixty-five and three hundred and sixty-five dark mice of my years, but only of my years in Sicily, in the mountains, and I felt them stir in me, mice and more mice until they were fifteen times three hundred and sixty-five, and the fife played inside me, and in this way a dark homesickness came over me as if I wanted to have my childhood in me again” (Vittorini 6-7).

256 the dictionary, a book that contains all the minutiae of one language. In a dictionary, words are ordered alphabetically, and one usually consults it in a ‘question and answer’ format, and not linearly as a novel. In the reference book, therefore, each word exists outside of any context or dialogue, in an ordered, alphabetical, routine manner. The dictionary not only symbolizes the impossibility of establishing a linear narrative, it also shows the elements with which Vittorini is working: he needs to reshape language from the ground up and create a new medium for

Silvestro to communicate with the Sicilians of his past and his present; and this new language, in need of a disguised form, momentarily takes on the form of music. Music literally awakens from within Silvestro and serves to unite the “topi” (mice), the topoi of his childhood, the nostalgic years he is incapable of remembering, and the context, the physical irretrievable place of childhood where topos and chronos meet in a fourth dimension, the “quarta dimensione” in which Silvestro believes he is travelling (184). If language exists as a system of semiotic referentiality in which signifier and signified create a sign, music and, as we shall see, taste, efface any strict one-to-one analogy. They are at once more abstract and more concrete than language. In order to represent the ineffable – from the horrors of war and dictatorship, to understanding the Other – Vittorini reverts to the abstract nature of music, working backwards, in an attempt to instil language with meaning that has hitherto dissipated.

Vittorini expertly inserts as an intertextual copresence113 the pifferaio (piper), thus diachronically calling to the mind of the aware reader the state of social affairs in the city of

Hamelin in 1284: a rat infestation plagued the city and children were disappearing, up to one hundred and thirty children according to some accounts. The tale has many variants, but the most

113 Genette in Palimpsestes: le degré zéro de la littérature uses the term coprésence as an intertextual element in a hypertext, which recalls a hypotext. For example, the copresence of the piffero in the hypertext Conversazione in Sicilia automatically calls to mind the mythological origin, the hypotext.

257 widely accepted is that the piper played a tune for the rats to congregate and willingly dive into a river to drown. When the village decided not to pay the piper for having cleansed their town, he played another hypnotizing song, luring children out of church and either into the river to drown

(according to some) or into a distant cave, never to be seen again. An allegorical reading cannot ignore the socio-political context of Vittorini’s writing: the Spanish Civil War and the soon to be

World War II. The political call to arms which sends a country’s children to war is the reality embodied by Liborio, Silvestro’s brother who dies in Spain. Vittorini, however, subverts this pejorative connotation of the piffero, transforming it into a call to life, the catalysing factor and filter to begin his return to Sicily through a similar hypnotizing method via music, not unlike a reversal of the sirens in Greek mythology. Since Silvestro is already in a state of indifference and arguably of death – he is “quieto nella non speranza”114 reminiscent of what is written on the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno,115 – any enthusiasm to move towards a goal can be characterized as positive, although he may not yet be aware of it (136).

The train on which Silvestro embarks is emblematic of motion, as well as progress, and represents one of Vittorini’s chronotopes in which different social strata and linguistic registers appear within one confined space. Travelling in the train is propitious to dreaming, which instigates a synesthetic experience. Silvestro narrates: “Così un topo, d’un tratto, non era più un topo in me, era odore, sapore, cielo e il piffero suonava un attimo melodioso, non più lamentoso”

(138).116 The transformation from a sense of mourning and sadness to a melodious feeling operates first via his sense of smell, followed by taste, then sight and sound. Almost all of the

114 “calm in my hopelessness” (Vittorini 6). 115 On the frontispiece of the gates of Hell is written “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” (29). 116 “And so, all of a sudden, a mouse was no longer a mouse in me but a smell, a taste, a sky, and for a second the fife played melodiously, no longer doleful” (8).

258 senses are present here, the most important acting as bookends to what Silvestro visually perceives surrounding him: smell, taste and sound. It seems as though Silvestro has taken

Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as a handbook for retrieving that which is lost, whether it be time, memories or sensations. In order to tap into the realm of involuntary memory, Silvestro, like Marcel – whose oft-quoted madeleine dipped in tea momentarily but thoroughly spawns all of Combray – reverts to a sensorial experience related to culinary sensations, an enhanced aesthetic experience.117 Synaesthesia, according to Doris Borelli, “illustrates the preternatural experience of [Silvestro’s] surroundings to contrast his previous anesthesia” (675). Such a

“preternatural experience” implies both a time which precedes or is outside the realm of normal time, as well as an aesthetic other time, since Silvestro is essentially invoking false recollections of past memories. Therefore, in an attempt to illustrate that authentic experience is no longer possible, Vittorini further comments on the anesthetic and amnesiac state of Silvestro and therefore of society as well, while also ironically aligning his character intertextually with

Proust: a parodic anti-Proustian hero whose involuntary memory triggers false memories – and the reader deems them as false or distorted given Silvestro superimposes two incongruous elements, believing them both to be real, such as the herring described above –, not completely unlike Joyce’s ‘epiphonies.’ Silvestro is a copy-typist who believes he has retrieved – via involuntary memory – past sensations hitherto dormant, a character in opposition with the artist for whom awakening involuntary memory is essential to a creative process. When read according to this paradigmatic orchestration, Vittorini is implicitly critiquing the aestheticism of a high

117 Although Proust’s mémoire involontaire is connected to food – via the madeleine scene, for example – it is a primarily synesthetic evocation and not necessarily food related; for example the Venetian cobble stone scene evokes sensations that are just as lucid and aesthetically significant as the madeleine for Marcel. For Vittorini, however, his notions of “due volte reale” and “quarta dimensione” are fundamentally culinary, and his memory – whether true or false – is most often than not food related.

259 modernist novel such as Proust’s which is neither capable of representing societal hardships nor of positing an engaged solution for them, since Proust’s mémoire involontaire is singular and subjective, and although Silvestro’s memory – which also obviously interacts with Bergsonian notions of temps and durée – manifests itself through the singular perspective of one author, it stands in for a more communal understanding of memory, particularly of humanity’s short-term memory. Although to different ends, in Vittorini as in Proust, food, its smells and tastes, take on a mnemonic function, operating as a medium which recreates and reanimates the past; however, as is the case in the fugue above, such a remembered past may violently clash with both the past reality and with the present. One question remains: if voluntary, unconscious or involuntary memory spawn false memories or illusions, do these not retain any veridical foundations?

4.1 Travelling in the Fourth Dimension

Vittorini’s mice, which symbolize the lost time of childhood, combined with their quasi anagrammatic acoustic image of topos, allow for the creation of an ideal Silvestro yearns for: to travel in the fourth dimension, where sensual and physical experience is “due volte reale,” real twice and twice as real, lived in a context where childhood memories, or his recollections of them, fuse with the present (182). The descriptions Vittorini employs related to the heightened experience of “due volte reale” are predominantly food related, from cheese to oranges to herring, culinary images that constitute the fugal writing above and the four-dimensional space described as follows:

Era questo, mia madre; il ricordo di quella che era stata quindici anni prima, venti anni prima quando ci aspettava al salto dal treno merci […] il ricordo, e l’età di tutta la lontananza, l’in più d’ora, insomma due volte reale. Esaminava l’aringa, tenendola alta, da una parte, dall’altra, non bruciata in nessun punto, eppure arsa tutta, e anche l’aringa era questo, il ricordo e l’in più di ora. E questo era ogni cosa, il ricordo e l’in più d’ora, il sole, il freddo, il braciere di rame in mezzo alla cucina, e l’acquisito nella mia coscienza di quel punto del mondo dove mi trovavo; ogni cosa era questo, reale due volte; e forse era per questo che non mi era indifferente sentirmi là, viaggiare, per questo che era due volte vero, anche il viaggio da Messina in giù, e le arance sul battello-traghetto, e il Gran Lombardo in

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treno, e Coi Baffi e Senza Baffi, e la verde malaria, e Siracusa, la Sicilia stessa insomma, tutto reale due volte, e in viaggio, quarta dimensione (183-4).118

Silvestro’s present context, his travels, and his memories, of his hometown and particularly his mother and all that surrounds her, are described as existing simultaneously: the past is superimposed onto the present, childhood memories permeating through. The protagonist’s first revelation of this hyperreality exists once he stops to properly perceive his mother, defining her in the first sentence of this passage as being an accumulation of her past selves, a harmonious coexistence of time and space. The mother occupies several domestic spaces in the novel, mostly either her home or the homes of those she cares for, as she distributes provisions and gives injections to the elderly and the ill. The mother, in her own home, is metonymically associated with food in this passage. The narration above flows as in the manner of stream-of-consciousness associations, opening with the mother figure holding the herring – absurdly both burnt and not burnt – which triggers more water-related imagery: the ferry Silvestro took and consequently, the oranges the poor Sicilians ate aboard. From the boat, he shifts his memories backwards to the train he took prior to boarding the ferry, and the contrapuntal characters he met: the policing officials With and Without Whiskers (Con Baffi, Senza Baffi), and the Dantesque character of the Gran Lombardo, who represents a form of landed gentry in Sicily, and an essentially anti- fascist community (Lombardi di Sicilia). Finally, slowly zooming out, the focalization of the narrative describes Siracusa and synecdochically, all of Sicily as “reale due volte” and

118 “This was my mother: the memory of her fifteen years earlier, twenty years earlier, […] as she waited for us to jump off the freight train; that memory, plus all the time that had passed since then, the something-more of the present. In short, she was twice real. She examined the herring on one side then the other, holding it up, and even the herring was both a memory and the something-more of the present – the sun, the cold, the copper brazier in the middle of the kitchen, the existence in my mind of that place in the world whre I found myself, everything had this quality of being twice real; and maybe this was why it made a difference to me to be there, to be on a journey, because of everything that was twice real, even the journey down from Messina, the oranges on the ferry, and the Big Lombard on the train, and Whiskers and Without Whiskers, and the malarial green, and Siracusa – in all, Sicily itself, everything twice real, and on a journey in the fourth dimension” (Vittorini 43-44).

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Silvestro’s voyage, according to him, becomes four-dimensional because, as in relativity theory, time takes on the fourth dimension of space; Silvestro’s descriptions and perception of reality therefore suggests he believes that multiple spaces can coexist at the same time.

Silvestro is suffering from what Paul Ricoeur describes as “le piège de l’imaginaire” in which the subject confuses two paradigms, that of the imaginary with that of memory (2000: 64).

Elements of a Proustian parody begin to fully form here, and it is extremely probable that

Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was the source for Vittorini’s reference to four- dimensionality, given the following description of the church in Combray: “un édifice occupant, si l’on peut dire, un espace à quatre dimensions – la quatrième étant celle du Temps -, déployant

à travers les siècles son vaisseau qui, de travée en travée, de chapelle en chapelle, semblait vaincre et franchir, non pas seulement quelques mètres, mais des époques successives d’où il sortait victorieux” (I, 61).119 Due to the polysemic nature of “vaisseau” as describing both a section of a church and a boat, Vittorini’s travel in the fourth dimension seems to take Proust’s text literally, by re-contextualising the sacred and static locus of the church in the ferry,

‘thickening’ diachronically (to evoke Bakhtin’s terminology). On a more speculative note, it could be that Vittorini, beyond engaging with Proust’s work from a more ideological perspective, and critiquing the lack of political engagement of the aesthete, also saw in his life- long novel an aspect of musical form. Could it be that Vittorini, who was working with fugue in literature, also saw La recherche as a fugue, reading the Italian equivalent to recherche, ‘ricerca,’ in its original musical context? After all, Arroyas explains that “Le ricercare, forme ancienne de la fugue, constitue le titre d’un roman de Geneviève Serreau” (53). This could explain one aspect

119 Despite Vittorini’s acknowledgement, in 1929, that Proust represented a new inspiration for his writing, I have encountered no criticism that unites either the notion of four-dimensionality in both authors’ works, or a comparative study on mémoire involontaire.

262 of Vittorini’s dialogue with, or commentary on, Proust’s aesthetics, and his understanding of spatio-temporality within the novel, and more particularly in musico-literary terms.

Silvestro’s interpretation of the fourth dimension relies upon a past that he truly believes existed. However, once he is faced with the reality of the present, the poverty-stricken village which has not changed according to his mother, as well as the reality of his mother’s adulterous affairs, he begins to juxtapose a past he imagined and the reality of a past his mother recounts, a mother whom he called “Mamma Melone” and “Mamma dei Meloni,” for her ability to always feed her family, by putting melon on the table, melons which magically appear as though she hid them within herself: “noi pensavamo che li custodissi dentro di te, in qualche modo…” (202).120

The mother, in a sense, also stands as a symbol of fertility, as being able to generate the melons, so to speak. Once again remembering food – Vittorini’s main manner of quantifying poverty in the novel –, Silvestro realizes that his mother was not always able to afford a proper meal on her own, or for her family; the fact that she would grow and hide melons underlines the omnipresence and power of the feminine in Vittorini’s novel, as well as a euphemistic or metonymic progression from the child’s pre-linguistic stage, to an infant or adolescent’s linguistic formation and identity construction: the rounded globe of the melon essentially replaces the mother’s breast on a literal and physical level.

The account of a fourth-dimension expounds the crux of reality and its opposition to abstraction and imagination, which also constitute the thematic underpinning of the fugal passage described in the first section of this chapter. Once again, the herring appears as both burnt and not burnt because Silvestro’s mind has imprinted a false past onto the present: he remembers the fish as perfectly cooked, when in fact it was rarely the case. Much in the same

120 “we thought you hid them inside yourself somehow” (My translation).

263 manner as the ‘bird-girl’ scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, described earlier in this dissertation in relation to epiphanies, Silvestro experiences an epiphany of his own, one which forces the reader here to ask: if Silvestro’s perceptions are heightened and twice real, what constitutes the reality of the thing perceived once? In order to divide the remembered object, the recuperated image from the real, Vittorini makes his character undergo a journey of alterity, where dialogues with others create an awareness within himself, a specular reforming of his identity.

4.2 A Linguistic Coda

In order for Silvestro to truly communicate with the Sicilians, he must retrieve something that he has lost within himself and within language. Vittorini’s specific goal in bettering “il mondo offeso”121 – one of the definitions he gave of his novel, and a problem quoted on numerous occasions throughout the text – is through language, the fundamental basis of a conversazione, dialogue or any form of communication. Beyond a thematic fugue created through the repetition of motifs from different viewpoints and different voices, which create a theme or subject, Vittorini seems furthermore to be working at more of a micro-linguistic level, with phonemes and sounds, such as the multiple interjections he writes as onomatopoeias between his characters. The first sound that goes almost unnoticed is “Ah!” heard in the ferry from the orange-peeler who begins many sentences by “Ah, cosi’ ” in response to Silvestro’s unsatisfying statements (143). Later, “Ih” is repeated vehemently by the piccolo siciliano on the train. Vittorini, not only employs synaesthesia, but also explicitly makes it his topic of discussion even within the musical construction; for example, passengers make reference to the puzza on board, puzza signifying “stink,” code for the presence of the authorities aboard the ship, and

121 “the offended world” (My translation).

264 another example of fugue manifesting itself via catachresis. This codified aspect of language is akin to fugue’s relationship to enigma, reinforced in Vittorini’s reconfiguration of a language under surveillance and, as discussed above, beholden to dictatorial powers. In the same passage,

Vittorini minutely unveils the portrait of a hidden body, by commingling whistling with other senses: “Un suono venne come un soffio, di fischio incipiente, morto, senza corpo di voce: -Ih! –

Ed era il vecchietto che rideva. Ma egli non rideva ora. Rideva, con gli occhi, fin dal primo momento che era salito; con gli occhi acuti, vivi, ridendo fisso, guardando a sé dinanzi, me, il sedile, io giovane catanese, e ridendo: felice” (156-7).122 By using synaesthesia to evoke the sound “Ih” – described as a “whistle’ and therefore intratextually recalling the whistle heard on the ferry when approaching Messina, a contrapuntal and hypertextual sound – which in turn transforms into a smile, (but a smile from one’s eyes), Vittorini hints at his writing practice: he employs a diverting – even symbolist –, distorted and catachrestic poetics to unify certain themes and ideas, but also to point the reader in a direction that is seemingly unnoticed or unexpected.

Here, it is language’s capability of achieving musicality, reaching the true abstraction of music, which is not enslaved in semiotic referentiality like language. Therefore, according to Vittorini, it is important to unlearn one’s preconceived notions, which have become manipulated and tarnished by authorities, in order to build a new language and identity, and the author suggests this revolution by adopting another medium in order to communicate and signify where language is no longer capable of doing so.

The final coda or stretto in Conversazione in Sicilia summarizes many of the fugal themes Vittorini employs throughout his novel:

122 “A sound came like a puff, the beginning of a whistle, but deadened, without the body of a voice: “Heh!” And it was the little old man who laughed. But it was not only now that he was laughing. He had been laughing with his eyes from the moment he got on board; with eyes that were penetrating, alive, laughing steadily as they looked around him, at me, at the bench, at the young man from Catania, laughing continually: he was happy” (22).

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Malattia, guarigione. Lo so, lo so. Morte, immortalità e resurrezione. – Ah! – l’arrotino gridò. – Che cosa? – dissi io. – È straordinario, - disse l’arrotino. –Ah, e oh! Ih! Uh! Eh! ... Troppo male offendere il mondo. (282)123

Not unlike Verlaine’s poetic use of breaking down phonemes or Rimbaud’s symbolist vowels,

Vittorini begins his revolution from the ground up, starting with language and particularly an oral tradition in order for communication, dialogues and conversations to flourish: “Ah, e oh! Ih!

Uh! Eh!” (282). However, throughout Conversazione in Sicilia, language, like Silvestro, remains in a dormant state; Vittorini, I understand, meticulously employs the musical style of fugue to set the stage for the hardships of a particular region and community, and for the fundamental role that dialogue will play in bettering both an individual, and a community’s future. The culinary fugue and Silvestro’s temporal misconceptions (the fourth-dimension) offer the protagonist the struggles of a metaphoric rebirth from the pre- and non-linguistic (in fugue and food) to a novel linguistic understanding of the world through code and enigma, and subsequently, through authentic conversation and dialogue. Only upon shedding any preconceived notions of a repeatedly self-inflicted indoctrination regarding the consistence of reality, is Silvestro able to reconstruct a medium through which he can communicate and comprehend his surroundings.

Similarly, such a musico-literary form and narrative structure offers Vittorini a manner in which he is able to convey his message despite the often dogmatic censorship.

4.3 Fugues Within Fugues: Dismantling the Modern Novel From the Inside Out Both Gide and Vittorini employ fugal narratives in novels that question the representation and understanding of ‘truth’ and the ‘real.’ They also fully share in their novelistic constructions

123 “Sickness, healing. I know, I know. Death, immortality, and resurrection.”/”Ah!” the knife grinder shouted. / “What?” I asked. “It’s amazing,” the knife grinder said. “Ah! And Oh! Uh! Eh!”/And I: “I suppose.”/And the knife grinder: “It’s a shame to wrong the world” (128).

266 en abyme, in which centripetal and centrifugal forces unite with the diachronic and the synchronic, the past and its corresponding universe of potential (imaginary) possibilities, in which the subject is both fugal – fleeting, dynamic and not static at all – and illustrative of the fugue itself (as ‘figure,’ in Lyotardian terms), the shape and form of the content it contains. More importantly, these two authors share in their conception of what Ricoeur designates as the ‘antiroman,’ defined above in terms of folly: “un héros à l’esprit fragile et incapable de percevoir la différence entre fiction et réalité prend pour réel (et actuel) l’univers de la fiction, se prend pour l’un de ses personnages, et « interprète » en ce sens le monde qui l’entoure” (Genette 206).

For Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs is an anti-novel in part, because, as an ironic

Künstlerroman, it enacts its own deconstruction, by breaking down the thought process of the writer intermedially, frame by frame, one boxed narrative at a time, before looping back on itself, in autophagic fashion. Furthermore, via ekphrasis, the novel contains and exceeds its boundaries in adding a metadiegetic layering to it, in its attempt to portray the endeavoured grasp of the ineffable, the ideal and utopic apprehension and possession of reality. Musical fugue in literature, as many of these texts within this dissertation demonstrate – albeit differently – is also utopic, but what is of substantial importance to these authors, and Gide particularly, is in how the transformation of one medium affects and alters the reading or comprehension of the other: in this case, fugue in literature parallels the representation of the real in its most banal forms in respect to a heightened, stylized portrayal of the real, a subjective, aestheticized alteration of it.

Fugue for Gide becomes the organizing principal, a linearly all-encompassing and potentially endless convolution of plot sequences in a texte scriptible; however, it also paradigmatically addresses the verticality of modernist literature, posing particular questions regarding who controls not only the characters’ or narrative voice, but also the reader’s perspective: we, as readers, need become conscious of the manipulation of voice – and its concurrent dialogic layers

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–, and Gide wants his reader to be mindful of this process, constantly deconstructing and therefore further emphasizing the hypermediacy of the novel’s diegesis.

Vittorini also evidently demonstrates the constraints of power and authority in the manipulation of voice and language, whether in terms of the authorial voice or in terms of intruding surveillance. Conversazione in Sicilia is also an anti-novel due to the reversal of truth or the real and the imaginary, which cloud the protagonist’s judgment and comprehension of the larger history of which he is a part, and his singular subjectivity: emblematic of the psyche of an individual caught in nascent fascism and in between wars. The psychogenic fugue state in which

Silvestro is living – caught in astratti furori – is a coping mechanism, the creation of a hypnotic, foggy life that ceases to stimulate him. His return home, punctuated by the contrapuntal characters he meets and conversations he has, as well as the fugal reconstruction of a communal

(even secret) language, constitutes Silvestro’s nostos, an anti-fugal paradigm that reflects the individual’s necessity to descend into his deepest anxieties, in hopes of recognition and anagnorisis: essentially coming to terms with his present and his past identity, in the face of the others cast before him, and of the other within.

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Stretto and Coda

Using the fugue, this dissertation has demonstrated that form and content are indivisible in the creation of literary meaning. Therefore, in the spirit of fugue, this conclusion will act as a stretto – by succinctly summarizing and revisiting key concepts of fugue’s intermediality – and as a coda – by suggesting novel directions fugue can take, given that it is, to echo Joyce, an essentially endless form capable of spiraling into “endlessnessnessness” (355). Beyond juxtaposition, the examples of fugal writing that we can read in symbolist verse, as well as in modernist poetry and prose, demonstrate that in their respective contexts, the numerous melopoetic elements of fugue are more than the sum of their parts.

In terms of the historical development of fugal writing, I do not contend that it solely originates in the period of French symbolism or in modernism, nevertheless, it is evident that literary and poetic fugue reaches an acute concentration within the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, allowing us to designate a modernist fugal poetics. By forcing transmediatic analogy, analyzing fugue outside of music becomes a naturally comparative endeavor, in which readers constantly juxtapose two forms that would not normally overlap or unite. What Verlaine, Mallarmé, Gide, Joyce, Pound and Vittorini have done, however, is transcend the static generic and mediatic boundaries (such as juxtaposition or metaphor) that separate music and literature to many aesthetic ends; at times similarly, at times quite differently, within diverse socio-political climates. I have demonstrated that the suggestiveness and evocation of symbolist verse unveils the contours of the observed object, rarely divulging its true identity, but rather evoking its essence, creating an aesthetic parallel akin to the poetics of fugal evolution and variation. It also demonstrates the fundamental crux of fugal poetics: the desire for wholeness, for a utopic totality, which, in a modern context, extends into the realm of aesthetic subjectivity and ontology more generally. Symbolism cannot depict the whole, but only its

269 pieces, its fragments, and even more often, the very effect of the fleeting thing or sensation itself.

Furthermore, as I have demonstrated, modernist writers also grapple with the question of totality

– both aesthetically and politically –, they continue a fugal poetics, in which subjectivity is at its core, and in which a fleeting self and desire for both completeness, and transcendence are thwarted at every turn. For these reasons, I contend that modernist and symbolist writers participate in an often difficult, resistant, enigmatic and even hostile fugal writing. These are writers who, despite their aesthetic and political differences, unite imagism and symbolism; fascism, nationalism and socialism; Künstlerroman and anti-Bildungsroman. In bringing together these elements, that are also brought into counterpoint, the writers participate in a fugal melopoetics and a dialectic breakdown, an intermedial design whose plurality allows its creators and readers to develop questions related to subjectivity in all its forms: the process of writing and creation more generally, space-time relations, and the crisis of language.

A Singular Melopoetics Within this corpus, many authors have a specific definition of music in a literary context, as well as musical terms adapted to the linguistic and narrative realm: from Mallarmé’s Poetry which “repren[d] à la musique son bien,” to Pound’s peculiar definitions of ‘harmony,’ ‘rhythm,’ and ‘pitch,’ among others that are far from the traditional musicologist’s definitions, without forgetting Joyce’s neologisms that both perform and catachrestically distort the semiotic systems to which each medium belongs (Touya de Marenne 91). This dissertation, however, over and above the study of an intermediality that underlines the juxtaposition, contiguity, combination and intrusion of musical form into literature – a multi-faceted definition of melopoetics – has analyzed the singular poetics of fugue in poetry and prose in the context of symbolist and modernist writing, and the larger aesthetic, philosophical and political ramifications of combining two distinct art forms.

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In order to reproduce or suggest the effect of fugue in writing, the writers in this corpus have reverted to three main methods, as expounded in chapter 1: the paradigmatic axis, free indirect speech, and the combinatory dynamics of motif and theme. It is interesting to note that all of these fugal devices transcend the generic divide between prose and verse, without necessarily privileging one over the other. Although every author employs the combination of motif and theme to evoke counterpoint – Verlaine engaging the least with this technique –, they do so in order to demonstrate the variations of distinct subjects. The subject of Verlaine’s fugue, for example, is the aesthetic subject and the relation between internal and external self; Pound, in a similar manner, also takes up the subject of ‘creation’ in “Canto 72,” where the subject and answer of the contrapuntal ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ meet in the overlapping countersubject of

‘transformation,’ also reiterating a recurring theme in this dissertation that relates subjectivity to the problematics of evolution: metempsychosis. For Mallarmé, Vittorini and Gide, the fugal subject navigates the question of mimesis, particularly the representation of reality, its authenticity or absence, its stylization, and its truth. The subject of Joyce’s fuga per canonem is fidelity, in its most general form, from Bloom’s unfaithful wife, Molly, to the ‘Croppy boy,’ and political deception and transgression in Ireland’s attempted Home Rule. Although many similarities and differences arise once these authors and their fugal poetics are juxtaposed, what they seem to share in the combination of theme/motif is an attempt to linearly conjure the effect of fugue, echoing recurring motifs at specific moments in time in order for them to appear at, and therefore organize – beyond a simple metaphorical use of fugue – pivotal plot sequences or character developments.

In this dissertation, however, I have sought to demonstrate that, despite what many critics have argued – from Werner Wolf to Zack Bowen, among many others –, fugue is certainly able to create the effect of vertical simultaneity, despite the linearity of language and more

271 specifically, of narrative. The second fugal device, most prominent in Gide and Vittorini’s novels, and one that creates a palimpsest-like overlapping of voices, perspectives, and even – as demonstrated in the example of Albéric Profitendieu – temporalities, is the use of free indirect speech. The blurring of lines between the character’s voice and perspective, and the infiltrating gaze, opinions, or description on behalf of the narrative voice, bring rise to numerous questions of authority and trustworthiness, as well as novel representations of polyphony in literature.

The final fugal element that also privileges the vertical over the horizontal or syntagmatic is the paradigmatic axis. The act of reading one character’s actions in accordance with the

“mythic method” (T.S. Eliot), necessarily evoking his or her counterpart, only demeans the low- mimetic character, often reducing him or her into an abject, debased one. Such an equation explains why Frye described this form of counterpoint as the basis of the ironic mode in modern literature. More often than not, it seems, the modernist protagonist pertains to this diegetic world.

On a similar, yet less mythological scale, another recurring paradigmatic and syntagmatic entity tied to fugue is the centripetal and centrifugal notion of ‘mise en abyme,’ a trope at the heart of

Gide’s ironic Künstlerroman, but also central to Vittorini’s narrative, and present in Mallarmé’s

“L’Après-midi d’un faune” as well. Through these procedures, fugal poetics emanate at both a micro- and macro-structural level, linearly progressing the plot while also ekphrastically intertwining narrative registers, as in the example of metalepsis, and therefore pushing the boundaries of what could otherwise be seen as a static form of intermediality.

These three fugal elements that suggest counterpoint represent the discursive (Lyotard) nature of fugue’s melopoetics, its experimental form, and its dynamic drive in organizing narrative spatio-temporally. Werner Wolf, in comparing the medium of music to literature, writes: “A similar kind of ‘pluridimensionality’ or ‘spatialization’ can never be fully attained in verbal art. Owing to the typical monodimensionality of its chains of signifiers, all it can do is to

272 suggest ‘polyphony’ by more or less makeshift means…” (20).124 I have demonstrated that the equivalences, echoes, and suggestion of fugue in literature is more than “makeshift,” and that these authors were indeed choosing a medium that could evoke pluridimensionality and a diverse form of spatialization in literature, by turning to one medium in order to supplement what was lacking in another.

However, if the effect or suggestion of fugue can be reached without the reader necessarily having decrypted its poetics as the manner in which the text signifies, does recognizing a fugal poetics matter? Although fugal writing is self-effacing, not to mention fleeting and elusive, it always – within this corpus at least – shares an intriguing relation to its content; how the text signifies and what it signifies, although not always harmonious, exist as interdependent entities nonetheless, especially in regards to hermeneutics and deconstructionism.

I have demonstrated that a fugal poetics is a peculiar intermedial form that not only takes into account its hybridity, but also its polysemy, since the definitions and uses of the term fugue are so numerous: whether in terms of plot progression, autobiographies, or the very definition of modernity. If these authors decided to suggest fugue, or re-create polyphony and counterpoint, it is not uniquely for the purpose of formal experimentation.

I have demonstrated how fugue functions in symbolist and modernist writing. It is a narrative organizational technique, a poetics of polyphonic and contrapuntal arrangement in

French, English and Italian prose and verse. Fugue is the very vessel that both contains and advances the (virtually infinite) variations of its subject, since fugue is, by definition, the variation of a single subject in time and space. It therefore paradoxically acts as a literary structure and form, progressing the plot and evolution of characters, themes and motifs. Yet, it is

124 The use of bold is his.

273 actually a formless entity: it does not have a pre-conceived structure skeleton, only a drive and force. It is a style of writing, even a dynamism of redaction, with the numerous connotations of fragmentation and censorship that the term redaction implies. It is now necessary to recapitulate why these authors reverted to fugue in literature, since, as a chameleon-like guiding force, fugue is elusive and adaptable, both form and formless, and its fleeting nature and inherent malleability make it propitious to representing a modernist crisis of subjectivity, a crisis of language, novel representations of spatio-temporality, and the attempted apprehension of both wholeness and the unrepresentable.

The ‘Hostipitality’ of Reading Fugue

Imogene Horsley explains that fugue originates as a sacred chant to God, an elevation of one’s soul in the form of a cantus firmus. Although Verlaine undergoes a religious renewal following his imprisonment and the publication of Romances sans paroles, the aesthetics of

Mallarmé, Joyce, Pound, Gide and Vittorini remain overtly secular: from Joyce’s epiphanies, and

Pound’s ‘luminous detail,’ to Mallarmé’s spirituality based on le néant. One could therefore ask: if God is no longer the receiver in the dialogic form of the fugue, then who is? One pervading answer to this question, which is evident throughout this corpus is the reader, with whom lies – especially following Barthes’ declaration of the death of the author – the authority of interpretation, particularly so in a ‘writerly’ text. However, this dissertation does not completely espouse the belief that authorial intent is lost, since I argue a fugal poetics is in fact willed, carefully crafted, and part of a larger ludic and enigmatic feat, further complicating the silence of authors such as Verlaine, Mallarmé and Vittorini on the subject of fugue in literature. Such an assumption begins with Bach’s fugues, in which the composer encrypted words, particularly names, reminiscent of Pythagorean enigma, as Dentler has explained. The enigma of fugue is at once ludic, didactic, and a modernist attempt to prolong a sense of mystery.

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The relationship between text and reader (or author and reader, in some cases) is one, at times, of hospitality, at times, of hostility, hence the Derridean neologism of “hostipitality.”

Reading and interpreting a fugal poetics means to untangle each strand of the narrative or poem’s web, by following specific motifs – once again, fugue as ‘discourse’ – in order to see where they lead, and to what theme they may link. It also means pinpointing the subject or musical ‘theme’

– and consequently the answer and countersubject – of the literary fugue, essentially encountering polyphony in its varying forms, from contrapuntal character arrangements, theme/motif variations, diverse linguistic registers and voices overlapping (free indirect speech), and the world of possibilities laden in the axis of substitution, the paradigmatic axis.

Fugal melopoetics, as a singular form of intermediality can go completely unnoticed – therefore reaching its effect self-elusively –, or disrupt common reading practices altogether, creating a sense of surprise, uneasiness, or bewilderment on behalf of the reader. Fugal writing, as an intermediary and hybrid form can therefore both supplement and disrupt reading, in which the very act of reading and interpreting is questioned, a revolutionary aesthetics in symbolist and modernist writing. From a biological standpoint, and in line with a hospitality of reading, fugue in literature functions in harmony with two extremes: the relation between music and literature is either one of mutualism – in which both media benefit from the relationship – or one of parasitism – in which one thrives to the detriment of the other. Never, however, are these two merely symbiotic, in a static juxtaposition, contiguity or proximity – as the etymology of symbiosis suggests –, since they intrude upon, overlap, influence and transform each other.

Musical fugue in literary form therefore necessarily disrupts both the act of reading and writing.

Although in this project I have argued for the more positive repercussions of fugue in literature, I would add that even the negative, violent or parasitic intrusion of fugue is at times beneficial in the long term as a form of renewal – of language, of the evolution of the novel, or of poetics –,

275 and part of these writers’ goals; even the ambiguity of the term hôte in French, which designates both ‘guest’ and ‘host,’ embodies a reciprocity that filters into a fugal poetics, whereby the dismantling of authority is something both author or text and reader share. Fugue, I have demonstrated, performs the deconstruction of binaries, between self and other, creator and observer, or, more importantly, between author and reader. If these authors have replaced God within the fugal form, it is because the act of creation, in its broadest sense, is no longer solely top-down, but depends both upon the author and the reader’s ability to generate meaning, and the text’s ability to renew itself in an endless semiosis. Such are the dynamics of Barthes’ texte scriptible, in which the reader and writer partake in the weaving and dismantling of signification in the textual braid, without mentioning the genetic value of such a creative form. After all, as

Escal suggests, this interpretative model is similar to “gestation,” and the reader actively and intimately participates in the process of its creation (169).

However, fugal writing, as we have seen, can also resist subjective appropriation. This dissertation has taken into account the innately enigmatic feature of fugue – which is present at least since the Baroque period –, the notions of an initiated reader (particularly in symbolism), as opposed to an ideal reader (Joyce, Pound and Gide), without forgetting the potentially ludic and even political act of decoding fugal poetics (Vittorini), in a similar way to a puzzle, as was the case in fugue’s nascent form of canon. The ‘stress,’ in Hopkins’ terms, theorizes both the reader’s attempt to capture the literary fugue’s ‘inscape,’ its internal tension, and the text’s resistance to the reader’s subjective manipulation. Therefore, despite its implicit occasional violence – from the hostility of Joyce’s “Sirens” episode that has baffled critics for nearly a century, to the misleading narratives and ambiguous voices in the works of Verlaine, Mallarmé,

Joyce, Gide, Pound and Vittorini –, a fugal melopoetics performs the ambiguous relationship between text and reader in symbolism and modernism. This relationship is symptomatic of the

276 very reason these authors employ fugue in literature: to guide and portray the attempted conception and apprehension of wholeness.

Apprehending Wholeness

It is evident, given the formal analyses in this dissertation, that fugue in literature functions as an experimental and dynamic narrative or poetics – beyond the static juxtaposition of an intertextual copresence, such as the manifestation or simple mentioning of a painting or a song within the text –, but the question of how fugue functions in literature is at least as important as why authors revert to fugue at all. The larger subjective, philosophical and interdisciplinary consequences of fugue, aspects often disregarded by critics, not only summarize what is “in the air” at a specific historical juncture, but they also point to different directions melopoetic projects can take. In this dissertation, I have offered many reasons for the use of fugue within this literary corpus, almost all of which unite in the notion of a desired totality or wholeness: from subjectivity, the representation of spatio-temporality, or the comprehension and attempted apprehension of the fourth dimension, in all its forms.

As fugue is the variation of a single subject over time and space, the polysemic ambiguity of ‘subject’ lends itself to an array of interpretations, most notably the notion of selfhood. This dissertation has argued that, in a similar fashion to Bach, the inscription of selfhood within the text is paramount to a fugal scaffolding, and even more specifically, the representation of a unified self over time and space. Whether Verlaine, Mallarmé, Gide, Vittorini, Joyce or Pound, making sense of the aesthetic self (or even the Bergsonian moi profond), or the historical, and socio-political self offers one interpretation into the use of fugue vis-à-vis the discontinuous, fragmentary, and often contradictory nature of modern subjectivity in their poetry and prose. For

Verlaine, the aesthetic and personal self – one’s interiority and exteriority – depends on alterity, and the Other, in turn, specularly influences and even transforms the self, particularly one’s

277 ipseity, further complicating notions of hetero- and homosexual identification within Verlaine’s work. For Vittorini, there is no harmony between the past (catachrestic) selves of Silvestro and his current state of recollection and re-membering, which creates a clash between the attempted unison of the modern subject, and a linear comprehension of spatio-temporality.

Subjectivity and space-time relations are in natural harmony with fugue – a polyphonic and therefore vertical and horizontal overlapping and progression of time and space, a meddling of synchrony and diachrony. The relation of time to space constitutes one definition of four- dimensionality in this project, time serving as the fourth dimension to a three-dimensional world.

Fugue is the organizing form that allows the reader to expand regular narratives’ ability to represent simultaneity, viewpoints (such as parallax, which gives a more complete or whole sense of the thing observed, while complicating the question of perspective), as well as this melopoetics’ relation to repetition and variation, such as in the omnipresence of metempsychosis in these works. Fugue’s connection to four-dimensionality also moves beyond temporality and into a uniquely spatial, even physical realm, with the example of M. H. Abrahm’s four- dimensionality, which is the actual embodiment of the text by the reader, and the pleasure s/he takes in reading aloud, lulling, and performing the poem. Another one of the reader’s roles, beyond interpretation, is therefore also to embody the text, to give it shape, form, and a voice.

Finally, the third and final definition of four-dimensionality lies in non-Euclidian geometry, whereby a space exists either within or outside the spatial realm visible to us, living in a third dimension. Apprehending the totality of the object, thing, or self perceived therefore represents one aesthetic goal for these symbolist and modernist writers. The stress of the object observed and the stress of the observer conflate – quite literally, as the etymology of ‘conflate’ suggests, in Mallarmé’s faun, who blows the empty grape expanding with desire –, and fugue acts as a guiding force to such attempts at apprehending the object’s essence, whatness, virtù,

278 among other terms in dialogue with Joyce’s epiphanies, and Pound’s ‘luminous detail,’ for example. The process of attaining the object which I stretch to include the self, according to

Aquinas, Joyce, Pound, Pater, among others, is one that constitutes a dismantling of the thing, its integritas, in order to apprehend its wholeness, its quiddity, impossible as this may be. Once again, in Lyotardian terms, whereas the progression of a fugal poetics and narrative constitute the discursive nature of fugue, the intermedial form also spawns an image, an intangible figure that also resists apprehension. And this paradoxically formless form hints towards fugue’s relation to what is not only ineffable, but also unrepresentable.

Following subjectivity and four-dimensionality, the last relation between fugue and totality or wholeness lies in yet two other geometrical forms: the circle and the spiral. As a theoretically endless form, the fugue could virtually spiral into infinity. The spiral, prominent in

Pound and Lewis’ vorticism, with centripetal and centrifugal forces creating its dynamics, also pushes the fugue forward, in its constant variation of subject, answer, and countersubject. Fugue, however, shares at least as much with the spiral as it does with the circle, suggesting a particular form of circularity that permits evolution and transformation. The image of the Ouroboros, for example, suggests the autophagic nature of fugue – which I discussed in relation to Gide –, which creates more of itself from itself. The Möbius strip, a twisted circle – part spiral, part circle, in a sense – also performs the contradictory, even Promethean, nature of needing to destroy in order to create or re-generate. This is the very subject of Pound’s fugue, as discussed in Chapter 3. For Mallarmé, for example, the destruction of the self is paramount to a renaissance, a re-creation of the aesthetic being: he needed to find le néant in order to reach beauty, as he explains. The power of language, in this dissertation – for Verlaine, Mallarmé,

Joyce, and Vittorini especially –, demonstrates that a crisis of communication can only pass through language itself if it seeks to be renewed; in order to recreate language (or suggest a pre-

279 linguistic moment, or ur-language), it is necessary to do so via the linguistic, in a poetics of erasure, as discussed in Chapter 1, or in relation to Gödel’s incompleteness theory (or the ‘liar’s paradox’), as discussed in Chapter 4. Such is also the dynamics of deconstructionism that unravels the binaries in fugal dialectics, which echoes fugue’s constant desire to reach an impossible totality, a wholeness that depends on the infinite discovery of self (in time and space).

After all, the fugue is a constant departure, and any return is only momentary, any nostos is but a moment of transition, since, to re-quote T.S. Eliot, the return “[w]ill be to arrive where we have started / And to know the place for the first time” (Eliot 43).

Loose Threads

This dissertation on the fugal poetics of symbolist and modernist works has analyzed the formal, aesthetic, and philosophical elements related to an originally musical style. Despite the attempt to extensively portray this musical form in literature, this dissertation is also condemned to repeat that which a fugal poetics performs: the desire to reach totality. There are, evidently, many theoretical, philosophical, and formal questions that arise from this project, many questions that remain unresolved, and new directions it can take. For example, although the concentration of fugue in literature between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th is historically relevant, other periods and languages’ portrayal of fugue, or use of a fugal poetics, merit further investigation, as well as a broader diachronic study of fugue in literature, such as the repercussions of the Baroque throughout history. Theoretically, I have primarily focused on counterpoint in fugue; however, fugue’s melopoetics can push theories of intermediality further in breaching the gap between static intermediality and a more fluid, dynamic one, for example with further studies on literature and tone-leading (as suggested by

Pound), or the potential representation of modal and tonal music in literature. In the realm of reader-response, for example, fugue could benefit from additional dialogue with Derrida and

280

Lévinas’ theories of hospitality, as well as Umberto Eco’s opera aperta,125 not to mention genetic criticism which would include the process of creation in a larger understanding of fugal poetics. Finally, other authors both within and outside symbolism and modernism deserve attention vis-à-vis their potential fugal writing, in what seems, at least in this project, as a very masculine genre. One poet, for example, whose interest in the four dimensions of space that could also complement fugue – while adding a feminine voice to the discussion – is Gertrude

Stein, as suggested by Wyndham Lewis’ (mocking) rendition of her poetry and “compositions” as: “FugfugggFFF-fewg: fugfug-Fug-fugue-fffffuuuuuuG” (Lewis 66).

The text, as its etymon implies, is an interwoven tissue, and the examples above represent some of the loose threads that make up this dissertation and that could lead to a larger understanding of fugue’s web: its interdisciplinary ramifications, beyond its representing a modernist mindset and as a fundamental dynamics or ‘stress’ to accessing reality. Barthes’ description of the text as a braid – and this is particularly pertinent to the texte scriptible – that creates its thickness, its horizontality and verticality, could intermingle with other theoretical questions. For example, one final loose thread that could shed more light on the subjective implications of fugal writing is the theoretical and methodological domain of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and more specifically, the mathematic Borromean knot, whose qualities are similar to the braid, which Hofstadter, as we have seen, compares to an endless fugue.

125 For an analysis of Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs and Eco’s work, see: Giovanna Lanza’s Pourrait être continue…: La poetica dell’opera aperta e Les Faux-Monnayeurs di André Gide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999.

281

Through this image of the Borromean knot, Lacan formulates his theory of the interdependence of the Real (R), the Imaginary (I), and the Symbolic (S). Should the Symbolic be cut, nothing would hold the Real and the Imaginary together, in a similar fashion to three interwoven and interdependent threads in a common braid. To cut one thread means dismantling the entire work: such an organization is fitting for the braid-like fugue which also questions the very substance and consistency of the self, of reality, and the process of aesthetic creation. Briefly, Lacan defines the Real as “ce qui est strictement impensable,” and completely dissociated from any notion of pleasure (2002: 14). The Symbolic defines itself as a process in relation to language and expression, since, as Lacan states, “le Symbolique s’écrit” (1973: 152). Thirdly, Lacan designates the Imaginary as fundamental to the perception of self: “le départ de celle-ci est la référence au corps et au fait que sa représentation, je veux dire tout ce qui pour lui se représente, n’est que le reflet de son organisme” (2002: 16). At the very centre of this knot and braid lies the

282

Lacanian “objet petit a,” the object of desire that is never fully attainable, and around which assemble the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

Given the presence of geometry in relation to fugue within this dissertation – from four- dimensionality to the Möbius strip –, Lacan’s Borromean knot as a braid, through which to question notions of the Real, of the Symbolic, and the Imaginary pass, offers a logical next step for this project on fugue’s portrayal of the (proto-)modernist subject in time and space. It is particularly relevant to this literary corpus as well, in which Mallarmé’s faun and his unattainable desire, Gide’s portrayal of a stylized reality, and Vittorini’s spatio-temporal weavings to make sense of the due volte reale and to escape the strictement impensable are fused. For Verlaine, Mallarmé, Joyce, Pound, Gide and Vittorini, fugue not only represents an intermedial melopoetics at a moment of aesthetic questioning and linguistic crisis, but it also performs and dismantles the unattainable desire, the ‘objet petit a’ that is the totality of the modern self in time and space.

283

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