Debussy and the Fragment (Chiasma 18)

Debussy and the Fragment Chiasma 18 General Editor Michael Bishop Editorial Committee Adelaide Russo, Michael Shering...

Author: Linda Cummins

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Debussy and the Fragment

Chiasma 18 General Editor Michael Bishop Editorial Committee Adelaide Russo, Michael Sheringham, Steven Winspur, Sonya Stephens, Michael Brophy, Anja Pearre

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006


Linda Cummins

Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN-10: 90-420-2065-2 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2065-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

CHIASMA Chiasma seeks to foster urgent critical assessments focussing upon joinings and criss-crossings, single, triangular, multiple, in the realm of modern French literature. Studies may be of an interdisciplinary nature, developing connections with art, philosophy, linguistics and beyond, or display intertextual or other plurivocal concerns of varying order. Michael Bishop Halifax, Nova Scotia * Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and literature, Linda Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy’s work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations. Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western cultural past in search of the surprisingly ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy’s scores and finds convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover. Anja Pearre Halifax, Nova Scotia 2006

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professors Matthew G. Brown, now of the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and Jan Herlinger and Adelaide Russo of Louisiana State University, co-directors and minor professor respectively, for invaluable guidance and generosity with their time during the completion of the dissertation on which this book is based; and since. The Graduate School of Louisiana State University, the Bourse Chateaubriand, and the Camargo Foundation provided indispensable financial support for research and writing, for which I am most grateful. Dover Scores kindly provided permission to use their publications as models for all musical examples. Thanks also to Alaric Haag, who responded with characteristic élan to a request for cover art; to Anja Pearre, whose conscientious and thorough editing saved me from many infelicities of expression; and to Christa Stevens, for seeing the manuscript expeditiously through the press. Finally, I thank my family and friends for their unflagging support and encouragement.


CONTENTS

Introduction

11

Chapter 1 Ruins of Convention; Conventions of Ruin

21

Chapter 2 Beginnings and Endings

63

Chapter 3 Arcadias and Arabesques

95

Chapter 4 The Sketch

117

Chapter 5 Auto-Quotation

135

Chapter 6 Preludes: A Postlude

151

Bibliography

171


INTRODUCTION

“Gifted as he was, there was nothing cosmic or inspired about Debussy’s work, as is proved by the fact that he never produced anything incomplete.”1 These words of the Berlin critic Adolf Weissmann, written in the early 1920s—dated, opinionated, no doubt nationalistically prejudiced—echo Friedrich Schlegel’s description of the Romantic literary work from his often-quoted Athenaeum Fragment 116: “the romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected.”2 Weissmann’s equation of the inspired with the incomplete identifies him as an heir of German Romanticism and indicates the extent of the influence held by certain aspects of that movement more than a hundred years after Schlegel’s writings gave it direction. Stefan Jarocinski, writing in the 1960s with a different agenda—the promotion of Debussy as a creator of the modern in music—continued to rely on the authority of the incomplete. Justifying his praise of Debussy’s music by the presence of that very element Weissmann found missing, he reiterated the Romantic ideal of the forever becoming: “Sa musique ne commence ni ne finit. … Sa forme n’est pas close. … [Elle] se forme, se renouvelle sans cesse …” [His music neither begins nor ends. Its form is not closed. It forms itself, it renews itself without ceasing.]3 Other critics of Debussy’s time agreed with Weissmann’s negative assessment of the composer, but for the opposite reason, decrying Debussy’s music because of its fragmentation and referring, for instance, to “fragments of the tonal wreck,”4 “la décomposition de 1 Adolf Weissmann, The Problems of Modern Music, trans. M. M. Bozman (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1925), 171. Originally published as Die Musik in der Weltkrise, 1922. 2 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 175. 3 Stefan Jarocinski, Debussy: impressionnisme et symbolisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), 74-75; my translation. 4 Louis Elson, Boston Daily Advertiser, March 4, 1907, quoted in Nicholas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 93 (of La Mer, “We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck …”).

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notre art … et la ruine de notre être” [the decomposition of our art … and ruin of our essence].5 Critics closer to our own time also find fragmentation in Debussy’s compositions, calling attention to “fragments of melody,”6 “fragments of counterpoint,”7 etc. Unlike those critics of Debussy’s time, they side with Jarocinski and single out these features for praise as harbingers of the future, comparing them to developments in modern art through their choice of terms like “collage citations”8 and “mosaic technique.”9 Yet they ignore or marginalize Debussy’s ties to the Romantic tradition he inherited and confronted. We have reached an imbalance: recent scholarship has focused predominantly on Debussy’s ties to modernism,10 while virtually ignoring his ties to fragmentation in music of the Romantic period. Although frequently considered the property of early German Romanticism on the one hand or of the twentieth century on the other, the fragment, the incomplete entity, has been recognized and consciously employed in Western art and literature at least since the fourteenth century. Scholars are now devoting more serious study to the role of the fragment in other chronological periods; as a result, a history of the fragment is currently being constructed. This history offers an alternative and balance to the long-held Aristotelian 5

Camille Bellaigue, Revue des Deux Mondes, Paris, 15 May 1902, quoted in Slonimsky, Lexicon, 90-91 (“Aucun n’est mieux qualifié que l’auteur de Pelléas et Mélisande pour présider à la décomposition de notre art. La musique de M. Debussy tend à la diminution et à la ruine de notre être.” [No one is better qualified than the composer of Pelléas et Mélisande to preside over the decomposition of our art. The music of M. Debussy leads to the emaciation and ruin of our essence.]). 6 Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press), 172 (of “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut”). 7 William Austin, Music in the Twentieth Century from Debussy through Stravinsky (New York: W. W. Norton and Sons, 1966), 45 (of the “Ballade de Villon à s’amye”). 8 Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 298. 9 Michael L. Friedmann, “Approaching Debussy’s ‘Ondine’,” Cahiers Debussy, 6 (1982): 22. 10 Most characteristically, perhaps, in the often-quoted remark of Pierre Boulez: “ … one can justifiably claim that modern music began with L’Après-midi d’un faune.” Stocktakings of an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 267.

Introduction

13

perception of unity as the ultimate goal of art—a unity analysts and critics construct by marginalizing disorder and fragmentation, by concentrating on and valuing what binds together rather than what pulls apart, and consequently by weakening and devaluing the very powerful statements made by fragments prior to the Romantic era.11 In music criticism, scant attention has been paid to fragments except in discussions of nontonal music of the twentieth century and studies of sketches and works left incomplete at a composer’s death. This omission is unfortunate in that it, too, distorts our view of the modern fragment by placing it in a vacuum, without prior history. More recently the importance of the fragment in the aesthetics of Romantic music has been traced by a number of specialists, most significantly Charles Rosen and John Daverio.12 They have demonstrated how Romantic ideas of the fragment were developed in the music of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, and others. These studies have made the phenomenon of fragmentation in music more visible and have provided a more nuanced view of the function of disorder, disruption, and incompletion in its history. This background can allow us to begin to see Debussy’s music from a more balanced perspective, to understand how he exploits the tension between whole and fragment. The composers mentioned in the preceding paragraph were a part of Debussy’s musical heritage: he knew their music, studied it, performed it.13 He placed himself in the company of Chopin and Schumann, writing in a letter to his publisher Jacques Durand,

11 On these points, see Lawrence D. Kritzman, preface to Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1981), vii. 12 Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993); also Ramon Satyendra, “Liszt’s Open Structures and the Romantic Fragment,” Music Theory Spectrum 19 (Fall 1997): 184-205. 13 For works Debussy played in competitions as a student, John R. Clevenger, “Achille at the Conservatoire,” Cahiers Debussy 19 (1995): 3-35; “Debussy’s Paris Conservatoire Training” in Debussy and his World, ed. Jane Fulcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 299-361. Debussy edited Chopin’s works for Durand (1915-1917); he transcribed Schumann’s Six études en forme de canon, op. 56 for two pianos (Durand, 1891).

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Debussy and the Fragment Avez-vous joué les Images...? Sans fausse vanité, je crois que ces trois morceaux se tiennent bien et qu’ils prendront leur place dans la littérature du piano... (comme dirait Chevillard), à gauche de Schumann, ou à droite de Chopin... as you like it. [Have you played the Images … ? Without false vanity, I think these three pieces work well and will take their place in piano literature … (as Chevillard would say), to the left of Schumann or to the right of Chopin … as you like it.]14

In 1904 Laloy introduced a concert with a talk intended to show connections between Debussy and Schumann, both of whom he called musical intuitives.15 Recent scholarship has illuminated the relationship of Debussy to these musical forebears as well. Roy Howat catalogs many instances of Debussy’s conscious or unconscious modeling on the works of Chopin in the Preludes, the Etudes, L’Isle joyeuse, and others.16 Rosen writes that Debussy loved the music of Schumann and understood its capricious imagination: he was able to adapt some of the unresolved sonorities and the fleeting phrases that Schumann himself distrusted into a new musical style, one almost totally liberated from the academic requirements of the past—to realize, in short, both the destructive and creative elements of Schumann’s art in his own way.17

Ultimately, Rosen observes that the classical hierarchy of genres had been shaken to the ground by Schumann and Chopin, shored up by Brahms and Wagner for a time, until the early years of the twentieth century. This is certainly one of the reasons why the 14

Claude Debussy, Correspondance 1884-1918, ed. François Lesure (Paris: Hermann éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1993), 204; trans. Roger Nichols, Claude Debussy, Debussy Letters, ed. François Lesure and Roger Nichols (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 158. The phrase “as you like it” is written in English in the original letter, dated 11 September 1905. 15 François Lesure, Claude Debussy (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 254. 16 Roy Howat, “Chopin’s Influence on the Fin de Siècle and Beyond,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 246-283. 17 Rosen, 706.

Introduction

15

work of Schumann and Chopin has more affinity with the style of Debussy and the early twentieth century than it does with the music of the last half of the nineteenth.18

Rosen’s statements parallel literary comparisons between French Symbolism and early German Romanticism that began at least as early as 1891.19 The specific connections are often vague, and are argued by scholars with various perspectives; nevertheless, Henri Peyre claims: “It happens that a family of like minds finds itself thus, a hundred years and a thousand miles removed from one another.”20 Ernst Behler and Roman Struc write of Friedrich Schlegel: With this conversion to mythology and symbolism, Schlegel [Friedrich] opened a path which consequently led to Nietzsche’s early aesthetics and to French Symbolism of the 19th century.21

Lilian Furst expands this comparison in an extended work, noting “parallel tendencies [that] develop within the framework of diverse national traditions,” singling out as features common to Symbolism and the Frühromantik “idealism, freedom of the imagination, flight from formal plasticity, obscurity, emphasis on the musical qualities of

18

Rosen, 699-700. Jean Thorel, “Les Romantiques allemands et les symbolistes français,” Entretiens politiques et littéraires 3 (1891): 85-109. Peyre and Furst report this early comparison. 20 Henri Peyre, What is Symbolism? trans. Emmett Parker (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 86-88; originally published as Qu’est-ce le symbolisme? (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974). 21 Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, introduction to Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms by Friedrich Schlegel (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 46. 19

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language, religious feeling.”22 A comparison of texts by German Romantics and by writers often labeled Symbolist reveals striking similarities. Verlaine, calling on the infinite possibilities of the incomplete, wrote of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in Les Poètes maudits that his poetic dramas “were ‘like cathedrals and revolutions,’ always unfinished and always begun again.”23 A. W. Schlegel’s statement The arts should be brought together again, and bridges sought from one to another. Perhaps columns shall come to life as paintings, paintings become poems, poems become music.24

foreshadows Baudelaire’s notion of “Correspondances” in the first two stanzas of his sonnet, labeled by Henri Dorra “a preliminary manifesto” of French Symbolism:25 La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, 22

Lilian Furst, Counterparts: The Dynamics of Franco-German Literary Relationships 1770-1895 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press: 1977), 8, 106-7. In her study, Furst notes other writers who compare early Romanticism and Symbolism, including Albert Béguin’s influential L’Âme romantique et le rêve (Paris: Corti, 1937), which focuses on a “lineage of interior romanticism.” (The Béguin quote is from page 328.) There is no space here to summarize Furst’s argument adequately, nor to take into consideration the numerous questions it raises: the timing and spread of the Frühromantik’s texts and theories in France, the effect of those intervening years of French Romanticism in the formation of Symbolism proper, Wagner’s role in France and Germany, and the unresolved problem of just what poets and writers constitute the movement labeled Symbolism. [On this mare’s nest, see Laurence M. Porter, The Crisis of French Symbolism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), especially Chapter I. 23 Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 119, n. 70. 24 A.W. Schlegel quoted by Guido Adler, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, vol. 2 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1961), 865. Translated in Donald J. Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short History of Opera, 4th ed., (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 418. 25 Henri Dorra, ed. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 10.

Introduction

17

Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. [Nature is a temple where living pillars Sometimes unleash a confusion of words; Man traverses it through forests of symbols Which observe him with knowing glances. Like extended echoes which mingle far away In a mysterious and profound unity, Vast as the night and as light, Perfumes, colors, and sounds answer each other.]26

Henri Dorra speculates that the source for Baudelaire’s image of “symbol-covered pillars” may have been a passage by Joseph Görres, “Priests based the great principles of all cosmogony on [the holy books]—a great, powerful, and noble row of pillars, which keep on appearing in all myths, unchanged.” Görres was a colleague of Friedrich Creuzer, who had been Friedrich Schlegel’s student. Dorra names Creuzer, Joseph Guigniaut, and Pierre Leroux as particularly important to the transmission of German Romanticism (specifically theories of the symbol presented in the writings of Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and Moritz) to nineteenth-century France.27 Certain aspects of Baudelaire’s correspondences find concrete expression in his writings on the visual arts, inspired by his association with Delacroix, and present interesting connections to Walter Pater’s notion that all art aspires to the condition of music, a sentiment shared by both Romanticism and Symbolism, and to ideals of Romantic distance illuminated by Berthold Hoeckner. Hoeckner begins his essay “Schumann and Romantic Discourse” with a quote from Novalis: “Philosophy is prose. Its consonants. Distant philosophy sounds like poetry—because every call into the distance becomes a vowel …” Hoeckner then sums up: “Novalis’s use of 26

Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” Les Fleurs du Mal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975), 1:17; trans. Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, A Division of Macmillan, Inc., 1988), 66. 27 Dorra, 9-10. Görres quotation: Joseph Görres, Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer, 1810), 2:644.

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distance captures the imagination of the musician: distant philosophy sounds like poetry. Dying away into the distance, prose turns into poetry, speech into vocalise, language into music.”28 What Novalis has seen distance do to language, Baudelaire has seen it do to painting: The appropriate way to determine whether a painting is melodious is to look at it from a distance so as to be unable to comprehend its subject or its lines. If it is melodious, it already has a meaning and has taken its place in the repertory of memories.29

Dorra points out similarities to Delacroix’s aesthetic theories: There is an impression that results from a certain arrangement of colors, lights, shadows, and so forth. It is what one might call the music of painting. Before you even know what the painting represents, … when you are too far away from it, … you are conquered by this magical accord.30

In the distance, everything becomes music. “In Frankreich geschah etwas, was in Deutschland ausblieb. Novalis’ Nachfolge ist in Frankreich viel echter und legitimer als in Deutschland selbst.” [In France there took place what failed to happen in Germany. Novalis’s succession is much more genuine and legitimate in France than in Germany itself.]31 Werner Vordtriede’s statement, quoted by Furst, mirrors Rosen’s notions of Debussy as inheritor and continuer of Schumann. If the bridge from Novalis’s blue flower to the Mallarméan azur has a parallel in music, if Peyre’s “like minds” and Furst’s “parallel tendencies” can extend to music, then we should look at Debussy’s work for the remnants of the Romantic fragment, for the fragment that, as Harries notes, “suggests

28

Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 55-56. 29 Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” Oeuvres complètes, 2:425, quoted in Dorra, 3. 30 Delacroix, “Réalisme et idéalisme,” Oeuvres littéraires (Paris: Crès, 1923), 1:2324, quoted in Dorra, 3. 31 Furst, 108, quoting Werner Vordtriede, Novalis und die französischen Symbolisten (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), 182.

Introduction

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our position in a historical continuum.”32 The purpose of this book is to begin to examine Debussy’s music in such a historical continuum. This examination involves the observation of techniques of fragmentation in literature—techniques that writers have reinterpreted and recast to their own use at least since the fourteenth century—and the identification of parallels in musical structures. Drawing on several studies of literary fragmentation, Chapter 1 provides an overview of the literary fragment through selected examples of some of the most famous and most influential fragment works, from Petrarch’s Canzoniere through Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Nerval’s Aurelia. Writers create their fragments by breaking the particular norms or conventions of their own time and place, but many of the techniques and strategies of fragmentation remain the same through the centuries: to omit the necessary, to add the superfluous, to combine the incongruous, to exaggerate out of proportion, to put things in the wrong order. Fragment writers build on the work of previous creators of fragments, as Harries points out;33 thus from the breaking of conventions arise not only fragments but also conventions of fragmentation: the essay collection whose founder was Montaigne; the lyric cycle whose creator was Petrarch; the digressive, nonlinear narratives of Rabelais and Cervantes that so influenced Sterne, Diderot, and Schlegel; in whatever guise, in whatever period, these genres are built on the inadequacy of perfection. Writers continue a tradition of fragmentation because fragments make powerful statements—statements of denial, of loss, of failure, or simply of the ridiculousness of life. Thus Petrarch turns to the fragment to acknowledge the inadequacy of words to capture his love for Laura, and Schlegel the inadequacy of literary forms to confront his Absolute. These and others became models, inspirations, for writers of Debussy’s time as they adapted strategies and techniques of fragmentation to new concerns, or different views of old ones. Writers imitated past fragments, even as they responded to their own artistic climate; Debussy did the same. Chapters 2-5 32

Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 13. 33 Harries, 91.

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examine strategies of fragmentation in individual works written either in direct response to literary fragments or to the images and aesthetics of fragmentation that remained powerful symbols in his society. Of particular importance are parallels in Debussy’s music to musical fragmentation in the works of Schumann and Chopin. Following the model of Rosen and Daverio, comparisons with literary fragmentation are based in part on the substitution of the tonal system for a linear or serial concept of time. Topics covered include the mutilation of beginnings and endings and the analytical uncertainty they can present; the translation of the arabesque as digressive narrative structure to tonal harmony and the accompanying subversion of notions of Aristotelian beginning, middle, end; the continuing fascination with the sketch perceived as the result of immediate and unmediated inspiration; the use of quotation to pull the listener/reader out of the work itself, interrupting progression even as layers of meaning expand. In conclusion, the final chapter investigates open and closed collections, taking Debussy’s Preludes for piano as a case study and comparing them to a cabinet of curiosities, a holder of souvenirs and memories.

CHAPTER 1 RUINS OF CONVENTION; CONVENTIONS OF RUIN A portent therefore, does not arise contrary to nature, but contrary to what nature is understood to be. Portents are also called “signs,” “monstrosities,” and “prodigies” because they seem to portend and to point out, to demonstrate, and predict future happenings. —————Isidore of Seville1

Man’s fascination with the fragment is ancient, his uses of it as varied and rich as imagination. From broken bits of reality—from disassociated heads, horns, wings, and feet, stitched and glued improbably together—he has fashioned both his gods and his monsters; from potsherds and ruins he has reconstructed his history and previewed his fate; and from shreds of artistic convention he has confronted Aristotelian ideals of perfection with the power of the incomplete, countering harmony, order, and unity with discord, disjunction, and deformity. The fragment in Western European art and literature never strays far from its kinship with ruins and monsters, with the broken and the malformed. Mimicking decay and deformity, artists through the centuries have turned the familiar into the unfamiliar, creating not only the monstrous creatures cavorting on the margins of medieval manuscripts and carousing in the intergalactic Star Wars bars at the boundaries of the science fiction universe, but also literary fragments, many now canonical, whose deformity has often been made perfectly clear by their authors: Petrarch titled the rime sparse (scattered rhymes) of his Canzoniere “fragments” (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), Montaigne described his Essais as “monstrous bodies,”2 Rabelais admitted that his reader would find little perfection in Gargantua’s 1 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, Libri XX, XI.iii/2-3, “De Portentis,” trans. William D. Sharpe in “Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 54, pt. 2 (1964): 51-54. All subsequent quotations from Isidore are from this source. 2 Oscar S. Kenshur, Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), 41, citing Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 1:198.

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story, Cervantes opened Don Quixote with endorsements as fake and as incomplete as the mutilated documents on which he claimed to base his tale, Diderot equated the unfinished statue with the ruin3 and chose the fragment to illustrate the failure of system in his De l’Interprétation de la Nature, Schlegel purposefully titled his works fragments, Victor Hugo compared his ideal theater to the composite creatures of mythology,4 while Eliot declared, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”5 Such fragments may cause interpretive and analytical problems for the critic, the analyst, and the audience. They foil expectations; they defy clear analysis; they do not fit neatly into prescribed buckets, not quite filling the measure or spilling over into other categories. The desire to complete the fragment, to identify the whole that has been somehow deformed, is compelling. When writers, artists, and composers intentionally make fragments, identifying the model they fragment is a necessary step for the audience toward classifying such works, locating them in a tradition, and understanding their meaning and purpose. These conventions do not function as an underlying structure in individual works, merely hidden by surface fragmentation and waiting to be uncovered; they are simply the measures against which the fragment can be recognized. In the arts, convention ultimately defines the whole, the model, and thus the perception of the fragment. Though the “normal” or familiar forms of the natural world and the concept of time as linear progression may serve as the most deeply rooted models of perfection, many broken versions of these ideals become conventions in their own right. A portrait painted from the waist up represents a fragment of the human subject, but does not strike the viewer as incomplete because it does not violate artistic convention; let the artist extend the subject’s hand outside a painted frame, as Bartolomé Esteban Murillo has done in a self-portrait c. 1670 (London, National Gallery), and he calls attention to the hidden 3

Anne Betty Weinshenker, “Diderot’s Use of the Ruin-Image,” in Diderot Studies 16 (1973): 328 n. 55, citing Diderot, Observations sur la Sculpture et sur Bouchardon in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 8, ed. J. Assézat and Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier, 1875-77), 43. 4 Victor Hugo, Cromwell (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), Préface, 69-71. 5 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland V/431 in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958).

Chapter 1: Ruins of Convention; Conventions of Ruin

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part of the image and to the artificiality of the convention of portrait painting itself.6 The bust, rounded edges neatly displayed on its pedestal, represents a fragment of the human subject, but is unsurprising because its presentation has become a convention. Igor Mitoraj’s Tindaro Screpolato, no bust but a gigantic partial head—a fragment of a fragment—with purposefully mutilated surface, rests alongside a path in the Boboli Gardens; a modern remnant of some imagined antique colossus, it defies convention and calls attention both to its deliberately incomplete state and to its kinship with the ruin. Heads remain more appropriate than other body parts. Grandville’s sketch of a robot artist chiseling a gigantic thumb titled “Le Doigt de Dieu” caricatured the rage for fragments in the nineteenth century; more than a hundred years later, César’s gigantic Thumb now rising from the pavement of La Défense is still unconventional, still makes a powerful statement.7 Conventions define, but conventions can change over time, and the perception of fragmentation in a work depends, in part, on a familiarity with the convention on which it was built, or rather, from which it was broken. Western European literature has a history of conventions based on unity and completion; it also has a history of conventions that have grown from attacks on those concepts of perfection, conventions based on fragmentation. The following brief survey of literary fragments, taken from studies of this subject, will begin to show how, and with what intent, each writer manipulated the conventions he inherited. It will reiterate the thought of current scholarship stressing that the literary fragment was not a Romantic invention or discovery, and will document Elizabeth Harries’ assertion

6

At least three reproductions of this image available online show only Murillo’s head and chest—typical of portraits—cutting off the painted frame and the extended hand; perhaps this is due only to matters of space. 7 For more on this subject, see Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: The Viking Press, 1984), 82.

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that fragment writers build on the work of previous creators of fragments.8 It will also begin to show the extent to which writers have used the fragment, the variety of its forms and settings, and the issues and concerns that revolve consistently around it.

Petrarch “Voi ch’ ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / di quei sospiri …” [You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs …].9 So begins Petrarch’s Canzoniere (final version 1374), called Rime sparse (Scattered Rhymes)—sometimes considered one of the first works of modern literature.10 Referring to Petrarch’s Latin title for the work, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Robert Durling believes this may have been the earliest documented use of the term “fragment” to describe a work of (presumably Western European) art.11 When Petrarch gave this title, he was not only commenting on the impossibility of confining love—and, of course, his response to love—to logical narrative; he was also describing the form of his work. In his time, there was no tradition for presenting a chronological narrative through short, lyric forms. Lyric collections generally grouped poems by type—sonnet, canzona, ballata—or by poet.12 There was, however, the tradition of the prosimetrum, a genre that alternates lyric poetry with prose commentary.13 Dante’s Vita nuova, a principal model for the Canzoniere, belongs to this genre.14 Dante documented his love for Beatrice through a series of lyric poems, each preceded and followed 8

Harries, 13. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The “Rime Sparse” and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), Poem #1, stanza 1, and translation, 36-37. 10 Harries, 14. 11 Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 26. 12 Poems were grouped by genre; Italian manuscripts separated sonnets, ballate, canzone. Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 13-18, citing E. H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), no page number given. 13 Peter Dronke, Verse with Prose from Petronius to Dante: The Art and Scope of the Mixed Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 14 Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 9-10. 9


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by a prose narrative explaining the poem’s structure and the circumstances of its creation. The work as a whole presents a continuous, if, as Dronke notes, sometimes tenuous, narrative.15 Petrarch’s Canzoniere also documents a love affair, his love for Laura, but Petrarch, rather than containing his poems within prose frames, “scattered” his narrative across the pages, telling his story only through isolated, lyric moments. Each perfect poem is a fragment of an imperfect work, a work that is itself only a fragment of the prosimetrum. Petrarch’s collection of fragments became a convention, a genre with many progeny, the lyric (or sonnet) sequence.16 The fragment thrives on the tension between its imperfect, fragmented state and the perfect whole from which it was broken, the source of its fragment identity. As Harries stresses, from form to subject to surface detail, fragmentation permeates this work at every level,17 but always as the counterpart to elements that create an expectation of unity. Laura unifies, pervades the collection as subject and inspiration, but that unity is thwarted by the poetic images that consistently echo fragmentation: copious references to individual parts of Laura’s body 18 and to parts of the poet’s own body; references to Acteon, Orpheus, and other well-known myths of dismemberment and dispersal; frequent use of words and images of fragmentation, such as scattering;19 and many quotations and auto-quotations that turn the reader’s attention to other works, as the Canzoniere reaches out beyond itself, fragmenting itself. 15

Dronke, 97. Dronke notes the kinship of Dante’s prose sections to the troubadour razos, short prose notes in some troubadour manuscripts that recount—with varying degrees of accuracy—the details of the poet’s life and the circumstances of the composition of his poetry. 16 As Durling reports, C. S. Lewis credited Petrarch with the invention of the sonnet sequence (more accurately the lyric sequence since Petrarch included not only sonnets but also madrigali, ballate, sestine, canzone) by omitting the prose narrative found in the Vita nuova. Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 9-10. 17 Harries, 14-17. 18 This listing of body parts in praise of a woman is called blason. Petrarch did not invent the blason, but his use of it was so often copied that it became a common device associated with his poetry. 19 Harries, 177 n. 4, quoting Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 85-97. Vickers gives a tally of 43 occurrences of forms of the Italian verb spargere, to scatter.

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Petrarch presents a chronology, writing 365 poems plus a final hymn to the Virgin, but it is a framework that is fictive and echos the tension between lyric collection and chronological narrative.20 The work has no climax or turning point, as Harries observes: Laura’s death provides neither the closing nor a climax, but triggers simply repetitive situations and emotions. The number 365 (plus the closing) does not indicate a progression through the year; it serves simply to limit the collection, to close it and frame it in a symbolic reference. Harries believes we may account for this lack of progression by accepting the notion that Laura was a fictional character: if Laura and the poet’s relationship with her are a fabrication of the poet’s mind, his attitudes toward her and his feelings for her need not change so drastically after her death.21 Why did Petrarch “scatter” his rhymes? Perhaps to imply the impossibility of grasping love in its totality, the necessity of breaking that experience into manageable pieces. Mazzotta writes, “desire knows only shreds and fragments, even if plenitude is its ever elusive mirage.”22 Why then did Petrarch bind his poems as he did, creating more than a simple collection? Perhaps to restore Laura and to restore himself in the only way he could. If the poems correspond to the body pieces of the hero in certain myths of dismemberment, then only by being gathered can they either be laid to rest (Orpheus) or reborn (Osiris).23 Yet as Petrarch must have known, collection and preservation are ultimately impossible: For Petrarch the term [fragment] expresses the intensely self-critical awareness that all integration of selves and texts is relative, temporary, threatened. They flow into multiplicity at the touch of time, their inconsistencies juxtaposed as the successive traces of a subject who dissolves and leaves only words behind.24

20

For more on this topic, see Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. Petrarch copied Laura’s obituary on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil. 21 Harries, 18, and also on questions of Laura’s existence, Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 4. 22 Mazzotta, 78. 23 Harries, 15-17. 24 Durling, introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 26.


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As a reader of classical manuscripts, Petrarch knew both the widening holes in parchment and the widening gap between the author’s intent and the reader’s interpretation. Had he mutilated his own manuscript, not only to reflect the inadequacy of telling but also the inadequacy of reading? Perhaps as he assigned to the reader the task of creating a narrative from his fragments, he acknowledged the inability of any reader to recreate accurately, regardless of information given or withheld; at the same time, he paralleled his own inability to recreate accurately from memory. Petrarch depicted memories, stored and retrieved like snapshots, but memories are far from perfect. Petrarch worked over the poems of the Canzoniere for more than forty years, collecting, reviewing, reorganizing, and refining his fragments and his memories. Mazzotta speaks of the palimpsests of memory,25 memory writing over reality, memory creating reality, memory creating memory. Perhaps Petrarch wrote and rewrote as much for himself as for posterity or audience, for forgetting is also a form of ruin.

Montaigne Like Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Montaigne’s Essais also establish a new genre: predecessor of the Essays of Bacon, the Pensées of Pascal, the Pensées, Maximes et Anecdotes of Chamfort, they lead to the aphoristic writings of Friedrich Schlegel and the Romantics.26 Like the sonnet sequence, the Essais create a genre whose progeny may be more easily recognized today than many of the genres Montaigne incorporated in its creation. He presents a collection of separate units of prose bound and published together, a unit defying classification in any contemporary genre, lacking any unifying narrative.27 He used as his models the classical maxim and epigram collections, and

25

Mazzotta, 4. For a discussion, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 40. 27 Donald M. Frame, preface to Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 2. 26

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particularly the annotated Adages of Erasmus.28 These collections do not normally imply any narrative and are not associated with autobiography, but that is precisely what Montaigne’s preface tells the reader that his work is intended to be: a self-portrait, complete with all his defects, for the use of his friends and relatives to remember him when he is dead. Stressing their autobiographical nature, Northrop Frye calls the Essais a short form of the genre of confession, missing only the continuous narrative of those longer works.29 Within this fragment form, as Gilbert Highet notes, Montaigne draws on a wide-ranging collection of topics belonging to the many other genres he deforms and mingles in his work: the moral treatises of Plutarch and Seneca, though longer, have similar titles, presented in a varied list of topics that range from lofty ideals to the functioning of the human body: Montaigne writes “Of Idleness,” “Of Liars,” “Of Cannibals,” “Of the Power of the Imagination,” “Of Drunkenness,” “Of a Monstrous Child,” “Of Three Good Women,” “Of Cripples,” “Of Coaches,” “Of Smells.” In addition Montaigne also appropriates the apology (“Apology for Raymond Sebond,” II/12, the longest of the essays), letters (Seneca’s treatises sometimes take the form of letters to friends; see Montaigne’s “Of the Education of Children” written to Madame Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson), and even a type of subjective literary self-portrait whose origin Montaigne attributed to the Roman Lucilius (see “Of Presumption).30 Montaigne peppers this mix with quotations, attributed and unattributed, to such an extent that they become a part of the texture of the work, interwoven strands, Montaigne addressing the past. (Highet reproduces a list of 51 authors quoted by Montaigne; included are 110 quotations from Plato, 116 from Vergil, 148 from Horace, 149 from Lucretius, 312 from Cicero, and 398 from Plutarch.31) Digressions and interpolations are also part and parcel of the texture; note that the 28 Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 192. 29 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 307. Frye also writes, “Montaigne’s scheme is to the confession what a work of fiction made up of short stories … is to the novel or romance.” 30 Highet, 191-92. 31 Highet, 188-90, from P. Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1908).


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essay “Of Friendship” begins with a quotation comparing his writing to the decorative grotesque (given below). Montaigne was as aware of the fragmentation and deformity of his Essais as was Petrarch of his Canzoniere. As Petrarch knew the inadequacy of the forms of art, inventions of man, to contain the perfection of love, Montaigne recognized the impossibility of confining the imperfections of the human mind in the perfect forms of art. He wrote: If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed.32

In a vivid description of their structure, Montaigne described his hodge-podge as an image that anticipated one of Friedrich Schlegel’s literary categories alternately labeled arabesque and grotesque. He compares his Essais to the Renaissance adaptation of decorative frescoes discovered in the late fifteenth-century excavation of Nero’s “golden house” in Rome: a work made of parts, mere decoration, a grotesque: 33 As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best 32

Donald M. Frame, preface to The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters by Michel de Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 2. 33 They were labeled grotesque because viewers had to be lowered through tunnels into the excavated rooms—hence the Italian root of grotesque, grotta, meaning cave. Goethe’s description of them prompted Friedrich Schlegel’s adoption of the term for digressive narrative. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 19. The function of these grotesques was decorative: profuse linear designs formed borders around a series of small portraits. The content was fanciful: vegetation merged into both composite creatures—creatures made of assembled parts that do not belong together in nature—and other constructions that defied natural laws. The style of the grotesque was adopted by Renaissance artists, notably Raphael, and subsequently spread throughout Europe. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On The Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 29.

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Debussy and the Fragment spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental? A lovely woman tapers off into a fish. HORACE I do indeed go along with my painter in this second point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art.34

Montaigne’s preface announced his Essais as autobiography. He began writing them in 1578, published the first edition in 1580; and continued writing and publishing them until his death in 1592.35 A true “work in progress,” they were presented in a series of editions each containing new essays. They raise the expectation of a chronological presentation and of an autobiographical account; yet according to Montaigne, they are not organized, merely collected, and not even chronology structures them: … at each new edition, so that the buyer may not come off completely empty-handed, I allow myself to add, since it is only an ill-fitted patchwork, some extra ornaments. … Thence, however, it will easily happen that some transposition of chronology may slip in, for my stories take their place according to their timeliness, not always according to their age.36

Countering the expected chronology is a deformed chronology; countering the expected autobiographical account is a 34 Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, I:28, 135. Harpham, 26, reports that this quotation is from Horace’s Ars Poetica. 35 Revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1582 and 1588; his final additions were included in a posthumous edition of 1595, which was in all likelihood heavily edited by Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Marie de Gournay, and his friend Pierre de Brach. Richard L. Regosin, “Montaigne and his Readers,” A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 249. 36 Montaigne, Essais III:9, Complete Works, 736.


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series of disconnected wanderings of the mind. As the works themselves form a grotesque around the absent center/subject— Montaigne himself—so the individual writings form a grotesque around the central topic announced by each title. Our actions are nothing but a patchwork. … We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.37

Anthony Grafton writes, “The introspective, wide-ranging Essays of Montaigne sometimes resemble a set of commentaries set loose from the texts they originally applied to.”38 Where Petrarch omitted the frames, Montaigne has omitted the center—and what Montaigne omitted, what he could not form according to art, or address directly, was himself, the center portrait: “I am myself the matter of my book.”39 Like Petrarch, Montaigne’s fragments may acknowledge the inadequacy of memory and the ruin of time on both the physical document and its interpretation. According to Rendall, Montaigne claimed he had a bad memory, distrusted it, and subsequently chose this format—nonlinear, following no system—over a discursive unity that required accurate recall.40 “If my mind could gain a firm footing,” he wrote, “I would not make essays, I would make decisions.”41 His own research reinforced the belief that the text is not incorruptible, that the future would change both its interpretation and its physical state. After studying a Virgil manuscript in the Vatican Library, he observed, “This Virgil confirmed me in what I have always judged, that the first four lines that they put in the Aeneid are borrowed: this book does not have them.”42 If Montaigne wrote in fragments to acknowledged inevitable ruin, perhaps he also wrote in fragments to 37

Montaigne, Essais II:1, Complete Works, 243-44. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 28. 39 Frame, preface to Complete Works by Montaigne, 2. 40 Steven Rendall, “In Disjointed Parts/Par articles décousus,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, 74-80. 41 Montaigne, Essais, III:2, Complete Works, 611, quoted in Dan Engster, “The Montaignian Moment,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 59/4 (1998), 633. 42 Montaigne, “Travel Journal,” Complete Works, 950-51. 38

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protect his work. Does the mangling of the already imperfect seem less drastic than the ruin of perfection? Like Petrarch, Montaigne wrote to preserve. If he chose his fragmented forms to depict the random workings of the human mind, of his mind specifically, then he collected to preserve that mind, to preserve himself. He wrote for his friends and family so that they might “keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive,” but perhaps he also wrote, as did Petrarch, to preserve himself in his own memory, to create and recreate from that memory he so mistrusted, a sense of who he was, the “matter of his book.”43 Neither Petrarch nor Montaigne could communicate, using an ordered and complete text, the overwhelming nature of his subject— for Petrarch, love; for Montaigne, his own identity. Both used fragments to approach telling what could not be told. Their fragments are separated by the space of the inexpressible and bound together by what both the authors and readers know is missing, by a lack as significant as the physical separation, the silent spaces between, that remain the physical marker of form and format. Both the lyric cycle of Petrarch and the essays of Montaigne exist in a balance between the expectation of a narrative chronology and its negation. Viewed as either the deletion of narrative from longer forms (literally stripped from the prosimetrum or merely omitted from the confession), or the addition of implied narrative to forms that carried no such implication (the lyric collection and the collection of aphorisms), both play on genre expectations. The essay collection and the lyric cycle have become accepted genres, but they are genres that retain their fragment heritage, genres in which the blank spaces still imply missing material, still challenge the reader to seek some overarching plan—even while they still invite the reader to select passages at random, rather than to read straight through, to read as Steven Rendall reports that Montaigne read his books, leafing through now one, now another, without order or plan, by disconnected fragments.44

43

See also Rendall, 73, for his discussion of Wayne Booth’s point that the Montaigne presented in the Essais is also a fictional construct. 44 Rendall, 75.


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Given the sheer numbers of their imitators and the acceptance of the genres they created, these works of Petrarch and Montaigne may now appear less radical, their fragmentation less extreme, than in their own time. The opposite may be true for the works of Rabelais and Cervantes, whose discontinuous narratives provided models for Diderot, Sterne, and ultimately Schlegel and the Romantics; these may present analytical problems to readers and critics today because the works follow narrative norms that are no longer familiar, norms that differ from the linear chronological model (from Aristotelian expectations of beginning/middle/end, or what Harries describes as temporal continuity and narrative flow45). As both Edwin M. Duval and Carroll B. Johnson point out, an apparent lack of coherence and order in the works of Rabelais and Cervantes can best be understood as a transformation of the compositional logic, the norms and conventions, of genres common to Classical, medieval, and early modern literature: the epic, the epic quest, and the related epic or chivalric romance. As Duval notes of Rabelais, these works are most successfully understood when anachronistic notions of literary form are put aside; the exaggeration and fragmentation of those unfamiliar narrative conventions led later readers to view the books as even more radical and extreme than perhaps originally intended.46

Rabelais In 1534 and again in 1535, Rabelais was in Rome as private physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay. While the Cardinal joined the ranks of French antiquarians quite literally seizing for France “the glory that once was Rome,” dragging into exile artifacts to adorn France’s gardens and palaces,47 Rabelais continued to dismantle the 45

Harries, 111. Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), xiii-xvi; Duval, “Rabelais and Textual Architecture” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 154-59; Carroll B. Johnson, Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 71. 47 Eric MacPhail, “Antiquities and Antiquaries,” in A New History of French Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 209-11. 46

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literary traditions of the epic quest and romance for the diversion of the French reader, creating a narrative of literary fragments often as disjointed and as jumbled as the hodge-podge of artifacts being carted off to Paris. Gargantua, one volume of Rabelais’s chronological history of the lives and exploits of the fictitious giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel, opens with an address to the reader, a poem that clearly states, “Vray est qu’icy peu de perfection.”48 In this book and the others in the series, Rabelais confiscated the goal-directed quest of the epics of Homer and Virgil, the story line of the medieval epic romance (the birth, education, and exploits of the hero), and the episodic and digressive narrative fostered by both conventions.49 He then peopled that mixed tradition with his own bizarre creatures and situations, substituting giants (with rather coarse habits) for the likes of the noble warrior Aeneas and a detailed description of Gargantua’s baby clothes for the depiction of the shield of Achilles.50 More than mere parody of character and situation, his works parody the very structure of the genres, amplifying the norms and conventions that contradict linearity—the in medias res beginnings, the expected digressions, exaggeration of minor events, fusion of history and folk tale—exaggerating but retaining enough scraps of convention to avoid total chaos, to allow the work to remain comprehensible against the model whole, the source of its fragments. Gargantua begins with a fragment, as Harries has pointed out.51 The narrator, Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of François Rabelais) has discovered (or perhaps invented) an account of Gargantua’s lineage, taken from a book whose excessive, alliterative, and contradictory description is a microcosm of the text itself: “un 48 Rabelais, Gargantua, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon with François Moreau (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 3. 49 Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 1; “Rabelais and Textual Architecture,” 157. For a discussion of medieval parody, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 50 Rabelais, Gargantua, “Comment on vestit Gargantua,” 24-27; Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), Book 18, “The Shield of Achilles,” 482-84. Rabelais was inspired by a giant of folk legend named Gargantua; Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 341-42. 51 Harries, 20-24, elaborates.


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gros, gras, grand, gris, joly, petit, moisy livret” [“a fat, greasy, thick, gray, pretty, tiny, moldy little book”] that is so worn it is impossible to make out all the letters. He has translated it “practicant l’art dont on peut lire lettres non apparentes” [“practicing that art by which one reads invisible letters.”] At the end of this book, Alcofribas Nasier has found a fragment whose beginning lines have been partially eaten by rats and moths or “aultres malignes bestes” [“other malign beasts”]; the mutilated opening is reproduced in the text: a i ? enu le grand dompteur des Cimbres v sant par l’aer, de peur de la rousée, ‘ sa venu on a remply les Timbres ’ beure fraiz, tombant par une bousée = uquel quand fut la grand mere arrousée Cria tout hault, > 52

Alcofribas performs the job of the audience for any fragmented work: he attempts to reconstruct a whole from the partial. Rabelais thus begins with the mutilated text, questioning the accuracy of writing, of telling, and of interpretation. Perhaps he also admits the difficulty of making a beginning, the need for some outside marker to answer the question, “why am I writing this?” His story has now been validated by the outside world—and yet that beginning is torn and unsure, just as any beginning must be. Rabelais’s characters are monsters, giants out of context in the human world, “uncompleted in the sense of the overcompleted, overfinished,” the whole plus more, added material that should not be present.53 Physical deformity and character deformity abound in all the books.54 Not only the physical descriptions of Rabelais’s characters, but many of their situations as well, are reminiscent of the Roman 52

Rabelais, Gargantua, “De la généalogie et antiquité de Gargantua,” 11; other sources use various spacings and symbols to represent the varmin-chewed holes. Harries, 23, notes that, as part of Rabelais’s joke, the complete lines in this and the rest of the fragment make no more sense than the incomplete ones. 53 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 113. 54 Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Rabelais’s Splintered Voyage,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, 53-70; Kritzman includes an extensive discussion.

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grotesques. Gargantua’s mother, for instance, eleven months pregnant, ill from having eaten too much tripe, has taken an astringent that constricts all her sphincter muscles. As a result, Gargantua cannot be born in the normal fashion. By this mishap were loosened the cotyledons of the matrix, through which the infant sprang up into the vena cava; and, climbing up by the diaphragm up above the shoulders, where the said vein divides in two, took the route to the left, and came out through the left ear.55

Though recalling the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, this image perfectly illustrates Bakhtin’s description of Rabelais’s writing, filled with forms “interwoven as if giving birth to each other.”56 The image would also find company with the decorative grotesques recalled by Montaigne when describing the lack of order, coherence, and logic in his own Essais.57 Edwin M. Duval uses this same image, and this same reference from Horace, to describe modern reaction to the convoluted structure of Rabelais’s works: … their inconsistencies and internal contradictions, their episodic structure, their radical open-endedness—conspire to suggest to postclassical readers not a coherent and ordered composition but something akin to those grotesque composite images described by Horace, which start as a beautiful woman and end as an ugly fish …58

The forms Rabelais’s writings take are as varied and absurd as his characters and their situations. A partial list includes pointless insertions; quotations and, more often, misquotations; long poems; series of clichés and maxims, strung together with no connectives; and whole chapters that consist of nothing but lists, often in double columns:

55 Rabelais, The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 20. 56 Bakhtin, 32. 57 Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” Essais, I:28 in Complete Works, 135, quoted above. 58 Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, xiii-xiv.


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Then, when the green cloth was laid out, they brought out plenty of cards, plenty of dice, and enough boards for checkers or chess. There he played: Flush, Primiera, Grand slam, Robber, Trump, Prick and spare not, One hundred, The spinet, Poor Moll, The fib, … [continuing for 206 more entries to end the chapter]59

In the end, Gargantua does complete his quest, but the achievement of his goal is compromised: the book ends not at the point of his military victory, but with a disagreement about the meaning of another found text, this one engraved on a bronze plate. Gargantua ends as it began, with an undecipherable fragment text. Framed by the uncertainty of time on the written word—on the physical document and on its interpretation—Rabelais’s story states clearly what Petrarch’s Canzoniere only hints: the ravages of time work on both document and meaning. The physical condition and circumstances of found manuscripts—damaged, incomplete, nearly illegible, only partly decipherable, author or authors unknown—bring to the forefront questions of origin, originality, authenticity, and the power of language to communicate over time. Gargantua began with a fragment; it also began with an ending—the fragment text reproduced was found at the end of the moldy book of Gargantua’s lineage; the story ends with another fragment text. Rabelais thus questions the possibility of any real beginning or ending. Gargantua completes his quest, but it is only the end of a task, the end of another in an ongoing series; the episodic form and content of the epic and the romance ever invite new episodes, unending challenges, sequels continuing even after the contrived “death” of the hero, since tales from the past may always be told, though never accurately and always through interpretation. Rabelais made fragments for another reason: to make people laugh. Borrowing from the comic traditions of his time, as Mikhail Bakhtin has shown in Rabelais and His World, he confronted literary traditions and the world around him, offering his criticism and commentary through grotesque deformity of genre and of character. 59

Rabelais, Complete Works, 50-51.

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His giants are as out of proportion in this world as his digressions are out of proportion in the epic. Where other writers will take the grotesque ornament complex and the single grotesque creature to express horror, the evil side of the unnatural, Rabelais and his followers will use them to make the reader laugh, to make fun—even cruel fun—of the conventions of literature and society.

Cervantes Cervantes, too, contains Don Quixote’s grotesque parody of knighthood and quest, his windmill enemies and magical barber’s bowl helmet, within fragments of genres he inherited. Cervantes directly confronts his principal model in his introduction, proclaiming that he writes a satire of chivalric romance. As Kenshur notes, Cervantes plays on the components of the romance that were singled out when critics compared the romance to the ideal epic: though both are episodic, multiple plots and digression are the elements that Cervantes highlights and expands,60 the elements he takes to excess. Don Quixote is monstrous, as over-filled with digression as Gargantua is over-sized. The physical fragment and its defects continued to provide props and structural models for later digressive narratives.61 Where Rabelais began Gargantua with a text missing the beginnings of lines, Cervantes opens Don Quixote with a poem written in versos de cabo roto, verses in which the final unstressed syllable of each line is omitted, for the reader to supply; the poem is the first of his fake preliminary endorsements. In Don Quixote, Cervantes retains the illusion of a dependence on the physical fragment as the narrator, Cid Hamete Benengeli, tells Don Quixote’s misadventures through a framework of incomplete found manuscripts, suffering the appropriate deterioration of age and munching vermin, missing endings or beginnings, written in exotic languages that must be translated, falling

60 61

Kenshur, 68 n. 5. Harries, especially Chapter I.


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into the hands of the narrator completely by chance, in strange marketplaces.62 In addition to these old manuscripts that supposedly generated the story of Don Quixote, other texts appear—texts that Cid Hamete’s story itself has generated: an unauthorized, printed version of the first manuscript and a spurious sequel result in Don Quixote’s being followed about by two different versions of himself, reduced to wearing a sign declaring his identity. Cervantes breaks Don Quixote onto fragments by duplication, just as surely as Petrarch made fragments of Laura by breaking her body into separate parts. The Don’s duplicates and the manuscripts that are the sources for them are fragments of replication and destroyers of true origin. They raise questions of authenticity that remain problematic today—questions Borges addresses in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and Andy Warhol with his multiple Marilyns.63 Within this frame of fragmented and duplicated texts, Cervantes draws on an encyclopedic array of literary fragmenting techniques: temporal paradoxes and inconsistencies, mixed styles, borrowing and quotation, repetition, multiple perspectives, authorial intrusion, digressions that range from interpolated stories to related asides—and the famous digressions that condemn digression. Boy, boy,” said Don Quijote at this point, in a loud voice, “go straight ahead with your story, and do not go curving off at a tangent; for it requires much proof and corroboration to bring a truth to the light.64

The chivalric romance, the mores of Renaissance Spain, mean little to us today; our Don Quixote is still a sympathetic rebel, but now he sings his impossible dreams to full orchestral accompaniment. Yet common themes do traverse the centuries, and if a foolish old dreamer can still touch our hearts, a rambling story can still lose our attention. One paperback edition of Don Quixote advertises itself on the title 62

The narrator first relies on a manuscript that ends in the middle of a battle. The outcome can be related only after the discovery of a second manuscript that picks up at the point the first left off. A third manuscript, appropriately chewed, must eventually be found to allow Cid Hamete to finish the story. 63 Harries, 24-26, gives a more complete analysis of this aspect of Don Quixote. 64 Trans. Kenshur, 57.

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page as “an abridged version designed to relate without digressions the principal adventures of the Knight and his Squire.”65 Why does Cervantes write fragments? Kenshur believes that for Cervantes, order was founded on the subordination of all detail to truth: pertinence to truth was the criterion for inclusion or exclusion. In his view, when Cervantes/Cid Hamete realizes that the truth cannot be known, he is faced with an unsolvable problem: he has no basis for excluding or including anything. Digression, the representation of disorder and the inability to know, becomes his only option. Ultimately, “Cervantes’s subject is not reality itself, but the human efforts to comprehend it,”66 and ultimately, that has been, and will continue to be, a driving force behind such fragmented works. Cervantes, like Petrarch, Montaigne, and Rabelais, also writes fragments to confront the impermanence of life and of the written word. Like the medieval monsters that must inhabit only the margins of manuscripts or the edges of maps, Don Quixote exists on the fringes of acceptable society, and Cervantes’ story exists on the fringes of acceptable narrative. When ancient, monstrous creatures are brought into the light of modern thought, they seem silly and useless; when Cid Hamete’s ancient manuscripts are brought out of their dark hiding places, they crumble; when Don Quixote is brought back to his real life, brought back in from the edge, he dies. As Martínez-Bonati notes, there is in Don Quixote a layer that is “disquieting, pessimistic, and tragic, where the ultimate reality of the body creeps in, with its inevitable corruption of all happy dreams.”67 There is also the layer that, like Rabelais, makes us laugh. Unlike Gargantua, Don Quixote is deformed more in mind than in body: the juxtaposition of his abnormal interpretation of sensory data against a “normal” interpretation is often the source of grotesque comedy. Don Quixote makes us laugh, but unlike Gargantua, he often brings us laughter that is bittersweet, tinged with sadness and pity. Rabelais and Cervantes would have us laugh because laughter is often 65 Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha, trans. and ed. by Walter Starkie (New York: The New American Library, 1957. My emphasis. 66 Kenshur, 67. 67 Félix Martínez-Bonati, “Don Quixote” and the Poetics of the Novel, trans. Dian Fox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 225.


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the only response to the impossible. They send their deformed, monstrous characters to face improbable situations; they send their deformed and monstrous books—scraps pieced together, seams showing, full of holes—to confront their own improbable monsters: the impossibility of representing and of comprehending reality, time and the reality of the ruin, the straitjacket of conformity, the ultimate futility of the written word, the blank spaces that neither inspiration nor craft will fill. These digressive narratives become models for writers in the centuries that follow, as each uses form, or the disruption of form, to address the issues of time, place, and personal need for expression. Northrop Frye, in fact, gives this type of digressive narrative a place among his four genres of continuous prose; he labels it anatomy and notes its frequent combination with his other categories: novel, confession, romance. He traces a lineage forward from Rabelais (where he believes it is combined with the novel) through Swift and Sterne, to Huxley and into the twentieth century. Tracing backward, he moves from Rabelais through Erasmus, Lucian, Apuleius, and Petronius to Menippean satire, a form named for Menippus, a third-century BCE author whose writings alternated prose and verse.68 Thus Menippean satire was a subcategory of prosimetrum, but, as Peter Dronke notes, later definitions of this form, and later works in this category, omit or downplay the mixture of prose and verse in favor of other elements: mixed tone (serious and comic, high and low) and linguistic styles (macaronic texts, slang, exotic words, coinages, prayers, baudy jokes), the fantastic as well as paradox and contrast. These juxtapositions, these combinations of disparate elements, create the literary grotesque; they are the means by which such forms undermine what Dronke calls the established decorum of genres and diction, the means by which such works question and undermine authority.69 Thus the prosimetrum, an example of mixed genre if measured by classical notions of genre purity, appears as the ancestor 68

Frye, 308-312, and Dronke, 1. All but fragments of the writings of Menippus are lost. See Dronke for a brief summary. Though Frye’s categories have met with criticism, this is not a lineage he developed, but one well-known to the nineteenth-century; see below. 69 Dronke, 1-6.

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of both the digressive narrative and the disconnected fragment, works that, left in pieces or overfilled, providing too much information or too little, can incorporate in their overall structure all the markers of the fragmented text: the mutilated beginnings and missing endings, the holes, the extraneous pages erroneously bound, the sections mistranslated and misunderstood, the quotations, the digressions, even the fragments of perfection scattered about. As mentioned at the beginning of this section, contemporary readers were familiar with the plot outline and the episodic nature of the models Rabelais and Cervantes used, even made fun of; these writers could weave their infinitely diverse digressions throughout their books, yet to some extent avoid for their own readers the level of chaos later readers and critics may perceive when they compare these narratives to the linear, chronological model. The perception of the balance between continuity and disruption, the identity and meaning of the fragment, changes for the reader who is not familiar with the model the author has mutilated. Yet, as Cervantes’s diatribes on digression clearly show, Aristotle’s classification of episodic plots as inferior and plots with beginning, middle, and end as superior, was already predominant.70 Modern readers may read and identify these works by their variance from conventions that, despite our familiarity with stream of consciousness works and the open novel, still rely on Aristotelian ideals. At bottom, regardless of genre, the strongest model for a story, against which it will be measured positively or negatively or neutrally, was given by Don Quixote: “tell it straight through,” not in isolated and disconnected moments lacking narrative glue, and not in narratives that lack proper beginnings and endings, that are filled with holes and stuffed with unrelated material. Conventions exist, or come into being, that incorporate these abnormalities, thus making the sense of fragmentation less sharp, but rarely do they erase that sense of what narrative ought to be when the reader is led to expect it.

70

Martínez-Bonati, 106.


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Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Fragments The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced rich stores of fragments. Building on Renaissance predecessors, writers tailored both the digressive narrative and the collection of disconnected units to express contemporary concerns. These forms of fragmentation provided the models that would open the way to the Romantic fragment, models so numerous and rich that Harries applies one of Schlegel’s famous aphorisms (“Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are already fragments at the time of their origin.”)71 to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition rather than, as is the more common, to the “broken, incomplete texts that proliferated in the Romantic period.”72 In contrast to writers who often used fragments to represent chaos and disorder, some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers used them to express belief in an underlying, though incompletely understood, natural order. Cervantes, Petrarch, and Montaigne fragmented to represent the impossible. Bacon, Diderot, and Hamann chose both the form of the aphorism (disconnected and disjunct thought) and its physical format (physical separation of short sections on the page) to express concerns about man’s ability to organize and to categorize the knowledge he acquires, but they also indicated a belief in the existence of a system—a system that man could, through examination and logic, come ever closer to understanding. To encourage further investigation, they used the fragment and its ability to encourage—or perhaps demand—a search for more.73 In “Knowledge Broken,”74 Kenshur compares Bacon’s seventeenth-century Novum Organum and its eighteenth-century counterpart, Diderot’s De l’Interprétation de la nature. Both are presented in aphoristic format—in short sections separated by blank spaces. Kenshur credits Montaigne’s Essais and the ancient Greek and Roman collections of aphorisms as models for both. These more 71

Harries, 2, citing Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 24. Harries, 5. 73 See Harries and Kenshur for detailed discussions of the following. 74 Kenshur, 38-54. 72

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recent works are concerned with the interpretation of the outside world through scientific method, and with recording those interpretations. Bacon, by his own admission, believed that the state of man’s knowledge was incomplete; to express that incomplete knowledge in a written form that was systematic and gave the impression of completeness was misleading. Such a form did not inspire further investigation. He turned to the authority of the ancients for a solution: But the first and most ancient seekers after truth were wont, with better faith and better fortune, too, to throw the knowledge which they gathered from the contemplation of things, and which they meant to store up for use, into aphorisms; that is, into short and scattered sentences, not linked together by an artificial method.75

Aphorisms represented “knowledge broken” and would “invite men to enquire farther”; whereas a systematic presentation, appearing to be complete, would “secure men, as if they were at furthest.”76 For Bacon, the aphoristic format represented fragmentary knowledge and stimulated further thought and investigation, but according to Kenshur, it was primarily the format—the short paragraphs separated on the page by white space—that Bacon exploited. His ideas actually flow together and would make perfect sense if written without the spaces.77 Diderot, in his concern with the way nature presents information to us in disconnected fragments, turns not only to the aphoristic format, but also to the aphoristic form; the sections of De l’Interprétation de la nature do not flow together to make a cohesive narrative.78 His first aphorism echoes Montaigne and a concern not only with the way nature gives information, but also with the way the brain stores and retrieves it. Je laisserai les pensées se succéder sous ma plume, dans l’ordre même selon lequel les objets se sont offerts à ma réflexion; parce 75

Kenshur, 41, quoting Bacon, Novum Organum (English trans.), Book 1, aphorism 86, in Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (Boston, 1861-64), 8:120-21. 76 Kenshur, 40, quoting Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in Works, 6:292. 77 Kenshur, 44-45. 78 Kenshur admits there are other opinions.


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qu’elles n’en représenteront que mieux les mouvements et la marche de mon esprit. [I shall let my pen record my thoughts in the same order in which the objects have presented themselves to my reflection; thus they will better represent the changes and the progression of my mind.]79

Diderot’s statement also coincides with the attitude of another fragment writer in Harries’s study, Johann Georg Hamann: My remarks will be just as unsuitable for a specific treatise as they would be for a book. I will pursue those thoughts that I come across, and follow them at my convenience; … truths, principles, systems are too much for me. Crumbs, fragments, whims, ideas. Each to his own.”80

Hamann is more embedded in Christian thought and belief than in scientific study, but Harries interprets his writings as yet another example of the ability of the disconnected and the unsystematic to reflect our inadequacy to comprehend and yet to express the belief in an underlying greater order.81 Implying the whole through the use of the fragment creates the same sort of tension Petrarch created when he implied his narrative but refused to supply it, the tension between what we can express and what we believe to exist. As Frye noted (see above), the line of succession in the digressive narrative continues in the eighteenth century with the works such as Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels; Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and Sterne’s great model, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. All announce a narrative, by title (a tale, a life) or opening—Jacques opens with the Master’s initial request that Jacques tell the story of his loves—but these titles and opening strategies are only setups, backdrops for narratives that thwart the very expectations they raise. In stories often still revolving around the requisite journey or quest, ruins and ruined manuscripts, the 79

Original and translation, slightly modified, from Kenshur, 41, recalling Montaigne, Complete Works, 721, “And when shall I make an end of describing the continual agitation and changes of my thoughts, whatever subject they light on …” 80 Harries, 36. 81 Harries, 36-37.

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atemporal quality of memory, and the interruptions of daily life, these writers question how, where, and when a story begins and ends; they weave and interweave digressions that overpower, obscure, or (in the case of Tristram Shandy) completely block the supposed main narrative; and they interrupt the idea of the fiction itself by allowing the author to intrude in the text, providing examples Schlegel will draw on to develop his theories of Romantic irony.82 Walter Bagehot’s negative evaluation and description of Tristram Shandy not only sums up Sterne’s debt to Rabelais, and in part to the medieval romance tradition, but also illustrates the importance given to the chronological model in narrative, the very model these writers flaunt: In Tristram Shandy especially there are several defects which, while we are reading it, tease and disgust so much that we are scarcely willing even to admire as we ought to admire the refined pictures of human emotion. The first of these, and perhaps the worst, is the fantastic disorder of the form. It is an imperative law of the writing-art, that a book should go straight on. A great writer should be able to tell a great meaning as coherently as a small writer tells a small meaning. … But Sterne’s style is unnatural. He never begins at the beginning and goes straight through to the end. He shies-in a beauty suddenly; and just when you are affected he turns round and grins at it. “Ah,” he says, “is it not fine?” … People excuse all this irregularity of form by saying that it was imitated from Rabelais. But this is nonsense. Rabelais, perhaps, could not in his day venture to tell his meaning straight out; at any rate, he did not tell it. Sterne should not have chosen a model so monstrous. Incoherency is not less a defect because a foreign writer once made use of it.83

Defects, disgust, disorder, unnatural, monstrous, incoherency: these words describe the digressive narrative—negatively to Bagehot, more positively to those who treasure the playfulness, the humor, the disrespect in these parodies of the act of writing, the act of producing a fiction.

82

Lloyd Bishop, Romantic Irony in French Literature From Diderot to Beckett (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1989), 31-32. 83 Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies, Vol. II, ed. Richard Holt Hutton (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1879, reprint New York: AMS Press, Inc. 1973), 118-19.


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Schlegel and the Romantic Fragment The fragment and the fragmented lie at the heart of Friedrich Schlegel’s critical and aesthetic theories, but as Raymond Immerwahr has noted, Schlegel was a discoverer, not an inventor.84 In formulating his theories, he drew on the works of the past, among others on Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes; he labeled Petrarch’s poems “classical fragments of a novel,”85 and noted Diderot’s authorial intrusions: “When Diderot does something really brilliant in his Jacques, he usually follows it up by telling us how happy he is that it turned out so brilliantly.”86 His preferred contemporary writers in their turn had been influenced by the earlier fragments as well: Hoffmann’s debt to Sterne is well known, Jean Paul translated Cervantes and mentions both Rabelais and Cervantes as models for his Der Komet, Tieck’s essays discuss works of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne, and so on.87 Schlegel’s fragmented works are among his most influential: his collections of fragments—the Athenaeum Fragments, the Critical Fragments, the Ideas—are aphoristic in form (disjunct thought) and in format (physical separation on the page), and his only novel, Lucinde, is a digressive narrative and a mixture of genres—an arabesque or grotesque. Lucinde is autobiographical, written when Schlegel was 26 (in 1798-99); it follows the life and loves of Julius (Schlegel), ending with his relationship with Lucinde (Dorothea Veit, whom Schlegel 84 Raymond Immerwahr, “Romantic Irony and Romantic Arabesque Prior to Romanticism,” The German Quarterly 42 (1969): 665; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), 40. Originally published as L’Absolu Littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978). 85 Friedrich von Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, 1797-1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 50. Quoted in Harries, 14, from Hans Eichner, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel, Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801), ed. Hans Eichner, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, vol. 2 (Munich: Schöningh, 1967), lvi, n. 4. 86 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 143. 87 Steven Paul Scher, “Hoffmann and Sterne: Unmediated Parallels in Narrative Method,” Comparative Literature, 28 (1976): 309-25; Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 66-67, 276.

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married) and the birth of their child. The work is far from a chronological narrative or comprehensive story; it is a sequence of atemporal images (only the central episode, “Apprenticeship for Manhood,” is chronological) with virtually no plot, and is concerned with the internal workings of the mind rather than external matters, with reflection on events rather than events themselves. Schlegel tells his story through a mélange of thirteen sections of unequal length: narratives, dialogues, letters, visions, confessions, and character sketches; the work thus tends toward his notion of the perfect, though necessarily unattainable, novel that would combine all previous genres. Julius writes to Lucinde in the opening section of the novel, “Confessions of a Blunderer”: No purpose, however, is more purposeful for myself and for this work, for my love for it and for its own structure, than to destroy at the very outset all that part we call “order,” remove it, and claim explicitly and affirm actually the right to a charming confusion. This is all the more necessary since writing about our life and love in the same systematic and progressive way we experienced them would make this unique letter of mine insufferably unified and monotonous, so that it would no longer be able to achieve what it should and must achieve: namely the re-creation and integration of the most beautiful chaos of sublime harmonies and fascinating pleasure. I’m making use, therefore, of my incontestable right to confusion and am inserting here—in quite the wrong place—one of the many scattered pages I wrote or scribbled on when I longed for you …88

In this short passage, already self-reflexive, Julius as protagonist describes the work in which he appears.89 The form Julius depicts—the chaos, the discrediting of order and temporal progression, the right to digress “in the wrong place,” and the genre mix that follows—perfectly describes Schlegel’s arabesque structure. Yet as Eichner points out, the visual arabesque, despite its apparent chaos, produced a coherent unit, and Schlegel considered this a 88

Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 45. Blackall, 39 and Firchow, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 30; Firchow connects this and the many other such internal descriptions of the structure of the work to Sterne’s use of Tristram as narrator.

89


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requirement. Athenaeum Fragment 305 states, “so the grotesque … loves the illusion of the random and the strange.”90 Behind the illusion of Julius’s chaos Firchow describes the structure of Lucinde: six short sections show Julius as he is, a central and much longer middle section (the “Apprenticeship for Manhood”) tells how Julius came to be what he is, and six final sections balance the first six to detail the direction of his growth.91 A sort of order can be made of Lucinde’s fragments, even though that order is best described via its deviations from the expected chronological model it deforms. Schlegel also relied on other tactics of earlier fragment narratives: the found manuscript ploy and the value given the unmediated intensity of the sketch are combined here as Julius’s excuse to include “one of the many scattered pages I wrote or scribbled on when I longed for you”; chance and the interruptions of daily life (that sidetracked the entirety of Tristram’s life) intrude as later Julius is interrupted “by rude and unkind chance,” which he intends to mold to his purpose: another opportunity to expound his theories of literature. Unlike the attitude toward memory taken by other authors of fragmented works, Schlegel, at least as he speaks through Julius, neither mistrusts it, as did Montaigne, nor seeks to preserve it intact; rather, the knowledge that memory both ruins and preserves—preserves but in an imperfect state, as memories deteriorate with time, become mixed with other memories, are subject to reinterpretation at the time of remembrance—becomes a tool, an adjunct to creativity and imagination, allowing Julius to avoid recording life in “the same systematic and progressive way we experienced” and enabling him to accomplish his “re-creation and integration of the most beautiful chaos of sublime harmonies and fascinating pleasure.”92 Many discussions of Lucinde dwell on the work as representative of Schlegel’s theories, but Lucinde is also a work of literature, not just a work of theory. Schlegel chose the subject matter and the form because they served each other. Lucinde is a love story 90

Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 205; for more see Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970), 64. My emphasis. 91 Firchow, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 32. 92 Quotations from Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 45.

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recreated in memory, not as real events occurred, not as laws of narrative dictate, but remade by imagination, embroidered with emotion, reordered and refocused, in the full overabundance and confusion of love. Schlegel recalls writing Lucinde: “naively and nakedly … in the thoughtlessness of youth, I made Lucinde reveal the nature of love in an eternal hieroglyph.”93 It is not only internally that Lucinde is fragmented: Schlegel intended to continue it with a collection of poems, and in its complete version it was to have been one of a set of four novels.94 Thus it is one of those many Romantic endeavors doomed to incompletion because its scope exceeded either the ability of the author or the form chosen to encompass it.95 Lucinde was not well received, partly for its blatantly autobiographical sexuality but primarily for its form (or apparent lack of form). When it was reissued in 1835, Heine called it “ludicrously Romantic”; in 1870, Rudolf Haym labeled it an “aesthetic monstrosity,” and his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey wrote that it was “morally as well as poetically formless and contemptible.” Though reception is more positive today, Firchow writes of critics who are still “slow and grudging” in giving approval. Born on the margins of acceptable formal structure and acceptable content, Lucinde was moved to the margins of literature (Schlegel even omitted it from the publication of his complete works in 1823) and has lived there, with other monsters, since its publication in 1799. Schlegel’s collections of fragments were more successful and more influential than Lucinde in his own time, and remain so today. The German translation of Chamfort’s Pensées provided an immediate inspiration, though Schlegel certainly had a rich store of other 93

On Incomprehensibility, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 261. Firchow, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 38. 95 See Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986); and Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) for discussions of such unfinished works and variations on categories of the incomplete. Examples include Coleridge’s Christabel, Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, and Byron’s Don Juan. The range of such works extends from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Pound’s Cantos. 94


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examples including the aphorism collections of the ancients, the essays of Montaigne, the writings of Pascal and La Rochefoucault, the collection of “Fragmente” included in Herder’s Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767). In his collections of fragments, Schlegel retained the fragment format, but created a grotesque form that combined aspects of the genres he inherited: the brevity of the aphorism and its tendency to say much in few words, the accidental incompletion of the aphorism collections of the ancients (lost or mutilated manuscripts, deciphering texts so far removed from their time and context, etc.), the lack of developed discourse or logically presented evidence that marked the essay, the wide variety of topics that might be covered in a collection of aphorisms or essays, and a certain sense of unity that derives from the thoughts or personality of the author rather than from the subject matter.96 In the Athenaeum Fragments in particular, Schlegel presented a disconnected stream of ideas in widely varying lengths and forms, some contributed by other writers (August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Novalis): in addition to individual fragments that are in length similar to aphorisms, Schlegel included what he termed condensed essays and reviews,97 and mini-dialogues posed as a single question and a reply. In content, all are more open, less self-contained, than previous examples. Sometimes this open quality is clearly evident from the construction, as in Athenaeum Fragment 73, beginning in mid-thought, ending with a question: “Might it not be the same with the people as with the truth: where, as they say, the attempt is worth more than the result?”98 In others, straightforward sentence structure and brevity work at odds with content that constantly questions interpretation—”The historian is a prophet facing backward”—and in many, Schlegel’s terminology made the fragments difficult to understand even in his own time. Rarely, if ever, does one of Schlegel’s little hedgehogs, no matter how “isolated … and

96

This list is expanded from Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 40. Firchow, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 16. 98 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 170. 97

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complete in itself,”99 ever appear, as Michel Chaouli states, as a “shrink-wrapped version of thinking.”100 Against the disorder of this bizarre mixture of incomplete, miniature genres on wide-ranging topics, Schlegel raises the expectation of plan, system—unity—through the tension he creates between the aphorism as a complete statement and the incompletion of the fragment, between the fragment’s right to stand on its own and its need to reach out both to other members of the collection (some containing content that will contradict, others that will confirm) and outside the work itself to the external knowledge and experiences of the reader. To the extent that each fragment is independent, it destroys unity; to the extent that each relies on other members, or reaches out toward them for completion, it raises the possibility of unity or system; to the extent that each reaches outside the collection itself, it again destroys unity, or posits it outside the collection itself. That tension between part and whole questions the role of the fragment within the collection and subsequently the identify of the collection itself. In Athenaeum Fragment 53 Schlegel wrote: “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.”101 By stressing the interdependence of the fragments, their reliance on each other for “mutual support and clarification,” Eichner claims that, through the collections of fragments, Schlegel has at least attempted the impossible—the combination of system and non-system—by creating a “system of fragments” (a phrase Schlegel uses to describe himself, see below).102 Firchow also claims these fragments form a system, a substitute for a formulated system that appealed to Schlegel because it did not need to exclude even the contradictory. He notes that despite the varied subject matter, the collection is primarily literary and forms what he calls an unusual and “curious form of criticism.” From these fragments, “ruins and not complete edifices,” as Firchow labels them, 99

Athenaeum Fragment 206, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 189. Michel Chaouli, The Laboratory of Poetry: Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 55. 101 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 175. 102 Eichner, 48. 100


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the reader must construct a system that, in fact, never existed. From this perspective they recall the fake ruins so prominent in the eighteenth century, built to resemble something once whole, now broken, but actually inviting the viewer to mentally reconstruct something that never actually existed.103 Schlegel’s fragments are simultaneously sketch and ruin, with the potential to inspire both creation and recreation. Just as Montaigne blamed his essays on the limitations of his own mental ability, Schlegel, too, claimed the fragment as a result of his own mental makeup: “I can give no other ‘echantillon’ [swatch] of my entire ego than such a system of fragments because I myself am such a thing.”104 Dorothea evidently described Schlegel’s entering a “ceaseless stream of his thoughts” as brief statements in notebooks— “unconscious processes and flashes of intuition.”105 Chaouli reports thousands of entries in 150 notebooks,106 undeveloped ideas intended for a theory of literary criticism that, as with the Lucinde project, Schlegel never completed. It was from these notebooks that Schlegel drew many of the fragments he included in published collections— works that, themselves, resemble the sketchbook: a hodge-podge of topics in genres of various lengths gathered together in no apparent order, with no sense of opening or closure. Schlegel’s theories, in part, were his justification of the fragment and fragmented, a defense of structures that already existed in literature, and that offered promise for literature of the future. He turned to them for his own literary expressions because he believed in their ability to accommodate both order and chaos—a chaos from which order may be intuited but never completely realized. As Bishop writes, the acceptance of the fragmentary is an attempt to transcend contradiction rather than resolve it.107 Because the fragment itself is never stable, the tension between part and whole allows the irreconcilable conflict between the absolute and the relative, perfection and reality. On a pessimistic note, Behler and Struc claim 103

Firchow, introduction to Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 14-18. Behler and Struc, introduction to Dialogue on Poetry, 41; from a letter to A.W. Schlegel, 18 December 1797, no further reference given. 105 Behler and Struc, introduction to Dialogue on Poetry, 35. 106 Chaouli, 47. 107 Bishop, 2-3. 104

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that the essence of Schlegel’s (and Novalis’s) aphorisms “lies in their relationship to the infinite and in the despair of not being able to grasp it in a more conventional way”108; on the other hand, the fragments embody Schlegel’s ideal of a Romantic poetry that is “always becoming.” The Absolute can never be reached; the attempt is ultimately futile, but infinitely necessary and infinitely rich. From fragments we constantly create and recreate new connections, draw new conclusions: these “multiply in an endless succession of mirrors.”109 In Lucinde, to avoid recording life in “the same systematic and progressive way we experienced,”110 Julius recreated experience, but any recollection is a recreation. Memories are fragments, ruins, constantly deteriorating, constantly being recreated, but they are the way we construct and reconstruct our past—whether personal or of a nation, a people, a civilization. In her study of Jena Romanticism and memory, Laurie Ruth Johnson argues that the fragment as a formal structure “functions as a metaphor for the ambiguous capacities of memory—like memory, the fragment both preserves something of the past and yet also bears witness to the decay of that past, to loss.”111 But memory, like the fragment, also allows endless recreation in the imagination—whether intentional or unacknowledged—endless new forms arise.

Nineteenth-Century France Nineteenth-century French authors could turn to a double heritage: their own fragment writers—Rabelais, Diderot, Chamfort— and the German Romantics who had, in turn, been influenced by them. The extent and timing of the influences of German theory and philosophy on the French, and specific points of contact (Madame de Staël, Victor Cousin, and others), are beyond the scope of this study; a 108

Behler and Struc, introduction to Dialogue on Poetry, 36. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 175. 110 Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 45. 111 On the role of memory in the works of Schlegel, Laurie Ruth Johnson, The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism: Memory, History, Fiction, and Fragmentation in Texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 3. 109


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few examples of French writers who clearly knew German theory and the works of some German Romantics must suffice. Victor Hugo, in the preface to his drama Cromwell, provides a manifesto of French Romanticism that relies heavily on his understanding of German Romantic thought; Baudelaire knew Jean-Paul (“le bon Jean-Paul, toujours si angélique quoique si moqueur”112), he and Gautier (and many others) knew Hoffmann,113 later in the century Laforgue lived in Germany and knew Heine’s works well, and never must Wagner’s influence be forgotten—on literature as much as music. Though the extent of the spread of Schlegel’s specific theories in France is unclear,114 his ideas have become instrumental in critical studies of works of the French Romantics, perhaps in part because the forms, the strategies, that Schlegel describes do appear, though they are not linked directly to his philosophy.115 Lautréamont’s two sets of Poésies are fragment collections, not poems but prose units of varying length, presented in the Oeuvres complètes with line breaks at the ends of even the shortest, but without spaces between the individual units.116 The second set parodies well-known authors, including authors of fragment collections, as well as those short phrases that have become aphorisms or maxims simply by virtue of being repeated. Thus Pascal’s defense of fragments, a sentiment shared by so many fragment writers: J’écrirai ici mes pensées sans ordre, et non pas peut-être dans une confusion sans dessein: c’est le véritable ordre, et qui marquera toujours mon objet par le désordre même. Je ferais trop d’honneur 112 Blackall, 67, from Charles Baudelaire, “La Double Vie par Asselineau,” Oeuvres complètes II, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), 88. 113 Bishop, 85-86. 114 Furst, 120, for discussion of this topic. 115 Lloyd Bishop relies on Schlegel’s theories of arabesque narrative to trace forms of Romantic irony in works in French from Diderot, who influenced Schlegel, through Musset, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, to Beckett. He notes the digressions and the juxtaposition of opposites, the coexistence of contraries that the arabesque allows. Rae Beth Gordon turns to Schlegel’s arabesque structure and its derivation from ornament in her discussion of imagery and structuring devices in works of Gérard de Nerval. (Rae Beth Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 116 Lautréamont, Poésies II, in Lautréamont and Germain Nouveau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre-Olivier Walzer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 273-92.

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Debussy and the Fragment à mon sujet, si je le traitais avec ordre, puisque je veux montrer qu’il en est incapable. [I will write my thoughts here without order, and not, perhaps, in a confusion without design: this is the true order, and this will always mark my object with disorder itself. I would do too much honor to my subject if I were to treat it with order, since I wish to show that it is incapable of it.] 117

when reversed by Lautréamont, negates the entire fragment tradition: J’écrirai mes pensées avec ordre, par un dessein sans confusion. Si elles sont justes, la première venue sera la conséquence des autres. C’est le véritable ordre. Il marque mon objet par le désordre calligraphique. Je ferais trop de déshonneur à mon sujet, si je ne le traitais pas avec ordre. Je veux montrer qu’il en est capable. [I will write my thoughts with order, through a design without confusion. If they are accurate, the first seen will be the consequence of the others. This is the true order. It marks my object through calligraphic disorder. I would do too much dishonor to my subject, if I were not to treat it with order. I wish to show that it is capable of it.] 118

Dante’s warning, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’,” becomes an invitation to a party, “Vous qui entrez, laissez tout désespoir.”119 Gérard de Nerval was, in many ways, the quintessential Romantic artist. He died young, a suicide, after suffering several episodes of schizophrenia, perhaps induced by ill-fated love. His works are filled with Romantic images: ruins, picturesque landscapes, craggy mountains, and storms; he left fragments, unfinished works as well as sketches, and he cultivated the forms of fragmentation in his published works. He was familiar with the German Romantics and traveled in Germany. He translated Faust, knew Heine and translated his poetry, and, when he began writing fantastic tales, was much influenced by Hoffmann. In his novel Aurélia, he employs a 117

Pascal quoted in: Walzer, notes to Poésies II, in Lautréamont, Poésie II, 1153. André Breton and Paul Éluard will use the same approach in Notes sur la Poésie. Walzer, in notes to Lautréamont, Poésie II, 1153-54. 118 Lautréamont, 275. 119 Lautréamont, 275.


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structuring device similar to Hoffmann’s technique of interleaving, a term used to describe narrative that alternates segments of two separate stories, each intruding on the other. The most famous example of this technique is Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, a bizarre alternation of segments of the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler with segments of his cat’s autobiography, written—by the cat—using Kreisler’s pages as blotting paper. The two were bound together by chance; thus in the printed book, segments of the two stories are run into each other without a break.120 In Aurélia Nerval alternates the narrative of reality with memories of schizophrenic episodes, often without transition from one to the other. Aurélia, part fiction, part autobiography, is an account of a descent into madness and return to health. Nerval addresses his own illness as well as contemporary fascination with connections of dream to imagination and creativity. Aurélia opens with a doubling, “Le Rêve est une seconde vie,”121 a sentence that is both introduction and summary, foreshadowing images of doubling throughout the text. As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the protagonist is doubled, split into two personae: the sane narrator and the madman,122 a split made literal, as Gordon notes, by the appearance of the Doppelgänger.123 The narrator’s comments, explanations, and summaries—made from the side of reason, in direct, clear statements—alternate with his descriptions of past dreams and hallucinations. These descriptions are vivid, profuse, colorful, some describing the very images of the decorative arabesque and its potential for endless creativitiy: Pendant la nuit … je m’étais cru transporté dans une planète obscure où se débattaient les premiers germes de la création. Du sein de l’argile encore molle s’élevaient des palmiers 120

John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 61. Just as Starkie separated the digressions from Don Quixote (see note 98 above), so Hans von Müller separated the Kreisler sections from those written by Murr and published them individually as Das Kreislerbuch and Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr. Steven Paul Scher, 309. 121 Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), 2:361. 122 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 37. 123 Gordon, 32.

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Debussy and the Fragment gigantesques, des euphorbes vénéneux et des acanthes tortillées autour des cactus; les figures arides des rochers s’élançaient comme des squelettes de cette ébauche de création, et de hideux reptiles serpentaient, s’élargissaient ou s’arrondissaient au milieu de l’inextricable réseau d’une végétation sauvage. [During the night … I believed myself transported to a dark planet where the first seedlings of the creation were struggling. From the breast of still soft clay were rising gigantic palms, poisonous spurge and acanthus twisted around cactus; the dry shapes of the rocks rushed forward like skeletons from this sketch of creation, and hideous reptiles were winding, stretching or swelling in the midst of the inextricable web of a wild vegetation.]124

Dream and reality converge, one interrupting and overtaking the other: as the protagonist walks down the street, the shapes of reality suddenly begin to transform into monstrous beings and his ability to interpret reality accurately fails. In two strands of narrative that are never completely separate, just as the two personae of the protagonist are never completely separate, narrator and madman continually qualify the reality of the dream episodes—the madman questioning whether they were truly real, the narrator whether they were truly false.125 Digression creates the structural element of the arabesque in narrative, but in order to identify digression (as Gordon emphasizes), it is necessary to identify a principal narrative. In profuse ornament, ambiguity arises when frame overpowers subject (as the original grotesques seem to overpower the center portrait), or digression overpowers primary narrative.126 In Aurélia, the narrating voice documents the journey, the epic quest from madness to sanity, but just as the dreams and hallucinations overpower the protagonist, so that organizing narrative is overtaken and overpowered by the length and vividness of the dreams and hallucinations—a profusion of ornament. Does the rational voice provide a defining frame for the rich arabesques of dream, or do the arabesques provide an overpowering frame for the center, for reality? The identification of a principal 124

Nerval, Aurélia, I:376-77. My translation with thanks to Olivia Jamin and Anja Pearre. 125 Todorov, 38-39. 126 Gordon, 34, 40.


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narrative is compromised, but the two lines are too interconnected to be co-equals. Nerval causes us to question the role of digression in his story just as he causes us to question the role of dream—is it higher reality or madness? Aurélia is open-ended; the story could continue in a never-ending cycle of illness and health, series after series of alternating dream and sanity. The final sentences of the novel do little to erase the possibility that the illness may recur, nor to answer the questions raised by the entire structure. Is dream a second life, a second level of reality? Is madness an illness or simply a higher reality, a higher truth? The end is no end, the conclusion no conclusion; there is no promise that the protagonist will not descend into his hell—or perhaps, his heaven—again and again, returning to “normal” again and again. The found-manuscript ploy, though absent from the narrative of Aurélia, is mirrored curiously in the circumstances surrounding the book’s publication. Aurélia was intended to appear in two parts in the Revue de Paris. The first appeared on 1 January 1855; Nerval committed suicide by hanging on the night of 25 January; the second part of the work was published posthumously on 15 February. Though this second section was most probably in galley proofs at the time of Nerval’s death, Alfred Dubruck reports that numerous rumors circulated claiming that the final pages of the manuscript had been discovered stuffed in the pockets of the hanged man’s clothing.127 Still, the intrigue of the “found manuscript” fragment must be balanced by the need to complete that fragment: Béguin and Richer report that letters found to Nerval from Jenny Colon, the real-life model for Aurélia, were substituted by the editor for a missing section in the novel—even though the narrative seemed to indicate that the letters should have been to Aurélia from the protagonist.128 Rather inconsistency than the unknown. To come to terms with reality: this appears to be Nerval’s quest, and surely, at least in part, the quest of all these previous examples, chosen from the earliest stages of Western European 127

Alfred Dubruck, Gérard de Nerval and the German Heritage (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965), 20. 128 Albert Béguin and Jean Richer, in notes to Nerval, Aurélia, 1:1296.

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vernacular literature to the heart of Romantic fragment production and criticism. The fragment does not belong to one period or philosophy, but can be reinterpreted for any. Aurélia may lack the humor, satire, and playful nature of some digressive narratives, but Nerval knew his lineage as well as Frye—or at least well enough to steal it from Nodier in his Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux, who had in turn lifted his title from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In Angélique, Nerval writes: “Et puis … ” (C’est ainsi que Diderot commençait un conte, me dira-t-on.) —Allez toujours! —Vous avez imité Diderot lui-même. —Qui avait imité Sterne … —Lequel avait imité Swift. —Qui avait imité Rabelais … —Lequel avait imité Lucien. Et Lucien en avait imité bien d’autres. … 129 [“And then … ” (That is how Diderot began a tale, they will tell me.) —Go on anyway! —You have imitated Diderot himself. —Who had imitated Sterne … —Who had imitated Swift. —Who had imitated Rabelais … —Who had imitated Lucian. And Lucian had imitated many others. …]130

Opening in mid-conversation, in the middle of a thought; a list made of sentence fragments that trail off into dots of ellipsis (the holes in the manuscript, in memory, in logical thought); interrupted by asides; mesmerizing with word repetition: this excerpt, by using many 129

Gérard de Nerval. Angélique, Oeuvres complètes, 1:239. Nodier’s text reads “Et vous voulez que moi, plagiaire des plagiaires de Sterne — Qui fut plagiaire de Swift — Qui fut plagiaire de Wilkins — Qui fut plagiaire de Cyrano — Qui fut plagiaire de Reboul — Qui fut plagiaire de Guillaume des Autels — Qui fut plagiaire de Rabelais — Qui fut plagiaire de Morus — Qui fut plagiaire d’Érasme — Qui fut plagiaire de Lucien — ou de Lucius de Patras — ou d’Apulée — car on ne sait lequel des trois a été volé par les deux autres, et je ne me suis jamais soucié de le savoir …” Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux (Paris: Éditions Plasma, 1979), 26-27. 130 Trans. Gordon, 73-74.


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of the strategies of fragmentation that mark the narratives it enumerates, becomes a tiny mise en abyme of the broad subject it both summarizes and embodies.


CHAPTER 2 BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS Others stem from a lack of parts … by reason of cutting off, decisio, such as those who are begotten without a hand or a head, whom the Greeks call steresios; others are praenumeria, when only a head or a leg is born. … It is believed that the Blemmyae in Lybia are born as headless trunks, that they have both eyes and mouth in their chests; and that there are others, born without necks, having eyes in their shoulders. —————Isidore of Seville

“Que signifie donc un discours parfait, achevé? Un texte qui commence et finit? [What is the meaning of a perfect, complete discourse? A text that begins and ends?]”1 Much may be forgiven in a work if only the beginning presents, with certainty, even a few concrete expository details, and the ending ties its bits and pieces together convincingly. Beginnings and endings are powerful and privileged edges; they function as both formal divisions and physical boundaries. As frames (to paraphrase Calvino),2 they isolate the work—separating it from what came before and what comes after; simultaneously, through the very act of separation, they acknowledge those surroundings. As thresholds, points of entry and exit, they usher the listener from the world outside the work to the world within and back, from silence to sound, from sound to silence. Beginnings raise possibilities and set expectations, endings fulfill or frustrate them; their effect on the work is crucial.3 Pierre Garrigues writes: “Tout fragment tient donc du miracle: suspendu dans un espace sans espace. Ses arêtes, courbes ou tranchantes, l’attirent en lui-même et hors de lui. [Every fragment is 1

Pierre Garrigues, Poétiques du fragment (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), 11. Italo Calvino, Note to Under the Jaguar Sun, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 86. 3 On Romantic composers’ tactics of beginning and ending, see Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1968); Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); and David Ferris, Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis and the Genre of the Romantic Cycle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 2

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like a miracle: suspended in a space without space. Its edges, curved or sharp, pull it into itself and outside itself.]”4 When beginnings and endings are fragmented, those powerful edges acquire the multi-directional pull of the fragment, reaching both into and outside the work in search of what the fragment lacks. The act of separation is no longer clean, boundaries are no longer clear; the distinction between the work and its surroundings blurs. Fragmentation makes suspect the expectations and conclusions that beginnings and endings present; it compromises their formal functions, sometimes provoking a search for an alternate—a real—beginning or ending within the work, somehow camouflaged by these deformed first and last sections. Convention defines beginnings and endings: it was common for the epic to begin in medias res, but in large part, the convention for narrative rests on a chronological sequence, resolution of plot, and the adequate identification of time, place, and character. Frank Kermode quotes Simone de Beauvoir’s claim (in her autiobiography) that L’Invitée is “a real novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end”; Kermode follows with this sentence, “And real novels do have these.”5 The convention is strong; deforming it can create a powerful effect. Recall Rabelais’s manuscript, beginning and ending with the physical fragment; its mangled and missing words ask what literature can mean, acknowledge what time can do to the written document, to interpretation, to memory. Later writers for these reasons and many others have manipulated their narratives by mutilating both beginnings and endings. Mallarmé gave Henri Cazalis “une recette” that he claims to have invented and to practice, “‘Il faut toujours couper le commencement et la fin de ce qu’on écrit. Pas d’introduction, pas de finale.’ Tu me crois fou? Je t’expliquerai un jour que là n’est pas ma folie.”6 [“‘Always omit the beginning and the end of what you write. No introduction, no finale.’ You think I am mad? I’ll show you some day that my madness lies elsewhere.”7] 4

Garrigues, 41. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 139. 6 Mallarmé, Letter to Henri Cazalis, 25 April 1864, Correspondance: 1862-1871, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 117. 7 Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), 82. 5

Chapter 2: Beginnings and Endings

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In tonal music, the archetype of a complete work, or movement, begins and ends in an established key, on the tonic chord, though sometimes an introduction—a section set off from the main part of the piece—may show a degree of tonal ambiguity that is resolved as the introduction ends and the main part of the piece begins.8 Works that do not conform to this convention are incomplete: fragments. Nineteenth-century composers sometimes began their pieces in the tonic key but with a chord other than that built on the tonic note; if that initial chord is long drawn out, as in Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor, op. 28, no. 2, so that the listener’s expectation is misdirected, or if the key is obscured through progressions difficult to place in a key, as in Brahms’s Intermezzo in B-flat Minor, op. 118, no. 1, the resulting tonal ambiguity tends to suggest the fragmentary. Composers, with less frequency and far more caution, manipulated and compromised endings as well; in such cases, of course, closure is thwarted and the sense of incompletion all the stronger. Rosen cites Chopin’s Prelude in F Major, op. 28, and Liszt’s 1844 setting of “S’il est un charmant gazon” as two examples of the rare practice of ending on a dissonance that clouds the final tonic, though without actually negating it; Schenker’s examples of pieces with off-tonic endings include Bach’s Prelude no. 3, BWV 999, and Chopin’s Mazurka op. 30, no. 2; the first song in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (also analyzed by Rosen), neither begins nor ends on its tonic.9 8

A tonic is at once a goal and a frame of reference. In tonal music—music in a major or minor key—notes and chords exist in a hierarchy organized around a tonic note; a piece (or movement) is said to be in the key of that tonic. Notes and chords progress from one to another according to certain conventions. The strongest of these conventions are that the key be established at the beginning of the piece (in part by beginning on the tonic chord); that, if the key is departed from, it be reestablished, and that the piece end on the tonic chord. Western art music was tonal from some time in the seventeenth century beyond the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, pieces deviate from the first of these conventions very rarely, from the last, almost never. Opera, as an extended, text-driven form, does not conform to these conventions, though smaller units within the opera usually do. 9 Rosen, 79-80 and 96-98; Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (Der freie Satz), New Musical Theories and Fantasies, No. 3, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster, 2 vols. (New York: Longman, 1979), 130-31 (par. 307) and Fig. 152/6 and 7.

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The music of these composers was part of Debussy’s musical inheritance. Just as writers have often developed their techniques and strategies of fragmentation in response to earlier models, so did composers—and Debussy was no exception. In this chapter I will examine Debussy’s development of strategies of fragmenting beginnings and endings in three works, the songs “Green” and “Spleen” and the Prelude “Canope.”

Beginnings: “Green” and “Spleen” “Begin at the beginning,” says Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts, but narrative is filled with opening strategies that obscure the temporal order of events, the identity of characters, and what is normally the very purpose of a beginning. They may begin in medias res, where the protagonists’ situations are not specified, their identities obscured by the use of pronouns without antecedents—such beginnings had become so common that Genette can speak of a “topos of initial ignorance”—or sometimes even in medias sententias (Nutall’s phrase), in the middle of a thought, opinion, or conversation, or literally mid-sentence.10 Such openings create fragments: some part of the true beginning has been severed; the information necessary to reconstruct it, if provided at all, has been repositioned later in the work. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, for instance, begins without any clue to the identity of the characters speaking or their circumstances: He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road

10 On the in medias res opening, a convention in the epic before being adopted by the novel, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 36. On the in medias sententias variant, A. D. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 156; on the topos of initial ignorance, Genette, 191.


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and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. “Is that the mill?” he asked. “Yes.” “I do not remember it.”11

Debussy knew several examples of the in medias res opening well, and praised Pierre Louÿs in 1896 after having read his novel Aphrodite, which opens, Couchée sur la poitrine, les coudes en avant, les jambes écartées et la joue dans la main, elle piquait de petits trous symétriques dans un oreiller de lin vert, avec une longue épingle d’or. [Lying on her breast, her elbows forward, her legs apart, and her cheek resting in her hand, she pricked little symmetrical holes in a green linen pillow with a long gold pin.] 12

Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande opens (in a scene Debussy did not set in his opera) with unidentified servants opening the doors to an unidentified building for reasons that are not revealed. Even the scene that Debussy used to open his opera offers more questions than it answers: Golaud explains himself and his situation (he is a prince, out hunting) but Mélisande, in Symbolist fashion, responds to his queries with vague non-answers or with answers to questions that were never asked. Her identity and background are never established; the viewer is left to imagine as much history as individual curiosity requires from a few clues: a crown, a land far away, great sadness.13 Joseph Conrad created multiple beginnings for his novel The Secret Agent. The protagonist leaves his shop in Chapter 1, his journey immediately interrupted by a digression that supplies background information; Chapter 2 begins at the same spatial and temporal point

11

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 1. 12 Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite: Moeurs antiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 43; my trans. Originally published in installments in the Mercure de France, in 1885-86, then under separate cover in April, 1886. 13 See Richard Langham Smith, “The Play and its Playwright,” in Roger Nichols and Richard Langham Smith, Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18-19.

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as Chapter 1.14 Debussy knew this novel and commented positively on it to Jacques Durand in a letter dated 8 July 1910: Avez-vous suivi, dans le journal Le Temps, le roman de J. Conrad, intitulé L’Agent secret ? Il y a là-dedans, une collection de crapules tout à fait réjouissante, et la fin atteint au sublime. C’est décrit de la manière la plus tranquille, la plus détachée et ce n’est qu’après avoir réfléchi qu’on se dit: “Mais tous ces gens-là sont des monstres.” [Have you been following Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in Le Temps? It’s full of the most splendid scoundrels, and the end is magnificent. It’s expressed in an absolutely calm and detached style and it’s only when you think about the story afterwards that you say: “But all those people are monsters.”15]

These openings are fragments, as torn and mutilated as the fictitious manuscript of Gargantua’s lineage. They provide a point of entry but they do not usher the reader into the work with comfort and assurance; instead they initiate a need to look both outside the work (to outside sources, experience, or knowledge) and further into the work in search of the missing information, the missing part of the manuscript. In Garrigue’s evocative words, “Ses arêtes, courbes ou tranchantes, l’attirent en lui-même et hors de lui.”16 The musical analogue of the fragmented opening is the off-tonic beginning: the true beginning, the initial tonic, has been severed and the information necessary to reconstruct it must come from later within the work.17 The identity of that missing tonic is revealed in retrospect (sometimes only at the end of the piece), just as the details missing from the beginning of Aphrodite or For Whom the Bell Tolls are supplied, or implied, as the text progresses. Debussy uses such openings often and in many different circumstances; following the example of other composers, he frequently chooses to begin pieces with such progressions that 14

On The Secret Agent, Genette, Narrative Discourse, 37. Debussy, Correspondance 1884-1918, 268; trans. Nichols, Debussy Letters, 221. 16 Garrigues, Poétiques du fragment, 41. 17 Schenker calls progressions that begin off the tonic but end on it auxiliary cadences; he explains them as incomplete transferences of the fundamental structure I-V-I, lacking the initial tonic of the bass arpeggiation. Schenker, 88-89 (par. 244-45). 15


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function as more than just introductions:18 complete sections of a work may be formed by progressions that begin off the tonic and reach it only later (Brahms’s Intermezzo, op. 118, no. 1, and Debussy’s song “Green”; see below); or an entire work may consist of a progression that begins off the tonic and moves to it (Chopin’s Prelude in A minor, op. 28, no. 2, and Debussy’s Prelude “La Terrace des audiences du clair de lune”).19 The two works discussed below are examples of Debussy’s response to this still suspect heritage of off-tonic beginnings and a response to texts that purposefully play on fragmentation. Verlaine’s poems “Green” and “Spleen”—the first two “Aquarelles” in his collection Romances sans paroles—are companion poems: addressed to a silent and unresponsive beloved, they present progressive stages in a love affair. In “Green”20 the poet experiences physical fatigue (and probably emotional fatigue) as he tries to please the beloved: unable to grasp the whole of this new love affair, he (like Julius in Lucinde) tells his story out of order, changes tone abruptly, and can speak of himself, the beloved, and nature only in fragments—yet the poem unfolds within a conventional strophic form. In “Spleen” the poet suffers the fatigue of boredom and of the perpetual dread of loss; here, fragmentation of the poetic form mirrors the undercurrent of disintegration in the poet’s mind. Debussy’s settings of “Green” and “Spleen” are the final songs (of six) in his Ariettes oubliées, published in 1888. Both are 18

See Matthew G. Brown, Debussy’s “Ibéria” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 83-89, in particular. 19 For Schenker’s analyses of these works, see Schenker, 88-89 (par 244-45) and Fig. 110/a/3 and 110/d/3; for the Debussy Prelude and other examples, see Brown, 132-33. 20 Green is often associated with new life, spring, and new love; Schubert’s “Die liebe Farbe” and “Die böse Farbe” from Schöne Müllerin provide two different—even contradictory—perspectives on green as an emblem of love. Otto W. Johnston notes that green symbolizes hope, joy, and youth, as well as their opposites, moral degradation and folly. See Otto W. Johnston, “Chromatic Symbolism in Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe” in Themes and Structures: Studies in German Literature from Goethe to the Present, ed. Alexander Stephan (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997) quoting Pierre Paul Frédéric de Portal’s Des couleurs symboliques dans l’antiquité, le moyen-âge et les temps modernes (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1837). References to the green-eyed monster, jealousy, are common, and in nineteenth-century decadence, green is a color of decay.

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incomplete at their beginnings, each opening with a progression that begins off the tonic, and they are disrupted within by harmonic digressions or discontinuities and, in “Spleen,” by quotation. Verlaine’s poem “Green”: Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous. Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches Et qu’à vos yeux si beaux l’humble présent soit doux. J’arrive tout couvert encore de rosée Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front. Souffrez que ma fatigue à vos pieds reposée Rêve des chers instants qui la délasseront. Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers; Laissez-la s’apaiser de la bonne tempête, Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez. [Here are fruits, flowers, leaves, and branches And then here is my heart that beats only for you. Don’t tear it to pieces with your two white hands And to your eyes, so beautiful, may this humble present be sweet. I arrive all covered still with dew, That the morning wind ices over on my brow. Let my fatigue, resting at your feet, Dream of the cherished moments that will refresh it. On your young breast let my head roll Still ringing from your last kisses; Let it be calm after the good tempest, And I may sleep a little since you are resting.] 21

Given Verlaine’s reputation for formal innovation, “Green” is remarkably conventional: three strophes of four alexandrines each, the 21 Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 205; trans. Rita Benton, ed., Claude Debussy Songs 1880-1904 (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), 167, minor changes. Influences on “Green” include Ophelia’s song from Hamlet and “Roses de Saadi” by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Antoine Adam, The Art of Paul Verlaine (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 96.


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lines organized in couplets that correspond to complete clauses or sentences and divide neatly into hemistichs, abab rhyme scheme, and alternating paroxytonic and oxytonic line endings. Debussy’s setting reflects this regularity (Fig. 2.3): the ABA1 musical form22 reflects the strophic division of the poem, with the sections clearly delineated by cadences23 and appropriate changes of key (G-flat major, D-flat major, G-flat major, clearly indicated by the printed key signatures);24 phrase structure preserves the integrity of couplet, line, and (usually) hemistich; the text setting is syllabic, so that the text is clearly heard. Yet within its formal regularity, Verlaine’s “Green” is made all of fragments, its images and its internal structure pulling at its conventional outer form; and Debussy’s setting reflects this fragmentation. The tiny narrative—the story of a poet/lover who returns, tired, from a journey, bringing gifts to the beloved—begins with the presentation of those gifts; the account of the journey and his resulting fatigue appear only in the second strophe. Debussy’s setting also begins in the middle—the middle of a very common chord progression, I-ii-V-I.25 As Fig. 2.3 indicates, Debussy’s incomplete progression ii-V-I lacks its initial tonic; the key of Gb can then be confirmed only in retrospect, after the V resolves to I. Where Verlaine entered into a situation already under way, Debussy begins with a progression as it were already under way. For the following discussion, the reader may refer to the poem above, and below to Fig. 2.1, which contains mm. (i. e. measures) 1-20 of the song, to Fig. 2. which contains mm. 48-58 of the song, and to Fig. 2.3, a formal chart.

22 In musical analysis, sections in a work are often diagrammed using letters of the alphabet: letters are repeated where music is repeated; if the music is similar but has some significant differences, a superscript is added. 23 In music, the term refers to an arrival or a point of relative repose; a cadence produces a degree of closure. 24 G-flat major, six flats; D-flat major, five. 25 In the analysis of tonal music, roman numerals indicate the scale degrees on which the chords are built; upper and lower case are used to distinguish chord qualities— “major”and “minor” respectively. The tonic chord (“I”) corresponds to the key of the piece; the dominant chord (“V”) is the chord that most often leads to that tonic (and often presages an impending resolution to it); “ii” belongs to a group of chords that characteristically prepare the way for “V.”

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Fig. 2.1, mm. 1-20 of “Green.”


Fig. 2.2. Mm. 48-58 of “Green.”

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Fig. 2.3. Chart showing formal structures of the poetry and music of “Green” (cont. on facing page). Stanzas: topic Line #s Musical form A Harmonic model: Gb:ii ii-V-I Measures 1----4

I gifts 1

plea 2 3

gifts 4 transition

ii----V---I interruption ii------V---I I (V/V) 5---------8 13--------16 17---------20 20-----23 9--------12

II journey 5 6 B V 24-----27 28-----31

As the poem opens, the protagonist is eager but uncertain: he has brought gifts for his beloved, but the urgency of desire has made him unable to discriminate what is valuable, what is appropriate, from what is not. He presents a string of fragments, bits and pieces, anything he can find, everything he has: fruits and flowers, but even leaves and branches, and a heart—his heart—offered almost in the same breath with a few sticks and twigs.26 All are of equal value, having no value except that of the beloved’s approval.27 Debussy’s opening is equally eager—the score indicates joyeux et tendre—but in spite of the buoyancy of the rhythm and the insistent harmonic and melodic repetition of the opening A-flat minor chord, there are also hints of uncertainty: minor harmony is not

26

Borel describes “a banishment of the self” in “a world where man is no more than an object, scarcely different from the houses and the roofs, the leaves and the flowers that surround him.” Jacques Borel, Notes, in Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 184. 27 The hard c of the coeur (heart), however, distinguishes it from the labial phonetic cognates v, f, b, p (votre, fruits, fleurs, feuilles, branches, puis). On such matters see Kenneth Burke, “Musicality in Verse” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 369-78. Burke sees one element of musicality in verse resulting from an increased use of a type of alliteration created by phonetic cognates, families of similar consonant sounds that create a “concealed alliteration.” The consonants n, d, t, d, and th (voiced and unvoiced) form one family; m, b, p, v, and f form another.


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Fig. 2.3 (cont.). Chart showing formal structures of the poetry and music of “Green.”

plea/rest 7

rest 8 retransition V

32-------35

III rest 9

10

plea 11

rest 12

interruption

ii--V----I

A1 ii

36---38--39 40----41

ii--------V----I

42---45 46--49 50--------53

54------58

usually the first choice for expressing joy; the texture stutters, repeating itself every two measures, each repetition giving the impression that it leaves a rising inner line (Eb-Fb-F in the tenor) suspended, resolving back onto itself only to begin its ascent again; the vocal line enters in m. 5 over the same material that began as an introduction but now continues as accompaniment; and of course A-flat minor is not the key indicated by the key signature.28 Listeners would have no way of knowing this without a score, of course, and would of necessity assume the key to be A-flat minor. When things do change they change with astonishing abruptness: the eight measures of A-flat-minor harmony are followed by a measure of D-flat major and another of G-flat major—in other words, an authentic cadence (the most common and decisive sort) finally confirming the key of G-flat major; it is immediately repeated (mm. 9-12). Only at this point is the listener able to interpret the long drawn out A-flat minor chord of the opening as ii in G-flat major, ii being one of the chords normally used to prepare for an authentic (V-I) cadence; and even here, the tonic chord is compromised by the vocal line as it continues to outline an A-flat-minor triad, by the comparative brevity of the V-I progression, and especially by the presence of an unresolved Fb in an inner voice, a note whose presence destroys the finality the chord would otherwise have possessed.29 28

A-flat minor would require seven flats. In precisely the same way as Chopin had compromised the F major triad at the end of his Prelude No. 23 by adding an Eb to it. 29

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In the third line, the poet’s tone changes: he interrupts the presentation of the gifts, and the forward progression of the narrative, with a desperate plea in the imperative voice and with a violent image—one that turns the traditional metaphorical gift of the heart to gory reality: “Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches.”30 The heart, an organ torn from the body, now torn into even smaller fragments, not just with the hands as a unit, but with “deux mains blanches,” fragments whose detachment from the body is somehow emphasized through their being needlessly numbered.31 The title’s green “watercolor wash”—David Scott’s evocative term32—is momentarily obscured by white and stained blood red. This change of tone tears not only at the poet’s heart, but also at the structure of the strophe, fragmenting the quatrain into couplets, as Verlaine exaggerates the natural tendency of the alternating rhyme scheme (abab) to separate at the midpoint into two units. Debussy parallels the poetic interruption of line 3 with a thematic and harmonic interruption: the progression ii-V-I (A-flat minor–D-flat major–G-flat major) clarified—with the reservation noted above—in measures 9-12 is followed by a chord spelled as an A dominant seventh, related only distantly to G-flat major and a tritone (melodically and harmonically the least stable interval) away from the root of the E-flat seventh chord that follows it. The initial rising stepwise diatonic gesture (Ab–Bb–Cb) that began the first phrase of the vocal line is now deformed, initially rising by whole tones to encompass another tritone, G–C#. (See mm. 13-16). These measures, a musical interpolation, interrupt the unfolding of the vocal line and any predictable harmonic motion; indeed the E-flat seventh chord points back to A-flat minor, just after the possibility of that key’s serving as 30

Arthur Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 51, points out this reversal of metaphor and reality, noting the metaphorical gift of the heart in the literature of courtly love. There is, however, in this literature of courtly love, the tradition of the eaten heart—the heart of the lover fed to the unfaithful lady by the jealous husband. Gregory Stone, The Death of the Troubadour (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 101-8. 31 As des separated the members of the gift list, dental cognates d and n now emphasize the words ne, déchirez, and deux (still surrounded by the labial p, v, m, b), words that perform a harsher separation. 32 David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 105.


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tonic has been denied by the D-flat seventh–G-flat major progression of mm. 9-10, 11-12.33 As the lover interrupted the forward progression of the narrative, Debussy has interrupted the forward progression of the harmony with this tiny A-major seventh–E-flat major seventh interpolation that reflects the brevity of the lover’s expression of doubt, but also the depth of his concern.34 The fourth line of the poem pulls the strophe back together: the alternating rhyme is a scheme of change, but also of recurrence.35 The repetition of the et that began line 2 marks a return to the expression of hope, though less unbridled, presented in the first and second lines;36 it also offers the first hint that the beloved is beautiful (she has beautiful eyes) and that she might actually find the poet’s strange conglomeration of gifts pleasing. Debussy sets this line with a clear, uncompromised V/V (substituting for ii)-V-I (mm. 17-20).37 The “introductory material” now appears clearly in the tonic, as it should have appeared at the beginning (“should have,” that is, in terms of normal tonal practice); the section ends as it should have begun, by establishing G-flat major without ambiguity. The functions of the initial A-flat minor chords, the compromised tonic in measures 10 and 12, and the tonal interruption in measures 13-16 now become clear. Verlaine continues his strategy of fragmentation in the second and third strophes: the poet speaks of himself and the beloved primarily in terms of body parts—brow, head, feet, breast; strophes 2 and 3 are both interrupted at the third line with the poet’s plea, but the change in voice and subject matter is less dramatic. Debussy’s setting of the second strophe (B section), in the key of D-flat major,38 differs 33

Brown, Debussy’s “Ibéria,” 82-83, has identified two types of musical insertion: parenthetical episodes provide thematic diversion without destroying the unfolding tonality; interpolations create discontinuities in the tonal motion. 34 Wenk’s analysis, though correct, obscures the disjunction of this interpolation, as well as the one in mm. 50-52. Claude Debussy and the Poets, 52-54. 35 Clive Scott. French Verse-art: A Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 134. 36 Marked also by a return to the labial b, v, p—until a return to the dental d emphasizes the final word doux. 37 V/V and ii have the same root; both normally function by preparing the way for a subsequent V. 38 Precisely the key one would expect for the central section of an ABA form in G-flat major.

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from the outer sections: increased rhythmic motion in the setting of the first two poetic lines reflects the journey; slower tempo and decreased rhythmic activity reflect the change from motion to rest in lines 3 and 4; the tritone root relationship reappears—this time G to Db —at the opening of line 4, not line 3 as before, though it does not function as a reflection of poetic disjunction as it did in the first strophe.39 Except for its slower tempo and the omission of two measures of piano introduction, Debussy’s reprise (for the third strophe) begins as a literal repetition of the opening. The change of tempo—unusual in the third section of an ABA form—is demanded by the dynamic of the poem: Verlaine’s “Green”—for all that it does consist of three strophes—clearly does not present statement-contrast-restatement, but rather a progression toward repose and the alleviation of anxiety. Debussy brings the musical motion to repose in several ways. The first statement of the tonic in the reprise is compromised to a lesser degree than in the opening: at m. 49 (corresponding to m. 12), though the Fb still clouds the Gb chord, the melodic contour now conforms to the key of G-flat major. Also, Debussy replaces the interruption from the A section with one of a different character, compressed in length, and used for a different purpose. As can be seen in Fig. 2.2, mm. 50-52 parallel the first-section insert in mm. 14-16, but whereas in the first instance the roots of the two interpolated chords were distantly related by the tritone, here they are less distantly related, by the semitone.40 They also connect more smoothly with what preceded (G-flat major seventh–C-flat) and what will follow (B-flat seventh–E-flat minor–Aflat minor–D-flat major–G-flat major). These differences serve to decrease—rather than heighten—tension, and to reflect the movement of the poem toward that state of repose, of motionlessness, that the poet desires.

39

The G-major chord separates the dominant A-flat seventh from its tonic resolution, D-flat major. 40 They are related as V7 (B-flat seventh) and VI (C-flat major), the chord to which V most commonly resolves in the so-called “deceptive” cadence, where the V moves to a chord other than the expected I. Debussy, however, minimizes this relationship by making the C-flat chord move to the B-flat, reversing the normal procedure and emphasizing this reversal through phrasing and dynamics.


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How, in sum, does Debussy capture in song the doubts and ambiguities of Verlaine’s poet/lover protagonist and the internal tensions of the poem? First, he begins off the tonic on an A-flat-minor chord, misleading listeners about what the key of the song will be and disconcerting them in the process. Second, he destabilizes what ought to be the most stable elements in the song, the opening and closing “A” sections, by (in addition to beginning them off the tonic) clouding the first cadences in the true key of G-flat major (mm. 9-12, 46-49), then introducing the extraneous chord progressions of mm. 13-16 and 50-51 (which, in the first section, actually look back to the “false” Aflat minor of the opening). Third, he extends the initial A-flat-minor harmonies of both “A” sections disproportionately; lack of proper (or expected) proportion is one of the factors through which fragments create the tension and cause us to question reality. All these ambiguities severely compromise the sense of form and the sense of key (intimately bound together in tonal music), in effect calling those conventions into question. In “Spleen” the poet’s state of mind has changed dramatically. Les roses étaient toutes rouges, Et les lierres étaient tout noirs. Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges Renaissent tous mes désespoirs. Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre, La mer trop verte et l’air trop doux; Je crains toujours,—ce qu’est d’attendre!— Quelque fuite atroce de vous! Du hous à la feuille vernie, Et du luisant buis je suis las, Et de la campagne infinie, Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas! [The roses were all red, And the ivies were all black. Dear, every little move you make reawakens all my despair.

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Debussy and the Fragment The sky was too blue, too tender, The sea too green and the air too mild. I fear always,—it is expected—! Some agonizing flight of yours! Of the holly with the varnished leaf, And of the shiny boxwood I am weary, And of the endless countryside, And of everything except of you, alas!] 41

“Green” has become too green, the gifts of nature now seem wearisome, even artificial (“varnished”); joy has turned to boredom, anticipation to dread, the motionlessness of repose to agitation; and in Debussy’s setting the Gb harmony that ended “Green” is reinterpreted as bII of F minor42—another off-tonic beginning and a symbol of the transformation of the poet’s state of mind. In his study of French Symbolism, Houston notes Verlaine’s reputation for the chanson grise, for “faint colors and insubstantial outlines”; as he puts it, “All the imagery of bercement, fadeur, langueur, pâleur, and monotonie in Verlaine is an attempt to conjure away violent emotions with their unwanted consequences.”43 In “Spleen” Verlaine acknowledges and expresses those violent emotions; this poem is not a “conjuring away” of emotion, but rather a longing for stasis that the poet has not yet achieved. If “Green” is a poem of new love, of innocence, “Spleen” is a poem of the degradation of that love, and a poem of decadence. The decadent persona is jaded yet overly sensitive; he prefers the artificial to the natural and the world of the inner mind to outer reality; he is ill in mind and body, and proud of it; he seeks to vivify the inanimate and to petrify the animate. In decadent writing, as Weir notes, description serves to present attributes of character rather than to set a realistic

41

Verlaine, Oeuvres poétiques complètes, 205; trans. Benton, Debussy: Songs, 167, minor changes. 42 The four flats in the key signature signal F minor. 43 John Porter Houston, French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 182.


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background;44 the artificiality of the description in “Spleen”—”all red,” “too blue,” “too tender,” “too green,” “varnished”—presents the poet’s reaction to nature, or to an unnatural world of his own creation.45 In either case, existence has become unbearable; he longs for relief from boredom but also from the dread that the beloved will leave—a release that can be bought only at the expense of the feared outcome. Reversing the Pygmalion and Galatea story, the beloved must become motionless, inanimate, a statue; the longed-for repose of “Green” is now an obsession with control. Where the poetic form of “Green” was conventional, that of “Spleen” is not. In “Green” the fear that the poet’s heart will be torn apart has now become the reality of the poem torn apart: “Spleen” is presented on the page as six separate couplets, but they are not typical rhyming couplets (aa bb cc dd, etc.); they rhyme ab ab cd cd ef ef. As Wenk has pointed out, they are the halves of three four-line quatrains, rhyming abab, that have been separated, split apart, at the midpoint. In content, the fragmentation is more severe. Again, as Wenk points out, couplets 1 and 3 are both descriptions in the imperfect tense; couplets 2 and 4 are present tense addresses to the beloved describing the anxiety of the poet; couplets 5 and 6 form a unit that combines both the descriptive elements and the anxiety46; however, Verlaine’s destruction of the quatrain can be taken one step further: by content and by verb tense (though not by rhyme) couplets 1 and 3 form a unit, as do couplets 2 and 4. “Spleen” is a variant of Schlegel’s digressive arabesque, a tiny example of the device of interleaving familiar from Kater Murr and Aurélia (See Chapter 1); in “Spleen” the conflicting emotions interleaved are boredom on the one hand, fear and anxiety on the other. Like Kater Murr and Aurélia, “Spleen” is a structural representation, not just a telling, of the poet’s emotional state. Debussy’s setting of “Spleen” is more fragmented than that of “Green.” The auxiliary cadence progression that controls “Spleen”— b II-V-I—does not resolve to a clear, functional tonic until the final 44

David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 106. 45 Note Des Esseintes’s artificial environment in Huysmans’s À rebours. 46 Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 116-20.

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cadence; thus the tonic is recognized, as in “Green,” only in retrospect, but in “Spleen” only as the song ends.47 In “Spleen,” the incomplete progression—bII-V—is not just prolonged, but repeated distinctly four times (strophes 1, 2, 4, 6); as Fig. 2.4 (below) shows, each repetition coincides with a statement of the main theme at the pitch of its initial occurrence. This theme, perhaps an ironic borrowing from the wedding song in Chabrier’s opera Gwendoline (Fig. 2.5), always occurs in the accompaniment, but is never aligned with the text of the respective couplets in the same manner; moreover, it is fragmented in strophe 3 and transposed in strophe 5.48

Fig. 2.4. Chart showing formal structures of the poetry and music of “Spleen.” (Continued on facing page) Couplets & rhyme scheme Alternating emotions Motivic statements Musical form: 2 views ----1. through-composed ----2. two parts Harmonic model Harmony

1 (ab) fatigue a

2 (ab) fear a1

3 (cd) fatigue extension

A f: bII---V f: bII---V

bII---V bII---V

Measures

1----------8

9-----13

bII ----------------extension bII--B: II--V-----bVII 14------------17

47

Noted by Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 119, and Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 34-36. As mentioned above, Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor is an example of such a technique: the dominant is prolonged throughout that work, resolving to the tonic only as the piece closes. Schenker gives this as an example; see 88 (par. 245) and Fig. 110/a3. 48 The quotation of the “Bénissez-nous” from the “Épithalame” in Chabrier’s opera raises questions of extra-musical meaning. Perhaps Debussy saw a certain irony (or sarcasm) in underlying the dread and boredom of “Spleen”—the relationship gone sour—with wedding music, as the blessings Gwendolyn requests have, for the poet of “Spleen,” become curses. Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans. Maire O’Brien and Grace O’Brien (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1973), 66.


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Through these tactics—an almost insistent repetition of harmonic and melodic material in an irregular and unpredictable manner, the constant beginning anew without real resolution,49 and a sustained harmonic tension created by the avoidance of the tonic— Debussy maintains both the anxiety and boredom expressed by the poet, though using a very different strategy from Verlaine’s alternating emotional states. Debussy increases the harmonic tension in “Spleen” by substituting bII for the ii of “Green”—increases the tension in that bII is a non-diatonic chord and in that its root lies distant from the root of the chord to which it moves (V) by a tritone, the least stable and one of the most highly charged intervals in the tonal system. Fig. 2.4 (cont.) Chart showing formal structures of the poetry and music of “Spleen.” 4 (cd) fear a2

5 (ef) fatigue a3 (transposed)

6 (ef) fatigue/fear extension---a4

A1 bII----V---bII----V---18-----21---

-------------------------IV# --------------V6/4 22-------------------25

---------------bII--------V----I I+-------------bII--------V----I 26------------28-------34

49

Recalling the opening strategy of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, mentioned above.

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Fig. 2.5. Comparison of measures 41-43 of the “Épithalame” from Gwendoline with measures 1-4 of “Spleen.” “Épithalame”

“Spleen”

Debussy’s use of motivic repetition and tonic avoidance in “Spleen” does not take place within a conventional formal structure that is as clearly defined as the ABA1 form of “Green.” Analyses that rely too heavily on motivic repetition seem unsatisfactory at the level of overall form and stretch the meaning of standard terminology. Howat, relying on Golden Section proportion for his own formal explanation of “Spleen,” acknowledges the motivic and harmonic repetition, but admits that “to describe the form, truthfully enough, as a tonally free rondo does nothing to explain what is crucial to its expression”;50 nor, I would say, does Parks’s description of the form of other works of Debussy that, like “Spleen,” consistently repeat and extend motives as “a synthesis of strophic variations with … continuous development interrupted by reprise.”51 Even the appearance of the main motive at m. 18, the midpoint of the song (and of the poem), unharmonized as at the opening, does little to suggest a two-part form (see Fig. 2.4). Since there is no strong resolution to any key area before the final tonic (though there is a weak one in mm. 25-6, see Fig. 2.4), and since the principal motivic repetition is irregular, it is perhaps best simply to read the song as through composed.

50

Howat, Debussy in Proportion, 34. Richard S. Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 224-25. 51


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“Green” and “Spleen” are fragments; they exist within a tonal harmonic framework, but for them, that frame has been broken. It has not dissolved: recognition of the model whole, the convention, from which they are derrived is crucial to understanding their structures. Each of the songs is modeled on an incomplete chord progression— ”Green” on ii-V-I and “Spleen” on bII-V-I—just as other works are modeled on complete chord progressions that begin and end on a tonic. They are fragments, incomplete at their beginnings though closed at their endings, and they are further fragmented by the internal repetition of those progressions, or portions of them—ii-V-I for “Green” and bII-V for “Spleen”—that govern their overall form. Those incomplete progressions and their repetitions allow Debussy to fragment the surfaces of the works and to build long-range tension, but these fragments do not yet exist in the modern world of the collage or of Warhol’s postmodern multiple, multi-colored Marilyns—a world where the meaning of the part no longer depends on its relation to a larger, overriding whole. It is in the nature of the Debussy’s fragments—like those in the literary works that inspired them—not to be ambiguous, but to appear ambiguous until enough information is revealed, or discovered, to make an identification. In both “Green” and “Spleen” the off-tonic beginnings create a certain level of ambiguity, but in both cases strong final cadences—in section or work—reveal the information necessary to place the preceding material in its proper context. Debussy creates a sense of uncertainty and expectancy by tearing at convention while ultimately maintaining, even depending on, that convention.

Endings: “Canope” In a photograph taken in 1910 in Debussy’s home in the Bois de Boulogne, Debussy and Satie lean against a mantel; from the mantel, just above Satie’s hand, a small Egyptian face stares out into a world completely alien to its origins. It is one of a pair of lids to canopic urns, funerary urns intended to hold certain internal organs in the Egyptian mummification process, artifacts reduced to the status of

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decorative objects. 52 These urn lids appear to be the source of the title of Debussy’s tenth prelude from Book II, “Canope,” just as other family possessions provided titles for Debussy’s works: the “Poissons d’or” from Images, Book II, swim on a Japanese-lacquer wooden panel, the “Puerta del vino” from the second book of Preludes appears on a postcard of the Alhambra, while Jimbo and the Golliwog are only two of the Children’s Corner and the Boîte à joujoux characters that populated his daughter’s toy box. The canopic urn lids are fragments in two senses: they are remnants of the original urns—lost, perhaps broken—and they are archeological artifacts, reminders of a distant and exotic culture. In his classification of literary fragments, Roger Shattuck describes his category labeled the linked fragment in terms of the archeological artifact: from the pottery shard, the archaeologist reconstructs the original vessel; from the realization of that vessel, with other reconstructed artifacts, he recreates an entire civilization—its history, beliefs, daily life, ultimate fate. This is the transcendental fragment of Romantic and Symbolist literature, of Swedenborg, Novalis, Nerval, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and even Yeats and Stevens. The identity of the literary fragment relies on the very convention it has broken, reaches back to that convention, just as the identity of the artifact relies on its origins in the past. From this perspective, as Shattuck claims, “nothing stands alone, and the tiniest fragment of the universe breathes forth its secret connections to everything else.”53 It is from this perspective of the archeological fragment that many writers on Debussy’s prelude “Canope” view the referent of the title—both as inspiration for Debussy and as interpretative guide for the listener. They weave around the urns a web of connections, or associations, centered on man’s ongoing fascination with ruins and the past, regardless of the approach they will ultimately take in their analyses. Robert Schmitz writes that Debussy “reaches far back to archaic ceremonials, to the magnificent [city of] Canope, of which 52 This photograph is reproduced in François Lesure, Debussy: Iconographie musicale (Paris: Éditions Minkoff & Lattès, 1980), 134. Lacking any evidence, I will ignore the very real possibility that they are reproductions. 53 Roger Shattuck, “The Alphabet and the Junkyard,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, ed. Kritzman, 36.


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there remain only the ruins of temples and palaces.”54 James Baker finds “little wonder, then, that the piece has an air of mystery, its subdued harmonies redolent of ancient ruins.”55 David Lewin sums up this attitude: “Debussy, to the extent he had the urn in mind, used the word canope as a metonym for the city, the temple, the associated rites, the dead civilization itself”; reflecting the significance for personal inspiration that the artifact and the ruin have had at least since Petrarch gazed over the ruins of Rome, he adds, “I am similarly beset by fantasies about the person buried in the beautiful Egyptian urn, the potter who cast that compelling art-work.”56 “Canope” is a tiny piece, only 33 measures long. (“Canope” is given in its entirety in Fig. 2.6; motives labeled U-Z are indicated on the score in large, bold type and circled.) A key signature of one flat is in effect throughout; the chordal opening clearly emphasizes D minor, as do all motives except X (m. 14) and Z (m. 17). The D chord at m. 7, now with F#, tonicizes G,57 and this initiates a string of descending fifths that lead, ultimately, to the dominant harmony at m. 18 and its whole-tone extension. At the end of m. 25 a fermata allows the sound to die away before a reprise of the opening motive in m. 26. Subsequently motive W returns in mm. 30-33, harmonized differently, but the final statement is incomplete: the closing melodic notes, Eb-D, are not written, and there is no sense of melodic closure even though D is already sounding (in the wrong voice) in the final chord. The sense of incompletion, of the motive left unresolved, depends on aural memory, the expectation created by the three previous statements of the W motive, but also on the E-Eb-D descent in the first statements of motive V (mm.7-8 and 20-21). The D tonal center is weakened by the following: in m. 3, the descending fifth, G-C; in mm. 14-15, the prominent C-major chords; and in the final measures, the C chord in root position, even given the added ninth. Chromatic alterations in mm. 4, 13, 23, and 28 also increase tonal uncertainty. 54

E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (New York: Dover Publications, 1966; originally published Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1950), 182. 55 James M. Baker, “Post-Tonal Voice-Leading,” in Early Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Jonathan Dunsby (London: Blackwell, 1993), 30. 56 David Lewin, “Parallel Voice-Leading in Debussy,” in Music at the Turn of the Century, ed. Joseph Kerman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 64-65. 57 By functioning as V in reference to a G tonic.

88 Fig. 2.6. “Canope.”


Chapter 2: Beginnings and Endings Fig. 2.6. “Canope” (cont.).

89

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In numerous attempts to explain the organization and structure of this work, analysts have employed topics ranging from the harmonics of the Javanese gamelan through the rules of medieval musica ficta to modern set theory.58 Tonal analyses of one sort or another all acknowledge a conflict between D minor and C major (or between D dorian and C mixolydian), but are divided in their opinions on the ultimate tonality of the piece. Arthur Wenk, Robert Schmitz, Serge Gut,59 and Amy Dommel-Diény 60 conclude that the tonality is D minor; David Lewin and James Baker settle on C major, Thomas Warburton claims bitonality. Given the final C major chord and the incomplete statement of motive W in the final measures, those who claim D minor (or dorian) tonality obviously must stress the inconclusiveness of the ending, the acceptance of an open-ended fragment; however, neither Wenk nor Schmitz attempts an explanation. As Schmitz puts it, “The final chord does not assuage our thirst for a final cadence. We are left with a choice of three tonal centers and yet none”; 61 his three tonal centers are C, G, and D, none of which can be reconciled with the others. Gut claims D is the central axis on which the piece turns: the final chord, he asserts, should not be analyzed as a triad with added ninth, but as a summary of the fifths Debussy uses through the piece.62 Dommel-Diény calls D “an immutable tonic” throughout, and a symbol of the eternity represented by the funerary urns. She provides support for her reading through a detailed account of voice-leading, and describes the final chord as an appoggiatura to an imaginary Dminor chord (which she supplies in one graph).63 Though her harmonic plan is unconvincing in that it indicates no dominant to tonic progression, she is the only one of those four to provide such analytical support of a compositional strategy.

58

Roberts, 164-5; Lewin, 68; Parks, 148-50. Serge Gut, “‘Canope’ de Debussy, analyse formelle et structure fondamentale,” Revue musicale de la Suisse romande, 33/2 (May 1980), 60-65. 60 A. Dommel-Diény, L’Analyse harmonique en examples de J. S. Bach à Debussy (Neuchâtel: Éditions Delachaux et Niestlé, 1967), 57-63. 61 Schmitz, 183. 62 Gut, 60-65. 63 Dommel-Diény, 57-63. 59


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Those who analyse the piece in C major (or C mixolydian) must stress a progression toward closure, and all do so with more current approaches to harmonic analysis. Baker concludes that “There is a rightness—even an inevitability—to the final cadence.”64 Lewin says of the ending, “The priority of D as a melodic final [has] receded into a vague and fragrant memory of things past.”65 Lewin and Baker thus imply that the piece is a fragment, but open at the beginning rather than the end. Even Warburton’s bitonal analysis notes that “the tone C gains in prominence” through the piece,66 though his analysis weakens the notion of the tonally open fragment by having the two tonal areas function separately. Many pieces by Debussy—like “Green” and “Spleen”—do begin away from the tonic, but end rather more decisively on it, clarifying the preceding material; this is clearly not the case with “Canope,” whose ending intentionally obscures or compromises what preceded it. There are models, precursors, for the fragment ending in the music of Chopin and Schumann. Among musical fragments that end off the tonic or on a tonic that is severely compromised, Charles Rosen includes Chopin’s Prelude in F Major. He describes the accented Eb added to the final F-major sonority as an unresolved detail that can compromise the conventions of the form without quite destroying them. Also connecting the Romantic fragment to the infinite, Rosen notes that in this context the Eb does not so much weaken the final cadence as make it more mysterious, prolonging the final chord beyond the confines of the form.67 Kallberg writes that Chopin may have intended an ironic gesture by including the Eb, thus allowing the reinterpretation of the tonic chord as a dominant-seventh, and introducing the possibility that the Prelude could serve as a preparation for a following work in Bb—the original function of the prelude as a genre before Chopin transformed it into the independent concert work (see Chapter 6).68 This Prelude becomes even more a 64

Baker, 35. Lewin, 70. 66 Warburton, “Bitonal Miniatures by Debussy from 1913,” Cahiers Debussy, 6 (1982): 11. 67 Rosen, 96-97. 68 Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 156. 65

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fragment when deprived of both a clear final tonic and resolution in a following work. Rosen also mentions the Romantic form of Chopin’s Mazurka op. 17, #4, ending with a broken fragment of its melody, completed in the correct register but the wrong voice, as a part of the accompaniment rather than in the melodic line. As Rosen notes, the last bars, which return to the opening phrase, shake the firm plagal cadence in A minor but not the sense of tonality. They turn the piece into an ideal Romantic fragment: complete and provocative, well-rounded and yet open.69 The ending of “Canope” recalls these techniques.70 Like the Mazurka (op. 17, #4), Debussy’s melody ends, an unresolved fragment, even though the resolution is sounding in a different voice (and in a different register as well). The final chord is more problematic since the tonic chord does not sound in the last measures, only the tonic pitch D. Nevertheless, the return of the opening material at pitch just before the closing, in conjunction with the unresolved melody (motive W) allows the unresolved dissonance of the final measures to prolong the D, in Rosen’s words, beyond the confines of the works itself; as a fragment, “Canope” turns both back into itself and outside itself in search of closure. In this form, the piece expresses what the urns represent: the certainty of death and uncertainty of what comes after. Though often without this level of final insecurity, the repetitive motive (an echo, an afterthought?), static harmony, and ever-decreasing level of sound and speed that mark the final measures of “Canope” became in Debussy’s output almost as much a topos as the in medias res beginnings identified by Genette in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Many of Debussy’s endings are reminiscent of Berthold Hoeckner’s representations of Romantic distance in music (see Chapter 1). He explains the ending of Schumann’s Papillons as such—sound gradually fading, dying away on the dominant-seventh chord whose notes vanish one by one, the final tonic touched only briefly.71 At least once, Debussy specifically 69

Rosen, 419. Recall Debussy’s familiarity with Chopin’s music, especially Chopin’s influence on Debussy’s music documented by Howat. 71 Hoeckner, 55-132. 70


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links such an ending to two Romantic images: horn calls and sound fading away in the distance—that distance which allowed both words and paintings to be transformed into music. The score of “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” from Book I of the Preludes has at the fourth measure from the end the indication Comme une lointaine sonnerie de cors [like the distant sound of horns] and for the last two measures, which are horn calls transposed to the piano, Encore plus lointain et plus retenu [yet further off and slower]. Similarly, the fading final chord of “Canope” reflects this aesthetic of distance inherited from Romanticism—the distant civilization, the distance of exoticism, and the distance of death—become more pronounced as the Symbolists inherit from the Romantics and from Baudelaire in particular a heightened sense of alienation from society. Both the assurance that Dommel-Diény assigned to the conclusion by predicting the resolution of the final dissonances to a specific D-minor chord, as well as the “rightness” and “inevitability” Baker assigned to the final cadence he reads as C, rob “Canope” of the character of the Romantic and Symbolist fragment—and point to a certainty about the afterlife that is out of character with the subject. At the very core of Romanticism, the fragment’s broken state is seen as a parallel to the incomplete art work: the unfinished is a reflection of the ongoing process of creation just as the broken is a product of the ongoing process of destruction; the Symbolist fragment is only a refinement of that aesthetic doctrine: the whole, the ideal, becomes less attainable, the degree of incompletion more pronounced, the role of the audience more involved in the process of recreation. Fig. 2.7 presents a graph that shows how the D minor tonality is maintained with a fragmented ending. The complete progression in D minor from mm.1-26 supports a series of nested scales descending a fifth; this descent includes both the natural and flat second degrees of the scale. The descending pattern is repeated in the final measures, but not completed. The flat second scale degree introduces the chromaticism that colors much of the work. Note in Fig. 2.6 that motives W, X, and Y are all derived from this descent. Fig. 2.6 also shows that motives Y, and Z are related to the descending fifth introduced in motive U. In this graph the prelude is rounded tonally (“complete” and “well-rounded,” to quote Rosen, above), but open at its end (again in Rosen’s words, “provocative,” and “open”), D minor


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is compromised but not negated, the lack of resolution of the final notes prolonging it far beyond the confines of the form.72 Fig. 2.7: Counterpoint graph of “Canope”

ctpt harmony motives mm. #s

5-------------8 i v/vi iv U V W 1 7 11

5-----8 fifths seq. X Y 14 15

5 Z 17

5-----------8 V WT i V U W 18 20 26 30

Commenting on a Novalis fragment from Pollen Dust, Rosen has written, “This fragment itself is not only provisional, tentative, but glories in its refusal to reach the definitive; and it is given to us with a premonition of its own death, imminent or deferred, with the prospect of its ruin.”73 Rosen eloquently and aptly characterizes the Romantic fragment—in words that could as easily have been conceived in reference to “Canope.”

72 73

Rosen, 418-19. Rosen, 94.

CHAPTER 3 ARCADIAS AND ARABESQUES Satyrs are little mannikins with hooked noses, horns in their foreheads and feet like those of goats such as the one Saint Antony saw in the desert, who also, questioned by this servant of God, is said to have replied, saying ... “I am mortal—one of those inhabitants of the desert whom the pagans, deceived by various errors, worship as Fauns and Satyrs.” —————Isidore of Seville

The legacy of Classical Greece and Rome, left to us in stone ruins and manuscript fragments, its stories told through the composite creatures that people myth and legend, has been a recurring source of inspiration for Western makers of fragments at least since Petrarch pondered the ruins of Rome. The nineteenth century was no exception, despite the myriad influences and interests that competed for the attention of artists: nationalism, naturalism, exoticism, among many others. In France, the intermingled and interdependent groups labeled Parnassians, Decadents, and Symbolists used aspects of the Classical tradition for their own purposes. Gilbert Highet, in his extended discussion of this reappropriation and reinterpretation of Classical ideals, highlights several areas: the Parnassian appeal to the universality of emotional restraint and formal control, visible most certainly in the poetry of Leconte de Lisle and the paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, but also in aspects of the works of Mallarmé and the Symbolists; the exaggerated notion of personal freedom and sexual license in the ancient world (contrasted with the repressive control of Christianity) seen in the works of Pierre Louÿs and Gustave Moreau, among others (writers and painters often labeled Decadents); and the Symbolist trove of mythological figures, from the faun to Narcissus, laden with centuries of meaning, capable of functioning as either subject or frame, center or decoration.1 The ancient world made a perfect destination for escapist literature, more concrete than the lands of pure imagination and recalling more from communal knowledge and expectation, but at the same time still shrouded in the mist of the past, hiding in uncertainty, opening doors to many interpretations and 1

Highet, 437-65 and 501-10.

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misinterpretations.2 The nineteenth century made many of its fragments on this rich base. Debussy’s interaction with these makers of new classical fragments is represented in this chapter by his tone poem based on Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, which premiered in December 1894, and his settings of poems from the Chansons de Bilitis, poems first published by Pierre Louÿs that same month.

Faune and Arabesque Debussy invited Mallarmé to the first performance of Prélude à “l’Après-midi d’un faune” with the following note: Cher Maître, Ai-je besoin de vous dire la joie que j’aurai si vous voulez bien encourager de votre présence, les arabesques qu’un peut-être coupable orgueil m’a fait croire être dictées par la Flûte de votre Faune. [Dear Master, Need I say how happy I should be if you were kind enough to honour with your presence the arabesques which, by an excess of pride perhaps, I believe to have been dictated by the flute of your faun.]3

Debussy’s use of the term arabesque—in his note to Mallarmé, as the title of two works for piano, and in other instances— has been the subject of several studies.4 Arabesque was an essential term in aesthetic theories in both literature and the visual arts in France in the late nineteenth century, particularly in the circles Debussy frequented: Mallarmé and the Symbolists drew on concepts related to the arabesque from Gautier, Baudelaire, and Edgar Poe; in the visual arts, Maurice Denis and art nouveau movement as well as

2

For more on classical themes in the escapist literature of decadence, Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870-1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1986), 225-35. 3 Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, “Debussy et l’idée d’arabesque musicale,” Cahiers Debussy 12-13 (1988-89): 67, transcription and facsimile of original note; trans. Nichols, Debussy Letters, 75, with minor changes. 4 In particular, see Eigeldinger and Françoise Gervaise, “La notion d’arabesque chez Debussy,” La Revue musicale 241 (1958): 3-23.

Chapter 3: Arcadias and Arabesques

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the Pre-Raphaelites drew on Ruskin5; Gauguin and Moreau also used the term arabesque in their writings on art. Debussy could have used the term arabesque in his note as a (no doubt somewhat insincere) gesture of self-deprecation, the novice daring to approach Cher Maître with his meager offering. In the Dialogue on Poetry, Schlegel wrote of Diderot’s Jacques, “To be sure, it is not a work of high rank, but only an arabesque,” and the term had not lost its association with its origins in ornament—bauble, trifle— even in Debussy’s time. Schlegel continued, “But for that reason it has in my eyes no small merit; for I consider the arabesque a very definite and essential form or mode of expression of poetry,”6 and Debussy echoed that sentiment, prevalent in his time as well, when he later wrote of the “‘arabesque musicale’ ou plutôt ce principe de ‘l’ornement’ qui est la base de tous les modes d’art” [the musical arabesque or rather this principle of ornament which is the basis of all the varieties of art.]7 Given the importance of the term arabesque in Mallarmé’s theories, Debussy might have used it here, as Eigeldinger says, to give Mallarmé what he wanted to hear.8 For Mallarmé, as Bradford Cook points out, every art form is defined by its own arabesque, but each is a multiple of one great art, the total arabesque.9 This Mallarméan concept invites an interpretation of Debussy’s work as musical arabesque intertwining with the poetic arabesque of Mallarmé’s poem (absent but present in memory), two very real facets of the ideal total arabesque. The origin of arabesque as frame also meshes with the interpretation of Debussy’s Prelude as musical gloss of Mallarmé’s poem; and fits well with the story that Debussy was originally to have composed incidental music for a dramatic reading of the poem. At any 5

Ruskin’s ideas were transmitted in part through Sizeranne, Ruskin et la religion de la beauté. See Richard Langham Smith, notes to Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer, collected by François Lesure, trans. and ed. by Richard Langham Smith (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 31. 6 Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 96. 7 La Revue blanche, 1 May 1901, quoted in Eigeldinger, 10. Debussy further qualifies his use of the term ornament, saying that it has nothing to do with musical ornamentation. 8 Eigeldinger, 10. 9 Bradford Cook, introduction to Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, xvi.

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rate, from Schlegel’s time forward, though varying in precise meaning from group to group and context to context, arabesque retains the double sense of both mere ornament and the basis of all creativity: these are two strands of one common and prevalent notion. Both Mallarmé’s poem and Debussy’s tone poem are examples of arabesque structures, digressive narratives, deformed and interrupted, but based, nevertheless, on recognizable conventions. L’Après-midi d’un faune, subtitled “eclogue” after Virgil’s designation for pastoral poems, is Mallarmé’s most famous homage to antique myth and its continued power to inspire.10 The faun is a grotesque, a creature made of fragments, part man, part goat; Mallarmé has taken the interleaving technique of Hoffmann’s rambunctious Kater Murr—who so boldly crossed the line between the animal world and the human—and with subtlety and delicacy has transformed it into the inner monologue of the timid faun, his vacillation between sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality, on a sultry afternoon in an Arcadia that never existed except in imagination. The poem is written in alexandrines, in rhyming couplets; on this model he makes his arabesques. The first line of the faun’s monologue begins in medias res (with a reference to something that has happened in the past and about which the reader is ignorant) and ends with a sentence fragment. Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. Si clair, [Those nymphs, I want to make them permanent. / So bright,]11

10

Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 13. The following analysis draws on the work of Cohn as well as the following: Rosaline Crowley, “Toward the Poetics of Juxtaposition: L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune,” Yale French Studies 54 (1977), 33-44; Houston, 56-58; Guy Michaud, Mallarmé (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 37-38 and 89-92; Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 108-43; Maurice Z. Shroder, “The Satyr and the Faun: A Definition of Romanticism,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literature 23 (fall—winter 1969): 346-53. 11 Mallarmé, L’Après-midi d’un faune, lines 1-2, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), 50; trans. Austin, in Debussy, Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” 23.


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By placing the caesura at points where it is not expected, Mallarmé fragments the alexandrine, as in this first line. Here the twelve syllables are broken, both by syntax and by placement on the page, into groups of three, seven, and two syllables rather than the accepted groups of six, or even four. The rest of the poem proceeds through sentence fragments indicated by dots of ellipsis, dashes, blank space,12 and other signs of omission and interruption—physical signs earlier used by Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, and others who depicted incomplete manuscripts in their texts.13 The faun, like the narrator in Aurélia, tells his own story, attempting to separate dream from reality: he saw some nymphs, or maybe swans; he captured two of them; they escaped before he could make love to them. The story is told as a factual account, told as if it had happened in the past, in three separate sections that are marked with quotation marks, and printed in italic type. In Mallarmé’s letters to his editor Edmond Deman, he described the use of italics as the printed equivalent of handwriting, indicating, according to Graham Robb, a draft, a fiction, rather than reality.14 The first of these sections is introduced by the word “contez” in capital letters; the second by the word “souvenirs,” again in capital letters: “tell” and “memories.” Like Petrarch and Montaigne, the faun questions telling and memory, for telling is always reconstructed from memory, and memory is always imperfect and always itself a reconstruction. Surrounding this narrative is the faun’s gloss—his musings, his emotions, his questions—told in the fictional present. These sections frame the narrative as the grotesque frames the center portrait it surrounds. Embedded in the final section of the gloss is a tiny mise en abyme, a fragment story that sums up the faun’s experience. In this short dream, he dares to hold Venus, but waking is his punishment as the dream trails off in dots of ellipsis. The line continues, after a break on the page, with the word “non.” This was a dream; perhaps the nymphs were also a dream. There is no resolution 12

In the original edition of L’Après-midi d’un faune the intervals of blank space on the page take almost as much space as the sections that are italicized. Crowley, 43. 13 Bowie claims many of Mallarmé’s poems could be profitably studied for their gaps, elisions, and discrepancies. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 56. 14 Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 213.

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of any section of the poem, or of the poem itself, but, in fact, it hardly matters. As the last line reminds us, “Couple, adieu; je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins” [Couple, goodbye; I go to see the shadow you became]: 15 whether real or dream, everything becomes memory. Debussy’s tone poem also bears the marks of the arabesque, of fragmentation. As Matthew Brown shows in his analysis of Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Debussy’s work may be interpreted as a standard ternary form—ABA1 followed by a coda—but one where fragmentation on many levels has obscured the structure to such an extent that it has opened the door to many differing analyses. 16 Brown’s formal divisions are summarized in Fig. 3.1 below. Fig. 3.1. Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Brown’s formal divisions mm. 1-30 A E opening with incomplete progression in mm. 1-13 vii7/V-V9-I

31-36 digression whole tone material extends V of E, delays transition to Db

37-54 transition to Db

55-78 B Db

79-106 A1 E composing out of mm 20-30, with allusion to B section

106-110 coda E

The work opens with what Brown labels a transformation of an incomplete progression: vii/V-V9-I in E major. Thus Debussy begins in medias res, in the middle of a chord progression, just as Mallarmé began the faun’s tale in the middle of his musings. The tonic, E major, is reached only in m. 13 with a clear V9-I, but that point of arrival and clarification is masked by its brevity and by misalignment with the end of the melodic phrase above it.17 The progression has been interrupted, not harmonically but aurally, by a 15 Mallarmé, L’Après-midi d’un faune, final line, Oeuvres complètes, 53; my translation. 16 Matthew Brown, “Tonality and Form in Debussy’s Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” Music Theory Spectrum 15 (1993): 127-43. 17 The opening progression VII7 of V-V9-I in mm. 113 actually bridges the first two statements of the flute theme. See Brown, “Tonality and Form,” 134.


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sort of hole in the manuscript—m 6 is completely silent; m. 7 begins a repeat of material from mm. 4-5, doubling back on itself just as the visual arabesque may double back before going on. The effect also mimics memory retrieval, recollection. Memories are often fragments, incomplete, inexact, brought to the forefront of thought in stages, first dimly then more clearly. Rosen stresses Schumann’s ability to mimic the imperfect process of memory by introducing first a short fragment of a known melody, followed by a longer version, still incomplete.18 Debussy often uses a similar technique of repetition and expansion to lead the listener into his works: the opening of “Danseuses de Delphes” and “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir,” both from Book I of the Preludes, are examples, as is the opening of Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un faune.” In these works, Debussy is not recreating from recollection, but literally creating the impression of recollection. The faun’s memories are the source of his creativity, though they may not be memories, or even dreams, but rather constructs of the imagination, mimics of memory. Mallarmé questions dream, memory, and reality with digressions, interruptions of the narrative; Nerval did the same when he intertwined reality and psychotic episodes in Aurélia; Cervantes used his interpolated stories to comment on reality; Verlaine’s tiny interpolations reveal the uncertainty of his protagonist, his questioning of the attitude of the beloved. Just as Mallarmé delayed the faun’s narrative with his gloss, so Debussy waylayed his musical progression with the musical equivalent of asides or parentheses (such as the brief two-measure interruptions in “Green” that echo the change of tone in the poem). One such harmonic digression or interpolation is found in mm. 30-39, where whole-tone material functions to extend the dominant chord of E major, as Brown shows, and to delay the modulation to D-flat major, but does not advance the primary tonal progression of the work. In his article, Brown includes a passage from Schenker’s Free Composition describing such delays in the harmony and compares them to life: In the art of music, as in life, motion toward the goal encounters obstacles, reverses, disappointments, and involves great distances,

18

Rosen, 98-100.

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Debussy and the Fragment detours, expansions, interpolations, and, in short, retardations of all kinds. Therein lies the source of all artistic delaying, from which the creative mind can derive content that is ever new.19

Both Debussy and Mallarmé derived “content ever new” from the “reverses, detours, interpolations” they made to accepted and recognizable models. Debussy also uses a compositional technique that parallels, though only loosely, the use of the mise en abyme—often expressed as an embedded or interpolated text whose purpose is either to reflect in miniature, or through similarity to shed light on, the principal work that contains it. The faun’s decision to dream/imagine that he goes to Mt. Etna and rapes Venus, in spite of “sûr châtiment” [sure punishment], captures his frustration, his dreams of conquest, his impotence, and ends with dots of ellipsis as uncertain of its ending as the poem itself.20 To form his A1 section, Debussy did not simply repeat the A material literally or with some alteration; instead, as Brown has shown, Debussy chose a small section, mm. 20-30 of the A section, which he expanded (composed-out), including in the process “subtle reminiscences” of motivic material and the tonality (C#/Db) of the B section. 21 This fragment of A then becomes a tiny reflection, as well as the basis of, the A1 section. It functions much as a mise en abyme through its explanatory power, its representation in miniature of the final A section, though it is not an interpolation or interruption. Mallarmé wrote of the arabesque: A l’égal de créer: la notion d’un objet, échappant, qui fait défaut. Semblable occupation suffit, comparer les aspects et leur nombre tel qu’il frôle notre négligence: y éveillant, pour décor, l’ambiguïté de quelques figures belles, aux intersections. La totale arabesque, qui les relie, a de vertigineuses sautes en un effroi que reconnue; et d’anxieux accords. Avertissant par tel écart, au lieu de déconcerter, ou que sa similitude avec elle-même, la soustraie en la confondant.22 19

Brown, “Tonality and Form,” 136, quoting Schenker, 5 (sec. 3). The Mad Tryst, the story the narrator reads to Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher, a work Debussy knew intimately, functions as another example of mise en abyme. 21 Brown, “Tonality and Form,” 140. 22 Mallarmé, La Musique et les lettres, Oeuvres complètes, 647-48. 20


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To create is to conceive an object in its fleeting moment, in its absence. To do this, we simply compare its facets and dwell lightly, negligently upon their multiplicity. We conjure up a scene of lovely, evanescent, intersecting forms. We recognize the entire and binding arabesque thus formed as it leaps dizzily in terror play disquieting chords; or, through a sudden digression (by no means disconcerting), we are warned of its likeness unto itself even as it hides.23

We recognize the arabesque in all its myriad forms only against expectation, its facets as convention deformed, its power as the tension between the fragment and the whole.

Chansons de Bilitis: Louÿs and the Tradition of the Hoax Poem The past speaks with the voice of authority and confers a legitimacy on its ruins and relics that contemporary works must earn. A false claim to this authority, coupled with contemporary tolerance of direct descriptions of sexuality based on the notion that pre-Christian morality permitted greater sexual freedom, allowed Pierre Louÿs’s literary forgery, the Chansons de Bilitis, to enjoy great success both before and after his hoax was revealed. Louÿs’s alleged translations of the fake poems of an imaginary Greek poet, and Debussy’s responses to them, are of particular interest for several reasons: these prose poems are related directly to the great eighteenth-century literary hoaxes, an important element in the climate that allowed the Romantic fragment to develop; they are examples of a reinterpretation of the themes of classical mythology and a representation of views of life in the ancient world written by a Symbolist/Decadent poet who was also Debussy’s close friend; specifically, the text of “Le Tombeau des naïades,” the third and last of Debussy’s settings of prose poems from this collection, illustrates another of his musical interpretations of the theme of fragmentation. The eighteenth century was mad for ruins; two of the more bizarre manifestations of that mania were sham ruins and hoax poems. Neither of these phenomena was new—the earliest report of a fake 23

Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, 48-49.

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ruin occurs in the sixteenth century 24 and the literary forgery was certainly older25—but the eighteenth century experienced a frenzy in this construction of decay. The creators of architectural and literary fakes worked with skill, care, and great seriousness, as witnessed by Joseph Heely’s description of a Gothic castle built in 1747-48: And to keep the whole design in its purity—to wipe away any suspicion of its being any otherwise than a real ruin, the large and mossy stones, which have seemingly tumbled from the tottering and ruinous walls, are suffered to lie about the different parts of the building, in utmost confusion. This greatly preserves its intention, and confirms the common opinion of every stranger, of its early date; while, to throw a deeper solemnity over it, and to make it carry a stronger face of antiquity, ivy is encouraged to climb about the walls and turrets.26

The great literary forgers were no less intent on maintaining this deception. Many hoax poems were presented in a fragmented condition to ape the genuine found manuscript;27 hoax authors, including the greatest of the eighteenth century, Macpherson (the Ossian poet) and Chatterton (the Rowley poet), included prefaces that detailed the circumstances of the recovery of the manuscripts they claimed to have found, as well as biographical data that situated the supposed original authors in time and place. Rabelais and Cervantes provided similar (though not so complete) descriptions for the imaginary found manuscripts they used as props for their fictions, but these eighteenth and nineteenth-century forgeries were not props: they were presented to the public as literary works themselves. Once these hoaxes were uncovered, they presented critical problems that placed them in a category quite different from both the legitimate literary fragments of the ancients (known most often through published translations in such popular collections as the Greek 24

Harries, 62. Roger A. Pack, “Two Classical Forgeries,” American Journal of Philology 110 (1989): 479-80. 26 Harries, 65-66, quoting Joseph Heely, Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil, and the Leasowes, with Critical Remarks and Observations on the Modern Taste in Gardening, 2 vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1777), 175-76. 27 Levinson, 34. 25


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Anthology) and the planned fragments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fragments of ancient Greek and Latin poems provided the reader in the eighteenth century with a form whose incompletion was a mark of its antiquity, comparable to the missing nose on an antique bust, and interpreted only as the result of the ruin of time, not as the result of artistic intent. Such fragmentation did not need to be questioned, since it was not part of the initial artistic plan.28 Many fragments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (those of Bacon, Hamann, Diderot, and Sterne among many others—see Chapter 1) were made quite deliberately, were proclaimed fragments by their authors who openly used fragmentation and incompletion to confront any number of concerns. On the other hand, the hoaxes, once discovered, created interpretative and critical problems, particularly if the hoax translations had been judged excellent before they were uncovered. Legitimate translation admits a level of imperfection: the impossibility of knowing the past—ancient languages, scripts, customs—and the mutilated state of the original text all contribute to accepted shortcomings in the translation, to holes the translator could not be expected to fill. In these modern hoaxes, such problems—such holes—were less easily forgiven. Either their imperfections, including a certain lack of originality, had to be attributed to shortcomings on the part of the writer, or had to be justified as integral to the form of the work; they could not be blamed on the difficulties of dealing with the past. The legitimate translation asked the reader to accept incompletion on the basis of unavailability of information; the hoax writer asked the reader to accept incompletion as necessary to the telling of his tale, necessary to his plan. At the same time, questions of creation and origin relevant to the meaning of the true antique had no meaning for the hoax; background information supplied by the hoax author, normally accepted at face value, had to be interpreted along with the main text. According to Levinson, this confrontation prepared general audiences and critics for the many nineteenth-century fragments whose incompletion was an integral part of both the work itself and the aesthetic behind it, the aesthetic of longing and 28

Levinson, 20-21. As sources of translations of such fragments, Levinson notes in particular the eighteenth and nineteenth-century editions of The Greek Anthology and The Palatine Anthology as well as collections of writings by individual authors.

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incompletion. As Levinson observed, “Without the hoax poems, the fragment might have remained the province of the antiquarian, the metaphysician, and the connoisseur of sensation and sensibility.”29 In the tradition of the Ossian and Rowley poets, Pierre Louÿs contributed his own manuscript hoax to a world in part still too naive, or still too anxious to uncover fragments of the past, to recognize immediately the joke he played. The Chansons de Bilitis were supposedly translations of the works of Bilitis, a sixth century BCE Greek-Phoenician poet and contemporary of Sappho, who documented her life through her poetry. She records three stages: her childhood and sexual initiation in Pamphylia in Asia Minor, her lesbian life with Mnasidika in Mytilene in the company of Sappho, and her later life as a courtesan on Cyprus. Louÿs published the Chansons de Bilitis in 1895, with all the accoutrements needed to give them the authority and legitimacy of the ruin.30 As a younger man, impressed by Leconte de Lisle’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he had taught himself Greek. Before he wrote the Chansons de Bilitis, he published the first French translations of the epigrams of the Syrian-Greek poet Meleager31 and Lucian’s Courtesans’ Conversations.32 The complete title of the Bilitis poems, Chansons de Bilitis traduites du grec pour la première fois par P. L., ostensibly presented the reader with a translation made by a reputable translator.33 Macpherson had recorded his hoax epic in rhythmical but

29

Levinson, 35. Complete discussion, 34-48. The first edition is dated 1895, but the actual publication date was 12 December 1894. See H. P. Clive, Pierre Louÿs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 110. 31 In 1893, Louÿs published first a collection of ten epigrams with a life of Meleager in the Mercure de France, followed by the larger Les Poésies de Méléagre, published by the Librairie de l’art indépendent. Highet, 458, and Clive, 98. Many of Meleager’s epigrams were found in the Greek Anthology. They were also imitated by French Renaissance poets, especially Ronsard, whom Louÿs admired. Clive, 69. 32 Highet, 457-58. 33 Louÿs at one point intended to publish scholarly notes for his fake translation. He imitated some authentic ancient Greek poems, and quoted from others, in order to claim that Bilitis was the original author and that others of her time and after had copied her. Lawrence Venuti, “The Scandal of Translation,” French Literature Series 22 (1995): 26-28. 30


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non-rhyming prose; 34 Louÿs made his fake translations into French prose poems, each paragraph a verse unit of the supposed original Greek.35 Following Macpherson and Chatterton, Louÿs provided a preface that summarized the life of Bilitis and explained how he had come to find and translate her poems. He added legitimacy to Bilitis and her work by claiming that her tomb had been discovered by a German, Professor G. Heim, who was also the first editor of her poems (Bilitis’ saemmtliche Lieder zum ersten Male herausgegeben und mit einem Woerterbuche versehen, von G. Heim, Leipzig, 1894); Louÿs described the circumstances of the preservation and discovery of the tomb and the poems written on its walls, here functioning as his found manuscript. They are not described as crumbling, defaced, or in any way marred, but Louÿs, perhaps as a gesture to the condition of ruin, lists several poems in the index as untranslated. He gives the impression either that he had found an incomplete work, or that those poems were, for some reason, untranslatable. David Grayson points out that Louÿs may have been implying that they were too risqué to translate.36 This also gave him the opportunity to publish more Bilitis poems at a later time, which, in fact, he did. Why Louÿs chose to perpetrate this hoax is unclear. Macpherson’s and Chatterton’s motivations to forgery may have arisen as a direct response to the value the eighteenth century placed on genius and originality. The works of the great masters of the past presented standards impossible to meet, much less surpass; the eighteenth-century writer had to ask—whether consciously or unconsciously—how to become a great poet in his own age. Macpherson’s answer, and subsequently Chatterton’s, was an appeal to the ready-made authority of the past—an authority that relieved them of the greatest burden, the burden of originality, and allowed flaws to be attributed to the physical condition of the original and to difficulties of translation.37 The nineteenth century saw no decline in 34

Robert Folkenflik, “Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery,” The Centennial Review 18 (1974): 380-81. 35 Pack, 482. 36 David Grayson, “Bilitis and Tanagra: Afternoons with Nude Women,” in Debussy and his World, ed. Jane Fulcher, 118. 37 Folkenflik, 378-82.

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the problems facing the eighteenth century poet. Issues of originality and genius were certainly no less important, and the specter of the past loomed perhaps even larger. Whether Louÿs wrote the Chansons de Bilitis to tease the professors, whether he intended it to be uncovered, believing the publicity of a literary scandal was worth any negative response, or whether he approached his hoax as a legitimate response to the same problems Macpherson and Chatterton had faced, his strategy is remarkably similar to theirs.38 In addition to the hoax format, Louÿs built on other fragment forms and traditions. He created a lyric cycle: even his prose poem paragraphs are separated by blank space on the page like stanzas of poetry—in the form of Hellenistic epigrams, one of Louÿs’s critics wrote.39 The sequence of isolated lyric moments bound loosely together, separated from a narrative they only hint at, opens the door—as it has since Petrarch defined the genre by omitting the prose narrative from his Rime sparse—to multiple interpretations, to active imaginative participation on the part of the reader. Louÿs is not as subtle as Petrarch or others who write in this genre: he is torn between the inherent uncertainty of the genre and the need to justify Bilitis in order to maintain his hoax. As a result, his prefatory Vie de Bilitis must answer questions his prose poems leave unanswered. Louÿs’s work, like Isidore’s monsters, inhabits the margins, the edges, the barely acceptable: the hoax uncovered remains a hybrid, always appearing to be something it is not; prose poems and lyric cycles made of prose poems are hybrids; Bilitis’s sexual exploits are presentable only in the context of their fake origin; Louÿs writes to his brother that the work is a souvenir of Algeria,40 a country both foreign and exotic, like Meriem ben Atala, the North African woman who served in part as a model for Bilitis.41 The hoax itself, not so cleverly concealed and soon revealed, caused great controversy, not only 38

Folkenflik, 378-82 and Pack, 483 for more information on this point. As Clive, 110, reports, “Louÿs pointed out to a correspndent in1896, anyone with a knowledge of German should have put on his guard by the professors name, since ‘G/Heim = Geheim = Le mystérieux’.” Perhaps “secret” is a better English translation. 39 Venuti, 32. 40 Venuti, 31. 41 Venuti, 30, and Clive 10-46. Louÿs dedicated the first edition to Gide, referencing Meriem ben Atala by initials only. She was romantically involved with both men.


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because it inhabited the land of the unclassifiable, and not only because any forgery questions the distinctions between translation, authorship, and scholarship (as Venuti notes), but also because Louÿs, whether advertently or inadvertently, triggered nationalistic and political responses. Louÿs promoted Sappho’s homosexuality— harshly denied in some circles, especially German, but more acceptable in France—when he depicted Bilitis in Sappho’s company, and he promoted and accepted Jewish culture when he gave Bilitis the Syrian name for Aphrodite. On both accounts he was taken to task by defenders of Sappho and by antisemites.42

Debussy and Bilitis Debussy responded three times to the Chansons de Bilitis. He first set three of the poems, on his own initiative, in 1897-98: “La Flûte de Pan” (#20 in the first edition), “La Chevelure” (not included in the original edition but sent to Debussy and later published in Mercure de France in August of 1897), and “Le Tombeau des naïades” (#31 in the original). Debussy’s setting of “La Chevelure” was first published in L’Image under the title “Chanson de Bilitis,” with decoration by Kees van Dongen.43 The songs were published as a set in 1899 and first performed as a group in 1900 by Blanche Marot.44 42

Venuti, 34-35, gives more information. The poems were first published before the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 but Zola’s article “J’accuse” was not published until 1898; afterwards, Louÿs sided with the antiDreyfus camp. See Nichols, The Life of Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92. 43 Information on the publication of the poems and songs comes from Clive, 100-12, 141-42, and 170-71, and Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 171-96. 44 Regardless of her status at the time of Debussy’s famous interrogation of Blanche Marot’s mother concerning the state of the young woman’s sexual awareness, by the time of the first performance, Blanche Marot was the mistress of Debussy’s benefactor Georges Hartmann, as Debussy knew. Nichols, The Life of Debussy, 96. Debussy’s supposed conversation with the mother is evidently reported first by Blanche Marot herself in Charles Oulmont, Noces d’or avec mon passé (Paris, 1964), 70. Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1992), 59. Jeanne Raunay refused to perform the songs for moral reasons. Lesure, Claude Debussy, 228.

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Debussy’s second response to Bilitis took the form of incidental music for a private reading in 1901 of eleven of the prose poems accompanying tableaux vivants and mime. None of the three prose poems Debussy had previously set were included. This incidental music, scored for two harps, two flutes, and celesta is delicate and atmospheric, as Orledge says, stressing modal and whole tone lines.45 Debussy’s music blurs any supposed musical reference to ancient Greece into the typical Romantic formula for the exotic, no more authentic than Louÿs’s attribution of oriental sexual practices and North African landscapes to ancient Greece46—the elusive Other, so easy to bring to mind, so difficult to differentiate and define. In a final response to Bilitis, Debussy reworked and expanded the incidental music as the Épigraphes antiques for piano duet.47 Louÿs and Debussy were such close friends during this time that it seems likely Debussy would have been one of those who knew about the hoax even before publication, though this is not made clear in the letters. Debussy’s song cycle presents only the early life of Bilitis.48 It is less direct than Louÿs’s original, not simply because of the limited number of poems he set, but because of his choice. Debussy omits poems in which Bilitis speaks directly of emotion or action: her tactics to evade her mother in order to visit Lykas, the undesirable shepherd she loves, or the account of her rape, or her child. The first two settings are texts of sensuality and desire, without narrative detail; the final poem appears, on the surface, to be a statement of unexplained, but presumably inevitable, disillusionment, but in the following discussion, I advance a less desolate interpretation, one that suggests a new response to fragmentation as a source of renewal and creativity.

45

Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 245-49. 46 Venuti, 33-35 and Highet, 458. 47 Orledge, 245-49, gives more information on this expansion. On these works, see also Grayson, “Bilitis and Tanagra,” 121-123. 48 Susan Youens, “Debussy’s Song Cycles,” The NATS Bulletin (Sept./Oct., 1986): 13, lists the Chansons de Bilitis as one of only three of Debussy’s song collections that qualify as song cycles; all contain minimal narrative.


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“Le Tombeau des naïades” Le long du bois couvert de givre, je marchais; mes cheveux devant ma bouche se fleurissaient de petits glaçons, et mes sandales étaient lourdes de neige fangeuse et tassée. Il me dit: “Que cherches-tu!” “Je suis la trace du satyre. Ses petits pas fourchus alternent comme des trous dans un manteau blanc.” Il me dit: “Les satyres sont morts. “Les satyres et les nymphes aussi. Depuis trente ans il n’a pas fait un hiver aussi terrible. La trace que tu vois est celle d’un bouc. Mais restons ici, où est leur tombeau.” Et avec le fer de sa houe il cassa la glace de la source où jadis riaient les Naïades. Il prenait de grands morceaux froids, et les soulevant vers le ciel pâle, il regardait au travers. [Along the wood covered with frost, I walked; my hair in front of my mouth was decorated with little icicles, and my sandals were heavy with muddy, packed snow. He said to me: “What are you seeking?” I am following the trail of the satyr. His little cloven hoofs alternate like holes in a white mantle.” He said to me: “The satyrs are dead. “The satyrs and the nymphs also. For thirty years there has not been a winter so terrible. The trail that you see is that of a buck. But let us remain here, where their tomb is.” And with the iron of his hoe he broke the ice of the spring where once the naiads laughed. He took large cold pieces and, raising 49 them toward the pale sky, he looked through them.]

In “Le Tombeau des naïades,” Bilitis searches a winter landscape for the elusive nymphs and satyrs she has previously pursued through the sunny meadows and deep forests of her youth. She follows false tracks, perhaps as false as the other near-sightings mentioned in her earlier poems, but these tracks finally lead to her goal—too late. An unidentified man tells her that the nymphs and satyrs have all perished in the cold; he shows her the tomb of the 49

Pierre Louÿs, Les Chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965), 76; trans. Benton, Debussy: Songs, 174.

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naïads. The poem is, of course, a not very subtle marker of the end of youth and youthful dreams: after this, Bilitis leaves her home and writes no more of her childhood, her first love, or her infant. The poem is a fragment, beginning in the middle of a journey, or simply a trek through the snow; the text offers no explanation, nor do the previous poems. Only Louÿs’s preface informs us that Bilitis’s love affair ended and that she abandoned her child at the end of the first stage of her life, marked by this poem. Stephen Rumph’s interpretation draws on parallels between “Le Tombeau des naïades” and the opening of Pelléas et Mélisande: the young woman, seated by a spring, discovered in the forest by an older man, questioned by him.50 Rumph reads into this poem, and Debussy’s setting, a very negative masculine/feminine conflict: the unidentified man is ultimately responsible for usurping Bilitis’s poetic voice, responsible for her loss of self and the death of her creativity. When he breaks the ice covering the spring of the naïads, he reenacts the rape of Bilitis reported in a previous poem.51 There is much room for interpretation in this poem,52 and while recalling Pelléas et Mélisande is logical— Debussy had finished the bulk of the opera before he started these songs—any study that considers similarities in character and situation should perhaps also consider similarities in the music. In his interpretation of Pelléas et Mélisande, Richard Langham Smith discusses Debussy’s symbolic use of tonality: he claims that C major (more accurately, it is often C as the dominant of F major) accompanies darkness; that F-sharp major and its dominant accompany both the appearance of light and the striving for the ideal, which in the opera, according to Langham Smith, is Mélisande herself. 50

Stephen Rumph, “Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis: Song, Opera, and the Death of the Subject,” The Journal of Musicology 12 (1994): 477-83. 51 Rumph fails to point out the hoe as an instrument used in agriculture, especially during growing season. It is unusual in the winter scene, and evocative when seen as an instrument associated with fertility that the man uses to break the ice/hymen. 52 Rumph’s interpretation is based on several assumptions that I would hesitate to present as fact: we do not know that the man is older: we know only that he is male, that he carries a hoe, and that he knows that they are near the tomb of the naïads. Anyone could have known it was the coldest winter in thirty years; he could be Lykas or a stranger; they could have come upon each other in the forest or they could have been walking together.


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In act 2, scene 3, G-flat (F-sharp) major tonality accompanies the moonlight flooding the entrance of the grotto and Pelléas’s line, “voici la clarté”; also, Mélisande’s “Je t’aime” in act 4, scene 4 is followed by a move to F-sharp major and includes a reference to ice breaking: Pelléas sings “On a brisé la glace avec des fers rougis!” [The ice has been broken with red-hot irons.]53 Does “Le Tombeau des naïades” reflect some of the same tonal significance? Debussy’s setting is a fragment, beginning with a key signature of three sharps (F-sharp minor) on a G-sharp half diminished seventh chord (i.e. ii7 in that key) but ending quite emphatically and undeniably, after the appropriate key signature change in m. 25, with a dominant-seventh to tonic resolution in and on F-sharp major. The only real indication of a tonic key area before m. 25 occurs in m. 9, where an F-sharp minor chord is arpeggiated, but the inflection is modal, with no leading tone, and is unconvincing. In addition, Debussy continues the negative association of C major by arpeggiating a C major chord in mm. 11-14, cancelling the C# and G# with accidentals. Here, Bilitis explains her quest; a root position C major chord accompanies the man’s response, “Les satyres sont morts.” Only through the final clarity of the F-sharp major section does the initial key signature seem relevant. Both the repeated motion of the inner voices and the weak chord progressions leading to the final section in F-sharp major may reflect Bilitis’s wandering, her unfruitful search for the nymphs and satyrs; the final section in Fsharp major begins at the climax of the piece—the highest pitch in the voice and the loudest dynamic marking—just as the man breaks the ice and raises pieces to the sky, to light, to the ideal, as Wenk notes.54 If any vestige of Langham Smith’s tonalities of darkness and light remains in this song, I question Rumph’s negative reading. If F-sharp minor represents the search for the old myths, the search of the poet for inspiration (just as Louÿs was inspired by ancient myth and legend), the F-sharp major represents the light, the source of that 53

Richard Langham Smith, “Tonalities of Darkness and Light,” in Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande, 107-39. My translation. 54 Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets, 193-94. Cohn notes the similarity to L’Après-midi d’un faune, when the faun raises the grape skins to the sky and looks through them.

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inspiration. F-sharp major, accompanying the breaking of the ice and raising of the pieces to the light of the sky, represents both the freeing of the old myths and their reinterpretation in a new poetry, not their deaths and the loss of their ability to inspire. The poem then ends with the triumph of both the old symbols and Bilitis’s ability to use them in a new way as she grows from a child into a mature poet. Symbolist poets and writers use ice and glass as symbols of sterility as well as the gateway toward the ideal. Since both Debussy and Louÿs were part of the Symbolist milieu and were well acquainted with Mallarmé’s works,55 two of his poems may serve as illustrations. In “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” the swan/poet/sign (cygne/signe) is trapped in the ice of a frozen lake; he cannot or will not free himself to reach the sky, the creative act. The promise of fertility inherent in the word vierge cannot be realized unless the ice is broken.56 In “Les Fenêtres,” an old man, dying in a white hospital room, looks out the window at sunset. He sees/hallucinates beautiful images, infinity, through the glass; then the transparent glass becomes translucent, his own face is reflected in the glass, and he sees himself as an angel. He wants to break the glass, to escape, but again, he, like the swan, cannot.57 Bilitis walks through the cold snow, unable to find the mythological creatures she has sought all her life, unable to find happiness with the man she loved or the child she abandoned. All her hopes are now frozen under the ice/window pane. The man, agent of action for Louÿs’s (in modern terms) sexist view, frees the old symbols and points Bilitis toward the ideal—new symbols drawn from fragments of old myth, or, if we accept John Porter Houston’s reading of the frozen lake in “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” as a state of mind, haunted by memories of what never happened, then the ice breaking could free Bilitis from the myths that never were real (she

55

Louÿs started attending the mardis in 1891 according to Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 16. 56 Fowlie, 96-101; Bernard Weinberg, The Limits of Symbolism: Studies of Five Modern French Poets (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 170-186. Many interpretations are similar. 57 Fowlie, 31-32.


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had never been able to see the nymphs or satyrs).58 Perhaps the man does reenact the rape that occurs earlier in the cycle, but to Louÿs, it was the rape that freed the woman to move forward, that freed Bilitis to leave her unhappy situation and to become a poet. In his novel Aphrodite, the heroine—having just left her homeland and no longer having her mother’s wrath to fear—rides into Tyre proudly showing on her legs the blood that proves she is no longer a virgin. Perhaps in Louÿs’s rather unfortunate sexist view, rather than taking away Bilitis’s voice, as Rumph suggests, the man offers her another chance to find it. Debussy’s F-sharp major setting of this section, tonally so clear compared to the rest of the piece, surely presents the end of the poem in a positive light. Perhaps the tonal clarity, now able to incorporate the continuous ostinato patterns into a tonally stable environment, is itself a fragment of the old system, resolving the tonal inconclusiveness of the rest of the song, providing the key to the puzzle just as the myths, in bits and pieces, offer their key to creativity to so many poets of this time.

58

Houston, 114-15.


CHAPTER 4 THE SKETCH A monster was born of Alexander’s wife which had human upper parts, which were dead, and the lower parts of various animals, which were living, indicating the king’s sudden death, for the worse parts outlived the better. But these monsters which are sent as signs do not live very long, dying as soon as they are born. —————Isidore of Seville

The white-hot flash of inspiration frozen before intellect and craft overlay genius; a glimpse, perhaps voyeuristic, into the realization of the idea; the face-to-face encounter with failure, with the artist’s inability to merge idea with form—whatever we choose to see in the sketch, it always fascinates. We ponder it, analyze it, frame it to exhibit in museums, and, as with any fragment, are compelled, at some level, to complete it. The very word “sketch” in the title of a work, even one the artist or writer presents for exhibition or publication, is enough to place the work in a special category for the viewer, who has now been given permission to “finish” it in his imagination, and for the critic, who may assess it from a different perspective than a supposedly completed composition. As the fragment tradition of the eighteenth century fed Romanticism, the sketch—mirror image of ruin—achieved a level of acceptance and appeal that challenged the status of the finished work, that questioned how “finished” could even be determined or defined. Debussy’s direct response to the sketch, and to the role of the sketch in his milieu, is the subject of this chapter. I will concentrate on two compositions: D’un cahier d’esquisses, a piano work that, by title, involves itself in this tradition, and Morceau de concours, a piece that Debussy created by literally patching together two short, unaltered sections from the only known sketches for his unfinished opera Le Diable dans le beffroi. The sketch and the ruin: both are incomplete, both have the power to provoke a sense of sadness or nostalgia, both inspire the imagination of the observer. Pliny the Elder’s observations echo sentiments familiar today:

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Another most curious fact and worthy of record is that the latest works of artists and the pictures left unfinished at their death are valued more than any of their finished paintings. … The reason is that in these we see traces of the design and the original conception of the artists, while sorrow for the hand that perished at its work beguiles us into the bestowal of praise.1

The Renaissance knew the aesthetic value of the incomplete in both the sketch and the ruin, but made a distinction between the two: though related by surface resemblance—by lack of detail and finish— only the sketch possessed the inherent sense of spontaneity and immediacy that offered a glimpse into the moment of artistic inspiration.2 The sketch, however, was still only the preliminary step. The Renaissance recognized, but did not purposely make, fragments. The rough, broken surfaces of the mutilated Belvedere torso might resemble the rough, uncut stone of Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves, but the Slaves were never meant to be exhibited in their incomplete state, and they found their first home not in a public place or even on display in the gallery or home of a wealthy patron, but rather in a grotto. There, among the collected artifacts—the shells, stones, and other bits and pieces so often decorating these underground fantasies—the Slaves joined the collage that so resembles a three-dimensional grotesque.3 The eighteenth century continued to parallel the sketch with the ruin, but did not limit the effect of spontaneity to the sketch. Wind illustrates this change in attitude by summarizing a section of the Reverend William Gilpin’s Essay on Picturesque Beauty: “Works of art decomposed by Nature resemble those left unfinished by the hand of man: in both cases irregular and accidental shapes convey a sense of spontaneity.”4 Further, the literary sketch was equated with the

1 David Rosand, “Composition/Decomposition/Recomposition: Notes on the Fragmentary and Artistic Process,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, ed. Kritzman, 22, citing Pliny, Nat. Hist. 35.145. 2 Rosand, 20-22. 3 A photograph of the grotto with the Slaves is reproduced in Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 8. 4 Wind, 40.

Chapter 4: The Sketch

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visual sketch, as seen in Samuel Johnson’s remarks on the unfinished manuscripts of the poet Edmond Smith: … if some of them were to come abroad, they might be as highly valued as the sketches of Julio and Titian are by the painters; though there is nothing in them but a few outlines, as to the design and proportion.5

Harries reports Diderot’s summary eighteenth-century associations with the sketch:

of

many

Le mouvement, l’action, la passion même sont indiqué par quelques traits caractéristiques, et mon imagination fait le reste. Je suis inspiré par le souffle divin de l’artiste, Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae [An IV, 23]; c’est un mot qui réveille en moi une grande pensée. Dans les transport violens de la passion, l’homme supprime les liaisons, commence une phrase sans la finir, laisse échapper un mot, pousse un cri et se tait; cependant j’ai tout entendu; c’est l’esquisse d’un discours. La passion ne fait que des esquisses. Que fait donc un poëte qui finit tout? Il turne le dos à la nature. [Movement, action, passion itself are indicated by a few characteristic lines, and my imagination does the rest. I am inspired by the divine breath of the artist. … In the violent throes of passion, one suppresses connections, begins a phrase without finishing it, lets a word escape, cries out and falls silent; and yet I have understood everything; it is the sketch of a discourse. Passion creates only sketches. What then does a poet do who finishes everything? He turns his back on nature.]6

These are the attitudes toward the sketch that the nineteenth century inherited: the sketch stimulates the viewer’s imagination and allows the viewer to identify with the creative process; it communicates as much as or more than the finished work; it finds its form in language as well as the visual arts; and it allies its maker with the ongoing process of creation in nature. The meaning and description of finish in a work changed from period to period. “Unfinished” can only be defined as less than the 5

Harries, 58. French and English translation, Harries, 106-107, from Diderot, Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhémar (Oxford: Clarendon 1963), 3:248. 6

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acceptable level of “finished,” and artists frequently incorporated into their works some element of what was considered, in their time, an unfinished texture.7 An appreciation for the unfinished increased in the eighteenth century, but the majority of works labeled sketches were still truly preliminary, meant to serve the creation of a finished work, whether or not that work was ever brought to completion. Sketches were a private matter: they retained the most personal elements of the artist’s working method—his preliminary gestures, unrefined compositional design, rough brush strokes; they resided most properly in the artist’s sketchbooks and in his studio, viewed by only a select few friends and connoisseurs, and were not intended for the general public. Sketching was also the working method of the trained professional. In France, sketches were part of the training of artists in the Academy. They were considered necessary preliminary steps, classified and labeled according to their phase in the sequence toward the properly finished work: esquisse, esquisse peinte, étude, ébauche among others. The Academy was concerned with both appropriateness of subject matter and the finish that erased rough edges, broken lines, brush strokes—all evidence of the sketch. Finish guaranteed the amount and quality of work that had gone into the painting.8 In the nineteenth century, as the romantic ideal of the incomplete spread, the sketch moved from these private spaces to the public arena. Measured against the Academy’s officially defined finish, artists began to present to the public works that could be defined only as sketches, not just in the area of surface finish but also composition (balance, proportion) and subject matter. Constable and others of his time began making sketches that were not intended for any particular finished work, but were ends in themselves. Sketches were bought and sold, moved from the studio to the walls of homes, and eventually to the walls of galleries.9 Once the training tool of the Academy, they became a protest against its rigor and its control over 7

Rosand, 21, lists Leonardo, Bosch, Giorgione, and the Housebook Master as Renaissance examples. 8 Rosen and Zerner, 226-7. 9 Wendelin Guentner, “The Inscription of the Sketch in the 19th-Century French Journal,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 27 (1999): 281-283.


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the success of artists in Paris, and also a protest against the bourgeois demand for this Academy-defined precision in finish as proof of value for the dollar.10 The process of sketching itself moved from the domain of the trained artist to that of the well-to-do amateur. Rather than buying paintings to document their travels, the wealthy now sketched a record—a predecessor of the photo album; their sketches were visible evidence that they had enough money and leisure time not only to travel but also to learn to draw. The tool of the professional became the pastime of the wealthy. Sketches by professionals were also in demand, but not those preliminary sketches valued for the glimpse of creativity and genius they were thought to offer; instead, the buying public wanted the same quick studies of scenes that they were themselves attempting—the “found” sketch rather than the sketch “made” by the inspiration and imagination of the artist.11 This type of sketch became a commodity, and its dependence on the taste of the public lowered its prestige. It was never judged by the same criteria as the completed work because it was never placed in the same category. Partly as a result of this shift, the sketch-artist, especially the sketch-artist trying to make a living while establishing himself as a reputable serious artist, began to present himself as a sort of dilettante, a flâneur, strolling about wherever chance happened to lead him, sketching whatever sight happened to please him, selling the work to whomever it happened to please. His sketches were works that he tossed off; they were not examples of what he could do if he painted as a professional. They showed his skill, but not his imagination and genius: they were fragmentary.12

10

Rosen and Zerner, 226-7. Richard Shiff, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 74. Shiff treats the theories of “making” and “finding,” and explains the distinction between two types of sketch identified by the Academy: the esquisse was a compositional sketch, showing the arrangement of the forms, and grew out of inspiration and imagination; the étude was quick study that grew directly from nature, was more passive, less consciously creative. Chapter 7, especially 74-75. 12 Alison Byerly, “Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature,” in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 41 (1999): 350-52. 11

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As journals and magazines grew in popularity and sales, writers (again, especially those attempting to build a reputation) were often forced to write short articles for publication in these venues in order to make a living. They relied on the interest of the buying public just like the sketch-artists.13 Writers (Irving, Dickens, Thackeray are examples given by Alison Byerly) often labeled such pieces “sketches,” and often included many of the techniques used by earlier fragment writers: the mutilated document as a prop, the midsentence ending, dots of ellipsis, and parenthetical expressions. Also like the sketch-artists, these writers masked a reliance on the taste of the public behind the impression of a work tossed off, the situation happened upon and reported, the “found” rather than the planned. The title “sketch” alleviated the burden of being judged by the same standards as the finished work; it excused an informal style and a lack of what would have been considered professional quality and finish.14

Debussy’s Sketches Debussy left important sketches for some major completed works (Ibéria, La Mer, Pelléas et Mélisande), for works he planned but never finished (Le Diable dans le beffroi, La Chute de la maison Usher, Rodrigue et Chimène), as well as other bits and pieces in assorted sketchbooks. For the most part, during his life, his sketches remained in his possession or among his private circle of friends and supporters, just as had the sketches of artists from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. Sometimes, at small gatherings, he would improvise (a practice often equated with sketching) or play a work in progress. He also gave away autograph copies of his scores (Gabrielle Dupont, his first long-term mistress, received the autograph of Prélude à “l’Après-midi d’un faune”). His sketches were, for the most part, very much a private matter. To what extent Debussy bought into the aesthetic of the sketch is uncertain. Howat notes that Debussy published each prelude of 13

The sketch entered the public world again as lithographs began to be published in newspapers and books. Guentner, 283. 14 Byerly, 352-53.


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Book II, either in part or completely, on three staves, and that in the manuscript of the first three of these preludes, he included four staves per system, though he never used more than three at a time. He suggests that Debussy may have intended to “give the impression of an orchestral sketch in short scores” rather than finished works.15 Such sketches were common intermediate steps for composers working out melodic and harmonic material before writing out a complete orchestration. The word “sketch” appears in the titles of two of Debussy’s published compositions, D’un cahier d’esquisses and La Mer: trois esquisses symphoniques;16 moreover, the tiny piano work Page d’album could refer to a sketch book, though “album” more often means a book used to collect autographs and other memorabilia.17 Debussy’s most truly sketch-like works, D’un cahier d’esquisses and the tiny Morceau de concours, are among the few pieces Debussy published in magazines. Both retain close ties (they show similar or identical material) to Debussy’s sketches for other works and may call to mind certain connections to the changing role of the sketch in nineteenth century. 15

Howat, foreword to Préludes, Livre I, Livre II, ed. Roy Howat with the collaboration of Claude Helffer, Oeuvres Complètes de Claude Debussy, Série I, vol. 5 (Paris: Durand-Costallat, 1995), 12m(French), 16 (English). The four-staff manuscript layout of Prelude no. 1, “Brouillards,” can be seen in facsimile on page 182. 16 Debussy may have borrowed the subtitle for La Mer from Paul Gilson, who wrote an earlier symphony also titled La Mer and subtitled “ esquisses symphoniques.” Simon Trezise, Debussy: “La Mer” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 33-35. 17 Artists and musicians would add a drawing or a composition to the album of a friend or someone who was wealthy and influential. Though many such entries are sketches, some are complete works. Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), Polish pianist and composer, owned several albums containing sketches, short writings, and compositions of many artists of her time. Album Musical: Maria Szymanowska, trans. Renata Suchowiejko (Krakow: Musica Iagellonica, 1999). Debussy wrote several little musical notes to his second wife, Emma Bardac, but according to Robert Orledge, none of these appear in published works. There is also no evidence to support Debussy’s claim that the music for his children’s ballet, La Boîte à joujoux, was based on music he had written for Christmas and New Year albums for children. Robert Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, 182; Robert Orledge, “Debussy’s Musical Gifts to Emma Bardac” Musical Quarterly, 62/4 (1976): 536-553.

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Debussy and the Fragment D’un cahier d’esquisses

In 1904 Debussy published the piano piece D’un Cahier d’esquisses in Paris illustré. That same year, Roland-Manuel quoted Ricardo Viñes during a conversation stimulated by Viñes’s having either played, or listened to Debussy play, D’un cahier d’esquisses: Debussy had declared his dream of composing music whose form was so free as to seem improvised; to produce works that sounded as if torn from the pages of a sketchbook [arrachées aux pages d’un cahier d’esquisses].18

The circumstances of the conversation are questionable. As Howat has shown, dates and entries in the Viñes diaries offer no corroboration and, in fact, indicate that the comment, if it was made, might have been made about another work.19 Even so, both the comment itself and Debussy’s title echo the nineteenth-century fascination with the fragment in the form of the unfinished sketch. Debussy, speaking through M. Croche, does make one documented statement that indicates he did associate the musical sketch with freedom from traditional formal structures, with imagination, and with rapid changes of idea: Certainly Chopin’s nervous disposition let him down when it came to the endurance required in composing a sonata. But he did make some finely wrought “sketches,” and it is at least agreed that he invented his own way of handling the form, not to mention the marvelous music he achieved in doing so. He was a man with abundant imagination, and would flit from one idea to another without demanding a one hundred percent commission on the transaction—which is what some of our more celebrated masters do.20

Howat believes that D’un cahier d’esquisses was originally written as the second of a set of three piano works titled “Masques,” 18

Roy Howat, “En route for L’île joyeuse: The Restoration of a Triptych,” Cahiers Debussy 19 (1995): 42. Howat quotes Roland-Manuel, Á la gloire de Ravel (Paris, 1938), 65. 19 Howat, “En route,” 42. 20 Debussy on Music, 47.


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“Deuxième sarabande,” and “L’Île joyeuse”21 intended to be published as Suite bergamasque. This suite never materialized: Masques and L’Isle joyeuse were each published separately, the “Deuxième sarabande” disappeared, and Debussy used the title Suite bergamasque for a set for piano written in 1890 and published in 1905. Although Debussy’s use of self-quotation and borrowing is well documented (see Chapter 5), D’un cahier d’esquisses is perhaps the most extreme example. It was written during 1903-4, when Debussy was also working on major works such as Estampes, La Mer, the Images for piano (first series), and the unfinished Le Diable dans le beffroi, as well as Masques and L’Isle joyeuse.22 As Howat has shown, D’un cahier d’esquisses borrows heavily from many of these pieces. Fig. 4.1 lists the quotations identified by Howat, with two additions (d, f). Fig. 4.2 places those themes in possible formal structures. Fig. 4.1. Borrowings in D’un cahiers d’esquisses. a = Masques, m. 3 b = La Mer, mvt. 1, after rehearsal 9 c = L’Isle joyeuse, m. 79 d = La Mer, mvt. 3, Chorale

e = L’Isle joyeuse, m. 67 f = Reflets dans l’eau, m. 1 g = L’Isle joyeuse, m. 219 h = Masques, coda, 362

Fig. 4.2. Possible formal structures of D’un cahier d’esquisses. Sections measures Form Howat Alternate Themes measures Harmony

21

I 1-10 Intro A a b 1 6 ii Ger6

II 11-28. A B c d trans e f— 11 13 20 I ii vi—vi/wtV-wtV

III 29-44 A1 B1 c+ d+ g-cad 29 38 43 I ii vi Ger6

IV 45-53 Coda A a h e 45 47 ii V I I

coda g 50 IV I

Howat writes L’île [sic] joyeuse, but notes later that Debussy changed the spelling to L’Isle, alluding to his stay on the English island with Emma. Howat, “En route,” 38. 22 Howat, “En route,” 48, notes a reference to a now lost autograph dated January 1904.

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Almost every measure of the piece contains borrowed material of one sort or another. Howat uses the copious borrowings from Masques and L’Isle joyeuse as evidence that D’un cahier d’esquisses is the missing middle work that, situated between Masques and L’Isle joyeuse , would form a triptych. Certainly this is a provocative idea, though Debussy’s handling of motives in these three pieces is not typical of that found in his other cyclic works and Howat offers no explanation for the separate publication of the three pieces. Another explanation is that the piece was, as its title suggests, literally lifted from the pages of a sketchbook. Roland-Manuel’s account (given above) would support this view, as would the make-up of a well-known sketchbook from the years just after 1903-4 that contains a conglomeration of jottings from many pieces Debussy was writing at the time. The so-called Images sketchbook23 from 1906-9 includes sketches for Gigues, Rondes de printemps, and all three movements of Ibéria; “Voiles,” “La Cathédrale engloutie,” and “La Fille aux cheveux de lin” from Book I of the Preludes; an entry marked “Angelus” and one marked “Bouddha”; as well as many unidentified scribbles. With its collection of shared material, D’un cahier d’esquisses suggests a parallel, fictional (so far as we know) sketchbook, and its title is an accurate description of the content of the work. Debussy’s title raises issues that should be of interest to analysts. By referring to the sketchbook, to a common source for ideas found in more than one work, Debussy acknowledged the conscious use of his technique of borrowing and reworking. This is a clear indication that his reuse of material in other instances is deliberate and has musical and extramusical implications that should not be ignored in any study of his work. In D’un cahier d’esquisses, Debussy’s use of fragments that appear in so many of his other pieces suggests the sketchbook of the professional artist. At least since the Renaissance, these sketchbooks contained much more than a series of scenes; they included reproductions of famous works, bodies drawn in different poses, objects drawn from different angles, composition sketches, drawing exercises—perhaps ears, or hands, or feet—as well as the

23

Now in the Lehman Deposit at Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.


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results of sudden inspiration or the quick study of the beautiful scene that was happened upon. Accepting D’un cahier d’esquisses as a piece made from the fragments of a sketchbook may also offer a clue to the unusual circumstances of its publication. According to Howat, in the eight years prior, Debussy had published only two pieces in magazines— two versions of his Sarabande, both meant to advertise the forthcoming publication of the suites for which they formed the middle movements.24 Howat believes the publication of D’un cahier d’esquisses had a similar purpose, even though no advertisement appeared with the piece. He suggests that Debussy was playing a little joke on his followers by publishing the piece mysteriously; perhaps its appearance under these circumstances would give the message that he had a “work in progress” or that readers should “watch this space,” as Howat puts it. The fact remains that no advertisement accompanied D’un cahier d’esquisses and the piece never appeared as part of any larger work—an unusual occurrence for Debussy’s piano works of this time.25 Perhaps Debussy’s choice of title was related to his decision to publish the work separately in a periodical, but not as an advertisement for a set that would include it. Perhaps he chose this title for the same reasons that the sketch-artists and journalists used the word “sketch” in their titles: to present it as something tossed off, to excuse it from being judged by the same standards as the other works in sets, to justify its solo position by presenting it as a “found” and not a planned work. If Roland-Manuel and Viñes reported Debussy’s quotation (“music whose form was so free as to seem improvised”) correctly, and if it can be assumed to refer to this piece, then clearly Debussy wanted to capture that sense of spontaneity that links the sketch and

24

The first suite for piano, titled Images, never appeared. It was published in 1977 by Presser as Images (oubliées). The second was Pour le piano. Howat, “En route,” 49. 25 Howat, “En route,” especially 49.

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the improvisation.26 Two facts of publication support this view. The title as it appears in the original publication is preceded by three dots of ellipsis, indicating something incomplete, and Henri Vanhulst reports that this is the first work for piano that Debussy wrote (perhaps more correctly, published) on three staves.27 “Howat has suggested that Debussy published the Preludes, Book II, on three staves to suggest orchestral score. (See further discussion in Chapter 6.) Yet Debussy’s title suggests not an improvisation, for D’un cahier d’esquisses implies that the bits and pieces had been jotted down in a sketchbook beforehand, but a grotesque, a creature made of parts that either do not necessarily belong together, or do not appear in their correct relationship to each other. The grotesque has always been closely linked to the sketch, to the work that arises from imagination and inspiration—from the working of the mind without interference of convention or reality. Montaigne compared his Essais to the grotesque (see Chapter 1), those fanciful decorative borders where vegetation merges with human and animal parts to create composite creatures from the world of the imagination—creatures made of fragments. The sixteenth century allied the grotesque with imagination divorced from reason. Kayser quotes Dürer: “If a person wants to create the stuff that dreams are made of, let him freely mix all sorts of creatures.”28 Here Debussy has freely mixed all sorts of parts, all sorts of creatures; they are recognizable to anyone familiar with his music. Rosen says that quotation is the memory made public; these quotations are both Debussy’s memories and the listeners’ memories, and they constantly 26

Jeffrey Kallberg (“Chopin and the Aesthetic of the Sketch: A New Prelude in E flat Minor?,” Early Music 29 [2001]: 409) offers this quotation from Eugène Delacroix’s diary: “We spoke of Chopin. He told me that his improvisations were much bolder than his finished compositions. It is the same, no doubt, with a sketch for a painting compared to a finished painting … Perhaps there is less scope for the imagination in a finished work than in a sketch.” Eugène Delacroix, Journal 1822-1863, ed. André Joubin (Paris, 1931-32; rev. ed. 1980), 330; translation adapted by Kallberg from Michele Hannoosh, Painting and the “Journal” of Eugène Delacroix (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 72. 27 Henri Vanhulst, “L’éditeur bruxellois Schott frères et D’un cahier d’esquisses de Claude Debussy,” Cahiers Debussy no. 26 (2002): 6; facsimile of first publication, 11-13. 28 Quote attributed to Dürer by Kayser, 22.


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pull us out of D’un cahier d’esquisses and into the memory of those quoted works. Its very fabric, the quotations, functions as the parts of the grotesque, never allowing it to coalesce into a perfect whole. The formal structure of D’un cahier d’esquisses also creates a grotesque. This freedom to accept formal distortion and genre mix, to confuse the essential with the decorative, the center with the frame, creates the formal grotesque or arabesque. In D’un cahier d’esquisses, the concept of the grotesque again sheds light on Debussy’s compositional practice. Fig. 4.2 shows the piece divided into four main sections: mm. 1-10, 11-28, 29-44, and 45-63. According to Howat these sections can be labeled as introduction, A, A1, and coda. Under this scheme the main motive of the piece (m. 11) is taken from L’Isle joyeuse. The opening motive from Masques is given a subordinate role. My alternative reading (fig. 4.2, “alternate”) suggests that the situation is not quite so clear-cut. First, Howat’s introduction and coda together make up more than half as much material (18 measures) as the main part of the piece (32 measures). Second, Howat’s designation coda devalues the formal function of the opening motive and its return near the end. Third, although the tonic harmony appears at the beginning of the last section (m. 45), the decisive cadence in D-flat major, with its leading tone resolution, does not occur until m. 49. Fourth, the final allusion to L’Isle joyeuse and the strong movement to the subdominant in m. 50 are perhaps classic signs for the start of a coda. What this alternate reading underscores is that the formal function of the four sections is anything but obvious. As we might expect from a grotesque, Debussy seems to blur the distinction between the essential and the decorative aspects of a composition. It is simply not obvious whether Howat’s introduction and coda frame the movement or whether they are an integral part of it, as in my alternative. The elaborate network of tonal and thematic cross-references between the sections only serves to blur their functions even more. D’un cahier d’esquisses satisfies two essential criteria of the grotesque: its form clearly distorts expectations of formal structure; and thematically, rhythmically, and even harmonically it is a creature made of parts. Whether they were torn from an existing, now lost, sketchbook remains a mystery, but for the listener familiar with

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Debussy’s music today, D’un cahier d’esquisses must bring to mind all those pieces it either quotes or that grew from common material. If this grotesque is subtle, then, as Hugo says of the grotesques of the primitives and ancients, some were “barely deformed.”29

Morceau de concours In January of 1905, Debussy allowed another work to be published in a magazine: the Paris periodical Musica included a very short work for solo piano, now titled Morceau de concours, as one of six anonymous pieces, given without title or other information that might reveal any of the six composers’ identities, used in a “name that composer” competition.30 As many other Debussy scholars have noted, mm. 1-7 and 19-22 of that work duplicate two segments of the only known surviving sketch for Debussy’s unfinished opera Le Diable dans le beffroi (based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Devil in the Belfry”) dated on the first page of the sketchbook as August, 1903.31 A comparison of Morceau de concours with the sketch for “Le Diable dans le beffroi” shows that Debussy copied two passages from the sketchbook exactly and in sequence, the last fact obscured by Lockspeiser’s publication of the pages out of order.32 Separating these two sections are ten measures that consist of a single bass line and two snippets of the opening theme (suggesting a repeat 29

Hugo, Cromwell, 71. The competition pieces were published in the January 1905 issue, #28. The winner and statistics were published in the April, 1905 issue, #31. The six composers whose works were included were Gaston Serpette, Camille Saint-Saëns, Cécile Chaminade, Jules Massenet, Rudolphe Berger, and Debussy. Of 530 entrants in the competition, 158 did not correctly identify the composer of any work, 194 identified one composer, 103 identified 2, 57 identified 3, 9 identified 4. Only Madame Maillard, professor of piano and solfège (48, boulevard Rochechouart, Paris) identified all six correctly, winning a piano. Massenet received 304 correct identifications, Debussy 218, Chaminade 150, Saint-Saëns 146, Berger 80, and Serpette 6. See Musica, no. 31 (April 1905): 63. 31 The sketchbook, now in the Bibliotèque nationale, Paris, (B.n. MS 20634), contains Debussy’s score and scenario. 32 Between the two, there is one minor difference in m. 2, but the sketch is difficult to read. 30


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and expansion of the opening) followed by a sequence consisting of parallel major triads moving by semitones, tones, and augmented seconds. For publication, Debussy replaced this passage with a different sequence constructed of newly-composed materials drawn first from one, then from the other whole-tone scale, and added a coda. The sketch and Morceau de concours are compared in Fig. 4.3; identical passages are highlighted in grey. Fig. 4.3. Chart comparing measures in Morceau de concours with “Le Diable dans le beffroi” sketch. Morceau 1-8 (m. 8 duplicates m. 7) I Diable [1-7] p 1, last system I

9-10 new material based on opening motive

11-18: sequence statement

19-22: sequence repetition

23-27: coda

V 8-17: repetition of opening theme in bass clef with added accompaniment subdom

I—WT 18-25: sequence statement

I 26-29: sequence repetition

I no more material

I

I

Morceau de concours then consists simply of two sections of Le Diable dans le beffroi extracted separately and reattached via a whole-tone sequence. Unlike the identifiable fragments of the decorative grotesque that become part of a fabric made of many parts, or the fragment that intrudes on a work in process, these fragments neither interrupt nor become absorbed into another texture. Rather, the fragments themselves become the subject of the work.33 Given the subject matter of “The Devil in the Belfry,” some connection to the grotesque, both as compositional technique and 33

Although the effect would be lost to listeners, since the music of the sketch would be unknown to them, the process is reminiscent of one of Géricault’s studies of severed limbs. In some of these, Géricault arranged mutilated body parts with great care into a balanced composition, painted slightly larger than life on a large canvas, with careful attention given to lighting and surface finish. With the exception of subject matter, they meet the requirements of the finished work. Rosen and Zerner refer to them as gruesome puns on the idea of the still life. See Rosen and Zerner, Plate 4.1 for a reproduction, and 46-48 for more information on Géricault.

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subject matter, is not unwarranted. Debussy’s description in the scenario he prepared for the opera, which is also contained in the sketchbook with the music, describes the devil: “Il est vêtu d’un strict habit noir et ne ressemble au Diable que par l’éclat de son regard et par la structure des mains.” [He is dressed in a severe black suit of clothes and he resembles the devil only through the flash of his eyes and the structure (shape) of his hands.] He begins his disruption of the daily routine of a well-ordered Dutch village by making the clock strike thirteen at noon. Debussy’s scenario is a rather bizarre juxtaposition of two different scenes. The first scene takes place in Poe’s controlled little Dutch village, Vondervattimitis, and it closes with the devil playing a violon poche, leading the inhabitants away in a “gigue fantastique” towards the canal—rather like a mix of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” and the Totentanz.34 The second scene, however, has nothing to do with Poe’s story. The curtain rises to a “décor … complètement changé,” as Debussy writes in his sketchbook; the village by the canal in Holland now resembles a village on a river in Italy. Everyone dresses and behaves in a manner quite different from their former lives (the men wear their hats sideways and the women their blouses open). Debussy then manipulates an ending that completely disarms the perversity of Poe’s tale: through the power of prayer and true love, the devil is undone. Debussy had worked on his Poe operas for many years; it is likely that he would not have spent undue time and effort on the project for Musica, and it seems quite sensible that he would have pulled out any sketch that could have been made ready for publication quickly. Was his choice of material from the sketchbook, or his choice of the new sequence material added to glue these sketchbook sections together, influenced by any desire to hide or to reveal his identity through this music? Did Debussy create what Gérard Genette terms a self-pastiche, an intentional imitation of his own style, as Verlaine did in his own “À la manière de Paul Verlaine,” which imitates both his 34

Similarities to Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat are interesting. As mentioned above, the earliest sketches for Le Diable date from 1903, well before Debussy met Stravinsky, but Debussy’s letters show that he continued to work on both Poe projects well after he did know Stravinsky.


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style and the themes that appear frequently in his work?35 While this seems the perfect opportunity for Debussy to have created a similar work, Morceau de concours does not have the atmospheric, subtle quality Debussy may have been best known for. (The work is more in the style of “Minstrels” from Preludes, Book I, which was published in 1910.) The opening measures certainly stress the tritone, perhaps identified with Debussy’s music, but the new sequence, added for the magazine publication, seems the most obvious clue since it is made of whole-tone material. Was Debussy, contrary to the idea of self-pastiche, trying out what he considered a new style, as a letter to André Messager from September 1903 indicates? Quant aux personnes qui me font l’amitié d’espérer que je ne pourrai jamais sortir de Pelléas, elles se bouchent l’ oeil avec soin … Il est probable du reste, que les mêmes personnes trouveront scandaleux d’avoir abandonné l’ombre de Mélisande pour l’ironique pirouette du Diable … [Those people who are kind enough to expect me never to abandon the style of Pelléas are well and truly sticking their finger in their eye. … Quite likely, the same people will find it scandalous that I should have abandoned Mélisande’s shadows for the Devil’s ironical pirouette … ]36

Whatever Debussy’s intentions, considerably fewer than half (218 of the 530 entrants) correctly identified the composer of Pelléas et Mélisande.37

35 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 124. 36 Debussy, Correspondance 1884-1918, 186; Debussy Letters, 141. 37 See n. 329, above.


CHAPTER 5 AUTO-QUOTATION They have made the Chimaera out to be a three-formed beast: a lion’s features, the hinder parts of a dragon, and the middle parts of a goat. Certain naturalists say that this was not an animal, but a mountain in Cilicia, nursing in some places lions and goats, burning in some and in other places full of serpents. Bellerophontes made this place inhabitable, whence he is said to have killed the Chimaera. —————Isidore of Seville

The use of quotation and related procedures—citation, allusion, borrowing—is common in Western European art forms, even in the nineteenth century when theories of genius and originality moved to the forefront of criticism and artistic endeavor. The creators of fragmented works often make blatant use of quotation: Rabelais’s examples range from the learned texts of the ancients to street songs; Montaigne’s Essais are filled with quotations used to lend credibility to a point he wishes to make or to demonstrate the breadth of his knowledge; Petrarch quotes other poets (Arnaut Daniel, Cavalcanti, Dante, among others) as well as proverbs. Gordon notes that “Nerval’s intertextual borrowings from the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are so excessive that they create an utterly novel approach to textuality.”1 From the voice of authority to the voice of the ridiculous, quotation is used for its power to create relationships between the world within the work at hand and the world outside. With only a minimum of material, quotation forces comparisons and builds tension as the reader questions the degree to which the borrowed or quoted material can or should be assimilated.2 Quotation has the power to disintegrate, to pull the audience out of the quoting work and into the quoted work, and thus to make fragments of both texts, each seemingly incomplete without information transferred from the other, each seemingly richer with it. 1

Gordon, 20. Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, trans. Theodore Ziolkowski and Yetta Ziolkowski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 6, discusses the tension of assimilation.

2

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Debussy was a master of quotation and allusion. His letters and writings are filled with quotations—from poems he has read or set, from the text of Pelléas et Mélisande, from his own previous writings. Laforgue and Baudelaire are among his favorites, but no one he has read or heard is safe from his pen as he quotes and (purposely) misquotes, consistently, across the pages and through the years. Debussy’s music is no different. From some of the earliest studies of his compositions to the latest, scholars have believed that the identification of borrowed tunes—even borrowed chords and chord progressions—is integral to understanding certain aspects of his compositional procedure as well as to ascertaining extra-musical meaning.3 There is no question that Debussy was a magpie, lining his nest with all the shiny objects that caught his eye or entertained his ear, using them to his own advantage, constructing for them new surroundings, new contexts, new functions. Both Daverio and Rosen include the use of quotation in their discussions of music and the romantic fragment, particularly with regard to the compositions of Robert Schumann. Few composers, as Daverio points out, have so systematically and successfully employed allusion in music.4 Among the various categories of quotation, Daverio includes examples that add a historicizing dimension: if the listener associates a quotation with a particular historical event or era, the juxtaposition of past and present increases the awareness of the distance between the two. Examples include the “Marseillaise” in Faschingsschwank aus Wien and Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” in No. 2 of the Intermezzi. But Debussy’s collection of quotations must surely compete with Schumann’s, if not surpass it. Daverio’s list calls to mind Debussy’s quotation of the “Marseillaise” at the end of “Feux d’artifice” and the subtle quotation of the alto line of the Brahms Waltz Op. 39, #15, in “Les Fées sont d’exquises danseuses” (both in Book II of Debussy’s Preludes for piano). Debussy is no snob when it comes to musical quotations: popular songs and children’s 3

Vallas is an early writer who identifies many of Debussy’s quotations and self-quotations. There are several studies claiming influence on Debussy’s style based on the accumulated number of quotations or references from other composers, for example, Robin Holloway, Debussy and Wagner (London: Eulenburg Books, 1979). 4 Daverio, 59.

Chapter 5: Auto-Quotation

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song (“Nous n’irons plus au bois,” “Do l’enfant, do,” “Camptown Races”) find a setting as easily as Brahms or Wagner. Quotation often plays a role in parody, satire, and caricature. Debussy’s pieces inspired by toys provide outlets for humor—whether sarcastic, simply light-hearted, or tinged with nostalgia. If the grotesque is made of the juxtaposition of incongruous parts, then the ballet for children, La Boîte à joujoux, certainly qualifies. It is filled with quotations and references, from Gounod’s Faust to moments that allude to Stravinsky, from quotations of Debussy’s own published works including “Jimbo’s Lullaby” and “The Little Nigar,” to previously unused material from his sketch books.5 “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” (from the Children’s Corner) forms a double grotesque—a caricature of a caricature—since the cakewalk Debussy spoofed originated as an African-American parody of white dancers. The juxtaposition of the Golliwog’s dance, forming the outer sections of the work, with the satirical quotation of the famous Tristan chord in the style of a “music-hall ballad,”6 in the middle section, is purposefully awkward, and that awkwardness is heightened and reflected by the abrupt “cakewalk” interruptions in the Tristan ballad. The audience recognizes a grotesque combination of styles, even before it recognizes just how out of place Tristan is when paired with the Golliwog or placed in the new harmonic setting Debussy provided. Even the cover of the Children’s Corner, the work in which “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” appears and which Debussy designed, is a visual quotation and a bizarre little grotesque. The disembodied head of the Golliwog, drawn by Debussy as a balloon tethered by a string, floating over the elephant Jimbo, resembles several of Odilon Redon’s disembodied heads—drawings of flowers with faces, many tied to the ground by a thin stem that seems incapable of supporting their weight.7 Hugo said of the grotesque, “Il y est partout; d’une part, il crée le difforme et l’horrible; de l’autre, le comique et le bouffon.”8 [It 5

Orledge, Debussy and the Theatre, 182-85. Roberts, 216. 7 Linda P. Cummins, “Debussy and the Grotesque,” Annual Meeting, American Musicology Society, Southern Chapter, University of Alabama, February 1997; Margaret Cobb, “Debussy and Le Roman de Rosette,” Cahiers Debussy 22 (1998): 7587. A striking example, A Flower with a Child’s Face, is reproduced in Dorra, 50. 8 Hugo, preface to Cromwell, 71. 6

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is everywhere; on the one hand it creates the deformed and the horrible; on the other the comic and the buffoon.] Auto-quotation or auto-citation can be a particularly effective form of quotation and may serve as a more powerful way of signing than a simple signature in the corner or name on the title page, for it places the artist in the work itself, not peripheral to it. It can also function in much the same way as the authorial intrusion: through a reference to another of the artist’s own works, thus to the artist as creator/maker, the fiction of the work at hand is destroyed. (This is a story being told, not something happening now; this is a painting, not a view out a window or a peek into a currently existing situation.) Visual artists placed themselves in paintings in several ways. These include not only the self portraits or examples of the “artist in his studio” genre that make the artist the focal point, or the numerous cases where the artist gives his face to a character in a painting, but especially works in which the artist inserts his presence as an artist but not as principal subject into the painting as a way of stating his role in the act of its creation. Often this was achieved through the use of mirrors or other reflecting devices, as in the tradition that Jan van Eyck followed when he painted The Arnolfini Double Portrait.9 In other instances, the artist makes his presence as creator known by placing a copy of his own work in the painting. Matisse’s Large Red Interior includes his own Pineapple hanging on the wall over the table; Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola clearly shows his Olympia, or a sketch for it, hanging in the upper right-hand corner.10 These paintings within paintings serve to remind us, more clearly than any signature, that we are viewing something made by the artist. In music the recognition of a quotation from another of the composer’s works can also make the listener aware that he is hearing something that has been created, crafted, by the composer.

9

Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 192-95, 247-55. Velázquez turned this tradition on its head in Las Meninas, where he appears as a central figure and the mirror reflects what is most likely the subject of the painting itself. 10 The Matisse paintings are reproduced in Yves-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 208-9, Manet’s portrait of Zola in Shiff, 31.


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Chapter 4 investigated Debussy’s use of auto-quotation in the context of the value the late nineteenth-century inherited and continued to place on the sketch. This chapter will present examples of Debussy’s use of auto-quotation to create a musical web of allusions similar to that attributed to Schumann by Daverio—a web that is literary in purpose and character, creating musical ideas that appear in multiple compositions, much as some nineteenth-century writers created characters who appeared as either major or minor figures in multiple stories. Each work is complete within itself and yet not complete since each quotation, each reappearing character, directs the attention of the reader outside the work at hand.11 The effect is one of fragmentation at the level of the individual work, but also of connection, binding multiple works in a larger context. Debussy’s “La Sérénade interrompue” from Preludes, Book I, with its borrowing from “Le Matin d’un jour de fête” (the last movement of Ibéria) and “Nuages,” the first of the orchestral Nocturnes, with its connection to act 2, scene 3, of Pelléas are two of many possible examples.

Ibéria and “La Sérénade interrompue” As mentioned in Chapter 3, Rosen stresses Schumann’s ability to make a quotation sound like a memory, to mimic the imperfect process of recollection by introducing first a short fragment followed by a version longer, though also incomplete. His example is the quotation from Papillons that interrupts “Florestan” in Carnaval.12 Papillons fragments its host—not simply by being included, but by literally interrupting the piece in progress twice, introducing a new tempo and sonority (Daverio also notes a change of key area, from G minor to B-flat major), before it is absorbed into its new context. Papillons fragments “Florestan,” but it also connects—not only two of Schumann’s individual works, but two of his collections of miniatures: Papillons and Carnaval. In “La Sérénade interrompue” from the first book of Preludes, Debussy also uses blatant auto-quotation, binding his serenade to one 11 12

Daverio, 59-61. Rosen, 98-100.

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of his most famous Spanish works, Ibéria.13 The serenade begins on the dominant (of B-flat minor), “comme en préludant,” in the manner of a guitarist warming up—typical gestures of the preludes as a genre: they are short and improvisatory, and end in the key of the work that follows, though they do not necessarily begin in that key. Eventually a slow, plaintive melody begins, breaks off with a piano return to the preluding, which is then suddenly and violently interrupted by a brief two-and-one-half measures, très vif, forte, with a different key signature (A minor). Soft preluding and a continuation of the serenade dissolve in a melodic cadenza (beginning in m. 76), when suddenly, softly, out of nowhere, lointain (m. 80 in Fig. 5.1), appear the first measures of the third movement of Debussy’s Ibéria, “Le Matin d’un jour de fête,” (marked “Dans un rythme de marche lointaine, alerte et joyeuse” in the Ibéria score). The key of the interruption is D major, not the E-flat of the original. The “guitar” then interrupts the Ibéria fragment twice (m. 85-86 and 98-90 in Fig. 5.1), the second time leading back to the serenade in the tonic. Debussy, like Schumann, has interrupted himself, interrupted his own serenade with another of his own works. Unlike Schumann’s Papillons reference, neither this interruption from Ibéria nor the earlier and more violent interruption (which does not seem to be a quotation) is actually incorporated into the texture of the serenade: they remain outside. Also unlike Schumann, who inserts the word “(Papillon?)” in his score at the second appearance of the quotation, Debussy does not sign his interruption with words. The connoisseur will know; the cultivated audience such as Mallarmé desired, the audience that is willing to work with the artist to decipher his meaning, will discover this clue easily.

13 Both Ibéria and the first book of Preludes were first published in 1910. See Brown, Ibéria, for complete sketch history of that work. Brown, 144, notes that, although the autograph for “La Sérénade interrompue” is undated, Howat (introduction to Preludes, Book I: The Autograph Score, iv) has speculated late 1909 or early 1910, the time when Debussy was preparing the premiere of Ibéria.


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Fig. 5.1 Mm 78-91 of La Sérénade interrompue.

Fig. 5.2. Reduction of last measures of the second movement and first measures of the third movement of Ibéria Ibéria, end of second movement

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Fig. 5.2, cont. Ibéria, beginning of third movement; return of secondmovement theme in m. 5

Debussy’s interruption quotes not only musical material, but also compositional technique—the technique of interruption. As “Le Matin d’un jour de fête,” the third movement of Ibéria, opens, the first theme—the theme that interrupts “La Sérénade interrompue”—is itself interrupted by material recalled from the end of the second movement, “Les Parfums de la nuit.” (See Fig. 5.2) The enchaînez indication between the movements and the alternation of leftover second-movement thematic material with the new third-movement material blurs the line between the two. With this subtle interweaving of themes, Debussy creates the effect of a march, heard at a distance, invading and interrupting the previous movement as the day of the festival interrupts the previous night (though, formally, it is the second movement that interrupts the third). In “La Sérénade interrompue,” unlike Ibéria, the borrowed theme from the third movement is foiled: it does not take over or even become absorbed; it simply disappears. Its effect, however, is far from inconsequential, for through it Debussy not only recalls his own motive, and the effect as well as the compositional technique of interruption, but also his fascination with Spanish music and the subcategory of his compositional styles that


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fascination has created.14 Through this interpretation, we see Debussy, like van Eyck in the mirror, at work.

Pelléas and Nuages Debussy wove a subtle web of allusion, of meaning and extramusical representation—one that ultimately extended beyond his own compositional output—when he reworked material from his opera Pelléas et Mélisande as the opening of Nuages from the orchestral Nocturnes.15 Fig. 5.3 shows the motive from act 2, scene 3, of the opera (which I will call the “grotto motive”) followed by the theme in the first measures of Nuages. Maeterlinck also wove such a web when he transposed the brief grotto scene in Pelléas et Mélisande (act 2, scene 3, in both play and opera) to the setting of the climax of his next play Alladine et Palomides. Both artists took a brief, though key, element from an earlier work, and highlighted it in a later one; in each case, the expanded reappearance creates a sense of the fragmentary, a sense that not all has been revealed in either work, that the role in the one must surely inform the role in the other. In the Symbolist world of both these artists, often a world of understatement and subtlety, an inherent sense of incompletion both magnifies and is magnified by the attraction of such reused fragments. Scholars once believed that Debussy composed Nuages before Pelléas. This view was based on two assumptions: that the orchestral Nocturnes are derived from two aborted scores, the Trois Scènes au Crépuscule from 1892 and the three Nocturnes for violin and orchestra from 1894-6; and that having started Pelléas in 1893,

14 Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 105-9, describes Debussy’s Spanish style. 15 Pelléas and Nuages share many of Debussy’s compositional strategies, including thematic transformation and techniques of fragmentation such as interpolation (discussed in Chapter 3 in connection with Prélude à “l’Après-midi d’un faune”). Major interpolations occur in Pelléas in act 2, scene 3, beginning at 469, and in Nuages at measures 84 and 86.

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Debussy completely revised it in 1898.16 A study of the extant sketches gives reason for challenging this view. No musical connections have ever been found between Nuages and the two earlier works; on the contrary, the only extant sketch for the Trois Scènes au Crépuscule (Paris, BN, Ms. 20632) has nothing to do with the orchestral score,17 and though no sketches exist for the Nocturnes for violin and orchestra, Debussy’s reference to completing “three other Nocturnes” suggests that these were different pieces rather than reworkings of the original Nocturnes.18 As for Pelléas et Mélisande, the earliest known sketches for act 2, scene 3, from 1895 (Paris, BN, Ms. 20631) contain the passage given in Figure 5.3. These sketches are so advanced and written with such confidence that they may even have been copied from prior sketches for the same piece. Based on information available today, it seems that Debussy worked out the theme in the opera, then reworked it for Nuages. With this adjusted chronology, the motive in Pelléas may now be seen to have musical and extra-musical implications for Nuages, while the prominence given to the opening motive of Nuages may encourage a closer look at its development and use in the opera. In the same way, the importance Maeterlinck gives the grotto scene in the later play Alladine and Palomides may lead the reader to return to the grotto scene in Pelléas, to reinvestigate its importance in that story. The fragment pulls apart, and at the same time seeks connections.

16

David Grayson, The Genesis of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” UMI Research Press Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986) includes dating of sketches for Pelléas et Mélisande. 17 Denis Herlin, “Trois Scènes au Crépuscule (1892-1893): Un Premier Projet des Nocturnes?” Cahiers Debussy No. 21 (1997), 11-14 shows facsimiles of sketches. 18 Though Debussy has mentioned Nocturnes for violin and orchestra to his publisher Georges Hartmann in letters of 31 December 1897, 14 July 1898, 16 September 1898, 1 January 1899, and 3 April 1899 (describing various states of completion), in a letter dated 3 July 1899, he writes to Hartmann: “Je terminerai La Saulaie, puis trois autres [emphasis mine] Nocturnes et les Nuits blanches.” [I will finish La Saulaie, then three other Nocturnes and the Nuits blanches.] Debussy, Correspondance 1884-1918, 128, 134, 138, 141, 150-151.


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Fig. 5.3. Comparison of act 2, scene 3, of Pelléas and the opening of Nuages. Pélleas et Mélisande, act 2, scene 3

Nuages, mm. 1-2

Alladine and Palomides, both promised to others, have fallen in love and professed that love; as punishment, they have been bound, blindfolded, and sealed in a grotto (act 4). Freeing themselves of their bonds and blindfolds, they “see” in the darkness (with the “sight” of the blind that Maeterlinck so values) a world they create within their minds. The grotto is beautiful, with clear water and blue roses, and as Palomides exclaims, “It is as if the sky had flowed all the way down here.” Standing dangerously near the edge of a cliff, they embrace, even as their rescuers arrive. Light streams in as the rocks at the entrance are dislodged, but the light reveals reality—an ugly, dirty cave, not a beautiful paradise; the lovers deliberately plunge into the water. Perhaps they did not understand that they would be freed,

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perhaps they chose the life of the mind over reality. They do not drown, but never recover and shortly die of unknown causes.19 Pelléas and Mélisande come to their grotto simply so that she will be able to describe it to Golaud, to further substantiate the lie she has told in the previous scene: she lost her ring there. The lie arises from guilt, from an awareness of her love for Pelléas. The scene is short, little more than a tableau. At the entrance, they also wait in darkness, wait for light so that they can see to enter. Foreshadowing Palomides, Pelléas describes the grotto, “Quand on y allume une petite lumière, on dirait que la voûte est couverte d’étoiles, comme le ciel.” [If you light a candle inside the cave, you would say that the vault is covered with stars, like the sky.] When the moon emerges from behind a cloud and light floods the grotto (to a G-flat major arpeggio, one of the tonalities of light in the opera), they see three starving beggars inside, leaning against each other, asleep. A famine in the outside world is as severe as the parallel spiritual famine of the characters in the story. The light has again revealed the truth—the three beggars are not three fates, or the future, but the present, the three main characters, weak and leaning on each other in a precarious balancing act, their destinies so intertwined that even a subtle change can spell disaster. For Maeterlinck, the grotto represents the interior life, the life of the mind. As Patrick McGuinnes states, descents into subterranean worlds function as determined “symbols” of a descent into the unconscious and as “correlatives,” projections, and extensions, part of an overarching structural system in which distinctions between inner and outer worlds are continually blurred.20

Both Palomides and Pelléas have described the grotto of the imagination; the light reveals the grotto of reality. The four characters react differently to the distinction between mind and reality: Alladine and Palomides turn away from the light, rejecting reality (even though 19 The similarities to Pelléas et Mélisande are clear; Bettina Knapp, Maurice Maeterlinck (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), 78, reports that Maeterlinck once called Alladine et Palomides a “decoction of Pelléas.” 20 Patrick McGuinnes, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144.


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it means rescue), choosing their inner dream even as death; Mélisande and Pelléas turn back toward the light, choosing to face the reality that the moonlit grotto revealed. Mélisande seems actively aware of this decision: as they leave, she turns away from Pelléas and away from their growing attachment, “Laissez-moi; je préfère marcher seule” [Leave me alone, I prefer to walk alone]. If the destiny of both couples is ultimately death, then Alladine and Palomides embraced that fate in the grotto; Pélleas (perhaps passively) and Mélisande (actively) rejected it. Just as Maeterlinck’s grotto scene has implication for the rest of Pelléas, Debussy’s “grotto” motive also appears in variant forms in other parts of the opera; he uses it to create a subcycle within the overall progression of the play. It is prominent in three scenes; all occur outside at night and progress through increasingly more certain premonitions of death. In act 1, scene 3, Pelléas and Mélisande look out over the sea, contemplating the possibility that the ship leaving the harbor will be wrecked by a storm. In act 2, scene 3, Pelléas and Mélisande enter the grotto at night to find the three starving beggars whose deaths are as real a possibility as they are a premonition of future events. In act 4, scene 3, little Yniold hears sheep “pleurer” [weeping] and then, after noting “Il n’y a plus de soleil” [There is no more sunlight], he watches the herd being led past him; the shepherd tells him the sheep are not on their way to the fold: the assumption is slaughter. Allusions to the deaths of Pelléas and of Mélisande are unmistakable. Mélisande believes the ship that may be wrecked is the ship that brought her to Allemonde; the three starving paupers are surely Pelléas, Mélisande, and Golaud; the sheep are led to slaughter as fate leads the characters to the inevitable conclusion.21 Embedded in this progression of scenes is a series of delays. Yniold’s scene, opening with his futile attempts to move a heavy rock and recover his gold ball and ending with the sheep on their way to slaughter, actually retards the progression of the drama itself. It is a digression serving merely to emphasize the futility of man’s actions 21

There are other brief variants of the fragment motive in all the night scenes, but the motive is conspicuously absent from the night scene where Golaud actually kills Pelléas (with the exception of a brief variant in act 4, scene 4, just after Pelléas asks Mélisande to come out of the light and into the shade), also from any indoor night scenes, and from any day scenes, including the scene in the dark vaults.

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and the inevitability of death. In the first two scenes, though, it is Mélisande who delays, hesitating to initiate or acknowledge her relationship with Pelléas, thus postponing the inevitable outcome. In act 1, she simply refuses his hand offered in assistance; in act 2, she turns away from him in the grotto. These hesitations forestall their final meeting in the forest, act 4, scene 4, where she makes excuses for being late—excuses that tell us that even at the end, she hesitated. These hesitations seem on one level simply in keeping with the passive Symbolist heroine, but this cycle Debussy creates with his use of the “grotto” motive may show that he understood Mélisande as a more active character, not one who is unable to defy destiny, but one who acts to do so in the only ways available. Her hesitations are actions, the act of turning away from Pelléas, and like the sheep scene, they delay the final outcome. Debussy noted in a letter to Henri Lerolle22 that act 2, scene 2, the scene immediately preceding the grotto scene, marked a turning point in the opera. Mélisande lied to Golaud about where and how she lost the ring he gave her. The lie is blatant and unnecessary. A modified version of the truth—the ring slipped off as she reached toward the water in the fountain in the forest—would have sufficed, but her guilt fabricates a response that places her physically far from the place where she willingly and willfully played her dangerous game of toss with the ring. It now lies beneath the water like her crown at the beginning of the opera—the crown the unknown “he” had given her and that she no longer wanted. The lie is an active, if still unrealized, acknowledgement of how little she cares for Golaud and how guilty she feels about her feelings toward Pelléas. Golaud has insisted she return to the grotto, even in the dark, to look for the ring, and that she take Pelléas with her. The grotto scene shows Mélisande now aware—if not completely aware of her feelings, then completely aware of her situation. At that moment, she is no longer the passive Symbolist heroine; she is active and her actions defy destiny. The adjusted chronology discussed at the beginning of this chapter, placing the composition of act 2, scene 3, of Pelléas before that of Nuages, directly effects the extramusical associations of the grotto motive and its reworking in Nuages, as well as of other 22

Debussy, Correspondance 1884-1918, 17 August 1895, 111-112.


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connected borrowings. In a published explanation of the titles used for the Nocturnes, Vallas reports that Debussy wrote, “‘Nuages’ renders the immutable aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white.”23 In Pelléas, the motive always appears with the night sky. It is not present in any indoor scenes or day scenes, and it is not always connected to clouds. One of the few moments when some variant of it is not present in act 2, scene 3, occurs when Pelléas says “No stars are out tonight on this side; Let us wait til the moon has broken through that large cloud.” When Pelléas and Mélisande watch her ship leave the harbor, there are not clouds, only low-lying mist; they do not fear for the ship because a storm approaches (in fact, the sea is still and there is no mention of clouds), but because there have been storms the previous nights. There is no mention of clouds in act 4, scene 3, when Yniold sees the sheep. Perhaps it is a subtle notion, but it seems clear that the opening motive of Nuages was, for Debussy, the immutable aspect of the sky, the dark background against which the clouds may pass, just as the clouds, the ship, the sheep, all pass across the immutable aspect of fate. Debussy’s borrowing extends in both chronological directions. Vallas (and others) have accused Debussy of taking “every note” of the opening of Nuages from Mussorgsky’s song The Noisy Day Has Sped its Flight from the Sunless cycle.24 Lockspeiser, defending Debussy’s originality and being perhaps sensitive to other than the top voice, responds, “As for Vallas’s contention, repeated unceasingly in programme notes, that the indefinite, flowing theme of Debussy’s Nuages derives note for note from Mussorgsky’s song, … this, if still likely to be upheld, can only be put down to a peculiar insensitiveness to concepts of melody that were utterly opposed.”25 Debussy openly admired Mussorgsky (especially Boris Godonov) and clearly could have known the song—and there are similarities, though there are also many differences. The matter should be opened to 23

Vallas, 112; French not available; source unattributed. Vallas, 113. 25 Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I:53. The notion is still upheld, among others, by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 665. 24

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further examination by the possibility that Pelléas was at least sketched before Nuages, and that there are fewer similarities between the Mussorgsky song and the grotto motive than between the song and Nuages. Note, though, that the title of the cycle is Sunless, and the song concerns the end of day, not clouds. A striking case of borrowing, this time from Debussy, is Stravinsky’s reworking of the main theme from Nuages at the beginning of his opera Le Rossignol. The similarity between the two scores was noticed as early as 1933 by Vallas, and is so close that Glenn Watkins has accused Stravinsky of “near plagiarism.”26 Watkins’ charge is not so clear-cut, however, since evidence supports the idea that Stravinsky knew the scores of both Pelléas and Nuages before he began Le Rossignol, and his opera actually opens at the pitch of the motive in act 2, scene 3, of Pelléas. Borrowing, quotation, even auto-quotation often raise complicated issues of timing, influence, and sheer coincidence. All these connections, these “memories made public”27 in bits and pieces, invite further investigation.

26 27

Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre, 39. Rosen, 111.

CHAPTER 6 PRELUDES: A POSTLUDE Portents, portentum, are named from portending, portendere, that is from “showing in advance,” praeostendere; . . Monstrosities, monstrum, are named from an “admonition,” monitus, because they point out something by signaling, or because they indicate what may immediately appear. —————Isidore of Seville

Expectations determine our perception of the fragment work; the paratext—that accumulation of material defined by Genette as the productions that accompany the text: author, title, preface, illustrations, epigraphs, dedications, genre indications1—determines many of those expectations. The title often provides both the first clues to the fragment text and the genre or other convention against which the fragment will work: Petrarch’s Latin title for the Canzoniere, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, alerts the reader to expect more than a simple lyric collection; Cervantes’ introduction to Don Quixote prepares the reader for the satire of the chivalric romance that follows; and Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, announces a narrative that the author then consistently evades. Yet, as discussed in Chapter I, conceptions of a convention, of a genre, can change over time, causing modern audiences to see Petrarch’s fragments as less startling and Cervantes as more disjointed than either might have been viewed in its own time. Extensions of paratextual elements are also subject to transformation over time; in particular the author’s name carries with it reputation, sex, and historical period, and to the extent that these are known by the reader, also determine expectations. When Debussy published his Preludes for piano, with that title and in groups of twelve (“The fateful number!” Vallas writes 2), he drew consciously on the tradition of such collections published in key order: Bach’s forty-eight Preludes and Fugues,3 but more directly on a 1

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), passim. 2 Vallas, 210. 3 2x24 proceeding chromatically, with each major key followed by its parallel minor.

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work that was also much influenced by Bach, Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes, op. 28,4 a work Rosen indentifies as one of the musical responses to the romantic fragment.5 These works are closed and ordered collections: ordered because they follow a predetermined, systematic succession of keys (a framing device); closed because they present all the possible keys in that succession; collections because key order was in no way teleological, serving merely as a sort of directory for presenting and locating a prelude in a particular key, and in no way affecting presentation in any performance venue.6 The most direct referent of Chopin’s paratext—his title as well as number and order of individual members of the collection— was the tradition of published preludes, some in collections in key order, meant to teach or to aid those less adept at preluding (at improvising an introduction to a longer work as a means of easing both the performer and the listener into the major work that would follow). In a very real sense, works of this genre were collections of fragments, of works that were not intended to stand alone as complete, but only intended to be completed by another work outside the collection. Preludes were sometimes short, improvisatory (the written preludes arose from a tradition of improvisation), sometimes technically difficult (meant to warm up the fingers, try out the keyboard, and show off a little), often open tonally (to lead more effectively into the work that followed). Their fragmentation was an element of their function, but was not necessarily, if ever, part of an aesthetic statement of fragmentation on the part of the composer. Key order was significant only in that it offered, in a systematic presentation, all the choices necessary to precede a work in any key. These collections were closed, and ordered by practicality.

4

These progress through the circle of fifths in the direction of increasing sharps, each prelude in a major key followed by one in its relative minor. 5 Rosen, 82-83. 6 Rosen, 83, notes that such methods of organization that transcend performance were not new to musicians and gives as an example the third part of Bach’s Clavierübung. (chorale preludes arranged in order of the ordinary of the mass, opening with the St. Anne’s Prelude and closing with that Fugue). Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes (first version 1826, second 1837, final 1851) are another example of the many collections ordered by key but never intended to be played as a cycle.

Chapter 6: Preludes: A Postlude

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Chopin’s Preludes did not meet the expectations signaled by his paratext: not only the expectations of genre and function announced by the title, number, and order, but also the expectations of his own reputation as well. Schumann evidently imagined that Chopin would have written longer, more imposing preludes that would move that genre from subsidiary to independent status, much as Chopin’s Etudes had moved the exercise to the stage: I confess I imagined them differently, and designed in the grandest style, like his Etudes. Almost the opposite: they are sketches, beginnings of Etudes, or so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusion.7

Through their brevity, their sketchiness, their ruin, and their confusion—exaggerated characteristics of the prelude—Chopin created works that, as Kallberg notes, actually did transform the genre. Kallberg offers evidence that Chopin did use them in performance as preludes to other works, in the original function of the genre, but that he often performed the Preludes as individual works or in small groups as well.8 When Chopin altered their function, when he chose not to use them simply to lead into another work, the preludes became intentional fragments—intended to stand on their own, in their incompleteness, hedgehogs, not just pieces of a puzzle waiting to be put together—and the act of separation a conscious aesthetic statement on Chopin’s part. Just as Petrarch omitted the connecting narrative of the prosimetrum, creating the holes, the blank spaces between his lyrics, through which a narrative is suggested by its absence but never stated, so Chopin omitted the possibility of conclusion, leaving instead the silence through which the fragment echoes its incompletion, never resolved. Today the Preludes suffer from the same problem that often affects the interpretation of earlier fragment forms: the loss of 7

Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 7 (22 December 1837), 200; reference and translation from Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 146. 8 Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 150-152. Kallberg gives evidence of at least one occasion when Chopin used Prelude no. 8 (F-sharp minor) as an introduction to the F-sharp major Impromptu, op. 36. Chopin’s last work published under the title Prelude is a substantial work (op. 45) and establishes the use of the title for what is, basically, a new genre.

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historical perspective. They are reinterpreted by a world that has lost the practice of preluding in piano recitals, that has embraced the performance of complete collections, regardless of original intent, that has lost the distinction between publication format and performance practice, and that has come to misinterpret the closed collection as a cycle whose meaning depends on the inclusion of all members in order. As David Ferris points out, in traditional modern analysis, defining traits of the musical cycle include “coherent narrative and immutable order.”9 A collection, on the other hand, has no such requirements, even though individual members of the collection may relate to one another, and to the collection as a whole, in a variety of ways. Complete performances of Chopin’s opus, though they would not have been an option in Chopin’s lifetime, are now considered appropriate, desirable, even necessary, perhaps fueled by the notion that the key sequence functions as a substitute narrative or requires a cyclic performance. Such performances, as Kallberg has eloquently and persuasively argued, deny the fragment quality of the individual preludes, are contrary to Chopin’s own performance practice, and rely for their justification on anachronistic notions of genre and prejudiced methods of analysis.10 Debussy’s work also contradicted expectations raised by his paratext. Though his Preludes are numbered, he abandoned any discernible key order, thus creating a closed but unordered collection, and one that is closed simply through association with Chopin and other prelude collections—the number twelve having meaning only in memory. Debussy also added titles, atypical of the prelude. These titles he placed unusually at the ends of the works, preceded by three dots of ellipsis and enclosed in parentheses.11 Though Debussy’s Preludes, in their use of interpolations and quotations, off-tonic beginnings, and incomplete endings, are fragmented—similar in this

9

Ferris, 3. Ferris questions the validity of this distinction in the nineteenth century. Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 149. 11 Three dots of ellipsis follow the title “Soirée dans Grenade” from the Estampes and precede D’un cahier d’esquisses (see Chapter 4). 10


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respect to Chopin’s 12—the titles, coupled with the greater length and more extensive formal structures, blurred the distinction between the prelude and the character piece—a category into which other Debussy piano works, including the Estampes and Images I and II, fall. Thus Debussy’s paratext sends mixed signals. The Preludes are a grotesque, a joining of genres. Debussy’s abandonment of key order has triggered searches for a substitute plan, one that would explain the order in which he chose to present his Preludes for publication and perhaps reveal that the collection is closed by more than mere reference to the number twelve—that would, in fact, provide evidence to consider the Preludes an ordered collection or even a cycle. Roy Howat has reported that Debussy stressed certain “pivot notes”(Bb in the first part of Book I and Db in the last part of Book II), and he has observed a shift of emphasis from C to Db through Book II, but he is careful to say that these are not key progressions.13 In addition, as has been the case with 12

Roy Howat has identified similarities between certain Debussy Preludes and those of Chopin, and of other Chopin works; musical influence is evident. (Howat, “Chopin’s Influence on the Fin de Siècle and Beyond,” 262-269.) Debussy scholars have often used language that makes clear reference to Chopin and to the prelude as a genre prior to its reinterpretation as character piece. Oscar Thompson stresses the improvisatory form of the preludes, describing them as “more like sketches than paintings” (Oscar Thompson, Debussy, Man and Artist [New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1940], 263-264.) Schmitz labels them “perfect miniatures” and compares them favorably to the sketch: “a few telling scratches of the pen—the picture is complete.” (Schmitz, 129) Vallas excuses what he perceives as unevenness of quality by writing, “It is probable that in some cases Debussy utilized old sketches.” (Vallas, 210.) Vallas also claims that “Debussy regarded these little pieces less as works intended to be played by themselves than as real preludes, short introductions to more important pieces in the same keys. This so-called revolutionary showed many traits characteristic of the conservative upholder of tradition.” He also stated that “Debussy … gives them the character of an improvisation or fantaisie which is best suited to this very free type of composition.” (Vallas, 208 and 210.) Roy Howat attributes lack of proportional structure in many of the Preludes to their brevity: since they are short, they do not need “more complex hidden unifying devices”; he proposes another explanation stemming from the title Préludes, and suggests “that a sense of incompleteness at the end of such pieces is apt.” He notes that incomplete harmonies at the end of “Brouillard” may correspond to its “unresolved proportional series.” (Howat, Debussy in Proportion, 158.) 13 Howat, “Chopin’s Influence on the Fin de Siècle and Beyond,” 266-67; foreword to Préludes, Livre I, Livre II, 12 (French), 16 (English).

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Chopin’s works, some scholars have noted tonal and motivic connections between certain preludes in their published order and among the preludes as a group. This evidence, even if more compelling, would not necessarily dictate performance order, but it has been misinterpreted as grounds for an “ideal” performance of the complete set, in order—essentially turning the collection into a cycle driven, in Debussy’s case, primarily by order in the publication (since no convincing substitute for Chopin’s key order has been uncovered).14 Many defend the practice despite the fact that Debussy’s own performances in public and private gatherings, as well as those given by his favored pianist, Ricardo Viñes, and others in his lifetime, followed Chopin’s lead: the Preludes were played alone or in small groups. Vallas has confirmed that performance tradition, stating that Debussy “did not like the complete series to be played as a whole, according to the present custom.”15 Debussy’s preludes depart from Chopin’s model only in ways that make them even more a collection: the omission of a controlling sequence, and the addition of titles that in no way form a consistent narrative, dissolve any convincing frame. It is just as difficult to imagine Debussy’s intention to thwart the fragment as it is to imagine Chopin’s, for both arose from a literary and artistic milieu of fragmentation—for Chopin, Schlegel and the Romantics; for Debussy, late nineteenth-century decadence, a subject to which I will return shortly. Kallberg has laid at least part of the blame for anachronistic performance practice in Chopin’s Preludes at the feet of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century analysts and critics (and the performers who follow them) who “locate the highest artistic achievement not so much in the individual preludes themselves … as in the nuanced motivic relationships that may be teased out of all twenty-four of the preludes working together.”16 This also explains, in part, why those who advocate complete performances of Debussy’s Preludes do so. Any approach to analysis that prejudices an over14

Roberts, 239-42, advocates cyclic performances of the individual books of Preludes and offers reasons supporting cyclic performances of both books in one performance, advising an intermission between. 15 Vallas, 210. 16 Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries, 149.


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arching unity, though valuable in its own right for the insights it offers, can be used to distort the relationship of part to whole, to devalue the part. The results can affect not only practice in the performative arts but also approaches to interpretation and criticism in all arts. Kallberg’s concerns are shared by other scholars. David Ferris has expressed reservations about modern expectations of unity in Romantic song cycles, cautioning against “organicist conceptions of musical structure,” with an emphasis on the search for a unified musical whole, and against using notions of unity and coherence to distinguish Schumann’s “true cycles” from “mere collections.”17 Steven Rendall laments anachronistic expectations of unity in his discussion of Montaigne’s Essais. He notes that the Renaissance reader (who was often read to) “did not assume that the meaning of any given segment of discourse was dependent upon its place in the overall structure of the text in which it occurred.” Such an approach to a text encourages attention to the individual segment, and discourages placing its primary value in its connections to the other segments, to the whole.18 (Other examples of misinterpretation of notions of unity and fragmentation were mentioned in Chapter 1.) The problem of maintaining an historically appropriate view of the relationship of part to whole, and of placing appropriate value on unity and fragmentation, is exacerbated by the fragment work. The collection of fragments may easily be mistaken for a cycle (and I use the term cycle to mean a work in which order of performance is significant) simply because the fragment invites the search for relationships such as those Kallberg mentions, motivic and otherwise; the fragment always reaches toward completion, invites the audience to search within the individual member, out to other members of the collection, and even outside the collection itself. To return to Garrigues’s description in Chapter 2, the edges of every fragment pull it both back into itself and outside, “en lui-même et hors de lui.”19 The creator of the fragment collection may include connections, may purposely set up a tension between fragment and whole, between unity and disorder, between the lack of resolution and the possibility of 17

Ferris, 4-5. Rendall, 72-75. 19 Garrigues, 41. 18

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resolution—but resolution is not the goal. As Rosen puts it for Chopin’s op. 28, “the opposing demands of the opus as a whole and of each individual prelude are intended to coexist without being resolved.”20 Ferris notes that the fragment cycle “implies structural connections and hints at larger meanings, but it never makes them explicit or definitive.” Fascination with the ruin, the sketch, the fragment lies in the invitation to completion, but also in the knowledge that there can be no definitive completion, only endless possibilities. Firchow noted that the reader of Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments was invited to recreate a theory of literature that actually never existed, that even Schlegel could not communicate as a logical, ordered whole. The creators of fragments—Debussy and Chopin included—could and often did make wholes, not fragments; we must remember that the intentional fragment is just that—intentional—and, paraphrasing Bishop, allows the author to transcend what cannot be resolved or contained in the forms and means available.21 We should not accept Don Quixote without the interpolated stories, or Kater Murr separated into its two narratives, or Schlegel’s fragments organized by topic, or Petrarch’s Canzoniere with added prose narrative—or one definitive performance order for Chopin’s or Debussy’s Preludes. Much speculation has surrounded Debussy’s misplaced titles, centering on two areas: the search for their sources and for an explanation for their unusual placement. Believable, if not completely verifiable, references for all but four22 have been tracked down, of which the following are representative. Three titles refer to poems he had previously set: “Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir” is from Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir”; “La Fille aux cheveux de lin” is the fourth of Leconte de Lisle’s “Chansons écossaises”; “Le Vent dans la plaine” is the epigraph to Verlaine’s “C’est l’extase langoureuse.” Some are possessions: canopic urns on the mantel (“Canope”), a postcard he received from de Falla or Viñes (“La Puerta del Vino”), illustrations in Chouchou’s books (Rackham’s “Les Fées sont d’exquises danseuses” from an edition of Barrie’s Peter Pan in 20

Rosen, 83. Bishop, 2-3. 22 Those four are “Des Pas sur la neige,” “La Sérénade interrompue,” “Brouillards,” and “Bruyères.” 21


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Kensington Garden. Many are recollections: a Greek sculpture on display at the Louvre (“Danseuses de Delphes”), Loïe Fuller dancing—or sailboats?—(“Voiles”), musical clowns who performed where Debussy spent the summer of 1905 (“Minstrels”), an article in Le Temps (“La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune”), the Bastille Day celebration of 1912 (“Feux d’artifice”). Howat reports an unconfirmed story of a wine label that inspired “Les Collines d’Anacapri” (or perhaps it was stories of Anacapri by Axel Munthe). “Les Tierces alternées” may simply describe the musical figuration.23 The sources of this mélange are all part of Debussy’s personal life, his possessions, bibelots, souvenirs, memories. The history of collecting leads not only from the King’s Kunstkammer to the state or private museum, but also from the cabinets of curiosities to grandmother’s curio cabinet. Unicorn horns, monster’s skulls, saint’s bone, and precious jewels may have been replaced by sea shells from last year’s vacation, a picture of the latest grandchild, and a commemorative spoon from the St. Louis World’s Fair, but much of the instinct behind both is the same: the desire to acquire possessions, whether to show material wealth or simply to provide the comfort of being able to own; the notion of defining oneself to others through possessions—this is where I’ve been, what I’ve done, who I am; the need to control time, to reclaim the past by retelling history (whether a private history or that of a civilization) through artifacts—souvenirs, fragments, ruins. Debussy was a collector. Madame Gérard de Romilly reports that he spent many hours in an antique shop near her family’s house, often spending his fee for her lessons there. He also evidently acquired a number of his possessions as gifts: Madame de Romilly recounts Debussy’s admiration of a medieval box and an engraved bronze platter that belonged to her father. After Debussy’s comment that “they’d look good in my apartment,” her mother sent them to him.24 Arthur Hartmann comments on Debussy’s collection of “priceless Japanese and Chinese oddities,” but also reports that after receiving, 23

Howat, foreword to Préludes, Livre I, Livre II, 12-13 (French), 16-17 (English), supplies a complete list. 24 Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered, 54. Madame de Romilly studied singing and piano with Debussy at the turn of the century.

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with little enthusiasm, the gift of a set of heirloom buttons Hartmann had collected in Norway, Debussy announced that there was something in the Hartmann house that he wanted. When questioned, Debussy identified an odd little pebble on Hartmann’s desk. From then on Debussy kept it on his own writing desk, perhaps in company with Arkel, the figurine he took with him on his travels. Clearly his tendency to collect extended beyond the quotation and allusion found in his music and letters.25 From his possessions and his memories, Debussy selected not the most valuable objects or memories of the most important events but the quotidian; not his collection of “Japanese oddities” but a postcard, perhaps a wine label, favorite books, a night out. The Preludes are musical representations of this scrapbook of the everyday.26 There are, through Western history, genres of art and literature that depict or describe collections. Notable examples include the Renaissance “Cabinets of Curiosities” paintings. These sometimes depicted real collections, and even functioned as catalogs for those diverse juxtapositions of valuable works of art with sea shells and telescopes; they exhibited wealth, and could include the owner (depicted visiting his cabinet, or through a portrait hanging in the cabinet). Often the collection is imaginary, put together for allegorical purposes.27 In a similar category are paintings of artists in their studios, with all their works in various states of completion around them. Though the Cabinet paintings have frozen the order of the art works, objects, and people represented, there is every indication in many of them that that order is flexible. Many objects stand on the 25

Nichols, Debussy Remembered, 208-09. Hartmann was a Hungarian violinist. Other writers have described the Preludes as catalogs or summaries of Debussy’s compositional style. Heinrich Strobel, Claude Debussy (Paris: Éditions Balzac, 1940), 222, claims that in the Preludes Debussy “a résumé toute sa création” and Oscar Thompson, 263, writes that they sum up the technical and harmonic devices which Debussy had been developing since 1880. Arthur Wenk, Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music, 93-113, lists several Preludes as examples of what he calls Debussy’s masks, subsets of Debussy’s styles that he has identified. The two books also mirror each other, each having a Spanish piece (“La Sérénade interrompue” in Book I, “La Puerta del Vino” in Book II), a Ragtime (“Minstrels” in Book I, “‘General Lavine’—excentric—” in Book II), etc., though not in the same order. 27 Stoichita discusses such paintings in detail. 26


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floor, leaning against something, others are being moved, others being held for examination. Though an interpretation of the Cabinet painting might be based on the positions of the canvases in that painting, there is no indication that the cabinet itself was static or fixed. The impression is often one of movement captured mid-action and frozen in time, like a snapshot. “La Sérénade interrompue” takes on a special role when viewed from the angle of the Preludes as a musical equivalent of the “Cabinets of Curiosities” paintings, especially since the author (Debussy) is describing his own collection. Stoichita analyzes the cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest painted by Willem van Haecht, in which the artist has signed a small canvas, a replica of one of his own works, placed in the foreground of the larger work. Not only the inserted painting, but also the signature (and therefore the author as a “name”) “becomes an intertext.”28 Similarly, Debussy’s Ibéria quotation becomes not simply a quotation, but a musical signature; a reference not simply to another work, but to Debussy himself and, as mentioned in Chapter V, to one of his compositional techniques. Various nineteenth-century literary subgenres reflected the increasing French, especially Parisian, fascination with acquisition and collection that arose in part as a result of a rising economy. The bourgeois apartment became a sort of giant curio cabinet, filled with bibelots; Emily Apter describes it as “increasingly like a museum in which curios, antiques, and personal memorabilia were lovingly displayed.”29 The description of homes, whether grand or small, and of the objects that filled them, became a literary topos. Baudelaire wanted to combine three Poe texts—”The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor’s Cottage,” and “Philosophy of Furniture”—under one title, Habitations imaginaires; Balzac’s description of the boarding house in Le Père Goriot is famous; Edmond de Goncourt even worried about the fate of his objects after his death: Pour les objets que j’ai possédés, je ne veux pas, après moi, de l’enterrement dans un musée, dans cet endroit où passent des gens ennuyés de regarder ce qu’ils ont sous les yeux; je veux que 28

Stoichita, 229. Emily Apter, “Cabinet Secrets: Fetishism, Prostitution, and the Fin de Siècle Interior,” Assemblage, no. 9 (June 1989), 6-19.

29

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Debussy and the Fragment chacun de mes objets apporte à un acquérant, à un être bien personnel, la petite joie que j’ai eue en l’achetant. For the objects that I possessed, I do not wish after my death interment in a museum, in that place where men pass, bored at looking at what they have before their eyes; I wish that each of my objects bring to a buyer, to a very private person, the bit of joy that I have had in buying them. 30

Debussy also worried about his objects, evidently personified them, and perhaps projected his own feelings on them. Dolly Bardac claims to have found a note written by Debussy as he prepared for a trip, “Do not put Arkel in the trunk; he doesn’t like that.”31 Judging from his letters and other reports, as an adult Debussy never enjoyed traveling abroad. Few, if any, of his souvenirs or other prized possessions appear to have been collected on his trips abroad, made primarily to conduct and promote his works. The Amsterdam lawyer and banker Richard van Rees claims to have entertained a very homesick Debussy during a conducting trip to Holland. Jacques Durand notes that he was a “stay-at-home” and both his stepchildren, Dolly and Raoul Bardac, claim that (by the time they knew him) Debussy rarely went out if he could avoid it, except, as both note, to the bookseller’s or to buy Chinese antiques.32 His collection of preludes includes no reference to travel of the sort that Louÿs made when he wrote to his brother that the Chansons de Bilitis were a souvenir of Algeria.33 Wallace Fowlie writes that Mallarmé “lived more in his apartment than in the world.” His objects—”his fans, vases, books, and bibelots”—made his parlor a refuge that reflected his elitist attitude toward poetry and his rejection of popular literature.34 These objects also found their way into his poetry, and hold clues to deciphering his works. Debussy’s apartment was also his 30

Séverine Jouve, Obsessions and Perversions dans la littérature et les demeures à la fin du dix-neuvième siecle (Paris: Hermann Éditeurs des sciences et des arts, 1996), 170, excerpted from Goncourt’s Journal, 1887; my translation. 31 Nichols, Debussy Remembered, 198. 32 Nichols, Debussy Remembered, 231, 195, 196, 198. It is difficult to know at what point Debussy’s illness began to affect his desire to remain at home. 33 Venuti, 31. 34 Wallace Fowlie, Poem and Symbol: A Brief History of French Symbolism (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 52.


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refuge and his objects, like Mallarmé’s, became involved to some extent in his works. The fictional extreme of this reclusiveness and obsession with possessions is, of course, Des Esseintes, the anti-hero of Huysmans’s À rebours. That work is perhaps the most famous prose representative of the late nineteenth-century French decadent movement—a movement that might be summed up as both a structural and topical obsession with the object over its context, the part over the whole, the decorative over the essential.35 Huysmans’s 1903 retrospective Preface to À rebours, a novel begun in 1881 and published in 1884, echoes, by accident or plan, Schlegel’s outline for the Romantic novel: … de secouer les préjugés, de briser les limites du roman, d’y faire entrer l’art, la science, l’histoire, de ne plus se servir, en un mot, de cette forme que comme d’un cadre pour y insérer de plus sérieux travaux … … to shake off prejudices, to break apart the limits of the novel, to introduce art, science, and history into it; in a word, no longer to use that form except as a frame into which more important undertakings might be inserted.36

Huysmans has taken to the extreme Schlegel’s intention (as presented by Julius in Lucinde) to destroy order, to remove it, and to recreate experience in the imagination,37 for in À rebours there is little if any order, and the only experiences are those of the imagination and memory. It is a novel in which the roles of narrative and of description have been reversed or turned inside out, a digressive narrative, categorized by Laurence Porter as an example of the genre that Frye labels anatomy (see Chapter 1).38 Huysmans first provides an introductory account of the circumstances of Des Esseintes. He is the model decadent hero—or anti-hero: passive, inactive, perverted, succumbing to illness rather than overcoming it. He is the sick last son, divorced from society, the end of a family, paralleling the sick 35

David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, especially 1-21 and 82-97. Text and translation in Laurence M. Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel from 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96. 37 Schlegel, Lucinde, trans. Firchow, 45. 38 Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel”, 95. 36

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society divorced from nature, the end of a civilization. He has retreated with all his possessions into a sort of live-in cabinet of curiosities—with his Moreau Salomé, his liquor organ, his jewel encrusted live turtle, and his first edition of Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. Near the end of the book, a doctor advises him to return to Paris and the society of man. Between this opening and lack of closure, cluster a collection of chapters that, as Weir and Porter both note, could be presented in any order since there is no plot development, no real chronological progression; Weir even points out that “chronological progression ceases to be of any value to an understanding of the work at hand.”39 Chapters on literature, interior decoration, perfumery, and so on are structurally interchangeable; individual chapters—with the exception of a few in which Des Esseintes recounts remembered experiences—are equally devoid of narrative progression. Each chapter, like a guided tour through his various cabinets—cabinets of reality, cabinets of memory—consists of description and recollection. In À rebours the digressive novel has disintegrated into little more than a collection, its external structure a mirror of the content of its chapters. Debussy’s placing of descriptive titles of the individual Preludes at the end of each is quite unusual; so unusual, in fact, that Genette claims it is the only example he has discovered.40 Genette notes that these are titles of parts, not of the whole, but fails to note that the individual Preludes actually do have titles, of a sort that he acknowledges in his discussion, in the normal position: their numbers—and, as mentioned above, the number of Preludes is significant. In Genette’s categorization, rhematic titles are those which designate genre, number, opus number in music, etc.; they refer to the work as an object, to its classification. Thematic titles, on the other hand, in some way indicate or allude to the subject matter of the text. For Genette, the choice of rhematic or thematic titles indicates one of two antithetical positions that the author may take in regard to his text: rhematic titles indicate a “restrained stance” on the part of author, one that recalls a certain classical dignity and later realistic seriousness; thematic titles imply a “demonstrative—indeed insistent—stance on 39 40

Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel,” 95-96; Weir, 95-96. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 65.


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the part of the author toward his work.”41 Certain titles mix rhematic and thematic elements, particularly genre and subject: Genette lists Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature.42 Had Debussy placed both number (rhematic) and descriptive (thematic) titles together on the first page of each Prelude, he might have weakened the notion of the works as members of the Prelude genre, or he might simply have emphasized his grotesque joining of old and new types of prelude (of traditional prelude and character piece). Instead, by separating the two types of the title, and by positioning the descriptive title at the end of each Prelude, he lends importance to the number, which does in fact serve as the section (or Prelude) title, and calls into question the proper function of the descriptive title. The distance he creates between the two is not simply a spatial separation, but a distance that questions the real genre and function of the work, and that highlights a certain ambivalence on Debussy’s part toward the two different authorial stances that Genette equates with the two types of title. How restrained, or how “demonstrative—indeed insistent” is Debussy’s stance toward this work? Explanations of and attitudes toward the descriptive titles vary. Marguerite Long calls them postscripts, and recalls Debussy and Emma together choosing names for some of them, presumably after the compositions were complete.43 Most explanations tend to downplay the significance of the titles as though Debussy felt he had to include them against his wishes or better judgment, and so hid them. Wenk believes that the titles at the end reflect an introspection created by the reclusion forced on Debussy by cancer. Schmitz claims that this practice places the music first in importance; he also notes that it stimulates enjoyment as an afterthought, offers a helping hand to those who need it, or a confirmation (for those who evidently came up with the right answer), and are of no use to those who have found their own thoughts and need no suggestions.44 Perhaps they reflect the Symbolist reticence to name: Mallarmé declared, “To name an object 41

Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 78-79, 315. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 88. 43 Marguerite Long, Au Piano avec Claude Debussy (Paris: Gérard Billaudot, 1960), 102. 44 Wenk, Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music, 17; Schmitz, 130. 42

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is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual divination. The ideal is to suggest the object”;45 Schmitz must have found that a frustrating practice, and claims that Debussy may have put them at the end “to avoid the coyness of those who have a subject and won’t say what it is.”46 In the same vein as Mallarmé, Redon wrote, “Designating my drawings by giving them a title is sometimes too much, so to speak. A title is justified only when it is vague, indeterminate, and even confusedly aiming at the equivocal.”47 Howat suggests a stage between the descriptive titles of the Images and the Estampes and the strictly pedagogical headings of the Etudes: Never one to labor a point, he [Debussy] may have felt that the picturesque titles heading his earlier Estampes and Images had achieved their object of encouraging extra-musical evocation, and that the music should now be allowed to tell its own story first.48

These misplaced “titles” are a part of the paratext, and if Debussy placed them at the ends of the Preludes because he did not want them to function as titles, then perhaps they function as something else; a few possibilities follow. Genette notes that chapter titles are already accessible only to those who either read the book, or perhaps flip through pages; in theory, if not practice, Debussy’s titles would be limited to the performer. Schumann inserted texts in his scores, private messages to the performer: “Papillon?” identifies the thematic quotation in Carnaval (See Chapter 4); the final dance of each book of the Davidsbündlertänze is prefaced by a sentence: “Here Florestan stopped and his lips quivered in pain”; “Superfluously, Eusebius added the following and his eyes filled with tears of happiness.” Perhaps the unusual placement of Debussy’s descriptive titles puts them in the category of such moments of intimacy between 45

Stephane Mallarmé, Enquête avec Jules Huret, quoted in translation in Claude Debussy, Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”: An Authoritative Score, Mallarmé’s Poem, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism and Analysis, edited by William W. Austin (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970), 109-110 46 Schmitz, 130. 47 Odilon Redon, À soi-même (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1961), 26-27; quoted in Claude Debussy, Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun”: An Authoritative Score, Mallarmé’s Poem, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism and Analysis, 125-26. 48 Howat, foreword to Préludes, Livre I, Livre II, 12-13 (French), 16-17 (English).


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performer and composer, moments not to be shared with the audience except as the performer wishes to transmit them through the music, moments when the composer will be more open to the subject of his work. Given Debussy’s debt to Chopin, perhaps the misplaced titles were a nod to the tradition of assigning inauthentic titles to Chopin’s Preludes. This tradition is more complex than the simple assignment of programmatic short titles such as “Raindrop” or “Winter Wind,” and recalls a common nineteenth-century practice denoted by the term melodeclamation, a recitation of poetry against the background of an instrumental performance. The most widely disseminated poems for melodeclamation accompanied by Chopin’s works were those from Kornel Ujejski’s cycle of poems titled Tlumaczenia Szopena [Translations of Chopin], first published in 1866, and circulating widely for decades in Polish as well as French, English, and German translations. Individual Preludes were even published with these titles, and in some instances the title of the poem or its first line came to function as a title for the Prelude, as in the case of Ujejski’s “Ascension-dream” for Prelude no. 7.49 By placement and format (the dots of ellipsis)—and ultimately by their function or end result—these descriptive titles resemble what Genette labels terminal epigraphs. Epigraphs are usually placed at the beginning of a work or a section; they are usually quotations—the epigraph is almost always a text, but can be a reproduction such as a drawing (Sterne uses one in Tristram Shandy) or a musical score (three measures from Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps introduce The Consecration of Spring by Alejo Carpentier.50 Epigraphs may comment on or elucidate both the text and the title; they provide connections between two texts that the reader “puts together” during the reading of the epigraphed text. This process changes when the epigraph appears after the text, when the reader is already familiar with the epigraphed text. As Genette notes, 49

I am indebted for this information to Halina Goldberg. The topic is briefly treated in Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, “Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Literatur und Musik in der polnischen Frühromantik,” Welttheater: Die Künste im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Peter Andraschke and Edelgard Spaude (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1992), 20210. 50 Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 150.

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“for the reader, the relationship between introductory epigraph and text is still prospective, but the significance of the terminal epigraph, appearing after the text, is more obvious and more conclusive.”51 That has been the effect of Debussy’s descriptive indications, even if it was not his intention, for almost every scholar who defends downplaying the titles because Debussy put them at the end also goes to great length to explain what the titles are and where they come from—and to then describe how the music reflects the title. In truth, we are convinced that these mysterious “titles,” in the wrong place, are at least as significant as those he placed at the beginning. In a statement that recalls Mallarmé’s attitude, Genette notes that some epigraphs, if given before a work, “would give the game away too soon.”52 Epigraphs are usually the words of a writer other than the author of the work at hand. Many of Debussy’s titles, while they identify his possessions, are not his own words. They are quotations— from a poet, from a postcard, from a newspaper. As Genette notes of the terminal epigraph, the author has left the last word to someone else and often the author of the epigraph is more important than the epigraph itself because in this way the author of the work at hand chooses his peers and thus his place in the pantheon.53 If so, Debussy has placed himself in a mixed pantheon: Baudelaire, Dickens, the daily newspaper, a postcard. Epigraphs may also be autographic, chosen from works of the author himself, which is also a possibility given that, either directly, assuming the Preludes name Debussy’s own works and possessions, or indirectly, assuming they are the words or images of others that then lead us back to Debussy’s own possessions and works (as the Baudelaire poem leads to Debussy’s song and to his piano Prelude), Debussy always returns to Debussy, to his cabinet, his souvenirs. Debussy, in the aesthetic act of recreating memory, has created a collection of fragments—fragments that can be arranged and rearranged, but never achieve a perfect form, memories that defined his life in fragments and mirrored the fragmentation of his world, inside his apartment and out. Debussy’s collection, his response to 51

Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 149. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 149. 53 Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 158-59. 52


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Chopin, is an act of preservation, but in fragments—remnants of the Prelude genre juxtaposed with the character piece, remnants of his own existence. Yet Debussy, as surely as Petrarch, realized that preservation is ultimately impossible. Like Mallarmé’s faun, he must relate (CONTEZ) and remember (SOUVENIR) among the dots of ellipsis, the holes in the manuscript, the fragments of old forms, both proof of loss and of creative potential, the futility and necessity of reconstructing the ruins of memory, memory in ruins. Dante wrote: In that part of the book of my memory before which little could be read, a rubric is found that says: Incipit vita nova. Beneath this rubric I find written the words that it is my intention to transcribe into this little book: if not all of them, at least their substance.54

That substance, from the book of memory, from the book of the mind, Petrarch could only transcribe in lyric moments, Montaigne in disordered attempts, Schlegel in “flashes of intuition,”55 and Debussy in musical souvenirs.

54

Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 47. 55 Eichner’s phrase, 46.


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Debussy and the Fragment (Chiasma 18)

Debussy

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

FRAGMENT

Fragment

Fragment

fragment

Das Fragment

Fragment I

Das Fragment

A Fragment Of Time

Fragment von Hyperion

A Fragment of Fear

Fragment von Hyperion

Robert Guiskard [Fragment]

A Fragment of Fear

Fragment: A Novel

Fragment eines Romans

Fragment A Gray Sky Arched

Debussy in proportion - A musical Analysis

18

18

Debussy La Fille Aux Cheveux Flute

The Alkaloids: Chemistry and Physiology V18, Volume 18 (v. 18)

Debussy: La Mer (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

Debussy and the Fragment (Chiasma 18)

Debussy

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

Fragment

FRAGMENT

Fragment

Fragment

fragment

Das Fragment

Fragment I

Das Fragment

A Fragment Of Time

Fragment von Hyperion

A Fragment of Fear

Fragment von Hyperion

Robert Guiskard [Fragment]

A Fragment of Fear

Fragment: A Novel

Fragment eines Romans

Fragment A Gray Sky Arched

Debussy in proportion - A musical Analysis

18

18

Debussy La Fille Aux Cheveux Flute

The Alkaloids: Chemistry and Physiology V18, Volume 18 (v. 18)

Debussy: La Mer (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

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