“Une qualité rare et précieuse”: Music, Affect, and Meaning

Jackson, Colin

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-z65d-6h41

Work

“Une qualité rare et précieuse”: Music, Affect, and Meaning

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

This dissertation presents an affect-centered approach to the analysis and interpretation of the experience of music and its attendant meaning in selected works of literature and cinema. Music’s interpretative mutability often charges it with meaning, though in infinite gradations of singularity rather than any universal sense. Rather than undertake a formalist musicological study of affect, I examine a variety of different manifestations of this affective polyvalence and concomitant ways in which authors, historians, and filmmakers use music as an affective shorthand, or take advantage of music’s ability to convey meaning. My conception of affect throughout this dissertation is shaped chiefly, but not exclusively, by the concepts of territorialization and the refrain in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; and, in its more physical manifestations, by Roland Barthes’s discussions of the grain of the voice and the corporeality of musical experience, as well as Vladimir Jankélévitch’s distinction between drastic and gnostic ways of listening. My first chapter surveys music and its affective territory in key scenes from Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie, whose narrator territorializes the ever-elusive “traditional” mores of his beloved Valois region onto its folk songs as interpreted by a succession of women who seem to him to bear the idealized truth of his Valois identity. In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the famous Vinteuil Sonata is seen to evacuate a blank space on Swann’s soul, a territory in which he inscribes the name of Odette, and which stands in for and sustains his love for her thereafter. And in André Gide’s La Symphonie pastorale, the narrator’s obsession with a blind woman in his charge, and his opposition of the purity of sound to the wickedness of sight, finds its most stark literalization in a scene where they attend a performance of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony together, allowing them to glimpse a territory too perfect to exist in their base reality. In my second chapter, I focus on the composer Frédéric Chopin as a case study in the construction of musical meaning through extramusical and historical cues. I look at the processes by which keyboard instruments were, over the course of centuries, established as symbols of feminine domesticity, and then at how the music of Chopin—who composed chiefly for the piano, rather than in larger-scale genres like the symphony—has been seen to propagate that symbol. I read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray with an eye to the distinctly queer subtext of its title character, a subtext that is immediately more evident to the reader with foreknowledge of the gendered construction of Chopin and his work. I also look at a more recent French-language novella, Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Madame Pylinska et le secret de Chopin, which shows the durability of Chopin’s symbolic power as a figure of womanly softness that always threatens to subvert heteronormative paradigms. Chapter three examines the role of music in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, in which it functions as the most reliable cure for existential despair, both allowing the narrator Roquentin to “unstick” himself from the morass of undifferentiated time, and providing him with a rhythm to overlay on his self-conception of his past exploits: the difference between meaninglessness and grandiosity, the “rare and precious quality” of adventure. As something of a coda to this reading, I look at two films by Lars von Trier that show the mutability of music’s affects by inverting, or even perverting, the Sartrean paradigm: Melancholia, which draws even the viewer into existential nausea with its repeated use of the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—and allows us a musical catharsis only at the moment of cinematic apocalypse; and Dancer in the Dark, an unsettling variation on the movie musical whose main character, Selma, uses imaginary music to escape into the safety of her own affective bubble and unwittingly brings about her own demise.

Creator