III. Literature Review
i. The Studies about Music in Proust’s Novels
Some scholars have been studying the fictive music and the real music in In
Search of Lost Time. They contrast the descriptions of Vinteuil’s sonata with other musical works in Proust’s contemporary. In the late nineteenth century, as Jennifer Rushworth suggests, this era is twisted by two forces — a nostalgia yearning of programme music and the breakthrough of absolute music. Jennifer suggests that Proust favors absolute music and wishes to portray absolute music through the fictive music of Vinteuil’s sonata. Rushworth’s analysis is based on Proust’s writing and the letters of Debussy. Joseph Acquisto also supports the idea of Proust’s allegiance on absolute music, yet different from Rushworth — he compares Beethoven’s music with Vinteuil’s sonata. I endorse Rushworth’s viewpoint of Proust’s allegiance to absolute music.
Some other scholars tend to suggest the structural model of the music to be the structural model for the novel. As Larkin points out, scholars have paid particular attention to the cyclical sonata form and regarded the sonata form as a parallel structure for Proustian narrative (71).One of the most prominent scholars who support this view point is Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Nattiez argues that Wagner’s Parsifal is the redemptive model for the redemptive work — Vinteuil’s sonata. Nattiez also believes that music is the redemptive model for the literature. However, I think that Nattiez places too much emphasis on the philosophical ideas. He neglects the clues and the hints for the musical descriptions such as tempo and tonality. To study the descriptions of music, I suggest that we should not neglect the significance of musicology.
Nattiez and Acquisto both discuss the experience of listening to music in In Search of Lost Time. Nattiez proposes a model of three stages of listening to music — how the intellect tries to decode the indescribable emotions aroused by the notes.
Acquisto relates the experience of listening to music to the “sonorous present,” a term conceptualized by Jean-Luc Nancy in Listening. I attempt to relate this question
to the philosophy of art — what kinds of aesthetic epiphanies are discovered as the
“sonorous present” takes place in the two protagonists and how the protagonists reflect differently on the meaning of Vinteuil’s sonata.
ii. Musicology: Musical Issues in the 19th and 20th Century
I will examine the musical descriptions in Swann’s Way and The Captive with musicology. Carl Dahlhaus’s The Idea of Absolute Music (1978) and Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century (1980) provide the elaboration of concepts of absolute music and
neo-romanticism. I suggest that Dahlhaus’s notions can explain Proust’s allegiance to absolute music, as Rushworth Jennifer points out in “Proust’s Notes to the Imaginary Music of Vinteuil: A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and the Programme Music
Controversy ”(2012). French Music since Berlioz8 (2006) offers the spectacle of music in nineteenth-century France and the beginning of Modern music. Charles Rosen’s Sonata Forms (1988) elaborates on the history and the variation of sonata forms.
Some of the scholars argue that the cyclical sonata form is as a parallel structure for Proustian narration. In the following paragraphs, I will point out the important issues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Romanticism to Neo-romanticism.
During the romantic period, circa 1825-1910, Ludwig Van Beethoven turned a new leaf of sonata form. Beethoven’s musical composition of sonata was no longer restricted by the classical sonata form. Due to Beethoven’s influence, as Rosen suggests, “sonata style insisted on a sharp focus on the tonic. The Romantics saw the tremendous advantages offered by a fuzzier system (368). Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert were all inspired and played their talents to the fullest in the fuzzier system
8 This is a book of collective essays by numerous authors.
of sonata. As Charles Rosen suggests,
After Beethoven, the sonata was the vehicle of the sublime. It played the same role in music as the epic in poetry, and the large historical fresco in painting. The proof of craftsmanship was the fugue, but the proof of greatness was the sonata. Only through sonata, it seemed, could the highest musical ambitions be realized. The opera, because of its extra musical aspects, was only a second best. Pure music in its highest state was sonata. (366)
Wagner distanced his music from that of Beethoven, According to Carl Dahlhaus, Wagner described Beethoven’s Ninth symphony as “endless and imprecise expressiveness” (18)9. As Dahlhaus points out, “ ‘Absolute instrumental music’ as Wagner understood is, strictly speaking, music ‘no longer’ determined by speech and scenic action”(22).In this sense, Wagner didn’t quite approve with Beethoven’s melody (22). Wagner felt that Beethoven had gone beyond his absolute-musical oeuvre, yet his music failed to achieve the precise and finite melody (Dahlhaus 22).
On the contrary, the impreciseness that Wagner avoided in his music was exactly what Beethoven wanted to portray in his Ninth Symphony— the music of endless and imprecise expressiveness— the music of abstraction.
According to Dahlhaus, the second half of the nineteenth century, from 1850 to 1890, was the period of neo-romanticism; the influential musicians of this period were Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Brukner (1)10. As he points out,
The stylistic continuity between Schumann and Brahms, Berlioz and Liszt, the Wagner of the romantic operas and the Wagner of the music dramas, may be seen as grounds for designating the entire century “romantic” so
9 The sentence was cited from Carl Dahlhaus’s The Idea of Absolute Music.
10 The idea is cited from Carl Dahlhaus’s Between Romanticism and Modernity: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century.
far and its music and is concerned, so that the caesuras of circa 1850 and circa 1890 diminish in importance to the level of divisions between phases of romanticism. […] Yet stylistic changes patently did take place, and there is no mistaking the altered “tone” of music after 1850 […]. The composers who died within a few years of 1850— Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin—
Represent a different era from that of Wagner and Liszt, although they belong to the same generation. (19)
The stylistic change took place radically in the nineteenth century. Romantic music was abundant with the structural change of sonata and symphony, flowering with Wagner’s operas. Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin focused on the pure instrumental music, while Wagner’s operas and Liszt’s symphony poems need the extra element of language. Proust mentions Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal in his novels. He also reveals his opinions to Liszt and Chopin in Swann’s Way.
iii. Art and Truth
To dig into the meaning of the encounters with music, I will delve into the relation between art and truth—how the philosophers Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche contend on the mapping field of art and truth. The list of the following books provides the discussion of the concept: Tom Rockmore’s “Kant on Art and Truth after Plato” (2013), Julian Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of art (1996), and Christopher Kul-Want’s Philosophers on Art from Kant to Postmodernism (2013).
As Tom Rockmore suggests, “according to Plato, art must but cannot grasp the truth, which can only be grasped by the philosopher who can literally ‘see’ the real”
(45). Rockmore points out Plato’s denial that art can’t successfully imitate the real (45). In other words, Plato thinks that art is only an illusion of mimesis, bringing
people away from truth and reality. While Plato thinks that the aesthetic judgment must be true or false, Kant bases his view on feeling which is subjective (Rockmore 45). Kant suggests that people do not judge works of art according to concepts but according to the so-called “free play” between imagination and the understanding (Rockmore 46). Kant contends that aesthetic judgment is subjective (Rockmore 47).
People can find different interpretations on the aesthetic objects (Rockmore 47).In this sense, Kant considers that the aesthetic objects can have multiple subjective truths.
Julia Young elaborates and summarizes Nietzsche’s philosophy with the discussion of Nietzsche’s works diachronically. These works include The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirit (1878), Gay Science (1882), and Twilight of the Idols (1888). Young points out that Nietzsche’s philosophy is inspired by Schopenhauer a lot and that the relation between art and truth for Schopenhauer is positive—artworks reveal the features of reality. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is a version of Kantian idealism in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (Young 5). As Young suggests, “[i]n aesthetic consciousness there is, we have seen, a radical transformation of its subject, a transformation into, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘the pure will-less, timeless subject of knowledge’” (12).
Schopenhauer insists “the will-lessness of the aesthetic perceptions“ (Young 14).
Schopenhauer thinks that art does not mirror nature, but rather eliminates or obscures everything in an object that is not its purpose (Young 16). Nietzsche adheres to part of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of Will, yet Nietzsche does not approve that art reflects truth and reality. On the contrary, Nietzsche contends that artworks provide the beautiful illusions. Young elaborates on the Apollonian and the Dionysian consciousness in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. According to Young, Apollonian consciousness basically adheres to what Schopenhauer thinks about the
platonic idea (33). As Young suggests, in Apollonian state, Nietzsche thinks that people take delight in beautiful appearance and that dreams stand for the Apollonian consciousness (33). Dreams are like filters that delete the unimportant details of the reality and make people perceive the features of reality. On the other hand,
“intoxication, rupture, ecstasy, frenzy,” these characteristics stand for the Dionysian consciousness (33). In Schopenhauer’s system, the objects of the Dionysian
consciousness is “world as Will” – which Nietzsche also recognized as the Dionysian consciousness (34). In Twilights of the idols, accordingly, Nietzsche believes that art is life-affirming and sublimated sexuality (127). Nietzsche thinks that art
paradigmatically idealizes reality because of its sexual intoxication (129).
Besides Julia Young, Christopher Kul-Want’s Philosophers on Art from Kant to Postmodernism: A Critical Reader (2013) offers the collective essays about scholars’
studies to the meaning of art, especially of Nietzsche. Among them, Alan Badiou specifically interprets Nietzsche’s idea Will to Power as “Will to Power as Art.” In Swann’s Way, for Swann, the meaning of Vinteuil’s sonata is deeply rooted and related to the obsessive yearning of love and the carnal desire. Therefore, I will examine the narrative about the entwining feelings of love and the haunting notes. I suggest that Nietzsche’s philosophy about art could offer an interpretation of the meaning of Vinteuil’s sonata for Swann.
IV. Methodology