I suggest Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening could be applied to the musical experience of the protagonists — of how the sonorous present takes place in them via the encounters. By definition, écouter means “to listen”; and entendre means “to hear.”
“To hear” is to understand the sense, for example, to hear the siren, the bird, or a drum. Whenever hearing something, one apprehends a rough outline of a situation (6). “To listen” means “tender l’oreille” in French, literally, “to stretch the ear”; this word also implies an intensification of the concern, a curiosity, or an anxiety (5).
Nancy claims that to be listening will always be to be straining toward or in an approach to the self (9). As Nancy suggests,
Approach to the self: neither to a proper self, nor to the self of an other, but to the form or structure of self as such, this is to say, to the form, structure, and movement of an infinite referral [renvoi], since it refers to something (itself) that is nothing outside of the referral. When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject. (9)
Nancy explains the relationship between the listener and the subject. The subject means the music, the voice, and itself here. As Nancy indicates, the subject, the music, “something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense “(9). In this sense, Nancy explains the nature of music (something or itself in Nancy’s words), resonating from self to self, and identify itself by the resonance. Nancy then refers to the visual sense. He suggests the idea that the sound would resonate between self and self, which seems similar to the idea of gaze. However, as he points out, the two is entirely different cases. As he suggests, “[i]n terms of the gaze, the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is, in a way, to itself that the subject refers or refers back. Thus, in a certain way there is no relationship between the two (10). How does this referral take place? Listening is the access to the reality into the musical amplification and composition (12). As Nancy emphasizes, the musical access to this reality (the condition of listening) is indissociably mine and
other, singular and plural, material and spiritual (15). The sonorous presence is a space-time which is made of a complex of returns of sound and always there is a contemporaneity of this audible sonorous presence (16). Thus, as Nancy thinks, the sonorous presence is always within return and encounter. As he suggests, “It returns (refers) to itself, it encounters itself or, better, occurs against itself, both in opposition to and next to itself” (16). The sonorous place is a place that becomes a subject when the sound resounds there (17).
ii. Musical Metaphor
Michael Spitzer defines musical metaphor as the relationship between the physical and the abstract; proximate and distal; familiar and unfamiliar (4). As Spitzer suggests, “[t]his relationship flows in opposite directions within the two realms of musical reception and production, and involves opposite concepts of ‘the body’” (4).
As Spitzer continues to point out, “[w]ith reception, theorists and listeners conceptualize musical structure by metaphorically mapping from physical bodily experience.” (4). On the other hand, as Spitzer suggests, “[w]ith production, the illusion of a musical body emerges through compositional poetics” (4). Spitzer firstly explains his idea with the material sound, the two notes E and F. Spitzer firstly uses the chord F Major to accompany with the bar of E and F, and then he uses the chord C Major to accompany with the bar of E and F. The bar is to present the different effect that the harmony can do with the notes. And also Spitzer explains that even a bar with only two notes can have different interpretations: F leads on to E, E as an ornament, or E as a goal. He disagrees with Scruton who suggests that the listener’s mood should go with the flow of the melody. According to Spitzer, Scruton suggests that music behaves like the body in motions and that the listener projects his
sensations to the movement of music; for example, the listener experiences rising and falling as the melody goes through (10). Accordingly, “a listener has no choice but to ascribe effects of space, motion, and purposive activity to tones, because not to experience music in this way is not to experience music at all”(10). As Spitzer continues to suggest, the “phenomenal space” of music is not clear according to Scruton11. Spitzer argues that the meaning of music, to a large extent, inheres not within notes themselves but within a concept we apply to them (10).
Spitzer then explains the duality of the notes of E and F may impact on the listener. As he suggests,
Now imagine the two notes as an image. E ornaments F not just in a structural sense, but like a decoration in a painting. To hear a phrase as a visual image is to objectify it into a quasi-plastic material. As ornamental figure, as the word suggests, bestows figurality upon a concept—gives it a physical presence, a body. Imagining music as painting, as tone painting, is to attend more to the qualities of its material than to the logic of its structure. (11)
Spitzer continues to ask his reader to imagine the two notes in different ways.
He asks the reader to imagine the notes as the vocal utterance. E completes F, not just as a weak beat to a strong beat, but like grammatical predicate to a subject. In this sense, music is compared to language. As he suggests, “the metaphor of music as language, like that of music as painting, is simply a way of hearing” (12). He then asks his reader to imagine the phrase as a living being—like a person moving through space; it traverses two coordinates of the pitch spectrum, F and E (12). As Spitzer suggests, “ [t]o comprehend the phrase as an image, an utterance, or an organism is to allow one’s hearing of musical structure to be shaped by a knowledge of different
11 Here Spitzer refers to Roger Scruton, the author of The Aesthetic of Music (1997).
spheres of human activity: representation, language, life” (12). As Spitzer points out, the listening experience is relational to the listener’s perspective of music (12). And it is even “ontological” (Spitzer 12). Music appears to engage the very being of a phrase, such that the notes seem to be alive, to speak, or to move (Spitzer12). Spitzer
discusses the conceptualization of musical thoughts, poetic sense of musical compositions, and the tradition of musical metaphors in the literary field.
iii. Deleuze’s Proust and Signs
Deleuze examines In Search of Lost Time through different types of signs and literary machines. He regards In Search of Lost Time as a quest for truths; Proust regains the time and approaches the essence through his applications of signs. The book has two parts— the signs and the literary machines. In part one, Deleuze suggests four major signs in Proust’s world. Deleuze elaborates on the content of these signs: to what truths they reveal and how these signs construct Proust’s memory. In part two, Deleuze argues that the artwork is essentially productive of certain truths. Proust’s novels have no truth but “orders of truth” (96). In the following passages, I will explain the worldly signs, the sensuous signs, and the love signs in Deleuze’s first and second chapters; and I will lead to the discussion of the art signs in his fourth chapter.
In chapter one “The Types of Sign” and chapter two “Signs and Truth,” Deleuze focuses on the three major types of signs that constitute In Search of the Lost Time:
the worldly signs, the sensuous signs, and the love signs. The worldly signs, for example, are often used in the social occasion. As Deleuze suggests,
The worldly sign appears as the replacement of an action or a thought. It stands for action and for thought. It is therefore a sign that does not refer
to something else, to a transcendent signification or to an ideal content, but has usurped the supposed value of its meaning. (5)
For example, if you make a cough at a certain point during the conversation, it can produce different tension by this deliberate cough. A cough is not merely a physical reaction that helps clean the spasm out of the throat but a deliberate behavior to imply something. As Deleuze suggests, “the worldly signs are the only ones capable of causing a kind of nervous exaltation, expressing the effect upon us of the persons who are capable of producing them” (5). As for the sensuous signs, Proust creates a world which abundantly flows out the sensuous signs with the impressions or quality of the senses: auditory, visual, kinesthetic, smell, and taste. The stimulations of the senses lead to the flux of the involuntary memory in the protagonist’s mind. As Deleuze elaborates,
It may happen that a sensuous quality gives us a strange joy at the same time that it transmits a kind of imperative. Thus experienced, the quality no longer appears as a property of the object that now possesses it, but as the sign of an altogether different object that we must try to decipher, at the cost of an effort that always risks failure. (6)
The sensuous signs lead to a quest time for a lost time eventually. What are love signs? Deleuze suggests that love signs are deceptive and that jealousy is the destination of love in Proust’s works. As he suggests,
They are deceptive signs that can be addressed to us only by concealing what they expressed: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts that give them a meaning, they do not excite a superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. (7) I suggest Deleuze’s analysis of love signs will be helpful for me to discuss the strong love of Swann and Marcel in the two main texts of this thesis. Besides, the
notion of the sensuous signs will be helpful for me to decipher “the little phrase” in Swann in Love. In my opinion, sometimes jealousy does not stem from the love rivals but from the charm of the lover in Proust’s works. For instance, in Swann’s Way, Swann is deeply in love with Odette:
With the result that he (Swann) came to regret every pleasure that he tasted in her (Odette’s) company, every new caress of which he had been so imprudent as to point out to her the delights, every fresh charm that he found in her, for he knew that, a moment later, they would go to in rich the collection of instruments in his torture-chamber. (SW 302)
The love signs incarnate the charm of the lover and targets to the imagination of the love rivals. The feelings of jealousy cause the affliction in Swann’s and Marcel’s mind, weaken the sovereignty of the two protagonists, and make them handover their own power to their lovers. As for Vinteuil’s sonata, Swann’s auditory experience is
depicted with other senses such as vision, olfactory, and tactile sensation, which together create the synesthesia effect.
However, according to Deleuze, worldly signs, love signs, and sensuous signs could not fully explain the objects because the objects are profounder. The quest of truth is led by the series of disappointments to acquire the real meaning of signs. In chapter three “Apprenticeship,” he defines “the apprenticeship” as an act of
attempting to decipher the signs, yet often fails. The reason behind this is that the objects are profounder than one expects and that the objects lead to other
associated objects. For example, Vinteuil’s little phrase is beautiful because it leads to the association of sea, fragrance, love, and so on. Deleuze contends that only art could reveal the essence that is half sheathed in the objects. As he suggests, “[a]s long as we discover a sign’s meaning in something else, matter still subsists, refractory to spirit. On the contrary, art gives us the true unity: unity of an
immaterial sign and of an entirely spiritual meaning” (27). In chapter four “Essences and the Signs of Art,” Deleuze asks the following question: “what is an essence as revealed in the work of art?” As he points out, it is difference, an absolute and ultimate difference—that constitutes being and make us conceive being (27).
Deleuze contends that there is no inter-subjectivity except an artistic one (28). As he suggests, “only by art can we emerge from ourselves, can we know what another sees of this universe that is not the same as ours” (28).
After a general discussion of signs, I shall explain the three literary machines in Deleuze’s system. Deleuze suggests that the artwork is essentially productive of certain truths. According to Deleuze, “all production starts from the impression because only the impression unites in itself the accident of the encounter and the necessity of the effect, a violence that obliges us to undergo” (95). The act to interpret and decipher the impression; in other words, the fragments of the
involuntary memory, is the part of the process of this production. The meaning is the product. However, as Deleuze suggests, there is no truth, but orders of truths (96).
As Deleuze elaborates,
The first order to appear is defined by reminiscences and essences, that is, by singularity, and by the production of time regained that corresponds to them and the conditions and agents of such production (natural and artistic sign). (96)
During this period, the truth is perceived simultaneously; the truth is anti-logos, worldliness. It is only reveal by the encounter. The epiphanies could not be decoded by the intelligence. As Deleuze suggests, “it is true that the first order seems to concern time regained because it comprehends all the cases of natural reminiscence and aesthetics essence” (96). Deleuze elaborates the second order of truth as
follows,
The second order is just as much concerned with art and the work of art, but it groups the pleasures and pains that are unfulfilled in themselves, which refer to something else, even of this something else and its finality remain unperceived. (96)
The second order of truth is to decipher the art signs— to dig in the undetermined meaning and to try to find the unification of senses and impression. It is a process of trying to unveil and discover meaning, however, the meaning often remains
unperceived. As for the third order of truth, as Deleuze suggests, “[t]he third order still concerns art, but is defined by universal alteration, death and the idea of death, the production of catastrophe (signs of aging, disease, ad death)” (96.). In The Captive, Vinteuil’s septet asks the question of the second order— death. Also
Deleuze argues that the second and third order produce “secondary truths” that are said to “enshrine” the first order (96)— to redeem time— and to find the meaning from the past time.