Music as Cultural Practice, 1800

V

If instrumental music, like the Freudian text, draws closest to narrative effects when it is at its most heterogeneous, its most self-conscious, its most experimental, does the converse also hold? Do we encounter a culturally instituted defense against the troubling pleasures of dislocation when instrumental music treats its forms as natural or invisibly conventional or spins out a seamless web of linear continuities? Do we encounter a form of the same defense when formalist and organicist modes of understanding insist that music is all syntax and no semantics, that to know a piece is to grasp a formal integrity that transcends culture and history? Is that defense repeated in a new guise when historicist modes of understanding claim that to know a piece is to grasp it as a reflection of culture and history, a text in its context? Is to resist dislocation to resist meaning itself? Is there, perhaps, a friction that works against such resistance in at least some

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music—by Brahms, say—that seems to adhere to it by design? Might one detect a similar resistance even in certain passages of formalist, organicist, and historicist commentary?

These polemical, these rhetorical, questions are, I believe, not merely posed in retrospect by what has waggishly been called a boadeconstructor, but also, and insistently, posed by the persistence of other-voiced discourse in the recent cultural past. In this light, the deconstructive practice that the present chapter—the present book—describes and enacts forms an effort to reclaim a lost legacy from Romanticism: a legacy, indeed, that has largely not been recognized as lost.

As the literary critic Jerome McGann has argued, the Romantic ideal sometimes called unity of being—"a completeness of idea, completeness of culture, perfection of art"—is typically theorized in fragmentary forms, "brilliant, argumentative, ceaseless, exploratory, incomplete, and not always very clear." Romantic poems take a parallel position; they observe "the realm of the ideal . . . as precarious—liable to vanish or move beyond one's reach at any time"; they "take up transcendent and ideal subjects because these subjects occupy areas of critical uncertainty," and their aim "is to rediscover the ground of stability in these situations."^[51] To all of which I would add: yes, but . . .

But consider Schumann's Carnaval , which approaches an ideal subject precisely through a kind of fragmentation. The miniatures that make up this collection are either character sketches or dances, that is, personal or social images; the two types come together in the closing piece, "Marche des Davidsbundler contre les Philistins." This appropriately macaronic title signals the expressive force of the collection, which is to affirm the social value of creative idiosyncrasy. (The League of David the Psalmist suggests an aspiration to social authority; that the league assembles in the spirit of carnival suggests the aspiration to debunk or evade social authority.)

[51] Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983), 47, 48, 72–73. I should add that McGann proposes a hermeneutics that is somewhat, if not perhaps entirely, at odds with the one I propose here. My position has more in common with the one offered by Tilottama Rajan in her Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980).

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My concern here is with just who makes the affirmation. At an early moment, Schumann sets forth a block of pieces (four or five, depending on how you count) that play with the idea of his musical signature. First come Florestan and Eusebius, the impetuous and introspective halves of Schumann's composite persona. The pieces named for these figures duly occur in tandem, but they fail to mesh into a bounded whole. "Eusebius" ends with a tonic

six-four chord; "Florestan," with a G-minor signature, then begins and ends on an unresolved dominant minor-ninth. Closure, and that only partial, must wait for the next piece, "Coquette," which begins by progressing from the dominant of G through

to its own tonic,

. Both "Florestan" and "Eusebius" find a deferred resolution here, "Florestan" in the progression to

, which acts as a deceptive cadence (g: V–VI), and "Eusebius" in the

sonority to which its closing

failed to progress. I reluctantly pass over the question of why Schumann's alter egos merge under a feminine sign—a "coquettish" one at that—to focus on questions of identity and plurality.^[52] In its harmonic open-endedness, Schumann's double persona proves to be something other than a sign of the self in division. Its complementary halves form a fiction of unity in the midst of a far more fragmentary and fluctuating mode of identity. And lest we think that the flux can be arrested, "Coquette" is immediately doubled in a condensed variant called "Replique," which begins by echoing, then literally repeating, the transitional passage that links "Coquette" to "Eusebius" and "Florestan." The result is a vertiginous trope for the plurality of the personal subject: a double female persona that doubles a double male one. What next?

The answer to that is "Sphinxes," the notation, in double whole notes, of the three pitch cells on which Carnaval is based. These famously employ all the letters in Schumann's name that also denominate tones in German usage: S.C.H.A.

and its anagrams AS.C.H.

and A.S.C.H. Now, because Ernestine von Fricken, to whom Schumann was engaged at the time of composition (and who appears in Carnaval as "Estrella"), came from the town of Asch, the S.C.H.A./A.S.C.H. anagram suggests a

[52] I explore the gender question in "Carnaval , Cross-dressing, and the Woman in the Mirror," in Ruth Solie, ed. Musicology and Difference (Berkeley, 1993).

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further (or more primary?) mobility of identity between masculine and feminine personae, and redoubles the "Eusebius"/"Florestan"—"Coquette"/"Replique" configuration. Yet it is important to note that S.C.H.A. takes pride of place; it is the first sphinx—pointedly a male, not female, sphinx—and it forms "the" signature of the piece by its transcription of the composer's "real" name. Another vertigo here, and one that corresponds quite closely to Friedrich Schlegel's concept of irony as "the clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos."^[53] The sphinxes are never played, and it is commonly assumed they are not meant to be. That assumption, however, rests on an esthetic of unity that Carnaval puts into question with great exuberance. Perhaps we should hesitate over this point; perhaps the sphinxes should be played after all, or played sometimes, at the whim of the performer. In any case, to "sign" the piece with sphinxes further emphasizes the eternal play of unity and plurality—that being the topic of the riddle the Theban sphinx posed to Oedipus. Q : "What walks on four legs at morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at evening?" A: "A man."

Schumann's deconstructive play with unity and plurality has parallels in many, indeed most, of the compositions we have studied in this book. Recall Beethoven's two-movement piano sonatas as we saw them in Chapter 2. The sonatas of travesty revalue fragmentation, resistance, and discontinuity as affirmative elements of the ideal. The sonatas of transfiguration repeat and interrogate the same elements at the center of utopian idylls. Op. 90 perhaps comes close to stabilizing the ripple of dislocation—and yet its problematical sonority, the submediant, continues to echo through the closing measures of the rondo. Op. 111 stabilizes nothing and transforms everything. It resolves its longest-standing dissonance (the Dm⁷ aggregate) in the midst of a dissonant episode (the espressivo passage), which forms an epilogue to a consummatory dissonance (the

trills and counterpoint)—all this by way of celebrating C major as the polestar of consonance.

I take these compositions to model a general cultural practice: a practice that resists as well as pursues, challenges as well as embraces,

[53] Friedrich Schlegel, "Ideas" (1800), fragment no. 69, trans. Peter Firchow, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe , ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge, 1984).

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the nineteenth-century ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. In aspiring to unity of being, the Romantic subject also aspires to plurality of being, each term forming the necessary and necessarily unstable horizon of the other. Hence, each in its own way, the materials of this chapter. "La malinconia" begins with, then excludes, the major key of the Allegretto; is this a continuity or the refusal of one? The Freud of "The Uncanny" disperses himself into a trio of alter egos—Hoffmann's Nathaniel, Ernst Mach, his own reflection—while a more distanced Freud insists that dispersal is only a (mis)translation of his character. And Schumann's stabilizing division of himself into complementary halves turns out to mask (or is it to empower?) a more radical and affirmative fragmentation. For every S.C.H.A., an A.S.C.H. and an AS.C.H; if there is going to be an anagram, there can only be more than one.

Where there is other-voicedness, then—and that is more places than one may think—the critical uncertainty of ideal subject matter becomes, or provokes, a productive agency: productive of meaning, and productive of openness of meaning. As Friedrich Schlegel observes, "Versatility consists not just in a comprehensive system but also in a feeling for the chaos outside that system, like man's feeling for something beyond man."^[54] Schlegel's remark slyly exemplifies its own principle; it deconstructs itself with a submerged chiasmus: system/chaos—something beyond man/man . The transcendental term, "something beyond man," is made parallel to chaos, otherness; the system is merely human. And yet, of course, only the system makes versatility possible at all; it is the "not just" before the "but also." In short, to promote something I said earlier in this chapter from footnote to text: deconstruction, by which I mean the practical deconstruction exemplified in other-voicedness, keeps discourse circulating and thaws frozen positions. It is a sign of life.

[54] Ibid., fragment no. 55.

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