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Ars NovaAuthor(s): Maurice Blanchot and Donald SchierSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 17, No. 2, (Spring - Summer, 1979), pp. 76-84Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832834Accessed: 08/08/2008 13:59

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Ars Nova Maurice Blanchot Translated by Donald Schier

In Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann delivers up the composer Adrian Leverkiihn to damnation. Not merely to eternal damna- tion-which would not be much-but to that more serious curse which makes of him the symbolic image of German destiny as it sinks into the madness of the Third Reich. Leverkuhn's story follows Nietzche's rather closely: Leverkuhn's art borrows much from Schoenberg. Not only that, Thomas Mann has pointed out these correspondences, which in any case are obvious. We know about his own relationship and later his quarrels with Schoenberg; we know also that Mann was initiated into twelve- tone music by Adorno, and that the latter is far from being willing to damn Schoenberg, much less to associate the destiny of the new music with the National-Socialist aberration. We shall not discuss Thomas Mann's novel itself, which is preserved by narrative ambiguities from simplistic conclusions. It remains true, however, that the musical system attributed to the de- testable ingenuity of the composer is the serial system, and that

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thus a decisive turning in all musical development, is, without much in the way of scruple or precaution, presented as a sym- bolic symptom of the Nazi perversion. Mann notes in his journal that behind the beloved name of Adrian Leverkuhn lies con- cealed the hated name of Adolf Hitler.

The Ars nova, which is the source of all future music, can then logically be defined as music socially and politically tainted. Others, on the basis of esthetic principles wrongly called so- cialist, speak of reactionary music. The same is true of non- representational art. But back to Thomas Mann. The motives of his judgment are complex. On the one hand, as he admits, his understanding of music stops at Wagner, and in the face of the new adventure he feels the suspicion and intolerance of a man still devoted to the traditional forms of an art which he loves- an intolerance which is universal and selfish but all the firmer for that. He sees in the new music a disruption which seems to him to be a disruption of order itself. But on the other hand his native shrewdness leads him to feel in atonal music the quality of change and innovation which he needed to give authority to the genius of Adrian Leverkuhn. He even suggests that this discovery, achieved through the personal folly of a man and the general folly of the times, is not a chance mistake, but represents the madness natural to an art which has come to its end. He says in his journal that the music of Schoenberg furnished him all that he needed to describe the general crisis of civilization and of music and thus to point up the main idea of his book: the coming of sterility, the innate despair which makes the pact with the demon possible.

In this condemnation of Mann's, one in which the word damnation is forcefully understood, there is the judgment of a cultivated man. It is as a cultivated man that Mann fears the Ars nova, just as it is as a cultivated man (I think this must be said in all simplicity) and not as a political theorist that any socialist ruler may utter a harsh judgment of non-representational art. The same is true of Lukacs and in general of all men of taste who, in the name of what they think is Marxism, define as reactionary all forms of art and literature which the long cultural tradition

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they have inherited does not allow them to welcome with open arms. Or more precisely: what they object to and (rightly) fear in artistic experience is what makes the latter a stranger to all culture. There is a non-cultural aspect of literature and art with which it is not easy to come to an understanding.

On the subject of the "new music"-we shall continue to use this expression though it is not really very satisfactory- Adorno expresses himself as follows: "Atonalism, if it really results from a desire to purify music of all convention, includes as a result of that very fact something barbarous and capable of continually disturbing afresh the artistically arranged surface; a dissonant chord sounds as if the civilizing principle of order did not entirely control it; the work of Webern, in its fragmentation, remains almost entirely primitive."1 Such statements must be read with caution. The words "barbarous" and "primitive" are hardly appropriate. The effort of the composer to make possible the total organization of the musical elements and in particular to renounce the idea of a natural esthetic (according to which the very sounds or a given system of sounds have in themselves

meaning and value), that effort decisively opposes and contra- dicts any barbarous conception of music, even when this bar- barism hides, as it always does, behind the appearance of the ideal. And as to the technique whose excessive use is being condemned (and it is condemned a second time as barbarous, as

being also the barbarism of total rationalism) it does not in any sense claim to be all of music, only that it must predominate momentarily in order to "break up the blind constraint upon musical materials" or else to hold in abeyance the already elab- orated meaning of musical expression; in a word, if we may repeat, it seeks to destroy the illusion that music has by nature a

quality of beauty independent of historical decisions and of the musical experience itself.

From this point of view, what appears to be "barbarous" in the Ars nova, is precisely what ought to keep us from judging it barbarous: its critical power, its refusal to accept worn-out

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cultural forms as eternally valid, and especially its violent de- termination to empty natural sounds of all preconceived meaning, to keep them empty, and so open to a meaning yet to come. This is a violence which, since it does violence to nature, has in it something despotic and dangerously uncivilized.

Similarly, what is the meaning of the judgment I have quoted from Adorno according to which the fragmentation of tonal units in Webern makes his music an almost entirely primitive event? Without undertaking a technical analysis, it is clear that when the composer, with austere rigor, renounces the con- tinuity of a unified work or the fluid development of what Walter Benjamin has called the "auricular" work of art, when he renounces creating a perspicuous work, his intent is not to deny all coherence, nor the value of the form nor even to oppose a musical work considered as an organized whole (as Stravinsky often seems to do) but on the contrary to place himself beyond esthetic totality. More exactly, the totality he rejects is that of a musical composition which is already given (preformed); he uses instead a language first made indeterminate through the re- jection of traditional conventions and then restructured so as to include most of the essentials of earlier thematic development; now composition will be able to progress only through analysis, through division into more and more subtle structures, i.e., through a method of composition which will make use of dis- tinction and dissociation. If the musical language then seems to be broken up and even to be scattered into ever more frag- mented forms, the reason is that in reality analysis has become creative just as variation has ceased to be a method of developing a theme which is to be enriched and has turned into a method of discovery by which the totality already potentially present in the choice of the tone row and its preparatory working up reveals itself by being put to what amounts to torture; yet the obstinate return of the identical notes seeks to bring about constant renewal, as Adorno also says. Finally, when it is claimed that the last works of Webern have "liquidated even contrapuntal organization, I think it would be better to say that Webern has in no way freed himself from rigorous counterpoint,

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but that he has decided we are to hear only its nodal points and traces, in memory of a rigor which is no longer imposed on us except as a reminiscence or as absence, and leaves us as we listen, always free (dangerously free).

The fragmentary work-the need of the work itself to be fragmentary-then has a very different meaning depending on whether the work appears as a renunciation of the act of com- position, i.e., an aggressive imitation of pre-musical language, (such as expressionism tried to achieve through refinement) or whether it appears as the pursuit of a new form of writing which makes the completed work difficult, not because it evades being finished but because -beyond the conception of the work as being unified and enclosed in itself, organizing and domin- ating values being transmitted by traditional skills-, this kind of writing explores the infinite space of the work with in- exorable rigor yet is based on a new postulate which is that the relationship of the work will not necessarily satisfy the concepts of unity, coherence and continuity. The problem posed by the fragmented work is a problem of extreme maturity; first in artists but also in societies. Walter Benjamin remarks that, in the history of art, last works tend to be catastrophes: "With the

great masters, finished works weigh less heavily than those

fragments on which they worked all their lives. They draw their

magic circle in the fragmentary work." Why? Because the work

against which they measure themselves cannot evoke in them a total response, or rather because the artist must find a beginning when the "composition" itself is in some sense already finished; this leaves him only the pain of apparently self-defeating work, the agony of a dislocation which is meaningless only because it continues to promise meaning or is refractory to the order of

meaning. I should like with these remarks to put an end to a mis-

understanding by recalling that if there is an essential difference between art and culture, it is not that art is retrograde, that is turned towards an uncultured primitiveness or that it is tempted

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by nostalgia for an originally natural harmony; the difference exists because art has always gone beyond all acquired forms of culture, to the point that it might better be called post-cultural. What frightens Thomas Mann in the Ars nova (and frightened the masters of the Third Reich no less, since they made haste to proscribe atonal works, preferring to atonalism an esthetic of grandeur, of monumentality and pretentious accomplishment) is indeed frightening through the unending demand which the artistic experience makes on us; and this experience can be realized in fragmentary works because they are enough, by their very existence, to undermine the whole future of culture and any utopia based on happy reconciliation.

The new music allows us to "hear" in an almost immediate way the gap between artistic affirmation and cultural affirmation. It undermines the notion of the work, whereas culture needs finished works that can be admired as perfect and whose eternal immobility can be contemplated in the depots of civilization that we call museums, concerts, academies, record collections and libraries. The new music does its best to "desensitize" language, to purify it of all those intentions and meanings which make of it a kind of natural knowledge. It is rigid, hard, austere, has no sense of play, no shadings, and refuses to concede any- thing to that "human quality" to which society is always so eager to appeal so as to have an alibi for its own inhumanity. Now, humanism is the idea that carries culture along, that is, the idea that mankind must be able to recognize itself easily in the works of man, that mankind is never divided against itself, that there is a constant progressive movement, an unbreakable continuity which joins the old with the new, since culture and accumulation advance shoulder to shoulder. Whence it follows that culture requires of art and language certain responses, because these responses alone can be accumulated in the great silos of culture: and therefore a difficult art which claims only to be pure questioning and also puts in doubt the very possibility

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of art, must appear as dangerous, hostile and unfeelingly violent. Cold, insensitive, inhuman, sterile, formalist, abstract, these reproaches, when directed at the Ars nova, always give away the man of culture who formulates them, and who formulates them all the more forcefully and sincerely since he feels himself threatened by what is "good" and "sound" and felicitous in that art when it comes face to face with the real distress which he refuses to admit. For who can deny that culture is "good"? And certainly it is legitimate to labor for its increase. What writer ought not also be a man of culture? We are all men of culture when we do not write and even when we write without

writing. When Alban Berg speaks of the joy he felt as the tone row came by chance (that is, by method) to produce tonal relationships, there is surely in that joy a feeling of consolation produced by return to a cultural tradition; exile has suddenly come to an end; like the prodigal son the composer has returned to the familiar bosom of tonality and unity.

The new music, and this is its most decisive endeavor for the other arts and for expression itself, the music condemned by the man of culture, is both rigorously constructed and yet of such a nature that it is not built around a center, and that the very idea of center and unity is as it were expelled from the area of the work, which thus becomes, in the last analysis, infinite. This is a

painful, a scandalous condition for any culture and for any comprehension. "In this music, where each individual sound is determined in a completely transparent way by the construction of the whole, the difference between the essential and the accidental disappears." And Adorno adds: "Such music is always close to its center and hence those formal conventions which used to regulate proximity and distance from the center lose their meaning". Since everything is taken to be essential, there are no more non-essential transitions between strong elements, just as there is no more development or theme to be developed, but instead a perpetual variation which varies nothing at all, a drive towards non-repetition which can be successful only through an indefinitely repeated affirmation within difference itself.

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Yes, this is a painful condition, and indeed what is presented by such a mode of expression is something very much like sorrow itself, sorrow which is heard and sorrow seeking to be heard, which is proof that thought is trying to escape the power of unity. At about the time when Schoenberg was beginning to become known, Worringer and certain German painters assigned to plastic art the task of finding an unprivileged field in which orientation would be impossible; the field was to be defined by lines all points of which would have the same value. Later, Klee came to dream of a space such that the omission of any center must at the same time eliminate any trace of vagueness or indecisiveness. Still later... But let us not seek in the com- parison of the different arts the characteristics of a common attempt: common precisely in this that all the arts affirmed the existence of relationships without unity, relationships which consequently escape any common measure. Yet when I read George Poulet's book2 in which all the adventures of word and thought are related to the power of the circle, since they are always enclosed in the relationship of a center to a circum- ference, a relationship they are always trying to break only to fit better within it, I wondered why this book, in which the simp- lest because it is the perfect geometrical figure allowed me to grasp without alteration and without monotony, the most di- verse values and riches, I wondered, once I had closed the book why the history of criticism and culture came to a close with it, and why it seemed with melancholy serenity to bid me farewell and at the same time to authorize entry into a new artistic space. What space? Not, of course, to reply to this question but to show how difficult it is to approach it, I should like to make use of a metaphor: it is almost accepted that the universe is curved, and it has often been supposed that the curve must be positive, whence the image of a finite and unlimited sphere. But we cannot exclude the hypothesis of a universe (the term now becomes deceptive) which is shapeless, evading every optical requirement, evading also the consideration of wholeness, being merely not finite, disunited, discontinuous. What is the universe like? Let us drop that question and raise this one: what will man

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be like on the day he dares to face up to the idea that the curvature of the world and even of his world must be indicated by a negative sign? Will he ever be willing to accept this thought which, although it would free him from the fascination with unity, might force him for the first time to take the measure of a godless cosmos, of a space defined only by questions which cannot have answers, since any answer would necessarily presuppose the shape of shapes? Perhaps this amounts to asking ourselves this question: Is man capable of a radical interrogation, which comes down to saying, is man capable of literature when literature verges upon the absence of the book? Such is the question that the Ars nova now directs at him with all its neutral violence (being in that respect diabolical, so Thomas Mann was right in the end).3

NOTES

1. Th. W. Adorno. Philosophy of Modern Music. Tr. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster New York: Seabury Press, 1973.

2. Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Tr. Carley Davison and Elliott Coleman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967

3. "Ars Nova" by Maurice Blanchot. Copyright Editions Gallinard, 1969 Translation published by permission.