The starting point of this analysis operates under a purely musicological perspective, aiming to answer two questions: what aspects of Burgess’s text are or may be considered as musical, and second, what do they bring to the literary text as such?
By reading Anthony Burgess’s texts that are full of technical and historical details, we feel an irresistible desire to check if all of them are really genuine. This would apply in particular to his short story about Claude Debussy and Stéphane Mallarmé, “1889, and the Devil’s Mode”, in which there is a large number of references to names and well-known facts. At first glance everything seems absolutely true: the characters whom Debussy loved and associated with, their remarks on music, poetry and literature, places visited, etc. Everything looks like a historical narrative which, in fact, encourages the reader to check his own knowledge, always insufficient when dealing with such a ‘multidisciplinary’ author as Burgess. Yet when one looks closer, the story offers an aspect of optical illusion: “from a distance” it seems very convincing, but seen “up close”, somewhat disturbing. The musical references which are the most interesting and the most numerous there, seen “from a distance” almost look scientific, in some cases understandable only to someone familiar with this kind of contents, but viewed more closely they are not always right:
First, the title. Why the “Devil’s Mode” if in the Middle Ages the augmented fourth interval was the only one that received the nickname “Diabolus in musica”? It was particularly disturbing in the Locrian scale (B - C - D - E - F -G - A – B), in which the tritone was formed between the final note B, and the middle note or fifth, F. Only the underlining points of support, fit for any modal system, made it stand out as augmented fourth. For this reason this mode was little used, and finally prohibited.
Let’s go further down the first page of the text: Burgess mentions the pentatonic mode of gamelan “la do re fa sol”[1]. Actually, the Javanese scale called Slendro or Salendro, according to various sources, is a pentatonic mode — C - D - E - G - A[2] or C - D - F - G - A[3] — the difference being due to an approximation of an equally-tempered five note scale. The pentatonic scale from the note la, mentioned by Burgess, is called in the western modal system as the minor pentatonic — A - C - D - E - G — but his version is different.
I checked the list of gamelan instruments used during the 1889 Universal Exhibition in the study by Jean-Pierre Chazal, entitled “Great Success for Exotics. Back to Javanese performances of the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition”[4]. It contains no ketipung nor kenong mentioned by Burgess, nor male or female choir. Let us read the excerpt of Burgess’s text in full:
And then there were the three pesinden or girl singers and the gerong or male chorus howling away in the pentatonic scale: la do re fa sol. So, then, he [Claude] had heard the Javanese gamelan. The black touches of the piano, putting the scale up a semitone. The white touches ignored, two especially, the si and fa that sounded the augmented fourth forbidden in the music of the Church. But that augmented fourth had been tamed into components of the dominant seventh[5].
Let’s reconsider this passage point by point: the “black touches” are C #, D #, F #, G #, A #. “The scale up a semitone”, as Burgess said, would be: D – E – G – A – B. This is not either the scale that the author mentioned above. And it’s difficult to understand, in the context of the Javanese scale, what the two “whites touches ignored, two especially, the si and fa that sounded the augmented fourth” are doing here, because the si is not mentioned in any pentatonic scale. Besides, in this disposition they are rather a diminished fifth. The author juxtaposes the augmented fourth “forbidden in the music of the Church”, namely the modal system of the Middle Ages with the pentatonic scale, specific to many cultures around the world and at different times, including our own. Moreover, this is not the dominant seventh which “tamed the augmented fourth”, but Guido of Arezzo’s hexachordal system, which replaced the modal system.
We know that a work of art or a literary work is not a scientific treatise, so I stopped looking for other possible inaccuracies and left out the meticulous pleasure of solving puzzles, since apparently, in Burgess’s case, the puzzles are not where we would look for them. It remains for us to find another mode of reading.
1. Polyphony
By reading the text more globally, and avoiding getting lost in the detail, we see that it consists of different levels. Which leaves us thinking about a global polyphonic process of development, since the reader is invited to pass from one reading level to another, from one context to another.
The first level is that of the whole short story which speaks about real people who were important in the life of Claude Debussy, about their encounters and relationships. The second level, which covers the entire text, is a critical reflection on music, poetry and literature, developed through the comments or remarks of the characters. And thirdly, many musical, poetic or literary references suggest a “factual embroidery” (since very detailed), which can be regarded as an independent line of narration because of its density and its particularity, namely, repetitions. This “factual embroidery” made of well-defined and recognizable elements throughout the text, could also be compared to musical notes that recur in various configurations in a mode, and thus develop different patterns.
One might ask oneself: what is Anthony Burgess’s purpose? Does he seek to give the reader a thorough understanding of the text and the pleasure of detail (which he himself has inevitably), or just the “poetic and musical perception” or the “sound colour” of narration, like listening to music, which can be either analytic, almost scientific, based on technical knowledge, or emotional, where one does not recognise “the mode” but rather feels “the ethos of the mode”, namely its specific musical colour and its particular sonority?
2. Audible Reading
Hans Georg Gadamer, in his text “Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Art”, mentioned two kinds of “great literature”: the one that “we cannot read aloud” (such as Rilke, “a poet who appeals more to meditation than recitation”), and the other, “examples of an art of language that one would like to hear as music” (such as Schiller, Goethe or George Eliot)[6].
Let’s return to the text of Burgess. He offers yet another mode of reading, which could be called “audible reading”. It isn’t about the musicality of the literary text, it isn’t about whether one would like to hear aloud or not, but about the sonorous content of the language which it evokes or to which it refers the reader. Like a musical work that the conductor hears just by reading the notes of the score. Burgess’s readers have the opportunity to actually hear the sound of his words, which gradually become a sequence of sounds with their own logic of appearance and repetition.
According to the musical experiences which each one of us has, in this short story some, many, or all the references will be audible. The strength and ingenuity of Burgess are based on the fact that it leaves no one outside of that pleasure "of hearing the text" just by reading it. There is at least one reference “audible” for everyone, it's La Marseillaise. And through it, the fourth interval, since the author explains very well where to find it:
You climb from the Allons en- to the fants, and that’s a fourth. And you climb again from the la pa- to the trie, and that’s another fourth.[7]
On the other hand, the reader with extensive musical knowledge feels real pleasure reading the text since it evokes a world of sonorities to which is added a set of different contexts, leading to what might be called “contextual listening”.
3. Polysemy
For a reader the transition from one content to another, from one narrative line to another, is all the more difficult because we find there a lot of examples, or rather, only examples, of polysemy and metaphor. By way of illustration: one of the components of this text, the expression “a blessed damozel”, which could correspond to one of the notes of our imagined mode, can be understood either as the relationship between Claude and Gabrielle (which was a real relationship), or at the religious level as an image of the Virgin Mary, namely the ideal of woman, or again as a poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or yet again as a musical reference to Claude Debussy's cantata of the same title, which used the text of Rossetti’s poem, or finally as Rossetti’s picture, of which “a version of the drawing in red chalk would adorn the second edition [of Debussy’s work — V.G.], published by Durand in 1902”[8]. It is therefore an expression which is enriched or transformed by another context with each repetition or evocation. Thus the note called “a blessed damozel”, through this polysemy, participates in the formation of various patterns, which in turn develop a quasi-autonomous thematic line.
So, the first time, “a blessed damozel” is used literally, to express the relationship between Claude and Gabrielle:
‘You’re a blessed damozel.’
‘La demoiselle élue. Am I really that?’”[9]
The second time, this expression appears with the name of the author, an allusion to his sister, who was a poet, and the English origin of the poem:
’That’s to get to London to meet the Rossettis. Devoted to the memory of their dear dead brother. La demoiselle élue. The sister has some kind of connection with somebody who runs the Philharmonic Society over there. But it has to be done in English.’[10]
The third time, the character of “Rossetti” is enriched with more details, while “a blessed damozel” is juxtaposed with “a Soho whore”.
’Neither of your musical career (what is the name again? I must make a note of it), only with reminding a forgetful public of the greatness of their defunct brother. And that brother – a bad and dirty man with a very minor talent in both arts – is best forgotten. His underwear was filthy, his love-making an unwholesome slobber. The blessed damozel indeed. The factitious purification of a Soho whore.’[11]
The fourth time, it appears in a purely religious context:
‘There was a battered upright piano, there were pouffes and dolls. On the walls were the Virgin Mary with stars in her hair, St Anthony and the adolescent Jesus, the blessing Pope, the mature Christ writhing on his cross. ‘La demoiselle élue’, Claude kept muttering.’[12]
And at the end of the text, as a summary of this theme line, the expression “virginal Gabrielle Dupont”[13] is used.
Let’s analyse another example, the aria “Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix” from the opera Samson et Dalilawritten by Camille Saint-Saëns. This expression is quoted either in its version of the title, or as an extract of words sung by Dalila, “Ah! réponds à ma tendresse”. It can also be understood either in terms of the relationship between Claude and Gabrielle; or on a musical level, as a phrase including a tritone on “-esse”, or again as a chromatic descent similar to the beginning of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune; or yet again as a reference to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, or finally as a reference to the style of Saint Saëns, who “remained true to his conservative principles”,[14] which is antithetical to Debussy style.
Saint-Saëns is not quoted here by accident since he participated with Debussy and Ravel[15] in the 1889 Universal Exhibition. But unlike Debussy, his music has not undergone significant influences. Debussy said about him in “Monsieur Croche”: “Saint Saëns by definition is the musician of tradition”;[16] “Saint-Saëns wrote operas with the soul of an old unrepentant symphonist”. [17]
By analysing similar items, we realize that each of them is used as a pyramid of meanings, from the profane to the most sacred, from the common to the most symbolic. As if a simple expression, like a simple sound, contained in itself a world of sounds and matter to be developed, like in spectral music or like the concept of “spherical sound”[18] created by Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi.
Thus Burgess built a multitude of patterns and themes promoting a literary polyphony in which each theme evolves in its own way, on its own measure, and forms a counterpoint to one or more other themes. It would take a whole book to unravel this contrapuntal mass.
4. Musical Criticism
The level of ‘critical thinking’ is built in the same way, in small steps and over time. Let’s just see an example concerning the musical field:
‘You couldn’t do it in music.’[19]
‘You could do it in notes, but notes aren’t necessarily music. That isn’t art, and it doesn’t deserve art. Engineering, no more.’ And yet and yet. It was the future, wasn’t it?[20]
‘It bores you when I talk about music, doesn’t it?’
‘Music’s for hearing.’
‘Somebody has to compose it first. It doesn’t grow on trees.’
‘But it does. Birds, I mean.’
‘That isn’t music.’[21]
‘As for your notion of setting the Eiffel Tower to music, I was telling Gabrielle here that it could not be done. Perhaps a scale from bottom to top of the keyboard. The materials of music as that is only the materials of architecture. The bones, so to speak.’[22]
’But the work is not the life.’[23]
‘Literature has to do with words.’
‘Literature must have a subject.’
‘Its subject must be itself. As with music.’[24]
‘The mind is complex, our sensibilities are labyrinthine. We learn that from Poe. Infinite delicacy of suggestion, as in music. Do not drag music into the realm of moral imperatives. Leave preaching to the priest.’[25]
’It says nothing.’
‘What does music say?’
‘Music says that discords are evil, but they can be resolved into concords, which are good. And there is a final concord, an ultimate cadence, which is so good that it must be God.’[26]
’Art is not easy. Art is excruciatingly difficult.’ [27]
’It’s the sound that counts’, Mallarmé said, nodding. ‘My friend here is a musician and he will tell you all about sound.’[28]
’The world had changed, since there was a new way of looking at the world.’ [29]
Mrs Mack said, fanning herself:
‘Sounds like the very devil. If he wants to play, that young man there, let him play proper music.’ [30]
This succession of reflexions about music, which may seem scattered and without any sense, actually evokes some of the great questions about the music of the twentieth century, such as “what is music?” or “to whom is music destined?”. Twentieth-century music has absorbed all the “constructing materials”: Iannis Xenakis composed music with mathematical models (Stochastic Systems), Olivier Messiaen and François Bernard Mâche, with natural models (for example, birdsongs), concrete music with background noises, etc. Like colour in painting, sound gained its independence in spectral music. The listener as a receiver has also undergone radical changes between the philosophy of the creative act of John Cage and the hedonism of postmodern music, which tried to tame the listener who, as “Mrs. Mack", wants "proper music”.
From a polyphonic point of view, Burgess’s text is very difficult to “unravel”. The voices mix, make echoes through numerous metaphors, overlap, or repeat themselves on other registers through multiple meanings. Sometimes it is even difficult to understand the degree of some statements. For example:
Never trust a poet, he said, and trust even less a lady poet. They think they enclose music, that music is the spume or écume of a well-turned poetic phrase and can present no sense unless lashed into being the slave of words.[31]
Is one talking here about the Rossetti brother and sister, about the “écume” of Mallarmé, the musicality of a poetic text in general, or about the relationship between text and music in a particular work, or all of those at the same time?
5. Literary Impressionism
Let’s return to the initial question, namely what could be the mode of reading of this short story so that it offers not only musical enjoyment but also its whole meaning.
If the text does not always offer an understandable reading in its details, we can try to browse the whole, as if looking at an impressionist painting, or, to quote Burgess, see it “as it were with dewdrops on the eyelashes”.[32] So one must just skim over the text to capture that feeling. In this case it is presented to the reader as a general atmosphere in which certain facts disappear, some patterns strengthen the impression or the meaning of certain statements, without reflecting the reality or the accuracy of the remarks. In this case, each reader can build his own image of the story, which may have a very compelling plot for a literary person, very musical and audible sonorities for a musician or a very poetic turn of phrase for a poet. Let’s ask ourselves here what is the point in considering a literary text as a score? We could just imagine that Burgess built an aleatoric literary score, that everyone can read in his own way and make it sonorous, poetic or just factual according to his own experience. In other words, as a Bakhtin[33] polyphony, as an unending chain of meaning, in which the result of the reading is relative and depends only on the attention of the reader who focuses on a particular aspect or on a particular dimension of this multi-dimensionality.
Every work is interesting, all the more so as it allows for surprising connections. What matters in such ‘impressionistic’ reading is feeling. Actually, the story of Claude – Debussy – the main character of this short story, is not very developed, unlike the abundance of food for thought or for hearing around this character. In fact, one could also see the writing process of this text as an invitation to a sound experience perceived from inside the character. As if the reader was invited to put himself in the shoes of the composer not to create but to perceive the world around him as a composer, to experience situations and thoughts as he does. One can either search for the meaning of this story, or simply surrender to it. And so as not to drown in the musical material of the text, one should just skim over it: not look for the meaning of each odd juxtaposition, but listen to this juxtaposition (by calling up one’s musical memory), or relive the images already present within us. For it must be noted that Burgess cites only the great. Those that everyone knows at least by name: Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Saint-Saëns etc. We all have a personal idea of oriental music even if we have never heard the gamelan and don’t know about the pentatonic scale. We can sing the Marseillaise, even if we can’t sing a fourth interval. We know the name of Mallarmé, even if we have never read his poems.
6. The Faun
Let’s reconsider the idea of mode and make a list of the most important components of this text: the pentatonic scale, the tritone, the chromatic scale, the tonic-dominant, the Tristan chord of Richard Wagner, the blessed damozel, the aria of Samson and Dalila “Ah! réponds à ma tendresse”, the solo flute melody, etc.
The various connections of these constitutive elements evoke progressively the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Debussy, inspired by the Mallarmé text, which becomes or is being built as the main subject of this short story.
Let’s dissect as we did before, only the appearance, the introduction of the faun theme in the text:
“At the moment of the engagement of lips he had heard in his head that theme of Saint-Saëns – Ah! réponds à ma tendresse – though on a somewhat breathy flute and with the missing note of the chromatic descent restored. A full chromatic glide from tonic to dominant on a pastoral flute heard inwardly in a street full of cabs and clatter. Then the glide back again, the theme recoiling on itself, getting nowhere, as was right for a shepherd lolling under an elm or alder in the shade of a Sicilian noon. Why Sicilian? Why should a shepherd possess a chromatic flute? Of course, it was no shepherd.”[34]
Here we have several motifs: the evocation of Mallarmé's poem, the description of the melodic line of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, without however mentioning the title, the author of the poem or the composer.
The development which follows also omits the details, but mentions each time a different aspect and a different context of the faun. For example:
’It’s impossible. Fourths on top of fourths on top of fourths. And naturally, there’s the salt and vinegar of the augmented one.’
‘Diabolic? Horns on its head?’
Claude looked gravely at him […] ‘Is a faun diabolic?’
‘Immoral, amoral. It depends on your point of view. Amoral, I’d say.’
‘That damnable faun.’ […] ‘That beautiful impossible faun. Definitive edition, he says. No more changes.’ [35]
Or again:
And he whistled Ah! réponds à ma tendresse, filling in the chromatic run from tonic to dominant.
‘Put Satie’s fourths under that and you might have faunal music,’ Godet said. Claude said:
‘No. Too acerbic. The faun wouldn’t lie among thorns. I must meet this Satie. When I return, that is. What else has he written?’
‘Three sarabandes. Based on consecutive dominant ninths.’
‘That sounds more faunal.’
‘Also mad.’
‘Perhaps we’ll reach the new sanity through dementia. Who knows?’[36]
To conclude, Burgess built his text by developing a multitude of mini stories, using various methods including the musical process, namely polyphonic development, mode, counterpoint, the gradual introduction of the main theme, etc. Thus, this short story reflects not only the birth of another musical thought but also the birth of another era. This is why it echoes all the 20th century.
It is in the balance between the past and the future, between the certainty of the past and the uncertainty of the future, between tradition and novelty that was born the masterpiece of that time, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
[1] Anthony Burgess, The Devil’s Mode (London: Vintage, 1990), 92. [2] Jean-Pierre Chazal, « Grand Succès pour les Exotiques. Retour sur les spectacles javanais de l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889 », in Archipel 63 (2002), 125. [3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slendro>. [4] Chazal, « Grand Succès pour les Exotiques. Retour sur les spectacles javanais de l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889 », 122-3. [5] Burgess, The Devil’s Mode, 92. [6] H.G. Gadamer, L’Art de comprendre. Ecrits II (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 179. [7] Burgess, The Devil’s Mode, 94. [8] Claude Debussy, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 72. [9] Burgess, The Devil’s Mode, 95. [10] Ibid., 97. [11] Ibid., 101. [12] Ibid., 120. [13] Ibid., 123. [14] Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy et son temps (Paris : Albin Michel, 1958), 93. [15] Chazal, « Grand Succès pour les Exotiques. Retour sur les spectacles javanais de l’Exposition Universelle de Paris en 1889 », in Archipel 63 (2002), 117. [16] Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 118. [17] Ibid., 39. [18] Giacinto Scelsi, Les Anges sont ailleurs… (Arles : Actes Sud, 2006), 125-139. [19] Burgess, The Devil’s Mode, 92. [20] Ibid., 93. [21] Ibid., 94. [22] Ibid., 95. [23] Ibid., 110. [24] Ibid., 116. [25] Idem. [26] Ibid., 117. [27] Ibid., 118. [28] Ibid., 120. [29] Ibid., 124. [30] Ibid., 125. [31] Ibid., 101. [32] Ibid., 93. [33] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboj, 1929). [34] Burgess, The Devil’s Mode, 95. [35] Ibid., 98-99. [36] Ibid. 99.