Ars Nova Author(s): Maurice Blanchot and Donald Schier Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 17, No.

2 (Spring - Summer, 1979), pp. 76-84 Published by: Perspectives of New Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832834 . Accessed: 20/03/2011 10:59
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Ars

Nova

Maurice Blanchot
Translatedby Donald Schier

In DoctorFaustus Thomas Mann delivers up the composer Adrian Leverkiihnto damnation.Not merely to eternal damnation-which would not be much-but to that more serious curse which makesof him the symbolicimageof Germandestiny as it sinks into the madness of the Third Reich. Leverkuhn's art story follows Nietzche's ratherclosely: Leverkuhn's borrows Not only that, ThomasMann has pointed muchfromSchoenberg. 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 twelvetone 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 ThomasMann's novel itself, which is preserved by narrativeambiguitiesfromsimplistic conclusions. It remains true, however, that the musical system attributed to the detestable ingenuity of the composeris 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 symbolic symptomof the Nazi perversion.Mann notes in his journal that behind the beloved name of Adrian Leverkuhn lies concealed the hated name of Adolf Hitler. The Ars nova, which is the source of all future music, can then logicallybe defined as music sociallyand politicallytainted. Others, on the basis of esthetic principles wrongly called socialist, speak of reactionary music. The same is true of nonrepresentationalart. But back to Thomas Mann. The motives of his judgment are complex. On the one hand, as he admits, his understandingof 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 traditionalformsof an art which he lovesan 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 personalfolly of a man and the generalfolly of the times, is not a chance mistake,but represents the madnessnaturalto 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 describethe generalcrisis of civilizationand of music and thus to point up the mainidea 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 forcefullyunderstood, there is the judgment of a cultivated man. It is as a cultivated man that Mann fearsthe 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-representationalart. The sameis true of Lukacsand in generalof all men of taste who, in the nameof what they think is Marxism,define as reactionary all formsof 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 makesthe latter a strangerto all culture. There is a non-culturalaspect of literatureand 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 satisfactoryAdorno 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 barbarousand capableof continually disturbing afreshthe artisticallyarrangedsurface;a dissonant chord sounds as if the civilizing principleof order did not entirely control it; the work of Webern,in its fragmentation, remains almost entirely primitive."1Such statements must be and read with caution. The words "barbarous" "primitive"are The effort of the composerto makepossible hardlyappropriate. the total organizationof the musicalelements and in particular to renounce the idea of a natural esthetic (accordingto which the very sounds or a given system of sounds have in themselves meaning and value), that effort decisively opposes and contradicts any barbarousconception of music, even when this barbarism hides, as it always does, behind the appearanceof the ideal. And as to the technique whose excessive use is being condemned(and it is condemneda second time as barbarous,as of being also the barbarism total rationalism)it does not in any sense claim to be all of music, only that it must predominate momentarilyin order to "breakup the blind constraint upon or musical materials" else to hold in abeyancethe alreadyelaborated 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 historicaldecisions and of the musicalexperienceitself. in From this point of view, what appearsto be "barbarous" Ars nova, is preciselywhat ought to keep us fromjudging it the barbarous:its critical power, its refusal to accept worn-out

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cultural forms as eternally valid, and especially its violent determinationto empty naturalsoundsof all preconceivedmeaning, to keep them empty, and so open to a meaningyet to come. This is a violence which, since it does violence to nature, has in it something despotic and dangerouslyuncivilized. Similarly,what is the meaningof the judgment I have quoted from Adorno according to which the fragmentationof tonal units in Webern makes his music an almost entirely primitive event? Without undertakinga technical analysis,it is clear that when the composer, with austere rigor, renounces the continuity of a unified work or the fluid development of what Walter Benjaminhas called the "auricular" work of art, when he renouncescreating a perspicuouswork, 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 contraryto place himself beyond esthetic totality. More exactly, the totality he rejects is that of a musicalcompositionwhich is alreadygiven (preformed); uses he instead a language first made indeterminate through the rejection of traditionalconventions and then restructuredso as to include most of the essentials of earlier thematic development; now compositionwill be able to progressonly through analysis, through division into more and more subtle structures, i.e., through a method of composition which will make use of distinction and dissociation. If the musical languagethen seems to be broken up and even to be scattered into ever more fragmented forms, the reason is that in reality analysis has become creativejust as variationhas ceased to be a method of developing a theme which is to be enrichedand has turned into a method of discovery by which the totality already potentially present in the choice of the tone row and its preparatoryworking 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 contrapuntalorganization,I think it would be better to say that Webernhas in no way freed himselffromrigorouscounterpoint,

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but that he has decided we are to hear only its nodal points and traces, in memoryof a rigor which is no longer imposed on us except as a reminiscence or as absence, and leaves us as we listen, always free (dangerouslyfree). The fragmentarywork-the need of the work itself to be fragmentary-then has a very different meaning depending on whether the work appearsas a renunciationof the act of composition, i.e., an aggressive imitation of pre-musicallanguage, (such as expressionismtried to achieve through refinement)or whether it appears as the pursuit of a new form of writing which makesthe completedwork difficult, not because it evades being finishedbut because-beyond the conception of the work as being unified and enclosed in itself, organizing and dominating values being transmitted by traditional skills-, this kind of writing explores the infinite space of the work with inexorablerigor yet is based on a new postulate which is that the relationshipof the work will not necessarilysatisfythe 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 Benjaminremarksthat, in the history of art, last works tend to be catastrophes:"With the great masters, finished works weigh less heavily than those fragmentson which they worked all their lives. They draw their work." Why? Because the work magic circle in the fragmentary against which they measurethemselves cannot evoke in them a total response,or ratherbecausethe artist must find a beginning when the "composition"itself is in some sense alreadyfinished; this leaves him only the pain of apparentlyself-defeatingwork, the agony of a dislocation which is meaninglessonly because it continues to promise meaning or is refractoryto the order of I should like with these remarksto put an end to a misunderstandingby recallingthat if there is an essential difference between art and culture, it is not that art is retrograde,that is turned towards an unculturedprimitivenessor that it is tempted
meaning.

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

The new music allows us to "hear"in an almost immediate and way the gap between artisticaffirmation culturalaffirmation. It undermines the notion of the work, whereas culture needs finished works that can be admiredas 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 purifyit of all those intentions and meaningswhich makeof it a kind of naturalknowledge. It is rigid, hard, austere, has no sense of play, no shadings, and refuses to concede anything to that "human quality" to which society is always so eager to appeal so as to have an alibi for its own inhumanity. Now, humanismis the idea that carries culture along, that is, the idea that mankindmust be able to recognize itself easily in the works of man, that mankindis never divided against itself, that there is a constant progressivemovement, an unbreakable continuity which joins the old with the new, since culture and accumulationadvance shoulder to shoulder. Whence it follows that culture requires of art and language certain responses, because these responses alone can be accumulatedin the great silos of culture: and thereforea difficult art which claimsonly to be pure questioning and also puts in doubt the very possibility

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of art, must appearas dangerous,hostile and unfeelinglyviolent. Cold, insensitive, inhuman, sterile, formalist, abstract, these reproaches,when directed at the Ars nova, always give away the man of culture who formulatesthem, and who formulates them all the more forcefullyand sincerely since he feels himself threatenedby what is "good"and "sound"and felicitous in that art when it comes face to face with the real distress which he refusesto 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 prodigalson the composerhas returned to the familiarbosom of tonality and unity. The new music, and this is its most decisive endeavorfor the other arts and for expressionitself, the music condemnedby the man of culture, is both rigorouslyconstructed and yet of such a nature that it is not built arounda 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 determinedin a completelytransparentway by the construction of the whole, the difference between the essential and the And Adorno adds:"Suchmusic is always accidentaldisappears." 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 affirmationwithin difference itself.

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Yes,this is a painfulcondition, 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 proofthat thought is trying to escape the power of unity. At about the time when Schoenbergwas beginning to becomeknown, Worringer certainGermanpaintersassigned and 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 samevalue. 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 comparison of the different arts the characteristics of a common attempt: common precisely in this that all the arts affirmedthe existence of relationships without unity, relationships which consequently escape any common measure. Yet when I read George Poulet's book2in which all the adventuresof word and thought are related to the power of the circle, since they are always enclosed in the relationship of a center to a circumference,a relationshipthey are always trying to breakonly to fit better within it, I wondered why this book, in which the simplest because it is the perfect geometricalfigure allowed me to grasp without alteration and without monotony, the most diverse 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 melancholyserenity 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 approachit, 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 imageof 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 considerationof wholeness, being merelynot finite, disunited, discontinuous. What is the universe like? Let us drop that question and raisethis one: what will man

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be like on the day he dares to face up to the idea that the curvatureof 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 measureof a godless cosmos, of a space definedonly by questions which cannot have answers, since any answer would necessarily presupposethe shape of shapes?Perhapsthis amounts to asking ourselvesthis question: Is mancapableof a radicalinterrogation, which comes down to saying, is man capable of literaturewhen 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. Philosophyof ModernMusic.Tr. Anne G. Mitchelland WesleyV. Blomster New York:SeaburyPress, 1973. 2. Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses the Circle. Tr. Carley Davison and ElliottColeman. of Baltimore: JohnsHopkinsPress, 1967 3. "ArsNova"by MauriceBlanchot.CopyrightEditionsGallinard,1969 Translation publishedby permission.