ABSTRACT
Literature writing music begins by dissecting the puerile reaction: it shows how and why people see representations in music, and consider them determined by the music; it demonstrates that they are never as determined as they think they are, and starting from that demonstration, it corrodes, evaporates, or expands them towards a generality which empties them of all localized sense, so that each equation between music and extra-musical meaning becomes, not the legitimate view of an interpretive community, but an error, an illusion, a hallucination, a betrayal of music's true character. Music saves language from representation. Music and literature, too, as defined by each other in an argument whose circularity is vicious to science but perhaps central to life, confound self-identity. Music returns the favour to literature: it provides the means to figure an unspoken, unrepresentable, singularity of literature, through the endless network of images of languages that hybridize music and letters. Music saves language from representation.
