ABSTRACT
In a short subsection titled ‘Music’ in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, university lecturer Franz experiences a minor epiphany. Drifting towards sleep, he realises he has ‘done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them’ (94). A moment of dreamy deconstruction ensues, in which his own logocentrism appears to him as fatally flawed. Addiction to the word has resulted not in clarity of signification, but in slippage: ‘in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand’. Rescue from such metaphoric loss is at hand, however, in the shape of what lies on the other side of language: ‘unbounded music, absolute sound’. Nearing sleep, music appears to Franz as ‘the negation of sentences … the anti-word!’ Music is here conceived as a means of palliation, a respite from ‘the pain, the futility, the vanity of words’. Kundera is understandably eager to employ the very malleability of words to point up the darker implications of Franz’s vision, his desire to have thought overpowered by sound and thereby ‘lulled’. The connotations of narcosis, with the attendant notion of an ‘overpowering’, are made clear. Indeed, for all their late twentieth-century explicitness, Franz’s thoughts are really just a post-coital version of the nineteenth-century trope of music’s transformative power, as discussed in the previous chapter with reference to Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’. The trope serves here as an expression of a commonly held construction whereby music is somehow extra-cultural, an escape from the messy contingencies of life in the language world. Much musical and literary capital has of course been made from this transcendence trope, but in recent years it has been subject to intense scrutiny, not least from musicologists themselves. Music has been opened up for examination in all its textuality, its entanglement in the language which we cannot but use as we listen, respond and disseminate. While far from dismissing the notion of music as offering privileged access to the rhythms of our body or the sound of the spheres – again, the post-coital setting for Franz’s ‘blissful imaginary uproar’ is pertinent – it is precisely in the expression of the need for music to carry such expectations that we can trace its positioning in culture, as part of the changing idea of the nature and function of culture itself.
