THE SUBJECT OF MUSIC AND MADNESS
Kreisler stood there shaken to the depths, unable to utter a word. He had always been obsessed with the idea that madness lay in wait for him like a wild beast slavering for prey, and one day would suddenly tear him to pieces.
—E. T. A. HOFFMANN, LEBENSANSICHTEN DES KATERS MURR
MUSIC’S PROXIMITY to madness is a theme dear to German romanticism. Hoffmann’s Kreisler—the eccentric if not altogether deranged composer—is but one of many examples that populate not only this writer’s fiction but also the literature around 1800. Alongside Hoffmann’s retinue of characters who actively wield or passively submit to the irresistible force of music stand analogous figures in the works of the period’s most prolific authors. Kreisler, the “mad musician par excellence” (HW 2.1.370), together with Ritter Gluck and Donna Anna, Theodor of “Die Fermate” and the baroness of “Das Majorat,” Rat Krespel and his daughter, Antonie, are all paradigmatic for the era.
The inclination to associate mental disturbance with the realm of sound proceeds almost effortlessly. “So much lies merely in the mischief [Spuk] that my notes create,” Kreisler confesses. “They often come to life and jump up from the white pages like little black many-tailed imps. They whirl me along in their senseless spinning … but a single tone, shooting its ray from the holy glow, will still the tumult” (HW 2.1.369/HMW 131). Kreisler’s problem, caught between the spooky taunts of mischievous notes and the redemptive tone of the numinous, between madness as heightened consciousness and as utter dementia, continually crops up in an age assured of music’s power but uncertain of where it might lead.
The trend—provocatively intermingling literary and clinical discourses, pathology and aesthetics, art and psychology—is strikingly persistent. It features a repertoire of conceptions and motifs shared among writers whose dispositions and purported intentions are otherwise quite divergent. Thus the late, brooding walks in the Nachtwachten des Bonaventura (1803), which expose a musically charged dark side of the workaday world, presages in a different key the strange events of Kleist’s Heilige Cäcilie (1811), where four brothers are struck insane upon hearing an oratorio at High Mass. The senility of Goethe’s harpist in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96) serves both as complement and contrast to the naïveté of Florio, the young man who is induced to mad hallucinations by sound and music in Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild (1819). Countless examples can be accumulated, from Karl Philipp Moritz and Jean Paul Richter to Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Clemens Brentano. Indeed, a cursory reading of the period would readily demonstrate, despite great diversity, a common tendency to link musical production and reception with descriptions of mad experience.
To be sure, the writers who are here loosely grouped under the term “romantic” did not invent the idea of music’s strong influence on states of the soul. Nor did such conceptions vanish in a later age. There existed a long classical tradition devoted to the so-called power of music. This widely held idea, based on a belief in music’s incomparably strong effect on the character and emotions of listeners, on the ethos and pathos of the citizenry, could be viewed in either a positive or a negative light, as pathogenic or therapeutic. The ambiguities are pervasive. Orpheus’s ability to appease the Furies is matched by his cruel death at the hands of the frenzied Maenads. The deeply felt nostalgia that overcomes Odysseus before Demodocus’s harp modulates to fright in encountering the Sirens, whose song would put an end to any hope for a return home. Plato’s fear that musical mimesis might lead to hysteria among the guardians of his ideal city is eased by the philosopher’s appreciation, expressed in the Timaeus, of the musical relationships that underlie and maintain a sound cosmic order. Timotheus’s legendary lyre—recorded by Plutarch, Suidas, and Boethius and then celebrated by Renaissance theorists such as Franchino Gafurrio and Gioseffo Zarlino—was said to have been capable of inciting Alexander to murder as well as escorting him back to sanity. Music’s power is matched only by its ambivalence.
Music’s influence on the passions, its direct bearing on the affectus animi, epitomized by the figure of Timotheus, was considered universal, as is evident in both classical and Christian traditions.1 For example, in his Musica demonstrata (1496), Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples correlated the story of Timotheus to the Old Testament account of David (1 Samuel 16:23), whose psalms exorcised the demons that attacked the melancholic King Saul.2 The early eighteenth century found its own Timotheus in Carlo Farinelli, the famous castrato who sang the same four arias every evening for twenty years to the Bourbon king Philip V of Spain in order to cure the sovereign of his manic fits. Elsewhere, the theme abounded in treatises on so-called musical magic and in folklore. It was perpetuated in the myriad examples of the indomitable strength of music, from pied pipers to Apulian tales of tarantism, from treatises on the efficacy of religious hymns to Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (published in 1533), which describes in detail the manipulation of celestial powers by means of sounds, tones, and melodic phrases.3
The notion that musical art affected psychological processes survived in the literature that basked in romanticism’s long shadow, even when romantic tendencies were critically reassessed or disavowed, for example, in the series of bizarre or maddening violinists of the nineteenth century, from Heine’s Florentinische Nächte (1837) and Lenau’s Faust (1836) to Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann (1848) and Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1855). Paganini’s mesmerizing hold over his audiences was corroborated by many accounts of Mephistophelean virtuosi in the literature from Biedermeier on.4 The general theme would later receive fresh impetus in Wagnerism and could be witnessed in the work (and life) of Friedrich Nietzsche, a musical madman in his own right. Spurred by Schopenhauer, he aligned tonal art to Dionysos mainomenos, the mad god, and thereby reevaluated philosophical aesthetics on the basis of irrational impulse. In the Nietzschean aftermath, the figure of the deranged composer saw its greatest and most abysmal illustration in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, where romantic energy rose to a fevered pitch before consuming itself in the catastrophic Götterdämmerung of 1945.
To close the history of the mad musician with Mann’s Faustian Leverkühn is not to suggest that this figure does not continue to shape the German cultural and literary imagination. Madly musical protagonists may be found in many post-1945 literary works, for example, in the novels of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, who both consciously engage in the tradition at hand. Add to that the countless publications of musical biographies, from Haydn to Schumann, from Beethoven to Wagner, from Mahler to Hugo Wolf, so replete with descriptions of mental illness that they often read like psychopathological case studies. One need only consult Franz Franken’s four-volume study The Maladies of Great Composers to ascertain to what extent psychoses and neuroses still color German conceptions of musical production.5
That said, it would nonetheless be imprudent to ascribe this theme exclusively to some Teutonic imaginary. There are countless representations of unhinged composers, overly impassioned instrumentalists, and dangerously affected listeners in practically all major literatures. One thinks, for example, of Balzac’s Gambara (1837), Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1890), or D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte (1894). The trend predictably continues in film and the visual arts. Popular as well as so-called serious music are consistently represented as experiences that border on something irrational, ravishing, or provocatively fascinating. The power of music—beneficial or detrimental, from the mother’s lullaby to the fascist broadcast—names music’s undeniably strong influence, its overwhelming emotional force, its capacity to seize and overtake, its elemental energy difficult to master. The subject’s loss of rational control in musical experience, the rise of unexpected passions or the sudden welling-up of tears, is hardly the province of a precise epoch or ethos but rather is a trans-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon.
From another perspective, the recurrent topic belongs to the even broader stereotype of the tortured genius, which derives from the Aristotelian problem (30.1) linking melancholia and giftedness. To this line of thought belongs Seneca’s famous pronouncement that “there is no genius without a mixture of dementia” (“nullum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae,” De tranquilitate animi). Both observations are again modulations of the entire tradition of inspiration or enthusiasm that since Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus falls beneath the banner of divine madness.6 To this day, in the popular and academic press, clinical psychologists as well as neuroscientists continue to be intrigued by the relation of creativity and mental illness. Works on the imagination’s indebtedness to bipolar disorder, autism, or brain physiology are legion.7
It is not, however, my intention to deal directly with these issues. Instead, I have chosen to look into the complex ways music and madness are treated in a specifically romantic tradition. I have therefore restricted my examination to a period of European history that, in my view, represents the deepest and most prolonged reflection on specific issues raised by the coupling of music and madness. The scope stretches from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the first decades of the nineteenth, from Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, with emphasized focus on this text’s reception and appropriation by the German romantics, to the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann. As shall become evident, however, these historical borders cannot be respected. The astounding persistence of the problems under investigation requires a broader view so as to include both the ancient sources, which instigate the central challenges, and their rich afterlife in recent formulations of literary criticism, aesthetic theory, and the philosophy of language.
The sheer preponderance of this literary practice immediately raises key questions. Why, first of all, music and madness? What does a highly refined art form have to do with mental disorders? How do these two heterogeneous experiences relate? And what distinguishes the specifically romantic appropriation of this convergence?
Some initial, highly general responses may be ventured here, in anticipation of a more elaborate, critical investigation below. For example, it would appear that music and madness need to be related through the third term of language. Considered romantically as spheres that challenge the norms of denotation and signification, music and madness may be said to define the upper and lower limits of language, respectively. In the epigraph cited above, Kreisler’s inability to “utter a word” (“keines Wortes mächtig”) can signal either a verbal failure or a sublime affect. Both mark out a conceptual border beyond which language cannot reach. On the one hand, if the rational working of language is what distinguishes mankind from beast, then Kreisler’s speechlessness may be taken as a symptom of an imminent insanity, of a psychically disturbed state, explicitly described as savage, that would tear his individual identity into pieces. Language—understood, of an intentionality that is grounded in a stable, unified subject, and it is that subjective ground that madness threatens to undo. On the other hand, the composer’s muteness may be interpreted as a transcendent move into areas of meaning that words cannot touch. If in the first case madness reduces man to the status of beast, to hunted prey—as in the classical examples of the madly driven Orestes, Ajax, and Pentheus—in the second case music constitutes a spiritual remedy to an existential wound we all share, bound to a symbolic logic that abstracts our relation to the world. Whereas madness as the lower limit to language dissolves the boundaries between mankind and savagery, music as the upper limit overrides the division that separates humanity from the divine. In purely linguistic terms, music frees us from the reductive powers of conceptualization. Certainly, this topos of ineffability underpins much of the tradition.8
It was in fact romantic theory that first exploited the irrational (or suprarational) force of purely instrumental music. What would eventually come to be known as absolute music—music liberated or absolved from all verbal discourse—was proffered as being capable of presenting human truths that evaded the rigid definitions and concepts of the lexicon and verbal syntax. Hoffmann himself was largely responsible for promoting music’s reevaluation as an autonomous rather than ancillary art form. In his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1810), he writes: “Music discloses to man an unknown realm [“ein unbekanntes Reich”], a world that has nothing to do with the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings ascertainable by concepts in order to devote himself to the inexpressible [“dem Unaussprechlichen”]” (HW 1.532/HMW 236). Music’s transcendence is based on a series of negations—“unknown,” “inexpressible”—and thereby moves beyond the positivism of human perception and cognition. Although this transcendence is generally presumed to be an ascent toward a divine sphere, it could just as well mark a descent into feral nature. The norm of subjective humanity, which is soberly distinct both from gods and beasts, blocks the approach to this musical experience, whose abnormality is based on a withdrawal from or a renunciation of the quotidian.
From another angle, one could say that music is not necessarily a medium more perfect than language but rather one that is qualitatively different. It could be taken as presenting its contents with an immediacy that is lost to the reflective mechanism of verbal communication. Here, music and madness truly belong together, occupying the same sphere. That is to say, they are not joined simply by sharing a capacity to limit language from either side of symbolization; they do not mark out the upper and lower limits to language but rather constitute a realm entirely removed from language use. Kierkegaard, one of romanticism’s greatest readers and harshest critics, follows this logic when he has his aesthete (author A of Either/Or) reappraise the “apparent poverty of language” as its “wealth”: “The immediate is really the indeterminate, and therefore language cannot apprehend it; but the fact that it is indeterminate is not its perfection but an imperfection.”9 Kierkegaard essentially replaces the notion of the infinite with the problem of the indefinite. Here especially we can see how notions of ineffability can easily yield space to the threat of madness. It is not gratuitous that Kierkegaard, in an earlier passage from the same text—the celebrated reading of Mozart’s Don Giovanni—ecstatically thanks the composer for “the loss of [his] reason” (47).
Two distinct scenarios can therefore be specified: (1) music and madness limit language from two opposing sides, from above or below the subjective norm; or (2) music and madness limit language from a shared position, from the sphere or stage of immediacy as opposed to the mediation of reflection. In either case, music and madness seem to constitute an origin of language that by definition is not comprehended by language. If this origin—illogical, insofar as it falls outside the logos—were appropriated by literature, it would represent literature’s striving toward something beyond language, something beyond or incompatible with the literary work itself. Music and madness, then, would unwork language by occupying spaces outside the work of language, moments of nonrepresentability that occur within the linear movement of representation, spaces that reside as the inaccessible kernel of the work. In this sense, music and madness would comprise the work’s own internal interruption.
For these reasons, music promises the poet liberation, the means for escaping the diminution and restrictions that invariably occur in verbalization, but like madness it also threatens complete incommunicability. In his essay “Silence and the Poet” (1967), George Steiner reflects on this ambivalence by turning to the myths of full poetic (musical) expression, where mortals vie with the gods and therefore arouse their jealous violence. The dismemberment of Orpheus, the flaying of Marsyas, and the cutting of Tamyris’s tongue demonstrate the outrage that shadows the careers of the transgressive artist. From one perspective, one finds the idealization of music that begins with German romanticism and goes on to nourish later European poetics from French symbolism on, where music’s attraction lies in its promise to free the poet from one kind of language by opening up new dimensions of the word. In a formulation reminiscent of Novalis, Steiner writes: “By a gradual loosening or transcendence of its own forms, the poem strives to escape from the linear, denotative, logically determined bonds of linguistic syntax into what the poet takes to be the simultaneities, immediacies, and free play of musical form.”10 Yet, from another, darker perspective, this kind of reaching out beyond the limits of reflective, rational language can result in a dangerous overreaching. The same impulse that drove the poet toward the “free play of musical form,” may well end up causing him to lose his mind, like Hölderlin in his tower.
These provisional remarks occlude many important complications, which will motivate the closer readings below. Here, I shall restrict my comments to a few main points. First, there is hardly a vaguer term than “madness.” Hoffmann, for example, who was conversant with the latest psychological literature, had an entire nomenclature of pathologies and conditions at his disposal—dementia, amentia, insania, delirium, vesania, melancholia, mania, and so forth—each with its own particular sets of manifestations, which could be interpreted from many different perspectives, say, as a somatic or spiritual problem, temporary or chronic, inherited or traumatically caused. Although, in the epigraph given above, Hoffmann’s Wahnsinn alludes to a decidedly negative ordeal, colored in by the typically romantic sickness of tornness, or Zerrissenheit, we can readily find instances where the author describes mental derangement as a blessing that promises higher states of consciousness, related to the classical notions of the Platonic theia mania (divine madness) or its latter-day development into the furor poeticus, the inspirational gift that transformed the Renaissance artist into “another God,” an alter Deus. Cyprian, one of the members of Hoffmann’s Serapion Brothers, who regularly meet to investigate the Wahnsinn that “lies deep in human nature,” states his belief that nature “grants abnormal people glimpses into its most gruesome depths,” yielding “intimations and images that strengthen and animate the spirit in an especially uplifting manner” (Die Serapions-Brüder, HW 4.37). Like a trance, madness, for those who are able to return from it and reflect on it, broadens the subject’s experience rather than tearing it to pieces. It represents the defamiliarization necessary for the process of psychic expansion. If this psychedelism redefines eccentricity as a godsend, then it would be the world left behind that should be portrayed as truly mad. Plato’s allegory of the cave is a case in point. Those deemed insane would then be the only ones who were not.
Second, notwithstanding Hoffmann’s contributions to the elaboration of the idea of absolute music, music’s autonomy should certainly not be taken for granted. In fact, as a Kapellmeister, Kreisler is primarily a composer of vocal music. The first decades of the nineteenth century still grappled with the musico-aesthetic debates of the centuries before, which all presupposed music’s inseparable relation to language. To be sure, arguments concerning song were often based on charges of madness. The properties of tone, accent, and rhythm were singled out as formidably comprising the force of a passage without contributing to the lexical meaning of the text. Melismatic passages and polyphony were especially feared as verging on irrationality, insofar as these techniques weakened the communicative power of the word and therefore blurred music’s association to discursive clarity. Yet here the potential madness was still verbal—bestial, perhaps, but not entirely inhuman.
The third complication is neither psychopathological (“what is madness?”) nor aesthetic (“what is music?”) but rather cultural. Why, we may ask, with occasional exceptions, are we dealing with a particularly German theme? If we agree with the thesis of Pamela Potter, that “music represented a mode of artistic expression in which all Germans could share,” that it served to “overcome a long history of political fragmentation and regional differences,”11 then why has this musical legacy been allied with madness, with a mental state that is ambiguous at best? Bypassing for a moment the dangerously essentialist presumptions implicit in Potter’s remark—is there, after all, such a thing as “the Germans”!—it would be worthwhile to consider precisely how the two themes were deployed toward the definition of a personal or national identity. Is there something theoretically important, something obtainable for philosophy or cultural history, at work here?
The focus on literary works brings me to yet another complication, namely, the problem of metaphor, which leads to the study’s core. The present project is about music and madness in the strictest terms: not as tonal art and mental states as such but rather as specialized metaphorical strategies deployed in or constituting works of literature. Although scholars are in the main cognizant of this figurative status, the large number of attempts to investigate the correlation of literature to mental illness or to musical experience has foundered precisely on this point. What Calvin Brown dubbed “musico-literary studies” in his seminal Music and Literature (1948) generally remain content to identify literary instances of music or musicality as metaphors of greater or lesser appropriateness, without considering their particular semiotic and semantic consequences. As Eric Prieto has recently argued, such critics “mistake the effect (metaphors) for the cause (the irreducible heterogeneity of music and literature).”12 In this regard, literary treatments of the effects of madness have fared much better. Foucault’s groundbreaking Histoire de la folie (1961) and the many studies published in its wake, above all the work of Shoshona Felman, should be lauded for paying attention to the specificity of represented madness and its philosophical implications rather than generalizing its force simply as one metaphor among other possibilities.13
The problem of metaphor once again demonstrates that the issue of music’s relation to madness is best investigated in relation to language. If we take music to be the nonsemantic elements of song or a purely instrumental piece and then declare that music “speaks,” then it is not, stricto sensu, music but rather music transformed (or metaphorized) into rational discourse, into something extramusical. Judging music to be somehow linguistic, as many aestheticians have done, often strives to interpret auditory experience by nonauditory means. The musicologist Carolyn Abbate therefore regards all writing on music as prosopopoeia, as giving language to that which itself has none. Radically considered, writing on music assigns the rights of subjectivity to language alone, while music abides, paradoxically, as a mute object, as a nonthinking res extensa. In concentrating, then, on the tropological nature of music criticism, Abbate implicitly reserves a space for music to remain as such, to sneak past the pull of reductively distorted verbalization: “Music may thus escape philosophical critiques of language, perhaps even escape language entirely.”14
Abbate’s remarks concerning music find a telling analogue in Derrida’s main problem with Foucault’s project concerning madness. In general, Derrida chides the Histoire de la folie for failing to escape the pitfalls that inevitably frustrate any desire to restore madness to language.15 Foucault’s self-styled “archaeology of silence” sought to discover a new language or to use “words without language,” as a way of saying madness, instead of speaking about it, in a writing that would not reinforce the so-called Cartesian great confinement. Nonetheless, Derrida detects the same prosopopoeiac gesture that troubles Abbate’s reflection on musicology. “Foucault,” Derrida writes, “wanted madness to be the subject of his book in every sense of the word: its theme and its first-person narrator, its author, madness speaking about itself” (39; emphasis in original). He therefore questions the feasibility of such a project: “Would not the archaeology of silence be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, the act perpetrated against madness—and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced?” (41).
The problem is of course irresolvable. The desire to bring music and madness into rational language as well as the hesitation to do so both require a division that maintains a fundamental difference. In the first instance, the division produces the ground for translation, for finding terms of equivalence on either side of the divide; in the second instance, the division is upheld so as to protect the nonsemantic from the crime of symbolization. Preserving madness and music from discursive formulation underscores the very same separation that encourages translation.
Literary cases of the mad and the musical therefore harbor a dual threat: either language fails to accomplish what it set out to do or language succeeds and thereby strips music and madness of the power to remain musical and mad. Concerning music, the desire to explicate melodies or harmonies rests on the decision to allow acoustic material to be supplanted with a syntax, grammar, and lexicon that are qualitatively different. If, however, music resists definition, then we witness how language ultimately breaks down before that which it cannot grasp. Projects of bringing madness to language lead to the same alternative. Either one or the other must suffer destruction. To write about madness is to cause the incommunicable to communicate, to let the incomprehensible be comprehended, and therefore to make madness no longer mad. Language’s achievement depends on transforming madness into something rationally explicative—something communicative and comprehensible—as we do when we say that madness is pathological, symptomatic of unconscious desires, or a clever method for deception. But if madness holds out as that which defies all understanding, then rational language must yield and forgo its designs to impose sense. Every linguistic encounter with either music or madness thus seems poised on the brink of two abysses: the emptiness of the abstract concept or the awed silence before the ineffable.
Although the last few decades have seen much scholarship on the isolated topics of music or madness in relation to language—say, on music and literature or on literature and madness—surprisingly little attention has been paid to the specific association of music and madness in literature and its ramifications for theories of aesthetics, representation, and linguistics.16 It is this deficit that my book hopes to address.
When the topic of music and madness crops up in scholarship, it is usually discussed in reference to the operatic tradition. Analyses tend to concentrate on notions of exclusion or insubordination or subversion, often with a focus on the acoustic properties of the voice as opposed to sense-laden properties of the word. In the history of opera, the tension is perhaps most evident in the eighteenth-century division between the recitatives, which traditionally communicate the dramatic plot, and the arias, which constitute a break in the action or a suspension of narrative information. Accordingly, Mladen Dolar writes: “The aria could present the voice beyond meaning, the object of fascination beyond content; it could aim at enjoyment beyond the signifier, at the immediate fascination with a senseless object.”17 From a physiological point of view, one can recognize how beautiful singing, which requires an open, unobstructed passage from throat to mouth, consequently renders the text less intelligible. The softening of the consonants, of the occlusives, precipitates a general derationalization—or maddening, if you will—of speech. Michel Poizat, too, focuses on this “enjoyment beyond the signifier,” on this jouissance, which for him results not from listening to unintelligible speech but rather from perceiving the process of the dissolution of sense.18 Jouissance consists in hearing how a working (communicative, informative) language comes to be unworked by senseless sound. To borrow Lacan’s pun, j’ouïs sens: “I heard meaning,” and now I am open to the senselessness that drives unbounded desire. Wagner’s endless melody, which he derived from Gluck’s blurring of the aria/recitative distinction, plunges the listener into an oceanic continuity that, according to Poizat, “tends to corrode or erode the signifying scansion of language” (75). The result is maddening.
As purely phonic resonance, the voice could indeed be said to function in conflict with the word. The simple emission of sound, the material substrate of every signifier, obstructs the operative efficacy of the word, which ultimately articulates sense on a symbolic, that is, immaterial plane. Julia Kristeva’s well-known psycholinguistic distinction between the symbolic (conscious, rational) and the semiotic (libidinal, pleasurable) speaks precisely to this division of labor, with the latter frequently associated with an idea of musicality.19 The rational working of verbal language must essentially channel this phonematic resource, this “semiotic chora,” and repress its more intractable elements in order to ensure the proper formulation of sense. Nonetheless, like Freud’s return of the repressed, sonority, rhythm, and timbre—remnants of a preverbal, lost sphere of pleasure—continue to press upon the symbolic process of signification and thereby threaten to destabilize the very ground of subjectivity, namely, the systematic functioning of language that produces the subject.20 Again, the voice as such opens the door onto irrationality or regression. Thus Roland Barthes, who comes to associate the “pleasure of the text” explicitly with the “grain of the voice,” turns the linguistic act of reading into an experience better understood beneath a series of psychoanalytic rubrics: “neurosis,” “fetishism,” “obsession,” “paranoia,” and “hysteria.”21
The tension between the rationalizing force of the word and the maddening subversion of the voice certainly appears to course through German romantic literature, especially in its flirtations with irrationalism. The texts studied below, however, were not destined for the living voice or the theatrical stage but rather for the sphere of publication and private readership. If the voice plays a role, it is not the piercing cry of the soprano but the silent voice of the written page. But what is this voice? To whom does it belong? What I would like to suggest is that, above all, the nonsemantic, fascinating voice of romanticism’s mad music is the voice of the author or rather the voice of the living person who is to become an author, who is about to ascribe his or her voice to a system that will work it into sense and thereby work it off. For these writers, this voice can never be adequately or fully captured by representational language. It resists entrance into the same and even withdraws from the assignation of difference, which only serves to reinforce the notion of sameness. Irreducible to any concept, outside every system (for example, the system of identity and difference), the voice’s singularity is what evanesces into the work—be it the book itself or the identity of authorship. The work’s discursiveness, its capacity to circulate in a meaningful language (meaningful for others and for oneself), is premised on the negation of this uniqueness. That is to say, the voice is the Eurydicean point that retracts from the production of meaning. Thus—in anticipation of a detailed analysis—music and madness, insofar as they confound this regime of semantic clarity, hold out the hope, however tenuous, that what has been silenced may be heard, that the self, which has disappeared into the work, may be recognized. The metaphorical strategy is Orphic to the extreme, insofar as it allows the self to be seen, it allows the voice to be heard, but only at the moment of fatal evanescence. In the end, the reader does not see anything at all save disappearance itself.
For the writers around 1800, self-inscription was an especially acute problem, more or less directly instigated by Rousseau’s autobiographical projects and anxieties.22 This theoretician of immediate expression and singular accents fell into a writing career that he would always feel had betrayed him. As he famously recounts in his Confessions, it was in the “excessively hot” summer of 1749, during a visit to his friend Diderot, who had been placed under house arrest in Vincennes, that the young man “fell upon” (tombai) the notice from the Dijon Academy announcing the essay competition that would launch his writing career: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” “The moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man [un autre homme]” (ROC 1.351/327). The alienating effect of this event leads to a reflection on personal memory and music lost: “Once I have written a thing down, I entirely cease to remember it…. Before I studied [music] I knew great numbers of songs by heart; but since I learned to sing from written music, I have been unable to remember any of them.” The fall into writing—into its concomitant alienation and amnesia—consequently marks a new period of near madness: “I was in a state of agitation bordering on delirium. Diderot noticed it…. He encouraged me to give my ideas wings and compete for the prize. I did so, and from that moment I was lost. All the rest of my life and of my misfortunes followed inevitably as a result of that moment’s madness” (1.351/328). According to the apologist, then, Diderot’s exhortation led directly to exposure and terrifying misprision. In the Confessions’ subsequent chapters, Rousseau goes on to stress the distorting effects that writing had on his identity: “I was truly transformed; my friends and acquaintances no longer recognized me” (1.416–17/388). The Confessions ask to be read as a story of a series of disfigurements caused by culture, a narrative of misrecognition, which is here to be set straight. As the so-called Neuchâtel preface points out, contrary to Montaigne, who merely offered a dissimulating profile, Rousseau promises to present himself in his entirety and in perfect transparency (1.11/49–50). Nonetheless, the paranoiac fear of expropriation and self-oblivion would eventually haunt the exculpatory, self-justifying Confessions themselves. Hence we have the subsequent autobiographical supplements of the Dialogues and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. The project of self-introspection and self-formation leads to a frightful repetition compulsion, the need to write over and over again. They are all in a sense fruitless attempts to reappropriate in writing what has been lost in writing.
Rousseau thereby sets the key for a later age obsessed with notions of selfhood. Here identity—one’s manifest appearance to others—came to be regarded as a falsification, a terribly constraining, oppressive, mortifying construct. The failed correspondence between lived experience and representation motivated attempts to have the self emerge in the literary work without allowing it to be distorted by that work. And this task, I believe, is what the romantic tradition of music and madness ultimately addresses. To put it in the simplest of terms (and this of course remains to be demonstrated): as metaphors of nonrepresentability, music and madness could introduce into a text the nonrepresentability of the self. They could open up, within representational language, a new dimension that exceeds or eludes representation. Still, as in the case of Rousseau, precisely because we are dealing with a literary tradition, this hope for reappropriation—however clever or secretive—is always accompanied by the possibility of further expropriations.
A quick glance at the major texts treated below would reveal a high frequency of self- or quasi-self-representation: for example, Diderot’s Moi in Le neveu, Wackenroder’s Berglinger, and Hoffmann’s Kreisler. The project may be formulated in terms of a first, second, or third person. It may involve a narrator’s personal, unnerving encounter, as in Rochlitz’s “Besuch im Irrenhause” or Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck.” It may even be diffracted among multiple personalities, for example, in the series of anonymous characters that surface in Kleist’s Heilige Cäcilie. One might go so far as to include Hegel’s Geist—that uncanny double of the philosopher who courses through the Phänomenologie, the book that nearly drove its author insane (so he confessed to Schelling).
To qualify the tradition of music and madness as an autobiographical project is not to say that the generic terms of the “autobiographical pact,” as defined by Philippe Lejeune, are fully respected. Rather, the proposed identification of the narrator or character with the proper name that signs the book is precisely what is being called into question.23 Nothing could be more improper here, for we are dealing throughout not with the stabilization of identities but rather with a typically romantic critique of identity. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy locate the singular work of romanticism precisely in this critique of identity, which aims, on the one hand, to create a sensible presentation (Darstellung) of the free, absolute subject while, on the other hand, destabilizing the ground for this presentation. For this reason, they resort to Maurice Blanchot in order to redefine romanticism: “Within the romantic work, there is interruption and dissemination of the romantic work, and this in fact is not readable in the work itself…. Rather … it is readable in the unworking [désœuvrement], never named and still less thought, that insinuates itself throughout the interstices of the romantic work.”24 Désœuvrement—this unnamable, unthinkable something, this aliquid that disables sense, that disengages from the production of meaning—constitutes for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy the force of romanticism. Although the authors of The Literary Absolute specifically have the Athenaeum’s mode of fragmentary writing in mind, this failure of thought (which is less thought’s negation than its impossibility) rhymes well with Hoffmann’s allusion to music’s “unknown realm [“unbekanntes Reich”].” It is, indeed, not fortuitous that music and madness frequently emerge as an unnamable, unthinkable, and hence unknowable character of the texts studied below.25
Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s allusion to Blanchot brings this issue of the unnamable and the unthinkable back to the theme of the voice. In L’espace littéraire (1955), Blanchot evokes the myth of Orpheus, specifically the fated gaze, to open literature to that which is outside the work. Looking back at Eurydice ruins the singer’s work, not in terms of a failure but rather in terms of a necessary movement that “carries the work beyond what assures it.”26 It is a sacrifice that “consecrates the song” (232/176). In a later text, discussing the writings of Novalis—with the clearly Orphic overtones that are very much fitting for this poet—Blanchot remarks: “One can indeed say that in these texts we find expressed the non-romantic essence of romanticism, as well as all the principal questions that the night of language will contribute to producing the light of day: that to write is to make (of) speech (a) work [œuvre], but that this work is an unworking [désœuvrement]; that to speak poetically is to make possible a non-transitive speech whose task is not to say things (not to disappear in what it signifies), but to say (itself) in letting (itself) say.”27 This nontransitive speech is nothing other than the voice, that which says nothing but itself. And this is precisely how the voice is enlisted into the service of music and madness, whose work is to unwork. The contradiction is intended. Regarded either as language’s upper and lower limits (savage muteness and mystical transcendence) or as an immediacy qualitatively distinct from the reflective work of verbalization, music and madness can resist the reductive nature of representational discourse; they can allow the subject to evade the mimetic double that threatens to rob one of one’s self—but only as tropes, that is, only by reinserting and thereby losing the subject in the work.
Before closing this introduction, it will be helpful to circle back to my starting point, to the eminently circular figure of Hoffmann’s Kreisler. Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke, as published in the definitive edition of 1819, feature two series of texts whose authorship is attributed to the fictional Kapellmeister. Hoffmann plays the role of an editor who presents the writings of the mysterious man, described as someone on the verge of madness. That Kreisler is a strongly autobiographical figure is apparent throughout Hoffmann’s writing career. There is evidence that he planned at many points to write an entire “musical novel” in the guise of a biography of his imagined composer.28 There is mention of a collection of “Lucid Periods of a Mad Musician” (“Lichte Stunden eines wahnsinnigen Musikers”).
Autobiography seems to convert a life into a static form, into a work, and it is precisely this formatting that Hoffmann’s writing resists. Paul de Man’s well-known definition of autobiography as “defacement” underlines the predicament. De Man’s emphasis on the “privative” function of “language as trope” reveals the referential crisis that confronts the would-be autobiographer—the written I is never adequate to the writing I. In challenging the commonsensical understanding of autobiography as employing “a simpler mode of referentiality” (say, in comparison with so-called fictional works), de Man writes: “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”29 Consequently, the autobiographer who desires to write himself writes himself away. The author auctions himself off. He gives himself a shape that betrays the experience of a life that is fuller, uncontainable—excessive. The autobiographical form invariably deforms.
Hoffmann tackles the problem in his incomplete novel, the Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1820–21). Here the autobiographical task falls to a writing cat and thereby introduces multiple layers of irony. To begin, the book merges the human with the bestial—a typical ironic technique that Hoffmann derived from the engravings of Jacques Callot. In the text entitled “Jacques Callot,” the head piece to his Fantasiestücke, Hoffmann writes: “Irony, in that it sets man and animal in conflict, derides man with his paltry works and endeavors [“mit seinem ärmlichen Tun und Treiben”]; it resides only in a profound soul, and Callot’s grotesque forms, created out of animal and man, reveal to the serious [ernsten], deeper-seeing observer all the hidden meanings that lie beneath the cloak of the scurrilous [Skurrilität]” (HW 2.1.18/HMW 76).
The irony of the Lebensansichten satirizes the idea of forming in general, for the tomcat Murr is conventionally “educated” (gebildet) and blatantly “forms” (bildet) his life in the style of the popular Bildungsroman. Furthermore, Murr uncaringly tears out sheets of his master’s printed copy of Kreisler’s biography to be used as a blotting paper for his own ouvrage. The work that contains the formed life of the composer is literally unworked and consigned to the status of “waste paper” (Makulatur-Blatt). When the manuscript is delivered to the publisher, the Kreisler pages are accidentally printed along with the feline autobiography. The ironic conflict is therefore very real for the novel’s reader, who must work through alternating stories, interruptions, and gaping lacunae.
Hoffmann confided to his friends that he hoped this book would finally show his authentic self (“What I now am and can be”).30 But how in fact does that authenticity manifest itself? Where is Hoffmann to be heard as “he is and can be”? I would like to offer a conjecture, however playful. In a letter to his Bamberg friend, Dr. Speyer, Hoffmann seems to joke with his own first name, Ernst, by employing the Callotian terms of “seriousness” (das Ernste) and “the scurrilous” (Skurrilität) that had marked the Fantasiestücke: it was “the highly wise and profound tomcat Murr … a real cat … [who] gave me the opportunity for this scurrilous [skurrilen] joke, which weaves through a truly very serious [ernste] book” (May 1, 1820, HW 5.913; emphasis in original). Is it the writing self—a self that would only be betrayed by an inadequate literary act of self-representation—that peeps out from beneath “the cloak of the scurrilous”? Is the encryption of the name Ernst, intended or not, where the self slips into the work without being subsumed or sublimated by it? If so, das Ernste enters the text precisely by remaining outside it, or rather it is in the text by virtue of being its outside, located in the work indeed as a kind of crypt.
The doubling of the autobiographical project, split between a cat and a mad musician, blatantly frustrates the gestures of simple identification ordained by Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. The line of every represented life, which runs from a beginning to an end (from a birth to a death, metaphorical or physical), is broken, falsified, wasted. It is in this break that Hoffmann could show what he truly is, but only as that which always retreats, as that which resists every form. Capturing the authentic self in representation is impossible. In a particularly telling passage, Kreisler comments on the impossibility of giving his true name. Alluding to Tieck’s Ritter Blaubart, Kreisler confesses, “I once had a most excellent name, but over the course of time I have almost forgotten it, and can recollect it only dimly now” (HW 5.77/KM 50). Although Madame Benzon pleads with Johannes to pronounce his other name, he refuses: “It is impossible, and I half suspect that where my name as passport through life for my outer form [“meine äußere Gestalt”] is concerned, my dim memory of my former self derives from that agreeable time when I was really not yet born [“da ich eigentlich noch gar nicht geboren”]” (HW 5.77/KM 50). In contrast to the name of Kreisler, explicitly attached to his “outer form” (“äußere Gestalt”), there is another secret name—barely remembered and unspeakable—that belongs to a sphere beyond or before this form, before his birth, before the beginning. This anterior time, which marks the utopia when one was “not yet born,” can only appear in the postnatal realm as that which has been negated: “It is impossible.” As for his present “appearance, complexion, and physiognomy,” nothing is more perfect than the name that he now uses and that others use to address him. In other words, the name Kreisler is what works—“Turn it upside down, dissect it with the anatomical knife of grammar, and its internal content will prove better and better” (HW 5.77–78/KM 50).
This description of a self engaged in societal communication stands in stark contrast to a barely remembered self, which throughout the Lebensansichten is coded as something musical and mad. It is this latter self that proves to be an object of frustration for Kreisler’s biographer. Although the man may be given a form—to be inverted or dissected at will—the essence of the subject eludes grasp: “Nothing more tiresome for an historian or a biographer than when, as if riding a wild colt, he must cavort this way and that, over stocks and stones, up hill and down dale, always searching for trodden paths and never finding them. Such is the case of the man who has undertaken to set down for your benefit, gentle reader, what he knows of the bizarre life [“von dem wunderlichen Leben”] of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler” (HW 5.58/KM 37).
To offer a brief, provisional summary: the turn to music and madness seems to promise that the self may be spared the inversions and perversions of verbal formation. As a metaphor of nonrepresentability, musical madness can enter into representation while pointing to what exceeds the form in which it appears. Consequently, the broken lines of the life stories contained in Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten raise form itself to the status of metaphor. In this way, the very idea of form comes to be interrogated.
Certainly, this problematization is no simple affair. Language can only be unworked by language itself. There is indeed an explicit antiverbalism that courses through Hoffmann’s works and continues straight to Nietzsche. Words are suspect, because they reduce or generalize that which is presumably irreducible. Nietzsche writes at the end of his career: “Our true experiences are not garrulous [“nicht geschwätzig”]. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be…. The things we have words for are also the things we have already left behind. There is a grain of contempt in all speech…. People vulgarize themselves when they speak a language” (Ecce Homo, NW 6.128/EH 205). The obvious problem is that every statement of the antiverbal position is formulated in the very verbal system under attack. Here, as in Hoffmann, a concept of irony helps to weather the logical disturbance, especially when raised to Schlegel’s perpetual “irony of irony.” For Nietzsche, as well as for his predecessors, music and madness together set up a limit toward which language aspires but never reaches. The limit may be understood as an immanent realm of the body or a transcendent realm of the spirit, a dream world or a world of pain and despair. It may simply mark the feeling of life itself—ein Lebensgefühl—which is lost as soon as it is recognized. The assumption of something extratextual is always accomplished by a new textualization. In part, the unworking of language, for which music and madness are powerful metaphors, names this impossible desire of giving mediated expression to the immediate. However naive or ill-fated, however sophisticated or hopeless, it constitutes the energy of the texts below.