From Music to Literature

From Music to LiteratureAuthor(s): Eric MéchoulanSource: SubStance, Vol. 28, No. 1, Issue 88: Special Issue: Literary History (1999), pp. 42-56Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685419Accessed: 23/10/2010 09:48

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From Music to Literature

EricM&choulan

I ONCE CAME ACROSS A TEXT ENTITLED "HISTORY OF THE WORLD,"

constituting a collection of students' bloopers. One of them runs like this: "In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature"! As sometimes happens, this is a clever blooper indeed, which shows how difficult it is to assign "literature" a specific position as object of knowledge. Literature is certainly more than texts, but what can it be?

The magnificent development of literary theories over the last thirty years has had at least one edifying consequence, which is to make us understand that a strict definition of literature is simply impossible to give. It seems there is a specific resistance of "literature," evading capture in the nets of knowledge, eluding becoming a theoretical "object." And perhaps it was not really possible to see this until recently, because the in- stitutionalization of literature and its objectification as an object of

knowledge has paralleled the very development of our conception of literature since the nineteenth century.

Strictly speaking, our ordinary use of the concept "literature" gives an account of practices since the nineteenth century, and not really before. Nevertheless, the crystallization of such a use is the result of a very long process, with many inflections. I would like to focus on only one of these- the shift from music to "literature," since it may at least help us understand

why the "object-literature" offers such resistance to theoretical and even historical knowledge. Even if one wants to abandon the idea of an "iden-

tity" of literature, we can at least give an historical account of the impos- sibility of finding that identity.

The Role of Music

It is well known that one of the major differences between our literary practices and medieval poetical practices lies in the intimate connection of

poetry and music in the Middle Ages: not only was almost every poem

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From Music to Literature 43

intended to be performed orally, but they were often sung, accompanied by instruments. As one trouvere at the end of the thirteenth century says, "une poesie sans musique est comme un moulin sans eau" (poetry without music is like a mill without water). And Jean de Grouchy, in his De musica, deals not only with sacred music, but with the chanson de geste, chanson de

toile, and other kinds of vulgar, vernacular poetry as well. Yet it is not only our conception of poetry that must be revised, but also our understanding of music.

For us, music plays predominantly the role of a frail emotion of

sounds, directly assigned to our pleasure or distaste-that is, to our subjec- tivity. For the whole of Antiquity, music was concerned with harmony, the emotion of sounds being intimately bound up with the motion of human

beings, of society and even of the cosmos. When, in the Timaeus, Plato describes the world soul, he uses the musical ratios discovered by the

Pythagoreans as its basic principle, claiming that they govern the ordered structure of the cosmos (Timaeus, 35b). Music is thus a principle of universal order, since it establishes mathematical proportions. Music actually occupies a central place in antique thought because it is able to join both mathematics and astronomy, which then lead to authentic philosophy:

[H]e who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars, and gone through the previous training, and seen the connection of music with these things, and harmonized them all with laws and institutions, is not able to give a reason of such things as have a reason. (Laws, 967e).

It is nevertheless true that in the Republic, although Plato emphasizes the value of music as good pedagogy for individual and social harmony, he does not assign it the highest position: its social standing is beneath the

intelligible value of the mathemata (Republic, 521b-c). But this stems from the very mode of music: music cannot occupy the first position because it deals precisely with the relation between heterogeneous positions. Its role is as general as that of mathemata, but in a very different way. In the

Timaeus, Plato claims that the universe has been created as near to an eternal-and therefore immobile-model as possible: the mathemata are the closest order to this model (37d).

Then time enters in, with duration, break and velocity: music is the science of time, or, to be more precise, the science of the harmony of time-it founds the just proportions of the different rhythms of beings, of the multiple speeds of planets and stars. Hence music deals with mobility and otherness. If the very process of anamnesis is possible (the method of remembrance by which every human being is able to recognize the model,

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44 Eric M6choulan

the original underlying its empirical copy), it depends on music for trans-

lating, for synchronizing the high and evanescent velocity of the empirical with the essential slowness of the realm of ideas.

Since ancient Greek education was less a matter of knowledge than a

way of molding and cultivating ethical character, music played a specific role, because of its harmonic composition. It is striking to see, for instance, that the element of grammar was not originally the gramma (that is, the letter), but the stoicheion, a sonorous element where speech is in accord with melody. As Edward Lippman has observed, "the grammatical stoicheia were measured tones capable of serial arrangements, and not

simply elemental constituents indifferent in nature. This new concept of element can have originated only in music, although it soon developed into a general word for elements of any type" (551).

But Lippman adds,

[W]ith the decline of the ancient musical institutions and their society, philosophy and rhetoric fought over the right of succession. We can see in Plato's Theaetetus how the whole musical conception with its class preroga- tive of leisure and its scorn for the servitude of practical occupations is taken over by philosophy. Rhetoric becomes the antithesis, representing illiberal employment for gain. (ibid.)

Music continues to pervade the whole of Greek society, but often as an

illusory leisure compared with philosophy, or a vain occupation compared with rhetoric. In De caelo, Aristotle begins to ironize about the inaudible music of the spheres (II, 9, 290b 12 ff.), even though music still plays an

important part in the neo-pythagorean philosophy. It will be the charge of

Christianity to boost music's fortunes, thanks also to a shift by Plotinus. The recurring comparison of the One, the Reason-Principle, with

musical harmony, is revealing for Plotinus, as it will be for Christian authors, because it permits them to think at once the multiplicity and the

symphonics of disparate elements-local heterogeneity and universal har-

mony. The Indo-European root ar of the Greek armonia refers to the notion of a just order of the universe, but armonia comes also from the idea of articulation, of the joint: arariskein means "to join," as one can join the wooden beams of a house (which is why we find in Vitruvius's book on architecture "the idea that the proportions of a building or of a room would look right to the eye if the dimensions were to be based on the proportions that rule the art of music") (quoted in Chadwick, 84). For Heraclitus, har-

mony is precisely the joinery of being, the principle of the exact, the just station in the presence. Plotinus tries to use a similar conception, but em-

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44 Eric M6choulan


phasizing the union of the One more than the articulations and disarticula- tions composing the rhythms of Being, as in Heraclitus.

Boethius: Music as Movement

I will now focus on Boethius's De institutione musica, the key source for the medieval conception of music. The sense of unity is so impressive in Boethius that for him, there is no fundamental break between Being and

knowledge. The division of knowledge closely follows the modes of Being. There is a kind of "diffusion" of unity at every level of the essences. An essence can be a magnitude-a continuous and indivisible identity (e.g. a tree or a stone), or a multitude-a discontinuous and divided unity (e.g. a

population, or grass). The magnitudes consist of immobile or mobile

unities, and the multitudes consist of things in themselves, or of things in relation to another thing. Geometry deals with immobile magnitudes, astronomy with mobile magnitudes, arithmetic with multitude per se, and music with multitude relatum ad aliud. Boethius is the first to have called this division of knowledge the "quadrivium."

In the quadrivium, music occupies a very specific position. The three other sciences are devoted to the search for truth, but music is related both to speculation and to morality. Moreover, music is both intellectual judg- ment and sensuous pleasure. We must understand that, for Boethius, the

principle of pleasure is none other than the principle of similarity: "when we compare that which is coherently (coaptatum) and harmoniously (con- venienter) joined together in sound-that is, that which gives us pleasure- so we come to recognize that we ourselves are united (compactas) according to this same principle of similarity" (I, 1).1 Of course not everyone is the same: there is a whole relativity of pleasures and musical conveniences (as Plato emphasized in Timaeus, 37a). Pleasure is then connected to morality because it enlightens the principle of unity.

But why is it incumbent upon music to play such a role? The other sciences are reasoning too far from the senses: the principle of pleasure is

foreign to them, and only music is able to establish the connection between

body and spirit (Boethius says that the joint-compages-of soul and body is none other than a musical harmony [I, 1]). We must notice as well that

geometry and astronomy deal only with closed, extrinsic bodies, and al-

though arithmetic is in charge of multitudes (the link between universal and particular), it does not explain the relationship between body and soul since it deals only with things in themselves: music alone is able to

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46 Eric M&houlan

thematize the relation to the other. Music is what permits us to think the

alterity as unity. That is the reason why music can divide itself in three without any problem: the musica mundana, the music of the cosmos; the musica humana, the music of social relations; and the musica instrumentalis, the music of sounds (the latter is what we would generally call "music"). It is not a matter of reducing the other to the same, or the multiple to the

singular, but of acknowledging that the principle of similitude, while

recognizing the difference between the proportions of the bodies, posits a

harmony between these different ratios, an intimacy between the dis-

parate. Music, like astronomy, is a theory of movement: the relationship is a

translation. For Boethius, when one speaks of consonance, one is speaking of sound; when one speaks of sound, one is speaking of pulse and percus- sion; and when one speaks of these, one is actually speaking of move-

ment-or, more precisely, speed ratios in the movement of bodies. If the movement is quick, the note is high; if it is slow, the note is low; the sounds are consonant or dissonant depending on their proportion or dispropor- tion in the synchronization (simul pulsae). A consonance is not the meeting of two similar sounds (that would be the reduction of the other to the

same), but the event of two different sounds at the same time (1,3; I, 31). In order to understand this, Boethius gives the following example: when you apply one stripe of red on a spinning top, and you "spin it quickly, the whole top seems dyed with red color, not because the whole thing is thus, but because the velocity of the red stripe overcomes the clear parts, and

they are not allowed to appear" (I, 3). In the same way, a consonance is

composed of heterogeneous sounds, but you hear only the unity of the sound: music is then the velocity of appearances and their synchronization in the unity of Being.

This is why music requires calculations. Mathematical deployment is an integral part of Boethius's neo-platonic and neo-pythagorean metaphysics. The whole of medieval learning follows this double trajectory of musica speculativa and musica practica. But we must not understand this division in the same way as our own separation of theory and praxis. The difference between the speculative and the practical parallels the difference between form and matter: to use the aristotelian lexis, theory and matter are to the potential what praxis and form are to the actual. As Michael Masi has noted,

For Boethius as for the ancient Greeks, there was a sharp distinction between philosophical number theory and practical mathematics, which in the Middle Ages was variously called algorism or computation. As with

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music, theory and practice came to be united in the treatises of the late medieval period. (13)

It is enough to remember Albert the Great's claim in order to recognize another kind of opposition between theory and praxis: "Omnis scientia aut

practica sive moralis, aut poetica sivefactiva et artificialis, aut est theorica" (Every science is either practical or moral, or poetical or fictitious and artificial, or theoretical).2 Hence praxis is never only the application of a theory, and

theory never only a speculation on one praxis. Such a conception requires a whole different setting and modelling of knowledge: not a unity and a

harmony any more, but a distance between subject and object that yields knowledge.

The New Analysis of Music

It is in such a new tuning of knowledge that music will soon lose its

speculative function. Music already goes toward the mere instrumental function in Aristotelian Arabic philosophy: the idea of the "music of the

spheres" so dear to Pythagoras, Plato and Boethius becomes unnamable in the name of Physics.3 At the end of the fourteenth century Evrart de Conty registers the idea as a pure rhetorical figure. In a similar way, the three boethian musics are revoked by Jean de Grouchy as early as the fourteenth

century: only instrumental music is taken into account. At the same time, the gregorian "plain-chant" withdraws in favor of polyphony (which is both religious and profane), and quantitative clock-time supersedes the more elastic church-time: the measurement of time is now divorced from

religion; it passes from the priest's hands to those of the merchant and to the power of the state. In fact, clock-time is quickly understood as an instrument of power: the urban clock rules the workers' time.4 Like the clock, polyphony implies another way of experiencing time, since time has now a spatial dimension (like the roundness of the clock, which is but one residue of the cyclical conception of time, a mere shape, or as in polyphonic writing, which is vertical). A new temporality, which is conceptual, metric, measurable and architectural, replaces the old musical organization. As Gerard Le Vot has noted:

Henceforth, the musician neglects the diversity and the plurality of the concrete times (...), he neglects their juxtaposition and their disjunction inside of a singular "univocal" experience and assumes another kind of plurality in the simultaneous voices, a plurality made of interrelations, tensions and concordances. The music he makes is henceforth analyzable and mentally reversible. (139)

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Formal research on musical writing has been substituted for speculative music.

In the words of Machaut's famous motet, "My end is my beginning, and my beginning is my end"-the meaning of the song duplicates itself in the mirror of the backward movement of the musical lines, even though such a movement cannot actually be heard, but only seen on the page. Calculation had been the favorite expression of unity amidst multiplicity, in accordance with a constrained flow of time. It is henceforth an enthusias- tic search for harmonious diversity, the constraint of time spatially brought to a standstill and then revived through games of writing. We can see such a shift in Evrart de Conty's Glose des echecs amoureux, an encyclopedic gloss where music plays a noticeable part. Evrart takes again Boethius's example of the spinning-top, but no longer in order to show the fusion of appearances and being according to velocity in the harmony of a consonancy, but to show innumerable multiples and the pure semblance of unity-not the

enigma of two voices accorded in one consonancy, but the stubborn and

unperceivable multiplicity of just one sound:

la corde fremit et tremble et va et vient a destre et a senestre si insensible- ment que les reiteracions des mouvemens (...) n'en peuent estre percevables au sens. Et pour ce samble ce estre un seul son, ja soit ce que ce soient, selon la verit6, innumerables sons (..) Et de ce met Boece un exemple de la toupie (...) Et c'est pour ce qu'il est necessite naturelment a ce que la veue se puist faire deuement et distinctement qu'il y ait temps sensible ouquel la chose visible se puist souffisamment monstrer a la veue, si comme il est en perspective demonstr.5

The cord quivers and trembles, comes and goes, on the right and on the left, so insensibly that the reiterations of the movements cannot be perceived. And that is why it seems that there is just one sound, whereas, according to the truth, there are innumerable sounds (...) And concerning this Boethius gives the example of the spinning-top (...) And that is why it is obviously necessary that we have sensible time in order to see rightly and distinctly one visible thing, as it is demonstrated in perspective.

The very word "perspective" implies this spatial context where time can

only henceforth appear. But this new way of constraining oneself presents certain difficulties,

for example in the relations between music and poetry. Closely related to

song, poetry usually embellishes music. The polyphonic text, though, seems to be dissociated from sounds, becoming less and less under- standable. This effect is intensified since voices and instruments tend to distantiate themselves from one another. In a fourteenth-century manuscript of a kyrie, one sees for the first time the instrumental transcrip-

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tion on the right-hand page and the vocal parts on the left:6 this spatial arrangement of the page is like a visual mark of the differentiation. Poetry dissociates itself from song just as instrumentation dissociates itself from voice. At the end of the fourteenth century, Eustache Deschamps, the dis-

ciple of Machaut, no longer knows music. Poetry, which is by that time more and more autonomous, must define its own status. This is one of the

purposes of the "arts of second rhetoric" which flourish during the fifteenth century.

Poetry Independent of Music

Deschamps writes in 1392 the first reflection in vernacular on French

poetry: l'Art de dictier.7 The first thing he does is to situate poetry in com-

parison to music-that is, to recover music's learned aura without losing poetry's newly acquired specificity. He places poetry inside music but

grants it a natural virtue as opposed to the artificiality of instruments

(including the voice). The advantage is twofold: poetry gains from music and from nature at the same time. Al-Farabi, the tenth-century historian of Arabic music, grants a similar distribution, but while artificial music can be

understood, the "natural" cannot-it is too fugacious. This opposition is

reprised in the eighteenth century by Vincent de Beauvais and by Raimond

Lulle, while Deschamps considerably modifies the distinction: natural music prevails over artificial music because although one can learn the

latter, the former "ne puet estre aprinse" (cannot be learned). Poetry gains its validity through an opposition to knowledge. We can understand this curious reversal only if we keep in mind that by the fourteenth century, knowledge does not have the same meaning as in Boethius's time. Thus

praxis and theory as objects and subjects of knowledge are on either side of a widening abyss. And although they both may still be in view, the voice can no longer carry over the distance; thus vision supersedes orality. When this happens, knowledge is not immediately related to the modes of being, but becomes an epistemology. Deschamps opposes nature to such a

knowledge; nature remains synchronous with Being for a short period of time: nature is the expression of God.

In one fifteenth-century anonymous art of rhetoric,8 the dichotomy of natural and artificial is mentioned in reference to Euclid, who

mesura le premier le cours du firmament et les cercles des planetes, la terre, et en trousvant ceste oeuvre trouva la mesure de la musique et les tons, c'est a dire tonus, et par li fut compasse astrologie la haulte et la basse, et toutes

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50 Eric M&houlan

aultres mesures, excepte mesure de parler, mais elle vient de Dieu et de

sapience plaine de bonte et de courtoise.9

The human learning process is opposed to the gift of God. To the verb

"former," which refers in Machaut to the poet's way of working, can be substituted the verb "cr6er" [to create], previously the domain of God alone. The very notion of gift/talent becomes tautological, as one can see in

Deschamps's Art de dictier: "De ceste musique naturele, et comment homme depuis qu'il se met naturelement a ce faire, ce que nul (...) ne lui

sqauroit aprendre se de son propre et naturel mouvement ne se faisoit."10 Such a tautology of the natural appears also in Evrart de Conty who writes, in the musical part of his Glose des echecs amoureux, that poetry is "sound music," meaning poetry has a musicality of its own and does not require further arrangement. And he adds that the poet does not need to know the musical numbers in order to compose verses: "vient come de nature a ceux naturelement enclins" (verses come naturally to those naturally inclined.)

Deschamps insists also, like Boethius, on the specificity of music, but unlike for Boethius, music is no longer moral, but medicinal:

Musique est (...) ainsi comme la medicine des VII ars [car] par sa melodie delectable les cuers et esperis de ceuls qui auxdiz ars par pensee, ymaginaison et labours de bras estoient traveilliez, pesans et ennuiez, sont medicinez et recreez, et plus habiles apres a estudier et labourer aux autres VI ars.11

From morality to medicine, the shift anticipates the passage from the medieval state, which is above all legal, to the modern state, which plays more the role of doctor to the political body. Deschamps's "natural music" must be read against the background of diverse historical struggles: French

against Latin, lay against clerical, nation state against catholic power- natural music is music of the vulgar.12

With the economic expansion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the social standing of mechanical arts (including medicine) and the very notion of labor has increased. As an "entertaining medicine," natural music is actually in the service of labor, just as the minstrel (whose name comes from ministerialis-state or civil servant) is at the service of his lord. The

jongleur moves in a physical as well as a social geography: he brings here and there news and common knowledge; he sings the unity of culture. In this sense, the jongleur never speaks for himself or about himself; he is only the locum by which society is able to speak itself-the music of its memory. When this memory begins to collapse, the jongleur is replaced by the

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minstrel: the voice of a particular person, be it his patron or eventually the

poet himself.

The Ambivalence of "Literature"

Poetry must find another kind of legitimation in the orb of the old

powers-that is, in music or rhetoric. We see then its specific situation in the ambivalence of Deschamps's "recreez": since writing has no accent yet, the word can mean "to entertain" (recrder) as well as "to re-create" (recreer). This very ambivalence is the allegory of a new idiom that we come to know under the name of "literature." In a world no longer temporally united by a religious power, nor spiritually united by waiting of a blessed eschatol-

ogy, literature will offer rest, leisure, and re-creation. In the ratios of

velocity it was possible to read unity in multiplicity and being in appearances; henceforth, reading is compromised in a world playing on the diverse voices of culture. Knowledge can no longer maintain "from the inside" the

harmony of appearances and being; indeed, it valorizes their distance.

Theory and praxis are face to face, and the poetical, set apart, is only able to play with this gap in the relaxing innovation of the recreer/recreer.

The emerging literature will exist in the locus of non-knowledge which, in principle, escapes the dichotomy between theory and praxis because it operates as the "rest" in the laborious calculations of exchanges. Here is the explanation of the tautological appearance of the "natural": since it is one of the elements of production of the whole system, it cannot be described in the system, except as both constative and performative. It is clear that literature is not at rest at all, but offers an effect of rest with

regard to the labors of the intellectual, merchant and political economy, because it is, so to speak, a place where velocities can be changed or

exchanged. Literature appears then as a vulgarization of music, a secular

way to accord or to synchronize the speeds of appearance in the vivacity of

exchange, more than in the constancy of being. Literature actually moves between theory and practice, in the gap formed between appearances and

being-a gap called "fiction."

An Allegory of the Fate of Music

In conclusion, I would like to take one last example, perhaps to be considered as one last allegory. The last romance of the Arthurian cycle

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was most probably written at the very beginning of the fifteenth century: le Chevalier au papegau (the knight with the parrot). It is well known that this

cycle, inaugurated by Chr6tien with his unfinished romance Perceval ou le conte du Graal, has spawned many continuations which have emphasized the allegorical quest for the Grail. Since the end of the thirteenth century, the cycle harked back to its origins, drawing from the roots of the cycle. King Arthur has always played the part of the originator and ultimately the judge of the quests. The Chevalier au papegau participates in this

retrieval, since in it Arthur has just been crowned. As a new king, he claims the right to the first adventure coming to his court, in order to prove himself worthy of his role. Thus Arthur's legendary immobility disap- pears, as well as his own name and title: he becomes merely an anonymous knight. Unlike the main quests, the romance focuses only on Arthur. His adventures follow a fine crescendo: he saves one lady, then hundreds of

knights and ladies, and subsequently even a whole city. In his second adventure, he receives a prize: a parrot which can, of course, talk, but also

sing and even prophesy. The reference to Chretien's tale Yvain ou le chevalier au lion is quite obvious, but the character of the parrot is a most unusual one. In the bestiary tradition, tle parrot plays a very minor part; only one small example is known, Jean de Conde's Messe des oiseaux (The Birds' Mass), from the first half of the fourteenth century. In it, the parrot is Venus's messenger, delivering the sermon at this strange mass. On the other hand, the lion is the allegory of power, force and kingship; in Chretien's tale it has an effective role, helping Yvain in his struggles: he is Yvain's emblem, adjuvant and identification. The parrot never helps Ar- thur (he is far too cowardly); his role consists of singing and commenting upon Arthur's adventures. He cannot be identified with Arthur; he is useless as an emblem, being more and more reduced to a single nomina- tion. Arthur's final adventure permits him to bring back to his court a wild, nameless giant as a conquest of the civilized over bestiality.

Far from being the zenith of the great allegories of the quest for the Grail, this seems an ironization of the quest and of the courtly tradition: the romantic ideal is tainted with a satire of the fabliau. But I think there is a last

allegory here: the allegory of the fate of music. The cosmological music that deals with ethics and the universe is now reduced to the songs of praise of a parrot, who is the commentator on the state and civilization's achieve- ments. But the satire is wedded to the praise, and thus the allegory of the adventure begins to be the adventure of the intertwining of discourses and of allegorical fragmentation. "Literature" offers itself as the mode for unit-

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ing the disparate, in the timing of its discourse, and in the very mobiliza- tion of topical figures and roles.

Literature: Object of Knowledge, or New Mode for Uniting the Disparate?

Literature seems to emerge as the vulgarization and subjectivation of

music, and as a way to mobilize heterogeneous discourses and synchronize them in the process of its discursivity, as a way to use fictitious stories where true-life experiences can be enjoyed and learned. But what about the

specific resistance to knowledge? It comes from the fact that literature moves between theory and practice, between appearances and being, between leisure and creation. Certainly there is knowledge at work in literary productions, but it is impossible to assign it any specific place in social discourses, and therefore any legitimacy. Because of its recreation and free use of contemporaneous or past discourses, literature seems to disclose certain historical logics at work in a given society, and it can do so precisely because it has been granted an entertainment status with no strong social

implications. Nevertheless, it is this very status that invalidates its speculative power.

It seems then impossible to give a definition of literature, because it would assume the possibility to fix it in delimited borders; as a heir of music, literature must be understood in terms of time and not space: literature not only is moving, but it is circulating at the very borders of the cultural and the discursive. Music was a way of contemplating the har-

mony of the universe, a valuable leisure activity that would lead to wis-

dom; literature is a way of offering the multiplicity of the discourses, an often devalorized pastime that leads (or is supposed to lead) not to wis-

dom, but to happiness. If we can historicize the ways literature was con- ceived of (and institutionalized), there is certainly no "history of

happiness." Historical investigation rests on two principles of otherness. First, the

present must be something other than the past, and the task of historical discourse is to show us how what seems the same (same concept, same

institution, same practice) is actually radically different-so different that it is almost ungraspable by us in the present, which is why we need experts in the interpretation of the past. Second, each present must also be other than what it is, meaning that it must not be able to understand itself without mediation; the moment of the present must be opaque to itself,

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which is why we need experts in the clarification and enlightenment of

"past presents," experts in mediation and knowledge who can give an account of the opaqueness of these presents. But here the problem with the construction of literature is that one considers literature as an immediate

knowledge of its present moment, since it looks like immediate knowledge (where there should be a process of mediation) and a knowledge of the

present (where the present should remain opaque to itself). This runs counter to any historical investigation.

We can briefly turn to Walter Benjamin to solve our problem. For

Benjamin, historical materialism does not construct the past as radically different from the present along the line of temporality (progression), but tries to show the "actualization" of the has-been in the now. This is what he

calls, paradoxically, a dialectic at rest. A dialectical image must be a light- ning image, implying an immediacy of actualization. When Adorno criticizes Benjamin in a famous letter about his project of Passagenwerk, he draws Benjamin's attention to the insoluble problem of missing the process of mediation between infrastructure and superstructure. Adorno is right in his remark, but blind to Benjamin's understatement that the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure is not the cause of a process of

mediation, but, as Agamben has remarked, an immediate identity. Histori- cal materialism looks then for those present moments where the has-been can meet the now, can be immediately actualized in order to be saved.

But in this process of synchronization and curious neutralization of dialectical process, can't we recognize the very mode of literature? The fact that Benjamin decided to use, as a method, "literary montage," testifies that he was not at all blind to the link. He clearly saw that the perfect model available for framing or staging effects of immediacy was literature. But of course it seems to compromise knowledge, since knowledge rests on a process of mediation.

No history of literature then? It depends on us to build a history attentive to effects of immediacy, which are none other than epistemologi- cal effects. Such a history would certainly need the help of what Benjamin calls "philology," which should be nothing, after all, but "love of lan-

guage." Universite de Montreal

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NOTES

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 1. The English translation appeared in a dissertation: Calvin M. Bower, Boethius's

the Principles of Music: an Introduction, Translation and Commentary. George Peabody College for Teachers, 1966.

2. Quoted by Marc-Rene Jung, "Poetria: zur Dichtungstheorie des ausgehenden Mittelalters in Frankreich," Vox Romanica, n? 30, p. 50. This division follows Aristotle's differentiation between praxis and poiesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Plato's break between theoria and praxis.

3. Cf. Al-Farabi, "Grand trait6 de la musique," in Rodolphe d'Erlanger, La musique arabe. Paris: Librairie orientaliste, 1930, vol. I, p. 22.

4. Cf. Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age: temps, travail et culture en Occi- dent. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

5. Reginald Hyatte, Maryse Ponchard-Hyatte, eds., L'harmonie des spheres: Encyclopedie d'astronomie et de musique extraite du commentaire sur Les Echecs amoureux (XVe s.) attribue a Evrart de Conty. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985, XXIII.

6. Cf. Jacques Chailley, Histoire musicale du Moyen Age. Paris: P.U.F., 1984, p. 262. 7. Eustache Deschamps, Oeuvres completes, ed. G. Raynaud. Paris: F. Didot, 1891,

Vol. VII. 8. Cf. Ernest Langlois, ed., Recueil d'arts de seconde rhetorique. Geneva: Slatkine

reprints, 1974 [1902], p. 11-103. 9. Ibid., p. 40: Euclid, who "was the first to measure the course of the firmament

and the circles of the planets, the earth, and in finding that he found the measure of music and the tones. He numbered high and low astrology, and every other kind of measure, except the measure of speaking, because that comes from God and from wisdom full of goodness and courtesy."

10. E. Deschamps, op. cit., p. 272: "this natural music and how one is naturally to perform it, cannot be learned by his own volition if natural movement does not incline him to do so."

11. "Music is the medicine of the seven arts because the hearts and spirits of those who have worked in the arts by thinking, imagining or laboring by hand, feeling heavy and annoyed, are soothed and entertained [or re-created] by its delectable melody, more skilled after that to study and labor in the other six arts."

12. Cf. my paper "La musique du vulgaire: arts de rhetorique et constitution de la litterature au XVe si&cle," Etudes litteraires, mars 1990, pp. 6-16.

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. Enfance et histoire: deperissement de l'experience et origine de l'histoire. Trans. Y. Hersant. Paris: Payot, 1989.

Aristotle. De caelo.

Boethius. De institutione musica. Ed. G. Friedlein. Lipsiae, 1867.

Chadwick, Henry. Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

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Deschamps, Eustache. Oeuvres completes. Ed. G. Raynaud. Paris: F. Didot, 1891, vol. VII.

Le Vot, Gerard. "Considerations sur le temps et la musique au Moyen Age," Le Nombre du temps: en hommage a Paul Zumthor. Paris: Champion, 1988.

Lippman, Edward A. "The Place of Music in the System of Liberal Arts." Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. Larue. New York: Pendragon Press, 1978.

Masi, Michael, ed. Boethius and the Liberal Arts: a Collection of Essays. Berne: Peter Lang, 1981.

Plato. Laws. Ed. and trad. A.E. Taylor. London: J.M. Dent, 1960.

. Republic. Ed. and trad. P. Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.

- . Timaeus. Ed. and trad. D. Archer-Hind. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

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From Music to Literature