Peter Dayan

Which Came First? Nature, Music, and Poetry in Mallarmé’s ‘Bucolique’

It is normally, if tacitly, assumed that nature came before poetry, and music somewhere in between the two. Mallarmé’s ‘Bucolique’, in the folds of its syntax, demonstrates why this belief is unsustainable. None of those concepts really functions unless, at a more or less hidden level, each can behave as if it were both anterior to and born of the others. Mallarmé does not assert this as a rational truth; rather, he shows this behaviour at work. Poetry, in this view, is both the consequence and the precondition of nature — and vice versa. Hence, perhaps, ecopoetry is the only poetry.

APOLLINAIRE'S MUSIC

There is a peculiar paradox in Apollinaire’s attitude to music. On the one hand, he took little apparent interest in the music of his (or any) time; he clearly did not appreciate it much, and his enjoyment of concerts was at best ambiguous. On the other hand, music as an abstract concept (including what he calls, in his poems, “le chant”) stands, in his writing, for the very essence of art: there is no higher praise for a poem or a painting, in Apollinaire’s vocabulary, than to say it is, or is analogous to, music. This essay seeks to explain why actual works of music, of specific audible music, have such a low position in Apollinaire’s value system, while the concept of music has such a dominant one. The answer is to be found in the relationship between art and the dynamics of representation, as Apollinaire understood them. Works of art, for him, are born of a struggle between reality and creativity. In that struggle, music, which never represents reality, stands for the purely creative pole; hence, it figures the goal of all truly modern art, which refuses simply to imitate what exists. However, actual successful works of music are difficult for Apollinaire to imagine, precisely because the struggle with reality seems to him absent from music. The result is an aesthetic system in which the highest value can never be realised in a work, and a poetics in which unrealistic ambition is as essential as frustration.

The Time for Poetry

Of course, ‘bien sur’ . . . Derrida would never have found the time to finish anything, to get to the end of anything, to see anything through properly, to do what he would have wanted to do. But perhaps the time that he would never have had was only one kind: the philosophical kind, the kind we are aware of as distinctively human. Perhaps there is another time, animal and poetic, which he did find. The paragraph from L’animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I am) of which I have quoted the first sentence continues thus:

Truth in Art, and Erik Satie's Judgement

It is certainly true that Satie, in his later years, did not tire of repeating that there is ‘no Truth in Art’; and in saying so, he was doubtless very much in tune with the spirit of his artistic milieu, which included, after all, such aesthetic anarchists as Picabia and Tzara, as well as the great artistic revolutionaries of the time, Picasso and Stravinsky, for whom he had unbounded admiration. And every time he did so, he was careful to attribute the erroneous belief that there is a Truth in Art to that class of writers whom he variously called ‘critiques’, ‘pedagogues’, ‘Pontifes’, ‘pions’: people of the serious persuasion, who think it is possible to teach or describe what makes a piece of art good or bad. Attacks against this tribe are, in fact, the staple of Saties writings. It might appear sensible to infer from this that it would be foolish for a critic to look for Truth in Erik Saties writings about art. Nonetheless, that is what I shall be doing in this article. I shall argue that, while there may, for Satie, be no truth in art, there are truths about art, susceptible of at least indirect expression, which Satie himself maintained with remarkable adroitness. Whether those truths are peculiar to the aesthetics of Saties writings; whether they are relevant to the way we might appreciate his music; and whether they have echoes in the thought of his artistic companions (especially those mentioned above) – these are questions that will remain open; but I would like at least to suggest that they are worth asking.