Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative Stephen Benson (bio) Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative. By Eric Prieto. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xiii + 322 pp. $55. It is no news to say that musicology has undergone something of an overhaul in recent decades. While this is, of course, true of all humanities disciplines, the study of music has lagged somewhat behind, for the simple reason that the formalism inherent in the dominant music-analytic approaches has seemed less a method than a natural, and so neutral, expression of music's own workings. Much has changed, however, albeit slowly. Not only have a variety of non-traditional methodologies been proposed as perfectly valid means of accounting for the actions of music in the world; the workings of the primary analytic tools have themselves been opened up for scrutiny as tendentious texts in their own right. The result has been an increasingly pluralist discipline, one far more willing, because able, to engage not only with the way non-musically trained mortals engage with musical sounds, but [End Page 205] also with the discursive constructions of such music in various non-musical media, and the far from peripheral importance thereof. Within this academic environment, musico-literary studies, for many years a rather dilettantish micro-field, has experienced a renaissance, to which Eric Prieto's Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative is testament. Yet one of the most striking features of Prieto's study, as we shall see, is precisely its confident sidestepping of what was known until relatively recently as the "new musicology." While this may raise expectations of radical post-new paradigms, Listening In is noteworthy for rather more traditional virtues. The object of Prieto's volume is the use made of music in French Modernist narrative, in particular the late Modernist texts of Pinget, Leiris and Beckett. As the author makes clear, in an introduction exemplary in its clarity, the musical turn in a significant range of European Modernist fiction was closely allied to the shift away from, and critique of, the empiricism of nineteenth-century realism: "music offers a set of formal, expressive, and referential principles that can be used in the attempt to better represent the inner space of consciousness. […] The literary means mobilized differ from author to author, but wherever a musical model is present, I argue, it always serves to further this inwardly directed mode of mimesis I call 'listening in.'" Prieto sets out his stall with admirable patience, in the process laying to rest one of those stubborn ghosts that can come to haunt internecine methodological debate, while seeming eminently irrelevant to onlookers. In the case of musico-literary studies (or melopoetics, as some call it), the ghost at the feast has been metaphor, in particular the question of the appropriateness or otherwise of the musical metaphor as used in the literary or critical text. As Prieto rightly says, "The test of a good musical metaphor should never be one of 'appropriateness,' defined as the degree to which it approaches literality, but the same test that applies for any other kind of metaphor: the quantity and quality of information imparted, the extent to which the metaphor affords new ways of seeing." I would go even further and suggest that metaphor operates in much the same way as ideology: it is precisely where it appears most bland, even devoid of content, that it is at its most potent. A tired musical metaphor may not excite us as we read, but it may have significant cognitive value, suggesting quite a lot in broad terms about the valuation of certain types and forms of musical practice. The three author-based chapters of Listening In are exemplary in their analytical detail and should be read by anyone at all interested in this particular branch of interdisciplinary practice. Again, Prieto is an extremely patient reader, notable for his ability to tease out the various ways in which [End Page 206] music is represented, and so made to signify, in his chosen texts. The long chapter on Beckett, for example, stands as the best exposition to date of the persistently...