The Performative Dimension of a Literary Text-Concert

Abstract

Using the premises of literary intermediality theory, the paper dwells on the particular performability of a literary text, in which a concert is not only described but also played out as a distinct socially significant phenomenon of contemporary culture. It is because of the performative dimension, which is an essential medium between actual musical events and their verbal rendition, between the embodiment of music in movements, gestures, sounds of instruments, program pieces, and its presentation in interpretations that are historically determined and motivated by personal poetologies of authors, that such texts could be treated as texts-concerts. It is stated that a literary text-concert thematizes and describes a concert event using specific names of musical pieces and their performers, drawing attention to the performing style and individual manner of expression used by musicians as well as the sound of musical instruments while interpreting specific musical compositions. The text itself is conceptualized as a concert, i.e., the plot may be framed by a concert event or be presented as a special concert event with a detailed description of the conditions of the performance (acoustic space, the drama, timing, atmosphere, acoustic background, relevant auditory habits, and performative and ritualistic elements of the concert) and their impact on the listener. Due to particular structural technologies aimed at the most adequate and vocal rendering of the musical performance, a text of this type is played out as a concert that exceeds the limits of representation and displays such dimensions as embodiment, mediality, or eventfulness. In a metaphorical sense, the text is a stage on which the musical performance plays out, which is often combined with the discourse on the author’s creative becoming. Since a text-concert is constituted through intermedial links with music, it has the potential of revealing its own mediality, showing the things it talks about, and in such a way transcending the limits of its content. The analysis is based on Julio Cortazar’s essay Around the Piano with Thelonius Monk and Friedrich Christian Delius’s The Future of Beauty.