Essays - On Flaubert and Debussy

On the Embodiment of Form: Polychronic Movement in Flaubert and Debussy

ABSTRACT

This contribution is born in the essentially dialogic “smithy” of a piano studio. It examines and gives audible presentation to categories of signification that are not inscribed in the linear unfolding of literary and musical discourse.

Poly-chronic construction – the simultaneous activity of different spatio-temporal orbits intersecting with one-another – has in Flaubert and Debussy illuminating points of convergence. Debussy’s aspiration au polychronisme has been explored by S. Jarocinski; “movement” as générateur dynamique de toute forme in his music, by A. Souris; parallel achievements in Flaubert - images motrices exprimant des mouvements… Un choix des temps verbaux, des coupes de phrases et de la ponctuation - have been described by A Schaeffner; a semiotic analysis of Flaubert’s order of mouvements moteur, des sonorités, et de lumière, has been done by M. Frier-Wantiez.

Debussy’s statement “je m’efforce d’employer cahque timbre à l’état de pureté…On a trop appris à mélanger les timbres; à les faire ressortir par des ombres ou des masses” points to “transparency” as the essential category that sustains his poly-chronic musical design.

Rare are the performances of Debussy’s music which enable the listener’s ear to perceive the five, or seven, not contrapuntal “voices”, but different, intersecting temporal orbits. The performer’s preparation represents a veritable intertextuality of déchiffrage and utterance, in an inexhaustible chain of transformations of visual signs, digital transmission, and aural verifications.

With juxtapositions of Flaubert’s texts and comparisons of recording, examples are presented that embody and articulate the forma fluens, and the transparent web of “les jeux du mouvement pur.”

Version read at the Sixth International Conference ICMS 6 on Music and Signification: Works, Discourse, Society, Aix-en-Provence., December 1998.