Music to read by

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

What with all this talk around Harold (“Mr. Western Canon”) Bloom and with some previous talk about music and musicians that would be relevant to Pynchon’s “Against the Day”, and what with ATD still months away, I’d like to turn your attention to a passage--- it runs about nine pages---in the translation I’m reading of Proust’s “Swann’s Way”, a passage about melody, memory and the heart, that is the most profound and affecting musing on the emotional pull of music that I have ever read. And I’ve read a shitload of musical criticism, essays, liner notes, unadulterated puffery from “Billboard”, utter cluelessness in provincial birdcage liners, the entirety of Nicolas Slonimsky’s “Lexicon of Musical Invective” about four or five times over, airplane-glue driven screeds from Lester Bangs, sycophantic drooling in “Gramophone”---you name it, I’ve choked it down. This passage starts on page 357 of the hardcover [though I doubt the pagination in the QP is going to be any different] edition
 of the Lydia Davis translation: 

“ . . . But suddenly it was as though she had appeared in the room, and this apparition caused him such harrowing pain that he had to put his hand on his heart. What had happened was that violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come back through, as one holds up a trapdoor that would otherwise fall back. And before Swann had time to understand, and say to himself: “It’s the little phrase from the sonata by Vinteuil; don’t listen!” all his memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, which he had managed until now to keep out of sight in the deepest part of himself, deceived by this sudden beam of light from the tim
e of love which they believed had returned, had awoken and flown swiftly back up to sing madly to him, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness . . .”

I consider this a public service announcement. These books, this hardcover run of the new translations, can be easily found for a song at the usual places that stack up remainders, and the sense of the world of Fin de Siècle France and music’s place in that world is expressed with a poetry that comes off the pages like perfume. If nothing else, good background into music’s relation to culture and Society in Europe during the “Belle Epoch”.

Of course, reading “In Search of Lost Time” is its own reward.