The Vibration of the Perishable Minute (Classics of Literary Criticism Revisited II)
Jean Starobinski: Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.] One can imagine a certain immobile time, a time of eternal present.In such a time there are no battles or notions of property. No death, only easy sleep. There are free moments of song and dance, music rather than work. Men and beasts understand each other perfectly—in music and in melody. The eternal present moves out and back on itself in sinuous folds of flowing arcs and circles. Becoming for each creature is a light movement in this present, a fluid élan. Only an interval is sometimes required in order to renew such moments of plenitude and felicity. But such a golden age is only the retrospective consolation of an unhappy humanity. Jean Starobinski begins his remarkable tour de force on operatic synesthesia by wondering whether human beings tried enacting such brief rest periods through their festivities right from the outset of community life. But will that not be a mere echo, a ritualized commemoration, a souvenir of some fabulous origin? Or are there also moments of the body and voice in such reenactments which might help cross the threshold of the realm of the dead? Is the moment of performance also a moment to witness the abolishment of the mortal consequences of time? Perhaps the performance that reconquers a parcel of eternity also witnesses its own duration measured. Is it that the poet and the musician who have relived the atemporal plenitude of the origin only turn and fall back into time and death? Surely, they must at first hold onto the temporal space and build their fable there. But they must also know how to close off such enactments, with a final cadence and a lifting of the masks—a salute to the public. The spectators applaud the enchantment that was, the very exploit of art. Ulysses has strapped himself to the mast of his ship to resist such an experience. What is so dangerous about this song, for one who has succeeded to resist the temptations of immortality? The Sirens, triply perfect epic minstrels, companions of Persephone, would live as long as they could stop every passer-by, but as soon as one passed without stopping, they would perish. The enchantment was so complete that the travelers would be bewitched, and forgetting their homelands, oblivious to food and drink, they would die from starvation: “Come here, renowned Ulysses, honour to the Achaenean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.” (The Odyssey, Book XII). If Ulysses had listened to the Sirens, he would have encountered the image of his own past transfigured by music. He would have believed that his life to be forever saved from oblivion, and he would have forgotten to live—like all other travelers whose white bones litter the Sirens’ shore. Here is a fascinating music that develops another relationship to time outside of the one that emanates from the golden age, a music linked to narrating speech that can only deploy itself within a succession of temporal events: a happy fluidification, in Starobinski’s words. This is the music of becoming, a music that elevates to the perfection of song, bloody entanglements and heroic patience and suffering. We now enter into a time that will be transmitted to future generations by enacting the glorious immortality of the hero who has gone through the test of time and whose existence is saved by song. For having accepted death, he will live eternally in and through speech. But Ulysses is also bitter since he is stripped and solitary. The pleading castaway and the hero in the minstrel Demodocos are there the same: “His glorious song celebrates a past action, and the surviving hero, if he is to avoid demeaning himself, must take the place of the minstrel and become the narrator of his own miseries…and elevate them to the plane of musical immortality, just as the minstrel did for his military services.” Here is a particular mode of deliverance, of spirit rendered in and through an immaterial sonorous condition. Time is simultaneously imagined as the age of heroes, subsisting in our past as sheer memory and yet it destroys all our illusions by asserting its own dominance only through lived temporality.There is an interior historicity to the operatic time. This is the most sensual and fragile of durations: the vibration of the perishable minute. Indeed singing and seducing are intimately related. To seduce, etymologically, means to lead aside. What is the force that attracts one away from the straight and narrow? There emerges a fatal creature of shattering beauty, speaking in silken voice and offering unknown pleasures. You should have listened and avoided its glance. One step off the sure road leads to another and suddenly you find yourself wandering in a state of perdition. At the end a kind of dizziness sets in—a concoction arising out of ecstasy, enthusiasm and intoxication.When the hero travels by road, through the wilds or by sea, the enchantress watches for him by the side of the road or haunts him, lurking over the island when he comes ashore. One can also see that sometimes the reverse happens and vulnerable heroines are seduced by wicked suitors. This has been the fate of the girls who listened to Don Juan’s compliments or those who had accepted Faust’s gifts. To be enchanted is to give in to a strange foreignness. But it would be erroneous to describe it through drives and beliefs and phobias. Nor are these moments’ anxiety dreams. Such moments of foreignness of a legendary past are transformed into a present enchantment in the opera—as one sees action