English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A silent barycenter beneath a string of texts 0:00 I can't name the theme I'm going to talk about, precisely because it is silent. A little journey I'm proposing to you this evening to inaugurate this series. A little journey through a string of texts whose common thread it will be up to you to tell me.
0:32 In any case, you'll see how we move from one to another even though these are authors who are never brought together, or if passages are brought together, they're ones we'd never even think of setting side by side. And not that I want to do what's called in literature departments intertextuality. I have no contempt for that. No, but it's at once less and more, at least I try to make it so. That is to say, I seem to be going in circles because I can't name the theme I'm going to talk about, precisely because it is silent.
1:10 Because we're going to talk quite a bit about music, and let's say in any case about auditory data. About sound, about noise sometimes, but above all about sound and, where appropriate, of course, musical sound. The thread running through it is that something circulates among these texts, but as if, running parallel to all these texts, another text stood invisibly in the background, containing what is common to each of them, precisely condensing the element they have in common, crouching behind them but silent.
1:45 And so if we managed to give it a name — maybe not this evening, but if we managed to get on its trail, to track down its name, since according to Holy Scripture God gave Adam the privilege of naming the creatures — it would be a pity if we couldn't give a name to this barycenter, it's a term from physics, it's a center of gravity, this silent barycenter, but the point, the place, where all the sound emissions cross, circulating and intersecting — they cross at this point of silence.
2:31 So, since I seem a bit mysterious, perhaps in a somewhat forced, artificial way, you'll see that it becomes very concrete as soon as we move on to people much more competent than me when it comes to texts. And I'm going to start without further delay with a text by someone — a writer, I'll tell you right away, it's Franz Kafka. Now, precisely, he's one of the very rare creators, writers, artists — Kafka der Künstler, as a major study published in German calls him — because we often forget, since people use the term "Kafkaesque" which means everything and nothing, a term used during the Cold War to denounce so-called concentration-camp regimes, whereas Kafka, throughout his work, when you look closely, never denounced anyone but himself.
Kafka, an artist of writing wary of music 3:19 I say this, yes, because you shouldn't think I'm speaking idly — in his diary he writes this to himself, admonishing himself with this recommendation, which I quote: "In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world." In another translation it's even better: "In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world." They are strained against you. But no, he's not some leftist who's going to denounce his neighbor for telling a young woman "You have a lovely blouse" by calling him a sexist bastard.
3:57 No, he's not an accuser. On the other hand, he often occupies the position of the accused, doesn't he? And not only in The Trial. So Kafka is one of the rare writers — and I'll say once more that besides the fact that he created a world to which we attach, with more or less success and relevance, the epithet "Kafkaesque," he is also an immense artist, and an artist of writing in particular.
4:29 It's so commonplace that I won't dwell on it too much. Except that he's one of the rare writers — and I'm getting there — who says frankly, straight out and bluntly, that music doesn't interest him. That's curious. I'm already starting, you see, I'm starting my string of texts hoping that by taking them from the periphery, moving inward concentrically, like a spiral drawing closer to the center, we'll reach the black point at the center, the point of silence from which all these musics emanate, and to which they lead back.
5:03 It's curious that I'm talking about an author — there aren't many — who doesn't like music. Except there are those who don't like it because they don't know much about it and their vanity can't bear that people might talk about things they're not competent in. Fine, but that's not Kafka's case — he likes it so much, music makes such an impression on him, that he feels it as a threat. That's how they don't like it. But it's up to you to decide. I don't want to interpret, you know, I hate interpretation. We're going to go straight in, to the way Kafka renders what comes to our ears.
5:39 And so, I'll start with an excerpt from his great final masterpiece, The Castle, unfinished like so many of Kafka's works. The Castle, which is said to be the most stripped-down, the most mysterious, also the most condensed, isn't it? Where there is the least voice-over, the fewest elements — sometimes pathos-laden — where each time we go straight to the essential.
6:11 Let me remind you of the plot very quickly: in a lost corner of the Reich, the Empire — Kafka is a Czech, a Czech Jew, who writes in the German language. You'll find your way. The Holy Empire. What a mosaic, isn't it? I'm not even talking about the Hungarians, the Slovenes, and the Serbs, because all that was part of the Austrian Empire. Including Czechia, Czechoslovakia, and so on.
6:43 So Kafka writes, he of Czech origin, very, very, very, very, very, very, very much marked by Czech culture. His name, moreover, Kafka, is the name given in Czech to the jackdaw, those birds that make those sharp cries among ruins — when you visit old ruins, when you look up toward the bell towers, whether in Bruges, in Normandy, or elsewhere, among the ruins, you hear the cries by which they call to one another.
7:14 Jackdaws, these champions of the currents, the wind currents, aren't they? And in Czech, jackdaw is kavka, kavka, kavka. So I'm fascinated by auditory matters, I have to be careful. And the plot is quick to summarize. In a lost corner of the Empire, a village — a stranger arrives. One winter evening, day has barely ended, night is falling, and he arrives and shows up right away.
The Castle: the land-surveyor between the village and transcendence 7:50 At the inn — there are only two in this village. There's the inn down below, the one where he arrives, the peasants' inn, let's say, where they come to have a small glass of beer after the tasks, the labors and the days. And there's another one, another evening inn, very different — it's the Gentlemen's Inn. The gentlemen, because they are the gentlemen of the castle. There's a castle overlooking it, a castle belonging to a local notable, overlooking the village. The whole novel is going to be the attempts of the newcomer, who says he's been summoned to the castle because he was hired as a land surveyor.
8:26 And we're going to have trouble believing him from the very start, even though he's telling the truth. He was hired as a land surveyor, and he's going to spend the whole novel trying to reach the castle, of course, without ever getting there — I'm sorry to tell you, it's not a whodunit after all, it's better than that. Or it's a whodunit on every line, you'll see, even when you know the ending. And his determination to reach the castle greatly astonishes the villagers, who wisely stick to their daily routine, as I said, the labors and the days, and who do not mix with the transcendence that is the castle.
9:02 It's not like the judge in The Trial, like the father elsewhere — of course it symbolizes something otherworldly, divine, it's the absolute, the castle. We always try to reach a heaven we never reach any more easily. It's the sun of Plato's cave, except it opens onto a black sun, with its divine irradiations. So it's this castle that motivates his arrival, and the peasants are not very surprised, because they don't concern themselves with the castle, they stay, in every sense of the term, down below, whether in the physical sense, the moral sense, etc.
9:45 And so you can guess that our hero — I've just summarized the whole book — is going to manage never to be either at the castle or in the village, but rather in a kind of permanent shuttle between the two. So, this is the evening of his arrival. It causes great astonishment — how, a land surveyor — you already see him arriving, you know, you don't know the Germanic countries well, but someone arriving from outside, in a little village, is the kind of place where everyone has their geraniums in the windows, where nothing has moved for so long. This isn't Marseille — Marseille, in France, has a very old tradition overseas; in Marseille, well before mass immigration, you'd already see Africans, North Africans, Vietnamese, Indochinese, Chinese, Arabs, all sorts.
10:31 Not in villages like this one, no more, by the way, in far-off Ukraine or the plains of Russia, of course. So, he arrives in the middle of this, and people look him over a bit, this fellow who claims — because saying you come from the castle is like saying "I'm having breakfast with the President of the Republic," you see, and even that seems quite prosaic next to the castle. And so there's a bit of tension between someone sent by the castle's administration, who has already heard that someone has arrived — what are you doing here, and show me papers proving you were summoned.
Reading from The Castle: the crackling on the telephone 11:11 And Kafka's character says, all you have to do is telephone. He says, what more do you want, do you want us to wake up the castle at this hour, you see, there's tension. And he says, I'll telephone myself. There, I'll stop giving context, since everything I've said is so far below what we're about to read. So Kafka dials the castle's number, asks the innkeeper for it, with the semicircle of peasants drawing closer around him to see what's going to happen.
11:44 Most of them saying, among themselves, in a low voice, the castle will never answer. And he picks up. And there I move on to the text: "Out of the earpiece came a crackling sound. A crackling such as K had never perceived." Had never perceived on the telephone. "It sounded like the humming of countless children's voices."
12:14 "But it was not a real humming. It was the singing of distant voices. Of extremely distant voices. It seemed as if these thousands of voices were merging, in some impossible way, into a single voice, high-pitched, yet strong, which struck the eardrum as though demanding to penetrate something deeper than a poor ear."
12:47 I'm worn out just from reading this paragraph, it's so beautiful, so dense, so... For someone said to be indifferent to music, it takes only a few lines to characterize a sound. A sound without words. A crackling. There are no words, because that would be somewhat mysterious words. No, nothing. No voice on the line. Or rather, from very far away, it seems there are voices. Let me start again.
13:18 "It sounded like the humming of countless children's voices. But it was not a real humming. It was the singing of distant voices. Of extremely distant voices. It seemed as if these thousands of voices were merging, in some impossible way, to form a single voice" — there we move away from children's voices — "a single voice, high-pitched, yet strong, which struck the eardrum as though it were asking to penetrate something deeper than a poor ear."
13:51 "K listened without speaking into the phone." K is the hero. It's no longer even Joseph K as in The Trial. This time he's reduced his hero's name to a single letter, isn't that so? It's the first letter of his name. "K listened without speaking. He had rested his left arm on the box of the apparatus and listened in that position." So much for our first text. I dial the castle's number.
14:23 We're finally going to hear the voice of God. And the voice of God is this crackling, this hum. We don't know if it's someone or several people, an individual or a crowd, whether it's near or far. There's something appealing about it, children's voices, distant, very distant, like an immemorial memory, but at the same time something threatening, isn't there? Something threatening, as though it wants to penetrate something more than a poor ear.
15:00 There. So, rather than interpret it — what does it symbolize? I'm throwing out these grand words just to show you the importance of what this moment represents. At the other end of the phone. You can replace God with whatever you like, as long as it's the end of every quest, if you will. There. It could be death, it could be... whatever. I'll go on. I'll stay faithful to our method.
15:30 So, very intra-textual, if you will. I'll stay within the text of The Castle, and a few pages, a few pages further on, still within this first chapter called "The Arrival." It's the arrival, one winter evening, of this stranger who says "I've been hired as a land surveyor." I'm going to read you a second passage. But first, let me dwell a bit on the title the central character gives himself: Mr. Land Surveyor.
16:01 That's what he's called in the village. You know, Kafka is known, in the popular imagination — though the popular imagination is far off the mark — for supposedly having created a logic of the absurd, a world, a universe ruled by absurdity, whereas nothing is more rigorous, more rigorously arranged, or less illogical. And it's not only true of this one text of Kafka's. I recall an excellent approach to The Trial by Bernard Groethuysen, who was a translator and also an excellent literary critic of Baltic-German origin, as you might guess from his name, who once said: "Take psychology and wring its neck."
16:43 Implying: if you want to understand texts like Kafka's, let's stay within pure logic. We are bodies that resonate. You see already? That resonate. No, no, no, that resonate — r-e-s, that are sonorous. So, people say he's at the very center of the absurd. Yet he himself arrives bearing the title "Mr. Land Surveyor" — the one who is going to establish measure. The opposite of the absurd. The one who has fixed a norm.
The land-surveyor, from Egyptian geometry to Kleist 17:15 The land surveyor. You see, after all, it's from land surveying that the whole origin of mathematics comes. And indeed, what was it called originally? Geometry — the oriental geometers, the Egyptians in particular, the Chaldeans, well, the Mesopotamians, the Sumerians, etc. I'll stick mainly to Egypt, because when the Nile began its recession and the peasants found their flooded lands again, each one's plot had to be restored to him.
17:55 And for that, its surface area had to be known. You see, the topography of Egypt, which is green only along a tiny ribbon on the banks of the Nile — after that there are deserts to the left, to the right, to the east, to the west. And to the north, to the south too, a bit less to the north. It was exhausting; they very quickly understood — this is the very first advance of geometry — that by measuring only one side of a square field, there was no need to measure the other three.
18:28 They were the same length if the field was square. You just had to multiply by four. That's what was originally called land surveying, geometry's origin. That is, you'd survey with your legs — one, two, three, four, five paces. You see, this wasn't yet our surveyors with their far more finely calibrated measuring tape. There. So it's no accident, Mr. Land Surveyor. And to close my parenthesis on this title of the land surveyor, and since we're doing intertextuality, I'll quote an author very little read in France, but fairly well known in Germany, because he's the only one of the German Romantics that Kafka knew very well.
19:10 He's the only one who succeeded in drama, in theater. He has a magnificent style. It's Kleist. Heinrich von Kleist, who ended tragically, but I can't talk about everything at once, by committing suicide on the shore of the Wannsee — but not like the other German Romantics, in a fit of despair or madness. No, no. Laughing, laughing with happiness, with his companion, a double suicide — both of them killed themselves. And the innkeeper, whom they had asked to bring them coffee outside in the dead of winter, said they wanted it served outdoors in the middle of winter.
19:47 Two shots were heard. They were laughing, they were as gay as children. They were found dead. Kleist — who, among other things, wrote The Prince of Homburg, isn't that so, which was one of Gérard Philipe's great successes and made up the golden hours of the TNP in the immediate postwar period — Gérard Philipe, you see him behind me. Now, Kleist, in a play called Käthchen von Heilbronn, little Catherine of Heilbronn, I recommend it to you.
20:20 Kleist's constant theme is sleepwalking. His heroes never know whether there's a mixture of what they've dreamed, and sometimes two people find themselves meeting at the level of the content of their respective dreams. As in a parallel universe. Well, Kleist's dream. There's a magnificent language. And at one point, the hero of Käthchen of Heilbronn, namely the Count von Strahl — Strahl means ray, beam — is accused before an Inquisition tribunal.
20:56 Count von Strahl, ram-like, irascible and a great warrior. He's even accused of being a sorcerer because — well, never mind why, let's not get sidetracked. But the one accusing him, Catherine's father, tells him: "It's true I have no proof. I believe he is a sorcerer, but I did not see him on the mountaintops with a staff in hand, measuring the invisible empire of the air."
21:26 So we find, you see, already, in this same language — a language I trace back here to German Idealism — this dialectic, isn't it, of trying to establish measure within the incommensurable. "I did not see him with a staff on the mountaintop, measuring the invisible empire of the air by night." Mr. Land Surveyor is a bit of that.
Reading from The Castle: the joyful and painful bell 21:56 So I move on to the second adventure, the very day after Mr. Land Surveyor's arrival. It's his first attempt, and therefore first failure, to reach the castle, where no one wants to take him. He finds a shabby little tubercular coachman heading in that direction, who agrees to take him. And then — too much snow, K's dreadful exhaustion from walking in the snow, until... He gives up, too tired from the previous days' journey, on top of the conditions of this one.
22:33 It's when he comes back that the passage I'm now going to read to you occurs. So he comes back by sleigh, you see. "Up there, the castle, already strangely dark, which K had hoped to reach that day, was beginning to recede again. But as if to greet K on the occasion of this temporary farewell, the castle rang out a peal of bells." A winged sound, a joyful sound, winged, with wings, a joyful sound that made the soul tremble for an instant.
23:08 "It seemed" — you see, earlier, it was, it seemed, thousands of children's voices, so each time he seeks to characterize a sound, he, of whom it's said he's insensitive to the art of sounds. "It seemed" — for it also had a painful undertone — "that it threatened you" — the sound of the bell threatened you — with what? "with the fulfillment of the things your heart obscurely desired." Let's read it again, because it's so dense, listen, frankly.
23:41 But as if to mark, on the occasion of its temporary farewell, the castle rang out a sound of a bell, a winged sound, a joyful sound, which made the soul tremble for an instant. One might have said, for it also had a painful accent, happy, painful, that it threatened you with the fulfillment of things that your heart secretly wished for. Then the great bell soon fell silent, relayed by a small one that rang, faint and monotonous, perhaps up there too, perhaps already in the village.
24:13 Yes, we already pass from up there, from transcendence, to the immanence of down here. We no longer know whether it comes from above or from below. This ding-dong suited all the better the long journey that K was making in the company of that shabby but relentless coachman — but I'm going to move on now to a text concerning Italy. I'm thinking of an article called "The Myth of Italy" in literature.
Faust and Wilhelm Meister, the works of Goethe's lifetime 24:43 We'll get the details right away. And I'll skip over the highlights to get to the character on whom we're now going to turn our spotlight, or rather our microphone, here. Let me tell you right away, this character is a creature that Goethe pulled out of his sleeve at the end of his life. It's Mignon. A young girl named Mignon. I said "a young girl" and I stumble a bit as I speak, because you'll see that it's not so simple.
25:15 No, no, I'm not inventing anything. I'm not adding to it. No need. I'm well below the mark. I'll keep two things from the two texts we just read. First, in the first text, the one about the telephone, the multiple voices gathered into a single one, sharp and strong, which wanted to pierce something more resistant than a poor ear. Isn't that so? And so there is something both attractive and threatening.
25:50 We had already seen, even more so, in the first text, since it says it was a winged and joyful sound, but at the same time — the bell is joyful, but the one who hears it, isn't it, finds an unhappy tone, because the bell threatens him, but not with negative threats; on the contrary, it threatens him with the fulfillment of his dearest wishes, to the point that he no longer even dares to formulate them. Isn't that so? And I remind you of this so we don't forget it in what we're about to read now. So, here again, I'll make a small effort at contextualization; I'm obliged to go quickly to summarize an elaboration of more than 40 years.
26:27 Faust is the work of a lifetime for Goethe, it's the work of an entire life; he began it very young, at the same time as another work, Wilhelm Meister — Guillaume Maître, Wilhelm Meister, Wilhelm, William, Bill, it's all the same. So, Willy too, Billy — both, he began them in his youth, but both he finished a few cable-lengths from his death.
26:57 And he lived a long time, Goethe, Goethe the Olympian — it's not just that all of Europe, all of Europe indeed, even Napoleon. Napoleon, very sparing with compliments, at the meeting at Tilsit, was introduced to Goethe and simply said, "well, there's a man." Goethe brings out this character of Mignon in Wilhelm Meister at the beginning, that is to say the complete opposite of Faust. Faust is truly the initiatory journey through all the themes that would later erupt in the Romantic current.
27:32 So Goethe doesn't belong — Goethe is wary of the Romantics and their pathological side. He's someone who always sought balance, and in the Greek sense, harmony. Moreover, you'll see that the scene takes place in Italy — against the initiatory and Romantic journeys in search of the blue flower or the grail or all sorts of thrilling adventures. He depicts the journey a bit like Flaubert's Sentimental Education avant la lettre.
28:06 But he does this in the 1820s — the journey of the little bourgeois, of the young man, isn't it, who is romantic like that, mad as a hatter at sixteen or seventeen, and who ends up finding balance in business and everyday life. The most absolute Romantics detest this evolution of Goethe's. But it turns out that it's in this apparently most prosaic novel that perhaps the most intensely poetic and most mysterious of his characters emerges: Mignon.
28:42 I won't say more, we'll talk about her. So, this is an article I recommend to you called "On a European Myth: Notes on Goethe, Italy, and Paradise." The fascination that Italy exercised over a whole array of writers — look at Death in Venice. In short, it's not our standard Charterhouse of Parma. So, Italy seen as a paradise. I'll tell you, for those who don't know, but every German schoolchild knows by heart, perhaps, the recitation.
Mignon's ballad and the myth of Italy 29:12 I say recitation, so much is it a schoolbook piece. The most famous one in Germany, isn't it, are the words of a song that Mignon sings in the novel, which is called "Mignon's Song." So I'll say it in German: "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?" — "Do you know the land where the lemon blossoms?" There, I'm giving you the first line, isn't it, "Do you know the land?" You can already picture the buses of German tourists rushing toward the Mediterranean. Come on, I'll bring in a bit of humor, and you'll see.
29:46 In Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship — that's the title of the story of Wilhelm Meister and his journey as a little bourgeois — in the Apprenticeship, there appears an enigmatic character who would haunt musicians and poets for decades. The number of musicians who have set to music the ballad whose first line I just quoted, "Do you know the land where the lemon blossoms?" In short, in the German language, one speaks of an elsewhere, because the lemon tree — that's not in Germany, that's not it.
30:19 Of an elsewhere, of a distant place. You see, the distant voices, earlier. The character of Mignon — Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving him or her a sex. Good grief! You see, it's starting even in our era, all this business with transgender issues and so on. At the time, it wasn't to make chitchat on TV panels. It wasn't to strike a pose and pretend to be an irreducible rebel against a world that exists, when in fact one is its dominant voice.
30:51 I'm speaking of identities in general, isn't it? Whether regional, racialized, whatever you like — sexed, gendered. There, you see, she's already transgendered here, isn't she? Or trans-genderable, I don't know, I'm making up barbarisms. So, look, look. Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving her a sex. A gift. Then he decided — now listen carefully to this sentence, because even for me it remains a bit enigmatic.
31:24 Goethe — personally the most balanced figure in all of German literature — decided that this asexual being who dresses as a boy would be a girl. Go figure. As for me, I'm grasping at straws for the moment, but let me repeat the sentence anyway. Goethe hesitated for a long time before giving her a sex. Then decided that this asexual being who dresses as a boy would be a girl. She speaks, or rather warbles.
Warbling, from the babbling of the Rhinemaidens to Mignon 31:57 Good grief, here comes our telephone again. He spoke of a crackling; she has a warble — well, that's prettier. And I remind you, for those who followed my cycle on the Ring, that the most gigantic aesthetic work of the West, which lasts four days — I'm thinking of Wagner's Ring cycle — in its first part, the prologue, The Rhinegold, from the very rise of the curtain, the first words we hear, after those formidable preludes which are nothing but the flow of Heraclitean becoming of the Rhine, so to speak — the first words are the babbling of the three Rhine daughters frolicking joyfully in their watery abode, isn't it, all while watching over the gold.
32:43 Now, what they say is not yet language. You know, all those — well, I mean those who have children, forgive me — all those who have had children know that there's a period like that when they're no longer at the stage of wailing, of crying, like the baby, borborygmi, still, of a small animal world. But they're not yet at the point either — they don't yet have the code of language. But in between, from a distance you get the impression they're talking, but when you get closer, you see — they have the code, they don't yet have the channel. Sorry, they have the channel, that's it, it's going to become articulate, melodious, it warbles, it's no longer hoarse when it warbles, but it's not yet a language.
33:22 It's a babble, babble, baby, Babel. The languages get scrambled, Babel. And the human work fails, as God willed it. She speaks, or rather warbles, a vague German. She knows nothing of the world. Struggles to read and write. The language of the Rhine daughters is not yet a real language, like that of a child beginning to move from the wails of a baby to its first words, in between the two.
34:01 And there, she also has trouble with reading and writing. She's incapable of undergoing the apprenticeship of social life the way Wilhelm Meister does. He, his whole long apprenticeship is to integrate into the society of Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt on the Main, in the center of Germany, where the German central bank is currently located, the Bundesbank, which is the central bank of Europe, roughly speaking.
34:32 And which often decides the decision of the Buba. Buba, Bundesbank. Mignon is a presocial character in whom socialization proves impossible, immature, because she belongs entirely to the raw world of primitive emotions. In his Aesthetics, Hegel lays out the list of the fine arts, as they say, isn't it?
The hierarchy of the arts in Hegel and Verlaine's Art poétique 35:02 Starting with those most engaged in material exteriority, architecture and sculpture, for example, in which there are all three dimensions of space, after all. Even though sculpture is more individualized than architecture, there is no hierarchy of values in all that. It's better — even though he places poetry above everything in his hierarchies — it's better to have fine architecture than a failed poem. But then, there's architecture and sculpture, and then an enormous leap occurs with painting, where there are only two dimensions, flat, the third being already abstract.
35:41 We have abstracted away depth. Painting has always been abstract, if we refer precisely to the abstraction it makes of depth, which we only recover in illusory form starting in the 16th century, in what's called perspective. Then, well, we drop all spatial dimensions. There's no more depth, no more height, no more length, no more surface. There's no spatial dimension left at all, there's only a temporal dimension, and that's music.
36:14 And that's the arts of time in general — music, poetry — and Hegel has his hierarchy. But he doesn't place music, as the German Romantics did, at the top of the hierarchy of the arts. That was the case for the German Romantics. As Verlaine would say later — Verlaine, so close to them in certain respects, you know, in his famous Art poétique: "Music above all else." I'll say the first stanza and the last of this long poem, which is the manifesto of modern poetry — it's not to show the importance of the sonorous thing, but it is our subject this evening.
36:48 "Music above all else, and for that prefer the Odd, more vague and more soluble in air." You see the sound. "Without anything in it that weighs or that poses." Then afterward, well, he tells us everything one shouldn't do in poetry, he takes Eloquence and wrings its neck — I'll skip that. And at the end, he comes back to it. And it's that admirable closing line, music again and always. "Let your verse be the thing that takes flight, that one feels has fled a soul on its way toward other skies, toward other loves."
37:24 "Let your verse be good fortune scattered on the crisp morning wind that goes about smelling of mint and thyme." It's almost as imponderable, scent, as sound. "Let your verse be good fortune scattered on the crisp morning wind that goes about smelling of mint and thyme, and all the rest is literature." I don't recognize poetry by that name. There. So, let's return to a literature that grants such a place to a character as intensely poetic, and as mysteriously poetic, as Mignon.
38:00 So, listen, all the same, let me start this portrait again. I'll tell you this too, we learn it over the course of the novel — we don't know where she comes from. In fact, he met her in a wagon with traveling people. You know, in Germany — I seem to be picking on the Germans a little; I know I'm a great germanophile by culture, but I'll allow myself to say that this is rather frowned upon over there. People who move about — I'll speak of their geraniums in the windows and the linden tree on the village square that hasn't moved since Luther's time, which gives us admirable things.
38:31 It gives us the second act of The Mastersingers and the Midsummer Night, unforgettable. But anyway, I mean, they don't much like what comes from outside, otherness, change. And she, she's definitely one of the traveling people, isn't she? She speaks, or rather warbles, a vague German. After the uncertainty of sexes, and already, let me remind you: she speaks, or rather warbles, a vague German. She knows nothing of the world, struggles to read and write, is incapable of undergoing the apprenticeship of social life. Which confirms the "traveling people" side, always frowned upon by those who are well anchored in social life, as Wilhelm Meister precisely is in the process of doing.
39:09 Mignon is a presocial character in whom socialization proves impossible. And don't imagine that Goethe is expressing through her a wish to be a marginal figure. No one is more firmly installed in society than Goethe. For she belongs entirely to the raw world of primitive emotions, against which Goethe was warning the Romantics. Like a small animal, she is afraid and protects herself from those who treat her badly. She loves Wilhelm Meister. He saves her, and she attaches herself to him the way a dog would, absolutely and unreasoningly.
Mignon's origins: between two ages and two sexes 39:46 So, let me tell you the end — it pains me to tell you the rest, forgive me, very quickly, but it pains me to tell you because it's not very cheerful. She's going to love Wilhelm Meister, who will turn away from her, being the kind of man we all somewhat are, who will forget her in favor of another, and so on, in the course of his journey. At one point in his journey, he met her in Italy, in the setting of the Borromean Islands. There. And we'll learn later why she has all these exceptional traits.
40:16 She is the victim and descendant of a terrible crime — I'm speaking in the terms of the time. She is the incestuous offspring of a brother and sister. And it's her father who tells this to one of the witnesses in Goethe's novel. A strange story, all this, isn't it? And so she comes, in a way, from social nothingness, and to it she will return. You'll see, she fascinates Wilhelm, who feels irresistibly drawn by the mystery emanating from her.
40:46 You'll say to me, well now, it's been a while since he talked about music. Patience. Her features are striking. Her expression is a mixture of ingenuousness and character. Her dark complexion hints at an exotic origin. Dark. Traveling people. It makes me think of Baudelaire in "Bohemians Traveling," with that magnificent line, "The prophetic tribe with burning eyes." She is a child without quite being one.
41:16 Something, you see, between two sexes, between two ages. I recall someone thinking — yes, not very long before Goethe, late 18th century, Goethe's favorite composer, who had very classical tastes in music, who was wary of the Romantics, and whom Beethoven rather terrified — Mozart, but it's Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, sorry — The Marriage of Figaro.
41:46 Isn't that so? "The Marriage of Figaro," set to music unforgettably by Mozart under that title. But yes, who is always between two sexes, between two ages, and who as a result creates chaos everywhere, isn't it? Everywhere the Count goes, isn't it — the Count who flirts with every skirt in sight, the maid, the gardener's daughter, of course, his own wife now and then. He's always there, in the bedroom, yes, Cherubino — yes, it just occurred to me.
42:19 Her dark complexion hints at an exotic origin, she is a child without quite being one, something peeks through beneath the picturesque quality that suggests a secret life. Yet no one knows who she is or where she comes from. So we don't know the mystery I revealed to you. She presents herself as a semi-gypsy, more or less associated with a troupe of street performers who mistreat her and from whom Wilhelm buys her. She dances and does tricks like a trained monkey. Ah, we're getting closer.
42:49 We're not yet at singing, but we're already at dancing. She dances and does tricks like a trained monkey. She also sings. She moves Wilhelm by letting him hear a melody that every German still knows by heart today. "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?" If nostalgia was ever put into words and music, it was in this passage of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
43:21 Who would have thought it — Goethe the sculptural one, the one who preferred colonnades, architecture, the Greek world, who reproached the Romantics, a bit like Nietzsche later, for being somewhat soft, somewhat effeminate, if not feminine, if you prefer, in favor of Hellenic maturity. What comes over him all of a sudden to give us this secret weapon? We'll find out in the next text. Let's be patient. But in any case, you see, even today, every young German at school knows "Kennst du das Land" by heart.
Paradise lost and the ambivalence of melody 43:57 tells you, "Do you know the land of the lemon trees in bloom? Do you know it? Tell me." It comes back like a lament. You see, you find again what we were saying earlier — this song that is both happy and sad. Do you know the land where it is found? Do you know paradise? And it's sad. It's sad because it's far away. Because, as Proust says, the only true paradises are those we have lost. The suggestion — needless for Goethe at the time, I'll end on this — where he writes to make clear that the country in question is Italy.
44:37 Still, let me read it to you, because there's a connection to the melody that comes up again. Thus, Italy is present from the very origin of the shared adventure of Mignon and Wilhelm; it exists through a melody. So now, she is a melody. You see? I've taken this long detour. So Goethe hastens to specify that it expresses, I quote, "an irresistible and nostalgic yearning." Nostalgic, the Sehnsucht. It's hard to translate.
45:09 And that it is spoken by Mignon with — this will remind you of something — with an intonation now pleading and urgent, now full of desires and promises. And there we find again that ambivalence of the bell from earlier. Yet no one would think to truly compare K.'s ordeal in the snow and in the castle with the paradisiacal moment that Wilhelm knew for too short a time, and Mignon to her ruin — he knew it with Wilhelm in some of the most beautiful spots in the world, in the heart of the Borromean Islands.
45:51 The islands that lie in Lake Maggiore, with sumptuous residences and dream gardens in sweet Italy — not the still-rocky Alps, but Italy which lies at the foot of the Alps, isn't it? But on the southern side, in Lombardy. There. I needed to introduce you to this character in order to dig further into what she reveals to us. What? I told you that the central element of my talk this evening on the matter of sound is a certain silence.
46:26 You're beginning to hear it, this silence which is present, which is what is common to all these texts. It's not the sound of footsteps in the snow, that's the castle. It's not the wagon of the Romanies, the Roma. No, that's not it. It's something that belongs to the very essence of what Mignon embodies, something that is all the harder to characterize because as soon as you characterize, your identity please. Name, first name, address, sex, male, female.
Music as indetermination, according to Hegel 46:58 We don't know. He has trouble giving her a sex. I'm summing up what we've seen. There's a margin of indetermination. Now, I'll finish now, I may seem to be spinning things out in a spiral, what I was saying about Hegel. Hegel almost ended his list of the arts, as his era did, with music, but he had it superseded by poetry. I don't want to digress, but that's another matter. One day I'll devote something purely to this problem, to the hierarchy of the arts in Hegel's Aesthetics.
47:29 But the thing is that poetry differs from prose to the extent that it incorporates a musical element. You see the problem isn't resolved. But still, it's poetry. He reproaches music with what, for him, prevents him from placing it at the top of the hierarchy. It's precisely its side—I'll use again his phrase, its childish babbling—of indetermination, of unintelligibility in the form of clear, univocal words. This is a screen, this is a keyboard, this is a sink.
48:00 The determinations. There, we find plastic things again, things have an outline. That was before modern art and Impressionism came along to blur contours and musicalize the decor. You see, this is that silence we're beginning to hear. She embodies the spirit of music precisely because she gathers together all the factors, the elements of indetermination, whether at the level of her sex, her age, since she is both child and adult at the same time, isn't she?
48:36 She is more than a child while remaining childlike. And she babbles a sort of sub-German. She's between German and some other language. She's not from here nor from there, but from everywhere, since she crosses countries without residing in any. So, indetermination of place, of time, of age, of sex. She is thus fundamentally musical.
49:08 And at the same time, music is indeterminate, let's say, if one wanted to characterize what one hears with very precise words. But what one feels is not indeterminate at all. We feel things with remarkable precision. You all know it. We all know it. So there's a problem posed there, isn't there, which we're beginning to circumscribe. So, here, I'll finish the last sentence. She exists through a melody which Goethe hastens to specify translates an irresistible and nostalgic longing, and which is uttered by Mignon with an intonation, I quote, at times pleading and urgent.
49:50 That's like the voice that wanted to force that poor thing earlier. The bell is at times full of desires and promises. Everything your wishes dare not fulfill. There you go. So I'm going to stay within this aura surrounding the character.
50:20 Mignon, I'm going to stay in this character's company. It's hard to leave her. And yet she is evanescent. I won't hide from you right away that she dies of grief when she learns that Wilhelm is already far away in every sense. And Robert Schumann, the composer, wrote a requiem for Mignon. I tell you, these are things rarely heard. What's mostly heard is Schumann's piano work, which is admirable. It's an unforgettable work.
50:50 But these works with chorus are seldom listened to. Orchestra and chorus. Well, the number of musicians—Schubert, Beethoven, Schumann, Duparc, Hugo Wolf, less well known, but one of the summits of the art of the lied in musical history at the end of the 19th century—who were inspired by this character of Mignon, one can hardly imagine. And I'm only naming the best known. So I'm now going to move on to someone who seems quite the opposite, isn't he, of the frail and evanescent Mignon.
Wagner the essayist and Baudelaire's letter 51:29 It's Wagner, but not Wagner—well, yes, the same one, it's the composer Richard Wagner, but Wagner as essayist, writing an essay. An essay—he wrote many. This chatty fellow, as Johann used to say. But he also wrote a great deal, especially at a time when his works couldn't be performed. He was banned from Germany because he had fired on the barricades in 1848. And here we're dealing with a work simply titled Beethoven, an essay on Beethoven.
52:09 The three B's, you know, of German music, or the four, that's for the purists. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—some add Bruckner, not Berg, if we go on into the 20th century. Well, in this essay, he speaks of the relations between France and Germany, because Wagner suffered a great deal in France, where he was snubbed because there were, let's not mix everything up, cabals against him—except for Baudelaire, who recognized his genius and wrote one of the most beautiful letters ever written on music by someone who didn't know it technically.
52:44 I recommend it to you. Baudelaire, on Google, Charles Baudelaire, letter to Richard Wagner, a page and a half. In it Baudelaire uses comparisons borrowed from painting, he says, because I don't know the technical terms of music, and you see a manifesto of abstract painting. And on this entirely red and scarlet expanse, one that couldn't imagine a more vivid red, there suddenly descends a rocket of dazzling white.
53:15 It's incredible. I mean, there's nothing figurative in it. Well, that shows it was in the air, all of that. In other words, a painting tending toward music. A painting that doesn't have an outline saying this is a piano and this is a soup tureen. But we're circling around the same problems. Now, Wagner, here, speaks of the respective positions of the two greatest German poets, isn't that so, of those who launched German literature, which entered the concert of nations rather late.
53:51 It's in the 18th century that we begin to hear it, when Europe begins to take an interest, and even then, only very gradually. That's what makes Madame de Staël say, light comes to us from the North. The very first are Goethe and Schiller, who are classics in German classrooms, of course. And then, of course, there's the fountainhead of the German Romantics. And here he compares each of the two in their position vis-à-vis art in general and music in particular. That's what interests Wagner.
Reading from the essay on Beethoven: Goethe, Mignon, and Schiller 54:21 How does each of them position himself? Of course he admires both, but he shows their difference. And he says this—I'll skip the beginning. Well, no, I'll take it here. We know that the conceptions of Faust and of Wilhelm Meister emerged at the same period, as we saw earlier, when the poet's genius was at its first flowering. He's speaking of Goethe. The deep passion that animated his thought led him first to write the first pages of Faust, then, as if frightened by the enormity of his own conception—well, it's a story that has inspired many musicians.
55:01 He turned away from his powerful sketch and sought, in Wilhelm Meister, that is his novel of the young bourgeois's development, to conceive the problem in a calmer form. In full maturity, he finished this novel of an easy-going nature. Its hero, Wilhelm Meister, son of a German bourgeois, seeks a secure and agreeable way of being. He tries the theater, crosses through the nobility, and ends up in an advantageous cosmopolitanism.
55:31 This is very contemporary, all this about the middle classes. The poet moves us when he lets us understand clearly that Mignon was the object of a great crime. This young man who seems so well-balanced, and so on, isn't he, he sends the kid off to get hurt all the same, isn't he, by toying with her, and it's afterward. I'm not accusing him, I'm just recalling the plot. So, careful, here you must listen closely now. The poet moves us when he lets us understand clearly that Mignon was the object of a great crime.
56:02 He does not let his hero dwell on this impression. In short, Wilhelm Meister doesn't seem to be overwhelmed by superego and guilt. He carries him off into a sphere free of all violence and all tragic eccentricity. That's Goethe's ideal, far from Romantic terrors and spasms, isn't it, an existence delivered from all violence and all excess, and from all tragic eccentricity, and gives him a fine education.
56:32 He walks him through a picture gallery. At Mignon's death, music is played. And this music, Schumann—it's still Wagner writing—Schumann actually wrote it later. It seems that Schiller—so we move from Goethe to Schiller, they were very close friends, but very different—Schiller, who wrote this hymn to joy that was set to music by Beethoven. And I'm sorry to say, now, the anthem of Europe, isn't it, which is really an abuse, because if Beethoven's greatness lies in the defense he always took up of the French Revolution and of those who stormed the Bastille, that's exactly what today's Brussels Europe despises, isn't it?
57:16 And not only Brussels Europe, but many of those who think of themselves as left-wing. The anti-Jacobin left, you know. It seems Schiller was outraged by the last book. Schiller was made an honorary citizen by the very young French Republic in [17]90, because he had defied the aristocrats. It seems Schiller was outraged by the last book of Wilhelm Meister, this sort of embourgeoisement. However, he was unable to draw his great friend Goethe out of his strange blindness.
57:49 Don't lose track. This is becoming fascinating. You wouldn't think so, looking at it. He could admit that Goethe, who had composed Mignon—you see, composed—and had, with this creation, called into being a marvelous new world, he could think that Goethe, deep in his inner dream, had fallen prey to a distraction from which he could not be roused. What happened to Goethe since he conceived Mignon? He forgot his character.
Goethe awakens: Faust and Helen of Troy 58:19 He's in a kind of waking reverie, half drowsy. And here begins the most interesting part of Wagner's text. Goethe alone could wake himself from it. He awoke. For at a very advanced age he finished his Faust. I don't want to lose you. No, he doesn't finish this great Wilhelm Meister—that he's just finished. He finishes Faust, the work he'd been working on for 40 years—now, having conceived the character of Mignon, to sum it all up, he can finally finish his Faust.
58:57 But what was missing? Look closely. For at a very advanced age he finished his Faust. Here, the object that distracts him from his dream is an original figure of total beauty, Helen. Yes, it is Helen of Troy. You know that Goethe's Faust made a pact with the devil—the devil says to him, I'll give you whatever you want. Including, if you want, he'll resurrect for him Helen of Troy from thousands of years ago, the most beautiful woman who ever existed according to legend, according to the myth, to offer her to Faust so he can do with her what he wants.
59:31 That won't hold Faust's interest for long. Faust is us, it's you, it's me, it's man, it's eternal dissatisfaction. The price the devil demands, isn't it? And Goethe—you know what the devil demands in return, it's always the same thing he asks for—the soul. Oh yes, sorry, and Faust, for his part, what he tells the devil is: I'll give you my soul, no problem, if you make me feel... That's the whole deal of Faust for 40 years. A happiness such that I could stop time at that very instant, saying to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön'—stay, you are so beautiful, isn't it—speaking to the moment.
1:00:12 And so he doesn't achieve it. Even by going to fetch Helen of Troy. There, I've summed it up for you up to this point, I'll stop there. We're at Helen. She herself is the antique ideal, the opposite of the Romantic. It's not the plastic ideal—Helen, a Homeric figure, well drawn—she herself is the antique ideal, complete and absolute, summoned up from the realm of shades and married to his Faust. Goethe marries Helen of Troy to modern man, to Faust. But the shade cannot be fixed, and she evaporates into a beautiful cloud that flees into the distance, and which Faust follows in a melancholy reverie, yet one free of suffering.
1:00:52 That didn't hold him either. Gretchen alone could deliver him. Gretchen, that's the Marguerite of one of his first loves, a woman he got pregnant and who has since died of grief, and who, now that she's in the beyond, will intercede on his behalf with the transcendent. Let's leave aside the story of Faust. But you see, the feminine returns—and not the antique feminine, but the modern woman, the sinner. So, from the world of the blessed, the one sacrificed too soon who nevertheless still lives in the depths of his being, reaches out her hand to him.
"The eternal feminine draws us upward" 1:01:27 Just as, in the course of our investigation, we drew analogical comparisons from philosophy and physiology, if we want to give the poetic work, the deepest one, Faust, for Wagner, a meaning for our own purposes that goes in the direction of what we want to prove close to my theme of silence. We shall see in the words—these are the last words of Faust, the very last, when he completes it—'All that is transitory is but a symbol.'
1:02:02 And right after that, these two second-to-last lines, the two last ones—'but the eternal feminine draws us upward.' And Wagner comments thus. I'll repeat the sentence because it had to be interrupted so as not to lose its complexity. Just as, in the course of our investigation, we drew analogical comparisons from philosophy and physiology, if we want to give the poetic work Faust, the deepest one, a meaning for our own purposes, we shall see in the words 'all that is transitory is but a symbol,' the spirit of the plastic arts, plastic.
1:02:37 So there, we remain Greek, classical, motionless, in space, not in music and in time. Plastic. Toward which Goethe strove so long and so excellently. Goethe was fascinated by crystals, he did a great deal of natural science, he did work on the theory of colors, he had unimaginable collections of shells, and so on. So, Goethe—but when he says 'the eternal feminine draws us upward,' here Wagner drops the final word of our journey through these texts, the spirit of music.
1:03:19 These two lines, 'the eternal feminine draws us upward,' embody the spirit of music—we have finally found what sex it is, the spirit of music which, from the depths of the poet's consciousness, has taken flight and now hovers, with nothing weighing it down or resting upon it, as Verlaine would say, hovering, freeing itself from gravity. It now hovers above him and guides him on the path of deliverance. There, that's the journey I wanted to take with you around the character of Mignon.
1:03:51 Those who were interested, or who might have found some interest along the way, if that interest wasn't too obscured by my digressions or my hesitations or my occasional memory lapses, I ask them to refer to our latest episode of Musicosophie, which I made with Aymeric Monville and which we recorded, as far as I know, on Tuesday—well, actually just yesterday evening—and in which I raise the question: what is musical in music?
1:04:30 We're not very far, as you can guess, from these problems. The question might seem silly—music is music, for... Yes, but what is musical about it? There is more architectural music and more pictorial music, isn't there? What is properly musical in music? That's the question I'm raising. I'd like to leave you with this question, hoping you'll ask it of yourselves, and referring you, of course, to a few links we'll leave on the site, of musicians and some of the finest achievements inspired by the character of Mignon in the history of music.
Excerpt from Orson Welles's The Immortal Story 1:05:05 Thank you for your patience, and I'll see you next time. He is dead, Miss Virgin. He was awaited at the end of the end of the cup of Man. But the cup was too strong for him.
1:05:35 It's very difficult for people who have things, so unfortunately that they cannot. If they cannot the things, it's difficult. And when they cannot the things, it's surely very difficult.
1:06:05 I've already heard it. The honor, for a long time now. But where?
