Stravinsky and His World
Page 49
Indeed, for Nabokov, the power of music and of sound—beyond all its links to memory—was that it intensified the ordinary consciousness of time understood as a continuum along the lines of the quotidian.52 The short story “Music” revolves around the perception that music easily links present with past.53 At the same time Nabokov grasped the need to deviate from a sense of time located in nature. Music was an art that, like poetry, could expand time. Kinbote, defending his friendship with Shade, credited his short acquaintance with the capacity of the aesthetic to defy the calendar, creating “inner duration,” “eons of transparent time” independent of external “rotating malicious music.”54 Nabokov’s view is not entirely dissimilar to Stravinsky’s. The composer wrote in his autobiography, “Music is the overarching domain in which man realizes the present.” Music’s sole purpose was to establish “an order in things” and especially “the coordination between man and time.” Music redefines time in the present and gives “substance” and “stability” to “the category of the present.”55
Art and Time
Stravinsky and Nabokov shared an obsession with how the aesthetic realm might influence the phenomenon of time perception, despite a surface of divergence between the two: Nabokov struggled against the tyranny of a seemingly objective and uniform construct of time, whereas Stravinsky attempted to deepen the sense of the present through musical construction. For both, nostalgia and memory were tied to the experience of time, and both struggled to come to terms with the link between past and present. In their various speculations, both also drew on two common sources: Henri Bergson and Andrey Bely. Writing about Stravinsky in 1949, Craft mentions Stravinsky’s having read Bergson.56 Whether he actually did so or learned of Bergson’s ideas from Pyotr Suvchinsky and Paul Valéry in the 1920s, the philosophical connection Bergson forged between the experience of time in the present and the expression of the human creative force left a lasting impression on the composer’s beliefs about the character and function of music.57 Music, by framing and in fact stopping the ordinary experience of time so that it appeared always in the present, rendered music “petrified” architecture and deepened the consciousness of human creativity. Nabokov, who had a more complex understanding of time, was also influenced by Bergson, whom he admitted reading avidly in the interwar years.58
With Stravinsky, musical time—defined as the extension and construction of the present moment—reappears as well in the late work, mostly as a result of his encounter with the music of Anton von Webern. Predominant in this music are silence as a component of compositional structure and the ascetic economic manipulation of sonority, mostly in units of short duration; the result is a heightening and deepening of time in the moment of listening. For Nabokov the issue of time, always present in the novels, took center stage in the 1960s in Ada. The “flowering of the present,” as Van Veen in Ada put it, demanded the awareness that time is “vaguely connected to hearing”; the apprehension of time requires “the utmost purity of consciousness,” which is not spatial and visual but aural.59
The key is that the “still fresh past” defines the present. The “present” slips in when we inspect “shadow sounds.” The “dim intervals between the dark beats” of the authentic rhythm of time offer merely the “feel of the texture of Time.” Nabokov concluded: “Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the nowness.”60 The synchronized flow of time as measured by clocks was itself an illusion, since the boundaries between past and present were if not fluid, interdependent, with the selective consciousness of the past defining the present and then subsequently the reverse, in which the past becomes circumscribed by the sense of the present moment.61 This fluidity reveals itself in the movement back and forth in time in Nabokov’s narrative voice. His characters take the same journey—often so deftly from the reader’s perspective that the shifts become noticeable only after the act of reading, making the reader aware of the author’s challenge to a reductive realism within his or her own time experience, not merely within the artificial time frame of the novel.
For both Nabokov and Stravinsky, the issue of time and its perception was more than an aesthetic problem. The experience of exile forced a many-sided dilemma with regard to memory and anticipation. First was the challenge of how to come to terms with the artistic heritage, public, and tradition of which the exile once expected to be part, and from which he was now separated. Second was the need to grapple with the tyrannies of memory—the lacunae, the willful and inadvertent distortions, and the fragments all heightened by discontinuity and distance, the forced separation from the familiar and the illusions of continuity that non-exiles take for granted. Third was the danger posed by the allure of nostalgia, the sentimental distortion of memory, and the exaggerated fear of forgetfulness. To forget was to destroy not merely the past but the possibilities of the present. Yet memory, the driving force of the present and essential to the artist, was constantly at risk in exile, where it became a purely mental property unaided by sight and sound.
A last dilemma for exiles, and a consequence of all the difficulties already alluded to was how to find an alternative to the tacit assumption of continuity—an effective means to forge an ongoing connection between past and present—something thoughtlessly possible for those not displaced. Indeed, the definition of the present—the temporal frame for the making and experience of art—became more complex since the significant past was ever harder to keep “still fresh,” and its capacity to “slip” into the present and define it was steadily weakened. At risk was the very capacity to grasp the present, to intuit the texture of time sufficiently to allow the imagination to take flight.
Nabokov’s approach to the issue of time was influenced by Bergson, but it was the thought of Bely that most directly shaped the way Nabokov considered his craft and vocation as a writer and his approach to aesthetic questions.62 Writing in 1907, Bely argued against a “synthesis” of art forms (despite his early admiration for Wagner). Rather, the purpose of art reflected an underlying unity in the arts. “Is it simply so that we may transform a few hours into a dream, only to have the dream destroyed again by the intrusion of reality?” Bely asked. His answer was that the creative act was, in Kantian terms, “cognition for its own sake,” an intuitive form of engaging time without any purpose or object. The “method of creation” becomes “an object in and for itself.” The result was the “extreme form of individualization.” The process of artistic creation demanded that each artist “become his own artistic form.” The categories of time were artificial subjective conventions for framing reality and must be rethought. Bely termed new art as “the past that is reborn,” where “we find ourselves at the mercy of the cherished dead.” In a manner reminiscent of Nabokov’s own speculations Bely argued, “We must forget the present. We must re-create everything and in order to do this we must create ourselves.”63
The interconnection of a construct of the past—the task of reassembling the past, or in Bely’s terms, re-creating it—requires that conventions about understanding the “present” be set aside. Forgetfulness is a prelude to the restoration of memory. The sense of time is not connected to a cognitive correspondence between external reality and consciousness but a function of a highly individualized creative act, using the aesthetic medium—the musical, the poetic, and the visual—to redefine consciousness and time. These claims connect directly to the innovations of both Nabokov and Stravinsky.
For Bely—as well as Nabokov and the mature Stravinsky—the key to escaping the notion that art was a mere illusory respite from an objective reality was the recognition that the form in which the creative act expressed itself generated an alternate reality, an experience of time located in the human possibility of individuality for the author and his public that vindicated life. In moral terms, the most significantly true reality came into being through the forms of art in a manner that transcended, with
considerable precision, the mundane understanding of real time and experience. This mundane understanding was itself the result of an impoverished use of language. Placing art before any notion of “life,” Bely concluded “in art, in life, things are more serious than we think.”64
The most “serious” realization—one crucial to Stravinsky and Nabokov—was Bely’s idea that “if words did not exist then neither would the world itself.” Bely put forward a notion of “living speech,” which was the “very condition of existence of mankind itself.” And since “mankind’s purpose lies in the living creation of life,” by hearing speech that is “imagined” and “living” we are led to new words and word constructions that in turn lead to “the acquisition of new acts of cognition.”65 The next step was from words to music.
Bely’s privileging of language as the mother of thought, as his Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus put it, was not new. But there was a metaphysical premise in Bely that justified a scientific precision in the use of language particularly dear to Nabokov. Language, especially poetic language, created the reality we define as “living” relationships, including the future creation of language. Within the linguistic realm, and within art, for example, the coincidence of vocabulary (as Bely discussed in the case of Kant and Hanslick) suggested that within this ever-expandable universe of linguistic invention were scientific criteria of truth, a “real dimension.”66 Nabokov’s distaste for conceptual language, the vocabulary of ideologies—in Marx and Freud—derives from Bely’s skepticism that there is false language, language that is wholly unreal, detached from the “direct expression of life.” Naming becomes crucial since it creates that which would otherwise not exist. “The word is the sole real vessel on which we sail from one unknown to another—amidst unknown spaces (called “earth” “heaven” “ether” and so forth) and amidst unknown temporalities.” The “firework” displays of words “fill the void surrounding me.”67 Bely’s vision veers close to a method of musical composition using intervals and sonorities in a novel fashion, much like Stravinsky’s procedures.
Poetry for Bely and Nabokov is the highest form of word usage; it is the source of the creation of language and the purely “imaginal combination of words.” Indeed, in historical moments of decay, poetry’s importance is at its highest, for it lets us “recognize the meaning of new magical words” by which to “conjure the gloom of night hanging over us.” In moments of despair, “we are still alive, but we are alive because we hold on to words.”68 This thought succinctly described Nabokov’s commitment to his vocation as a writer, particularly considering his keen sense of the darkness of the era in which he lived. For Nabokov, Bely’s observation that “mankind is alive, so long as the poetry of language exists,” was a genuine article of faith.69
For Bely, all this was contingent on a belief in the necessity of form and the capacity to locate objective criteria for understanding aesthetic form within all the arts. Formalism was not derivative of tradition or a distillation of historical practice—a deduction resulting from the imposition of norms of judgment onto an empirical base of past practice, such as the manner in which theorists establish norms of sonata form. Bely, an accomplished mathematician, was in search of a priori axioms. Predictably, his source was mathematics and physics. Bely’s translation of scientific modes of thought into aesthetics was distinctive and may have provided the young Nabokov a suggestive model of how to link his fascination with nature and with butterflies to his ambitions as a writer.
For Bely there was no division between content and form: the way in which the concrete materials of art are considered constitutes the subject of form. Form was the “governing” principle in all art and protected art from descending into meaningless chaos and “tendentious encroachments.”70 Bely’s principles were framed in terms of Newtonian laws. First came a hierarchy of the arts. He posited an “inverse proportion” between space and time in the ranking of the arts. This made music the highest of the arts, since in it all spatial and visual elements were abstracted. Music possessed no spatial dimension. It was the means by which pure temporality was expressed. Only through “vague” analogies could “visual and spatial” meanings be attributed to music. For Nabokov, as for Stravinsky, aesthetic judgment required the subordination of the spatial and visual to the temporal, for it strengthened the idea that art was autonomous and ought not be tied to a vulgar sense of the real, to any illusionism or pictorial realism. Music was the art of time, understood as the “art of pure motion,” with a precise truth-value akin to science.71
For Bely, poetry came next after music. “Poetry views the visible world musically, like a veil over an unspoken mystery of the soul. … Music is the skeleton of poetry. If music is the common trunk of all creation, poetry is its leafy crown.”72 Although Nabokov derided his own connection to music, his notion of poetry and the nature of his prose, when considered in light of Bely’s premium on word creation and the novel combinations of words, are like musical renderings of a world imagined. Painting, predictably, occupied the lowest rung of Bely’s ordering of the arts.73
Bely’s formalism was further understood in terms of the natural law of conservation, defined as the conservation of creative energy. In a proper artistic form that aesthetic energy needed to be expended in proportional manner to overcome “stasis” in the very materials of creation. The aesthetics of form possessed its own “law of equivalents” by which the creative energy of the result matched that of its components and creation. Bely’s effort to establish a non-arbitrary parallel between the laws governing energy with those governing art led him to assert that aesthetics could be an “exact science” with unlimited competence in the sense of the natural sciences.74 Here again can be found the sources of the conceits of Stravinsky and Nabokov, particularly Stravinsky’s explicit appeal to the primacy of the “Apollonian” dimension in art. Indeed, Stravinsky’s turn to the ideal of neoclassicism reveals a debt to Bely.
Using a single-minded emphasis on form, Bely formulated his own answer to the question of the connection between truth and beauty. Unlike the normative philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century that posited the link as between aesthetics and ethics, Bely’s was a direct, unmediated link between the truth content in descriptive aesthetics and science.
In Nabokov’s case the connection to Bely is even more striking. Using elaborate diagrammatic schemes, Bely argued that one could measure and describe the harmonious balance between content and form in a lyric poem; one needed a theory of rhythm and “instrumentation” so as to study word choices. Bely dissected a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov, separating its “experiential” from its “ideational” content.75 He compared the rhythmic complexity of early and late Pushkin in order to grasp the “how” of words and sounds. An intensely descriptive science, including a taxonomy, was required to grasp the beauty of poetry, hence:
Every lyric work demands a basic commentary. In commenting on a poem we are decomposing it, as it were, into its constituent parts and looking carefully at the means of representation, at the choice of epithets, similes, and metaphors in order to characterize the content. We feel the words and look for their mutual rhythmic and sonorous relations. In thus reorganizing the analyzed material into a new whole, we often can no longer recognize a familiar poem at all. Like the phoenix, it arises anew out of itself in a more beautiful form, or, conversely, it withers away. In this way we come to recognize that a comparative anatomy of poetic style is truly necessary, that it is the ultimate stage in the development of a theory of literature and lyric poetry, and finally that it represents a rapprochement between these two disciplines and the various fields of scientific knowledge.76
There could be no more persuasive source for Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin project, his structural choices in Pale Fire, or his suspicion of anything but literal translation. The purpose for this exact analytical science rested first in precision in the variables of art—words, colors, and pitches—and second in the inherent objective logic of their u
se and elaboration. The pure aesthetic that such analysis could reveal was an authentic realism of the imagination beyond the realism of the visible. “Reality is not how it appears to us. … Reality as we know it is different from reality as it truly is,” Bely concluded.77
In Bely’s terms, Nabokov, by first approaching language as poetry, aspired to the state of music. “I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose,” Nabokov once observed.78 Since all art shares features with music, and music “unites and generalizes” all art, owing to its status as purely about time, “the profundity and intensity of musical works give us, according to Bely, a hint” that through the aesthetic imagination, composer and listener, writer and reader can begin to remove “the deceptive veil” that covers the “visible world,” and demolish the “deceptive picture” with which we live.79 Nabokov’s intensity of visual and oral observation, shorn from a conventional narrative or obvious temporal context, cast in rich and original poetic language (invented words and startling juxtapositions), invited his reader to lift the veil and penetrate beyond the deceptive picture.
Stravinsky’s connection to Bely was certainly less direct, but equally significant. The influence of Bely’s notions of form and his views on music—and indeed the centrality of art—were most powerfully communicated through the World of Art movement, by the painters and poets who were his contemporaries. But the link to Stravinsky’s mature positions on the nature of music was profound. Perhaps the most oft-cited claim Stravinsky made can be found in his autobiography:
For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood and phenomenon of nature, etc. … Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.80