Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T02:00:07.700Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unheard Melodies: The Force of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Marshall Brown
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Music is the realm where meaning is not ruined by saying. With the phrase “unheard melodies,” Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” evokes the unspeakable in a passage whose logic has collapsed. Literally unheard melodies, along with related phenomena, appear in music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, and Beethoven; each hidden melody resonates with the expressive structure of the piece containing it—with the felt idea that performance must actuate. Unseen pictures in paintings function similarly. Thus in unheard melodies thought acts unmediated by utterance. They—and not the Imaginary—are the Platonic ideal Mallarmé sought. They show how form is power and life.

Type
1. Writing Performance: Harmony, Silence, Noise
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 465 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Miller, Richard. New York: Hill, 1974.Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo. The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. “Chardin and the Text of Still Life.” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 227–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. “Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats.” A Grammar of Motives. New York: Braziller, 1955. 447–44.Google Scholar
Butor, Michel. “Claude Monet; ou, Le monde renversé.” Art de France 3 (1963): 277–301.Google Scholar
Cage, John. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961.Google Scholar
Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modem Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. New York: Knopf, 1985.Google Scholar
Cook, Albert S. “The Wilderness of Mirrors.” Dimensions of the Sign in Art. Hanover: UP of New England, 1989. 62–83.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Force et signification.” L'écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 9–49.Google Scholar
Epstein, David. Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structure. Cambridge: MIT P, 1979.Google Scholar
Fineman, Joel. “The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire.” October 45 (1988): 77–96.Google Scholar
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1830. Ed. Nicolin, Friedhelm and Pöggeler, Otto. Hamburg: Meiner, 1959.Google Scholar
Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1991. 183–236.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank. The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Kronik, John. “The Web, the Hive, and the Looking Glass: Self-Consciousness in Hispanic Literature.” Mid-America Conference on Hispanic Literature. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, 3 Oct. 1986.Google Scholar
Levinson, Marjorie. Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.Google Scholar
Liu, Alan. “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism.” ELH 56 (1989): 721–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Mondor, Henri and Jean-Aubry, G. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.Google Scholar
McDonald, Christie V. Dispositions. Québec: Hurtubise, 1986.Google Scholar
Paz, Octavio. “El ritmo.” El arco y la lira. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1967. 49–67.Google Scholar
Porter, Andrew. Music of Three Seasons: 1974–1977. New York: Farrar, 1978.Google Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phono-text. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Susan. “The Language of Interpretation in Romantic Poetry: ‘A Strong Working of the Mind.‘” Romanticism and Language. Ed. Reed, Arden. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984. 22–49.Google Scholar