The book of nature is written in a mathematical script. Human nature finds itself called upon to decipher this text, and it is perhaps more deeply implicated in this activity than a mere external reader would be. The idea that there is a text outside that demands attentive and renewed reading fails to do justice to the complexities postulated by Freud, for whom the unconscious is equipped with its own inner text. Any reading that is to be done then presupposes the existence of a relation between these interiorities and an exterior that they are engaged with. There is a question here of giving an interpretation of a text, but there is also a question of whether a mathematician may be needed in order to address these questions of exterior, interior, and the frontier between them.

The psychoanalyst is called on to be a poet – or, as Jacques Lacan occasionally phrased it, to be a poem. Analytical work, at the same time, “scientifically” purifies the subject. Lacan held to both these opinions, and he was not alone in the analytical movement in wanting to bridge the gap between them. Such themes were present from the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Freud put forward claims on both sides of this divide; on the one hand, he described how words have a magical power, and on the other, he suggested that psychoanalysis can be formalized as a science.

INTRODUCTION

The last years have seen a shift in the winds of culture. The approaching storm - or the dissipation of the existing storm clouds, depending on your perspective - has been widely heralded as the “postmodern shift.” Postmodernity has as many interpretations as it has advocates and critics put together, which renders it impossible to begin a chapter of this sort with a pithy definition. But all (or at least most) of its descriptions exhibit two important features: a thoroughgoing critique of the “modern project” (when and what that was being a matter of deep contention), and an insistence that the solution to the problems of modernity lies not in a return to premodern questions and answers, but rather in moving beyond the modern project to something radically new and different.

Certain stereotypes notwithstanding, theologians are highly sensitive to shifts in the wind. As Walter Lowe points out in chapter 14 of this volume, Karl Barth recognized the exhaustion of the “modern” German intellectual projects (Hegel, neo-Kantianism, von Harnack) already in the opening of the twentieth century and proclaimed an anti-modernist (and in that sense, at least, postmodern) program. With no less insight, Paul Tillich put his finger on the pulse of the postwar intellectual–existential climate when he published his highly successful The Courage to Be (1953) and began formulating his mature systematic theology. One detects a similar cultural acuity in the death-of-God movement, in Langdon Gilkey’s naming and reaping of whirlwinds, and the diverse forms of liberation theology that have left an indelible impression on theology at the turn of the millennium.

One way of telling the story of modernity and postmodernity is by charting the relationship, often volatile and sometimes violent, between Scripture and tradition. At stake is the nature and locus of divine authority: does it reside in the canon or in the community?

In one sense, the postmodern condition would seem to be a swing back to the authority of tradition, in particular, to the authority of interpretative traditions. On the other hand, the postmodern situation brings to light certain reductionistic tendencies in thinking about language and literature. Some look to the later Wittgenstein as indicating a new way of thinking about language. Interestingly, Wittgenstein's emphasis on language use correlated to forms of life brings back the very Scripture/tradition dynamic in a postmodern key. For what is tradition if not a form of life to know and glorify God? And what is Scripture if not a certain use of language to name God?

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION IN MODERNITY: FROM REFORMATION TO ENLIGHTENMENT

Protestantism: the eclipse of tradition?

From one perspective, the Reformation was a victory of the Scripture principle over ecclesial tradition. The reality, however, is more complex, for the Reformers did not object to the use of the church fathers or deny that the Bible ought to be interpreted in the context of the life of the ongoing church. What they rejected was rather the elevation of noncanonical, and hence human, traditions that were thought to supplement the revelation given in Scripture. The Reformers’ so-called “Scripture principle” identified the Bible as God’s word in human speech, while the notion of the priesthood of all believers handed Scripture to the laity and encouraged them to interpret it for themselves.

Jacques Lacan is a thinker and clinician whose apprehension of recording and broadcast media allows him to live on posthumously with the pop star status he gained in post-war Parisian intellectual life. He is not only a serious rival to the official heirs of Freud, but has emerged as a rival of that other superstar, Jean-Paul Sartre. The history of his exclusion (or excommunication) from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and his subsequent notoriety is crucial for the theorization of his reception in Anglophone academia: there is an aura of transgression, or the smell of sulfur surrounding the sovereignty of his actions and thinking. His insistence on the signifier is key to an undoing of a humanist hermeneutics that swaddled more orthodox receptions of Freud. In addition, Lacan's interest in cybernetics seems to anticipate the plague of questions raised by technological progress. The reactions to his deviation from psychoanalytic orthodoxies revealed the religious fervor with which the guardians of Freudianism tried to protect their territory. Today, Lacan's work continues to teach us lessons, not only about psychoanalysis, but about media and history as well.

Playing the master on the airwaves allowed for Lacan to perform as both charlatan and master – consider his performance in Télévision: his analytic attitude seemed like a posture of pure provocation of his more conservative colleagues. In his pedagogical performances, Lacan demonstrated that all forms of inter-subjectivity, whether mediated by transference or other forms of telecommunication, are based upon a bewitching mirage of reciprocity or mutual understanding.

Why speak of the “mirror stage” as an archive that has been obliterated? The reason is both simple and complex. First, there is no existing original of the lecture on this subject delivered by Jacques Lacan at the 16th congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which took place in Marienbad between the second and eighth of August 1936. After he had been speaking for minutes, Lacan was interrupted by Ernest Jones, the chairman, who considered that this French participant, of whom he had never heard, was exceeding the time allotted to each speaker. At this time, the rule regulating the duration of each spoken contribution was already being applied at international conferences. Lacan, who regarded the interruption as a humiliation, quit the conference and went on to the Olympic Games in Berlin to see at close quarters what a sporting event manipulated by the Nazis was like. One might well see some connection between the forceful manner in which Jones interrupted Lacan's talk and Lacan's notorious invention of “variable sessions” marked by radical brevity and a sense of deliberate suspension. All his life, Lacan would struggle with an impossible control over time, as evinced by the masterful analysis presented in his 1945 essay on “logical time.”

Introduction: neoclassicism

In his homage to Stravinsky, Milan Kundera explains that Stravinsky's experience of forced emigration triggered a change in his musical style no less reactionary than irrevocable. Also an émigré, Kundera sees emigration as a wound – the ‘pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign’. Stravinsky, like any émigré artist, suffered estrangement from the ‘subconscious, memory, language – all the understructure of creativity’ formed in youth. Leaving the place to which his imagination was bound caused a kind of ripping apart. Kundera believes that emigration erased Russia for Stravinsky. After that, his homeland became the historical landscape of music, and his compatriots were the composers that populate that history. Kundera describes the advent of Stravinsky's neoclassical style as a metaphorical recognition – and achievement – of a new home with the ‘classics’ of European music:

‘A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country – he can have only one country – and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life.’ These words were uttered by Stravinsky at a banquet held in his honour in Moscow on 1 October 1962. The eighty-year-old composer had returned to his homeland after an absence of fifty years. In the intervening period he had acquired first French and then American citizenship, and developed an increasingly hostile attitude towards his native country and its culture. This hostility had been fully reciprocated by the Soviet musical establishment. Now, as the guest of the Union of Composers, Stravinsky was seemingly performing a complete volte-face by wholeheartedly embracing his Russian identity. For Robert Craft, his assistant and amanuensis, this was nothing short of a ‘transformation’, and he was astonished, not only to witness Stravinsky and his wife suddenly taking ‘pride in everything Russian’, but to observe at close hand how ‘half a century of expatriation’ could be ‘forgotten in a night’. Craft's diary of the famous visit contains many revealing comments about a composer who was a master of mystification.

Like his younger contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, with whom there are some intriguing biographical parallels, Stravinsky did not care to be pigeon-holed or linked with any particular artistic trend after he left Russia. Above all, because of a sense of cultural inferiority which stemmed from the fact that Russia's musical tradition was so much younger than that of other European nations, he came to disavow his own musical heritage, which necessitated embroidering a complex tapestry of lies and denials.

When Chroniques de ma vie was published in 1935, Stravinsky sanctioned what has become his most famous remark: ‘Music is powerless to express anything at all.’ Even if he capitulated to the ventriloquism of his ghost writer Walter Nouvel on that occasion, Stravinsky's faith in the precept of objectivity, ‘perhaps the overriding feature of Stravinsky's modernism’, pervades his aesthetic manifesto, Poetics of Music (1942), to the extent that his ‘explanation of music as I conceive it’ is egoistically declared not to be ‘any the less objective for being the fruit of my own experience and my personal observations’. Objectivity, and its ascendance over what he called ‘the subjective prism’, was, or became, Stravinsky's distinctive habit of mind, an aesthetic and compositional position maintained in relation to any musical material, including his own free inventions. ‘What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation –’, he wrote in Poetics, ‘is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally submit to the law: Apollo demands it.’ Stravinsky's identification with the Apollonian – order, selection, construction, logic and unity – exemplifies the rationalising tendency within modernism and dominates, but does not expel, the Dionysian – freedom, fantasy, emotion, expressivity and irrationality.

One way of characterising the modernist period might be to say that it was the age of Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce: geniuses who brought about revolutionary changes in the procedures for their arts and publicised them from Paris, so contributing to the myth that it was the avant-garde capital of Europe at that time. Other capitals were home to great geniuses as well – Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Mann – people who, while quite different from Stravinsky, were also very influential modernists and were well out of his cultural range. Indeed, to understand them, we would be moved towards modernist considerations to which Stravinsky was deeply antipathetic. His ‘rivalry’ with Schoenberg (whether it was actual or invented by defenders of the atonal, such as Adorno) is not nearly so important as his intellectual differences from him, including his refusal to write the kind of music that ‘develops’, as it does within the German tradition. But it is the modernist tradition in France – that of Debussy, Proust and Matisse – which influenced at least the early Stravinsky. This was a world that grew out of the Symbolist tendencies so strongly supported by Diaghilev and his circle in Russia and one that produced works such as Fireworks, Zvezdolikiy, The Firebird and, most obviously, The Faun and the Shepherdess, influenced as it was by Debussy, Ravel and Dukas.

When one examines the earliest works of a great composer, it is almost Inevitably with hindsight that one does so. Hearing the earlier works through the portal that the later, more well-known works supply can be a strange experience, through which hindsight often hardens into self-reassurance. Does one hear a familiar foretaste of this here, a pre-echo of that there? Is there a discernible quality to the early works that is evident to us today, but which contemporary listeners seem to have overlooked? Such questions are easy to ask and carry a hint of smugness, but, conversely, is anything to be gained by turning the presumptions around – by dwelling, for example, on the ordinariness that allowed the composer's contemporaries to remain unaware of the genius in their midst? Surely not: for such inversion merely preserves the same impoverished agenda in negative.

Questions of style impinge on the assessment of ‘early’ works in ways that demand examination in the present context. Consider the early works of Mozart as an alternative case to those of Stravinsky: as Charles Rosen has famously argued, the received idea of the ‘classical style’ is defined for us today by the mature works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, rather than by the music of their many accomplished contemporaries. It is not that Mozart's music is recognised as similar to that of, say, J. C. Bach, Kozeluch and Kraus, and can be measured against it, revealing Mozart's ‘superiority’.

Introduction

Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik was published in 1949, at a decisive turning-point for music in the mid-twentieth century. In this highly influential book, Adorno put forward a dialectical reading of the New Music in the form of a critique of its two most extreme representatives, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The effects were dramatic, providing a rallying cry for the generation of new composers emerging in the immediate post-war years, and who were to become associated both with the rejection of neoclassicism and with the espousal of the multiple serialism of the Darmstadt School. The reception of Adorno's critique by the two protagonists themselves was in some respects contrary to expectations. Schoenberg, who disliked Adorno, saw it primarily as an attack on himself, thus going directly against the general view, which regarded Adorno as the great advocate of the Second Viennese School. But at the same time Schoenberg also sprang to Stravinsky's defence, annoyed by Adorno's treatment of his old adversary. Stravinsky, on the other hand, remained silent – in public, at least – thus making it difficult to gauge the extent to which Adorno's critique of his music may have played any determining role in the composer's own spectacular change of direction in the early 1950s, when he himself abandoned neoclassicism and turned to serialism. This has, naturally enough, prompted speculation. Célestin Deliège, for instance, has argued:

The years 1928–9, when Stravinsky first recorded his Russian ballets, have not yet passed beyond living memory. And yet, when it comes to the history of performance (and especially of orchestral performance, since recording so large a group of musicians became possible only with the development of electrical recording around 1925), this is a remote and only just recoverable past. It is true that the pianola versions of The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring push the horizon back to the early 1920s, but the ballets' premieres, from the last years before the First World War, lie altogether within the long, silent, initial phase of music history. Stravinsky recorded each of them on a number of occasions (he recorded The Rite, for instance, in 1929, 1940 and 1960), and in this way the history of these works unfolded, as Peter Hill puts it, ‘exactly in tandem with the emerging record industry’. Successive developments in recording technology represent one of the reasons why Stravinsky recorded many of his works several times: the 78 gave way to the LP in 1948 and to the stereo LP in 1957. (‘Last year's record is as démodé as last year's motor car,’ Stravinsky wryly observed.) But there were further reasons. One was Stravinsky's financial dependence on recording and more generally on conducting, as a result of the drying up of his Russian royalties following the 1917 Revolution; there is a terrible irony in the fact that Stravinsky's career as neoclassical and serial composer was bankrolled by nearly a thousand performances of The Firebird. The other reason takes longer to explain, for it opens up the whole issue of Stravinsky's intentions as a recording artist.

The development of Stravinsky's musical language from Petrushka through The Rite of Spring to Les Noces represents Stravinsky's emergence as a modernist composer. In these three works, definitive Russian subject-matter and content is articulated in an increasingly radical language. The expression of Stravinsky's Russian inheritance within the context of modernism – common ground shared by these three works – is the subject of this chapter.

Petrushka

Petrushka, as is well known, was conceived in the aftermath of the success of The Firebird and repeated the earlier work's collaborative context: it was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Following the public success of The Firebird, Petrushka provides what Richard Taruskin describes as ‘Stravinsky's process of self-discovery’. This self-discovery takes the form of a recently acquired technical confidence in conjunction with a new-found modernism. Stephen Walsh has written that ‘the emergence of Stravinsky as a modernist, with an individual manner unlike any other, can be dated with some precision to his early work on Petrushka’. This ‘individual manner’ consists largely in the adaptation of borrowed materials, a process which immediately suggests a relationship between past and present and sets up points of reference.

Stravinsky as context

The eloquent conclusion of Richard Taruskin's monumental study of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions has quickly become the most widely quoted, generally accepted declaration of Stravinsky's significance for twentieth-century compositional practice:

Taruskin's purpose is to assert that once, in Petrushka, ‘Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky’ by transforming his own defining Russian context, he could be seen as ‘one of music's great centripetal forces, the crystallizer and definer of an age’, whose ‘work possessed a strength of style, and his oeuvre a unity, that could accommodate an endless variety of surfaces’. It is a powerful argument, and its appeal might even have been strengthened by Taruskin's subsequent emphasis on the deplorable morality of Stravinsky's sympathy for fascism and anti-semitism – a general lack of democratic fervour that allegedly infiltrates even the exuberant rituals and ultimate sublimity of Les Noces.