Adam Piette - Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett

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Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

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Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc. New York

Adam Piette 1996

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Piette, Adam. Remembering and the sound of words: Mallarm, Proust, Joyce, Beckett/Adam Piette. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. French literature--19th century--History and criticism. 2. French literature--20th century--History and criticism. 3. Mallarm, Stphane, 1842-1898--Language. 4. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922--Language. 5. Beckett, Samuel, 1906- --Language. 6. Joyce, James, 1882-1941--Language. 7. Literature, Comparative--French and English 8. Literature, Comparative--English and French. 9. English literature--20th century--History and criticism. 10. Memory in literature. I. Title. PQ283.P44 1996 840.9--dC20 95-16585 ISBN 0-19-818268-6

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Typeset by Pure Tech India Ltd., Pondicherry Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

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For Diane

a voice murmuring a trace. A trace it wants to leave a trace, yes, like air leaves among the leaves, among the grass, among the sand Texts For Nothing XIII

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I would like to thank Queens' College, Cambridge, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Lausanne for their support.

I am grateful for the help and advice of many friends and colleagues, particularly to: Neil Forsyth, Alex Holdcroft, Alison Harvey, Alban Harvey, Ralph Pite, David Taylor.

I am indebted to Rosemary Lloyd, Christopher Ricks, and Malcolm Bowie for their guidance and example at different stages in the writing of the book.

I would like to thank Diane Piette and my family for their tireless encouragement, forbearance, and help.

My greatest debt is to Eric Griffiths, il miglior fabbro, who saw me through it all.

A. P.

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When Shelley heard a bird sing, he thought of himself:

A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. (116)

When we read poetic prose, or prose we believe to be poetic, we are in the position of those auditors: hearing sweet sounds, a certain melody, being moved and softened, yet not knowing the precise causes. Is the music within the prose simply there as a meaninglessly 'softening' adjunct to syntax and sense--or is the author merely cheering him- or herself up along the bare and bitter tracts of narrative? Shelley's sentence is sweet in this mysterious way. The s + -run along 'sits'-'sings'-'solitude' resolves itself sweetly and aptly into 'sweet sounds', with the slight after-shock in 'unseen'. 'Melody, similarly, finds echoes in 'men'-'musician''moved', reinforced by a vowel-sound chiasmus. But beyond noticing this, how far can one go? The sounds of prose, even within the most intense passages, seem condemned to remain either pretty little mimetic tricks like the 'melody'-'sweet sound' echoes, or unseen musical accompaniments threading through the halfsilent words to the satisfaction of the author alone. But Shelley's poetic prose has another mimetic trick up its sleeve the mimesis of memory, memory of writing poetry.

Thinking in prose about the poet as bird, he remembers writing a poem about a bird as poet, 'To a Sky-Lark': 'Like a Poet hidden/In the light of thought,/Singing hymns unbidden,/Till the world is wrought/To sympathy with hopes and fears it