Shared Abysses
by Jean-Jacques Nattiez |imed_9633-0001|
“Each man in all men
All men in each man.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I often wondered why I am so touched by Sous le regard
d’un soleil noir, by Francis Dhomont, since
in general, I feel little esthetic affinity with electroacoustic works.
Perhaps because, beyond the musical proposition, it leads us into the abysses
of human psychology and the depths of the divided self. It is explicitly
inspired by the writings of the English specialist in schizophrenia,
Ronald D Laing.
A program work, this poem by Dhomont is not
ashamed of the musical genre to which it belongs: it tells a story, a slow
descent towards madness. The title of at least three sections reveals an
illustrative connection with Laing’s theory:
Engloutissement (Engulfment), Implosion (Implosion), Pétrification
(Petrification), and I have little doubt that Dhomont wished to give them musical equivalents: the murmuring
of water, empty and obsessive octaves, sonorous ores.
As a matter of fact, when looking at it closely, Laing’s work calls for a musical extension. Of course, here we
are dealing with theoretical books, where plays on words quickly become
‘sound inanities’ (as Rimbaud would have said) ; in
fact the composer does not fail to make the most of them: “I’m an in divide
you all” (“I’m an individual”). And in Knots, Laing
has translated in a quasi poetic fashion the complex strategies of his
patients:
“it hurts Jack
to think
That Jill thinks he is hurting her
by (Jim) being hurt
to think
that she thinks he is hurting her
by making her feel guilty
at hurting him
by (her) thinking
that he is hurting her
by (his) being hurt
to think
that she thinks he is hurting her
by the fact that
da capo sine fine”
The musical terminology which concludes this text is significant. In a
long six page development (“If it’s not me it’s mine / If
it’s mine it’s not me […]”), Laing himself
felt the musical resonance of his works, or at least the world which he had
recreated. In order to reinforce the vertigo that soon seizes the reader, he
adds: “poco a poco accelerando al fine,” and in the very middle, alludes to
“an enharmonic change.” In the same text, the conditional if (si in French)
becomes obsessive alliteration: did it inspire — with the contamination of
Wozzeck — the si — the note now [in French, si is both
the conjunction ‘if’ and the note B natural] — around which Dhomont has organized his work? The composer, in any case, did
not yield to the facile temptation of a repetitive type of music and
succeeded in translating an unbearable mental world into an original sound
work.
Of course, it might be interesting to experiment and listen to the musical
component of the work without the text quotations which punctuate it, in
order to know whether, by itself, it is able to suggest the inner world of
the schizophrenic. Dhomont conceived Soleil noir, with its Nerval-like title borrowed from the
delirious ramblings of a patient, Julia, and with deliberately audible
sentences, as a balanced dosage of sounds and text where the music acquires a
precise meaning thanks to the words, and where the words acquire their tragic
and experienced resonance thanks to the music.
There lies the eminent virtue of Soleil noir: it
makes us share in an immediate manner the anxiety, the anguish, the solitude
of the schizophrenic ; a new ‘uninhabitable space,’ it makes us share his
distress and his despair. Dhomont’s music presents
us with the sonorous image of an inaccessible world and convinces us of its
reality.
There is, of course, a paradox since, and Laing
said it himself, “I cannot experience your experience, or vice versa.” On the
other hand, the composer tells us: ‘I have you listen to the experience that
I believe they have,’ and we believe that he tells the truth. Because, with
his own musical means, he achieves the same goals as Laing who, by relying on the remarks of his patients and,
despite the existentialist conception of incommunicability, presents us with
an inner snapshot of this mental world.
Illusion? Perhaps. We will never know.
In fact, Sous le regard d’un soleil noir reaches us
through something more essential. Program music did we say ? Yes, but just
like the symphonic poems of Liszt took hold of the
heroes of Goethe, Byron and
Shakespeare, and provided Faust, Mazeppa and Hamlet
with their full mythic dimension, Dhomont takes hold
of the post-Freudian man, and from the specific case of schizophrenics,
constructs a more general myth through which the ‘normal’ man discovers his
own schizoid traits. Today as in the romantic era, but in different terms,
the divided self is the self of the double man.
This electronic poem therefore fits in a very precise musical tradition,
but at the same time utilizes the resources of a contemporary language. I
recognize in it the narrative efficiency of the Requiem of Chion and the classicisim of
De natura sonorum by Parmegiani: I mean that Dhomont has not
deployed the whole gamut of the GRM hardware store,
but has used with the utmost economic organization, the only sound
combinations necessary to his purpose, therefore making it most
efficient.
Beyond schizophrenia, Sous le regard d’un soleil
noir tells us about ourselves, about the terrifying solitude that
faces everyday man, as if we were sitting at the deepst end of a cavern, only
capable of looking straight ahead.
But we are the cavern.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Montréal,
1982-96 [x-96]
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