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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