For Want of a Better Term?: Polyphony and the Value of Music in Bakhtin and Kundera

Abstract

In a short subsection titled "Music" in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the character Franz experiences a minor epiphany: drifting towards sleep, he realizes he has "done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them." A moment of dreamy deconstruction follows, in which his own logocentrism appears to him as fatally flawed; addiction to the word has resulted not in a clarity of signification, but in slippage: "in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand" (94). Rescue from such metaphoric losses is at hand, however, in the shape of what lies on the other side of language: "unbounded music." For Franz, floating towards sleep, music appears as "the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!" As Kundera is eager to demonstrate, a belief in music's palliative care is far from the only way of conceiving the relation between music and language; indeed, as we shall see, it is far from Kundera's own conception. However, it serves here as an expression of a commonly held construction, whereby music is somehow extracultural, an escape from the messy contingencies of life in the language world. Much musical and literary capital has of course been made from this transcendence trope, but in recent years it has been subject to intense scrutiny, not least from musicologists themselves. Music has been opened up for examination in all its textuality, its entanglement in the language that we cannot but use as we listen, respond, and disseminate. Far from dismissing the notion of music as unmediated and as offering privileged access to the rhythms of our body or the sound [End Page 292] of the spheres, the expression of the need for music to carry such expectations is precisely where we can trace its positioning in culture, as part of the changing idea of the nature and function of culture itself.

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