Les récits-partitions : imaginaire musical et écriture romanesque dans la France du XXe siècle

This dissertation strives to understand the various interactions between 20th-century fictional works and the contemporary musical imaginary that was developed and modulated throughout the century. Rooted in a dual approach – that of the history of ideas and of the poetics of the novel –, this study examines how a given idea of music, inducted as a writing paradigm by many French novelists between 1900 and 1980,  models textual composition and becomes a means to rethink the creation of signification in narrative forms. It also traces the evolution of the French novel and its writing practices in the light of musical discourses and aesthetics as reflected by and integrated into novelistic works. To this end, the concept of “narrative score” (récit-partition), as a hermeneutic instrument or reading tool, is paramount in order to grasp the ways in which the musical – i.e. the properties derived from music as an objective or phenomenal reality – imbues the literary text and becomes the modus operandi of fiction writing for some French novelists. The “narrativescore” emerged in the context of an artistic crisis – stemming from the semiotic fabric of language itself – that questioned both the ideas of representation and meaning. The present work will show how this crisis of language and consequential impasse of the novelistic genre lead some 20th-century writers to conceptualize music as a fiction of and for the novel with the purpose of fashioning a new narrative framework by remodeling the genre’s parameters. Descending from the romantic trope of “absolute music” which considers the musical piece as an autoreferential structure comprised of pure sounds without intrinsic meaning thus irreducible to verbal speech, the idea of music as a writing paradigm allows novelists to relinquish the referential premises of the narrative genre to introduce new poetic configurations based on the resonance of meaning, the self-reflexivity of the medium and a textual memory, more engrained in the sensible than in the speakable (dicible) or the philosophical. We will first outline the epistemological, metaphysical and discursive landscape that lead to the advent of a musical paradigm in literature, which is dependent on a specific “partition of the sensible” (Rancière); here, we will explore what motivated several generations of writers to turn to music as a way to replenish the fictional material they perceived as deficient while fulfilling their ideal of an autotelic work of art. The textual analysis that follows will be divided into four parts: in the first chapter, we will consider the score not as a metaphorical notion, but as an actual model; indeed, some paratextual elements and structural configurations highlight the presence of writing techniques directly inspired and shaped by the musical; the second and third chapters will examine the textual actualization and representation of music respectively through the lens of musical composition (poïesis) and musical reception (esthesis) by analyzing fictional composers and musicians (chap. 2), then musical ekphraseis and listening scenes (chap. 3); lastly, we will focus on the great musical myths – ancient myths, but mostly Wagnerian ones – whose rewriting, more or less in line with the original stories, allow the writers to renegotiate their complex relationship with modern times, by re-capturing meaning, narrative temporality and novelistic discourse through the use of these founding myths and the unitary, almost pre-adamic, language.

Keyphrases: récit-partition, musical imaginary, 20th-century French novel, history of ideas, poetics of the novel, intermediality, text/music relationships, semantics of music, crisis of narrative genre, crisis of representation