Critical Inquiry

Spring 2001
Volume 27, Number 3

Excerpt from
Pelléas and Pénélope
by Vladimir Jankélévitch

Translated by Arnold I. Davidson and Nancy R. Knezevic

 Translator's Introduction:

I am tempted to say that Vladimir Jankélévitch's writings on music are sui generis, since they do seem to me to read unlike any other philosopher's writings about music. Jankélévitch had an uncanny ability to, as it were, write from within music, entering a piece of music and capturing its philosophical significance without deflating it by turning it into a mere illustration of some already given philosophical doctrine. He heard music with the same depth as we read philosophy. Thus, in this early piece, to take but one instance, Faurean wisdom marks out a vision of life that is to be treated alongside, and made to bear the weight of a comparison with, Stoicism, Epicurus, and Spinoza. Jankélévitch knew how to characterize the philosophical dimension of music without sacrificing any of its specificity, avoiding the temptation to force it to be a servant to something else while at the same time refusing the impulse to treat it as a lesser or coarser articulation of human experience and aspiration. He could hear Erik Satie's Socrate as a genuine interpretation of the death of Socrates; so Plato's description of Socrates' death, after his imbibing, in complete serenity, the fatal cup of poison, is interpreted in Satie, by a false note, a friction, but without tragic grandiloquence, that never abandons its "exemplary equanimity."1 And Jankélévitch can proceed to an astonishing comparison that would occur to no one else, a comparison between the death of Socrates and the death of Mélisande.

And one thinks of the death of Mélisande that takes place in the fifth act of Pelléas, in the supernatural whispering of the pianissimos, just as the final start of Socrates, in Erik Satie, passes unperceived in the imperturbable immobility and uniformity of four quarter notes. . . . The death of the sage and the death of the innocent are therefore both contrary to all rhetoric. . . . The peroration of Socrates shows us by what miracle the most prosaic narrative can touch the sublime, but a simple sublime that dismisses eloquence and declamatory hysteria.2

Nobody else would have had the intellectual audacity and assurance to describe Satie and Debussy in the same breath as Plato, endowing each with their own philosophical force. As this short piece brilliantly shows, Jankélévitch's writing focuses our experience of music by giving it voice, by showing us, for example, why we emerge from Fauré's Requiem transformed. As with much great writing--literary and philosophical--Jankélévitch gives us new access to our experience while never underestimating the exigencies of self-transformation, the rigors and joys of moral, metaphysical, and musical ascent. Who could ask for anything more?

--Arnold I. Davidson

It is in this regard that Fauré and Debussy are opposed to one another like the two eternal aspects of humanity: on one side, a straight and narrow life with, at its end, the supernatural hope of the Requiem, the immortality of the Chanson d'Ève, and the serene euthanasia of the Treizième Nocturne; and, on the other, a brief voluptuous life, tossed between pleasure and suffering and finally cut short by an implacable illness. With Debussy, the "antique epigraph" Pour un tombeau sans nom, dense with pain, anonymous death, miserable and forlorn threnody; with Fauré, the Inscription sur le sable, which is so full, I won't say of a fatalistic resignation to fate, but of a free consent to destiny, which exhales the noble acquiescence of the entire being, and Olympian serenity. Fauré's fecund work is entirely brought into harmony with the majestic rhythms of longevity; and the hereafter that is its future does not appear as a nothingness but as a beginning; death is not the end, nor the day of Wrath, but hope itself. With Debussy there is precisely no ventilation of life by hope; rather, there is condensation, intensification, and acceleration of all rhythms by the risk of death. Pénélope brings together whereas Pelléas separates. P&ecute;nélope tells the story of a return, a nostos; Pénélope is the solution to a problem: like in fairy tales, the lovers shall meet again. Thus the entire drama converges toward Ulysses' joyous exclamation in the third act: "Now, we are going to live." For the gods finally bring together those who sought one another out with all their heart. The drama itself is therefore the preface to happiness, which never is a story in and of itself. And, on the other hand, there is Pelléas: "Go away! Let us separate!" (Act 4). For Pelléas is the obstacle, the impasse, the insoluble, and the Traité du désespoir; the distressing and contradictory situation that can only be resolved through death . . . which is precisely not a solution but an absurdity. The necessity of loving and the impossibility of loving, contradicting one another--here indeed is all the negativity of the tragic! Pelléas therefore signifies closed, sealed, centrifugal fate; Pelléas is failure and conflict without escape. More than Pénélope the mobile, the immobile Pelléas recalls Bérénice, the stagnant tragedy in which we find neither unravelling of mistakes, nor untangling of imbroglios, nor resolution of misunderstandings. Pénélope does not know the death of the innocent, nor the thrust of the tragic sword in the night, but only the joyous massacre that is the punishment of the guilty and the victory of justice; so that evidence and reason recover their rights. I admit that there is, at the end of the first act, a Ulysses mad with love, whose Dionysian fury would make the love duo of the Debussian fourth act pale; but let us not forget that this "lover" is a husband in his own house and that, here, delirium is at the service of the law. In Pelléas there is no intrigue, nor debate, nor fruitful conspiracy; there is only unjust fatality and the incomprehensible and stationary collision of two destinies confronting one another, embracing, involved in dialogues of multiform counterpoints. Everything pivots, in Pénélope, around the axis of faithfulness, and the husband gravitates, in his very subterfuges, toward this attracting center. But the duality of Pelléas and Mélisande will not resolve itself in unity. Sincere love will not find its reward. What therefore would this happy but sad Mélisande expect, she who can only be faithful on the margins of her duty? The two fates will therefore eternally repel one another, in virtue of an antagonism related to the disconnectedness of the creature's condition. "Winter has ceased"?6 Alas! The musician of the Pas sur la neige has not sung, with Fauré, La Bonne Chanson of hope, of dawn and of joy. "Hope has fled, vanquished, toward the black sky."7 Absurd death inhabits the innocent from the beginning, and whereas Pénélope arises, at the end, in the cloud of gold and the pause of an apotheosis--"In Paradisum deducant te angeli"--Mélisande, dying her undeserved death, is extinguished little by little; Mélisande finally completes the death begun in the forest of the first act and returns to the nothingness of nonexistence.

1. Vladimir Jankélévitch, "Satie et le matin," in La Musique et les heures (Paris, 1988), p. 34. See also "Vladimir Jankélévitch: La Vie. Entretiens," in Vladimir Jankélévitch, ed. Guy Suarès (Paris, 1986), p. 99.

2. Ibid., pp. 35Ð37. I have discussed some of these aspects of Jankélévitch's work in "Lo charme di Jankélévitch," Iride 11 (Dec. 1998): 619Ð22.

6. Paul Verlaine, "L'Hiver a cessé," La Bonne Chanson (1870), Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec and Jacques Borel (Paris, 1962), p. 154; set to music by Fauré in his song cycle La Bonne Chanson, op. 61.

7. Verlaine, "Colloque sentimental," Fêtes galantes (1869), Oeuvres complètes, p. 121; set to music by Claude Debussy in his song cycle Fêtes galantes II.

Vladimir Jankélévitch held the chair of moral philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1951 until his death in 1985. His written work comprises more than twenty volumes, including Bergson (1931), Traités des vertus (1951), Le Pardon (1967), La Musique et l'ineffable (1961), Fauré et l'inexprimable (1974), and Debussy et le mystère de l'instant (1989). Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of philosophy and divinity and a member of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. He has most recently edited Foucault and His Interlocutors and is the general editor of the English edition of Michel Foucault's courses at the Collège de France. His forthcoming book is The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Nancy R. Knezevic is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago.

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