SOURCE: "Music and the Modern Imagination: Nietzsche and Schoenberg," in Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music, Associated University Presses, 1994, pp. 44-58.

Nietzsche is the conclusive nineteenth-century figure for the study of music's tie to modernism, and in this regard he is, next to Beethoven, the most significant, not only for his influence on individual novelists like Proust, Lawrence, and Mann, but for his seminal ideas about dissonance and its tie to listening and reading, and to modern existence itself.

One key to Nietzsche's ideas about music is suggested by his late reflections "contra Wagner," his postulating there that his own writings rather than Wagner's operas were the true focus of his early conceptions of music in The Birth of Tragedy. Here, as well as in his 1886 preface to his early work, and in The Wagner Case, Nietzsche's late comments abrasively confront and—in their athletic vigor—triumph over what he saw as the decadence of Wagner's operas, the music's "surrender" to passive "impotence" and "hatred against life." Wagner's listener becomes a central target of this critique: His listener is numbed to independent perception, to the needed, tragic and playful questioning. The operas achieve "effects … in the service, the slavery, of poses" in order "to give the people satisfaction," to "impress" them, so that ultimately the listener is "comforted metaphysically." The effect, then, of Wagner's art is one of "surrender," of "floating," of "hebetation" on the passive "mass, on the immature, on the blasé, on the sick, on the idiots, on Wagnerians."

The rhetorical thrust of Nietzsche's critique of the listener's "surrender" in Wagner is to call for an alternative way of engaging aesthetic experience based on radical doubt about ordinary habits of perceiving works of art. Theodor Adorno helps us to describe that doubt. A consenting passivity in the music listener, he writes, "serves the status quo, which could be changed only by people who, instead of confirming themselves and the world, would reflect critically on the world and on themselves." In Nietzsche's work, music—revalued as a metaphor—can become an instrument to identify and stimulate that active, critically reflective doubt.

Before we examine the conception of music to be found in The Birth of Tragedy and elsewhere, let me describe generally the nature of Nietzschean doubt in music. Rather than a Wagnerian, manipulative cynicism that, to Nietzsche, seems to secure and reinforce a passivity in the "spectator," Nietzsche desires a "pessimism of strength," which can arise from the musical experience and which comprehends as well as confirms "the fullness of existence." Both in aesthetic experience and in "life," consciousness and language—through which it knows itself—are redefined as activities filled with imaginative potentiality, a play of possibilities continually on the verge of coming into being. Arising from this redefinition of consciousness are critical recognitions both of the dis-figuring and imprisoning hold which cliché can have over perception and of the relative "fictiveness" of "truth." Yet Nietzsche's radical and affirming pessimism emerges from, and itself yields, a sense of the overabundance and vitality of consciousness.

As we read Nietzsche's own texts, we confront a rhetoric—or really a process—which has an impact not unlike that detected by listeners as diverse as Tovey, Mann, Bloch, and Barthes in Beethoven's late works: We experience a disruption of complaisant "certainties" which is not cynical but rather looses in us a creative process and potentiality. The radical doubt with which Nietzsche assaults the reader compels in him a sense of the open-ended abundance of fiction, so that the text becomes, finally, the scene of intense activity in the reader. What such a text requires is embodied and defined by an important entry (no.310) on the wave and "we who will" from The Gay Science. This passage takes up a key image of sea and swimmer/navigator which has recurred in the texts on music I have examined, and it is akin also to another passage in Nietzsche's work—on the image of woman stirring the menaced recognition of life as a fiction, amid "the flaming surf—which Derrida takes up in Spurs as part of his critical performance on Nietzsche.

How greedily this wave approaches, as if there were some objective to be reached! How with awe-inspiring haste it crawls into the inmost nooks of the rocky cliff! It seems that it wants to anticipate somebody; it seems that something is hidden there, something of value, high value.

And now it comes back, a little more slowly, still quite white with excitement—is it disappointed? But already another wave is approaching, still greedier and wilder than the first, and its soul too seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live the waves—thus we who will.

This destabilizing metaphorical leap from the waves to the way we live evokes how the shore of our consciousness is confronted by an overfull, vertiginous choice of imaginative possibility; the leaping vigor of Nietzsche's own text aims to provoke "us," his readers, with a wrenched and greedy liberation from habitual thinking, with "waves" of self-questioning and freedom. "The danger for the reader," David Allison suggests, "ultimately lies in the dispossession of his own identity and the loss of his conventional world." Nietzsche's texts confront the bourgeois "self in the reader with its tendency to identify with the power of the will, and they stir a transformation of that tendency by means of their critical and satiric instability. To engage the aphoristic attack particularly of his late style, its hyperbole, parody, and oxymoronic ambiguity—in short, to read Nietzsche—is, finally, to engage an intimate assault on and opening up of consciousness.

The distinction between the perceiving consciousness—with its manifestation in "style"—and the perceived "world" is erased for Nietzsche; both present themselves as a "play of appearances," an interactive abundance of fictions, finally as "waves" of language. They emerge so partly because the habitual fictions or codes—which form how and what we know—are subject to the workings of desire, to our creative will (as Gilles Deleuze argues in his discussion of Nietzsche's politics of desire). What results is a suspension of consciousness and the world as fictions, as "texts." Nietzsche's notion of self-overcoming mirrors this conception of consciousness, for it celebrates a process of the provisional, committed creation and testing of versions of selves. The idea of how "overcoming" operates illuminates the workings of Nietzsche's own text—and of modern narrative, I would add—on and for the reader. The process of testing and creating selves is the process into which the modern novel initiates the reader; such fiction self-consciously promises and welcomes the playful vitality of the process as it affirms its tragic endlessness and uncertainty. To read such a text is to navigate the disaster of modernity, to preserve access to creative freedom, and to resist the totalizing structures—or horizon—of assurance; "reading," Derrida suggests about this Nietzschean strategy, "is to perforate such an horizon or the hermeneutic sail." Nietzsche's text powerfully invites this critical engagement as it eludes definitive interpretation.

Nietzsche's link to the assumptions underlying Deconstruction is worth examining here and can help us to understand some of the implications of Nietzsche's thought for dissonant narrative and for modernism itself. The work of Paul de Man, for example, offers a sometimes discomfiting appropriation of Nietzsche along with, indeed, a panoply of pre-, proto-, and postmodernisms. The dense, obscure abstraction of de Man's discourse, even the brief early invocations of racist elitism, and then the later risk of solipsism in his interpretations—all be-speak the tense importation into his work of certain, at times deformed, practices of modernism. The tortuous abstraction in de Man's presentation of these various strands of thought enacts the dilemma of a critical practice on the edge of nihilism; the agony of its circuitous refusal to affirm anything beyond its own practice in language mirrors the agony of a disappearing humanism in the aftermath of modernity.

Several essays of de Man take up Nietzsche's thought, most notably in Allegories of Reading, in which the emphasis is on exposing the disordered freedom of consciousness at work particularly in the most prescriptive Nietzschean rhetoric and texts. This approach to Nietzsche grows from de Man's allegiance to two contradictory strains in modernist thinking: One is concerned with the agonized risk and fertility of a freed, open-ended consciousness, and the other is concerned with the purely linguistic autonomy of modernist form.

About the first, more clearly Nietzschean conception, de Man develops an idea of reading—and interpretation—as an opportunity to circumvent the "self and the "self-deception or "blindness" assumed by the reader's "knowledge" and values, his epistemological and methodological perspective. In this way, de Man argues for literature's power to enact and achieve the Nietzschean insight in Ecce Homo that "to become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is." "The text," de Man writes in Blindness and Insight, "brings the reader back to what he might have been before he shaped himself into a particular self." In this derivative conception, the reader experiences a version of Binneswanger's "fall upwards," an always incomplete and unstable process, a movement out of the structured representations of empirical or metaphysical "reality" onto the plain of freed, imaginative consciousness. Particularly modern literature offers the moments of "unbearable" pressure in this way to renew alternative selves, to activate the imagination.

Simultaneously at work, however, in de Man's conception is a contradictory assumption that abjures all ethical resonance in literature. De Man emphasizes that literary language does not "represent" reality or any access to "meaning," but is rather a projection of purely fictive possibility, empirical only in rejecting the claims of "presence" and certainty as meaningless. In various essays, de Man adapts and indeed reduces ideas of music developed by Rousseau or Rilke or Nietzsche to a demonstration that literature—specifically a musicalized literature—demystifies and negates all "truth" claims in a process of continual, fictive construction and deconstruction. Human reality, whether critical, creative, or empirical, becomes in de Man's hands, a shallow, debased version of the scene and drama Nietzsche brilliantly describes, as follows: "Truth" is

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, cannonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

De Man, however, in emphasizing a quasi-tragic reduction of literature into pure figuration, solely into the language of tropes, "isolates too purifyingly" (as Harold Bloom suggests) "the trope from the topos or common-place that generates it." De Man's tendency is to with-draw from the Nietzschean insistence on truth as a struggling "sum of human relations," of "people," yet "these are," as Jonathan Arac writes, exactly "the elements, less than the figures, from which to construct a history of the contingencies that have put us in the odd place that we are."

It is in a struggle to understand "the odd place that we are" that Nietzsche himself creates a rhetoric to explore the sense of the endless multiplicity, contradiction, and nontruth of "truth." In this way, he offers us a prototype for modern narrative texts. Given the skepticism and freedom at work in such texts, the critical Nietzschean aim becomes to envision—as Erich Heller writes, echoing Zarathustra—what it is like to perceive and live without belief in truth, again not cynically, but with the awareness that "truth" is a function of will, judgment, self-critical sublimation, and choice.

II

We can now return to the issue of the activity—as opposed to the passivity—of the aesthetic consciousness and to Nietzsche's use of the dissonant metaphor to characterize that activity. It is Nietzsche's development of that analogy which explains and prefigures the musicality—the dissonance—of the modern novel.

Nietzsche takes up the matter of music in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and then implicitly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The latter work unfolds on many levels under the aegis of the musical metaphor: "Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music," Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, and he adds a salient point about the Dionysian listener/reader: "Certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its pre-conditions." Nietzsche's 1886 introduction to The Birth of Tragedy also reminds us of Zarathustra's tie to the work of 1872.

In this early major text, he presents the fundamental idea that Greek tragedy emerged from the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian: the former manifests itself as the perfected, dream-like heroic forms of tragedy, which imagine the desired ideals in "existence," and the latter is the Dionysian, "choric" response embodying the audience's emotional reaction to tragedy, the force of their awed, enraged, and immense desire for the perfected Apollonian forms. To maintain the balance between Apollo and Dionysus, is the process—and finally the ascetic ideal of "overcoming"—at the core of Nietzsche's vision generally, as Arthur Danto argues. Here, in Greek tragedy, the disillusioning, anarchic, "tragic insight" of the musical, Dionysian imagination—with its capacious desire for and summoning up of Apollonian forms—is the choric audience's recognition that beautiful Apollo is but a fiction yet, as such, a crucial source of the "multifarious diversity" seen as fictions, as metaphors. Here the perceiver's recognition (like the creator's) denies all certainty of self, of subject, and of audience itself, in other words, moves away from the lyric ideal toward the model of dissonance. Nietzsche's conception of dissonance provides a key analysis of this Dionysian response of the perceiver in tragic art. The passage on dissonance occurs at the end of The Birth of Tragedy, after his celebration of the Dionysian vision he has already located in Wagner; it is one of the moments in the text when, in retrospect, we see Nietzsche wrest himself free of his anxious projection of a Nietzschean image onto Wagner's operas. Now he links musical dissonance to the phenomenon in Greek tragedy of facing the terrible, out of an over-fullness of life, and of having the capacity to render and to affirm it as part of the abundance of life.

Here, the Dionysian is not seen as rooted in a Schopenhauerian "metaphysical solace" which substitutes the presence and witness of irrational "truth" for a Socratic "rationalization" of the "truth." Rather, Nietzsche's redefinition now insists that the Dionysian is an aesthetic activity, above all a process involving the listener/reader in a journey of engagement, the destination of which is unknown:

Existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this sense, it is precisely the tragic myth that has to convince us that even the ugly and disharmonie are part of an artistic game that will in the eternal amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself. But this primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art is difficult to grasp, and there is only one direct way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately: through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance.… The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primordial joy experienced even in pain, is the common source of music and tragic myth.

Musical dissonance becomes here a metaphor for the creative process activated within the freed consciousness (a "singing Socrates" indeed). Dissonance—the ambiguous movement away from and between tonal "certain-ties"—exists in a state of suspension, of striving beyond "heard harmony" toward its negation, the powerful, un-heard creative silence which each of the writers studied here finds and celebrates in Beethoven. Dissonance—which longs "to get beyond all hearing"—"reveals to us the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight."

Nietzsche here moves beyond affirming the solemn myth in Wagner which holds the listener in the grasp of "metaphysical solace" and "surrender." To see this feature of the text most clearly, Walter Kaufmann shows, The Birth of Tragedy should be read in conjunction with excised portions and notes and particularly with the contemporaneous fragment "On Music and Words" (appended to Carl Dahlhaus's Between Romanticism and Modernism), a fragment which, as Dahlhaus indicates, "contains the outlines of Nietzsche's later critique of Wagner." Read in this way, The Birth of Tragedy "explodes" the limitations of its sporadic, lyrical, "Wagnerian" affirmations, of the text's "authority," so that the Dionysian process at work here is shown to concern not a mythic presence but the disordered freedom of consciousness. This movement redefining the Dionysian not as solemn, irrational "truth" but as a process, finally, of liberation, is carried further in the 1886 preface criticizing the turgid lack of musicality in The Birth of Tragedy (which was, after all, his Ph.D. thesis). The Preface avows the need to "dance," to "learn to laugh" as essential to the nature of music, to Dionysian "play." The rhetoric of modern narrative is forecast by this rhetoric of the 1886 preface, with its own experimental "dance" intermingling "critical irony and tragic gaiety, earned by that irony," very much like the autobiographical, literary strategy of Ecce Homo as Altieri describes it (such an aesthetic strategy pervades Nietzsche, as Alexander Nehamas shows).

Modern consciousness and narrative, and finally history itself (as Foucault suggests about Nietzsche) can all be understood as emanations of such dissonance. The link for Nietzsche between a dissonant aesthetic and ethic becomes evident here, and we can now also begin to see the connection between Dionysian dissonance and other keys to Nietzsche's thought—the idea of self-overcoming, as I noted earlier, and that of the eternal return. These Nietzschean ideas link together, as Kathleen Higgins has argued, to convey a "simultaneous awareness of past and present [finally projecting] a sense of the whole in which the present moment is the immediately experienced part." She explains, using and then moving beyond a Zuckerkandlian perspective, that Nietzsche reveals how "we enjoy the fullness of the present musical moment, even if it is dissonant, not for its own efficiency in moving towards the evident musical goal, but for its own surprising presence." Pierre Klossowski similarly and even more insistently shows that this network of link-ages (eternal return, self-overcoming, and, I would add, musical dissonance) shares an ethic and aesthetic which, above all, posit the flux of multiplicity in selves and events. Nietzsche's tragic affirmation of that multiplicity is nowhere more evident than in his embrace of amor fati, of the eternally recurrent process by which the encompassing flux of image and experience is tested and affirmed, now, as it were, intrinsically worthy of fated reperformance. This notion of the embrace of multiplicity and "reperformance" points again to the connection I am exploring between Dionysian dissonance and the modern novel; for, in this regard, the eternal return and dissonance provide a model for reading itself. The engagement, testing, and affirmation of the ever-changing, clashing, and unfolding waves of multiplicity define that opportunity and operation of reading modern narrative. (Claude Lévesque speaks in similar terms of the tie, in the century since Nietzsche, between dissonance and aesthetic language generally.)

III

The connection between Dionysian dissonance and the modern novel can be illustrated in D. H. Lawrence's vision, in Aaron's Rod, which we saw presents an image of Beethoven as well, or later in Apocalypse, which is in part a lapsed, English "nonconformist's" variation on themes from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In this, his last prophetic essay, Lawrence defines and presents the Dionysian as a dynamic "seeing through" the veil of the conventional, the forced pose, the "known," the empirical; in pre-Socratic Greece, for example, '"the cold,' 'the moist,' 'the hot,' 'the dry,' were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi." What is seen in the Dionysian perspective is a great flux of "life's" images, both agonized and beneficient, all filled not with materialist presence but with imaginative desire, with the "gods"—that is, with the "primordial delight" of imaginative consciousness. And in Lawrence's Nietzschean vision such creative delight exists in opposition to the "evasion" insisted on by the author of Revelations, with John's "proud impotence" so like the resentment and solace the Wagnerian listener is confronted with.

By the very frenzy with which the Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world.… we can see how deeply the apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth and the waters of the earth, for nobility and lordship and might, and scarlet and gold spendour, for passionate love, and a proper unison with men, apart from this sealing business. What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his 'soul.' … We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

The Dionysian is a means of ascertaining neither revenge nor false solace nor mechanistic truth. Rather it is the process of creating a world of yearned-for, imaginative truth, an earth whose soil is meaning, in which it is not only dirt but the stuff of significance into which one thrusts one's hands. Such are the images Lawrence offers in Apocalypse, as does Joyce in Stephen's epiphany at the end of chapter IV of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

What is the bearing of Dionysian dissonance on the rhetoric of such images in modern fiction? For the freed, creative, Dionysian consciousness, language becomes the scene, indeed the very process of tapping the capacity for imaging, for the metamorphosis of selves and of meanings. A result is the layering and complicating of modern narrative—its freeing from convention, its opening up to ambiguity. Language as dissonance formulates its images as freely created fictions. Particularly for the novelist with a consciousness of this fictiveness, language displaces its own self-destruction through its abundant waves of imaginative energy, the process of its dissonance. Finally, the "sinister resonance" of a work like Conrad's Heart of Darkness ("dwelling on the ear after the last note had been struck") is a metaphor imaging that freed critical and creative novelistic consciousness, above all, in the reader.

The "wisdom" resonating in dissonant fiction is particularly the awareness that, as modern fiction activates creative freedom in the reader, a profound risk is involved, which Lawrence and the novelists who play out the Nietzschean logic recognize. When Lawrence, for example, introduces the fertile image of Dionysis in his theoretical essays or of "Osiris cut to pieces" in his late The Man Who Died, the texts also simultaneously dramatize the potential despair in the object of Dionysian metamorphosis. Particularly, Lawrence's late fable takes up the notion, which Nietzsche also voices in Zarathustra, of imagining for Jesus a final human trajectory, a full, agonized fall to sensuous earth. Resurrected, he is repelled by being worshipped by his followers, disappears to Egypt, and takes a Dionysian part there in the rite of a priestess of "Isis in Search" of dismembered Osiris.

She was looking for fragments of the dead Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in fragments over the wide world.… [S]he must gather him together and fold her arms around the reassembled body till it became warm again, and roused to life, and could embrace her, and could fecundate her womb.… [S]he had not [yet] found the last reality, the final clue to him, that alone could bring him really back for her.

The fleeing, alienated Jesus, she finds, is this realization of Osiris. In a prose of intentional uncontrol that characteristically forces together incantation and an exposing objectivity, Lawrence allows Jesus momentarily to know (both sexually and spiritually) his nakedness: "If I am naked enough for this contact, I have not died in vain." Lawrence insists always here on the naked as the operative term and concept; his emphasis is above all on the vulnerable, the unmoored and stripped down, the fated transiency, the naked circling in death of Jesus. This metamorphosis in a continual death and stripping of former selves takes him out again at the fable's end, past Isis, navigating still further in death: "Let the boat carry me."

Jesus in The Man Who Died experiences the risk and fate embodied in the image of Osiris—and of Dionysus and, indeed, of Orpheus—another dismembered god. This new, final, open-ended fable of Jesus contains precisely the challenge of dissonance to his hearer/reader, that the orphic song contains—and the same danger of dismembered, constantly disappearing and reassembling consciousness. An endless metamorphosis, charged with desire, in the midst of dying selves—Blanchot explains in "Orpheus' Gaze"—constitutes the knotted and paradoxical effect for the reader as for character and creator in twentieth-century narrative; "in his song … Orpheus is the dismembered, endlessly dying Orpheus his song has created. The song cannot do without desire and lost Eurydice and dismembered Orpheus." The "song-text" which emerges for Lawrence and other modern novelists is composed of Dionysian dissonance. "Dissonance takes root in this nether region," Claude Lévesque concludes in "Language to the Limit," a region

where resounds endlessly the mute scream let out by Dionysus.… Why be astonished that man, at the point of not being able to know and to bear it anymore, in appealing to the other, takes on the colossal and intolerable voice of the scream?

In dissonant narrative, we hear—and see bared in the text and in ourselves—the potential despair in the object of Dionysian metamorphosis: It is the yearned-for release, both endless rupture and healing, compounded of the promise and the void of creative desire. These antinomies are best defined and understood through an examination of the crucial modern composer in the mode of dissonance, Arnold Schoenberg.

IV

The example of Schoenberg's music can further clarify the risks and opportunities for the perceiver in a musicalized text. In this composer's work, we hear a full, uncentering "roaring" of "unearthly" dissonance, to use images from the George poem sung in the finale of Schoenberg's second string quartet (1911); in that movement, as the strings violently disassemble a primitive scale of half-tones and the soprano offers a twelve tone melody as she sings of "breathfing] the air of another planet," the listener hears a historic welcome of the free play of dissonance in music. Indeed, the dissonance of this final movement of the 1911 quartet—not the serial controls of his later music—embodies the aesthetic of dissonance I explore and most clearly parallels the aims of modernist narrative. Schoenberg's dissonance achieves an intentionally difficult negation of music's grounding, commonly received, tonal conventions, a negation that becomes the only certainty left to assume (as Charles Rosen suggests). Such dissonance—typical of Schoenberg's reimagining of the entire range of musical conventions—achieves its creative negation above all, as Rosen and Adorno indicate, in the context of the common musical language—that is, above all as opposition. Schoenberg drives to its logical conclusion the subversions propounded by the irony and ironic beauty of Mahler's symphonies; by Debussy's nuanced, synaesthetic, sometimes violent freeing of tonal centers from clichéd stability, even by Brahms, as he follows a Beethovenian logic of freed formal experiment, breaking atrophied lyric conventions in favor of developing a "musical prose," as Schoenberg suggests in Style and Idea. The severe and radical logic in Schoenberg's music is an indication that—like Beethoven before him, only more "absolutely"—Schoenberg must attempt to explode the compulsively and falsely "affirming" stasis of the common language in order to emancipate the creative imaginative potentiality of language itself; both Rosen and Carl Dahlhaus emphasize that this "emancipation of the dissonance" is, as Dahlhaus writes, "the reason why tonality had been renounced."

Schoenberg's aim is, then, to give his musical language the guise and substance of freedom, of a freed, continual becoming, shaped though it need be, by opposition and negativity. By exposing what Webern calls "the chasms in cliché," this difficult, disruptive, continual negation in the dissonant language becomes in part a protest against those too-easy, preformed, subjective affirmations to which the listener could otherwise surrender. Nietzsche's prescription for a dissonant aesthetic consciousness is fulfilled here, for—as Stanley Cavell points out—Schoenberg understood the dangerous necessity of dissonant composition: "that taste must be defeated," music "discomposed," in order to fulfill "the essential moral motive" of modern art. Adorno describes this necessity in Philosophy of Modern Music when he analyzes what I am calling the Dionysian or dissonant consciousness in Schoenberg's music. The bourgeois illusion of individual subjective affirmation—the "illusion of authenticity"—is, Adorno writes, "sacrificed" because it is "incompatible with the state of that consciousness which has been driven so far towards individuation by the liberal order, to the point that this consciousness negates the order which had advanced it thus far." Schoenberg's dissonant language presents that negation "as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked."

Here we directly face the notion of the risk to the perceiver of dissonance. Schoenberg's listener is thrust into the activity of perceiving this new language of dissonance as a radical event in the language of consciousness itself. Its alienation and liberation of the "perceptual" process aims at straining the potentiality of tonality, of the order of consciousness and language exercised now in revolt at the outer limits of their capacity; the "fictive" creations of dissonance are radical particularly in that they demand an openness to negation in the listener. Schoenberg's self-consciousness about this demand on his diminished audience for the "new music" in Vienna helps to raise the issue of the performative impact of dissonance on the perceiver. By continually reenacting the "shipwreck" of modern consciousness (the casting out onto the waves of negation), the rhetorical strategy of Schoenberg's desperate negation leads the perceiver to engage a risktaking, aesthetic and ethical challenge, one suggested by the antinomies which Adorno, Rosen, Dahlhaus, and others explore: that challenge is to encounter dissonant negation as the form, the language and activity ("not mere contemplation" as Adorno says in Prisms, "but praxis") which embodies and achieves the survival of a freed consciousness in the modern period.

Jean-François Lyotard's critique of Schoenberg—in "Several Silences"—questions this freedom achieved by the composer's dissonant strategy (and his critique finds echoes in Jacques Attali's argument, in James Winn's contrasting of Schoenberg's "subjectivity" with Stravinsky's rhetoricity, and in certain criticisms of Adorno's "atonal philosophy" mounted, for example, by John Shepard et al.). Lyotard would abjure what he sees as Schoenberg's puritanical seeking of "the tragic" and of a "therapeutics" in which music is a "discourse" of stigmatizing negativity and "control." Instead, Lyotard would embrace an aesthetic of "circulation by chance," a "free wandering" suggested teasingly by images of Mao's noisy swimming in the Yangste and of Cage's play with noise and silence. Yet where Lyotard hears in Schoenberg's dissonance a holding aloof from the free play of cultural sounds, there is as accurately a refusal to wrest apart—indeed an insistence on the link between—freedom and critical consciousness; and where he hears a "liquefying" or "dememorizing" of "domination" in Cagean play, there coexists in such play also an ornamental, "aestheticized subjectivity" (as Dahlhaus suggests in Schoenberg), a postmodern forgetting and erasure—like plastic surgery—of the scars in twentieth-century history and culture, to use an image from Kroker and Cook's The Postmodern Scene.

Schoenberg's art provides a revelatory model for modern fiction and particularly for its modernist aim: to prompt the perceiver first to imagine a disintegration of consciousness, a tearing apart of received, assumed "expressivity," a movement into contradiction, obliquity, parody, and silence, so that Moses and Aaron ends incomplete, fractured, its sung speech splintering into silence: "O word that I lack." Yet, simultaneously, as the act of imagining can negate the processes of consciousness, Schoenberg's music offers a paradigmatic model for dissonant narrative which conveys within that negation a liberating attitude toward consciousness. Torn from the moribund habits of ordinary, habitual consciousness, the reader of the modern novel is challenged to engage the liberated fullness of fictive form within the suspension and negation of the habitual modes of perception. The "fullness" of alienation within the dissonant fiction of Proust, Mann, and Joyce achieves above all a full, imaginative, and critical freedom within the suspension of consciousness as a fiction—abundant, multifarious, playful, alien, and distressed.