Captive Genie

This is perhaps merely a footnote to some of my previous notes on the uncanny etc. I suggested (Plastic Things) that there seemed to be a 'Modern' uncanny object – those old Victorian dolls and puppets, who might be jerked into life by an alien (human) hand, or moved by the tinny melody of a music box, before returning to their crumpled, forlorn state in the corner of the room, irradiating a peculiar melancholy silence. By contrast, we have the ‘Koonsian’ plastic beings of post-modernity, benign and unaware of the humanity they lack, unperturbed by the poverty and muteness of their world.

Is there something analogous, or weakly related, in musical terms? There is a famous passage in Proust, where the violin is described as, basically, a little wooden box with a genie inside*. The genie is released by the violin player, and the sonorous notes of the instrument are somehow like the plaintive striving towards speech of this genie. This is part of the violin’s appeal - it is eerily reminiscent of the human voice, the pure voice uncoupled from content, searching out but never discovering that content. It both exceeds the eloquence of speech and fails to attain it.

One of my impressions when listening to Jazz (specifically old, Dixieland-style jazz), esp. the trumpet, is of a trapped voice trying to get out. It’s on the verge of speech, but – comically – never quite makes it. We have a drunken, jolly, swaggering anticipation of a voice which never itself appears. And the various instruments frequently seem to reply to oneanother, a crazy melodious bar room banter.

In such cases, then, there is a kind of implicit speech, a voice trapped in a foreign medium, but all the more expressive for this. The eloquence is that of melancholy, albeit a comic melancholy in the case of Jazz.

Now isn’t it a defining trait of modern synthetic music that it does not have this quality? It can simulate for sure, but it is not given in the instrument itself. The synthesizer is the appropriate accompaniment to those plastic Koonsian dolls who have forgotten what they lack. Such music has nothing to say about the eloquence of the unsaid.Because it is not lacking anything its ‘fullness’ is completely empty*.

[*Have now found the passage, which reads:

‘at times, too, one thinks one is listening to a captive genie, struggling in the darkness of the sapient, quivering and enchanted box.’]

As one commenter points out (below), this emptiness can indeed have its own unearthly/ chilling beauty - but it is of a different order than that of the searching note of the violin.