Gide, Claudel, Jules Romains: des comparaisons volontairement imprécises avec la musique?
Résumé
“Gide, Claudel, Jules Romains: des comparaisons volontairement imprécises avec la musique?” [“Gide, Claudel, Jules Romains: Deliberately Imprecise Comparisons with Music?”], Alain Corbellari and Augustin Voegele (Eds.), “Musique et réflexivité de la littérature” [“Music and the Reflexivity of Literature”], Fabula-LHT, to be published in autumn 2024.
Whether Gide, Claudel or Jules Romains, French writers of the first half of the 20th century who compare their works to musical hypotexts or architexts are being imprecise. It may well be that this imprecision is intentional. In fact, none of the three authors mentioned above is a man of systems, and the imprecision of these comparisons with music echoes the imprecision of their respective poetic arts. Moreover, it is not by chance that music is chosen as the comparator in these imprecise comparisons: indeed, perceived by dilettantes such as Claudel, Romains, and even Gide, music may seem like an art whose structures are the least analysable without prior training. So we find ourselves faced with comparisons where we know the comparator with certainty, but where the compared is uncertain: is it the form or the substance of the work that is comparable to music? Its genesis, its ideological content? Or all of these at once – which would allow the authors in question to underline, through the very imprecision of these comparisons, the coherence between the different dimensions (literary, cultural, ideological, religious, sociological, depending on the case) of their works?
Domaines
Littératures
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