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Pam Fox Kuhlken is professor emerita in Classics & Humanities, English & Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, and MALAS (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) at San Diego State University after 13 years, preceded by six years at the University of California, and four years as founding director of a writing center and an online Master’s in Creative Writing program, in addition to teaching at Anglo-American College in Prague, the Czech Republic. She is currently teaching at National University and at Fusion Academy; rebuilding her online Master's program, Perelandra College (2001–2015), as a certificate program; and researching projects that include a Bible as Literature survey and a collection of poetic monologues based on speeches by the 120 Nobel Literature Laureates. Her essays have appeared in journals including Modernism/Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Comparative Literature Studies (Penn State) and her book on the Dead Sea Scrolls won “Best History Book” and is a best-seller at museums.

Hearing With a Severed Ear: In Search of Le Petit Noir Musical Phrase in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

Pam Fox Kuhlken, San Diego State University

Editor’s note. This article was created as a lecture at the generous invitation of Prof. William Nericcio, Director of San Diego State University’s MALAS (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) for the Cultural Studies Lecture Series 2021.

Opening Credits

Le petit phrase: an intoxicating frenzy beyond reason, traces of an elusive love…lost. Proust’s character, the music connoisseur Charles Swann, is transported to the ether simply by an epiphanic sonata “for piano and violin,” which the reader can feel and even hear through the lyrical narrative. The single coda had a seismic effect on Swann.

Unriddlers that we are, can we recreate the music score and identify a single composer, or an amalgam of influences Proust savored in the Parisian salons of the Belle Époque? Attempts have been made. Proust’s fictional composer “Vintuil” has been identified in a line-up of the usual Romantic suspects: César Franck (1822-90), the Belgian-born Parisian, and his Sonata in A major; or the French organist Gabriel Pierné’s (1863-1937) Violin Sonata Op. 36; Claude Debussy’s (1862-1918) nostalgic late sonata; Camille Saint-Saëns’ (1835–1921) Sonata for violin and piano in D minor with its memorable petite phrase in the first and last movements; the revolutionary German Richard Wagner’s (1813-83) Lohengrin; even songs written by Proust’s occasional lover, the Venezuelan Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947).[1]

A 2017 Spanish performance from the Fundación Juan March by the violinist Birgit Kolar and pianist Malcolm Martineau performed César Franck as “the Vinteuil Sonata,” while Russian virtuoso sisters, Maria and Nathalia Milstein, released their French CD La Sonate de Vinteuil (2017) with an array of four composers: Pierné, Hahn, Saint-Saëns, Debussy.[2]Lest I wax too Sherlock, I am reminded to step back and behold Proust’s lyrical flight itself, which is emotional and not an actual coda inscribed on sheet music. Alex Ross also tempers our hunt, “What matters most about the ‘little phrase,’ after all, is not its intrinsic quality but the emotional resonances it accumulates as it dances through time.”[3]

Scopophilia is a focus of film theory, watching Jeffrey in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet walking home through a grassy field and finding a decomposing ear teeming with insects. Scopophiles watch Jeffrey watching Dorothy Vallens getting raped by Frank through slits in the closet door--a Venetian blind fantasy granting both concealment and investment to the voyeur, close enough to hear threats, pleading, and the breaths in between.[4] Bibliophiles love the fictional narrative on the page and screen, and resulting literary criticism like Fanny Daubigny’s 2019 Proust in Black: Los Angeles, A Proustian Fiction (Proust au Noir). In this essay, I am an audiophile of the subterranean American noir in its capital of Los Angeles, as well as in David Lynch’s North Carolina and Marcel Proust’s Paris.

I begin by hearing with the inner ear, maximizing the six ear muscles to hear as many as 20,000 vibrations a second. Out-hearing our species are dogs with 18 muscles, hearing up to 50,000 vibrations a second with a longer ear canal to localize and capture sound at higher frequencies. If only cats were more pliable to training we could put them to use with their 30 ear canal muscles.

It would be too easy to simply play Canal March’s 2017 recording of the fictional Vinteuil’s Sonata as a harmonic fusion of César Franck, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel as imagined and performed by violinist Birgit Kolar, pianist Malcolm Martineau, and narrator Carlos Hipólito.[5]Instead, I begin my experimental literary investigation in the silence of the textual page, blending fictional discourse and academic commentary as we listen for the sound of noir—as many as 20,000 vibrations a second—in Lynch’s film, Daubigny’s essay, and Proust’s fiction. Now or later, before or after, listen to the Canal March recital and Milstein sisters’ CD to compare with your imagined noir vibrations.

Curtain

A knock on the P.I.’s door announces an inquiry into the sound of noir. Much like Franz Kafka’s dark art parables, what you seek and find is a mirror. You are Joseph K., or Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet, Marcel in Proust’s memoir, or Fanny Daubigny a French academic teaching in California, a split consciousness that enables you to hear the music of noir in the shadows, the liminal space between blinding light and impenetrable darkness. In Prague, I lived down the street from Kafka’s grave, and passed it daily with a petite pause. I wrote an imagined collection of the letters (or prayers) I watched pilgrims leave on his grave under stones, like visitors entombing prayers in the Wailing/Western Wall in Jerusalem. Pilgrims’ silent prayers whispered from Kafka’s grave, as noir pilgrims are haunted by ominous whispering spectres.

 Kafka wrote in his Notebook: “Everyone carries a room inside him. This fact is proven through the sense of hearing. Walk fast and prick up your ears and listen, in the night, when everything is quiet, and you hear the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”[6] One sleeps through L.A. traffic at night, while the sirens persist. Journalist David Hochman moved to L.A. for “the excitement, energy, population, buzz,” but felt like a peregrine falcon hearing the onslaught of car alarms, trash pickups, and the municipal airborne police force, so he checked himself into Serra Retreat in Malibu for a silent escape in 2011, down the street from where I studied at Pepperdine University decades earlier.[7] No doubt he heard mirrors rattling on walls above the San Andreas fault line.

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (1832), the royal fairy lady is cursed to weave and watch Camelot below. But she’s grown weary of shadows, watching Camelot from her tower, weaving the reflections she sees in her blue glass. One night, she hears funeral music, and sees two lovers just wed, and says, “I am half sick of shadows.”[8] Too long awaiting life’s destined funeral, she is sick of watching lovers and not having her own knight in armor, so she breaks through the mirror. The “mirror cracked from side to side.” In her canoe, she floats down the river, chanting her death song: “A longdrawn carol, mournful, holy, / She chanted loudly, chanted lowly.” Singing her song…she dies. The lovers see the strange, pretty creature…dead, and cross themselves. This is the cost of leaving the silent shadows for bustling Camelot. She was safer weaving in the shadows behind glass, but today’s texts invite us to investigate Proust’s Paris, Lynch’s Lumberton, and Daubigny’s L.A.—but at night so we’re safer in the shadows.

As audiophiles, our stethoscope is Marcel Proust as we listen for the heartbeat of noir, or perhaps Proust is our scalpel for our forensic analysis. Aldous Huxley coined the phrase “musicalized fiction” to describe authors like Marcel Proust whose fiction is musicalized through its sonorous prose, complex sentence structure, and the resulting transcendent defiance of any single mode of representation.[9] (1928). Proustian passages call from Camelot throughout Daubigny’s Proust in Black (2019) before turning to Lynch’s Blue Velvet.[10]

The Severed Ear, or, “For Those Who Have Ears to Hear”

In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus presented parables so those that “have ears to hear, may hear.” Is that opaque reference to the prisoner in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” who is freed from being chained to watch shadows on the cave wall… to ascending from the cave to see the sun itself? He is painfully blinded at first, but his eyes adjust and sees the true forms, the Ideals. Like a boddhisattva who is enlightened and could be extinguished and enter nirvana but chooses to return to earth, compassionately, and guide other suffering beings to enlightenment, the prisoner returns to the cave and announces, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “Everything you know is wrong. That God is a shadow…and is dead.”[11]

Is Jesus talking to everyone, since everyone has “ears”? Or just those freed from the shackles of ignorance? In the Bible’s final book of Revelation, the prophet says “whoever has ears, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches,” and since a Spirit communicates supra-linguistically, the prophets interprets into words. God’s voice in the Hebrew Bible is the shofar a ram’s horn producing the sound of thunder, usually interpreted as a “trumpet.” And from the thunderous horn, into the Hebrew language. Asking for the sound of noir is like asking for the language of the shofar, or the soundtrack of Plato’s Allegory (which may be the Chemical Brothers’ EDM music). It is supra-linguistic.

From the ineffable, subterranean noir surfacing in the likes of Jesus, Nietzsche, and Plato, back to Proust for a moment’s landing because Proust considered the Russian master, Leo Tolstoy, to be the almighty lord of his works, controlling all their actions and thoughts.[12] For Tolstoy, abstract though it may be, music had an incantatory sensuality and immediacy that he only knew by its effect.[13] Even the genius of Tolstoy didn’t know how or why it worked:

Music makes me forget myself; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music I feel what I do not really feel, I understand what I do not understand, I can do what I cannot do. Music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see someone yawning; I laugh when I hear people laughing. Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another, but why this happens I don't know.[14]

Leo Tolstoy, well-known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, also wrote The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), inspired by Beethoven’s Sonata of the same name. The book was published and then promptly censored by the Russian government. In the novella, a man tells a stranger on a train why he stabbed his wife, a pianist whose lover was a violinist. Together, they played Beethoven’s Sonata, driving the husband into the jealous frenzy of an animal. To regain his civility, he went on a trip, but upon his return, he caught them in adultery and flew into a rage, stabbing his wife to death. He was acquitted, as the Russian court only incriminated his wife as the adulteress. It’s as if Beethoven’s Sonata was the cause, as in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel: Beethoven’s Fifth fed the sociopath Alex and his droods.

Proust’s Marcel feels that music represents an alternative mode of being that humankind might have developed further had they not taken the route of language instead. Perhaps if Orpheus had lived…? Pindar called Orpheus the “father of all songs” whose music and singing could charm the birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance, and divert the course of rivers. The god of music, Apollo, himself was his father and taught Orpheus to play the lyre (as a sort of Guitar Hero). When his wife Euridice died from a snakebite, Orpheus played such compellingly sad songs, that Hades relented and let Euridice return to earth from the land of the dead, but Orpheus lost her a second time. After his own brutal dismemberment, Orpheus’ immortal head and lyre still make mournful music in a Greek river. Playing music as an act of memory, creating meaning, and reclaiming lost objects like a wife, or Swann’s lover.[15]

The ear and brain react to overtones, harmonies, cacophonies, and rhythms. Time flows through sound modulations in space and time; no new matter is created or destroyed in space. Proust’s Swann has epiphanies and involuntary memory is triggered by his senses; le petite phrase summons the past, and becomes divine, transcendent, eternal. Swann can see the sound of a sonata, as he sees the piano and violin. A curtain of sound rises like a veil. Swann smells it like perfumed roses opening to the humid night air. He is transformed. Then the phrase ends… disappears. Newton would say the sound did vanish in time; but Einstein may say the sound can still be heard.

Walter Benjamin’s Nachlass commends mémoire involuntaire as the most profound and important images—images we have never seen before we remember them, “developed in the darkroom of the lived moment.”[16]

What The Essai? or, Write to Life

In her experimental essay, Proust in Black, Daubigny sees Jeffrey Beaumont as Marcel Proust’s Charles Swann: the outlandish dandy in love with the woman of a thousand faces. They are both detectives and perverts. In my conversations with Daubigny, a former colleague at the California State University, she said “‘La Nuit, je mens’ (‘At Night, I lie’) by French pop singer Alain Bashung was also a kind of leitmotiv for me, working as a haunting theme, my ‘le petite phrase de Vinteuil,’ so to speak.” I asked her how music informs the noir genre. She said “music is the most abstract artistic form. I believe it is the artistic expression, with poetry, that gives a best sense of the mystery and opacity one encounters in the noir universe, and in the enigma represented by the Femme Fatale.” She reinforced the ethereal motives and crimes of the heart that elude detectives even with the murderer behind bars. These are the gossamer traces that lure literary and film critics into conjuring words from thoughts about imagined sounds. Like the Siren’s song, the music is alluring, but the effect is deadly. Appropriate for the noir genre, one may chase its meaning…into the rocky cliff. And yet, with Odysseus’ wily use of wax in our ears, we widen our search for the elusive sound of noir.

Our rhetorical genre is the French verb for attempting or investigating, and with the essayist Fanny Daubigny we, too, “wander poetically and intellectually ramble.”[17] Writing in the noir capital of Los Angeles, the writer bears witness to an impending theoretical disaster on the San Andreas fault—the “Big One” waiting to happen. Kafka could also hear the rattling mirrors. Even as I write in Los Angeles, I make my mimetic essay of the noir genre, inviting and not legislating new interpretations of our shared human ontology.

Let’s compare the genotype of a generic essay or noir film to the phenotype of a unique author/auteur’s contribution to letters in our challenging age of plague. In biology, the genotype is the inherited genetics observed under a microscope (e.g. the ear canal) whereas the phenotype is a result of conditioning and existential choices (e.g. hardened hearts and earwaxed hearing that is closed to input on the one hand, or on the other, ear canals open to imagination, seeing and hearing and interpreting in the shadows like Jesus’ ideal listeners to his parables). In her chapter on “Fear Noir,” Daubigny proposes that we live as long as we’re in the shadows. The extremes of the blinding light or suffocating darkness are both death. To live is to tell another daily story like Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights (8th c. Arabic, first English translation in 1700). Hearing the musicality of the voice—reading or writing an essay or Proust’s remembrance—prolongs life. And asking questions—to essayer an investigation—gets one into trouble in noir. There is both danger and liberation in confronting the shadows…in hearing noir.

Farewell to the genotype of the “academic essay.” From the shadows, the phenotype of poetic wandering and intellectual rambling is inscribed like this attempt to hear noir amidst rattling windows above California fault lines. David Lynch’s Sandy and Jeffrey know “it’s a strange world,” and yet await 1,000 robins who “represent love.”

In Search of Noir’s Sound

Among other leitmotifs, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is Proust’s anthem to the timelessness of music. A human programmed something to count: written in seven volumes, 3,000 pages of 1.3 million words and a cast of 2,000 different characters. Proust’s genre is archetypal, even primeval: a journey, a search. This is an unremitting first-person search to the final curtain; fiction in the guise of autobiography, questioning stable subjectivity and the facade between public and private identity. Proust, Daubigny, and Lynch exemplify the subjective principle driving the search (the essai). The narrating consciousness shapes the truest representations of the world and we find some truth in noir. The aesthetic goal is intersubjectivity: a revelatory communion facilitated by music with a totalizing effect in subterranean space and lost time. An act of memory, creating meaning, reclaiming lost objects.

The P.I.s (Proust, Daubigny, Lynch) search for evidence and follow trails of ideas, sniffing out guilt through deep sensitivity led by bulldog determination that ultimately trails its way to…empirical truth? In noir, this truth becomes unattainable, as announced by clues in the music; dissonant, atonal musical themes unsettle security. Does our severed ear transcend limitations of time and space? Do we then become composers of what we seek, solving mysteries? Who are you as you listen to a noir film: a truth seeker, a meaning giver, a problem solver? Who will you write your essay to?

Reading/Listening the Text

We read or listen to a text because we desire--to experience and feel, to hear and know it deeply. Yet to know is to close off the possibility of generating new meanings and novel experiences, and to suppress the spiritual overflow. Proust’s character Swann is infatuated by Odette. He does see through Odette like Plato’s prisoner deciphers the shadows on the cave wall—and loses his desire once he knows her without the veil of illusion.[18]

Proust’s first reference to music is inseparable from Odette, and occurs many pages before his famous development of the “la petite phrase.” Music first appears as a metaphor for love: hearts join without hesitation, mutually constituting each other. When Swann hears a phrase… “suddenly it was as though she had entered; all his memories of the days when she had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of his being had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, the forgotten strains of happiness.” Music sparks “involuntary memory” (Proust invents this phrase). Eating a Madeleine cookie with tea immediately sent Proust back to his aunt’s house for summer vacation as a child. There is no more tea, and no more cookie, but the new reality is a narrative that unfurls. There is no more Odette after the musical phrase, only empyrean vibrations above and beyond the terrestrial cavern.

Le Petite Phrase de Venteuil in Proust’s Seven-Volume Search

The phrase is never heard by Proust’s reader, like all that remains in the shadows of noir. This is only appropriate, as Proust believes music is unattainable, fleeting, and transcendent. Descending chords of a harmonic minor arouse strong desire, as in historic compositions, analogs for the fictional Vinteuil. In Beethoven’s Last String Quartet or Grosse Fuge 130 and 132, the “B” chord is played in “A” harmonic minor; in fact, not even just “A” minor, but with an interval leap that increases tension. Chopin’s Nocturnes inspired by the night are three songs linked thematically by the two chords of the relative minor scale, and not just any minor, but a harmonic minor that increases tension so the windows rattle on the fault line.

Chords are designed around the principle of creating and releasing tension, the fuel that propels drama, fiction, and a good essay. Ascending chords announce the Jedi or a superhero in John Williams’ Star Wars (1977) or Superman (1978) themes. Relief is the catharsis when help arrives. In contrast, the descending chords of a harmonic minor scale are signatures of the noir trope, and Classical composers like Beethoven and Chopin.

“Le petite phrase”: Metonymy and Synecdoche

The little phrase stands for the whole Vinteuil sonata. Proust contrasts the reality of the phrase (its genotype) with Swann’s perception of it (phenotype). When Swann (the character) hears it in a reductive sense (in contrast to listening), the music’s meaning was reductive; it was metonymy signifying disillusionment with Odette. Proust writes, Swann “regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind. Keys awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void” (Vol. I, p. 46). Does Proust’s Swann have “ears to hear” the noir? Music moves him deeply to a synthetic experience of intensity, but he’s tempted to treat music as instrumental, reducing it to one meaning.

In his book, Proust, Music, and Meaning (2017), Joseph Acquisto, a French Professor in Vermont, proposed trading in hearing music for listening to music.[19] Listening is not a static state, but a participle that opens and extends meaning. Once we hear, we can never un-hear, or un-see, for example, classic noir scenes like Frank masked with his inhaler as a Darth Vader raping Dorothy.[20] Entertaining Acquisto’s proposal, Swann is either the consummate listener (remaining open and allowing the music to take him to an area of memory his consciousness feared), or no listener at all (who hears to conjure desire).

 Proust the author assumes the omniscient point of view of the musical phrase and describes the characters’ anguish of the unknown: “It floated by, so near and yet so infinitely remote, while it was addressed to them it did not know them. Swann regretted that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, extraneous to themselves” (46). Unlike the grasping Swann, Proust calls for the reader to accept listening to the disembodied anthropomorphized phrase. And we additionally transform this into the investigation of this essai—hearing with a severed ear to a parable from Jesus that is anonymous and undeciphered… addressed to those with “ears to hear.”

A single meaning might calm our anxiety and pacify Edvard Munch’s Skrik (1893) after a century of sustained Angst, but happy states are not sustained indefinitely, so listening becomes our dominant ontology. Noir invites us to realize it is both possible and impossible to know true meaning, and to acquiesce having parts and never the whole, settling for synecdoche, knowing it may only be a metaphor or metonymy for the thing itself. Yet we scopophiles and audiophiles of the noir find comfort in its capital of L.A., wondering if the rumbling is traffic or the fault line, and still calling it home.

Encore: Liberation

People are echoes, inseparable from and constituted by what they hear, as in the musical emanations of noir-- Alain Bashung’s “La Nuit, je mens” as the soundtrack for Daubigny’s essay; David Lynch’s Ben singing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”; Dorothy Vallens singing Bobby Vinton’s recording of Bernie Wayne’s and Lee Morris’ title song for the film, “Blue Velvet”…and le petite phrase de Vinteuil invoking epiphanies within Proust’s 3,000 pages and over one million words. Proust’s classical soundscape contrasts with noir’s austere, angular bebop or improvisational jazz, yet Proust improvises with classical music in subterranean halls of memory.

Music is the heuristic guide for Proust’s aesthetic quest: navigating from perception to intellectual analysis to transcendent meanings. “The little phrase, as soon as it struck Swann’s ear, has the power to liberate in him the space that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; assuming for him a sort of reality superior to that of concrete things. This thirst for an unknown delight was awakened in him by the little phrase, but without bringing him any precise gratification to assuage it.”[21] Listening to Proust opens space in us, like the fairy tales or dreams of “beyond, somewhere else” David Lynch envisions in his films (Bresky, p. 66), and as Fanny Daubigny describes as the “split consciousness” of dreaming sleep as a writer.[22] This is the lure of the uncharted noir soundtracks in memoir, film, and the essay.

Proust’s imaginary phrase has to remain imaginary. Walter Pater, the great Oxford essayist on the Renaissance, believed “all modes of art aspire towards another art form [Anders-streben], the condition of music, the ideally consummate art that obliterates matter and form.” He doesn’t explain how this “subtle and vague” art works. We’re trying to hear the genre of noir, feel cinema, hear writing. Renaissance giant Walter Pater does not explain how music is the consummate art, but here we are, trying, even hoping for transmutation of musical and visual art into meaning.[23]

Russian linguist Roman Jakobson explored “transmutation” as the translation from one art form into another, from a verbal structure to a nonverbal one: “All cognitive experience is conveyable in any existing language.”[24]“Can’t? There is no can’t. There is only do,” proverbial Yoda would say. When language is insufficient, use loan words, neologisms, circumlocutions--or music.

Listening to the little phrase makes the invisible…visible. The phrase is described by Proust, and Swann becomes obsessed with it, and relays his obsession to the reader. Proust cares most about depicting the phenomenal world insofar as it represents the world beyond the ravages of time, reaching for transcendence. (David Lynch sees rotting cities and the Golden Gate Bridge constantly being painted in our losing battle against entropy. He doesn’t see the bridge, but decay. He doesn’t see a robin ushering in an era of love; he sees a predator with a worm in its mouth).[25]

Proust describes the little phrase as noir’s femme fatale seen through the aqueous veil of a waterfall in a mountain landscape. She is highly theatrical, arresting, and inaccessible. Then there is no woman, no waterfall. We arrive at empty Zen space: a reality superior to that of concrete things. A woman as woman isn’t meaningful. Like a melody, it’s up to harmonic colorations filling space to bring out the full significance of the phrase, like the harmonic vibrations of a woman: Fanny Daubigny essai-ing, the Blue Lady singing in Blue Velvet’s Slow Club, Odette transmuted as a musical phrase from a sonata. Harmony brings atmospheric depth, which suggests the subterranean realm below, rather than above. The robin will eat insects and worms, and although it can fly, like Dedalus, the predator along with its prey will return to dust.

Do we sculpt the 3D woman from behind the waterfall, or hum le petite phrase in a dream? Proust’s “involuntary memory” unifies this “split consciousness” Daubigny defines as the terrain of noir between the waking and dreaming self. Searching in the shadows and through waterfalls, the melody and harmonic resonance are fused in dynamic, unresolved tension. Universal genotypes become relatable as a unique phenotype. Who is the woman, what is the sound of the music? Do we seize a definition, or remain in search of…?

We will soon encounter Frank in Blue Velvet, who seeks satisfaction for his tormenting desire. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, the imaginative father of psychoanalysis, 1939), contended that an infant loses a partial object (the mother’s breast), and then the mother as a whole, and consequently turns to autoeroticism. Then one of two things happen in Freudian theory. A child either A) dominates and masters the object in fantasy or reality and succeeds in maintaining a silent existence “beyond seeking pleasure,” or B) bypasses the need for it, admitting it is lost.[26]

Proust’s father was a doctor and Chair of Public Health at the Sorbonne who studied the revolutionary research into sleep studies and split consciousness during this period.[27]Biographers say it was too soon for Proust to read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (published in 1926). Proust’s object loss (of time) led to his melancholy, anxiety, mourning, and pain, exorcised in 3,000 pages and 1.3 million words.

Jacques Lacan (1901-81), the French psychoanalyst and literary theorist, gave structure to Freud’s unconscious which he claimed was structured like a language (“l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage”).[28] Lacan lectured on Freud’s objet petite (“lost object”) from 1950-80: reflections of a desire that cannot be achieved. Classical film score was designed to “conjure forth remote, impossibly lost utopias.” Like algebra, noir remains untranslated, but our investigation continues.

A Fantastic Unicorn Listening to Sound

Sound comes from vibrations on vocal cords—from breath. Proust describes the phenomenon: “Watching Swann’s face while he listened to the phrase, one would have said that he was inhaling an anaesthetic, which allowed him to breathe more freely.” Music is the vehicle for arousing desire, rather than being a portal to aesthetic experience. Proust calls it an “anaesthetic.” And what is the result of the aural experience? Hearing the music, Swann experiences not agitation, but repose, the “mysterious refreshment in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, deprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone.” Music has an instrumental value for Swann who wants to experience his own desire. (Listening to music, are we most like Nietzsche’s Apollonian or Dionysian unicorn?)

A fixed, fetishized sound—le petite phrase de Vinteuil—helps Proust imagine immortality. Marcel Proust famously suffered night terrors and was utterly dependent on his mother and her goodnight kisses, crying if he didn’t get a dozen. Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” just as famously postulated the origin of a fetish: the mother’s castrated phallus--her clitoris--causing the son to seek sexual fulfillment in another object. And voilà: a dozen goodnight kisses induce sleep. And in the absence of a mother or Odette, le petite phrase.

In Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s sociopath Frank is low-hanging fruit for a Freudian analyst, famous for depending on “Mommy’s kisses” as he fetishizes music.

Enter: Film Noir

Classical Hollywood scores deployed full romantic symphonic orchestras to reinforce a potential for utopian ideals: positive resolutions, prosperity, stability! Leitmotifs and refrains created familiarity and security. Tonality always returned “home” to the tonal center of the piece. The sanctity of this home was preserved by expelling “foreign” elements such as chromaticism—and domesticating those few outliers with green cards. From classic to neo-noir films, soundscapes helped create the mood of the urban narrative space with increasing techniques and ambient noise to convey threats, warnings, darkness, and even silence. Nightclub singers from Rita Hayworth as Gilda to Lizabeth Scott in a series of roles offer an oasis of sympathetic romance in a cold, asphalt, loveless city, although the suspended state of tension continues to build as the stringed instruments hum and horns wail.[29]

Proust (1871-1922) and Freud (1856-1939) lived through the Great War (1914-18), but neither through W.W. II (1939-45) and the rise of noir film. In a post-war urban dystopia, film turns from classical tonal Hollywood scores to atonality and dissonance that threatens the security of “home” and “family.”

After the Great Depression in the 1930s and W.W. II in the ‘50s, everyone is a potential killer and victim in a disillusioned Modern age. This dark, tortured, delirious world is unswayed by compassion. Physics provides our analytic key: the physical world is truly an illusion of stability. The haunting timelessness of Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism provides comforting awareness: existence precedes essence, choices constitute us. There is no riddle to solve because that would presume a riddler. Therefore, relax into discomfort.

Classical Hollywood scores of romantic symphonies became 12-tone played by smaller ensembles. Noir is atonal, like Proust’s musings, Daubigny’s essai-ing, and Lynch’s directing. And paradoxically, dissonant elements create the final achievement of a new, more complex tonality, like Nietzsche’s Apollo, god of reason, wedding Dionysus, god of ecstasy and intoxication.

After W.W.II, four factors led to the emergence of film noir: 1) a shrinking of the frame with improved technology; 2) a change in the physical appearance of the actors and mise en scène; 3) the weakening of censorship, and 4) a transition towards a more serious tone.

In 1930s Hollywood film, the British feel gave way to the 1940s American style.[30] Romantic films are now darker and more avant-garde with tremolo strings. Composer Dimitri Tiomkin scored Franz Lehár’s “Merry Widow Waltz” as recurring theme in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), giving it “the atonal treatment…and worse,” with shocking dissonance that rips through silence and ends a life. The femme fatale’s erotic undertones dominate the 1950s and nostalgic longing for an idealized white picket childhood of the nation’s alleged Edenic past, inspiring the supersaturated blue sky and red roses of neo-noir Blue Velvet’s (1986) opening scene. Henry Mancini scores Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) using the nostalgic big band and jazz backgrounds, and the most recognized contemporary film composer, John Williams, (The Killers, 1964; The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman, 1973), began his career doing big band. It was in the 1960s when jazz prevailed as the dominant motif, whereas in noir films of the 1940s, brief diegetic horn solos appear, if at all, and not as part of the underscore.

The second cycle of film noir in the 70s-80s suggests a problem with finding a tonal center in the genre as music searches for a home that never existed in the first place. Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) offers constructed nods to past noir films; it is still atonal, but revisits melody, recording 20 minutes of the score for the 130-minute film with a small ensemble: strings, 4 pianos, 4 harps, 2 percussionists, and solo trumpet. And a personal favorite, Greek electronic musician Vangelis brought new technology to noir for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) using percussive synthesized effects with melodic horn themes. And after this rich history of noir, in 1986, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

David Lynch: Many Hidden Things and Many, Many Secrets

As a director, David Lynch weds music to images, and he likens cinema to music: it flows and has transitions. Lynch says, “I catch an idea that I can see, feel, and hear, then I write it down. If you stay true to it, it guides you, if you have freedom.”[31]

Blue Velvet put the “vile” in “violence,” notes interviewer David Breskin.[32] Living in Spokane, Washington, Lynch recalls his childhood: “I would stare at ant just alive on a cherry tree with sap oozing out of it. I would watch it for hours like TV. Smiles were all I saw. I was embarrassed that my parents were so normal. I longed for something out of the ordinary to happen. There are too many possibilities for something to go wrong, so I worried about many hidden things and many, many secrets. I didn’t know if I was being paranoid or if there really are some secrets.”[33] But Lynch chose to leave mysteries unexplained because of their terrible beauty and the rush of bliss this playfulness arouses. Mysteries always allow for interpretation, which answers thwart, so his filmmaking is “all intuition—no rule book. Like great symphonies. You can’t believe that one chord flows into the next, then that swoops in. It’s too great. Too thrilling. How they come to be is a mystery.”[34] How the present worked on nerve endings couldn’t be decoded using a rulebook.

Lurking in shadows, Lynch finds an idea, and sees, feels, hears, and then films it. Lynch explains, “In film, things are heightened, lighter and darker. If things are normal, just stay home. Being in darkness and confusion is really interesting to me like a strange carnival. A lot of fun, but a lot of pain. This world is maybe not the brightest place one could hope to be.”[35] Lynch, like a noir detective, thrives on secrets and mysteries with their infinite potential in a myriad of alleyways. He is pulled to learn the mystery of a beautiful phrase, “dark secret.” But the allure does not preserve a Magic Kingdom reality. Lynch saw buildings rotting, and the Golden Gate Bridge constantly being repainted, and a Philadelphia gang shoot the son in a family on their way to church (Breskin, 1997, 57). That was the turning point that consummated the falsity of plastic smiles, white picket fences, and a “golden” reality rusted to the core.

Yet Lynch describes his comfort with this unnerving search in the shadows: “It’s very scary to feel out of control. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Filming the scenes of Frank raping Dorothy, it was hysterically funny to me. Frank was completely obsessed. It was so horrible and so frightening and so intense and violent that there was also this layer of humor. People have to be able to create these things. Please walk out of the theater if it’s upsetting you” (Breskin, 1997, 65). Noir detectives like Lynch want to know why. Perhaps we, too, ask, and dread the answer, because it requires a severed ear to hear.

Filming The Severed Ear

After a $40 million “stillbirth,” Dune (1984), Lynch was given a “final cut” deal and small budget for Blue Velvet (1986), which he wrote, cast, directed, edited, and scored the music for. Lynch was trained as an Abstract Expressionist painter and in film was a true auteur and “genius naif” (Pauline Kael, 1986) who wanted control (as cities fell apart, and he suspected decay below suburban smiles).[36] He reminded himself to avoid two pitfalls as he began Blue Velvet: 1) don’t be self-conscious and cutely self-referential; 2) don’t be so idiosyncratic, solipsistic, masturbatory.[37] The best example: Kafka; the worst, forced grad essays.

Lynch’s sleuthing came to a conclusion that felt true: people’s relationship was not with evil itself nor evil monsters, but with the forces and possibilities of an evil environment. Lynch would diagnose evil without judgment or a prescription. In Blue Velvet, villainous Frank turns to Jeffrey in the car and says, “You’re like me.” In denial, the naif Jeffrey punches Frank in the face. But the film unearths dark secrets and exposes them to the light; Lynch’s cinephiles exit Plato’s Cave and gain a certain power. Frank rapes Dorothy high on “poppers” (Amyl Nitrate, an aphrodisiac) insisting she call him “daddy,” as his voice raises to the pitch of an infant who wants to f*ck Mommy. Jeffrey hits Dorothy during sex and she likes it. The film review by Pauline Kael opens with an overheard quote at a Blue Velvet screening that summarizes the allure of the noir: “Maybe I’m sick. But I want to see that film again” (1986). 

David Foster Wallace’s ad hominem critique of Lynch’s films says the “Czar of the bizarre’s” reputation is like an EKG—either he’s an idiot with jejune, incoherent, weird, bad films…or a genius.[38] Either way, Lynch is fascinating…and creepy: “anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish with little inhibition or semiotic layering of a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness.”[39] We are anchored by Jeffrey, while Jeffrey remains remote. Jeffrey is detached, but the viewers are empathetic. And do we relate to his degeneracy, voyeurism, and primal violence? Will we be “entertained” while being powerless in Lynch’s nightmare? Do readers feel empowered reading Daubigny’s essay, ready to write their own?

Fanny Daubigny writes an essay.
Roy Orbison sings “In Dreams.”
Bobby Vinton sings “Blue Velvet.”

Lynch’s use of music opens up “marvelous” qualities. We can’t content ourselves with remaining spectators. Sooner or later, we have to get up on stage ourselves. We’re not sitting back watching Criminal Minds, we are the production team of the crime scene like the auteur writer, director, editor Lynch engaging with the film on multiple levels—both private and public—as he shares his synesthetic nightmare.

Culture’s collective memory seems to have internalized Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” which makes the transmutation of Lynch’s dream into our consciousness more seamless.[40] In an opening scene, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed ear that leads him to the wife of its owner, the “Blue Lady” who sings “Blue Velvet.” They become secret lovers. In a later scene, we sit with Jeffrey and Sandy in Arlene’s Diner and hear their wonder over coffee: “We’re seeing something that was hidden. We’re involved in a mystery.” In Dorothy’s music, Jeffrey is hearing depths he never experienced and has a love triangle with a symbolic virgin and a whore. Different from music in films by Lynch’s more virginal contemporaries--George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), or Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994)--Lynch uses music not as a signpost marking time and place, but as a shadowy guide to Dante’s Infern: downtown L.A., a skid row encampment in our mind.

Hearing In Dreams

Roy Orbison resisted the inclusion of his song “In Dreams” in Lynch’s film, since its expression in this context would give it a new meaning. Umberto Eco’s semiotics says this can happen endlessly. Lynch never defines what the song means, which would “halt unlimited semiosis.”[41]Orbison’s song “In Dreams” is heard twice in Blue Velvet, and never in its entirety. Lynch calls it “a necessary prelude to closure.” The keyboard drips with reverb in the ethereal song presented by a vulnerable Orbison.

The first time we hear “In Dreams,” Ben mimes Orbison’s “candy-colored clown” with drag make-up. The original 1963 recording is diegetic, played on the cassette player while Frank and his hoodlums, and Jeffrey and Dorothy are transfixed. Ben is a “suave f*cker” in drag, and Orbison’s voice enters falsetto, decidedly unmanly. Frank is on stage with Ben and becomes increasingly uncomfortable, calling it off with the exit command “Let’s hit the f*ckin’ road!” upon which he regains control. The second time we hear “In Dreams” is leaving Ben’s drag performance, as Frank’s posse continues their kidnapping joyride. Frank pulls Jeffrey out of the car, smears lipstick on his face, and echoes Orbison, turning the ballad into a threat on the streets of Lumberton. The song continues to the warbling falsetto, juxtaposed against Frank’s aggressive homoerotic attack.

Roy Orbison is a liminal figure regarding gendered norms and in music history: between Elvis in the 1950s and the Beatles in the 1960s.[42]Orbison is a sort of man of mystery, a tabula rasa (blank slate), the perfect vehicle for Lynch to appropriate. Orbison never hired a publicist, and suffered stage fright so he stood as still and wooden as a tree on stage (in k.d. lang’s description, and parodies by John Belushi on SNL totally immobile in dark glasses). Like Ben in Blue Velvet, Orbison is an anti-rockstar whose vulnerable maleness sings sentimental lyrics in falsetto; his soaring melody and vocal timbre are more romantic than rock. The subject of “In Dreams” fits Lynch’s surreal mise en scene, and captures the dual nature of reality: idyllic and hellish.

“In dreams I walk with you…in dreams you’re mine, all the time.” But bliss is interrupted by dawn: “Just before the dawn, I awake to find you’re gone.” It was night that brought bliss, like Plato’s prisoners in the dark cavern entertained by shadows. Ben’s lip-synch is quadruple removed from reality: Orbison’s composition, then recording, then on cassette, then replayed by Ben during his lip-sync. The petite phrase of dreams is a dream mimetic of lost time since it is reminiscent of a lost era of rock n’ roll, enhanced with an ersatz nostalgia in falsetto like an Amyl Nitrate “popper.” In a Hollywood with the sign in need of repairs from vandalism, and the Walk of Fame cracking, and Donald Trump’s star defaced then repaired for $10,000, nostalgia is false and as unattainable as a dream. Orbison’s “In Dreams” comes just months before JFK’s assassination in 1963, ending Kennedy’s Camelot. The opening parade of Blue Velvet with its beautiful façade is the idyllic Camelot that veils a grotesque reality that seethes in the shadows of Lumberton, more easily seen at night.

(Even more intense is Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), in which the vulnerable Orbison is reduced to tears by his former lover’s touch and the memory of their relationship. “Crying/Llorando” is sung by Rebekah del Rio in Club Silencio diegetically. The singer collapses before the song is over, but still the singing continues non-diegetically. It is all an illusion. “It’s a strange world” in Blue Velvet as well.)

Hearing Blue Velvet

Lynch heard Bobby Benton sing “Blue Velvet” in 1952 and dismissed it as schmaltzy and not rock ’n roll. Years later, Lynch heard it in a new setting and saw “green lungs, red lips, a severed ear, and a field.” The string of ideas that birthed the film, births many interpretations for viewers and listeners. The magic lantern illuminates film not linguistically but supralinguistically; the ideas are not legible in black and white font on a page, but in the shadows of chords for audiovisualphiles who hear with the severed ear. The film recontextualizes the song, just as Lynch revisited it after years. The landscape is painted in sounds of frustrated sexuality.[43]

“Blue Velvet” is heard five times: 1) in the opening sequence during Jeffrey’s dad’s stroke; 2) in the Slow Club by the Blue Lady, Dorothy Vallens; 3) again in the Slow Club one hour into the two-hour film, with both Frank and Jeffrey entranced; 4) the nondiegetic recording plays as Jeffrey goes to Dorothy’s apartment for sex; 5) and finally during conclusion with Dorothy hugging her son, cut to Jeffrey and Sandy having lunch with a fake robin on windowsill, with a bug writhing in its mouth.

Our relentless sleuthing of noir’s sound has led to the minor chord progression of “Blue Velvet”: “And I still can see Blue Velvet through my tears.” Although the song is played in a major key, it has a minor sound and is set up as a minor, but resolves as a major key. In the languid key of “C,” we hear the typical popsicle progression of the 1950s (I – XI – IV – V), then melancholic minor chords after “blue velvet” with another minor chord in between as the hook. (Think of the jazz great Chet Baker singing “Oh how strange the change from major to minor” in “Every time we say goodbye.”)

We found our answer. Le petite phrase is the minor chord of noir. For essayist Fanny Daubigny, “‘La Nuit, je mens’ (‘At Night, I lie’) by French pop singer Alain Bashung as in Dorothy Vallens’ character arc, major progresses to minor. The genotype of “mother” becomes the phenotype of the “Blue Lady” singing languidly through tears as a widow reunited with her son. There are picket fences and robins, but there is police corruption, addiction, rape, and murder. The sound of Mommy’s voice becomes the image becomes the feeling becomes the meaning in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. In Proust’s narrative, le petite phrase descends to minor chords, ensconsing the listening reader in mystery.

The list of usual suspects for Proust’s fictional Vinteuil Sonata share a frenetic dynamic pitch and tempo with legato melodies, especially in triplet forms.[44] The sustained tension teases resolve and envelops the audience in mystery. The melody is dynamic, in step with melodramatic, melancholic noir. The Belgian-born Parisian César Franck (1822-90) tops the lists as the potential inspiration for “Vinteuil,” whose Sonata in A major repeats the triplet phrase in legato.[45] French organist Gabriel Pierné’s (1863-1937) Violin Sonata has a cascading arpeggio in triplet form often in dreamy legato; Pierne’s melodramatic tension does not release and uses augmented and diminished chords for dynamic rising and falling pitch and tempo. French organist and composer Camille Saint-Saëns’ (1835–1921) Sonata is built on triplets using 16th notes, which is aggressive and virtuosic rather than dreamlike, but has the dynamic tempo and pitch, rising and falling, with some languid moments. Proust’s occasional lover, the Venezuelan Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) uses 16th notes, but not in triplets; Hahn’s tension is created with dynamic undulations of le petite phrase.

Le petite phrase is an intoxicating anesthetic that is impossible to know or attain, other than it yields a spiritual overflow that makes death feel mortal and life transcendent. Am I guilty of illuminating shadows, that is, using music for instrumental value in this cartography of the sound of noir? Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979) described reading Proust as a “simultaneous single moment” without duration (pp. 67-8).[46] Narrative is the metaphor of the moment. Reading is the metaphor of writing. And noir is the metaphor of hearing the shadows, the chiaroscuro between blinding light and invisible darkness—neither of which can be seen.

The strangest phrase comes: “Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata really did exist.” Proust’s narrator continues “it belonged to an order of supernatural beings whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognize and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen coaxes it forth from that divine world…to shine for a brief moment in the firmament of ours.” The narrator’s identity is constituted by listening. The author gives and withholds meaning: it is audible and silent; it is blinding light and darkness because it is in the descent from major to minor chords, the split consciousness, the sleeping-waking, the shadings of chiaroscuro: the essential “sound” of noir’s dreaming mystery.

The sound of noir may be pure ontology, the act of composing, or filmmaking, or essaying to make meaningful art. Proust writes, “Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is non-existent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.”

Notes

[1] André Cœuroy offers an engaging discussion of music in Proust that is not intellectual but beautiful and spiritual like the music by German Romantic composers, especially the soul of Richard Wager. André Cœuroy, “Music in the Work of Marcel Proust,” The Musical Quarterly, 12.1 (1926): 133, 135-6.

Julian Johnson offers an Austrian-German symphonist to the list of primarily French composers: Gustav Mahler. Julian Johnson, “Rehearing Lost Time: Proust and Mahler,” Romance Studies, 32.2 (2014): 88.

[2] Fundación Juan March, “Proust's musical univers: Vinteuil's Sonata. César Franck: Sonata in A Major for violin and piano, and reading of In Search of Lost Time by Proust,” Birgit Kolar, violin; Malcolm Martineau, piano and Carlos Hipólito, narrator (2017), https://canal.march.es/es/coleccion/universo-musical-proust-sonata-vinteuil-870.

Maria and Nathalia Milstein, La Sonata de Vinteuil: Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Hahn, Pierné (Proustian theme for Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, 2017).

[3] Alex Ross, “Musical Events: Conjuring the Music of Proust’s Salons” (The New Yorker, 2021), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/ 03/22/conjuring-the-music-of-prousts-salons.

[4] Liz Greene’s video essay, “Do It For Van Gogh” (2018), reads the three scenes in which Jeffrey watches-listens from inside Dorothy’s closet. Greene explores the mysterious cognitive dissonance between point of view and point of audition, as Dorothy looks to the closet, to Jeffrey, and to the camera and by extension, to us, the viewers who are as complicity inactive in saving Dorothy as Jeffrey. Liz Greene, Do it for Van Gogh: Detecting and Perverting the Audience Position in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (FilmScalpel, 2018).

[5] “The Musical Universe of Marcel Proust: The Sonata by Franck & Vinteuil,” Fundación Juan March, March 2017,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS13CqKDl9g.

[6] Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks. (Exact Change, 2004).

[7] David Hochman, “Sound Check: A Study of L.A. Noise Pollution,” (L.A. Magazine, 2014), https://www.lamag.com/wellbeing/sound-check-a-study-of-la-noise-pollution/

[8] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (The Poetry Foundation, 1832), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832.

[9] Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (Modern Library, 1928).

[10] See Daubigny, 21, 23-24, 26-27, 31, 32, 36-37, 40-42, 48-50, 63, 71, 73, 87, 89-90, 92-93.

[11] My improvisation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “This old saint in the forest has not yet heard about this, that God is dead!” Also sprach Zarathustra: ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Alfred Kröner Verlag im Leipzig, 1916), 12.

[12] Russian author and tv host, Victor Erofeyev, reported in “The Secrets of Leo Tolstoy” (The New York Times, 2010).

[13] Albert Einstein (1879-1955) explicated this bold idea at length to one scholar of creativity, telling Max Wertheimer that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations, but in images, feelings, and even musical architectures. Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking (Harper and Brothers, 1959), 213-28.

"If I were not a physicist," Einstein once said, "I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.... I get most joy in life out of music.” Alice Calaprice, The Expanded Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, 2000), 155.

Einstein’s son, Hans, amplified what Albert meant by recounting that "[w]henever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.” Ronald Clark, Einstein. The Life and Times. (Crowell, 1971), 106.

After playing piano, Albert’s sister Maja said he would get up saying, “There, now I've got it.” Something in the music would guide his thoughts in new and creative directions. Jamie Sayen, Einstein in America (Crown, 1985), 26.

[14] Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy on Art, ed. Aylmer Maude (Small, Maynard & Company, 1924), 14.

[15] Phenomenologist Jessica Wiskus analyzes how le petite phrase moves the reader to empathy as the music is like a living person providing a foreign consciousness. Jessica Wiskus, “On the Petite Phrase of Proust and the Experience of Empathy: Exploring the Rhythmical Structure of Music,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 50.3 (2019): 275.

Berthold Hoeckner explores the triggering processes of memory that infuse the moving image of film music working on us to generate memories we never had. Cultural consciousness is the “tertiary” (exterior or technical) memory that happens in three stages: storage, retrieval, and effect. This novel cultural consciousness is facilitated by film music, and, I argue, through Proust’s literary reverie. The result? Technical recordings become extensions of living memory. Nietzsche’s eternal return congealed in the law of the commodity becomes dialectically contained in Proust’s pursuit of his past happiness, reproduced in the very act of repetition. Berthold Hoeckner, Film, Music, Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 7.

[16] Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Suhrkamp, 1987).

[17] Daubigny, 98.

[18] Bettina Knapp offers a Jungian approach to the anima figure personified in archetypal music like Vinteuil’s Sonata through involuntary recall that transcends our three dimensions into a fourth one of the collective unconscious. Knapp, “Marcel Proust: Archetypal Music, An Exercise in Transcendence,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6.3-4 (1985): 251.

[19] Joseph Acquisto’s chapter “Swann Set to Music” presents a listening-based approach to the text that calls for the reader to remain sceptical to straightforward interpretations, but to “become subjects constituted by attentive listening.” Joseph Acquisto, Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 72.

[20] Bettina Knapp’s reading of Swann listening to Vinteuil’s Sonata conjures images of Frank with his intoxicating mask inhaling poppers, “awakening to new dimensions, opening up to fresh sensations, able to breathe freely and to absorb the inexpressible feelings of the moment” (254).

[21]  Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way: Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Henry Holt and Company, 1922, New York. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm.      

[22] Daubigny, 27.

[23] Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Project Gutenberg, 1873, 2009), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm.

[24] Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” On Translation (Harvard University Press, 1959), 234. Oxford professor Jennifer Rushworth is also fascinated by the transmuting power of music and literature, making it necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach to Proust. Jennifer Rushworth, “The Textuality of Music in Proust’s À la recerche du temps perdu,” Romance Studies, 32.2 (2014): 85.

[25] Bresky, 1997, 58.

[26] Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (The Hogarth Press, 1920, 1955), 14-17.

[27] Daubigny, 27.

[28] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge University Press (1954–55, 1988).

[29] Helen Hanson traces the history of Hollywood soundscapes, sharing the development of technology in sound’s role of accentuating the darkness, anxiety, and threats that saturate noir filmsets in wastelands, deserted offices, nightclubs, warehouses, and mean streets. Helen Hanson, “The Ambience of Film Noir: Soundscapes, Design, and Mood,” A Companion to Film Noir (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Also see Richard Ness, “A Lotta Night Music: The Sound of Film Noir,” Cinema Journal, 47.2 (2008): 52-73.

[30] In 1928, Charlie Chaplin was quoted in the LA Times Review for famously saying talking films destroyed the silence of film art: “Talkies, you might say I loathe them! They have come along to spoil the most ancient art in the world, the art of pantomime. They utterly destroy the great beauty of silence” (Daubigny, 26). While silent films lacked a diegetic soundtrack, they were rarely silent as a piano accompanied the screenings.

[31] Stratton, 2015.

[32] David Breskin, “David Lynch,” Inner views: Filmmakers in Conversation, (De Capo Press, 1997), 54.

[33] Breskin, 55-6.

[34] David Stratton, “A Conversation with David Lynch,” David Lynch: Between Two Worlds (Gallery of Modern Art, 2015), https://youtu.be/jGd6lnYTTY8?si=aeRCHEzbo3tDHssD.

[35] Stratton, 2015.

[36] “Genius naif” is from Pauline Kael’s 1986 review in The New Yorker, https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/blue-velvet-review-pauline-kael/.

[37] Stratton, 2015.

[38] David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Back Bay Books, 1997), 146-212.

[39] Wallace, 1997.

[40] Umberto Eco explores how unlimited semiosis in action, such as Lynch’s use of “In Dreams,” is actually not as unlimited as it first appears, but is limited and governed by the relationship between the artist and audience in a sort of living intertexual framework. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Indiana University Press, 1979), 195.

[41] Musicologist Eero Tarasti describes Proust’s “semiotic” musical communication as neither linear nor logical, but like an anthropological field worker and semiotician, Proust moves from one sphere of reality to another; similarly, the reader cannot expect a fixed meaning, but explore a moving, flexible, changing meaning, like reality itself. Eero Tarasti, “The Implicit Musical Semiotics of Marcel Proust, Contemporary Music Review, 16.3 (2009): 9, 11, 21.

[42] Using Umberto Eco’s model of unlimited semiosis, Katherine Reed examines Lynch’s use of Roy Orbison’s popular hits that “enter our head” in a personal way via common memory and operate “through the lens of unlimited semiosis,” and minimally, betraying a more complex portrayal of femininity than is recognized in Lynch’s films. Katherine Reed, “‘We Cannot Content Ourselves with Remaining Spectators’: Musical Performance, Audience Interaction, and Nostalgia in the Films of David Lynch,” Music and the Moving Image, 9.1 (2016): 3-22.

[43] Holly Rogers’ “The Audiovisual Eerie” describes Lynch’s “transmedial world-undoing” through his haunting meta-, extra-, and trans-diegetic aural textures that include “the numerous loops, side-slips, echoes, repetitions and mirroring that infuse and confound the film’s narrative.” Rogers describes how Lynch’s audiovisual eerie leads to “a nebulous aural space whose re-visualization requires our own individual process of imaginative supplementation.” Holly Rogers, “The Audiovisual Eerie: Transmediating Thresholds in the Work of David Lynch,” Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and the New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2019), 5, 48-9.

[44] Special thanks to the assistance of musicologist, composer, and virtuoso guitarist Tony Baricivec for decoding the music with me.

[45] On the importance of legato, Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensées (1660, 2006): “When we read too fast or too softly, we hear nothing.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées(Project Gutenberg, 1660, 2006), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm, 17.

[46] Paul de Man concludes his chapter on reading Proust: “A la recherche du temps perdu narrates the flight of meaning, but this does not prevent its own meaning from being, incessantly, in flight.” Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, RiIke, and Proust (Yale University Press, 1979), 78.