Antithetical Arts by Kivy Peter;

Author:Kivy, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Virtues of Ambiguity?

With the appearance of the second dance, the waltz, you will recall, Newcomb identifies the entrance of a new element. You will recall as well, that he describes it as an action, but is unable to say whether it is another action of a single protagonist, or the action of another protagonist newly entering the scene. Whether the one or the other is, he avers, “finally indeterminate,” and indeterminate too whether, if it is a second agency, that agency is “a social group” or “another person.”

Now I put it to the reader that given this degree of indeterminacy we cannot be dealing here with narrative fiction in any true sense of the concept. If an interpreter of what he claims to be a work of narrative fiction invokes the canonical dramatic texts as what he means by narrative fiction, and then admits that he cannot tell you who the characters in the narrative are, whether there is one character or there are many, whether we are confronted with agents or agencies or protagonists, whether there are in the narrative physical events or only mental events, and so on, you are justified in concluding that the interpreter is simply mistaken in his claim that he is dealing with a work of narrative fiction. Or, else he has redefined narrative fiction to accommodate a case that, given the customary definition, does not fall under it.

Newcomb gives every evidence of awareness that this indeterminacy constitutes a problem for his interpretation. For when, towards the end of his essay, the ambiguities multiply even further, and we are driven to ask, “Who or what did this?,” he is driven to give something like a justification for his failure to answer the question that, it seems, tries to make a virtue of the apparent defect. In absolute music, Newcomb says, “this question must—or, I would say from the positive side, can—remain indeterminate.”

Newcomb seems to be offering us two options here, one of which, he thinks, is a plus, a positive for absolute music, the other a negative. To take what seems to be the negative option first, it is that absolute music must, cannot be other than indeterminate with regard to the “who” and the “what” of its purported narrative content. It is compelled, in other words, by its nature, to lack the means for disambiguation. But if this is the situation, then we are justified, as before, in rejecting the claim in the first place that absolute music has dramatic or narrative content. If it cannot do this crucial thing that dramatic and narrative fiction can, if it cannot fulfill this necessary condition, then it cannot, for that reason alone, possess narrative or dramatic content.

But what are we to make of the second, “positive” option: that absolute music “can” remain indeterminate? What construction are we to put on “can” here, and what is “positive” about it?

One possibility would have it that in absolute music the composer can choose to leave his music

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