Lovecraft in December 1921 produced one of his most unusual and intriguing stories, his own second favorite among his works: “The Music of Erich Zann” (DUN, 83-91). The only Lovecraft story to be set (à la Poe) in France and the only one to employ music as a major motif, this tale has a first-person narrator who comes to a city (presumably Paris) as an impoverished student of metaphysics. He comes to live in a tall old house in the steep and narrow rue d’Auseil, which, oddly enough, he cannot find again after the events of the story, despite “peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there” (83). Taking a room on the fifth story of the nearly empty lodging house, he hears “strange music from the peaked garret overhead” (84). Upon questioning the concierge, he is told that the music comes from “a strange dumb man” who signs his name as Erich Zann, an old German viol player who plays evenings in a theater orchestra and whose gable window commands “the only point on the street from which one [can] look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond” (84-85).
Fascinated, the narrator introduces himself to Zann and asks to be allowed to see him play. With reluctance, the reclusive Zann agrees, and they go up to the garret room, where Zann plays from memory, enchanting the listener with apparently original music, “a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality” (85-86). The music, however, lacks the special weirdness that the narrator heard when listening from his room below. When the narrator whistles some of the “weird notes,” Zann grows disturbed and glances fearfully toward the curtained window, inadvertently giving the narrator “a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hill-top” (86), which only this “crabbed musician” can see. But upon attempting to do so, he is rudely stopped by Zann, who then, by writing “in the laboured French of a foreigner,” explains that he is afflicted with “nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things” (87), and asks the narrator to take a lower room where he will not hear Zann playing in the night.
The narrator does move down to the third floor but contrives to hear the old man’s playing from the hall anyway, noticing that the music grows ever wilder, the old man ever more haggard. Finally one night he hears the “shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound” and hears “the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish” (88). Coming upstairs, he hears Zann stumble to the mysterious window and close the shutter. Zann admits him to the room, and indicates that he will write “a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him” (89). But Zann is interrupted in this task by the sounding, beyond the window, of “an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note” (89). The old man seizes his viol and begins to “rend the night” with exceedingly wild music, as if “to ward something off or drown something out.” He fails to drown out “a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West” (89).
A nightmarish wind springs up, blowing the shutters loose, shattering the window, extinguishing Zann’s candles, and carrying the old man’s handwritten sheets up and out through the window. The scene becomes one of utter pandemonium, with the “night-baying viol” shrieking ever more insanely in the dark. The narrator steps to the window and looks out. Instead of the expected city lights, he sees “only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth” (90). Feeling in the dark for Zann, his fingers encounter a cold, corpselike face with bulging eyes, though the old man continues the “ghoulish howling of that accursed viol.” The narrator flees the house, to “broader, healthier streets and boulevards” (91), and can never again find the rue d’Auseil. The tale, like the house in which Erich Zann lives, consists of many “stories.”
It is significant that Erich Zann’s music is described as “a kind of fugue,” for, to begin with, the text itself on the thematic level can be seen to have something of the structure of a fugue. It is not by any means unknown to find fugal structure in literature. Such a “novel” as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Topologie d’une Cité Fantôme, with its transmuted and echoic images, may much more readily be called a fugue than a novel even in the most open sense of the latter term. We shall trace this structure here only in part, as it can be done in different ways, all of which make interesting exercises. It is sufficient to point out that just as a musical fugue consists of multiple themes interwoven in certain ways, the story at hand has at least three textual “themes” similarly employed: the setting of the rue d’Auseil, the music of Erich Zann, and the weird externality or alienage of whatever influences may lie beyond Zann’s curtained window.
Just as in a musical fugue, the story opens with a sounding of one theme alone—the setting—with yet no hint of the others. This theme is soon “modulated” up—up to the fifth, in fact, in perfect keeping with fugal practice—by the narrator’s climbing the steep street and lodging on the fifth floor of the house. The other themes soon interplay with the first one in obvious ways, as one sees when reading the text with such interplay in mind. As in a musical fugue there are even “episodic” pauses that break the general flow of subjects and countersubjects but echo and foreshadow thematic strains: Erich Zann pauses, twice, to write messages to the narrator. The text even has a kind of stretto, or reiterated thematic condensation, at the end (i.e, in the coda), when we are told again that the narrator has “never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil” (91). This brief, final restatement of a thematic matter required, at the opening of the piece, three rather long paragraphs for its expression.
But what are we to make of this fugal text, beyond mere discernment of the structure? Structure, as we know in modern critical theory, has a way of folding in upon itself, a way of self-subverting. The key (one unavoidably resorts to musical terms) to this tendency here lies in the term fugue itself, whose Indo-European source is the root bheug-, “to flee.” We note that the narrator does just that in the end. From the same root, the Latin fugere derives, whence in turn come the English fugitive and words with the ending -fuge. The ending suggests avoidance, as in vermifuge, febrifuge, and the like. This derivative ending is sometimes problematic, as in subterfuge, from the Latin subter, “secret(ly),” “below.” If, for example, febrifuge means avoidance of fever, then subterfuge would in its form suggest avoidance of secrecy, the opposite of its familiar sense. The notion of fleeing is at least bidirectional, since one flees not only from somewhere but also to somewhere. In a musical fugue, one may say that the fleeing is from a too simplistic notion of thematic content to a freely generalized conception of content and form. Likewise, in a literary fugue, the fleeing is from too pat a notion of contained structure to a wider arena of free play. But here we find the text working against its own devices. What enables it to flee at all is structure, the structure of the fugue, the same enabling structure from which it flees.
In expanding out into a fuguelike web of complexity, the text flees any too reductive attempt at assigning meaning, and we are tempted to coin yet another avoidance-term, from the usual root sem- denoting signs and meanings: semifuge, the text’s fleeing from facile assignments of meaning (semantics, sememes) to its signifiers. Yet one notices here that “semifuge” is also “semi-fuge,” a partial fleeing, for in textual movements along fugal lines, we do not flee wholly and forever from meaning. Rather, we recognize that meaning is deferred and relationally distributed. It would appear that the structure of the fugue—a structure redolent of fleeing, hence of avoidance of structure—is highly appropriate to a discussion of the text’s inevitable differential oscillations and self-subverting turns. It is interesting, in this regard, that the term fugue also means, in psychology, a pathological amnesia whereby the patient performs actions with apparent consciousness, actions of which there is later no memory. In keeping with this idea, we note that the text-as-fugue will be, as tends to be the case with texts sufficiently rich in linguistic potential, “unaware” of much of what it does. Elements in musical fugues get modulated up and down, get transmuted; the elements of the text do likewise. As usual, things are not simply themselves. Even the narrator says, “I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself’ (84). Indeed he is not; nor is Erich Zann.
And what of this strange old man? Significantly he is a stranger both literally and symbolically, in language and nationality, as a German among the French. He cannot communicate through speech and, capable of only an “execrable” French (87), must resort to German in hope of more effective expression. His surname, Zann, has no meaning in German. Phonetically it rather suggests sann, the irregular imperfect of sinnen, “to brood,” “to meditate over,” “to ponder,” suggesting a past and remembered mental activity. This, interestingly enough, is antithetical to the psychological sense of fugue.
This observation tends to separate Zann from “his” music, and we may question whether “of Erich Zann” in the title really limits itself to a phrasal genitive and makes the title only a euphonic-syntactic variant on “Erich Zann’s Music.” What music, if any, “belongs” to Erich Zann? What is the music “of” Erich Zann? There is music associated with him, but the text is not always clear on the point of who produces it. When the narrator comes upstairs and listens at Zann’s door, he sometimes hears strains having “a symphonic quality” that he cannot “conceive as produced by one player” (88). Here both the source of the music and the textual unity of Zann are called into question. We cannot know for certain who produces some of the music, and we cannot say that Zann is “himself” any more than the narrator is.
The old man’s given name, Erich, as a cognate of Eric or Erik, comes from the Indo-European root reg-, “to move in a straight line,” “to rule,” whence derive many terms connoting straightness and conformity to systems: rectify, rectangle, regiment, regular, and the like, as well as the Latin rex. The etymological content of the name works in a way in consonance with, in a way contrary to, the old man as a character. We associate him with music, which is after a fashion regular (and even “ruled,” written on lines) but which cannot be too much so. Indeed the music associated with Erich Zann becomes anything but regular and controlled. The old man is inseparable from “his” music, which of course is of the Muses.
Muse is of (appropriately) unclear origin but is associated with the root men-, “to have one’s mind roused,” “to love,” “to be mad,” “to think,” “to remember,” among whose numerous derivatives is the Greek maenad, a worshiper at the wild rites of Dionysus. Yet the god of music was Apollo. With regard to the eternal tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian—as Nietzsche would have it, the freely imaginative or creative versus the controlled or rational—we find in music a double potential belying any such fixed bipolarity. The narrator, in describing Zann’s music as “weird harmonies” (87, emphasis added), has intimated that that music is not simply melodic, not self-identical, not monadic. The old man derives his character from music but in so doing, inherits impossibility of simple characterization. Music may partake both of the Apollonian and of the Dionysian, both of order and of wildness.
While the narrator has described the old man’s music as a manifestation of genius, he has also said, at one point near the end, that the unseen viol’s sounds have become “a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could ever suggest” (90, emphasis added). This remark, aside from suggesting that it cannot suggest what it suggests, makes reference primarily to the orgiastic (Dionysian), but in mechanical (controlled, well-ordered) we sense a paradoxical whiff of the Apollonian as well. The same root men- which is associated with music gives rise not only to the word monster—well in keeping with the text’s descriptions of the final music, which one would indeed think of as monstrous—but also to the Greek Mnemosyne, the patroness of memory. This notion is antithetical to the psychological notion of fugue, so that the old man’s music is in every way problematic. It characterizes him but in so doing shows (Latin monstrare, monstrousness again) that he cannot be unambiguously characterized.
It is significant that muse is related etymologically to mosaic, the pattern in which the Muses in olden times were often portrayed. Erich Zann, obviously, is a mosaic himself. The root reg- of his given name, after all, is responsible not only for derivatives denoting regular and Apollonian qualities but (by way of the Celtic form rig-yo-) also for that frequent Lovecraftian adjective eldritch, redolent of weirdness, irregularity, in a sense the opposite of the Apollonian character. The old man is as fugally complex as his music.
What can we make of the relation between the narrator and Erich Zann? Superficially they are contrasted by their actions, their functions within the text. The old man plays music, the narrator listens; the old man is active, the youth passive. Yet here again we run into complexities. We find that each end of the binary opposition of activity versus passivity contains the other, such that the bipolarity dismantles itself into things that differ from themselves more than from each other. The text symbolically attempts to insert space between Zann and the young student (the narrator moves from the fifth floor to the third, leaving the fourth and fifth floors empty between the third floor and the garret), but covertly it works to remove that spacing. The differentiating space is not between the two men but within each of them.
Erich Zann appears as the active pole of the opposition because he plays. Whether one takes the verb in the performative sense most commonly suggested by such a context or in the ludic sense, a sense not unknown even in the language of music, where one finds such terms as prelude, Zann’s textual role marks him as active. The more youthful narrator, on the other hand, is passive, as a listener. He listens to the old man’s music whether by permission or without it, and again the old man as giver or withholder of that permission is presented as the active figure, in contrast with the passivity of the one who only receives or does not receive permission. But with the textual portrayal of the narrator as the passive figure, one finds evidence that he is in fact active. Thus he resembles the other figure with whom he is supposed to be contrasted. It is the narrator’s coming to the house to live that occasions, if not the playing of Zann’s music itself, the effects of that playing. It is he who moves in and is dynamic; Zann is there already and is static. The narrator, by listening, causes the music to impinge upon the textuality of the tale. Just as a text writes itself by being read, so the music of (by, or associated with) Erich Zann in a sense plays itself by being heard. Without the narrator there would be in textual terms no music, not merely because the narrator narrates but because he brings the music into play by hearing it.
Conversely, Erich Zann, portrayed as the active figure, the player of the music, in a number of ways more resembles the supposedly passive narrator than he resembles his supposedly active “self.” First, if the sign of passivity here is listening, then it is important that Zann listens, even though marginal textual references to his listening appear to serve only to heighten suspense. We are told that “unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly” (89), and that he has “a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening” (88). Indeed it is clear in the text that Zann is captive to whatever spectral influence lies beyond the curtained window. He is defensive and is in the end passively possessed. Further, we are early given to understand that he is mute. Besides suggesting (on an associational level) mutability or passive changeability, which Zann indeed undergoes on the final, fateful night, his muteness leads to another linguistic connection. Dumb as a nautical term means “not self-propelling,” that is, passive—acted upon rather than acting. Zann writes lengthy notes intended for the narrator, but they are carried off by the wind before they can be read. Zann, still not the active figure, is not destined to be “Erich the read.” His only claim to being active seems to reside not in his written notes but in his musical notes. If we understand writing in the broadest and most primal sense to be the drawing of distinctions, the generation of differential networks, then when his viol begins to “rend the night,” Zann is doing precisely that—writing, carving or cleaving the undifferentiated world into difference. (His scribblings in German make no difference.)
Yet as we have observed, in a very real way it is the narrator who “writes” or creates the music, or its effects, so that even here Zann is denied the status of activity. His music consists of the effects of writing in the broad sense mentioned. It ties itself to language by being called “a chaotic babel of sound.” It operates through and by language, whereof the agent is more the narrator than the viol player, whose French is “laboured” and “execrable,” whose German is unread, and whose throat is capable only of an “inarticulate cry.” The reference to Babel reminds us that structures become subverted. Indeed the structure of simple activity versus passivity here is typically given to destruction, not by an angry God, but by itself—by its always already indwelling incapacity for holding together. We note that this situation is symbolically adumbrated in the text’s early description of the houses in the rue d’Auseil: “Occasionally, an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch” (84). The text describes the unraveling of its own oppositional pairs, an archetypal phenomenon.
And what of the setting itself, the mysterious rue d’Auseil? The closest word in French is le seuil, “threshold,” both in the architectural and the metaphoric sense. Au seuil means “at the threshold.” The rue d’Auseuil, then, is the street of being at the threshold, suggestive of the narrator’s being figurally and literally on the threshold of beholding the cosmic mysteries beyond the curtain. But with thresholds there are difficulties. A threshold is both a stage of expectation and a barrier. Like a door or a window or a hymen, it both invites and prohibits entry, both marks a place of conduit and serves as an obstruction. A threshold is a celebration of absence: when it is a stage of expectation or promise, that is, a stage at which one is on the verge of an advance, it suggests the absence of that toward which one has not yet advanced. And when threshold connotes doorway, blockage, barrier, it is the agent of absence and denial. Erich Zann’s window—etymologically, “wind-eye,” here not a seeing eye but a temptation to and a denial of seeing—both invites the narrator to behold the wonders beyond and shows him only absence, “the blackness of space illimitable” (90), when he does look. The hymen is broken, but what it protects is still and forever virginal. And the never-resolving fugue plays on and on in the dark without end.
As one would expect of such fugal activity, “The Music of Erich Zann” overwraps itself with perplexity and polyphony. It enjoys structure only to overrun it, to melt and reshape its lines, to use structure to deny structure as structure. It is “centrifugal,” shunning the possession of any center, any privilege of structure or reading, any characterizations free of paradox. Like a fugue of Bach, it resonates in a dizzying plurality of voices, daring us to hear and understand, promising us only that we never wholly can. For this, like the young student who cannot find the rue d’Auseil again, we are “not wholly sorry” (91).