Image—Movement—Pulse

In act I, sc. 3, of Pelléas et Mélisande (1895), Mélisande and Pelléas look out over the sea as storm clouds gather on the horizon. Despite diminishing visibility, they find themselves immersed in a world of images, which resolve into a parallel series of overlapping perceptions: one of a ship leaving harbor, the other of beacons lining the far shore. The scene can thus be understood as a staging of perception, a paradiscursive articulation of a historical mode of cognition richly described in Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896). As the ship moves out to sea, it sails into and out of the last remaining streak of sunshine, encouraging us to apprehend the chain of images as a seemingly continuous movement in time. In its mimetic doubling of contemporaneous studies of motion, however, the scene lapses into what Bergson calls the “cinematographic illusion,” a series of still images to which movement has been added: the singing of the sailors on board, hoisting its sails, divide the ship’s motion (and the music) into discrete, separable sections, rendering time discontinuous. Turning on the palpable sense of pulsation in the orchestral surround, the article draws on Bergson’s consideration of “qualitative multiplicity” in the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) to reconstruct our intuitions of musical meter, with an ear toward restoring these measures to durée.