Facts, fictions and the Alma Mahler machine : a schizoanalysis

In this review article, I will enlist the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze with Felix Guattari, to critique the standard model of music criticism as practised in musicology, and to facilitate a reading of the abstract machine,1 which I will call the Alma Mahler machine. In the first section of the article, I will perform a conventional review of two books that have been recently added to the continuously expanding research about Alma Mahler (1879–1964): a novel by Mary Sharratt and a biography by Oliver Hilmes. I will show that the construction of the molar2 figure of Alma Mahler—variously labelled ‘composer, author, daughter, sister, mother, wife, lover and muse’ (Sharratt, dust jacket)— forces it into repressive desire: in Hilmes’ biography, in particular, the binary machine operates to polarize the rational male (the author) against the irrational (hysterical) female (his subject). In so doing, his biography mirrors the patriarchal norms that underpin much biographical research writ large. However, as I will also argue, the creative, inventive approach to biography, as undertaken by Sharratt, transmutes desire to a life-force or flow in which its dynamic movement of connections, with the socius,3 music and words, releases flows of positive desire. In other words, while adopting a conventional biographical approach, Sharratt’s imaginative narration of the Alma Mahler story shifts it beyond the stratified hierarchies that repress identity and, instead, seeks to affirm the triumph of the feminist spirit as it traverses the Alma Mahler assemblage. This contrasts the story of Alma Mahler, as narrated by Hilmes. Here, the Alma Mahler machine is set in motion towards its own destruction, reinforcing and reproducing the connection between desire and lack. The lines that run through the assemblage of Hilmes’ book pathologize desire and bind the subject to the sense of its own impossibility, detaching it from its creative possibilities.