Musical Stimulacra

Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen

Ivan Delazari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000327809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fiction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass's Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction's music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music's physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen—to musical words and worlds.

1 On Verbally Transmitted Music

In strictly theoretical terms, there are some fundamental uncertainties about musical effects of fiction: Can music be verbally transmitted? When we read a fictional narrative that speaks about or otherwise draws from music, do we end up having a musical experience? Turning to novels, it makes sense to wonder: Is the music we encounter in fiction of any special importance? There are straighter ways of acquiring musical experience. Why would novels “want” to mediate music in the first place? Why would we read fiction for “musical stimulacra”—even the most stimulating simulations of music—when we can just go and listen?

Such commonsensical doubts are reasonable, yet there are also quite casual arguments to confront them. Not everyone can hear, and those who can will always hear things differently. When people read about music, whether in reviews or novels, they obtain some verbal guidance in musical understanding. Those who generally care less about music than about literature may even, by way of reading, end up thinking more about, listening more to, and discovering more in the music when it directly presents itself. Furthermore, not all music is available at all times. Works by fictional composers are simply nowhere to find but in fiction: Would that necessarily mean that these nonexistent pieces have nothing to do with music? Undeniably, the experience of reading a verbal account of a musical composition is never identical to the experience of hearing the work performed. However, considering attentional and mnemonic constraints that accompany actual listening, there is no telling which of the two experiences—hearing the music or reading about it—is experientially richer in all cases. Listening does not even exhaust the very basic sides of musical experience: Such practices as composing and performing are far less readily available to most people. We can try them through imaginative reading—that which also lets us visit nineteenth-century Russia and Germany by flipping pages of Ivan Turgenev and Thomas Mann (Hemingway 115). Even a glimpse of elementary musicology, not to mention full-scale textbooks, may retune our ear, so every time novelistic discourse dares communicate some music theory (even folk or fake), it can affect and alter our musical sensibility.

That is not to suggest that people read novels for music once we exclude music-biased critics and collectors of musician characters, literary imitations of musical forms and genres, or sonorous storytelling styles. A musical effect of fiction, if there is such a thing, is a byproduct delivered in a package of complex and multilayered stimuli forming a musical stimulacrum. But what is not a byproduct? Is there one technique or message constitutive to all fiction? Fiction is not more inherently social, political, philosophical, or moral than musical. Social, political, philosophical, moral, and musical issues are conditionally foregrounded and connoted by literary narrative. Leo Tolstoy’s “Kreytserova sonata” (The Kreutzer Sonata, 1889)—a scandalous novella that may still shock readers with its radical ideas against marriage and sex voiced by a wife-murderer—is, technically, not about music, despite its Beethovenian title. But the musical stimulacrum of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Op. 47 performed in chapter XXIII is so powerful that, after reading Tolstoy, many people “have no trouble at all hearing sex in the first movement” of the Beethoven (Kramer, “Music Recomposed” 25). The reported puzzling and devastating effect of that music on Tolstoy’s narrator, aligned with aesthetic and ethical messages of the book, “infects” the reader irresistibly.

In what follows, music is conceptualized as a salient presence on literature’s margin, with the assumption that whatever occurs on outer borders can instruct us about inner territories. Wherever the academically recognized center of literature—its literariness—happens to be located at a given moment, music—as approximated in Northrop Frye’s Aristotelian notion of melos—never takes its final leave from the literary. In cultural history, there have been “melocentric” ages (cf. Benson, “Modernism” 92–98). Under romantic, symbolist, or modernist tenets, for instance, a significant proportion of verbal art “aspires towards the condition of music,” in Walter Pater’s phrasing (106). Long after this line of thought went out of fashion, some twenty-first-century novels still demonstrate that the idea of “literary music” (cf. Benson, Literary Music) has not quite exhausted itself in the two preceding centuries.

“Installing” musical forms apparently alien to literary technical gear enables fiction “to incite a metareferential reflection on the limits and strengths of the novel as such” (Petermann 3). Translating that into Jean Baudrillard’s terms, fiction’s identity is made up and justified by an incorporated simulation of music, as in “the proof of art through antiart” (Baudrillard 19).

Music is the proof of literature, and vice versa—interchangeably. It is no accident that Werner Wolf considers “self-referentialization” in literature as a key indicator of what he theorizes under the rubric of “the musicalization of fiction” (Musicalization 74). When a novel, such as Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), refers to music, it also refers to itself—to how novels are, or сould be, composed. When a literary work refers to itself instead of (or, as in Huxley, along with) politics, history, and morals, it is like music, which, in its “absolute” form, does not refer to anything beyond itself—the idea articulated by Pater in the late nineteenth century as self-evident, born but a hundred years earlier. According to Carl Dahlhaus, “in the 1790s, the interpretation of ‘indeterminacy’ as ‘sublime’ rather than ‘vacuous’” endowed instrumental music with aesthetic currency that it previously lacked: “That the content of music can be determined not at all or only vaguely no longer demotes the allegro of a symphony … but raises it to a sublime position” (Idea, 63). The romantic sentiment favoring the inexpressible replaces the verbose rationality of the Enlightenment aimed at discoverable truths, so music without words becomes an artistic ideal: Without words, there is nothing it can speak wrongly with or about.

In light of that belief, an association with music may occur quite naturally every time fiction is stripped of its mimetic commitment to portray concrete reality. In addition, taking music for a subject matter allows literature to address the tricky problem of musical meaning in a variety of cultural contexts. Music in novelistic narrative is, in this sense, an exemplary touchstone for lots of other things—embodied experiences as well as impossible objects and abstract ideas that the novel communicates to its readers. The ability to transmit the experience of music is a test for the general “experientiality of narrative,” to import the key term of Monika Fludernik’s 1996 Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology from the title of Marco Caracciolo’s 2014 book. If we read fiction for experiencing a fictional world on our own subjective terms, music—as an idea of musicality, as the social practice of listening and playing, and as a companion in our everyday life glued to personal memories—may constitute a very important part of that experience.

Major indeterminacies regarding this book’s raison d’être dwell not as much in the kind of hasty dismissal of its relevance on casual grounds, which I have addressed above, as in the realms of literary theory and musical aesthetics. First, it is worth asking if there exists a particular class of fiction that is related to music in a special way. Are some novels more musical than others? Second, one could wonder if there is anything musical about the experience of reading such fictions. Can literature transcend itself to entail something that music is considered to be uniquely responsible for? How much depends on the reader, and what can we know about readerly experiences of music? Third, what is musical experience, after all? Fourth, which narrative devices in verbal narrative could serve to make such experience “story-driven”—i.e., invoke it in the absence of direct musical stimuli, by generating musical stimulacra?

Those four concerns detail my initial two questions and reformulate them for this chapter to share a theoretical view of the basic concepts that one may need to envision before deciding whether and how musical experience can reach readers of particular books.

What Kind of Fiction?

In 2008, Gerry Smyth describes what he sees as a “musical turn” in contemporary British novel and complains about the excessive nomenclature for the kind of literary texts in question. Mentioning “melopoetic fiction, musical fiction, the intermedial novel, the ekphrastic novel, interart discourse, verbal music,” and several others, Smyth adds “music-novel” on top (9), counter his own implicit appeal for Ockham’s razor.

Some items in this necessarily incomplete and ever-growing thesaurus suggest singling out an entire subgenre, as Emily Petermann does explicitly in The Musical Novel (2014). Other notions among and apart from those listed in Smyth, such as Steven Paul Scher’s “verbal music,” Wolf’s “imaginary content analogies” to music, or my “musical stimulacra,” refer restrictively to specific passages in literary works. In addition, Wolf’s “musicalized fiction” is not a genre but a result of intracompositional intermedial engagement between the arts due to the strictly defined procedures of “musicalization of fiction.” Hazel Smith’s “musico-literary miscegenation” modifies musicalization to account for cross-cultural exchange involving media, genres, styles, and technologies beyond the baroque, classical, and romantic idioms that Wolf’s concept of musicalization primarily rests upon.

No matter whether the emphasis in the studies of music in literature is theoretical or critical, scholars continue to produce and supplement catalogues of literary texts that bear musical relevance. From some samples discussed in Calvin Brown’s seminal 1948 Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts to dozens of entries in Kellie Brown’s 2005 book-length Annotated Bibliography and Reference List of Musical Fiction and on, this unofficial canon grows naturally as new literature comes out. Recent entrants in English include, for instance, the novels by Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing, 2016), Bradford Morrow (The Prague Sonata, 2017), and Matthew Herbert (The Music, 2018).

My own terminological choices in this book are stipulated by the wish not to multiply entities without necessity. Where possible, I utilize an existing expression instead of coining one, being at times selective in order to avoid terminological ambiguity. Stephen Benson’s “literary music,” for instance, sounds somewhat counterintuitive, since not music but fiction is the object under scrutiny, while many other terms cited in Smyth appear to be either too broad (interart discourse) or too narrow (ekphrastic novel) for my material; hence “musical stimulacra.”

I do not use Petermann’s “musical novels” because I am not convinced that the group of texts in question does indeed make up a genre. Various musical leanings that novels, novellas, tales, and short stories may pursue fail to collectively construct a distinct formulaic pattern of the kind that we find in modes of genre fiction (love romances, detective stories, and alike). Stable genre systems of normative poetics—ancient, medieval, or classicist—are historically sealed and disinclined to accommodate new members. Genre taxonomies used to embrace both formal and thematic features: A certain poetic meter or versification principle, for instance, was ascribed to a particular mood or subject matter. For the novel, which rises on the ruins of the classical order, this correlation generally does not work, and were music-novels merely novels about music, we would still expect a paradigm of parallel subgenres to cover, say, painting and plumbing, in line with others to counterpoise them. However, painting-novels and plumbing-novels could be qualified as species of the German Künstlerroman (“artist novel,” a Bildungsroman subclass) and the Soviet proizvodstvennyi roman (“production novel,” a major specimen of socialist realism), respectively. There is little need to introduce a new category for what fits an old one. Narratives about musicians are also quite safe under the Künstlerroman rubric. If no musical novel genre seems to have established itself through authorial and critical efforts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when music importantly preoccupies the (post-)romantic and modernist aesthetic thought, it may now be a little late to strive for its recognition. Similarly, although Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is a celebrated token of nautical fiction, we would not benefit much from tagging Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) as a dendrological novel, though it is set among and devoted to trees. Ecofiction readily claims that text, as well as the Melville.

I would therefore refrain from identifying prose narratives entertaining a musical interest of sorts as forming a subclass of fiction: The existing genre typology is asymmetric enough to not require further complications. However, what resists critical rigor may still structure readerly demand, cognitive as well as commercial—hence “novels about music/composers” forming a Wikipedia category and identified by web search engines. Such demand is founded on certain associative processes in the reader’s mind that stories may trigger, which I would identify with the act of “musicalization,” borrowing the key term from Wolf’s vocabulary. Wolf’s well-formulated grounds for telling a truly musicalized novel from an insufficiently musicalized one allow him to contrast Huxley’s Point Counter Point with André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1925)—almost identical in so many other respects—and dismiss Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) for failing the musicalization test (Musicalization 82, 85–92). The fact that some readers and critics of Gide and Sterne would draw musical connections nonetheless, finding something particularly musical about the experience of reading them, is not necessarily a delusion. Rather, it may be related to the aesthetic illusion—another area of Wolf’s own expertise.

The phrase “the musicalization of fiction” originates in Huxley’s Point Counter Point, where a character, novelist Philip Quarles, coins and briefly explains it in his notebook (384). Theorizing musicalization, Wolf distinguishes between “thematization” and “imitation” of music in literature. Respectively, fiction can refer to music in the mode of “telling” about it or resemble music iconically by “showing” some of its techniques and structural properties (Musicalization 44–45). Mere thematization—the presence of characters from the musical trade, compositions played and discussed in the fictional reality—is not enough for a text to be properly musicalized. “It needs to be emphasized that we can only speak of attempts at a ‘musicalization’ of literature, if some kind of … intermedial ‘iconicity’—text imitating music—occurs in a work of literature,” Wolf contends (“Musicalized Fiction” 48). Petermann also privileges intermedial imitation in stating that the “genre definition of the musical novel relies on a significant or overarching presence of some variety of music on a formal, structural level; any explicit thematization of it is strictly optional” (3).

Such essentialism falls vulnerable to the critique that, as Smith observes in The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century musical products, which literature profoundly interacts with, do not obey procedural norms of the Common Practice Period in the history of Western art music (roughly, 1650–1900). After all, literature too, with the modern novel devouring and digesting epic, dramatic, and lyric elements, resists formalization and classification. The novel is diverse and omnivorous: It recycles all kinds of plots and styles. The twentieth century unleashes forms of music as well as forms of literature to overcome all normativity. Vain efforts to find steady parallels between such emancipated forms across the arts and complaints about their mutual incompatibilities reflect a normal state of affairs: Things need not fit perfectly. Absolute equivalence is redundant.

My premise on musicalization is that it is not only a textual phenomenon but also a readerly one. Novels are musicalized by readers, who associate them with music and experience them accordingly. In this sense, the musicalization of fiction is optional, although it often starts as an authorial project, with story and discourse parameters intentionally modeled on musical templates. The roles of the author and the reader merge from the outset: In fashioning musicalized designs, novelists such as Huxley and his invented Quarles thematize and imitate music for the sake of producing certain readerly effects. For summoning those effects, musicological precision is far less important than figurative, at times “impressionistic” suggestiveness, which some critics praise, and others mock. From a reader-oriented perspective, there is no urge to dismiss intermedial thematization as the inferior secondary mode of musicalization, because readers have better chances of perceiving formal analogies to music when their expectations are guided toward the conceptual domain of music—through explicit textual reference to musical phenomena. Musical stimulacra, then, are textual correlates of musicalization, pretexts for the reader to musicalize. Literary imitations as well as thematizations of music can both serve as musical stimulacra; they are either ostensible or inconspicuous triggers of musicalization.

Thematization of music occurs in texts and/or on their paratextual “thresholds,” in Gérard Genette’s parlance (Paratexts): Titles, epigraphs, prefaces, notes, and external authorial comments may contain a musical reference. For example, the incessant critical commotion around the golden standard of intermedial imitation, the “Sirens” episode in Ulysses (cf. Shockley 47–73), would be impossible without James Joyce’s 1919 letter to Harriet Weaver and his manuscript marginalia indicating the mysterious fuga per canonem as the episode’s formal matrix (Ziolkowski 138–40). Such authorial commentary is a case of “contextual thematization” of music from Wolf’s typology (Music...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Permissions
• List of Abbreviations and Symbols
• A Pre-phase of Musical Experience
• 1 On Verbally Transmitted Music
• 2 Vollmann’s Verbal Scores
• 3 The Metamuse of Gass
• 4 Powers and Els
• 5 What Comes Afterwords
• Works Cited
• Index