ABSTRACT
Literary music represents music to the reader, aiming thereby to make music present. The process of (re)presentation requires of music that it be embedded in the worldly fabric of the novel, however much the narrative is dependant for content upon the manifest difference of music (I am thinking in particular of the novels of Seth and Kundera). As I have sought to suggest, in line with much contemporary musicology, music is always already worldly: socially situated, entwined with words, however silently. The bind in which the musically-interested writer finds her or himself – music is interesting for its musicality, but it is this above all else that will escape the writing – thus takes on allegorical status. Barthes proposes that the value of music is its usefulness as a singularly effective metaphor.1 We might counter that literary music’s language is an allegory of the necessary metaphors of music itself. The bind remains, however. Literary music is founded on an empirical impossibility: language is silent, perhaps never more so than in poetic attempts to replicate some
pre-defined aspect of musicality.2 In one sense this is merely a local instance of the constitutive bind of literature, its once-removed status as representation; or, to be less logocentric, its constitutive possibility. Yet at the risk of reanimating aesthetic hierarchies, it could be argued that the distance predicated in representation is felt most keenly in the representation of music. Hence the perennial bemoaning of verbal descriptions, the ‘verbiage’ of ‘almost everything said about musical composition by critics, by poets or writers of fiction, by the ordinary listener and music-lover’: ‘It is talk which enlists metaphor, simile, analogy in a more or less impressionistic, wholly subjective magma’.3 Even critics of this severity admit selected exceptions, however, in much the same way as the fictional and theoretical texts selected in the present study exhibit a particular attention to musicality. The door is left open to the possibility of a language suitably attuned to that which it is not, or even just to the grasp, in phenomenological terms, of what happens in listening. Still, the more successful we feel the evocation of music to be, the more oxymoronic is the novel, in that the proximity to music only serves to draw attention to what is missing.
