ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the musical dimensions of William H. Gass’s last novel, Middle C (2013). The coiner of metafiction, Gass, subverts the practice of reading for the plot. Middle C is fashioned as a Bildungsroman, but it unfollows the genre requirement for the protagonist’s evolution: Joseph Skizzen’s musical education does not progress, while his eventual music professorship is fraud under threat of exposure. The chapter questions Gass’s stereotyped reputation for abstract play of highbrow style addressed to a disembodied intellect. In the novel, Gass’s reader is delicately redirected from Skizzen’s petty life to the metaphorical tenets of musical experience, passive and active. The former is realized as Skizzen’s failed diegetic involvements with Beethoven and Schoenberg. The latter promotes him ironically to a composer of prose music—a single sentence seeking to parallel Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism. In dozens variations of that sentence, Gass’s “music of prose” performs itself. Even though music is diegetically mistreated, the reader is reimbursed with non-diegetic music—Gass’s plot-resistant narrative and his sonorous “word music” of prose rhythms and rhymes. The absent music becomes experientially valid and stimulating for Gass’s devoted readership. Even dysfunctional verbal imitations of music rest upon powerful conceptual metaphors of the embodied mind.
