ABSTRACT
While most attempts at writing prose works structured on musical ones have been little more than "superficial fancy," a few works have, to continue Burgess' quote, "gone whole hog." Burgess himself in his novel Napoleon Symphony and in the much smaller-scale "K. 550 (1788)" earnestly attempted to map pages of text onto forms proposed for pitches by Mozart and Beethoven. Joyce, in his last novel, Finnegans Wake, took up this challenge in a more in-depth and yet less overt way: writing a novel in a language reinvented and redefined for this work alone and making the reading of this novel a very similar experience to listening to a musical composition. More recently, David Markson and William Gaddis have written small-scale novels that, while not purporting to be musically formed, nevertheless work much like musical works. Music extends to them a great mystery; it challenges the limitations of language.
