It would be an understatement to write that Alan Shockley’s book, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel, is an ambitious work. Napoleon Symphony alone is one of the most challenging books for even the most adept of readers but to examine it alongside Ulysses and Finnegans Wake verges on the masochistic.
Thankfully the reader is eased into Shockley's act of what I am tempted to call critical self-flagellation by an introduction that is at once bold and illuminating.
I do not envy Shockley the task of writing such a broad ranging narrative that draws together music and fiction across civilizations ancient and modern, however. For, I know that it is an impossibility to satisfy the diverse opinions of all readers in such an account. I do envy, though, the skill with which he uses it to explain with clear-sightedness the musical forms of the sonata, symphony and fugue.
At the same time as explaining not only the theory of musical forms, Shockley explains the practice: in particular the way in which Beethoven mutated musical forms. He also draws parallels between the employment of musical forms and the novel from Pamela, Clarissa and Jane Austen forwards. But, most importantly, the introduction prepares the reader for failure ahead, warning of the fugue – which is far less narrative in nature than the sonata or symphony - and is so it seems itself a kind of ‘siren’ attracting writers only to leave them shipwrecked.
The first work to be appraised at length is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Chapter 2), and here Shockley explores what it means to write 'contrapuntally', and the difficulties of presenting simultaneity within the linearity of a text (pp. 20-1ff.). He argues that 'sustaining distinct plots in separate locations', as with Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, 'is just that and no more, it is a stock device of the novelist, and not an example of Polyphonic musical composition.' (p. 23)
The chapter goes on to draw from a short story by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, concrete/visual poetry, Anthony Burgess, Barthes, Balzac, and so on, as Shockley places in front of the reader his visions and variations of textual simultaneity. While also making enlightening points about authorial footnotes and marginal glosses, before explaining: 'Having just shown how counterpoint might crop up in a literary text, I have really only demonstrated attempts at non-imitative polyphony. A musical fugue is not a narrative. Though fugues and contrapuntal writing in general are often likened to conversations, canonic writing, or strict fugal technique, does not make for a tidy model for conversation.' (p. 28)
A close textual reading follows of the 'Ant Fugue' in Hofstadter's book (pp. 28ff.), and in this Shockley describes in detail the relationship between the text and Bach’s fugue, which plays in the background. This is a precursor to Shockley's reading of Burgess' 'K. 550 (1788)’ section of Mozart and the Wolf Gang (or On Mozart, as it was titled in the USA; pp. 33ff.), and his conclusion that Burgess's work, like Hofstadter’s, still ultimately 'fails' in its representation of music in text, but 'The basic language of "K. 550" is much more musical than Hofstadter's. Sentence structure breaks down, words shatter into fragments of words or morph into new amalgams. The reader senses an imitation of an allegro tempo ... ' (p. 44).
In his consideration of the ‘Sirens’ episode of Ulysses (Chapter 3), an old friend to those who have studied modern fiction, Shockley presents a close textual reading of the chapter’s centre piece, as well as a careful consideration of the work’s earlier critics. The outcome of which is that he rejects Margaret Rogers’s reading for its lack of rigorousness (p. 60), while Werner Wolf's fugal reading he finds unsatisfactory for its inability to convince completely (p. 61). He makes no bones about his opinion: 'Simply put, the main section of "Sirens" is not a fugue' (p. 66). There is no single overarching musical form that can be applied to ‘Sirens’, argues Shockley, instead it cannibalizes many forms and elements of music.
Conclusions on the ‘Sirens’ section of Ulysses lead into the longest chapter in the book, which is devoted to Burgess's Napoleon Symphony. Shockley explains Napoleon Symphony in a precise way, and carries the reader through a close and careful reading of the book, which as he rightly asserts has been largely ignored or derided by critics.
‘Napoleon Symphony works much more like poetry or music than like biography or a novel’ (p. 101), writes Shockley and he concludes: 'perhaps in his failed novel Napoleon Symphony, Burgess has ceased to be a novelist, and returned to his preferred profession - become again a composer.' (p. 116).
Although it is not spelt out in big letters, the reader presumes that Shockley finds Napoleon Symphony more authentic in its application of musical form than the ‘Sirens’ section of Ulysses. The reason for not spelling it out might well be that Shockley finds himself suddenly on dangerous ground with these opinions despite his earlier confidence about the correct way in which to approach Joyce's writing. This would be understandable given Joyce’s dominance in literary studies throughout the majority of the twentieth century.
The reader is returned to Joyce in the guise of Finnegans Wake, eager to grasp more wholly Shockley’s argument, and to understand where all the textual analysis is leading. Unsurprisingly, Shockley is not unaware of the challenge he faces. He writes: ‘To tackle even a small part of this work, [Joyce’s] colossal “legpull,” is a mammoth task’ (p. 117).
The moderately brief Wake chapter centres on the way in which Joyce overloads the text, gives it density, and virtually commissions critical works on his novel (p. 130). Shockley compares the Wake to a ‘polyphonic piece from the baroque period’, where one ‘must hop on at the beginning of the ride, and hang on for dear life’ (p. 131), an image of the sort that burns itself onto the mind’s eye.
In conclusion he writes: ‘Perhaps the Wake doesn’t read like a piece of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach, or any extant musical work; but it asks its readers to listen to its counterpoint, to join the dance at any point, and then to hold on breathlessly.’ (p. 136).
The theme of listening to novels like music is carried forward through the examination of David Markson's This is Not a Novel in Chapter 6, 'a beautiful, funny, sad little work’. ‘Reading it as music,’ writes Shockley, ‘teases out some of the myriad themes that fill this brief work, and gives the reader entrance into the book's melodies, its rhythms, and its multiple voices.' (p. 156).
Introduced later is the musical term ‘rondo’ (p. 170), and at this point I wondered whether continual returns to Burgess and Joyce in this book were intended by Shockley, himself a composer, to be musical, and to reflect patterns such as the rondo, the fugue, or the symphony. Which might explain the rough arrangement of the chapters following an, at times, inexact ‘hierarchization of success in the musicalization of the novel’.
It is Agapē Agape that draws Shockley’s ‘symphony’ to an end with what might be termed the ultimate musical novel, for the following reasons:
Quoting other novels, misquoting, and repeatedly using the same material from other novels … is very unnovelistic. Novels may refer to like themes from other novels, may share characters, may even include epigrams or other small quotations from other works, but they are not usually (built of) this material. Conversely, musical compositions are often composed in this way ... (p. 172).
The discussion of William Gaddis’ Agapē Agape is followed by a short conclusion (Chapter 8) that draws together loose ends, and leaves the reader with a tangible notion to take away with them when Shockley writes of music as a challenge to writers, and an attempt to extend the ‘reach’ of their ‘everyday tools’, i.e. words (p. 174).
Of course a book of this kind, which aims to consider ‘musical form and counterpoint in the twentieth-century novel’ in less than 200 pages, is unable to do everything. While mentions are made of Barthes and Bakhtin, for example, there is no detailed analysis of their works on polyphony. There is also no time to look in detail at works, such as Point Counter Point and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, also mentioned in passing.
Shockley further identifies a ‘cottage industry of musicological readings (conducted almost exclusively by literary critics)’ of Napoleon Symphony (p. 79), but no direct citations are attached to this. This is a shame, for I am familiar with the newspaper readings, and Geoffrey Aggeler’s discussion of Napoleon Symphony, as well as M. L. Holloway’s PhD thesis ‘Music in Words: The Music of Anthony Burgess and the Role of Music in his Literature’ (1997), and further points made by Christine Lee Gengaro in Anthony Burgess and Modernity (2008), but I didn’t uncover these other contemporaneous readings to which Shockley alludes in my own research on the novel.
These points aside, Chapter 3 should be read by every undergraduate student of literature (course convenors photocopy this for your course packs); Chapters 2 and 4 should be read by every scholar of Burgess (to overlook them when attempting to write anything on Mozart and the Wolf Gang and Napoleon Symphony respectively would be foolish); Chapter 1 (the Introduction) should be read by scholars interested in tracing the historical connections between literature and music; Chapters 5, 6 and 7 should be read by those interested in exploring the limits of making the novel musical.
References
Aggeler, Geoffrey, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979)
Holloway, M. L., ‘Music in Words: The Music of Anthony Burgess and the Role of Music in his Literature’, PhD thesis (University of Huddersfield, 1997)
Lee Gengaro, Christine, ‘From Mann to modernity: Anthony Burgess and the intersection of music and literature’, in Alan Roughley, ed., Anthony Burgess and Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2008)
A copy of this review can be read on the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF) Website.
