The Point of Counterpoint in Fiction

Alan Shockley, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-Century Novel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 97809-7546-6199-3 (hbk), £55.


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.

Portrait of a Modern Man

Anthony Levings, 'Futures Past: The End of the World News', in Alan Roughley (ed.) Anthony Burgess and Modernity, intro. David Lodge (Manchester University Press, 2008)

"Anthony Levings’s ‘Futures past: The End of the World News’ ... adds to our sense of why Burgess’s creativity tended to involve generic experimentation, generic hybridity and narrative structures in which time moves both diachronically and synchronically. Levings argues, after acknowledging that the novel’s origins ‘appear various and overly avant-garde and with it ambivalent’ and that its themes ‘do not guide the reader into a meaningful way of reading the novel’, that the disorientation which The End of the World News tends to produce in readers can be mitigated somewhat if its social, political and philosophical concerns are read in light of Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Koselleck’s work offers us a comprehensive reflection on the nature of modernity by way of its exploration of how ideas and approaches to history and the notion of the historical itself changes from the medieval to the modern era. Centred on the French Revolution, Koselleck’s study shows how this event ‘created a shift in terminology from histories to history, and developed the modern conception of the importance of temporality and chronology’.

"Levings’s analysis highlights how Burgess manipulates genre and narrative as part of a process of semantic and epistemological deconstruction, a process which lays bare the importance of narrative to understanding but also its failure to produce understanding – understanding, that is, which leads to change. A key narrative device employed by Burgess to underline the peculiar status of narrative to understanding is anachronism. As Levings sees it, generic deviations ‘highlight the anachronistic qualities of the structuring narratives: the narratives are at once necessary, but at the same time out of place’. Further, Burgess uses anachronism to ‘sensitize’ the reader to the importance of historical interpretation; the work of sensitisation helps to ‘open’ the reader ‘to the possibility that the point in time can be connected to other points in time’. Thus, Burgess’s experimentation should be seen, not as a ‘trick’ played on the less educated and less creative reader, but as Burgess’s confession of ‘his own fallibility in writing’ and his desire that the reader engage in serious and creative interpretation of history." (Carson Bergstrom, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14)

Author? Publisher? Bookseller? Printer? Social Networking? Blogging? Published? Self-published? Short-run Books? Print-on-Demand Books? eBooks?

I am currently updating for publication a paper presented at the University of Bedfordshire (http://cwparadox.wikidot.com). It is aimed at postgraduate students who have embarked on a Creative Writing PhD and discusses the options open to them when it comes to publishing. This is a call for as many viewpoints (and statistics) from those embedded in the publishing industry as possible. Are you an author whose books sell well? Are you a publisher disillusioned by eBook sales and the costs involved? Are you a bookseller who is watching sales decline in the current economic climate? Have you managed to use social networking to establish yourself in publishing or is it all a mystery to you? Are blogs a time-consuming distraction? Is print advertising still worth the bother? Are you making money through self-publishing? Are you a printer seeing expensive machinery left idle?

Please comment on the site or email me. All comments and opinions welcome.

University of Kent Library (PhD Thesis)

Anthony Levings, 'The Public Personage as Protagonist in the Novels of Anthony Burgess', PhD Thesis (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007). Library Record

When Anthony Burgess began writing novels that contained public personages as protagonists (Nothing Like the Sun, MF, Napoleon Symphony, ABBA ABBA, Earthly Powers, The End of the World News, Mozart and the Wolf Gang, A Dead Man in Deptford) in the latter half of the twentieth century, the challenge was to move away from (or re-manipulate) modernism but at the same time avoid a straightforward return to nineteenth-century (historical) realism. However, recognition and understanding of the way in which history is incorporated into the novel has changed dramatically over the last four decades. Burgess must now be read not only against earlier novelists, theorists and philosophers (particular examples being James Joyce, Roland Barthes and Kant), but also against a whole body of work by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, John Banville and Günter Grass, as well as theorists such as Linda Hutcheon, Hayden White, Thomas M. Greene and, once again, Umberto Eco, to name but a few. For these writers have pushed the boundaries of how history is now understood in terms of the novel.

International Anthony Burgess Foundation (Symposium Paper)

Anthony Levings, 'Burgess and Kafka: Second Selves', paper presented at the Second International Anthony Burgess Symposium, Anthony Burgess: Selves and Others, Liverpool Hope University, 26–28 July 2007. Symposium Details 

John Keats dreams of F.B. in ABBA ABBA and John B. Wilson, BA writes of a man named K. in The End of the World News. They are initials that echo across time, and though they have other meanings as well, they appear to point a finger towards one of Kafka’s most famous works, The Trial. It is a subtle signpost, and one that highlights the shared indulgence of Burgess and Kafka for self-insertion into their novels as second selves. By examining models from the recent work of Frédéric Regard on Burgess’s biography of Shakespeare, the paper demonstrates how the apparent simplicity of inserting autobiographical elements into ABBA ABBA, in particular, is an acknowledgement that the self has an undeniable influence on the interpretation of histories, and cannot be held apart from them. In doing so the paper demonstrates how Burgess not only moulds Keats in the novel but also how the poems of Belli are changed as well in line with the author’s own preoccupations.

Anthony Burgess Centre (Symposium Paper)

Anthony Levings, ‘Incongruous Voices: Musical Philosophies in Mozart and the Wolf Gang’, paper presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Anthony Burgess, ‘Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music’, University of Angers, France, 8–9 December 2006. Programme

Bringing together Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Prokofiev, Bliss, Rossini, Stendhal, Berlioz, Gershwin, Schoenberg, Henry James and Lorenzo Da Ponte in colloquy would appear to be the perfect way of coming to understand the place of Mozart among the great composers, or at the very least the position of Mozart within Burgess’s own personal ‘sonic universe’. Heaven in Mozart and the Wolf Gang, however, is a place where everyone talks and no one listens. As such, although there are many arguments, in particular concerning the cerebral and the bodily in relation to musical counterpoint, no dialectic can be established to arrive at any meaningful conclusion. The novel instead starts and ends with unanswerable questions. It begins with the question: what is the relationship between Mozart’s bicentennial and the Gulf War? It ends with the question: what is the relationship between Mozart’s work and non-Western forms of music? Answers to these questions can be nothing more than speculative and often worryingly naive. The paper explains why this is by demonstrating how each of the composers is very much of their own time and place in terms of their musical philosophy and that in consequence the characters are not a collection of timeless and universal beings but a collection of anachronisms - not necessarily inseparable from their own time but incomplete without acknowledgement of it. The perspective is part of a much wider appreciation of the way in which the discussions that have taken place in the realm of music, and which are echoed throughout Mozart and the Wolf Gang, have influenced Burgess’s attitude towards not only music but also the individual.

University of Angers Press (Book Chapter)

Anthony Levings, 'Biographical Perspectives on Anthony Burgess (from Geoffrey Aggeler, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Roger Lewis and David Lodge)’, in Graham Woodroffe (ed.) Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2006), pp. 55-66. Angers Press

While the writers discussed in the paper do not encompass all of the writing on Anthony Burgess they do capture some very distinctive differences in approach. Geoffrey Aggeler in The Artist as Novelist, for example, provides at the beginning of his work an Enderby-esque portrait filled with a humour appropriate to consideration of a novelist often labelled as comic, whereas Roger Lewis is so humourless that he fails to see why Burgess should be allowed any extravagance whatsoever in his autobiographies or his fiction. A. S. Byatt meanwhile is shown to have reasons for her depictions of Burgess in fiction that go beyond a mere liking for the writer, and Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis are discussed with regard to their congruence and divergence on the man in question. Finally the paper addresses David Lodge’s criticism that has labelled Burgess as an author who is pursuing ‘the Ideal’ (a conclusion that arises from a very narrow section of the author’s work, but is surprisingly more valid than it at first appears). Additional to the writers named in the title, the paper also draws into its theoretical discussion Umberto Eco and Hayden White in order to demonstrate that the imaginary is an important element in biography.

International Anthony Burgess Foundation (Symposium Paper)

Anthony Levings, ‘The Opera Libretto as Narrative after Narrativism in The End of the World News and Mozart and the Wolf Gang’, paper presented at Anthony Burgess and Modernity: A Symposium, The International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF), Manchester, 7–9 July 2005. List of Speakers

End of the World Newsletter (Paper Review)

'Anthony Levings (Canterbury) reads a paper which at first seems to be all about Martin Amis’s The Information, but gradually we get the point. He talks about differing attitudes to AB from Kingsley Amis and Martin, literary rivalry, writerly doppelgangers (AB and JBW) and suddenly it hangs together. A good paper which should have been twice as long.'

Douglas Milton, 'Burgess on the Loire: A Celebration', End of the World Newsletter 1(1): 2-3. Download Newsletter (PDF)

Anthony Burgess Centre (Symposium Paper)

Anthony Levings, 'Anthony Outside, or Fictional, Critical and Biographical Perspectives on Anthony Burgess from Geoffrey Aggeler, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Roger Lewis and David Lodge', paper presented at the 2nd Anthony Burgess Symposium, 'The Lives of Anthony Burgess' at the University of Angers, France, 10-11 December 2004. Programme

Inter-Disciplinary Press (eBook Chapter)

Anthony Levings, ‘The Prince of the Powers of the Air: An Examination of Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers with Respect to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan’, in Daniel E. Keen and Pamela Rossi Keen (eds) Considering Evil and Human Wickedness (Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2004), ISBN: 1-904710-02-6, pp. 153-167. Download eBook (PDF)

Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness (Conference Paper)

Anthony Levings, ‘The Prince of the Powers of the Air: An Examination of Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers with Respect to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan’, paper presented at the Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, Fourth Global Conference, Anglo-American College, Prague, 21-26 March 2003.