Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 418-421

Hoa Hoï Vuong, Musiques de roman: Proust, Mann, Joyce. Bruxelles: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes/Peter Lang, 2003; 427 pp.; ISBN: 9052011842

Their respective critical industries have separately produced detailed instructive commentary on the important role of music in each of the major authors named in this title, but Dr. Vuong accomplishes what we always hope a good comparatist will do for us. He has brought the chapters of a yet larger story together in an enhancing juxtaposition that illuminates one of the ruling passions of modernist "epic" and "encyclopedic" narration: its need for some guiding model of the operations of the human mind and of the human experience of being in the world. Proust, Mann, and Joyce represent the pinnacle among novelists who came to maturity in the Wagnerian and Nietzschean decades, when the romantic and symbolist discourses on the arts privileging music had already borne fruit; and in Proust, Mann, and Joyce the cult of music as a master reference became symphonic in its scope. Vuong meets the terrific challenge of sorting out the marked differences in these authors' approaches without losing sight of the deep epochal sharing of discoveries and concerns they exhibit — a sharing all the more remarkable because there is virtually no direct or reciprocal influence among them, rather only a considerable overlapping in their awareness of significant predecessors and contemporaries.

Vuong's study presents a feast of evidence and argument whose critical delights concentrates in a final paragraph that makes the high modernist novel, in effect, into a triumph of romantic and symbolist desires for a "pure" poetry (in line with Pater's dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music). Quite correctly, he grasps Mann's distinct temperament which tends more toward the elaboration of dialectical tensions, Logos versus Music in countless variations; but he also notes Mann's attempts to enact a musical principle, whereby Mannian narrative does intersect after all with the often more radically "musicalized" Proustian and Joycean varieties. Proust's painterly statement on "beauté absolue" in a letter of 13 June 1904 (written unbeknownst three days short of Bloomsday!), which Vuong cites (402), certainly reads simultaneously like a symbolist theory of the novel (e.g. Rilke's in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) and like Joycean aesthetics: beauty being to Proust "une espèce de fondu, d'unité transparente, où toutes les choses, perdant leur aspect premier de choses, sont venues se ranger les unes à côté des autres dans une espèce d'ordre, pénétrées de la même lumière, vues les unes dans les autres, sans un seul mot qui reste au dehors, qui soit resté réfractaire à cette assimilation." The reviewer's own prelude on the emergence of a new mental space with its [end page 418] unifying luminosity in modernist fiction (in chapter 1 of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context) dovetails with Vuong's coda, where the modernist super-epiphany is seen to be based mainly on the musical analogy, because, in the final analysis, what Joyce calls the ineluctable modalities of the "audible" and "visible" and the equally ineluctable, linguistic deep structure of the mind merge.

Vuong conducts us to another very important junction. He is aware of an evolution of the humoristic-encyclopedic novel from Rabelais to Sterne to Mann and Joyce, and he believes that, increasingly, not "sense but "operation" came to matter in these totalizing forms. Although he colors this trend at times a bit too heavily in such terms as Barthes' idea of texte as a system without end or center and Deleuze's idea of the multidimensionality of the brain, Vuong's treatment of key narrative works as way stations toward an extensively musicalized "operation" is quite precise and insightful. Thus, for example, he distinguishes the musicalization which Mann achieves by a complex montage technique in Dr. Faustus from the musicalized chapters in Ulyssses and theWake at large, because in Faustus (written at a rather late date close to the Wake) we still encounter a rather powerful structuring according to a hierarchy of rules. That is, Mann's dialogic discursivity trumps "pure" poetry. If Vuong had taken up the case of the novella Tonio Kröger (1903), he might have noticed that an extreme degree of musicalization, intimately linked with a cubistic montage technique, virtually abrogates any traditional hierarchy and introduces a crisis of "nowness" in this work, a nigh on unbearable recognition of life's patterns unfolding in and as recurrent leitmotifs. There is a back and forth in Mann's interest in and approach to music over his lifetime, rather than a steady progression. One could argue, as Roger Shattuck did, that the trauma of World War I galvanized Proust back into understanding what his artistic mission was and how he should close Recherche in a passionate coda, regathering all the themes into a Joyce-like permanent circularity which intimates eternity. In that sense, Proust reproaches Mann whose double experience of catastrophe deeply conditioned his humanistic fideism. As Vuong demonstrates, Mann cannot avoid problematizing the liberation of "voice" in Dr. Faustus (in which the agonizing Leverkühn feels the necessity to "revoke" Beethoven's Ninth Symphony), whereas Joyce effects the release of "voice" in the Wake through his conjuring of an eternal multiplicity, to a point almost eluding our imaging anything further. A question Vuong leaves clouded in some uncertainty is whether, in ideological postmodernist terms, this step obliges us to demote the extraordinary vitality of Joyce's own world view as a kind of wisdom; that is, to see the Wake as terminating the train of humanist reaffirmation from Rabelais to Sterne (and other thinkers) down to modernism. [end page 419]

There are so many excellent sections in this book that a review can only encourage readers to explore the treatment of specific works by enumerating some of the most prominent issues and phenomena on which Vuong focuses. His opening chapters frame the main matters and illustrate them by naming a bevy of relevant authors in addition to his key trio, so that Musiques de roman will long serve as a kind of "Bible" for discussions of this aspect of modernist creativity. The biggest peak into which things converge is the question of "intermediality," that is, the ways in which allusion or imitative use cross back and forth among various media of expression; in this case, the ways in which music functions as theme, quotation, analogy, metaphor, and/or structuring principle in literature, and the modern novelists go beyond its roles established in the romantic-symbolist heritage. Vuong sorts through kinds of literary referentiality in order to define a newer mimesis of subjectivity in fiction, which he correctly associates with the aesthetic-metaphysical trend found in Hegel and (more importantly) Schopenhauer for whom music in itself was a copy of the "will" and therefore exhibited an identity with the gamut of sentience low to high. However, because, as Vuoung notes, there is no "roman essentiellement musical, mais des approches romanesques" (29), our task is to recognize the range of types of musical novel, whether they may be seeking to represent music or to represent things through music, or mixing both possibilities.

Three densely illustrated parts dedicated in turn to Proust, Mann, and Joyce examine such propositions as whether and to what extent they treat purely imaginary musical works, or present moments when some not specifically identified music is heard or thought of by a narrator or characters; or allude to historically real works with precision; whether they intersperse or interweave multiple fragments of quotation of instrumental music and/or song, or they offer a mixture of real and invented music; and, in general, whether they abandon any realist striving for verisimilitude in favor of conveying the emotional experience of music and thereby the tensions of life as it is being lived. Vuong brings great clarity to his analyses by invoking the concept of various "horizons" to which readers can relate. Thus even though horizons may fluctuate considerably within and among works of fiction, we have a stable gauge for kinds and degrees of referentiality.

With Proust, Vuong argues, music offers a "third pole" alongside the standard life/fiction pairing; by interrogating the world through music, the novel increases our awareness of the role of the interpreter, of inter- and extra-textual phenomena, and shifts the emphasis from a mimesis of historical time to ritual induction into a symbolic realm of story time. With Mann, besides the heightened sense of tension between the time of telling [end page 420] and the time told, we find a tendency toward an interactive stratification of layers of reference; and one outcome is an increase in authorial playing with the "space" of a narrative already noted in Proust. For example, the tempo of narration can be condensed for displays of spiritual or emotional energy or relaxed to accommodate essayistic excursions or imaginative expansions on details, often with structural features that resemble music variations. With Joyce, we leave behind the kind of deep interior space which Proust conjures through musical reference. Vuong does not elaborate on the iconic, architectural, and imagistic aspects of Joycean, but he fully acknowledges new kinds of synthesis in which the modality of the audible does not override or exclude the modality of the visible; yet musical description enables the staging of virtual metaphoric objects which pertain to a poetic dynamism. In Vuong's view, Joyce arrives at a more advanced "adequation" between music and literature when his text itself appears to sing.

The preference for certain metamorphic relations between literature and art is well known (e.g., Hugo's use of architecture in Notre Dame de Paris, Wilde's use of painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc.). Equally well known are the romantic-to-modern cult of the artist, the vogue of synaesthesia, and the belief in some deeper connection between a musical patterning and the evolutionary structure of the psyche (espoused in the chain of theoreticians and artists from Hoffmann and Schopenhauer to Wagner and Nietzsche et al.). Vuong has seized this red thread adroitly and by every pull on it he sends our thoughts radiating in multiple directions along various intertwined lines of inquiry. His book is all the more valuable by illustrating "musicalization" in great narrative structures, and, thus, helping to correct an imbalance which perennially creeps into studies of high modernism. Out of a desire to demonstrate that modernism is defined by fragmentation, montage, indeterminacy, dissociation, and so forth, some critics attempt to exclude the massive works of Proust, Mann, and Joyce in favor of smaller compositions. Amongst many other devices, the epic narrations containing (indeed, swallowing) such phenomena keep alive our awareness of a larger order of history and culture, and thus disturb overtly neat zoning of the respublica litteraria.

Gerald Gillespie

Stanford University