The “musicality” of modern prose: Towards the genesis and typology of forms (part 1)

Abstract

This article deals with the intermedial dialogue, a literary-musical transfer that has changed the idea of the novel and “prose” per se, the ideal of which in Western literature in the 18th and 19th centuries was referential transparency. Using the methods of intermedial and comparative studies, narratology and stylistics, the logic of the development of this dialogue is traced. Whereas the Bildungsroman, the career novel, and the novel of naturalism developed under the sign of “the individual’s rebellion against idealism” (Lukacs), the modernist novel seeks to return the individual to the intimate space of the self and abstract meditation. The character of modern novel tends to have a “terror of history” and seeks refuge from the rumble of technology and catastrophe, from the influence of the “ornament of the masses” (Kracauer) in myth, archetypes, and the codes of other arts. This utopian space for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Bernhard is music, which they implement under the influence of the Romantic idea of an “absolute”, “autonomous” art that expresses the invisible and (un)possible. Music performs the function of a meta-poetic code in this context, with the specific embodiments of the dialogue between the novel and music taking various forms, from the imitation of early music genres (fugue, passion) to modern styles (jazz, atonal music). The influence of music leads to the complication of the structure of the novel, to the creation of a hermetic style, which turns the process of reading into a procedure of deciphering score. The novelty of the research consists in clarifying the typology of musical-literary dialogue, and in the historical-literary aspect in identifying the semiotic, epistemological and poetological foundations of modernist quasi-musical prose, which developed its own equivalents of musical techniques and styles on the way to deconstructing the bourgeois novel.