Pierre Dubois
Music and the Georgian Novel, or the Divorce of Adam and Eve*
In Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel (1978), William Freedman argued that Tristram Shandy was a fundamentally ‘musical’ novel that borrowed not only metaphors, but also structural elements, from the art of music.** While other writers, such as Werner Wolf, reduce the so-called musicalization of Tristram Shandy to only a few elements amounting at best to some ‘dubious “metaphorical impressionism”,***’ it can nevertheless be reasonably admitted that Sterne’s ground-breaking novel inaugurated a new era in the way music was mentioned, referred to and used in the eighteenth-century English novel. The growing importance of musical allusions in late eighteenth-century novels paralleled, and corresponded to, the rise of the so-called ‘age of sensibility’ and the ‘sentimental’ tide.
It is the very nature of the inscription of musical references in the Georgian novel that I propose further to investigate. The demise of the classical theory of the ‘sister arts’ in the course of the eighteenth century enabled music to become autonomous as an artistic practice. It prompted the divorce between poetry and music and consequently encouraged the development of instrumental music. I would like to argue that this had a direct bearing upon the new role accruing to music in the literary text, as can be exemplified by comparing the way earlier novelists such as Fielding and Richardson used musical allusions to the way Sterne, Radcliffe, Burney, and even Austen (among others) were later to do. Further, I would like to suggest that there is not only a difference, but a fundamental generic incompatibility or tension between music and the literary text as they try to share a common territory. Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century writers felt that the ‘new sensibility’ they endeavoured to express in their texts could aptly be explored through references to music or musical practice, hence their effort to summon up music within their novels. However, the very fact of mentioning music or of using musical devices in a prose text inevitably calls in question the nature of the literary medium itself. Music and literature live uncomfortably with one another. The role attributed to music inside the literary text drives the latter away from its usual shores, towards dangerous zones that threaten its normal balance. The rise of the place of music in the late Georgian novel can be read as a tale of attraction as well as essential incompatibility and ultimate divorce. Even as music freed itself from the shackles of imitation and became more and more autonomous from the constraint of having as it were to ‘clothe’ poetry, it acquired a greater role in the novel and, doing so, it highlighted the expressive shortcomings of language. By inviting music as a key component in their texts, novelists both paradoxically enriched them and endangered, or showed the limitations of, their own art.
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* The phrase ‘The Divorce of Adam and Eve’ is borrowed from the title of Juan Alonso’s novel Althea (the Divorce of Adam and Eve) (New York: Fiction Collective, 1976).
** William Freedman, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978), passim.
*** Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam-Atlanta GA: Rodopi B.V., 1999), p. 233.
