Is there music in Joyce and where do we look for it?(Critical Essay)

I admit that I am not an expert on Joyce at all but a composer and a music theorist. Worse still, it won't be long before I start meddling in yet another field, namely psychoanalysis. If this will indeed make me appear as some kind of Jack of all trades, I nonetheless hope I can be a master of some, and offer a not totally uninteresting side look at Joyce from a musician's angle.

Of course, music in Joyce has always been a common plate in Joyce scholarship, and his works have always been described as musical. However, let's ask ourselves what it is that makes a literary work musical? My answer will start by clarifying what, in my opinion, doesn't make it musical. Obviously enough, by simply writing about music and/or musicians, a writer does not make his work any more musical than if he wrote about the eternal triangle or crocodile hunting. Thus, the question of the many musical allusions and references found in Joyce is not of any particular interest for this paper. Secondly, both literature and music are forms of art, and by virtue of this fact there must be something they have in common; moreover, they are temporal arts, and even though the division of the arts into spatial and temporal must be taken very tentatively, this aspect does bring them even closer together. Therefore, up to a certain point, the effects produced by all literature, including Joyce of course, may have something in common with the effects of music. Now, what I would like to discover in Joyce--and for that matter in literary works in general--is which techniques, procedures and effects found in his work are peculiar just to music, rather than to literature, and so discover how literature achieves the effects of music.

There is nothing strikingly new in my last statement, especially as far as Joyce is concerned. When, for instance, Lawrence Levin discusses the "Sirens" episode from Ulysses in terms of the fuga per canonem structure he is doing exactly this: discovering a preeminently musical construction in a literary passage. (1) Here is, however, where a musician begins to feel uncomfortable, since the very same passage is elsewhere interpreted in terms of Wagner's leitmotif technique (2) (the same technique is actually discovered throughout the work), or as a twelve-tone piece in the vein of Schonberg (3) (again observed in other parts of the novel). Things become quite complicated when on the global scale the novel is assigned the sonata form by some authors, whereas others--in manifest contradiction to the aforementioned views of "Sirens" which imply polyphony, and avoiding to identify the novel with any formal type--insist on chordal, homophonic structure. From the point of view of music theory, we are presented with a number of disparate, even mutually exclusive keys to musicalization.

Speaking perhaps with a professional bias, I could argue that something is fundamentally wrong with an approach that does not allow us to distinguish between, say, Bach, Schonberg and Wagner. Are we, then, to give up these musical explorations of Joyce completely? By no means. What we need is a more systematic approach, a more clearly defined methodology. In another article, (4) I have proposed a methodological framework, based on a system of levels or aspects of music by which it can influence literature. On this occasion, the most I can do is present these levels in a simplified version, and with the briefest possible comments:

I. SONIC, AUDITORY SIDE OF MUSIC

One should beware of overestimating this level; namely, it is necessary to distinguish between a literary work characteristic for its euphony and a work (less frequently found) in which the euphony produces a musical effect; I refer to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism for further explanation. (5) Even if he explicitly mentions Joyce as an example of musical prose, I contend that the musical effects of that prose depend less on the way it sounds than on the next levels we are going to discuss.

2. FORM AND STRUCTURE OF A MUSICAL WORK