Borrowed Forms the Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction
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Borrowed Forms The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 1 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 2 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Borrowed Forms The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction Kathryn Lachman LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 3 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Borrowed Forms First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Kathryn Lachman The right of Kathryn Lachman to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-030-7 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 4 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 From Mikhail Bakhtin to Maryse Condé: the Problems of Literary Polyphony 29 2 Edward Said and Assia Djebar: Counterpoint and the Practice of Comparative Literature 59 3 Glenn Gould and the Birth of the Author: Variation and Performance in Nancy Huston’s Les variations Goldberg 89 4 Opera and the Limits of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 113 Conclusion 137 Notes 147 Works Cited 175 Index 195 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 5 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 6 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements I completed this book at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I have benefited greatly from the support and generosity of my chairs: Julie Hayes, Bill Moebius, Patrick Mensah, David Lenson, and Jim Hicks. Maryse Condé has been an inspiring mentor and a model of how artfully to negotiate the roles of writer, critic, teacher, public intellectual, and matriarch. I am grateful to Dominic Thomas, Cathy Portuges, Maria Tymozco, Ronnie Scharfman, Leah Hewitt, Bruce Baird, Michael Papio, Laura Doyle, and Stephen Clingman for contributing insights and expertise. I thank Rhona Trauvitch for her efficient research assistance during my summers abroad, and Patricia Matthews for providing careful copy-editing in the book’s final stages. Many other colleagues and students throughout the Five Colleges have engaged with these ideas and provided inspiring and collegial community. I remain indebted to Thomas Trezise for his guidance throughout my graduate studies at Princeton University, where this book began. I am grateful also to Michael Wood, Marie-Hélène Huet, Suzanne Nash, André Benhaim, Simon Gikandi, David Bellos, François Rigolot, Caryl Emerson, Gyan Prakash, and Göran Blix for furthering my development as a scholar. Samuel Webber and Sylvie Pebrier in Paris, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Lynne Huffer, Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, and Susan Blood at Yale University sparked my interest in many of the questions I pursue here. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in Assia Djebar’s seminar at New York University and to exchange ideas on music and democracy. Of the many teachers and mentors who influenced my understanding of music over the years, Mischa Koskoff and Erick Friedmann at Yale marked me profoundly. I feel their absence acutely. Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 7 06/05/2014 09:30:15 viii borrowed forms I gratefully acknowledge the generous research support provided by a George Lurcy Fellowship, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the UMass Amherst Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, and the UMass Amherst Faculty Research Intensive Semester Program. A Henry Hart Rice Fellowship from Yale University funded my residency in Beirut, Lebanon from 1998–1999, where my interests in Francophone writing and multilingualism coalesced. An earlier version of Chapter Two was published previously in Research in African Literatures; it is reproduced here with kind permission. At Liverpool University Press, Alison Welsby has nurtured the book with exceptional professionalism and care. Sue Barnes, Patrick Brereton and their staff helped to shepherd the manuscript through to timely completion. David Luljak provided expert assistance in preparing the index. I extend particular thanks to the two anonymous readers whose substantive responses allowed me to sharpen the argument. Although we are spread out across different continents and all too rarely together, I am immensely grateful to my parents, Anthony and Margaret, for their love and encouragement, and to my brothers, David, Jamie, and Adam, who never fail to inspire, provoke, and challenge me. I greatly appreciate the support that my in-laws, Susan and Barry Ferris, have provided at various stages. Finally, I owe a special debt to Bettina Lerner and Kerry Bystrom whose friendship and ideas have enriched my scholarship in countless ways. I dedicate this book to Noah and Eli, who have grown up alongside it. And to Jesse, whose love and commitment have lit the way. Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 8 06/05/2014 09:30:16 Introduction Introduction I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view—I am, after all, a novelist. —Orhan Pamuk Borrowed Forms considers the impact of musical forms on late twentieth-century literature. The book looks closely at four musical concepts that have significantly influenced the novel and critical theory: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, interdependent voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of the diverse possibilities contained within a single theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Although these musical forms took shape in the European Renaissance and Baroque, novelists have appropriated them as literary strategies because they open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms. In our cultural moment, novels circulate more widely than any other literary genre, and possess an exceptional plasticity that readily accommodates multiple perspectives, languages, styles, and registers. Not surprisingly, the novel has emerged as the privileged literary vehicle for expressing plurality and difference. How the novel reflects this increasingly transna- tional consciousness, and more precisely, how novelists and critics deploy musical forms to respond to new ethical and aesthetic demands, are among the principal questions this book addresses. Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 1 06/05/2014 09:30:16 2 borrowed forms The short novella, “Clone,” by Argentine author Julio Cortázar, offers a compelling example of the kind of formal experimentation that music has inspired among contemporary writers. Published in 1980, “Clone” follows a group of eight madrigal singers on tour throughout South America. Problems arise as the ensemble’s hot-tempered lead singer, Sandro, comes to suspect his wife, soprano Franca, of having an affair with another singer. His mounting jealousy increasingly compromises the collaborative spirit of their rehearsals, and threatens to derail their performances. The situation comes to a head on the evening of the group’s final concert in Buenos Aires, where they are to perform the notoriously difficult music of Carlo Gesualdo, an eccentric early Baroque composer known as much for his audacious use of dissonance as for having murdered his wife and her lover in the conjugal bed.1 As the curtain rises for the performance, Franca fails to appear. Sandro has re-enacted Gesualdo’s crime of passion, murdering his wife offstage and delivering a stunning blow to singers and audience alike. Cortázar’s story presents a highly unusual—and unanticipated—musical construction that is emblematic of the novels we will examine throughout this work. As he reveals in an afterword entitled “Note on the Theme of a King and the Vengeance of a Prince,” Cortázar borrows the structure of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musical Offering. The eight protagonists represent the eight instruments in an orchestrated version of Bach’s suite. Mimicking the Musical Offering’s thirteen contrasting movements, the story contains thirteen sections that closely follow Bach’s pattern of voicing. The final movement of the Musical Offering includes all eight instruments, save one. By extension, the closing scene of Cortázar’s story assembles all eight singers, with the exception of the murder victim, Franca. The structure of an eighteenth-century Baroque suite thus governs the organization and voicing of a contemporary Argentine novella: it determines the number and types of characters, as well as the mood and trajectory of the narrative, right up to its violent dénouement. At the same time, Gesualdo’s fabled history exerts a thematic pressure on the narrative: the composer is a frequent subject of conversation among the musicians, and his tumultuous history comes literally to repeat itself through Sandro and Franca. In this manner, two musical source texts from the European Baroque determine the demise of Cortázar’s unfortunate soprano in Buenos Aires. Gesualdo’s legendary past, which is repeatedly evoked in the story, plays out on the thematic level, while the Musical Offering—a work which is not once mentioned in the narrative itself, apart from in the afterword—operates at the level of structure and form.2 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 2 06/05/2014 09:30:16 introduction 3 It turns out that Cortázar is far from alone in appropriating Baroque musical forms and redeploying them as formal strategies in transnational narratives. However, the title he gives to the story, “Clone,” immediately problematizes what it means to create a literary response to a work of music. When scientists produce a clone, they analyze the genetic code that makes up an entity, and use it to fashion a full or partial copy thereof.