Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2015 Joseph Conrad and the Aesthetics of Music Christopher Michael Rorke Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE AESTHETICS OF MUSIC By CHRISTOPHER MICHAEL RORKE A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music 2015 Christopher Michael Rorke defended this thesis on April 10, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were: Douglass Seaton Professor Directing Thesis Iain Quinn Committee Member Charles E. Brewer Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Joseph Conrad, Scientific Positivism, and Absolute Music: The Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ................................................................. 9 Chapter 2: Absolute Music, Narrative, and Voice: Heart of Darkness ...................................... 23 Chapter 3: Music, Aestheticism, and Art-for-Art’s Sake: Victory.............................................. 38 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 48 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 51 Biographical Sketch .................................................................................................................... 56 iii ABSTRACT An essential relationship between science, subjectivity, and music is evident in the work of Joseph Conrad. The origins of this interdependence can be traced back to the Romantic metaphysics of the early nineteenth century, when the aesthetics of absolute music began to defend the primacy of music as an unmotivated, autonomous form of art. Despite the influence of scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, music continued to enjoy a privileged reputation and is cited by Conrad in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” as the highest art. Conrad’s interest in music was specifically related to the alternatives that its temporality provided for new narrative forms, and in Heart of Darkness Conrad makes an explicit attempt to create a narrative voice based on the aesthetics of absolute music. This attempt proves problematic, however, and in his late novel Victory Conrad reflects on the tragic contradictions inherent in the relationship between music and the realization of subjective autonomy. iv INTRODUCTION Over the course of the nineteenth century music’s position in European thought underwent a radical transformation. In the late eighteenth century a new aesthetics of what would later come to be known as “absolute music” had just begun to justify instrumental compositions as independent of the traditional tripartite definition of harmonia, rhythmos, and logos; by the end of the next century the reputation of instrumental music was such that poetry, literature, and philosophy explicitly cited music as a model for their endeavors. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844- 1900), referring to music, repeatedly argued in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) that it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,”1 the French Symbolist Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) demanded “Music before all else” (“De la musique avant toute chose”) in the opening line of his poem “Art poétique,” and in one of Modernism’s most famous aesthetic pronouncements the English art critic Walter Pater (1839-1894) declared in “The School of Giorgione” (1877) that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”2 Oscar Wilde later articulated a position very similar to Pater’s, when he explained in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) that “[f]rom the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.”3 By 1940 the relationship between music and literature was so solidified that Virginia Woolf could write in confusion to her violinist friend Elizabeth Trevelyan that “It’s odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but I always think of my books as music before I write them.”4 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, Kritische Gesaumtausgabe (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999): “nur als aesthetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt.” Translated by Walter Kaufman as The Birth of Tragedy in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 52. 2 Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione” in The Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 156. 3 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (NY: Dover Publications, 1993), 18. 4 Virginia Woolf, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6: 1936-1941, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, 1980), 426. Woolf would write to Ethel Smyth later in the same year with the 1 In philosophy music came to be considered not merely a form of metaphysics, as it had been by Romantics like E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), but as something higher than even philosophy itself. In one of logical positivism’s early manifestos Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) asked rhetorically if “when a metaphysician gives verbal expression to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this attitude in an adequate medium?” and concluded that “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.”5 On the opposite side of the analytic philosophical divide6 Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is reported to have pronounced upon hearing Schubert’s final Sonata in B-flat (D. 960) that “We cannot do that in philosophy.”7 Given the intellectual richness of this period and the wide variety of conceptual frameworks that were used to discuss music, there is no single vocabulary that can fully account for what music “was” or what it was understood to mean. “Music” could be variously explained as a scientific, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, institutional, or textual phenomenon.8 I have chosen in this thesis to focus primarily on explicating music in its relationship with language and subjectivity. One of my main reasons for focusing on these two aspects of the Modernist understanding of “music” is historical; music has been traditionally talked about in these terms in suggestion that “why dont [sic] you write a Common Reader review of music? Now consider that. Write your loves and hates for Bach Wagner etc [sic] out in plain English. I have an ulterior motive. I want to investigate the influence of music on literature. But there’s not a book on music that gives me a hint—Parry all padding. What about Tovey? Too metaphysical” (450). 5 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 80. 6 Much of Carnap’s “Elimination of Metaphysics” essay is in fact directed specifically at Heidegger, in particular the latter’s claim in “Was ist Metaphysik” that “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” [“Nothingness negates itself”]. 7 Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity; from Kant to Nietzsche (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 15. 8 See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) for an analysis of music understood as “works.” 2 Western culture since at least Plato.9 The relationship between music, language, and subjectivity becomes particularly important, however, in nineteenth-century intellectual culture. Carl Dahlhaus has argued that Romanticism’s understanding of music’s transcendence was derived from the literature of the late eighteenth century,10 and in a book on Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche, Andrew Bowie begins a chapter about “Music, language and literature” by pointing out that “the relation of music to language, whether in the sense of music being seen as a language, or as revealing what language is unable to say, serves as an important indicator of the ways in which aesthetics in this period is linked to truth. Music can be regarded as a deficient means of articulation, or as a privileged one. This nexus is fundamental to the philosophical history of subjectivity being considered here.”11 In order to investigate this nexus, I have chosen to focus in particular on the work of Joseph Conrad, whose personal interest in music has been well documented. As Jeffrey Meyers notes in his biography of the novelist, “Music played a surprisingly pervasive role in Conrad’s life and art.”12 Conrad’s first childhood memories concerned his mother and music, and he heard Italian and French operas during his early years in Marseilles. Émilie Briquel, whom Conrad unsuccessfully attempted to court in 1895, was a pianist and recorded in her diary how Conrad 9 Plato, The Republic (New York: Hacket Publishing, 1992), 76: “We shouldn’t strive to have either