Minstrels in the drawing room: music and novel-reading in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Scott, and George Eliot Andrew Lynn Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Andrew Lynn All rights reserved ABSTRACT Minstrels in the drawing room: music and novel-reading in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Scott, and George Eliot Andrew Lynn “Minstrels in the Drawing Room” is an investigation of the representation of musical listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Theoretical accounts of the novel have tended to see it as a universal form, one that opportunistically subsumes all others as its represented content; descriptions of the novel’s implied audience often interpret novel-reading as an essentially absorptive activity linking private reading to public belonging through an act of identification. For the writers I discuss here, however, musical listening is interesting because it is a rival mode of shared aesthetic experience that, before the advent of sound recording, was necessarily social. This dissertation draws on recent developments in the history of reading and media theory to describe how novels by three central figures of the European novelistic canon – Goethe, Scott, and Eliot – turn to musical listening to reflect upon the ways in which the absolutely open nature of the novel’s mode of address is nevertheless prone to limitation. The dissertation thus complicates often all-or-nothing theories of novel-reading, offering instead a description of how novels model a distanced identification between reader and text. Table of Contents Introduction 1 One: The Interesting Child: Mignon (as though) for the first time 31 Interchapter 1: Scott reads Goethe 84 Two: Romances for General Circulation: Scott and the structure of reading 97 Interchapter 2: The Victorians read Scott 152 Three: “Beyond the Occasion”: Daniel Deronda after Wagner 166 Works Cited 214 i Acknowledgments There can be in an enumeration of intellectual debts something unpleasantly akin to the balancing of books. Let it be understood that in thanking the people below I hope only to hold open my accounts. My parents, Bob Lynn and Siew-Jyu Wong. Ondrea Ackerman, Dehn Gilmore, Jesse Rosenthal, Courtney Thorsson, and Eugene Vydrin were ideal colleagues and friends at Columbia, people with serious and interesting things to say on any topic, at any moment. The members of Columbia’s Nineteenth-Century Colloquium provided invaluable comments on an early draft of chapter three. Anahid Nersessian and Ross Hamilton read this dissertation after its completion, and I will continue to think about their charitable and probing questions for a long time. Nick Dames, Jenny Davidson, and Jonathan Arac advised this project from its beginnings; their warmth, erudition, and wit have been both support and inspiration. And lastly, Sarah Kerman, who thought about every page of this dissertation. She has made it and everything else better than it should have been. ii Introduction On my lap was the score of some concerto I had been studying in a lackadaisical way for the previous hour, which I had been considering abandoning for one of the nineteenth-century novels piled on the wooden floor near my feet. -- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled Wavering between two of the nineteenth century’s most important long forms, Ishiguro’s Ryder knows that he can’t have both.1 The scene, like The Unconsoled as a whole, is an investigation of social isolation, and of its relation to those abstractions from the everyday offered both by reverie and reading. At this moment, Ryder, a concert pianist, is reminded of precisely how much his constant practicing removed him from society in his student years, preventing him from taking part in even that most basic ritual of going drinking after exams. The moment Ryder recalls here – sitting on the couch in his room on a sunny day, deciding whether to exchange concerto for novel – is accordingly one in which his choice of reading material is also a choice between two ways of living in the world. On the one hand, Ryder’s room is a self-conscious echo of those scenes of private reading that tend to appear early in Victorian novels: specifically Jane Eyre, reading a copy of Bewick’s History of British Birds on a window-seat, placed comfortably between “[f]olds of scarlet drapery” and a window’s “clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating [her] from the drear November day.”2 Ryder, like Jane, seated next to a window, uses his piles of novels to create a place for himself, to turn the otherwise impersonal and barren room – “just a mattress on 1 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (New York: Knopf, 1995), 305. 2 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard Nemesvari (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004), 64. 1 the floor, and, in the corner, a small desk and upright chair” – into something he could be “very fond of.” Yet – as with Jane’s reading, though far less agonistically – Ryder’s private reading both encloses itself from and permits entry to its social surround: his remembering eye passes over those heaps of books, and finds its way to the door, which Ryder “had got into the habit of leaving… ajar so that whoever happened to be passing could just wander in for a talk”; through the open window, he remembers, he could hear the voices of other students “whom [he] had once languidly welcomed when they had peered around [that] door,” and who had often come in for an hour’s talk about “some novelist” (305). The passage is thus a kind of metacommentary, in which Ryder’s novels remind us of what nineteenth-century novels say about reading: books do furnish a room, as reading encloses the self, nourishes it; at the same time, though, reading makes that interior space permeable, creating the possibility for a negotiation between inside and outside.3 Ryder’s nineteenth-century novels socialize as they individuate, separate as they connect: a familiar and true image of the complex double movement of novel-reading and of the self it both represents and forms, one built, as Lukács observes, in the hope “that a reconciliation between interiority and reality, although problematic, is nevertheless possible.”4 And what of the concerto? The scene has less to say about it, as The Unconsoled has little to say about music, and what it does say is far cruder, in more ways than one, than its ideas about novel- reading. If the novel creates pathways for a complex but comfortable back-and-forth movement between interior and exterior space, the concerto – at least from the perspective 3 See, for example, Nancy Armstrong’s overview of these matters in the opening of her How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900 (New York: Columbia UP, 2005): “the modern subject came into being as it took in sensations from the outside world and, of that material, composed first the ideas and then the judgment and moral sense that gave it a self-enclosed and internally coherent identity” (1). I discuss Armstrong’s arguments at greater length below. 4 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1971), 132. 2 of society – seems to exist in an entirely oppositional world, one in which the instrumental soloist, absorbed in his obscure and fantastical doings, is pitted against a hostile and mocking mass: the performer “piano-playing in the air,” his audience united in “making the most disgusting noise, something half-way between a jeer and a retch” (304).5 Ishiguro’s novel is of course more complex than this schematic opposition suggests. Even within the scene Ryder recalls, it is surely important that his reading of the concerto score is not fervent but “lackadaisical”; on a larger scale, this entire process of recollection, in which the choice between the formed but permeable self of novel-reading and the absorbed, isolated self of piano-playing is posed, is itself an involuntary reverie, but one with a specifically social use: Ryder slips into apparently idle musing to isolate himself from an awkward conversation – about his isolation. Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank argue that the self-enclosure of the solitary “reading posture registers as extroversion as least as much as introversion, as public as it does private.”6 The Unconsoled, as a page-turner in which little happens, a novel about the social meaning of apparently inward states of abstraction from the everyday, is constantly undermining the distinctions this passage sets up. Yet the choice between concerto and novel is in a sense true to the nineteenth- century novelistic tradition it echoes so strongly. Those novels on Ryder’s floor in all likelihood do represent musical listening as a threat to the self that can either overwhelm it, 5 My discussion of this image of reading, as enclosed from yet also connected to an outside world, clearly owes a debt to Paul de Man’s essay on Proust in Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979). It will be noted that Marcel’s “inner, sheltered space” is, as de Man emphasizes, connected to an exterior world by means of a likeness existing inside the mind of the reader – as Jane’s implicitly is, too, when she draws upon her reading to tell John Reed that he is “like the Roman emperors” (67); Ryder’s reading, in contrast, is connected to the world through what Jakobson would call a metonymic rather than metaphorical logic, of juxtaposition without similitude. The relationship between reading-as-like-the-world and reading-as-spatially-in-the-world is a major topic of this dissertation’s chapter on Scott.