MICHELLE WITEN. James Joyce and Absolute Music

Extract

James Joyce and Absolute Music might seem an odd fit for a series entitled ‘Historicizing Modernism’. ‘Absolute music’, the notion that ‘pure, non-referential instrumental music’ is formally self-sufficient (p. 2), would seem to forestall historical readings. Michelle Witen, however, argues for absolute music as a historical ‘discourse’ in Joyce’s work. Scholarship on music in Joyce takes many paths: excavations of allusions and debts; cultural histories of theatre and popular culture, media and soundscape; and studies of textuality that find, in Joyce’s imitations and inscriptions of musical scores, a dissonant rupture. From a scholarly field that has covered Joyce’s fascination with gramophones and pianolas, opera and popular song, and dozens of fleshly and mechanical performing bodies, Witen turns to the history of ideas, arguing that debates over ‘absolute music’ are themselves a context, reworked throughout Joyce’s oeuvre. At the book’s centre lie two chapters on the ‘Sirens’ episode from Ulysses, entitled ‘A Case of Structure’ and ‘A Case of Effect’ (nods to Nietzsche’s Case of Wagner, not Joni Mitchell). Like twin prongs of a tuning fork, these chapters create a complex resonance between musical ‘structure’ and ‘effect’, a crucial distinction in the nineteenth-century aesthetic debates. What might seem like an idée reçue, the fuga per canonem in ‘Sirens’, Witen tackles with gusto, using manuscripts to establish Joyce’s ‘nuanced’ understanding of musical technique. The book proceeds to the ‘Circe’ episode, closing with the ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ from Finnegans Wake.