Fullness of dissonance
Subtitle: modern fiction and the aesthetics of music
By: Daniel C. Melnick.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Rutherford [NJ]; London; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 159
Subjects: Fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Musical fiction -- History and criticism.; Music and literature.; Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics.
Other titles: Modern fiction and the aesthetics of music.
Description: During the modern period, the bond between music and literature constituted a crucial and influential idea for Conrad and Eliot, Mann and Rilke, and many other writers. For modern novelists in particular this idea has provided the model and rationale for the experimental liberation of narrative form and its desired effect on the reader.

Critics later in the twentieth century have undertaken analyses of various contrapuntal, sonata, and other musical structures in fiction, and some critics have studied the influence of various composers on novelists. Fullness of Dissonance is concerned with the related matter of how the aesthetics of music influenced the writers and texts of modern fiction.

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The musical aesthetic to which Proust, Mann, Joyce, and other novelists responded originates in Romanticism, and it culminates with the notion of a musicalized literature developed by many of the major progenitors of modernism - Mallarme, Pater, and Nietzsche. The first several chapters trace the bearing on modern novelists of this inheritance from Romanticism through Nietzsche's idea of dissonance; these chapters also analyze the musical paradigms provided by Beethoven, Schoenberg, and other composers.

It was Nietzsche who first posited the idea that dissonant form liberates art from conventional, harmonious patterns of perception in order to formulate and provoke the perceiver's refusal of a habitual response to art and life.

The key assumption of modernism in music is that dissonance is the sole "language" music can effectively speak in a century of disequilibrium. Fullness of Dissonance studies the ways in which this assumption applies to modern novelists' self-avowed efforts to "musicalize" fiction; their efforts lead to the use of a series of destabilizing strategies that, under the guise of "musicalizing" fiction, tacitly assume and achieve the effect of dissonance in the novel.

The dissonant nature of modern fiction has both an aesthetic and an ethical identity; the hoped-for impact of dissonance in narrative is to activate the reader's capacity for a freed and independent consciousness. James Joyce is the climactic figure in this study for his work - particularly Ulysses - affirms the freed, fiction-generating consciousness at the core of dissonant narrative.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (149-156) and index.