Why Can't Novels Include Music?

I’m interested in experimental fiction and the current possibilities of the novel. In particular, in these posts, the question is why the novel can’t continue incorporating new kinds of material. It’s not unusual for novels to address all sorts of non-literary subjects; in English, Richard Powers is an adequate example. It’s less common for fiction to include blocks of material in the original discourses—real science, engineering, technology, finance—despite the many precedents, from Musil to Gaddis.

Especially since Oulipo, collage fiction, and “inexpressive” conceptual writing, it seems that the sky’s the limit on what might be interpolated into a work of fiction, and yet the limitations persist. This is both a sort of literary-critical question (What, in the logic and history of the novel since modernism, sets limits on the specificity of non-literary material in novels?) and also a practical problem (What prevents contemporary writers from continuing to expand the resources of the novel?). My own project, Five Strange Languages, includes mathematics, music, biology, philosophy, and several other “technical” discourses, and I am exploring the ways those can be added to the project of conteporary fiction.

The last post on this subject was “Why Can’t Novels Include Mathematics?” and I’m planning one more, on what David Letzler called “cruft”: blocks of text in non-literary modes, like philosophy (as in Musil), finance (as in Gaddis), or even utility bills (Tan Lin).

After that first post, people made a number of suggestions of novels that include mathematics and science, such as Lewis Carroll and Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris. My subject is slightly but, I think, decisively different. Those books address mathematics and science, and Carroll provides examples of paradoxes and analogies of problems in logic and number theory. But the Alice books don’t resemble what Dodgson worte as a professional mathematician, and the quantum mechanics in Stella Maris is paraphrased in words.

Matrix from one of Dodgson’s books, from a paper by Francine Abeles

What interests me is how it might be possible to incorporate the actual languages of mathematics and physics, for instance, into fiction—and by “actual languages” I mean equations.

In regard to music there are two issues here. First is the question of why music is so seldom described in detail in fiction. Proust evokes Vinteuil’s sonata in poetic terms. Helen DeWitt has some fun with pianism in “The French Style of Mlle Matsumoto” (in Some Trick). Even Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the best-researched and most fully engaged example of music in fiction that I know, is content with general ideas of pitch, harmony, and classical music structure. Here’s a typical description:

The first part, inscribed moderato, is like a profoundly reflective, tensely intellectual conversation, like four instruments taking counsel among themselves, an exchange serious and quiet in its course, almost without dynamic variety.

(A reader pointed out this is an account of an unrealized composition, but the level of detail, and use of analogies and metaphors, is characteristic, and it can also be found in music journalism, which is limited by space and the imagined capacities of readers. Not much can be concluded about the music from descriptions like this.)

Music can be analyzed in detail in prose—witness Mark Mazullo, Daniel Gregory Mason or Donald Francis Tovey—but the usual strategy in fiction has been to keep all that specificity at a distance.

So the first question is: Why not incorporate more precise verbal descriptions of music? In my own work I’m engaged by a more radical or direct possibility: Why not include sheet music in novels? If it’s possible to describe the printed music for readers who don’t play an instrument—and I think it is—then there’s a parallel between this second question and the one in my previous post on mathematics. Both music and mathematics could be admitted to the novel.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (Der Untergeher, 1983) is about two fictional pianists, the narrator and his friend Wertheimer, and versions of two real pianists, Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz. (Wertheimer also echoes Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist, brother of the philosopher, and friend of Bernhard’s.) The novel is about music and pianism, and yet there is very little talk about individual musical pieces. A couple of individual pieces are named, and there are stray mentions of Schoenberg, Webern, and Handel. There’s one passage on an individual piece of music, when Wertheimer overhears Gould playing the second half of the Aria in the Goldberg Variations. And—to my second point—there is no sheet music in the book.

These absences aren’t the result of a lack of knoweldge. Bernhard knew a great deal about music. One of his favorites was Josef Matthias Hauer, whose music raises pertinent issues of structure and large-scale form. (You can judge your own knowledge of modernist music by whether or not you know him.)

Josef Hauer

In The Loser, as in Proust and others, music and pianism are matters of “genius.” The narrator talks incessantly about who was the “best” “piano artist,” and who was second best. Gould was of course “better” than Horowitz, and so forth. It’s not that musicians don’t talk this way, it’s that they spend most of their time learning pieces, and that means engaging with specific performing choices in particular pieces.

Once you learn about an art (classical piano, abstract painting, whatever) you come to care about individual artists and artworks, and even about parts of artworks. I admire Gould for his performance of some of the variations in Beethoven’s Op. 109, but not others; some preludes and fugues in the WTC, but not others. I am convinced by his performance of individual passages and even single notes in Bach, and not others—for example in the Aria, where some notes sound overdone and intrusively ornamental, and others crisp and “modern” in Gould’s manner. I don’t think this is unusual, and it’s attested by the intense scrutiny listeners give to performances by their favorite pianists. (Those comparative videos on Youtube are a contemporary manifestation.) Once you get to know an art, a medium, or an instrument, it is no longer sensible or helpful to say things like “Gould was the best pianist in the world.”

(This is related to the reason why I put off reading The Loser until I’d read almost all Bernhard’s work: I have my own ideas about Gould and Horowitz, and I imagined Bernhard’s thoughts would get in the way of a sympathetic reading of his novel. As it turns out, there are no specific ideas about Gould or Horowitz at all—you could never tell, from The Loser, how they played.)

Why did Bernhard avoid writing anything specific about Gould’s or Horowitz’s technique, or about their interpretations of any pieces of music?

Here are a couple of possibilities.

1. The Loser has a satiric purpose: it’s about obsession, self-destruction, and people driven by claims of precedence, fame, and genius. This question could be asked without reference to music. There is little of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in Correction, little of the Wittgensteins in Wittgenstein’s Nephew, only a snippet of Goethe in Goethe Dies, and so forth. But The Loser seems different to me, because it names enough actual music to signal the reader it is not only about ambition, “winning” and “losing,” or personalities, that the music matters. The force of characters’ failures would be very different if he had permitted them to talk, as actual pianists do, about the difficulties, structure, and voicing of particular pieces.

2. Perhaps Bernhard thought that literature itself could not accommodate detailed discussions of music, because references to individual works would not be known to readers. I don’t like this as an answer, because Bernhard was the last person to care about his readers’ level of education—and also because any reader who is engaged by the book will have some experience of Horowitz and Gould.

3. Or maybe Bernhard was averse to music criticism, description, or analysis of any sort. This is possible—if someone knows pertinent texts here, let me know.

4. Or he thought discussion of music is incompatible with the narrative forms and voices of literature. This is the explanation that intrigues me, but if it’s right, then I don’t understand the reasoning that led to it.

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I can imagine a version of Bernhard’s book that would show Wertheimer’s or the narrator’s obsessive dedication by engaging indvidual passages of The Goldberg Variations or Schoenberg’s piano pieces. I don’t see how that would undermine or distract from the (always wonderful) obsessive mania of his characters. If anything it would make the narrator and Wertheimer even more obsessive, more ridiculous, pathetic, or tragic. I can even imagine a version that would have sheet music as emblems of the characters’ compulsive lives.

This question of including music is a live one for me, because I am working on a large novel project in five volumes that includes samples of sheet music, some adapted from actual composers, and others my own. The publisher even put together a vinyl record with some of the music, although the music on the pages of the novel is intended to be independent of any performance. The next post in this series details the ways I have found to include sheet music, even for readers who do not play music.