Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E. M. Forster (review)

Abstract

FILLION, MICHELLE. Difficult Rhythm: Music and Word in E. M. Forster. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. xxiii + 196 pp. $50.00. Musicologist Michelle Fillion's Difficult Rhythm is an ambitious project. While studies of music's representation in British novel have often been able to illuminate particular scenes in works of authors such as George Eliot, they sometimes cast a narrow beam that does not widen outward to revise scholarly understanding of a given work as a whole, let alone author's oeuvre or biography. Yet Difficult Rhythm attempts to do all these things, and takes its justification from Forster himself. The book's title is taken from one of Forster's Clark lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1927, in which he argued that great novels should imitate music's ability to set in motion, through a careful concatenation of chords, a trembling vibration that continues to affect listener even after music has stopped. Such a difficult rhythm, if achieved, would allow to reader, like listener, suddenly to apprehend something that has never actually been played (qtd. in Fillion xvii). While Forster was clear that novels should imitate music, he was much less sure that music could signify anything definite; his conviction, then, that novelistic form should mirror musical form indicates, for Fillion, a deliberate, modernist ambivalence in not themes but forms of Forster's works. The book's two great strengths are quality of its research and clarity, and sometimes even beauty, of its writing. That clarity, however, results at times in glossing over potential difficulties. The book is marred by too-frequent speculation; words likely, may, and surely appear with alarming frequency. The first chapter, for example, provides readers with a concise biography of Forster's musical life, where no argument need be made and matters of fact need be recounted. Yet we are told that Forster made swift progress in his early piano lessons, while his poor performance of scales was a sore point with his mother (2); during his university years, his college conversation group, The Apostles, well have discussed the dominating musical figures of day (4). The five following chapters, each of which features a close reading of one of Forster's novels in context of Forster's musical knowledge and beliefs, often repeat this hesitant tone. Chapter 3's argument that The Longest Journey is best understood as a revision of key characters and plot points in operas of Wagner, while formally imitating Wagner's use of leitmotif, is promising, but studded at key points by words surely, likely (47), and may (54). The same is true for Chapter 5, which considers Four Serious Songs of Brahms that share concert program with Beethoven's Fifth in much-discussed fifth chapter of Howards End. Fillion rightly suggests that Forster's choice of program is not haphazard, but again important moments in her argument that Brahms's songs represent a realism that presages impossibility of only connecting are presented as likely or surely (87) true. This frequent difficulty in applying book's musical background to its literary examples is due to a frequent assumption that music is ahistorical. Fillion's general modus operandi, in this chapter and others, is to argue that a given musical work conveys an essential, unchangeable message or mood--such as stark realism--which each chapter is at pains to explain with musical examples. Yet whether Forster himself, or contemporary audiences, saw work in same light is sometimes considered. …