Music in The Architect of Ruins, a postmodern novel by Herbert Rosendorfer

Abstract

Herbert Rosendorfer’s work entitled The Architect of Ruins fits in the postmodern novel trend. Its connections with culture texts include references to literary texts and music pieces. The most important references of the first type seem to be the ones to Jan Potocki’s novel The Saragossa Manuscript. The existence of music compositions in the novel by Rosendorfer, a witter and a musicologist in one person, functions on a number of levels. Here it is worth to mention the concept coined by the Polish scholar Michał Głowiński according to which music may appear in a novel on three levels – when it is an element of the plot, when it constitutes a topic by itself, and when the work of music referred to acquires a symbolic dimension in the context of a music piece. These three literary situations can easily be found in Rosendorfer’s book. What is particularly important and interesting, however, is applying a construction pattern taken from the field of music in a literary work. Such a possibility, i.e., musical elements functioning in in a literary piece, is described in Andrzej Hejmej’s Musicality of a Literary Work. In The Architect of Ruins construction references fit in the specificity of a postmodern novel: as stated by Magdalena Janoszka, Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript, which was an important inspiration for Rosendorfer, should be classified as a polyphonic novel. According to Bachtin’s concept, a word does not a exist in an isolated and independent way, but it is an answer to other words written in the past. As a writer and musicologist, Rosendorfer skilfully moves in the field of references to music and literary works – e.g. Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the literary thread of Giacomo Casanova’s Memoirs. In his book, the Austrian writer presents the profiles of musicians – a virtuoso (whom music lovers are desperate to hear live – in vain), an organist performing a truly postmodern Musiquiana, and a vampiric composer stealing every new composition written by his student. This way, in The Architect of Ruins music becomes the material with which the author of the novel co-creates his work as if with literary motifs.