The “musicality” of modern prose: Towards the genesis and typology of forms (part 2)

Abstract

The article explores the musicalization of modern fiction, reflecting such tendencies as the crisis of language and mimesis, the desire for abstraction and non-figurativity. With the reduction of the represented world, the role of the plan of expression and self-reflection of form increases. For the modernists, music becomes the language that allows them to express the utopian, the invisible and the (un)possible. The susceptibility of the contemporary reader and researcher to medial codes allows us to detect in the modernist novel’s imitation of music not only the extravagance of the author’s imagination, but also the unmasking of referential illusion and the tendency towards performativity. The novelty of the research consists in clarifying the typology of musical-literary dialogue, and in the historical-literary aspect in identifying the semiotic, epistemological and poetological foundations of modernist quasi-musical prose, which developed its own equivalents of musical techniques and styles on the way to deconstructing the bourgeois novel. As an example of musical prose, the novel “The Lime Works” (“Das Kalkwerk”, 1970) by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard is considered. It is interpreted as the culmination of the author’s creative evolution, from the lyricism imitating the baroque style and attitude, to experimental poetry and prose, and finally to the prose with a sophisticated syntax imitating the romantic musical phrasing. The polyphonic structure of Bernhard’s prose, its strict, abstract compositional pattern, is interpreted as a modern technique of ordering the existence chaos.