Unseen Paintings and Unheard Melodies: The Uses and Limits of Interart Studies

Abstract

Interart or intermedial research has become a widely accepted branch of Comparative Literature. The temptation to cover two or three different arts is great, although the dangers of this are also undeniable. A literary scholar, even if he or she is accomplished, is not necessarily qualified to comment on music, painting or film. The adjective ‘musical’ is often used in a figurative, metaphoric, or simply vague sense by both creative authors and literary scholars. One of Celan’s early poems is entitled ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’) (1944–45), and Aldous Huxley’s semiautobiographical character Philip Quarles writes about ‘contrapuntal plots’ in his notebook.1 In Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art) Roman Ingarden applied the term ‘polyphony’ in his discussion of the stratum of meaning, and the title of Chapter One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problemy poetiki Doetoevsogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics) is ‘Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature’. In my view, all these metaphorical references to music may be somewhat misleading if we remember the precise meanings of the musical terms, for instance that ‘polyphony’ implies the simultaneity of independent lines of melody. In Chapter Five ofHowards End, the characters discuss the possibility of interart comparisons. Margaret Schlegel disagrees with her sister: