Voicing the Music in Literature

Abstract

The musicality of literature is a constant preoccupation, if not always a clearly delineated one, of literary studies. To speak of a novel as a symphony, a dialogue in terms of counterpoint, or a literary style as melodic, is hardly exceptional. In an ever-increasingly interdisciplinary academic world, ‘music and word studies’ has proved to be a particularly popular field of enquiry, the concept of ‘musicality’ playing a central but also controversial role in our appreciation of literature. But what do we mean when we speak of a text's musicality? What, in fact, for that matter, do we mean when we speak of music's musicality? Very rarely do we seek answers to such questions and yet, without those answers, our interdisciplinary critiques can only be built on very shaky foundations. When using the term, we assume we are speaking a common language which somehow transcends the boundaries of our own artistic fields. We assume that we are speaking of the same thing, despite the fact that within musicology itself, the fundamental question, ‘what is music?’, has always been, and still is, hotly debated. If the musicologists themselves are not agreed as to the nature of music, in which way can literary scholars possibly speak relevantly of the musicality of a novel? In this essay, I look more closely at the concept of ‘musicality’ in the writings of Virginia Woolf. My aim is to give a clear conceptual framework which takes into account the different directions which this term can take in its travels, so that its usage may better reflect the nature and being of the works or styles we term as ‘musical’ and help us transcend our limited disciplinary outlook in order to better analyse the elusive fluid boundaries between the arts.