Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music (review)

REVIEWS DANIEL C. MELNICK. Fullness ofDissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics ofMusic. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994. 159 pp. Music and literature were born together; and, as Daniel Melnick's study postulates , they have been following a similar destiny: the dissolution of Apollonian form into Dionysian dissonance. For Melnick (via Nietzsche), the dissolving of harmonic, coherent form into dissonant fragmentation is welcome, for it awakens human consciousness (or spirit, or élan vital perhaps), challenging it to respond to the discordant nature oftwentieth-century life/art and thereby making the reader/listener a participant in the creative process. Just as he considers Beethoven's piano sonata Opus 1 1 1 the end of classical sonata form, so the author regards Thomas Mann's DoctorFaustus as the coup degrâce to traditional narrative fiction. Writers ofthe modernist era, following the influence oftheir musical counterparts in promoting the demise oftraditional form, created the "dissonant narrative," or "dissonant fiction," a mode ofcomposition that Melnick seeks to define and illustrate in his study. An initial example is extracted from the Author's Note to Heart ofDarkness in which the Conrad, discussing the significance of his novella, uses a musical analogy and, by doing so, anticipates the musicalization offiction by the likes of Proust, Mann, and Joyce. After a concise definition of musical dissonance as "a structure oftones unresolved into the familiar cadences ofharmonic closure" (8), Melnick calls on aesthetic theorists Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch to help distinguish the "experimental, destabilizing strategies, which, under the guise of musicalization, assume and achieve the effect of dissonance in the novel" (8). Finding the roots ofdissonance deeply embedded in Romanticism, Melnick traces its development as a musico-literary phenomenon through the nineteenth century, with the Romantic composers Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt and the Symbolist poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine represented in this perspective. Although not numerous, specific quotations are illuminating, especially those taken from Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Inner struggle, desire to transcend or transform reality, impressionism, illusion, irony, ambiguity—all are considered part of the complex legacy ofthe nineteenth century which culminated in the figure and works of Richard Wagner. His efforts to fuse the arts into one form—the Gesamtkunstwerk , his extensive use ofleitmotifs, and, above all, his creation of long chains of unresolved harmonies profoundly influence the course of literature as well as music. In his chapter devoted to Nietzsche and Schoenberg, "Music and the Modern Imagination," Melnick engages the support ofdeconstructionists Derrida, de Man, and Foucault to reiterate Nietzsche's rhetoric in terms oftwentieth-century critical theory. In his examination of Schoenberg's renunciation ofthe triadic harmonies ofthe common practice period, Melnick sees (or rather hears) the composer as the emancipator ofdissonance. An idea which could have been explored in this context is the balance between formalism and dissonance inherent in the codified use ofthe tone row as practiced by Schoenberg and his successors. Although the tone row represents a radical departure from the traditional, it does establish a new, strict format which, while usually imperceptible to the ear (which is busy with all the new dissonance and fragmentation), is obvious in the musical score. In this sense, dodeVoI . 20 (1996): 190 THE COMPAnATIST caphonism successfully continues to counterbalance formal constraints and imaginative freedom. In the tomes ofÀ larecherche du tempsperdu, Proust seeks the transcendence and elevation ofsoul proposed by the Symbolists through the fictive composer Vinteuil 's music, through involuntary memory, through "figure-laden prose" (64), and through "paradoxical metaphors" (65). Melnick posits that Proust's use of the musical idiom is not only structural (contrapuntal leitmotifs), nor only thematic (the role ofVinteuil's music); more significantly for the purposes ofthis study, music provides "an aesthetic and ethic at the core of [Proust's] vision" (61). This vision is defined as the breach between spiritual illumination on the one hand and spiritual corruption on the other, a rift which produces alienation, ambiguity, negating paradox , and dissonant narrative (71). Proust's dissonance exerts a "rending, inspired pressure" on the reader, which evokes a "Dionysian response" in Nietzsche's terms, "enduring insight" in Melnick's (78-79). In the analysis of Doctor Faustus as dissonant fiction, prime importance is given to the influence...