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Reviewed by:
  • Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould
  • Catherine Laws
Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould. Deborah Weagel. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp. xvi + 160. $76.95 (cloth).

The cross-fertilization of music and literature was new neither to the twentieth century in general nor to modernism in particular. But music's apparent vagueness of meaning yet fullness of expression, as formulated most notably by Schopenhauer, offered many writers of the early twentieth century a model for the rejuvenation of literary language. As a result, the positioning of music as an "ideal other" of literature became a fairly typical modernist strategy. The relative dearth of book-length studies of this relationship is, on this level, somewhat surprising. Deborah Weagel's Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould brings the comparative study of musical aspects of two literary works—Camus's The Outsider and Beckett's Waiting for Godot—into relation with the work of two significant musicians: composer John Cage and performer Glenn Gould. Ventures of this kind are to be welcomed; we need more such studies, and these are good candidates. Unfortunately, this book serves more to demonstrate the difficulties and pitfalls involved in such interdisciplinary approaches than to enrich our understanding of these artists and their work.

The book is characterized by generalization and superficiality. Background information is sometimes excessive and overly pedantic: we are halfway through chapter six before we reach its main topic, Gould's radio documentaries, and surely we do not need to be told that performing scores often "involves performing certain notes in a specified rhythm and implementing the suggested dynamics" (110)? Conversely, important contextualization is often too brief and sometimes confusing. The introductory attempt to place these figures in relation to ideas of modernism and postmodernism is cursory, telling us little more than that they are all, in some apparently undefinable way, associated with these discourses. The specific difficulties of Beckett's relationship to modernism are presented merely as a disagreement between individual critics rather than a matter of interest with respect to the range and complexity of Beckett's writing and its relationship to authority, subjectivity, ontology, and so on (5-6). The summary of modernist developments in music, intended to contextualize the extent of Camus's musical experience (16-17), is haphazard; it includes reference to dodecaphony but not atonality more generally, cites specifics of Messiaen's work that would not have been more widely known until after the Second World War, but makes no mention of other contemporary developments. Similarly, the brief placing of Cage within "the avant-garde movement that became prevalent after World War II" (6) suggests an ignorance of the politics of American experimentalism versus European avant-gardism in music of that period.

Weagel explains that there is some repetition of ideas and concepts so as "to present chapters that both interrelate and can be read independently" (9). However, on many occasions this repetition is of unnecessary, peripheral information and occurs within individual chapters—as with the information about Camus's wife (11, 16), or the reiteration of comments about the degree of performer choice in Cage's Songbooks. In the Gould chapters, it is hard to follow the logic as [End Page 928] to what goes where; much of chapter seven, ostensibly focused on 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, returns to the Solitude Trilogy—the subject of chapter six. This would make sense were the change of context—from radio documentary to film—considered in some depth, but it is not.

In fact, much of this chapter, especially the information drawn from Gould's fascinating notes and graphs for the radio documentaries, would greatly enrich chapter six. One wonders, however, how much substance chapter seven would be left with were this material transferred across.

Overall, it's hard not to conclude firstly that the structural issues result from the origination of each chapter in a discrete conference paper or previously published journal article, and secondly that the book needed better editing.

This impression is supported by the many sentences that tell us little and suggest a lack of familiarity with the terms and conventions of the field. Albert Camus "most likely had...

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