Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (review)

Harry White's Music and the Irish Literary Imagination is one of those rare, seismic books that shakes up and rearranges the ground beneath its readers. It is beautifully conceived and written: detailed, nuanced, eloquent, persuasive, and at times, very funny. White is also endearingly honest about his occasional use of strategic argumentation. He deploys a musicologist's familiarity with the history of European art music, and a deep understanding of English Romanticism and the depth and breadth of Irish literature and culture from Moore to Heaney. This impressive scholarly heft is put to work in the service of a wide-ranging argument that will cause White's readers to re-evaluate their thinking about the connections between words and music in the Irish literary canon. Music and the Literary Imagination deservedly won the ACIS Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture in 2009.

White's central argument is that language predominates and functions as a substitute for music in the Irish literary imagination. The book explores "how words became 'words for music.' "What is the place of music in Irish cultural history, and how do we explain the extent to which literature has replaced it? White proposes that the quest for the Irish omphalos, "the stone that marks the centre of the Irish world," requires "a consideration of music not simply as a striking absence but as a vital presence in the Literary Revival and in contemporary Irish literature." Noting that "the canonic reception which attaches to Irish writing is still in striking contrast to the marginal presence of Irish composition in the world," he interrogates the relative unimportance of music, particularly art music, and seeks to find the "hidden music." Citing "two ghosts in the machine, "White first connects the absence of art music to its indictment "as an expression of the colonial presence," while a "verbal understanding" of Irish music attained significance in Irish literature written in English in the 1890s as "the unheard melody of the literary imagination." He also points to the loss of the Irish language, with words in this case answering "the need for music."

In the course of eight organically connected chapters, White takes us from a careful reconsideration and rehabilitation of Thomas Moore, who, he argues, "mapped the essential terrain of the Literary Revival" and "was the first writer in English to nominate music as the supreme intelligencer of Irish history," to a potent examination of Seamus Heaney's collapsing of the gap between words and music. "In Heaney," he asserts, "the extent to which literature fills the void left by art music in Ireland is essentially complete." In an Irish literary imagination that privileges throughout the "the notion of words for music," Heaney's poetry "comes as close to the Irish Omphalos as we could wish." White identifies in Heaney "the long tradition of music as a vital intelligencer of the text" going back to Moore, but argues that the Nobel laureate unlocks so completely the music inside language that the music itself becomes redundant. He leaves us with the assertion that Heaney creates music that is verbally conceived, "made good by words alone."

The first, and by far the longest chapter, is devoted to Moore. White sets up a detailed and convincing corrective argument in favor of restoring Moore's reputation to the high position it occupied throughout Europe during his lifetime. Acknowledging that "reception history . . . has not been kind to Moore," he makes clear that Moore has suffered his reversals of fortune for reasons that have little to do with his talents and significance, having come to be dismissed as a "drawing-room toady," or a "poetaster of the English country house." White argues that Moore, in fact, understood the role of Irish music in the expression of loss and dispossession in a way that can "be legitimately read as the source of that stable association between music and the Irish literary imagination which is so strikingly reinvented by Yeats." Moreover, Moore's...