James Joyce and Absolute Music by Michelle Witen (review)

Michelle Witen begins her fascinating and far-reaching new study of Joyce by establishing the inseparability of Joyce's literary and musical lives and then precisely and assuredly overhauls our perspective on this aspect of his literary output. The work initially concerns itself with the changes to music during the nineteenth century in different ways, principally the gradual aesthetic shift from Romanticism into modernism. Later, Witen's attentions narrow to the development of the fugue as a musical form, which was not truly defined until the sixteenth century when "Gioseffo Zarlino first differentiated the fuga into the categories of fuga legata and fuga sciolta, denoting the sustained flight of the canon and the segmented flight of the fugue respectively" (115). Witen is specifically interested in how Joyce understood the fugue form and in adjusting critical discrepancies and misconceptions in the way he transposed it into literature in Ulysses's "Sirens" episode. She rigorously locates and contextualizes the writing of this section, one that has already been the subject of much discordant cross-examination, by devoting significant space to a necessary musical reorientation of most of Joyce's oeuvre and its innately musical predispositions.

That Joyce's use of musical structure and thinking was a progressive action within his works is established early in Witen's text. The book moves intelligently and chronologically to promote her ideas about how literature and music were sensorily and artistically parallel in many areas of Joyce's creative life and consequently found expression in his literary output. For Witen, Joyce's debt to music in his writing runs much deeper than simply alluding to and referencing songs or other forms of music. Rather, her stance is that Joyce's musical involvement was deeply theoretical and formal, even in works such as Chamber Music and Dubliners.¹ Scraps of correspondence add narrative color from the outset and enhance her approach. At this point, we see communications with Anthony Burgess, George Antheil, and Joyce himself (3, 4, 6, 7). After some consideration of Joyce's vocal abilities and notable scholarship investigating allusions to song in his writing, Witen leans firmly on her fugal line of inquiry: "[m]y interest is to interrogate Joyce's claim of having written the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses as a fuga per canonem, and his choice of the fugue as his vehicle" (2).

Chapter 1, "Toward a Modernist Condition of Absolute Music" (17-82), like all of the chapters, is divided into helpful subsections. This is a sweeping consideration of the dramatic changes in music during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Included here is effective visual attention to changes in concert-hall arrangements and etiquette as concert halls, orchestras, performances, and music itself evolved. The chapter's combination of historical, technological, aesthetic, and philosophical angles proves extremely illuminative. Witen is attuned to the similarly (r)evolutionary sonic and compositional changes in music as it transitioned into the era of the great Romantic composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Antonín Dvořák. She also devotes significant space to E. T. A. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, which became "[not only] a landmark in styles of reviewing music, but it also, for the first time, articulated the presence of a debate surrounding instrumental music and the hierarchies within music" (21).² For Joyce, the musical aspect of language accrued complexity as his writing developed, and the idea of absolute music internalized and subsumed by a literary work assumed a more elevated hierarchical significance and primacy by the time of his later works such as Finnegans Wake, the subject of Witen's concluding chapter. It is clear that Witen is treating Joyce as a composer as much as a writer, but which came first: composer-writer or writer-composer?

Also instructive in the first chapter is Witen's consideration of nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic thought concerning music...