Almost a century ago, when James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published — the novel came out this month in 1922 on Joyce’s 40th birthday — the author failed to strike a chord with his readers on various grounds. Yet his love for music rang true. Although his claim of having composed the chapter, “Sirens”, in the form of a fuga per canonem is contested by critics, Joyce certainly hit the right note with his contemplations on the power of music to transcend the boundaries of time and space. In this chapter, Leopold Bloom listens to the whistled tune of an aria from the opera, La Sonnambula, which sings of the despair of its hero, Elvino, translating the latter’s anguish into his own. He thinks of his wife, Molly, betraying him the way Elvino perceives the infidelity of his beloved. The cry of “Tutto è Sciolto” resonates with Bloom. He sighs, “Yes: all is lost.”
Three decades earlier, and across continents, Leo Tolstoy also detected the compelling effect that music could have on the listener. In The Kreutzer Sonata, Posdnicheff claims that “music provokes an excitement which it does not bring to a conclusion”, since the listener cannot comprehend fully the emotions that drove the composer but is, nonetheless, moved by them — enough to commit murder, in his case.
What connects the two works — besides facing the music for alleged perversity — is the reference to famous musical compositions that readers were likely to be familiar with. Of course, literature and music share an intimate history. While Claude Debussy composed a cantata based on a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Richard Strauss wrote an opera on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, characters in books by Anthony Burgess, Milan Kundera, Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami, among others, are found to appreciate Beethoven. For Murakami, music is organic to his storytelling. “Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm,” he writes. Other elements like melody, harmony and free improvisation follow. Like Burgess, Kundera, Ishiguro, and even Joyce, he has a deep, personal connection with music.
But does referring to particular musical pieces — Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun and Norwegian Wood derive their titles from songs — in books also serve as a literary device? When characters are endowed with a certain taste in music, it saves the author the effort of having to etch out all the shades to their personalities in words. Songs also establish the mood of an episode like a soundtrack does in a film. In a world where multi-sensory entertainment is the norm, this is not surprising. Authors are not the only ones who stand to gain from infusing music into literary works. After the Japanese release of Murakami’s 1Q84, Leos Janacek’s “Sinfonietta”, featured in the book, sold as many copies in a week as it had sold over the last 20 years. Literature, then, serves music as much as music inspires literature.
