An Equal Music | Literary Precedents

An Equal Music Literary Precedents

It has been said, famously, that "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture;" nonetheless, Seth is hardly the only writer to have attempted the dance. One of the more striking formal experiments in a novel noted for its formal experiments is the "Sirens" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), in which the novel's central character, Leopold Bloom, pauses in his wanderings through the streets of Dublin to lunch at the Ormond Hotel, where a few of his fellow Dubliners are gathered singing opera arias and Irish songs. The episode is densely packed with musical allusions, but, more remarkably, it attempts to mimic the very structure of a canon or fugue, so that the action unfolds according a logic that is more that of music than of conventional narrative fiction. Perhaps attempting to follow and even top Joyce is Anthony Burgess's 1974 novel Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements,...
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