CULTURAL STUDIES: Music and the Irish Literary Imagination,By Harry White Oxford University Press, 260pp. £55
HARRY WHITE’S key argument in this learned, ambitious study is that “words for music” is “a permanent mode of address in the Irish literary imagination”. By this he means that because of particular Irish historical circumstances, much of the imaginative energy and feeling that in other countries went into “art music” in the 19th and 20th centuries was in Ireland, of necessity, invested in the verbal universe, the world of words.
The necessity involved was, of course, the historical difficulty of executing classical music in conditions of deprivation and cultural isolation.
In addition, White, professor of music at UCD, proposes that the Irish language represents, in Irish literature in English, a lost horizon of musicality, its sounds, its rhythms, remaining as a kind of ghostly presence behind the work. The persuasiveness of this argument, which is of course not fully provable, is greatly enhanced by White’s masterly first chapter, following his long introduction, which is on Thomas Moore.
This treatment of Moore's Melodiesmarks a very considerable advance in the understanding of a highly problematic work. The importance of the Melodieslies in its function as a bridge between the world of Irish music (and language) and the Anglicised Ireland that superseded it.
Despite what Moore did to them, the tunes on which the Melodies is based are Irish, and of course the Melodiesare indeed music, works in which the melody and the text cannot be treated separately.
The particular cast which Moore gave to the Melodies– excessively Romantic, melancholic and elegiac in the eyes of the later 19th century and much of the 20th – does not alter the force of his achievement in both preserving a national musical tradition and transmitting it, in however attenuated a form, to later generations – in a sense, creating a nation. White then pursues the implications of this heightened sensitivity to the importance of the musical dimension of language in the work of seven Irish writers – Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Friel and Heaney.
Yeats is the most striking example of a poet to whom a musical dimension is all-important but who was utterly disabled in the presence of the thing itself. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of song, particularly the ballad mode, in Yeats’s work. Yeats needed to get beyond the drawing-room ambience of the late-19th century Victorian song; his “singing school”, as White ably shows, was the Irish ballad tradition.
One only has to think of the role of The Lass of Aughrim in The Dead to realise the importance of music in the work of Joyce. In addition to all the songs and tunes that populate his work, he also made of music the explicit subject matter of an episode of Ulysses, namely 'Sirens'. I had hoped to gain some enlightenment from this book as to the function of the alleged fugal structure of that episode, only to find that White dismisses it in a footnote. While it is true that it remains unclear quite how this schema actually operates, the fact that the fugue structure is spelt out explicitly in a very early manuscript of Ulysses, now in the National Library, would seem to confirm that it cannot be disposed of quite so easily.
Any disappointment occasioned by this treatment, however, is more than compensated for by White’s discussion of the next episode, ‘Cyclops’. One does not have to believe that Joyce consciously intended an analogy with oratorio in this episode to be impressed by White’s detailed working out of this parallel, with the narrator corresponding to the similar figure in oratorio, the huge interpolations corresponding to choruses, the exchanges between the characters resembling duets and some of the Citizen’s speeches not unlike arias. This is a convincing and detailed argument – and confirms one’s sense that this episode would lend itself very well to musical treatment.
The treatment of Finnegans Wakesuffers somewhat from an excessive emphasis on the work of Wagner in this text. A strong case could be made that Moore's Melodies are more important in the Wake, by a long chalk, than the whole of Richard Wagner – all the titles of the Melodiesare quoted in the text. In view of the fact that White's key chapter is on Moore, this omission on his part can only be seen as an opportunity missed.
White intriguingly suggests that Beckett’s relation to Joyce can be paralleled by Webern’s to Schoenberg. It is true that Schoenberg does represent the extreme limit of expressionism in music, to which the austerities of Webern can be seen as a response, and something very similar can be argued of Beckett’s reaction to Joyce.
With Brian Friel, White does come (almost) full circle, with a return to Thomas Moore, specifically Oft in the Stilly Night.But Dancing at Lughnasa, on its own, is sufficient proof of the importance of music in Friel. Indeed, Friel provides perhaps the best example of White's overall thesis in the entire book: White's own theme is also Friel's, to a lesser extent, namely music as a resource which is also a key to a lost universe of Gaelic civilisation. To this degree, White's book can be seen as a late addition to the Field Day cultural project.
IN THE LAST CHAPTER, White argues that Heaney completes the Yeatsian revolution, reaffirming that dominance of language over music which is the apparent destiny of Irish literature, and concluding, with Yeats, that ultimately “words alone are certain good”.
As I have said, this is an ambitious study, covering a broad swathe of Irish literature, and sometimes its rather elusive central theme can disappear behind the variations.
Leaving aside the question of whether there really is such a thing as the Irish literary imagination (an old and unresolved debate, as the author acknowledges) the other term in the title, “music”, is also so wide as to mean very different things in different contexts. The book’s importance lies less in its overall thesis – the grand symphonic structure – than in the chamber music – the close engagement with the musical dimension of the work of these writers which each chapter offers.
Terence Killeen is the author of Ulysses Unbound:
A Reader’s Companion to Ulysses
. He is working on a study of Finnegans Wake. He is an Irish Times journalist