Soundproof: Reading Fictional Music from Proust to Mann

PhD Thesis Abstract

For Marcel Proust, the disembodied nature of performed music stirs deep mysteries and longings in his characters. But the reader cannot experience Vinteuil's Sonata in its aural form, only its effects on the characters. Vinteuil and his Sonata are fictional creations, there is no 'real' piece of music for the reader to hear. The music is forever locked into the pages of Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time. So how do we imagine a piece of music that is fictional?

This thesis argues that fictional music cannot be directly transcribed into the narrative form while retaining its ontological status as both fictional and musical. I demonstrate how fictional music in the work of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Anthony Powell each engages different literary devices to mimic musical imagery through objects, allusion, and manipulation of narrative time, but the necessary movement of musical progression cannot be represented in unison with narrative description.

Previous criticism has focused on assigning a real musical example as the source of the fictional referent. I argue that this post-reading activity cannot account for the initial interaction with fictional music as it exists in the text, and is an attempt instead to resolve the discomfort of the 'unknowable' referent for the reader.

This study of fictional music details a critical problem for the wider field of literary interpretation: the moving juncture between static text and the formation of fictional ideas by the reader relies on our ability create the fictional world of the text within the limited frame of our own imagination. By exposing the mirage of space and time which we assume holds some sort of ontological existence, this research calls into question the assumptions undertaken by all acts of reading and knowledge formation.

Research published online here

The curious case of Suite française

Research Thesis (Masters)

This thesis will analyse the publication of the English edition of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française by dissecting the elements of its composition. The key question at the heart of this thesis is to understand how Suite française, as a (21st century) publishing product, manages to combine elements of both fiction and history into a unified reading experience. Némirovsky’s text was written during the Second World War, but was published sixty years later to a post-Holocaust audience, who inevitably view the text in light of what happened to its Jewish author. The published form of the text actively ties the work to its historical predicament, by combining the author’s unfinished fictional manuscript and biographical information side by side. The seamless transition between these sections – which are similar in time and location – provides a multi-layered experience for the reader which blurs the traditional diegetic lines of narrative between fact and fiction.

Research published online here