Borrowed Forms

Front matter

The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction

The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction

Kathryn Lachman

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

1 From Mikhail Bakhtin to Maryse Condé: the Problems of Literary Polyphony

2 Edward Said and Assia Djebar: Counterpoint and the Practice of Comparative Literature

Introduction

I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view—I am, after all, a novelist.

— Orhan Pamuk

Borrowed Forms considers the impact of musical forms on late twentieth-century literature. The book looks closely at four musical concepts that have significantly influenced the novel and critical theory: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, interdependent voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of the diverse possibilities contained within a single theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Although these musical forms took shape in the European Renaissance and Baroque, novelists have appropriated them as literary strategies because they open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms.

In our cultural moment, novels circulate more widely than any other literary genre, and possess an exceptional plasticity that readily accommodates multiple perspectives, languages, styles, and registers. Not surprisingly, the novel has emerged as the privileged literary vehicle for expressing plurality and difference. How the novel reflects this increasingly transnational consciousness, and more precisely, how novelists and critics deploy musical forms to respond to new ethical and aesthetic demands, are among the principal questions this book addresses.

The short novella, “Clone,” by Argentine author Julio Cortázar, offers a compelling example of the kind of formal experimentation that music has inspired among contemporary writers. Published in 1980, “Clone” follows a group of eight madrigal singers on tour throughout South America. Problems arise as the ensemble’s hot-tempered lead singer, Sandro, comes to suspect his wife, soprano Franca, of having an affair with another singer. His mounting jealousy increasingly compromises the collaborative spirit of their rehearsals, and threatens to derail their performances. The situation comes to a head on the evening of the group’s final concert in Buenos Aires, where they are to perform the notoriously difficult music of Carlo Gesualdo, an eccentric early Baroque composer known as much for his audacious use of dissonance as for having murdered his wife and her lover in the conjugal bed.’ As the curtain rises for the performance, Franca fails to appear. Sandro has re-enacted Gesualdo’s crime of passion, murdering his wife offstage and delivering a stunning blow to singers and audience alike.

Cortazar’s story presents a highly unusual—and unanticipated— musical construction that is emblematic of the novels we will examine throughout this work. As he reveals in an afterword entitled “Note on the Theme of a King and the Vengeance of a Prince,” Cortazar borrows the structure of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musical Offering. The eight protagonists represent the eight instruments in an orchestrated version of Bach’s suite. Mimicking the Musical Offering’s thirteen contrasting movements, the story contains thirteen sections that closely follow Bach’s pattern of voicing. The final movement of the Musical Offering includes all eight instruments, save one. By extension, the closing scene of Cortazar’s story assembles all eight singers, with the exception of the murder victim, Franca. The structure of an eighteenth-century Baroque suite thus governs the organization and voicing of a contemporary Argentine novella: it determines the number and types of characters, as well as the mood and trajectory of the narrative, right up to its violent dénouement. At the same time, Gesualdo’s fabled history exerts a thematic pressure on the narrative: the composer is a frequent subject of conversation among the musicians, and his tumultuous history comes literally to repeat itself through Sandro and Franca. In this manner, two musical source texts from the European Baroque determine the demise of Cortazar’s unfortunate soprano in Buenos Aires. Gesualdo’s legendary past, which is repeatedly evoked in the story, plays out on the thematic level, while the Musical Offering—a work which is not once mentioned in the narrative itself, apart from in the afterword—operates at the level of structure and form.”

It turns out that Cortäzar is far from alone in appropriating Baroque musical forms and redeploying them as formal strategies in transnational narratives. However, the title he gives to the story, “Clone,” immediately problematizes what it means to create a literary response to a work of music. When scientists produce a clone, they analyze the genetic code that makes up an entity, and use it to fashion a full or partial copy thereof. Roberto, one of the characters in the novella, uses the word “clone” to describe the impression of seamless unity the musicians aspire to achieve in performance as they give unified expression to the music in a score: “El otro dia leyendo ciencia-ficción encontré la palabra justa: éramos un clone [...] el canto y la vida y hasta los pensamientos eran una sola cosa en ocho cuerpos” (Cortázar, 1980, 110). [“The other day, reading some science fiction, I found the exact word: we were a clone [...] singing, living, and even thinking were all one single thing in eight bodies” (Cortäzar, tr. Rabassa, 1983, 45)]. Ironically, however, by the beginning of the novella, this unity is already a thing of the past, as jealousy and desire have destroyed it. Instead of the clonelike unity promised in the title, the story recounts the gradual dissolution of the ensemble and the fatal elimination of one of its members. It is also worth noting that Roberto borrows the notion of “cloning” from sciencefiction novels, as it indicates just how closely imbricated music and fiction are in this text. Music determines the course of the novella, but literature has already shaped the protagonists’ perceptions.

To pursue the genetic metaphor further, Bach’s Musical Offering functions as the determining code that generates Cortazar’s story. Its role only becomes visible through the author’s afterword, despite the pervasive thematic presence of music throughout the story. In this sense, the code is hidden in the text, much like the mathematical patterns and lipograms adopted experimentally by Oulipo writers of the mid-twentieth century in Europe and the United States, particularly Georges Perec, Harry Matthews, and Italo Calvino. These writers used formal constraints to produce literary texts, often embedding them into narratives unbeknownst to readers.* Cortazar’s constant thematic references to Gesualdo’s madrigals obscure the formal relation between the story and the Musical Offering. The technical explanations of his afterword thus come as a great surprise, and to some degree displace the catharsis of the story from the thematic level (the murder) to its fascinating formal construction (its imitation of the musical structure of the Musical Offering).

At the same time, Cortazar’s story alerts us to the dangers of what Hayden White (1992, 288) calls the “structuralist fallacy: namely, the belief that when we have identified a structure in an artistic work, we have also found its meaning.” Recognizing the role of the Musical Offering does not necessarily bring readers any closer to seizing the significance of the story. In fact, while the title may seem to offer a commentary on the work’s borrowing of musical form, it actually misleads readers into pursuing formal connections that are not supported by the text. The author takes pains in his afterword to list the sequence of contrapuntal movements to which each section of his story corresponds, only to proclaim subsequently his lack of musical expertise. He even quips that he simply read the movements (and their instrumentation) off the record jacket of Millicent Silver’s orchestral recording of the Musical Offering during an afternoon at the beach, thereby revealing that the source on which he modeled the story is not the authoritative original, but an orchestrated adaptation. Cortázar thus undermines the temptation to read the story itself as a “clone,” by asserting its necessary difference from the musical model, which itself already differs from an original text that recedes into the distance. Even for an author fully versed in musical composition, it would be an impossible project to render the multiple contrapuntal genres that make up the Musical Offering—crab canons, canons in contrary motion, and so on—in any literary text, let alone such an economical piece as a short story.

Cortazar thus brings virtuosity and experimental verve to “borrowed” material, just as Bach did before him. Bach produced the Musical Offering at the request of Frederick the Great who set him the task of extemporizing a fugue on a particularly unwieldy and chromatic theme. Bach improvised an impressive three-part fugue in the king’s presence, and later sent him a collection of thirteen elaborations of the theme, far surpassing his expectations. Cortázar in turn responds with his own extravagant elaboration of Bach’s work. Mario Vargas Llosa (2011, 145-46) observes that “no other writer has bestowed on the game the literary dignity that Cortázar gave it, or made the game such a flexible and profitable instrument of artistic creation and exploration.” Along with the game, Vargas Llosa sees freedom as vital to any discussion of Cortazar’s fiction: “Freedom to violate the established norms of writing and narrative structure, [...] to revolutionize [...] narrative time, the psychology of the characters, the spatial organization of the story and the relationships within it. To unwrite the novel, to destroy literature.” “Clone” illustrates Cortazar’s affinity for puzzles and radical approach to form, as does his earlier novel Rayuela (Hopscotch), whose chapters the author encouraged readers to read out of order, either according to their whim or following a sequence suggested in the text.

Through his formal and thematic appropriation of these different musical sources, Cortázar develops a transnational and interdisciplinary aesthetic, while demonstrating the impossibility—and the undesirability—of achieving true coincidence of forms. As we have seen, the story is a hybrid creation rather than a perfect clone. Cortázar borrows the structural apparatus from Bach, while thematically embracing the darkness and murderous passion of Gesualdo’s biography. “Clone” thus stages an encounter—in Buenos Aires, no less—between multiple musical and literary sources. The author uses sixteenth-century Italian scandals, the contrapuntal voicing of a masterwork of the German Baroque, and the experimental spirit of the Oulipo movement of the mid-twentieth century to spin a contemporary murder story while asserting the essential difference between literature and music. In this sense, the story works against the very notions of uniformity and repetition invoked in its title, “Clone,” to affirm instead an aesthetics—and ethics—of difference as fundamental to creative expression.

In the context of this study, it is especially important to take note of what “Clone” reveals about the relationship between a musical “voice” and a voice in literature. Cortázar realizes each “voice” in Bach’s musical score through a corresponding literary character. By twinning a character to each instrument, he rewrites the contrapuntal lines of Bach’s work as dialogues or larger conversations. Virtually all the action takes place through verbal confrontations between characters, whose spirit is predetermined by the music.

“Clone” demonstrates the kind of innovative and virtuosic experimentation with musical form that this book locates in the novels of writers such as Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Nancy Huston, and J. M. Coetzee. The turn to musical form in transnational fiction must be understood as a move of both aesthetic and ethical dimensions: it reflects an effort to challenge the conventions of genre and form, an interest in bringing new perspectives to the fore, a desire for new ways to engage conflicting viewpoints and histories, and a commitment to preserving difference. Furthermore, it indicates a refusal to identify with any single national tradition and an understanding of artistic and cultural heritage as hybrid, multilayered, and complex.

The appropriation of musical forms by contemporary novelists goes hand in hand with the intense interest that literary and cultural critics have accorded to music throughout the twentieth century. Baroque forms, in particular, play a striking and explicit role in postmodern and postcolonial critical theory. As early as the 1930s, Catalan critic Eugenio d’Ors defined the Baroque as a revolutionary and destabilizing current that traverses every historical period. The atemporality and unbounded inventiveness of the Baroque similarly captivated Alejo Carpentier, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Wilson Harris, and Édouard Glissant. Like d’Ors, Carpentier identified the Baroque as an aesthetic that surfaces in all times and that accommodates the proliferation of forms and accumulation of styles. For Deleuze (1993, 5), the “Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds... Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.” Benitez-Rojo (1992) later lays claim to the Baroque as a creolizing aesthetic that spirals out from the Caribbean to touch the furthest reaches of the world. He locates traces of Caribbean dance—the swaying rhythm of a creole woman’s walk—in the florid, expressive gestures and repetition in European Baroque art and architecture. Glissant likewise embraces the Baroque “as a rebellious [...] decolonizing strategy to deform—creolize—the metropolitan standard” (Zamora and Kaup, 2009, 622). Significantly, all of these critics undermine European claims to Baroque forms and ideas, and seek to locate them instead within a dynamic, transcultural framework. While scholars have increasingly attended to the phenomenon of a New World or alternative Baroque that emerges from the Caribbean and Latin America (Kaup, 2005; Lambert, 2004), this book deterritorializes the Baroque even more radically to show how novelists deploy its forms transnationally across borders, forging new connections among diverse locations and historical contexts.

Voice

It is impossible to address polyphony, counterpoint, variation, and opera, without first engaging the question of voice. The term “voice” signifies differently in music and literature, and is the subject of debate within both fields. In “Clone,” we saw how Cortázar transposes each of the various musical voices that constitute Bach’s (instrumental) counterpoint into a corresponding literary character. And yet, as the novels examined in this book reveal, the act of translating the concept of voice from music to literature is far from simple. Between the musical and literary understanding of voice lies a crucial divide: a musical voice implies sound, while a literary voice is invariably silent. A musical score encodes a performance, whereas a literary text occasions a reading. A performance often involves multiple actors who occupy a common space and time; reading, by contrast, is an intimate act. Music can simultaneously deploy multiple voices in relations of harmony, unison, or dissonance, while works of literature necessarily alternate voices in succession.*

The notion of voice is extremely multifaceted, as even standard dictionary definitions attest. For instance, the first entry on “voice” in the Oxford English Dictionary places emphasis on sound. The voice is the “sound formed in or emitted from the human larynx in speaking, singing, or other utterance.” Significantly, the second entry on voice emphasizes the political: “the right or privilege of speaking or voting in a legislative assembly, or of taking part in, or exercising control or influence over, some particular matter; part or share in the control, government, or deciding of something.” Another entry links the voice to questions of singularity and alterity, and defines it as the mark of an individual: “sounds regarded as characteristic of the person and as distin-

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guishing him from another or others.” “To voice,” in the verbal form, is “to act as the mouthpiece or spokesman,” “to give voice, utterance, or expression to,” and “to endow with voice, or the faculty of speech or song.” These definitions point to the tensions between voice as agency and singularity, on one hand, and voice in the sense of “to speak for” and “to take the place of,” on the other.

In music, there are also multiple dimensions to the understanding of voice. In one sense, “each of the melodic lines in polyphonic music, whether sung or not” constitute a voice, and thus voice is synonymous with a musical part. In another, the voice is the physical, resonant production of a human body, “the specific, irreplaceable quality of human vocal cords, membranes stretched across the larynx in song. [...] not reproducible in symbols and thus fixable on the page” (Abbate and Parker, 2012, 7-11). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 96) argue that “as long as the voice is song, its main role is to hold sound.” The operatic voice is an extreme instance of voice, as the singer generates an unparalleled range of volume and expression.

These definitions indicate the fundamental ambivalence that haunts the notion of voice. On one level, voice connotes political agency and presence. Having a voice entails a capacity to communicate needs, desires and thoughts. This necessitates an audience, for as Gayatri Spivak (1988) demonstrated in her seminal essay on subaltern subjectivity, a subject who goes unheard or unacknowledged cannot be said to possess voice.° At the same time, the voice rests on the precarious premise of a unified speaking or singing subject, a notion upended by the linguistic and psychoanalytic revolutions of the early twentieth century that revealed the fractured and unstable nature of subjectivity. In De la grammatologie, one of the founding texts of deconstruction, Derrida revisits eighteenth-century works on the evolution of music and language to question the phonocentric bias of Western philosophy and the privileged status accorded to voice as an indicator of presence. Derrida unravels the binary distinction between writing and voice to show how writing and difference always already inhabit speech, and even thought itself.

Nonetheless, there has been an unmistakable resurgence of the term “voice” in literary criticism since the 1990s. The reinvestment of literary scholars in questions pertaining to the voice has often been understood in relation to the discovery of anti-Semitic publications authored by preeminent Yale critic Paul de Man. The revelation that de Man had contributed more than one hundred literary articles to Belgian collaborationist newspapers between 1940 and 1942, and never retracted the positions he espoused in these pieces, led many to question the ethical and ideological underpinnings of his critical approach. Deconstruction insists on the indeterminacy of the text, and affirms the capacity of language to produce meaning independent of authorial intention, which its opponents saw as highly problematic because it risks evacuating human responsibility and negating “the possibility of action and political opposition” (Bernstein, 1998). Ann Banfield (1991, 22) observes that “to linguistics, there was an ‘anti-linguistic response’ [called alternatively discourse analysis, pragmatics, speech act theory, communications theory ]— that turns instead to the ‘human voice divine’ within linguistic performance, substituting communication for language. It provides the justification for the return of a unified authorial voice, in the guise of the speaker, to literature.” The renewed critical interest in the voice signals an effort to re-inscribe political responsibility and agency into texts in response to deconstruction and the postmodern fragmentation of the subject as a function of language.® In addition, it stems from the translation of Bakhtin’s critical work into English and French in the late 1980s, and the introduction into the critical vocabulary of terms like polyphony that explicitly focus on “voice”?

The issue of voice—what it is, who has access to it, how it is understood across different genres and disciplines—is of particular importance with respect to transnational fiction. As recent scholarship attests, the transnational experience is divided along lines of class. The growth of transnational corporations and the development of new communication technologies have led to the unprecedented global movement of people and ideas, but they have also increased inequality, widening the divide between “those who circulate capital” and “those whom capital circulates” (Zizek, 1999). While the cosmopolitan elite elect their affiliations and determine their movements between different cultural contexts, this is not the case for working-class immigrants and refugees whose displacements are dictated by economic, environmental, and political pressures. Indeed, as Vertovec and Cohen argue, while capital, merchandise, and information move freely across the globe, restrictions on the movement of people—travellers, labor migrants, and asylum seekers—are tightening (Ezra and Rowden, 2006). Whose voices do not come across in transnational fiction? As David James (2011, 191) asks, “have modern and contemporary novelists offered stories about belonging that unsettle the outright celebration of perpetual relocation, complicating the model of global citizenship upheld by those of an economically comfortable cosmopolitan class?” The novels addressed in this book show access to voice to be both unequal and mediated. Alongside the concept of voice, these texts explore the possibilities and problems of “voicing”: how agency and voice are assigned within the text, who speaks for whom, and which voices remain underrepresented or excluded.

The Music of the Transnational Novel

Condé, Djebar, Huston, and Coetzee are among the most prolific and visible figures on the stage of contemporary transnational literature. The musical dimension in their work is emblematic of an ongoing engagement with multiple literary traditions, in local and global issues, and in a virtuosic experimentation with narrative form. Moreover, in spite of their success, each of these writers lays claim to a kind of marginality, because of the creative freedom such marginality confers. Educated abroad, subject to multiple displacements, and currently residing in voluntary exile, they claim “transnational” affiliations. Djebar, born in the coastal town of Cherchell, Algeria in 1936, moves between Paris and New York; Condé, born on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe in 1937, worked for many years between New York and Paris; Huston, born in Calgary, Canada in 1953, writes from Paris in both French and English; and Coetzee, born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940, currently writes from Australia and has long maintained a formidable presence in publishing, book reviews, and academia both in Britain and the United States. All four writers have engaged in multifaceted careers as writers, scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals, and maintain a subversive and independent distance from fixed ideological positions. Their novels convey skepticism toward collective identities, an uneasy relationship with tradition, and a sense of being out of place and out of time.

Their deployment of musical forms to express complex, transnational affiliations recalls Edward Said’s (1993, 248) discussion of the Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James:

Well after négritude, Black nationalism, and the nativism of the 1960s and 1970s, James stubbornly supported the Western heritage at the same time that he belonged to the insurrectionary anti-imperialist moment which he shared with Fanon, Cabral and Rodney. In an interview he said: “How am I to return to non-European roots? If it means that Caribbean writers today should be aware that there are emphases in their writing that we owe to non-European, non-Shakespearean root, and the past in music that is not Beethoven, that I agree. But I don’t like them posed there in the way they have been posed either-or. I don’t think so. I think both of them. And fundamentally we are a people whose literacy and aesthetic past is rooted in Western European civilization.”

James turns to music—and to Beethoven, specifically—to lay claim to a broad, aesthetic tradition, as does each of the writers considered here.

These writers were born between the late 1930s and 1950s, at a time when music was still very much part of a liberal, humanist education. They came of age before “the mass entertainment media eroded the culture of home performance and musical amateurism” (Kramer, 1995, 4). Djebar studied classical piano and has been identified as an unusually musical writer since the publication of L'amour, la fantasia [1985, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade], an epic novel that deploys personal autobiography, oral testimonies, and historical accounts of Algeria’s colonization and struggle for independence, all the while making reference to the structural transgressions and expressive excess of Beethoven’s fantasies and to the traditional North African cavalry formations called fantasias. In more recent years, operatic adaptations of Djebar’s novel Loin de Médine [Far from Medina] have been premiered on stages in Italy and the Netherlands.

Said, as is well known, was a highly accomplished pianist and the music critic of Nation magazine. In addition to his extensive writing on music, which includes Musical Elaborations and a volume of essays entitled Music at the Limits, Said co-authored Paradoxes and Parallels with Daniel Baremboim, the world-class pianist and conductor. The two also partnered in establishing in 1999 the West-Eastern Divan Symphony Orchestra to bring together Middle Eastern young musicians across political divides. Said wrote insightfully about his own position as an Arab intellectual who questioned the West’s imposition of its authority—political, cultural, economic—over the Middle East, and who nonetheless remained deeply committed to the performance and consideration of Western classical music.

Condé, though not a musician, asserts the importance of music to her writing. She claims she always writes to music, favoring artists as diverse as Vivaldi and Kassav. Many of her novels feature musicians, and again exhibit the same diversity in styles: the protagonist of Victoire, les saveurs et le mots (2006) is obsessed with classical music; La vie scélérate (1987) features a celebrated Gwoka musician engaged in the preservation of Guadeloupean traditions,’ while Marie Noélle in Desirada (1997) marries an innovative Jazz musician whose compositions fail because they are too ahead of the times.

Huston has a particularly close relationship to music, as she studied piano and harpsichord. Her novels engage with music on all kinds of levels: thematically, they include many musicians; formally, they enact principles and narrative structures borrowed from music; philosophically, they explore the differences between music and language, and probe the social conventions that govern how music is produced and received. Huston has ventured into musical recording as well. In the early 1990s, she assembled an eclectic group of Baroque and jazz musicians to produce a musical reading of her novel Les variations Goldberg, which she released on disc as Pérégrinations Goldberg [Goldberg Wanderings], and which bears striking resemblance to Glenn Gould’s experiments in contrapuntal radio.

Coetzee came to music much later; by his own account, he was fifteen years old when he first heard Bach’s music wafting over from a neighbor’s garden. He later completed a doctoral thesis on Samuel Beckett’s writing and thus developed a rare intimacy with the work of one of the most interesting musical writers of the early twentieth century. Coetzee’s fiction, like that of Djebar, has inspired adaptations for the operatic stage: the Theatre of Erfurt, Germany in 2005 commissioned an operatic version of his novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), with a musical score composed by the prominent American composer Philip Glass. Disgrace inspired a film version in 2008, for which Antony Partos and Graeme Koehne wrote original music to represent the opera that Coetzee’s protagonist is writing.'°

As each of these writers elects transnational affinities over national identities, musical forms provide a means of addressing the complexities of their experience. This makes them vulnerable to Benita Parry’s (1996, 39) critique that “despite the fictions’ disruptions of colonialist modes, the social authority on which their rhetoric relies and which they exert is grounded in the cognitive systems of the West.” While their engagement with Western classical music’! undeniably brings into view the influence of their Western education, these authors self-consciously inflect this tradition and allow it to interact, overlap, and relate with others. It would be too simple to regard these forms as remnants of an elitist, imperial world order and an indication of a pervasive neocolonial aesthetics. In the act of borrowing and reappropriating forms, these novelists bring them into vastly new contexts, making visible new relations, and thus performing the kind of radical, relational poetics that Glissant advocates. Multiple musical traditions intersect in the novels of Djebar and Condé, including traditional Andalucian song, Berber chants, and North African military fantasias in the case of Djebar, and Zouk and reggae in that of Condé. Huston constantly probes the distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, juxtaposing classical music and genres such as popular folksongs, blues, and jazz, and evaluating spontaneous forms of music against those that require extensive instruction and practice. Coetzee incessantly calls into question the validity and relevance of all inherited forms, whether lyric poetry, the African griot tradition, opera, or the novel itself. The authors examined in this book thus self-consciously confront the possibilities and problems that arise in the “translation and transformation of borrowed or inherited categories’—musical, linguistic, philosophical, aesthetic, social, and political—which Gikandi (1992, 44) identifies as the primary task of postcolonial writing.

The novels under consideration here span the last decade of the twentieth century, and occupy pivotal roles in the literary production of each author. Traversée de la mangrove (1989) is Condé’s first work to be set in Guadeloupe following the author’s symbolic “return” to the island. Les nuits de Strasbourg (1997) is the first novel by Djebar to be entirely set in Europe, and to grapple with the entangled legacies of World War II and the Algerian War. Les variations Goldberg (1981) is Huston’s first novel, often seen as an act of homage to her teacher and mentor Roland Barthes. Finally, Disgrace (1999) is Coetzee’s first novel to address post-apartheid South Africa. Disgrace provides a particularly illuminating counterpoint to the fiction of Djebar, Condé, and Huston not only through its engagement with music (opera), but more broadly because of Coetzee’s interest in and frequent references to the

French literary tradition, particularly to Rousseau and Beckett.!? Despite this affinity, this is the first time Coetzee’s work has been placed in dialogue with francophone fiction.

Transnational Studies

This study engages with a wide range of scholarship on transnational literature and on the interdisciplinary relations between music and literature. Benedict Anderson (1983) persuasively linked the rise of the novel to nation formation and to the constitution of national identities, showing how novels played a vital role in enriching European national languages by disseminating shared ideas about national history and shoring up collective identity. Novels legitimized certain voices and experiences, while relegating others to silence. Transnationalism shifts focus from the nation as the determining frame of experience, to consider the dynamic movement “within, beyond, and between nations” (Ashcroft, 2010, 22), as individuals and communities navigate multiple pulls of belonging and identification. Accordingly, scholars of transnational literature have sought to determine how the genre of the novel has changed to account for the different tiers of transnational experience, from migrant workers to refugees of political violence or environmental disaster, international students, employees of global corporations, and artists. Does the transnational novel require a new set of critical terms, or can existing theories of the novel adequately account for such developments in transnational fiction as the diversity and multiplicity of voices, wide-ranging cultural references, and shifts between vastly different geographies and temporalities? What part does music play in meeting the aesthetic challenges and priorities of transnational fiction?