Michel Delville

James Joyce and the Prose Poem

Even though they were published posthumously and therefore cannot be granted a historically central or founding place within the history of the prose poem, James Joyce’s epiphanies (1900–1904) emerge as an early attempt to move the prose lyric away from the stylistic intricacies of the British Decadents and to carry out Baudelaire’s project to reproduce the complex and discontinuous rhythms of consciousness. Joyce’s posthumous Giacomo Joyce enacts the formal struggle between lyric (self-)presence and narrative continuity which was to characterize the prose poem throughout the twentieth century. By withholding the pressures of both narrative linearity and poetic closure, Giacomo eventually results in a ‘writerly’ variant of the traditional lyric, one which attends to nothing less than the movement of desire itself.

Gertrude Stein's Melodies: In Anticipation of the Loop

Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (1948) offers an apt perspective on the notoriously unmelodious developments in the classical music of the first half of the twentieth century. In the novel narrator Serenus Zeitblom, an oldfashioned humanist academic, desperately seeks to come to terms with the new music and musical theories of the novel’s protagonist, Leverkuhn, whose ideas are based on the work of Arnold Schonberg, and the birth of serial, twelve-tone music accounts for his rejection of harmony in favor of polyphony in the following terms: I find that in a chordal combination of notes one should never see anything but the result of the movement of voices and do honor to the part as implied in the single chord-note—but not honor the chord as such, rather despise it as subjective and arbitrary, so long as it cannot prove itself to be the result of part-writing. The chord is no harmonic narcotic but polyphony in itself, and the notes that form it are parts. (74) 1 Leverkuhn’s refusal to honor the “chord as such,” his substitution of polyphony as dissonance for the narcotic effects of tonality, and his contempt for “subjective” appropriations of music point to modernism’s ambivalent relationship with the affective power of music. 2 When Leverkuhn prefers the part (the isolated note) over the wholeness of the chord, he argues for an understanding of music as an affectless field of expression in which there is little room for a notion like melody, which, traditionally, connotes tunefulness and plenitude. Indeed, the exchange of affect and expression for a “chilly, rationalistic wisdom” is exactly what Oscar Bie—unaware of the ideological connotations twentieth-century history would bestow on melody—deplores about modernist music, which he finds “unable to admit even the semblance of melody” in the July 1916 issue of The Musical Quarterly (Bie 402).