Joyce's Music and Noise
Theme and Variation in His Writings
by Jack W. Weaver
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Jack Weaver explains all of Joyce's writing in terms of music and
evaluates the music--its form, kind, and technique--in each work.
Using Joyce's own rhetoric of theme and variation, Weaver moves
from one character to another, through the poems, fiction, and
drama, noting improvisations and finding intricate musical
patterns throughout the canon.
As Joyce's work grows in philosophical complexity, Weaver says,
its music becomes more recognizable. In Chamber Music
and part of Dubliners, Joyce at first merely mentions
musical titles, instruments, and forms. In other stories in
Dubliners, he alludes to them. His writing in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man begins to approximate musical
techniques, and music reflects and dominates its story and
characters. By the time of Finnegans Wake, it
replaces both. Within the works, Weaver cites examples of musical
augmentation, diminution, harmony, counterpoint, and key
signatures, showing how the works become more experimental and
increasingly dissonant in the manner of avant-garde composers.
Exploring fresh territory in the study of Joyce and music and of
music and literature, Weaver argues that Joyce's characters and
works operate between the extremes of order and disorder, harmony
and chaos, music and noise, and that these polarities both signal
and contribute to the rhetoric within the texts. Finally, he
says, Joyce's rhetoric itself becomes music.
Jack W. Weaver, professor of English at Winthrop
University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, has written numerous
articles and book chapters on Joyce, music, and Irish literature.
The Florida James Joyce Series
1998. 208 pp. 6 X 9.
3 illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1608-8Cloth, $55.00
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"Weaver's book will be a find for those seeking musical tidbits amidst the swelling voices of the
Race-Class-Gender Critical Chorus." -- James Joyce Literary Supplement
"Breaks new ground for Joyceans. . . . Weaver's work embodies a perceptive, believable explication of Joyce's interpolation of verbal and musical modalities, and in the process makes the reader eminently aware of the interlocking nature of the two art forms."--Zack Bowen, University of Miami