The music of Gounod – a thought form, by Annie Besant

We’re reading a bunch of novels for this month’s Culture Club (Under the Volcano, The Power and the Glory, The Plumed Serpent). I love reading novels, but when studying them I’m reminded of the inherent flaw in the genre – its innate lack of form.

By ‘form’ I mean literary or artistic form, such as the 14 lines and strict rhyme scheme of a sonnet, or the four-movement structure of a symphony. There are often attempts to bring formal qualities to the novel, such as the 12-book structure of Under the Volcano (meant to recall Homer’s and Virgil’s epics), but these are unique to each work and bound to fail because they are rendered in unstructured prose. (In my view the most successful novelist in this respect is Jane Austen, whose intricate patterning of plot and narrative comes closest to creating a unique novel ‘form’.)

So why is this a flaw? Mainly because it removes one of the most powerful aspects of art forms that do have formal qualities, such as music, poetry and drama: the interplay between form and content.

For example, the following lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra work on more than one level because of their poetic formal qualities:

….on each side her

Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did.

The rhythm of ‘And what they undid did’ makes us hear and therefore experience the fans flapping in the hot breeze in a way that a pure prose description can’t achieve.

Formal elements in art enhance, contradict, surprise and extend meaning. As Stephen Fry says in his book on poetry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet within,

The point I am anxious to make, is that metre is more than just a ti-tum ti-tum: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO.

To some critics, form  takes on even greater import, perhaps because it alone has the power to ‘express the inexpressible’. This is what Walter Pater was getting at when he said ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition of music’. For a great discussion on this quote see: All art constantly aspires to the condition of music – you don’t say. Nigel Beale’s point in his comment on this post is illuminating:

This post put me in mind of composer Clive in Ian McEwen’s overly contrived Amsterdam:
“Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose – to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalisingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.”

Back to the novel then. Why does it lack the formal qualities I’ve described? I think Ian Watt nails this in his book The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding:

When we judge a work in another genre, a recognition of its literary models is often important and sometimes essential; our evaluation depends to a large extent on our analysis of the author’s skill in handling the appropriate formal contentions. On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work: and the reason for this seems to be that since the novelist’s primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success. What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism.

Jacqueline Bisset as Yvonne in the movie version of Under the Volcano (1984) (Image from www.screenrush.co.uk)

Under the Volcano is our main focus in this month’s Culture Club. In an earlier Penguin Modern Edition (I don’t have a link, as it’s no longer published) the introduction features a very length letter that Lowry wrote in 1946 to Jonathan Cape (the publisher) arguing against suggested cuts. He goes through each of the 12 chapters, and one of the most fascinating revelations is that he regards the death of Yvonne (and how it happens) as central to the novel.

The passage comes at the end of chapter 11, in which Yvonne and Hugh follow the Consul into the forest. Amid the confusion we find dark portents, in Hugh’s song ending with the words ‘prefiere morir prefiere morir’, and the ensuing description of the coming storm:

All at once the rain fell more heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead lightening struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder that shook the earth…

Before his own death, the Consul unleashes fate/destiny – the horse with the number 7 brand that crosses their respective paths throughout the novel and then kills Yvonne while she’s searching in the dark for him, trying to reach him:

Again trying to rise she heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her. The sky was a sheet of white flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant pinioned –

The contrast of their respective ends is clear: Yvonne’s death is a rising up to the stars, whereas Geoffrey’s at the end of the next chapter is a falling down into the volcano/ravine, representing the entrance to the underworld towards which he is drawn throughout the book. According to Lowry himself: ‘a not dissimilar idea appears at the end of one of Julian Green’s books, but my notion came obviously from Faust, where Marguerite is hauled up to heaven on pulleys, while the devil hauls Faust down to hell.’ Both are scenes of burning – Yvonne’s is in the heavens, Geoffrey’s is in the earth:

And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever widening circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades…

See the excellent Hypertextual Companion to Under the Volcano for more details on the references in this chapter and throughout the novel.

Buy the novel here: Under the Volcano (Amazon affiliate link).

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Well, it’s been a long time since I updated the Culture Club blog. There’s been a big gap between meetings, but the Culture Club is still going, have no fear.

This time we’ve decided on a Mexican theme for the works we’re looking at. Why? No reason, it just seemed to fall into place when we were bouncing around a few ideas.

Here’s the list of works we’ll be reading, listening to and discussing in the next couple of months:

• Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry (novel)
• The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene (novel)
• The Labyrinth of Solitude – Octavio Paz (essays)
• Mornings in Mexico – DH Lawrence (essays)
• The Plumed Serpent – D.H. Lawrence (novel)
• Studies for Player Piano – Conlon Nancarrow (music)
• El Salón Mexico – Aaron Copland (music)

Shakespeare cut-out from Toy-A-Day (click picture for link).

My English teacher at school once told me: ‘Shakespeare is a greater poet than he is a dramatist.’

This isn’t meant to mean that Shakespeare wrote better poems than plays, which is clearly not the case. Rather it means that the poetry in his plays is what drives the drama, and it is in his poetic gifts that his claim to being our greatest writer lies.

This is what I think the great author Vladimir Nabokov meant when he said:

The verbal poetic texture of Shakespeare is the strongest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973, quoted in After Shakespeare: An Anthology

And also what Boris Pasternak was getting at in the following excerpt from Observations on Translating Shakespeare (1939-1946, translated by Ann Pasternak Slater), quoted in After Shakespeare: An Anthology:

Rhythm is fundamental to Shakespeare’s poetry. Half his thoughts, and the words that verbalised them, were prompted by metre. Rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts, not a framing last touch. Some of Shakespeare’s stylistic vagaries can be explained in terms of rhythmic bursts, while rhythmic flow governs the order of questions and answers in his dialogues, their speed of exchange, and the length and brevity of periods in his soliloquies.

For more on the essential rhythmic nature of Shakespeare’s drama, see my post on the Musical Structure of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Is this emphasis on the poetic over the dramatic in Shakespeare because we feel, like Martin Amis, that drama is an inferior form of literature?

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.
Martin Amis, Experience, footnote on page 91

Despite all this, I may be having a change of heart after all these years. Because on reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets for this month’s Culture Club, I’ve been struck by how dramatic they are. For me, part of the greatness of these poems lies in their narrative drive, in the substance of the principle characters and their motivations.

So now I’m confused. Is Shakespeare a greater poet or a greater dramatist? Or is he, as seems the obvious answer, both?

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.

I’m just reading Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Amazon affiliate link). I think she is my favourite interpreter of poetry, and this might be her greatest work. Every page is revelatory.

One of her major themes is that a consideration of ‘form’ in lyric poetry is vital for a full understanding of the poet’s expression: ‘A set of remarks on a poem which would be equally true of a prose paraphrase of that poem is not, by my standards, interpretation at all.’ (Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Introduction, note 5, page 40).

Vendler demonstrates that lyric poetry of the type represented by these sonnets has very little of interest to impart if we concentrate purely on the propositional ‘meaning’ on the surface:

‘I have insomnia because I am far away from you’ is the gist of one sonnet; ‘Even though Nature wishes to prolong your life, Time will eventually demand that she render you to death,’ is the ‘meaning’ of another. These are not taxing or original ideas, any more than other lyric ‘meanings’ (‘My love is like a rose’, ‘London in the quiet of dawn is as beautiful as any rural scene,’ etc.). Very few lyrics offer the sort of philosophical depth that stimulates meaning-seekers in long, complex, and self-contradicting texts like Shakespeare’s plays or Dostoevsky’s novels.

Vendler goes on to discuss how the poem’s ‘linguistic strategies’ need to be taken into account to yield a comprehensive interpretation of lyric poetry.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet form

The 14-line sonnet form as worked out by Shakespeare in his collection of sonnets consists of four parts: three four-line ‘quatrains’ and one ending ‘couplet’. As Vendler illustrates, Shakespeare (in a totally new way) manipulates the relations between these four parts, putting them in a wide range of logical relationships with each other.

Sometimes the parts are successive and equal, sometimes they contrast with each other, sometimes they’re analogous, at other times logically contradictory. The four ‘pieces’ of any given sonnet may also be distinguished from one another by changes of agency (‘I do this; you do that’), of rhetorical address (‘O muse’; ‘O beloved’), of grammatical form (a set of nouns in one quatrain, a set of adjectives in another), or of discursive texture (as the descriptive changes to the philosophical), or of speech act (as denunciation changes to exhortation). Each of these has its own poetic import and effect.

What Vendler demonstrates is that these formal features represent an ‘inner emotional dynamic’, as the fictive speaker of the Sonnets ‘sees more’, ‘changes his mind’, ‘passes from description to analysis’ and so on. In other words, these formal devices are ‘designed to match what he is recording – the permutations of emotional response’.

I found these perceptions invaluable in appreciating the extraordinary range of expression in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There seems to be an inexhaustible energy of creativity behind them, and once you take into account the ways that the formal and propositional elements interact to create wider perspectives of meaning, the true nature of Shakespeare’s genius emerges.

I wonder if this also accounts for the experience I had while reading through the complete sonnets in sequence – which I can only describe by saying that I fell in love with them. Reading Vendler’s analysis this makes total sense. Shakespeare’s Sonnets enact the emotional/logical confusion, perplexing variety and breadth of vision that accompanies love itself.

As Vendler asserts, ‘no poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets’.

The following links offer useful and free online resources for the study and analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Full text

• Shakespeare: Sonnets – easy access to all 154 sonnets
• The amazing web site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – this site is a little clumsy to navigate, but does feature the complete texts plus useful commentaries and sonnets by contemporaries such as Sidney, Spencer and Drayton
• William Shakespeare Sonnets – full text plus background information
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets – free ebook from Project Gutenberg
• Free audio book of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – complete collection of audio files read by various non-professional contributors

Essays and Analysis

• An Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – full text plus paraphrased version for each sonnet and essays
• Spark Notes: Shakespeare’s Sonnets – summary and analysis of sonnets 1, 18, 60, 73, 94, 97, 116, 129, 130 & 146
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Cummings Study Guide – useful background information, anatomy of form and discussion of key themes
• Cliffs Notes Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets – includes an introduction, overview, analysis and original text for all sonnets
• Understanding Shakespeare’s Sonnets (YouTube video) – The University of Warwick celebrates the 400th anniversary of the sonnets in this discussion between Professory Stanley Wells, Jonathan Bate and Paul Edmondson. Also available on iTunes U (this link will attempt to open iTunes if you have it installed on your computer)

William Shakespeare, the so-called Chandos Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London.

January – February 2010

Happy new year to all Culture Club readers!

This month we’re looking at some of the greatest poetry in the English language, and some other works that relate to it. Here’s the list:

• The Sonnets – William Shakespeare (poems)
• The Portrait of Mr W.H. – Oscar Wilde (short story)
• Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life – Anthony Burgess (novel)
• Crystal Tears: John Dowland and His Contemporaries – Anderas Scholl and Julian Behr (music)

The Beatles' Here, There and Everywhere. This cover was used when the song was released as a single in Portugal.

Here, There and Everywhere is one of the songs on The Beatles’ Revolver, and is the album’s brightest affirmation. Paul McCartney is the song’s sole writer (despite the Lennon/McCartney credit), and it is suffused with his inveterate sentimentality. But it is sentimental in the best possible way, balancing finely ordered poetic thought with an intoxication that suggests the writer is ‘drunk with love’ (as Jonathan Gould puts it in Can’t Buy Me Love).

Even John Lennon, The Beatles’ most cynical band member and the first to pull up McCartney on his sentimental tendencies, called Here, There and Everywhere ‘One of my favourite songs of the Beatles’ (Playboy interviews, 1980).

In purely compositional terms, the song stands as a beautiful example of music and lyric working together to reinforce meaning. McCartney sets the song in three closely related keys, analogous to the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ of the song’s title: G major (the first half of the verse), E minor (the second half of the verse) and G minor (the bridge).

Harmonic shifts like these are unusually sophisticated for popular music, but if this were not ingenious enough, the modulations are made to work at precisely the right moments. Ned Rorem describes the first modulation in The Music of the Beatles, New York Review of Books, 1968 (quoted in The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles by Dominic Pedler, pg 80):

‘Here, There and Everywhere’ would seem at mid-hearing to be no more than a charming slow ballad but once concluded it has grown immediately memorable. Why? Because of the minute harmonic shift on the words ‘wave of her hand’, as surprising and yet as satisfyingly right as that in a Monteverdi madrigal…

That harmonic shift is the sudden appearance of an F# minor chord after four bars that are solidly in G major. This is followed by a move to B7, which takes us to E minor, the relative minor of G major.

That a surprise modulation occurs on the line ‘changing my life with a wave of her hand’ makes that change all the more real to the listener. It provides a vividness to the detail that is reminiscent of a similar line from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: ‘But look—he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.’

Likewise, the most significant moment in the song is handled with consummate skill – the opening out into ‘everywhere’ that makes this song a statement of all-embracing love. Look at how the song builds to this moment so beautifully. ’Here’ is introduced on the dominant (D7) in the intro (‘To lead a better life, I need my love to be here‘) and is then immediately appropriated by the tonic G major at the start of the verse (‘Here, making each day of the year’). It’s as if the singer has pulled his lover closer to him and the song immediately becomes more intimate.

‘There’ has been through the same journey, first showing up on the dominant (D7) at the end of the verse (‘nobody can deny that there’s something there‘), and is likewise immediately appropriated into the tonic (G major) for the start of the second verse (‘There, running my hands through her hair’).

For the ‘everywhere’ section, the song shifts even more abruptly, leaping from D7 to F7 (‘I want her…’), a completely alien chord to the predominant G major tonality. It then moves to a remote Bb major (‘…everywhere’) before settling on G minor (‘…and if she’s beside me I know I need never care…’). How much more satisfying then is the final appropriation of ‘everywhere’ in its turn, back in the main key of the song, G major – ‘But to love her is to need her everywhere…‘

The last verse brings together all three states (‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘everywhere’) for the first time in the tonic G major. It is one of the most sublime endings in all popular music – ‘I need her here, there and everywhere’ – as the melody reaches a high ‘g’ on ‘…where’ and the final plagal cadence sounds a distinct ‘Amen’.

Here, There and Everywhere can be heard on Revolver by The Beatles (Amazon affiliate link).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8X4eoNfm5E

Eleanor Rigby statue, Liverpool, by Tommy Steele, 1982.

Eleanor Rigby is perhaps the Beatles’ most shocking song. Not simply because of the sound of it, which was an abrupt departure for its time, but because of its theme. It is hard to think of a more desolate statement in any work of art, let alone popular music.

This song marked a sudden break with the optimism that was a hallmark of The Beatles’ earlier work, and in its place presented an almost unbearably dark cynicism. Two lonely people, living in a church community, cannot find a way to connect and end up living their entire lives alone and apart. Their destiny is not that they will end up together, but that one buries the other, a grim irony that would be humorous if it weren’t tragic (the poet Ezra Pound is said to have ‘smiled lightly’ when he first heard the song).

But the song suggests even greater despair. We learn that Eleanor dies in church, which ought to be a comfort, and ‘was buried along with her name.’ Even Hodge, in Thomas Hardy’s war poem Drummer Hodge, leaves his name behind. In Eleanor Rigby’s death we see the death of hope itself. As Ian MacDonald says in Revolution in the Head:

MacKenzie’s sermon won’t be heard – not that he cares very much about his parishioners – because religious faith has perished along with communal spirit (‘No one was saved’).

The novelist AS Byatt remarked that it has ‘the minimalist perfection of a Beckett story’, pointing out that had Eleanor Rigby’s face been kept in a jar by the mirror, it would suggest the less disturbing idea of make-up, but behind the door, inside her house, it suggests she ‘is faceless, is nothing’ (from a talk on BBC Radio 3, 1993, quoted by Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head).

The song avoids sentimentality by keeping a distance from its subject throughout. The action is presented like a film script –  ‘Look at him working…’ – and uses various tenses to imply shifts in perspective: Eleanor Rigby ‘died in the church’ (past tense) while in the same scene Father MacKenzie is ‘wiping the dirt from his hands’ (present tense).

Positioned as the second song on Revolver, Eleanor Rigby casts a shadow over the whole album. We already have a hint of death in the opening track Taxman (‘my advice for those who die…’), but here we have an all-encompassing despair. As Jonathan Gould says in his book Can’t Buy Me Love:

The questions the song poses aren’t rhetorical; they’re unanswerable. They’re the sort of questions people ask when they don’t know what else to say, and by raising them as he does, Paul calls attention to the inadequacy of his own response.

Nevertheless, we can see the rest of the Revolver album as an attempt to present an answer to the issues raised in the song Eleanor Rigby. Whether it’s a turning away from old age and a return to childhood, in Yellow Submarine and the ‘When I was a boy, everything was right,’ section of She Said She Said; or the escape into the unconscious of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’; or the drugs pedalled by ‘Doctor Robert’; or the urgent embrace of sexual love in Love You To (‘Love me while you can, before I’m a dead old man’); or the attempt to reach a more spiritual, omnipotent love in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, which starts with the line ‘To lead a better life…’.

Meanwhile other songs on the album serve to remind us of Eleanor Rigby’s bleak message: the desperate emptiness presented by the death of love in For No One, and the difficulty of communication that prevents attachment in I Want To Tell You. It is not until the album’s extraordinary climax, Tomorrow Never Knows, that we finally get an answer, one that transcends the failure of the Christian Church in Eleanor Rigby by re-asserting a progressive belief in universal love.

Eleanor Rigby can be heard on Revolver by The Beatles (Amazon affiliate link).

More posts on the Beatles at Culture Club:

• Analysis: Here, There and Everywhere by The Beatles
• The Beatles’ Revolver and the Universal
• The Beatles’ Yesterday and the Nature of Belief
• Happy Birthday Sgt. Pepper

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcIZdG4xsGg

If you can’t make it to the Royal Opera House to see The Nutcracker this Christmas, you need not miss out. Opus Arte, the ROH’s multi-platform arts production and distribution company, is bringing The Nutcracker to cinema screens across the country, filmed in a high-definition recording from the Royal Opera House itself.

To promote the screenings Opus Arte has made a wonderful digital advent calendar for The Nutcracker. Enter your details (it just takes a few seconds) and you get daily clips of the opera throughout December. A neat idea and a delightful way to count down to Christmas.