Literary Anthropology The field of “literary anthropology” actually covers two fields of study. The first is an exploration of the role that literature plays in social life and individual experience, in particular social, cultural, and historical settings. Included in this study is the question of what “literature” is. Literary anthropology can be understood here as an exploration of different kinds of genre of expression, and how these genres can be said to have a historical specificity, a cultural evaluation, and a social institutionalism attached to them. The anthropologist might examine literature as the oral recounting and exchange of myth among 20th-century Amazonian hunter-gatherers, or the focus might be on the establishment of printed daily newspapers in Hungary and its links to the 19th-century rise of Hungarian nationalism. Secondly, literary anthropology is a study of the nature of anthropology itself as a discipline. What role does writing play in the processes of accruing anthropological knowledge? What is the history of the relationship between anthropology and particular kinds of writing? Should exponents be happy to proceed with this historical tradition or is it appropriate that anthropology now reimagine itself in terms of different kinds of expression—visual, audible, sensory—or different kinds of literary genre: fictional or poetic or dialogic? It can be seen that these two fields of study—the first, more traditional approach and the latter “literary turn” to the very nature of knowing and representation—are not discrete. In asking what kinds of expression it should adopt for getting to know its research subject and for disseminating the results of its research, anthropology is also considering the role of literary and other forms of expression to do work—to make sense—at particular historical, social-structural, political, and personal moments. Literary anthropology has thus been a focus of growing anthropological concern for the way in which it throws light on the entire complex of the human social condition, including the role of narrative in consciousness, the nature of creativity in social life, and the way in which anthropology might do justice to evidencing the subjectivity of experience.
The Literary Turn
In a key text, Geertz 1988, Clifford Geertz suggested that writings by some of anthropology’s past grand masters bore a distinct authorial signature, a writerly identity. Albeit that anthropological texts purported, or at least aimed, at simply presenting a true and detached view of the world, they did not come from nowhere, and they did not give onto an unbiased reality: inevitably they represented historico-socio-cultural documents. Indeed, the very claim to truth represented a particular rhetoric, a narrative and stylistic technique, which served to obscure the links between those representations, the “knowledge” they constructed, the relations of power they embodied, and the interests they furthered. Geertz’s work was evidence of a difficulty that was seen to be emerging concerning the whys and wherefores of the act of representing “others.” What had once been an unproblematic process and relationship became “the subject”—for some “the crisis”—of anthropology as such. “The literary turn,” most broadly, can be understood as anthropology turning its attention to its own processes of inscription. Was not anthropology part of its own local and national literary traditions? (See Boon 1972.) Far from analytic and scientific, were not anthropological concepts such as “culture” and “society” part of their own “folk tradition” (Wagner 1975)? Opinion was divided, however, on the question of what recognition of the literariness intrinsic to anthropology should amount to. For some there was now a lack of persuasiveness in anthropology’s traditional claim to explain others by going “there” and sorting strange facts into familiar categories for perusal “here” (Strathern 1987). For others, talk of a moral and epistemological gap—of words being inadequate to experience and of Western words being a continuation of asymmetrical power relations laid down during contexts of colonialism—was an irresponsible affectation, leading to a dereliction of scientific duty to know and improve the human condition (Gellner 1992). For still others, the literary turn represented an opportunity for reassessing the possibilities of fine anthropological writing (Campbell 1989), for substantiating the universality of the literary endeavor (Hymes 1973), or for examining universal creative processes and the ubiquity of “writing social reality” (Rapport 1994).
In 1982 Steven Paul Scher identified three general categories to help us understand the rich connections between music and literature.
The category of “music in literature”—which includes the literary “imitation…of the acoustic quality of music,” adaptations of “larger musical structures and patterns and the application of certain musical techniques and devices” in literary works, and “literary presentation … of existing or fictitious musical compositions has been expanded in recent years to encompass a whole manner of ways in which the implications of how music is represented in literature might be understood. Discussions of gender, genre, structure, the nature of creativity, the cultural significance of musical instruments, aesthetics of criticism, and authorial proclivities have all contributed to a rich debate,representative of the “high-quality synergetic interactions” that interdisciplinary studies offer.
Scher’s two remaining categories, however, were music-centered: “music and literature” (primarily the setting of text) and “literature in music”—broadly related to concepts of musical narrative, where literary paratexts might help us to understand the nature and sequence of specific musical events. Growing numbers of studies in these areas continue to assert interdisciplinary promise, particularly where the nature of the literary text in question suggests a distinctive analytical or interpretative methodology.
Given the significant potential of this approach, this special issue, an outgrowth of the 2014 conferences “Words About Music” at Monash University and “Music Literature, Historiography and Aesthetics” at the Institute of Musical Research in London (convened by the Universities of Monash and Leeds), explores further possibilities of how our understanding of specific musical works might be productively revised or enhanced by viewing them through the lens of literary models, works, or allusions.
Building on Lawrence Kramer’s suggestion that “a song…is a reading, in the critical as well as the performative sense of the term. we might explore how all types of musical representations of literature might be seen more overtly as critical interpretations of their texts. Susan Youens has interpreted Schubert’s “Der Einsame” as a “pointed critique” of Karl Lappe’s poem, for example—part of a “partial détente” that typically represents the composer–poet relationship: “born from the need to say ‘No’ to something in the poet’s proposition and from the challenge of creating multiple levels of musical commentary on the text. However, this can be developed further, engaging where pertinent with literary debates as part of a text’s reception history and, in particular, considering how selected literary criticism of a writer and their works (not just the specific texts themselves) might be appropriated in searching for a suitable hermeneutic approach to any musical refiguring.
Not only can this help to reassess “problematic” or relatively marginalized musical works, as well as offering new insights into familiar repertoire, but it can be applied to various manifestations of the music–text relationship. In terms of text setting, for example, competing aesthetics of the ballad have been used to highlight the musical uncanny in Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and musical readings by Parry and Elgar of Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” have been explored overtly as contributions to the debate over the poem’s didactic or aesthetic status in literary scholarship.
A similar interdisciplinary frame might be used to interrogate text–music relationships in other musical genres, however. Developing James Hepokoski’s familiar concept of the contract between composer and listener in defining program music to encompass what the listener “finds” rather than what they are “given,” for example, thefirst article in this issue explores how the listener might “grapple” with the connections suggested by the juxtaposition of musical text and paratext in Granville Bantock’s 1902 orchestral poem, The Witch of Atlas, based on a poem by Shelley of 1820. While Bantock’s inclusion of an abridged paratext in his published score offers a useful approach to appreciating his orchestral refiguring, literary scholarship in particular can be identified as a site of meaningful interpretative strategies that might be applied to aspects of the music; these include issues of genre (the specific concept of mythopoesis), the central idea of transformation in the poem, and Shelley’s awareness of the visual perspective. The resultant close reading has implications for both literary scholarship and musicology: Not only can Bantock’s reading be seen as a contribution to the poem’s reception and meaning, but the study also confirms Bantock’s significance in the development of program music—as a composer willing to experiment with musical structure to take account of the implications of his poetic models.
The issue of “voice” has been at the center of a wide range of studies in music and literature, whether in terms of tensions between natural and studied music-making of literary characters, broader representation of female vocality (including the voice being silenced or marginalized), structural concerns, or exploration of national cultures; if overviews of contemporary music have adopted the concept of the decomposing voice to explore issues of human and inhuman sonorities, the field of opera studies has encouraged the placing of voice at the heart of concepts of narrativity, aesthetics, and cultural, sexual, and performing identities.
This potential of voice in an operatic context is reinforced by Jason R. D’Aoust’s article. After a brief discussion of Massenet’s opera Werther in relation to other operatic versions of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, D’Aoust focuses on how the idea of voice might be explored when translated from one genre to another—in this case, how a “semantic space of vocality” in Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian is refigured in Werther’s “Lied d’Ossian” scene in Act 3. Moving from the “archaic ballads” of Macpherson’s original and the epistolary context within which the Ossian reference appears in Goethe’s novel, D’Aoust highlights how in Massenet’s opera the Ossianic voice—while framed in a separate aria distinct from the through-composed writing elsewhere in the work—is hidden through a “seamless illusion of undifferentiated singing and speech.” This revocalization has implication for how we might reconsider the real and the symbolic in operatic staging.
If vocal identity is a central issue in Massenet’s Werther, then Anthony Burgess’s song-cycle, The Brides of Enderby (1977), raises wider questions of authorial identity. While Burgess is a relatively familiar figure in general studies of intermediality (given the musical references in his poetry, novels, and autobiographical essays, and his substantial output as a composer), this particular composition offers the opportunity to explore how Burgess interprets poetry penned by his own literary persona, F. X. Enderby.
In unravelling the complexities of these relationships and exploring their implications, Carly Eloise Rowley focuses upon the importance of the Muse figure within the cycle, whose contrasting personas mirror the authorial ambiguity of the entire set. By reverting to a form of the poetic text associated with a younger version of Burgess’s poetic self, rather than the fictitious Enderby, the penultimate song in The Brides of Enderby, “She was all brittle crystal,” as Rowley suggests, represents a more personal fusion of words and music, symptomatic of this multi-layered composition.
As Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka have noted, “cosmopolitanism emerges more and more as a key analytical tool to study a variety of outlooks, processes and ethico-political practices that are observable in a variety of social and political contexts”; this is underlined by the recent plethora of musical studies that have applied this ideology.
The concluding article by Ryan Weber moves away from the close analysis of a specific work to explore how the literary models of Arne Garborg and Hamlin Garland might be used to reformulate our understanding of the cosmopolitanism of Grieg and MacDowell, helping to frame their cultural identities. Not only does this have implications for the composers’ respective reception but these parallel readings (encompassing Garborg’s Weary Men, Grieg’s “Eros,” Garland’s Crumbling Idols, and MacDowell’s Eight Songs, Op. 47) identify a cultural network of composers and writers who “manufactured a style of inbetweenness” that transcended “boundaries of time, geography and discipline.”
Asserting the potential of literary criticism as an analytical tool, understanding the musical refiguring of vocality, exploring the implications of authorial identity in a composer’s setting of his own literary texts, interrogating a transatlantic discourse of cosmopolitanism through music–literature parallels—these distinctive approaches to reading music through literature, applied to a range of musical genres (symphonic poem, opera, song-cycle, solo song, and orchestral suite), are suggestive of the wide scope and rich potential of such interdisciplinary work. Future contributions to this fascinating field of study can only be encouraged.
