Imaginary Music as Literary Soundtrack in John Steinbeckʼs The Pearl

Cruz, Filipa

http://hdl.handle.net/10362/169925

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Cruz, Filipa

Resumo(s)

Musicology, together with Word and Music Studies, has, for the last few decades, explored and valued the connection between music and verbal language, insisting, as Lawrence Kramer so regularly does, on the need to reflect upon different types of discourse about music, for example in the form of informal ascriptions, critical descriptions, and literary references. Our purpose is to address a specific kind of musico-literary object which remains rather neglected from a theoretical and methodological standpoint: imaginary music, by which we mean those cases of description, reference, presentation or thematization of music in literature that concern themselves only with fictitious (or unidentified), and therefore inaudible, works. The study of imaginary music impels us to consider concepts such as ekphrasis, intertextuality and intermediality, but it mostly demands that we try to understand the importance of music as idea, the relationship between music, silence and meaning, and the role of the listenerʼs (or, in this case, readerʼs) expectations and interpretations. In her analysis of the song of the Sirens in the Odyssey, Laura Odello takes this idea further and states that music is not just reduced to silence but “muted”, as a result of a “platonic gesture” that rids music of its dangers (its sound) and lets it act as “logical understanding”. We propose to discuss the meaning and the implications of this muted music through the analysis of the imaginary soundtrack that guides the narrative of John Steinbeckʼs The Pearl, hoping to provide a better understanding of what is left of music when the sound is gone.