Borrowed Forms

Despite Lachman’s personal knowledge of music, from a strictly musicological point of view (assuming for a moment that there is such a thing), Borrowed Forms sometimes reads more like Misinformed Borrowings . This is not necessarily, or at least not only, a problem with the book. Perhaps it is a problem with the discipline, or disciplines. In any case, both book and problem seem much more to do with metaphor than form. Music and/in/of fiction is rarely straightforward, sometimes precisely because novelists appear to think that it is. But, while Lachman’s chosen authors are nothing if not self-conscious about the relationship, her field of enquiry is nonetheless rather uncertainly defined. Her plan is to bring together, in each of the four brief chapters, a late twentieth-century novel that is in some sense transnational, a critic or critical approach, and a musical technique, showing how the last has impinged on the first two. Thus the first chapter considers the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove (1989) in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of ‘polyphonic’ style (as expounded in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , 1929, and developed by Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel , 1986). The second chapter, similarly, analyses Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997) by the Algerian Assia Djebar, using Edward Said’s notion of ‘counterpoint’ (set out in a keynote address in Beirut in 1999 and, Lachman argues, taken up by critics ranging from Kimberlé Crenshaw and Sarah Nuttall to Michael Rothberg and Mark Sanders). The third, in a somewhat more convoluted reading, juxtaposes Nancy Huston’s Les Variations Goldberg (1981) with Bach’s score (of which the novel’s structure is a close analogy), Glenn Gould’s various pronouncements on live performances vs. recordings, and Roland Barthes’s essay on The Death of the Author (1967). By the fourth chapter, the neat triangulation (as well as the emphasis on Francophone women writers) has apparently been abandoned: the novel is J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), the musical technique is now a genre rather than a technique (as many will recall, Coetzee’s central character composes an opera), and the critical approach is nothing more specific than an amalgam of the reception of the book with an overview of music in the twentieth-century novel, from Proust and Mann to Beckett and Vikram Seth.

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