operatic metaphors for novelistic structure

[truepenny]

This is matociquala's fault. Just so y'all know that.

When I was a kid, nine or ten maybe, my father the opera buff made me listen to a recording called something like "The Interpretation of Wagner's Ring Cycle." Although opera bores me silly, I realized today that I actually internalized something from that recording and have come to use it as a way to think about compositional structure in my writing.


The purpose of this recording was to disentangle the complex music of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) so that ordinary listeners could appreciate what Wagner was doing. (I use "appreciate" in the sense of "understand," not in the sense of "enjoy.") Now, it's been almost twenty years since I heard this, and I'm sure I've forgotten most of what the guy had to say, but the thing I did grasp was the idea of leitmotifs.

If you want to explore the proper Wagnerian take on this concept is, this site has an in-depth explanation. They also have a discussion of John Williams's debt to Wagner in the score for Star Wars. All I'm going to give you is the definition my ten-year-old self grasped, which is that a leitmotif is a phrase of melody associated with a particular character or object or theme. So, for example, all the moments that are steps along the path to Götterdämmerung are tagged with a particular melody. But because, in Wagner, these melodies are very brief and because the music is so complex, you can't follow everything that's going on unless you've been trained to--or you've got a recording to show you how it works.

The recording didn't make me like opera any better, but what it did do was give me a word, and the word in turn gave me a tool. I think of subplots as leitmotifs that I have to keep remembering to bring back into the score of the opera-that-is-the-novel. Or, if you prefer Bach to Wagner, strands of melody that have to be woven together into a fugue. It's a way of thinking about how subplots have to rise up out of the background and be heard/seen clearly for a while and then sink back down to make way for another subplot. There's some other value to it for me in thinking of subplots as leitmotifs, but it's harder to articulate. Maybe it's because I don't think of myself as a plot-centered novelist, or maybe it's because "leitmotif" can apply to characters and themes as well as plot elements. It means I don't have to begin by thinking of a thing to have happen, but can start with a theme or a character and work from there. It's a mental construct--as all these models of writing and creativity are--but it suits me better than more traditional ones.


Which goes to show that even Wagner has his uses.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Coolness. Very much coolness.

Photographs are a leitmotif in the 1919 novel. I like that.

One could also use "fugue" as a concept, I bet, for thematic elements that keep reappearing.

A lot of musical terms could be applicable--"rhythm" and "tempo" get used a lot for prose style and pacing.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's a great chapter in E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel which is called something like 'Rhythm and Pattern', in which I think he also draws on the Wagnerian example to explain what he means. Unfortunately my copy of this work has been AWOL for a while, for reasons I'm unable to fathom, so I can't look it up, but I do recommend it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

*puts ANOTHER book on the list*

Thank you!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

But it is short and brilliantly readable, and is in print in mass paperback, while www.bookfinder.com has numerous used copies at under $5.

[heresluck]

It's upstairs when you want to borrow it.

What? It's Forster. You *know* how I feel about Forster.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I know Aspects of the Novel is in your bookcase.

I may read it once I'm done with Leon Edel (who is lovely except for his obstinate persistence in practicing biographical criticism). Strange how my "light" reading has gotten awfully heavy of late.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I am insanely fond of Anna Russell, although I'm still Ring-shy enough that I have not listened to that particular piece.

Force-feeding works great for pâté de fois gras. Not so much for music appreciation.

The two operas I love are Carmen and Die Dreigroschenoper.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Force-feeding works great for pâté de fois gras. Not so much for music appreciation.

[Choke] ROFLMAO!!!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

misia's beaten me to the Anna Russell recommendation which I can heartily second, as well as her similarly fiendish/brilliant deconstruction of how to write a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.

I don't know about leitmotifs. One of my absolute favourite novels is Ian McDonald's [ US title Terminal Cafe, UK title Necroville ] which uses five viewpoint characters and has very impressive and well-integrated elemental imagery with each of them and how they interact; Papersky and I had a conversation with him at the 1998 Eastercon, I think it was, in which this came up, and he said nobody had noticed. I'm trying to do things with elemental balance and imbalance in Hands of Smoke and Steel that are to my mind a lot less subtle, and as much a way of dealing with my inability to write "water" people as anything else, and no second readers notice that either. I suspect readers vary enormously widely in how obvious such things are to them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, leitmotifs aren't for the audience; they're for me. There's no reason that anyone would pick up on what I'm calling leitmotifs in my writing, because they are indistinguishable to the naked eye from subplots.

It's a hermeneutic model, not an artist's statement.

[vass]

Actually, Liszt has a better claim to have invented the leitmotiv than Wagner. Wagner developed it further, and used it in four four-hour operas.

And I heartily, emphatically, stentorianly second misia and rysmiel's recommendation of Anna Russell's take on the Ring. The more you know about the Ring, the funnier it is. After a semester's musicology elective in which we studied all four operas, it sent me into fits.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

In the novel I finished earlier this year, there are two characters, one of whom is significantly screwed up, and the other is only moderately screwed up. They are living together, and sleeping together, but most of the time they don't have sex, and they're not in love with each other. They can't demonstrate physical attraction or human affection in any of the normal ways: they are both locked up inside their skulls when it comes to communicating how they feel about each other. (Which, in the case of the so-screwed-up one, is probably just as well.)

I consciously and deliberately used food - offering it, refusing it, cooking it, sharing it, throwing up after it *two vomiting scenes* - as a kind of theme through the novel by which they could demonstrate, to the readers, if not to each other, how they currently feel about each other. I suspect that no reader is actually going to consciously pick up on this, but I hope it's going to work as an undercurrent in their minds. (I've had two beta-readers tell me so far, with surprise and indignation in their voices, "Of course, ScrewedUpCharacter isn't in *love* with OtherCharacter, he's *obsessed* with him!" to which I can only say, "Duh!" (or possibly: "Yee-hah!") because yes, indeed, that's exactly the way I wrote it.

It would be lovely if someone told me they'd figured out what I was doing with the food, though. Because I had a lot of fun with it.