THREE PILLARS OF MODERN WESTERN CULTURE

According to the author of this marvelously exacting study, both James Joyce and Marcel Proust knew composer Richard Wagner’s work intimately (Joyce’s library “included fifteen books by or about Wagner…Only Shakespeare occupied more space on Joyce’s shelves”; “Proust claimed that he had nearly memorized all of the composer’s works”), and their groundbreaking literary techniques were partly inspired by Wagner’s own “revolutionary operatic style.” To support this thesis, Pastor begins by clearly elucidating the “theoretical underpinnings” of Wagner’s own genius, specifically focusing on three elements of his operas: “leitmotifs,” the recurrent themes that bind a complex work together; “endless melody,” a long passage of music that links together leitmotifs; and “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the “mutuality or synthesis of the arts” that integrates various artistic elements into a coherent whole. The author argues that the works for which Joyce and Proust are most famous, Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time, respectively, are imbued with these characteristic features of Wagnerian opera. He offers impressively close readings of both texts, finding both elliptical and explicit references to Wagner. To make his argument persuasive—an objective Pastor unquestionably accomplishes—the author catalogues the interest both authors had in Wagner and furnishes a fascinating tour of the rise of modernism as a philosophical and artistic force. What emerges is not just a literary study but a broader reflection on what it means to be modern, as well as a consideration of the possibility that a nonmusical work could also be a Gesamtkunstwerk, a category into which Pastor places both books in question. The book concludes with a series of supplementary appendices, including one that succinctly records various philosophical influences on Joyce and Proust. This is among the several additions to the first edition of this work—this iteration is greatly expanded, despite its relative brevity.  

While many have suggested that Joyce and Proust owe Wagner a considerable artistic debt, no one has ever so meticulously documented it. This is not an easy task; as the author candidly acknowledges, the “vocabulary of musicology” does not so neatly graft onto the forms of a literary work. In fact, the discussion of leitmotifs can sometime seem too underdetermined—both books in question abound in themes, and Wagner hardly invented the notion. (The fact that death is a recurring theme in In Search of Lost Time does not itself scream for a Wagnerian interpretation.) However, Pastor never succumbs to facile analogies—he explores the works with extraordinary depth and rigor, and he convincingly makes the case that the ways in which these themes arise, and the literary techniques used to represent them, are in fact identifiably traceable to Wagner. Of course, this is not a fully objective issue, and the argument simply cannot be made with empirical finality, dependent as it is upon literary interpretation. Nonetheless, this is as persuasive an exegetical case as one can hope for; Pastor has delivered a thrilling scholarly study.