The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction

Abstract

An exact definition of music is difficult to lay a finger on. Over the many years, the meaning of the term has shifted many times over to be construed and considered through many different conjectures of it. Yet it must be said that few of these definitions have ever accounted for the element-external that surrounds and intrudes upon the process of musical generation. This thesis concerns itself with the influences of such environs, since through these interjections, they become an indelible part of the quality of the musical. By incorporating them into a functional definition of the musical—as the acoustic eloquence that arises out of the incidence between these terroirs and said conjectures of musicality, we allow for the term to be translated across artistic media and into fiction. Where such fictions frequently exhibit moments of extraordinary musicality within the medium of language, I posit that the terroir of music production finds equivalence in the semantics of the modern novel. Turning this lens towards three novels: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is (1964), this thesis will demonstrate that the curation of this terroir of semantic meaning imposes itself as a structural and circumstantial binding condition on the acoustics of language in the modern novel, and thus forms an essential component in the cadences of its sounds and musicality of its words.