"Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee as a postmodern variation of the novel about a musician

As the life of the main character changes, so does the sonic background of the novel, a modulation (a change in the tone) of David's “life music" occurs: at the beginning of the novel, when he meets Melanie, “He puts on music: the Mozart clarinet quintet" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 12], and then “to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, he makes love to her" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 19]; since his forced move “He makes his way through the crush, and through a sudden cacophony" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 80], and his life on his daughter's farm is filled with “the sounds come to him of Lucy leading her own life: drawers opening and shutting, the radio, the murmur of a telephone conversation" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 86] and at the very end of the novel, having experienced the violence and injustice of life, having undergone an existential crisis, for David “There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish to prolong for ever" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 218] that indicates an inner calm and perhaps even humility.

Both the music work which David creates in the novel and the sound background of the narrative reflect the inner transformations of the protagonist. The originally conceived opera about Byron which was to "call for quite lush orchestration. Like Strauss, say" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 63], within the miseries in his life gradually has lost its grandeur and pathos: "Now I'm inclining the other way, toward a very meagre accompaniment - violin, cello, oboe or maybe bassoon'¹ [Coetzee, 2000, p. 63]. And by the end of the novel, David changes the musical instrument, because "there is something about the sound of the piano that hinders him: too rounded, too physical, too rich" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 184] and he finds "a little seven-stringed banjo" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 184], which proves to be the only suitable instrument to convey the music in which "he is held" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 184]. Like the musical and sound background of the hero's life changes from Mozart (Hesse's favourite composer, who embodied harmony in his compositions) through the hearing-cutting cacophony of crowds, barking dogs and radio sounds to complete silence in nature, the choice of musical accompaniment for his opera about Byron also changes: from ideas of borrowing grandiose orchestrations of great composers to personally creating scores for an African banjo.

The choice of the instrument to perform the arias is highly symbolic. David does not accept the situation related to his exclusion from the university, he resolutely rejects the commission's offer to confess. Because of his refusal, Melanie's statements remain unread, and as a "white male privileged, he avoids responsibility for his actions and silences the voice of the oppressed", as D. Babcock claims [Babcock, 2021, p. 431]. However, after that, exactly the opposite situation happens: his daughter, who is pregnant as a result of being raped by black men, refuses to make a statement, and she is going to keep the child and marry her black employee Petrus. Now the voice of oppressed whites goes unheard and black criminals go unpunished. But David really cannot accept this, continuing in vain to hold on to his old beliefs and trying to change Lucy's mind. Perhaps in the end he chooses the quirky African banjo instead of the classical European musical instrument as a symbol of humility and recognition of the African indigenous population's dominance in the post-apartheid period. Moreover, the sounds of the banjo now respond to David's inner changes, and perhaps this is the only way for his opera to be heard and understood, but not the piano, which sounds too "material". In his reflections on his affairs with Melanie while playing the banjo at the end of the novel, the main character does come to the idea of repentance: "Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape under the weight of old men <...> No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: A regrettable note on which to go out"¹ [Coetzee, 2000, p. 190]. Thus, the sound of the African banjo makes David feel remorse which he finishes his piece of work with.

Additionally, through music, David tries to "get through" to his daughter. Suddenly, in the impulse of the creative process, following Teresa "page after page he follows", he hears another voice that he has never thought to hear until now, "it [voice] belongs to Byron's daughter Allegra; but from where inside him does it come?" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 186]. The daughter's voice sings "Why have you left me?" and her father does not answer her for a long time because "he has had enough of life; because he would rather be back where he belongs <...>" and finally Byron sings, "for her to hear": "My poor little baby!" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 186]. A new character appears in the opera only because David needs his daughter to hear him, and since in conversations and letters they have failed to hear each other, the music, specifically the sound of the banjo, becomes the only possible mediator of their communication.

In general, in the novel language loses its state in the socio-communicative system as well as in the protagonist's personal existence, and its main function - to convey thoughts, feelings, intentions - is performed by music. According to O. Keba, in "Disgrace", "there is a kind of deconstruction of language; the social and personal dramas of the protagonist demonstrate that language is unable to solve not only the problems of human mutual understanding caused by historical, cultural, racial reasons, but it fails on the existential level, leaving the individual unable to express the underlying contradictions of his own existence" [Кеба, 2017, p. 132].

At the very beginning of the novel David, reflecting on the nature and function of the language, deduces that "the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 4]. Repeatedly J.M. Coetzee emphasizes the inability to reach a mutual understanding by means of language: “He [David] speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in the darkest Africa" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 95]; in the letter to his daughter, David begs: “I plead with you, listen to me", but he is rebuked in return: "You have not been listening to me'¹ [Coetzee, 2000, pp. 160-161]; in a conversation with Petrus he is thinking of “Stretches of English code whole sentences long have become thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulateness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened'¹ [Coetzee, 2000, p. 117]. David used to write books and “that was where my heart was" [Coetzee, 2000, p. 162], but now the language has lost its function for him and only music can express his inner feelings and emotional experiences, so the protagonist creates a musical work rather than a literary one.

The fifth level of the presence of music in the novel - the level of musical quotation - which is considered as the interaction of two sign systems within the same text and can be represented in note-sound or word-letter form, is closely related to the theory of intermediary. Implication, imitation or other mediated approximation to music in literature occur by linguistic means and literary techniques. There are countless cases of interaction between music and literature, variations of which are studied in the works by S. Scher and supplemented by W. Wolf [Scher, 1984; Wolf, 2002]. S. Scher distinguishes three main groups of such interactions: 1) verbal music, 2) spoken music (phonics, rhythm, dynamics) and 3) musical structures and musical technique (modulation, counterpoint, etc.) [Scher, 1984]. In the case of “verbal music" there is an attempt in artistic work to reveal a particular piece of music, its composition and the impression made on the listener through the words. It is a literary imitation of music by using words (according to the principle of transposition d'art). In “Disgrace" we can see linguistic constructions made up of onomatopoeic words of playing banjo, which evoke feelings similar to those we experience listening to music: "<...> chants Byron in his cracked monotone, nine syllables on C natural; but life, I found (descending chromatically to F) <...> Plink-plunk-plonk go the strings of the banjo. Why, O why do you speak like that? sings Teresa in a long reproachful arc. Plunk-plunk-plonk go the strings"; “Plink-plunk squawks the banjo" [Coetzee, 2000, pp. 185, 214].

The extracts of poetry by Wordsworth [Coetzee, 2000, p. 21] and Byron [Coetzee, 2000, pp. 32, 33] are inserted into the novel, which themselves represent a kind of synthesis of literature and music (an example of verbal music): melody and rhythm are often heard in the textual canvas of the poem, and poetic speech forms a single speech and music stream. It is also interesting that the protagonist is composing an opera, which W. Wolf defines as an example of plural mediality, i.e. the intermedial fusion of music and literature [Wolf, 2002]. At the same time, W. Wolf distinguishes between explicit and implicit reference (intermedial thematization and imitation). By explicit reference, W. Wolf means allusions to musical works, musicians and composers while by implicit - depiction of their creative process in a literary work as well as imitation of one media through another (transmission of music through language means), which is based on the analysis above certainly corresponds to J.M. Coetzee's text.

Thus, based on our analysis, we can state that the novel “Disgrace" is a postmodern novel about an artist, who absorbed the tendencies of the contemporary literary process: pastiche by forms, genre mixing, intertextuality, intermediality, etc. The narrative and compositional structure of the novel has a three-part structure - the biography of the hero-artist, his work (opera) and his reflections on art; at the same time, the unity of the internal form is kept at the expense of the main motif of the novel about an artist - the motif of creation. The chronotope of J.M. Coetzee's novel is based on “the life path of one who seeks true knowledge", and the image of the creative process of creating an opera, which permeates the entire plot of the work, becomes a kind of test of the hero-artist for his artistic genius, while all life's peripeteias test the hero for his suitability for life, which corresponds to the main idea of the novel about an artist (according to Bakhtin). The image of the hero-artist is reinterpreted in the novel under the influence of the aesthetics of postmodernism and acquires the features of a modern man - powerless, insecure, confused in the chaos of life.

The study of the specifics of the 'internal' genre-forming features (the hero-artist writing an opera throughout the novel, the conflict between the artist and the world, the chronotope of culture and the motif of creation) allows us to come to the conclusion that “Disgrace" is a postmodern variation of the novel about an artist, moreover, the type of art of the hero-artist, excessive intermediary indicate that this work belongs to such an invariant of this subgenre as the novel about a musician.

We have identified five levels of the artistic text characteristic of the novel about a musician - plot-thematic, metaphorical, compositional and narrative, verbal and figurative, and the level of musical quotation - at which we can detect the 'presence' of music in the novel. Music in “Disgrace" turns out to be the only possible mediator of communication, because the universal language of music makes it accessible for perception by people of all origins and social backgrounds, and gives the protagonist an opportunity to be heard. Music is implicated and imitated in J.M. Coetzee's text by linguistic means and literary techniques which demonstrate the explicit intermediality of the novel.

This study opens up the prospect for further research on the novel about an artist and its invariant - the novel about a musician, since this subgenre is a frequent phenomenon in the literary process at the turn of the 20^th-21^st centuries and is reflected in the works by such Englishspeaking writers as J. Barnes, K. Ishiguro, I. McEwan, S. Rushdie, etc.

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kutsee's novel music text

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