National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Polytechnic Institute” (Ukraine)
This paper focuses upon the tropology of trauma and traumatic experience related to music, which might be actualized verbally and narratively in a literary text as the embodiment of its musicalisation. Traditionally, trauma aesthetics issues were regarded as a focal research point of Literary Criticism. However, lately, due to the epistemological and methodological conflation of Linguistics and Literary Studies that has taken shape of the so-called Interphilology, as well as a consequence of global conflicts that have seized the whole planet, the issues of trauma in its literary manifestations tend to penetrate the research space of Linguopoetics. The paper aims to reveal verbal and cognitive mechanisms of literary problematisation of trauma triggered by music and musicking actualized in literary texts of various genres by way of their musicalisation as a format of literary discourse intermediality. The main tasks of the research are: defyning the role of trauma studies in the present-day interphilological context; revealing the double emotional impact of music as a psychotherapeutic and traumagenic factor viewed from the literary text musicalisation perspective; identifying and classifying tropological manifestations of the personages’ musicalized traumatic experience in the English version of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher (2004) and in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009). The research methodology employed has an interdisciplinary character while including hermeneutic, narratological, semantic stylistic, cognitive poetological, emotive and axiological as well as intermedial analyses. The research results confirm the hypothesis that trauma aesthetics in its positive and negative dimensions is characterized by complex psychoemotional architecture where music and musical experience play an essential role. Literary embodiment of trauma provoked by music viewed through the plot development as well as literary discourse musicalisation as an intermediality facet can be the result of using a wide spectrum of emotively enhanced metaphoric tropes conceptualised in terms of pain, violence, perversions, aggression, enclosed space, grotesque, etc.
State of the art in the present-day Philology tends to display two adverse trends, those of disciplinary divergence and convergence. The former results in a radical expansion of the subject and research area spectrums of Linguistics, and particularly Stylistics that embrace its Cognitive, Corpus, Critical, Feminist, Film, Multimodal, Narrative, Pragmatic, Ludic, Intermedial and quite a few other varieties. Some of them, viewed from cross- and transdisciplinary perspectives, to a great extent concern, in line with the latter trend, a heuristic and methodological rapprochement of the rival areas of Philology, first and foremost Linguistics and Literary Studies.
This unifying tendency that dates back to Jacobsonian Linguopoetics currently received a new impulse within Germanic, Anglophone and Ukrainian philological traditions resulting in the emergence of Linguo-Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, or Interphilologie, the evolution of Literary Semantics, and Linguonarratology as a syncretic vision of literary text structure and mechanisms of its unfolding. The decisive factor that provoked the blurring of disciplinary boundaries within the domain of Philology proves to be a newly revived interest towards the search for meaning-making mechanisms in literary text as a connecting interphilological link. Using the term “Interphilology” as an umbrella one, the study focuses on one of such meaning-making mechanisms related to the tropology of trauma triggered by music and music-making, being viewed through the lens of musicalisation as a facet of literary intermediality.
With this aim in mind, the paper addresses three issues:
determining the place of trauma studies in the current interphilological context;
revealing a double emotional impact of music as a psychotherapeutic and traumogenic factor actualised via literary text musicalisation;
identifying the tropological manifestations of personages’ music-driven traumatic experience in the English version of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher (2004) (Die Klavierschpielerin) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), as well as suggesting the typology of such manifestations.
The interdisciplinary research methodology embraces the methods of hermeneutic, narratological, stylistic, conceptual, emotive and intermedial analyses.
Though scholars tend to agree on the role of style and Stylistics in shaping Interphilology — a bridge between aestheticised and verbally-oriented approaches to literary text — there is no ultimate consensus on the other factors of influence.
Prof. Ulla Fix from the University of Leipzig describes the current wave of rapprochement between Linguistics and Literary Studies as a sum total of four factors:
A widened semiotic perspective, with special emphasis upon the textual surface (often multisemiotic) as an access to hidden senses.
A focus shift onto the cultural specificity of text-types as related to genres.
Viewed through the on-going process of meaning-making, grounded in textual gestalt as a basis for understanding and interpretation.
A source of analytical models for construing multifarious linguistic and literary-oriented theoretical discourses.
Beyond these, the paper suggests a complementary perspective. The decisive factor proves to be the cognitive turn in Linguistics — often termed “a cognitive revolution” — which expanded its scale of impact onto Philology and the Humanities at large, highlighting the joint search for deeper, conceptual mechanisms of meaning-making that often have a ludic character.
The rapid growth of Cognitive Poetics, along with a more recent Ludic one, brings several epistemological shifts to the interphilological foreground. The constitutive vector inverts from the traditional literary-semiotic bottom-up movement into the top-down cognitive-poetic vector that proceeds from conceptual worldview to imagination → creativity → conceptual imagistic patterns → linguistic / textual patterns, following Mark Turner’s seminal idea that “Language is the child of the literary mind.”
A significant contribution to the emergent interface came from the shift from well-established hypothesis-and-methodology paradigms towards a phenomenologically syncretic postparadigmal scholarly vision. This placed into focus the notion of interphenomena, including intermediality as a kind of “semiotic cross-dressing,” relevant both verbally and aesthetically. The inversion of the aesthetic-semiotic vector — from “language → literature → art & fine arts” to “art & fine arts → literature → language” — brought to life a methodological shift: methodological triangulation, or clustering, the search for a metamethod of synthesized philological analysis of literary text in its multifarious formats.
Traditionally, aesthetics of trauma constituted one of the research foci of literary studies within classical psychological and psychoanalytic, (trans)generational postcolonial, and historical frameworks, viewed alongside the studies of memory — collective and/or individual — from cultural, social and personal perspectives, often associated with war. However, the rapprochement of Linguistics and Literary Studies alongside recent catastrophic events on the global scale — caused by ecological, political and military convulsions — shifted the linguistic focus onto the issue of trauma through traumatic war narration, bringing it closer to Literary Studies. This metamorphosis can also be traced in the interphilological area of Intermediality Studies, particularly where it concerns the musicalisation of fiction.
Music tends to be viewed interdisciplinarily as a therapeutic tool that fosters working-through — psychically transforming trauma by gradually integrating it into conscious experience, presumably due to the brain’s increased neuroplasticity. Psychotherapists use its intrinsically mood-boosting effects to improve mental health and overall well-being.
Not infrequently music acts as a source of traumatic experience per se, provoking cumulative or sequential psychological traumas. For highly empathetic people, including musicians, music may act as a traumatic trigger, as it is processed by the same neural mechanisms as empathy and other forms of socialisation.
This bidirectionality constitutes the contential core of the two literary works revisited here — the English version of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher (2004) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (2009) — though with a different scale of personage traumatisation: stronger in Jelinek’s novel and milder in Ishiguro’s collection.
A qualitative rendering of the article’s central comparison between the two works.
Visualises the article’s statement that personage traumatisation is “stronger in Jelinek’s novel and milder in Ishiguro’s collection of stories.” Values are illustrative-ordinal, not measured.
As literary and poetological trauma studies problematize trauma aesthetics in its variable manifestations, they focus upon verbal and narrative figurations that highlight the symbolization of trauma — the transition of traumatic experience into verbal, mental or multimodal imagery, music being one of its triggers. According to Tamara Hundorova, traumatic narratives — mostly non-linear and fragmentary — are manifested through monstrous personages, particularly monstrous femininity (as in The Piano Teacher), with their injured or self-injured bodies, through lack of communication, up to “empathetic unsettlement,” in Dominick LaCapra’s parlance, or accentuated silence. Generally, such narratives are designed to release tension via catharsis while helping to restore severed ancestry, kindred, generation, family, nation and community ties.
Tropological symbolisation does not only differentiate between music’s positive (therapeutic) and negative (retraumatizing) effects — it captures their affective duality: the simultaneous presence of both effects on the human psyche.
Across both works, alongside “the healing jouissance of music,” one comes across negative metaphorical and narrative conceptualisations of music — a trap, a tool of pressure, a vampire, a source of physical suffering.
“he had to listen to us rehearsing, day after day”Ishiguro, 2009, p. 113
“I was a musician, why should I have to join in this game”Ishiguro, 2009, p. 131
“then she’ll be doing something else with music, that bloodsucker”Jelinek, 2004, p. 97
“the music grinds into sensitive nerve endings exposed by the man named Klemmer”Jelinek, 2004, p. 165
All along, music acts as an emotional agent — an instrument of healing (“Your music helped my mother through those times, it must have helped million of others”; “we play because we believe in the music”; “Erica’s vocation is her avocation: the celestial power known as music”), a weapon of torture (“Or else she’s an evil spirit, haunting some rehearsal with her students”), or — not infrequently — producing an ambivalent effect of both healing and victimizing:
In Ishiguro’s collection, music’s traumatic role mostly inhabits a musician’s or singer’s professional sphere — career pitfalls, creative slowdowns, an unflattering appearance incompatible with marketing, and striving for recognition. Jelinek’s novel, by contrast, penetrates much deeper into the tormented soul of the musicians, surfacing their physical, psychological, sexual, and spiritual suffering.
How the two works distribute music-driven trauma across the dimensions the article contrasts.
An interpretive synthesis of the article’s qualitative comparison. Jelinek’s novel concentrates in psychological, bodily, sexual and spiritual suffering with collapse of hope; Ishiguro’s stories foreground the professional sphere while preserving empathy, reconciliation and fragile hope.
Jelinek’s iconoclastic texture, permeated with intermedial references, gives access to a network of conceptual metaphors triggered by verbal markers of repression, control, violence, aggression, perversion and pressure. The most salient trope moving the plot is — both physical and emotional.
Erika’s contradictory nature — “one hand playing the keyboard of reason, the other the keyboard of passion” — and her overwhelming musical optics (“the universe of music is vast”) make her compare everything around her to music, finally turning her music-triggered love affair into a truly traumatic one, culminating in self-inflicted violence.
Approaching the musicalisation of fictional narrative in terms of trauma theory, intermediality poetics and cognitive stylistics may be regarded as further proof of the emergent interphilological blend of Linguistics and Literary Studies. Comparing the works of two Nobel Prize winners — Elfriede Jelinek and Kazuo Ishiguro — permeated with the motifs of music as a significant part of human life, the study concludes that trauma aesthetics, in its positive and negative formats, may determine the narrative architecture of fictionalized experience driven by music, grounded in a wide spectrum of emotively enhanced metaphoric tropes conceptualised in terms of elation and violence.
Considered through the prism of intermediality and literary musicalisation, trauma becomes a complex cognitive, emotive and semiotic construct embodied in the verbal and narrative texture of fictional discourse. The comparative analysis reveals that music in literary representation possesses an intrinsically ambivalent nature: it simultaneously acts as a source of emotional consolation, aesthetic transcendence and existential harmony, while also functioning as a catalyst of repression, alienation, violence and psychic disintegration.
At the tropological level, this process is realized through metaphorical and conceptual patterns that verbalize traumatic experience in terms of violence, bodily pain, imprisonment, aggression, grotesque deformation and emotional devastation. Particularly significant in Jelinek’s novel is the recurrent metaphor , which determines both the psychological portrait of Erika Kohut and the overall narrative atmosphere of emotional suffocation and existential despair. By contrast, Ishiguro’s musicalized narratives — though permeated with melancholy, frustration and emotional loss — preserve the possibility of empathy, reconciliation and fragile hope, without the total collapse of personality characteristic of Jelinek’s fictional universe.
Trauma narratives related to music cannot be interpreted within a single discipline — their analysis requires a cluster of approaches.
The six approaches the article names as the required “methodological triangulation.” Segments are equal — they represent the combined metamethod, not relative weight.