More Than a Soundtrack: Music as Meaning in Howards End
In Howards End, E. M. Forster experiments with intermediality through the mixture of literary and musical media. By doing so, the author attempts to make the novel greater than the sum of its parts. Recognizing this achievement in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor “due mainly to the re...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Polish Association for the Study of English
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Polish Journal of English Studies |
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| Online Access: | http://pjes.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PJES_4-2_1_Patrick-McCullough.pdf |
| Summary: | In Howards End, E. M. Forster experiments with intermediality through the mixture of literary and musical media. By doing so, the author attempts to make the novel greater than the sum of its parts. Recognizing this achievement in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor “due mainly to the relation between its movements” and because the movements “all enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity,” Forster applies what the symphony accomplishes musically to fiction (1955, 164, 168). This technique he calls “repetition plus variation” (168). Like Beethoven’s iconic four note rhythmic phrase of three shorter notes of equal length followed by one longer note: “diddidy dum,” Forster repeats a phrase of his own that resonates throughout the novel: “Panic and Emptiness” (1989, 26). I argue that a reading of the novel without an attempt to understand Beethoven’s experimental and irreverent approach to the symphonic form, especially in the third and fourth movements, leaves the reader of Howards End with an incomplete understanding of Forster’s artistic vision. Forster’s intermedial strategy is to create a work whose purpose is “expansion... Not completion” (1955, 169). In contrast, the 1992 film adaptation of the novel relies on Beethoven’s Fifth as little more than diegetic accompaniment. In fact, the construction of the concert scene actively discourages an intermedial reading as sophisticated as in the novel. As a result, the film fails to communicate Forster’s idea that “the more the arts develop the more they depend on each other for definition” (1955, 149). Unlike the novel, the adaptation does not attempt to translate Beethoven’s rhythmic development into the medium of film, resulting in an adaptation that misunderstands Forster’s artistic vision. |
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| ISSN: | 2545-0131 2543-5981 |