Introduction to Endings

Does music tell a story? This is a valid question for many, and those who reject it generally do so because of a belief that music goes beyond storytelling, that it is beyond mere signification. But what if we could grant that music does not tell a specific story, that music does not mean or equal one thing? We would then be wondering, by asking the question "does music tell a story?", whether music is like a story, whether the two operate in the same way. For instance, I can tell you about something that happened to me today, and then you might go and listen to a CD of the Eroica. These are both temporal events; they rely on time for their existence. But are they the same kind of experience? And do they have the same relationship to time, or different relationships?

A clue is already given in the way we formulate our sentences. We might say that music tells a story, but we rarely say that music is a story. It is true that we do often say, "This song is about" or "This opera is about," but it is understood that we are actually referring to the story imbedded in the opera, and not the opera itself. The opera tells a story of such-and-such, but it is not the story of such-and-such. This is quite different from what I might say to a friend, namely, "This is the story of such-and-such" before launching into it. Storytelling is only one thing; but there is a distance in art, which means a distance between the part that is story (if it exists) and something else. It is this something else that I am interested in.

If music is unlike a story, and music is a temporal art, then we might guess that all temporal arts are unlike stories, and we can examine this thought further. This would include, of course, theatre, and even novels. To make this claim, we would have to say that Charlotte's Web is not the story of an unlikely friendship between a spider and a pig; but we can say that the novel Charlotte's Web tells that story. This may strike some as a ridiculous distinction to make, or even no distinction at all. How does the story of Charlotte's Web differ from Charlotte's Web?

I choose this particular book because it is a transparent, clear case of story-telling, which means that it is an important test for my argument, but not necessarily the easiest to tackle. Let's begin with a more straightforward case, which is by contrast a piece of opaque, metaphorical, deliberately artificial writing:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This is the last paragraph of James Joyce's short story The Dead. Now imagine I was telling you this story - as in, "Hey dude, want to hear a story?" - and told you a story that ended with the above. What would you think? You would probably notice my mode of presentation - my rhetoric - as a separate feature from the plot. Yes, you can follow the story, but whereas you might not be aware of any particular mode or rhetoric in the hundreds of exchanges you have daily with people you meet, here the way it is said becomes a striking and even distracting element that exists alongside the what that is being said.

What if you simply read the passage above as part of the short story The Dead? You would still notice the prose, probably, though it would not seem so out of place, since writing never sounds like conversation to begin with. But not all writing can dare to be as heavy-handed in its metaphor, its alliteration, its repetition as the passage above; here Joyce pulls it off (I think miraculously) because the passage comes not only at the end of a short story, but also at the end of the whole Dubliners set. The above paragraph is simultaneously the close of a story and of a whole progression of stories, which latter gain in complexity and depth as they approach their end. The so-called "purple prose" of the above is still obvious, but given its placement and what it is meant to do, I would argue that the style is also necessary.

Most importantly, the last paragraph of The Dead gives us an instance where the art of the literary work is discernible against the story, or content, of the literary work.

(SIDEBAR: I know we're trained to believe that art and technique, or style and substance, or art and story, are inseparable. It is a belief I've stood by and defended vehemently, often. I still stand by it, but I have started to suspect that there are points of separation, especially at the ends of things, and this is where I want to pick at.)

And if an overabundance of style over content is actually necessary, as I have claimed, then we can make a statement to the reverse: that without this overabundance, without this glaringly obvious dive into the machinations of rhetoric, the ending to The Dead and Dubliners would not feel like an ending at all.

Maybe I have taken too long to get here, but here I am: Even when art looks like storytelling, the two are not about the same thing. When I tell a story, there is not as strict an order in which my words must go, and few impositions on my style or delivery (aside from being clear, of course). Art can resemble story, as in novels, but always in their endings - and this applies to all temporal arts - there is a certain rhetorical acceleration, a point at which the style of art draws attention to itself, and indeed breaks the reader's concentration on the story of art. In storytelling, this concentration is maintained to the very last word; in art, the shift of focus from story to art - in the sense of its relation to artifice - is a necessary event. Without it, the work of art, be it opera, play, novel, risks losing its status as art; it risks becoming only story.