What is Silent Music about?
Silent Music is a ‘theoretical’ novel that explores through its narrative and the central analogy between love and music, several themes now common to literary theory and interdisciplinary studies working at the intersection of memory studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, historiography, rhetoric and poststructuralism.
Silent Music is not a 'theoretical' novel; it's a devour-it-in-a-weekend book that threatens to empty you out when you read it, leaving you reaching for something you've lost, a bit ghostly/ghastly, not quite as sure of your self or your ground as when you started out on the book. If you like the way fresh scones melt you should read it.
The novel, which moves between 1976 and 1983, and between the Isle of Wight and northern Europe, is about identity and Being. The first half describes a series of ‘first encounters’ between the main characters and details the developing relationship between Annagreth and Benedict over a few weeks in the summer of 1976. The second half of the novel relates the story of their relationship, her part in the band, and the band’s progress and fortunes.
Silent Music tells of meetings and beginnings, of the formation of the band, the makings of a romance, her becoming a member of a band, and tells tales of family gatherings, recording sessions, touring, birthday and Christmas parties, along with incidental events that assume significance over time as the story reaches its climax, bringing to an end both the band and its hopes.
Written in a style that pays as much close attention to the crafting of anecdotes as it does to the terrible importance of the narrator’s memories thirty years after the events of the novel, Silent Music presents a striking elegy to the enduring nature of love.
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Julian Wolfreys is Professor of English at the University of Portsmouth and a member of The Nightwatchmen. His research covers the nineteenth century and English modernism, with particular interests in inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, while also being informed by continental philosophy from Kant to the present day, and with a particular philosophical interest in phenomenology.
He has published on Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism and postmodern literature and culture, with particular interests in questions of identity and subjectivity, the politics and poetics of urban representation, the rural subject in English culture, perception in literature, and the relationship between language, music and that which cannot be expressed directly.