On the Relationship Between Music and Literature in Woolf's The Waves and Bach's Chaconne

After completing his chapter Sirens, James Joyce is quoted as saying: "since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven't cared for music any more." Au contraire, Hector Berlioz writes that, after the conception of Beethoven's Pastorale symphony, the great poets have been "gloriously vanquished, but vanquished!" (glorieux vaincus, mais des vaincus !). If we are to be diplomatic, however, the greatness of music and literature need not be mutually exclusive; in fact, we may succeed in playing the part of mediator, for the warring factions are more alike than appearances suggest.

For instance, since finishing The Waves , I've harboured the peculiar thought that Bernard's soliloquy is strangely reminiscent of Bach's Chaconne; in both works, we watch the rising crest of anger, grief, and despair hurl itself against the shore; in Woolf, "without a self, weightless and visionless" (206); in Bach, this occurs during the return of the main D minor theme (measures 126-132, for the equally nerdy), following the rapidly swelling tension in the preceding arpeggios, perhaps the most sombre point in the piece. Woolf, however, does not desert us without the slightest glimpse of hope:

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet. (206)

Hope—for it is precisely in this moment when the self, having exhausted its belligerence, lies shattered amongst the darkly jagged rocks, that we hear the tentative promise of the parallel (D) major, in its fleeting, crystalline clarity, the nightingale's tender song after the growl of thunder; it is then that we, after a mere moment of respite, must decide: is this enough? are we to endure the crash of another wave? Perhaps the answer lies in the novel's penultimate sentence:

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! (214)

To me, The Waves is ineffably beautiful, the aesthetic pinnacle of literature, the greatest English prose work ever, in the poetry of its six-voiced polyphony—honestly deserves 6/5.

N.B. There is one more set of passages closer to the end of both works that parallel each other—remarkably close in structural placement and emotional impact—but in lieu of exams it would be irresponsible for me to write more (this entire exercise has already been bad enough).