'I was listening … but did not succeed in hearing you': Flann O'Brien, Ralph Cusack, and the Absurdities of Silent Musical Experience. Issue 2 (November 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Erraught, Stan
• Is Part Of: Irish university review. Volume 51:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: 360
• Page End: 374
• Publication Date: 2021-11
• Subjects: Flann O'Brien -- Ralph Cusack -- Adorno -- silence; Ireland -- Civilization -- Periodicals; English literature -- Irish authors -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Irish literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 820.99415
• DOI: 10.3366/iur.2021.0524
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-1427

Abstract

Abstract : The notion of soundless music seems contradictory, even absurd: the concept of soundless musical experience less so. In this article, I explore two quite different descriptions of this kind of experience as set out in two mid-twentieth-century Irish novels. In one, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, the narrator watches one of the titular sergeants enjoy music that he – the narrator – cannot hear. In the second, Ralph Cusack's Cadenza, the narrator watches as a village priest mimes playing the piano on a café table, a performance he 'hears' and appreciates. Speculatively combining and extending these episodes, and using the figures of the philistine and the aesthete in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as a key, I suggest that an anxiety about music and musical expression characterized the newly independent Ireland, an anxiety linked to wider concerns often read as 'postcolonial'.