Rewriting Clara Schumann: Intertextuality and Intermediality in Janice Galloway's Clara

Diplomarbeit von Julia Novak

Introduction:

When I spent a year in Edinburgh as an exchange student, I was introduced to the novels of Janice Galloway in a seminar on contemporary Scottish women writers. I was immediately impressed by her unique, original approach to writing fiction and, being a student of literature as well as a musician, I knew I had found the perfect topic for my thesis when I learned about the subject of her next novel, which was to be published in the following summer, a literary biography of Clara Wieck Schumann.

Clara Wieck Schumann was one of the leading concert pianists of the nineteenth century. Born in 1819 in Leipzig, she received her musical training from her father, Friedrich Wieck. At an early age she began her successful concert tours through Europe, and soon she equalled the likes of Liszt or Chopin in terms of masterly performance and fame. When she married Robert Schumann in 1840, he was still an obscure composer while Clara was already a word-famous virtuosa. Unfortunately, she had no means of recording her playing in those days, and since she was not equally prolific as a composer, her name has become widely unknown today. Thus, Clara Wieck Schumann has been granted a five-page entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.), while the entry on Robert Schumann stretches over 57 pages in the same work. During the last few decades, however, a scholarly interest in Clara Wieck Schumann has awoken, which has resulted in a number of publications on her life and work. Among them there are also some novels, or ‘literary biographies’, each of which draws a very personalised, subjective portrait of the pianist.

One of the most recent literary accounts of Clara Schumann’s life is Clara, the latest novel by Janice Galloway. Before turning to Clara Schumann as a subject for her next project, Galloway produced a number of works, including two novels (The Trick is to Keep Breathing and Foreign Parts) and two collections of short stories (Blood and Where You Find It). She also won an impressive number of prizes and awards for her writings. For her original literary biography of Clara Wieck Schumann she received the ‘Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award’ in 2002.

In writing Clara, Galloway has of course drawn heavily on historical source texts such as letters or diary entries, as well as on biographies of Clara Schumann and on fictional texts, which is why her novel can be called a ‘rewriting’ of Clara’s life. This study is not only concerned with intertextuality in Galloway’s work, but also with the way the medium of music has had a bearing on the rewriting of her heroine’s life. Music is integrated in the novel in various ways, and the second part of my paper will therefore deal with intermediality in Clara. That intertextuality and intermediality are related phenomena stands to reason: in both cases a text, which is our point of departure here, reaches out to other domains to constitute itself.

An intertextual work draws on different texts to ‘piece together’ its meaning, while an intermedial novel somehow stands ‘between’ two media. Intertextuality and intermediality can therefore both be subsumed under what we may call ‘medial relations’, for want of a better term. This study follows Wolf’s definition of ‘medium’ as a conventionally distinct means of communication, specified not only by particular channels (or one channel) of communication but also by the use of one or more semiotic systems serving for the transmission of cultural ‘messages’.

Intertextuality can then be classified as a sub-form of ‘intra-medial’ relations, since only one medium is involved, while the term intermediality denotes relations between two or more media, with musico-literary intermediality being one possible sub-form.

The first part of my thesis will discuss the concept of intertextuality and how it relates to literary biography as a fictional genre. Iser’s theory of fiction will provide a basis for the analysis of the various ways in which Galloway’s Clara makes use of pre-texts, and how it compares to other literary biographies on Clara Wieck Schumann. The second part will examine the novel’s relation to the medium of music, based on Werner Wolf’s typology of intermediality. It sets out to demonstrate that intermediality is not only related to intertextuality, but that there may even be overlaps between the two, such as can certainly be found in Clara. With this study I hope to provide not only an insight into the complex workings of the various textual and musical dimensions that Galloway’s novel opens, but also an actual guide to alternative ways of approaching this fascinating multi-layered work.

Table of Contents: