Music as Narrative ’ s Limit and Supplement

The contributions that have preceded this article have compelling and evident coherence as a group. So much so that I had to be assured by the conference organisers, during the event which originated the present volume, that this sequence, consisting of studies centring on American texts, followed by clearly-related and closely-related topics such as the Gothic as geographical / topological mode, or the British experience of slavery, were in fact fortuitous in their coincidence. It is the sort of collection which would have gladdened John Cage, where the narrative which a disinterested observer would more or less be forced to read from the titles of papers and the liveliness of discussion, is in fact a creation entirely of the observer rather than the result of intention. And yet the sense persists that what is to be presented here is a sort of appendage, a supplement to the eight chapters that have preceded. For what I have to offer is in some senses more theoretically oriented than most of the other discussions, and in addition, the texts I use for examples, by contrast with the great majority of those found earlier in this volume, are already well-known, even canonical. However, I am more than aware of the intellectual absurdity of appearing marginalised within a volume on liminality, and the potential of the supplement is a central topic (if a supplement can be central) of what I have to argue. My title indicates that I write from a position as a musicologist, and thus a participant in a discourse outside literary textual studies. But if at the outset I raise the possibility that what appears as supplementary, as ‘outside’ may turn out, on closer inspection, to be that which gives the very possibility of meaning to the system which, nevertheless, necessarily excludes it, then I suppose that I am in fact an instantiation, in my professional persona, of the theoretical matter which I wish to discuss. Thinking of the supplement in this way owes a debt to Jacques Derrida, as most readers are probably already aware. Derrida will recur in the fi nal section of this chapter, when I try to contextualise the historical matter with which I am going to start. That matter has to do with the interrelationship of narrative modes