Garry W. Trompf's review of The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity

BOOK REVIEW

Ruth Skilbeck: The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. Newcastle (Australia): Postmistress, 2017; pp. iv + 436.

Review by Garry W. Trompf, published in Journal of Religious History, Vol. 44, Issue 1, March 2020, p 141-142.   https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12642

I dare anybody to read this book. The author of “fugal novels,” Ruth Skilbeck pulls out all stops and works vigorously on the treadles of literary philosophy to produce a veritable fugue of scholarship, sounding many notes important for religious history. If looking discordant in a book eventually arriving at “literary fugue studies” — about Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail‐coach (Chap. 3: Dream‐Fugue), Marcel Proust's À la recherché du temps perdu , James Joyces's Ulysses (Epis. 11: The Sirens) Paul Celsan's Todesfuge, and Sylvia Plath's Little Fugue — the first half of this unusual book runs backwards and forwards between the trauma of refugees in Australian offshore detention centres and issues of subjectivity and personal memory in Western musical and cultural theory.

The recursing back to the Nauru and Manus Island detainees may now seem too Pacificocentric, especially when we consider the biggest worldwide amassing of refugees ever known in our time. Yet Skilbeck, as an accomplished Australian journalist and cultural analyst, rightfully focused on the worst social atrocity in her region, and in any case seems the first to write anything in a serious monograph about Behrouz Boochani, the Iranian‐Kurdish refugee on Manus who was to win the lucrative Victorian Prize for Literature (2019) after sensationally sending a book, snatch after snatch on WhatsApp, from his incarceration on Manus to his Sydney translator Omid Tofighian. Tofighian (a proud product of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Sydney) has placed the composite nature of Boochan's work as unique and as “horrific surrealism” (see New York Times, 8 Feb. 2019); but Skilbeck has “fugue” to cover anything as disturbing as that. She draws awareness to many other forms of writing under trauma, exile and anxiety (some already introduced in her other writings), and takes us through a small host of thinkers attentive to these issues she reads as “fugal‐critical” (Mikhail Bahktin, Michael Holquist, David Hamlyn, John Queripel, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Saul Friedlander, Susan Gubar, and Hans Markowitsch in that order of appearance among an interesting list), and introduces music historians authoritative on fugue (inter alia Alberto Ghislanzoni, Alfred Mann, Charles Rosen, and Paul Walker). The gallery of thinkers most cited are usually in tune with Skilbeck's quiet inclusion of spirituality in emotion‐filled, imaginative, creative, and strife‐torn life, and with her stubborn refusal to write the subject qua whole person out of the written text (esp. p. 205).

Part Two deals with the literary case studies. We are taken by De Quincey's Dream‐Fugue on the Theme of Sudden Death to spectacular, drug‐enhanced “visual images of endangered maidens, battles, volition, warships, childhood, Christendom, and death and redemption” all jostling and metamorphosing “in rapid succession,” like the layering upon layer of a musical fugue (p. 209). We put up with so much “recurrence” in Proust's Recherches as a symbolic device from which develop, fugally, the contrapuntal themes and complex variations of consciousness” in his subject's (sometimes “disembodied”) memory (and “lost time”) (pp. 263, 269). We find ourselves strangely absorbed in Joyces's “play of tension between subject and countersubject, in exposition and counterexposition, interwoven with songs of seduction and rebellion” so quintessentially Irish in Ulysses that are used to parody classical heroic myth, push toward “an anti‐violent alternative” and record the wonder of “everyday life lived by ordinary people” (pp. 293, 343). I leave commenting on these three crucial texts to illustrate how stimulating Skilbeck's study could be for practitioners of religious history; indeed I take her argument seriously enough to announce that the fugue is among the most useful analogies of human processes, keeping open (for the moment) the question of who is doing most of the playing.    
Emeritus Professor Garry W. Trompf, University of Sydney


Ruth Skilbeck: The Writer's Fugue: Musicalization, Trauma and Subjectivity in the Literature of Modernity. Newcastle (Australia): Postmistress, 2017; pp. iv + 436.

Buy it from the publisher Postmistress at this link https://www.borderstreambooks.com.au/borderstream-bookshop-online Or through another online bookshop.