Absolute Music by Jonathan Geltner

Absolute Music by Jonathan Geltner
Slant Books, 2022; $25, 292 pp.

The relation between words and music is mysterious: often fruitful, occasionally baffling, always a little irritating. Many voices, many sounds, many senses resonate together at once. Which is primary: tune or lyric, melody or sense? It’s tempting to reach for the same sorts of oversimplifications that cloud our understanding of the relation between mind and body, head and heart. We need to follow the Scholastic philosophers here in their healthy fear of sloppy equivocation.

Yet truthful equivocations do exist. Though Anselm fears that equivocation will obscure the nature of God, Pseudo-Dionysius speaks in equivocal registers so as to make our contemplation of God’s mysteries more fruitful. These are strange things to speak of in words; language is not a strong enough net in which to snare the Divine Nature. Perhaps this is why Jonathan Geltner, seeking light upon these questions, titles his novel Absolute Music.

Geltner’s hero McPhail would spend a dozen pages tracking responses to the above themes across the foothills of his consciousness. Lest this hunt seem a placid pursuit, Geltner’s novel is, in many ways, a study of sin and misery and their roots in our consciousness. Why, it asks, do we sin? Why are we unhappy? Absolute Music is a tale of a man in crisis, caught in a hinge of life and pinched, twisting in the agony but unable to get away.

Yet McPhail is not sure why that crisis is happening. His life is not altogether settled, but neither is it in great upheaval. He is married to an intelligent, beautiful woman he admires greatly. He has written a successful fantasy novel and has a contract for a sequel. He is part of a community, not exactly of equals, but at least of peers. Yet the first page of the novel thrusts him into a chaos of memories, emotions, reactions, and decisions that threaten to tear down everything he cherishes.

How could such a little thing—the turning of the leaves in a tree outside McPhail’s house—stir up a quest so erratic, so convulsive? McPhail gradually reveals various sides of himself, from a peaceable father and husband to a reckless teenage musician to a man wracked by doubt in his chosen religion. He struggles to balance all of these voices and to discern what is his true self as he traverses the wilderness of his own memories.

Those memories themselves are, in many ways, the setting of the novel, which also evokes Ireland and the Midwestern cities of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. This technique of setting a novel in the landscape of memory is reminiscent of Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose vexing My Struggle series and Seasons Quartet exemplify “autofiction,” a contemporary genre that blends autobiography and fiction.

Geltner does not consider Absolute Music to be autofiction. However, he has clearly absorbed the difficulties and possibilities inherent in the form (as in contemporary life). The pitfall of autofiction is the same one that sinks many memoirs: the sin of self-absorption. There is something devilish in leveling such a long and exclusive look at oneself. The sin of Lucifer was the sin of pride, a fixation entirely on the light within himself instead of on the source of that light.

Pride is, of course, the most interesting way to sin. That is why it poses such problems for writers. We all want most of all to be interesting. Sins of sensuality make for compelling drama, but as Dmitri Karamazov can testify, once past they have no lasting appeal. Yet intelligent creatures can indulge in the sin of pride for a very long time and not weary of it—in the devil’s case, for millennia unnumbered; in the writer’s case, for hundreds of pages.

From the miry depths, the remedy is fashioned. Geltner wields the strengths of this extreme form of contemporary fiction: staring down complexity and self-deception, playing the multitudinous voices of McPhail’s consciousness against each other. Autofiction at its most problematic says: We are all Legion—a cacophony of voices that chatter over each other and make our own choices at once self-evident and nearly impossible to unravel. Geltner’s novel, though not autofiction, takes up autofiction’s psychological burden: seeing the world entirely through one deeply flawed character, at once hero and villain, a univocal authority (the speaker) who is, like all of us, profoundly vexed by his own equivocality.

Absolute Music is not, however, only a novel of words. It is also a novel of music, in three major ways. First, McPhail’s musings and adventures unfold against a soundtrack. It would be a delightful experiment to listen through all the music mentioned in the book. Secondly, Absolute Music has the emotional descriptive sensibility of music, where emotion is evident but its shading and tone will depend on the listener. There is a sense in which all art wants to be music. Art attempts to perfectly assimilate an experience and a form, an emotion and a sign: to permeate the mind so completely that any rational response is secondary to the response of the soul.

Third, Geltner gives language itself the evocative power of music, as in this passage:

I heard the sound of my shovel scrape against the concrete, and the silence between the thrusts of the shovel. The sound was endowed with shape, it possessed contour, crescendo and sudden cessation, and there was a contour to the silence that intervened. I understood that the silence between the thrusts of my shovel was a single silence, and the sound of my shoveling was a single sound, and each implied the other, present always.

Silence as Geltner makes us hear it here is not absence but presence. The quiet spaces, which we conceive of as empty, are themselves as teeming and vibrant as the arpeggios of a wedding day, the grave chords of a death, the bright chaos of a birth. Around, between, within each of those musical moments is a luminous silence, for music knows what too much language has forgotten: the enduring, real nature of the silences between sounds. The quoted passage teaches us how to read Absolute Music: slowly, with attention, savoring the shifts from action to passivity, joy to sadness, sound to silence.

This is the second novel I have reviewed in 2022 that used music and words contrapuntally; the first was Eugene Vodolazkhin’s Brisbane. Neither novel offers easy answers. Both employ the gradual drawing together of storylines from across a wide expanse of time; both explore the narrator’s shattered faith alongside the exchange, mysterious and dreadful, of grace spanning and transforming our days; both voice equivocality presenced in memories that collide and shatter, words and music, music and silence.

McPhail, after much wandering, discovers at last that there is an escape from the tyranny of memory’s many voices. Escape lies beyond memory, in that which is greater than our memories: the vast unending love from before the beginning of the world, which persists always underneath our sporadic lives just as silence persists beneath the music and springs, fully formed, complete in itself, into every space the music clears. Music, words, songs, stories all seek to punctuate the eternal silence of love that surrounds and enfolds us.

Perhaps for every artist such silence is the secret goal. As we sing, we present the polysemous, which embraces the equivocal in its right sense. If this causes us to fear, let it be not with the fear of avoidance, but with the same desire-shot “fear and trembling” we bring before the Lord of all Beauty.