De la partition au roman: métamorphose d’une sonate baroque

Abstract

In Nancy Huston’s writings there are a lot of references to music – they are either simple quotations referring to musical works or textual reworkings of specific sound forms. Particularly, the novel Instruments des ténèbres (Instruments of Darkness) offers an interesting opportunity to analyze the domain of interdisciplinary research into the relationship between literature and music. The author uses a musical baroque proceeding called scordatura to create a text in which the alternation of two sections produce a peculiar polyphony. As a matter of fact, Nadia’s journal and Barbe’s story alternate and cross their thematic and symbolic content like the violin strings in a baroque scordatura, making the novel a perfect example of the transposition of a music form into a literary text.