The story’s early reception is one of success, with praise from Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and T. S. Eliot (D2: 109, 125). Yet the story’s musical references have also provoked a variety of divergent interpretations. The narrative is so deceptively simple that Avrom Fleishman argued that it has a circular A-B-C-B-A structure patterned on a Mozart quartet, concluding that it is simply “an exercise in imitative form” that could not be considered one of the most important tales (67). Peter Jacobs astutely pointed out that the clue that Mozart’s music is heard in the story is ironic (243), yet he also interprets the story as having a “straightforward bithematic A-B-A-B-A-B-A scheme” (244–455). Emilie Crapoulet, in turn, has argued that Schubert’s “Trout” Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667, is the musical composition that inspired the story, and not a Mozart quartet (“Beyond Boundaries” 208), basing her interpretation on Woolf’s diary entry of March 9, 1920 (D2: 24n13).15 However, the story’s title itself refers to a quartet, and in a short paragraph Woolf omitted from the published text, which is extant in the typescript (see CSF 140n2), the author mentioned Mozart for what would have been a second time in the story. Even allowing for the assumption that, if the story’s characters envision fish swimming in the Rhône while they hear a musical performance, it must mean they are listening to Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, by mentioning Mozart’s name, Woolf pointed to her characters’ failure to recognize the composer they have just heard – a criticism of musical performance as a purely social event in which attention focuses on everything but the music itself. More importantly, this also means the author intentionally provided ambiguous or inconclusive clues about exactly which composition should be associated with this short story. Had she wanted, Woolf could have easily singled out a particular composition – as she did with Beethoven’s Sonata, op. 111, in The Voyage Out. Beyond any imitation of musical structure or desire to capture and convey musical meaning, this discrepancy between the use and mention of music in “The String Quartet” points to a metafictional engagement with classical music, postmodern in its playfulness (see Manhire 147, this volume). In fact, the story’s narrator (or one of the story’s narrators) asks herself: “But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair – I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music!” (CSF 139). Musical meaning is ineffable. If the first reaction to music invokes a “conglomeration of fish all in a pool,” later passages suggest a transcendence of the indoor concert experience – “‘these are the embraces of our souls.’ The lemons nod assent. The swan pushes from the bank and floats dreaming into midstream” (CSF 30) – while the very end of the story describes an entirely different, synesthetic and visionary experience reminiscent of Lucy Swithin and Isa Oliver’s musings in Between the Acts: “the green garden, moonlit pools, lemons, lovers, and fish” dissolved “in the opal sky across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches,” like the architecture that arises from Rachel’s playing, “firmly planted on marble pillars . . . Tramp and trumpeting. Glang and clangour. Firm establishment. Fast foundations. March of myriads. Confusion and chaos trod to earth” (CSF 141).
Woolf’s approach to exploring the relationship between music, language, and literature may therefore be situated against the background of a dispute that reflects two distinct perspectives on this relationship: an aesthetic one, valuing music as autonomous with a meaning detached from linguistic semantics or social value (an expression-based approach [Cross 27]); and an approach that assumes comparisons between music and language can be naturally drawn, linguistic and musical meaning often intersect, and “the relationship between a page of print and the poem it represents is analogous to that between a score and the music it represents” (Brown 7). Critiquing the latter approach,16 Suzanne Langer argued that reading a score is not equivalent to reading a text, because, while in music the passage of time is made audible by “purely sonorous elements,” which exist for the ear alone,17 the elements of literature are not sounds as such: “Instead of being pure sense objects that may become ‘natural’ symbolic forms, like shapes and tones, they are symbols already, namely ‘assigned’ symbols, and the artistic illusion created by means of them is not a fabric of tönend bewegte Formen, but a different illusion altogether” (Feeling 135).18
The argument is based on analyses Langer had made earlier in Philosophy in a New Key (1942), where she explained that the actual function of meaning calls for permanent contents. Music, as opposed to language, is an “unconsummated symbol” – it articulates without asserting (240). It is a point Virginia Woolf had made in her 1909 essay “Impressions at Bayreuth,” when she briefly tried to discuss the difference between musical and linguistic expression: “Apart from the difficulty of changing a musical impression into a literary one, and the tendency to appeal to the literary sense because of the associations of words, there is the further difficulty in the case of music that its scope is much less clearly defined than the scope of the other arts. [ . . . ] Perhaps music owes something of its astonishing power over us to this lack of definite articulation; its statements have all the majesty of a generalization, and yet contain our private emotions” (E1: 291).19
The similarities with Langer’s discussion of the difference between music and language are striking, yet they should not surprise: Langer’s aesthetic approach to musical meaning relies heavily on Clive Bell and Roger Fry’s “Significant Form,”20 a concept Woolf was well acquainted with. While she did not seek to imitate musical structure, Woolf not only found inspiration in musical form when structuring her own writing, as she explained in her letter to Elizabeth Trevelyan, but she also understood and emphasized literary form in a way that brought it close to musical form as described by Langer: “Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made” (Philosophy 240). The “Impressions at Bayreuth” passage quoted above continues with a comment about Shakespeare that shows Woolf was thinking of authors who attempted to bring the quality of the English language close to that of music: “Something of the same effect is given by Shakespeare, when he makes an old nurse the type of all the old nurses in the world, while she keeps her identity as a particular old woman” (E1: 291). The debates with Arnold Bennett centered precisely on an emphasis, on Woolf’s part, on form and formal expressiveness rather than meaning and plot. While she was not interested in imitating musical form, the constant attention Woolf devoted to form in writing; her awareness that form can drive articulation/utterance in ways that are significantly different from assertion and explanation; and the importance she placed on rhythm, sound, and silence in her writing bring her textual praxis close to musical form in the sense Langer meant it, as exhibiting “pure form not as an embellishment but as its very essence” (Philosophy 209).
Woolf was certainly well aware of the pitfalls of indiscriminately comparing music and text. She stated quite early her belief that descriptions of music were “worthless” and “rather unpleasant” (D1: 33). She also affirmed, metafictionally, through the heroine of her first novel, that it would be better to write music instead of novels (VO 212). At the same time, as several contributors to this volume (Szegedy-Maszák; Manhire; Varga) point out, Woolf was fascinated by the ideal of ut musica poesis and was influenced by Walter Pater’s “School of Giorgione” maxim, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” As early as 1905, she recorded in her diary that she was passionately studying Pater’s works “not to copy [ . . . ] but to see how the trick’s done” (PA 251). In Woolf’s fiction and in her writings on music and literature there are tensions similar to those arising from debates about where the boundaries that separate the arts can be drawn. When discussing the “Laocoön problem” – the problem of “discovering how strongly the boundaries separating the various artistic media manage to repel transgression” (Albright 6–7) – Daniel Albright points out that alleging that all media are one paradoxically calls attention to their recalcitrance and, vice versa, that “artists who deliberately seek divergence among the constituent arts sometimes discover that the impression of realness, thereness,