Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby

Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby Victoria C. Roskams (bio) There is something queer about listening to music in late-nineteenth-century literature. Scenes of public musical performance in two novels with very different publishing histories—one of the best-selling novels of the century, Trilby (George du Maurier, 1894), and the privately circulated erotic novel, Teleny (anonymous co-authorship, 1893)—have in common their identification of listening as a space of queer possibility. The ability of texts to disclose and enclose queerness gains particular resonance at this fin-de-siècle moment, with new understandings of identity producing the categories of hetero- and homosexuality. Voicing homosexuality in the repressive legal atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Britain required recourse to codes and circumlocutions: famously, it was "the love that dare not speak its name."1 Authors turned to the expansive semiotic potentialities of music, then, to avoid naming in language desires, behaviours, or identities which might be suspect. Taking a sonic approach to texts revivifies these layers of meaning which were once muted. In thinking sonically about these novels, moreover, we can understand them as contemporary [End Page 161] readers understood them: as novels with richly sounding backgrounds and afterlives. While much of the work in this volume deals with sonic material, I am looking at objects whose sonic dimensions are implicit, not immediately evident, although not necessarily buried deep. References to music in the literary text have traditionally been figured in terms of allowances (permitting the text to engage the auditory) and limitations (gesturing to sounds it ultimately cannot create in and of itself). Yet a central claim of my work on music in literature is that any musical reference, allusion, or interpolation provides a resonant moment within a reading experience which always necessarily implicates some degree of listening (as Angela Leighton proposes in Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature). By approaching these texts sonically, we not only restore the oral and aural dimensions which have attached to works of literature throughout history, but we draw attention to the importance of thinking about orality and aurality in the representation and taxonomization of non-normative sexualities and identities in the late nineteenth century and perhaps beyond. That is, we can look (or hear) beyond the traditional wealth of written material (across literature, medical writing, and legal documents) to restore the sounding body at the centre of the formation of new understandings of identity in the period. Resituating the reader as a listener reveals differing treatments of music in the construction of queer identities and communities in Teleny and Trilby.2 The musical performance functions, in Teleny, as a voicing of desire among a closed readership, and in Trilby, as a destabilization of gendered and sexual categories, its subversion alleviated for the novel's large readership precisely because, within the limits of the text, the music remains silent. Silence might be a virtue in the repressive context into which these novels were published, but by considering the workings of sound, musical allusion, vocality, and affect in these texts, we can enrich, and even challenge, our perspective on the "unspeakability" of queerness in this period.3 In both novels, the representation of musical performance functions as an extradiegetic mediation for the reader, whose position as member of a wider, reading audience forms a point of comparison for the narrower, [End Page 162] listening audience within the narratives. Looking at music in these novels enhances our understanding of their production and reception. Throughout this article, I lay stress on coteries and afterlives as aspects to which a sonic approach is essential (and indeed inevitable: with respect to Trilby, at least, I consider recreations of the novel on stage and on film). In literature, performances are often sites of indeterminate meaning with the ability to shape and disturb our sense of identity and community. Teleny, which ties music to affirmation and particularizes the queer listener as a distinguished, receptive, and privileged identity, was produced by a coterie of men and, initially, circulated privately among men. Trilby, on the other hand, deals with the mass and was read (and re-enacted) by the mass. I take up Roland Barthes's notion of...

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